Night Terror E-Book

John Passarella

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 426

Beschreibung

Twenty-three years ago, Sam and Dean Winchester lost their mother to a mysterious demonic supernatural force. In the years after, their father then taught them about the paranormal evil that lives in the dark corners and on the back roads of America... and he taught them how to kill it. Alerted to strange happenings in Clayton Falls, Colorado, Bobby sends the boys to check it out. A speeding car with no driver, a homeless man pursued by a massive Gila monster, a little boy attacked by uprooted trees—it all sounds like the stuff of nightmares. The brothers fight to survive a series of terrifying nighttimes, realizing that sometimes the nightmares don't go away—even when you're awake... A brand-new Supernatural novel set amidst the turmoil of season 6, that reveals a previously unseen adventure for the Winchester brothers, from the hit CW series!

Leseprobe

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SUPERNATURAL

NIGHT TERROR

JOHN PASSARELLA

SUPERNATURAL created by Eric Kripke

Titan Books

Supernatural: Night Terror

Print edition ISBN: 9780857681010

E-book edition ISBN: 9780857685445

Published by

Titan Books

A division of

Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark St

London

SE1 0UP

First edition September 2011

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

SUPERNATURAL ™ & © 2011 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

Cover imagery: Front cover image courtesy of Warner Bros.

Visit our website: www.titanbooks.com

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the United States.

For Andrea, who kept our family on course while my writing routine drifted into the nightmare hours.

And in loving memory of my father, William Passarella whose absence/presence affects me every day.

HISTORIAN’S NOTE

This novel takes place during season six, between “Frontierland” and “Mommy Dearest.”

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Acknowledgments

About The Author

PROLOGUE

Gavin “Shelly” Shelburn ambled along the tree-lined streets of downtown Clayton Falls, Colorado with enough conviction to avoid any charges of loitering. Occasionally, he sat on one of the secured wrought-iron benches to rest his perpetually sore feet, which had worn down the soles of his scuffed boots to the intimation of rice paper. Mostly, he spent the evening hours circling the restaurant district, eight square blocks encompassing the most popular sit-down restaurants, asking for handouts.

Whether people were about to sit down to a good meal, or returning to their cars after enjoying a fine repast, his strategy was to impart a touch of guilt on these more fortunate citizens. With a notoriously bad economy struggling to right itself, Shelburn remained on the bottom looking up. Not that it was much consolation to a man who had lost his wife to a lengthy illness, his job to subsequent neglect in unforgiving times, and his house to dispassionate bankers, but his current disenfranchised condition lacked the stigma of years past. With record unemployment and housing foreclosures “There but for the grace of God, go I” had become a familiar refrain.

The decline and fall of Gavin Shelburn had begun in advance of the so-called Great Recession, but he wasn’t above accepting the sympathy of those still gainfully employed to keep his stomach, if not full, then at least occasionally mindful of its gastric function. To that end, he made his nightly rounds wearing a battered fedora—which he unfailingly tipped to the ladies and regularly flipped over to accommodate folded donations—along with a rumpled overcoat that also served as his blanket and fell to the top of his second-hand combat boots. His gaunt torso gained some bulk from the two button-down shirts he wore, one over the other, though he switched the layers each day in lieu of regular laundering. Combined, the two shirts had a complement of buttons sufficient for one. His threadbare jeans retained a hint of their original black color.

On most nights, the reliable combination of sympathy, guilt and polite panhandling kept Shelly’s stomach fed and, yes, his spirits warm, while steering clear of Chief Quinn’s holding cell. But the lingering effects of a poor economy led to slow evenings in the restaurant district, especially on weeknights. He’d reached the outskirts of his bread-andbutter zone, near the smaller pizza joints which offered slim pickings at the best of times, and was about to head back, when a middle-aged woman rushed out of Joe’s Pizza Shack with a large pizza box and a two liter bottle of Coke.

“Good evening, Madam,” he said, tipping his multipurpose fedora.

“Oh,” she said, startled, pausing in her dash to her car, a white Nissan idling at an unfed parking meter. “All right.” She set the pizza box on the hood of the car, fished a crumpled dollar bill out of her purse and dropped it in his hat. “Here ya go.”

“Thank you, Madam,” he said, graciously accepting the dollar, which he stuffed into his left pocket since the right had a hole that had traveled the entire length of the seam.

With a careless wave she gathered up her pizza box, jumped in the car, and sped off.

A fine white mist roiled in her wake, seeming to seep in from the side streets and roll past him, lending an unearthly quality to the gritty areas that lay beyond the reach of the urban gentrification of the downtown district. More than isolated, he felt... abandoned, as if reality, along with the suburban woman, had decided to move on without him.

He stood for a moment, staring after her car, before pushing the fedora back down over his thinning, prematurely gray hair, and turned back the way he had come. Despite momentary delusions to the contrary, his reality had not changed. Though it had become routine, his life remained unpleasant, with no guarantees. But these days, he thought, nobody has any guarantees.

Over the course of the slow evening, he’d collected enough to pay for a few slices of pizza and a beverage to call his own, but it was too soon to reward himself with a meal or a drink—alcoholic or otherwise. Within the next hour, the last wave of sated diners would be heading home to park themselves in front of their high-definition plasma screens. Surely a few would spare a buck or two for a neighbor who had fallen on hard times?

Ignoring a protracted grumble of protest from his stomach, he continued his trek back toward the heart of the restaurant district. He hadn’t gotten far, when he heard another sound behind him, a scrape like steel on concrete followed by a sudden, slurping hiss.

Startled, he whirled around. And staggered backward in disbelief.

“What the hell?” he whispered.

It wasn’t possible.

His right hand patted the flask tucked into his overcoat pocket. Almost full. He hadn’t touched the stuff. Was saving it for later, when he would hunker down for another fitful night’s sleep. But even if he had drained every drop, it couldn’t explain what he saw.

It was easily as long as two Nissans. A giant lizard, with a black pebbled face, its long powerful body and massive tail banded with bright orange. A name bubbled up from his subconscious, planted there in his grade school years and not quite forgotten.

Gila monster.

Its forked tongue, long as a pink yardstick, flickered out toward him, tasting the air. Then its jaws spread open, revealing a row of sharp teeth lining a mouth that could accommodate his head and entire torso in a single bite.

He remembered something else about Gila monsters. They released venom in their saliva, a nasty neurotoxin that would paralyze their prey.

“Sweet Jesus...”

Unable to tear his gaze away from the monstrous lizard, Shelly stumbled back several paces. These creatures were supposed to be slow—but they were also supposed to be less than two feet long. This one was twenty times that size.

It took a step toward him, one set of sharp claws scraping the pavement beneath it. The tongue flicked out again. Then all four legs began to churn forward in an alternating stride that covered ground much too quickly for Shelly’s liking.

Turning his back on the enormous creature, he ran almost doubled over, out of control. Behind him, the raking claws stuck the concrete in a frightening, metronomic rhythm that gained in volume as the distance between him and the creature withered away.

“Help! Somebody, help me!” he screamed breathlessly.

His voice seemed lost in the night, silenced by the blanket of mist and his total isolation. Never had he felt more alone on the streets of Clayton Falls than at that moment. Gasping in a breath to scream again, he felt the monster’s long, forked tongue, sticky with what he imagined a lethal dose of venom, strafe his stubble-covered cheek.

He squealed in uncontrolled fright, his heart pounding so hard he thought it would burst in his chest like a blood-filled grenade. Claws slapped down on his right heel and the combat boot was wrenched off his foot, twisting his ankle painfully to the side. Staggering, he barely managed to maintain his balance, but knew his time had run out, so he veered left, into an alley behind a Chinese restaurant.

The hot breath of the giant Gila monster washed over the back of his neck.

Shelly heard a loud thump as the creature’s enormous tail stuck a parking meter.

The alley ran all the way through to Bell Street, but he couldn’t outrun the creature here, either. In seconds he would be devoured close to where he often scavenged for discarded food himself, right out of the—

He veered to the left, raised his left arm up to the edge of the shadowy bulk of the restaurant’s Dumpster and heaved himself over the lip and down into the damp and malodorous refuse.

No sooner had he landed in the cushion of garbage than something, probably the Gila monster’s head, stuck the side of the Dumpster and propelled it down the alley. Metal shrieked against the brick wall opposite the rear of the Chinese restaurant. The Dumpster trundled spastically as its undersized wheels squealed in protest.

Abruptly, the jittery motion stopped.

Shelly held his breath. All he heard was the thunderous beating of his overtaxed heart. As he pushed himself up to a sitting position, something powerful struck the side of the Dumpster, dimpling the steel right between his feet, and rocking the container back into the brick wall. Another protracted screech as the creature’s claws raked the exterior.

Shelly remembered another unfortunate fact about Gila monsters.

They could climb.

And this one was large enough to raise itself over the edge of the Dumpster.

He was cornered.

Frantically, he swept his hands through the slimy and sticky refuse, searching for something sharp or hard, anything that could serve as a weapon. His search became more desperate when he saw the creature’s claws wrap around the rim of the Dumpster like a matching set of butcher knives. The trash bin began to tilt forward as the creature’s weight pressed down on it. Shelly heard an explosive pop as of one of the wheels sheared off the base. It was only a matter of seconds before the pebbled head, beady black eyes, and grotesquely long, forked tongue would rise over him and block out the sky.

Shelly’s foraging hand slammed into a wooden slat. He blindly traced its dimensions because he refused to look away from the Dumpster’s opening. A produce crate! he realized. Flimsy, but if he broke it apart he could use one of the slats as a makeshift dagger. Poke its eye out and maybe it would go elsewhere for its next meal.

Abruptly the Dumpster eased back and bumped into the brick wall.

Long seconds passed before Shelly realized the claws were gone. One moment they’d been pressed against the steel, the next they were absent. He waited a minute, motionless, listening intently for any sound. Gradually, he became aware of the ambient noise of the night. The rumble of passing trucks, the hiss of tires on asphalt, the toot of distant horns... his own ragged breathing.

He rolled onto his hands and knees and reached for the edge of the Dumpster, slowing pulling himself up out of the garbage, his head rising above the surface like a periscope in enemy waters. He peered along the length of the alley, left and right.

Nothing. As if the lizard had dropped off the face of the earth.

“I’ll be damned.”

“This town is so lame.”

Eighteen-year-old Steven Bullinger drained his second can of beer, crumpled the empty aluminum can and tossed it into one of the decorative bushes that ringed the tarnished bronze statues of Charles Clayton and Jeremiah Falls at the center of Founders Park.

Tony Lacosta shook his head. “You say that every night.”

“Yeah, Bullinger,” Lucy Quinn said. “You need new material.” She stood between them, facing the opposite direction, hands stuffed into the pockets of her hoodie, which was hot pink and densely patterned with tiny black skulls. She was the lookout.

The bronze nineteenth-century pioneers were depicted astride their horses, angled away from each other in a V-shape, illuminated by recessed floodlights. Clayton pointed into the distance, possibly indicating the site of the present municipal building, while Falls pulled up on his horse’s reins. But the three teens did not choose their loitering spot out of any sense of civic pride. The benches directly behind the bronze horses were obstructed from view and cloaked in shadow at night, beyond the harsh glare of the monument’s floodlights.

Steven grumbled, “Making sure you were paying attention.”

“You could leave.”

“Thinking about it,” Steven said sullenly. “Weighing my options.”

“Right,” Tony said. “Toss me a beer before you drink them all.”

Steven slipped his hand into the open backpack he’d set on the park bench next to him and tossed a can to Tony. He looked at Lucy. “You want one?”

She shook her head. “I’m good.” Drinking was the furthest thing from her mind.

“You don’t drink no more, is that it?”

“No,” she said defensively. “It’s not that.”

“Worried your dad will catch you?” Steven persisted.

“No,” she said, then sighed. “Maybe. He is the chief of police.”

“And you have him wrapped around your finger.”

She scoffed. “I wish.”

“What’s the real reason?” Tony asked, index finger poised over the tab, waiting to open the can.

“I don’t know,” she said and shrugged. “The timing.”

“What? Not late enough for you?” Steven asked.

Tony heaved an exasperated sigh. “She’s talking about Teddy, you dumbass.”

“Yesterday was the one-year anniversary,” Lucy said. “You guys don’t think about the accident?”

“Sure I do,” Steven said defensively. “Don’t see me driving, do you?”

“Jackass!” Lucy said, kicking him in the shin.

“What the hell?” Steven seemed more upset about dropping his third can of beer than about the kick. He scooped it off the ground before much had spilled. A thin white mist had rolled across the park grounds, progressing in eddies and swirls. Steven only gave it a moment’s notice. “I didn’t mean anything by it!”

“So being a jerk comes naturally?”

“More like constant practice,” Tony said, smirking.

“Shut up,” Steven said to him. Then he turned to Lucy. “Look, a year ago that’s all people talked about. Every time they saw me. Any of us walk into a room or if they passed us on the street. Can’t say I miss that. Ever since the factory fire... All I’m saying is, I get to deal with it on my own terms now. Without people shoving it in my face all the time.”

Lucy crossed her arms and glared at him. “Excuse me if I don’t want to forget about Teddy.”

“I don’t—I didn’t say—Tony, talk to her.”

“None of us want to forget Teddy,” Tony said. “He was your boyfriend, but we knew him since grade school. And we were all... stupid that night. But dwelling on it? I don’t think that’s.... What’s wrong? Cops?”

Lucy was staring at the statues. Her eyes were wide, her green irises ringed with white. She pointed. “Three—three horses.”

Tony followed her gaze. Steven twisted around on the bench, looking over his shoulder. Moving within the V created by the horses of Clayton and Falls was another horse, a black stallion. Its hooves clopped on the marble base of the life-sized monument and it snorted as its rider steered it away from the bronze tableau, between two benches and through a gap in the decorative bushes.

“It’s coming for us,” Lucy said.

“What?” Steven looked from her to Tony.

Tony dropped his beer can. “What the hell?”

The rider was clad in black, a riding cloak, shirt, trousers and boots. But the first thing Lucy noticed was his head. Rather, his lack of a head. The cloak was tied around the trunk of his neck, but the neck ended in a ragged, bloody stump. No head... and yet she had the feeling he could see everything. He seemed to be staring right at her through invisible eyes.

The rider held the horse’s reins bunched in his left hand because his right hand held a gleaming sword.

“Run!” Tony yelled.

Lucy was paralyzed. In that moment, she was sure she would have stood still as the headless horseman shoved the sword straight through her heart. But Tony grabbed one of her suddenly clammy hands and tugged her sideways. She stumbled after him, looking back, unable to take her eyes off the nightmarish apparition that had materialized out of thin air.

Steven trailed behind them, mainly because he had paused to grab his beer-filled backpack.

The horse whinnied and reared up on its hind legs. The rider kicked spurs into the horse’s flanks and it dropped down to all fours and galloped after them, its hooves pounding the earth with deadly determination. Lucy could feel the vibration in her shins and thought she would throw up any second. She realized she was sobbing.

Steven hadn’t paused to zip up his backpack. Every few strides a beer can slipped free and tumbled to the ground, letting out a protesting hiss of pressurized foam. Finally, he cursed and tossed the backpack aside.

Lucy couldn’t help glancing back every other step. She stumbled again and again, but Tony’s momentum kept her upright. She saw the horseman bear down on Steven and swing his sword in a whistling arc, determined to reduce the young man to his own headless condition or perhaps remedy his cranial loss by random substitution. Lucy gave an involuntary shriek.

The gleaming blade missed Steven’s neck by a whisker.

Steven must have felt its swift passage. He clapped a hand to the nape of his neck, as if checking for blood.

They were near the edge of the park, within sight of the municipal building, when Lucy was jerked to the side. She stumbled and fell against Tony for a moment before he led her to the right.

“What—?” she began.

“We need to split up,” Tony said, his breathing ragged.

“Can’t chase all of us.”

“But Steve...”

The vibration in her legs was gone. She glanced back but could no longer see the headless horseman. In his gray sweatshirt and faded jeans, Steven was a blur of motion running and stumbling toward Park Lane.

“C’mon,” Tony said, pulling her attention back. “Think we lost him.”

“What was that?”

“Sure as hell wasn’t the neighborhood watch.”

Steven had never run so fast in his life. At some point, between tossing aside the backpack he’d used to smuggle beer out of the house and feeling the horseman’s sword whistle past his neck, he forgot about everything that had led up to the nightmarish chase. He stopped questioning the impossibility of a man without a head riding a horse that had appeared out of nowhere. Every iota of his concentration focused on racing from his imminent death, while suppressing the powerful urge to vomit up every last ounce of beer he had imbibed. A single hesitation, for whatever reason, would mean the difference between life and death. Even so, a man, even a sober man, couldn’t outrun a horse for long. Steven veered close to tree trunks, favoring those with low hanging limbs. Unseat the horseman and the chase turned in his favor. But it seemed he couldn’t shake the headless rider, only postpone the inevitable. The thunderous rumble of hooves was never more than one false step away.

Face contorted in a rictus of pain, he burst from the edge of the park, bounded across the wide sidewalk and sprinted onto Park Lane. Several steps into his panicked flight across the blacktop, he stumbled and almost fell to his knees. Doubled over, he cringed, waiting for the hard steel to bite into his flesh. Then it occurred to him that the thundering noise of hooves had stopped. He looked back and saw that the headless horseman had vanished. He had never followed Steven out of the park.

Steven straightened and peered behind him. Nothing moving between the trees. No horse. No headless rider. Looking left and right, he couldn’t see Tony or Lucy. Vaguely he recalled them veering to the side, away from his mindless, straight-line flight. Sensible strategy, but he would have had their back.

Or would he?

Staring back at the park, he wondered if the horseman was confined within its boundaries. If his friends remained in the park now, were they in danger? Would the rider seek them out after his solo target had escaped? Steven could go back and warn them... but he had no idea where they had gone. Was the horseman even real? Could they have imagined the whole thing? When you really thought about it, it made no sense. How could it? Unless...something in the beer? Product tampering? LSD in the cans? No, because Lucy had seen it first and she hadn’t had any beer. Then how—?

BEEP!

A battered Ford pickup truck swerved around him, the driver leaving behind a string of curses with the truck’s pungent white exhaust.

Steven looked down at the painted line and realized that he’d pulled up in the middle of Park Lane. Fortunately for him, traffic was light in the evening. And the white exhaust was really spreading...

Not exhaust. The white, cottony mist he’d barely acknowledged in the park had spread out across the road, swirling around his ankles.

An accelerating motor—a deep-throated roar—drew his attention up again but this vehicle didn’t swerve.

He had a moment to register the color red, with a white stripe across the hood leading his eye to the driver, but—

Air exploded out of his lungs as his legs shattered and his body flipped through the air, bounding across the hood of the car, skipping past the windshield and tumbling up and away from the roof as if gravity had suddenly released any claim to his mass. But just as suddenly, it reclaimed him with punishing force, slamming him down onto the blacktop as if swatted from above by a giant hand. His head struck and his skull seemed to lose its rigidity, his vision splitting into two separate views a split second before one side went completely dark and the other began to fade.

Somewhere he heard a woman scream.

A man looked down at him, shock on his face.

“Oh, God,” Steven heard him say.

Steven wanted to tell the man not to worry, but the words came out jumbled and seemed to originate far away. Didn’t help that he was shivering as he spoke.

“I can’t believe—that guy—he hit you on purpose!” the man declared.

Steven tried to shake his head. Big mistake. Pain knifed through him so fiercely he blacked out for a second. Maybe longer. When the man’s pale face returned, this time with a cell phone pressed to his ear, Steven tried to explain what he saw before the moment of impact but only the last two words made it past his numb lips.

“...nobody driving.”

“What—?”

A young woman stepped into Steven’s diminishing field of vision. She grabbed the man’s arm.

“I—I can’t believe it!” she said. Her voice sounded distant and hollow.

“I called an ambulance,” the man told her.

“—tried to get the license plate,” she said, glancing briefly at Steven, long enough for him to see the horror and disbelief on her face before she looked away. “Blake, I—I couldn’t.”

“That’s okay,” he said. “It happened so fast.”

“That’s not what I mean,” she said. Her words were out of sync with her lips, as if she were an actress in a poorly dubbed foreign film. Movement began to leave smears of color across Steven’s vision. “I was looking right at the car and it... vanished.”

“Vanished how?”

Like the headless horseman? Steven wondered.

“I don’t know how,” she said. “One second it was there. And the next it was gone.”

Steven blinked, but when he opened his eyes there was only darkness. He thought they might still be talking above him but the only sound he heard was a soft, rhythmic thumping, fading and slowing and then nothing...

ONE

The beam of Dean Winchester’s flashlight played over the pair of stained manacles dangling from an eyebolt mounted in the back of a stall in Cletus Gillmer’s horse stable. He didn’t need a forensic kit to guess the nature of the stains.

“Sick bastard kept the victims chained back here,” he said.

Across the aisle, his brother Sam examined the tack room, dominated by a sturdy wooden work table with eyebolts screwed into the surface at each corner.

“And chopped them up over here,” Sam responded.

“Not what old man Gillmer had in mind when he asked junior to take over the family farm.”

They’d found Cletus Gillmer in the farmhouse, sprawled on an old recliner patched with duct tape, his eyes bulging and bloodshot, his tongue protruding and his throat savagely crushed. On the round table beside him, he’d left behind an old, loaded revolver and a curious, apparently interrupted, to-do list. After “siphon gasoline from generator,” “bury body,” and “burn stable,” he’d written “burn” a second time before dropping the pen on the floor. Dean guessed that “burn farmhouse” would have been next, followed by “insert revolver in mouth” and “pull trigger.” Apparently old man Gillmer had grown weary of chasing thrill-seeking teens off his property, but not before somebody else decided to punch his ticket.

A local newspaper’s piece on the five-year anniversary of the machete killings and the sudden, mysterious disappearance of Cletus’ murderous son, Clive Gillmer, had created an urban legend to test the mettle of a new crop of teenagers. From deranged serial killer to phantom bogeyman in five years. The old man tried to scare the kids away, garnering “crazy old coot” status, but some had gone missing nonetheless. Dean suspected the old man knew what the Winchesters did: bogeymen have teeth.

On their way out of the farmhouse, Sam spotted the pink sneaker in the high grass beside the front porch steps, bathed in moonlight. Their flashlights had revealed the young woman with a broken neck stuffed under the crawlspace. And so the to-do list had led them to the horse stable...

As Dean walked toward the second stall—duffel bag hanging from his left shoulder, shotgun loaded with rock salt cradled under his right arm—he heard Sam open and search one of the tack trunks under the table.

“Dean!” he called. “Found a machete.”

“Keep looking,” Dean said absently. “Junior’s body’s gotta be here.”

He opened the next stall door with the tip of his shotgun. The eyebolt in this one was angled down. Dean grabbed it, wiggled it back and forth, felt the wood planking give, bits of rotted wood falling away like damp mulch. His flashlight flickered—

A loud crash broke the eerie silence of the stable.

Dean whirled. “Sam!”

Looming over him was the six-foot-seven, three-hundredpound vengeful spirit of Clive Gillmer, in mottled whiteface, wearing the traditional black-and-white striped shirt under blood-stained bib overalls. “The Machete Mime,” as the press had dubbed him.

Dean swung the shotgun up, but the Mime clubbed his arm away and rammed him against the back wall with enough force to split the weakened boards. The shotgun fell from his numb fingers along with the flashlight.

“Sam! Little help!”

Before Sam regained his soul, Dean was never sure when his brother would have his back. But that was before. Now...

The Mime picked Dean up and slammed him against the wall to the right and then to the left. Both were in better shape than the rear wall, if the sharp pain in his ribs was any judge.

“Marcel Machete here has anger management issues!” Dean yelled.

He dodged a fist which punched a hole in the wall next to his head, but caught a knee in the gut and dropped to the ground, stunned.

The crash he’d heard earlier, after Sam discovered the machete...

“Sammy!”

Face it. Sam’s out of commission.

Dean heard a clanking of chains, then felt cold steel encircle his neck, bite into his flesh and inexorably tighten.

He managed to slip his fingers under the chain and alleviate the pressure long enough to suck in some air and clear his vision. His other hand scrabbled across the matted straw of the dirt floor until his fingers closed around the barrel of his shotgun.

The Mime’s booted foot kicked Dean’s arm against the wall and once again the shotgun slipped from his grasp. Dean’s vision began to dim again, fading to black at the edges, when he heard a shotgun blast from above.

In an instant, the pressure of the chains around his neck was gone and he was stumbling forward onto hands and knees, coughing and gasping for air.

Sam stood in the aisle, shotgun braced in his hands. His jacket was torn at the shoulder seam and a line of blood trickled from his scalp.

“He surprised me,” he stated.

Dean nodded. “Makes two of us,” he rasped.

Dean grabbed his own shotgun and Sam helped him to his feet. Brushing straw off his clothes, Dean scanned the ground for his flashlight and found it near the back wall of the stall.

“Let’s find the body before Baby Huey comes back,” he said, scooping it up.

“Don’t think it’s here,” Sam said.

Dean didn’t respond.

“Dean?” Sam said.

Dean stared through the gap in the broken back wall. He kicked a split plank out of the way.

“Behind the farmhouse,” he said. “You see that?”

Sam looked past his shoulder. “Wooden shed.”

“We assumed the old man planned to burn the farmhouse after the stable.”

Sam nodded. “Clive knew his father’s real target.”

They slipped through the gap in the wall and raced along the corral fence, behind the farmhouse to the unprepossessing tool shed in back. Ten feet square, it was open in front, revealing three walls with hooks for various farm implements long ago removed. The floor was covered with mismatched scraps of outdoor carpeting littered with old leaves, yellowed sections of torn newsprint and snack food wrappers.

“Nothing,” Dean said flatly. “More nothing.”

Sam walked into the shed, probing the corners of the single room with his flashlight beam. Boards squeaked under his weight. He stopped, looked down, then back up at Dean.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?”

“Root cellar?”

Sam crouched, lifted a few uneven squares of carpet and tossed them aside, revealing twin wooden doors secured by an old padlock with an elongated shackle.

“Bolt cutters?”

“Try this,” Dean said, passing him a crowbar from his duffel.

Slipping the straight end under one of the door handles, Sam levered it up and out of the rotting wood until the screws popped out. He repeated the process on the other handle and wiggled the padlock free.

“Here goes.”

He wedged the crowbar under the edge of the right-hand door and raised it enough to slip his fingers under it. He flung it open to the squeal of protesting hinges.

“Whoa!”

The stench assailed them like a physical presence.

Left hand pressed against his nose, Sam leaned over and flipped open the other door. Dean’s flashlight beam speared the darkness at the bottom of the rickety staircase and revealed the hulking corpse in the remnants of a striped shirt and bib overalls, curled on its stomach, with a pitchfork buried in its back.

Deep enough to puncture lungs, Dean thought. Or skewer his heart.

“Old man put him down five years ago. Left him to rot,” he said.

“Let everyone assume he’d run off,” Sam said.

He reached down for his own duffel bag and so was caught by surprise.

Flickering into existence between them, the Mime’s spirit charged—

“Sam!”

—and shoved Sam down the stairs.

Both root-cellar doors slammed shut.

Junior spun around and rushed Dean, his marred white face stretched wide in a hideous grin that revealed years of dental neglect.

“I’ve seen your act, Tiny,” Dean said grimly, taking a step back to pump the shotgun’s action and level the barrel at the killer Mime. “It blows.”

He blasted a round of rock salt into the spirit’s torso.

The Mime vanished, buying them some more time.

Dean slammed the action bar down and back to chamber another round.

Then, rushing into the shed, he flipped the doors open and aimed his flashlight into the darkness.

“Sam! Sammy!” he called.

“Here, Dean,” came the reply. “I’m okay.”

Dean negotiated the rickety stairs, sweeping the underground room with his flashlight to reveal sagging multi-tiered wooden shelves lining the walls, filled with an assortment of mason jars and plastic containers, rotting vegetables and rancid salted meats long since abandoned. On the floor, sitting beside the decaying corpse, Sam massaged his neck with one hand while shielding his eyes from the light with the other.

“Let’s end this,” Dean said, tossing his brother a canister of sea salt. He rifled through his bag for the container of lighter fluid.

Sam climbed to his feet, pressed a hand to his lower back and winced. But he shook off the residual aches and pains of having rolled down the stairs and spread salt liberally over Clive’s remains.

“What is it with mimes anyway?” he wondered. “Clowns with a vow of silence?”

“This one forgot the rule about ‘no props,’” Dean replied.

Dean squeezed the aluminum container and flicked the stream of lighter fluid back and forth over the corpse, head to toe.

“Machete Mime.” Sam shook his head. “Light him up.”

Something took shape in the darkness.

Their flashlights dimmed.

“Dude, we’re not alone!”

Out of the shadows a beefy arm snaked around Sam’s throat and pulled him back into the darkness. They crashed into the shelving in the back of the root cellar, busting shelves and sending jars shattering against each other on the floor.

Blocking out the frantic sounds of Sam’s dire struggle, Dean fished his Zippo lighter out of his jacket pocket, flicked it to spark a flame, then tossed it on the Mime’s remains. As the fire caught hold, Dean heard Sam gasp and stumble forward across the shattered glass. The wooden handle of the pitchfork protruding from the Mime’s back caught fire and the racing flames quickly ignited the shelves to the right. In seconds, the fire swept along the back wall and then spread to the left. Dean realized that if it reached the stairs they’d find themselves trapped in their own private inferno.

“Sam!”

“Go!” Sam yelled, veering unsteadily around the burning corpse.

Dean caught Sam’s upper arm long enough to steady him, then shoved him toward the wooden staircase. Sam took the stairs two at a time. One of the boards cracked under his weight but Sam was up and out. The heat had become unbearable. Dean shielded his face with his arm, holding his breath and squinting through the roiling black smoke as he followed his brother. Flames scorched his heels as the hungry fire roared up out of the ground. He rolled clear of the shed, which was engulfed moments later, and gulped down huge mouthfuls of fresh Nebraska air.

Dean left the Impala parked at the curb and walked into a local tavern. With his ribs aching and his mouth tasting of bitter smoke, he wanted nothing more than a cold one or three to apply the layer of numbness he needed to sleep through the night.

It was a few hours before closing time, but the barroom was deserted. Tables, booths and stools were empty, the lone pool table unemployed, and the jukebox silent. A flat-screen TV angled over the bar displayed a soccer match in some other part of the world, the volume turned down to white noise hum. Other than Dean, the middle-aged bartender was the only person in the place.

Tapping the eraser end of a pencil against his teeth, the bartender was hunched over a pile of papers on the countertop with the concentration of someone working on his taxes. As Dean neared the bar, he saw the object of the man’s concentration was a horse racing form. The man looked up at his approach.

“Get you something?”

“Whatever you got on tap,” Dean said, sitting on the nearest stool. He rested his forearms on the padded edge of the counter and sighed. “Maybe a few peanuts.”

“Sure,” the bartender said, taking down a glass. “Quiet night, huh?”

“Didn’t start out that way.”

“Problems?”

“Same old same old.”

The bartender held the glass under the chrome faucet and pulled the brass lever. Amber liquid flowed into the glass, rising toward the brim. But at the halfway point, the beer level began to fall.

“That’s odd,” the bartender murmured.

“Hole in the glass?”

“No, no, the glass is fine.” Nonetheless, the bartender released the lever, set the glass aside and began to fill a replacement. Same result. As fast as the beer flowed into the glass, it seemed to... evaporate. “This makes no sense. Let me try another one.” He sidestepped to the next draft lever and repeated the process. Beer flowed into the glass and was as quickly gone. The bartender passed a hand over his close-cropped blond hair. “This has never happened before.”

“First time for everything, pal.”

“Maybe it’s the CO2 tank. How about a bottle?”

Dean nodded. Tapped the countertop in front of him.

“Domestic? Import? Microbrew?”

“Let’s start with domestic and go from there.”

The bartender grabbed a long-necked brown bottle from under the counter, popped off the cap, releasing thin streams of vapor, and slid it across to Dean with the glass from the tap.

Dean decided to skip the middleman and raised the tip of the cold bottle to his lips. He tilted the bottle back and... nothing came out.

“What the hell?” he declared.

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s empty.”

“That’s impossible.”

Dean upended the bottle over the glass. Not a drop fell out.

“Let me try that,” the bartender said, grabbing a fresh bottle. He eased it back and forth and liquid sloshed within the bottle. He then popped the cap and titled it over Dean’s glass. Wisps of vapor escaped the bottle and dissipated. A few drops of liquid struck the bottom of the glass and promptly evaporated. The bartender pushed the empty bottle aside and tried a third, and a fourth, different labels, all without success.

“Cans,” Dean said. “What about cans?”

The bartender opened a door behind the counter into a back room, and returned a moment later with a six-pack.

“These were delivered today,” he stated.

He pulled the tab off the first can and they heard a faint hiss as vapor spiraled out the opening. One can after another, the glass remained empty.

Dean shook his head. “This is not happening.”

“I’m sorry,” the bartender said. “What can I do?”

“Try something else,” Dean said. “Anything. Whiskey, rum, vodka. Peach schnapps!”

Nothing worked. The bartender tried Irish whiskey, Russian vodka, and Jamaican rum.

“I can’t explain this,” the bartender said, incredulous. “What does it mean?”

Dean noticed the audio hum emanating from the television set above the bar had changed. He glanced up and saw a news bulletin had replaced the soccer match. A telegenic news anchor in her late twenties spoke while a news crawl informed Dean one letter at a time that the world’s supply of alcoholic beverages had become unstable.

“The volume,” he said. “Turn it up!”

The bartender pointed a slim remote control at the set and raised the volume.

“...the scientific community remains baffled by the sudden and complete volatility of alcohol in any form.”

Dean stared aghast. “You gotta be kidding me!”

“This bar’s been in my family for sixty years,” the bartender said morosely. “And it’s all gone?”

The news anchor continued in an upbeat tone, “...face the new reality that we have become a nation, indeed an entire world, of teetotalers.”

“She’s smiling,” Dean said, pointing accusingly. “Why is she smiling? She can’t smile about this.”

“Oh, well,” the bartender said, now strangely at peace with the family-business-ending news. “How about something nonalcoholic?”

“No,” Dean said, backing away abruptly and knocking over his stool.

“Pop? Or milk?”

“No!”

“Juice box? Bottled water?”

“No!”

“Got it,” the bartender said, snapping his fingers. “A Shirley Temple. No alcohol in that!”

“Dude! Seriously?”

Dean backed up to the door, tugged on the handle but the door wouldn’t open. In frustration, he pounded his fists on the wood panels.

“An egg cream?”

“Noooo!”

Dean sat upright, heart racing. A fleeting sense of displacement faded and he remembered where he was. The nondescript motel they’d checked into in Lincoln, Nebraska. He sat in the dark and fought the ridiculous urge to turn on CNN to confirm the safety of the world’s alcoholic beverages.

Across the room, sprawled on his bed as if sleep had been an afterthought, Sam mumbled something about hunters.

Dean stacked pillows against his headboard and laid back gingerly, enduring sharp protests from his ribs with each awkward movement. Felt as if he’d been kicked repeatedly by a mule with a sour disposition. Bedside clock radio told him he’d been asleep less than an hour. He’d need at least a few more before they hit the road. Coffee would take care of the rest.

“But no more dreams.”

TWO

Sam Winchester stood in the root cellar again.

The underground storage room was empty. No shelves or mason jars or plastic containers. Even the Machete Mime’s corpse and the pitchfork that had killed him were gone. No evidence of the all-consuming fire.

He stood at the bottom of the wooden stairs, moonlight spilling across the floor on either side of him, but not reaching far enough to penetrate the darkness that shrouded the back of the room. And though the room seemed empty, Sam was not alone. A shape of equal height and mass stood within the shadows staring back at him.

“What do you want?” Sam asked.

“To replace you.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m better at it than you are.”

Sam wanted to step forward, to reach into the darkness, but he was paralyzed where he stood, as if balanced on a precipice. One false step and he could fall; maybe never stop falling. He was close to something dangerous here. Had to be careful. He’d lost his way before. How many times could he go astray before it became impossible to find his way back to... himself?

The other took a step forward, emerging from the shadows. Like looking in a mirror, Sam stared at another version of himself. Sam without a soul. And that Sam was smirking at him.

“Your soul is a burden. It makes you weak.”

“You were out of control. You tried to kill Bobby to save yourself.”

“Self-preservation is an admirable trait in a hunter.” Soulless Sam walked around him in a loose circle while Sam struggled to move his legs. He was pinned to the spot.

“You were no different from the monsters you hunted.”

“Keep telling yourself that, Sammy,” he said. “We both know I was the more effective hunter.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Sam said. “You’re done.”

“Am I?” Soulless Sam asked. “Or... could be that soul of yours is a poor fit these days. Damaged goods. Might not stick around for the long haul. One little push—” Soulless Sam poked him in the chest with a forefinger and Sam staggered back a step before regaining his balance—“and poof! I’m back in the driver’s seat.”

“No,” Sam said. “That’s not gonna happen.”

“You’d be surprised,” Soulless Sam said. “You’re not free of me. Never will be. I’m still in there, itching to get out.”

“No!”

Sam was frozen to the spot while Soulless Sam had complete freedom of movement. He walked behind Sam and paused at the staircase. Sam twisted his head around to keep Soulless Sam in view.

“Not as safe as you think you are.”

Soulless Sam climbed the creaking stairs. Before he disappeared into the night, he turned back and shook his head.

“Better watch your step, Sammy.”

With a sense of impending doom, Sam looked around the dark root cellar. Soulless Sam’s parting words had been a warning, no mistaking that but what—

Through the soles of his feet, he felt vibrations, as if the ground was pulsing. And with that chthonic disturbance, he regained control of his feet. But the moment he shifted his position, the cellar floor began to sink from the center outward, the concrete crumbling to the consistency of gravel—or sand. Even the walls began to slide down, funneling into the widening hole. Sam leapt toward the wooden staircase, falling forward to grab the bottom step with his hands. The ground fell away so quickly it offered him no support. He pulled himself up the stairs far enough to get his knees, and then his feet under him. But without the floor to brace the staircase, it was unable to support his full weight. The tread beneath his feet cracked down the middle, separating from the riser. As he jumped up to the next step, he heard a sharp crack and saw the top tread separating from the front wall. Sam lunged toward the exit—

—and struck an invisible barrier.

He pressed his hand against what appeared to be a glass barrier, several inches thick. After pounding his fists against the glass to no effect, he rammed his shoulder against it and almost fell off the teetering staircase. Catching his balance he pressed his back against the transparent barrier and tried to push it out of the way. His gaze dropped to the center of the root cellar where a whirlpool of sand sank into darkness.

Suddenly the staircase collapsed under him.

Falling, he flung out an arm and caught the shattered wooden framework, clinging to the wood as if it were a life preserver in the swirling ocean of sand. Soon he was caught in the current, cycling around and down, ever closer to the darkness that would consume him—

“Whoa!”

Sam sat up on the motel bed, heart racing as he tried to remember where he was. Middle of the night, but cold light cast from the motel parking lot sliced through a gap in the curtains and split the room in half. On the other side, he saw Dean propped up against his headboard. Too dark to tell if his brother was awake.

“Dean?”

“Yeah.”

“Ribs?”

“Waiting for the aspirin to kick in.”

“Right.”

“Bad dream?”

“That obvious?”

“Case of the three a.m. shakes,” Dean said. “Had a doozy myself. Terrifying.”

“Really?” Sam had the unsettling idea that Dean had witnessed Sam’s dream. Or had the same dream. They’d seen stranger things. “What about?”

Sam listened with a growing incredulity.

“...and to top it off,” Dean finished. “I was trapped there with that guy.”

“That was your terrifying nightmare?” Sam scoffed.

“All the beer, Sam. In the world. Gone!”

“Wow.”

“What? Tell me yours was worse?”

“No—I—no,” Sam said. Actually, he was relieved that Dean didn’t know what had plagued his subconscious. As it was, Dean thought his brother’s psyche was too fragile. No need to add fuel to that fire. “It was—was fine.”

Dean’s demeanor changed. He climbed off the bed with a soft grunt of pain, and walked toward Sam, the slice of light momentarily painting a swath of illumination across his concerned expression.

“Sam, if this is something serious, maybe I oughta know about it.”

“Look, Dean, I get it. You’re worried about me. But this is... nothing. Really. Nothing at all. Okay, man?”

“Then tell me.”

“It was the Mime, all right? I was back in Gillmer’s root cellar.” At least that part was true. “Too close to the clown thing.”

“Stealth clowns,” Dean said, nodding. “Right.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“No. I’m convinced. But that don’t mean we should forget you have a wall inside your head keeping a hell storm of memories bottled up.”

“Dude, do you seriously think I’d forget about the wall in my mind?”

“No. You’re right. Thing about a scab is, you pick at it.”

“I’m not picking at anything,” Sam said in exasperation.

“I was sleeping. Dreaming. That’s normal, right? Something I couldn’t do when my soul was MIA.” Sam took a deep breath. “It’s not like I can control my dreams.”

Dean thought about it for a moment and nodded. “But, you notice any cracks in the wall, you tell me. Right?”

“Sure, Dean.”

In the dim lighting, Sam couldn’t tell if his brother believed him.

A cell phone rang.

Dean grabbed his jacket, pulled out his mobile and glanced down at the display.

“Bobby,” he told Sam and answered the call.

THREE

“You boys up for a drive to Colorado?” Bobby Singer asked in Dean’s ear. Dean punched a button to put him on speaker.

“Machete Mime’s in our rearview. What’s in Colorado?” he asked.

“Clayton Falls,” Bobby said. “Giant lizards. Headless horseman. Hit-and-run car with no driver. Definite weirdmeter stuff.”

Sam got up from his bed to position himself closer to the mic.

“Mass hallucinations?” he said.

“Wasn’t no hallucination that run down a kid fresh outta high school,” Bobby responded.

Sam frowned.