The Devil You Know

Chapter 10

Dean felt his way along the wall, and his eyes focused suddenly, enough to read the house number. Sixty seven – he'd walked past the right house. Clumsily, he turned, and staggered back, eventually finding himself in front of door number sixty four, the home of Grace Holden. He leaned heavily against the doorframe, and hammered ineptly at the door. It barely occurred to him that it was an antisocial hour of the morning, or that Mrs Holden must by now be in her seventies and would probably be terrified to find a bleeding and desperate man on her doorstep before dawn. He was too numb to focus on anything other than his mission.

The door rattled, and shifted inwards a few inches, secured by a chain. A pale eye appeared in the gap, narrowed and frightened, set in a thin, wrinkled face. 'Can I help you?' she demanded, trying to disguise fear with sharpness.

Dean stood upright with great effort, and tried to school his face to an expression which she wouldn't find threatening. It wasn't easy. He knew he looked like a corpse. 'I hope so,' he answered her, in a low, strained, but reasonably steady voice.

'What do you want?' she asked, in the same tone, without moving.

'I need to know about your mother,' he told her flatly.

'Why?'

'Because I think her spirit is causing the recent murders and suicides,' he replied. He was too tired to lie. He stared frankly into the single eye he could see, hoping that he could communicate his honesty without speaking any more, because, damn, breathing hurt.

He wasn't surprised when the door slammed, but his heart sank.

He was surprised when the door opened, wide, revealing a dark hallway. Grace Holden stood, short and frail, holding the door back. 'I think you'd better come in,' she said quietly, looking him up and down with a startling strength in her eyes.

He swallowed, and shuffled in, gasping when an awkward movement jostled the wound. Screwing up his eyes against the fire in his stomach, he pressed a palm against her floral wallpaper, waiting for it to pass.

'What the hell happened to you?' she murmured, placing a thin hand on his forearm and guiding him gently to a chair. It wasn't really a question; just an expression of shock, anger, and sadness. He sank down gratefully, hoping that he'd be able to get up again when the time came.

Dean swallowed, and forced himself to sit up and meet her eyes. 'You… you believe me? About your mother's spirit?'

'Son, my mother killed my father, and then she killed herself. My daughter, in this last year, seems to have acted out her grandma's story. And then poor little Lucy killed my grandson. For all I know she's taken herself out now, too. Nobody knows where she's gone to. But I'll tell you this: my Annie and Lucy… they weren't killers, not a chance. There've been more murders and suicides in this town than's normal, and maybe yours is the only explanation that makes any sense.' She stared at him, hard eyed, almost challenging him to contradict her.

He nodded. 'You're right,' he told her.

She nodded, frowned, and stood. 'Wait there, I'll be back.' He started to object, but she stopped him with a raised finger. 'Whatever you got to do so urgent, you can't do bleeding to death,' she told him sharply.

'Got to…' Dean replied.

'I'll do what I can do quick. In any case, I'll never get those stains off my chair.' She turned, and tottered off, followed by Dean's muttered apology.

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Lucy could see Sam's anger mounting as he kept up his conversation with the door.

'Are you trying to tell me,' he began, through gritted teeth, 'that my brother walked down those stairs covered in blood, and instead of calling an ambulance, you let him walk off on his own?' His hands, balled into fists, were pressed against the wood as though he wished he could push them through the door and leave a mark on Andrew Zaretta.

'I'm sorry… he just… seemed so desperate. He had to be somewhere in a hurry, I'm telling you. I was trying to help.'

'If you'll open the damn door, I might get to him before he bleeds to death in an alley somewhere,' Sam spat, every word charged with frustration.

'He told me you were dangerous,' Andrew objected; a note of apology in his voice. 'I'm really sorry, I just can't… My wife and daughter are still asleep. I got to look out for my family.'

'I won't hurt your family!' Sam yelled, too angry to make his voice unthreatening.

Lucy let her head drop back and thud against the back wall of the closet. The debate was circular, and they'd been arguing round it for nearly twenty minutes. Michael was staring vacantly into the wall, his eyes empty. She was bored and uncomfortable, haunted with the image of Dean as she had last seen him: hunched and pale and trembling and bloody. Too many had died already…

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Dean grunted as Grace's veined hands yanked the ends of the bandage tight around his stomach and tied them. She'd hissed and shuddered with horror at the sight of the wound. It was ugly: jagged and inflamed, painted with congealing blood and criss-crossed with botched stitches. The three pulled stitches had torn his skin as they came loose.

'Lucy's safe,' he gasped out, glad that he could offer her some comfort.

Grace met his eyes, and nodded with gratitude. 'Do you know how to stop this… madness, taking control of people?'

'I'm sure it's your mother's spirit…' he choked, pausing for breath. 'I… need to… burn her bones.'

She looked at him, a strange mixture of emotions playing on her face; among them, horror.

'Sorry… it's the only way I know… to… stop her.'

'She's dead these seventy years,' Grace replied, her face impassive again. 'Won't hurt her.'

She finished securing the bandage and sat back. There was silence for a moment as she frowned critically at him: pale and shaking. He wasn't bleeding any more, but he'd lost too much already: Grace had been a nurse for several years in her youth, and knew 'serious' when she saw it. She couldn't quite understand how he was still conscious.

Sighing, she directed him to the plot holding whatever remained of her mother. Dean was leaning back, eyes half closed, hissing air in and out slowly through his teeth. She watched his tense face carefully, not sure if he was listening.

Apparently he heard: when she'd finished, he nodded mutely, steeled himself, and lurched to his feet awkwardly, nearly overbalancing and snatching clumsily at a stand lamp for support. Grace watched him try to master the pain and dizziness; studied his tensed jaw, dipping eyelids and the stretched tendons in his neck.

'Honey…' she began uncertainly, her grandmother's heart swelling with compassion. 'You're not going digging graves like that. Could you even lift a shovel right now?'

Dean opened his eyes and fixed her in a brief, diluted green stare. He nearly nodded, but stopped himself. He shrugged. He remembered Sam, locked in the closet, and it occurred to him that if he could torch Marianne's bones, he might not have enough left in him to go back and release his captive brother.

'Listen…' he began. His voice was rawer than it had been just minutes earlier. Jesus, breathing hurt. Surely he should be numb by now? 'Give me… an hour. Then -,' he paused to choke, spitting blood onto the back of his hand. 'Go to Zaretta's place, the… coffee shop… Ask him to let… to let my brother… out of his closet…'

'Boy, what is your brother doing in Zaretta's closet?' Grace demanded, her heart leaping at the news that her visitor wasn't operating alone.

Dean answered with a wet cough, shrugging at her, or at least shifting his shoulders against the wall supporting him.

'Couldn't he help you?'

'No-,' he replied, more sharply than he'd meant to.

Grace frowned, but didn't ask. He probably couldn't have answered her anyway. She nodded, and followed his unsteady steps to the door, closing it behind him. Turning, she noticed a dark lump lying forlorn on the carpet near where Dean had been sitting. She shuffled up to it, her slippers hissing against the linoleum. It was a gun.

She sighed heavily. She was too old for this.

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Andrew Zaretta sat slumped on the floor, leaning against the closet door, trying to work out the best way to explain the situation to his wife, and watching his watch tick towards the hour when her radio alarm would wake her. Honey, a dying burglar told me to guard the people he locked in our closet…

He didn't understand what was going on, and he didn't want to understand; he was still hoping to wake up to reality. He was a third generation Italian immigrant, he was thirty-six and he ran a coffee shop with his wife and their four year old girl. Murders, suicides and insanity shouldn't feature in such a life. It seemed to violate the proper course of nature. These things didn't belong in his life…

He ignored the sounds of impatience and discomfort issuing from behind the door. His prisoners had been quiet for the last half hour. Maybe if he ignored them, he'd be able to open the door later and find that they'd disappeared as unexpectedly as they had originally appeared.

Not for the first time, he wondered if madness was contagious: seeping out from under the door to infect him.

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Sam chewed his knuckles, lost in thought, watching Lucy studying the backs of her hands, wearing an absent expression.

A distant sound invaded his reflection and he jerked upright. Lucy lurched to her feet again, stiff and awkward after a long hour's perching on an upturned bucket. Michael, between them, didn't move. Sam knocked insistently on the door.

'I'll go see who it is…' Andrew told the door. 'Maybe your brother's back.'

The door bell rang again, more urgently. 'I'm coming…' the coffee-seller muttered, distractedly.

He stumbled down the first flight of stairs, and met his wife – bleary eyed and clad in a bath robe, dragging slow fingers across her eyes in an effort to wake herself up. 'Andy?' she murmured, confused with sleep.

'I'll explain later,' he called, over his shoulder. He'd never really formed a satisfactory explanation. 'Later' would be interesting. His sleepy wife nodded her assent and disappeared into their four-year-old's pink-painted bedroom.

In the closet, Sam realised he had all his fingers crossed, hoping desperately that Dean had returned. If not unscathed then at least… well, at least not dead.

Lucy stood half-hunched and nervous, tensed similarly in hope…

They waited for a disproportionately long time, the seconds stretching on; trying Sam's pressured patience. He tapped his feet angrily, and finally heard Zaretta's footsteps - and somebody else's - in the stairwell. The other steps were slow, shuffling, awkward, like an injured person's. Sam realised he was holding his breath.

The door opened, and his face broke into a smile like it hadn't in days. Relief cracked open like an egg, spreading warmth inside him. It turned cold quickly, though. There was no sign of Dean.

'Who are you?' he demanded, anger lending a rough edge to his voice. It was unlike him, being rude and intimidating to little old ladies, and it surprised even him, but he didn't take it back. He was too close to the edge.

'Your brother's going to need your help,' she said flatly, pressing Dean's gun into his hand.

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Escape from the cupboard:D To be continued…