AN: Please note – WARNING: there is a lot of violence in this chapter, and mentions of human and animal deaths. Not for the faint of heart!
sfaulkenberry: I only see your review once. Glad you like the line about the Wanderer. I do like making up new kinds of baddies. You'll have to wait another chapter or two to hear about what's going on with poor Sam. Your comment about when isn't he in trouble made me laugh. I'm meaner to poor Sam even than the writers of the show…maybe.
sylvia37: Yeah, he would! Dean's POV will show up again two chapters from now and we'll see just how not happy he is!
Janice: Yeah, it gets creepier in this chapter and the next…not sorry! LOL Lots more history – a heck of a lot more than I intended. These little plot bunnies grow so fast.
Stormy: I'm so glad you're liking it! Your suspicious mind makes me happy. I read all of Agatha Christie's works when I was a young teen, and I became such a suspicious reader because of her. And yes, this Agatha is named in her honor (though it's a dubious honor, I suppose, since she's so evil). Thanks for your comments!
Like ink in water, the evil spread slowly but inexorably.
Abel Morrow was the first to disappear. He was old enough by then that the general assumption was that he'd wandered into the woods and run into something he couldn't handle. After all, they were still out on the frontier, and plenty of people of all ages had run afoul of wild animals or simply gotten lost in the dense, unforgiving woods. Agatha smiled through the entire funeral.
Not long after that, Abel's long-time mistress disappeared, but nobody really thought the two were connected, since the two no longer liaised. Some time later, people began to notice that a few of the trappers who came to town every few months hadn't shown up for a while. It took over a year before anybody looked into it, since they were loners and not really part of the community. Their huts and normal haunts were abandoned, and most assumed that they had simply moved on to greener pastures, though a few started to wonder if there were something or someone evil around.
Two years after that, several leaders from the small local Native American tribe came to town to complain that their people were disappearing. But of course, they were hardly considered human by the white settlers, so they were roundly ignored. They soon learned what area to avoid.
Nearly five years later, a family of six came to town, then were simply gone one day. Everyone assumed they had simply kept moving – until the rest of their party showed up two weeks later. They'd expected their brothers, sisters, and cousins would be there, and they would all settle in the still unnamed town. It was one of those women, a sister to the missing woman, who put up a sign that said Welcome to My Travails. To the disgruntlement of the town fathers, people began to call the town Travails.
Many, many years later, little Amos Morrow would be tasked with picking up the pelts from outside of his great-great grandmother's hovel. He immediately noticed the grizzly bear pelt. If anybody in town had killed a grizzly, everyone would have heard about it. Curiosity piqued, he tiptoed up to the shack and peered between two gaping boards, briefly wondering how an old woman could survive the winter in such a decrepit place.
A feeling of wrongness engulfed Amos as he looked. Every bit of furniture he could see was covered in leather, but it was a strange sort of leather that he didn't recognize. Feeling uneasy in a way he couldn't explain, little Amos grabbed up the pelts and ran all the way back home.
Amos would never forget that miasma of ill-will, the sense of something truly evil. As an adult, he would study the occult and the arcane until his family privately worried about his sanity. Then he would spend half of his fortune building a mausoleum, typical marble, but with a band of decoratively etched iron banding the entire thing. The single doorway would be lined in iron. And by the time The Wanderer decided that Agatha was no longer useful and allowed the old body to die, Amos' trap would be complete. And by the time it learned she would not let go even in death, they were both stuck.
But of course, no matter how much Amos insisted nobody go into the mausoleum, some people ignored him. Amos' grandson James would think the stories were simple myth until two of his own children disappeared. Then he would shut down the entire cemetery to future burials and any visitors, though the iron fence was long gone.
Years passed. Agatha and The Wanderer waited. They were patient in their hatred.
Then finally, the child Allen Morrow, lonesome, angry outcast, six generations removed from Agatha, began to go to the cemetery behind his house whenever he wanted to just get away. He began to hear the whispers from the mausoleum. He listened.
One day at school, Tommy pushed Allen down and said his mother hadn't died – she'd left because she couldn't stand his face. Allen knew what the whispers would tell him to do, and anger gave him the courage to do it.
Tommy's dog trotted happily along with Allen that night. When it froze at the door of the mausoleum, Allen simply pushed it inside. He watched every move the specter made and didn't even throw up. In fact, he thought about it for days. It was horrible. It was glorious.
A lot of animals went missing after that. Allen taught himself to trap. To shoot. And he lived for the trips to the mausoleum.
It took him twenty years to work up to bringing humans. But when he got there, it was even better than he'd ever imagined.