Supernatural 1 - Nevermore

by Keith R. A. DeCandido

  They entered the shabby office, which had cracked wood paneling, a badly stained beige carpet, and a pockmarked front desk. An older woman sat behind that desk, puffing away on a cigarette while sitting under a red no smoking sign and reading a Dan Brown book. Her face was caked with enough makeup to allow her to attend a Halloween party as the Joker, and her hair was sprayed within an inch of its life into something that probably wanted to be a beehive. Sam was fairly sure he could have hit that hairdo with any weapon in the Impala's trunk and not done a lick of damage to it. She wore a name badge that said Monica.

  "Hey," Dean said, "we're checking out."

  Monica took a final puff on the cigarette, then stubbed it out in the ashtray. "You're Winwood, right?" she asked with a scratchy voice. Sam managed not to roll his eyes. Just once, Sam wished Dean would pick an inconspicuous alias.

  "That's right," Dean said with a smile. "We're ready to check out."

  "Yeah, there's a problem. Your credit card was declined. I'm gonna need another one."

  There was Dean's wide-eyed look again, but this time Sam didn't smile. "Declined. Really."

  Dean looked at Sam helplessly, then turned back to Monica. "Could you try it again, please?"

  She gave Dean a withering look. "I tried it three times. That's all they'll allow."

  "Did they say why?"

  "No, no reason. You wanna call the credit card company? You can use this phone." She picked up the desk phone—which, Sam was appalled to see, was a rotary dial—and held it up for Dean to take.

  "Uh, no, that, uh—that won't really help."

  Sam realized why Dean was stalling. He had other credit cards, but none of them said Dean Winwood on them.

  Quickly, Sam stepped forward, reaching into his back pocket, and said, "I'll get it." He removed one of his own fake credit cards from his wallet and handed it to Monica.

  She took it and stared at it, which Sam had been hoping she wouldn't do, since this one didn't say Winwood either. "Thought you two was brothers."

  Without missing a beat, Sam said, "We are, but I was adopted. By the time I tracked down my birth parents, they had both died, so I changed my name to McGillicuddy in tribute to them."

  Monica's face split into a rictus that Sam supposed could've been called a smile. "That's so sweet of you. What a nice boy you are." She ran the card through the machine, then entered the total for the three nights they stayed. The wait for the machine to check was interminable. Dean, to his credit, had recovered, and he had his best poker face on.

  Finally, after several eternities, the machine beeped and the word approved appeared on the small screen.

  "All right," Monica said, still smiling, as the whirr of a printer could be heard under the desk.

  "Here's your card back, Mr. McGillicuddy."

  "Thank you," Sam said, retrieving it and putting it back in his wallet.

  "Such good manners. Mr. and Mrs. Winwood obviously raised you both right."

  Dean smiled. "Yes, ma'am, they did a bang-up job."

  Monica then handed the printout, as well as the credit card machine's receipt, to Sam. "Just sign here, and you can be on your way."

  Once that was all done, they went back outside.

  "Nice save there, Sammich," Dean said with a grin. "Y'know, I'm finally starting to get it."

  Sam frowned. This sounded suspiciously like the beginning of a lengthy diatribe, the end of which would be a joke at Sam's expense. "Get what?"

  "Well, Sammy, we grew up together, and that whole time, nothing about you ever screamed 'lawyer' at me. So when you told me that you were applying to law school, it kinda threw me. But I've been watching you the last year, and I think I figured it out."

  Here it comes. Sam tried not to groan.

  "You can shovel manure as good as anyone I've ever met. That line you pulled on Monica there with the adoption? Beautiful. And with a straight face."

  In fact, Sam's skills at lying—both in terms of pretending to be someone else and also misleading people as to the true nature of his life and of the world itself—had been one of the things that attracted him to the law. His life as the child of a hunter of supernatural creatures, and of being trained to be a hunter himself, had given him these skills anyhow, and it only seemed natural to put them to good use. That wasn't what he told his brother, though.

  "Yeah, I can pull the wool over people's eyes. And I do most of the research and know most of the lore. And I'm good with the weapons and the hand-to-hand." They arrived at the Impala, and Sam gave his brother a grin as he stepped up to the passenger door. "So, uh, what do I need you for, exactly?"

  Before Dean could construct a reply, his phone started playing Deep Purple's "Smoke on the Water."

  "For that matter," Sam added, "I'm the one who showed you how to download ringtones."

  Pulling the cell phone out of his pocket, Dean scowled. "I would've figured it out eventually." He flipped it open and glanced at the number, which caused his eyes to go even wider than they had in the office. Putting the phone to his ear, he said, "Ellen?"

  That surprised Sam. Ellen Harvelle ran a roadhouse that catered to hunters. He and Dean had recently learned that Ellen's late husband died when he was on a hunt with their dad, and it put a bit of a strain on their relationship—especially since they only found out because Ellen's young daughter Jo snuck out and went on a hunt with him and Dean against Ellen's very strenuous objections. Years of listening to loud music and using firearms had played merry hell with Dean's hearing, so he kept his cell's volume up way too loud. That meant Sam could hear Ellen's tinny voice over the phone's speaker.

  "Listen," she said, "I may have a job for you boys."

  "Really? 'Cause—"

  "It's for Ash. He wouldn't ask himself, but I figure he did you two a favor, so you might be willing to do him one back." Ellen seemed to be barreling through the conversation, not letting Dean get a word in.

  Or, at least trying not to. Keeping Dean quiet was usually a forlorn hope. "Sure, I guess." He smirked. "Always had a soft spot for that mullethead. What's he need?"

  Ellen gave the particulars of the case to Dean, and did it in a lower voice, so Sam couldn't make it all out. Ash was a deadbeat drunk who nonetheless was a genius and able to track demons via computer, a trick Sam had never mastered despite many attempts. As Dean had once said, Ash's geek-fu was strong. Sam didn't entirely believe his claim to have gone to MIT—for starters, he said it was a college in Boston, and anyone who'd gone there would know it was in Cambridge—but he did believe that Ash had the know-how, based on the times he'd helped him and his brother out.

  "Okay. We'll check it out." With that, Dean flipped the phone shut and looked out the driveway. "That road'll take us to 80, right?"

  Sam tried to remember the map. "I think so, yeah. Why, where's the job?"

  Dean grinned. "The town so nice, they named it twice: New York, New York."

  "Really?" Sam turned and went back to the trunk. "Open it up, I wanna show you something."

  "Something in New York?" Dean said, joining him at the back, since he had the keys. After Dean opened the trunk, Sam took a folder out of his bag. "It may not be anything, but I noticed a couple of murders that took place there."

  "Sam—it's New York. They get, like, fifty murders a day."

  "Which is why these two probably flew under the radar." He took the clippings, photocopied off newspapers he'd looked at in several different public libraries they'd visited recently. "First, we got a guy bricked up in a building's basement." Sam handed Dean an 8½ by 11 sheet of paper with a filler news story in a section of the New York Daily News dedicated to community news about a man named Marc Reyes, who was found bricked up in the basement of a house in the Bronx. As Dean glanced over the photocopy, Sam went on: "And this past Sunday, two college kids were beaten to death by an orangutan."

  Dean looked up at that. "Seriously?"

  Sam nodded. "That's two murders that are right out of Edgar Allan Poe short st
ories."

  "That's kind of a stretch," Dean said as he handed back the story about the bricked-up man.

  "Maybe—but they both took place in the Bronx, and Poe used to live in the Bronx. Plus, the first murder was on the fifth—they didn't find the body until two days later, but it happened on the fifth, which was—"

  "The last full moon," Dean said with a nod. "Yeah, okay, maybe, but—"

  Tossing the folder back into the trunk, Sam said, "And the orangutan was on the last quarter." He didn't need to add that lots of rituals were based on the phases of the moon. "It's not that big a deal, but since we're going to New York anyhow, I figured we could look into it while we—uh, do whatever it is we're doing."

  Dean slammed the trunk shut. "Haunting. Some friend of Ash's is having ghost issues. So who's he gonna call?"

  Sam chuckled. They both got into the car, Dean in the driver's seat. "That's really weird."

  "What, that there'd be a haunting? We see them all the time."

  "No," Sam said with a shake of his head, "that Ash would have a friend."

  With a chuckle of his own, Dean slid the key into the ignition. A grin spread on his face as the Impala hummed to life. "Hear that engine purr."

  Squirming in the passenger seat, Sam thought, I swear to God, if he starts petting the dashboard again, I'm walking to New York. However, he was spared that. Dean shoved a Metallica tape into the player, twirled the volume up, and the car was filled with the guitar opening to "Enter Sandman."

  Dean turned to him. "Atomic batteries to power."

  Glowering at his older brother, Sam said, "I'm only gonna say, 'Turbines to speed' if you don't make a comment about me in short green pants."

  Dean pulled the gearshift down to R and said, "Let's move out." He backed out of the parking spot, then brought it down to D and sent them out onto the open road.

  THREE

  On the road

  Interstate 80, approaching the

  George Washington Bridge

  Thursday 16, November 2006

  "How can there be so many people on one road?"

  Sam tried not to laugh out loud at Dean's plaintive cry, the fifth time he'd asked the question in the last ten minutes—a time span during which the Impala had moved forward maybe fifty feet. They'd been driving all night. Sam had suggested they stop at a motel overnight, but Dean wanted to get there quickly. They had stopped in a motel in Clarion, Pennsylvania, to shower and change clothes, paying for it with one of the fraudulent cards, but didn't stay the night. Instead, they worked their way across Pennsylvania and New Jersey, taking it in turns to sleep or drive.

  Unfortunately, that meant they arrived at the approach to the George Washington Bridge smack dab in the middle of the morning rush hour, and traffic was bumper-to-bumper.

  Dean was about ready to jump out of his skin.

  "There's gotta be a faster way to get into the city."

  Sam didn't bother looking at the map, since they'd had this conversation several times already.

  "The Lincoln Tunnel and the Holland Tunnel are farther away from the Bronx, and they're tunnels—they've probably got more traffic 'cause they have to squeeze more cars into fewer—"

  "All right. " Dean pounded the steering wheel. Ash's friend lived in a neighborhood called Riverdale, which was also in the Bronx, which meant it would be easier for Sam to investigate the Poe murders. "That other thing you were talkin' about," Dean said. "You said they were all from Eddie Albert Poe stories, right?"

  "Edgar Allan Poe, yeah."

  "Right, whatever. He's the guy that did 'The Raven,' right?"

  Giving his brother a sidelong glance, Sam said, "You've read a poem?"

  "They did it on The Simpsons once. Hey, c'mon, move it, will you!" Dean suddenly screamed at the car in front of them. "Christ, you don't have to leave fifty car lengths between you and the guy in front of you!" Again he pounded the steering wheel. "I swear, these people got their drivers' licenses from freakin' Crackerjack boxes."

  "Anyhow," Sam said, as much to take Dean's mind off his frustration as anything, "the guy bricked up in the basement is from 'The Cask of Amontillado.' The orangutan is from 'The Murders on the Rue Morgue'—which, by the way, was the first detective story."

  "Really?"

  "Yeah, that story was an influence on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle when he created Sherlock Holmes."

  "Well, thank you, Marian the Librarian."

  Sam was glad to hear Dean teasing him, as it meant he wasn't letting the driving get to him—

  "Hey! Use the freakin' turn signal, will you?"

  —much. "I took a lit class as an elective at Stanford—it was called 'American Hauntings,' all about the use of the supernatural in American fiction, including a lot about Poe." He shrugged. "I was curious, after all the weird stuff we've seen, what the pop culture interpretations of what we do were like."

  "What, X-Files reruns didn't do the trick?"

  "Honestly, Dean, you should read Poe's stories. 'The Fall of the House of Usher,' 'The Masque of the Red Death'—some of this stuff sounds like it could've been right out of one of our jobs. You gotta wonder what he saw to make him write that. I mean, he practically created the horror genre."

  "So, Professor, whaddaya think the deal is with these murders? Phases of the moon, re-creating old short stories—sound like any ritual you know?"

  "Not offhand, but there's something else. Before, when I had the maps out? I was checking something, and both these murders were exactly one mile from the Poe Cottage."

  "First of all, what's the Poe Cottage?"

  "Poe lived in the Bronx for a few years in a little cottage."

  "Dude, I've seen Fort Apache—the Bronx doesn't have cottages. Hey, jackass, pick a freakin' lane!"

  Sam suddenly felt the urge to get a firm grip on the dashboard with his good hand. "It did in the nineteenth century. The Bronx didn't even become part of New York City until the 1890s or so. Anyhow, because Poe lived there, they preserved the cottage—and his wife died there."

  Dean nodded. "Okay, so the place has some emotional significance. Still not connecting the dots."

  Shrugging, Sam said, "Me, either."

  "Second of all, why didn't you tell me this when you were playing with the maps? I thought you were trying to find alternate routes."

  Amazed Dean even had to ask, Sam said, "You had Led Zeppelin II in the tape deck. I know better than to try to hold an intelligent conversation with you when 'Whole Lotta Love' is playing."

  Dean opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again. "Yeah, okay, fair enough."

  They crawled ever more slowly toward the bridge, and Sam realized that they were approaching a toll booth. Dean saw that some lanes were moving faster, and he inched into them.

  "Uh, dude, those are the E-Z Pass lanes."

  "Aw, crap." The bane of the Winchesters' existence had been the proliferation of things like E-Z Pass, Fast Lane, I-Pass, and assorted other services that involved sticking a piece of plastic on the windshield that a scanner would read, deducting the toll from a credit card or from payments made with a check. The former required a consistency of use with a card that Dean and Sam couldn't afford, since their credit cards were all phony. Sam had considered setting something up with the checking account he'd had when he was at Stanford, and through which he maintained his cell phone and internet, but now, with he and Dean wanted by the law, it wasn't prudent for them to attach something to the car that could be used to trace their movements. However, the cash lanes were considerably slower, which, Sam knew, would only increase Dean's dark mood.

  Sure enough, the realization that he'd be stuck in slow traffic while dozens of other cars zipped through the E-Z Pass lane undid all of Sam's distraction work, and Dean was now holding the steering wheel with an iron grip in his right hand while punching the inner driver's side door with his left and muttering curses to himself. Recognizing a futile endeavor when he saw one, Sam pulled out his Treo and made use of its web browser
. It was slow—basically as fast as dial-up—but he was eventually able to find and call up the website of Ash's friend's band, Scottso. By the time he was done reading up on it, they were next in the toll line. "Dude," Dean asked suddenly, "you got any cash?"

  Sam whirled around. "Excuse me? I thought you were the keeper of the lucre, Mr. Pool Hustlin' Poker Player Man."

  "Remember that girl in South Bend, the Notre Dame student who—"

  Under no circumstances did Sam ever want to hear the end of any sentence of Dean's that began with the words "Remember that girl." "Fine, whatever." Sam tried to straighten his lanky form as best he could in the front seat and dug his left hand into his pants pocket. He pulled out a ball of fluff, three quarters, several business cards that read Sam Winchester, Reporter that he'd made up in a print shop back in Indiana, and his monogrammed money clip, which had four bills in it, one of which stood out as being a ten dollar bill, since they were all a different color now. He gingerly yanked it out and handed it to Dean.

  Dean paid the toll with the ten, waited for the change, responded to the toll taker's request to have a nice day with an incoherent grunt, and then stuffed the four singles into his own shirt pocket. Sam considered objecting, then decided that life was just too damn short, instead saying, "We wanna take the Henry Hudson Parkway, so stay in the right lane."

  Dean nodded as they started over the bridge. For a moment Sam just took the time to admire the view. The George Washington Bridge was one of the most famous bridges in the country, and while it didn't look quite as distinctive as, say, the Golden Gate—which he'd visited on a trip he and Jess had taken to San Francisco—or the Brooklyn Bridge right here in New York, it still had a certain grandeur that he admired.

  As the Impala rolled over the bridge—still moving at less than twenty miles an hour, but that was an improvement on their pre-toll-booth pace—Sam turned to his right. It was a clear day out, so he could see the most famous skyline in the world: skyscrapers in gray and red and silver and brown all reaching upward, all different sizes and shapes, with the pinnacle of the Empire State Building rising above all of it. It was a complex melange of constructed life, a monument to human achievement over nature.