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Part I
It moved through the woods. Twisting and whirling past the gnarled trees and thick underbrush, the unseen force hurtled through the forest, the only sign of its passage being a handful of damp leaves fluttering in its wake. It continued in its rollicking approach, over an unkempt road and past an old Volkswagen hatchback, the car’s plastic-looking blue exterior rusting in places. Up the little walkway, right to the dilapidated porch, and to the wooden door, where a warm light shone out the cracks at the frame and laughter and music spilled out from within.
At the door, the force dissipated—but not before one person within noticed it. A girl, college-aged and mousy, jumped back from the window where she had been looking out at the dark trees swaying in the wind.
“Did you see that?!”
Of the three other people in the small room, only one acknowledged her outburst. “It’s just the wind,” he said, hardly looking up from where he was pouring more liquor in his mug at the table next to where she sat. The other two people at the party kept talking, maybe because they were ignoring her or maybe because they didn’t hear her over the music blasting from the portable speaker they had brought. “Get another drink and come talk to us, Clara. It’s our last college spring break! Don’t spend it looking forlornly out the window.”
He put a hand over his heart with a flourish at the word “forlornly” then smiled, and Clara couldn’t help but sheepishly smile too. “I’m not being forlorn.”
“You’re sighing dramatically and watching the moon. That’s pretty forlorn.” He elbowed Clara playfully before making his way back to their friends.
Clara glanced out the window and exhaled (it was not a sigh!), grabbed a beer from the table, and followed him.
“—and the only reason they’re going all the way to Mexico is because Paul’s dad is, like, a millionaire and is paying for everyone else’s tickets,” the other woman in the cabin said, pausing only to take a big sip out of the straw in whatever high-ABV concoction was in her mug. “And it’s like, none of them even studied Spanish!”
“This is basically as good as Mexico,” Clara deadpanned, gesturing with her beer around the room at the rickety wood furniture and dingy yellow wallpaper. The group laughed.
“Some people go to all-inclusive resorts on the beach. Others go to abandoned cabins in the woods.” Chris, the boy who grabbed Clara from the window, said, weighing his hands as if they were equal. “Different strokes, and all that.”
The other girl, Emma, laughed. “Well, our strokes kind of suck—"
Bang.
The door, which had definitely been latched a second before, slammed open and shut in quick succession.
Everyone watched the door for a second in silence.
“What the hell was that,” Emma’s boyfriend, Liam, intoned.
“Did—did we forget to lock it?” Clara whispered.
Chris shook his head. “No way. I know I double checked.”
The group stood, staring at the door for a second longer, when suddenly there was a loud electric pop. Emma screamed as the music shut off.
“Emma, chill,” Liam said, going over and poking the speaker. “I told you this thing was totally janky. It does this all the time.”
He clicked a button on the speaker, and the lights in the cabin flickered. After a second of darkness, the lights and music came back on—but the sound was distorted and unnervingly slow, infusing the mindless pop with a sinister air.
Three of the partiers took deep breaths, and Emma even made a joke about her overreaction at the brief power outage. But Liam stayed leaned over the speaker and the mini generator, propped up on what had once been the kitchen table.
“Liam?” Clara said quietly. Emma and Chris laughed at something she didn’t hear as she stepped toward Liam’s back. To Clara, it was as if the music drifted away, and the reassuring forms of her friends seemed to slip to the peripheral of her vision. As she approached, Clara reached a hand out toward his shoulder. “Hey, Liam—"
His neck cracked, sickening and sharp, as his head spun around to face her, his body still facing the other direction. Clara let out a strangled scream and stumbled backwards, dropping her beer as she fell to the floor. Chris and Emma looked over then, and each let out a yelp at Liam’s face, with its chalky pallor and filmy white eyes, looking out at them over his own back in a sick contortionist way.
Liam—or whatever Liam had become—laughed. “Just trying to keep the party going,” he sneered, and took a step toward Clara as she scrambled backward on the floor.
Then all at once the force returned, moving backwards through the window behind where the group stood, shattering the glass as it spun and sped backwards through the woods. The screams inside grew quieter as it continued its unpredictable path. The cabin shrunk as the force hurtled back the way it had come, branches twisting and curling as if reaching out like fingers on a skeletal hand.
It stopped. In the far distance, the lights in the cabin flickered, and another scream pierced the night.
—
Part II
The Impala, in all its roaring glory, zoomed down the two-lane road.
“I just think we have better things to be working on!” Sam said, exasperation evident.
Dean, driving, rolled his eyes. “Like what?”
“Like, I don’t know, the fact you’re going to Hell in a couple months?”
“Sam, we’ve been over this—there are no leads. Zip, zilch, nada. I’m not going to sit around on my ass, waiting for some miracle to undo my deal—I’m gonna keep doing my damn job.”
“Your job?” Sam scoffed. “This isn’t even a job. It’s a rumor about a rumor about a place that might be haunted.”
“Yeah, and haunted’s our job, right?” Dean asked. “So, let’s go burn some bones.”
Sam shook his head, and turned to look out the windshield. “We’ve been driving out here for an hour, Dean. Did you ever think maybe this cabin doesn’t even exist?”
“Of course it exists,” Dean grumbled, but slowed down, and looked more carefully around at the thick woods on either side of the vehicle. “Why would the creepy guy at the creepy gas station lie about the existence of a creepy abandoned cabin?”
Sam rolled his eyes, and turned to look at the woods outside the passenger’s side.
They drove in silence, until a moment later the music (classic rock, obviously) stuttered in and out from the radio. Dean slapped a hand on the dashboard as the lights flickered, and both brothers shared a glance at the rapidly dropping temperature within the car.
“That’s always a good sign,” Dean deadpanned.
Sam clenched his jaw, then turned to look back out the window. “Hey, do you see that? It looks like tire tracks, off to the right here.”
Dean slowed the Impala to a stop. “I thought we were looking for an abandoned cabin?”
Sam shrugged. “It’s the first lead we’ve had.”
Dean turned onto the road—though road would be a generous term. It was hardly more than a path where one car had driven before, so the brush was semi-flattened in two parallel lines. Sam didn’t comment on the number of branches with brambles and thorns likely scraping up the car’s immaculate finish the deeper they ventured into the woods; Sam knew that Dean’s pursed lips and furrowed brow meant he already could tell a car detailing was in his future.
They kept following the path, deeper and deeper into the woods, until eventually Dean had to slow down to a crawl to even see where he was supposed to be going.
“Hey, look at that,” Dean said eventually. “Is it just me, or does that kinda look like a cabin?”
All at once the underbrush lessened and Dean pulled into a clearing. If calling the path on the way here a “road” had been generous, calling this a “cabin” would be the greatest act of charity in history. It may have once been nice; there was a little porch and a brick path leading up to the door. But now it was ramshackle, and looked like one good gust of wind would knock it flat.
“Home sweet home,” Dean muttered.
“I don't think this is the cabin we’re looking for,” Sam said. “It’s definitely not abandoned.” He inclined his head toward the other side of the clearing, where a little blue Volkswagen Golf sat parked.
“Huh,” Dean said. “Maybe not.”
A crash caused both Sam and Dean to look up in surprise—what looked like a porcelain plate went flying through an open window and shattered on a nearby tree.
“What the hell?” Dean asked.
It seemed silent and still both within and without the cabin.
Then, there was a scream and a figure—this time, it looked like a person—flew out of the window where the plate had gone flying a minute before, and crumpled on the ground.
Dean and Sam didn’t even have to look at one another before they moved in unison. Dean opened the trunk and grabbed two duffels as Sam ran, crouching, up to the figure in the ground.
Dean approached where Sam was kneeling; when Sam stood and turned, Dean tossed him a gun, freshly loaded with rock salt. Dean nodded his head at the figure. “Is she okay?”
“Knocked out,” Sam whispered back as they moved toward the front door. “Probably concussed. You ready?”
Dean didn’t answer, just kicked the door in, his gun raised.
Inside was a mess. Any furniture left from the previous owners had been splintered—a wall clock had fallen into the remains of a couch and, on the other side of the room, what appeared to be a person was half-buried in mildewing books at the base of a tipped-over bookshelf. And in the center of the room was a—a something, growling and leaning threateningly over a cowering woman, who was bleeding profusely from a cut on her cheek.
Dean saw all this in a half-second and instantaneously decided he didn’t have to know what that monster was to take care of it. He raised his gun and shot. The monster paused in its approach at the woman, then turned and laughed at Dean.
“Salt?” it jeered. Dean's eyes widened.
“Definitely not a ghost!” Dean said, but pumped it full of another salt round anyways as it slowly walked toward him.
The creature waved one hand lazily, and Dean went flying into the wall to the left of the door. Sam raised his gun, but before he could get a shot in, the creature lunged for him; they grappled for a moment, until Sam managed to get his hunting knife out of his boot. Sam sunk the knife deep into the creature’s left arm, then sliced to the side. The monster howled before flying out the open door, leaving Sam splattered in its blood in its wake.
“Dude,” Dean said, struggling to stand a couple feet to Sam’s left. “What the hell?”
—
“How’s the girl outside?” Dean asked, standing up from where he had been kneeling to check out Chris’ injuries.
“She’ll be fine, but she’s freaked out. She couldn’t even explain what happened—what did the kids in here say?”
“Kids?” Dean scoffed. “They’re, like, two years younger than you.”
“Dean, they’re kids. They’re normal, regular college kids. Even when I was in college, I was never normal.”
Dean rolled his eyes, then shrugged. “Okay, well, they don’t know what happened either. They came here for a cheap vacation and were having fun until one of them turned into that.”
Dean gestured vaguely and Sam frowned. “That was one of their friends? Do you think he was a rugaru? Or some kind of weird werewolf?”
“He wasn’t a werewolf,” a voice—Emma, the girl from outside—said, walking slowly into the room. “He was my boyfriend.” Sam offered her a hand as she collapsed, crying, into a chair.
“Whoa, wait. Werewolves?” Clara said, leaning in the doorway to the kitchen. “Who are you guys?”
“We hunt things like your ‘friend’ there. And we’re gonna take care of you, okay?” Dean said, and dropped his duffel on the floor. “We just need to know more about what happened.”
“It’s spring break,” Chris said, as if that was obvious, leaning up from where he had been laying on the floor.
Dean rolled his eyes. “I'm gonna need more detail than that.”
“He means that this is our spring break,” Emma said.
Sam and Dean looked around at the crappy room. “I thought spring break was about going to a beach and getting really drunk and wearing tiny bikinis,” Dean said. Sam cleared his throat threateningly.
“Not when you don’t have money to travel,” Clara said. “We couldn’t even afford to drive to Chicago for a long weekend.”
“Whose idea was it to go to a cabin like this?” Sam asked.
“My older brother told me about it,” Chris said. “Someone told him it was a perfect place to hang out for cheap.” He sighed weakly.
Dean looked around at the dilapidated cabin and huffed out a laugh. “Dude, no offense, but your brother has awful taste.”
“Okay,” Sam cut in. “Spring break’s over. Let’s all get back to our car, and we’ll drive you guys to the nearest town.”
Dean grabbed Sam’s shoulder and started whispering. “Sam, no. You saw how slow we had to drive and how long we were on that road here. That thing is out there in the woods, and in the car we’ll be sitting ducks.”
“Do you have a better idea?” Sam whispered back, glancing over at the three people gathering their belongings.
“We stay and fight.”
“What? No. We don’t even know what that thing was. We need to get them—" he nodded at the college kids—"out safe, and then we can call Bobby and ask him what the hell that was before coming back here with a way to kill it.”
“We can’t fight back in the car,” Dean said. “If we want to have any chance, we need to stay—"
Emma screamed. In the middle of the floor stood a figure, an unassuming elderly man in a tweed suit—perfectly normal except for his sudden appearance.
“I’ve killed her,” he whispered. “I chained her up.” The man’s form flickered, and Sam and Dean exchanged a glance. “I’ve damned us all. They’re free—all of them—" and he stumbled backwards, a large knife suddenly appearing and burying itself in his heart.
He disappeared as unexpectedly as he appeared.
There was a chorus of “what the hell!”s from the students, and Sam clenched his jaw. “It’s a death echo,” he explained over their exclamations. “He can’t hurt us.”
“A what?” Clara said, now holding a candlestick as if to use it as a weapon.
“A death echo,” Dean said. “It happens sometimes when a person dies traumatically—their spirit gets trapped in a loop, reenacting when they died.”
“What the hell, Dean. Are we dealing with ghosts?” Sam whispered to Dean.
Dean shrugged with a frown.
The man appeared again as he had originally, no knife buried in his chest. “I’ve killed her,” he said again, flickering slightly. “I chained her up.” The man paused. “I’ve damned us all. They’re free—all of them—"
And then, the knife sunk into his chest and he disappeared.
“Now do you believe we should get out of here?” Sam asked.
“It’s just a death echo, dude,” Dean shrugged. “Throw some salt at it.”
Dean took a step toward the center of the room when the man appeared again, practically nose-to-nose with Dean. Dean stumbled back with a “son of a bitch,” much to Sam’s enjoyment.
“I’ve killed her, I chained her up. I’ve damned us all.” Then, the man looked directly at Dean and grabbed his shoulders. “They’re free,” the echo wheezed. “All of them—"
The door slammed open, and a gust of foul air rushed into the room. The college students screamed, and Dean stumbled back from where the echo had been, as no-longer-Liam came running into the room, wielding a knife that looked familiar—
“Did it get that from the car?” Sam yelled over the howling wind.
“If that thing touched my car, I’m gonna kill it!”
Dean jumped straight at the monster, tackling it either because it had touched Baby or because it was on a path to attack Emma. They scuffled on the floor as Sam helped the others out of the room into the kitchen.
“Barricade the doors!” he yelled at Clara—the least injured of the group. She nodded and closed the flimsy door after Sam.
Sam turned just in time to watch the monster nearly stab Dean; at the last moment, Dean put a piece of wood between himself and the monster. The knife stabbed through the wood easily (or else the monster was crazy-strong), and Sam managed to shoot the monster with salt just as the knife was within an inch of his brother’s face.
As before, the salt didn’t do much except distract it, which for Sam’s purpose of saving Dean was good enough. Or, at least, it was good enough until the monster turned to Sam and let out a long howl. It began stumbling toward Sam, its face a rictus of fury.
Sam managed to shoot two, three more times before the creature waved its hand, sending Sam flying. Dean had had barely enough time to grab the knife, still pierced through the wood, out of the monster’s hand when it turned back to him with a roar. The monster knocked him over and pinned him to the floor.
Dean took the wood-embedded-knife and stabbed upward, straight to its heart, and buried the weapon deep enough that the piece of wood was pressed up against its chest.
The monster didn’t even flinch, just laughed. “Did you think that would hurt me?” it sneered.
Then a voice perked up from behind the monster. “Hey ugly!” The monster sat up and cocked its head as the rough whir of a chainsaw sprang to life. “Heads up.”
Dean barely had time to close his eyes and mouth before the blood and viscera began flying; a couple seconds later, the chainsaw died, and he felt the monster’s body fall to the side, off of him.
He opened his eyes to find himself absolutely soaked in blood. And there, standing over him, was a man—black hair, prominent chin, and, bizarrely, wearing a uniform and name tag from an S Mart—holding the monster’s severed head in his left hand and chainsaw in the right.
“Who the hell are you?” Dean asked, not even trying to hide his amazement.
“The name’s Ash. Housewares.”
—
Part III
“Housewares?” Dean asked.
“It’s my department,” the guy said, as if that was obvious. “You may want to take a couple steps away for this next part.”
Dean scrambled away as the man turned, restarting the chainsaw. Dean stumbled over to Sam, who was half-lucid against the wall.
“Did—did I just see a guy use a chainsaw to kill that thing?” Sam asked, rubbing his head.
Dean, at a loss for words, helped Sam up, and then used a semi-clean cloth nearby to wipe most of the blood off his face.
“Total dismemberment is the name of the game,” the guy said, turning around once he had finished. On the floor, the bits and pieces of the monster slowly disintegrated and melted into a bouquet of stomach-churning colors and textures.
“What was that thing?” Dean asked, eyeing the newcomer.
“I call ‘em deadites. They’re pretty sick—" he waved his right arm around a bit, and Sam and Dean both raised their eyebrows in shock.
“Do you have a chainsaw for a hand?” Sam asked.
“What, this? Yeah,” the guy—Ash—said, wiggling his chainsaw-arm so some monster goop fell off onto the floor.
Sam grimaced in disgust. “That’s—"
“Awesome,” Dean finished.
“Look,” Ash said, tearing off his blood-spattered S Mart uniform, revealing a plain blue button-up shirt beneath. “You guys better get out of here. Stick around too long and you’ll turn into that.” He dropped his soiled uniform shirt on top of the pile of monster slowly melting into the floor.
“What? No,” Sam said. “We’re staying.”
“You’re the one who wanted to leave,” Dean told his brother.
“Actually, you should both leave. Civilians can’t help.”
“Right,” Dean scoffed. “The guy wearing the friggin’ name tag is calling us civilians.”
“Hey, I need to make money somehow,” Ash said. “And fighting deadites ain’t gonna pay the bills.”
“Wait. You’re a hunter,” Sam said, awed.
“What?” Dean and Ash said at the same time.
“Yeah, you know—you go around, hunting monsters—"
“Monsters?” Ash shook his head and laughed. “What are you talking about? ‘Monsters’ aren’t real. Deadites are.”
“Monsters are real,” Dean said. “And my brother and I hunt them.” He gestured at Sam, who huffed out half-laugh at Ash’s incredulous expression.
“Monsters?” said a voice suddenly from the other side of the room. Ash yelped and turned, holding his chainsaw up, but Dean took a step forward and pushed Ash’s arm down. Emma, her head poked out from behind the door to the kitchen, looked totally freaked out, and Clara and Chris were just visible behind her.
“Some monsters,” Sam said, using his calm and reasonable voice. “But Dean and I specialize in stopping them before they can hurt anyone—"
“Oh my god, is that a chainsaw?” Sam’s little speech got cut off when the gaggle of students fell into the room, and everyone began speaking at once—the kids asking what was going on, and Sam and Dean trying unsuccessfully to calm them down.
“Okay!” Ash yelled. “I don’t know what the hell is going on here. And, honestly, I don’t give a crap. All I know is that you all need to get out here before—"
“I chained her up,” the death echo intoned, appearing out of nowhere. Emma, Clara, and Chris all screamed in surprise, and Ash swore and stumbled backward. “I’ve damned us—" Ash swung his chainsaw through the apparition, and it disappeared.
“Stop waving that around!” Dean bellowed, knocking Ash’s arm down again. “It’s just a death echo.”
“A what?! Okay,” Ash said, teeth clenched. “I changed my mind—if someone doesn’t explain what’s going on here in the next ten seconds, I’m gonna start carving it out of you—"
“It’s a ghost, okay?!” Sam stepped forward between where Dean and Ash stood almost nose-to-nose, shouldering them apart. “Not a dangerous one, but still a ghost.”
“A ghost?”
“They said it can’t hurt us,” Clara said to Ash from where she was huddled with her friends. “It’s trapped in a loop or something. That just means that this cabin is where he died.”
As if on cue, the spirit appeared again. “I chained her up. I’ve damned us all—"
“Did he say he chained someone up?” Ash said, stepping closer to the ghostly man, studying the patches on the elbows of his tweed jacket.
“Probably some weird sex thing,” Dean said, watching the echo with a frown.
“—They’re free—all of them—" And, like before, a knife appeared in the air and stabbed the man in the heart.
For a moment, the room was silent.
“Huh. Are you crazy kids in college?” Ash asked the huddle of Chris, Clara, and Emma. They nodded, looking confused. “Did that guy look like a professor to you? You know, before he got shish-kabobed?”
“Um, I guess,” Chris said slowly. “I mean, he didn’t look like any of my professors, but he kinda looked like what a professor in a movie might look like—"
“Yeah, he was a regular Nutty Professor,” Dean said, rolling his eyes. “What’s your point?”
“Damn,” Ash muttered. “But that doesn’t make sense—"
“What doesn’t make sense?” Sam asked.
Ash looked like he was considering answering, when the only remaining window into the room shattered.
Branches, thorny and twisted, tore into the room, grabbing at the people gathered within. One vine curled around Dean and knocked him sideways into Ash; another swung Clara and Emma out of the way and grabbed Chris by the ankle. He screamed as it dragged him swiftly toward the window; at the last second, before Chris got pulled into the night, Sam cut through the vine with a machete and Chris dropped to the ground with a heavy thud.
There was a loud screech, as if the vines themselves were howling in pain, and the branches retreated back through the window as quickly as they had appeared.
The branches disappeared, and the group within the cabin began moving all at once. Clara helped Emma to her feet; Sam and Ash started boarding up the windows with the planks that used to be the dining table; Dean started hammering boards over the door. Chris remained seated on the ground, hands curled around his ankle, moaning softly.
“Now the trees are evil?” Dean barked, hammering in another board.
“You should get used to it,” Ash muttered.
“Ashley knows all about it,” Chris said from the floor. But there was something wrong with his voice—it was sing-song and childish, too high-pitched.
“Chris?” Emma whispered, stumbling away from him with Clara.
“You’ll all join us before the end!” Chris screamed, and leapt at the girls, his white eyes flashing in the dark.
Sam and Dean both dove for their duffels, pulling out knives and machetes, but Ash went straight into action, throwing his hammer at the back of Chris’ head. It connected with a sick thunk and Chris turned toward Ash and Sam, baring teeth in a bloody grin.
Whatever had taken over Chris’ body stood and moved toward Ash in a weird half-stumble, laughing as it did so. It had closed half the distance of the room when there was a bang—Dean, standing on the other side of the room with his sawed-off, began replacing the shot immediately. Formerly-Chris, now missing a good chunk from its head, turned to Dean and hissed, and Dean (with a panicked, “son of a bitch!”) widened his eyes as he lifted the shotgun again.
He shot another time into the thing’s chest, and though it stumbled, it didn’t stop.
“Chris!” screamed Emma. “Chris! Please—"
The creature paused, then turned toward Emma and Clara, cowering in the far corner.
“Chris can’t come to the phone right now,” it taunted, then lunged at where the girls stood.
Sam, Ash, and Dean all yelled at once, readying weapons and moving towards where the creature was hurtling, when suddenly the creature fell through the floor with a howl.
“Now!” Emma yelled, and Clara swung the door to the cellar shut over where the creature had fallen through.
The hunters all stopped in shock, as the girls looked up at them, terrified but triumphant.
—
“Good thinking,” Sam complimented Emma and Clara, while Dean chained the door shut.
The door shook as the creature pounded from the other side. Clara bit her lip. “I’m just glad you didn’t have to cut him up.”
Ash shook his head. “We’ll still have to do that.” At Emma and Clara’s horrified gasps, he swallowed. “I mean, probably. Based on past experience.”
“Sam and I have killed some nasty sons-of-bitches, but nothing like these.” Dean finished locking the chains with a snap, then stood and started reloading his shotgun while leveling a look at Ash. “So what’s the deal? What the hell is going on?”
“And why were you so interested in the death echo?” Sam added.
Ash looked around at the group—Sam and Dean, both surprisingly composed (maybe they really did hunt monsters, he thought), and Clara and Emma, their eyes darting between Ash and the rattling cellar door.
“Okay,” Ash said, nodding slowly. “I guess you guys deserve to know. When I was in college, I went to a cabin like this one with a couple friends. We knew it belonged to some professor—but we didn’t know what the professor had been working on. Turns out, he was into translating ancient languages, and we found a recording of him reading a book—this book.” Ash reached into the little bag hanging off his shoulder and pulled out a positively ancient-looking tome.
“Looks like a fun read,” Dean muttered, eyeing the twisted face on the cover.
“What is it made of?” Sam asked, pulling a face at the oily leather.
Ash held the book out. “It’s bound in human flesh, and inked in blood.”
“Seriously?” Sam asked. “What is it? Some kind of book of summoning rituals?”
“Yeah, something like that.” Ash tossed the book to Sam, who flipped through the pages gingerly. “As for the ‘death echo’ thingy—"
“Huh. You think that’s the ghost of the professor who read from this book,” Sam suggested, passing the book to Dean, who took it in one hand with a grimace and then tossed it back to Ash without looking inside.
Ash nodded. “Yeah—he’s the one that unleashed the deadites, and after they were free, his wife got infected. He chained her up in the basement—just like that ‘echo’ said.”
“But none of that happened here. So what,” Dean said, shaking his head in confusion. “The doc summoned all these things at some other cabin, and then he came all the way here just to get stabbed? That doesn’t make any sense.”
Ash shrugged. “I never figured out what happened to Professor Knowby. I suppose I always assumed that his wife wasn’t the only one who joined the ranks of the evil dead—probably some other deadite got him on his way out of the cabin.”
“But that was at a different cabin?” Dean clarified. At Ash’s nod in the affirmative, he frowned. “Why would the professor come here after leaving Ash’s cabin?”
“The professor didn’t necessarily die here—someone could have brought the professor’s body here,” Sam suggested. “Remember the Morton House? With the, uh, Ghostfacers?”
Dean groaned. “Don’t remind me.”
“So are the ‘deadites’ here because the professor’s ghost is here?” Emma asked.
“I don’t think that’s how it works,” Ash said. “This book is one of a kind—there’s nothing else around that can summon deadites. The professor only read from it once, and that was at a cabin in Michigan back in ‘87. I’ve had it since then, and I know no one else has read from it since.”
“Then how are there deadites here?”
Ash shrugged. “Maybe someone got the recording of him reading the book and played it here.” He frowned. “And, I guess, the professor also happened to die here?”
“That’s way too much of a coincidence,” Sam said.
“Plus, if this is happening because of a recording, then who was it that played the recording?” Dean said.
“You don’t already know?” Emma asked. At Sam, Dean, and Ash’s looks, she pursed her lips. “I thought you’d know, since you came here to hunt those things.”
“We didn’t know there were ‘deadites’ here,” said Dean slowly.
Clara and Emma frowned at each other. “If you didn’t know, then why did you come here in the first place?”
“Huh,” Sam frowned. “Okay, well, Dean and I came because we heard that it was haunted.”
“Which it is,” Dean said. “Kind of. Even though death echoes are usually below our paygrade. What about you, Kwik-E-Mart?”
Ash rolled his eyes. “I work at S Mart, dumbass. And I was in town when I heard that there was a cabin in the woods where weird stuff tended to happen. I thought, ‘Hey! I know about weird stuff in cabins in the woods!’ and drove by to check it out.”
“Talk about weird coincidences,” Clara said, studying the hunters closely.
“That’s definitely not a coincidence,” Dean said, shaking his head. “What are the chances we’d all happen to show up at the same cabin on the same day?”
The group looked around at each other. The death echo appeared again, and the man—the professor—recited his death scene once more.
“So, we’re back to asking why someone would have brought that professor’s body here.” Emma asked, gesturing as the echo flickered away.
“That is officially outside my wheelhouse,” Ash said. “All I know is that we need to survive until dawn to get out of here. Your little Scooby Doo mystery of ‘who’s into playing with corpses’ doesn’t really matter to me.”
“Doesn’t matter?” Dean said, incredulous. “Buddy, you’re the only one that seems to have any experience with what the hell’s going on here. For all we know, there’s a lot more you haven’t told us.”
Ash scoffed. “What does that mean? You think I wanted everyone to come here? You think I wanted to fight some deadites? Look, ‘buddy,’ I’ve had a crappy enough day already without you accusing me of—whatever it is you’re accusing me of. That I’m fighting deadites in the woods is just the cherry on top of a friggin’ awful day! I drove ten hours to the middle of nowhere just to find out that the free meal coupon I got in the mail was for a restaurant that doesn’t even exist.”
“Wait, what?” Sam asked.
“Yeah, and now your heart is breaking for me,” Ash said. “Well, you can take your pity and shove it!”
“Okay, okay,” Dean rolled his eyes. “You’ve had a tough day. Now, what coupon are you talking about?”
Ash looked around. “You know, a coupon. It comes in the mail, and you can get free things—"
“We all know what coupons are,” Emma said.
“Okay, well this was a good one.” He looked smug. “It said it was the only one sent to Michigan, and I had been randomly selected. One free meal at the largest all-you-can-eat buffet in Iowa.”
Sam made a face. “You drove ten hours to go to a buffet?”
“It was a deal worth $24.99! Good only for today. Or, I guess now it’s worth $0, since now it’s past closing and no one around here seems to have heard of ‘Big Buck’s Unlimited Fiesta.’”
“Why didn’t you google it first?” Emma asked.
“What’s google?”
Dean huffed out a laugh. “Gotta say, man, I respect the hustle.”
“Thank you!”
“Someone wanted you to come to this area,” Clara reasoned slowly. “But why would you get singled out?”
“Is it so hard to believe that I could win a coupon?”
“The coupon wasn’t real,” Sam said. “Do you really not get that?”
“Yeah, I get it,” Ash snapped. “I think.”
“Maybe because of the book,” Emma cut in. “Someone knew you had that book, and they wanted you to come here with it.”
Sam said “huh” and nodded while Ash pulled the book out of his bag and gave it a grimace.
“Well, the coupon might have brought you to the area, but how did you say you got to this cabin?” Dean asked.
“I told you. I went to a gas station for directions and overheard some guy talking about a freaky abandoned cabin where kids sometimes go to party.” Ash shrugged while Dean frowned.
Clara then turned to Sam and Dean. “What about you guys?”
“Well, we didn’t get any coupons,” Sam said. “We were just hunting, like normal—we found some records of weird events in the area and then traced them to this cabin.”
Dean raised a hand. “Hang on, that’s not true. We didn’t trace the stories to here, that guy at the gas station told us where this cabin was.”
“Gas station on Jefferson Highway?” Ash asked.
Sam started. “Yeah—did you go to the same one?”
Ash nodded.
Dean scoffed. “And let me guess—the guy who gave you directions was about six feet tall, long brown hair, and looked like he needed a sandwich or three?”
“Yep, that sounds like him.”
“So an evil gas station attendant is the real culprit here?” Dean said, pinching the bridge of his nose.
“That doesn’t explain why we ended up at this cabin,” Emma said, hugging herself. “Chris’ brother had a friend who came here—"
“No, he didn’t,” Clara whispered. “It wasn’t a friend. His brother just heard about it from someone else, at—at a gas station.”
The cabin was silent for a moment.
“Okay, new plan,” Dean suggested. “We survive ‘til dawn, then go torch the damn gas station, preferably with that guy inside.”
“Um, do you guys hear that?” Emma said.
“Hear what?” Sam asked.
“I don’t hear anything,” Ash said, looking around.
“Right—why’s the cellar silent?”
Everyone turned and looked at the perfectly still cellar door.
—
Part IV
“Remind me why Dean and Ash are going down there?” Emma asked, frowning as Sam finished untangling the chains on the cellar door.
Sam sighed. “Ash thought the only way to summon the deadites was with that book, the Necronomicon, but if there’s some other way, we need to know how.”
He stood up and dusted off the knees of his jeans while Clara and Emma shared a look. “Okay, but why do they have to look in the cellar?” Clara asked.
“We checked all the rooms up here and didn’t find anything.”
“Well, maybe whoever summoned this stuff did it somewhere else.”
Sam shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. This cabin is obviously at the heart of what’s going on. But you two don’t have to worry about it—I’m gonna stay with you in the kitchen and make sure you’re safe.”
All three looked down at the cellar door.
Meanwhile, Dean swore at the sight of his car.
“Oh, Baby, what did it do to you,” he muttered, inspecting the broken window in the backseat. He slapped a hand on the car’s roof. “I’m gonna kill it!”
Ash, half a step behind, snorted. “You call your car Baby?”
“We have a special bond,” Dean snapped.
“Yeah, I have a special bond with my car too—my ‘baby’ went with me back to 1300.”
Dean, who had still been inspecting the broken window, blinked in confusion, then stood straight. “What?”
“What do you mean, ‘what’? It’s pretty obvious. When I got sent back in time to 1300, my car came with me.”
“1300 1300? Like, seven hundred years ago?”
“Yeah, genius—what other 1300 is there?”
Dean rolled his eyes, then moved to the back of the car and opened the trunk. He propped up the false door in the Impala’s trunk, and Ash whistled appreciatively. “Quite a stash back here.”
“Now do you believe we aren’t civilians?” Dean muttered, and began piling shotgun shells in his duffel, while Ash inspected the painted warding in the trunk.
“You guys didn’t strike me as the satanist types,” he said, running his fingers over the devil’s trap.
“Like I said—Sammy and I hunt monsters.” He pushed a shotgun into Ash’s chest. “There’s a lot more out there than just deadites.”
A branch snapped behind them. Both men flipped to face the woods, their shotguns raised, but everything was still.
Actually, it was all too still. There was no wind, and every leaf on every branch hung as if suspended in time.
“I think we should get back to the cabin,” Ash said, backing slowly away from the car.
“Starting to agree with you,” Dean muttered and slammed the trunk closed.
They hurried back to the cabin, but right before they reached the brick path up to the porch, Dean swore. “Look,” he said, and gestured to the side of the cabin.
It was an egress window into what must be the cellar, the window wide open to the night.
“Dammit,” Ash said, turning around and looking out at the woods. “What are the chances it’s waiting nicely in the basement for us to kill it?”
Dean opened his mouth to answer, but a snarl from up above cut him off; he managed to get a knife up just as the creature tackled him from where it had been waiting on the roof. The deadite, even with a knife in its throat, laughed, and bit down towards Dean’s hand. He kicked it off, barely in time to keep his fingers.
Ash started up his chainsaw, but the deadite just giggled. “It’s been too long, Ash,” it said. “Remember Scotty? Shelly? Linda? Cheryl? We killed them all—and now, we’re gonna get you.”
Ash roared and swung wildly at the deadite—the deadite jumped back and then swung its knife at Ash’s chainsaw hand. There was a spurt of liquid—not blood, but oil, as the deadite used its knife to cut through the motor of the chainsaw.
It laughed again and then took off, running into the woods.
“Chainsaw!” Ash said, falling to his knees and cradling it in his arms like it was some kind of injured baby animal. “My chainsaw!”
“Come on!” Dean said, grabbing him. “We have to chase it!”
Ash spent one more second looking at his chainsaw before unbuckling the straps and letting the chainsaw fall to the ground. Then he took off after Dean into the thick underbrush.
Inside the cabin, Sam, Emma, and Clara were still waiting. “They’re taking a pretty long time,” Clara said eventually.
Sam clenched his jaw, and walked across the room to the window. He peeked out, moving the moth-holey lace curtain out of the way so he could look at the car.
There was no one there.
The Impala sat, untouched and still. There was glass on the ground by the left side of the car—Sam thought Dean might have an aneurysm when he saw the broken window—but neither Dean nor Ash were in the clearing.
“What the hell?” Sam muttered. Then, he yelled. “Dean! Dean?”
“What’s wrong?” Emma asked, hurrying over to the window. “Is Dean—did he—?”
“He’s not out there. Ash is gone, too.” Sam went to the front door, grabbing a gun on the way. “I’m gonna go—"
“Um, guys?” Clara said from the other side of the room. “Do cellars usually glow?”
She pointed down and Sam and Emma followed her gesture. Sure enough, there was a green glow emanating from the edges of the cellar door.
“I’ve killed her,” the death echo began again, out of nowhere. Sam, his nerves fried, started back and then tossed some salt onto it, making the image disappear.
“I’m really starting to hate that thing,” he muttered, moving to open the door.
“I’ve killed her. I chained her up,” the professor started again, flickering into existence. “I’ve damned us all—" he turned and looked directly at Sam. “Help me. Sam, you must stop it.”
And he pointed at the cellar door and disappeared.
“Did that ghost just say your name?”
Sam sighed deeply, looking between the door leading outside and the cellar. “Dammit, Dean,” Sam muttered, then walked over to the entrance to the cellar. “Okay. I’m going down there.”
“You’re what?” Emma squeaked.
“You’re seriously going to follow directions from a ghost?” Clara asked.
“Yeah. He was just a professor, right? He didn’t mean to start all of this—maybe he’s trying to help stop it.”
“You said you’d stay with us up here while Ash and Dean went down there!” Emma said. “What are Clara and I supposed to do now?”
Sam dug in his duffel for salt and a can of spray paint. He handed the salt to Emma and directed her to make a circle on the floor, while he quickly painted a protection sigils on the door and walls.
“Stay inside the circle,” he said. “These symbols should protect you from anything else that comes in here—"
“But will it help against deadites?”
Sam swallowed. “I don’t know. But that other deadite is still in the cellar—so it’s probably safer up here.”
“Probably?” Clara said, paling significantly.
“Here,” Sam said, handing them knives. “I’ll be back in a minute. I’m just gonna go down and take a quick look around and see if I can figure out how the deadites got summoned here.”
The girls stepped into their salt circle and Sam walked over to the cellar. With his gun trained on the door, in case anything was waiting for him, he kicked it open with his foot, and was greeted by—nothing.
The green glow showed him the rungs of the ladder, the packed dirt floor less than seven feet below him. Before he could think better of it, he jumped down into the room, landing with a grunt. He straightened, overly aware of how close the ceiling was to the top of his head.
The cellar was about as creepy as every cellar Sam had ever had to jump into as a hunter—in other words, it sucked. The wooden shelves along the walls displayed jars pickling indeterminable things. A sheet hung over a line over in a far corner, and mildewing cardboard boxes on the ground held sundry items of a basement-type—tools, old clothes, Christmas decorations, and, in one box, pictures still in their frames. He picked one of the pictures up, and found himself staring at an image of a family standing in front of a cabin.
Or, rather, they were standing in front of this cabin. Sam hadn’t recognized it at first; the porch wasn’t sagging, the windows gleamed, little flowers dotted the path to the door, and the building itself had been painted a cheerful red.
The family looked like a good, old-fashioned, as-American-as-apple-pie family. Mom and dad, plus two teenage sons, all beaming at the camera in what looked like new bright orange and camo hunting gear, a dog laying at their feet. If he had to guess, Sam would say the picture was from the mid ‘80’s—so the kids would be a decade or two older than he and Dean, more like Ash’s age.
Sam studied the picture for a moment longer, and then, for some reason, pulled it out of its frame and stuffed it in his pocket.
He crept through the cellar, keeping his back to the earthen walls, toeing aside boxes and peeking inside bags. The green glow was less pronounced down here, casting a gentle light not nearly as bright as he expected it to be from upstairs.
There was one place left he hadn’t checked. The white bed sheet rustled slightly in a breeze; the line it hung from was almost up to the ceiling, so Sam’s view of the corner behind the sheet was completely obscured. Sam took a deep breath and reached a hand out slowly to the sheet, and with a swallow, pulled the sheet off the line.
It fell to the floor and Sam’s eyes widened.
In the woods, Ash had just caught up to Dean. The deadite, traipsing along up ahead, seemed to pick its paths at random: Ash was pretty sure he and Dean had been led in a circle or two already. When the deadite would turn into a thicket without any way out, it would clamber up a nearby tree and hop to the other side, leaving Dean and Ash to go out of the way around the obstruction.
“Can—we—stop—yet?” Ash panted, swatting a low-hanging branch out of the way with where his chainsaw hand should have been.
“We’ve almost caught it,” Dean said, somehow sprinting a little more.
But that didn’t make sense. How could they be catching up to it when they were forced to slow down to avoid bushes while the deadite was just jumping or climbing over them? And Ash was pretty sure he had seen that exact tree at least four times before.
Ash stopped. “Shouldn’t it have gotten away by now?!” he shouted.
Dean didn’t answer but kept running. Ash moved as if to start running again, then paused. Dean disappeared into the woods, and Ash swore, turning around to look at his surroundings.
The forest was totally still. There was no sound or movement anywhere. Everything seemed semi-hazy, as if the moonlight was fogging everything up instead of illuminating it.
Then, he heard a rustling in the woods behind him (he was pretty sure that was the direction from where he and Dean had just come) and he turned, raising his shotgun.
A second later, the deadite tore into the clearing. Ash fired immediately, and the deadite howled in pain, one of its hands blown clean off.
“That’s how it feels!” Ash yelled, laughing in triumph.
The deadite made a pushing motion at Ash with its remaining hand, and he went flying backwards into a tree—Dean arrived in the clearing just in time to watch the deadite hiss and disappear into the woods, while Ash groaned and sat up.
“What the hell?” Dean asked, out of breath. “How did you get ahead of it?”
“I didn't,” Ash said, taking Dean’s outstretched hand as he stumbled to his feet. “It was just going in circles.”
Dean blinked. “In circles? Why?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it wanted me to work on my cardio.”
But Dean was already moving back to where he had just come. “I don’t like this. Come on—we have to get back to Sa—"
And then there was a hand covering Dean’s mouth.
A hand, greying and bloody, disconnected from any arm.
Dean pulled it off with a “what the hell!” and threw it away. The hand flew into the middle of the little clearing and laid on the ground for a second before hopping back up, using its fingers like tiny feet as it scampered about.
Dean and Ash both tried shooting it, but it seemed to be able to anticipate their moves. It leapt and twirled out of the way of the shots, almost balletic.
As if it got bored of playing, it suddenly moved toward Dean again, dancing between his feet. Ash raised his shotgun to shoot at Dean’s feet, but Dean hollered, “Don’t you dare!”
Dean, who looked like he was doing a dance too, jumped around, until suddenly he stomped on the hand. The bones cracked, and Dean put the barrel of his gun right up against the grey flesh. The hand made a sad little sound as it blew apart, and Dean immediately went over to scrape his boots on a nearby tree.
“I friggin’ hate deadites!” Dean yelled.
“Hey, man,” Ash said, going over and clapping his good hand on Dean’s shoulder. “Fighting off a possessed disembodied hand? I’ve been there, done that, and even got the commemorative souvenir.” He waved his stump and Dean grimaced. “At least you didn’t have to fight your own hand.”
Behind them, a crow alighted in the remains of the hand and began to pick at the flesh.
—
Back in the cellar, Sam was looking at an altar. The candles, dripping copious amounts of wax, were the source of the sickly green glow—whatever had been mixed in the wax to cause them to glow green smelled absurdly like burnt popcorn.
It looked like witchcraft—four candles, arranged in a semi-circle, with a complex symbol drawn on the table in blood in the middle of the candles. At the head of the table was a human skull, yellowing, cracked, and missing its jaw.
“Hey, Professor,” Sam muttered to the skull, taking in the evidence of a spirit summoning ritual with a frown.
The candles sputtered, and Sam looked up. The egress window up above was propped open, and he swore. That would explain why the deadite wasn’t in the cellar, but it meant the girls upstairs weren’t safe.
He turned to go back upstairs to the girls, when he noticed a book on the floor, as if it had been knocked accidentally off the altar. It was a spell book—not bound in human flesh like Ash’s, but plenty evil all the same. Sam picked it up and flipped through it, then stopped on a dog-eared page.
“Oh no,” Sam whispered, then sprinted over to the ladder. He had just grabbed it when the cellar door swung shut above him.
He climbed up a couple rungs and banged on the door. “Hey!” Sam shouted. “Let me out!”
He pushed up against the door as best as he could—the door lifted just a crack, enough for him to see it had been re-chained shut. To his horror, he also saw Emma and Clara, hugging each other, while a figure with its back turned to Sam pointed a gun at them.
“Leave them alone!” Sam yelled.
The figure paused, then turned to the door. He couldn’t see the person’s face, but he could see their knobbly knees sticking out from ill-fitting shorts.
Sam barely managed to jump back out of the way when they shot at the crack in the door, and he scrambled away as the wood splintered overhead.
Sam sat for a second in the darkness until a breeze swirled through the cellar. He looked up at the open egress window and, with a nod, ran over to the wall and began to climb through.
“I have to say,” the man said, pointing his gun at the girls again. “I’m shocked you managed to survive this long. If I were a betting man, I would have guessed you two would have been the first to die.” He checked his watch and hummed. “Instead, it’s almost midnight. I know I have this gun pointed at you and everything, but you should be proud. I am genuinely impressed.”
“Why are you doing this?” Emma sobbed.
“No, no,” the man said, shaking his head. “I’m not doing it. See? I figured it out—how to get my proverbial cake and eat it, too.” Emma choked out another sob as he pointed his gun at the girls, and Clara looked up—meeting Sam’s eyes where he stood outside the window. He raised a finger to his lips—quiet!—and she moved her head in a half-nod as he crept to the front door.
“What I’m working on takes some serious juice,” Sam heard the man say through the door. “Of course, the particular juice I need—human sacrifice—" (Clara and Emma whimpered) “tends to leave quite a stain on your soul—but I’m sure Sam here has already put that all together.”
Sam’s eyes widened, but he was unable to do anything as the door was flung open and he was dragged into the room by an incorporeal hand. Sam stood, frozen in place, his back to the door, as he looked at his assailant.
It was the man from the gas station. He was still in his uniform—black shorts and a purple polo shirt—and in the low light the stark lines of his face made him look like a skeleton. He waved a hand and Emma, Clara, and Sam were suddenly still, as if shackled in place by invisible chains. The man walked over to Sam and drew a knife along Sam’s forearm. Sam struggled impotently as the guy took the spellbook out of Sam’s hands, opened it to a wicked looking page, and wiped some of Sam’s blood on the sigil inked inside.
“You should never let a witch get your blood,” he said, mocking, then waved his hand lazily and threw Sam across the room to the far wall.
“Tonight hasn’t gone as well as I planned it,” he said, adjusting his nametag—"Grant”—and sighing. “I thought you’d all be dead by now, either killed by one of those things, or turned into one and killed by Ash Williams.” He practically spit Ash’s name as he toed the pile of goop on the floor where Ash had cut up not-Liam. “Either way would have worked for my purposes.”
“It’s not gonna work,” Sam managed to grit out. He was pinned to the wall by an invisible force, and speaking took almost all his strength. “You have to do the ritual before midnight, and you don’t have enough sacrifices.”
Grant shrugged. “Well, I didn’t have enough sacrifices. But the minimum I need is five. Your friend here on the floor, plus you three—that gets me to four. I can’t believe I’m rooting for them, but if your idiot brother and that chainsaw-armed freak manage to get that other one, then I'll be golden. Of course, in a perfect world, your brother would die, too. Why give five sacrifices when you can give six?”
“Five sacrifices?” Clara asked. “What are you talking about?”
“It’s what my dark lord requires,” Grant deadpanned, then barked out a laugh. “Or whatever.”
“It’s not a joke,” Sam said, struggling against his invisible bonds. “That thing you’re summoning—the Ankou—it’s gonna kill you.”
“No,” Grant said, shaking his head. “It’s gonna reward me. I’ll give it five sacrifices, at least, and at midnight, when I summon it, I’ll get what I’m owed.”
He stepped over to the table where the little speaker and mini-generator Liam had brought to the cabin still sat. Grant pushed everything off the table and began drawing something on the surface in chalk, chanting as he did so.
“Grant, man,” Sam ground out. “My brother is still out there. So is Ash. When they get back, they’re gonna stop you—and I haven’t known Ash for long, but I don’t think he’s going to be gentle about it. Let us go!”
Grant ignored him and kept chanting. Sam looked at the girls, who were both crying quietly, and he struggled against his bonds and bit his lip, before going to a new angle—
“You’re not thinking this through,” Sam tried. “We’re all still here, we’re still alive—are you really gonna kill us? I thought you didn’t want to stain your own soul.”
Grant paused, then looked up. “Oh, I should have mentioned. I’m not worried about your brother, Ash, or having to kill you myself. You see, I brought some help.”
Out in the woods, Dean and Ash were totally lost. “We’re totally lost,” Ash remarked, as he and Dean wandered between a couple trees.
Dean made a triumphant sound and stepped into a clearing—where there was a painfully familiar tree stump and the remains of a hand on the ground.
“Huh,” Ash said. “Back where we started.”
“Are we dead?” Dean asked. “Is this what it’s like living in a friggin’ loop like a—a death echo?” He kicked the pulpy remains of the deadite hand out into the bushes.
A crow cawed, the sound tearing through the unnatural silence like a knife. Both Ash and Dean jumped, pointing their shotguns at the branches overhead.
“I don’t think the crow liked that,” Ash said.
“Boo hoo for the crow.” As if in response, the crow cawed again.
“Wait. Do you hear that?” Ash asked.
“The crow? Obviously,” Dean muttered darkly.
“No—the wings.”
Dean strained for a moment and then he heard them—the beating of hundreds of wings, all headed straight towards their clearing. Ash punched Dean in the shoulder and started running into the woods, away from the birds. Dean paused for only a second—just long enough to see a flock of crows, their eyes milky white and their beaks sickly grey—before he started running, too.
“What the hell are they?” Ash asked over his shoulder as Dean fought to catch up.
“Deadites!” Dean yelled, and as he passed Ash, grabbed his shirt and pulled him to the side in a hairpin turn.
The crows screeched raucously as they overshot their quarry; Dean pulled Ash along through the thick underbrush, turning every which way through the woods.
They, impossibly, passed through the same clearing again—"You've gotta be kidding me!” Dean yelled—and then, miraculously, the forest came back to life. It was as if the bubble in the woods popped, and Dean and Ash were back in the real world. A cold wind whipped through their hair as they ran: branches shook in the breeze, an owl hooted, and the moonlit fog dissipated.
“I’ve never loved the woods so much,” Dean said to Ash, over his shoulder. “I—"
“Look out!” Ash yelled, and pulled Dean to the ground; a hair's breadth of a second later, the bark in the tree above where Dean’s head had been splintered.
“Who’s shooting at us?” Dean whispered to Ash, both crouched down behind some bushes.
Ash shook his head. “I don’t know. Deadites don’t usually use rifles.”
“They’re over here!” A voice called, some distance away.
“That sounded like a person,” Ash said, furrowing his brow.
“Yeah—okay, here’s the plan. You go that way,” Dean pointed behind Ash, “and I’ll go this way. We’ll try to surround this guy.”
Ash nodded, and then hurried off, crouching, in the exact opposite direction Dean had indicated. Dean rolled his eyes and then went the other way from Ash, moving as quietly as possible through the brush.
“Come on,” Dean heard the man say into a walkie-talkie. “I think I saw them move further into the woods.”
The walkie-talkie crackled badly enough that the response was hardly sensical. “Do not—orders—remain by cabin—"
Dean risked a peek and watched as the guy—maybe ex-military, maybe some sort of hired gun?—shook the walkie-talkie and swore.
Dean clenched his jaw, preparing to jump out and tackle him, when a branch snapped on the other side of the man. The guy turned, and walked slowly toward the sound, his rifle aimed at a bush.
There was a crash—Ash came falling out of the bush and Dean said, “Crap,” and then a second later the deadite with the missing hand jumped out after him. “Crap!” Dean said, reloading his shotgun.
Ash, on his back, kicked the deadite over his head, sending it crashing into the ex-military guy. The deadite and mercenary grappled on the ground for a second, and when the deadite stood up, the ex-military guy stood up, too, his eyes now also filmy white.
“Crap!!” Dean said, and popped up out of the bushes, already shooting at the two deadites moving toward Ash.
The one with the missing hand now was missing part of its head, but it continued ambling toward Ash. The other, though, turned to Dean and roared.
Dean jumped out from behind the bush. “Let’s get to the cabin!” Dean yelled. Ash didn’t need to be told twice—together they ran wildly into the woods.
The deadites were close behind—Dean’s sixth sense, honed by a lifetime of hunting, kept him aware of where the deadites were behind him—and though they had picked a random direction, he and Ash inexplicably burst into the clearing by the cabin.
Dean opened the Impala’s trunk swiftly—Ash didn’t even hesitate as Dean tossed him a machete.
“Total dismemberment,” Ash had said before. Dean drew out his own machete with a grimace, and stood back-to-back with Ash. He really did hate deadites.
Only a hundred feet away, Sam didn’t know what time it was. It had to be close to midnight—he would guess it was after 11:30. Grant was still chanting and drawing, when he suddenly straightened a little, taking a deep breath in through his nose.
“Two more done,” he whispered. “I’m up to three. Look,” Grant said, gesturing out the window. “As midnight draws nearer, as Ankou begins to seep into our world, this cabin draws away from the earthly realm.” He smiled and turned to Sam in triumph.
Sam drew back in horror. Grant’s eyes were no longer brown: instead, they shone the same sickly green as the light from the cellar had been. And sure enough, the forest was no longer visible outside, as if a veil had been drawn between them and the rest of the world.
Then, it hit Sam. Two more dead—was Dean one of them? It was a bloodbath, and there was nothing he could do, pinned to the wall by the crazy witch in front of him.
“Grant,” Sam pleaded. “You just need five. Let the girls go. You can take me, but not them.”
“With you I would only have four,” Grant said, shaking his head. “They need to stay, until I know what I need to do.” He checked his watch and gasped. He pulled out a walkie-talkie and spoke quickly into it. “Clegg! Holcomb! Come in.”
Silence, then a crackling voice. “This is Clegg.”
“Come here! I need you to do something for me. Some final business to take care of.”
He shut the walkie-talkie off with a snap, and then spoke a handful of words over his altar. The chalk began to glow blue and Grant leaned away with a smile. “It’s ready.”
“You know, for a so-called servant of a god of death, you’re pretty trigger-shy,” Sam strained. “You gonna make your lackey kill us?”
“I don’t deserve damnation for this,” Grant said. “I knew I couldn’t be the one to conduct the sacrificial killings—but my master needs to feed on fresh souls.” He tutted, as if the Ankou was some kind of petulant child instead of an ancient god of death.
“Do you believe in the soul, Sam?” Grant asked, looking up. “I do. I’ve believed in it ever since I summoned that professor’s spirit, all those years ago. He’s been dead for almost two decades, but he still feels guilty. He’s stuck here—but I can’t get stuck here, not after all the work I’ve done.”
“He’s just a death echo,” Clara said, miserably from the floor.
“Ah, have you seen him? Yes—I needed his bones to summon him. I wasn’t expecting that shade to pop up and show me how he died a hundred times a day, but I can’t complain. It’s an annoying side effect, but he did his job well.”
“You summoned him to force him to reawaken those deadite-things, right?” Sam asked. “It wasn’t you who brought them here—it was the professor all over again doing the summoning. Same as what happened to Ash.”
Grant’s jaw twitched at Ash’s name, but he nodded. “Yes. I knew the only way to get the ‘deadites’ here was with that book, the Necronomicon, and since there’s only one copy, I went for the next-best thing. It took years to force the professor to recall all the words, but when it finally worked, it was all worth it.”
“There’s no way the Professor liked being forced to do that,” Sam said. “That’s what killed his wife.”
Grant shrugged. “My plans are more important than some ghost’s feelings.”
“Convoluted,” Emma muttered. Grant pointed the gun at her and told her to speak up and she yelped. “I said, that’s so convoluted. If you can’t control the deadites, why use them to kill off your sacrifices?”
Grant smiled. “I know this sounds crazy, but it’s worth it for a little . . . poetic justice.” He then drew out his walkie-talkie again. “Clegg! Where are you? We only have ten minutes.”
Outside, Dean and Ash were covered in bits and pieces of the deadites.
“I see why you like the chainsaw,” Dean muttered, wiping the grimy machete off on the bottom of his boot. “Do this too often and you’ll get tennis elbow.”
Ash shook out the cramp in his hand. “That teaches you for not having a chainsaw in your murder-mobile.”
“It’s not a murder mo—duck!” Dean yelled as a bullet whizzed overhead, and he pulled Ash down to the ground behind the Volkswagen. The second shot came almost immediately after—from under the car, across the clearing, Dean could just make out where another gun-for-hire stood in the shadows, his weapon trained on where Ash and Dean had been a second before.
“I’m out of shells,” Ash whispered.
Dean checked his shotgun and swore. “Me, too.”
“Any ideas?” Ash hissed—and then they both froze as a terrible sound returned.
A cacophony of beating wings and bloodthirsty caws broke out from the woods from behind the second mercenary; he screamed for a moment until the sound of birds overtook him entirely. Dean and Ash ducked down on the ground as the crows flew overhead, and as they disappeared into the woods across the clearing, Dean could just make out the shape of a man—or what was left of him—in the heart of the pack.
“A literal murder of crows,” Ash said.
Dean barked out a laugh. “You know what? If we survive this, I think I’ll owe you a beer.”
“Or ten,” Ash said, getting up slowly. “You know, maybe just a whole damn bar.”
Within the cabin, Grant tilted his head back. “Four have died.”
Sam grimaced and tried and failed once again to break free from his bonds. Grant had his blood—that was bad even with a weak witch, but as midnight drew closer, Grant was waxing in power. Now, he practically glowed.
The door splintered and Dean and Ash rushed in—Grant hardly had to wave his hands to fling them to the wall next to Sam, even without their blood.
“Hey, Sammy,” Dean said weakly, struggling.
“Hey, Dean.”
“Hey!” Ash said to Grant. “I know you!” Grant’s eyes flashed dangerously and his face twisted into a snarl. “Yeah, you’re—oh my god, you’re—"
“Scotty’s brother,” Grant finished, his eyes brimming with tears. “You murdered my brother.”
“No—no,” Ash shook his head. “No, there were these things, these deadites—"
“You could have saved him. You should have tried.” Grant slammed a fist down on the table and the candles jumped. “You were infected, right? You became one of them? But you survived. So then why the hell couldn’t you have found a way to help Scotty?”
“I didn’t know—"
Grant waved a hand, and the remains of a dictionary went flying up and hit Ash in the stomach. Ash doubled over and groaned, and Grant looked at his watch, his eyes wild. “One more must die,” Grant whispered. (“Witch?” Dean muttered to Sam. Sam nodded. “Man, I hate witches.”)
“There must be five sacrifices. I have to do it,” Grant said, suddenly waving his gun around at his various hostages. “I know it means I won’t see Scotty in the afterlife, but I don’t have any other choice. I have to kill one of you.” He swung and pointed at the girls, who screamed.
“If you’re gonna kill someone,” Ash said, sounding very unsure, “it should be me. This is all about your brother, right? All about my best friend? You want a stupid fifth sacrifice? Look no further, bucko.”
Grant blinked, then he laughed. “Kill you? Oh, Ash, you’re the only one I need alive. You’re the Ankou’s gift.”
“What’s an Ankou?” Ash hissed to Dean.
Dean shrugged, his eyes wide. “Whatever it is, it’s bad.”
Grant turned back to his altar, as if trying to work up the courage for his last ingredient.
“Hey!” Sam said suddenly. “What about me and Dean?” (Dean’s eyes widened yet further.) “We’re the ones who messed your plan up, right? You wanted dumb kids here because you thought they’d die quickly. You wanted Ash here for stupid revenge reasons. But you were worried about having enough sacrifices, so you last-minute decided to draw some hunters here, too.”
“That’s why the only record of a haunted cabin in this area came from a single sketchy website,” Dean reasoned slowly. “Because you made it up.”
“You were hoping some second-rate paranormal investigator or hunter would show up and fall easy to the deadites—but you weren’t expecting me and Dean.” Sam strained against the bonds again—Grant, his face twisted with fury, didn’t seem to notice when there was a little more give than there had been before. And, more importantly, Emma and Clara were slowly standing, their incorporeal shackles all but gone. Grant was inhumanly powerful, but still human enough to get distracted.
Sam laughed, and he tried to sound cruel. “Dean and I are the reason you’re here, a couple minutes from midnight, and about to put a stain on your soul so black, you’re never gonna see your brother again.”
Grant laughed maniacally. “Maybe I won’t get to spend eternity with Scotty. But I’m still going to be reunited with him in this life.” At Sam, Dean, and Ash’s blank faces he smiled. “Ankou is a god of death. But he can also bring people back to life.”
“I’m the gift,” Ash said, sounding hollow. “You’re going to trade me for Scotty.”
Grant nodded, his eyes brimming with tears again. “And the Ankou is almost here. All that’s left is one final sacrifice—"
He raised the gun and pointed it at Sam; half a second later, Clara jumped on his back and Emma grappled with him for the weapon. Grant screamed and fought back viciously, but in doing so focused even less on his magic: one by one, each of Sam, Ash, and Dean fell to the ground, their restraints suddenly gone.
Thunder crashed overhead, and the cabin shook. “It’s midnight!” Dean yelled, holding up his wrist to show his watch. “As long as no one dies in the next minute—"
“I’ve killed her,” Professor Knowby said, appearing next to where Clara and Emma were scuffling with Grant. But his voice kept getting louder. “I chained her up! I’ve damned us all!” The professor waved his arms, and Clara and Emma flew back, leaving Grant staring at the ghost he had tortured for so many years standing before him. “They’re free!” The professor yelled, and when the knife appeared in the air, he grabbed it and turned it on Grant.
Grant screamed and stumbled backwards into his altar, a hand on the knife stabbed through his heart.
“That’s five,” Ash said, and the walls shook.
—
Part V
Grant’s body was leaned up against the legs of the table where his altar glowed. Ash took a step toward him as if in a trance, his good hand extended. “Ash!” Dean yelled, over the thunder booming overhead. “Get the girls and get out of here!” He handed Ash the keys to the Impala. “The car’s warded—you’ll be safe inside! Go!”
Ash took the keys and, after a final glance at Grant, nodded to Dean and went over to where Clara and Emma were picking themselves up out of the rubble of a bookcase. The three ran to the front door, and Emma managed to run through before it slammed shut. Ash grabbed the handle and pulled back with all his strength; Clara was barely able to squeeze through the gap before it slammed again, trapping the three hunters inside. Ash ran over to one of the broken windows but found it cut off from the outside, as if a force field separated the cabin from the world.
Sam and Dean, meanwhile, were flipping through Grant’s book of spells and rituals. “There’s nothing here about reversing a summoning,” Sam shouted. The walls shook violently, and from the kitchen, a chorus of broken glass and porcelain sang as the shelves shook their contents onto the floor. “Maybe we could summon something else?”
“Like Godzilla vs. Mothra? That’s a terrible idea,” Dean said. “What about just destroying the altar?”
Sam shook his head. “No way. The altar could be tethering it—if the altar is destroyed, then the Ankou could just go wherever and do whatever it wants.”
“There’s no way out!” Ash said, stumbling over to Dean and Sam as the thunder shook the cabin again. “I think we're trapped—"
The cabin became perfectly still. In the wall in front of where the group stood huddled, a black horizontal line appeared and then began to unknit itself, widening into an inky mouth.
Who dares summon me, a voice echoed from the dark.
“Um, we didn’t mean to!” Ash said, ducking down behind the altar with Sam and Dean. “Our bad!”
The floor rumbled. The black stain on the wall before them began to deepen, becoming a crevasse to an unknown pit.
Many centuries have passed since my last summoning, the voice said. I am not patient. Release me, so I might sow death upon the earth.
“Grant was gonna make a deal, right?” Dean hissed to Sam and Ash, all three crouched on the floor. “Maybe if we make a deal, then he’ll go away.”
“A deal…” Sam whispered. “Dean, what if it can break your contract?”
“Contract?” Ash hissed. “Like, you got some bad payday loans?”
Sam ignored him. “Dean, you should ask.”
“No,” Dean said. “No way. Five people had to die to get this thing here. I don’t want it helping me.”
“What are you two talking about?” Ash said. “The giant scary monster is waiting.”
Dean cleared his throat. “Ankou,” he started. “We wish to bargain.”
A form began to materialize in the darkness. It looked almost like a man, in a great black cloak and wielding a wicked-looking scythe. Make your offer.
The air smelled like ozone, like lightning had just struck. The walls began to shake again, not from thunder, but in time with each footfall as the hooded figure approached out of the dark.
“Break my brother’s demon deal,” Sam said, standing tall.
“Dammit, Sam!” Dean hissed.
The Ankou seemed to straighten up. I cannot.
Sam’s eyes widened, crestfallen, and Dean pulled Sam back down to where he and Ash were crouched.
“I told you not to do that!” Dean snapped.
“Dean, I had to try! You know—"
“Not to cut in on sibling-fight time,” Ash said. “But we still need to make it a deal. It threatened to kill everyone, right? Maybe ask it not to ‘sow death’?”
Dean nodded, then stood and faced the Ankou. “How’s this. You leave this place, and—and you don’t get released,” Dean yelled.
Hm. And what would you give me in return?
Dean blinked. “And in return—um…” He looked at Sam and Ash and gestured around at a loss.
The figure stopped its approach. It tilted its head. There was a long hissing noise—it was inhaling deeply. I know that book.
Sam looked at Grant’s spellbook, still in his hands. “It’s yours, Ankou,” he said, standing and holding the book out.
Not that one.
Dean and Sam turned to look at Ash. Ash widened his eyes, and then drew out from his bag the Necronomicon.
Ash sat, staring at its cover; Dean and Sam looked between his frozen form and the Ankou, standing still with its head tilted in the otherworldly doorway.
“Ash, buddy,” Dean whispered, crouching down to Ash. “I think you need to give it your book.”
Ash licked his lips. “I—I don't…”
That book came from the dead. To the dead it should return.
“I hate it, you know?” Ash whispered. “Like, it’s done nothing but screw up my life. But—but it’s been mine for so long…”
My patience wanes.
“Without the Necronomicon, who am I?” Ash whispered, looking beseechingly at Dean and Sam. “I’m a screw up. I’ve worked at a frickin’ S Mart for twelve years, and I’m still not an assistant manager! An eighteen-year-old got hired two months ago, and she already outranks me! The only thing I’ve ever done well is fight deadites—and I don’t even fight them that well.” He hugged the book to his chest.
“Yes, you do,” Dean said. “You’re a hell of a fighter. Plus the chainsaw arm—I mean, seriously, it’s amazing.” Sam elbowed him to get back on track. “Look—forget deadites. There’s a whole world of evil creeps out there you could be fighting. You should be a hunter.”
“What?” Ash whispered. “How am I supposed to become a hunter?”
“Dean and I will help you,” Sam said, nodding at Dean.
Make your decision, mortal.
Ash stood unsteadily, and looked at the cover of the Necronomicon for a second. ”What the hell,” he said, and threw it at the Ankou. “I guess it’s time for a career change.”
The book and the Ankou melted into the inky darkness; the black seemed to shrink in on itself, until only a few seconds later the wall was back to normal, as if the Ankou had never appeared at all.
—
“My first hunting lesson,” Ash remarked, looking bored at the flames engulfing Professor Knowby’s skull on a mini pyre in the clearing outside the cabin. “Ghosts kind of suck.”
“Yep,” Dean said, closing up the Impala’s trunk.
“So, are you gonna explain what your deal is?” Ash asked Dean. Dean narrowed his eyes. “Not in general, princess. Your ‘demon deal’ or whatever?” He waggled his fingers like it was some kind of magic. Which, Dean supposed it was.
“It’s not much of a story,” Dean said with a sigh. “But it could be hunting lesson number two. Demons also suck.”
“Huh. You’re a wellspring of knowledge,” Ash said.
Sam then wandered over. “The girls are gonna be fine. Or, mostly. Clara said that with enough therapy they’ll probably be okay.”
The Volkswagen honked, and the three men turned around to wave goodbye as the girls headed back out on the path away from the cabin.
“Is this what your spring breaks were like?” Dean asked Sam.
Sam snorted. “Totally. Right down to the guy with the chainsaw hand. Which, speaking of—" Sam handed Ash the remains of his chainsaw. “I found it outside the cabin. I assumed you’d want to keep it, maybe get it fixed up.”
“Yeah, thank you!” He strapped it onto where his right hand should be with a smile.
“I found this, too,” Sam said, handing over the picture he had found in the basement.
Ash sighed. “That’s Scotty, definitely. And the little kid must be Grant. So this was his family’s cabin?”
Sam shrugged. “Looks like.”
“Thanks.” Ash stuffed it in his pocket. “I mean it.”
“And we meant it about getting you started as a hunter. Here,” Dean said, and scribbled something down on the back of a scrap of paper. “This is our friend Bobby’s number. When you’re ready for some more hunting, give him a call. He’ll find you something to gank and teach you how to do it.”
Ash took it with a grin. “Bobby. Got it. And if you’re ever looking for a hell of a deal on housewares while in Michigan, look me up.”
He waved bye and then went and jumped in his Oldsmobile; when the engine came on, classic rock came blasting out the speakers.
Sam scoffed.
“What?” Dean asked, walking over to the Impala.
“It’s just, you two are literally the same person.”
“Shut up.” They got in the car.
“I’m serious, Dean! If you could find an excuse to get a chainsaw hand, you would in a heartbeat.”
“No I wouldn’t!”
“You totally would!”
Dean turned the key in the ignition. The same exact song that Ash had been listening to started blasting out of his speakers.
Sam snorted and Dean lifted a finger in warning. “Not a word!”