SPN FIC - Bay (Part 1 of 12)
A mysterious message, bearing a single word: BAY. It could be a cry for help, or it could be a trap. Armed with a little information from Bobby, Sam and Dean travel to a tiny town in the New Mexico desert and find themselves surrounded by angry hunters, oddball locals, and an elusive creature that's been slaughtering humans since before The West Was Won.
CHARACTERS: Dean, Sam, Bobby, various OCs
TIMELINE: July 2011, AU after mid-Season 5
RATING: PG
GENRE: Gen
SPOILERS: Nothing after mid-Season 5
LENGTH: Remains to be seen; this part is 4394 words
BAY
By Carol Davis
One
It's just a piece of pressed board, an eighth of an inch thick, cut to size and painted and boxed in a factory somewhere in China.
Sam paid $19.95 for it at a Toys4All, back in the summer of '06.
Sat on a hospital floor with it.
Used it to talk with his brother.
It's been put to use since then, now and again, once in a while: as a snack tray, a prop for windows that won't stay up on their own, a divider between things and other things.
Nobody's ever said it's wrong to use it for anything other than its intended purpose, that it's wrong not to take that piece of pressed board seriously. They don't say that, because the Mystical Talking Board was intended to live out its life as a game.
A toy.
Nothing more than that.
Just a game.
~~~~~
"Hey," Dean said from across the room.
Sam looked up from the trio of books he'd laid open on the little round table, half inclined to dive for shelter between the table and the wall, because if Dean was as bored as he sounded, he was in the mood to throw things. Throwing things, watching them ricochet off some part of Sam's body (most frequently, Sam's head; Ain't my fault you're such an easy target, was Dean's usual response to Sam's cries of dismay or disgust or outright I'm-going-to-kick-your-stupid-ass fury) - that was pure 8‑year-old, Sam thought. Therefore, pure Dean. Paper cups, vegetables (Dean was an expert at pinging peas or corn kernels off the palm of his hand), balls of every conceivable size and density.
Nothing quite like a golf ball to the temple to get somebody's attention.
"What?" Sam sighed.
"We can get rid of this, right?"
It was inventory time, Dean had decided, a process that involved his unloading the contents of the Impala's trunk into their motel room, sorting it into categories, cleaning what needed to be cleaned, and, finally, loading it all back into the trunk, in exactly the same mildly-ordered chaos it had all been in in the first place.
All of it - because that was pure Dean, as well - was currently piled on Sam's bed.
"Whatever," Sam said. Then he took note of what Dean was holding. "No," he said firmly. "Not that. We've been through this."
"It's all beat to shit."
"You beat it all to shit. I keep telling you to leave it alone."
"I'll buy you another one," Dean offered, in the tone that meant he'd decided Sam was being a princess.
"I want that one."
"Jesus. Dude. Come on."
Rankled, Sam pushed up out of his chair, took the three steps necessary to bring him within grabbing distance of his brother and pulled his Mystical Talking Board out of Dean's hands. He stopped short of clutching it to his chest, settled for letting it dangle from a firm grip, wary of Dean making a lunge to grab it back.
"It's a friggin' piece of junk, Sam."
Five years, Sam thought: five years since he'd sat cross-legged on the cold linoleum floor of a hospital room with this friggin' piece of junk, on the day before they lost Dad.
He'd expected it to do nothing, expected it to be a useless party game in search of a party.
"Bela," he said.
"What?"
"Bela used these all the time. To talk to the spirit world."
That made Dean back off a bit. They went months, usually, without making any mention of Bela Talbot (the late and not terribly lamented Bela Talbot), but Sam knew better than to believe Dean never thought about her. Sam himself had moments of grief for the kid Bela had once been, well-seasoned with annoyance for the adult she'd become, the one who'd stolen from them, toyed with them, tormented them - and, hell, shot them.
Shot him, at least.
"We ain't Bela," Dean pointed out.
"Still," Sam said, and sat back down, propping the board against the wall in a spot Dean couldn't reach without crawling under the table.
He could see Dean's point of view, could certainly understand that to Dean, the board was probably a reminder of being almost-dead. Of Dad dying. Of pain and fear and loss, of his car being wrecked, of losing what little they'd thought they had.
Sam got all that.
But to him, the board was a tangible reminder that, caught up in a years-long nightmare that had only barely gotten underway on that summer day back in 2006, he had placed his faith in something.
And he had found his brother.
"Can you get all that crap off my bed sometime in the next couple of hours?" he said to Dean, who was standing by the bed with his arms clamped across his chest, biceps gripped in his hands, feet spread, face set into a glower that would probably terrify children and small animals. "I'd kind of like to get some sleep. If that works for you."
"Dude."
"I told you, man. We're keeping the board. I'll put it someplace you can't see it, but we're keeping it."
"You don't -"
"I do."
"You don't even know what you're agreeing to."
"Yeah. I kind of do."
Sam went back to his research, tracing lines of old Latin with the tip of a finger, stopping to make a note, flip to a new page in one of the books, close his eyes to call back a picture of something he'd seen before, maybe read, maybe heard from Bobby, or Dad, or Dean. Across the room Dean reluctantly went back to his inventory, sorting weapons and ammo, cleaning a blade, checking the contents of a hex bag, dividing his clothing into piles: sort of clean, nowhere near clean.
"Look, man," Sam said after a while.
Dean glanced at him. Twitched a shoulder. Said, "Forget it."
"No, man, look."
"It's just a stupid board."
"It's more than that. Okay? Really. It's more than that."
When all that crap was stowed in the trunk, it didn't seem like much. Their whole lives, jammed into the trunk of an old Impala.
In here, laid out on the bed?
(And the floor, and the dresser top, and the long counter outside the bathroom?)
It still didn't seem like much.
"You don't even have the thing," Dean challenged.
"What thing?"
"The thing. You know."
"The planchette? Do so. It's in my duffel."
"It's in your duffel," Dean echoed. "What the hell for?"
"So I won't lose it."
"For cryin' out loud, Sam."
Sighing, Sam left his chair again and wandered through the room, considering all the things his brother had laid out for examination as if he were shopping at a very unusual yard sale, something that offered machetes and dream catchers and sawed-offs instead of battered toys and old paperback novels.
At the end of it all, he looked at Dean.
"We can get rid of it if you want," he said quietly. "If it bugs you that much."
"It doesn't 'bug me'," Dean complained. "It's a piece of busted-up junk. Takes up room in my car."
"Fine. We can -"
"Forget it."
And Dean turned away. Went back to his sorting. Sam watched him for a minute - watched his shoulders relax, his movements become more casual. "Thanks, man," Sam said as Dean began to roll up his semi-clean t-shirts preparatory to jamming them back inside his duffel.
"Whatever. I got cassettes, you got -"
You, Sam thought, and snorted, because he'd heard enough old rock-n-roll on the radio over the years that the image of Sonny and Cher popped immediately into his head, and he was tired enough that he started to laugh, then full-on guffaw, until there were tears dribbling down his face and snot trickling out of his nose. It took a good long while - and a couple of long swipes of the back of his hand to clear the tears and the snot away - for him to quiet back down.
When that finally happened, he said, "Lemme help you with that stuff."
Dean bounced a hex bag off Sam's head.
~~~~~
Noise in the middle of the night was nothing unusual. The rooms they stayed in were seldom quiet; clanking plumbing and wheezing AC units were pretty much a norm, as was a blaring TV in a neighboring room, or the sound of somebody (or a couple of somebodies) arriving home drunk. A near-silent room was so unusual that Sam found it difficult to sleep in one.
Noise seldom woke him up.
The absence of it almost always did.
He lay in bed for a couple of minutes, staring up at the dirty popcorn ceiling in the dim, flickering light from the parking lot that the drapes at the room's single window weren't thick enough to block. The room wasn't completely silent; Dean was snoring softly in the other bed, and he could hear a rhythmic thumping he decided was the ice machine in the alcove opposite their door. A couple of footsteps creaked overhead, then stopped.
Nothing.
Then there was something else: a light scratching sound, something rubbing, scuffing.
What -?
In the room. Definitely in the room.
Rats? Okay, the place wasn't a Marriott, but he'd thought it was cleaner than that. A mouse, maybe, attracted by the remains of his and Dean's dinner.
Still…
If someone had come in, if anyone human (or possessing a human) had managed to get into the room, they weren't standing up. Sam could see all of the room without moving his head and saw no one. True, they might be in the bathroom, but that didn't seem likely. There was no window in there, no way to get in from outside.
He sat up slowly but efficiently, his right hand curled around the gun he'd pulled out from beneath his pillow. When he saw nothing out of the ordinary from that position he slid his legs out from under the covers and got out of bed, poised and ready to fight.
Jerk. You're gonna…what? Blow a mouse to Kingdom Come?
The almost-empty pizza box lay where they'd left it, on top of the low dresser opposite the beds. A step in that direction told him the scraps of crust they'd left in the box weren't under attack, nor were the beer bottles.
He stopped. Froze in place. Listened.
Yes. There.
What the hell?
"Dean," he said, and when Dean didn't respond, "DEAN."
The latter brought his brother to a sit, gun in hand, as Sam had done, wide awake, zero to sixty in one-point-four seconds. He said nothing, questioned Sam silently, slipped out of bed and swept a look around before Sam could answer.
Sam pointed to the small, round table, where he'd left his little stack of old books and his notes.
And the Mystical Talking Board, with its planchette, dug out of Sam's duffel so Dean could see that yes, he did still have it.
"Stop doing that," Dean hissed.
"Stop what? I'm not doing anything."
"Then what the shit, Sam."
A few feet away from them, completely out of reach of anyone human, the planchette was sliding across the surface of the board.
"Yeah," Sam said. "That was kinda my reaction, too."
He and Dean moved closer, half a step at a time, near enough to see the board, to watch the little plastic triangle scrape back and forth.
"A, Y, B," Dean read.
Then another A. Another Y.
Another B.
The planchette - or whatever was guiding it - seemed to be encouraged enough by their presence to pick up its pace considerably. It zipped back and forth across the board at a frenetic pace, choosing the same three letters over and over: A-Y-B-A-Y-B-A-Y-B-AYBAYBAYBAYBAY.
Then it stopped.
"Not A-Y-B," Sam pointed out. "B-A-Y."
The Winchesters stood still and silent for a minute, each of them expecting the planchette to start moving again. When it didn't, they sat down on the ends of their respective beds, their attention still on the board, guns propped against a knee.
"Bay," Dean said finally. "There's no bay near here."
"No body of water of any kind."
"Might be a creek. Or a pond, or something."
"But no bay."
"Maybe it can't spell. Maybe it meant 'baby'."
Sam pondered that for a moment, then laid his gun down on the bed, went over to the chair he'd been using a few hours ago and sat down, his butt hitting the seat and his fingertips hitting the planchette almost simultaneously.
"Wait, now," Dean said sharply. "What're you doing?"
"I'm gonna see if it's got anything else to say."
"That's not -"
"You have a better idea?"
"Yeah. I'm thinkin' we could go back to bed."
Sam raised an eyebrow at that, then turned his attention back to the board. Let his touch go loose and his mind go close to empty.
"Sam," Dean said.
"Be quiet."
"If this goes south, man, I'm gonna -"
The planchette quivered a couple of times, nothing more than that. Come on, Sam encouraged it silently. Say what you need to say.
It quivered once more under his touch, then, as if it had rallied just enough strength for one last spurt of communication, slid slowly across the board to the B, landing there off-center, the letter only half visible through the planchette's tiny plastic window.
Then it lay still.
"Bay B," Dean said, leaning in for a better look. "Baby. Told ya."
"Or it could have been trying to spell 'bay' again."
"What are the damn odds?" Dean sighed as he sank back down onto the end of his bed and tapped the barrel of his gun idly against his leg. "We pick a place to crash for a couple days that's got decent cable and a hot tub that doesn't look like the friggin' Okefenokee Swamp, and we end up with this. How do we do that? Huh? How do we pick the only motel on the whole freakin' I-15 that's haunted?"
"Maybe it's not."
"Maybe it's not? Okay, boy genius. It's not. What moved that thing? Microwaves from space?"
"I don't know."
"But we're going with 'definitely not haunted'."
"I don't know what we're going with, Dean," Sam groaned. "We can talk to the desk clerk in the morning."
"And in the meantime?"
They both looked long and hard at the Mystical Talking Board.
"Told you we should've pitched that thing out," Dean said.
~~~~~
Sam woke again a little after seven in the morning - after a good solid two and a half hours of sleep - to find no sign of his brother other than a scribbled note bearing a single word: COFFEE. Or maybe, COFFIN. Or, Sam thought, shoving a hand through his hair as he pondered the now-silent Mystical Board, COLUMBIA.
CONIFER.
COUNTY.
COLORADO.
He was still pondering, sleepy-eyed, when Dean came rattling back in, bearing twin brown-and-white foam cups, a white bakery bag clamped between his teeth. How he'd managed to get the door unlocked was a mystery; he had to hip it shut, and Sam grimaced at the crash it made when it connected with the jamb.
"Dude," Sam winced. "Early."
"Early, hell," Dean said around his mouthful of paper bag, and shuffled over to the bed so he could drop it without spilling the coffee. "Best part of the day's already over with. Got coffee cake," and he nodded at the bag. "Smells like heaven."
Sam accepted one of the cups gratefully and took a long pull of the coffee before he said anything more. "You're…chipper."
"Also awesome."
Which implied that Dean had done more on his excursion than fetch breakfast. "You talked to the desk clerk?"
"I did."
"And what did she say?"
Dean's mouth worked a little in response to Sam's emphasis on the "she," but he let the gibe go by in favor of ferreting a big hunk of coffee cake out of the bag and shoving half of it into his mouth. "Nobody died," he said around the cake, chewing it noisily and messily - for no other reason, Sam knew, than to push Sam's buttons. "Cops come now and then. Couple drug situations. Some drunk and disorderlies. An aggravated assault, a few months ago - wife trailed her husband here, caught him with his secretary, and beat the bejesus out of both of 'em with a plastic baseball bat. Trashed the room pretty good too. But nobody died. Near as anybody knows - I talked to a couple of the maids too - there hasn't even been an unfortunate heart attack. Zip. Zilch."
"Did you -"
"Nobody knows what 'bay' means. Closest thing to it in town is the Bayou Café, but nobody's ever died on the premises there either."
"According to your friend the desk clerk?"
"Maureen."
"Bayou Café?" Sam said. "We're like…twelve hundred miles from the bayou."
Dean heaved a shrug and took a big gulp of his coffee. "There's a North Country Auto Supply, too. What do you want me to say?"
"That board's never been active before, Dean. There's got to be something going on."
"Maybe the spook can't connect to his Facebook page."
"I'm serious, man."
"And you figure I'm not? I've been out trying to dig up some information for an hour while you drooled on your pillow."
Sam heard that, but his attention was on the Mystical Talking Board and its planchette, now sitting still and silent on the table with his books and notes.
"Yeah," he said after a minute.
"Yeah, what?"
"I figure you're serious. And I think it" - he nodded at the board - "is, too."
~~~~~
It was one of the fine points of 21st century society, Dean had figured a while back, that most people, when faced with someone who was asking too many odd questions, would simply write that someone off as being a weirdo. A nutball. An obsessive.
They'd turn the situation into an anecdote, more than likely - would complain about it to family and co-workers (and their Facebook friends) - but no more than that.
They definitely wouldn't call the cops.
Particularly not if the weirdo said he was a cop.
"So nobody's ever died here?" Dean asked the kid who'd just finished dumping a load of lunchtime trash into the barrels behind the Bayou Café.
"I didn't say nobody."
"Well, then."
"People die, man. You know. You get old. Or shit happens. Kid in my class died from an asthma attack."
"When was this?"
"I don't know. Five or six years ago. Why?"
"Was it sudden?"
"I don't know. How should I know? He was in school one day, and the next day he wasn't."
"So it was -"
"I guess," the kid blurted.
"Do you remember his name?"
The kid squinted hard. The sun was in his face, but Dean knew better than to think the kid's narrowed expression came entirely from that. "Simpson," the kid said after a second. "Gary Simpson."
"Got an address?"
"They moved."
"His family doesn't live here any more?"
"Yeah," the kid replied, exasperated. "That's usually what 'moved' means." There was more; obviously, the kid had had enough of this and wanted to get back to work, if for no other reason than to avoid a chewing-out from his boss, but he was cowed enough by the badge Dean had flashed at him a few minutes before to keep most of his frustration in check. He took a couple of deep breaths, glanced at the trash cans, at the dented Service Entrance sign beside the back door, at a squashed paper cup that hadn't made it into the trash. "Look, okay?" he said then, and sounded genuinely perplexed. "If you tell me what's going on, I can try to help you out. But these random questions - I don't get it, okay?"
"Okay," Dean told him.
"So -?"
"We got one clue. The word 'bay' mean anything to you?"
"There's no bay around here. We're landlocked, man. Bunch of little lakes is all we got. Little Salt's the closest, and that's dry most of the time."
"It mean anything other than a body of water?"
"No, man. I - no."
Dean stood there for a moment, watching the kid squint at him in the afternoon heat, then dropped his pen and notebook into the pocket of his suit coat and offered the kid a reasonably amiable smile.
"That it?" the kid asked him.
"No," Dean said. "But you can head on back to the grindstone."
He walked away from the little restaurant knowing the kid was watching him, that the kid was thinking What the hell?? and What a freak. Maybe a little bit of What'd I do? I didn't do nothin', when of course he'd probably done a little of this and a little of that: probably had some weed stashed in his room, had probably boosted some snacks from the local mini-mart just to prove he wasn't a pussy, stayed out too late, made some noise, ran a stop sign here and there.
Normal, Dean thought, and sighed.
He found Sam a couple of blocks down the street, coming out of a small gift shop whose window advertised Genuine Native American Souvenirs - Turquoise - Cold Drinks. "Anything?" he asked, though he knew from Sam's expression what the answer would be.
"Great Salt Lake's got a bay," Sam said mildly. "And there's a strip club called The Bay in Salt Lake City."
"So our ghost is interested in strippers?"
"Or he died there."
"And he's complaining about it down here? He's got a hell of a broadcast range. Salt Lake's what, two hundred miles?"
"We could try it."
"Not until we finish here."
"You don't want to give up the great cable and the hot tub?"
Dean took a long, silent look around. From where they were standing, he could see most of the town: one of a thousand similar places he'd visited over the years, where the excitement was pretty much limited to new rollbacks at the local Walmart and the economy lived or died on tourism, such as that was. Some years back he'd shared a beer with a man who hunted on both sides of the line: the supernatural, to help push back the spread of evil, and rabbit and deer so he could feed his kids. He didn't have a regular job, he said, because there wasn't one to be had.
The scenery here was spectacular: red rock hills, forested with evergreen, clear blue sky. People came here for that, and not much else; all the town was was a half-mile spill of houses and one- or two-story commercial buildings, a few minutes' drive from the path from Salt Lake to Vegas.
It was a place to stay overnight.
A place to buy some Genuine Native American Souvenirs.
Not much else, unless you lived here.
"Yeah," Dean said quietly. "I'm worried about the cable."
~~~~~
After a mostly-ignored dinner of subs and Cokes, they Googled the word "bay" and came up with three hundred and fifty million results.
They pondered eBay, and director Michael Bay. Bay County in Florida and Michigan. Bay College, the Mandalay Bay Hotel, New York Mets left fielder Jason Bay, British Airways (stock exchange code-named BAY), the Save the Bay Foundation, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bodega Bay, Glacier Bay, and Old Bay seafood seasoning.
Whitepages.com provided a list of several thousand people named Bay.
"Friggin' thing couldn't be more specific?" Dean complained.
"You could ask it," Sam replied.
"I'm not touching that thing."
"Why?"
It was a reasonable question. It was a perfectly reasonable question. It was so reasonable that Dean drained his bottle of Coke, let the soda churn around in his stomach for a minute, then shifted his position a little and let out a belch.
"You know what, man?" Sam said.
Dean waved him off.
"So you're gonna ask it?"
Yeah. Reasonable.
The board remained where they had left it, sitting alongside Sam's abandoned research. The past five years, as Dean had pointed out the night before, hadn't been kind to it; its painted surface was scuffed and scratched, and one of the corners had broken off. A wrinkle ran from top right to bottom left because it had been flexed a little too much.
Damn thing was just a…thing. Beat up, begging to be shitcanned.
Still, it took a minute of self-persuasion for Dean to sit down at the table and look at the board up close.
"Well?" Sam prompted.
Dean had touched it plenty of times. Had eaten his dinner off of it now and then.
"I'll do it," Sam said.
"No," Dean told him.
He expected to feel something when he lay his fingers on top of the planchette. A tingle, a jolt of static, something. But that piece of plastic was exactly what it looked like: a piece of plastic. Nothing mystical.
"Gonna need a little help here," he said to the planchette.
Plastic.
"We'll buy in," he went on. "'Cause that's - you know, that's what we do. You need some help movin' on into the light? You need some of that unfinished business taken care of? That's cool. We're good with that. But - 'bay'? Not really giving us what we need."
He sat there, hand resting lightly on the planchette.
"Try both hands," Sam suggested.
"Try shuttin' your cakehole," Dean told him. "I got this under control."
He tried using both hands. Tried letting his arms go a little slack, so if the planchette started to move, it would have less trouble dragging his hands along with it. He tried clearing his mind, in case whoever was Over There In The Spirit World had a problem with negativity.
The thing just sat there.
"Screw this," he sputtered. "I'm turnin' on the TV."
"Fine. I'll -" Sam said, but he didn't.
They looked up old news stories involving the word "bay" and came up with earthquakes and toxic spills and professional athletes switching teams, detainees protesting at Gitmo, jellyfish studies and wildfires and thunderstorm forecasts.
None of it was any help at all.
Nothing was any help at all.
Not until a little after two in the morning, when - without an assist from Dean, or Sam - the planchette began a slow but determined slide across the battered surface of the Mystical Talking Board and centered itself over the letter B.
Part 2…