A/N: I want to thank everyone who has given me support for this story. I appreciate all the reviews, the story/author alerts, the inside info and words of encouragement. The chapter title (and lyrics) is taken from the song For Whom The Bell Tolls, by Metallica.
Disclaimer: I don't own Supernatural. This is for entertainment only, and not for profit.
Chapter 8 – for whom the bell tolls
The demon poured out of Withers' mouth just as the rope tightened and the man's neck snapped. It had many names over the years. Anthony was just one of them.
Meg was another.
Ben Murray hated Sweetbriar State Hospital. He came to see his sister every Friday, which was his usual off day from the factory. Ben really didn't know if Georgia even recognized him. He held her hand in the visitors' area, and he talked to her about the family, and how his job was going. He told her he missed her. She smiled blankly at him the whole time and nodded in all the right conversational pauses, but he was never sure that she even knew he was there.
Ben pulled out his keys just as some godawful clanging shook the air high over his head. Sounded like church bells or something, and he turned, tilted his head upward to look.
There was smoke in the sky. Ben stood there by his truck, and he watched as this big coil of black smoke moved through the sky. He didn't understand it, but it didn't worry him all that much. It was just smoke, right?
Nothing to get alarmed about.
Five minutes later Ben's body started the ignition and pulled out from the parking lot. Meg looked up into the rear view mirror and grinned as his eyes turned pitch black. It was too bad about Cal, but he was boring anyway.
Dean Winchester at Sweetbriar. Big bad hunter in a mental institution. Ben's fingers tapped out a rhythm on the steering wheel as he pulled onto the ramp for the highway. This is too good not to share.
Two hours after police pulled Withers' body back into the bell tower, patient Calvin Meyers was found dead in his cell. Apparently he chewed open the veins in both wrists. The words LEFT ME were scrawled on the wall over the bed.
There was a lot of blood.
Jimmy Novak quietly walked into his room and sat down on the bed without being told. Dr. Michaelson was pleased about that.
Dr. Weddington called for a lockdown of the place until everything could be sorted out. The sound of the bells sent the more susceptible patients into a tailspin. The sunroom had to be cleared out and all the patients were escorted back to their cells. For a time the walls of Sweetbriar vibrated with cries and shouts and screams. The noise was deafening, and Beck organized teams of orderlies and nurses who went from room to room dispensing medication.
By the end of the day Beck had a pretty good tension headache. He popped two aspirin and stayed over to supervise. He wasn't about to touch any of the red pills in the medicine bottle he carried. It was the same formula, just a new batch that he'd made a little stronger, increased the percentage of Amobarbital, just for Dean.
Seeing two entirely different alters in the same body was something that Beck had seen before. Dean favored his left hip; John didn't show signs of any disability. Each one had different reactions to the drugs. Beck wondered about Dean's so-called 'daddy issues'. He was worrisome, a personality that Beck frankly didn't want to deal with. Maybe the extra dosage would be enough to put Dean down and make him stay there for good.
Beck had to talk to the cops and Dr. Weddington about recently deceased Eldon Withers, and no sir, he hadn't noticed any strange behavior from him. Withers was a model employee, and in Beck's world, that was certainly true. He bought drugs from Beck occasionally, he was hands on with the patients, he kept his damn mouth shut and he didn't ask any questions. Good man.
No one entered John Doe 317's cell. By the time Beck remembered to go back and check on John, it was later that evening.
Gabriel sat in a corner of the cell and listened. His skin throbbed every time he took a breath. Every time he blinked his eyelids made he heard a low, booming sound, like the noise the white bees always made when they came out.
No, please…Gabriel looked around warily. They might come out the walls this time, instead of out of thin air. He was too tired to do anything about it if they did.
Hadn't felt this way before. Gabe could vaguely remember the first time he took the pills, and he wasn't sure if he'd felt this way before. He hadn't, had he? Beck could have told him whether he had or not, but Beck had to leave. Gabriel could hear the sound of bells overhead, and the patients in Ward A howled like banshees.
Gabriel's next door neighbor, Tom Stephani, screamed for Jesus to help him and begged his dead family to stop tormenting him. He said he was really sorry he killed them all.
Stephani threw himself against the walls, and it felt like a heartbeat, slow and steady.
The noise stopped soon enough.
Beck didn't come back, but Abraham Bender did.
He was all black scratchy lines and static at first. Abraham stood in the center of the cell and the sight of the shotgun cradled in his arm made Gabriel cringe.
Abraham pointed the barrel of the shotgun down towards the floor. "Look at you. Got you all strung out on those pills." He shook his head in disgust. "Thought you were better than this, little brother."
"You didn't come for me." Gabriel swallowed hard. "None'a you did."
"I know a man's gotta do things to get along. But this?" Abraham spat on the floor. "We hunt and fuck these sonsofbitches. If I found you by the side of the road like this, I'd hunt you myself."
Gabriel blinked, and Missy was there.
Her long brown hair was a mass of snarls and tangles, her face smudged with dirt and mud. She wore a long brown dress that was tattered and ragged around the edges, slouchy brown socks and scuffed workboots. Gabriel knew, even though he couldn't see them, that her knees were scarred and scabbed over, and he could practically feel the self-inflicted slash marks on both arms, even though her arms were covered by long sleeves.
Missy cocked her head to one side and stared at him, and her eyes were bright with wonder and hurt. Gabriel couldn't understand why she was looking at him like that.
"Don't love me anymore," she whispered sadly. "Is that it?"
"…nuh…no…t-that's n-not…" Gabriel shivered uncontrollably. He clenched his jaws to stop his teeth from chattering.
"You left me, Gabriel. Why'd you leave me?"
"Please…I can't…can't remember…" The words were too damn hard to get out.
Lee and Jerry laughed.
Gabriel recoiled backwards into the corner. They were up in his face, the both of them. He could smell funk, ground-in dirt, rotgut and dried blood.
"Sure you do, freak. You remember just fine." Lee fisted the front of Gabriel's top and jerked him up on his feet. Jerry pressed into Gabriel from behind, slowly rubbed his body up and down against Gabriel's back .
"We ditched you, remember?" Lee grinned, wide and cheerful. "Ol' hoss there smacked you upside the head and we dumped you out on that parking lot just like you were trash."
Jerry laughed into the shell of Gabriel's right ear, a blast of bad breath and rotten meat that made Gabriel flinch. "You musta wandered away and the cops picked you up later on."
It was hot now, so warm in the cell that Gabriel couldn't catch his breath.
Lee let go and Gabriel hit the padded floor on his hands and knees.
Jerry's boot connected with Gabriel's kidneys. It was a bright, blinding pain that took his breath away. Lee slammed his boot down on Gabe's right hand. Bones broke, but Gabriel barely felt it. His body shivered and shook. His eyes rolled white and he was barely conscious as he sank back down on his right side.
It was too much trouble to keep his eyes closed, so Gabriel closed them.
The air around him felt heavy, so heavy it was hard to draw it into his lungs, so after a time Gabriel stopped trying to breathe.
The slot in the door opened up behind him, but Gabriel didn't notice.
Tuesday was a black dog in Canton, Ohio.
Make his fight on the hill in the early day
Constant chill deep inside
Dean scowled as he looked down at his work boots. He strood at the gas pump while his baby got filled up. Damn dog gnawed on them when he played bait to lure the bastard in. Well, the credit cards were good. Maybe it was time to stop by Wal-Mart and get a new pair.
Sam strolled back from the men's room just as the pump stopped. Time to go.
Shouting gun, on they run through the endless gray
On they fight, for they are right, yes, but who's to say?
Wednesday, no rest for the wicked. It was all a blur now. Miles on the road, one skeezy hotel room after another. The fugs came out of the woodwork. Vengeful spirits and other assorted spooks, 'geists with dead on aim that threw everything at the brothers but the kitchen sink.
No word from Dad. That bothered Dean. A lot, more than the way he felt nowadays. He didn't show it, though. Sam had the bitchface these days about enough things. Bringing up John Winchester's lousy parenting skills was guaranteed to get Sam started.
Dean kept a headache all the time. Food tasted funny, like dirty metal, but he wasn't gonna cry about it. He ignored it. He moved on.
He and Sam laid that spirit to rest in Breese, Illinois. Dean noticed those teethmarks on his neck when he shaved the morning after. It was no big deal.
For a hill, men would kill. Why? They do not know
Stiffend wounds test their pride
He couldn't stay warm. Maybe he was coming down with something. Some bug or the flu. Maybe that hot dog he'd eaten at that rest stop didn't agree with him. Yeah, that was it.
Men of five, still alive through the raging glow
Gone insane from the pain that they surely know
His skin felt funny, too, like it was stretched too tight over his bones. And that constant ringing in his ears came and went.
They had a job to do, and all these minor aches and pains didn't mean a thing. It was him and Sam and the Impala and the open road, it was the hunt, the family business, saving people, killing things, and hell yeah, it would be nice if Dad checked in every once in a while, but Dean wasn't gonna cry about that, either. This was what he had, what he wanted.
There was something else out there, just beyond the edge of his vision and the reach of his hands that he was pretty damn sure that he didn't want.
Come on freak. Doc wants to see ya.
Dean could swear sometimes he could taste something like rubber in his mouth. His skin prickled like he'd stuck his finger into a live socket.
You're not the one I want. Dean…
He wasn't sleeping very well at night. Bad dreams. Dad touching him, what social workers and shrinks called bad touches, only Dad never touched him like that. Dean was sure of it. Yeah, the old man was known for sending him out on endurance runs or making him dig a trench with a teaspoon, and Dad could make Dean doubt himself just by quirking an eyebrow at him, but John Winchester never looked at his eldest son like that, never claimed him with his mouth and his hands and body and the only thing for it was to fuck him into the mattress while calling Dean by a name he didn't even recognize.
We just want to see you get better.
Dean remembered words like 'devil's sunrise' and he didn't know why but he hated the color red.
Blackened roar, massive roar, fills the crumbling sky
Shattered goal fills his soul with a ruthless cry
Stranger now are his eyes to this mystery
It all came to a head in Harmon, Indiana. At least, that was where Dean thought he was. Rumor was the Lawson house ate people. Franklin County had the highest rate of missing persons in the whole damn state of Indiana, and this huge wreck of a house was at the center of all the disappearances in the county.
The place gave him the creeps. It was huge, and the windows looked like dark mouths, not eyes. He usually was pretty level headed, but the image stuck with him, and he didn't know why.
Sam gave him this look as they got out of the car.
"Dude? You okay?"
Dean couldn't hide the brief shock of pain that jittered across his face when he straightened up.
So sweet, John, the voice whispered. You really are. Phantom hands skittered across his neck and down his back and Dean flinched.
"I'm fine. Just super."
Sam didn't seem convinced. He looked up at the sky and frowned. "It's daylight, Dean. Nothing's gonna happen now. I can do this by myself."
Dean rolled his eyes. "Stop hovering, Grandma. Let's get this done. Cover more ground if we split up."
"Don't leave me, Dean," Sam said, and the serious tone in his voice made Dean freeze right in his tracks. Sam shouldn't have to look like that, horribly young and vulnerable all of a sudden.
"What?"
Sam sighed. "I said…don't leave me. You don't have to go back out there. You don't."
He hears the silence so loud
Crack of dawn, all is gone except the will to be
Now they see what will be, blinded eyes to see
Something pulled at Dean. He could feel it just then, more hands, all over his body.
Get him up on the table, now ---
He stumbled into the side of the Impala, stumbled into his girl hard enough to leave a bruise on his left hip, just another one on top of all the other bruises that were already there now. Dean's knees bucked, and he was down on the ground, on his knees, staring at the thick green grass between his fingers. He couldn't catch his breath.
For whom the bell tolls
Time marches on
For whom the bell tolls
"Don't leave me, Dean, please don't leave me…"
Sam and the world drew away from Dean in a long, slow spiral.
Next post Monday.
