AN: I really want to welcome my new readers who have recently found this story. Thanks to Kathy, Princess of Fae and Atlasina7 for their kind reviews as well as scootersmom and Dargur. Here is the longest chapter of this story. Enjoy!
Drugs and Doorknobs
The ride back to the motel was thankfully short. Jane had her hand clamped so tightly across her mouth that her fingertips were white. His own stomach wasn't feeling so great either and Dean was more than happy to park and get out of the car. Opening the trunk, he collected his duffle and Sam's laptop. He and Sam hadn't bothered to get a room of their own yet, but since all the collected research was in Jane's she'd just have to deal with him.
Jane had managed to open the passenger side door while he'd been getting his gear, but she was only halfway out of the car when he saw her start to crumple. Dashing over, Dean got one hand on her shoulder, pushing her against Baby's body barely in time to stop her from falling to the asphalt in a heap.
"Whoa! Hold on." Shuffling the bags to one side, he wrapped one hand around Jane's bicep. "C'mon, let's get you inside." He guided her into the dim room and deposited her as gently as he could onto the ugly bedspread. The only light was what filtered in through the thin curtains. Jane slumped over with a low moan and fumbled with the drawer in the bedside table to dig out a prescription bottle.
"You good now?" he asked, feeling a little awkward.
"Yeah, thanks," she mumbled. Tossing two pills into her mouth, she washed them down with water from the half empty bottle that was sitting beside the lamp. Sliding to lie flat, she took off her sunglasses and slung her arm across her eyes. "I'm sorry for what I said back there," Jane's voice sounded loud in the uncomfortable silence. "Just give me a couple minutes for these to kick in and I'll help you with the research."
"Take your time." Dean didn't bother to respond to the apology. He had kind of overreacted himself and what was important now was finding the missing men.
A fiery spasm ripped through Dean's gut and he had to clutch the edge of the table to keep from doubling over as he breathed through it. The pain ebbed a little, but he figured it was time for some meds of his own. He had to keep it together long enough to track down the spirit that had snagged Sam. Rooting through his bag, Dean palmed some pills from their med kit and dry swallowed them. They probably wouldn't do more than take the edge off, but he needed to be able to think if he was going to figure this out. With Jane's eggs scrambled, he couldn't count on her brain power.
Sitting at the table where Sam had been earlier, he pulled the first pile of papers over. Dean was used to his brother's particular way of organizing research, but Jane's system was easy enough to figure out. This close to the window, there was enough light for him to see, so he flipped open a file labeled "Victims" and started reading.
An hour later and Dean was certain the ghost was not Nicole Allen. In fact, he'd bet dollars to donuts that none of the victims were the spirit they were looking for. There was no rhyme or reason to the victimology. Young, old, male, female; the only thing the people had in common was they had disappeared from the house or its surroundings. Putting the folder to the side, he sighed and rolled his stiff shoulders.
He glanced over to the bed where Jane was asleep. As much as he could use the help, she obviously needed the rest. Besides, without an audience Dean didn't have to try so hard to hide the growing effects of the curse. He felt like he'd been hit by a truck and the burning sensation beneath his skin was slowly building. Moving quietly, he stepped into the bathroom and splashed some cool water on his face. It didn't make a difference, but he convinced himself he was refreshed and went back to the table to keep reading. The answer was somewhere in those piles of paper.
xxxxxx
The darkness was profound. For an irrational moment, Sam thought he had been blinded. He squeezed himself closer to the wall behind him and braced for an attack, whether from the hunter across the room from him or the spirit. The air was frigid, much colder than it had been. A drift of icy fingers caressed his face and he flinched. The sensation passed after a moment and then a garbled cry echoed in the blackness. Sam fumbled for his phone and thumbed it to life again.
The ghost of Charity was hovering over Bryce. Translucent hands clutched the side of the hunter's head. His face was ashen, eyes wide with terror, and heels kicking in the dirt as he struggled. Small tendrils of energy bled from his open mouth as he soundlessly screamed, tethering him to Charity who seemed to absorb them. Sam frantically patted his pockets but he didn't have a single grain of salt on him. The phone's bluish light cast wild shadows as he swung it around the room looking for anything to use as a weapon. Spotting the rotting door, he lunged past the ghost and her victim and yanked on the door handle.
The decayed wood gave way and the knob and rosette came free. Spinning, Sam lobbed the heavy iron through the spirit and she vanished before the iron handle fell to the ground.
Bryce slumped over as the onslaught ended. He waved Sam off, puffing and groaning as he pushed himself upright again on shaking arms.
"I'm okay," he panted. "Thanks for the save," he said grudgingly.
"Could you tell what she wanted?" Sam asked. Maybe if he could figure out what was driving Charity, he could convince her to move on or at least buy them some time.
"Wanted? You mean other than to suck the life right outta me? No." Bryce was back to eyeing him with suspicion, but Sam had bigger problems right now than a skeptical hunter. If Charity came back, he needed a better weapon than the doorknob. Breaking out the rest of the crumbling door, Sam took a look at the old bed frame. The mattress had rotted to nothing and the frame was more rust than metal at this point. He kicked at the spindles in the headboard and managed to knock a couple free.
"She's coming!" called Bryce in alarm. Sam quickly handed the other man one of the iron spindles and took a defensive position to protect him. Charity coalesced in front of them. She was still very indistinct, barely more than a cloud, but he did get the impression of a face with large eyes and a puzzled expression. She didn't attack, and Sam hesitated, watching and waiting. Impossibly fast, a spectral arm shot out and slammed into his chest. The spindle fell from his hand and Sam sank to his knees.
Before, her touch had shown him remembrances of her own short life, but this time she was tearing through Sam's brain, almost as if she was searching through his memories. Images flashed through his mind, like an old-fashioned Rolodex. Abstract and out of order, scenes from his life, raced past faster than he could register them. Faces appearing and blurring together - Mom, Dad, Bobby, Cas, Jack, Charlie, Lucifer, Chuck, Eileen. Amongst it all, like a solid-colored background juxtaposed to a whirlwind of color, was Dean. Countless memories; Dean's face, his voice, his laugh, his smell, the rough touch of his hand, the brush of his shoulder, the sound of his footsteps, the comfort of his hug.
Sam fought to expel Charity from his mind and grabbed onto a random memory as it whizzed by. It was nothing special, one of a million moments spent in the car. He couldn't tell when or where it had happened. It was Dean in the Impala, hands on the steering wheel, grinning at him from across the bench seat. Sam clung to that remembered image like a lifeline, an anchor keeping him from being swept away in the torrent. Miraculously the maelstrom of memories curved, rushing past like floodwaters. His brain was on fire and his body was frozen, but Sam willed himself to hold fast. If he died here he was condemning Dean to an agonizing death from the curse.
"Dean," he rasped, reaching out with every fiber of his being. Like a spark in the darkness, Sam touched a fragile thread of connection between him and Dean. It was probably wishful thinking, or even some sense memory of the link created by the counter-curse spell but regardless, Sam sent a desperate prayer to his brother just before he lost consciousness.
xxxxxx
By the time Dean looked up again, the early evening sun was beginning to cast long shadows across the parking lot of the motel. He'd reviewed everything there was to know about the construction of the subdevelopment. The houses had been built in a predictable schedule without any accidents or issues. There were no police reports or news stories about any of the other houses. The developer had a good reputation and had seemingly got all the approvals and permits needed for the build. No one had been hurt or killed during the construction. By all accounts the house on Daisy Street should be part of a nice quiet neighborhood, not the stomping grounds of a powerful vengeful spirit.
Dean rubbed the back of his neck. The extra painkillers he'd taken a while back had done next to nothing to ease the curse which was back in full force. His jaw was aching from clenching it so tightly and his head was thundering a powerful counterpoint to his pulse. He wanted to rip off his burning, itching skin, he wanted to scream in frustration. But mostly he wanted Sam, safe and sound and fussing over him. Instead, Dean settled for digging into their dwindling stash of morphine. With a tiny smile, he could imagine Sammy worrying about him taking a dose so soon after the pills. "Sorry Sam," he thought. If he was going to get his brother back, Dean needed to buy himself some time.
The small stab of the needle into his thigh was followed very shortly by a sense of relief as the narcotic soothed his overactive central nervous system. Dean slid back into his chair and slumped over the table, resting his head on his arms. It was easy to understand how people got addicted to this junk. Closing his eyes, he let himself enjoy the blissful euphoria of being pain free for a moment.
"Dean!"
He panned the room. It was Sam's voice, tinged with a panic that immediately had him on high alert. The first image hit him, and he slammed his hands to his eyes, blotting out the motel and Jane, who was still asleep on the bed.
He was seeing some other place. It was dark, broken only by a dim blue light. He got the impression of a cave or cellar with a dirt floor. He saw a dark-eyed man with a beard. After that, he got bizarre flashes of a girl in an old-fashioned dress. Finally, he saw the same grey fog from the house. Overlaying all these images was a strong sense of his brother, a combination of the warm, close connection created by the curse-cure and a completely unacceptable feeling of grief-tinged regret. Whatever was tying them together abruptly ended, leaving Dean in a daze with Sam's final word ringing between his ears - charity.
"What's going on with you?"
Between the morphine and the weird vision, Dean was slow to come back to himself. He pulled his hands away from his face and the motel room jolted back into place making his stomach roll. Jane was sitting on the edge of the bed holding a pistol in her good hand. The gun was still at her side, but her posture was tense, all traces of her long nap gone.
"Nothing, I'm fine," Dean said. In his gut he knew the brain-bending, Sam-o-vision was a message from his brother but until he had time to process what he'd seen, he wasn't about to share it. Hunters seldom were cool with unexplained visions.
"Bullshit," she snarled, waving the gun in his direction.
"Whoa," he cried, pointedly raising his empty hands.
"What's the morphine for?" she asked, indicating the empty syrette on the table with a jut of her chin. "I sincerely doubt you're hurting that much from getting tossed into the wall. So either you're hiding something or you're a junkie. Which is it?"
He shuffled through a number of lies, but then shrugged. Once the drugs wore off, she was going to find out sooner than later.
"I'm not an addict. I got bit the other day by a Bestia Doloris." He grudgingly confessed, watching the suspicion creep across her face. Slowly he dragged aside the collar of his t-shirt so she could see the still healing bite. She glanced at it briefly and he released the soft cotton.
"What the hell is a Beast of Pain?" Every hunter worth their salt had a rough grasp of Latin.
"Sam called it a physical manifestation of a curse." A flutter of trepidation had Dean recklessly standing to pace the room despite the gun in her grasp. He didn't have time for this, he needed to find his brother. The message from Sam suggested the kid was in danger.
"What kind of curse?" Jane asked and he spun at the end of the bed to face her. She looked even more skeptical, but she didn't seem eager to shoot him, so Dean chalked that up as a win.
"The kind that causes a metric crap-ton of pain, okay?" he snapped at her. He found himself grinding his teeth in frustration. It wasn't Jane's fault he was so stressed out. It had been his choice to keep her in the dark until now. He took a deep breath and flashed her a half smile in apology. "Look, it's fine. I can handle it for now with a little…pharmaceutical help. But we have to find Sam before it gets worse, okay?" The question came out in an embarrassingly pleading tone, but he met her eyes anyway and silently begged her to believe him.
She stared at him then pointedly laid the gun down on the nightstand.
"So that's what Sam meant when he said you weren't at 100% earlier." Dean was surprised she had heard their whispered conversation, but he nodded. It was a relief, really. Now that Jane knew, he didn't have to waste energy trying to hide his discomfort. She crossed over to the table.
"What did you find while I was sleeping?" Grateful she wasn't pushing for more detail, he joined her, shoving a pile of folders her way.
"Look for anything to do with charity," he said, sliding back into his chair.
xxxxxx
The ticking of the stupid wall clock was getting on Dean's nerves. It was an ominous sound as if each flick of the hand was counting down the remainder of Sam's life. Page after page he read, looking for some reference to caves or charity. The clarity of Sam's psychic message had faded, but the sense of urgency had not. Dean flipped open another bundle of papers.
The Hollman family had been prominent members of Monticello back in the day. They arrived at the end of the Civil War and Alexander Hollman commissioned a huge house for his family. Photographs from the turn of the century showed a sprawling, gothic hulk of a house with pointy gables and dormers stuck all over the place. Dean wasn't impressed by architecture, but he skimmed the description of the grounds.
The estate was originally almost 40 acres but over the years the family sold off land, both to the growing city and to other families. Eventually the house itself burned and the last parcel was sold by Edgar Workman in 1989 to the developer who built the subdivision.
"Dean, I found a reference to Charity Hollman. Is that what you meant?" Jane slid a sheet of paper his way and he grabbed it even as she continued. "She was the granddaughter of Alexander, born in 1872. Do you think she's the ghost?" the other hunter asked.
The document Dean read was sparse, a photocopied article from an old newspaper. The author noted the girl's birth, but focused more on her younger brother Ernest. Ignoring Jane's question for now, he snatched up the rest of the file she had been working from. Sam wouldn't have mentioned this girl if it didn't mean something. Quickly he scanned the rest of the column. He noted the girl's mother had died when she was about eight. Disappointment and fear were growing heavy in Dean's stomach and he shoved the folder away, hanging his head and rubbing his palms across his forehead. He couldn't lose Sam. There was actually a future worth living for now, but what was the point without his brother?
Despite his rudeness, Jane had continued her own reading while he skimmed the clipping. If she noticed his despair, she kindly didn't mention it. Instead, she tossed another document in front of him, stabbing it with a finger. It was a copy of a page from a local church history.
"See this," she pointed at some text. Dean let his eyes crawl across the typed page.
"When George Hollman died suddenly in 1916, Ernest moved his family from Little Rock to take up residence in the grand family home he inherited from his father. He began extensive renovations to the mansion to both modernize it and to put his own stamp on the house. Within a few months tragedy struck the family again with the death of Charity Hollman, Ernest's sister. The Hollman family had claimed Charity had gone to school overseas as a child, then devoted her life to missionary work in distant lands. Unchristian-like rumors persisted that she had never left the family home and in fact was kept locked away due to insanity or disfigurement. Regardless, Ernest made a substantial gift to the church to have a memorial plaque installed in the chancel."
"Maybe there was something to the rumors?" Jane asked.
"Could be." Dean was noncommittal. Even if Charity was the ghost, this didn't tell them where she was taking people. He closed his eyes and tried to remember what he'd seen. The images had flashed by so quickly, but the dirt floor and cave-like room he'd seen suggested somewhere underground.
Rifling through another bunch of papers he examined everything he could find on the house itself. A grand mansion like the Hollman home wouldn't have had a cave, but maybe there was a basement, wine cellar or cold storage? It would have been helpful if plans for the house were available, instead Dean had to wade through far too much boring crap about the life of servants and workers on the estate in the late 19th century. But eventually he found a reference in a letter from a long-dead cook to her sister of a storeroom where apples from the Hollman orchard had been kept. The word 'orchard' twigged a gut feeling and Dean pawed through the piles of papers.
"There was a photograph…of a playground…" he said as he searched haphazardly.
"Do you mean this?" Jane proffered a grainy news clipping and he grabbed it from her.
The story was about the altruism of the elderly Mr. Hollman who sold the property. Apparently the purchase agreement required a specific chunk of the property remain undeveloped to be used as a public park. A chunk of land that had previously been an orchard. The low-resolution photo showed a playground bordered on one side with a low dry-stacked stone wall, the same wall that edged the lawn behind the ghost house on Daisy Street. Dean had been a hunter a long time, long enough to trust his personal spidey-sense.
"I think I know where they are," he blurted, standing so fast the chair toppled over.