Supernatural 7 - One Year Gone

by Rebecca Dessertine

  At the front of the store, Sam got out of his truck and peeked through the window. He spotted a shopgirl and banged on the glass.

  She looked up and mouthed, “We’re closed.”

  “I just have a quick question,” Sam yelled, indicating he needed her to open the door.

  “Dude, come back tomorrow.” She shook her head and went to the back of the store.

  Sam cautiously doubled back to the alley where he had seen Dean. The coast was clear. Sam walked up the alley and peeked his head through the doorway. The girl stood there surveying the damage to the door.

  “I just have a couple questions,” Sam said.

  “Listen Bigfoot, I’m already late, so if you don’t mind, I’m just going to close this here door on your face and you can come back tomorrow to get your glow-in-the-dark witch mask.”

  “Okay Sabrina, cut the crap,” Sam said, his patience at an end. “I’m going to ask you some questions and you’re gonna flap those sweet hippy lips of yours. Get it?”

  “Oh wow, the sensitivity training is doing wonders. You throw any puppies into rivers lately? Tell me, how do you feel?” The girl had lost her fresh-faced gaze, and she now looked decidedly mean. “Because I’ve seen corpses before, but never one walking and talking like you. Though you don’t so much walk as lumber.”

  “What the hell are you on about?” Sam demanded. He hadn’t met many people who could tell straight off that he was... unusual.

  “Puh-lease, you can see your silly walk from a mile away.”

  “I meant about me,” Sam growled.

  “I’m a witch, lug-head. I got powers. I can feel things. You’re off. Can’t you feel that?”

  Sam wasn’t in an introspective mood.

  “What’d you say to him?” He inclined his head down the alley, in the direction Dean had presumably headed.

  The girl smirked. “Who? The guy that just left? He your shower-buddy or something? You guys look similar—same Cro-Magnon brow.”

  “He’s my... Forget it. What did he want?” Sam demanded.

  “His girlfriend got sick. He thought someone like me or my boss might have hexed her. We carry a lot of shit here. I told him I didn’t do anything. He and the chick seemed harmless. I might have mentioned that my boss was into heavier shit. But that’s it. I sent him on his way. I don’t need people up in my grill. I played it nice and sweet with him. You, I don’t like too much.”

  “Well, glad I’m getting to see the real you. What about the other witch-bitches around here, know anything about what they’re doing?”

  “I don’t hang with anyone else if that’s what you mean. I live with my mom, who makes soap for a living. I work, I text my boyfriend, and occasionally I rearrange my Netflix queue. Like I told the other guy, not everyone with a gift hangs around together here. I know it’s Salem, but we don’t all put on witchy hats and ride around on brooms.”

  “And that guy just went away, you didn’t tell him anything else?” Sam was skeptical this chick was telling the truth.

  “Yawn. Yes, and no. Can I go now?”

  “Yeah.” Sam spun around on his heel and walked back down the alley.

  “You’re welcome,” the girl shouted after him. “Dick.”

  THIRTEEN

  A cool evening fog rolled in from the ocean. Dean walked back toward the inn. He took a shortcut through an old graveyard. Under normal circumstances Dean would end up digging and burning things when he was in a bone yard, but he found himself looking at the worn stone faces of various headstones. Lichen stuck to the weathered stones, making some of the names difficult to read. Nevertheless Dean found himself enthralled. These people had all been accused of witchcraft.

  Dean knew a little about the history of the Salem witch trials. He supposed that maybe the people lying underfoot could actually have been witches, in that case, good riddance to them. But he also knew that envy and suspicion could cause a lot more harm than a couple of people doing spells so their crops didn’t die.

  Dean reached the inn, crossed the street and threw his duffle in the trunk of the car. He supposed that he should probably go up and see how Lisa and Ben were doing, he peered up at their bedroom window, the curtains were tightly drawn. But he really wanted to find this Connie woman. If she practiced the dark arts like her employee said, then she might be behind the attack on Lisa. She also might be powerful enough to be able to help him raise Sam. Either way, Dean needed to find out more information before he confronted Connie Hennrick.

  Closing the trunk, Dean headed into the lobby of the inn. Ingrid smiled saltily from behind the counter. She waved Dean over. In front of her was an itemized bill of the damage to their room.

  “I’m having the curtains and floor professionally cleaned. The fire you started in the waste basket smelled everything up. I’ve also moved you all to a different room.”

  Dean nodded and thanked her. He really didn’t care. But now more than ever he wished they were staying in one of his usual crap-hole motels. He put on his sweetest smile.

  “Ingrid, if I wanted to find out information about a family who’s been in Salem for a while, where would I go? Is there a library in town or something?” Even in the age of the Internet, some information could only be culled from old-fashioned records.

  “There’s the Peabody Essex Museum. Not walking distance though. Lots of tourists go there to see if they were related to anyone in the Salem witch trials. My great, great, great, great grandmother lived in Boston and her husband came up to see the Court of Oyer and Terminer.”

  “The court of what?” Dean asked.

  “It’s the court that heard the testimony of all the girls accusing people of being witches. In any case, Peabody Museum. Look up your ancestor names. Though I never heard of Winchesters in Salem.”

  “Probably not. Thanks for the info,” Dean said.

  Dean made his way back out of the door again. After changing into a tweed jacket and khakis—his professor outfit—Dean followed his GPS to the museum.

  An old woman in a beige pantsuit was just locking the door from the inside as Dean walked up. He rapped on the glass panel of the door and mustered his most academic-looking smile, pressing a Harvard ID up against the glass.

  The old woman unlocked the door.

  “Sorry, we’re closed. Come back tomorrow,” she said and went to close the door again.

  Dean stuck his foot against it to stop her. He smiled winningly.

  “Pardon my tardiness,” he began, and cleared his throat. “I’m Doctor Jones from Harvard. I have a lecture tomorrow and I’m terribly behind on a crucial part of my research. Is there any way...?” Dean gestured with his hand.

  The old woman looked him over. Dean beamed at her, turning up the charm another notch and keeping his foot in place against the door.

  It must have worked as she smiled brightly back at him, nodded, opened the door and ushered Dean into a wood-paneled room.

  “Now what family are you looking for, Doctor Jones?” she asked Dean, moving behind the counter.

  “I’m actually looking for information on the Hennricks,” Dean said.

  “Humm, I’m not sure if we have much on that family. Let me see,” she said, taking a list from a draw in the table.

  Dean peered at it from upside down, it seemed to be a list of families starting from when Salem was first settled in 1628.

  “Hmm. Abbey, Adams, Allen, Baily, Bayley, Bibber, Churchill, Campbell, Cory—”

  “Wait,” Dean said, taking the paper and flipping it so he could read it the right way round. “Campbell?”

  “Yes, right here.” She jabbed the paper. “Not much there though, if I remember correctly. I can get the box for you, if you want.”

  “Yes please,” Dean said.

  The old woman disappeared for a few minutes and then shuffled back holding a dusty box.

  “This is all we have on the Campbells. Let me know if you need anything else,” she said. “I have a few things to finish up so I can g
ive you about half an hour.”

  Dean nodded and thanked her. She left him to it and he sat down at one of the dark-wood tables near by and opened up the box.

  Inside was an old leather journal, imprinted in faded gold script “Nathaniel Campbell.” Dean carefully opened the cottony, yellowed pages.

  He had never heard of any Campbell relatives in Salem, Massachusetts. Though he didn’t know about many relatives past his grandparents, Samuel and Deanna. But whoever this Nathaniel Campbell was, it seemed he was an avid journal writer.

  Dean peered at the first page, it was dated 1664. A flowing brown script spread across the page. He began to read:

  I signed the homestead papers today with the honorable Cotton Mather. The price is three English pounds each year hence. The property starts around twenty meters from the old oak tree at the corner of the road to Ipswich. It runs around 500 meters wide and some 2,000 meters deep. On the west side it is bordered by a small brook, and on the south by the river that runs to Ipswich.

  Dean stopped reading and flipped through a couple more pages. On a page dated “Feb. 1692” something caught his eye:

  A young girl’s body was found north of the village today. Abigail Faulkner age 14 was found in the snow with her throat cut. I asked the village doctor, William Grigg, if I could see the body to give the poor girl her Last Rites. I got there before Reverend Parris—otherwise he surely would have raised a big fuss and then I would not have been able to examine her. The Widow Faulkner did not want to delay one minute, lest her daughter not rise up to Heaven. She gave me permission to administer them. I insisted on having a moment or two alone with the body first in order to “make it right and proper” for the widow to see her daughter. In that short amount of time I came to a couple of clear conclusions that I am sure the good physician will not. Namely, the girl’s neck was broken, even though it was sliced, the neck bones were pulverized, as if by a regular wood-chopping axe. But there was no bruising in the back of her neck. I fear the force might have come from something otherworldly. I am quite sure I exterminated the witches some years back, but perhaps more have fallen under the dark spell of Satan. I can only hope not.

  But I fear that my sons may be correct: Witches are again in Salem.

  Dean sat back and stared at the page. Could this be the journal of his ancestor? Could Nathaniel Campbell be a great, great, great grandfather on his mother’s side? Dean shuddered. He had to read the rest of the journal.

  Rising from his seat he peered out into the dark corridor beyond the wood-paneled room. The click, click, click of the docent’s heels pierced the silence. Dean always carried his father’s journal in his jacket pocket. With Sam gone, Dean really had nothing else to connect him to his family. He removed the leather cover of Nathaniel’s journal with his pocket knife, then carefully wrapped it around John Winchester’s. They were of a similar weight and size and surely no one else would be coming to look at an old Campbell family journal. When Dean was finished he would return and switch them back.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?” the old woman asked as Dean passed her on his way out.

  “And more,” Dean said.

  Dean drove back to the bed and breakfast and was relieved to find Lisa and Ben watching TV and eating burgers they had ordered from the inn’s kitchen—one waited for him as well.

  Lisa said she was feeling better, but she still looked pale. She said she was going to rally in the morning so they could go see the clipper ships. Ben proceeded to speak in a pirate accent for the rest of the night.

  Dean munched his burger and then sat back on the other bed and took out the pages of Nathaniel Campbell’s journal.

  “What’s that?” Lisa asked.

  “Just something I picked up from the library,” Dean replied.

  He started to read about a family of hunters named Campbell.

  FOURTEEN

  Caleb Campbell and his older brother by three years, Thomas, were walking back from the village when they saw a man and his cart emerge from a little-used road that ran to the northwest. He was wild-eyed and perspiring as he approached the boys.

  “The Devil has been let out, boys. Get thee home and lock the door,” the man yelled.

  “Why sir?” Thomas asked.

  “’Tis the Devil himself killed a poor little thing. Too gruesome for children like you to see.”

  The man indicated a wrapped bundle in the back of his simple horse cart. Two snow-covered shoes peeped out from beneath the burlap covering. It was a dead body, and from the size of the feet, and style of shoe, it was that of a young girl.

  The man hastened his horses toward Salem Village.

  Thomas and Caleb looked at one another.

  “It’s about time,” Caleb said. “This village was putting me to sleep.”

  Even in the wintry light, Caleb’s sandy-blond hair shone like a summer sun. He had dark eyes and a wide-set mouth. Though he was the younger of the two Campbell brothers, he was by far the better student.

  Thomas was already acquiring his adolescent brawn. The breadth of his shoulders had outgrown his coat. His mother had tanned a couple of hides from the previous winter’s hunt and sewn him a jacket. It was all deer hide, burnished to a walnut brown. She had pulled the collar up to cover most of Thomas’s neck and sewn two large pockets for his mittens, which he would surely lose several times that winter. Thomas’s coat didn’t look like any of the other boys’ clothes in town. But that was the way all the Campbells were—they didn’t quite fit in.

  The Campbell family had come from Europe with the wave of English-speaking settlers in the mid-1600s. No one knew exactly which country they had originated from. They traded a few of their crops in the village, but for the most part they kept to themselves. They did not attend church, which sparked the ire of many townspeople, in particular the new minister, Reverend Parris.

  Nathaniel Campbell wasn’t a religious man anyway, but he didn’t trust Reverend Parris. He told his children never to trust a man so desperate for adoration and attention. “A man such as that can be dangerous,” Nathaniel warned his family. It was for that reason Nathaniel told the clergyman that they would worship at home on Sundays and Thursdays, the days when people gathered in the tavern to talk about the Bible. Though in fact, rather than worshipping, Nathaniel made his three children study.

  The Campbell children weren’t learning the Bible—they already knew it back to front—instead they were studying Latin, herbs, and texts about monsters that their ancestors had written. The family business was hunting and it was very important to Nathaniel that his two sons and daughter continue the Campbell tradition.

  Thomas looked at his brother.

  “You go tell Father and I’ll follow that man to town,” he said.

  “Why do you get to follow him? I want to follow him,” Caleb objected.

  “Because I’m older, and if I’m caught I’m better spoken,” Thomas responded.

  Caleb shook his head but started toward the family farm anyway, while his brother ran after the man and his cart.

  Thomas was fast and caught up with the man’s tired mare before it had reached Salem. In the village the visitor stopped and asked a local resident where to find the nearest doctor. He was directed toward the east end of town, and Thomas followed cautiously from a distance.

  When they reached the doctor’s, he waited a short way down the street, crouched down next to another cart, while the man stepped inside.

  A couple of minutes later the portly physician emerged from the house and approached the cart. He scooped up the body of the young girl and hurried back inside.

  Thomas ran to the window of the doctor’s house and peered through the tiny glass pane. The men were laying the young girl’s body on a table.

  Thomas grew anxious. He knew that his father would want to find out what had killed the girl, and he could only do that by examining the body.

  The ways Nathaniel could gain access to the bodies were many, but nor
mally he would lie and dissemble. If they were in another town or county Nathaniel would dress up as a man of the church, or sometimes pose as a merchant or a judge. Nathaniel always kept a couple of changes of clothes in his sack for these exact occasions. He would insist that he needed to see the body before anyone else did. Once he had gained access, he was usually quick to identify the culprit.

  Thomas knew that his father was used to seeing strange animal bites or scratches. He knew what kind of mark a wendigo made—his Indian friends had helped him identify the first one he had ever come across. But such things would have induced panic in the common colonist. Even though the Bible played the primary cultural role in Puritan communities, Christianity couldn’t quash the inherent folk beliefs that people had brought over from Europe.

  Many of the colonists were superstitious: the English spoke of baby-stealing fairies, the French of loup-garou, and German merchants of Vampir. So Nathaniel often hid evidence of those creatures, for the safety of the colony. Sometimes he would patch the wounds up on the victim’s corpse before anyone else could see them—he carried a candle for just that purpose, to drip wax into the wounds to hide them.

  Before Thomas could come up with a plan to gain access alone, his father and Caleb arrived at the doctor’s in their rickety carriage. Thomas could make out the outline of the worn book of Latin spells inside his father’s coat. He always carried it with him just in case the victim was demonically possessed.

  Nathaniel jumped out of the carriage as Caleb tied the horse to a post. Nathaniel nodded to Thomas and entered the doctor’s house.

  Caleb left the horse and crossed the street toward his brother. The boys listened quietly at the window. They understood immediately that the men had identified the girl: Abigail Faulkner. She lived with her mother and two lame twin brothers just north of town on a small plot of land only big enough for a couple of pigs and a vegetable garden. Thomas and Caleb knew her only by sight.

  Inside the house, the men decided that they had to tell Abigail’s mother what had happened, and the doctor’s servant girl was sent to fetch Widow Faulkner.