Wichita Falls, Texas
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
“Good morning, gentlemen,” the waitress said, smiling too brightly for six-thirty in the morning on such a cold day “ in the middle of the week, no less. “My name is Kimberly, and I’ll be your server today. Can I get you anything to drink?”
“Coffee, please,” said Sam.
Kimberly made a note on her little paper pad and bent over a little, just enough that the space between two of her shirt buttons puckered and exposed the silver clasp of her bra. “And for you, sir?”
“I’ll have a coffee, too,” Dean said. “Thanks.”
“All right. I’ll be right back.” She straightened up and half-winked with one eye before turning around and moving to the next table.
“What are you doing?”
Dean snapped his head back to face Sam. “Deciding what I want for breakfast.”
“You were staring at her ass.”
“There was a blue ink stain on her pants,” Dean said smoothly, and started to read his laminated menu.
“There was not.”
“How would you know if you weren’t looking, too?”
Sam shook his head and squeezed the sides of his menu tightly enough to crinkle the plastic. “Never mind. Just never mind.”
“What the hell is wrong with you, Sam? You’ve been moody since yesterday afternoon. Is this about Anna?”
Sam cringed at the mention of the little girl they’d found… well, they’d found half of her. “It’s not about anything. I’m fine.” It was nothing and everything, at the same time; the dead girl, the hunting, Dean, the nightmares...
“No, you’re not fine. And you need to snap out of it before it gets one of us into trouble. We don’t know when we’re going to be on another hunt and you have to be alert and ready.”
“We could have saved her. We knew who the werewolf was!” Sam latched onto the topic that was easiest to talk about, easiest to blame.
“No, we didn’t. Not early enough for it to have made any difference. You suspected her father at first, and I agreed with you. It was a good thing we waited until we were sure, because we were both wrong. We did all we could, and we killed it, and the town is safe. We can’t save everyone.”
Can’t save everyone. Sam’s mind went immediately to Jessica, now dead for over a year. It only added to his internal confusion to be reminded of her, bleeding, flames bursting all around her; something killed her. The same thing that killed his mother. He’d vowed to find the killer and destroy it... and he still did want that, but things had changed. He’d been moving on, and he felt guilty for moving on, guilty for letting the paranormal killer run loose, guilty for starting to feel less guilty. “Then why do we even bother?”
“You know damn well why we bother,” Dean said.
Kimberly came back then, holding two small mugs of coffee on ceramic coasters. “If you need any more cream, just let me know,” she purred. “Are you ready to order?”
Sam ordered a stack of pancakes, and Dean stuck with eggs and bacon. Kimberly wrote everything down in laboriously neat handwriting, and then left them alone for a second time. Sam opened up his newspaper and started to leaf through the pages.
“What are you doing?” Dean asked.
“Running for President. What does it look like I’m doing? Looking for the crosswords.”
“Crosswords,” Dean snorted. He poured a little bit of half-and-half into his mug and stirred it around.
“They’re good for keeping your vocabulary skills up. You should try them sometime. But don’t try the New York Times crosswords yet; those are hard.”
“I get your point, college boy,” Dean snapped.
Sam was starting to hate daytime between hunts. When they were busy, their minds were focused, and they worked together as a team “ no, as one person split into two, with perfect synchronicity. At night, in whatever motel they decided to crash at, they were either too tired to talk or ripping at each other’s clothes. But now… now they just sat on opposite sides of the table and argued like an old married couple. Trying to pass for normal to avoid attention and succeeding way, way too much.
A few words of an article caught his eye, and he read the headline and the first few sentences. He got a prickly feeling in the back of his neck, and it wasn’t just from the cold air that hit him when another patron opened the doors.
“That’s weird,” he mused.
“What?” Dean didn’t look up from his mug.
“There was a murder about a hundred miles from here.”
“What’s weird about that? Fort Worth is about a hundred miles from here. How many people live in that area? A million?”
“No, take a look at this.” Sam folded the paper and turned it around so that Dean could see it. “A football player was killed two days ago, by his younger brother. Played for the University of North Texas.”
Dean frowned at Sam, at the mention of someone being killed by his younger brother, and took the paper. He skimmed the article, and the creases in his forehead deepened. “Looks like the kid went insane,” he said. “Maybe he got a concussion and it did something to his mind. See?” He pointed at the fourth paragraph. “Says right here that he got into a fight with Brian and was hit on the head.”
Sam sighed. “He claims to have X-ray vision. That’s not normal, Dean. He knew his brother was coming at him with a knife because he saw the knife hidden on the inside of a coat. He couldn’t fake that or be deluded into seeing that.”
“Maybe it wasn’t weird for them. Joshua went crazy, knew Brian was going to attack him, and killed Brian first. End of story.”
“No, I think we need to go check it out.”
“Come on, Sam. We can’t run off and investigate everything that seems just a little bit strange. Everything in the world is a little bit strange.”
“But what if this is something supernatural? Who knows what this kid is capable of? What if he really does have unusual powers and hurts somebody else “ or what if other people are getting powers, too?”
“Look. If we had more time, maybe we could go out and talk to him on the tiny chance that something’s up, but we’re on our way to Austin. We have to be there by tomorrow afternoon for the gun show, or we’re not going to be able to get better weapons. We don’t have the time to drive out to some college town in the middle of nowhere.”
“Denton isn’t really in the middle of nowhere. It’s only about twenty-five miles out of our way, and if we don’t find anything worth checking out, we’ll just leave.”
“I don’t know, Sam. We need to get where we’re going and settle in for the night.”
“I’ll make it up to you.” Sam lowered his head and looked up at Dean, eyes smoldering. He reached under the table and put his hand on Dean’s knee. There was usually at least one way to get what he wanted, and Sam would use it if he had to. It wasn’t exactly a sacrifice.
“Well… all right. We’ll go after breakfast, and give it two hours. If nothing turns up, we go on our way.”
Both of them were suddenly aware of a shadow, and Sam snapped back into his seat, pulling his hand back as he did. “Here you go,” Kimberly said, her face fallen and her words clipped. “Please tell me if there’s anything else you need.” And she was gone before they could get any words in.
“Looks like somebody doesn’t want a tip,” said Dean.
Denton, Texas
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
“They’d kill me back at Stanford if they saw this,” said Sam, indicating the Texas A&M shirt that Dean had found in a thrift shop a half-hour earlier and talked him into wearing.
“Nobody you know is going to see it. Come on.”
They pushed the glass doors open and entered into the lobby of the mental hospital. The waiting room was small and empty, except for the receptionist who sat behind a panel of thick glass. Old magazines spread out over two wooden end tables, and pharmaceutical advertisements masquerading as mental health advice littered the single coffee table. Dean grabbed Sam’s arm and pulled him towards the desk.
“Hello, uh, Nancy,” Dean said. “I was wondering if I could get a pass to talk to one of the patients here.”
Nancy frowned over her glasses and looked up. “That depends. Who are you coming to visit, and are you on the visitor’s list?”
“I think I’m on the list. Our mom said she had our names put on it. Anyway, the patient is Joshua Gregory.”
Nancy’s eyes widened, and she typed a few things into her computer. “I’m sorry, but he’s not able to have visitors outside the family.”
“We are family,” Sam insisted, playing the role of the angry relative rather well. “We’re his cousins. Our mother is his mother’s sister.”
“What are your names?
“I'm Dean Smith, and this is my brother Sam,” Dean replied.
“Aha... hmm... no, you’re not on the list. And we’re only allowed to admit immediate family to see Mr. Gregory.”
“There isn’t any immediate family,” said Sam. A few quick Google searches had turned up the information they needed. “My aunt Barbara died two years ago, and we’re the closest family Josh has. Please let us in. Only for a few minutes.”
“I don’t know, boys.”
“We just want to see him and make sure he’s okay.”
Nancy stared up at them sternly and opened her mouth as if to say no, but she stopped herself. “One time. But only for ten minutes.”
*
Sam and Dean sat on one side of a tall reinforced glass wall, and a boy who appeared to be about five years younger than Sam slowly walked into the room. He was dressed in a white hospital robe, and looked drugged and tired. His eyes were bloodshot and his face was covered in small cuts and bruises. As he walked towards the chair that was set aside for him, though, his eyes darted around from object to object, and he seemed to have difficulty gripping the wooden and plastic chair.
Joshua looked through the glass, glancing briefly at Sam and Dean, but not keeping his eyes on either one of them for long. He then fixed his gaze on the telephone in front of him, and kept staring at it.
“Telephone components must be less scary than skulls,” Sam said.
Dean only shook his head and picked up the phone. “Joshua Gregory?”
The boy picked up the phone gingerly and wrapped his hand around it as though he wasn’t entirely sure of its shape. Then he lifted it near his mouth. “I already talked to the police. Don’t wanna talk any more,” Joshua said.
“I’m not with the police,” said Dean. “My name is Dean, and I’m... a detective. This is Sam; we work together. We just want to talk to you for a few minutes.”
“You can’t help me.” Joshua's voice came out somewhere between a whisper and a whine, and he shrank back into his chair.
“Help you with what?”
“Look at the hospital report. I'm sure they've written all kinds of things in there about me being delusional. Crazy. I see things, I see through things. I see metal, bones, just like an X-ray machine. I can’t close my eyes and get rid of it because I see through my fucking eyelids. It stays with me when I sleep and dream. The drugs don’t help. They just make me sleep and have nightmares and it’s worse than being awake.”
Sam winced and pressed in close enough to the telephone receiver to hear Joshua. His breath was hot on the back of Dean’s neck, and Dean’s legs tensed as that breath sent shivers down into his groin. “Sam, back up,” he hissed.
“I want to hear this,” Sam whispered back.
“I didn’t mean to kill him,” Joshua went on. “I swear I didn’t. I was aiming for his shoulder but he moved, and the bullet went through his heart.” He put one hand over his eyes, and started to wipe the tears away.
“You were just trying to protect yourself, right?”
Joshua nodded. “And make the visions stop.”
Sam closed his hand over their end of the telephone and, after a brief struggle, Dean gave it up. “When did the visions start, Joshua?” Sam asked.
“Last Friday. It was Friday evening.”
“Can you tell us what happened on Friday?”
“No. My lawyer said not to talk about it.”
“It’s all right,” said Sam. “We won’t tell anybody else. Information you give to us is kept strictly confidential.”
“You promise?”
“Yes, I promise.”
“All right.” Joshua took a deep breath, wincing slightly as he did so, and he shifted around in his chair. “I went out to the Townsend well and made a wish there.”
“And that’s when you started seeing... differently?
“It happened just a few seconds later. Everything went black and white.”
Sam and Dean exchanged glances. The odds that they were dealing with something that concerned them instead of the psychiatrists had just jumped. A lot. “Is that what you wished for? In any way at all?” Sam asked.
“No. God, no.”
“Can you tell us what you did wish for?”
Joshua shook his head slowly then, and he closed his eyes reflexively before opening them.
“It won’t go in your files. We won’t record anything. We just need to know so we can figure out how you might get your sight back?”
“All right. I... I wished that my older brother would get into a car crash and die. He hits me “ he broke my arm last year “ and I just wanted him gone. I didn’t really mean it, though. I was just so mad and scared. I didn’t really want him to die. Not even when I shot him.”
“I know you didn’t,” said Sam. “Let me see if I understand. You went to a well and wished that he would die, and that’s when you got X-ray vision?”
“Yeah. That’s exactly what happened." Joshua looked up at them through the glass, and his eyes jerked a little bit, as if trying to find their eyes and finding only sockets. "You believe me, right?”
“I believe you,” said Sam.
“I think we need to do a few tests first,” Dean interjected. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a few quarters, which he held in the palm of his hand underneath the wooden table. He took the phone back. “Josh, how many quarters am I holding?”
Josh stared at the spot where Dean’s hand was, like the table wasn't even there. “Three,” he said.
Dean was holding three quarters. He picked another coin. “What about now?”
“No quarters, but the coin you have is either a dime or a penny. I can’t really tell.”
Dean pocketed the dime and nodded. Whatever was going on, it had to be something a little bit more than just psychiatric problems. “I believe you now,” he said. “How did you find this well, the... Townsend well?”
“I found a map. It belonged to a kid who lived across the street from me. He died last year on Halloween, though, and I put the map away and kind of forgot about it. I found it again about two weeks ago in a stack of homework papers. The map had exactly how to get to the well and how to make a wish, but you only get one. You have to drop a penny in “ a 1947 penny “ and turn around three times, then say what you want. Except it didn’t work!”
“It did something, apparently. Where’s the map now?”
“I... I don’t know. When I got back I had it, but between the apartment and the library I dropped it and couldn’t find it on my way back. It blew away or someone picked it up or something.”
“That’s not going to do a lot of good, then. Listen, Joshua, I promise we’re going to do all we can to help you out and protect other people. But we need your cooperation on this. Tell anybody who comes in that we’re your cousins, or don’t say anything at all. I’m going to see if I can find the well. Do you remember anything else about how to get there?”
“Not really. It’s a few miles off Highway 380, kinda north, but that’s all I remember.”
“We’re about out of time on our visit. Keep your head on, and we’re going to get to the bottom of this.”
Joshua nodded. “Okay. Thanks.”
*
“I told you so,” said Sam.
“It was a long shot. You guessed right, but it was a long shot.”
“I wasn’t guessing. I had a feeling.”
“Don’t get cocky.” Dean threw his bags down next to the single bed in the little motel room and booted his laptop. “We don’t have a lot to go on here. All we know is that there’s a child who died last year and had the map, and that it has something to do with a Townsend. We can either look for the well or look for the kid.”
“Straight to the source. We look for the well.”
“Without having any idea what it does or how it works? It’s a real place, and it does something, but it doesn’t do what a wishing well is supposed to do. Maybe if we find out more about the ones who went before Joshua, we’d have a better grip on what we’re dealing with. Spirits haunting the well? A demon? Could be anything.”
“All right. Let’s look up the obituaries for the first week of November.”
There was only one death listed that week from any children; a nine-year-old boy named Jorge Sanchez, who had died in a car wreck, along with a middle-aged couple. “Here we go,” he said. “This has to be the boy. And his parents still live here. Let’s go talk to them.”
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