“Yes, officer?”
“Do I look like someone who cares about your sex life? That’s entirely too much information. Why don’t you just haul your ass outta here, and stop wasting my time.”
“Suit yourself.” The pickup lurched a little again, the door slamming shut, the flashlight waving.
“Move along,” the cop said, “and drive safely.”
Back at the McClanes’ house, Sam and Dean found almost everything they wanted—hydrocortisone cream for Sam’s mosquito bites and, best of all, fresh hot cheeseburgers from Tommy’s kitchen stove.
They washed them down with cold beer while Nate brought a pair of bolt-cutters from the garage and cut the cuffs off, after which they spent twenty minutes rubbing the raw-red bruises encircling their wrists.
Sam finished eating and then used Tommy’s land-line to call Sarah Rafferty’s cell phone. She answered on the second ring, sounding glad to hear from them.
“After what happened out on the battlefield today,” she said, “I was worried about you both.”
“It would have been a lot worse if it weren’t for you,” Sam told her. “That was quick thinking.”
“I just remembered what you said about the sheriff. How she was more hindrance than help. But Sam...” Sarah’s voice hesitated a little, “are you really with the FBI?”
“No,” he said. “It’s something else.”
“What is it? Another government agency?”
“Not exactly. I don’t think it would make much sense if I tried to explain it.”
“You might be surprised,” she said. “But I won’t press you. Not if you’re really trying to figure out what happened with Dave.
“That is what you’re doing, isn’t it?” she added.
“Yes. That hasn’t changed.”
“Then I’m glad I helped you.” She sighed, and it was a shaky, restless sound. “At least I think so.”
“Where are you, Sarah?”
“I’m still out by the battleground. A lot of us are, actually—the re-enactors, I mean. The police have stopped trying to drive us off, for now anyway. They haven’t even had a chance to get those howitzers off the cliffside yet. We told them we’re not going anywhere until we get a reasonable explanation of what happened out there today, and so far, the authorities haven’t even acknowledged that anything out of the ordinary happened at all. It’s like Sheriff Daniels sneezed, and they all caught the misinformation flu.”
The misinformation flu. Sam found it an oddly apt turn of phrase. “Just be careful,” he said. “Take care of yourself. We’ll talk to you soon.”
“And you’ll explain more?”
“I’ll try,” he said. It was the closest he could come to the truth, and hoped for now it would be enough.
When Dean finished his beer, he pushed back his plate and stood up, turning to face Tommy.
“I don’t suppose there’s any way we could clean up a little.”
“I was wondering when we’d get around to that.” Tommy eyed the tattered hazmat suits that the Winchesters were still wearing. “I’d offer some of my gear, but you’re both taller than me and I don’t have clean clothes either one of you could fit into.”
“Our stuff is back at the motel,” Sam said. “At this point we can’t very well go back and get it ourselves.”
“Yeah, the cops’ll be watching it,” Tommy agreed. He glanced around, one eyebrow cocked. “There’s a general store in town where I could go pick up some clean clothes for you—jeans and t-shirts, at least. Y’all could just hang out here with Nate.”
“Much appreciated,” Sam said. He opened his wallet and handed Tommy some cash for the clothes. “I’ll even finish the dishes.”
“That’s a deal.”
Tommy paused as if to consider something.
“Oh, and Sam?”
“What?”
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m on your side—you’re hunters, after all. But when I get back, and you are all showered and clean—” He looked straight at Sam, his expression grim. “I’d appreciate an explanation of just what the hell is going on here.”
“Don’t worry, you’ll get it.”
Tommy turned and left, and Sam took his place at the sink and began washing the plates and cutlery. A moment later Nate came up alongside him and began wiping them dry before placing them carefully on the drying rack. The boy worked quickly, with easy efficiency. Glancing over at him, Sam noticed the automatic Whirlpool unit installed alongside the kitchen sink.
“You’ve got a dishwasher,” Sam said. “Don’t you use it?”
Nate shrugged.
“It’s just the two of us here. Dad says it’s not worth running.”
“Right.” Sam handed him another dish, and the boy dried it, front and back, with a couple deft swipes of the hand-towel.
Balanced on the shelf in front of them was a photo in a simple wooden frame, Tommy McClane and a pretty twenty-something redhead in a pale pink scoop-neck blouse and jade earrings, holding a toddler. The toddler—obviously a one year-old Nate—was wearing a giant, crooked grin and a t-shirt reading: I DO ALL MY OWN STUNTS.
“My brother and I grew up without a mom, too,” Sam said. He passed Nate another dish, and the boy took it without comment, rinsed and wiped and racked it. “It wasn’t always easy.” That was the last of the plates, and he turned the water off and wiped his hands on a towel. “Not everybody gets that.”
The boy still didn’t say anything, or even look up, and for a second Sam thought he’d overstepped his boundaries, become too personal. But then Nate did look up, his face uncertain, almost puzzled.
“Did you like your dad?” he asked.
“My dad...” Sam started, unsure how to proceed, “taught me a lot. He tried.”
“Mine too,” Nate said. “The stuff he talks about, it freaks me out sometimes, you know? I think he wants me to be like him when I grow up, take over the Historical Society and... everything else. But sometimes...” He shrugged.
“What?”
“My mom was an artist. I mean, what if I decide to do that instead?”
“Then you should,” Sam told him. “If that’s what you want to do, you should follow it.”
Nate frowned again.
“I still dream about her sometimes, you know? Even though I was so young when she... when it happened.” He blinked at Sam. “Weird, huh?”
“Are they good dreams?”
“Yeah.”
“Then it’s good. That’s your way of remembering her.”
Not long after, the front door opened and Tommy came back with new clothes. Sam and Dean went upstairs to take turns showering and getting changed.
As he washed off the dirt and grime of the day, Sam made a mental note to ask the boy more about his mother.
After Dean and Sam got cleaned up, they all sat back down in the big old-fashioned plantation kitchen, gathered around McClane’s pine table. The windows were open and the night-sounds of crickets and cicadas rippled in through the screens. Far off in the distance, lightning pulsed and flickered in the darkness, followed by the distant rumble of thunder.
Tommy had the Braves game playing softly on the radio and the reception blurred into static as the storm moved closer.
“All right,” he said finally. “I’ve waited long enough. You gonna tell me what happened to you out there?”
Dean cracked a fresh beer while Sam told Tommy and Nate about what they’d seen on the road, the floating black substance that had come oozing from Beauchamp’s remains, and how Dean had seen the same thing coming out of Dave Wolverton’s corpse.
When Sam finished, Tommy nodded slowly.
“So the thing about the Moa’ah,” he began, “is it’s the animating force behind the noose, but its presence doesn’t always mean the noose is still nearby. Hell, it can hover around the infected, sometimes for decades, even centuries, until it gets a chance to air out.”
“I guess nobody told the demons that,” Sam said.
> “Or they’re just that desperate.” Tommy ran one hand thoughtfully over the wood-grain of the table. “If the demons were torturing civilians for information, like you said, that sounds pretty desperate.”
“What about Sheriff Daniels?” Dean asked. “For that matter, what about my car? And our knife?”
Tommy nodded.
“The knife and the car, I can probably help you with,” he said. “But Jacqueline Daniels isn’t a woman you want to mess with.”
“We saw her Santeria tattoo.”
“That’s the least of it. Her family goes back to the original battle of Mission’s Ridge.” Tommy’s voice darkened a little, and he glanced over at Nate, who had been sitting in silence at the end of the table, listening intently. “Why don’t you run upstairs and get ready for bed.”
“Do I have to?”
Tommy shot him a stern look.
“You heard me.”
The boy sulked off, mumbling under his breath, and when his footsteps faded up the stairs, Tommy sat back and opened a little drawer in the table, taking out a pack of American Spirits and a lighter.
He glanced up at the Winchesters a little sheepishly.
“You mind? I’ve cut down to one a day, but if I’m going to tell you this story, I think I’m gonna need it.”
He shook out a cigarette and lit it, inhaled, then sat back and blew a stream of smoke toward the window.
“You said you saw that tattoo on her wrist. That’s not actually Santeria in the traditional sense. For generations now, the Daniels family has been practicing their own twisted version of backwoods witchcraft. It started with her great-great-great-great grandfather, who came up from the Louisiana bayou back before the war and set up shop outside of Mission’s Ridge. Not long after that, local people started disappearing.”
“That was Daniels’ ancestor?”
Tommy nodded. “He started abducting people, slaves and children mainly, to experiment on them. There were rumors of human sacrifice, cannibalism, and vivisection using human subjects while they were still alive and conscious. Daniels was trying out some of the... variations on African rituals he’d learned back in New Orleans.”
He dragged on the cigarette again. It was almost halfway gone already.
The kitchen felt darker now.
“After a year or so,” he continued, “some of the locals got together and lynched him for it. Hung him up and burned him alive. It’s all in the public record, if you care to dig a little. On the night he died, his infant son was whisked away and raised by another family. He grew up to be a Civil War doctor named...”
“My God.” McClane scraped back his chair and stood up. For the first time he actually looked shaken. “Aristede Percy,” he looked at Sam, “you said when you were reading Beauchamp’s journal that he was the Civil War doctor who supposedly used the powers of the noose to bring Jubal back to life.”
McClane sank back into his chair, his face alive with the possibilities the connection opened up.
“Tomorrow marks the two hundred-year anniversary of Daniels’ lynching,” he added. He opened the pack of cigarettes again, considered it briefly then put it away. “The noose’s power will most probably be at its peak. We’ve already seen its effects, even though the actual rope has yet to be recovered.”
“It’s out there somewhere, though,” Sam said.
McClane nodded. His face was a grim mask.
“And Jacqueline Daniels won’t rest until she finds it.”
“She’s the sheriff,” Sam said. “How do we stop her?”
“You have to get to it first. Use a special weapon and cut the thing to pieces.”
“Like a supernatural weapon.” Dean half-laughed, then looked glum. “We had one of those once.”
“You mean this?”
McClane reached into a leather sheath on his belt and took out Ruby’s demon-killing knife, sliding it across the table to Dean. The sight of it made Dean’s face light up with such enthusiasm that he almost looked childlike.
“Where’d you get that?”
“Let’s just say I’ve got a few connections in the sheriff’s office. Stuff disappears from the evidence cage all the time. Thankfully, Sheriff Daniels doesn’t have any idea what this particular item is capable of. If she did...” McClane shuddered, letting the thought drift away unarticulated.
“So we’ve got the knife back,” Dean said, his mood darkening again. “What about the Impala?”
“In the impound lot. We can see about getting it in the morning. I’ll talk to Raymond Ungeroot—he’s one of the deputies down there. Also my nephew.” Dean tossed him a look, and Tommy looked a little chagrined. “What can I say, it’s a real small town.”
“Any idea where the noose is?” Dean asked.
“On that score,” McClane said, shaking his head, “I got nothing.”
“No,” Sam said, “but I might. We’re going to need a ride into town.”
TWENTY
The old church was silent.
Sam and Dean approached the front steps, both holding flashlights that Tommy McClane had supplied.
Somewhere in the distance a dog yapped twice, howled and fell quiet. It was two a.m., and the narrow side streets of the town had lapsed into a thick, narcoleptic stillness that was as close to slumber as it was going to get.
“First Pentecostal Church of Mission’s Ridge,” Dean read, and then he turned to Sam.
Sam shone his flashlight on the cornerstone, looking at the date.
“Year of Our Lord 1833. It’s the oldest remaining building in town. The one structure the Union army didn’t torch after General Meade whipped the Rebels out on the hill.” He gestured around the side. “And according to what Sarah Rafferty told us, this is where it all changed for Dave Wolverton—on Phil Oiler’s wedding day. I think he and Phil were wandering around down there, and found the noose.”
“And what, decided to take turns trying it on?”
“Authentic Civil War relic,” Sam said. “They probably couldn’t resist.”
He and Dean walked along the outside of the church, following its outer wall toward a back alleyway.
“Careful,” Sam said, shining his light on the steel tracks running off into the distance.
“Railroad tracks?” Dean mumbled. “Here?”
“Remember that armored train? It ran right through town—and right past here.”
“Crazy,” Dean shrugged. “Well, let’s go to church.”
The clapboard exterior was massive, seeming to occupy limitless space in all directions. Around the back, Sam’s flashlight picked out a narrow utility stairwell leading down. A plain white door with a square window stood at the bottom.
Navigating the steps, Dean bent over and picked up a loose brick, wrapped his jacket around it, and punched it through the glass. The window burst and glass tinkled down inside the door. Dean reached through—avoiding the shards—found the knob and turned it.
Feet crunching over broken glass, they stepped inside.
Sam went first, shining his flashlight along the walls. Heavy shreds of cobweb hung from the ceiling, and the air was thick with dust. He realized they were standing inside a storage space, a wide, musty room filled with old Bibles and hymnals and racks of choir robes. An old pipe organ towered against the wall, partially disassembled.
There was a sharp clicking noise.
Spinning around, Sam caught a glimpse of a figure leaning over them from above and pointed his flashlight at it.
His heart pounding, he stared at the bloodied face and hands of the wooden statue peering down from its crucifix. The expression on the statue’s face was a combination of suffering and infinite gentleness.
“Jesus,” Dean breathed. “What’s he doing in the basement?”
Sam shrugged.
“Maybe there’s been a shift in the dogma.”
Dean just gave him a puzzled look.
“Which way from here?”
Sam looked at the far end of the st
orage room, where several divergent hallways ran out in what looked like a half-dozen different directions. Back at the McClanes’ house, Tommy had told them that the church basement was a labyrinth of corridors and sub-chambers, many of which hadn’t been thoroughly cleaned out for a century or more.
Half the stuff in the Historical Society came from there, he’d told them. But there’s still whole rooms that people haven’t checked out since the Union Army came through. If the noose is anyplace, you’ll most likely find it in one of those.
They kept walking, neither of them speaking. Dean took half a dozen steps forward and stopped, stomping his foot.
“It’s metal under here,” he announced. “Hollow.”
“You mean there’s another layer underneath us?”
Dean shone his flashlight down.
“Might be,” he said. “It’s a heavy metal, too, like iron. Lead, maybe. Except...” He sniffed. “...it smells like ammonia.”
“Ammonia sulfate was an early fire retardant,” Sam said. “Going back to the nineteenth century. They used it in circus tents and army forts. Somebody had something important to protect down there. See if you can find—”
“A way down?” Dean swung his flashlight directly in front of him, clearly revealing a wide trapezoidal door with a ringbolt. “Like this?”
“Yeah, just like that.”
They each grabbed the ring and pulled, swinging the trapdoor upward. The steps leading down were ladder-steep and descended so sharply that they had to clamp their flashlights under their arms so they could hang on with both hands to keep from falling.
The steps ended abruptly, and left them standing in a dank and airless cube. The walls were lined with what appeared to be lead, grafted together with bolts and rivets. Tufts of what looked like spider webs festooned the upper edges. From where they stood, they did a slow, circular inspection of the space.
The glow of their flashlights seemed to wither in the outermost pockets of darkness, as if the room itself was sucking the light away in great hungry slurps. Even with the flashlights, there was no way they could see every recessed area at once. Anything could have been waiting for them there.
“What is this?” Dean asked, his voice flat and hollow, as if he were talking inside a tin can.
Supernatural The Unholy Cause Page 13
