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ELEVEN
West Willow Motel
Willow, Connecticut
Saturday, October 7, 2006
5:18 PM
There had to be something that connected the victims, there always was, that much John knew for sure. But what he didn't know was what that link was and where to find it, leaving him stranded as he stared harshly at the mark-up of the case on the wall. Articles, blue prints, and maps took up most of the papered sheetrock, with post-its surrounding each with tidbits of information that might prove either helpful or worthless. On the table next to him, files from the police station sat open, splayed out for easy viewing from across the room. Still, none of it pointed to an association between both Molly Walter and Natalie Hollbrook.
So far, John only knew two things about the case he was working—what the creature he was dealing with was, and how to kill it—but neither of those things could be considered helpful when the missing components consisted of where to find it or how to track its pattern. Back when he had first started hunting, the latter had always been the easiest part of the job, the research coming the quickest with all the down time between cases. In the mid-eighties, only a few years after he had begun, demons and spirits were rarities, maybe appearing once every other month, or even once a year, depending on the area he was tracking and level of past activity. Recently, with the thing that had killed Mary rising again, the supernatural was pouring out of every crevice imaginable, making it unmanageable for even the most seasoned of Hunters in the network. In the past, John would be able to discover what he needed at his leisure, reading informative books in between incidents to fill the gaps in time, sometimes taking off for weeks to hunt something down that didn't seem to be an immediate threat. But now, everything felt rushed, as though it had to be taken care of quickly before all hell could break loose—literally.
It wasn't as though John despised have to speed up his work—in fact, he enjoyed it more that way—but with the intensity came an overwhelming sense of something being missed, as though the sudden swell in the abnormal was being used to distract him from his true goal. Before he had been made aware of what was happening in Willow, John had been on track to finding the gun he needed to kill the demon; or was rumored to, anyway. For some reason, the idea that the case hadn't been that far away unsettled him, almost as though the disappearing girls were being used to sideline his hunt for the mythical gun he was becoming foolish enough to believe in. On top of that, to find his daughter and her friend in town, working the same gig, proved something was up, though on what side the strangeness came from, he still didn't know.
But, as much as he didn't want to drop what he was doing and what he was searching for, John had a duty to protect people, and that was his job. Though he recently began sending the cases he had heard through the grapevine to Sam and Dean, knowing that they would take care of it, this one was too close to forward to them, especially since he knew they were currently caught up in something in New York. However, to discover that Amelia and her friend were within arm's reach, doing the same as his sons and working as a team to dig up whatever they could on this case, John had been a mixture of disappointed and angered. If there was anything John could want for his kids, it would be a life away from demons and spirits. Unfortunately, for his boys, that was already too late, Amelia still had a chance.
Ultimately, though, it seemed as though no matter how hard he tried to keep the girl away from the life she shouldn't have, the life John had promised her mother she wouldn't have, he couldn't keep her out of it. After a two-hour stint at the police station, talking over the details of the case with an officer and pretending to be genuinely uninterested in helping— claiming to just be there due to the Special Agent in Charge wanting to cover all the bases in terms of any situations that might be beyond police control, the attitude he sensed the sheriff would want, though he didn't know why—John had managed to walk out of the building with two thick folders full of similar past occurrences and current write-ups. However, just as he was about to walk out the door, John had spotted Amelia talking to another cop a few feet away, noticing that the girl was there trying to retrieve the belongings that had been taken from her the moment she had been arrested. Though he knew the girl could see him, John had slipped out the front door in a hurry, leaving her behind to fend for herself—and hopefully head straight back to school.
Putting it out of mind by the time he returned to his motel room at the very corner of West Hartford, John had solely focused on the task at hand, realizing right off the bat that he was dealing with a criatura de l'aigua, a type of spirit that dwelled in dark spaces and attacked small children. Meaning literally "creature of the water" in Catalan, this type of thing was easy enough to spot, tipping John off as soon as he heard the specifics of the case. In most instances, criatura snatched children from their bed using a form made entirely of water, a type of protection against any sort of weapon that might be used on them to stop them from achieving their goal. As soon as the kid was in custody, it usually disappeared into a puddle, literally melting and solidifying again once back in their lair. The minute they reach their base, the criatura keep the children captive until they have enough for a meal, usually containing three or more at a time for a feast, never less.
But there was something about the criatura that snagged John's attention, a detail that was easy enough to miss if not for his trained eye. Most of the time, such a creature wasn't seen unless summoned or held in custody until it was released. For this thing to be out roaming, that meant that either it had been set loose or it had found a way to freedom. Either way, someone had to have initially called the thing, but as to who or why, or even when, was still a question to be answered.
Deciding to put everything he had into it, John had taken the time to reread every past related incident, making notes of each similarity before sticking the information on the wall around the maps he had scribbled on, making red marks over where the two current victims lived. Finding that there was something comparable occurring every ten years leading up to now, the first to be reported on happening in October of 1976—though the write-up mentioned something similar happening before but never officially filed—John had marked the houses of the previous attacks in a different colored pen, discovering that none of them lined up in any way. Turning to the blueprints of town, the glorified sketch that had been made back when Willow had become its own established area in 1916, John found that none of the houses had been built on anything that would send up a red flag, seeing that the place beforehand had been nothing but a mound of dirt that had been leveled and dug into to make a small pond in the dead center of town.
Unfortunately, with nothing to point John in the right direction, the only choice he could make was to leave his motel to begin manually searching for where the criatura was hiding out during the day. From what John knew, the things usually liked cold, damp, dark places, usually miles from civilization to ensure that the kids they captured wouldn't be able to go far if they escaped. Knowing that Hartford bordered one side of Willow, leaving the three other flanks of town with nothing but abandoned industrial area to surround them, John was going to have to search high and low for a clue as to where it could be holed up, something that would keep him from having to comb through countless amounts of long-standing homes and buildings that had been decades forgotten in an attempt to find it.
Turning his attention toward the police reports on the table, John took a seat to begin poring over them, looking for something that might give him an indication as to where the creature had been lodging before. Scanning through handwritten accounts, typewritered forms, and affidavits claiming that everything contained within the folder was as true as possible, he searched for city names and town codes, hoping to find something that would narrow the playing field. Eventually, at the tail end of a document dated the fifth of October in 1996, somewhere called Chicklow was mentioned, though the town was somewhere John had never heard of. Narrowing his eyes to look at the map tacked to the wall in the dim light, John could see that the place wasn't too far off from Willow, appearing to be nothing but an abandoned field, or so the helicopter-view photograph depicted.
Getting up from his chair to grab his keys and his coat, checking the gun stashed inside the breast pocket for ammo, John shrugged on his jacket before heading for the door, knowing that as soon as he put the criatura in the ground, he would be able to move onto bigger and better things. Thankfully, if he were to find this thing stooping somewhere in the basement of an abandoned house or factory, he would be able to put it down with a single bullet to the head, the creature being easy enough to kill once it became its solid, unprotected form, one that looked eerily similar to the Creature from the Black Lagoon. However, John wasn't about to count his chickens early, knowing that finding the thing was just about as difficult as waiting for it to get out of its liquid, defensive state. Criatura became nearly invisible in dense lighting when they returned to their watery shape, giving them the advantage on anyone who didn't have extremely acute eyesight. However, that was a thought for later, after he had stumbled upon the thing. But now that he knew where to look, it was only a matter of time until he found it.
Taking a step out into the fading gray day, John paused in the doorway to peer around at the cement lot of the motel, his senses picking up at the sight of a blue Hyundai parked not far from where his truck sat idle. Narrowing his gaze at it as he walked toward his own vehicle, and finding nothing strange aside from the purple Avis sticker sitting on the left-hand corner of the hood, John ignored the prickling sensation as he slid behind the wheel and started the engine of his truck.