Dark Shadows - Metaphysical Gravity - Ch. 19 - A Chuck Shurley Novella
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Ben’s come down with the chicken pox and Dean itches just looking at him.
“Dude, I know,” says Ben grimly at Dean’s expression.
“You look like you got stung by a thousand bees and dunked in Pepto-bismal.”
“It’s calamity lotion.”
“Calamine.”
“Yeah, and it’s s’posed to help with the itching but that’s bull shit.”
Dean raises his eyebrows at Ben’s language.
“Well it is.”
“Ben Collins don’t you dare start scratching,” Pamela says from the doorway. “Dean can only stay for ten minutes.”
“Aw, c’mon, I don’t even feel sick!”
“But you are sick,” Pamela counters and then turns her sharp eyes on Dean. “Ten minutes, Dean.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Dean nods. He waits for Pam to leave, craning his neck out a little to ensure she’s gone and then slides the new Nintendo DS game out from his pocket and flips to Ben on the bed.
“Is that the new Pokemon?” Ben’s eyes light up.
“Sure is.” He points a finger at Ben. “Don’t get me in trouble by playing it too much. When Pam says to rest, it’s time to rest. Or I’ll take it back.”
Ben nods like he’ll never betray Dean’s trust and won’t stay up an hour past his bedtime playing video games.
For the first time in days, Dean smiles and it feels real.
“So, chicken pox, huh?”
Ben makes a face. “Yeah, I probably got it from Jolene who got it from her little brother who got it at daycare. Pam’s pissed because I guess Jolene’s mum knew she was sick but sent her to school anyway and now there’s like, a million of us sick.”
“Well, couple days at home, daytime cartoons, video games,” Dean shrugs. “Can’t be so bad.”
“Dude, it itches. Everywhere.”
Dean nods.
“No, Dean, everywhere.” He turns his large eyes up toward Dean meaningfully.
“Well,” Dean drawls, trying to hide his grin. “I’m sure you’ll live.”
Ben gives a dramatic sigh. “I can’t even go outside to the forest. I’m not really sick-sick, I just itch. And I’m kinda tired, but that’s it. And I barfed once. And Pam keeps putting the pink stuff on me. And she won’t let me outside.”
“You’ll be better soon.”
Another disgusted sigh. “But that’ll take forever. Like maybe even days. And Sarah and I were just getting to the good part in Swiss Family Robinson.”
Dean stills slightly at the mention of Sarah, remembering Ben’s ghastly tale told to him by the young spirit about a witch named Ruby. “So, uh, you still hang out with her?”
“Yeah,” Ben shrugs, ripping into the packaging of his new game. “She’s pretty cool.”
“She, uh, ever tell you any more stories?” He tries to keep his tone casual.
“She tells me stuff all the time.”
“No, I, um, mean like the ones about… Ruby.” It’s strange but he can’t even say her name without getting a slight chill and feeling the muscles of his neck tense up.
“Oh, no, just that one.”
“What other kinds of stories does she tell you?”
Again Ben shrugs. “I dunno. Just stuff about horses and Mr. Collins.”
Dean’s heart stills. “You mean Cas? Er, Castiel? That Mr. Collins?”
Ben rolls his eyes. “Duh. He’s her brother.” Ben finally frees the tiny game booklet from its packaging and starts to devour it.
“What?” Dean stutters.
“What what?” Ben asks looking up from his book to Dean.
“Is Sarah Castiel’s sister?”
“That’s what I said,” Ben replies as though it were obvious.
“What kind of stories does she tell about him?”
“I dunno. He would take her horse riding. Or shopping in town sometimes. She’s got a sister too, Abigail, but I don’t know much about her ‘cept she looks a lot like Anna. And just that she missed him and wished she could go see him. That’s why I had to pass that message along that day. You remember? When you were at Mr. Collins kitchen real early and then we had pie.”
Dean has tried very hard not to remember anything about Castiel, and certainly not that warm, easy morning after his first night at Collinwood. “Right,” he finally manages. “I remember.”
“So, yeah. She’s tried to see him a bunch of times, but it doesn’t work. So I gave that message to Mr. Collins. Did it exactly right too.”
“Uh, do you remember what it was?” Dean asks.
Ben wrinkles his brow. “Dude, that was like, forever ago.”
Dean’s back to his fake smile. “Right, of course.” But Dean does remember snatches of what Ben said. He remembers thinking it was so bizarre, so out of place, he’d been so worried about the boy.
… No one can claim to have made a deal with the devil … Do not fear the past. Those who own it do not repeat it.
“Are you getting sick too?”
Dean jerks slightly at Ben’s voice pulling him out of his reverie. “What?”
“You look like you’re gonna ralph. Don’t do it on the bed. Pam’ll kill you. She just changed these sheets.”
“No, I’m not gonna be sick, I just, uh, got a lot on my mind, that’s all.”
Ben gives him that look children give adults when they think they’re full of shit.
Pam’s strong voice carries up the stairs. “That’s ten, Winchester, you can show yourself out.”
Ben’s groan of disgust must carry back downstairs because Pam retorts, “I don’t care, mister, you’re sick.” There’s a pause while Ben pleads wordlessly with his eyeballs for Dean to stay.
“Sorry, buddy,” Dean says patting Ben’s blanket covered knee. “How ‘bout I come back in a few days when you’re feeling better and we have a video game marathon?”
“Pokemon?”
Dean winces. “How about Mario Brothers?”
“That game is so old.”
“Humor an old man.”
A large overdramatic sigh of acquiescence is pulled out of the small boy. “‘Kay.”
Dean leaves just as Ben inserts the new game cartridge into his player and happily settles down further into bed to start playing video games. He pulls Ben’s bedroom door shut quietly behind him, satisfied that Ben is fine and just down for the count for a few days.
“Hello, Mr. Winchester.”
He spins around startled by the small voice and finds a young girl standing in front of him.
Even without all the discussion of her before, he recognizes the family resemblance in those bright blue eyes.
“Hello, Sarah.”
She smiles and it’s achingly familiar as well. It should completely freak him out, standing before a ghost. He should be more surprised, more stunned, more… something. But at this point, he can only think, She looks like him. Like a tiny, pretty, girlish version of him.
“My brother misses you.”
“Aren’t you a little-” dead “- young to be interfering?”
Another smile but this one is slightly sad. “If I could, I would visit him,” she says, ignoring his comment.
“Why don’t you?”
She looks down the upstairs hallway toward the window in the staircase, the window that faces Collinwood. “I have tried. He will not see me.”
“Will not?” Dean questions her choice of words.
Sarah turns back to face Dean. “You haven’t read Mr. Shurley’s book.”
He can feel himself pale slightly. “How did you-?”
“You should read Mr. Shurley’s book,” she cuts him off.
“Look,” he begins, feeling a little annoyed he has to explain this at all, let alone to a dead girl, who’s barely ten at that. “It’s complicated.”
She gives him the same look that Ben did moments earlier.
Like he’s full of shit.
“Jesus, is everyone meddling in my life now?” he mutters.
“It wasn’t his fault. She lied to him, you know.”
“Ruby,” Dean whispers.
Sarah nods solemnly. “The witch.”
Dean can’t take his eyes off the small girl, the wheels of his mind spinning. He asks the questions even though he already knows the answers. “Was that a true story, Sarah? The one you told Ben?”
“You should read Mr. Shurley’s book,” she repeats.
Although he knows the answer to this question too, he feels compelled to ask it.
“Why?”
She’s gone.
***
Dean stops off at the pub and to say he’s disappointed to find out that they don’t need him and that Ash is more than happy to kick him out is an understatement. He tries to shoehorn Ash out of the kitchen, cajoling, smiling and then turning serious. He tells Ash he can go home, Dean will even pay him for the evening. He tells Ash he’ll buy him a new computer and Ash laughs and says he never bought pre-manufactured.
He threatens to cut off Ash’s mullet.
Ash chases him out of the kitchen with the mop.
He tries to get Ava on his side, asking her to go into the kitchen and spill some hot chicken stock on Ash so he’ll have to go home.
“Seriously?” she asks, her eyes disbelieving. “Go home, Dean.”
“C’mon Ava, help a guy out.”
“Dean, you already work like sixty hours a week here. You’re the one who decided that everyone needs a break from too many night shifts or we all start looking like vampires.”
He goes still at the word but Ava doesn’t notice.
“Go home, Dean,” she repeats, pushing ineffectually at his shoulders, her small frame no match for his bulk. “Go home before you annoy Ash and he decides to hack your back accounts.”
“And I’ll buy all the porn I want,” Ash hollers from the kitchen.
Ava raises her eyebrows at Dean. “He’ll do it and you’ll probably end up wanted in, like, fourteen states knowing his taste in stuff.”
“I’m a connoisseur!” Ash yells.
“You’re weird,” Ava shouts back through the closed door. She turns back to Dean. “Look, I know things have been… tough,” she begins.
“Christ, if one more person butts into my personal life…”
“You know, I couldn’t butt in if you weren’t here,” she says with a smile.
He grumbles about mutiny and treason and fired employees as she pushes him toward the door.
“Yeah, yeah, we’re all fired. Again. Didja hear that Ash, we’re fired!”
“Again?”
Ava finally has him through the door. “Now, you’re looking a little peaked lately so I already talked to Ash and he’s gonna close for the rest of the week.”
He opens his mouth to protest but she stops him.
“Don’t let the door hit you,” she calls and pushes it shut in his face.
Kicked out of his own restaurant, he grouses the entire drive home. Fine. He’ll just have another spectacular evening at home. Just him and the Steven Segal Marathon tonight. Tomorrow it’ll be Chuck Norris and if they won’t let him back in the pub by then he’ll move on to Stallone.
He parks the Impala diagonal in the driveway, just because he can and because if Sam does decide to come home it will be annoying as fuck that Dean’s taken up all the space.
Although Sam probably won’t come home. He’s too busy staying a Collinwood.
With Castiel.
He kicks his shoes off, not even wincing when they leave black marks on the wall where they hit. He grabs a beer from the fridge and flops down on the sofa, flicking on the TV. Two fucking hours until the Segal Marathon starts. Fuckers. He flips through the digital cable guide and the fact that there’s absolutely nothing on infuriates him. The best he can come up with is Iron Chef, which he used to like until that one episode with the giant eel (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7m2wSHmmOhs) and that was it. No more Iron Chef ever.
Something’s poking in his back and he shifts, reaching behind him to yank out the offending item.
Chuck’s manuscript, still carefully bull-clipped together, although now the first several pages are curled at one corner and folding in. He tosses it down on the floor. He should burn the fucker. Honestly. He takes a swig from his beer.
His eyes slide sideways and catch the title. The Inamorato and the Malediction - a novella by Carver Edlund
Huh. He wouldn’t have figured Chuck as a ‘big word’ kind of guy. But then again, he is a writer, so he probably likes to use big words.
It’s just a stupid story. Chuck’s not a prophet. Pffft. No such thing. So really, it’s ridiculous of Dean to not read the manuscript. Not reading it is like decided it really is true. Avoiding it is like saying it really would have power over him.
And it wouldn’t.
It doesn’t.
He puts his beer down and picks up the novella, flipping through the pages. It’s not very long. Dean could probably knock it out in a couple hours and then toss it in the trash. Next time he sees Chuck he’ll tell him, Yeah, I read your book. And? And nothing. Shrug. Nothing at all.
He pulls the bull-clip off and flips the cover page over. All-righty. Page one.
It was the year of our Lord, seventeen hundred and ninety-six and Collinsport, Maine still remembered the Declaration of Independence when the country was divided into Patriots and Loyalists; those who supported the revolution and those who did not. Americans and Tories. But this is not a tale of a colony uprising against a distant master. It is not the story of political upheaval and the subsequent birth of a nation.
This is a story of how far two people will go in the name of love; both of them converging at the same point in horror. One driven by madness and desire and the other by grief and despair. At that time in Collinsport, while it was easy to tell a Whig from a Tory, it was not as easy to distinguish evil living among the good people of Collinsport, and that evil wore a lovely face...
Next Chapter - 20 - Inhumation
Ben’s come down with the chicken pox and Dean itches just looking at him.
“Dude, I know,” says Ben grimly at Dean’s expression.
“You look like you got stung by a thousand bees and dunked in Pepto-bismal.”
“It’s calamity lotion.”
“Calamine.”
“Yeah, and it’s s’posed to help with the itching but that’s bull shit.”
Dean raises his eyebrows at Ben’s language.
“Well it is.”
“Ben Collins don’t you dare start scratching,” Pamela says from the doorway. “Dean can only stay for ten minutes.”
“Aw, c’mon, I don’t even feel sick!”
“But you are sick,” Pamela counters and then turns her sharp eyes on Dean. “Ten minutes, Dean.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Dean nods. He waits for Pam to leave, craning his neck out a little to ensure she’s gone and then slides the new Nintendo DS game out from his pocket and flips to Ben on the bed.
“Is that the new Pokemon?” Ben’s eyes light up.
“Sure is.” He points a finger at Ben. “Don’t get me in trouble by playing it too much. When Pam says to rest, it’s time to rest. Or I’ll take it back.”
Ben nods like he’ll never betray Dean’s trust and won’t stay up an hour past his bedtime playing video games.
For the first time in days, Dean smiles and it feels real.
“So, chicken pox, huh?”
Ben makes a face. “Yeah, I probably got it from Jolene who got it from her little brother who got it at daycare. Pam’s pissed because I guess Jolene’s mum knew she was sick but sent her to school anyway and now there’s like, a million of us sick.”
“Well, couple days at home, daytime cartoons, video games,” Dean shrugs. “Can’t be so bad.”
“Dude, it itches. Everywhere.”
Dean nods.
“No, Dean, everywhere.” He turns his large eyes up toward Dean meaningfully.
“Well,” Dean drawls, trying to hide his grin. “I’m sure you’ll live.”
Ben gives a dramatic sigh. “I can’t even go outside to the forest. I’m not really sick-sick, I just itch. And I’m kinda tired, but that’s it. And I barfed once. And Pam keeps putting the pink stuff on me. And she won’t let me outside.”
“You’ll be better soon.”
Another disgusted sigh. “But that’ll take forever. Like maybe even days. And Sarah and I were just getting to the good part in Swiss Family Robinson.”
Dean stills slightly at the mention of Sarah, remembering Ben’s ghastly tale told to him by the young spirit about a witch named Ruby. “So, uh, you still hang out with her?”
“Yeah,” Ben shrugs, ripping into the packaging of his new game. “She’s pretty cool.”
“She, uh, ever tell you any more stories?” He tries to keep his tone casual.
“She tells me stuff all the time.”
“No, I, um, mean like the ones about… Ruby.” It’s strange but he can’t even say her name without getting a slight chill and feeling the muscles of his neck tense up.
“Oh, no, just that one.”
“What other kinds of stories does she tell you?”
Again Ben shrugs. “I dunno. Just stuff about horses and Mr. Collins.”
Dean’s heart stills. “You mean Cas? Er, Castiel? That Mr. Collins?”
Ben rolls his eyes. “Duh. He’s her brother.” Ben finally frees the tiny game booklet from its packaging and starts to devour it.
“What?” Dean stutters.
“What what?” Ben asks looking up from his book to Dean.
“Is Sarah Castiel’s sister?”
“That’s what I said,” Ben replies as though it were obvious.
“What kind of stories does she tell about him?”
“I dunno. He would take her horse riding. Or shopping in town sometimes. She’s got a sister too, Abigail, but I don’t know much about her ‘cept she looks a lot like Anna. And just that she missed him and wished she could go see him. That’s why I had to pass that message along that day. You remember? When you were at Mr. Collins kitchen real early and then we had pie.”
Dean has tried very hard not to remember anything about Castiel, and certainly not that warm, easy morning after his first night at Collinwood. “Right,” he finally manages. “I remember.”
“So, yeah. She’s tried to see him a bunch of times, but it doesn’t work. So I gave that message to Mr. Collins. Did it exactly right too.”
“Uh, do you remember what it was?” Dean asks.
Ben wrinkles his brow. “Dude, that was like, forever ago.”
Dean’s back to his fake smile. “Right, of course.” But Dean does remember snatches of what Ben said. He remembers thinking it was so bizarre, so out of place, he’d been so worried about the boy.
… No one can claim to have made a deal with the devil … Do not fear the past. Those who own it do not repeat it.
“Are you getting sick too?”
Dean jerks slightly at Ben’s voice pulling him out of his reverie. “What?”
“You look like you’re gonna ralph. Don’t do it on the bed. Pam’ll kill you. She just changed these sheets.”
“No, I’m not gonna be sick, I just, uh, got a lot on my mind, that’s all.”
Ben gives him that look children give adults when they think they’re full of shit.
Pam’s strong voice carries up the stairs. “That’s ten, Winchester, you can show yourself out.”
Ben’s groan of disgust must carry back downstairs because Pam retorts, “I don’t care, mister, you’re sick.” There’s a pause while Ben pleads wordlessly with his eyeballs for Dean to stay.
“Sorry, buddy,” Dean says patting Ben’s blanket covered knee. “How ‘bout I come back in a few days when you’re feeling better and we have a video game marathon?”
“Pokemon?”
Dean winces. “How about Mario Brothers?”
“That game is so old.”
“Humor an old man.”
A large overdramatic sigh of acquiescence is pulled out of the small boy. “‘Kay.”
Dean leaves just as Ben inserts the new game cartridge into his player and happily settles down further into bed to start playing video games. He pulls Ben’s bedroom door shut quietly behind him, satisfied that Ben is fine and just down for the count for a few days.
“Hello, Mr. Winchester.”
He spins around startled by the small voice and finds a young girl standing in front of him.
Even without all the discussion of her before, he recognizes the family resemblance in those bright blue eyes.
“Hello, Sarah.”
She smiles and it’s achingly familiar as well. It should completely freak him out, standing before a ghost. He should be more surprised, more stunned, more… something. But at this point, he can only think, She looks like him. Like a tiny, pretty, girlish version of him.
“My brother misses you.”
“Aren’t you a little-” dead “- young to be interfering?”
Another smile but this one is slightly sad. “If I could, I would visit him,” she says, ignoring his comment.
“Why don’t you?”
She looks down the upstairs hallway toward the window in the staircase, the window that faces Collinwood. “I have tried. He will not see me.”
“Will not?” Dean questions her choice of words.
Sarah turns back to face Dean. “You haven’t read Mr. Shurley’s book.”
He can feel himself pale slightly. “How did you-?”
“You should read Mr. Shurley’s book,” she cuts him off.
“Look,” he begins, feeling a little annoyed he has to explain this at all, let alone to a dead girl, who’s barely ten at that. “It’s complicated.”
She gives him the same look that Ben did moments earlier.
Like he’s full of shit.
“Jesus, is everyone meddling in my life now?” he mutters.
“It wasn’t his fault. She lied to him, you know.”
“Ruby,” Dean whispers.
Sarah nods solemnly. “The witch.”
Dean can’t take his eyes off the small girl, the wheels of his mind spinning. He asks the questions even though he already knows the answers. “Was that a true story, Sarah? The one you told Ben?”
“You should read Mr. Shurley’s book,” she repeats.
Although he knows the answer to this question too, he feels compelled to ask it.
“Why?”
She’s gone.
***
Dean stops off at the pub and to say he’s disappointed to find out that they don’t need him and that Ash is more than happy to kick him out is an understatement. He tries to shoehorn Ash out of the kitchen, cajoling, smiling and then turning serious. He tells Ash he can go home, Dean will even pay him for the evening. He tells Ash he’ll buy him a new computer and Ash laughs and says he never bought pre-manufactured.
He threatens to cut off Ash’s mullet.
Ash chases him out of the kitchen with the mop.
He tries to get Ava on his side, asking her to go into the kitchen and spill some hot chicken stock on Ash so he’ll have to go home.
“Seriously?” she asks, her eyes disbelieving. “Go home, Dean.”
“C’mon Ava, help a guy out.”
“Dean, you already work like sixty hours a week here. You’re the one who decided that everyone needs a break from too many night shifts or we all start looking like vampires.”
He goes still at the word but Ava doesn’t notice.
“Go home, Dean,” she repeats, pushing ineffectually at his shoulders, her small frame no match for his bulk. “Go home before you annoy Ash and he decides to hack your back accounts.”
“And I’ll buy all the porn I want,” Ash hollers from the kitchen.
Ava raises her eyebrows at Dean. “He’ll do it and you’ll probably end up wanted in, like, fourteen states knowing his taste in stuff.”
“I’m a connoisseur!” Ash yells.
“You’re weird,” Ava shouts back through the closed door. She turns back to Dean. “Look, I know things have been… tough,” she begins.
“Christ, if one more person butts into my personal life…”
“You know, I couldn’t butt in if you weren’t here,” she says with a smile.
He grumbles about mutiny and treason and fired employees as she pushes him toward the door.
“Yeah, yeah, we’re all fired. Again. Didja hear that Ash, we’re fired!”
“Again?”
Ava finally has him through the door. “Now, you’re looking a little peaked lately so I already talked to Ash and he’s gonna close for the rest of the week.”
He opens his mouth to protest but she stops him.
“Don’t let the door hit you,” she calls and pushes it shut in his face.
Kicked out of his own restaurant, he grouses the entire drive home. Fine. He’ll just have another spectacular evening at home. Just him and the Steven Segal Marathon tonight. Tomorrow it’ll be Chuck Norris and if they won’t let him back in the pub by then he’ll move on to Stallone.
He parks the Impala diagonal in the driveway, just because he can and because if Sam does decide to come home it will be annoying as fuck that Dean’s taken up all the space.
Although Sam probably won’t come home. He’s too busy staying a Collinwood.
With Castiel.
He kicks his shoes off, not even wincing when they leave black marks on the wall where they hit. He grabs a beer from the fridge and flops down on the sofa, flicking on the TV. Two fucking hours until the Segal Marathon starts. Fuckers. He flips through the digital cable guide and the fact that there’s absolutely nothing on infuriates him. The best he can come up with is Iron Chef, which he used to like until that one episode with the giant eel (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7m2wSHmmOhs) and that was it. No more Iron Chef ever.
Something’s poking in his back and he shifts, reaching behind him to yank out the offending item.
Chuck’s manuscript, still carefully bull-clipped together, although now the first several pages are curled at one corner and folding in. He tosses it down on the floor. He should burn the fucker. Honestly. He takes a swig from his beer.
His eyes slide sideways and catch the title. The Inamorato and the Malediction - a novella by Carver Edlund
Huh. He wouldn’t have figured Chuck as a ‘big word’ kind of guy. But then again, he is a writer, so he probably likes to use big words.
It’s just a stupid story. Chuck’s not a prophet. Pffft. No such thing. So really, it’s ridiculous of Dean to not read the manuscript. Not reading it is like decided it really is true. Avoiding it is like saying it really would have power over him.
And it wouldn’t.
It doesn’t.
He puts his beer down and picks up the novella, flipping through the pages. It’s not very long. Dean could probably knock it out in a couple hours and then toss it in the trash. Next time he sees Chuck he’ll tell him, Yeah, I read your book. And? And nothing. Shrug. Nothing at all.
He pulls the bull-clip off and flips the cover page over. All-righty. Page one.
It was the year of our Lord, seventeen hundred and ninety-six and Collinsport, Maine still remembered the Declaration of Independence when the country was divided into Patriots and Loyalists; those who supported the revolution and those who did not. Americans and Tories. But this is not a tale of a colony uprising against a distant master. It is not the story of political upheaval and the subsequent birth of a nation.
This is a story of how far two people will go in the name of love; both of them converging at the same point in horror. One driven by madness and desire and the other by grief and despair. At that time in Collinsport, while it was easy to tell a Whig from a Tory, it was not as easy to distinguish evil living among the good people of Collinsport, and that evil wore a lovely face...
Next Chapter - 20 - Inhumation