Salt Lake City, Utah
Thursday, May 10, 2007
“How much money do we have left?” Sam asked. It was a tired, routine question in a tired routine; he usually knew the answer already.
“Depends on if we go to the pool hall tonight or not,” said Dean. He scowled out the window at the driver of a car that swept a little too close to his in the crowded parking lot of the 7-11.
“Let’s assume we don’t.”
“Then we have twenty dollars and fifty cents.” Dean handed Sam a five-dollar bill. “That ought to get you through to tomorrow.”
Sam sighed and climbed out when they pulled up to one of the back gas pumps, and he didn’t say anything even when Dean pushed his scammed credit card into the pay-at-the-pump reader. They were even more desperate for cash than usual; in the past few months, Dean wasn’t winning quite as much at billiards as he normally did, and went to bed early without even trying more often than was wise.
Sam grabbed a half-dozen box of donuts and a two-liter bottle of Coke, and then walked up to the counter. The clerk standing at the register was a young girl with auburn hair, probably no more than eighteen years old, and she paused in her change-counting to look up at him. “Have a nice day,” she said absently to her last customer, and then continued on to Sam, in one bubbly run-on sentence: “Hi welcome to 7-11 my name is Kelly will this be all for you sir?”
“I don’t know. What’s the total?” I could really go for a hot dog, he thought.
“Four dollars and… eighty-six cents.”
“No, then. That’s all.”
Another woman, about ten years older than the clerk, walked up to the second register and punched in a secret code. “I can help the next person in line here,” she announced, and then turned to Kelly. “I swear, the ice machine is possessed.”
Kelly tossed her head and nodded, then slowly counted out fourteen cents. “Here’s your change. Have a nice day,” she said.
“Wait,” Sam said, and Kelly’s eyes lit up. “Your manager said something about the ice machine?”
“Oh, it’s just broken. It busted three days ago and we haven’t been able to get anybody to come out to fix it yet. Michelle will have it working by tomorrow morning.”
“That’s why they pay me the big bucks,” agreed Michelle. “A whole nine-fifty an hour.”
“So, wait. You’re saying that the ice machine isn’t possessed?”
Michelle frowned and finished bagging three cans of soda and a bag of chips. “No, sir, there aren’t any evil spirits hiding in our equipment. It was just an expression; the machine is on the fritz.”
“Oh. Never mind, then. Thanks.” Sam took his bag and gave them an awkward smile.
Michelle raised her eyebrow and opened her mouth as if to send him on his way and get out of the way of other customers, but her eye caught something behind him and she stopped. “Kelly, you can go on a 10-minute break,” she said abruptly.
Kelly shook her head, giggled, and excused herself from the checkstand. Sam turned around to see what was going on, but all he saw were two more customers “ and Dean. This is getting ridiculous, he thought. Were they giving off pheromones or something? Well, probably... Sam shot Michelle a dirty look and stepped aside.
Dean went up to the counter and laid his purchases on it “ a jar of mustard, a jumbo bag of crunchy Cheetos, two king-sized Twix bars, a bag of marshmallows, and a chicken sandwich. “Fourteen dollars and sixty-two cents,” said Michelle.
“Dude, what do you think you’re doing?” Sam hissed.
“Buying food?”
“That’s all the rest of our money!”
“I’m hungry. What’s your problem, Sam?”
“How are you paying for this, sir?” Michelle cut in. “Cash or credit?”
When Sam didn’t speak and didn’t change his stance from arms folded across his chest, Dean handed Michelle the credit card. “Just charge it,” he said.
“Will do.” She handed him a receipt to sign and one to keep, and he scribbled “Frank Johnson” on the signature line.
As soon as they were outside, though, Sam couldn’t keep quiet any more. “If you’re going to be crazy shopping like this, then we need to go to a grocery store. We’re getting overcharged and we can’t afford it.”
“All right, we’ll go to Albertson’s tomorrow.”
“And maybe we ought to buy a little less junk food.”
“Hey.” Dean lowered his eyebrows and glared at him. “Watch it, Sam.”
“You’re the one who was complaining this morning that you could hardly zip up your jeans.”
“It’s probably gas. It’ll be gone in a couple of days.”
Sam bit his lip and sat down in the passenger seat. “Roll down the windows, then,” he said. “You know, I’m worried about you.”
“Don’t be. I’m fine. Whatever was bothering me this winter is gone. I’ve got my appetite back.” As if to prove the point, Dean opened up the jar of mustard and the bag of marshmallows.
“I believe you. Oh, god, no. Don’t. That’s gross.”
“Come on, Sam! Expand your horizons. Try something new.” Dean dipped a marshmallow into the mustard and stuffed it into his mouth.
“No, thanks. And whatever you do, don’t put the Twix bars in the mustard. Because if you do, I’m going to be sick, and you’re going to clean the car afterwards.”
“I’ll wait until we get to the Super 8, then.”
“Look, there is something wrong with you. I know it, and you need to get it checked out. Maybe it’s hypercalcemia.”
“Hyper-what?”
“Hypercalcemia. Too much calcium in the blood. A lot of different things can cause it, like your bones breaking down, and it causes a lot of symptoms you had. And it’ll upset your body’s balance of nutrients, so now you’re craving salt and sugar and who-knows-what to get them back into the right balance.”
“Then I’m cured, right?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you should see a doctor. And you know what else I thought of? Cancer. It can strike at any age and that would explain a lot of things, too.”
“Sam, I’m fine. I feel fine. Better than usual, and a lot better than a couple of months ago. Let it go. I’m not going to the doctor. So I gained five pounds or so. I’ll work it off. Michelle was still flirting with me, gut and all. And you still want me, right?”
“Of course I do, I just-”
“Nothing’s wrong. Drop it.” And so, Sam dropped it, for the evening.
Salt Lake City, Utah (and surrounding area)
Friday, May 11, 2007
Flames shooting up from the ground in a circle. An arm hooking around his waist, dragging him down, down, down to the dirt, down into the grass that was on fire. He tried to breathe and only got a lungful of hot vapors - ash, sulfur, and brimstone.
He tried to scream, but he couldn’t. His throat burned, hot enough to blister, hot enough to sear the flesh closed. A blonde-haired woman stood in front of him, immersed in the flame but untouched by them. “You,” she said with unmoving lips, “will come with me.”
She wore a simple, straight skirt, vaguely like something out of a World War Two movie, and her hair was sleek and shoulder-length, blonde wisps that didn’t move in the roiling currents and didn’t singe in the heat. He smelled his own hair burning, a sickening undertone to the scent of charring human flesh.
He couldn’t move.
She threw her head back and started to laugh. “You thought you could destroy me,” she said. “But you only earned yourself a place in Hell “ next to mine.”
“Sam!”
Sam opened his mouth to shout back at Dean, but he couldn’t separate his lips, melted shut. I should be dead. I should be dead.
“Some things are not as they should be,” she said. “You’re being saved for last.”
“Saaaaaaaa--!!!” Dean’s voice pierced through the crackling fire, then dissolved into it. Sam’s vision began to fade, but the heat only intensified, past pain, past death, into-
He sat up, sweating and gasping. Strong hands grabbed his shoulders and he felt a familiar presence behind him. “Sam,” Dean whispered.
“Another nightmare,” Sam whispered back. His throat felt raw, but he could speak. “I was… I was dying. I think it killed you and was dragging me to hell.”
“What was?”
“I “ I don’t know. A woman, or her spirit. She said I was being saved for last.” He swung over the edge of the bed and stood up, testing out his limbs. They still worked, at least, although he was shaky for the first few steps on his way to the bathroom sink for water.
There was no use in trying to go back to sleep now, so Sam waited until Dean had drifted off again, and then booted up their laptop.
He stared at the Google search page for a few minutes before typing anything. He wasn’t sure what to enter, and “1940s deaths” yielded too many results when he tried it. Over a million, he thought, and tried again: “1940s violent death.” Still about 750,000.
Wait. 1947. That well we went to. I was the last one to make a wish at it... and Dean was next to last.
He tried a few more search terms until he got to “drowning wishing well Denton.” That didn’t give up any immediately useful information, either, and he was about to start the search over when a brief article caught his eye. It probably didn’t have anything to do with his dream, but it was strange nonetheless.
“On February 19, 2007, Double and Trouble “ known in their hometown of Denton, Texas as Melissa Hall and Amanda Kline “ released their first album, Null and Void. It reached gold-record status at the end of April, marking one of the fastest rises in the history of American music...”
Sam shivered and continued skimming the article, then clicked on the website of the band. Two women, probably about Dean’s age, posed with vacant expressions on a red Ferrari in the background image, and he heard instrumental music, without voices, over the laptop’s small internal speakers. It sounded awful, and also familiar.
Click Here for song lyrics!
This is what was playing when we found that vampire in Dayton, Sam thought. He read the rest of the lyrics “ all dark, empty, and utterly hopeless. The only one that seemed to have any shred of humanity in it was “Angel Too Soon,” one of the last-minute additions to the album. The lyrics were written by Melissa Hall, to honor her brother Brandon, who was killed on January 20.
Oh, shit.
The other song had been co-written by both members of the duo, and was titled “Life-Giver.” At first, he thought that it, too, might have been something resembling hope, but it quickly degenerated into the clichés of the generation, and…
He could hardly bring himself to read the last verse.
She comes in the night at the witching hour
A circle of flame and a pillar of light
She holds out her hand and says to me
Close your eyes, my dear, sleep tight
She gives and she takes
It burns and it aches
Try to slam on the brakes
We can’t win the fight.
Ten minutes later, he was shaking Dean awake. “We’ve got to go to Denver,” he said.
“Denver? What?” Dean sat up and looked at the clock, still hazy with sleep. “It’s three o’clock in the morning, Sam.”
“We have to talk to these girls.”
“What girls?”
“Melissa Hall and Amanda Kline. Double and Trouble, the dark-rock twins. Well, not twins “ they’re not even sisters - but you know what I mean. They’re having a concert in Denver on Saturday and we need to talk to them.”
“I know you’re still young enough to get starstruck, but I am not driving across the state just so you can have a half-chance of seeing a couple of girls walk out of Starbucks.”
“Remember Joshua Gregory? The kid down in Texas who could see through walls and skin?”
“Well, yeah. But he was fine when saw him the next morning. Heavily sedated, sure, but I think we got rid of whatever was bothering him.”
“I don’t think we did. And it’s still out there, somehow, even if it’s not in the well anymore. Melissa and Amanda used to be Joshua’s upstairs neighbors. They’ve moved out now, and I think their permanent residence is in New York City, but listen to this. They went from being nobodies to being very much a pair of somebodies in only months. They didn’t even have a record deal until the end of January, and then their album was released in February and now it’s May and they’re on a nationwide concert tour. That’s fucking weird.”
“Okay, I’m following, but I don’t see what that has to do with us, or anything evil, other than they were Joshua’s neighbors.”
“And they wrote a song about some of the stuff I’ve been dreaming about. Might just be coincidence, since it wasn’t that specific, but there’s more. Melissa’s brother died on January twentieth.”
“January twentieth, January... wait.” Dean sat up straight. “That’s the day after Joshua’s vision problems started.”
“Right. If Melissa and Amanda went to that well, after Joshua and before us “ which is probable given how fast they got their start and that they lived upstairs from him “ then we didn’t need to worry about you dying, because Melissa was the one who got Joshua’s wish. Her brother died in a car crash that same day. Which also happens to be the same day that they got the news that they might be signed on for a record.”
“That’s wonderful, Sam. Just wonderful.” Dean shook his head. “What else did you find out?”
“I think they wished for success. Or at least one of them did; couldn’t have been both because then you would be the one at the top of the charts. And whatever Amanda wanted, you got.”
Dean got up and looked at the website Sam had left up. “Which one’s Amanda?”
“Amanda is the skinny one with black hair. Melissa’s shorter and, uh, thicker.”
“Christ. I hope she didn’t wish for anorexia.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that. You ate the whole bag of marshmallows and most of the Cheetos,” Sam pointed out. “Look, we have two problems here and I think they’re all linked. First, the problem with the Townsend well is still there, although it’s changed. Second, if we talk to Amanda, we might find out what made you sick.”
Dean nodded and said, “All right. But we don’t have to leave right this minute; Denver isn’t going anywhere and it won’t matter if we leave now or in a few hours.”
“Fine, but we’re checking out at seven.”
*
“Sam, how many times are you going to call that radio station? You’re wasting our minutes.”
“As many as I need to. This is going to be a lot easier if we can get backstage passes for after the concert.”
“We can get in without passes. And as a bonus, we won’t have to listen to them sing.”
“Shut up, Dean! It’s ringing!”
Sam held the cell phone up to his ear, then scowled and put it down. “I was caller eighty-five,” he complained. “Eleven away.” He started to dial the number again, but Dean grabbed the phone from him and snapped it shut.
“I think we can handle a few bodyguards,” Dean said. He popped a tape in the tape deck and they sped on towards Denver.
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