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mile 22
It’s a highway of a hallway, or vice versa. A long, skinny spit of asphalt, all alligator cracks and weedy shoulders, narrowing to nothing on the horizon. Empty fields, stubbled with shorn wheat—unless that’s just the wallpaper—crowd the way on either side. Every seven miles, they pass a mural of a farmhouse with cockeyed shutters and a sagging bottom lip of a porch. The woman on the front steps is wearing a white dress and watching. Or waving. The sun sinks, bloodies the sky, the road, the windshield, Dean’s hands on the steering wheel, but never sets.
The Impala—Dean’s car, Dad’s car—trembles under the soles of Sam’s boots like a living thing. He lays a hand on the dash like he could soothe it.
“It’s not that I don’t—” Dean’s saying again, eyes on the road, knuckles bruised, holding tight to ten and two.
“Don’t,” Sam tells him, or himself, or the road, or the woman, or—
1.
The ceiling’s dripping.
House fires, 1980-2005. Dates and addresses marked in John Winchester’s open-handed scrawl, more than a dozen circled, the rest crossed out. (Neither, only blank space surrounding it: 10345 Ash Tree Lane, Newport News, VA.) A few photos, gutted shells of other people’s white picket lives, blackened and curling at the edges. The smell of charcoal, melted linoleum. Always at night? their father wonders in the margins, with an uncertainty Sam’s never heard him voice. Fatalities offers the third column. Parents, mostly. The occasional sibling, told to run too late. Roommates, girlfriends, boyfriends, spouses.
Gray water splashes the page, runs like fresh ink. The journal’s a delicate artifact; appended with yellow legal pad paper and newspaper clippings as thin as onion skin and starting to flake; all bound with string and paper clips and obsession. Sam tucks it into his jacket.
The wet patch on the ceiling is spreading, darkening, quickening. A drop strikes him in the middle of the forehead, a baptism or a bullet. Bang.
Upstairs, in the scorched remains of a nursery, he’s saying to Dean, “I don’t know, man, something about this place just feels off.”
2a.
Someone’s spilled salt on the tablecloth. Made wavering yield lines of it on the windowsills, the thresholds. Marked off the doorway between here and the hallway, and the dining room. Sam, too, could make a last stand clutching a canister of Morton’s. Pull the cabinet door shut behind him. Draw a shaky sign of the cross. Say the Latin—mean it, let it sound holy, righteous—he’s been working on his pronunciation, timing, emphasis, emphasis. These, these are the correct words. Scribble them all over the walls, dig them into the grout, spell them out in grains of sodium chloride, trace them onto the back of his hand.
Don’t be scared, Sammy. He’s ten—Dean must be fourteen—and he has to hold the .45 with both hands to keep it level. This isn’t their house; they’re not supposed to be here. If somebody catches them, they’ll take them away, split them up. The social worker at school gave him her card once; he kept it folded in his pocket, like an incantation, for weeks. Only that’s for bad men and his father isn’t one. Only Dean would never forgive him. Only if someone tried to save him now, he’d run.
He watches through the crack in the door.
2b.
One of a thousand greasy spoons off a hundred highways bisecting the heartland, but it doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter that the coffee tastes like it was brewed in an ashtray or that the waitress pinched his cheek so hard that her nails clicked or that Dean ordered what could best be called ‘Heartburn on a Plate,’ like always. Doesn’t matter that the row of truckers at the counter keeps giving them the weigh station evil eye or the vinyl seating’s split and foaming out its guts or that the music’s so godawful that Sam’s ears are starved for hair metal. Doesn’t matter that he can’t look too closely at the menu, because the letters won’t stay put. Today’s special: not for you.
None of it matters, because they’re posted up in a corner booth and Sam has his laptop open next to his neglected dinner—half a head of iceberg lettuce drowned in Thousand Island dressing, croutons bobbing like buoys, one lone slice of radish capsizing—and he’s got a lead on another missing kid, and finding missing kids is what they do best. Because Dean’s nodding along as he talks like what Sam’s saying is important. Because their knees and wrists and elbows keep bumping and it’s so achingly easy, just the two of them.
mile 109
“You were talking in your sleep,” Dean says. It sounds more like an accusation than it would have a month ago. A month ago, he would have softballed a wadded-up receipt into Sam’s mouth and laughed when he snuffled awake. A month ago, he would have been relieved that Sam was sleeping at all—kept giving all those untouched beds pointed looks. A month ago, as far as Dean knew, Sam’s nightmares were only bad dreams.
He scrubs the crust from his eyes. “What was I saying?”
“You tell me.”
There’s a bonfire in the field. Maybe the woman, maybe only the scarecrow, maybe a vessel for a forgotten god. Sam swallows the taste of smoke. “It doesn’t work like that.”
“Then how does it work, Sam?”
You don’t need to be afraid of me, he wants to say, only then Dean would scoff and make a joke, because he always does when he’s scared, tries to laugh away the killer alien clown in the sewer just like you’re supposed to.
Or that’s not it, not exactly. It’s not that Dean’s afraid of him.
Dean’s afraid Sam’s something he’ll have to kill.
The fire growls like a revved engine. Spreads.
III.
Those vast, in-between spaces are always under something—a twin bed, a family room sofa, the back bench seat of a family car. Sam lies flat in the footwell and reaches, reaches, reaches into the only safe dark there is. Finds a whole infantry of Dean’s army men, the kazoo he chucked under here when Sam wouldn’t stop playing it, three library books that will never find their way home. Marbles, matchbooks. Pencils gnawed to timbering ‘round the middle. Pocket lint and smushed foil wrappers, fossilized with old gum. There it is: the hard edge of the picture frame. Sam hooks it with his fingertips, inches it forward until he can grab it, smudging the glass—sorry, Mom—and scrambles back up and under the covers. “Okay, now I’m ready.”
Blink and thirteen years later, he’s sitting side-saddle, sock feet up on the seat Dean abandoned to move up front; he and their are talking in low, serious tones Sam doesn’t bother to decipher. Check again: there, the stack of textbooks he’s stowed under the seat, the acceptance letter, its creases softened from rereading, tucked safely between the covers of his AP US Government book.
He can’t stretch all the way out like he used to, but he can turn on his side and close his eyes. Listen to the road noise, drown out plans that don’t belong to him anymore. It’s only for a little longer.
IV.
Down, down, down into the smell of damp. Not too many haunted conservatories, meditation salons. The stairs groan. His flashlight strains, flickers, expires. How it goes. Sam lifts the shotgun, waits for the ghost to rush him. He’s getting better at this part. When it comes to it, maybe he’ll even—
The ground cuts off sharply; his heels kick up loose dust—dirt—as he falls back, lungs emptying on impact. Wet earth, alive with nightcrawlers, squelches and squirms under him.
Next to him, the flashlight winks back on. Here lies Constance Welch, reads the headstone at his feet. The hole he almost pitched into: an open grave. A breath sighs in Sam’s ear, colder than the air.
Farther on: another excavation, another monument looming out the dark. Peter Sweeney. Beloved Son.
Sam moves the beam from stone to stone. Mary Worthington. Jacob Karns. Sanford Ellicott.
Sam shrugs the chill hand from his nape. “So you know some names, so what?” he asks, going for bravado. Not thinking of the names he'd rather not see.
The floorboards creak overhead. Dean’s voice, then his answering: “Kind of makes you wonder. Of all the things we hunted, how many existed just because people believed in them?”
“Dean,” Sam hollers. “Dean, can you hear me? I’m down here.”
Behind him, the stairs lead to nothing but a bricked-up wall.
No way out but through.
𝛀
A house is a body is a house is a body is a body is a body is a house. A house sits on four corners—square the angles, level the slab, build up from there. After a while, the frame settles, mostly; the playroom floor is askew, unattended toys catch in the corners. The walls fill up and up and up with light, color, sound—promises and arguments and bedtime stories and Saturday morning laughter and Tuesday evening tears. But there are too many empty spaces in this house, those wide underneath places that go on and on. Hallways a hundred miles long. Bathtubs for an armada. Entire wildernesses at the backs of the closets, and here be monsters certainly. A basement deeper than tombs and catacombs. A root cellar to the center of the earth. No family can laugh or cry or scream enough for it. Vacate, lease, inhabit, repeat. It goes on too long like that; entropy sets in; the nothing starts to bloat. The right angles no longer meet, if they ever did. A house is a body, is a cavern between ribs and skull. Is miles of viaduct bridging the joints. All the soft parts go to paste. Someone’s burning in the attic.
(A home is a body is a brother is a brother is a brother.)
mile 403
“Sam,” Dean says again, and clears his throat. “It’s not that I don’t—”
“Shut up a minute,” Sam interrupts. He can feel Dean bristle: still can’t tell if it’s because it’s the Shining, a direct transmission of well, fuck you too, Sammy from Dean’s brain to his, or simply that he knows his brother that well. “No, I mean, just listen, okay?”
And this may only be a memory, a vision of Dean, pinned between two planes of glass, but he hears Sam out, frowning his way through his explanations the way he always does. Not because he doesn’t understand, but because he’s working his way to what do we do about it?
“A haunted house with no ghost,” he mutters when Sam’s finished. “Is that even possible?”
“Isn’t anything?” Sam asks, not meaning for it to sting, but Dean looks away all the same, across the field. The sunset stains the woman’s dress, makes a pharos of her hair. “We’ve hunted weirder than that, right? Shapeshifters and reapers and tulpas.”
“Oh my. Yeah, okay, fair. We’ve seen some freaky shit. But what’s this sentient McMansion want?”
“Don’t know. Maybe nothing. Maybe just more—” of us, of me. “Every room’s different so far.”
“Sounds like you better keep looking then. Where haven’t you gone yet?”
Room 082
Upstairs: two parallel lines of motel room doors. The one with the numbers painted on wooden cutouts of pastel seashells or cowboy hats or balls of yarn for some reason; the one with the broken lock and Dean’s duffle holding it closed; the one with all the taxidermied possums and raccoons in the front window. Inside, there will be the same Magic-Eye wallpaper and six-pointed mirror and crunchy art deco carpeting. The smell of stale cigarette smoke. Unplugged coffee pots and TVs with bunny ear antennas, screens fuzzing with static but nobody's home. It’s a room just like that, like every room behind every door until Sam’s starting to remember places he’s never been.
The one where Nebraska’s four states and six hundred miles behind them. Where Dean is still letting Sam touch him, still letting him put his hand over his heart, counting iambs, simple duple, one-two, one-two, until Sam drops off. The last time they shared a bed was 1994 but Dean does, lets Sam stay, chest to back, lets him put an arm around him, lets him curl his fingers around skin-warm brass, just one more dreamless night.
What Sam can’t say—how much, how many more lives he would have traded just for this, for him.
Room 214
Another door that they come through stinking and hobbling and splashed with mud, at the end of that ten-mile walk in the dark. Sam’s palm is plucked raw by barbed wire, and there’s still bloody straw stuck to the bottoms of his shoes, and he’s almost shivered his way back to warm again. He’s leaning back against the bathroom sink, letting Dean look him over again, letting him pick the grit and gravel out of his wound. Even though they barely fit in here, the two of them; even though Sam keeps knocking his elbow against the shower stall; even though he’s had worse, they both have. He understands why it’s necessary for Dean to mutter over him and cup his face, thumb braced under his eye, and check his pupils for signs of concussion.
It’s what he would need to do, if Dean had been lost.
What Dean won’t do, no matter how badly Sam might want him to—won’t push him back against the sink, won’t kiss the cold from his lips, won’t peel his shirt up and off, won’t put his hands where Sam needs him to most, won’t grab his hair, won’t pull him into the shower and under the hot water, won’t, won’t won’t.
Room 229, 307, 352, 404, 650
A dozen doors, loose on their latches. The first room he and Dean shared all to themselves, the first room where Sam lay back on the scratchy comforter and put his hand in his shorts—the first room where Dean walked in on him and laughed and threw a sock in his face.
The rough wooden doors of the cabin, the smell of cedar and tequila. Where they had gotten drunk together, Dad gone somewhere with Uncle Bobby, and Sam would have, then, would have leaned over and done it and never mind what anyone thought, except he puked on Dean’s shoes instead. Spent the whole night hugging the toilet.
His freshman dorm room with its white board and red and black pennant and Jess laughing without laughing at him and saying she’d never met a boy who felt her up so politely before. The same room where he folded up, so wracked with homesickness he thought he was really, truly sick and called Dean seventeen times just to listen to his voicemail.
The apartment they shared senior year, quizzing each other on LSAT and MCAT questions on the couch. Jess previewing her Halloween costume—”sexy nurse, wouldn’t that be the stupidest costume for a med student”—and straddling him when he got his scores.
Room 785
Next one down, and it should be different from the others, should stand out, except it’s so familiar they might as well have already been there and wouldn’t know if they hadn’t: the diamond wallpaper and blue and green checkerboard cupboards and a pastoral scene on the wall. The sort of place where they stop when they have a choice about it—homey, quiet, next to a laundromat or a diner or both. The potpourri on the nightstand that always makes Dean sneeze.
No, nothing different about the room, except for Dean’s jacket and Sam’s flannel on the floor, except for their kicked off-and-over boots, except for Dean under him, letting Sam kiss him—no, kissing him, meeting him, leaning up into it. Hands on him, down his back, squeezing his ass through his jeans. Foot moving against the inside of his calf. Dean, mumbling his name into his teeth, Sam, Sammy. Dean, reaching for his belt buckle, his zipper. Dean, dragging him down, kissing him hard enough to bruise, to bleed, hard enough Sam can still feel it. Fuck, you gotta stop that. Don’t do it again, okay. Don’t disappear on me. If you’re going, go, but don’t vanish, okay, Sammy, don’t leave me wonderin’ if you’re all right.
Mile ???
Dean’s saying, “It’s not that I don’t—”
Want this, you comes the undercurrent, except Sam doesn’t know if it’s only wishful thinking. Mind reading should be simpler than this. Dean’s face doesn’t give away a damn thing either; he’s staring down the road like it could shift on him, like it isn’t the same flat stretch of Kansas it always is, the same house and the same woman and the same fire burning, because there’s always someone burning somewhere, a father or a mother or someone else he loves.
“Stop,” Sam says. “Pull over here.”
“What?” Dean asks.
“Stop the car,” he repeats. “I want to get out.”
“Look, Sammy, I—”
“I already know,” Sam tells him. “That’s the point, isn’t it? It doesn’t matter that it hasn’t happened yet, that we haven’t—because I know what happens after. You’ll tell me you can’t, and we’ll go on like it never happened, because we’re Winchesters and that’s what we do. So stop the fucking car.”
Dean slows, eases them off the road as much as he can. The sky’s red, cooling to indigo, the first faint specks of the evening stars beginning to show. The air smells like autumn, like woodsmoke, like frost and fallen leaves. Sam pushes the door closed behind him, gently, waits for the second slam. But the car’s empty, the engine quiet. Right. He’s on his own here.
Sam puts his hands in his pockets, starts walking. If he turns around, there will be no Impala at all, no home on four wheels going on forever. This is somewhere, something else.
Up ahead: another door.
Fire Exit
Not a motel room door, marked with brass numbers. Not an apartment or a cabin. A farmhouse door, sturdy and stolid. The doorknob is warm, going over to hot. Not so much that Sam has to let go, although he could, he could walk away from this door and go back down the hall and find one of those motel beds and let it pull him down, down, through the mattress and back into the heart of whatever this place is. Find Dean again, or a version of him, and grab on and fuck the rest of it. He wants to, the urge heavy as lead and eyelids. The doorknob is warm, and smoke or dust is leaking out his feet in thready fingers of heat and light.
Sam wards off the sunlight with one hand, can’t see her at first, for the glare.
“Hi, Sam,” Jess says, all hushed beatitude until her expression falters. “Oh, hey, baby, come on. You know if you cry, I’ll cry.”
“Is this really you?” he needs to know. “Or are you another vision?”
She smiles, not that serene smile, well beyond mortal concerns—a wry one, a nudge in the side when he was being too serious at a party (always). “What is a ghost, anyway, if not a memory with really great legs?”
Sam laughs, wipes his face on his sleeve, laughs again. “Jess, I’m just—I’m so sorry, I never should have—”
Her hand on his arm is warm, firm. “I don’t think I’m the one who needs to let you off the hook here, Sam.” She smiles again, sadder now. “But thanks. It would’ve been nice to live. Have a life with you.”
“You too.” He nods, throat too thick for more. Eventually he manages: “So what now?”
“I think you’re supposed to go that way.”
They’re standing on the bowed boards of the porch together, looking out at the empty field. The path she’s pointing to winds out of sight between tall, swaying stalks of grain. “That’s it?”
“Don’t ask me, Scarecrow. You’re the one who let yourself get lost.”
“Right. Yeah.” Sam takes the first step. Looks back at her, that last living, breathing glimpse of her, without the fear and pain. “What about you?”
“Oh, I think you’ll be seeing me.”
“Sam, Sam.” Dean’s voice has that broken bottle quality, how he sounds when he’s scared and pissed about it. He’s holding him up, one hand under his jaw, trying to get Sam to look at him.
That’s easy enough; he can do that, can open his eyes and find his brother’s, reflecting green and gold, seaside and prairie at turns. Can make a catalogue of the freckles over the bridge of his nose. Follow the roundabout downturn of his mouth, overwound with worry.
“You with me?” Dean’s asking. “What the hell happened in there? You vanished out of thin air, dude.”
Sam looks up at 10345 Ash Tree Lane, unremarkable in every sense, ordinary faux brick front, vinyl siding, slate gray roof, half moon of transom over the front door, ajar. Not a farmhouse door, not a motel door. The welcome mat sun-faded, illegible. The lawn unkempt, probably the bane of the HOA, the mailbox a tilting sentry. Ten years ago, the second floor caught fire, but it is a house empty of demons, empty of ghosts, emptier than anyone knows.
Sam doubts it would burn now, or if it would matter that they tried.
Dean’s looking at him, and he should feel guilty, maybe, for making him worry. For liking this part, Dean’s arm around him and his hand on his face. For what he dreamed two days ago—came out of it with that same too-aware knowing that it was real, would be real. For wanting it, what’s waiting for them down the road: the diamond print on the coverlet, the blue wallpaper, Dean breathing into him. For whatever follows, wherever that puts them.
For not staying lost when he had the chance.
“Nothing,” Sam says. “It’s just a big house, that’s all.”