Dandy in the Underworld - 2
A thunderstorm rolled in late in the afternoon, draped the sky in heavy clouds and made everything smell like wet dust. Ivan woke up to the low-level rumbling and lay still for a minute, with his heart beating in his throat. It was only thunder. His dreams were leaving quickly, and very soon he remembered nothing except a vague sense of dread and standing at the open mouth of a huge beast, hearing the beast’s stomach grumble.
He rolled out of bed and made his way into the kitchen, past more mementos from the old dragons he hadn’t noticed before - photographs, a locket, a faded old rag doll - all lined up on shelves and covered in cobwebs, older ones pushed deeper into corners by more recent dragons. How was the greatest game in Vegas so grim?
In the kitchen, he inspected the table and the fridge in the hopes that maybe Sam left a note this time. No dice. Another sandwich was waiting for him on a plate. Ivan eyed it, remembering distantly a maybe-dream and maybe-reality, in which he heard Dean behind the wall of his bedroom, rooting around in the kitchen. He could tell it was Dean by the dragging of that goddamn chain on the floor. Suppose the man had to make himself a cup of coffee sometime, but he could’ve been crushing drugs and mixing them into mayo just as likely. Ivan poked at the sandwich, then washed his finger and went searching through the cupboards. He found an unopened box of expired crackers in one. Could Dean have opened it discreetly, sprinkled drugs - or poison - over the crackers and sealed them back up? Ivan considered it, but finding the scenario unlikely, stuffed a handful of crackers into his mouth and took the rest into his bedroom to hide. They were soft and had a stale taste to them, and they were wonderful.
When he came outside, Dean was straddling a porch’s railing, reading a book and munching on beef jerky.
“So, my man. Is Sam here?”
Dean raised his head from the book and fixed Ivan with a look, so calm and even. There was something of a reptile in that look. He knew, of course, the bastard knew everything. “Yeah, he’s around somewhere. He might have a shift tonight.”
Ivan gulped. “A shift?”
“He’s a bartender on the Strip, in a fetish bar. Picks up funny ideas there.”
Ivan hit a bit of a panic then, running around the house to try and find Sam before he left. The Impala remained parked out front, and whenever he came out to check on it just one more time, Dean gave him a wave. It was two hours before midnight when Ivan finally found Sam. One would think the dude was hiding on purpose. When he did find Sam, it was by the sound of an old record coming from the bedroom, some old man shit from before Ivan was born: And if you don’t love me now, you can never love me again… Dean’s chain reached into the bedroom as well, which thankfully meant that the door was ajar.
Inside, awaited a full-blown sick-o show. Ivan swore in his head and backed away from the sight but stayed, keeping the clues in mind.
In the room with the blackout curtains drawn tight, the only light came from several candles. They weren’t the sleek sexy type Ivan lit for his chicks sometimes but rather the ugly, thick ones that bled wax in fat droplets and smoked. They kept the deep shadows moving in the corners and around the bed, where Sam lay on top of the covers with Dean straddling his hips. At least both were wearing pants, and Dean even had a shirt on. Small mercies. Dean had his hands on Sam’s ribs, pressing firmly, running his hands up and down Sam’s sides with the rhythm of his breathing. Breathe in - down, breathe out - up, as if he was pumping Sam’s chest for him. Neither one was saying a word, only staring at each other and having some silent conversation Ivan couldn’t follow, and didn’t necessarily want to. Dean moved his hands up Sam’s torso and under his arms, thumbs reaching out for the clavicles, then over the shoulders and up the sides of Sam’s neck, pushing hard all the way like some weird massage, one hand coming up to grab the headboard and the other disappearing behind Sam’s head. Dean took a handful of Sam’s hair and pulled, exposing his neck and bending down to kiss it, then moving over to Sam’s mouth.
In the hallway, Ivan winced and shuffled from foot to foot, not knowing what to do with himself. On the one hand, clues. On the other, he just accidentally imagined doing that to his own brother and was wishing he could unsee the mental image. God, he hoped they weren’t going to fuck right now, because he didn’t sign up for creep porn.
The freaks were still kissing. Sam had picked up a loop of the chain and threw it over the back of Dean’s neck to pull him down, and it was probably going to bruise. Damn your love, damn your lies, went the record. It wasn’t a particularly sexy song. Ivan personally preferred “Suga Suga” for such purposes. The record player itself was an old turntable - probably another relic belonging to some former dragon, which could explain the music selection as well.
“So,” Dean said, straightening up, with the chain still draped over his shoulders, “what’s it going to be?” He grinned down at Sam, the candlelight catching in his eyes, and added, “Oh Muse.”
“Hey, you think the old man dragon had a muse?”
Dean made a face. “Nah. I bet he was too stubborn to let anyone.”
“What, to boss him around?” Sam pulled down on the ends of the chain, forcing Dean to bow his head. The record had stopped and was hissing quietly. Sam smiled up at his goddamn brother, all teeth and dimples. “There’s some rope under your pillow. Tie me to the bed, bitch.”
Dean grabbed the chain too, above Sam’s hands, resisting the slow pull. “Tell me the word, and I will. And it’s ‘Lord and Master’ to you, dude. Who’s getting tied to the bed, for fuck’s sake?”
Sam just rolled his eyes. “Hurry up. It’s going to be midnight soon.”
Dean pulled a coil of nylon rope from under the pillow and tossed one end over the bedpost. “Hands up.” Sam let go of the chain and lifted his arms, gripping the headboard. He flexed his muscles and arched his back a little when Dean ran the rope over his wrists, settling in like a large cat. Dean said, “The word, oh Muse.”
Chain, Ivan read in Sam’s lips.
~~~~
At three in the morning, the waxing moon sat high over the roof. Ivan could see it through the dusty skylight in the study’s ceiling as he was getting drunk with the Dragon of Las Vegas. There were nights in a man’s life not to be faced sober. He offered to share his precious leftover weed earlier, which Dean declined and in return brought a bottle of whiskey. He even demonstrated the unbroken seal and took the first drink. Ivan thought, what the hell. On an empty stomach, the alcohol hit too hard and too fast. With his feet up on the table, Ivan watched the moon through the skylight, smoked his joint and chased it with whiskey.
“You know what I’m gonna wish for when I win?”
“Tell me.”
Ivan pointed up with the joint, trying to pin down the moon. It was swimming in the sky, elusive. “I’m gonna wish to be able to fly. Then I can go to the moon.”
Dean thought about it, squinting up at the sky as well. “That’s kind of a cool wish, actually.”
“Wow, my man! Can you fly? You know, like a real dragon?”
Dean snorted and shook his head. The flame of the oil lamp jumped, and on the study’s wall Dean’s shadow twisted and crawled. Ivan imagined for a moment that it had wings, like those of a bat, but it didn’t.
“When you make your wish,” Dean said, “make sure I can hear you and that you word it straight up. What I hear will come true. There was this actress who wished Holly would love her forever. Well, the dragon heard ‘Hollywood’. She’s been dead for thirty years, and Hollywood still worships her. I don’t know about Holly, though. And anyway,” he added, a little sad, “you have to win first. One more night.”
Ivan waved him off. Two correct guesses down, one to go, and life was starting to look awesome. “Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, right? You know Sam tells me?” The minute he said it, he wanted to bite his tongue. He watched Dean’s face carefully but saw no surprise there.
“Sure. That’s how you have to play this game. I hear that before, in the days when it was just the well in the desert, there were no clues. I don’t think people won much then.”
“But what’s the point if Sam just tells me? I don’t get it.”
Dean kicked his chair. “You want him to stop telling you? Don’t be such an idiot. Here, you want some chips? It’s a sealed bag.”
Ivan’s stomach rumbled. He took the offered bag and shoved a handful of chips in his mouth. They were cheddar, his least favorite, but he ate another handful before remembering to give some to Dean.
“Sorry,” Dean said. “I really got nothing against you, man. You’re alright.”
“Ha! But you’re still going to eat my bones if I lose?”
“No. I’m going to eat your meat, then throw your bones down into that well with the rest of them. Then I’m probably going to puke for a week until I look like, whatserface?” Dean took a sip of his whiskey and made a face up at the moon. “Those twins, whatever their names are. Look like death. I don’t think Hollywood even loves them now.”
Ivan hugged the bag of chips to his chest. Hell, the guy threatening to throw his bones down the well didn’t deserve any chips. “Do you have to?”
“Fuck if I know. You’re only our second, and the first guy won.”
There was a moment of uncomfortable silence, and Ivan thought of Sam. It’s been a while since Ivan heard him make a sound, and he wondered if Sam was asleep, if he was still tied to that bed. Was he allowed to go to sleep? Ivan himself wasn’t into that sort of shit but he had some vague idea that this was how things went: Sam would have to call Dean ‘master’ and say ‘please’ and ask permission to come or to go to sleep. Well, something like that. Some people got off on weird crap.
“You know, you two are incestuous hillbilly cannibals,” he said, as a continuation of the thought, “like in those horror flicks.”
Dean gave him a long considering look, then shrugged and went back to staring at the moon. “That we are.”
“But won’t that make you sick? Like, to eat a human? I’d,” and he paused, trying to imagine what it would be like. “Gross.”
Dean sighed, putting his glass down on the table. “We’ve both been to hell, dude. Literally. That’s nothing. Now go to sleep.”
~~~~
At dawn of the third day, Ivan found Sam sitting cross-legged on the lid of the old well under the acacia tree again, scratching at it with his knife. He looked disgustingly pleased with himself.
“Tell me the third one now,” Ivan said. “I’m not watching another sick porno.”
“That’s not how it works.”
Ivan kicked the side of the well. “Fuck, man! You know I watch you, he knows I watch you, so what the hell? You’re up to something.”
“Of course we are. Come on, sit down.” Sam patted the well’s lid. It looked dried out with age, and Sam was, what, two hundred pounds? Ivan shook his head.
“Calm down, Ivan. Find your third clue, tell the dragon your wish, and then go home.”
The sky in the east was turning a gentle pink. The third and last day was starting, and at the conclusion of it, Ivan would go home as an unimaginably rich man. There, he’d tell Uncle Cornelius to shut his goddamn mouth about the guy and his island in the Caribbean. He hadn’t even thought of a wish yet.
Sam was watching him, tapping out a rhythm on the lid with the tip of the blade. It made Ivan imagine someone knocking from the inside with skeletal fingers, to be let out of the cool, damp darkness.
“Sam. What would you wish for, if you were me?”
“For the game to be over for good,” he said as if he’d known the answer to that for a long time. “To have my brother back and go home.”
~~~~
Ivan woke up in his darkened room, unsure of what pulled him from sleep, and got momentarily scared that he overslept and missed his chance for the final clue. But the watch showed one in the afternoon - only four hours since he went to bed. A strip of bright light crept in between the curtains and fell at the foot of his bed, too far to wake him. There was yelling in his dream, he remembered. Then he heard voices.
“So how are you feeling?” Sam was saying.
“I don’t know, dude. Something’s weird.”
Ivan rolled out of bed and tiptoed to the window, peeking around the curtain. The well stood wide open, with the lid pushed aside, and Sam and Dean were standing with their backs to Ivan, looking in. Sam was tapping a flashlight against his thigh. Ivan felt a shiver creep up his spine. The well must’ve been deep - weren’t they always, in a desert? Was there even any water down there, or just bones? Suddenly he could imagine the cold and the musty smell of the well like he was standing right next to its mouth. It must’ve been freezing in there.
Dean said something else, too quiet to hear, and Ivan pushed up the window just a little, hoping that it wouldn’t make a noise as it slid up.
Sam said, “Are you sure you can handle it? Listen, maybe I should pick up some tranqs in town.”
“Fuck you, tranqs. So I could be a zombie all night? No way.” Dean walked halfway around the well and stood under the tree, hands shoved in his pockets and shoulders hunched. He looked for a moment like an angry bird of prey.
“You’ve been acting a little edgy,” Sam said. “It’s the last night.”
The last night, Ivan repeated to himself in the room, silently, only his lips moving. It was the last night of the game.
“I’ll be fine, Sammy. Hey, you want to play tonight? That might get me relaxed.”
“Sure. Here, come sit with me.”
They sat down on the lip of the open well, staring down. They kept on talking, heads bowed close, too quiet for Ivan to make out a single word.
When Ivan woke up again, the sun had already set. He finished his stale crackers and the chips from last night. An oddly numbing thought came to him that he didn’t need to squirrel away clean food anymore: after midnight, he was either going to walk out of here and have dinner at the best restaurant on the Strip, or his bones would tumble down the well to join all the others. What did those people want, the ones in the cold and the dark - thrill, money, fame, other people, health? He licked powdered cheddar off his fingers and went looking for Sam, with the food sitting in his stomach like a grease ball.
Sam was in the kitchen, sharpening the knives. Ivan couldn’t hear Dean anywhere but saw the end of the chain stretching outside through the back door.
“Tell me,” Ivan said.
“You already had your clue.”
Ivan winced at the sound of the knife scraping against the stone. He had always hated that particular sound. “Would you stop that?”
Sam did, putting down the stone with a sigh. The knife he kept and went on turning it in his hands.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ivan said. “I need the fucking clue, Sam.”
“You had it. I couldn’t spell it out to your face if I wanted to. Look, I don’t pick the last object for him because it’s always the same. It’s the core element in the game, and it’s what everything always comes down to. It’s the one most important thing. You want some mac and cheese?”
It had cheddar in it, but it came from a sealed box. Ivan waited by the stove while Sam cooked the food - in part to breathe in the aroma, in part to make sure nothing funny made its way into the pot. Through the window, he could see a part of the well. Dean was sitting on the lid, looking down between his knees as if he could see through the wood and inside.
“Be careful with him tonight,” Sam said, stirring the pot, and Ivan shuddered. Up close, he could see more worry lines in Sam’s face, and the shadows under his eyes. “Dean isn’t himself when it’s this close to the end. Don’t drink with him, don’t smoke with him and don’t chat him up. Take your final guess, make your wish and get the hell out.”
And if I get it wrong? Was Dean going to sprout wings, shoot up to the ceiling like in a cartoon, all teeth and claws and scales? Would he start with biting the head off, at least, so it wouldn’t hurt for long?
He couldn’t eat the mac and cheese after that.
“Make sure that wish is clear,” Sam told him before he left the kitchen. “If he can’t hear or understand it, he can’t grant it. Make it loud and clear, and no ambiguity.”
~~~~
Ivan spent the remaining hours in his room, playing Angry Birds on his phone to keep his mind occupied. He glanced out the window now and again involuntarily, double-checking his last clue, as if staring at the thing was going to tell him anything. He bit his nails, for the first time since childhood, and sent bird after bird flying.
His nervous bladder got him out of the bedroom an hour before midnight. The house was dark and quiet, except for the rain pounding on the roof. The end of Dean’s chain disappeared down the basement’s stairs, and not a sound issued from below. Not wanting to draw Dean out, Ivan tiptoed down the hallway, stepping over the squeaky floorboards. He didn’t think twice about the light coming from the bathroom, until he was at the door and caught a glimpse of what was inside through the mirror.
Sam was sitting on the edge of the bathtub, and next to his thigh were a small syringe and an empty vial. As Ivan watched, Sam tied a tourniquet around his upper arm, pulled the knot tight with his teeth and popped in the needle.
This, Ivan realized with clarity that came out of nowhere, this he wasn’t supposed to see. Of all the intimate, disturbing, secret things he witnessed around the house in the past three nights, he wasn’t meant to see this one.
He retreated and waited in his bedroom, listening through the door for Sam’s quiet footsteps. For such a big dude, he never made much noise. After he was gone, Ivan waited another five minutes and returned to the bathroom, thinking that things were just getting more fun for him by the minute. Was Sam already loaded that evening, when he told Ivan about his final clue? Ivan always got a weird sense of humor when he got high, so who’s to say Sam wasn’t the same way? He locked the door and dug through the trash until the found the tiny glass vial.
“Lorazepam,” he read quietly from the label, frowning. He wasn’t very good with prescription drugs, but he thought it might’ve been a psychiatric one. Anti-anxiety, maybe? He tossed the vial back into trash.
~~~~
At midnight, Dean was waiting for him by the well, under an umbrella. Storm clouds had rolled in two hours ago, and rain was falling in sheets, turning the desert into mud. The water drummed on the roof and windows of the house, yanked at the acacia leaves and slapped against the ground. When Ivan came closer, the mud sucking at his flip flops, he could hear the rain trickling through the cracks in the well’s lid and echoing far down below. He thought that he could distinguish the flat sound of it hitting bone, but it could’ve been anything.
Dean’s jeans were soaked to the knee, and he didn’t seem to care. He was barefoot. The chain was probably freezing against his skin but he showed no discomfort, sitting in the wet and the mud with that ridiculous umbrella over his head, which wasn’t doing much.
Ivan stopped a few feet away from him, holding on to his own slightly mangled umbrella he found in the closet. “Why are we here?”
“It has to be here on the last night.”
In the dark, it was difficult to see his face. There was something new in Dean’s voice, some unpleasant new undertone, and Ivan wished that he could see the facial expression that went with it. Don’t chat him up, Sam had said.
“I’m ready,” Ivan said.
“Okay. Hit me.”
Ivan drew a deep breath, and with it took in the smell of the rain, of the dirt and the wet shrubbery, and the sweet smell of acacia. “A well,” he said. “You’re thinking of a well.”
He almost expected a clap of thunder but none came. Rain fell all around them and rang down between the old boards, and Dean sat perfectly still. Finally, he sighed. “Yeah, okay. I was thinking of a well.” There was almost palpable tension after those words, like he wasn’t done, like he was waiting for something else.
Make your wish and get the hell out. “I wish for the ability to turn invisible.” He shuffled his feet in the dirt, thinking that the wish had sounded silly. It had sounded childish, like “Dragon of Las Vegas” had sounded to him when he first came here. Dean was quiet. “I mean, not like to spy on girls in the shower or anything. I’m gonna take over my father’s business one day.” Dean still didn’t move and didn’t say a word. “Hey, you hear? I wish for the ability to turn invisible.”
Dean said, “Huh.”
Ivan thought really hard about disappearing into thin air. He willed for his body to become transparent. When he lifted his hand to his face, it was still there and very much solid. “How do I turn it on? It’s not working.”
“Interesting,” Dean said, speaking to the mud under his feet, as if he had forgotten that Ivan was there. “I guess I don’t really have to grant it.”
The rain thundered down all around them. Everything else was quiet. Where the fuck is Sam? Something cold was running down Ivan’s spine, and he couldn’t tell if it was sweat or rainwater.
“You,” his voice caught, and he tried again, “you have to.”
“I guess I don’t. How about that?” Dean looked up, and Ivan saw then how different his face was from the first day. He didn’t look like Joe Schmoe of the Dump House anymore. There was an air of dark excitement about him, a carnivorous look. “I’ve been sitting here, wondering if I’d have to grant your wish, or if maybe I could just eat you instead.” Ivan took a reflexive step back. “See, it’s actually impossible for me to disobey the rules. I’d eat you now.”
Ivan took another step back, and his foot slipped on the chain. He lost his balance and landed on his ass, and in the next moment Dean was right there, kneeling over him, with a hand on Ivan’s chest - not restraining, just keeping him in place. Ivan gasped for air, of which there was not enough. Dean’s face was too close.
“I’d eat you, but I can’t. However, it appears that I don’t have to grant your wish. What I think we should do is keep on playing, until you guess wrong.”
Ivan tried to scream, to call for Sam, but only a strangled sound escaped. He backed up on all fours, slipping in the mud. Ivan didn’t realize at what point he turned over but he made it into the house somehow, smacking twice against the plexiglas door before it occurred to him to slide it open. He stumbled into the dark room and ran into the hallway, tripping over a pair of shoes on his way. There were too many goddamn doorways, and he couldn’t think which one he needed.
“Sam! Sam!”
“In here!”
Ivan ran into the room which turned out to be the master bedroom, lit by the ugly candles again. Sam was kneeling on the bed, dressed in those leather pants and shirtless, his arms pulled back and cuffed to the headboard behind him. Ivan locked the door and leaned against it, trying to slow down his breathing so that he could hear. It didn’t sound like Dean followed him into the house. He realized that he was shaking. He had always thought that cold sweat was just an expression, but he could feel it now even with the rainwater on his skin, the sick feeling of burning hot on the inside and cold on the outside.
Ivan hurried over to the bed and yanked on the chain of the cuffs. Somehow, he expected them to be fluffy and more symbolic than anything, but they were real handcuffs, the serious stuff. Sam stared at him over his shoulder.
“Where’s the fucking key?”
“Dean has it. Sit down and breathe.”
Ivan did. A brief thought came and went that he just sat down on the bed in a goddamn sex dungeon next to a half-naked man, and he didn’t give a shit. It felt good to sit down. He was uncomfortably aware of the heartbeat in his chest, going too fast.
“Oh man,” he said after he caught his breath, “oh man, your brother, he’s gone batshit.”
“I figured.”
Ivan leaped up to check that the window was closed, then sat back down again, cradling his head in his hands. His leg was shaking, beating an erratic rhythm against the floor, and he slapped a hand down on it to stop it. “It’s fine for you to be so calm, sitting here all doped up. He won’t eat you.”
“There is a difference between being calm and not flipping my shit.” Sam head-butted him out of the blue, making Ivan jump.
“What the hell, man?”
“I’d slap you if I could. Ivan. Focus, so that we could figure this out.” He nodded at the night stand. “There’s booze, if you need it.”
Ivan grabbed the whiskey and swallowed right from the bottle. It hurt in his chest and in his head and brought tears to his eyes, but then it felt better. He took another swig and waited for the pain to go away, for the bit of warmth and calm. He sat back down on the bed.
“Did you get the third one right?” Sam said.
“Yeah. Yeah, I got it and I said my wish loud and clear, but nothing happened.” Ivan felt the panic starting to take over again, and he gripped the mattress and took a few deep breaths. It helped, and he finished, calmer, “And then Dean said that he wanted to eat me anyway and that we were going to play until I lost. But he can’t do that, can he?”
Sam didn’t answer, but the look on his face was enough. Ivan dropped his head into his hands again. “I’m a dead man, aren’t I?”
“You know, maybe not.” Sam shifted back a little to ease the strain on his shoulders. “You still have your wish. Maybe you can stop the game.”
“What, wish for the dragon’s life, like he did?”
Sam winced. “No, dude, that’ll just make you the next dragon - for about twenty seconds, before I rip your throat out.”
Ivan was shaking his head before Sam even finished talking. “I already made a wish, and he just didn’t do his magic. Just like that. He said he didn’t have to.”
“Maybe the well can. It’s the heart of the game, and it controls everything.”
“I’m not going back out there.”
“Maybe you won’t have to,” Sam said. “Just open the window and yell that you wish for the game to be over. It’s worth a shot.”
It was worth a shot, and the whiskey at least got Ivan to stop shaking. He walked to the window and pulled the curtain aside. Dean was sitting on the lid again, completely soaked through, and he turned his head at the movement. Ivan paused, assessing how fast Dean could cover the distance between the well and the window and grab him. Dean was looking straight at him through the sheets of water, waiting. Ivan took a deep breath, threw open the window and yelled at the top of his lungs, louder than he had yelled in a long, long time, “I wish for the game to be over, you well motherfucker! I earned it! Make him do it!”
And as the words left his mouth, he thought, But I already said my wish right by the well, where it could hear me.
Something shifted imperceptibly. A smell of ozone in the air came from nowhere and made his nostrils tickle. In the yard, Dean stood up and took a tentative step forward, stretching his neck. In the room, Sam drew a sharp breath. And Ivan had a terrible feeling all of a sudden. He turned just as the gust of wind threw cold rainwater at his neck and made the candles’ flames jump. Ivan saw the room from that new angle in its whole, with all its shadows and its monstrosity that he had missed before.
Sam doubled up on the bed, his spine curving and his fingers flexing spasmodically. His enormous shadow on the wall twisted its claws and arched its reptilian neck. Its bat-like wings shot up and stretched across the ceiling, and as Sam gasped, his shadow clicked its jaw with the sharpest, longest set of teeth that reminded Ivan of something he saw in a paleontology museum as a child. The monster on the wall arched its back sharper than Sam could, until it was bent impossibly, until it folded itself in half. Its wings collapsed and were gone, its teeth and claws crumpled like burning paper. The shadow shrunk and shrunk, until it was that of a man kneeling on the bed with his hands cuffed behind him.
“Dude,” said Dean’s voice right next to Ivan’s elbow, and he jumped, realizing that Dean had come up to the window and was looking inside. He turned his face up to Ivan’s and grinned - not like a man-eating monster but like a kid that just made something blow up. “It totally worked.”
“Yeah, well,” Sam said into the covers, with his face still pressed against the bed. “Come get me out of the cuffs whenever you feel like it.”
~~~~
The first thing Dean did, right after climbing through the window to liberate Sam, was take the goddamn chain off. Ivan backed up into the corner and was watching from there, looking like he might cry or have a psychotic breakdown. Dean ignored him, which was probably best for the guy’s mental health. He threw the chain out the window as far as he could and went to take a long hot shower, which was number three on his personal list of things to do, once the whole thing was over. To take off the chain was number one. To kiss Sam was number two, but he wanted privacy for that one. He was done with the public performances for a while.
It was a long shower, and it was hot, and it was good. Dean stood under the spray until he felt like his muscles started to thaw, and then he scrubbed his body clean. The soap made the abused skin of his ankle sting. He welcomed it as a reminder of not having to drag the chain around anymore. That chain sounded like a cool idea in theory, worked great in practice, and he was kind of proud of himself for that one, but damn.
When he got out, Sam had already changed into jeans and some old shirt. Dean stopped in the bathroom’s doorway, watching him across the hallway as Sam watched him back silently. Sam looked great, so much like himself again that it made something ache deep inside Dean’s chest.
The house was very quiet around them. Dean said, “Is he gone?”
“Yeah. I offered to drive him but he told me to go fuck myself, so I called him a cab. He says ‘fuck you’, by the way.”
Dean nodded. There was a deep sense of accomplishment in him.
One more thing remained. Dean crossed the hallway quickly and drew Sam into a good long kiss, one to compensate for the past three days when it was tense and awkward as all hell with Ivan always watching.
“You’re getting old,” Sam said. “You used to love showing off.”
“I’m not getting old. I’m aging gracefully.”
“Like cheese.”
Dean flipped him off, stole another kiss and squeezed past him into the kitchen, to get the salt and matches.
The rain was still pouring outside, and small streams ran through the mud from the porch to the acacia’s roots. Hell, when the sky over the desert decided to break in these parts, it wasn’t kidding. The rain lashed at the two abandoned umbrellas and at Ivan’s flip flops stuck in the mud. The iron chain lay across the yard like a snake, with its jaw of an open shackle gnawing on a mouthful of wet brush. It reminded Dean of something he wanted to ask.
“So. Rope and cuffs?”
Sam shook his head. “Yeah, let’s never do that again, not unless you want to pump me full of benzos first. I couldn’t breathe, the first night.”
“Sorry about that.”
“It kept me in the room, so it’s all good.”
Sam had assured him that it was some horrid environmental crime to dump gasoline into groundwater, but by the look of things, the well went dry a long time ago. Dean spent a few days investigating, stopping short of climbing down. Sam objected to that one, said it was a bad idea, and he was probably right. One thing for sure - there was no water down there. There were plenty of other things.
Dean pushed the lid aside. Although the water was long gone, it was still freezing inside, and that unnatural, deathly cold stung at his face. He couldn’t see in the dark, with the moon behind the clouds and the shaft being so deep, but he knew what was down there: ribs and long bones, pelvises and vertebrae and dozens and dozens of skulls with grinning teeth, all sitting on the bed of phalanges and metatarsals and of older skeletons crumbled into dust.
Next to him, Sam stretched out his neck and leaned forward. Dean was about to grab him, but Sam drew back.
As they looked down, the ghosts came out of the walls. They wore modern suits and expensive dresses, and track suits and old-fashioned three pieces, and baggy clothes of poor men. Mostly men, a few women, they all turned up their faces to look. They were crowding each other, standing on each other’s heads, just like their skulls were sitting on others’ skulls.
“Let’s burn it,” Sam said.
Dean overturned a canister of gasoline into the cold mouth of the well and heard it hit the bones far down below and ring out against the collected rainwater. Sam dumped salt in, making the ghosts scatter. But they returned and gathered down there again, staring out of the darkness. Dean lit a book of matches and dropped them into the well.
At first, he didn’t think it was going to catch. They still had two canisters of gas back in the house, and he was contemplating making some Molotov cocktails, when all of a sudden the bones went up in a blaze. A wave of heat rose out of the well’s mouth and made him and Sam take a step back. Down there, the ghosts were going out in showers of sparks that flew up to the sky and hissed in the rain. Dean turned to look at Sam, at his ex-dragon finally back to his normal self. Sam was grinning back at him, and the fire of the burning ghosts lit up his face. He looked like he always did - at four by the campfire in Virginia, at eight by the candlelight when the power was shut off, at different ages in different states, in the cemeteries and by unmarked graves in the woods. It was and had always been the best thing for a cold, wet, miserable day - Sam’s smiling face in the firelight.
Notes