The Witch Is Dead: Part 1
You fit into me like a hook into an eye.
A fish hook. An open eye.
(Margaret Atwood)
1.
On the New Year’s Eve, in the last hours of 1988, Black Betty dreamed of boys. Her leg twitched within a cozy blanket cave, in a cabin deep in the Montana woods, but her spirit soared up high over melting fields of rye. Her spirit, shaped today like a dirty bird - which she hated but tolerated - circled above the road that cut through the fields with barely a twist in sight, and above the black car running along it, and above the two boys melting, sweating inside the car. Betty could see them simultaneously from above and from all sides, since this was her dream and she was free to have as many eyes here as she wished. And Betty wished for many eyes.
They were brothers: she could tell by the way they blended in with one another, as if there was something non-physical between their bodies that kept getting mixed up, some unseen continuity across the front seat of their mean car. The older one drove with one hand on the wheel, his elbow resting in the rolled-down window. Betty saw beads of sweat on his face and the back of his neck. It was hot wherever - whenever - they were, far and long from her cabin. The youngest boy was reading a book, and within her dream Black Betty knew that the book belonged to a library from another state, and that they stole it, and that the boy felt guilty about it, but there was something deeply and casually criminal about his entire life that made book theft ultimately acceptable. There was a gun stashed away under the seat next to his brother’s leg as further proof.
High as she was, Betty could hear nothing but the roaring of air currents under her wings, and there was nothing to hear in the car, as the boys weren’t talking, but she saw the older one wince and twist the dial of the radio. His lips moved. His brother glanced up for a moment and returned to his reading again with the faintest of smiles lurking in the corners of his mouth.
A wind rose and crumpled the rye fields on both sides of the road, fluffed the pages of the stolen book, threw a strand of hair into the younger boy’s eyes, cooled the sweat on the older one’s neck. The gust hit Betty’s soaring spirit under the wings and sent it tumbling through the air. She lost her feathers and watched them swirl up in a ragged vortex to the high afternoon sun. She fell backward and downward, and as she fell she became a mean skinny dog. She fell barking and growling back into her own sleeping body in Montana at the very tail end of 1988, and barking and growling she bolted up from under her mount of covers.
Betty sat in her dark bedroom, with her uncombed black hair hanging about her head like a curtain. Some amount of light crept through the open door from the kitchen at the other end of the hallway. Betty parted her hair and wiped the spit from her lips with the back of her hand. The clock in the corner read twenty past six in the evening, but this deep into the winter, the night had already fallen over the woods outside her window.
Betty’s days of empty dreams about boys were long in the past, and she wasn’t about to write this one off as some resurgence of teenage silliness. She was an old thing, a very old thing who didn’t get to be this old by ignoring her dreams. Her momma beat that lesson into her when Betty was still a pup. Wash your hands, bury your sweetest bones deepest, and never ignore your dreams.
Tossing the covers aside, Betty climbed out of bed and put a cardigan over her nightgown before heading out of the bedroom and into the kitchen, where she heard a knife knocking against a cutting board. Sarah was probably in the middle of cooking their holiday feast. Betty would talk to her about the boys while she worked. No, not boys; the men, the witch hunters. Now that the dream had settled in the back of her skull, Betty knew them for what they were, the same way she knew about the library book.
But it wasn’t Sarah in the kitchen. When Betty walked in, her claws making soft clicks on the bare floorboards, Clementine looked up from behind the work table. Chopped vegetables lay scattered around her board. She had a knife in one hand and a stump of a carrot in the other. Naturally, she wasn’t wearing gloves. Clem’s nasty dead fingers with their greenish-white skin were all over that carrot. Presumably, they had already touched the rest of the food.
“Hi, sleepy head,” said Clementine and waved with the knife. “Had a nice nap?”
Betty looked down at Clem’s dead hands where they were touching their food and twisted and twisted her mouth, until a tip of her yellow canine started poking out from under her lip.
“Oh, right!” Clem giggled, put the knife down and wiped her hands on her apron before reaching for a pair of gloves. Betty could see a small piece of her skin clinging to the apron, and she wondered where else she was going to find Clem’s skin later tonight.
“Where’s Sarah?” she said, deciding that tearing out some of Clem’s hair could always wait for a better time.
“She went to the barn to check on the animals and to get some water for Cutie Pie.”
Betty moved to the kitchen window and pulled aside the lace curtain. The snow outside the cabin glowed blue in the moonlight, with a single track of deep footprints leading from the back door to the barn. Otherwise, the white cover lay thick and undisturbed. A few fresh flakes swirled in the air. A square of yellow light fell out of the open barn door from Sarah’s lamp, and Betty could hear Sarah speaking softly to her animals - the stupid goats and the nasty ostrich.
Betty thought dreamily of the way Sarah could scratch under the chin, and she suddenly wanted those fingers fondling her own throat. Sarah’s fingers always smelled of mosses and milk.
“I had a dream about hunters.” She let the curtain drop back across the window and turned around to see Clem freeze. Clem’s fingers smelled of nothing but dead fish, no matter what she did.
“Where? How much time do we have?” Shadows of trout swam back and forth behind Clem’s stupid blue eyes, which was always a sign of worry for her. “Are they going to hurt Cutie Pie?”
Betty thought of the stolen book again, and just like that, she knew that the book and the big black car were removed from the Montana cabin by two decades. The grandfather of the rye that would give rise to the rye from her dream hadn’t yet been sown.
“It’s a couple of decades away,” she said. “But it must be important. I have to tell Sarah.”
“Oh, decades,” said Clementine, forever the airhead, and rolled her eyes. One of them popped out of the socket with a small splash of murky water. Betty winced, watching that eye dangle from the optic nerve next to Clem’s nose. Clem left it there, because things like this happened a lot to her, and got busy peeling ginger. “In that case, I’m certain that it can wait until after dinner.”
“Idiot.”
“Sticks and stones.” Clem shrugged. “Be nice, Betty.”
Betty was about to tell her where she could shove her nice - and then to leave it alone and go see if Sarah had already roasted the birds and if she could steal a wing - she was going to, but just then she saw the child.
It’s no wonder Betty only just saw him now: he was sitting perfectly still in the very corner of the cage by the pantry, his knees drawn up to his chest, and only the tiny shiver of shoulders betrayed how fast he was breathing. Otherwise, the boy looked like a stone idol. He had dark hair, though Betty couldn’t tell in the shadows what color it was. There was just enough of that delicious plumpness of childhood about him that let Betty guess he was about five years old. He stared, too scared to blink. His face was a mess of red and white splotches, with smudges from where he tried to wipe the tears with dirty hands.
“What is this?”
“You like?” Clem hurried around the table and stood next to Betty. “I found him wandering around all on his own. I thought we could have a special treat tonight.”
The boy whimpered.
And Betty was all for a little sweet morsel to toast away the 1988 and greet the new year, but something about this child covering in the corner of the cage bothered her dog senses.
“I was careful,” Clem went on. “Nobody’s going to miss this one. Kids like him go missing all the time, and nobody notices.”
Betty could see Clem’s simple calculations all the way through: the boy was clearly too small to be left alone by a responsible adult, and no caring mother would’ve allowed her child to run around with this wild hair and unwashed hands. Betty could also see where Clem was wrong: a rip on the child’s sleeve had been carefully stitched, someone else must’ve tied his shoes that morning, and someone’s loving hand had been feeding him and keeping him free of disease. He wasn’t the favorite child of some well-to-do Missoula family, but he wasn’t unloved either. Someone was going to come looking for this boy, but that wasn’t what made Betty’s nose itch and her eyes water.
There was a tiny mole by the side of his nose, and when Black Betty saw it, she also saw the fields of rye rippling in the afternoon heat and the black car with the gun hidden underneath its front seat. She saw him as an adult, with his eyes moving back and forth across the page and a smile hiding in the corners of his mouth, for something his brother said. The snapshot of the dream was so clear that Betty could distinguish the tiniest of veins in the man’s eyelid.
“Isn’t he sweet, Betty?”
“Clem,” Betty said. “Get away from him.”
But Clementine had already dropped to her hands and knees and crawled to the cage with the boy inside. “Look at him,” she cooed. “Aw, who’s the honey bunny? Who’s Clemmie’s sweet little shrimp?” And she stuck her waggling finger into the cage.
The boy went from a frozen idol to a wild animal in a split second when he lunged forward and clamped his teeth on Clem’s disgusting dead finger. It came clean off. Clementine fell backward, shrieking and shaking her hand. Half-congealed blood flew all across the kitchen and stained the bottom of Betty’s nightgown. The boy made a distressed wail and spat out the finger, but he did so out of Clementine’s reach.
“Leave me alone! Leave me alone! You witch!”
“You give that finger back!” Clementine yelled.
The boy started crying again, but he took the finger with him when he tried to press further into the corner of the cage.
“You give it back!”
He stomped on the finger, which made the dead skin come halfway off. “Leave me alone! My dad is coming to get me! He’s gonna- gonna-!” But he couldn’t finish the threat and cried harder. “Daddy! Dean!”
“What’s all this noise?”
Sarah stood in the kitchen doorway, still flushed from the cold outside and smelling of snow, more snow melting in her hair and on the soles of her heavy work boots. At the sound of her voice, Clem stopped screaming at the kid and turned around. Betty felt a sweet shiver start at the base of her spine, like a tail wanting to wag, and she dropped to the floor on her hands and knees and crawled to Sarah across the kitchen floor. Sarah was wearing her red skirt, and Betty pressed the side of her face through the fabric to Sarah’s knee and rubbed lovingly.
“Hey, Betty, hey, girl.” Sarah’s hand brushed behind her ear and scratched, and it was the sweetest thing in the world. Long blades of wild grasses came out of her sleeve, from under the skin on her wrist, to tickle Betty’s face. Even the kid in the cage fell quiet.
Betty stood up once she was sated with the scratching. Sarah had plucked the enoki mushrooms from her nostrils for the holiday, but she left the oyster ones growing out of her ears, which gave her face some strange elegance in Betty’s eyes. Forget-me-nots swaying from her scalp among the dark strands of hair matched her eyes and the earrings she picked for tonight. Looking at her, smelling her, Betty was momentarily overcome with puppy love.
“I got us a little holiday cookie, Sarah,” said Clem. She was still sitting on the floor in front of the cage. She waved her hand with the missing finger in the air. “Look, it’s got teeth!”
“I need to talk to you about this,” said Betty. “I had a dream about hunters. Turns out, Clem here brought one of them into our kitchen.” And Betty bared her teeth at Clem, and Clem stuck out her tongue.
“Be nice,” said Sarah.
“We weren’t fighting.” Clem got up from the floor and started dusting off her skirt. “Honest.”
Sarah approached the cage with Betty at her left shoulder and Clementine at her right. She tipped her head, making the forget-me-nots sway, and looked in the boy’s face. He had stopped crying and now sat quietly, staring at her. “Looks like a yummy little thing.”
“My daddy’s coming,” said the boy. “And my big brother.”
Sarah nodded. “I know, sweetie. My goats and my ostrich heard your daddy in the woods. They told me just now. You know what an ostrich is?” The boy didn’t answer. “It’s a bird, love. A big bird, big enough to swallow little things like you.” Sarah stroked the grasses growing out of her wrist. She looked her best in those tail hours of 1988, so strikingly beautiful. “Now, you sit tight. The girls and I are going to go outside and wish your daddy a happy New Year, and then we’ll all come back in, to have dinner. I imagine your dad is quite old, but he might do for a stew.”
She winked at the kid and headed for the back door, and Clementine and Betty followed. Where Sarah went, they always followed.
~~~~
Dean wasn’t going to think about certain things, certain people. Those were paralyzing thoughts that could reduce him to a sobbing little boy, and Dean couldn’t afford to be a sobbing little boy tonight.
Weird how the world could suddenly become so narrow and simple in a way it never had been before. You do this, or you die. There was nothing else to it, and the simplicity filled him with horror. Dean had lost his yesterday, his tomorrow and his belief in eating breakfast in the car in a few hours. In fact, everything was gone, except for the knife, the stack of snow-covered crates and the high kitchen window. Dean couldn’t even see the woods around him. Somewhere in the woods was- No.
Dad? The thought was a terrified little squawk, which he bit down on, hard.
Large waves of shivers were passing through Dean’s entire body, making his teeth clatter, making cold sweat break out on his skin. He wanted to wipe his hand on his pants to make the palm less slippery, but he didn’t dare let go of the knife even for a moment. What if the witches came around the house just then? What if they let that big bird of theirs loose and it was out there somewhere right now?
Listen, he told himself, momentarily relieved to have remembered something of what he was supposed to do. Listen, since you can’t see inside. One witch wore boots and the other one had claws that clacked on the floor when she walked, and the third one stomped a lot. He heard the back door open, heard footsteps, though now it was impossible to tell the three footfalls apart. He definitely heard the boots, but was there stomping? And was there stomping with the claw clicks, which was different? Dean listened so hard, but the sounds were gone so quickly, and there was no way to bring them back and play them slower, until he could be sure he got it all. He couldn’t tell if all three left the kitchen.
But then Sammy started crying again, and no one laughed at him or said anything to him. Sammy was having an all-out, hiccupping kind of private cry.
Dean let out a shaky breath. The kitchen window was too high for him to reach, but the crates stacked underneath it looked like they could hold his weight. They smelled of dirt and snow, and of something earthy, perhaps some vegetables that were once inside. Dean would have to put away the knife to climb them. Shit. You should never climb with a knife, or you could fall on it. But the witches could come back any minute. After a moment’s hesitation, Dean put the knife away into his coat’s pocket and straightened up, finding suddenly that his knees had gone numb and his legs were almost too weak to support him. He waivered, but stayed upright. There was nothing else to it. Either you do it, or you die.
Inside, Sammy went on crying, a heartbreaking sound.
Dean found a purchase for his foot, pulled himself up and kneeled on the top crate, to peek into the kitchen. The window he found was a small one, and rarely used, judging by the collection of old spider webs from years past. It was over the stove, probably meant to vent the steam from cooking. There was a large pot of stew bubbling away right under where Dean was sitting. He got scared by the sight of it, thinking that it was full of blood, but realized that the brew was orange, not red, and smelled like curry. The kitchen itself had a huge table set by one wall, with chopped vegetables abandoned on it in a messy pile. Dean saw a multitude of knives with mismatched handles hanging from a modern magnet strip over the table. He wiped the condensation from the half-opened window and pressed his nose closer to the glass, trying to see into every corner. Sammy’s crying was coming from somewhere left of the stove, too close to the wall for Dean to see from his position. There was a door leading outside, probably the way the witches left, and a dark mouth of a hallway that scared Dean the most because there was no door in it and no light, and anyone or anything - a big bird - could jump out of there at any moment.
But it wasn’t going to. Dad was out there in the woods, distracting them, to give Dean an opportunity to free his brother. And that opportunity was going to be wasted, all Dad’s hopes wasted, if Dean, if he….
Dean pushed the window open. There was just enough room for him to squeeze through. He pulled a knee up on the ledge, pushed both legs in and lay on his stomach, grabbing onto the frame as he slowly started to lower himself to the stove, toes stretched out to find something to stand on. His shirt and jacket pushed up, and the edge of the window pressed painfully into his stomach.
A shotgun blast came from the woods like the world exploding, scaring birds, but Dean didn’t see them rise up into the sky with indignant cries, because Dean lost his grip on the window’s frame just then. The moment the shotgun boomed, Dean came crashing down onto the stove. His foot knocked the stew pot off, and the orange brew cascaded over his jacket and the kitchen floor. The sound of the pot thundering down was even louder than the shot, and in a moment it was followed by Dean’s falling off the stove. He didn’t see or register any of it right away, only heard the boom and saw the world spin, and then he was lying on the floor. It happened too fast. He scrambled up to his knees, pressed into a corner and belatedly covered his ears. He waited for the witches to bust in, for the pain of a knife wound to come, for death.
Nothing happened. Dean’s back hurt from where he whacked it across the stove on his way down, his ankle was throbbing, and there was an intense burning all over his hand and wrist that felt like his skin might start peeling off. His clothes were covered in the witches’ stew. The rest of it was now spreading slowly across the kitchen floor, steaming. Outside, the birds complained loudly. And Sam was very quiet.
“Sam,” he tried to say. His throat was so tense that the name came out barely louder than a breath and hurt on the way out. Dean swallowed. “Sammy?”
“Dean?”
The sound was coming from the left, somewhere next to the pantry. Dean hurried around the stove, splashing through the cooling orange lake, and there was Sam clutching the bars of a cage. His eyes were red and puffy and his nose was running, but he looked unharmed, and Dean felt something inside of him, some tightly wound spring, let loose.
“Sammy, hey, I’m here.” He grabbed Sam’s outstretched hand and squeezed while looking for a lock pick in his pocket with his burned hand. “Hey, it’s okay.”
“Dean, they’re witches. They wanted to eat me and Dad.”
Dad, like a dull needle to the heart. Dad.
Dean started poking around inside the lock. “Don’t be stupid, there are no such things as witches. They’re just crazy.”
“No, Dean, but this one was like a dog.” Sam grabbed onto his coat through the bars with both hands while Dean worked the lock. He was still hiccupping from crying. “And this other one had mushrooms in her ears. I saw them!”
“They’re just crazy. I’m gonna get you out.”
“Where’s Dad?”
The lock clicked, and Dean was saved from having to answer the question. Once he swung the door open, Sam came tumbling out and immediately threw his arms around Dean’s neck. Dean let him, even though it was hard to breathe. “Okay, Sam, okay. Come on, we gotta get out.” But he held on just as tightly as Sam, unable to move for a moment, because if he moved, that would bring them both to the second part of the task.
And that was when the sound came from behind Dean that made his blood run cold and made Sam stiffen in his arms. It was the sound of boots by the back door, more than one person coming, and the next moment the door swung open.
A blonde woman that looked like something from the bottom of a lake that’s been dead for quite a while fluttered into the kitchen and stopped when she saw Sam and Dean. The second witch that was following closely stopped in the doorway with one foot across the threshold, and that foot, Dean saw, that foot was bare and red from the cold and had long claws, round and dark, like a dog’s. She looked like she’d have her hackles raised, if she had any.
“Oh,” said the dead one.
“Great,” said the one that was like a dog.
“What, what?” said the third witch, pushing past her into the kitchen. She had long hair, among which grasses and flowers grew, and there were mushrooms behind her ears and something like lichen on her neck in uneven patches. She was cradling her hand, and Dean saw that it was covered in blood, with two fingers missing and the flesh of her palm torn up in a way that made his stomach turn. “Well, would you look at that!”
Something odd happened to Dean at that moment. He felt calmness come over him. He realized, suddenly and with perfect clarity that he wasn’t going to make it. There would be no breakfast in the car for him, no Dad, no morning, no next year, no anything at all, except for this kitchen. And the kitchen was where he could make it count.
He pressed his mouth to Sam’s ear. “Go up on the stove and out the window, find a road, stop a car, don’t stop running. I’ll distract them.” But Sam grabbed tighter onto his neck. Dean had to pry his hands off. He found the knife in his coat pocket and waited.
“This must be the big brother,” said the mushroom witch, coming into the kitchen. Her wounded hand was bleeding and badly swollen, and Dean caught a gleam of a shotgun pellet embedded in the flesh. “Well, isn’t it great to have the whole family for dinner!”
The dead one clapped her hands. “I call the leg from this one. The leg is mine, Betty!”
The one that was like a dog shot her a dirty look but spoke to the mushroom one, “Sarah, I saw them both in my dream. I saw them grown up.”
The mushroom one - Sarah - chewed her lip for a moment, studying Sam and Dean. Then she shrugged. “Perhaps we can discuss this over the holiday roast, what do you say, Betty?” She came around the table to get closer to the cage. “Clem, dear, would you get me a bandage?” The dead one hurried out of the kitchen. Sarah stopped in front of Dean and stared down at him. “You must be Dean.”
She was standing too close, and Dean saw that if he tried to get up, she’d just slap him down like a puppy before he could even lift the knife. She was wearing boots, old leather worn and creased, and without steel toes. They were right under his nose, and they were now all he could see. The world shrunk to the size of the witch’s boots, if only for a moment.
Dean didn’t try to get up. He threw his body forward from the knees and he plunged the knife into her foot as hard as he could, landing on top of it with his entire weight. It was the sickest sensation - a moment of resistance before the blade went through the boot and the flesh, the squeak of leather and the scrape of a bone, and then he was lying on top of it. The witch screamed, and Dean rolled to the side and away. He thought she was going to stomp on his head, but she pulled her foot up with the knife in it, which didn’t go all the way into the floor after all like he thought it did. She hopped around the kitchen, screaming. Betty dashed in the narrow doorway like an agitated dog and made sounds that were a lot like barking. Clem came running back into the kitchen but stopped and clutched her chest when she saw Sarah grab onto the knife’s handle and yank it out. Sarah lost her balance, landing with a crash and bringing down a rain of dishes and cutlery from the table.
Dean only had enough time to push Sam onto the stove. They could still make it. Sam was pulling himself up to the window. Dean tried to follow him, but his injured ankle turned, and the pain was like fire. It made him fall back down, and then the dog witch was upon him. She kicked him in the stomach, knocking all air out of him and making him double up in pain. She picked him up easily, like he weighed nothing, threw him into the cage and threw Sam after him, locking the door. And there was that. There went Dean’s rescue operation. Just like that.
“You little shit!” Sarah tossed the knife across the kitchen, where it hit the fridge and left a long scratch. “You little shit, oh, fuck you!” She was sitting on the floor, cradling her foot with her good hand. There were tears in her eyes, and her blood all over the kitchen now. Dean could smell it, too, so much copper in the air. “Goddamn little fucker, I’m gonna skin you alive.”
“Sarah!” Clem kneeled next to her and tried to touch her foot, but Sarah jerked away. “Your poor foot!”
“You leave us alone!” Sam yelled. “Bitch! Leave us alone!”
Betty bent down to the cage, and Dean saw a flash of powerful teeth in her mouth. Her jaw looked longer than normal, close up. “You know what I’ll do? I’m going to knock all your teeth out and make you suck on a soap bar if I hear another bad word out of you, ‘cause I’m not eating something this dirty. That’s less than my momma would’ve done, if I had a mouth like yours. She would’ve cut my tongue out.”
Dean grabbed Sam without a word and hauled him away from the bars, away from the witch with a dog’s face. Sam felt small in his arms, and he was trembling, though Dean couldn’t tell if it was from fear or from anger.
“Where’s our dad?” Sam said.
It was Sarah who answered. “What, baby needs his daddy? I turned him into a moose. A big, fucking stupid moose.” She stood up with Clem’s help, keeping her weight off the injured foot. Ferns had shot out of her chest at some point, and now their coiled green tendrils were bursting her shirt open, exposing a white lace bra. “He’s out there now, trying to figure out how to work a shotgun with hooves. In a minute, Clementine will go and cut his big stupid heart out and leave the rest of him for the animals.”
“I will, I will,” Clem said. “You sit down, Sarah.”
Sarah batted her hands away. She hopped over to the cage, where she grabbed Betty’s shoulder for support. She leaned down, until she was looking into Dean’s eyes, completely ignoring Sam. She had gone very pale, almost as pale as the dead Clementine. “I want to give you a little gift, for the year leaving and the year coming.”
“What do you want to give him anything for?” Betty said. “We’re just gonna eat them both.”
Sarah shrugged, straightening up while Betty held her by the waist. “Well, you know, just in case. You’re my smart one.” She turned to look at Betty with so much pride and smacked a passionate kiss on her cheek. “What if you’re right, and they do, somehow, grow up and come back to us? This has certainly been an unpleasant evening.”
“They won’t grow up,” said Clem. “Betty was wrong.”
“My Black Betty is never wrong. So there, a gift for the New Year, for a boy who fucked up my foot. What shall we give him?”
“Gangrene,” Betty suggested.
“Love,” said Clementine. “It’s so much worse than gangrene.”
A moose, Dean thought. They didn’t, really. It’s a lie. The witches’ words about gifts and gangrene were barely registering in all the mess in his head. Sam shook and shook in his arms, and Dean had no idea what to do.
Sarah nodded. “Love, yes, I like. How about the ugliest fucking whore in the world?”
“Who’d that be?” said Betty.
“Oh, I know, I know!” Clementine bounced, stretching her arm up, like she was in a classroom. “There’s some duchess in Europe, looks like a platypus. I saw her picture in a magazine once.”
Sarah considered it. “Nah. What’s the use of him falling in love with some ugly duchess in Europe that he’s never even going to meet? How about that syphilitic crackhead that hangs out by the church on Main?”
“How about his brother?” said Betty.
That made the other witches pause. In silence, Sam breathed very fast, and Dean tried to figure out what it was exactly that they were planning to do to him and Sam. They were talking about making him love Sam, which was odd. What kind of a curse was that? There was a trap there somewhere, and Dean tried to see it, he really did, but the thoughts of a moose kept intruding and wouldn’t let him focus.
“Oh,” Sarah said. “Oh, Betty, you’re the smart one. You are.”
“That’s so sick!” Clem squealed. “Do it, Sarah, do it!”
Sarah bent down again and put her hand between the bars. Dean saw that hand coming, but the time didn’t stretch for him like in the movies while he tried to think of something to do, somewhere to go, some way of shielding Sammy. She touched his forehead. There was a brief burning sensation, something warm spreading from his head down, and then she was pulling her hand away.
Sam bit her, quickly and quietly and viciously.
Sarah yelped, jumped back and landed on her injured foot. Dean yanked Sam away, trying to hide him behind his back, the burning in his head forgotten. Sarah kept screaming and crying while Betty tried to keep her upright and Clementine dashed around the kitchen uselessly.
“Leave him alone!” Sam was yelling, right into Dean’s ear. “Leave him alone! Fuck you!”
Dean felt vibration through the floor before he recognized the sound of hooves with so much screaming. Not knowing what to do with any of it, he just held onto his brother and squeezed his eyes shut, and waited for it to be quiet again. Because his eyes were closed, he didn’t see the back door getting kicked in, but he felt it. He didn’t see a huge animal burst into the kitchen, but he caught its sharp wild scent and heard its roar. He thought it must’ve been a bear - a dinosaur! - but it was a moose, very large and very angry. Dean didn’t see its hooves crush Sarah’s skull, but he heard that, too.
~~~~
There was breakfast in the car after all. There was morning. A new day came, and Dean watched it break out over the Montana-Wyoming border from the front seat of the Impala. The sky was enormous, with nothing but low hills around to obstruct it. Its color faded from black to grey, from grey to pink, and all the while thin, fluffed up clouds rolled over the planes. The wind blew snow dust over I-90, rocked the Impala and tried to push it out of the lane.
Dean nibbled on cold fries from McDonald’s as the car flew south, watched the skies turn colors, counted the trucks and didn’t think of much at all. Montana receded into the back window, overhung with low snow clouds. Dean watched it go, kneeling on the front seat, with his arms folded on the headrest. Ibuprofen helped with the pain, but he hunched his shoulders to guard his stomach and made sure his twisted ankle was positioned so that he wouldn’t hit it on anything if the car found a pothole. A fresh bandage was covering the burn on his wrist, and its whiteness was distracting in the corner of Dean’s eye.
If he looked away from the back window and just a little bit below, there was Sammy sleeping on the backseat. He wrapped himself in a blanket like a caterpillar, so that only a tuft of hair and a corner of his face were showing. They told Sam that the witches were a bad dream, and Dean wondered if he was still young enough to trust everything his family told him without question. He seemed to have believed them, although reluctantly.
Whenever Dean looked at his brother, his head felt a little hot. So he watched the sky, the road and the trucks passing in the opposite direction, toward Montana. He ate his fries and licked the salt off his lips. It was good - to be able to lick salt, after everything. It was a relief.
“Dean.”
It was the first word Dad said since leaving the McDonald’s drive through. It made Dean jump a little. He’d been worried, for the past hundred and fifty miles, that Dad might be angry at him, even though Dad hugged him and Sam after it was all over and held on for the longest time. But who could tell? Somewhere in this mess something was Dean’s fault - he could feel it. Not getting Sam out fast enough, falling off the stove, not being able to move away when the mushroom witch - Sarah, Sarah of the big bird, Sarah of the crushed skull - reached into the cage and touched his head.
Dad’s hand rested on his shoulder. “Deano. You alright?”
So Dad wasn’t mad after all. The relief was so great it stung in his chest and almost made him cry like a little baby. He forced the shakiness down and turned to look. Dad was watching the road but sneaking glances at him, and his face wasn’t angry in the least. There was a sizable lump in Dean’s throat.
“Are you in pain? Does your hand hurt?”
Dean swallowed. “No, I’m okay.” Sam slept in the backseat, oblivious. Something warm was spreading through Dean’s temples. He could still hear the sound of bones breaking, and his hands ached with the feeling of a knife pushing through a human foot, so horrible that he didn’t think he’d ever get rid of it. He smiled and turned around to sit facing forward. “Where are we going?”
“I’m gonna drop you guys off at Bobby Singer’s.” Dad put his hand back on the wheel. “Then I’m going back to deal with those other two.”
Those other two. The dead Clementine and the dog-faced Betty. Betty fled, but Dad backed the other one into a corner. Dean had opened his eyes by then and saw the enormous moose occupying half of the kitchen, saw the blood and the strange way Sarah’s head looked where she lay on the floor. He could see it now all over again, clear as if he was back in the house. The moose had Clementine in the corner, but it waited and stared at her, until she touched its nose, and then it started folding in on itself, twisting. The moose screamed in Dad’s voice, and the witch ran past him and out the door. He couldn’t chase after her.
Don’t go, Dad. He said instead, “You think maybe Uncle Bobby knows someone who can-?”
“No.”
“He knows a lot of people.” Dean had long suspected that there were others like Dad out there, other superheroes, maybe even as many as five. Bobby Singer kept in touch. Perhaps he could pay one of his friends to go to Montana, and Dean could repay him one day, when he was old enough to make money.
John rubbed a hand over his mouth, scratched at the stubble. “I’m sure he does. But this is nobody’s business - not Bobby Singer’s, not anybody’s.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.” John nodded. “Don’t worry, Dean. They won’t get me twice. Hand me my sunglasses, will you?”
The highway had started twisting to the east, and the morning sun was now in their faces, unobstructed by the ragged clouds. The entire plane was sunlit, covered by a snow blanket and fully exposed from horizon to horizon. The snow hurt to look at. Dean reached into the glove compartment, pushed aside takeout menus from seven states over, a gun and some stray map that didn’t belong in there by itself, and handed John a pair of glasses.
“I won’t take long,” John said.
Dean nodded, and before he could change his mind, said quickly, “Are you mad?”
“What?” Dad turned away from the road to look at him. “Why would I be mad?”
Because I fell off the stove and made so much noise. Because I couldn’t save Sammy by myself. Because I didn’t tell you what Sarah said about that duchess from Europe. Dean shrugged. John blew out a breath and pulled Dean’s head closer to kiss the top of it and ruffle his hair. It made a new kind of warmth, a good kind.
“You did good, Deano. You did really good.”
They drove in silence for a little longer, until John put on music, turned low because Sammy was still sleeping off the rough night. Dean finished his fries and licked his finger, so that he could pick the last grains of salt from the bottom of the bag. Sam was going to be happy that they were driving to Bobby Singer’s. He liked the books and the dogs there. Dean wished he had time to speak to Bobby before Dad left, to ask him about sending one of his friends to Montana. But Dad was probably going to leave immediately after dropping them off and go back to look for Betty and Clementine.
Dean felt very small and very helpless, so much like a little kid. Insignificant was perhaps the word.
The highway was heading straight east now, to South Dakota. The sun had shifted since they got into Wyoming, but the view hadn’t changed one bit. Johnny Cash sang. Sammy slept. And Dean thought about love and tried to understand, from his tangled memories, what exactly Sarah did to him before she died. She wanted him to fall in love with a whore when he grew up. Was that bad? He knew, of course, what whores made bad wives, but he’d seen Dad talk to them occasionally at truck stops, when he thought that his sons were asleep. Whores didn’t seem like the worst people out there, and far better than witches. And then Clementine said something about that duchess, and Sarah mentioned a crackhead. Well, he could just stay away from those two, couldn’t he? Then Betty said something about loving Sammy. That made no sense at all, because it didn’t seem like a bad thing, and because Dean loved his brother already. So what was the big deal?
No, it must’ve been about the ugly duchess.
“Dean,” Dad said, and Dean jumped a little. “Did those witches do anything to you? Or to Sammy? It’s really important that you tell me.”
“Like what?”
“Like a spell, or a ritual, like how they turned me into a moose. They didn’t do anything like that to you, did they?”
Dean saw Sarah’s hand reaching through the bars, the grasses growing through her skin like long fur. The ugliest fucking whore in the world. How about his brother? There was blood on her hand, and her fingers were sticky with it when she touched his forehead. That’s so sick, do it, Sarah.
There are things one can’t talk about at the age of nine, not for anything. Things too embarrassing to give voice to, even in the middle of a highway in the emptiest of states, no matter how important it is to tell, and love was one such thing. Love was a stupid, embarrassing subject. At least it was for Dean. How should he know about any other nine-year-olds?
“No, sir. They didn’t do anything like that to us.”
Part Two .. Master Post