Waking Hour

Chapter Two

Oak Springs turned out to be as hard to find as Joshua said it was. Sam did his best to guide Dean down the roads Joshua told them to take, but it didn't help that the road signs were all hand painted on wooden planks nailed to a wooden post. Half of the road signs were either broken, leaning over, or simply not there. And none of them were on a map. It took them a bit longer to find the place and by the time they pulled into town, if that's what it could even be called, it was almost five o'clock. Sam and Dean were both ready to kill something when they did finally park in front of one of the four buildings that made up the downtown of Oak Springs. They were hoping they could do just that.

"Quaint," Dean snarked and killed the engine. He leaned forward and eyed the buildings, his face scrunched in disgust. Sam didn't blame him. It was like they had traveled back in time about 100 years. The buildings were old and falling apart. The main street in town was cobblestone. On one side was a river, on the other, just forest. Miles and miles of forest. This hunt would be fun, Sam could tell.

"Come on," Sam said, annoyed, and climbed out of the car. He looked around. The four buildings consisted of a bar, a diner, a town hall and a church. Together, aside from the few dozen homes spread over the few square miles, they made up the entirety of Oak Springs. Dean had gotten it right. Quaint.

"You boys get lost?" Sam turned and saw a man he could only assume was Joshua emerging from the bar. Sam appraised him quickly. Joshua stood about as tall as Sam, but with wider girth. His shoulders were broad and he had a small beer gut showing through his flannel shirt. He was scruffy and his hair was unkept and all in all, Joshua reminded Sam a lot of their father. Only Joshua smiled more and lacked that commanding tone in his voice and face.

Dean snorted. "I was gonna tell Sammy to start hiking."

Joshua laughed and walked over to Dean, standing with his hands on his hips. "Well, let's take a look at you," he said, looking Dean over. Sam grinned when Dean glanced at him. "Yup, Johnny did good by you." Joshua looked over at Sam and grinned. "You too BFG." Sam shook his head at the nickname. He'd forgotten about that name. Caleb used to call him that all the time after Sam had hit his growth spurt and shot up pass Dean and John. "'Cept you need a haircut."

"Yeah, well look whose talking," Sam said lightheartedly. He felt himself relax after just a few moments of being with the other hunter. The John's friends had always had that effect of Sam. When they were around, Sam just felt…calm. Safe. These guys were family to him. Jim, Caleb, Bobby, all of them. They hardly knew their real family, they couldn't, so they'd made family where they could. And this was it.

Joshua snorted and looked back at Dean, hooking a thumb towards Sam. "College didn't dumb him down at all, did it?"

"We couldn't be so lucky," Dean said playfully, winking at Sam before Joshua clapped him on the shoulder and they headed back towards the bar. Sam followed, catching up and giving Dean a punch to the arm, to which he got a backhand to the chest in return.

After beers were ordered and all three were settled into a table in the back of the room, Sam leaned forward and said quietly, "So, can you tell us why we're here now?" he asked.

Joshua took a swig of his beer and eyed Sam. Then he reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a newspaper clipping. It was old and yellow, faded. He slid it across the table to Sam, who picked it up and unfolded it. Dean leaned over, trying to get a look at it, but he couldn't read it from that far away in the dim light, so he waited for Sam to give an explanation.

Sam read through the article quickly before giving a brief summary to Dean. "June, 1978, three teenagers from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania were found dead near Oak Springs. One body was found in the river, missing its head and limbs. The other two were found scattered in a bean field."

"Scattered?" Dean asked, looking towards Joshua.

"Yeah," Sam answered for him. "Body parts were spread out in a mile radius."

Dean turned up his nose. "Yummy."

Sam shook his head, frowning as he looked up at Joshua. "This is from almost thirty years ago," he said. "There's not going to be anything left for us to investigate."

Joshua nodded. "You're right," he agreed and leaned back, taking another swig. "But four days ago, Walter Mills, he was a local gardener around here, kept grass mowed, weeds down, that sort of thing, he was found dead. Same exact thing. Body parts spread out, hardly anything recognizable left."

"How'd they know it was him?" Dean asked.

Joshua leaned forward after looking over his shoulder at the bartender, who was eyeing the three of them. He grinned at the guy, obviously forced, before turning back to Sam and Dean. "A town this small, people know when you're missing." He paused for a second, eyes staring at the table. He gave a small huff and titled his head to the side. "And they identified his wedding ring."

Sam cringed. "Did they talk to his wife?"

Joshua shook his head. "She's been dead ten years."

Dean let out a sigh as he leaned back. Sam reread the newspaper clipping again, keeping this new information in mind. But still nothing stood out to him.

"You got any ideas about what it could be?" Dean asked. "Werewolf, demon maybe?"

Joshua shook his head. "I don't have a clue, boys." He paused, suddenly giving a wan smile, nervous laughter as he said, "And there's one more thing."

"What?" Sam and Dean said in unison.

"You brought your shovels, right?"


The graveyard was rather impressive for a town so out of date. In the center of the graveyard was a crypt. About 10X10 with a nice statue of the Virgin Mary being blessed by an angel above the chained doorway. Sam could tell it creeped Dean the freak out, but he thought it was rather nice looking. And all of the graves that surrounded the crypt had not only a tombstone, but also a post with what looked like the top of an old fashioned streetlight attached to them. But on closer inspection, Sam found that instead of a lamp or a candle inside the lanterns, there were bells.

They had waited for a few hours, Joshua saying that the real action wouldn't start until midnight. So Sam had done some research, even though he wasn't at all sure what he was looking for. He'd gotten a few ideas by the time they'd made their way to the graveyard.

Sitting by the crypt, Sam watched as Dean walked around to the different headstones. There weren't any names left on them. Most had never had names to begin with, but those that had had since eroded enough for the names to be unreadable. Dean bent down by one, running his fingers over the markings on it. Then he looked at the bell, reached forward, and dinged it. He frowned and looked at Joshua for an explanation. Sam did too.

Joshua chuckled. "No one knows whose buried here anymore. There's no records about this graveyard anywhere. But one thing we know for sure, the people who were buried here were afraid of being buried alive."

Sam frowned. "How do you know that?"

Joshua pushed himself off the crypt which he'd been leaning against. He walked over to one of the bells and hit it with his toe. "These. It's an old English contraption. You ever heard of Nikolai Gogol?" Sam and Dean shook their heads. "He was Russian writer. His whole life, he advocated the prevention of premature burial. Scared the guy to death. The worse thing in the world to him was being buried alive."

"Yeah, that would suck," Dean said dryly.

"Yeah it would," Joshua agreed. "Well the guy died and a few years later, the Russian government was moving his grave, him being a writer and whatnot they wanted to give him, I dunno, a classier spot I guess. Well, when they opened his coffin, they found that he was no longer laying on his back. He'd shifted onto his stomach, lying face down, not at all the position they buried him in."

"So the guy was still alive?" Sam asked, horrified to even think of such a thing happening.

Joshua shrugged. "I don't know. It could have been shifted when they were lifting the coffin. But it doesn't matter, that single occurrence started a new wave of paranoia. People wanted to do everything possible to make sure they weren't buried before their time. And these bells, are just one of the contraptions they came up with. Each of these bells are tied to a rope that's tied to the limbs of the bodies in the graves below them."

Sam looked at the bells. "So if the body moves, the bell rings," he observed, disturbed by the thought of being buried alive still.

"You got it," Joshua said. "A bunch of bullshit if you ask me. Whose gonna be out here to hear the bell ring anyway?" Sam gave a crude chuckle at that.

Dean let out a pronounced sigh and stood up, brushing off his knees from where he'd been kneeling by the grave. He looked at Joshua, impatience showing through his eyes. "That's a nice tidbit to know, but what are we doing here?"

Sam looked up at Joshua and was happy to see that the man wasn't frustrated or even annoyed with Dean's impatience. The man was probably used to it. He'd been friends with John Winchester after all.

"Give it time," Joshua said.

"Give what time?" Dean asked.

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, the bell above the grave he was standing next to suddenly rang once. Sam and Dean's heads both shot to look at it. But nothing happened. Sam began to wonder if it was just the wind, but suddenly another bell rang from somewhere near the back of the graveyard. And quickly following that one, another one rang on the other side.

One after one, the bells began to ring. Dean took a few steps backwards, towards Joshua and Sam, hand ghosting over the gun at his side. The ringing picked up pace and intensity. After just a few moments, all of the bells were ringing with such ferocity that there was no doubt the wind wasn't the one moving them. And as quickly as they started, the bells stopped, leaving an awkward silence in their wake. Not even the bugs were making noises. Sam and Dean exchanged a look while Joshua sighed.

"That's what we're doing here."