Sam and Dean traded a look, neither of them speaking for a moment. Then Sam turned back to Sarah.
“What exactly did the sheriff say to you?”
“Well, I told her about what happened at the church. She was really interested in that. But when I couldn’t answer any of her questions, she just lost interest.” Sarah frowned. “Why, do you think she’s got something to hide, too?”
“It’s too soon to say,” Sam said.
“Look,” Sarah said. “If you know something, you have to tell me. I cared for Dave. I want to know the truth.” She reached up and rubbed her eyes. “That’s why I thought maybe the two of you—I mean, I heard you say that you were Federal Agents, so...”
Sam touched her arm.
“We’ll do what we can. In the meantime, if you think of anything else, don’t talk to the sheriff. Come directly to us.” He handed her a card with his cell phone number on it.
“I will.” She glanced down at the slouch cap, still gripped in one hand. “You know my secret now anyway.”
“In the morning,” Dean said, “we’ll go back out to the battlefield and talk to Phil Oiler about his wedding day.”
“Thank you both.” She held out a slip of paper. “Here’s my cell.”
“We’ll be in touch,” Dean said, grabbing the paper. As they walked back to the car, Dean glanced at the number again and exhaled deeply, puffing out his cheeks with a long, exhausted sigh. “What a day. Right now all I want to do is go back to the motel, crack open a nightcap and watch a little Casa Erotica.”
Sam shook his head.
“Not tonight, Dean.”
“What? Why?”
“I’ve got some people I want you to meet.”
NINE
Sam called Bobby on the way out to the McClanes’ house, giving Dean directions while he asked Bobby about the Judas noose and the Moa’ah. There was a long pause and he heard pages rattling in the background.
“Looks like the noose is part of Civil War lore from the beginning,” Bobby’s voice came back. “There’re even songs about it.”
“What about the Moa’ah?”
“From what I can figure, it sounds like you’re talking about two sides of the same coin. Down in that particular region of the South, Moa’ah’s the animating force behind every bad kind of mojo you can imagine. Like the fuel that makes it go. Sounds like your dead Civil War soldier must’ve gotten some on him when he wore the noose.”
“So even if the noose itself is gone...” Sam started.
“The Moa’ah sticks around. Yeah.”
“So what do we do to stop it?”
“For now, nothing. Just stay the hell out of its way till I get a better handle on the info. I’ll call you back as soon as I’ve got something.”
“Thanks, Bobby.” Sam cut off the call and turned to Dean. Then he noticed that the Impala had slowed down enough that he could see individual pebbles and blades of grass in the headlights. “What’s wrong?”
“We’re lost,” Dean said. “Gotta be.”
“No, we’re not.” Sam pointed straight ahead through the windshield. “Tommy gave me directions. Take a left here. Look—up on the hill.”
“Tommy, huh? Sounds like you two got pretty chummy.”
“Well...” Sam said. “When he found out that we were hunters...”
Dean’s head swiveled to stare at him.
“Wait a minute,” he said, his voice growing louder. “You told him? What’s the point of having a cover story if you’re gonna...?”
“Hold on, it’s all right,” Sam said, cutting him off. “I didn’t tell him—he figured it out himself. He’s the one who called Rufus.”
“Sure, that’s what he told you—”
Sam felt himself getting hot under the collar.
“Sorry, Dean, but I didn’t have my portable polygraph test on me at the time.”
“That’s the point—you’re not supposed to need one,” Dean replied, refusing to back down. “Never trust a stranger, Sammy, that’s Demon Hunting 101. Suppose this McClane guy was dropping Rufus’s name to get to us. Now we’re walking in there blind, and he already knows everything about us.”
“Not everything,” Sam said.
“What, you didn’t get around to telling him that you jump-started the Apocalypse? Give it time—he’ll figure that out, too.”
“Fine, I’ll tell you what,” Sam replied, “I’ll call Bobby back and ask if he knows him. That’ll prove he’s on the level.”
“Forget it,” Dean grumbled, “we’re already here.”
Sam turned and peered through the windshield, into the beams of the headlights. They were curving along a circular drive, and the plantation house spread itself above them, half-lost amid the cottonwoods and willows that draped over it like mourners at a viewing. It was a hopeless ruin, but he could see what the place must have looked like in its heyday, back when the flaked paint had been fresh and the high imposing Doric pillars stood straight and tall.
Now everything sagged, wings and cupolas giving way to gravity, and the entire structure seemed to be sinking slowly into the Southern soil. It was as if Tommy McClane and his son had devoted all their energy to the town’s Historical Society, but at the expense of maintaining their own family homestead.
There was a light on back in the house—dimly visible through the broad windows—and a lamp hanging on the porch, its flame flickering in the thick evening breeze.
Parking next to a big black Ford Ranger, they got out and looked up at the long porch that ran along the entire front of the house. Two figures were sitting there, gazing back down at them, lit only by lamp light. He could smell the rich mossy odor of the swamp somewhere nearby.
“Mr. McClane?” Sam called up.
“Sam,” Tommy said. “Glad you decided to take me up on the invitation.”
They walked up the creaking front steps to where Tommy and Nate were sitting on cane-backed chairs. Both had been reading, Sam saw. Tommy held Tony Hurwitz’s Confederates in the Attic, while Nate was gazing raptly down at what Sam realized was an electronic reader. It cast a ghostly light on his features.
“Kid’s a reader, what can I say?” Tommy asked, by way of explanation. “When I was his age I was reading Batman comics. But he asked for a reader for his birthday, and now I can’t get him to put it down.”
“Tommy, this is my brother Dean,” Sam said.
“Pleased to meet you,” Tommy said, holding out a hand.
“Quite a place you’ve got here,” Dean said, accepting the handshake.
“Been in my family for five generations. We were gonna sell, but then the bottom dropped out of the real estate market, so I guess we’re stuck here.”
“What are you reading there?” Dean asked the boy.
Nate grinned a little sheepishly, held up the reader so Dean could see. Hammer of the Gods.
Dean’s eyebrows went up.
“You like Zeppelin?”
“I tried to get the kid to listen to Allmans, Skynyrd...” Tommy shook his head. “Lost cause.”
“Zeppelin’s the best,” the boy said. “I’m reading the part where they’re partying in the Riot House in L.A., throwing furniture down into the pool.”
Dean nodded.
“You know half the stuff in that book is bullcrap.”
“Yeah, but it’s still pretty good.”
“Yeah.” Dean grinned. “It is.”
“You want a glass of iced tea?” Tommy asked, nodding to the Mason jars sitting on the table beside them. “Or something stronger? I got beer in the fridge.”
“Wouldn’t say no,” Dean said.
“Help yourself. It’s straight back through the door, last room on the right.”
Dean opened the screen door. Stepping inside, he was immediately struck by the sheer size of the house around him, an ancient and somehow majestic shipwreck of a mansion that was much too large for the man and his son. The rooms he could see were lavishly appointed with worn furnishing
s, tables and lamps and Georgian antiques that looked like they could’ve sold at auction for thousands.
He wondered if anything significant had changed since the McClanes’ ancestors had lived there.
Passing through the arched kitchen doorway, he opened the fridge and took out a bottle of Beck’s. Turning, he glanced up and noticed the broom above the door.
And froze.
What the hell...?
There was a small cloth bag mounted over the doorway he’d just stepped through. And another, nailed up over the window to his immediate right. In fact, from where he stood, he could see that every point of entry was marked with some small, easily overlooked item—a bundle of chicken bones tied together with hair, a scrap of rawhide wrapped around a bunch of feathers and animal teeth.
You idiot. You walked right into this. Without so much as a knife to protect yourself—
Slowly, without making a sound, Dean set the unopened beer on the counter. He felt wide-awake, absolutely alert. Walking silently back in the direction he’d come, he automatically started evaluating all possible exits and weapons.
By the time he got to the screen door and heard Tommy McClane laughing, his heart was beating fast.
What happened next would depend on how hard McClane wanted things to be for him.
“What people don’t realize about a battle like Bull Run,” Tommy was saying, “was how much the original eyewitness reports of what happened—”
He stopped, as Dean stepped up from behind.
“Don’t move,” Dean muttered over his shoulder, and he tossed the Impala keys to Sam. “Get the car and bring it around. Knife’s in the usual place. Get it.”
“Dean, wait.”
“There’s hex bags all through here. Place is a freaking death trap.”
“Dean, wait.” Sam stood up. “The McClanes aren’t possessed,” he said. “It’s hoodoo.”
“Those charms you saw are household protection symbols,” Tommy said, sounding surprisingly calm. Looking back at Dean, he scowled a little incredulously. “Were you actually gonna stab me with my own barbecue fork?”
“It was the only thing I could find,” Dean mumbled, laying it aside, then turned to Sam. “What else did you forget to tell me?”
“You were already suspicious. I didn’t want to make it worse.”
“Yeah, well...” Dean fumed. “I left my beer inside.” As he stepped back into the house, he thought he could feel McClane’s eyes burning into his back.
Gotta be my imagination, he thought. That’s just a stupid cliché.
When he got back to the porch, Nate had switched off his e-book, and he and Sam were listening to Tommy McClane’s theory of how the South really lost the war.
“This business with the noose,” McClane said, “that’s just part of it. By the last year of the war, Lee’s armies were desperate. Soldiers were using all kinds of Louisiana voodoo on the battlefield. Hell, in the end, the CSA practically sanctioned it. Benign stuff at first... charms for protection and herbal remedies. Brought over by the slave trade, absorbed across the color line into local culture, including the poor white farm boys who were out there dying on the front lines.
“And by that point, the Confederates were using everything they could to try to hold off the Union.” He shook his head. “Except it was backfiring all over the place. Here in Mission’s Ridge, for example, in the battle they’re re-enacting this week, the South was winning. And then all of a sudden, without any explanation, Confederate troops started turning on each other, and on themselves. The history books treat it like it was some kind of insurrection, a fatal breakdown in the chain of command. But it was more than that. It was a damn massacre and the town fell to the North because of it.”
“Let me guess,” Dean said. “Jubal Beauchamp was right smack in the middle.”
“And he was wearing the noose,” McClane said. “No doubt in my mind.”
“So where is it now?” Sam asked.
Tommy McClane looked up at them wearily.
“Wherever it is,” he said, “good riddance. There’s a reason why I’ve got protection charms over every door and window in my house.”
“Have you ever heard of something called Moa’ah?” Dean asked.
Tommy flinched visibly at the mention of it.
“Where did you hear about that?”
“Let’s just say I got to see some of it up close and personal,” Dean said.
“That’s impossible. If you came across the Moa’ah, you wouldn’t be sitting around talking about it.”
“Well, I had help.”
“You really think it’s that powerful?” Sam asked.
“It’s inside the noose.” Every trace of good humor had fallen away from McClane’s face. “And those knots were tied in Hell.”
TEN
Their motel room was painted blue and gray.
Half of it was decorated with old photos of Union soldiers and paintings of the Yankees. The other half was decorated with Rebel flags and replicas of Confederate artifacts. An imaginary Mason-Dixon Line divided the space cleanly between two sagging single beds.
“You want Lee or Sherman?” Sam asked.
“Huh?”
“North or South?”
Dean didn’t answer, just climbed on one of the beds and lay on his back with his hands locked behind his head, staring straight up at the ceiling fan as it paddled the humid night air.
After a moment of silence, Sam set up the laptop on the desk and went online, running an image search on different types of nooses. In the quiet, he could feel the slow tension boiling off his brother until finally it became something he could no longer ignore.
Sam turned around and looked at Dean.
“Dean? Is there something you need to say to me?”
Dean didn’t move. “Nope.”
“So you’re just going to lie there and watch the fan spin all night?”
“I was thinking about brushing my teeth.”
“Come on. If you internalize one more dark thought, you’re going to explode.”
Dean sat up fast, the shadows under his eyes making him look simultaneously exhausted and bursting with nervous energy.
“Your buddy McClane talks about Hell like he did time there. Meanwhile I could give him a freakin’ guided tour of the place.”
“He knows about the noose,” Sam said.
“And that’s another thing. What does he really know? History’s not my strong point, and personally I could give two craps about who lost the war and why. I’m here to smoke this thing, whatever it is, and get out of Dodge.”
“It’s not that simple.” Sam stood up from the desk. “What’s this really about? McClane or me?”
Dean stopped pacing and faced him across the room.
“It used to be about us, Sammy. You and me and Bobby, and that’s it. Now it’s you and me and whoever you feel like trusting on any given day. And frankly I’m not so crazy about that.”
“Well, it’s a little late to cut him out,” Sam said. “So for the sake of getting this figured out, let’s focus.”
Sitting back down at the computer, he added, “Take a look at this.”
He clicked back to the digitized image of Jubal Beauchamp that showed the hangman’s knot around his neck. Dean stepped up beside him and stood, arms crossed, peering down.
“Beauchamp’s rope had six coils around it, the standard technique. Right?”
“Sure.”
“It says here that the more loops you make, the more the friction increases on the rope.”
“So?”
“But if you look at this picture—” Sam magnified the Beauchamp image, squinting at the grainy pixels. Centering on the noose, he looked closer. “there’s a seventh coil.”
“Riveting. Really.” Dean returned to the bed. “So where does that get us?”
“We need to go out there in the morning and talk to Oiler again. Find out exactly what he saw—what happened at the wedding. He has to be
holding something back.”
“And this time he’ll definitely tell us the truth.”
“No,” Sam said, “he’ll prevaricate and lie and try to cover up, just like everyone else is doing. But we’re going to lean on him—just you and me—until he levels with us.” He turned and faced the bed. “Because I, for one, am sick of feeling like we’re not getting the whole story here.”
Dean studied his brother’s face, saw cold steel in his eyes and wanted to believe in it.
“And then what?”
“And then we find this thing,” Sam said, “and we deal with it.”
Dean didn’t say anything.
Sam closed his eyes and listened to the silence.
Far off in the distance he heard the scream of a train whistle.
ELEVEN
Outside of town, night fell over the battlefield, its full weight sinking fast over the star-rattled sky.
Campfires dotted the hillside where the men bivouacked, re-enactors on both sides hunkered in front of their tents, drinking from tin cups, scraping food off plates, talking in the hushed tones of men away from their families and homes. Corncob pipes were produced, muskets disassembled and lovingly cleaned and oiled by lantern-light, the old rituals brought out and pored over one more time.
Here and there cell phones shone between the trees like blue fireflies as one man or another sneaked a quiet call to a wife or girlfriend.
Private Terry Johnson sat in front of the fire with his banjo, plucking out the first plaintive notes of ‘My Old Kentucky Home.’ He played softly, almost to himself, unselfconsciously. It was late now, and most of the 32nd had already bunked down for the night in preparation for the long march in the morning.
The only other sounds were the crackling of the fire and the nickering of the several dozen horses corralled near the cavalry troops, as the animals too settled down for the night.
“Know any Coldplay?”
Johnson flinched a little in surprise and stopped plucking. Phil Oiler—also known as Norwalk Pettigrew, of the 32nd Georgia—sat down on a stump next to him.
“Oh,” he said. “Hey, Phil.”
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