One day, they find a town.
This isn't the first one of its kind they've come across. Other hunters find them too, going off the drunken rambling that occasionally kicks off in the bars their brethren frequent, then falters and dies just as fast under the combined weight of a hundred icy glares. No one much enjoys the discussion.
Back when they discussed it, Sam and Dean disagreed on who can find themselves rolling through one of these things. Sam still thinks long-haul truckers must see them at least as frequently as they do, drifters, sales or tradespeople who still travel by car. His arguments would draw from tales of phantom towns running back centuries, millennia. Brigadoon had a kernel of darker truth to it. He liked to bring up Atlantis a lot. On the other hand, Dean still believes you don't run into this kind of thing unless you've been touched by something before. Curses have a way of rooting in fertile soil.
They tend to find them most often in the Midwest. Depression-bleak farming communities, mid-century cookie-cutter subdivisions laid out in plasticine pinks and aquas. Ragged mining settlements in the desert. Colonial layouts in New England. This is the first they've ever found on the West Coast. Hot, rocky, on a cliff the ocean's been taking for the past thousand years and doesn't intend to leave alone anytime soon.
There are never hunts surrounding these things. They don't make the papers, the news. They never take anybody who doesn't wander into them, and Sam and Dean agree on one thing, at least: nobody who wanders into them has anybody to miss them who wouldn't have at least a suspicion about where they actually went.
Like with a lot of these places, they don't realize what it is until they're actually in it. Sometimes, they can tell from a mile away, and they can go around, turn around. This time, it wouldn't have mattered. They haven't seen an exit off the sun-bleached two-lane coastal highway in hours.
That can be one of the signs a place like this is coming up. But it can also just be a sign you're driving through rural America, so they didn't catch it. They never do.
It's a tiny town, but they always are. Main Street has a gas station, a fast food joint, stores in rows with mannequins wearing faded clothes standing stiffly in the windows. Some of them are old enough to still have painted faces on them, but there's something bizarre about the mouths and especially the eyes, maybe hinting at a local artist trying their hand for fun rather than features being stamped on in a factory. The houses are little white boxes, only the faint areas the sun doesn't touch betraying they were each once painted a single vivid color. Sea foam, coral, chartreuse, egg yolk. Salt crusts the shingles and the yards are sand and yellow-eyed grass. At the very edge of the cliff, a ramshackle fence of wire and driftwood has been erected, and if you squinted, you could see the very top of a bone-colored staircase. There's no way of telling if there's a beach below, or rocks, or just water pounding against stone.
No seagulls cry. There's just the sounds of the ocean.
It's late afternoon. The sun hangs low and orange in a cradle of thin clouds. The light is hazy with dust, or salt, or smoke. It could be anything; it's California, after all.
Dean has slowed the car to a crawl as they come up on the gas station, peering doubtfully at it. Their gauge is on the worrying side of a quarter-tank and since he doesn't know when the next town's showing up, they could use a top-off. The pumps look modern, but there's no red-and-blue open sign in the windows, no prices hung out, no deals on Monsters and Camels.
"Think they're open?" he asks Sam, then looks around at the rest of the stores. "...think any of 'em are?"
"I saw somebody," Sam says suddenly after a couple seconds of squinting.
"Where?"
"There. In the back." Sam points to a store, then slowly drops his hand. "Th-they. They didn't move...right."
Dean swears softly, and smacks the wheel with the flat of his hand. "Son of a bitch. One of these places."
Sam shoots him a warning look. They used to talk about these. They figured other hunters were just spooked, and they couldn't blame them, it heebie-jeebied the hell out of them, too. That was, until they started thinking that maybe they were finding them more often. Until Sam started keeping a dated record. Until they realized that the more they talked, the more towns like this they wound up passing through. They stopped without any further discussion, and even though they've never talked about it, they're both aware they share the same fear: that one day, they'll wake up in one. And there will be no road leading out.
But not this one. Because Sam can see the way out clear as day, yards in front of them. They're fine.
Right?
"C'mon." Sam jerks his chin towards the open road. "Let's go." He eyes the shadows on the ground. They swim. "It's getting late."
Dean clicks his tongue behind his teeth. They're not moving at all now, his foot on the brake.
"Dean?"
"Fuck, Sammy." He sits back in his seat, rakes a hand through sweaty hair. He's tired. There are bags under dull eyes. "I'm not sure we're gonna make it." He would take a bullet for his baby in a heartbeat, but gas efficient she is not.
Sam's mouth works for a second before the incredulous words make their way out. "You wanna stay here?"
"No!" Dean looks like he'd rather jump back in the Pit with tickets to the Torture Museum for Alastair. "Christ. Look, all I'm saying is, might be gas in those tanks or something."
Sam doesn't say anything. He doesn't like the idea.
"Long as we're outta here before sunset, we're fine," Dean assures. "Let's at least check." After a second's silence, he raises his eyebrows. "You wanna hike forty miles through the desert to the nearest town?"
"Fine," Sam says eventually. "Whatever."
He guides the car up to the station, parks beside a pump, climbs out. Sam hesitates only a fraction of a second before following him, because he can't let him do this alone.
While Dean fiddles with the pump, Sam leans against the blistering metal of the car, and looks at the town. He sees the usual things. Nautical flags snap in the wind, their edges splintering briefly into colors it hurts his eyes to look at. The sand that seeps into the parking lot tapers by grains into rusty fractal patterns. The store across the street looks larger through the front window than the outside would suggest.
Something is watching him. He doesn't like the color of the ocean on the horizon.
"Need any help?" he asks over his shoulder.
"Nope," Dean grunts back. Sam returns his attention to the shops across the street, and notices that one of the mannequins is not only in a different position, but closer to the door.
God, does he ever hate the ones with mannequins in them.
"Getting close over there?" he asks, this time not taking his eyes off the mannequin. It's child-sized, but not proportioned. It's one of the ones with faces.
"Few more minutes." Dean swears as he cracks a nail to the bed. He'd take Sam up on that offer to pitch in, but he's all goddamn thumbs when it comes to stuff like this. Not for lack of trying on Dean's part, but he'd just keep them here longer.
And he's pretty sure neither of them wants that.
The mannequin is still not moving. Sam's satisfied with that until he sees something past the store. Past the houses. Past the fence, even. On the staircase.
It's a shimmering, a gentle waving. Just a heat mirage. Sam realizes he let his eyes stray to it, immediately snaps them back to the mannequin, which is now frozen in the process of stepping out of the window and into the shop proper. He glares.
At least until it occurs to him that there was something slightly...off about the heat waves. That's normal in a place like this, but he looks away from the mannequin anyway. It takes a second, in the odd light and the heat waves that actually are present, for him to pick it fully out. When he does, it takes a little longer to fully process.
Loops of black thread. Piling into the air from below the cliff, drifting slowly down to land draped over the railing at the top of the stairs. The pace is sedate, dreamy. But steadily increasing.
Sam swallows.
"Dean," he says, voice low.
"Sam, seriously, gimme five minutes here."
"No - " He takes a moment to check the mannequin, which is now visible at the door of the shop, hands pressed to the plate glass and painted head tilted. Honestly, though, fuck it, it weighs eighty pounds at most and it's hollow, no trouble to kick in half. "We gotta go."
"Look, I get you got your jimmies rustled, but that's what these things do, okay? I'm trying to keep us from dying of - " A loud clanking from the pump that suddenly stops. A groan of frustration from Dean. "If this stupid fucking thing'll let me."
There are now enough threads on the railing to have formed cords of varying thicknesses. Again, it might just be the heatwaves, but Sam thinks they might be pulsing.
"We're leaving." Sam comes around to the other side of the car to physically move Dean if he has to. A bell like one that might hang over a shop door jingles on the other side of the street, but Sam ignores it.
He checks the stairs. Clumps on the railing, threads spouting feverish from below.
"I'm serious, we - "
Dean puts a finger to his lips. Sam shuts up, listens. There's a mechanical grinding, a sputtering. It's coming from beneath them, and from inside the pump.
"Think it's working." Dean grabs the nozzle and maneuvers it into Baby's gas tank.
"It's not worth it," Sam tells him. "You're just gonna have to trust me on this."
Dean looks up at him, frustrated. "Yeah, you say that now, but…"
Sam basically tunes out the rest of what he's saying, looking at the stairs. The clumps have formed a hand. Attached to the arm that unravels into cords and threads that disappear beneath the cliff.
"There's not even any gas," Sam tells Dean suddenly. It's become clear to him in a way he doesn't understand why it wasn't before.
"The tanks - "
The arm is moving. It has begun to pull up whatever hangs below.
"There's nothing in the tanks. Nothing a car would be able to run on, at any rate. Because this isn't a town, it never was, and people never lived here, and they never drove cars. Why would there be gas, Dean?"
Sam has bent down to talk to him behind the car. Dean takes that in, then removes the nozzle from the gas tank, holding it between both hands.
"Gotta check, at least," he says quietly.
And there is something haunted in his eyes. A memory of cold, of thirst, of dying lonely while already dead, and ordinarily Sam would respect scars from Below as the putridly sacred things they are. But now, he grabs Dean by the shoulder, and yanks him upright fast enough for the nozzle to fall from his hands and clatter on the asphalt.
Dean doesn't see it at first as they look over the top of the car. Irritation crosses his face. "Dude. A mannequin? That's seriously what you're filling your pants over? Just grab a - "
Sam points. Dean looks.
There is a still and quiet second. Then they both climb wordlessly into the car, stepping over the puddle of thick, dark something-that-is-not-gasoline that has begun to spew from the twitching nozzle, and Dean floors it the second the engine turns over. The mannequin's fingers scrape across the trunk as they leave, and Dean bemoans the damage to the paint job beneath his breath.
He and Sam say only five words to each other as the sun sets.
"I'm sorry."
"Yeah. Me, too."
After that, there is silence. Even when the car coasts to a dead stop in the night, further than Dean thought she'd get them, even the memories of the fumes burned off. He gratefully pats the wheel in a thank-you, and they climb out, grabbing their things before they begin to hike together towards the distant lights of a beach town.
Sam's right hand and Dean's left are shoved firmly into their pockets. Sam's left hand and Dean's right are clasped firmly together between them. They have not done this since childhood. There was no discussion and there never will be; they don't even look at each other below the stars, even when one trembles and the other squeezes reassuringly.
It's better than running the risk of something else grabbing on.