Supernatural--Joyride

by John Passarella

  “Not at first,” he said. “She brushed against me. And I felt her. You gotta understand how weird this was—this thing.” He turned to Dean. “Well, you know. You saw one.”

  “Saw one,” Dean said. “But it didn’t touch me.”

  Dean had made a point of avoiding its touch. He’d seen how it oozed out of Jasper’s pores and Dean had no interest in becoming its rebound host. But it had touched the kid. Without possessing him. Was it trying to communicate? Or something else?

  “Well, trust me, it’s freaky,” Maurice said. “It’s this floating darkness. Shouldn’t be able to move through the air like that. And you shouldn’t be able to feel it. But I did. And I yanked my arm back.”

  “When did it cut you?” Sam asked again.

  “After I pulled away, she seemed… I don’t know, confused, at first. But then she… charged me, basically. Her hand pushed against my skin hard. Right away I felt it cutting through my flesh. I freaked out.”

  “I can imagine,” Sam said sympathetically.

  “Then what?” Dean said.

  “I was shouting,” Maurice said. “And my friends were yelling through my laptop. Woke my parents up. They came rushing in. I tried to explain—well, you know how that went—wanted to search my room for drugs. They convinced themselves I had a nightmare or was high. Along with my friends. Hallucinating. Refused to believe some… creature had invaded our home and attacked me.”

  “What about the shadow?” Dean asked.

  “Honestly, I don’t know,” Maurice said. “Between me freaking out and all the commotion, she disappeared. I mean, I never saw how she entered my room and I never saw how she left. For all I know, she’s still there, hiding somewhere in the shadows. What if—What if, you know, after my parents went back to sleep, she came out and—oh, crap…”

  “Maurice,” Sam said after a quick glance at Dean. “Maybe we can help with your… peace of mind.”

  “Mo,” Maurice said.

  “What?”

  “My friends call me Mo,” he said. “How can you help?”

  “We’d like to see where the attack happened,” Dean said. “And we have a device—something that will tell us if it—she—is still in your house.”

  “That’s great, man,” Maurice said, visibly relieved. “Let’s go!”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Before the Winchesters left the interview room to visit Maurice’s house, Gruber poked his head in and told them he needed to stay at the police station and would catch up with them later. Sam suggested he watch the surveillance footage again and look for any unusual movement in the shadows. Dean could understand why he simply didn’t tell Gruber to look for autonomous shadows gallivanting around town and invading homes. The cop would never take either of them seriously ever again. But if Gruber discovered for himself the many incidents of anomalous movement in the shadows, and the free-flowing darkness, he might start to accept that something unnatural was at work in his town.

  Sam left him with a final bit of advice, “Consider the possibility that your fellow police officer, Brady, may not have been in control of his actions when he tore up his neighbors’ lawns.”

  “Numerous eye witnesses put him in his car,” Gruber said. “It was Brady, all right.”

  “That seem like something he would do?” Dean asked.

  “No. But he did.”

  “Before tonight? Would you have imagined the possibility?” Sam asked.

  “Again, no.”

  “And these other people,” Sam added. “The ones you know.”

  “Before today—yesterday—no,” Gruber said. “What are you suggesting? Mind control?”

  “Just…” Sam said. “Be open to the possibility there’s another explanation. Look at that footage.”

  Gruber threw up his hands. “Okay. Sure. Why not?”

  Until they found hard evidence of supernatural possessions, something law enforcement could accept, advising Gruber to keep an open mind was the best they could do. But, deep down, Dean worried no amount of evidence would satisfy the police, the prosecutors or the courts. People would serve jail time for crimes they had no control over.

  * * *

  Sam had borrowed a first-aid kit and bandaged Maurice’s arm. Then Maurice drove home with Dean and Sam following in the Impala. By the time they turned down his suburban street, dawn arrived with a retreat of shadows. Curious, Dean scanned the area to locate any of the shadow creatures who might have left themselves exposed. Sam greeted the new day with a jaw-cracking yawn.

  “You okay?” Dean asked.

  “Haven’t slept.”

  Dean had grabbed a few hours before the EMF detector woke him from his shadow invasion dream. “Good thing I’m driving.”

  “Roles reversed,” Sam said, “would it make a difference?”

  “Not really.”

  Maurice’s beater bypassed the driveway to park in the street, so Dean pulled in behind him. As they climbed out of the car, Sam said, “Maybe he’ll come around.”

  “Gruber?” Dean said. “Unless something happens to him, not likely.”

  “It’s like that Arthur Conan Doyle quote,” Sam said. “‘Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.’”

  “Far as Gruber’s concerned,” Dean said, “anything but personal responsibility is impossible. Some law enforcement types only see black and white. No shades of gray.”

  Maurice led them into his house, taking care to close the front door quietly. His parents wouldn’t wake for another half-hour, he said, and they were already mad at him for interrupting their sleep with a crazy story. He had no desire to explain to them why he’d left home in the middle of the night or returned at dawn with two FBI agents.

  Waving the EMF detector before him, Sam said, “We need to sweep the whole house. Only way to be sure.”

  “Right, well, they’ll be awake soon enough.”

  The morning sunlight filtered through the first-floor windows. Dean caught himself checking shadows in corners, and behind doors and furniture for any signs of roaming darkness. Maurice turned left at the top of the stairs and led them to his room at the end of the hall. His closed door was painted black with a bumper sticker that advised visitors to “Rock On!”

  Inside, rock band posters were plastered across every square inch of all four walls and the ceiling. The two windows and the carpet offered the only visual relief from the promotional assault. When Maurice shut the door behind them—again with utmost care—the room produced a dizzying effect, as if they stood in a pocket dimension.

  Maurice led them to a half-concealed corner of the room.

  “This is my broadcast booth,” Maurice said, pausing to hastily shove a frog-on-a-lily-pad bong and some wrapping papers into a desk drawer. “Where I, um, where I live-stream my album reviews.” He flashed a crooked smile that seemed to suggest they should pretend the last few seconds hadn’t happened. “And… keep my various props.”

  “Props,” Sam repeated as he switched on the EMF detector and began a circuit of the room.

  “Yeah, you know, gotta look the part,” Maurice said. “Hard core and all that.”

  “Where were you when you saw the female shadow?” Dean asked.

  “At my desk,” Maurice said, happy to change the subject. “Sitting in my chair, facing the laptop screen. But only after Sally pointed it out.”

  Dean sat in the executive chair and looked across the room. Many of the posters had black as a dominant color. Others were variations of black-and-white or shades of gray. The whole room, at eye level, offered a lot of camouflage for a black creature to go unnoticed, especially if it remained still.

  “Everything’s the same?”

  “Basically,” Maurice said. “Except the laptop was on and my friends—fans—were on the screen.”

  As Sam continued to scan EMF readings, Dean said, “Recreate everything.”

  “You think it will come back?”

  “Worth a
try,” Dean said.

  “If it left,” Maurice said. “Not sure I want it to come back.”

  “Could come back when we’re not here.”

  “Fair enough,” Maurice said. “I was playing Skull Town.” He walked to his stereo, turned on the receiver and turntable and dropped the needle on the vinyl album. Immediately, he twisted the volume knob down so the music faded into the background. “We were talking, so I had it low. Otherwise, you know, I crank it up.”

  Maurice returned to his desk, spun the laptop around and loaded the video chat software. “Should I contact those guys? For real?”

  “Why not?” Dean said. “They were witnesses.”

  “Maybe they saw or heard something you missed,” Sam said, opening the closet door to scan inside. He paused, reached for a pull chain and yanked, bathing the closet in the light of a bare sixty-watt bulb. “She’s not in here.”

  Maurice stared at the laptop screen and shook his head. “Looks like only two are online… Reggie and Sally.” The laptop emitted some beeping and chime sounds.

  “Hey, Mo,” Reggie said. “What’s up?”

  “Maurice? Are you okay?” Sally asked.

  “Not bleeding anymore,” Maurice said, flashing his bandaged arm. “Went to the cops and came home with two FBI agents.”

  “What?”

  “FBI? Seriously?”

  Maurice lifted the laptop off the desk and turned it in a slow arc for the webcam to pick up Dean and then Sam, who stood across the room with the EMF meter in his hand. “Special Agents Tench and Blair,” he said.

  “So, the cops believed you?” Reggie marveled.

  “Cops thought I was high,” Maurice said. “But these FBI agents believe me. Agent Tench saw one of those shadow freaks before me!”

  “Cool,” Reggie said.

  “Well, not cool that it happened,” Sally said. “But—what now?”

  “We asked Maurice to recreate the circumstances before the shadow appeared,” Sam said as he approached the desk, satisfied they were alone in the room. “That’s why he contacted you.”

  “We were just talking,” Reggie said.

  “Maurice was in the chair.”

  Dean stood and indicated Maurice should take the chair.

  Maurice sat, looked from one Winchester to the other and shrugged his shoulders. “This is it. Nothing special.”

  “We’re missing the others,” Reggie said. “Gary, Stevie, Fig, Cory and Eddie.”

  “No answer,” Maurice said. “Everything else is the same. We were talking. And then Sally noticed the shadow coming near me before I did.”

  “What did you see, Sally?” Dean asked.

  “At first, I thought his webcam was glitching,” she said. “This black shape or streak or something at the edge of the frame. But then it started moving toward him. Kind of floating. Couldn’t see all of it. Maurice said it had the shape of a person, but I could only see the top half of it on the screen.”

  “Maurice said it changed,” Sam said. “From low to high definition.”

  “Yeah, that came later, after it cut off our view of Mo,” Reggie said.

  “He backed up,” Sally said, “and then it came across the screen, almost blotting out the rest of the room.”

  “I rolled back on the chair,” Maurice said. “Back into my broadcast booth. It had me cornered.”

  Dean looked around the room, from where Maurice sat, past the desk and across the room, taking in the field of posters across the walls and ceiling, confirming his first impression that the shadow creature had enough camouflage to stay hidden while motionless. They lacked much depth at all, so that when seen from the side, they almost disappeared. Maurice had been distracted, talking to friends. It would have seemed that it came out of nowhere, but it could have been in his room for minutes before revealing itself. Or it could have slipped through the keyhole or through a gap in the windowsill seconds before Sally spotted it. Dean looked at Sam and nodded toward the EMF detector. “Nothing?”

  Sam shook his head.

  “Everything else is the same?” he asked Maurice and his friends.

  “Yeah,” Maurice said.

  “Identical,” Reggie said.

  “No,” Sally said. “Something was different.”

  “What?”

  “The lighting.”

  “Yeah, it’s morning now,” Maurice said. “Hours ago, it was dark.”

  “No, not that,” Sally said. “Your broadcast booth lighting. Even though you stopped your review, you left the black lights on after.”

  “She’s right!” Maurice said. Around the entrance to the nook, he had several strips of black lights mounted to the wall. With all the visual chaos of the tiled rock posters, the strips disappeared into the background. “I use them to set the mood.”

  The power cords for each of the light strips came to a master power switch on the floor by his desk. Maurice tapped the orange rocker switch with the tip of his shoe and all the black lights flashed on at once. Bathed in black light, many of the posters took on new life and detail.

  “Cool, huh?” Maurice said.

  Dean nodded. If he stepped outside the nook, the lighting was normal. Back in, the black light shone on his arms and clothes. “Would you say the shadow switched to high-def when she came back here?”

  “Soon as she passed the laptop and my desk.”

  “When she was bathed in black light?”

  Maurice rolled his chair back and reached out his arm, nodding. “Definitely.”

  Sam joined them behind the desk, standing under the black lights. “At the police station, you said she seemed confused after she touched you the first time.”

  Maurice nodded again. “When she touched my arm, she seemed confused.”

  “Something surprised her,” Sam said. “Something unexpected happened. Or failed to happen.”

  “That’s when she became angry?” Dean asked. “She charged you?”

  “The second time, yes,” Maurice said. “Felt like I’d made her mad the first time. But I didn’t do anything. I was, like, in shock. Panicked.”

  “He did freak out,” Reggie said, chuckling.

  “Thanks, bro,” Maurice said.

  “Whatever she tried, didn’t work,” Sam said softly to Dean.

  “So, she tried to force it,” Dean replied.

  “Second time was when she sliced my arm open,” Maurice said. “That’s when I really freaked out.”

  “One guess what didn’t work,” Sam prompted.

  “Possession,” Dean said quietly, nodding.

  Maurice caught the end of their side conversation and his eyes opened wide. “What was that? What didn’t work?”

  “Nothing,” Sam said quickly. “We were discussing another case.”

  “The shadow at the club oozed out of that man’s pores,” Sam said to Dean. “With no physical trauma. This one tried to get in, but couldn’t. Did you notice any black light at the dance club?”

  “Maybe,” Dean said. “On the dancefloor. Hard to tell with all the moving spotlights and strobes flashing. And the possess—the bad guy never got that far. The shadow came out by the table.”

  Sam turned to Maurice. “Do you remember exactly how you reacted after it cut you?”

  “Like I told you,” Maurice said. “I freaked out.”

  “He screamed like a girl,” Reggie said, chuckling again.

  “Really, Reggie?” Sally said, rolling her eyes in exasperation. “Or did Cory join this chat?”

  “Oops! Sorry, Sally!” Reggie said quickly. “Removing foot from mouth.”

  “Okay, maybe I yelled,” Maurice said. “And I—I…” He raised his arms, palms out and froze. “I… shoved her away.”

  “You mean, you tried to shove her?”

  “No,” Maurice said. “I actually shoved her… She kind of sailed backward toward the middle of the room. And she became… fuzzier around the edges.”

  “No more high-def?” Dean asked.

  Maur
ice shook his head.

  “Once she was out of the black light area.”

  “And then she darted away, toward the door,” Maurice said. “Her… I don’t know, attitude, changed. Confused… or, maybe, surprised again.”

  “What if the black light not only makes their appearance more defined,” Sam said softly to Dean, “but gives them too much substance to take over a human host?”

  “Makes sense,” Dean said, voice low. “She came here thinking possession, but couldn’t complete the hijack, got mad and tried again.”

  “And when she realized Maurice could shove her away, she freaked out and fled.”

  A quick knock on Maurice’s bedroom door preceded the door opening far enough for his father to poke his head in. “Maurice, I thought I heard—voices,” he said, noticing Dean and Sam and trying to reevaluate the situation. He opened the door all the way and entered the room. “What’s going on here?”

  “They’re with the FBI,” Maurice said quickly.

  “FBI? Maurice, what have you done?”

  “Nothing!” Maurice said indignantly. “I was attacked and reported—!”

  “Special Agents Tench and Blair,” Dean interrupted, pulling out his fake ID since neither he nor Sam were dressed the part. “We were at the Moyer police station when Maurice reported the attack.”

  “There was no attack,” the elder Hogarth said. “He was alone. He had a nightmare. That’s all it was.”

  Maurice held up his bandaged arm. “Did a nightmare do this?”

  “You said you fell out of your chair at midnight,” Hogarth said. “You probably cut yourself and only noticed it later.”

  “Agent Tench and I are investigating the strange incidents happening in Moyer,” Sam said to try to extricate them from a family spat. “What your son witnessed is consistent with other reports around town.”

  “I don’t understand any of this.”

  Sam held up the EMF detector. “I’d like to check your house with this,” he said. “Elevated EMF readings are consistent with some of these… unusual events.”

  “Will that cause any damage to our home?”

  “The detector?” Sam said. “None at all.”

  “Do you need a warrant for that?”