Chapter 1 Salt'n'Burn
October. Winterset, Iowa
Dean slowed until the black car was idling at walking pace, allowing him to peer from side to side along the road.
"Where did Sam say this place was?" he muttered to Ellie.
She looked up from her calculations, the map rustling in her lap.
"Here." She waved a hand at the thin forest lining the road they were on in both directions as far as they could see. "It's supposed to be right here."
Ahead, Dean saw a gravelled wayside. He pulled in and stopped the car, turning the engine off and glancing around again.
"Well, it's not. Unless the town is actually built in the forest without access roads."
She handed him the map and pulled out her phone, frowning down at it.
The town clearly marked, it even had a railway crossing near the centre, although they hadn't seen a line for over twenty miles. He looked at it, checking the roads they'd come in on, and the distances, brows drawn together. He put it back on the seat and looked at her.
"Either we're wrong, or the map's wrong." He raised a brow. "Which do you think?"
"Neither." She looked past him to the other side of the road. "I think the town's here, but we're not seeing it."
"Yeah, you're gonna have to do better than that," he said, closing one eye. "What I'm seeing is a lot of trees."
Ellie gave him a half-smile as she continued to look around. "You know those half-assed holographic pictures we saw down at the markets in Corvallis in summer? Where, if you tilt the picture one way, you see one image, and if you tilt the other way you see a totally different image?"
He nodded, mouth compressed, not liking this explanation anymore than he'd liked any of the possibilities he'd already come up with. "Sure, yeah. You think we're sandwiched in some sort of giant cheapo holograph?"
"Not exactly." She opened the door and stepped out of the car, closing it behind her. Dean blinked. She'd vanished, the minute her feet had touched the ground.
"Ellie?" He shifted across the seat, staring at the forest that started only a few yards away. "Ellie!"
The door opened and Ellie got back in. "More like a divisional slip between planes. I think maybe the ghosts are doing it."
"What the fuck!" He stared at her. "Where'd you go?"
"Into the town." She gestured up the road. "There's a motel about a hundred yards further, Dean. They even have a vacancy. I'll tell you where to turn and where to stop."
He slid back behind the wheel, and started the engine, pulling out onto the empty road and idling slowly up the road until she indicated the left turn.
"Stop here. We're right next to the ice machine, and we'll use that as a marker to find the car when we need to get out."
"What do you mean…find the car?"
"Mmmm…once you're out of the car, you can't actually see it anymore," she said, her expression apologetic.
"What?" He stared at her. "How is that good?"
"Come on." She smiled and got out, disappearing as the door shut on its own.
He looked at the small, wilted pine he'd parked beside and shook his head. Transdimensional ghost-hunting. Sam was gonna love it.
He got out of the car, turning back inside to grab the canvas bag from the back seat, and looked around, closing the door but keeping his hand on the roof.
She was right. They were in the town.
He was standing in an unremarkable asphalt parking lot, a row of single story motel rooms enclosing two sides, a free-standing and dingy-looking office on the other side. The motel's sign stood beside the driveway they'd just pulled in, red neon lit and one letter hanging forlornly by its wire and blinking intermittently.
The road had no traffic, and as he turned slowly to look down the way they'd come, something nagged at him, looking at the cars that were parked along the other side, in front of the dozen or so shopfronts that had appeared.
His hand seemed to be suspended in mid-air but he could feel the car's shape as he followed the roof's curve down to the trunk. His fingertips found the lock and he looked down in bemusement, the half-a-key hanging in the air. He shook off the Dali overtones and turned it, rolling his eyes as the lid lifted and the trunk remained invisible. He knew every gun, knife, bag and box in there but it still took several minutes to locate what he wanted by feel and pack into the gear bag that lay equally invisible inside.
How did that work, he wondered? The car was here, just not visible. But on the other side, where it was, none of the physical attributes of the town existed. He sure as hell hadn't run into any of the parked cars that lined the curb here when he'd pulled off the road there.
Ellie walked across the lot from the office, holding up a key. He nodded as she walked to the room door. They might be in the Twilight Zone, but they still needed some place to sleep, and some place to work out exactly how to put this town back the way it should have been.
He felt around for the handles of the gear bag and yanked it out, then closed the trunk lid and removed the key, following her to room number eleven, a few feet from where the car was parked. He glanced back over his shoulder and looked at the empty space in front of the ice-machine. Where the car was parked in the real world, he amended to himself.
"So the whole town is haunted?" Dean looked down at the file that lay open on the table in front of him. "As well as the dimension slip?"
"Looks like." Ellie looked at the small stove that was all that the kitchenette in the room had to offer for heating water. She bent, looking in the narrow cupboards beneath the counter and pulled out an old-fashioned kettle, filling it at the sink and lighting the gas burner. The motel provided coffee, in a jar, a brand she didn't recognise. Next to the jar, a tin of creamer was unopened.
"How are we supposed to find the foci?" He flipped through the pages, skimming over the mix of official reports, grainy newspaper copies and handwritten notes that Marcus had put together for them.
"The original reports of the haunting are at the back of the file. A house, somewhere near the cemetery. There were a couple of deaths when a family moved into it in, uh, '76 I think, and then it was quiet for a while, then a whole lot more deaths in '79," she said, glancing over at him.
He turned to the back, finding the clippings, the police and coroner's reports, and started reading.
An hour later, he finished the last of his now-cold cup of coffee and closed the file, looking down at his notes. Whatever was going on, the house was definitely the starting point. He pulled the map of the town closer. About a half-mile to the cemetery, a little further along to the house.
"We should have a look at this place in daylight, you know," he called out, looking around the room. Ellie came out of the bathroom, wrapped in a towel.
"I know. We've got a few more hours before sundown." She went to the bed and picked up her bag, pulling out clean clothes and getting dressed. "I don't think we can take the car."
"Why not?" His brows started to draw together at the thought of leaving her here alone – well, not here, exactly, worse, she'd be in the forest alone.
"I don't think we'll be able to find the house when we're in it."
"Why is the car in the other plane, and we can move between them, by the way?" he asked. "And why could I feel it here but we didn't hit any of the stuff that's here when we were there?"
"I don't know." She sat on the bed and pulled on her boots.
"Not crazy about leaving her here," he said, watching her transfer her wallet to her jacket.
"I know." She smiled at him. "Can't be helped. I don't have a great feeling about this place and I'd like to get out of here as soon as we can."
He nodded. "Yeah, I hear that."
The house wasn't hard to find. On a rise behind the cemetery, it sat in a large, wild garden, with a single gravelled access road leading to it. In the mid-afternoon sunshine, it looked peaceful, a nondescript two-storey clapboard home, possibly the original farmhouse in the area, a little weatherworn but not decrepit.
They picked their way up the driveway, now almost covered with grass and lined on both sides by rose bushes that had grown wild, long, thorny branches reaching for each other across the cleared ground. Every once-domesticated plant in the garden had grown tall and wide, and between them the ground was padded with years of leaf-fall, this year's drop blowing and tumbling over everything, a crackling carpet of red and brown and gold.
Dean looked at his EMF, watching the needle on the gauge jump up and fall, the device yawping and yeeing madly as they approached the building. Ellie glanced at it, and tightened her grip on the pump action shotgun she carried.
The front door was solid and locked when they reached out. She pulled her snap gun from her coat pocket and slid the end into the lock, pressing the button. The clack of the lock's mechanism being released was very loud in the still fall air, and they both looked around, half-expecting an outraged home-owner to emerge and demand to know what they thought they were doing. Nothing happened, and she pushed the door wide open, revealing a short wide hall with a staircase to the left, and two doors opposite each other just before it.
The EMF continued to jump and fall as they entered, Dean turning to the left, and opening the door to a long, narrow living room, Ellie turning taking the right hand door, walking into a smaller room, perhaps the parlour, still furnished and decorated in the colours and patterns of the '70s, the small, overstuffed couch and matching armchairs arranged in front of a massive and ancient cathode ray tube television.
They backed out of their respective rooms and Dean looked at the door beside the stairs, nodding as Ellie walked forward and opened it. Another hallway led to the back of the house, and they walked past a dining room on the right to a kitchen at the back of the house. The large room had three doors along two walls, two in the interior wall, the third a back door half-paned in glass that let in slanting sunshine. Dust lay everywhere, a coating several millimetres thick, undisturbed by vermin or anything else that she could see.
She lifted the barrel of the shotgun and drifted silently over the floor to the closer of the two interior doors, glancing back at Dean. He followed, his sawn-off's barrels rising as he monitored the EMF. The needle continued to flicker up and down.
Ellie twisted the knob and pushed the door open, and they looked into a long, narrow room, lined with empty shelves. The last door, she thought as she backed out of the pantry and pulled its door shut, would be the basement. She moved along the wall, aware of Dean pacing her, no further than six feet away, his attention split between the softly muttering device in his hand, the back door and the hall behind them.
The basement door handle was older, an iron lifting latch and she had to get closer, lifting the latch and pushing at the door, which swung open onto a set of wooden steps leading down into the darkness. The air that rose up was earthy and dank, and she wrinkled her nose, extracting a flashlight from her jacket pocket and flicking it on, holding it alongside the barrel of the shotgun as she looked down the light beam. The steps were illuminated to the bottom, and she could see that the floor was dirt. The light shone on one corner of what might have been a workbench, a massive vice bolted to its end. With an inward sigh, she put her foot onto the first step and started down cautiously.
"VeeeEEE-AWP!"
Dean jumped as the EMF screamed at him, looking up to see Ellie disappear on the second step.
"Fuck NO!" He reached the doorway in a single stride and teetered on the edge of the first step, his hand swinging out wildly in front of him.
Ellie felt the shift as she landed on the third step and stopped, looking around. The wooden steps under her feet were harder, and she glanced down to see they'd become a concrete staircase. At the bottom of the basement steps, the floor had turned to concrete as well. It wasn't dark anymore either, she realised, turning off the flashlight. Now, there were windows letting in the late afternoon sun under the roofline of the basement, and she realised she could smell pizza, the faint chemical odour of synthetic carpet and traces of pot. She walked down the steps and took in the smooth, faux wood panelling now lining the external and internal walls.
Another doorway? The thought seemed preposterous, but the evidence was in front of her. A glance over her shoulder showed the concrete steps with their rubber strips to add traction, the door to the kitchen closed. One of those steps had moved her to another reality. She backed up the steps, waiting to see the original basement. Nothing happened.
Perfect. One way.
There would be another way out, she told herself, pushing aside a creeping tendril of doubt. Retracing her steps down the stairs, she stopped at the interior door, then pushed it open. Most of the basement had been remodelled into a large room, painted in psychedelic shades of lime green and brilliant orange. A full-size billiards table stood to one side, and at the end she could see a stereo system taking up an entire wall, the monstrous bass speakers six foot high and four foot wide. In the centre of the room, bean bags and floor cushions surrounded a long, low, tiled table, covered with empty pizza boxes, ashtrays and a half a dozen home-made bongs. Despite the lingering smells, there was no one down there. She walked the perimeter of the room, looking for another way out, but whoever had turned this basement into a rumpus room or play room or hang out for their teenagers had been thorough. The walls and floor had been lined, and covered and the stairs she'd come down were the only way in or out.
She turned around and headed back for them, stepping on each one, just in case, but she reached the top and pushed open the door without being returned to the plane she'd left. The door at the top of the stairs opened into the kitchen.
The kitchen was the same layout, but the décor had been changed. Ellie looked around at bright yellow walls, shining with gloss paint, at the woodgrain Formica cupboard fronts and gleaming white tiled counters. Café curtains covered each of the windows and the half-glass of the back door, the thick cotton material showing a spiral pattern that drew the eye in, relieved by large and small solid circles of lime and red.
I'm going to need my sunglasses if I stay around here too long, she thought, her nose wrinkling in distaste. Unlike the kitchen she and Dean had entered, this one was clean and new-looking; surfaces wiped, glasses sparkling on open shelves, flowers bright against the dark cupboards, still fresh and dewy from being cut that morning.
She walked through the open doorway to the hall, and stopped. She could hear noise outside. Hurrying to the front door, she pulled it open. Where the cemetery had been, there were a multitude of houses, busy with life. A man pushed a lawnmower along the verge of the house opposite, several children rode their bikes down the driveway of another. Ellie took a step back and closed the door, leaning against the wall.
Alternative universe? A reality that branched off from the one she'd come through? It seemed around the same time-frame, somewhere in the 1970's, she thought, her judgement purely based on the décor in the house.
She looked at the living room, partly visible through the open sliding doors. Like the rest of the house, it was lived in. She was going to have a hard time explaining her presence in the house if the owners came home. The stairs were in front of her, and she started up them, her boots soundless on the thick purple shag pile that covered them.
Dean stared helplessly down the wooden steps. Follow her through or get back to the motel and see if she was in the car? Had she returned to that reality? There couldn't be another one…could there?
He heard a noise at the front of the house and spun around, the EMF squawking. Shifting his grip on the sawn-off, he ran through the doorway and into the hall, movement catching his peripheral vision on the stairs. He threw himself forward, twisting to land on his back, the shotgun pointing up the staircase.
Ellie looked at him, frozen in place halfway down.
"For fuck's sake, I could have killed you!" he growled, lowering the gun and rolling to his feet. "Where were you? How'd you get back?"
She walked down the rest of the stairs and looked at him. "Some alternative reality, I think. Same house, but things were different there. I was going up the main stairs when I was zapped back here. Although…I think it had branched from this place, sometime in the past."
He shoved the EMF into his pocket and grabbed the edge of her jacket, pulling her close, his arm curling around her back.
"How long was I gone?"
"A few seconds." He looked at her expression and lifted one shoulder in a shrug. "You'd just disappeared on the basement steps when I heard the noise at the front."
"Huh." The crease appeared between her brows. "It was more like fifteen minutes, in the other reality."
"This…place…has too many wormholes. From now on, we're sticking together, okay?"
"Yeah, definitely." She tucked her flashlight back in her pocket and slipped her arm around him, resting her cheek against his chest.
"You know, I was really looking forward to a haunting. Just a plain old simple haunting where we find the bodies and we set them to rest," he grumbled over her head.
"Yeah, I know," she agreed. "I was too."
He looked down at her. "This is the place, huh? Where whatever this is started?"
"I think so." She pulled in a deep breath and stepped away from him. "It's definitely the nexus for the conjunctions, but I can't think of a reason for all these doorways, for any reason why it would be happening here. There's nothing in the file to indicate a history like that."
He looked up the stairs she'd just come down. "Do you want to check up there?"
"I think we'd better be a bit more prepared before we do any more exploring in here," she said, her gaze following his. "I've got an idea for how we can map this place, but I need some stuff from the room."
Dean nodded. "Let's go."
Outside the afternoon light was almost gone, the sky already turning purple to the east.
They walked down the road and cut through the cemetery, coming out onto a quiet street behind the main street.
"I'm starving."
Ellie glanced at him, and nodded. "So'm I."
"Think there'll be anywhere in this burg that'll have decent food?" He looked at the silent houses, dark and unlit.
"The motel office was manned." She shrugged. "There are some people here."
"What's with that, anyway?" He thought about what they'd seen. "Where we came in, there was no one, no houses, no town. Then when we get out of the car, there's a town but hardly anyone around, and everything looks like it hasn't been used in years."
He looked at the row of parked cars along the street. "Look at these. Nothing here that's later than…1979."
Veering from the road, he walked closer to the Oldsmobile. "Even the registration is '79." The car was in immaculate condition, except that it was covered in dust and grime. Dean rubbed an elbow on the driver's window and peered in at the dash. There was only 22,000 miles on the clock.
Ellie frowned. "I don't know."
"How many time lines are converging here?" Time travel was never a good thing, in his view. Multiple realities were worse. He had too much to lose, if he got lost between them.
"At least three. Maybe more." She shivered in the vagrant breeze blew toward them up the street. "Come on, we can have this discussion inside, where it's warmer."
He looked down at the Olds, his mouth twisting. He reached out with one hand and touched the hood, half-expecting his hand to pass through the metal, not entirely reassured when it hit the smooth surface, and picked up a half-pound of dust with the sweep.
Just because it was solid didn't make it any more explicable. He stepped off the sidewalk and walked back to Ellie, wiping his hand on his jeans.
"I guess this is why no other hunters have taken this place on," he wondered aloud as she turned and fell into step with him.
Ellie looked up as the streetlights came on, throwing their shadows in front of them. "Maybe no one else could find it."
They left the guns in the motel room and walked down the main street together, looking from side to side at the empty shopfronts. At the end of the block, a blue neon sign proclaimed Hal's Bar & Diner, and Dean smiled as they climbed the short flight of steps to the door, looking in through the glass panes at the interior.
Inside, it was warm, the air slightly blue from the cigarette smoke drifting to the ceiling. On one side of the room, a long counter extended almost from the front door down two thirds of the room's length. The top was patterned red Formica, and stools were placed at intervals along it, most of them filled now with the locals. The other side held a dozen tables, also topped in the same red Formica, and most of them filled as well. At the rear, another, shorter, bar spanned the width, the mirror behind it reflecting shelves of bottles. Between the dining and drinking sections, a juke box, playing something quietly, several small tables and a billiards table took up the last third of the room. Old-fashioned painted advertisements and three neon signs covered the walls. Turning to the long counter, Dean noticed the soda fountain, backed by shelves of thick, curved soda glasses.
"I haven't seen a place like this in years," he said, grinning as he read the menu, chalked on a board above the counter. His grin got wider when he saw the pie case, near the swinging door at the other end that led into the kitchen.
Ellie looked around, her eyes narrowing slightly as she took in the décor, the men and women seated at the tables and bar and counter, the cigarette smoke in the air.
"No one has seen a place like this in years," she said. The smells from the kitchen seemed real enough, she thought, pushing at Dean to keep moving.
They ordered and found a small table in the front corner, giving them a good view of the whole room. Dean looked at the bar and glanced at her.
"I'm going to get a beer. You want anything?" He pushed back his chair and got up.
"Yeah, I'll have a beer. Whatever they have on tap." She nodded, her gaze going past him and scanning the room.
Most of the customers were in their mid-thirties to early forties, their clothing a mix of denim and polyester, the paisleys and stripes and swirls occasionally broken up with fringed leather and tie-dyed dresses and shirts. They were so in the '70s, she thought. The collars of the shirts were ridiculously long and pointed, the ties worn by some of the men had to be more than six inches wide, several women were wearing flowers in their long, loose hair, others showing off skyhigh afros.
Not in Kansas anymore, she thought.
At the bar, Dean nodded to the man next to him, and ordered two beers from the bartender, a pretty girl in her early twenties, with long blonde hair that reached her waist. Now that he was closer, he recognised the song playing on the juke box, the volume low but the music unmistakable. His mother had sung the song sometimes, along with the radio, in Kansas when he'd been small. California Dreamin', he thought, by the Mamas and Papas.
He was frowning again as he carried the beers back to their table, a glance at Ellie's face showing that she'd noticed the differences as well.
"So we're in the '70s," he said without preamble, setting the glasses down.
"I don't think this is an alternative time line, Dean," she said. "Look at these people. I think that time maybe just stopped here, sometime around '79, and maybe this is a loop."
"That would explain the cars, I guess." He exhaled and picked up his beer. "And the fact that the phones and the laptop aren't working."
"Yeah." She picked up her glass and sipped.
Dean saw the small crease appear between her brows and waited, swallowing a mouthful of beer.
"Something happened here, something that not only kickstarted a haunting but split the whole area off from the rest of the world." She set the glass down and closed her eyes. "The question is, was it done deliberately or accidentally."
He blinked. "That's the question?"
She opened her eyes and shrugged. "It would take incredible power, like atom-splitting power, and a spell or spelled object that could control the boundaries of the parallel world."
"How?" He leaned forward, keeping his voice low. "How is that possible?"
She looked up as the waitress brought their food, burgers piled high, surrounded by a mound of fries, glistening with oil and crusted with salt. Dean breathed in appreciatively.
"At least the food is good." He picked up the burger and took a bite, his eyes rolling up slightly as the tastes hit his tongue. Ellie smiled at his expression, the smile fading as she thought about his question.
"I don't know how, not exactly. We need to get a good look around this place before we go back to that house." She picked up her burger. "We need to look at their library, if they have, or newspaper office. There must have been some event that precipitated this."
"Yeah." He picked up the bottle of ketchup and squirted some onto the pile of golden fries. "Tomorrow."
He looked up at the menu. "You think they do breakfast here?"
Dean looked speculatively at the television set in the corner of the room as he set a bottle of beer on the low table for Ellie. She was sitting on the couch, hunched over the file on the table, reading through the copies of the press clippings, her murmured thanks indicating that she'd barely noticed him.
He walked over to the set, and turned it on, the big knobs and the cloth-covered speakers to either side reminding him of the years of travelling with his father and his baby brother. A lot of the TVs had looked like this in the hundreds of motels they'd lived in back then.
The television speakers hummed quietly, the picture tube warming up, then burst into life, the colours a little wonky and over-bright, the edges of the picture a little blurry to his eyes, but the show unmistakable.
Staightnin' the curves
Flatnin' the hills
Someday the mountain might get 'em
But the law never will
Makin' their way
The only way they know how
That's just a little bit more
Than the law will allow.
He adjusted the volume and backed away from the set, sitting down when he felt the couch on the back of his legs.
Ellie looked up. "You're kidding, right?"
He glanced at her. "What? I haven't seen this in years!"
"Kind of in the middle of something here?" She gestured to the file over the table. "You know, the fact that we have a haunting that also involves a time-slip?"
"Hey, this might be the only perk I get out of this case," he said, looking back at the television. "Just this one show, I'll get back to it when it's over."
Ellie snorted and picked up her beer, leaning back and swallowing a mouthful.
The press clippings were vague, she thought, tuning out the music and tyre-squealing and explosions of the show, on the original event. A family murdered in 1966 in the house behind the cemetery, the local police baffled and the FBI brought in to work the case. The official report had been vague as well. They'd arrested and jailed a vagrant for the murders, but the evidence had been thin, and mostly circumstantial. The vagrant had died in jail in 1968, from pneumonia. Nothing really unusual about it, except that she thought he hadn't committed the murders.
The house had remained unoccupied for ten years. In 1976, the Thompson family had moved in: father, mother, two girls. A nice, ordinary nuclear family. No history of mental illness, violence or…anything really. Two months later, the mother had taken the girls and run, out of state presumably since none of the reporters had been able to find her. The father had been found in the house, his body scattered around the ground floor rooms in several pieces. House was locked from the inside. The cops didn't find a point of entry.
She tipped the beer up again, and leaned forward, tapping the end of the pencil against the file's cover.
The house was empty for another three years, then another family had bought it cheap in '79. The family disappeared on the night of October 30. She wasn't sure if that date was meaningful or not. The night before Halloween, All Hallow's Eve, Samhain in the Wiccan calendar. They'd moved in a week earlier. The '76 family had moved into the house in September, and the father's body found in early November. Was the timing significant? Why the jump from ten years to three? Or was that just that victims were available?
She flipped back through the reports. The family who'd moved in in 1979 and disappeared had been the McCallisters'. Mom, Dad, three teenage sons and a nine year old daughter. She thought of the refurbished basement, of the billiards table and the stereo, the electric guitars and pizza boxes. Maybe they hadn't disappeared, really. Maybe they were still alive and kicking, just in a different dimension, a parallel timeline where the town had undergone significant development. She put the bottle down and stared at the file. She needed the library or newspaper office.
Ellie closed her eyes tighter, pushing the pillow against her ear. The noise kept on, conjuring the image of a bright orange Charger. She rolled over, sliding her hand up his chest and resting her fingers over his lips and the noise stopped.
"Dean, you're humming."
His eyes opened and he looked at her. "Yeah, sorry, can't get the song out of my head."
"I get that."
He smiled, and pressed his lips against her temple, shifting his arm so that she settled against him.
"When I was a kid, that's kind of how I thought hunting was gonna be, with Dad and Sammy, the three of us taking everything on—" His laugh sounded embarrassed. "—in a really cool car."
She wasn't sure where he heading with this look into the past, so she waited. He was silent for a moment.
"I thought nothing would ever get bad, you know, not really bad, because we were together and we were a team," he continued. "Even when it did, when one of us was lying in the hospital because something had ripped the crap of us, it didn't seem to be…I don't know…it didn't seem to be all that bad."
She saw his brow draw together, maybe remembering those stays in hospitals, when he'd been torn up, or Sam had, or his father.
"Sam hated it. I think, even then, when he really was a kid, he knew how close to the edge we were, and that scared him," he said, his voice softening. "I didn't see it. I thought it was all normal and pretty good."
"When did that change for you?" she asked him, feeling that there was something behind this, something he wanted to get clear.
"Uh…in '99, I think." His arm tightened around her. "Just a regular ghost hunt, and Dad took off, left us to it. We found one of the bodies, but got trapped in the house, and Sam…" He trailed off, and she felt him tensing. "Sam, uh, was thrown across the room, into some old plumbing. Pipe punched right through his chest, punctured his lung."
She bit her lip, listening past the words to a pain that ran very deeply in him. He felt her stillness, and looked down at her, dragging in a deep breath.
"I had to do everything on my own, and it hit me then," he said, his voice very low. "It wasn't a good life; I wouldn't have my family around all the time, to back me up. Sam nearly died, and I couldn't talk to Dad for weeks."
Ellie curled her arm around him, feeling the acceleration of his heart, against the inside of her elbow.
"That was a lot of responsibility on you."
"Yeah, but that was only a part of it." He closed his eyes. "We were already kind of drifting apart, even then. I just didn't want to see the cracks. After that, it all fell apart pretty fast."
The next year, Ellie thought, remembering what Dean had told her about that time, Sam had taken off without telling anyone, gone to Flagstaff; and by the time Dean'd gotten over that and thought that things had settled down, his brother already applied to college and been accepted. And then he'd really gone.
"I thought everything would stay the same."
She heard the wry self-deprecation in his voice and smiled slightly. Keeping the status quo was something he still tried to do.
"Where'd all this come from, Dean?" she asked.
"Was all this supposed to happen the way it did, Ellie?" He moved a little and she shifted away from him, settling herself higher on the pillow to look at his face.
"I mean, was that all predestined to work out that way? That Sam would leave like that, and all the things that followed it…there was no choice, no other way for it go?" He gestured vaguely at the room. "Is all this following some path that we can't know, can't see…and could it all change?"
She tipped her head, her gaze on the ceiling without seeing it. "Well, you've got three choices. You can believe that it was all fixed. You can believe that it's all random. Or you can figure that some of it is fixed and some of it is random, based on our own choices."
She glanced sideways and saw his brows draw together again.
"What do you believe?" he asked.
"I'm definitely in the door number three camp. Some things, like the way your family found me, I think weren't fixed…but something meant that to happen in that way, at that time. Other things, like choosing this case, are more random, they could go either way." She rolled onto one arm, propping herself up.
"The Apocalypse, for example. Although getting everyone in place, at the right time, was clearly the work of destiny, or Fate, or God, Sam choosing to try and take Lucifer on wasn't. And what you did, in Stull's, that wasn't a part of any grand plan. Nothing could have made you keep trying to get through to Sam, with what Lucifer was doing; that was just you, your choice, your free will. Random."
"What about us?" He looked at her.
She closed her eyes, thinking about her decisions, his decisions. Some of it had been manoeuvred by destiny, and some of what had happened where their lives had intersected had been thwarted by destiny, or at least by the angels who could see the destinies, but a lot of had been their own choices.
"I think we've followed our hearts, as much as we've been allowed to," she said finally. "No argument that destiny wasn't involved, but only in the biggest things. We could have slept together and conceived John and chosen not to be together, not to stay together. You could have kept hunting with Sam."
He very nearly had, Dean remembered with a pang of discomfort. It had been a sudden decision to go and see her, one that had led to them sorting through what had happened. With Bobby's unwelcomed help, he amended.
"Is that what's happening here?"
"Destiny?" She shook her head, her gaze a little distant as she thought about it. "No, I don't think so. The family that disappeared, in '79. I think they're all still alive, still living in that house, just not in this reality."
He blinked. "What?"
"When I…went through that doorway, it was a lived-in house, clean, food in the cupboards, flowers on the table…and the neighbourhood there was very different, really built up. I think there's a loop here, but I don't know why, and I don't know what caused it."
"So, could we be trapped in it too?"
She looked sharply at him. "Is that what you're worried about? That we're going to be stuck here?"
"Well," he said, his expression uncomfortable, "It wouldn't be the first time we've been dragged into something that something else is controlling."
"No," she acknowledged with a hint of a smile. "It wouldn't. But, I don't think this is deliberate. I think this is a mistake, an accident."
"What makes you so sure?"
"I'm not sure, really. But we can still move freely between the planes," she said. "If it were deliberate, I think we would have lost the car as soon as we got out of it."
"Is that supposed to make me feel better?" he asked indignantly.
"No, this is supposed to make you feel better." She moved close to him, her fingertips brushing over his skin.
The library was open but empty when they found it the next morning. No staff, the magazines and newspapers from out of town yellowing, their dates all the same.
"Not big readers?" Dean wondered aloud as they walked past the librarian's desk.
"Can you find the original newspapers our clippings came from?" Ellie asked, handing him the file. "They might have archives in the back? I'll check the county references for what happened in town in the 70s."
As Dean headed for the rear of the building, Ellie walked past the reading rooms and found the records section. The public copies of the county records, including the meeting minutes, were there, neatly filed by date and subject.
She started with 1975, pulling the files out one by one, skimming through them and returning them. Nothing much had happened in that year, and she moved onto the next.
In 1976, a development group had lodged an application to the county to build a huge new development in the town. Ellie looked at the proposed plans which built over the cemetery for several housing tracts, a part of the downtown area for a new business complex and further out, a light industry development. She frowned as a name leapt out at her from the list of directors. Rodney McAllister had been a director of the development.
The proposal had been opposed by some of the townspeople. Fisher Thompson, newly arrived from New York City, had been one of the names on the petition against it.
She leaned back in the chair, pen tapping furiously against the papers in front of her as she tried to imagine what had happened here in this place almost forty years ago. She looked up as Dean brought an armful of newspapers to the table, dropping them at the end.
"'76 was a busy year here," he said, dropping into the chair next to hers.
"I noticed that. There was some controversy over a proposed development in town," she said, looking past him to the pile. He handed her the topmost paper.
"More than a controversy, it got pretty physical."
She picked up the paper and looked at the headline, the small line appearing between her brows as she started to read the story.
Both McAllister and Thompson had, in fact, grown up here. That put an even worse wobble on the coincidences that were piling up, she thought. The two men had argued in the hearing at the hall over the proposed development, and that argument had escalated later that evening in Hal's, local bar and diner, leading to McAllister being taken to the ER in the next town over for a broken nose, four broken ribs and bruising. McAllister had denied that it was assault, calling it a difference of opinion and telling the cops to leave it alone.
She put the paper down and looked at Dean, one eyebrow raised. "Guess they didn't get on as kids either."
The corner of his mouth lifted as he handed her the next one. One week later, Thompson had been found in his home, torn into little pieces, his wife and daughters fled. The accompanying picture had been one of those stiff, professional ones, showing Thompson standing with his arm around his wife, their two girls standing in front of them, all four dressed up nicely. Alice Thompson was a pleasant looking woman with pretty blonde hair, her slim figure complimented by the tailored pale suit she wore. She was wearing a fine gold chain with a tear-drop pendant and the girls had been wearing matching pearl necklaces and small pearl studs in their ears. They looked like an ordinary, nice family, no different from any one of a million others. McAllister had a solid alibi for the time. He'd been entertaining half of the town's bigwigs in his dining room that night. The police were baffled. The FBI was baffled.
But the feeling raised in the town had snuffed the development proposal cold. No one was interested in it after the murder. McAllister and his company had left town, and things settled down again, until he'd returned three years later, when probate had finally been cleared for the Thompson family, and had bought the property.
"It gets better a little further back." He passed her another paper and she looked at the date. 1966. Same house. This was the article that the file held, the murder of the family, supposed by a vagrant. She skimmed down the article noticing, as Dean had, the fine print notice at the very bottom that it was continued on page 33. Frowning, she turned to the middle of the paper. The rest of the story was just a short half-column, tucked between bake sale, used car and secretarial services advertisements, and a story about a missing dog. Marcus had missed the continuation, when he'd copied the story for the file.
The family that had been murdered were the Haileys. Mr Hailey was the sexton for the cemetery. The oldest child was Cole, a sixteen year old with a bright future. He'd won a football scholarship. Ellie looked up at Dean.
"Two more for you." He passed her a school yearbook, 1966, and another paper, also 1966 for March of that year. "Look at the football team."
Ellie flipped through the yearbook, and found the photographs of the football team, the names listed underneath. Hailey had been the quarterback. McAllister had played centre and Thompson was the fullback. In the photograph, the three young men stood together, arms slung around each other's shoulders, grinning into the camera. She stared at the photo for a minute, then put the yearbook down and picked up the paper.
In March 1966, fifty-six year old Harriet Winslow went missing. The search had lasted three weeks, then the police had closed the file, citing no further leads. Harriet had been an embarrassment in life to the town, and apparently someone had advised that she shouldn't continue to be an embarrassment in death. Her body was never found. The story was brief, even for a case with no leads. Ellie looked up at Dean, one brow raised in silent query.
"I had to go a little further back to get the dirt on Harriet." He passed her another paper. "Page 6."
Ellie flipped past the first few pages, stopping as she came to the story. The story, again, was brief and vague. The lady in question had been arrested for soliciting at the local bar. The grainy picture above the story showed a voluptuous woman wearing a low cut dress, long tousled-looking hair piled on top of her head, and a lot of makeup giving her features a striking, gypsyish look, accentuated by the necklace with a tear-drop pendant around her neck, and the long earrings dangling from her ears. Nothing else was mentioned. She stared at the picture for a long moment, something bothering her about it, then put the paper down when it wouldn't come.
"Alright. You have my attention." She looked up at him.
"Apparently, Harriet was soliciting the high school kids as well as older clientele." He took the paper from her and opened it again near the back. A small, discreet advertisement advised potential clients of her business there. "She might have hooked up with those three, sometime around graduation. Might have managed to get something compromising on the quarterback who'd gotten a scholarship. They might have decided to do something about her."
Ellie's mouth twisted. "That's pretty thin."
"Anorexic," he agreed readily. "But what else? We got three kids who all knew each other and were pretty tight in school. Then one of them is murdered and the other two stop talking to each other. They take off for their respective lives, and then ten years later they're back, on opposite sides of a town-wide dispute, and the ones who live in the house are murdered. The other one takes off and when he comes back to town, his house and family, hell, the whole town get shifted into the Twilight Zone."
She nodded. There were too many connections to be coincidence. The whole time shift didn't add in, but perhaps that was the result of something that had happened over the course of the events.
"Ellie, we need to find Harriet's body. If she's ground zero, maybe everything else will snap back."
"Yeah." It was possible, she thought. She didn't know how it could've happened, but it was certainly possible. She tapped the papers. "Pretty sure I know where it is."
"You do?"
"The quarterback's dad was the sexton at the cemetery. His son had just won a scholarship, so maybe he gave the boys a hand to bury the body." She looked over the table, now covered in papers and notes and files. "Let's get copies of all of this stuff."
He nodded, gathering up the papers again as she pulled out the map of the town. Finister's Funeral Home was the only death service in town. They should have the grave allocations for the cemetery.
It was early afternoon when they walked back up to the cemetery, the air crisp and cool, the cloudless sky a deep azure, vivid against the fall colours of the trees. Salt, butane, shotguns, shovels and matches filled the bags they carried. The thought of digging up a grave in the bright sunlight brought another layer of surreal to the day.
"Somewhere on the house side?" He dropped his bag and looked at Ellie, who was studying the allocation sheet from the funeral home.
"Yeah, and out of the way, to one side." She looked along the edges of the wide field, dumping her bag next to his and starting to walk between the gravestones to the northern side of the field. Dean followed her, looking at the rough grass that spread between the graves and rows. Field had to be a couple of acres, he thought, and the existing plots took up barely a quarter of the ground. Finding this grave wasn't going to be as easy as he'd hoped.
"Look at that." Ellie's voice was soft. He followed her gaze and blinked. At the edge of the field, close by a towering wild rose, he could see a square of grass clearly differentiated from the surrounding vegetation in colour and texture.
"They didn't do that deliberately?" he asked her. She shook her head.
"No. The rest of the soil here must be pretty poor, but where the body is, there a lot more nutrients and the soil's been loosened. Very handy thing." She walked up to the edge of the grave, ducking as the errant breeze brought a long runner from the rose swaying close to her.
"We'll start with this, and hope the townsfolk haven't been burying other murder victims up here."
They retrieved their bags and started to dig. The turf was tough to cut through, but once it had been lifted, the soil was soft and came out easily. When they got three feet down, Ellie climbed out of the grave and swapped her shovel for a shotgun, watching and waiting for any sign that the spirit of the woman they were digging up was going to take it personally.
Dean felt the resistance in the earth before he heard the shovel's thunk against the rotten lid of the box. He scraped the lid with the edge of the blade, and tossed it out of the hole, using his hands to sweep the final piles of dirt free. Most of the cheap pine box had rotted away, leaving a fine, deep surround of humus over the bones that were arranged within. He looked at the skeleton carefully, noting the size of the skull, of the pelvis and hands and feet. Definitely a woman's body, he thought.
Ellie passed him the opened bag of salt and he spread it over the bones, shaking the last of it over the skull. He turned to the edge of the grave and took her hand, bracing his foot against the side of the hole and jumping, as she pulled against his weight. He smiled inwardly, her strength never failed to surprise him, packed into a slender body half his size and weight.
The breeze had picked up, bringing a line of cloud from the east along the horizon. He looked around the edge of the field, seeing the branches of the trees tossing and bending, looking for any skirls or twists that seemed to be going against the direction of the wind he could feel on the side of his face. It'd had been awhile since he'd just salted and burned the remains of a vengeful spirit, but he had plenty of memories of occasions where the damned things had been pissed at him for doing it. He squeezed the bottle over the grave, and crouched by the edge, shielding the match from the wind and dropping it in.
The lighter fluid caught with a solid whoomf and burned fiercely in the deep shelter of the hole, the bones charring under the flames, the smell rising out and dissipating. Ellie was watching the house, the small crease back between her brows. He looked around, wondering if they'd be able to feel the town returning to the single plane of the present. Nothing looked or felt any different.
"Did it work?" he asked, finally.
"I don't think so." She looked down into the grave at the smouldering ashes that were all that remained of the body. "I mean, I think that the haunting part of it is probably over, but it doesn't seem to have affected the rest." She held out her watch to him. The hands were still stopped on the time they'd entered the town, yesterday morning. "Pretty sure we're still without phone coverage too."
"Crap." He looked down at the grave. "What now?"
"I don't know." She bent and picked up the shovel, knocking the loose dirt off before sliding it back between the handles of the bag.
Hal's Bar & Diner was quieter when they arrived, the jukebox a little louder, Gerry Rafferty's Baker Street filling the room with guitar and sax.
"Whatever is doing this, it's in the house," Ellie said, dipping her French fry into a puddle of ketchup and eating it slowly. Dean nodded, looking around the room. The same people, some of them anyway, were there, at the same tables they'd been last night. It looked like a loop.
"You don't think …" Ellie looked up at him suddenly, her nose wrinkling at her thought.
"What?"
"That maybe, one of those guys took a … a souvenir?"
Dean looked at his burger and put it back on the plate. He thought about the skeleton he'd uncovered. "Body was intact."
"They could have taken hair, or something she was wearing, even jewellery." She looked down at her food, feeling her appetite disappearing.
"Jewellery," Dean said slowly, his eyes losing their focus. Ellie watched him, and felt the same connection crackling in her mind, in the air between them. Her eyes widened.
"Alice Thompson was wearing—"
"Harriet's necklace," Dean finished, his gaze focusing on her.
"Where are the photographs?"
"Uh, in the room, with the file." He picked up his burger and took a big bite.
"You thinking—?"
He nodded, chewing faster and swallowing. "Cursed object."
"Yeah." Ellie pushed her plate aside and finished her beer, pulling a couple of bills from her wallet and putting them on the table. Dean took another bite and put the burger down, getting up as she did.
Under the flat overhead light, the two photographs showed the necklace clearly enough. Ellie put down the magnifying glass and leaned back in the chair.
"It's the same one."
Dean turned away from the table, going to the fridge for a beer. "That woman took off with her kids—how're we gonna find it now?"
Ellie straightened up, leaning forward on the table. "She can't have. The necklace has to be what's holding everything open, the gates or doorways or wormholes or whatever they really are." She looked down at the photograph. "It has to be there."
"Did the feds confirm that she'd left the state?" Dean sat down and pulled out the reports again.
"No. The reporters were the only ones who said that she couldn't be found."
"Maybe she didn't leave."
They looked at each other.
"I'll get another canister of salt," Ellie said, getting to her feet.
"There should be more butane in the trunk." Dean followed her out.
The walk back up to the house was harder after dark. The wind, forerunner of the storm that had been slowly approaching throughout the evening, was strong enough to bend the boughs of even the big trees, and fallen and falling leaves rose and fell around them as they crossed the cemetery, the almost-full moon's light flickering intermittently over them as cloud built up overhead.
They'd quartered the cemetery first, examining the long sides of the fields under the moaning, tossing trees. Even under the flashlight it was hard to see the differences in colour that might have marked an unofficial grave. And neither thought that Alice Thompson and her daughters were buried in the cemetery. The house was the centre of the slips. The jewel the centre of it all.
"Why do you think the necklace is still on the body?" Dean raised his voice as they crossed the last stretch of open ground to the building.
"I think she liked it." Ellie stopped at the porch, throwing her hand over her face as a whirlwind of flying leaves swept around her. She opened her eyes when it'd passed. "It didn't suit the outfit she was wearing in that photo at all, but she still wore it."
Fashion clues, Dean thought in bemusement. He wouldn't have known—or cared—if a piece of jewellery fit or not. He wondered, with a half-repressed snicker in his throat, if Sam would've.
Inside the house, it was quiet and still and they stopped in the hall, tucking flashlights, salt canisters, butane bottles, matches and extra shells into the deep, wide pockets of their jackets.
"Whole ground floor?" Dean asked, waiting by the first door in the hallway. Ellie nodded.
"You take that side. We'll meet back at the stairs when we're done?"
Dean nodded and turned into the living as Ellie started in the front sitting room. They ran lines of salt across the thresholds and window sills, around the vents and fireplaces. If it was just a cursed object, they could destroy it and leave, but if it was something else, Dean thought worriedly, they wanted to trap the thing in there with them. He still wasn't sure that was such a great idea.
"Which way?" Dean tossed the empty salt canister to the floor next to the front and looked up the stairs when Ellie appeared.
Ellie nodded. "We'll try there first. Together…one of those middle steps was a doorway from the alternative time line."
As he took the first step in unison with Ellie, he felt the prickling sensation on the back of his neck, and stopped, turning to look around. The EMF was on, in the inside pocket of his jacket, murmuring and burbling to itself, but not really showing anything.
"What is it?" she said softly, stopping when he had.
"Bad feeling." He shook his head. The house was still silent, still quiet. He hadn't seen anything. He lifted his foot and they took the next step, and then the one after that together.
Ellie tightened her grip on the shotgun. She respected Dean's feelings; they'd often given them just enough advance warning to get out of the way of things that had been trying to kill them. She looked down as they reached the middle of the staircase, but they passed over the step she'd appeared on without anything happening, and at the top of the landing, she turned left to follow the hallway to the bedrooms.
All four bedrooms were still furnished, dust laying over the beds and shelves and dressers without any sign of disturbance. The EMF remained mulishly silent as they checked the two bathrooms, and approached the narrow door that led up to the attic.
Ellie turned the doorknob and pulled the outward opening door wide. A dark set of steps led up and they could hear the moaning and wailing of the wind clearly now. Dean took point, and was halfway up the stairs when the EMF squawked, throwing himself against the wall, swallowing his heart from where it had lodged in this throat, hearing Ellie's furiously muttered swearing behind him. He pulled it out and looked at the gauge, which was swinging wildly across the meter.
"Ellie, get up here." He squeezed back against the wall, making her room for her to come up beside him.
"Another doorway?"
"Yeah, maybe." They took the last few steps together and came up into the attic, a wide, open space, spanning the roof of the building, unlined and filled with boxes, old pieces of furniture and bric-a-brac. The air smelled musty and very faintly of dried flowers, despite the draughts Ellie could feel trickling past her as the wind outside sought the cracks in the roof.
Her attention was snagged by a neat pile of luggage, sitting to one side of the space, several steamer trunks and huge suitcases, piled one on top of the other. She pointed her flashlight at the pile. Every piece had been arranged precisely perpendicular to the others.
"Seem a bit obsessive-compulsive to you?"
Dean looked at the pile and nodded, heading for it. The top suitcases were empty, and he pulled them down, tossing them to one side as he reached for the first small trunk. That wasn't empty. He gave Ellie the shotgun and flashlight and pulled the trunk from the top, easing it down to the floor. The metal hasp still held a padlock and he pulled out his knife, setting the blade beneath the hasp's fastening to the trunk and popping the entire lock off. The flashlight illuminated the small skeleton inside the trunk clearly when he lifted the lid.
"Sonofabitch."
He pushed the trunk to one side, and reached for the one that had been under it. Also not empty, he realised with a sinking heart as he dragged the weight over. Ellie poured salt over the bones in the first trunk as he broke the lock of the second and they saw another child's skeleton lying in the bottom. The sharp smell of butane filled the air and Ellie dropped matches in both trunks as Dean struggled with the padlock on the largest trunk.
The firelight and flashlight revealed the woman who'd been crammed into the trunk, pretty blonde hair still adhering to her skull. They gleamed on the fine gold necklace and disappeared into the faceted sides of the dark purple jewel set into the centre of the tear-drop pendant, as if the jewel was swallowing the light. Dean reached into the trunk and undid the small clasp, drawing the necklace free as Ellie poured salt over the bones.
The EMF shrieked and the air around them dropped in temperature by fifteen degrees.
Dean dropped the chain onto the floor as Ellie spun around, both barrels of his sawn-off fired at the spectre that had been behind them, splintering it momentarily, their ears ringing with the gun's noise in the closeness of the attic.
"What the fuck?"
"God, I am so stupid!" Ellie reloaded and passed him the shotgun, scooping up the necklace and shoving it into her pocket as she dumped the salt over the bones in the trunk.
"What?" Dean squirted butane into the trunk without looking, his gaze moving fast around the room behind them.
"The necklace was what she was after, as much as the men. She would've left the rest of the family alone if Alice hadn't kept the necklace on. She couldn't get up here before we burned her remains."
"Oh." He straightened up and glanced over his shoulder at her, as she lit the match and dropped it into the trunk. "What now?"
"She's going to keep coming for us." Ellie looked around the darkness surrounding them.
"You think we can destroy that necklace?" He looked at the stairs leading down from the attic. "Maybe in one of the fireplaces?"
"I don't think fire's going to do it, Dean." She thought of the basement, the edge of the wooden work bench she'd glimpsed down there, before she'd been transported to the McAllister's alternative universe. "There's a vice in the basement."
"Okay." He moved slowly toward the stairs, feeling her behind him.
Harriet Winslow appeared to his left, and he pulled the trigger without hesitation, working the slide one-handed with the weight of the gun, and bringing the barrel up again as she reappeared to the right.
Ellie reached the stairs and stopped at the corner of the balustrade, the barrel of the sawn-off tracking the area as Dean moved past her. She went down the stairs half-sideways, keeping Dean in her peripheral as she watched behind them.
They ran down the hall, taking the steps down to the ground floor in threes and fours, then slowed as they entered the narrow hallway to the kitchen. Ellie pulled the trigger when Harriet appeared behind her, her hand diving into her pocket for shells. The boom of the pump and the noise of the slide loading the next shell told her Dean had seen the ghost as well. She caught the flicker of movement again and fired the second barrel, turning as she expelled the spent shells and reloaded.
"Just blow the door open, we have to get down there now."
Dean nodded, sending two shells into the ghost in quick succession as it blinked in and out around the kitchen. He fired at the basement door's handle, and the door swung open, Ellie stepping around him to cover him while he reloaded on the top step.
"Dean."
He looked up as the last shell was seated, and caught the pendant Ellie tossed to him, pushing it into his pocket. He took a step down, bracing himself to be sent elsewhere, then opened an eye when he wasn't. The flashlight, held along the gun's barrel showed him the bench, the big vice gleaming blackly at its end, and his stride lengthened as he took the stairs in chunks. Behind him, Ellie fired again, then leapt down the first few steps, one hand breaking the gun, the other scrabbling in her pocket for more shells.
Dean was already at the vice when the air turned frigid around her, and a shove from behind sent her flying off the stairs and onto the ground. She twisted in the air, landing on her shoulder and rolling onto her back, firing as the spectre swept toward her. Staggering to her feet, she reloaded again, backing toward Dean, the barrel swinging from side to side. Then the temperature dropped, and she felt hands, behind and to one side of her, lifting her off the ground.
At the vice, Dean scrabbled among the oddment of tools on the bench, his hand closing around the ten pound sledge with a feeling of relief. He caught the movement behind him in the corner of his eye, unable to turn and look, and positioned the pendant on the vice's flat surface. There was a crash and heavy thunk behind him at the same time as he swung the sledge down, the purple jewel shattering into a thousand slivers of stone when it was crushed between the hammer and the vice.
He turned as Ellie fell from the height of the ceiling, the shotgun lying on the ground. The ghost shrieked and vanished and the house flexed sickeningly around him, the air disappearing for a moment as the world shifted incrementally under his feet, the timbers and glass and plaster of the building appearing to bow outward and then inward before settling back into their accepted shape.
He dropped to his knees next to Ellie, lifting her head gently. Blood dripped onto his hand and he turned her face to see a long gash disappearing into her hair. It was shallow, more like a deep scratch than anything worse. Looking more closely, Dean realised Ellie's arm was hanging at a peculiar angle and his breath whistled out when he saw it was dislocated. He glanced up at the thick beam above them. Harriet must have lifted her straight up, and she'd taken the impact on the back of her shoulders, ducking her head, maybe getting the scratch from a nail or screw in the timber.
He was glad she was unconscious as he rotated the arm inwards, then up and out, feeling the ball of the joint sliding along the edge of the socket, and pressing hard as it came free, the ball settling back into the joint under the pressure of his hand. He looked around for anything to use as a sling. It took a second or two to recognise the changes he was looking at. The bench and vice had gone. Instead, the floor was concrete, a short hallway to an interior wall and door were taking up the space where the bench had been. He glanced at his watch and saw the second hand resume its journey around the face.
The interior door opened and the sound of Zeppelin and the smell of pot filled the space. Dean looked up at the mildly interested expression of the boy standing there.
"What happened?" the boy asked.
"Ah…" There wasn't an explanation that would make sense, Dean realised. "Had a fall, you got a towel or something I can use for a sling?"
The boy nodded and backed through the door, leaving it open. Dean saw two other boys sitting in bean bags. He nodded self-consciously to them and they nodded back, passing a bong between them.
"Here you are, man," the first boy said, handing him a large cotton square. "Be cool."
"Right on." He folded the square and knotted it, sliding it over Ellie's head and around her arm. "Later."
He shook his head, half-smiling at them as he picked Ellie up, and turned for the stairs.
Ellie looked around as they pulled out of the motel's driveway. The town was back—not the town they'd found but the one that had meant to be. The people they'd seen all looked more than a bit shell-shocked. They'd had breakfast at Hal's, after Dean had patched her up, and everyone in there had been silent, staring at their food, or each other, as the radio behind the counter had played music and read the news. It would be an interesting assimilation for them, into the twenty-first century.
"How's the head?" Dean glanced at her.
"It hurts." She smiled at him, settling against the corner of the door and the back of the seat. "Painkillers haven't kicked in yet. It'll be alright."
He nodded, watching the road in front of them. "Ellie, did you get the feeling that we might have been a bit manipulated back there?"
"Oh yeah." She looked through the windshield. "And not just a bit."
"Who do you think was pulling the strings?"
"I don't know." She frowned. "I called Marcus, asked him where that case came from. Anonymous tip, he said. It turned up, full case details, in our post office box, three weeks ago."
"Huh."
"Yeah."
Castiel stood at the edge of the town, staring at the black car as it pulled away.
"Atropos."
"Castiel."
"You were forbidden to have anything to do with the Winchesters."
The slender woman turned to him, pushing her glasses back up her nose with one hand, as the other clutched a large leather-bound book to her chest. "That necklace was holding open a dozen wormholes, Castiel. I couldn't do anything about it, and the people in there were trapped for almost forty years." She glanced at the distant car. "Your pets are hunters, they're experienced in this kind of thing. They could get in and destroy the necklace and release everyone without destiny being involved."
"They could have been killed."
"I suppose so. But they've always been in that position, Cas. And it was their free choice to take the case on." She shrugged. "If they're going to be around, they may as well be useful."
She vanished.
Castiel sighed deeply, then the clearing filled for a moment with the sound of beating wings as he disappeared.
