Shards of Yesterday - RBB Art Fic!
Dec. 8th, 2011 12:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
glasslogicFic title: Shards of Yesterday
Author name: glasslogic
Artist name: moodilylit
Genre: gen, end of season 6ish casefic.
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Disclaimer: I have no rights to any of the copyrighted
characters/material in this fic, and I make no profit from it.
Rating: R
Word count: 15k
Warnings/Spoilers: Endish of season 6. The story was written for the 2011 SPN Reverse Big Bang.
Author's Notes: So, apparently I was more fuzzy on the order of happenstance at the end of season 6 than I thought. I was under the impression that Sam was having hallucinations that Dean knew about before the whole throw down with Castiel and random plot reveal in the season finale. Since I was wrong, the timeline in this fic is a little off when interpreted strictly as per canon. However, itt really shouldn't cause any problems in understanding what's happening.
I'd like to thank my fantastic artist, moodilylit for her hard work and infinite patience with my ...slackerness. You can find her art post HERE. Effusive gratitude also to elusive-life-77 who, as per usual, dragged, petted, and prodded me into finishing this project, and is generally just an amazing and fantastic person! Also to caz2y5 who continues to listen patiently to me in the long hours after midnight no matter how incoherent my typing become, and most definitely to emilia8388 and slightlysatanic, who mercifully answered my 11th hour begging for grammatical assistance and got drafts back to me with lightning speed! Thank you guys so much!
Summary: The voices in Sam's head aren't the usual ones, and the poltergeist in the glass factory isn't making anything better.
Shards of Yesterday
Sam opened heavy eyelids to the harsh glow of 5:00 am on the alarm clock and the tinny strains of “Traveling Riverside Blues” from the cell phone on the nightstand that had roused him from sleep. He had the dim idea that it had been ringing for a while, weaving insistently into his dreams until he had no choice but to surface and deal with it.
Softly muttered complaints in the form of four-letter words from behind his back let him know that he wasn’t the only one pulled from sleep. Since it wasn’t his ringtone, Sam felt no compunction about scooping up the cell and dropping it onto Dean’s chest. A heartbeat later Sam heard the distinctive snap of the hinge as his brother flipped the phone open and then Dean’s half-snarled, “What?”
Neither of them were sleeping well or easily lately, and it was painful to surrender what little rest they found. Sam switched on the bedside lamp and swung his legs over, resigned to consciousness.
“One sec, Bobby. Hang on--" Dean’s hand locked like an iron band around Sam's wrist before Sam could shrug off the sheet and stand. Sam twisted to give his brother an irritated look. Dean had the phone pressed to his chest and his gaze was hard and focused. Sam stopped resisting and slumped back.
“What’s the answer to life, the universe, and everything, Sam?”
Sam rolled his eyes, having grown tired of the game days ago. “Forty-two.” Dean released him wordlessly and put the phone back up to his ear. Sam went to find clean clothes in his duffle bag, if he still had clean clothes. He paid the conversation little attention, but couldn’t help but overhear Dean’s side of it.
“Yeah, Bobby. We’re still sharing the bed.” A long pause. “Well, I don’t exactly have a lot of options.” Another pause. “He stole my car! And didn’t even know he was driving. Excuse me if I want to know exactly where he is while I’m sleeping.”
Sam pressed a shirt to his face, wrinkled his nose, and tossed it in the dirty pile.
“Handcuffs? You don’t think that’s a little extreme?”
It wasn’t, they had tried that days ago. But Sam’s ability to pick locks wasn’t damaged by the voices in his head and that experiment had lasted less than a night.
“No, it’s fine. Like being twelve again. I don’t think I slept more than a handful of nights alone until I was twenty. You knew Dad; his idea of good sleeping arrangements for us was sharing a couch.”
But when Dean was twelve, a queen bed was more than enough room for them to both toss and turn and throw elbows in their sleep. As adults, it was an entirely different story. But Sam couldn’t get up without waking Dean when they shared the bed, and Dean wouldn’t let him go unless Sam could answer whatever inane question came to his mind. It wasn’t foolproof, but at least if he responded to Dean, it was reasonably likely he was focused on reality and not the distorted reflections cast by the break down of the barrier in his mind. Or that was their theory anyway.
The only other option was to lock him back up in Bobby’s basement. Or put a bullet in his brain. They were carefully not discussing either possibility, acting instead like the situation was temporary, like he would get better.
Sam finally found a shirt that was less offensive than the others and gathered his jeans up from floor.
“Glass factory?” Dean’s surprised voice carried across the room. Sam slipped into the bathroom and pressed the door firmly closed before he overheard anything else. Whatever was going on could wait until he had a shower.
When done, he toweled off roughly and dressed, then wiped condensation from the mirror while he decided about shaving or not. Black spider-webbed cracks radiated out from a chipped edge and cast lines through his reflection. It made him feel a little unsettled; off-balance in that corner of his mind he thought of as the Cage. That little corner was always there, a subtle itch that needed scratching. But indulging the desire would hasten the breakdown of the walls that kept the Cage contained, and when those walls went down the memories of what he had endured in Hell would unstring his mind -- or so Death himself had promised. Sam hoped the collapse was a long way off. He privately doubted it though. The barrier was only slightly weakened and already he couldn’t tell reality from delusion when an attack hit. So far the episodes had been brief and caused no real harm, but worse was coming. He could feel it, like being tied to a train track when the rails start vibrating.
Sam turned resolutely away from the mirror and opened the door; the carpet felt disgusting under his bare, damp feet, but it was better than the icy cold of the grungy tile and the black lattice of the broken glass cast over his own face.
Dean was still sprawled on bed, the phone closed now and lying next to him on the sheets. He watched disgruntled as Sam paced through the room.
“Feeling okay?” Dean finally asked.
“Are you real?”
“That isn’t funny, Sam.” Dean scowled.
Sam shrugged. “I feel fine. I always feel fine. What did Bobby want?”
Dean stood up and stretched, letting the topic of Sam’s questionable sanity go. He pulled on his jeans and fumbled his feet into the boots that he’d kicked off earlier beside the bed. “Of all stupid things -- there’s a haunting a couple of hours down the road he wants us to look into. Some factory. He knows I don’t want to take jobs right now. That’s why we’re on the freaking road in the first place dropping off his mystical thingamahickies to idiots who can’t make their own kelpie traps!”
“What did you tell him?” Sam asked, trying to feign interest. It was hard to be interested in anything anymore. He just felt so tired all the time. Waiting for the inevitable.
Dean finished tying his laces and dragged his jacket on over the t-shirt he had slept in. “I told him we’d think about it. He gave me some info.” Dean motioned towards the nightstand where his semi-legible scrawl covered the margin of a take-out menu. “You want to look into it while I pick-up breakfast?”
Sam glanced at the clock. “At 5:20 in the morning?”
“There’s a donut shop across the road.” Dean shrugged. “I thought I’d grab some coffee and muffins, then we can hit the road. We can head in that direction and decide how to let Bobby down along the way.”
“I can tell you’re really serious about the thinking it over part,” Sam commented.
Dean patted his pockets down to make sure he had his wallet, his expression darkening. “Do you think this is a really good time for us to be taking jobs, Sam? With your... whatever going on and all?”
“I don’t think we should be stalking werewolves or anything like that, but doing some research and maybe a little salt and burn shouldn’t be too much for us to handle.”
“Because we’ve never gotten the crap kicked out of us while seasoning a spook before,” Dean snorted. “I’m just not happy about taking cases right now, I can’t watch your back, my back, and do the damn job, you know? Two of those things -- no problem. But three of them and someone’s going to get hurt. Or killed.”
“You still want me to look it up then? If we’ve already decided we’re not going to do it, then it just seems like a waste of time.”
Dean sighed and raked his fingers through his short hair. Half of the furrows left in their wake stood straight up, but Sam managed to keep his amusement off his face. He hadn’t found much funny lately, and wanted to enjoy it while it lasted.
“Yeah. Yeah, go ahead and look into it. I might as well at least have something to discuss when I tell Bobby to bite me. Back in fifteen minutes.”
Dean’s handwriting hadn’t improved much since about the fourth grade, but Sam had decades of practice deciphering it. Hooking up to the neighboring, more expensive, hotel’s Internet and finding what he was after only took a few minutes after that. For a haunting, it was about as bad as bad could be in their business. It would have been nice to have something to do for a while other than play wandering errand boys for Bobby and the loose network of hunters he supplied, but Sam had to agree that Dean was absolutely right to call this job a pass.
“You need to take this job.” The unexpected voice spoke practically in his ear, causing Sam to almost slide off the bed in shock. He scrambled to catch the laptop before it could hit the ground.
“Cas!”
The angel gave him an odd, assessing look. “Hello, Sam. You and Dean must take this job.”
“What do you mean we ‘must take this job’? I looked it up and--” Sam started to protest before Castiel cut him off.
“It is very important that you and Dean handle this matter.”
Sam looked at him helplessly. “You already said that, but... Look, Dean’s on his way back. Hang out a couple of minutes and then explain to us--“
“I don’t have time to ‘hang out’ or ‘explain.’ I would not be here if it was not important. Go to Evanston.”
“Cas--“ Sam tried again, but the angel was gone.
~~~~~
Dean was too pissed to listen to any details about the job after Sam dropped Castiel’s little bombshell on him. He shoved a Styrofoam cup of coffee into Sam’s hands and then packed his few belongings with harsh, angry movements. Sam understood; Dean had come up with a variety of excuses for why it was important to talk to Cas over the last few weeks, but Sam knew it all boiled down to finding a way to shore up the barrier in Sam’s mind that was fracturing by the day. But the angel had already insisted he knew of no way to do that, and Sam suspected his conspicuous absences had to do with not wanting to put up with Dean’s increasingly bad behavior over a problem that had no solutions.
Dean had not taken abandonment well.
Sam wasn’t sure if his own acceptance of the situation was exhaustion, resignation, or a strange kind of maturity. Some things just couldn’t be fixed. You made your choices, then lived with the consequences. No one had ever claimed life would be fair.
Once the car was packed and he’d eaten his share of breakfast, Sam elected to nap instead of listening to Dean’s irritated grumblings. It was easier to find sleep slumped over in the rumble of the Impala’s familiar embrace than in the quiet stillness of a motel room. Laying with Dean in the shared darkness always felt like waiting for a disaster in exactly the same way that the Impala always felt safe.
He woke up when the car slowed down as Dean exited off the interstate. Sam’s face was hot from the sunlight and drool was sticky at the corner of his mouth. He hastily wiped it off, hoping Dean hadn’t noticed. He ducked inside to grab more coffee while Dean filled the tank. The fall air in the parking lot was bitingly cold and Sam was grateful for the heat radiating from the cups. He slid back inside the car and handed one to his brother.
“Okay. Talk,” Dean ordered as he pulled back on the interstate.
“I tried talking earlier and couldn’t even hear myself over the cursing,” Sam pointed out.
“I’m better now.” From his tense grip on the wheel, Sam doubted that, but it was probably as good as things were going to get for a while.
“Soooo...” Sam found the notebook he had been using to copy things down into and flipped to the first page with his notes. “The factory was built in 1958 for Wilson Glass. They manufactured pane glass. Windows, doors, maybe mirrors -- that kind of thing. It sounds like there were problems from the get go. I only had about ten minutes to look into this, Dean, but one of the articles I saw credits more than twenty deaths to the ghost in the three years the factory was open before the company locked the doors and walked away.”
“Fine,” Dean growled. “Bodies, abandoned building, angry ghost -- sounds pretty typical so far. Still not anything someone who can’t tell reality from the hell beasts in his head needs to be dealing with, but we can probably manage if we have too. What’s the catch?”
“This isn’t just an angry ghost,” Sam said reluctantly, “this is a seriously pissed-off spook. Twenty bodies, Dean! Those dead guys didn’t accidentally trip and impale themselves on something... it’s a full-blown poltergeist.”
The silence in the car seemed to stretch for a small eternity. “Dean?”
“I’m not even going to get into whatever the hell Cas is smoking, but do you think Bobby hates us or something? Did we do something to him, like, I don’t know -- run his panties up a flag pole and I forgot about it?” Dean sounded more bewildered than angry. “Not that I wouldn’t have wanted to forget about that. But a poltergeist? In a glass factory?! This would be a stupid thing even if we were at our best. And I hate to tell you, Sam, but it’s been awhile since either one of us have really had our heads that much in the game.”
Sam flipped to another page. “I don’t think Bobby hates us. I think he saw an opportunity. You want to let me finish before you blow up this time?”
Dean flipped him the bird. Sam accepted the apology and continued.
“The ghost is powerful, but erratic. There are big fits of activity, and then years of nothing.”
“Like it’s pitching one big tantrum, then having to store up the energy again?”
“Exactly,” Sam agreed. “When they shut the factory down in 1961 it was because six of those victims died in the same day. Apparently of, uh--“
“Being in a fucking glass factory with a poltergeist?!” Dean guessed.
“Yeah. That.” Sam pushed on before Dean could get too invested in that idea. Again. “But they explained it by some crap about poor maintenance and building codes. Since then, every five to ten years something weird and unexplained happens -- sometimes fatal, weird and unexplained things. Violent windstorms, teenagers poking around claim to be thrown physically off the property by invisible hands, cars get shoved off the road--“
“Off the road?” Dean asked incredulously. “How far away from the factory is this thing’s range?”
“I didn’t see any account of anyone who’d been inside since the building was sealed, but it looks like most of the reported manifestations are either in the parking lot or... in the surrounding neighborhood.”
Dean slammed one hand on the wheel. “This is fantastic, Sam! This just gets better and better. A poltergeist in a glass factory, God knows what’s inside that Cas wants us to handle, and for all you know right now you’re sitting on a curb chatting up a telephone pole! I can’t imagine how this can go wrong.”
Sam read silently for a few minutes until Dean heaved a sigh. “Fine. What’s this opportunity you think Bobby saw?”
“The factory is locked up, but the building next door shares the parking lot. Yesterday the ghost flipped two parked cars out into rush hour traffic.”
Dean shook his head in resigned disgust. “So... the theory is that it should be holed up somewhere weak and fuming? Not able to rattle a wind chime?”
“I think that’s the idea.”
“You know, the problem with ideas, Sammy, is that some poor sap has to find out if they’re good ones or not. Why can’t this wait? It’s been going on since the sixties, and if it’s just had this tantrum and was tossing about cars, then it should be nice and quiet for a couple of years. Someone else can look into it.”
“It’s centered somewhere inside the factory, Dean. A building full of glass, it doesn’t have to be very strong to kill someone. It’s at its weakest point right now. Now is the time to do something about it.”
“Now?” Dean repeated skeptically. “Why now? So we don’t get it this time. In five or ten years, when it pitches another fit, someone can go take care of it. It hasn’t been worth anyone’s time in the last fifty years, it’s not worth our lives now.”
When Sam didn’t say anything Dean groaned. “What else?!”
Sam drew a deep breath. “It’s just that since the spirit seems tied to the building’s construction, whatever is going on might not be solved just by razing the place.”
“Is that likely to happen?”
“Next week,” Sam confirmed. “The area was industrial, but it’s been turning more mainstream in the last decade or so, and the property owners sold the building lot to the school board. They’re going to build a school there, Dean.”
“With a violent, angry, poltergeist in its basement. Fucking fantastic.”
“The part of town is becoming busier in general.” Sam glanced at his brother. “One of the cars it threw into traffic hit a school bus full of middle-schoolers.”
Dean’s eyes tightened a fraction, the change of expression probably unnoticeable to anyone who didn’t know him as well as Sam did. Middle-schoolers. Kids Ben’s age.
Losing Ben and Lisa was a scar on his brother that surprised Sam with its depth sometimes. He had lost Jessica, but as profound as that loss was, there had been something still transitory and temporary feeling about their relationship. They had been planning a life, invested in their potential. But Dean had left Lisa’s house every morning for work and gone to sleep every night in Lisa’s bed for a year. Had helped Ben with his homework, watched movies together on the couch, decorated for the holidays... Dean hadn’t been planning anything. He’d had a family, and a son, and a woman he was all but married to. Sam couldn’t imagine what it had cost his brother to walk away from that. Wondered if anything but the threat to Ben and Lisa’s lives could have made him, in the end.
But that was over now. Another life in the rearview mirror.
“Was anyone hurt?” Dean asked quietly, bringing Sam’s wandering attention back to the present.
“Scared and a few bumps and bruises. No one died.”
“Yet.”
“Are you talking about us or the ghost?”
Dean gave him a sidelong look of irritation. “You’re a riot. And none of this brings up the biggest problem with this mess.”
Sam nodded, knowing exactly what Dean was referring to. “What interest does Castiel have in the place?”
“Exactly. Because I can absolutely guarantee whatever it is, it’s going to make the rest of this seem like a cake-walk.”
“Does that mean you’re interested in taking the job?” Sam raised an eyebrow.
“Bobby asked us to look into this. Cas apparently ordered us to -- and I can’t tell you how excited I still am about that, by the way. But they both usually know what they’re talking about. We’re heading in that direction -- may as well poke around. Rattle some cages. See what tries to kill us. I mean -- a freaking school?”
“So like any other job, then.”
“Yeah,” Dean snorted. “For us anyway. What about you? You okay with looking into this -- with everything else going on?”
Sam looked out the window at the golden blur of fall grass alongside the highway. “It’s important; maybe we can even save some lives. Do something other than sit on our asses and run errands.”
Something other than wait for the inevitable.
Dean growled something under his breath, then seemed to shift the entire problem to the back of his mind. “We’re still about two hours out. What do you want for lunch?”
~~~~~
Sam drummed one hand on the cheap laminate of the table and picked idly through his salad with the other. The dressing wasn’t very good and the lettuce was wilted around the edges, but he was still enjoying the croutons. He had been sitting in the diner for going on six hours and was ignoring the dirty looks from the section’s waitress -- there was free Internet and Sam was making good use of it. Their motel had free wireless too, for once, but Sam didn’t think he could stand to sit in there alone with the walls closing in for the afternoon while Dean hit up city records. The corner diner across the street wasn’t exactly overrun with customers, so he didn’t feel bad about practically moving in.
The afternoon had been somewhat enlightening, but Sam figured he had exhausted everything the internet had that was of interest to the case. Now it was just a matter of waiting for Dean to show back up -- hopefully with the rest of the pieces. Which should have been two hours ago. Sam sighed and clicked on another link. At this point everything was repetitive, but there was always a chance of finding something he had missed on an earlier pass.
“Why aren’t you at the factory?”
Sam startled so hard he banged a knee on the bottom of the table. Castiel was sitting across from him in the booth. The angel picked up the menu curiously.
“There’s nothing in there you want to eat,” Sam offered, rubbing his knee under the table.
Blue eyes flicked his way, then refocused on the greasy plastic in his hands. “Why aren’t you at the factory, Sam?”
Sam closed the laptop and leaned in. A quick glance around told him no one was paying them any attention, meaning no one had noticed the angel’s sudden arrival. “We’re doing some research. We can’t just jump into a situation like this blind--“
“There is nothing you will be able to research that will help you with this. Go there.”
“Dean doesn’t even want to do this at all, and I’m not real happy about it either,” Sam hissed. “The least you can do is throw us a bone. What is so important about this job that it’s worth charging in blindly and getting killed over?! Because I called Bobby, Cas, and he’s keen on getting it done, but he doesn’t have a clue why you’d be interested.”
“Things are not always as they seem, Sam.”
“I, of all people, really get that. But--“ A sudden crash caught Sam’s attention and he looked over reflexively, only to find a very embarrassed waitress trying to pick up a dropped tray.
When he looked back, the angel was gone.
~~~~~
“Of course he vanished, Sam,” Dean said in disgust when Sam relayed the episode about an hour later. Dean was steadily munching his way through a pile of over-cooked French fries while Sam flipped through a stack of photocopies Dean had scored at the city records office. They were old, reduced reproductions of originals that had been long lost to time, but they were still interesting. “He knew if he stayed he was going to have to answer questions, and apparently that’s just not something the third wheel of Team Free Will is into these days.”
“He’s not exactly having an easy time of things either, Dean. He’s fighting for control of Heaven. It’s understandable he might not exactly have a lot of time to hang out with us playing twenty questions.”
Dean stabbed a fry into the ketchup with unnecessary force. “Yeah, well, I’m thinking ‘Team Fucked’ would have been a more apt description. And he sure as hell has the time to drop in to visit long enough to assign these little chores!” Dean’s bitter outburst seemed to surprise himself more than it surprised Sam and he lapsed into silence.
“We won,” Sam said quietly after a moment.
“What?”
“We won,” Sam repeated. “Team Free Will.”
“Yeah,” Dean snorted. “And look how great that’s turned out for us.”
Sam looked outside to where cars passed on the street and people walked slowly down the sidewalk. A couple hand in hand, giggly girls with shopping bags, a few just briskly on their way to other places. “Yeah,” he echoed his brother, but with entirely different meaning.
Dean followed his gaze, then pushed the plate away and leaned back in the booth. “I’m not sorry, Sam. I just--“
“It’s the price. I’m grateful.” Sam caught his brother’s gaze and held it, trying to convey the truth of his words to the person who loved him most in the world. “Grateful that we won, that the world is still here. That I was rescued and I have this time now. Whatever else comes later, it was worth it, Dean.”
Dean’s eyes held a wealth of pain, guilt, and genuine fury as Sam’s words sank in. Then the emotions were blanked out beneath Dean’s usual defenses of irritation and impatience. Sam remembered a time before those defenses had been raised against him by habit, and knew his brother would switch subjects before Dean even opened his mouth. He didn’t know how to fix the rift that the past few years and their own actions had created between them.
“Back to the more immediate example of how everything in this life is out to screw us,” Dean said, unaware of the direction of Sam’s thought, ”what did you find out? There wasn’t really anything out at city records except those papers and some local gossip.” He snagged a fry from the plate and pointed at the loose sheets in Sam’s hands with it before popping it into his mouth. “But not anything good or more useful than the Internet. I spoke with a dozen people, including seven who lived here when the damn thing was built in the first place, and got a dozen wildly different stories on what the hell is going on around here. Everything from aliens to jilted lovers, and none of it fits the scenario we’re dealing with.”
Sam nodded, frowning at the documents he was flipping through. “This pretty much goes with what I’ve found from the web and making a few calls. It was an empty lot, no prior construction. Nothing attached to the land I can find at all as far as legends or strange stories go. Not even any really notable murders or missing people reported here or in any of the surrounding counties for the months before construction started. The building was originally supposed to be some kind of stockyard processing area, but people complained and it created such a problem that the owners sold the half-completed construction to Wilson Glass. Then the new owners made the changes they needed for glass manufacturing and storage. It was pretty much a disaster from the start. The problems actually began with the initial construction, but there weren’t any fatalities until later on, so people only talk about the glass factory.”
“Thing got worse after the building was completed?” Dean raised an eyebrow. “Sounds like strong evidence that something bad happened during construction. Unless they were doing something special that might piss of the ghost once they opened?”
Sam shrugged and dropped the papers back on the table. “It doesn’t sound like it from what I can tell. They were just trying to operate a business. It doesn’t look like there was anything else shady going on. It’s had a pretty high double fence around it since they shut it down, and the cops patrol it regularly enough that like I said, I can’t find any first-hand accounts of anyone who’s been in there since the day they sealed it up.”
“That’s impressive,” Dean commented, fishing a crouton Sam had missed out of his abandoned salad. “Teenagers tend to weasel into these kinds of places like rats.”
“The graphic pictures of impaled bodies they apparently pass around under the table probably help deter any real interest. Cops and fifteen foot fences with razor wire do the rest.”
Dean stopped eating. “What impaled bodies?”
Sam opened the laptop again and found the page he wanted, then turned it so Dean could see. “Remember what I said about teenagers being thrown off the property?”
“You didn’t say onto street signs.” Dean glanced at the ketchup covered plate and pushed it away. “And nobody thought leveling this place was a good idea before now?”
Sam shrugged and reclaimed the laptop. “They didn’t have a good reason too, and no one wants to say ‘ghosts’ out loud.”
“You would think with images like that on everybody’s mind, someone would have mumbled something about a bad foundation and everyone else would have just nodded along to get the job done,” Dean said with a hint of disbelief. “Any more activity from it today?”
“Nope. Seems quiet since the traffic incident.”
“I guess we’re doing this then,” Dean sighed. “Oh, hey--“ He pulled a battered white paper bag out of his pocket and offered it across the table to Sam. Sam took it cautiously and was surprised to find two slightly smooshed cookies inside.
“What’s this for?”
“It’s like those billboards you see on the walls in stores. For how many days they’ve been accident free, you know? Except in your case, it’s day’s without unholy manifestations of your quality time in the Cage fucking with our lives. Go a week, get a cookie.”
“But you gave me two cookies,” was all Sam could think to say, bemused by the gesture.
“Yeah, one of those is mine. I earned it by not shoving you into the floor every time your cold, overgrown feet touch me in bed.” Two women in the restaurant gave them an odd look and then leaned into whisper to each other. Dean glared at them until they moved.
“Gee, Dean. That’s so--” thoughtful was definitely not the word he was looking for, “you.”
“Yeah, I’m a freaking saint. Now give me my cookie and start planning what you want to bring to tonight’s little exercise in ‘how many ways can we get ourselves killed.’”
~~~~~
The factory, when they finally saw it in person, was an almost disappointingly unimpressive structure. What could be seen of it, anyway. Most of it was hidden by a fifteen foot corrugated steel fence that surrounded the actual building, and what was visible over that was old, dark brick, occasionally accented by the particularly relentless vines that had climbed their way to the roof over time. The top panes of dark windows glittered ominously in the late afternoon sunlight, like wary eyes peering cautiously out onto the world.
The steel fence was set about ten feet behind an equally tall chain-link fence with an impressive enough lock on it that Dean actually blew a low whistle of admiration when they cruised past.
“That’s a sweet lock. Too bad invited people don’t care, and the uninvited who want in wouldn’t waste their time messing with the lock on a chain link fence.” He rolled his eyes. “It’s like they don’t know why god gave us wire cutters.”
They were still discussing options an hour later, the sun had long since set and they were settled comfortably in the window booth of a seedy bar. It was a little ways down the road from the factory and gave them a good vantage to continue their observation.
“The problem isn’t the actual getting in part,” Sam mused. “It’s having enough time to do it.”
Dean nodded, watching with narrowed eyes as yet another police car circled the building. The patrols were inconveniently frequent, and they could only speculate that the recent explosion of activity was behind the current diligence. Roughly every fifteen minutes a patrol car pulled off the road, ambled through the parking lot, and circled the building, sweeping every inch of the fence perimeter with harsh, unforgiving light.
“Fifteen minutes might be enough time to get in, or it might not,” Dean said. “Depends on how hard the second fence is to handle. Fifteen feet without a foothold on a smooth fence topped with razor wire... we might be better off trying to go through it, and that’s not going to be that fast.”
Another hour of observation and the patrols were still running almost as regularly as clockwork.
“This is stupid! Don’t these cops have anything better to do?” Dean asked, voice heavy with annoyance.
Sam swallowed the rest of his water and stood up. “The town isn’t that big; this can’t be more than one or two different cars, right?”
“If it is, they have way too many bored cops on the payroll. Usually it’s the opposite problem.”
“Right. Let’s go. I need to find a pay phone on a nice, deserted street corner.”
Dean grinned and tossed a twenty on the table to cover their tab. “Lead on, Sammy.”
“Stop calling me that.”
Twenty minutes later the patrol circling the building switched on its lights and pulled away in a flurry of noise and sound, merging into the light traffic and speeding off in the direction of other distant sirens.
“That won’t take long,” Sam observed.
“It will take long enough,” Dean said with satisfaction. “Screams and gunshots coming from some random room at a skeezy motel? That place rents by the hour. The cops will have to assume everyone they talk to is lying to them. Even if they shrug it off, it’s going to be at least thirty minutes.”
They left the Impala in the back of the neighboring building where she would hopefully remain unnoticed and made quick work of getting through the chain link at the back of the factory. There was plenty of evidence that others had gotten this far in the past, but the snipped links had been meticulously mended.
Sam kept a wary eye out for anything unusual in the night while Dean cut their way in with the ease of long practice. But everything around them stayed dark and still while they used a thin length of wire to tie the cut links back together so a brief glance wouldn’t show an obvious problem.
The inner fence was a different matter entirely.
“Looks like a custom job. Hand me the crowbar.” Dean paced about twenty feet along the steel, testing the riveted seams, before finding one he seemed to like and putting muscle into getting the bar in. It wasn’t a fast process, nor a particularly quiet one and Sam felt about to crawl out of his skin with anxiety at every pop or screech of protesting metal. It probably wasn’t that noisy, but it felt that way to nerves raw with tension.
“I just wish Cas had taken a sec to give us a clue as to what the hell he expects us to find in here that he’s interested in,” Dean panted as he worked the metal apart. “I mean, it would have been freaking nice if we could have prepared ourselves, you know? It’s not like he’s never asked us to deal with anything a little forethought wouldn’t have made easier.”
Sam couldn’t think of anything easy they had ever done that involved Castiel, forethought or not.
“Like, what if this is another one of those super-nasty angelic weapons? What if it’s the freaking Ark of the Covenant stashed away in here and he expects us to baby-sit it until he can get off his feathery ass to reclaim it?”
“How the hell would you prepare to handle something like the Ark, Dean?” Sam hissed.
“Well,” Dean said thoughtfully, “for starters, I’d pack a lot of duct tape.”
“Duct tape?”
“To keep the lid on. I’ve seen that movie too, Sam. Things aren’t so bad that I want to be accidentally melted.”
“Movie... You mean Indiana Jones?” Sam stared at his brother, unsure of how serious Dean was being at the moment.
“It’s a good film. Very instructional. Like Cool Hand Luke or the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
Now Sam was almost positive he was being teased. Almost.
Before he could make sure, Dean set the crowbar down on the ground and wiped his gloved hands off on grimy jeans, then flicked his brother a satisfied look and used sheer muscle to shove the short opening he had created wide enough that he could slip through.
“Good thing they didn’t bury the base,” he grunted as he squeezed himself onto the other side and gave Sam an impatient gesture to hurry up. Sam left skin on the rough metal edges of the opening Dean had created, but managed to follow him through nonetheless.
Inside the fence it was as if even the moonlight had been extinguished. They had moved less than three feet in space, but the very air now felt dark, almost unwholesome. Like it was heavier than it should have been, and much, much too still.
“Jesus,” Dean muttered, pulling the metal as much back into position as was possible from the inside. The cops swept the place regularly, but after doing it so many times Sam and Dean were banking on the actual looking part being cursory and uninterested. “This feels like a real fun place, Sam.”
Sam pulled the zipper up higher on his hoodie and gave Dean an unhappy look. “Let’s just get this over with and get out.”
“In one piece,” Dean agreed grimly, picking his way around the building with Sam close in his wake. “You let me know if you see anything odd. Okay, Sam? I know you can’t freaking tell usually, but this is not a place I want to deal with an episode of your whatever. So I don’t care if it’s a sudden attack of the sniffles -- you feel weird, we get the hell out, and Bobby and Cas can get someone else to do the job. This is a one-time-only show for us.”
“Yeah,” Sam agreed. The decision to try the job had seemed a lot more justifiable in the sunlight and across town. In the shadows now, the dark, crumbly-looking brick seemed to radiate with a deep, pervasive cold and the two rows of windows were set up well out of reach. Untamed bushes grew up against the wall in some places, either the wild results of landscaping left to fend for itself for half a century or the result of seeds blown in after the place was already abandoned. No grass grew anywhere, and what had once been huge delivery bays were chained shut. Dean gave them a cursory try, but it was almost immediately evident that dealing with the doors, even if they could get the locks out of the way, would be considerably more trouble than it was worth. They paced around to the front and looked at it for a long moment.
The Wilson Glass Co. sign was so faded it was barely legible, especially in the dim light that was penetrating the gloom from over the fence. Sam had trouble not thinking of the rest of the world as “the land of the living,” he didn’t like what that implied about the place they were standing. The lettering on the sign had originally been blue and very crisp -- professional. Now, the broken outlines of the old print looked as sad and derelict as the rest of the place. Soulless. Cracked, cement paving stones had been thrown out of alignment by time and weather and were buried by dust and dried weeds. They found most of the stones by stumbling over them.
The main doors themselves were metal, and very utilitarian looking. The remnants of a marine-blue paint that had probably matched the sign was still flaking from the corners, but the rest had been battered off by fifty years of negligence, and the bare metal was dark and rusted now. Doubtlessly, the doors had been formally locked when the place had been abandoned, considering the circumstances, but two heavy chains and padlocks that had probably been state-of-the-art for the time had been looped through the handles as well.
Someone had been very serious about keeping the place locked down.
Dean walked closer with his flashlight to examine the lock, then took a step back and frowned.
“What?” Sam demanded in a low voice, more creeped out than he could remember ever being on a hunt where nothing had actually happened yet.
“Does it look like this rust has a pattern to you?”
Sam stepped up beside him and looked closely, then felt all of the hair on the back on his neck stand up. He resisted the urge to step back, and keep on stepping until they were in the Impala and on their way somewhere else. Hanging out in motel rooms waiting to go mad was starting to have its attractive side.
“Yeah,” Dean said grimly, sensing Sam’s reaction. “That’s what I thought too. They never use the thumb.”
The rusty metal was covered in long layers of scratches. Ragged rows of four, over and over and over again. A patterning Sam had seen far too often on the insides of doors... and the lids of caskets.
They looked at each other for a long minute, then Dean crouched in front of the door and poked at the rusty chains.
“We can’t get in?” Sam asked, trying to keep the hopefulness from his voice.
Dean snorted, hearing it anyways. “No such luck. The chains and locks are solid, but the handles themselves are, well--” Dean grabbed hold of one and gave it a fierce wrench. It pulled off the door and dangled at the end of the chain connecting it to the other handle.
“What about the actual lock?” Sam asked, resigned to a depressing answer.
“Stainless steel, not really much of a challenge either. I guess no one thought anyone was going to be really desperate to break into a glass factory. It’s not like panes of glass are easy to steal, or have a lot of resale value.” Dean pulled a small can of WD-40 and some highly illegal lock-picks out of his coat and set to work. A few minutes later a soft click echoed like a gunshot. A sudden breeze stirred the leaves and ruffled their hair and they both looked around with sudden wariness.
“The wind?” Dean asked doubtfully.
Sam nodded slowly, still scanning the area with great suspicion.
Dean stuffed the equipment back into his pockets. “Then I guess we’re going in.”
~~~~~
Even with the lock picked, actual entry was easier said than done. The doors were jammed fast with decades of dirt and decay, and the bottom six inches were completely buried under fifty years of storm runoff and weed growth. They had to dig the debris out by hand, then use the crowbar to try and force the doors apart. Eventually one of them wiggled a bit, and then gave with such suddenness that Dean actually fell backwards, sprawled in the dirt on his ass.
He didn’t say anything about it, though -- just accepted Sam’s hand to get back up, giving the gaping, cavernous hole in the building an angry look as he brushed himself off.
“This is a really stupid idea, Sam,” Dean said flatly.
“Yeah.” Sam didn’t have any argument to that. “You want to, uh...” He glanced back towards where they had pried the hole in the fence.
“We’re already here,” Dean sighed after a long pause during which he actually seemed to be considering Sam’s offer. “And I might be willing to tell Bobby to take a hike, but Cas? It’s important, and we’re already here. Besides, by the time someone gets around to admitting they have a freaking poltergeist attending whatever-High they plan to build on this lot, it will probably have decorated a flag pole with half the student body. Let’s just get this done. Then go on vacation.”
“All right,” Sam agreed, taking a cautious first step inside the dark warehouse-like factory. “Any place in particular?”
“Disneyland,” Dean said grimly, all attention obviously focused on the building as if he expected it to try and eat them. Sam hadn’t discounted that it might, he just figured it would wait until they were deeper in before it tried to take a bite. Less chance they could escape.
With a flashlight trained on the inside of the half of the double door that was still closed they could see the same repetitive scratch pattern. Visible insanity, desperation. The marks made that dangerous corner of Sam’s mind feel a little unsteady, as if for an instance reality was just a little less tangible, a little more...malleable. An involuntary shudder crawled over his skin and he looked away before Dean noticed his distraction.
Besides, there were plenty of other disturbing things to pay attention to.
It was dark inside the factory, but somehow not as dark as it should have been. Thin light filtered in from the high windows and illuminated a huge, cavernous space. It was much bigger-looking inside than it had appeared from the outside. Half of the ground floor looked like it had been sectioned into work spaces by tall dividers of wood and metal, and above that rose two floors of wood beams on metal frames that appeared from their vantage on the ground to be in poor repair.
“I hope we don’t have to go up there,” Sam said flatly, voice loud in the dusty silence.
Dean grunted something noncommittal and continued to sweep the room with the beam.
Huge shelving units and bins still held carefully stacked sheets of glass, and everywhere the flashlight touched, metal and broken shards glittered in the moonlight. The floor was heavily coated with a thick layer of mud and debris where the door and windows seals had probably failed after half a century of heavy rains. By the front door where they were standing was a wide metal desk with an overturned chair. Scattered on the desk were ruined papers, picture frames, an antique Rolodex, and a couple of pens and other items. Sam picked up one of the photos and wiped the dust off the glass; a young girl in pigtails and a sweater looked out from fifty years past. He set it down and picked up a strip of fabric instead. Dark crusty stains still stiffened it and Sam let the bandage drop as soon as he realized what it was.
Dean poked at another wad of dark-stained fabric on the desk, then focused the flashlight on an ancient key ring with keys still attached and a glass bottle coated with some kind of residue on the inside. In the middle of the desk lay a dagger-like shard of glass, the edge and tip brown with what looked like more old blood.
“Those must be left over from the last round of accidents that got this place shut down. I guess when it says they threw everyone out and locked it up, they mean right then. Too bad they weren’t also smart enough to shower it with salt and burn it to the ground,” Dean commented quietly.
Sam was practically vibrating in his boots; he could feel something in the air. And it wasn’t friendly, and it was all too aware of them.
“You feel it?” Dean echoed his thoughts.
“Yeah,” Sam replied grimly. “Let’s find this thing and get it over with.”
Dean flung his arms wide taking in the volume of space. “Great. You point the way and I’ll start digging! This place is massive, and we don’t have one clue as to what we’re actually looking for! It could be a body, or it could be a fingerprint. You know spooks, they can cling to the smallest scrap of nothing to keep themselves anchored to a place,” Dean said in disgust.
“I don’t think they do it on purpose, Dean. We’ve been around enough to know that sometimes things just get screwed up. We’re doing the ghosts as much of a favor as we are the innocents they’re likely to hurt.”
Dean snorted his opinion of that.
Sam pulled the battered EMF sensor Dean had jerry-rigged one summer out from his back pocket and flipped it on. It immediately ramped up to an ear-piercing squeal.
“Fantastic,” Dean growled. “How are we supposed to find the anchor when the whole goddamned place is active?”
Sam shrugged and readjusted the tuner until the volume and pitch were more acceptable. “Take it step by step until something jumps out.”
“Yeah, because that’s exactly what I want to happen in a freaking haunted factory-- things jumping out at me.”
Dean paused to wedge the broken, overturned desk chair into the doorframe to make sure the door stayed open, then stomped off into the gloom with Sam at his heels.
Scraps of paper on the desk behind them fluttered silently for a moment, then laid still.
Part II
Author name: glasslogic
Artist name: moodilylit
Genre: gen, end of season 6ish casefic.
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Disclaimer: I have no rights to any of the copyrighted
Rating: R
Word count: 15k
Warnings/Spoilers: Endish of season 6. The story was written for the 2011 SPN Reverse Big Bang.
Author's Notes: So, apparently I was more fuzzy on the order of happenstance at the end of season 6 than I thought. I was under the impression that Sam was having hallucinations that Dean knew about before the whole throw down with Castiel and random plot reveal in the season finale. Since I was wrong, the timeline in this fic is a little off when interpreted strictly as per canon. However, itt really shouldn't cause any problems in understanding what's happening.
I'd like to thank my fantastic artist, moodilylit for her hard work and infinite patience with my ...slackerness. You can find her art post HERE. Effusive gratitude also to elusive-life-77 who, as per usual, dragged, petted, and prodded me into finishing this project, and is generally just an amazing and fantastic person! Also to caz2y5 who continues to listen patiently to me in the long hours after midnight no matter how incoherent my typing become, and most definitely to emilia8388 and slightlysatanic, who mercifully answered my 11th hour begging for grammatical assistance and got drafts back to me with lightning speed! Thank you guys so much!
Summary: The voices in Sam's head aren't the usual ones, and the poltergeist in the glass factory isn't making anything better.
Shards of Yesterday
Sam opened heavy eyelids to the harsh glow of 5:00 am on the alarm clock and the tinny strains of “Traveling Riverside Blues” from the cell phone on the nightstand that had roused him from sleep. He had the dim idea that it had been ringing for a while, weaving insistently into his dreams until he had no choice but to surface and deal with it.
Softly muttered complaints in the form of four-letter words from behind his back let him know that he wasn’t the only one pulled from sleep. Since it wasn’t his ringtone, Sam felt no compunction about scooping up the cell and dropping it onto Dean’s chest. A heartbeat later Sam heard the distinctive snap of the hinge as his brother flipped the phone open and then Dean’s half-snarled, “What?”
Neither of them were sleeping well or easily lately, and it was painful to surrender what little rest they found. Sam switched on the bedside lamp and swung his legs over, resigned to consciousness.
“One sec, Bobby. Hang on--" Dean’s hand locked like an iron band around Sam's wrist before Sam could shrug off the sheet and stand. Sam twisted to give his brother an irritated look. Dean had the phone pressed to his chest and his gaze was hard and focused. Sam stopped resisting and slumped back.
“What’s the answer to life, the universe, and everything, Sam?”
Sam rolled his eyes, having grown tired of the game days ago. “Forty-two.” Dean released him wordlessly and put the phone back up to his ear. Sam went to find clean clothes in his duffle bag, if he still had clean clothes. He paid the conversation little attention, but couldn’t help but overhear Dean’s side of it.
“Yeah, Bobby. We’re still sharing the bed.” A long pause. “Well, I don’t exactly have a lot of options.” Another pause. “He stole my car! And didn’t even know he was driving. Excuse me if I want to know exactly where he is while I’m sleeping.”
Sam pressed a shirt to his face, wrinkled his nose, and tossed it in the dirty pile.
“Handcuffs? You don’t think that’s a little extreme?”
It wasn’t, they had tried that days ago. But Sam’s ability to pick locks wasn’t damaged by the voices in his head and that experiment had lasted less than a night.
“No, it’s fine. Like being twelve again. I don’t think I slept more than a handful of nights alone until I was twenty. You knew Dad; his idea of good sleeping arrangements for us was sharing a couch.”
But when Dean was twelve, a queen bed was more than enough room for them to both toss and turn and throw elbows in their sleep. As adults, it was an entirely different story. But Sam couldn’t get up without waking Dean when they shared the bed, and Dean wouldn’t let him go unless Sam could answer whatever inane question came to his mind. It wasn’t foolproof, but at least if he responded to Dean, it was reasonably likely he was focused on reality and not the distorted reflections cast by the break down of the barrier in his mind. Or that was their theory anyway.
The only other option was to lock him back up in Bobby’s basement. Or put a bullet in his brain. They were carefully not discussing either possibility, acting instead like the situation was temporary, like he would get better.
Sam finally found a shirt that was less offensive than the others and gathered his jeans up from floor.
“Glass factory?” Dean’s surprised voice carried across the room. Sam slipped into the bathroom and pressed the door firmly closed before he overheard anything else. Whatever was going on could wait until he had a shower.
When done, he toweled off roughly and dressed, then wiped condensation from the mirror while he decided about shaving or not. Black spider-webbed cracks radiated out from a chipped edge and cast lines through his reflection. It made him feel a little unsettled; off-balance in that corner of his mind he thought of as the Cage. That little corner was always there, a subtle itch that needed scratching. But indulging the desire would hasten the breakdown of the walls that kept the Cage contained, and when those walls went down the memories of what he had endured in Hell would unstring his mind -- or so Death himself had promised. Sam hoped the collapse was a long way off. He privately doubted it though. The barrier was only slightly weakened and already he couldn’t tell reality from delusion when an attack hit. So far the episodes had been brief and caused no real harm, but worse was coming. He could feel it, like being tied to a train track when the rails start vibrating.
Sam turned resolutely away from the mirror and opened the door; the carpet felt disgusting under his bare, damp feet, but it was better than the icy cold of the grungy tile and the black lattice of the broken glass cast over his own face.
Dean was still sprawled on bed, the phone closed now and lying next to him on the sheets. He watched disgruntled as Sam paced through the room.
“Feeling okay?” Dean finally asked.
“Are you real?”
“That isn’t funny, Sam.” Dean scowled.
Sam shrugged. “I feel fine. I always feel fine. What did Bobby want?”
Dean stood up and stretched, letting the topic of Sam’s questionable sanity go. He pulled on his jeans and fumbled his feet into the boots that he’d kicked off earlier beside the bed. “Of all stupid things -- there’s a haunting a couple of hours down the road he wants us to look into. Some factory. He knows I don’t want to take jobs right now. That’s why we’re on the freaking road in the first place dropping off his mystical thingamahickies to idiots who can’t make their own kelpie traps!”
“What did you tell him?” Sam asked, trying to feign interest. It was hard to be interested in anything anymore. He just felt so tired all the time. Waiting for the inevitable.
Dean finished tying his laces and dragged his jacket on over the t-shirt he had slept in. “I told him we’d think about it. He gave me some info.” Dean motioned towards the nightstand where his semi-legible scrawl covered the margin of a take-out menu. “You want to look into it while I pick-up breakfast?”
Sam glanced at the clock. “At 5:20 in the morning?”
“There’s a donut shop across the road.” Dean shrugged. “I thought I’d grab some coffee and muffins, then we can hit the road. We can head in that direction and decide how to let Bobby down along the way.”
“I can tell you’re really serious about the thinking it over part,” Sam commented.
Dean patted his pockets down to make sure he had his wallet, his expression darkening. “Do you think this is a really good time for us to be taking jobs, Sam? With your... whatever going on and all?”
“I don’t think we should be stalking werewolves or anything like that, but doing some research and maybe a little salt and burn shouldn’t be too much for us to handle.”
“Because we’ve never gotten the crap kicked out of us while seasoning a spook before,” Dean snorted. “I’m just not happy about taking cases right now, I can’t watch your back, my back, and do the damn job, you know? Two of those things -- no problem. But three of them and someone’s going to get hurt. Or killed.”
“You still want me to look it up then? If we’ve already decided we’re not going to do it, then it just seems like a waste of time.”
Dean sighed and raked his fingers through his short hair. Half of the furrows left in their wake stood straight up, but Sam managed to keep his amusement off his face. He hadn’t found much funny lately, and wanted to enjoy it while it lasted.
“Yeah. Yeah, go ahead and look into it. I might as well at least have something to discuss when I tell Bobby to bite me. Back in fifteen minutes.”
Dean’s handwriting hadn’t improved much since about the fourth grade, but Sam had decades of practice deciphering it. Hooking up to the neighboring, more expensive, hotel’s Internet and finding what he was after only took a few minutes after that. For a haunting, it was about as bad as bad could be in their business. It would have been nice to have something to do for a while other than play wandering errand boys for Bobby and the loose network of hunters he supplied, but Sam had to agree that Dean was absolutely right to call this job a pass.
“You need to take this job.” The unexpected voice spoke practically in his ear, causing Sam to almost slide off the bed in shock. He scrambled to catch the laptop before it could hit the ground.
“Cas!”
The angel gave him an odd, assessing look. “Hello, Sam. You and Dean must take this job.”
“What do you mean we ‘must take this job’? I looked it up and--” Sam started to protest before Castiel cut him off.
“It is very important that you and Dean handle this matter.”
Sam looked at him helplessly. “You already said that, but... Look, Dean’s on his way back. Hang out a couple of minutes and then explain to us--“
“I don’t have time to ‘hang out’ or ‘explain.’ I would not be here if it was not important. Go to Evanston.”
“Cas--“ Sam tried again, but the angel was gone.
Dean was too pissed to listen to any details about the job after Sam dropped Castiel’s little bombshell on him. He shoved a Styrofoam cup of coffee into Sam’s hands and then packed his few belongings with harsh, angry movements. Sam understood; Dean had come up with a variety of excuses for why it was important to talk to Cas over the last few weeks, but Sam knew it all boiled down to finding a way to shore up the barrier in Sam’s mind that was fracturing by the day. But the angel had already insisted he knew of no way to do that, and Sam suspected his conspicuous absences had to do with not wanting to put up with Dean’s increasingly bad behavior over a problem that had no solutions.
Dean had not taken abandonment well.
Sam wasn’t sure if his own acceptance of the situation was exhaustion, resignation, or a strange kind of maturity. Some things just couldn’t be fixed. You made your choices, then lived with the consequences. No one had ever claimed life would be fair.
Once the car was packed and he’d eaten his share of breakfast, Sam elected to nap instead of listening to Dean’s irritated grumblings. It was easier to find sleep slumped over in the rumble of the Impala’s familiar embrace than in the quiet stillness of a motel room. Laying with Dean in the shared darkness always felt like waiting for a disaster in exactly the same way that the Impala always felt safe.
He woke up when the car slowed down as Dean exited off the interstate. Sam’s face was hot from the sunlight and drool was sticky at the corner of his mouth. He hastily wiped it off, hoping Dean hadn’t noticed. He ducked inside to grab more coffee while Dean filled the tank. The fall air in the parking lot was bitingly cold and Sam was grateful for the heat radiating from the cups. He slid back inside the car and handed one to his brother.
“Okay. Talk,” Dean ordered as he pulled back on the interstate.
“I tried talking earlier and couldn’t even hear myself over the cursing,” Sam pointed out.
“I’m better now.” From his tense grip on the wheel, Sam doubted that, but it was probably as good as things were going to get for a while.
“Soooo...” Sam found the notebook he had been using to copy things down into and flipped to the first page with his notes. “The factory was built in 1958 for Wilson Glass. They manufactured pane glass. Windows, doors, maybe mirrors -- that kind of thing. It sounds like there were problems from the get go. I only had about ten minutes to look into this, Dean, but one of the articles I saw credits more than twenty deaths to the ghost in the three years the factory was open before the company locked the doors and walked away.”
“Fine,” Dean growled. “Bodies, abandoned building, angry ghost -- sounds pretty typical so far. Still not anything someone who can’t tell reality from the hell beasts in his head needs to be dealing with, but we can probably manage if we have too. What’s the catch?”
“This isn’t just an angry ghost,” Sam said reluctantly, “this is a seriously pissed-off spook. Twenty bodies, Dean! Those dead guys didn’t accidentally trip and impale themselves on something... it’s a full-blown poltergeist.”
The silence in the car seemed to stretch for a small eternity. “Dean?”
“I’m not even going to get into whatever the hell Cas is smoking, but do you think Bobby hates us or something? Did we do something to him, like, I don’t know -- run his panties up a flag pole and I forgot about it?” Dean sounded more bewildered than angry. “Not that I wouldn’t have wanted to forget about that. But a poltergeist? In a glass factory?! This would be a stupid thing even if we were at our best. And I hate to tell you, Sam, but it’s been awhile since either one of us have really had our heads that much in the game.”
Sam flipped to another page. “I don’t think Bobby hates us. I think he saw an opportunity. You want to let me finish before you blow up this time?”
Dean flipped him the bird. Sam accepted the apology and continued.
“The ghost is powerful, but erratic. There are big fits of activity, and then years of nothing.”
“Like it’s pitching one big tantrum, then having to store up the energy again?”
“Exactly,” Sam agreed. “When they shut the factory down in 1961 it was because six of those victims died in the same day. Apparently of, uh--“
“Being in a fucking glass factory with a poltergeist?!” Dean guessed.
“Yeah. That.” Sam pushed on before Dean could get too invested in that idea. Again. “But they explained it by some crap about poor maintenance and building codes. Since then, every five to ten years something weird and unexplained happens -- sometimes fatal, weird and unexplained things. Violent windstorms, teenagers poking around claim to be thrown physically off the property by invisible hands, cars get shoved off the road--“
“Off the road?” Dean asked incredulously. “How far away from the factory is this thing’s range?”
“I didn’t see any account of anyone who’d been inside since the building was sealed, but it looks like most of the reported manifestations are either in the parking lot or... in the surrounding neighborhood.”
Dean slammed one hand on the wheel. “This is fantastic, Sam! This just gets better and better. A poltergeist in a glass factory, God knows what’s inside that Cas wants us to handle, and for all you know right now you’re sitting on a curb chatting up a telephone pole! I can’t imagine how this can go wrong.”
Sam read silently for a few minutes until Dean heaved a sigh. “Fine. What’s this opportunity you think Bobby saw?”
“The factory is locked up, but the building next door shares the parking lot. Yesterday the ghost flipped two parked cars out into rush hour traffic.”
Dean shook his head in resigned disgust. “So... the theory is that it should be holed up somewhere weak and fuming? Not able to rattle a wind chime?”
“I think that’s the idea.”
“You know, the problem with ideas, Sammy, is that some poor sap has to find out if they’re good ones or not. Why can’t this wait? It’s been going on since the sixties, and if it’s just had this tantrum and was tossing about cars, then it should be nice and quiet for a couple of years. Someone else can look into it.”
“It’s centered somewhere inside the factory, Dean. A building full of glass, it doesn’t have to be very strong to kill someone. It’s at its weakest point right now. Now is the time to do something about it.”
“Now?” Dean repeated skeptically. “Why now? So we don’t get it this time. In five or ten years, when it pitches another fit, someone can go take care of it. It hasn’t been worth anyone’s time in the last fifty years, it’s not worth our lives now.”
When Sam didn’t say anything Dean groaned. “What else?!”
Sam drew a deep breath. “It’s just that since the spirit seems tied to the building’s construction, whatever is going on might not be solved just by razing the place.”
“Is that likely to happen?”
“Next week,” Sam confirmed. “The area was industrial, but it’s been turning more mainstream in the last decade or so, and the property owners sold the building lot to the school board. They’re going to build a school there, Dean.”
“With a violent, angry, poltergeist in its basement. Fucking fantastic.”
“The part of town is becoming busier in general.” Sam glanced at his brother. “One of the cars it threw into traffic hit a school bus full of middle-schoolers.”
Dean’s eyes tightened a fraction, the change of expression probably unnoticeable to anyone who didn’t know him as well as Sam did. Middle-schoolers. Kids Ben’s age.
Losing Ben and Lisa was a scar on his brother that surprised Sam with its depth sometimes. He had lost Jessica, but as profound as that loss was, there had been something still transitory and temporary feeling about their relationship. They had been planning a life, invested in their potential. But Dean had left Lisa’s house every morning for work and gone to sleep every night in Lisa’s bed for a year. Had helped Ben with his homework, watched movies together on the couch, decorated for the holidays... Dean hadn’t been planning anything. He’d had a family, and a son, and a woman he was all but married to. Sam couldn’t imagine what it had cost his brother to walk away from that. Wondered if anything but the threat to Ben and Lisa’s lives could have made him, in the end.
But that was over now. Another life in the rearview mirror.
“Was anyone hurt?” Dean asked quietly, bringing Sam’s wandering attention back to the present.
“Scared and a few bumps and bruises. No one died.”
“Yet.”
“Are you talking about us or the ghost?”
Dean gave him a sidelong look of irritation. “You’re a riot. And none of this brings up the biggest problem with this mess.”
Sam nodded, knowing exactly what Dean was referring to. “What interest does Castiel have in the place?”
“Exactly. Because I can absolutely guarantee whatever it is, it’s going to make the rest of this seem like a cake-walk.”
“Does that mean you’re interested in taking the job?” Sam raised an eyebrow.
“Bobby asked us to look into this. Cas apparently ordered us to -- and I can’t tell you how excited I still am about that, by the way. But they both usually know what they’re talking about. We’re heading in that direction -- may as well poke around. Rattle some cages. See what tries to kill us. I mean -- a freaking school?”
“So like any other job, then.”
“Yeah,” Dean snorted. “For us anyway. What about you? You okay with looking into this -- with everything else going on?”
Sam looked out the window at the golden blur of fall grass alongside the highway. “It’s important; maybe we can even save some lives. Do something other than sit on our asses and run errands.”
Something other than wait for the inevitable.
Dean growled something under his breath, then seemed to shift the entire problem to the back of his mind. “We’re still about two hours out. What do you want for lunch?”
Sam drummed one hand on the cheap laminate of the table and picked idly through his salad with the other. The dressing wasn’t very good and the lettuce was wilted around the edges, but he was still enjoying the croutons. He had been sitting in the diner for going on six hours and was ignoring the dirty looks from the section’s waitress -- there was free Internet and Sam was making good use of it. Their motel had free wireless too, for once, but Sam didn’t think he could stand to sit in there alone with the walls closing in for the afternoon while Dean hit up city records. The corner diner across the street wasn’t exactly overrun with customers, so he didn’t feel bad about practically moving in.
The afternoon had been somewhat enlightening, but Sam figured he had exhausted everything the internet had that was of interest to the case. Now it was just a matter of waiting for Dean to show back up -- hopefully with the rest of the pieces. Which should have been two hours ago. Sam sighed and clicked on another link. At this point everything was repetitive, but there was always a chance of finding something he had missed on an earlier pass.
“Why aren’t you at the factory?”
Sam startled so hard he banged a knee on the bottom of the table. Castiel was sitting across from him in the booth. The angel picked up the menu curiously.
“There’s nothing in there you want to eat,” Sam offered, rubbing his knee under the table.
Blue eyes flicked his way, then refocused on the greasy plastic in his hands. “Why aren’t you at the factory, Sam?”
Sam closed the laptop and leaned in. A quick glance around told him no one was paying them any attention, meaning no one had noticed the angel’s sudden arrival. “We’re doing some research. We can’t just jump into a situation like this blind--“
“There is nothing you will be able to research that will help you with this. Go there.”
“Dean doesn’t even want to do this at all, and I’m not real happy about it either,” Sam hissed. “The least you can do is throw us a bone. What is so important about this job that it’s worth charging in blindly and getting killed over?! Because I called Bobby, Cas, and he’s keen on getting it done, but he doesn’t have a clue why you’d be interested.”
“Things are not always as they seem, Sam.”
“I, of all people, really get that. But--“ A sudden crash caught Sam’s attention and he looked over reflexively, only to find a very embarrassed waitress trying to pick up a dropped tray.
When he looked back, the angel was gone.
“Of course he vanished, Sam,” Dean said in disgust when Sam relayed the episode about an hour later. Dean was steadily munching his way through a pile of over-cooked French fries while Sam flipped through a stack of photocopies Dean had scored at the city records office. They were old, reduced reproductions of originals that had been long lost to time, but they were still interesting. “He knew if he stayed he was going to have to answer questions, and apparently that’s just not something the third wheel of Team Free Will is into these days.”
“He’s not exactly having an easy time of things either, Dean. He’s fighting for control of Heaven. It’s understandable he might not exactly have a lot of time to hang out with us playing twenty questions.”
Dean stabbed a fry into the ketchup with unnecessary force. “Yeah, well, I’m thinking ‘Team Fucked’ would have been a more apt description. And he sure as hell has the time to drop in to visit long enough to assign these little chores!” Dean’s bitter outburst seemed to surprise himself more than it surprised Sam and he lapsed into silence.
“We won,” Sam said quietly after a moment.
“What?”
“We won,” Sam repeated. “Team Free Will.”
“Yeah,” Dean snorted. “And look how great that’s turned out for us.”
Sam looked outside to where cars passed on the street and people walked slowly down the sidewalk. A couple hand in hand, giggly girls with shopping bags, a few just briskly on their way to other places. “Yeah,” he echoed his brother, but with entirely different meaning.
Dean followed his gaze, then pushed the plate away and leaned back in the booth. “I’m not sorry, Sam. I just--“
“It’s the price. I’m grateful.” Sam caught his brother’s gaze and held it, trying to convey the truth of his words to the person who loved him most in the world. “Grateful that we won, that the world is still here. That I was rescued and I have this time now. Whatever else comes later, it was worth it, Dean.”
Dean’s eyes held a wealth of pain, guilt, and genuine fury as Sam’s words sank in. Then the emotions were blanked out beneath Dean’s usual defenses of irritation and impatience. Sam remembered a time before those defenses had been raised against him by habit, and knew his brother would switch subjects before Dean even opened his mouth. He didn’t know how to fix the rift that the past few years and their own actions had created between them.
“Back to the more immediate example of how everything in this life is out to screw us,” Dean said, unaware of the direction of Sam’s thought, ”what did you find out? There wasn’t really anything out at city records except those papers and some local gossip.” He snagged a fry from the plate and pointed at the loose sheets in Sam’s hands with it before popping it into his mouth. “But not anything good or more useful than the Internet. I spoke with a dozen people, including seven who lived here when the damn thing was built in the first place, and got a dozen wildly different stories on what the hell is going on around here. Everything from aliens to jilted lovers, and none of it fits the scenario we’re dealing with.”
Sam nodded, frowning at the documents he was flipping through. “This pretty much goes with what I’ve found from the web and making a few calls. It was an empty lot, no prior construction. Nothing attached to the land I can find at all as far as legends or strange stories go. Not even any really notable murders or missing people reported here or in any of the surrounding counties for the months before construction started. The building was originally supposed to be some kind of stockyard processing area, but people complained and it created such a problem that the owners sold the half-completed construction to Wilson Glass. Then the new owners made the changes they needed for glass manufacturing and storage. It was pretty much a disaster from the start. The problems actually began with the initial construction, but there weren’t any fatalities until later on, so people only talk about the glass factory.”
“Thing got worse after the building was completed?” Dean raised an eyebrow. “Sounds like strong evidence that something bad happened during construction. Unless they were doing something special that might piss of the ghost once they opened?”
Sam shrugged and dropped the papers back on the table. “It doesn’t sound like it from what I can tell. They were just trying to operate a business. It doesn’t look like there was anything else shady going on. It’s had a pretty high double fence around it since they shut it down, and the cops patrol it regularly enough that like I said, I can’t find any first-hand accounts of anyone who’s been in there since the day they sealed it up.”
“That’s impressive,” Dean commented, fishing a crouton Sam had missed out of his abandoned salad. “Teenagers tend to weasel into these kinds of places like rats.”
“The graphic pictures of impaled bodies they apparently pass around under the table probably help deter any real interest. Cops and fifteen foot fences with razor wire do the rest.”
Dean stopped eating. “What impaled bodies?”
Sam opened the laptop again and found the page he wanted, then turned it so Dean could see. “Remember what I said about teenagers being thrown off the property?”
“You didn’t say onto street signs.” Dean glanced at the ketchup covered plate and pushed it away. “And nobody thought leveling this place was a good idea before now?”
Sam shrugged and reclaimed the laptop. “They didn’t have a good reason too, and no one wants to say ‘ghosts’ out loud.”
“You would think with images like that on everybody’s mind, someone would have mumbled something about a bad foundation and everyone else would have just nodded along to get the job done,” Dean said with a hint of disbelief. “Any more activity from it today?”
“Nope. Seems quiet since the traffic incident.”
“I guess we’re doing this then,” Dean sighed. “Oh, hey--“ He pulled a battered white paper bag out of his pocket and offered it across the table to Sam. Sam took it cautiously and was surprised to find two slightly smooshed cookies inside.
“What’s this for?”
“It’s like those billboards you see on the walls in stores. For how many days they’ve been accident free, you know? Except in your case, it’s day’s without unholy manifestations of your quality time in the Cage fucking with our lives. Go a week, get a cookie.”
“But you gave me two cookies,” was all Sam could think to say, bemused by the gesture.
“Yeah, one of those is mine. I earned it by not shoving you into the floor every time your cold, overgrown feet touch me in bed.” Two women in the restaurant gave them an odd look and then leaned into whisper to each other. Dean glared at them until they moved.
“Gee, Dean. That’s so--” thoughtful was definitely not the word he was looking for, “you.”
“Yeah, I’m a freaking saint. Now give me my cookie and start planning what you want to bring to tonight’s little exercise in ‘how many ways can we get ourselves killed.’”
The factory, when they finally saw it in person, was an almost disappointingly unimpressive structure. What could be seen of it, anyway. Most of it was hidden by a fifteen foot corrugated steel fence that surrounded the actual building, and what was visible over that was old, dark brick, occasionally accented by the particularly relentless vines that had climbed their way to the roof over time. The top panes of dark windows glittered ominously in the late afternoon sunlight, like wary eyes peering cautiously out onto the world.
The steel fence was set about ten feet behind an equally tall chain-link fence with an impressive enough lock on it that Dean actually blew a low whistle of admiration when they cruised past.
“That’s a sweet lock. Too bad invited people don’t care, and the uninvited who want in wouldn’t waste their time messing with the lock on a chain link fence.” He rolled his eyes. “It’s like they don’t know why god gave us wire cutters.”
They were still discussing options an hour later, the sun had long since set and they were settled comfortably in the window booth of a seedy bar. It was a little ways down the road from the factory and gave them a good vantage to continue their observation.
“The problem isn’t the actual getting in part,” Sam mused. “It’s having enough time to do it.”
Dean nodded, watching with narrowed eyes as yet another police car circled the building. The patrols were inconveniently frequent, and they could only speculate that the recent explosion of activity was behind the current diligence. Roughly every fifteen minutes a patrol car pulled off the road, ambled through the parking lot, and circled the building, sweeping every inch of the fence perimeter with harsh, unforgiving light.
“Fifteen minutes might be enough time to get in, or it might not,” Dean said. “Depends on how hard the second fence is to handle. Fifteen feet without a foothold on a smooth fence topped with razor wire... we might be better off trying to go through it, and that’s not going to be that fast.”
Another hour of observation and the patrols were still running almost as regularly as clockwork.
“This is stupid! Don’t these cops have anything better to do?” Dean asked, voice heavy with annoyance.
Sam swallowed the rest of his water and stood up. “The town isn’t that big; this can’t be more than one or two different cars, right?”
“If it is, they have way too many bored cops on the payroll. Usually it’s the opposite problem.”
“Right. Let’s go. I need to find a pay phone on a nice, deserted street corner.”
Dean grinned and tossed a twenty on the table to cover their tab. “Lead on, Sammy.”
“Stop calling me that.”
Twenty minutes later the patrol circling the building switched on its lights and pulled away in a flurry of noise and sound, merging into the light traffic and speeding off in the direction of other distant sirens.
“That won’t take long,” Sam observed.
“It will take long enough,” Dean said with satisfaction. “Screams and gunshots coming from some random room at a skeezy motel? That place rents by the hour. The cops will have to assume everyone they talk to is lying to them. Even if they shrug it off, it’s going to be at least thirty minutes.”
They left the Impala in the back of the neighboring building where she would hopefully remain unnoticed and made quick work of getting through the chain link at the back of the factory. There was plenty of evidence that others had gotten this far in the past, but the snipped links had been meticulously mended.
Sam kept a wary eye out for anything unusual in the night while Dean cut their way in with the ease of long practice. But everything around them stayed dark and still while they used a thin length of wire to tie the cut links back together so a brief glance wouldn’t show an obvious problem.
The inner fence was a different matter entirely.
“Looks like a custom job. Hand me the crowbar.” Dean paced about twenty feet along the steel, testing the riveted seams, before finding one he seemed to like and putting muscle into getting the bar in. It wasn’t a fast process, nor a particularly quiet one and Sam felt about to crawl out of his skin with anxiety at every pop or screech of protesting metal. It probably wasn’t that noisy, but it felt that way to nerves raw with tension.
“I just wish Cas had taken a sec to give us a clue as to what the hell he expects us to find in here that he’s interested in,” Dean panted as he worked the metal apart. “I mean, it would have been freaking nice if we could have prepared ourselves, you know? It’s not like he’s never asked us to deal with anything a little forethought wouldn’t have made easier.”
Sam couldn’t think of anything easy they had ever done that involved Castiel, forethought or not.
“Like, what if this is another one of those super-nasty angelic weapons? What if it’s the freaking Ark of the Covenant stashed away in here and he expects us to baby-sit it until he can get off his feathery ass to reclaim it?”
“How the hell would you prepare to handle something like the Ark, Dean?” Sam hissed.
“Well,” Dean said thoughtfully, “for starters, I’d pack a lot of duct tape.”
“Duct tape?”
“To keep the lid on. I’ve seen that movie too, Sam. Things aren’t so bad that I want to be accidentally melted.”
“Movie... You mean Indiana Jones?” Sam stared at his brother, unsure of how serious Dean was being at the moment.
“It’s a good film. Very instructional. Like Cool Hand Luke or the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
Now Sam was almost positive he was being teased. Almost.
Before he could make sure, Dean set the crowbar down on the ground and wiped his gloved hands off on grimy jeans, then flicked his brother a satisfied look and used sheer muscle to shove the short opening he had created wide enough that he could slip through.
“Good thing they didn’t bury the base,” he grunted as he squeezed himself onto the other side and gave Sam an impatient gesture to hurry up. Sam left skin on the rough metal edges of the opening Dean had created, but managed to follow him through nonetheless.
Inside the fence it was as if even the moonlight had been extinguished. They had moved less than three feet in space, but the very air now felt dark, almost unwholesome. Like it was heavier than it should have been, and much, much too still.
“Jesus,” Dean muttered, pulling the metal as much back into position as was possible from the inside. The cops swept the place regularly, but after doing it so many times Sam and Dean were banking on the actual looking part being cursory and uninterested. “This feels like a real fun place, Sam.”
Sam pulled the zipper up higher on his hoodie and gave Dean an unhappy look. “Let’s just get this over with and get out.”
“In one piece,” Dean agreed grimly, picking his way around the building with Sam close in his wake. “You let me know if you see anything odd. Okay, Sam? I know you can’t freaking tell usually, but this is not a place I want to deal with an episode of your whatever. So I don’t care if it’s a sudden attack of the sniffles -- you feel weird, we get the hell out, and Bobby and Cas can get someone else to do the job. This is a one-time-only show for us.”
“Yeah,” Sam agreed. The decision to try the job had seemed a lot more justifiable in the sunlight and across town. In the shadows now, the dark, crumbly-looking brick seemed to radiate with a deep, pervasive cold and the two rows of windows were set up well out of reach. Untamed bushes grew up against the wall in some places, either the wild results of landscaping left to fend for itself for half a century or the result of seeds blown in after the place was already abandoned. No grass grew anywhere, and what had once been huge delivery bays were chained shut. Dean gave them a cursory try, but it was almost immediately evident that dealing with the doors, even if they could get the locks out of the way, would be considerably more trouble than it was worth. They paced around to the front and looked at it for a long moment.
The Wilson Glass Co. sign was so faded it was barely legible, especially in the dim light that was penetrating the gloom from over the fence. Sam had trouble not thinking of the rest of the world as “the land of the living,” he didn’t like what that implied about the place they were standing. The lettering on the sign had originally been blue and very crisp -- professional. Now, the broken outlines of the old print looked as sad and derelict as the rest of the place. Soulless. Cracked, cement paving stones had been thrown out of alignment by time and weather and were buried by dust and dried weeds. They found most of the stones by stumbling over them.
The main doors themselves were metal, and very utilitarian looking. The remnants of a marine-blue paint that had probably matched the sign was still flaking from the corners, but the rest had been battered off by fifty years of negligence, and the bare metal was dark and rusted now. Doubtlessly, the doors had been formally locked when the place had been abandoned, considering the circumstances, but two heavy chains and padlocks that had probably been state-of-the-art for the time had been looped through the handles as well.
Someone had been very serious about keeping the place locked down.
Dean walked closer with his flashlight to examine the lock, then took a step back and frowned.
“What?” Sam demanded in a low voice, more creeped out than he could remember ever being on a hunt where nothing had actually happened yet.
“Does it look like this rust has a pattern to you?”
Sam stepped up beside him and looked closely, then felt all of the hair on the back on his neck stand up. He resisted the urge to step back, and keep on stepping until they were in the Impala and on their way somewhere else. Hanging out in motel rooms waiting to go mad was starting to have its attractive side.
“Yeah,” Dean said grimly, sensing Sam’s reaction. “That’s what I thought too. They never use the thumb.”
The rusty metal was covered in long layers of scratches. Ragged rows of four, over and over and over again. A patterning Sam had seen far too often on the insides of doors... and the lids of caskets.
They looked at each other for a long minute, then Dean crouched in front of the door and poked at the rusty chains.
“We can’t get in?” Sam asked, trying to keep the hopefulness from his voice.
Dean snorted, hearing it anyways. “No such luck. The chains and locks are solid, but the handles themselves are, well--” Dean grabbed hold of one and gave it a fierce wrench. It pulled off the door and dangled at the end of the chain connecting it to the other handle.
“What about the actual lock?” Sam asked, resigned to a depressing answer.
“Stainless steel, not really much of a challenge either. I guess no one thought anyone was going to be really desperate to break into a glass factory. It’s not like panes of glass are easy to steal, or have a lot of resale value.” Dean pulled a small can of WD-40 and some highly illegal lock-picks out of his coat and set to work. A few minutes later a soft click echoed like a gunshot. A sudden breeze stirred the leaves and ruffled their hair and they both looked around with sudden wariness.
“The wind?” Dean asked doubtfully.
Sam nodded slowly, still scanning the area with great suspicion.
Dean stuffed the equipment back into his pockets. “Then I guess we’re going in.”
Even with the lock picked, actual entry was easier said than done. The doors were jammed fast with decades of dirt and decay, and the bottom six inches were completely buried under fifty years of storm runoff and weed growth. They had to dig the debris out by hand, then use the crowbar to try and force the doors apart. Eventually one of them wiggled a bit, and then gave with such suddenness that Dean actually fell backwards, sprawled in the dirt on his ass.
He didn’t say anything about it, though -- just accepted Sam’s hand to get back up, giving the gaping, cavernous hole in the building an angry look as he brushed himself off.
“This is a really stupid idea, Sam,” Dean said flatly.
“Yeah.” Sam didn’t have any argument to that. “You want to, uh...” He glanced back towards where they had pried the hole in the fence.
“We’re already here,” Dean sighed after a long pause during which he actually seemed to be considering Sam’s offer. “And I might be willing to tell Bobby to take a hike, but Cas? It’s important, and we’re already here. Besides, by the time someone gets around to admitting they have a freaking poltergeist attending whatever-High they plan to build on this lot, it will probably have decorated a flag pole with half the student body. Let’s just get this done. Then go on vacation.”
“All right,” Sam agreed, taking a cautious first step inside the dark warehouse-like factory. “Any place in particular?”
“Disneyland,” Dean said grimly, all attention obviously focused on the building as if he expected it to try and eat them. Sam hadn’t discounted that it might, he just figured it would wait until they were deeper in before it tried to take a bite. Less chance they could escape.
With a flashlight trained on the inside of the half of the double door that was still closed they could see the same repetitive scratch pattern. Visible insanity, desperation. The marks made that dangerous corner of Sam’s mind feel a little unsteady, as if for an instance reality was just a little less tangible, a little more...malleable. An involuntary shudder crawled over his skin and he looked away before Dean noticed his distraction.
Besides, there were plenty of other disturbing things to pay attention to.
It was dark inside the factory, but somehow not as dark as it should have been. Thin light filtered in from the high windows and illuminated a huge, cavernous space. It was much bigger-looking inside than it had appeared from the outside. Half of the ground floor looked like it had been sectioned into work spaces by tall dividers of wood and metal, and above that rose two floors of wood beams on metal frames that appeared from their vantage on the ground to be in poor repair.
“I hope we don’t have to go up there,” Sam said flatly, voice loud in the dusty silence.
Dean grunted something noncommittal and continued to sweep the room with the beam.
Huge shelving units and bins still held carefully stacked sheets of glass, and everywhere the flashlight touched, metal and broken shards glittered in the moonlight. The floor was heavily coated with a thick layer of mud and debris where the door and windows seals had probably failed after half a century of heavy rains. By the front door where they were standing was a wide metal desk with an overturned chair. Scattered on the desk were ruined papers, picture frames, an antique Rolodex, and a couple of pens and other items. Sam picked up one of the photos and wiped the dust off the glass; a young girl in pigtails and a sweater looked out from fifty years past. He set it down and picked up a strip of fabric instead. Dark crusty stains still stiffened it and Sam let the bandage drop as soon as he realized what it was.
Dean poked at another wad of dark-stained fabric on the desk, then focused the flashlight on an ancient key ring with keys still attached and a glass bottle coated with some kind of residue on the inside. In the middle of the desk lay a dagger-like shard of glass, the edge and tip brown with what looked like more old blood.
“Those must be left over from the last round of accidents that got this place shut down. I guess when it says they threw everyone out and locked it up, they mean right then. Too bad they weren’t also smart enough to shower it with salt and burn it to the ground,” Dean commented quietly.
Sam was practically vibrating in his boots; he could feel something in the air. And it wasn’t friendly, and it was all too aware of them.
“You feel it?” Dean echoed his thoughts.
“Yeah,” Sam replied grimly. “Let’s find this thing and get it over with.”
Dean flung his arms wide taking in the volume of space. “Great. You point the way and I’ll start digging! This place is massive, and we don’t have one clue as to what we’re actually looking for! It could be a body, or it could be a fingerprint. You know spooks, they can cling to the smallest scrap of nothing to keep themselves anchored to a place,” Dean said in disgust.
“I don’t think they do it on purpose, Dean. We’ve been around enough to know that sometimes things just get screwed up. We’re doing the ghosts as much of a favor as we are the innocents they’re likely to hurt.”
Dean snorted his opinion of that.
Sam pulled the battered EMF sensor Dean had jerry-rigged one summer out from his back pocket and flipped it on. It immediately ramped up to an ear-piercing squeal.
“Fantastic,” Dean growled. “How are we supposed to find the anchor when the whole goddamned place is active?”
Sam shrugged and readjusted the tuner until the volume and pitch were more acceptable. “Take it step by step until something jumps out.”
“Yeah, because that’s exactly what I want to happen in a freaking haunted factory-- things jumping out at me.”
Dean paused to wedge the broken, overturned desk chair into the doorframe to make sure the door stayed open, then stomped off into the gloom with Sam at his heels.
Scraps of paper on the desk behind them fluttered silently for a moment, then laid still.
Part II
