Net Knots Chapter 17, a supernatural fanfic

Disclaimer etc, see Chapter 1

NET KNOTS

Chapter 17

At random, Dean clicked YES for 'still in original use' and then the first radio button for 'house' under BUILDINGS.

Immediately the screen 'dissolved' into a new page that asked a series of questions with a long horizontal text box underneath for answers. Again, they were the questions that Dean and Sam usually tried to find out as soon as they could, such as How long have you lived in the house? How old is the house? Do you know the history of the house? Can you list previous owners/occupants? Has anyone ever died in the house? What is the house constructed of, i.e., wood, stone, adobe, etc? And so on.

Again, just like people, they gave the hunters vital information. An old house was much more likely to attract an entity because of something that had happened to a person who lived there, such as the demolition of Cyrus Dorian's ancestral home disturbing the murderously racist SOB. A newly built property that experienced problems was much more likely to be because of the location or an external factor – Oasis Plains, please step forward. There were, of course, exceptions to these rules, like a nice house in Lawrence, Kansas, that had only been built in 1977 but which had had sufficient disturbances for a centuries old mansion.

Problems could also be caused if, for instance, a church or temple had not been properly deconsecrated before being turned into some other building and offence was caused to the God who had been worshipped there. Occasionally what the house was made of was also a problem. During Sam's four-year Stanford absence Dean and their Dad had nearly been stumped by a property developer's plight because only some of the houses he had built were affected whereas others weren't and they had quickly established the project had not been built on holy Indian land, or disturbed a battlefield or the like.

Finally John Winchester realised that the affected houses had all been built using stones 'reclaimed' from a disused Quaker Meeting House that it turned out hadn't been disused at all. The developer's sub-contractor had not bothered to travel the seventy miles to the right Meeting House but instead had arranged to 'accidentally' crash a dumper truck into one only two miles down the road so it was so structurally unsafe it would have to be taken down.

He had made a nice little profit on money saved in gas and transporting the stone back to the site, but he had been considerably less arrogant when the judge sentenced his ass to jail.

The developer had been an excellent client, unhesitatingly giving John a fat cheque, but his unforgiving attitude had been understandable. John had regretfully had to explain that there was no way to determine the source of individual stones, meaning every single one of the nine affected houses would have to be torn down and rebuilt again entirely from scratch – in short, it was equivalent to the developer building eighteen brand new houses then just giving nine of them away free like a McDonald's Meal Deal Toy.

Continued in Chapter 18…