Little Monsters in the Tide - 1
Dean wakes up without any memories of a nightmare but with absolute certainty that he just had one. He almost hits his head on the car’s roof when he bolts upright, with his heart going a thousand miles an hour. He presses two fingers to the side of his neck and feels the hammering of blood there.
The world outside is pitch-black, and there’s not a single streetlight or human habitat within miles to brighten the night. Dean can see the stars through the windshield, so huge up there, clustered in constellations that all basically look like dippers to him.
Dean rubs his palm over his face, trying and failing to shake off that vague feeling of dread always left behind by nightmares. He rummages in the pockets of the jacket that he was using as a cover, pushes aside the keys, the crumpled receipts from gas stations three states over and finally feels the cool metal of a lighter. Dean pulls it out and clicks it, illuminating the car’s interior. His own reflection in the window looks pale. He automatically ruffles his hair where it was standing up almost vertically on one side of his head.
He looks over to the backseat and meets Sam’s eyes.
Sam looks inexplicably comfortable, folded into the back with his legs up on the window and his head pillowed on his bent arm. He gives Dean a tiny happy smile and mouths, Go to sleep.
Not fully awake, Dean clicks the lighter shut and slides back down into the embrace of the upholstery warmed by his body. The nightmarish feeling is right there, waiting for him on the seat, no solid images but a sharp sense of terror. Dean breathes in and out, in and out, and watches the night sky through the windshield. Everything’s quiet, and in the quiet he can almost hear the sounds from the dream crossing over, superimposing on the real sounds and twisting them into whispers, all these whispers in an unfamiliar language too strange to be speech. In a minute, they’ll take over the world, and there will be no shutting them out. Listening to the ticking of his wristwatch, Dean thinks he can hear a clicking voice in it, some sort of a hellish Swahili. The rustling of wind in the trees, Sam’s quiet breathing - all become that strange incessant whispering.
A hand reaches over the back of his seat and hovers above Dean’s face, fingers spread. Dean blinks up at it. He lies quietly in the dark and stares up at the hand with its scarred palm and its crooked little finger. The hand opens and closes impatiently.
Aren’t you a little old for me to hold your hand after a nightmare? Dean thinks. What, is the Boogeyman under your seat again? The hand wiggles its fingers, and Dean sighs. The whispering has died down, scared away by Sam’s hand-octopus. Fuck off, Sam, I’m sleeping. Why do you, where, what do you-? There’s no one but coyotes and bobcats for miles around. Dean sighs again and touches two fingers to Sam’s palm, like a blessing. Sam’s hand closes around them, so warm and dry. It only lasts a moment, and then Dean pulls his hand back, and Sam’s disappears behind the seat.
The night is full of stars - swimming, swaying and slowly blurring - and stained with the afterimage of Sam’s smile that chases Dean into unconsciousness.
~~~~
Mindy sounded like an ex-cheerleader on the phone. Dean was picturing an apple-cheeked thirty-something year old with soft curves of a new mother but found her appearance to lean more towards an ex-Marine. It’s no wonder: anyone under retirement age building a house in the wilderness of the Olympic Peninsula has to be a survivalist.
“Josh is a geophysicist,” she explains as she leads Dean and Sam towards the house. “And I’m working on a Ph.D. in oceanography. We like to be close to nature.”
“Awesome!” Sam hasn’t had any coffee this morning and is fiercely faking signs of life. He’s overdoing his enthusiasm a little.
“Thank you.” Mindy flashes him a smile over her shoulder. “I know we’re in the middle of nowhere, and I appreciate you guys coming all the way out here.”
“We’re ‘middle of nowhere’ kind of guys,” Dean says.
From experience, Dean can say that haunted houses rarely look the part. There are hundreds of creepy, desolate places scattered throughout every state, standing dark and dead along the road like they’re just asking for an unquiet spirit of an axe murderer to move in and get cozy. But the truth is that bad economy in rural areas is far more commonplace than axe murderers. For every house that has an actual ghost there’s a dozen that only look like they might. No, hauntings are far more common in suburban cookie cutters. But one thing even rarer than haunted abandoned houses in the country are newly built ones. Dean can count on one hand the number of those he’s seen. He heard of one case where the ghost arrived with the lumber, but other than that, it’s always the land.
Mindy leads them into the house and heads straight for the kitchen - big, bright and almost sparking, with a few barely touched appliances sitting on the counters. She pulls a bag of coffee beans out of a cabinet, making Sam and Dean perk up immediately. “Coffee?”
“Yes.” They say it together, and Dean adds, “Coffee sounds fantastic.”
“Did you guys drive from Seattle? I heard on the radio there was an accident blocking off I-5 this morning. I hope you didn’t get stuck there.”
“No.” Sam has found a bar stool and is making himself comfortable, elbows on the bar behind him. He yawns hugely before continuing. “We took the ferry last night and slept in the car on the side of the road.”
“Why in the world?”
Dean shrugs. “It was nice.”
When the coffee is passed around and the caffeine has started to kick in, Dean pulls an EMF meter out of his bag and switches it on, just to test the waters. It whines briefly, blinks a couple of lights and shuts off again, picking up faint traces. Dean checks around the kitchen for ungrounded equipment but doesn’t see any. Something’s definitely been around.
Sam already swallowed most of his coffee and is quickly losing resemblance to a zombie. “So, Mindy,” he says. “When did you say you started to suspect that the house was haunted?”
“About a week after we moved in. Someone started knocking on the windows, a few times through the night. Josh went out, but didn’t find anybody.” Mindy hesitates for a moment, frowning, but shrugs and starts slicing bread for French toast. “It doesn’t happen every night, maybe once or twice a week, but when it does, lights flicker all over the house. I saw a shape in the woods once, and the construction crew complained that some guy was hanging around after dark.”
She follows Dean with her eyes as he walks around the kitchen with the EMF meter. The device blips a couple more times but mostly stays quiet.
“Could there be?” Sam says. “Some guy hanging around the house, I mean.”
“Where would he come from? Port Angeles is an hour away by car, and Seattle is all three with the ferry ride. What would a homeless man be doing here, in the middle of the woods?”
Dean hides the EMF meter and picks up his coffee again. “Why do you say ‘homeless’?”
“He smelled really bad.” Mindy shrugs, visibly uncomfortable, and starts flipping the bread over, though it could use another minute. “Like guys who live on the street, only much, much worse. Dead fish and feces and vomit… ugh. But I could smell him from the second floor window like he was standing next to me, so I figured, it couldn’t be natural.”
“How come you believe in ghosts?” Sam asks. “You’re a scientist.”
“Just because science hasn’t been able to explain something yet doesn’t make it less real.” She hands Sam the first plate. “Give us time. And anyway, Mom told me the story a million times, about how your dad got rid of the… presence in the house when I was little. I don’t remember your dad, but I remember pans flying all over the kitchen.”
Dean has some vague recollections of staying in western Washington for a while when Sammy was still a toddler. It was a long time ago, and there’s a plethora of towns, hunts and temporary houses to crowd that one memory. It was probably a singular experience for Mindy’s mother, the one she’ll be telling her grandkids and their kids about someday, if she lives that long. For them, it was another town. He faintly remembers Sammy’s plump little face all red from crying because Daddy had gone away for the day, and of plugging that mouth with a bottle of juice.
The mouth in question is currently getting stuffed full of toast. Dean smirks and takes a bite of his own breakfast. Sam, noticing, lifts an eyebrow but Dean shrugs it off. Mindy watches their exchange with some interest.
“Anyway,” Dean says. “When you and your husband bought this land, was there by chance an old house already standing here that got demolished?”
“Yes. Do you think-?”
“Almost for sure,” Sam says. “If the construction crew saw it before the place was finished, then it’s not the house’s contents, and it’s highly unlikely that the building materials are haunted.”
“Oh man.” Mindy slaps a hand over her mouth. “It was a solid concrete foundation, so there was no sense in setting in a new one. Shit, there’s a skeleton down there, isn’t there?”
Dean gives her a reassuring smile. She still eyes him with suspicion. “We’ll check. But since he’s outside all the time, it’s probably the house that draws him.”
“Yuck.”
“You know anything about the history of the house or the land?” Dean says.
“Practically nothing. The bank used to own it, and whose it was before I have no idea. Josh and I came out here once to look at the old place - it was just a ruin.”
“We’ll see what dirt we can dig up.”
“Yeah, well…” Mindy wraps her arms around herself. “This is giving me the creeps. And to think that this guy is probably buried somewhere on this land, if not under the foundation. Awful. Do you think two weeks should be enough? He doesn’t come often.”
“More than enough.” Sam has already pulled out his laptop and connected to the wireless network - no intention of starting the work yet, just setting things up. “We’ll call you if the house isn’t clean by then.”
Later, Dean walks her out to her car, getting the last instructions. “There’s plenty of food around - frozen meat and fish, too. The nearest store is in Forks if you ever need anything, but the kitchen is stocked for a month at least.” She is stalling, casting glances toward the house where Sam moves around from window to window, laying down salt lines. “Listen, will you guys be okay here?”
“It’s just a ghost, Mindy. We’ve hunted worse.”
“Do I even want to know?”
Dean smiles and closes the Jeep’s door after her when she climbs inside. “Probably not.”
After her car is out of the driveway, it takes a while for the sound of the engine to die down in the quiet of the empty land. Dean stands in front of the house waiting, for no reason. The wind picks up soon, bringing with it the briny, rotten-wood smell of ocean water.
~~~~
There are stairs leading down to a beach, though calling them stairs might be too much of a stretch. Dean eyes them from the top, tapping a flashlight against his thigh. The slope looks like goddamn seventy degrees, and the wooden bars set into its side are rotten to the core and visibly splintering in several places, swollen and slippery from all the rain. A couple of poles stick out at odd angles where the railing used to be. Not ten feet below, raspberry bushes have completely obstructed the way.
Dean puts “climbing gear” on his mental Shit We Need to Get list.
It rained for the most part of the previous day, and the backyard is full of mud. Dean found no footprints there other than his own - not under the windows, not at the edge of the woods and not by the back kitchen door where Mindy mentioned having heard the knocking. The EMF meter picked up traces of more or less recent ghost activity in all those places, though, the signal being the strongest by the ancient stairs. Whatever it is, it comes from the beach below.
From where he’s standing, Dean can see the surf breaking over rocks. The tide is high, and the water reaches almost to the base of the stairs. Waves roll over the beach and the sea retreats, suckling between stones, and then the cycle repeats. The motion is too uneven to be hypnotic but it calls to Dean, makes him want to go down there and stick his hands into the ocean.
One huge wave rises. Dean can see the swell before it reaches the shore, can see it grow and begin to break, and it sends a shiver of excitement running down his spine. Ninth wave, he thinks. It comes crashing onto the rocks with a distant thunder, reaches further than any before it, swallowing the bottom foot of the stairs for a moment. Dean feels like champagne bubbles are bursting in his veins. He marks that one as wave zero and counts nine from it and gets a weak little sucker instead of another monster. He smirks to himself. The game never works - it’s too hard to keep track of incoming waves among the confusion of return flow, in all that messy turbulent movement. The ninth wave in a series is supposed to be the largest, and Dean plays this game every time they make it to the coast, has been doing it since he heard about the phenomenon and doesn’t see a reason to quit. The count never works but it also never stops being amusing.
He wonders if the ghost comes riding on the ninth wave. It would be so appropriate. He gives the stairs another appraising look before heading back to the house.
He finds Sam’s laptop in the living room and Sam himself in the kitchen, working on their dinner. Through the open doorway, Dean sees him slice a small piece off a block of raw salmon and put it gingerly in his mouth. Dean stands there frozen, watches Sam’s jaw work on the soft morsel and wonders how he’s even related to this penguin.
“If you expect me to eat it, you better cook it first.”
Sam swallows and grins at him, unselfconscious. “It’s no different from sushi,” he explains. “I don’t know, man, California ruined me for life.”
The kitchen is ridiculously large, with a center island and too many counters and cupboards. It’s mostly empty, like the rest of the house. Dean sits on one of the counters out of Sam’s way, from where he can supervise the cooking process to make sure nothing weird finds its way into their dinner. Sam rummages through the spice cupboard for anything interesting, finds a salmon rub and squints at the label, reading the list of ingredients in tiny print. Dean doesn’t offer any comments. Sam unscrews the lid, sniffs the contents and with a shrug starts rubbing them on the fish.
“The ghost comes from the water,” Dean says. “I’m pretty sure. The EMF is the strongest by the stairs in the back, and those go down to the beach. Did you find out what it wants with the house?”
“There’s nothing remarkable about the history. Built in 1904, stayed in the same family, the last owner died in the eighties. It all looks clean but, you know, one family lived here for several generations. Could be something.”
“Yeah.” Dean sighs and looks around the sparkling new kitchen. Whatever clues might have been in the old house are long lost in the pile of demolition debris.
Sam continues. “The name - Bukowitz - is relatively common, but I checked the local news anyway. Nothing stood out. They lost one family member in each of the world wars, and a small girl went missing in the fifties, though she had Down’s syndrome and could’ve gotten lost in the woods.”
Dean nods. “Could be something, could be nothing.”
Once the salmon is in the oven, there’s nothing for Dean to supervise, so he climbs off the counter and goes to explore the living room. There’s barely any furniture around except for what that can fit in the back of a truck. “What about the basement?”
“Nothing’s there. I need to make another swipe with the EMF meter, but it’s all been cleaned out.”
Once the basement has been searched again - there was little EMF, like traces of haunting - they spread out sleeping bags on the living room floor. Dean feels warm and comfortable with the spicy salmon and rice in his stomach, his skin clean after a shower. His sleeping bag smells vaguely of dampness from being in the trunk for too long, but it should air out quickly. There’s a drunk, happy feeling in him and he can’t stop thinking about the salmon which was just spicy enough to burn in his mouth. It makes him want to do something nice for Sam for making the dinner. He can’t think of anything, though, so he sets the intention aside for the future.
Sam fidgets forever like he always does, finally settling on his stomach.
There’s a ghost around here somewhere. Dean’s thought train jumps from salmon to ocean and from there to human bones buried in the seabed, under the enormous pressure of tons and tons of frigid water. Who would like it - to be buried in the northern Pacific? If he and Sam drown one day, Dean thinks, let them drown around Charleston, so that they can watch from under the green waves southern girls splashing up above. Dean thinks of chocolate brown legs, and then he thinks of Cassie, and then he thinks again of the ghost in its underwater grave, rising up from the depth on the peak of the ninth wave.
~~~~
From somewhere in the house comes a soft sound that wakes Dean up. He opens his eyes and waits, but the sound is gone from his memory. But there was a sound, and it was close by. Dean looks over and sees that Sam is awake, too. They lie still, waiting. Dean is acutely aware of how large the living room is, how many dark corners it has, and of how his own position leaves his back unprotected and vulnerable.
Water splashes in the bathroom.
Dean rolls out of his sleeping bag, already reaching for his shotgun, and out of the corner of his eye sees Sam do the same. The air in the room feels notably colder than they left it, raising goosebumps on Dean’s arms. The thermostat on the wall registers fifty-five degrees. Dean notes all of this in a flash as he studies the room. Sam turns on the EMF meter, which gives a sharp whine.
“We must’ve disrupted the salt lines,” Sam whispers. It sounds too loud in the quiet house, and he frowns. “Maybe I missed a window.”
The damn house has too many windows, and it’s probably been too long since they hunted anything that could be stopped by salt lines. Dean makes a face at Sam and nods towards the back hallway where he thinks the sound came from. There’s a small bathroom there, and as they move towards it, the splashing sound comes again, like someone moving around in a filled bathtub. The hallway is dark and without windows, but after Dean’s eyes adjust, he sees a very faint bluish glow coming through the bathroom’s door at the far end. It’s the unnatural, unmistakable light of a ghost. Dean almost jumps back when he puts his bare foot down on the hallway’s floorboards and finds them icy.
Within two feet of the bathroom door, they suddenly step into a cloud of stench. It’s the familiar smell of decomposing flesh that makes Dean gag, and next to him Sam goes pale. There’s no getting used to this smell. Breathing through his mouth, Sam stands opposite the door with the shotgun trained on it. Something inside splashes again, several times, as if someone is playing with a rubber ducky in there. Dean stands to the side, out of Sam’s line of fire, and slowly pushes the door open.
In the dark bathroom, the ghost is its own source of light. The thing now sitting in a full bathtub was a male once, judging by the dripping beard in which pieces of seaweed and a couple of small crabs are caught. He’s wearing the waterproof yellow jacket and pants of a fisherman, but his body is so badly swollen that the clothes are no longer loose, pinching off flesh at the wrists. The ghost is missing his fingertips, as well as the tip of his nose and one eye, the empty eye socket stuffed with sand.
Shit, Dean thinks, it’s a drowned fisherman. Go find his bones.
As if he’s heard him thinking, the ghost looks up. He opens his mouth and moans, and more sand comes pouring out, along with a little transparent crab that catches hold of his beard. The ghost raises his arms out of the water, Dean hears behind him a shotgun pumping, and then the ghost flickers and disappears. The smell of decomposition is suddenly gone, too. The water in the bathtub is still, undisturbed.
“Sam,” Dean says. “Did you see the ghostly crabs?”
“Yeah. That was messed up.”
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