Demon Seals
Chapter Fifteen: Poltergeist
Oh, boy. Don't hate me. There's some stuff in this chapter that I pulled from seasons eight and nine of the show. We're talkin' our first taste of knowledge regarding the Knights of Hell (I really hope you're up-to-date on the show!). I won't be getting too deep into it, but I felt that it was necessary. I'll get more into why in the next chapter.
"You scream so sweetly for me," Alistair whispers to Dean as Sam looks on. "C'mon, gimme another."
Dean's screams echo, rattle around in Sam's brain as he woke up and stumbled to the bathroom to retch in the toilet.
Would the nightmares ever get any easier?
Ruby headed out a few days after Sam's breakdown on the side of the road to see if she could get in touch with any of her former contacts and figure out what, if anything, Lilith was currently up to. It wasn't like there was a thing Sam or Ruby could do to stop her directly, but if there was a way to cripple her role as a leader, then Sam would do it.
After a week, he got a short text message from Ruby:
No leads yet. Keep you posted.
With nothing else to do, Sam parked himself in a college town in Mississippi and got a job as a bar-back (and if he swayed the manager's opinion with his Jedi crap, no one needed to know but him, right?). The summer semester was close to wrapping up, which meant pretty busy weekends and slow weeknights.
His third night there, a Monday night, something weird happened.
"How do you make it look so effortless?"
Sam glanced up from moving a series of boxes at the bartender, and shot him a grin. "What, the hair?" he asked. "It's just naturally awesome."
Greg laughed. "Those boxes, asshole," he replied. "You look like you're pretty strong, but you're gettin' the things moved faster than anyone else who's ever done the job." He crossed his arms and leaned against the nearest wall. "What's your secret?"
"Telekinesis," Sam joked (well, yeah, actually, but who would believe it, anyway?). "I dunno, man, I'm just good at it."
The top box suddenly slid forward and tumbled to the floor right as something not human tingled at the edges of Sam's consciousness. "Damn it!" Greg cursed, moving forward and turning the box (of pretzels, so not a big deal) right-side up and ripping it open. "Not again."
"Again?" Sam asked. Greg sat back and sighed.
"So, this bar is almost as old as the university," he began, rubbing his forehead. "Boss decided to remodel the place a couple years ago, and ever since then…" He shook his head. "Weird things keep happening. Things falling that were secure, opening up the store to find the chairs in weird arrangements, but the security alarms haven't been set off…" He trailed off and pursed his lips for a moment. "You know that empty shelf by the pool tables?"
"Yeah."
"It used to have a bunch of things on it, like collectible glass tumblers and shit, and one day it all started flying off the shelves, one item at a time like someone was grabbing each thing and chucking it across the room!"
"Wow," Sam said, reaching out with his senses to see if he could feel anything that was possibly supernatural, like the something that had tingled when the box of pretzels had been knocked down. There hadn't been anything obvious before, but now that he knew something was going on, he could feel something slightly off about the place.
"We contacted one of those paranormal groups that has a reality TV show last summer, and they documented a few of the things we've been seeing, but not any of the major ones like the chairs moving around. So like, either this… whatever it is — ghost just wasn't feeling all that active that night, or —"
"Or it knew they were there to film it and it didn't want to play ball," Sam finished, mind racing through the possibilities. "Did this paranormal group look up the history of the bar?"
"Why, you a ghost hunting junkie or something?"
"Or something," Sam said, silently commanding Greg to tell him the truth.
"Well, yeah, they did." Greg appeared uneasy now, his emotions accommodating, but wary. "They actually said they weren't comfortable sharing the information on their show, so we made up this bullshit scene where they said their research turned up nothing that would explain the activity, but it turns out that there was a satanic cult that owned the property before it became a bar."
Sam felt his eyebrows rise, and quickly schooled his features.
"These… Devil worshippers," Greg continued, "they pledged their allegiance to something called 'The Knights of Hell', demons supposedly hand-picked by Lucifer to make all kinds of Hell on earth. There was a mass murder of the worshippers in 1863, and the original building almost burned to the ground."
Sam swallowed hard. "Did they give you the research they did?"
Greg shook his head. "Boss-man begged them to get rid of everything they'd found. That kind of destruction, and the number of lives lost… It was a little too much for him, y'know?"
"Yeah," Sam agreed distractedly. He'd never heard of something like this before. Knights of Hell?
After his shift ended that evening, Sam began researching the history of the bar and the Knights, coffee and protein bars the only thing fueling his researching frenzy. There wasn't much to be found online, but somewhere in hour eight (or maybe it was hour nine?) of his research, he ran across a name: Abbadon.
"I've seen that name before," Sam muttered to himself, rising and heading over to his duffel bag. After rummaging around for a few seconds, he pulled out John's journal.
Sam hadn't looked at the thing very much for the last few months, but he had read it cover-to-cover many times, and that name… It was in there somewhere, he was sure of it.
December 4, 1991
Picked up a demon, a protégé who had bones with someone called Abbadon.
And under that was a series of numbers ending in the letter 'T'.
Sam leaned back in his seat and frowned. He had basically glazed over this entry dozens of times because it was so short, and Dean had said he thought that he and Sam had been at Bobby's at that point. Sam had figured he was right because it lined up with his memory of when Bobby gave Sam the amulet that he chose to gift to Dean instead of John. He reached up, almost unconsciously, to tug at the amulet where it now hung around his neck.
That's not the only series of numbers in here. The thought startled Sam out of brooding over Dean, and he began flipping back and forth through John's journal, faster and faster as he discovered dozens of number listings under entries, usually short, but not always.
Within minutes, he had written several numbers sequences out on a spare bit of paper, rising as he took them all in.
"It's a filing system," he breathed with wide eyes and caffeine-shaky hands.
John's storage locker in New York had filing cabinets. Sam had thought about sorting through everything their dad had in there, but life had been so hectic, first with that cursed rabbit's foot, and then everything else, that he hadn't ever gone back.
He couldn't help but feel that these Knights of Hell and Abbadon were worth looking into, but there was still the matter of the activity going on in the bar. Since he hadn't once felt a spirit on the premises, there was a very good chance that it was a poltergeist.
A little digging online allowed Sam to watch the episode the ghost hunting show had put out for the public to see following their "investigation" at the bar. They managed to catch some interesting EMF readings, a cash register dinging and opening on its own with the nearest person standing three feet away, and a couple of boxes shifting when no one was around, but that was it.
Sam watched the whole thing and pondered over what he knew about poltergeists. What stood out to him the most was the bar's bloodied history from 1863. And from what the episode said, the activity hadn't started until the basement, once closed up, was reopened as extra storage. That further pointed to the massacre in 1863 being the reason that all of this was happening.
Then Sam thought back to when he and Dean had gone back to their home in Lawrence and met Missouri Moseley. What had she said about their home?
"Real evil came to you. It walked this house. That kind of evil leaves wounds. And sometimes, wounds get infected."
Based on what little information he had found, Sam could see these Knights of Hell being the kind of evil that could leave a wound open to infection. The ghost hunting show had set up cameras in the basement, but the cameras kept failing for different reasons, even the ones the team had been carrying on their persons.
Sam hadn't been down in the basement as of yet, but with this visual evidence on top of everything else he had learned, he knew that was exactly where he needed to go.
Now to find a strong purification ritual. There was the one he had used a year ago to get rid of a poltergeist at Missouri's request, but he couldn't help but wonder if maybe he might need something stronger.
His hands had picked up his phone and all but selected Bobby's number to call before Sam came to his senses. He had cut ties with Bobby, he couldn't just call him out of the blue like this, never mind that he had access to the best research and contacts.
Was there anyone safe to ask for help?
After some deliberation, Sam decided to just go with what he already had and hope for the best.
But first things first: he needed to go down in the basement.
"Hey, can I get a moment of your time?" Dean asked the bartender at a college bar in Oxford, Mississippi. "I'm lookin' for someone, he was here for about a month last year in August." He held up a photo Bobby had snapped a few weeks before Dean had gone to Hell.
"Sam?" the guy said.
"Yeah, yeah, that's his name," Dean quickly responded, moving closer. "Was he here?"
"He was," the bartender confirmed, "worked here as a bar-back until our usual guy came back for the fall semester up at the university."
Thank God, Dean thought silently. "I really need to know more about his time here," Dean said, "it's important."
The guy looked a little uncertain, and Dean sighed. "Did he tell you not to talk to anyone who came here asking questions about him?"
The guy nodded. "What's your name?" Dean asked him.
"Greg."
"Greg, my name is Dean. I'm Sam's brother. When he was here last year, he thought I was dead."
This workaround was Dean's only possibility of getting past Sam's Jedi shit. If this didn't work —
Greg's eyes cleared, and he called for one of his coworkers to take over behind the bar while he talked with Dean. "What d'ya wanna know?" he asked when they settled down in a quiet back room.
"Just — everything," Dean said with a shrug. "How was he, did anything weird happen, was there a girl hanging around him, that sorta thing."
"Well, there wasn't a girl that I ever saw," Greg began thoughtfully, "but he seemed like a good guy. Eager to help, always got the heavy-lifting in the back taken care of twice as fast as anyone I've ever had work here, got along with the college students… Uh, anything weird?" He swallowed hard and looked away. "I don't know if you'll believe anything I have to say about that."
"Dude," Dean said with raised eyebrows, "I practically raised Sam. There ain't a damn thing my brother's been involved with that I don't know about. Well, apart from the last year, that is."
Greg eyed him for a long moment, and then he began to tell Dean what happened.
"Dude, did you even sleep last night?" Greg asked when he saw Sam the next afternoon.
"Yeah," Sam lied (he got maybe two hours before nightmares chased the ability to sleep away). "Listen, tell me what I can go get out of the extra storage for you."
"Uh, there's really not —"
"Actually, you know what," Sam interrupted, "I'm just going to go down there and look around, okay?"
It wasn't a question or request.
Greg's eyes went a little dull as he nodded in agreement, and off Sam went. It probably wasn't one of the nicer things Sam had done, but he needed to figure out what was going on in the basement before he came back with his supplies to perform the purification ritual, or do whatever needed to be done to stop the paranormal activity in this place.
Sam had brought an EMF detector with him, but as soon as the lights flickered on in the basement, he knew he wasn't going to need it.
The basement reeked of evil, so much so that Sam thought he might choke on it. He wondered how humans without his special gifts could stand to be in this space, though a distant part of his mind was quick to remind him that just a few short years ago he himself hadn't been this sensitive.
A large box came flying out of nowhere and crashed into Sam from behind, sending him to his hands and knees as the wind was knocked out of him. "Not — playing fair," he gasped out as he struggled to regain his footing and ability to breathe.
Of course, why would a poltergeist even want to play fair? Sam recalled the one at his childhood home choking him with the cord from a lamp. He had barely given the other one last summer a chance to do anything to him, but he had needed to be certain about this one.
Well, now he was. This was definitely a poltergeist. A very nasty one, and now that it knew that Sam was more than aware of it, its intent felt more malicious than when Sam had first entered the basement.
The ritual needed to happen ASAP.
"Sam?" Greg cautiously opened the door. "I thought I heard —"
The spare bar stools on the other side of the room shot up into the air and hurtled straight toward Greg. Sam forced back his panic and reached out, dipping into his reserves and channeling it to the chairs, using their momentum to swing them in an arch that ended in the wall next to the one containing the door. The stools smashed apart from the force of the blow. Sam dashed forward, grabbing Greg and pulling him out of the room with him as he forced the door to shut behind them. "Go!" he shouted at Greg, and they both ran up the stairs and out the back door, stumbling into the back alley.
"What the fuck —?" Greg's eyes were wide and his chest heaved for air as he stared at Sam. "Sam, what's going on?"
"Poltergeist," Sam replied, still feeling breathless and a little dizzy. "Nasty SOB, just been playin' with you the last couple years." He swallowed hard. "Think I pissed it off into a rage."
"Wait, you mean like the movie?" Greg said, face pale in the afternoon light. "Is the bar gonna get sucked into an alternate dimension?"
Sam huffed out a small laugh. "Not that dramatic, no," he said, shaking his head. "I just need to get some stuff and do a purification ritual. It's not gonna be pretty, though."
Greg eyed Sam for several seconds. "How do you know so much?"
Sam shrugged. "I kinda spent pretty much my whole life traveling the country to put an end to weird things like this," he finally said.
"But that guy your first night… and all that pre-law talk —"
"I said pretty much my whole life," Sam cut him off, "not every last minute of it. Look, Greg, I need you to keep people outta the bar until I get this taken care of."
"How long is that gonna take?" Greg asked.
"Not long," Sam answered, "I've already got the stuff I need in my car." He nodded his head toward the end of the alley. "C'mon."
Greg had about a million questions to ask as he followed Sam to the Impala, and Sam answered them as best he could until he was all set at the front door. "Okay," he said, "I'm gonna lock the door behind me, and you've gotta promise to stay out here until I come back."
Greg nodded. "But what if it like — possesses you or something?"
Sam shrugged. "There's a very good chance that it's going to be too angry with me to try that," he said, holding out a sawed-off. "But just in case, this has rock salt loaded into the shells. If anything seems off about me, use it, okay?"
Greg nodded again. "Stay safe in there, Sam."
"Not likely, but thanks." Sam nodded and headed back into the bar, mentally forcing the lock on the front door to keep the doors shut. He hefted his supplies, mind seeking out the poltergeist.
Game on.
"So he walks into the bar, and the door locks behind him," Greg said, slumping in his seat. "Like on its own, I didn't have to use the keys at all."
Dean nodded encouragingly. "Than what?"
"It was really quiet for a couple minutes," Greg told Dean, "and then I see chairs moving, glasses flying off the shelves — God, it was like all hell broke loose in there!" He threw his arms up with an astounded look on his face. "We'd seen some weird shit since this place was renovated, but this…" He shook his head. "I ain't never seen the likes of that day before or since.
"Suddenly," he continued in a low voice, "there's this dull glow comin' outta the walls, and this weird wailing, growling sound started up — dude, I thought my eardrums were gonna burst — and then there was this… tidal wave, I guess, of energy with a bright flash of light, damn near knocked me off my feet, and then —" Greg shook his head in bewilderment. "Nothing. Silent as can be."
"Damn," Dean couldn't help but comment.
"Damn is right!" Greg exclaimed. "So I'm standing outside the bar with a curious crowd gathering up behind me while holding a freakin' shotgun, and finally, finally, Sam comes stumbling up to the doors with a gash on his forehead and looking just… totally beat up, and he flicks his hand at the door, which unlocks on its own." Greg raised his hands a little, almost speechless. "I just… I couldn't… like, how did that even happen?"
"And then?" Dean asked, trying to keep the man on track.
Greg snorted. "Sam steps forward, fucking trips on nothing, lands on his knees and says our 'pest problems' are over." Greg shook his head yet again, looking away. "I wanted to call an ambulance, but he said not to, so I didn't." He leaned forward. "Your brother is probably the most incredible person I've ever met," he admitted quietly.
"Yeah," Dean replied, mind churning over everything Greg had told him. "He is that."
"Pest problem?" Greg burst out as the small crowd behind him murmured in confusion. "Sam, that was — that was dangerous! What if you'd died in there?"
I'd be fine with that.
"I wasn't gonna die," Sam said, hefting himself back up to his feet and snatching back the shotgun he'd lent to the bartender. "That wasn't my first poltergeist, Greg. I was fine in there."
"Dude, you're injured is what you are!"
Sam chuckled and lightly touched the cut on his forehead. "I've had worse," he said, willing the small crowd to walk away. "We uh, we should probably clean up," he added, jerking his thumb at the mess behind him.
"Yeah," Greg said. "Are you sure you're okay? I can call an ambulance."
"Don't worry about it," Sam dismissed. "I'm okay, I promise."
And that was that, pretty much. They cleaned up the bar, and Sam stayed another three weeks until the regular bar-back returned from his time visiting family.
After that, with no real word from Ruby as to when she'd return and four months gone since Dean's death, Sam ordered Greg to keep quiet about what he had seen and then headed off to New York. It was time to check out his dad's storage unit and see what he could find on this demon, this Knight of Hell called Abbadon.