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spn_summergen2017-08-30 02:13 pm
summergen_mod) wrote in spn_summergen2017-08-30 02:13 pm
Entry tags:
Before I Sleep, for dizzojay
Title: Before I Sleep
Recipient: dizzojay
Rating: PG
Word Count: 13.9k
Warnings: This is a hunt set in a cave, so if you’re claustrophobic you may want to skip this one.
Author's Notes: Thank you for such great prompts! This one turned into a monster – so also thanks to the summergen team for helping me set up a deadline I could meet! Takes place circa season 2 of Supernatural.
Summary: Sam and Dean investigate a rash of deaths in Mammoth Cave National Park.
Cave City, Kentucky
With the windows closed and the curtains drawn all day the temperature in the cabin had slowly climbed over ninety degrees. Sweat ran freely down Conor’s face and his lips cracked from dehydration; despite this he didn’t move from his curled position in front of the kitchen cabinets. He rocked to himself as his bare feet slipped across the tile repetitively, moaning softly.
He was so tired.
Pressing his face against the cabinets he let out a soft sob and scratched down his arms. It had been three days since he’d had even a nap. The first night he’d tossed relentlessly in bed, desperate to sleep after an exhausting hike that day. The second night he’d taken to pacing, hoping to accumulate his weariness until it could overcome his strange bout of insomnia. As the third night gathered he had ended up on the floor, despairing of ever finding a solution.
His eyes were dry and sandy whether he kept them open or close. His mind raced aimlessly, too fatigued to focus on anything for long. His ears rang with an eerie sound, like babies crying in the other room. He had come into the kitchen to check. There were no babies here, and his cabin was too isolated from the others for it to come from another family.
Conor covered his ears and curled tighter, whimpering. Dust dripped from his eyes and mixed with the sweat on his face to create grimy facsimiles of tear tracks.
“Just let me sleep,” he muttered to whatever was crying inside his cabin. “Please just let me sleep.”
-----------------------------------
Beneath the drone of the local news there’s a curse and a scuffle. Sam sticks his head out of the motel bathroom to fish eye Dean, who’s half-crouched on the edge of his bed like he aborted a scramble upwards when he heard Sam put his razor down and didn’t have time to fling himself prone. There aren’t any guns on the bed or electronics next to him, and Dean had wandered away from their research half an hour ago to the allure of infomercials.
“What?”
“Hm?” Dean widens his eyes and shakes his head but his cool unflappable act stopped working on Sam when he was twelve
Sam studies Dean suspiciously but Dean refuses to twitch. Eventually Sam has to give up. “Nothing,” he mutters, retreating back to the bathroom. He can hear Dean resettling on the bed before he turns on the water to rinse his face.
When Sam leaves the bathroom Dean has wandered back to their books. Sam looks at his laptop, sighs, and throws himself in Dean’s old position.
“Anything?”
Dean grunts in the negative and flips through more pages. “Dwarves, rock spirits, pagan gods, cursed miners, Japanese ghosts, nothing about limestone or any of them killing you by insomnia.”
“Bobby?”
“Nope.”
Sam drapes an arm over his eyes, wrangling with the familiar frustration of having no leads and no clue what they were hunting. There was definitely something going on. People don’t spontaneously start crying limestone and then die of exhaustion on their own. Yet two weeks of interviews, wild goose chases, and research left them no closer to cracking whatever had happened to the four hikers who’d died since summer had started.
Dean shuts his book and scrapes his chair backwards. There’s a rustle of fabric and then Dean whacks Sam’s leg. “C’mon. I’m hungry. You want tacos?”
They’ve been cooped up in a stuffy hotel room all day, cranking the insufficient AC as far as it will go. By this point anything Sam reads he’ll only have to re-read tomorrow. “Yeah,” he mumbles, and swings his legs off the bed.
“Aw, don’t pout. I’ll get you one of those margaritas with the umbrellas.”
-----------------------------------
Dean gets margaritas with umbrellas for both of them – and steak tacos for himself and grilled chicken tacos for Sam. They listen to the kitschy music and see who can load up more salsa onto the complementary chips while they wait. Dean plays dirty by asking the waitress to bring them hotter salsa when she comes around to refill the bowl. Sam retaliates by dumping hot sauce all over the chips.
When their food arrives they need another round of margaritas, and they’re both discreetly trying to wipe their noses when the other isn’t looking. After they’ve stuffed themselves on unauthentic – “I don’t want to hear it California boy, my tacos my way,” – Mexican food the stressed knot in Sam’s shoulders has eased and he flicks spitball wads of straw wrappers at his brother until Dean cracks and returns fire.
Following their brief but intense war the conversation swings back to their current job.
“Look, we’ve read up on everything there is that’s rock-related and sleep-related and found nothing. Next step is to go have a look ourselves.”
“We tried that already,” Sam points out. “Three times. We don’t know where any of the victims went and the park is too big to wander around guessing.”
“We already interviewed the coroner twice,” Dean counters, waving his cocktail umbrella for emphasis. “And the desk clerks and the cleaning lady and the tour guide and the intake nurse. At least wandering around is better than sitting on our hands.”
Sam can’t really argue against that so he drains the watery dregs of his margarita instead. Dean throws down a handful of crumpled bills to pay the check. Sam is first into the parking lot, holding the door open behind him for Dean. A man on the other side bumps into Sam and keeps walking without a word.
“Hey,” Sam says. “Heads up next time.”
The man turns towards Sam slowly, expression blank for a minute before something clicks in his mind. “Sorry,” he mutters.
The restaurant is at the end of a long road with no public transportation. Sam glances around but there’s nobody in the parking lot obviously looking for the man. He hopes he hadn’t driven himself here.
“You okay?”
There’s another long pause while the man digests Sam’s question. “I’m… I’m so tired.” As he looks at Sam, something powdery falls down his face. Sam stiffens.
“Dean.”
Loitering nearby, Dean is quick to step closer. “Yeah?”
Sam reaches out slowly. The man doesn’t seem to mind. He brushes the cheekbone underneath the man’s left eye, feeling grit beneath his fingers. In the sinking dusk light he shows his fingers to Dean.
“Oh, shit,” Dean breathes.
“Yeah.”
Dean is quick to flip out his badge. “Sir, I’m Agent Rose with the National Park Service. I need you to come with me.” The man staggers slightly when Dean takes his arm and starts moving him towards the Impala but he manages to make his unsteady way there without falling. Dean tosses Sam the keys to unlock the backseat. The minute they have him seated he topples sideways and closes his eyes.
Sam checks his pulse. It’s faint and racing. “Still alive.”
Dean grunts and turns the ignition. He’s away to the motel before Sam finishes closing his door. Sam sits sideways doing his best to monitor the man in their backseat but he’s not really sure what he’s looking for. Other than the limestone dusted down their faces and the signs of death by exhaustion, the local coroner had thrown up his hands and said he left the rest for God to figure out.
Either way, the man survives the short drive to their motel. He stirs weakly out of his stupor, having never really fallen asleep, when Sam prods him. “What’s your name?”
“My...”
“Tell me your name.”
“Floyd.”
“Floyd, my name is Sam. I need you to get up. Can you do that, Floyd?”
Floyd twitches each time he hears his name but doesn’t seem to register Sam’s question between it. Regardless he moves easily enough when Sam tugs on his elbow. They take small steps to keep Floyd from toppling over. Dean keeps the door open for them, the lights in their room already switched on. Sam walks him to the nearest bed, which he topples into with a frustrated sob. “I’m so tired.”
Sam exchanges a worried glance with Dean. How are they supposed to protect this man if they don’t even know what they’re up against? “When was the last time you slept?”
“I don’t…” Floyd’s fingers clutch rhythmically at the covers and he trails off.
“Floyd?”
He twitches. “Third day. No sleep.” His eyes flutter but don’t open all the way, dusting his pillow with limestone. “Make them stop crying.”
“Stop who crying?”
“Babies. Babies in the next room.”
Sam checks with Dean; neither of them can hear babies. “What else do you hear?”
“Please stop,” Floyd mutters. He covers his ears. “Stop.”
Dean steps forward with a map before they lose him entirely. “Hey, Floyd. You were hiking three days ago, right?” Sam helps haul Floyd into a sitting position so they can dump the map in his lap, gently pulling away his hands from his ears. He looks around wildly until Dean repeatedly snaps his fingers in front of his nose. Dean moves his hand down to tap at the map.
“Where were you hiking, huh, Floyd?”
Sam thinks they won’t be able to get an answer out of him but eventually Floyd’s half-open gaze pauses on a specific spot and he laboriously presses a finger down near one of the bends of the river.
“Alright,” Dean breathes. He doesn’t bother to move Floyd’s finger before marking the spot. “Alright, you did good, Floyd. You did real good. Just hang in there.”
Floyd groans and his eyes roll backwards, unresponsive to Sam’s prodding or questions. Sam eases him down horizontally again. Dean tosses him the salt and they make a circle. They place iron above the doorway and cat’s eye shells on the tables. Purification incense burns in all four cardinal directions. Dean lays out an assortment of knives and they wait.
When the last rays of sunlight die from the sky Floyd sighs and doesn’t breathe in again. Dean shoves the books off the table and curses a blue streak.
-----------------------------------
In the morning Sam checks with the coroner while Dean updates Bobby. As they expected the cause of death is attributed to exhaustion. Dean’s conversation with Bobby is equally short; he reports the three-day time frame and sound of crying babies to add to their list of symptoms and Bobby promises to hit the books.
Soon after Sam and Dean lace up their hiking boots and hit the pavement. In addition to weapons they pack a map and compass each, flashlights, extra batteries, chalk, canteens, high-calorie snacks, first aid. Given that two of the other hikers were here specifically to search out caves, they expect this trek will lead them underground at some point.
They drive into the state park in grim silence. Sam eyes how Dean strangles the steering wheel and waits until they’ve pulled off to the parking at the head of the trail. “There was nothing we could do to help him.”
“Yeah,” Dean growls, hands twisting to make the wheel faintly squeak. “But he didn’t deserve to die like that when were sitting right there.”
Sam doesn’t have anything to say against that. After a moment of silence Dean kills the engine and swings open his door. “Let’s go hunt this bastard down.”
There are a handful of trails in the area Dean circled last night but they had decided to start with the one that winds furthest away from the river. If the creature was on a more accessible trail the number of fatalities would have been higher. Small mercies, Sam supposes.
Including short rest breaks the trek outbound should take two hours but Sam and Dean periodically sweep sections beyond the path so it takes nearly twice that. At the beginning it was cool enough for a pleasant breeze. Now as the sun climbs higher sweat begins to prickle Sam’s brow. Summer insects call raucously and the leaves rustle with birds and other small animals. It is occasionally hell on the nerves given they have no idea what the creature they’re hunting looks or sounds like.
As they begin the gradual arc that will turn them back towards their car, Sam spies freshly furrowed dirt that must have been overturned by the half-rotted tree trunk sunken in one end of the rut. The other end disappears behind a thick cluster of thorny bushes. Sam pushes them aside and sees the faint remnants of a path wind between a narrow gap in the thorns and away into the woods, nearly invisible from elsewhere on the trail.
Sam whistles and waves for Dean to come over. “Look,” he says softly when Dean is close enough for them to talk quietly. “Someone cleared an old path recently.” He gestures to the half-rotted tree trunk and then to the abandoned trail.
Dean can read the same evidence Sam did. He jerks his head towards the path, already half-stepping towards it. “Let’s have a look.”
They pick their way through the thicket then down a hill and up another, digging their hands into the loose soil to grab at tree roots to keep themselves balanced. More than a few trees are nearly parallel to the ground, their grip in the soil tenuous at best. It’s likely why the trail was closed in the first place. At the top of the next hill they nearly lose the trail again until Dean spots a thin alley cleared of vegetation in the valley.
Sam sips frequently at his water bottle, wishing for the breeze from earlier to come back and cool the sweat dripping down his nose. Shaded as they are beneath the trees the sun’s heat still bakes them slowly as it radiates down from the canopy. The breeze earlier in the day has been replaced by a stuffy stillness. Even the animals have quieted down, taking shelter against the oppressive heat.
Just when Sam’s ready to call Dean over for their next break Dean whistles and waves with a vigor that means he’s found something. They’re currently in the narrow valley between two sets of hills, weaving from the base of one slope to the other as they make their way along. What Dean spotted is embedded into the side of one of the hills where most of the dirt has eroded away, leaving a scoured cliff of limestone trailed by creeping vines.
The cliff face is pocked by shallow divots from erosion – and there, beneath a vertical seam, is a dark hole in the limestone that seems to absorb all light. Dean cocks an eyebrow at him. Should they go in?
Sam nods.
They approach carefully, stepping around dry twigs and slowly past crunching piles of leaf debris. They each have a flashlight in one hand and a gun in the other.
The entrance itself is wider than it is tall but once illuminated they can see the ceiling rises a dozen yards beyond the initial entrance to something approximating a reasonable height. Dean goes first, crawling on his belly with both arms outstretched in front of him. Sam watches Dean dig his toes in to push himself onwards, ready to dive in and pull him out by his boots if necessary.
Suddenly Dean’s boots tip upward, brushing against the ceiling, and he slithers out of sight. Sam’s heart races momentarily despite the steady light of Dean’s flashlight bobbing along. There’s a scuffle of fabric against stone and then Dean stands up fully, head barely brushing the ceiling. Had the floor remained level he would hardly have been able to sit up straight on his knees.
He pans his flashlight right-to-left then back again before turning around, waving at Sam to come through.
Sam hoists himself onto the ledge of the entrance and copies Dean’s movements, inching along on his belly in an army crawl. With his sleeves pushed up the dirt powdered on top of the stone clings to his forearms. The point where Dean – and now Sam – slithered down is a welcome relief, even though Sam needs to stoop over to prevent his head from colliding with rock.
The small room they ended up in is roughly hexagonal in shape with a ceiling that had fallen away in large circular swaths and walls carved out by centuries of erosion. With his back to the entrance Sam can see two other passages disappearing into the earth, one sloping downwards nearly in line with the exit and one to his left that seems to curve back towards the cliff face.
Dean, attention drawn by something on the walls to Sam’s right, glances over at Sam to confirm he’s on his feet and waves him over. On the walls are a set of colorful pictographs in reds, yellows, blacks, grays, and whites. Clumps of crosshatching, chevrons, zigzags, and concentric circles paint an unintelligible but striking swath over the uneven walls from knee to shoulder height. Dean takes out his phone and snaps a couple photos but from his face the quality is lacking.
“Maybe this is marking a burial ground,” Sam murmurs. Their research had identified a handful of long-discovered burial caves already existing in the area, and at this point a disturbed spirit makes more sense than a creature.
Dean reaches out and scratches some of the paint from the edge of a red circle. “It’s not spray paint. What?”
Sam rolls his eyes and sighs because trust Dean to touch the prehistoric art. “Let’s go.”
Down the sloping passage across from the main entrance the temperature drops steadily. Sam ducks carefully around protruding stalactites in the sections of the passage too low for him. Dean smirks but there are a few spots he has to duck just as low as Sam to get through – once they even have to crawl on hands and knees. The traversable width of the passage changes as well, pressing in so close they have to slip sideways through a honeycomb row of limestone pillars and expanding out so far Sam and Dean could each outstretch their arms and touch neither each other nor a wall.
Closer to the entrance Sam had been able to hear wind flowing from the cave and the occasional chirp of a cricket wandering the darkness. Further down those sounds have ceased, leaving an eerie stillness. Small noises – Dean’s gun clacking against the wall as he brushes up against a narrow squeeze, the carabiner on Sam’s canteen banging against its lid – whisper back from the gloom. Soft scratches of insects crawling on stone and occasional echoed drops of water from distant still-forming stalactites are the extent of the ambient noise.
They encounter two other rooms, each with a wall patterned with colorful geometric shapes. One room branches out to other passages. Dean marks which way they went with a heavily drawn chalk arrow opposite the wall paintings. At a third point the top of a chimney drops out from the steep side of the primary passage, narrowing into a vise that plunges into darkness. Even illuminated by flashlight it keeps its mystery, sheering around a discolored outcropping of rock without flattening into any sort of landing.
Sam inspects the edges of the chimney for nicks or gouges in the stone that could imply something large habitually slithering through. He doesn’t see any. Dean still chalks a biohazard sign above the tunnel, ignoring Sam’s eye roll, and scatters salt around the entrance. They can come back tomorrow and see if it’s disturbed if they don’t find any better leads.
They climb on. Sam loses track of how long they’ve been down here – long enough for him to start shivering beneath his thin summer clothes. There are no corpses to salt and burn, no strange phenomena to investigate. There have been no indications of inhabitation besides the old cave paintings. Dean’s EMF meter is quiet in his pocket. Even if this is the right location, their target has left no clues for them to find.
When they reach the third room Sam spots a sloping ledge that will act well enough for a bench. Sam touches Dean’s shoulder lightly, jarring him out of his focused stare down the continuing passageway. Trying his best to hide his twitching lip from Dean’s stink eye, Sam walks pointedly towards the bench to signal he needs a break. Against a wall they can keep an eye out for anything approaching and the room is large enough for them to maneuver if necessary.
Once sitting against the cool limestone Sam swaps a handful of peanuts for some of Dean’s M&Ms and they each wolf down an energy bar. The food goes a long way in revitalizing Sam but when he checks the time Sam knows they need to start heading back. They’ll reach the car narrowly before dark but they’ll definitely miss dinner time. Sam elbows Dean and taps his watch. Dean does his own calculations and scowls, leaning away from the next passage regretfully.
Sam clasps his shoulder and takes one more swig of water before packing away his trash. Dean does the same then pulls out a canister of salt. He pours a thick line across the entrance of the room as they leave, much like he did to the chimney passage they had inspected earlier. He lays a few more lines at choke points in the tunnel, swapping Sam for his full canister halfway through. If anything stirs in this cave at night they’ll be able to spot its passing if not deter it from leaving altogether.
Returning to the mouth of the cave is easier now they’re retracing known ground. At the abrupt ceiling dip between the first and second rooms where the vertical clearance shrinks to less than two feet, Sam’s palms aren’t nearly as sweaty coming back as they were his first time through. Then they had been so slick they slid against the stones while Sam pictured nightmarish scenarios of the ceiling continuing at this height for hours, or compressing even further so he wouldn’t even have the space to turn his head. Now he clears the forty yards of crawlspace focusing on how nice fresh air will feel against his face.
Dean hauls him up on the other side, body just as tense as Sam. They haven’t spoken almost all day, wary of drawing something out before they could complete their recon. Compounded with the close confines of the cave the stress is affecting Dean as much as it is Sam. Their pace quickens as they approach the first room, able to pick out the light peeking through the darkness beyond the radius of their own flashlights.
After the steep incline into the first room there’s only the entrance to tackle, Sam and Dean sliding on their bellies with hands extended in front to pull themselves forward. Dean doesn’t bother to catch his fall off the short ledge onto the loamy earth on the other side, simply tucking and rolling himself away to clear space for Sam. He lays spread eagle watching until Sam is on his feet, then jumps up as well.
Sam feels his chest expand fully for the first time in hours, drawing a great breath of air through his nose and marveling at the smells of flowering plants, damp mud and decomposing vegetation he wouldn’t be able to notice had he not been in a different kind of environment the minute previously. The sun is inching closer to the horizon, and Sam is sure if it was at its full strength his eyes would be stinging from the change in brightness.
“Oh,” Dean groans, dropping his caution for a minute to revel in the breeze that billows his shirt, “That feels so damn good!” He shouts the last word and throws his arms upward, smacking the thin whippy branches above his head.
Sam laughs even as he checks to see if anything heard that. It sure does.
-----------------------------------
It’s harder to pick out the old path in the fading light but they get to the main path without wandering astray and reach the car just as the last streaks of red-orange daylight fade from sight.
Sam is rolling down the window to the Impala before Dean even pulls onto the road, still reveling in the feeling of fresh air against his face and a wide expanse of sky. He’s tempted to hang his head out the window like a dog.
“Ok,” Dean says, one hand on the steering wheel and the other cranking down his own window, “So what do we got?”
Sam pulls his head away from the window and starts ticking off points on his finger. “Someone recently cleared an old hiking trail. Five of the people that decide to go down it end up seeing a cave off-trail and go in to explore. Native American drawings in the cave are consistent with other findings in the area. It’s possible whatever’s happening may be related to a local myth or legend – except we don’t have any of those that fit the pattern of killings. Visual inspection of the cave didn’t reveal any signs of burial grounds or inhabitation by anything corporeal. Walking around didn’t seem to disturb whatever caused the affliction that the other hikers suffered.”
“So,” Dean says, picking up the thread, “Maybe more than five people found this cave, and left unharmed. We haven’t explored it all. Whatever it is could have a territory in the cave. We didn’t find any remains or other signs people were actually living there, so maybe the paintings were warnings about something deeper in the cave. I took some pictures. We can send them to Bobby tomorrow and see what he finds.”
“Hm,” Sam says. He hadn’t thought about the lack of other artifacts – no fire pits, decomposed remnants of tools, or shards of pottery. “So it could still be corporeal. But then how did it kill Floyd?”
“I’ve been thinking about that – what about some kind of poison?”
Sam raises his eyebrows and shrugs. It’s certainly plausible.
“The five hikers,” Dean extemporizes, “get bit or, I dunno, touch some kind of giant slime trail or infected puddle of water. They don’t realize it, and touch their eyes or eat some food, and bam. The poison works its way through their system until it kills them three days later.”
Sam considers this against what they already know. “Wouldn’t that have shown up in the tox screen?”
Dean shakes his head. “Not yet. They ran the typical stuff and came back negative but the full screen is still in the backlog at the lab. And that’s assuming whatever it is even gets picked up by the screen.”
“So we’re, what, hunting some kind of giant snake?”
Dean shrugs. “If it works in Harry Potter…”
Sam’s head whips around so fast he nearly breaks his neck. “What?”
Dean looks away from the road to meet Sam’s look blankly. “What what?”
“If it works in…”
Dean glances at Sam again, and immediately puts on the face he wears when he’s about to protest complete innocence to something. All of a sudden the empty road demands the lion’s share of his attention.
“Isn’t there a snake in one of those books? I’m just trying to put it in geek terminology to make it easier on your overheating noggin, dog-boy.” Dean tilts his head knowingly towards the window.
“No,” Sam corrects him – gleefully. “That wasn’t a reference for me. That’s what made you think of a giant snake in the first place. Because you felt like you were crawling around in the Chamber of Secrets today.”
“Chamber of whose secrets?” Dean adds a saucy wink, clearly trying to switch tactics since counter-accusation didn’t work. No way is Sam accepting that either.
“Salazar Slytherin. Which you already know, seeing as you read Harry Potter.”
“Did not!”
“Quit being such a Malfoy!”
“Hey!”
“Ha!” Sam crows, throwing his head back against the seat. “You totally did.”
Dean shifts uncomfortably, sliding his hands along the steering wheel until he decides to accept he’s been found out. “Just ‘cause your stupid books were the only thing to read,” Dean mutters, “Hermione”
Sam sits back smugly and grins. “You’re welcome.”
“Anyway,” Dean grumps, “can we get back to the giant snake? You know, the one that’s poisoning people right under our noses?”
That refocuses Sam’s attention but doesn’t completely make the smile drop from his face. “Yeah, ok. So if they’re poisoned, something may show up in the tox screen. I’ll mention it to Bobby, see if there’s any lore about something similar.”
“Thank you,” Dean says, exaggerating the first word.
Sam tries to come up with another theory but honestly ‘giant Harry Potter snake’ is the best option he’s heard so far. After a minute of silent reflection, Dean grunts to signal the matter is settled and punches the power button of the tape deck. Sam lets the comforting hum of the Impala and Dean crooning to Steely Dan fill the silence the rest of the way back to their motel.
-----------------------------------
Sam calls Bobby while Dean jumps in the shower, snagging Dean’s phone to text the pictures of the cave paintings despite the horrible glare their flashlights had caused. Then he passes along their snake idea.
“Hm,” Bobby says, pages rustling in the background. “If a snake is what you’re looking for then I’d say a colo colo is your best bet – but I’ve never heard of one that far north much less living in a cave.”
“Colo colo?” Sam repeats, jotting the name down.
“Mmhm, it’s a South American creature with a snake’s body and a rat’s head. But they usually live in houses, and folks only die when they stop getting fed on.”
Sam surveys the books they have available and misses the comprehensive indexes of his college textbooks with a passion. “Thanks, Bobby, I’ll see what we can dig up.”
“Yeah,” Bobby says distractedly, still flipping through pages. “You do that. I’ll make some calls tomorrow about those paintings you found, see if any of those squiggles stand for ‘snake rat creature.’”
“Thanks,” Sam says heartfelt. Over the years Bobby has cultivated contacts in multiple tribes who specialize in their culture’s lore – most of which isn’t even written down much less in a book Sam and Dean possess. A network like that is worth its weight in gold for a hunter.
“No problem. Now shut the hell up so I can get back to sleep.”
Sam hangs up the phone laughing. He wonders if Bobby had fallen asleep in his library, or if his bedroom was just as stuffed with books as the first floor of his house.
He tosses Dean’s phone on the table and boxes the words ‘colo colo’ a couple times before taping it to the wall that touched the table. After his online searches return nothing but a soccer team and an Indonesian condiment Sam moves on to the more esoteric books in their collection. When Dean comes out of the bathroom he’s made some progress stacking them into piles reflecting the likelihood of finding a South American myth in them.
Scrubbing his hair dry with one of the washcloths, Dean quickly identifies the new addition to their wall of clues. “Colo colo? Bobby tell you that?”
“Yep,” Sam says, deciding to add Menhirs, Dolmen, and Circles of Stone: The Folklore and Magic of Sacred Stone to the unlikely pile. “Some kind of snake rat hybrid from South America.”
Dean shrugs and tosses his wet towel onto the foot of his bed. “Basilisk meets Scabbers, then. Alright.”
Sam snorts and points him to the piles of books. “Bobby will ask around about the paintings. I’ve been putting the ones that might cover South American myths in that pile.” Dean takes the other seat while Sam vacates his own, eager to shower off the sweat crusted on his face and arms.
When he comes back out Dean has not only sorted the books but already began leafing through the first one, using a folded sheet of note paper to keep pace with his eyes as they move down the lines of text. Sam shifts guiltily, eyeing his bed across the room. He was planning to leave that research for tomorrow but if Dean is awake then Sam should be too.
Dean rolls his eyes without even looking up. “Dude, I can hear you getting constipated from over here. Go to sleep, I’ll finish this one up before turning in.”
“You sure?”
Dean snaps on the lamp beside him and finally looks up to smile. “Yep. You look beat, Sam. Go to sleep.” Sam hits the overhead lights and does that, hardly even remembering his head hitting the pillow.
-----------------------------------
Sam wakes up in the morning to Dean lounging on the other bed with a pile of books surrounding him. He blinks a couple times to make sure his mind has caught up to what his eyes are seeing then asks hoarsely, “Did you stay up all night reading?”
Dean hums and flips another page. “Wasn’t tired. How was your beauty sleep?”
“Ugh,” Sam groans, rolling onto his back with an arm across his eyes. He hadn’t thought the cave exploration had drained him that much but Sam feels like he could sleep for another ten hours. It’s an unusual inversion of their normal roles. “What time is it?”
“’Bout eight.”
“Hn.” Eight isn’t terribly late but Sam should start working. He reaches out with his other arm and blindly gropes until Dean slaps a book in it.
“Also,” Dean says, crinkling a bad he had stashed next to him so Sam can hear, “I got breakfast.”
Sam sits up for that. Dean passes him a paper bag from the good bakery across town with a cooled apple danish inside. Then he nudges one of the coffee cups on the nightstand over to his side. “You’re awesome,” Sam says, chowing down.
Dean smirks. “That’s just my bribe to make you do the rest of the research.”
“Find anything yet?” Sam asks around a mouthful of Danish.
Dean sighs and points to three books placed on the pillow next to him. “Those three mention colo colos, but they’re not very consistent about what it looks like – one says it’s an unusually large rat, another says snake with a rat face like Bobby mentioned. Third one says it’s got feathers.” Dean shakes his head. “Whatever its fugly mug looks like, they all agree that its call sounds like a wailing baby –“ Dean raises his eyes significantly before looking back at the book he was reading and paraphrasing, – “and it feeds on the ‘saliva of the residents’ of a house it infests, making them feel exhausted and bringing disease to the household.”
“Disease as in exhausting them to death?”
“That’s what I’m thinking. Except this thing didn’t set up shop in a house, so instead of feeding on one family it’s snacking on anybody who comes into its cave.”
“Snacking on them by… eating their spit?”
Dean makes puckered kissing face. “Get your game face on, Sammy, this one’s just looking for love.”
Sam throws his coffee lid at Dean who unfortunately bats it down easily. “Gross. So you think the five hikers took a nap and this thing came crawling out and infected them?”
Dean shrugs. “Ducking into a cave for a nice midday nap to escape the heat? Yeah, maybe.”
Sam can buy that one, too. “Anything on how to kill it?”
Dean holds up two fingers. “One,” he says, ticking the first one with his other index finger, “burn down the house around its ears. That one is a problem there because –“
“—you can’t set fire to limestone. Smart. So what’s two?”
“Two is some kind of exorcism ritual performed by a tribe shaman. There hasn’t been anything specific about what’s in the ritual yet but,” Dean sweeps his arms above the books on his bed, “Hopefully we can find something because I don’t exactly know any Chilean mystics. How’s your Spanish?”
Sam shrugs. “Worse than my Latin but I can get by.”
“Great,” Dean says and points to the book Sam had tucked against his side while he was eating. “I stopped by the library. You can start on the untranslated ones.” Sam takes a fortifying draught of coffee and cracks open the first book.
“Dean?”
Dean takes a sip of his own coffee before answering. “Yeah?”
Sam pulls out the reservation slip from the card slip taped to the inside cover. “Who’s Dwayne Riley?”
Dean snickers.
“Dude!” Sam sighs and folds the slip before tucking it back, just in case a maid got nosy. The last thing they needed was local trouble from library book theft.
“What? They only open at nine. Dwayne probably won’t mind, I left him like five other mythology books.”
Sam decides it’s better not to engage. With one last aggrieved look he flips to the index and tries to remember his conjugations.
They research into the early afternoon, Sam slowly working his way through the new books – two others which were also reserved for Dwayne. Dean took the rest of the books Bobby sent with them. By early afternoon Dean had moved to an open legged sprawl on the ground by the foot of his bed with books scattered in front of him and Sam was at the table with his feet propped up on Dean’s chair, a book in his lap and his laptop opened to a translation site.
“Hey,” Dean says, interrupting his own mindless humming. “You hungry?”
The only thing Sam ate since lunch yesterday had been the danish Dean brought him for breakfast. “Yep. Food?”
“Food,” Dean agrees, standing up and stretching with a groan. “Then maybe a nap. Any luck?”
“Nope. You?”
“Same. Why tell people there’s an exorcism and not give them the damn recipe?”
Dean scowls at the books like he’s considering a good kick will solve his problem. A break is definitely in order, Sam decides. Every hunter gets sleepless nights but they tend to leave Dean easily frustrated. “Want to try the barbeque place?”
“Yeah,” Dean says, clenching his fists for a moment until his equilibrium is regained. “Let’s get some ribs and then call Bobby.”
-----------------------------------
The restaurant is a needed break. By the time they get back to the motel Dean has gone from frustrated to covering jaw cracking yawns behind his arm. After they call Bobby Sam’s going to insist he take a nap. Sam can use the break from Spanish, and Dean needs to sleep to be sharp enough for a hunt.
They call on Dean’s phone and put in on speaker, sitting side by side on Dean’s bed so they can both hear.
“Yeah?”
“Hey, Bobby,” Sam says. “How’s it going?”
“Sam, Dean. I was getting ready to call you. One of my buddies just got back to me about those cave paintings you saw. Do you remember how many colors it was in real life? The colors in the photo are all washed out.”
Dean pulls up the picture on his cell and they try to remember. “Yellow, red, black. Three, Bobby.”
“No –“ Sam corrects, remembering a series of chevrons that had disappeared in the photo’s glare. “There was white, too, so four.”
“Just black or black and gray?”
Dean smirks. “Looking for something to match the color scheme in your library?”
“Yeah, Bobby,” Sam says, since he’s the one with the phone. “Gray and black. Why?”
Bobby inhales long and slow. “Well.”
Sam and Dean both perk up because that’s Bobby’s sound for when he’s about to launch into a long explanation.
“You find something?” Dean asks.
“It’s not a colo colo.”
“Not –“ Sam silently mirrors Dean’s dismayed expression to have lost half a day of research on the wrong thing. “But Bobby, the death by exhaustion and baby crying both fit!”
“Now hear me out. Like you say it almost matches so I thought I was sending you in the right direction. But I spoke to a friend who specializes in prehistoric American art. He thinks your pictures weren’t made by humans at all but by creatures called uwani azi. The name translates to ‘rock babies,’ on account of their humanlike crying. They’re cave spirits that use five colors to paint on the walls of caves they inhabit. Sound about right?”
“Shit Bobby – yeah, could be.” Dean sighs and leans back, balancing the phone on his chest.
Sam presses, “How do you know it’s not a normal cave painting?”
“According to him humans didn’t really use more than three colors back then – and mostly they used one or two. With everything else you’ve told me, these things fit the profile much better than that snake theory you had. Wait until you hear the rest of the lore.”
Sam leans forwards and drops his head onto his hands. What a waste their research had been. At least they hadn’t gotten as far as getting the ingredients to an exorcism that apparently wouldn’t have ever worked. “Alright. What do you have?”
There’s a rustle as Bobby likely shifts the phone to the crook of his shoulder, his voice coming in louder than it was previously. “Uwani azi are normally harmless which is why there hasn’t been a recorded attack for decades. There’s only one thing humans can do that piss them off – touching their art. After you do that, they afflict you with some kinda curse that prevents you from sleeping for three days before killing you. Just like what happened to your hikers.”
Sam slowly turns to look at Dean who is already staring back at him. Dean weakly raises his hand and tries to buff out his fingertips on his shirt, far too little too late. On the phone Bobby continues unaware that Sam and Dean are hardly listening anymore.
“You can’t actually kill an uwani azi, but the good news is you can cleanse the caves if you wash the paintings off using water drawn from within the cave itself. Although from what you were saying about its location, it may also be good to just collapse the cave entrance before anyone else stumbles into it because I’m not sure what’s stopping them from drawing in the same cave again once you leave.”
“Hey Bobby,” Sam says, still maintaining eye contact with Dean, “What about people that already touched the paintings?”
“Why? Did you find another hiker already?”
“Not exactly.”
Bobby catches on quickly. “Which one of you idjits touched it?”
Dean winces. “Bobby –”
“I should have known,” he growls.
Dean tries to defend himself, protesting, “I wanted to make sure it wasn’t just kids leaving graffiti on the trails!”
Bobby huffs unmoved. “Do you two philistines know why you never touch things at museums? It’s because you don’t know what kind of mojo has kept it around that long!”
“Oh, come on, it’s not like there was a glass case around it! They didn’t want people touching it they can put it in caves humans can’t reach!”
“Bobby,” Sam interrupts, before Bobby or Dean can get more belligerent, “Is there a cure?” He holds his breath while Bobby thinks.
“Not for sure. If I had to guess I’d say you can cleanse yourself with the same water you use to wash the walls – but it has to come from water within the same cave system the drawings are in. You’re gonna need something bigger than a puddle.”
“Ok,” Sam says, getting a handle on his racing thoughts. More research is useless; with such a close match they would have already found them if they were in the books. Bobby’s information is the best they have. Sam’s options are to go all-in or come up with a different solution out of thin air in two days. It’s not a hard choice. “Water from the caves,” Sam repeats, thinking back. “There were drips echoing yesterday, so there has to be water somewhere in there.”
“That’s good,” Bobby says.
They just have to explore every depth of the cave in the next day and a half until they find it. Sam swallows. “Thanks. We’ll talk to you later.” He gets up and starts packing – all the energy bars they have left, dense caloric snacks, extra socks and batteries.
Dean sits up from his exhausted sprawl to watch Sam. How had he not noticed the deep purple underneath Dean’s eyes earlier?
“Sam? What are you doing?”
Sam lobs Dean’s half-full backpack towards him. “Packing. We can get to the cave within four hours and start looking. I want as much leeway as we can get on this one.”
“What, now? You planning on looking all through the night?”
Sam shrugs. “Not like it matters underground.”
Dean concedes that one although he looks a bit unnerved at the reminder of how dark it could be. Sam snags the canteens and refills them from the bathroom tap while Dean starts packing their heavy ordinance – consecrated iron, silver, anything that has the chance of stopping a rock creature in its tracks.
“Bobby,” he calls to the phone still lying on his bed, “We’ll call you in a day or two.” Dean’s voice lilts at the end so his statement turns into a question.
“Both you boys better,” Bobby agrees quietly. “The minute you’re back.”
“Yeah. Take care.” Dean hangs up as Sam screws the lids on their canteens. In short order they were ready to head out the door.
“You good to drive?”
Dean scoffs. “This isn’t the first time an art school wannabe kept me up all night.” He tosses Sam a bag of half the ammunition with a smirk, tucks away his pearl handled pistol and jiggles his keys. Sam snags his own pistol from the drawer and follows him out. He checks the clock on the nightstand before shutting the door.
It’s half past three in the afternoon. Dean has a day and a half to live.
(Part Two)
Recipient: dizzojay
Rating: PG
Word Count: 13.9k
Warnings: This is a hunt set in a cave, so if you’re claustrophobic you may want to skip this one.
Author's Notes: Thank you for such great prompts! This one turned into a monster – so also thanks to the summergen team for helping me set up a deadline I could meet! Takes place circa season 2 of Supernatural.
Summary: Sam and Dean investigate a rash of deaths in Mammoth Cave National Park.
Cave City, Kentucky
With the windows closed and the curtains drawn all day the temperature in the cabin had slowly climbed over ninety degrees. Sweat ran freely down Conor’s face and his lips cracked from dehydration; despite this he didn’t move from his curled position in front of the kitchen cabinets. He rocked to himself as his bare feet slipped across the tile repetitively, moaning softly.
He was so tired.
Pressing his face against the cabinets he let out a soft sob and scratched down his arms. It had been three days since he’d had even a nap. The first night he’d tossed relentlessly in bed, desperate to sleep after an exhausting hike that day. The second night he’d taken to pacing, hoping to accumulate his weariness until it could overcome his strange bout of insomnia. As the third night gathered he had ended up on the floor, despairing of ever finding a solution.
His eyes were dry and sandy whether he kept them open or close. His mind raced aimlessly, too fatigued to focus on anything for long. His ears rang with an eerie sound, like babies crying in the other room. He had come into the kitchen to check. There were no babies here, and his cabin was too isolated from the others for it to come from another family.
Conor covered his ears and curled tighter, whimpering. Dust dripped from his eyes and mixed with the sweat on his face to create grimy facsimiles of tear tracks.
“Just let me sleep,” he muttered to whatever was crying inside his cabin. “Please just let me sleep.”
-----------------------------------
Beneath the drone of the local news there’s a curse and a scuffle. Sam sticks his head out of the motel bathroom to fish eye Dean, who’s half-crouched on the edge of his bed like he aborted a scramble upwards when he heard Sam put his razor down and didn’t have time to fling himself prone. There aren’t any guns on the bed or electronics next to him, and Dean had wandered away from their research half an hour ago to the allure of infomercials.
“What?”
“Hm?” Dean widens his eyes and shakes his head but his cool unflappable act stopped working on Sam when he was twelve
Sam studies Dean suspiciously but Dean refuses to twitch. Eventually Sam has to give up. “Nothing,” he mutters, retreating back to the bathroom. He can hear Dean resettling on the bed before he turns on the water to rinse his face.
When Sam leaves the bathroom Dean has wandered back to their books. Sam looks at his laptop, sighs, and throws himself in Dean’s old position.
“Anything?”
Dean grunts in the negative and flips through more pages. “Dwarves, rock spirits, pagan gods, cursed miners, Japanese ghosts, nothing about limestone or any of them killing you by insomnia.”
“Bobby?”
“Nope.”
Sam drapes an arm over his eyes, wrangling with the familiar frustration of having no leads and no clue what they were hunting. There was definitely something going on. People don’t spontaneously start crying limestone and then die of exhaustion on their own. Yet two weeks of interviews, wild goose chases, and research left them no closer to cracking whatever had happened to the four hikers who’d died since summer had started.
Dean shuts his book and scrapes his chair backwards. There’s a rustle of fabric and then Dean whacks Sam’s leg. “C’mon. I’m hungry. You want tacos?”
They’ve been cooped up in a stuffy hotel room all day, cranking the insufficient AC as far as it will go. By this point anything Sam reads he’ll only have to re-read tomorrow. “Yeah,” he mumbles, and swings his legs off the bed.
“Aw, don’t pout. I’ll get you one of those margaritas with the umbrellas.”
-----------------------------------
Dean gets margaritas with umbrellas for both of them – and steak tacos for himself and grilled chicken tacos for Sam. They listen to the kitschy music and see who can load up more salsa onto the complementary chips while they wait. Dean plays dirty by asking the waitress to bring them hotter salsa when she comes around to refill the bowl. Sam retaliates by dumping hot sauce all over the chips.
When their food arrives they need another round of margaritas, and they’re both discreetly trying to wipe their noses when the other isn’t looking. After they’ve stuffed themselves on unauthentic – “I don’t want to hear it California boy, my tacos my way,” – Mexican food the stressed knot in Sam’s shoulders has eased and he flicks spitball wads of straw wrappers at his brother until Dean cracks and returns fire.
Following their brief but intense war the conversation swings back to their current job.
“Look, we’ve read up on everything there is that’s rock-related and sleep-related and found nothing. Next step is to go have a look ourselves.”
“We tried that already,” Sam points out. “Three times. We don’t know where any of the victims went and the park is too big to wander around guessing.”
“We already interviewed the coroner twice,” Dean counters, waving his cocktail umbrella for emphasis. “And the desk clerks and the cleaning lady and the tour guide and the intake nurse. At least wandering around is better than sitting on our hands.”
Sam can’t really argue against that so he drains the watery dregs of his margarita instead. Dean throws down a handful of crumpled bills to pay the check. Sam is first into the parking lot, holding the door open behind him for Dean. A man on the other side bumps into Sam and keeps walking without a word.
“Hey,” Sam says. “Heads up next time.”
The man turns towards Sam slowly, expression blank for a minute before something clicks in his mind. “Sorry,” he mutters.
The restaurant is at the end of a long road with no public transportation. Sam glances around but there’s nobody in the parking lot obviously looking for the man. He hopes he hadn’t driven himself here.
“You okay?”
There’s another long pause while the man digests Sam’s question. “I’m… I’m so tired.” As he looks at Sam, something powdery falls down his face. Sam stiffens.
“Dean.”
Loitering nearby, Dean is quick to step closer. “Yeah?”
Sam reaches out slowly. The man doesn’t seem to mind. He brushes the cheekbone underneath the man’s left eye, feeling grit beneath his fingers. In the sinking dusk light he shows his fingers to Dean.
“Oh, shit,” Dean breathes.
“Yeah.”
Dean is quick to flip out his badge. “Sir, I’m Agent Rose with the National Park Service. I need you to come with me.” The man staggers slightly when Dean takes his arm and starts moving him towards the Impala but he manages to make his unsteady way there without falling. Dean tosses Sam the keys to unlock the backseat. The minute they have him seated he topples sideways and closes his eyes.
Sam checks his pulse. It’s faint and racing. “Still alive.”
Dean grunts and turns the ignition. He’s away to the motel before Sam finishes closing his door. Sam sits sideways doing his best to monitor the man in their backseat but he’s not really sure what he’s looking for. Other than the limestone dusted down their faces and the signs of death by exhaustion, the local coroner had thrown up his hands and said he left the rest for God to figure out.
Either way, the man survives the short drive to their motel. He stirs weakly out of his stupor, having never really fallen asleep, when Sam prods him. “What’s your name?”
“My...”
“Tell me your name.”
“Floyd.”
“Floyd, my name is Sam. I need you to get up. Can you do that, Floyd?”
Floyd twitches each time he hears his name but doesn’t seem to register Sam’s question between it. Regardless he moves easily enough when Sam tugs on his elbow. They take small steps to keep Floyd from toppling over. Dean keeps the door open for them, the lights in their room already switched on. Sam walks him to the nearest bed, which he topples into with a frustrated sob. “I’m so tired.”
Sam exchanges a worried glance with Dean. How are they supposed to protect this man if they don’t even know what they’re up against? “When was the last time you slept?”
“I don’t…” Floyd’s fingers clutch rhythmically at the covers and he trails off.
“Floyd?”
He twitches. “Third day. No sleep.” His eyes flutter but don’t open all the way, dusting his pillow with limestone. “Make them stop crying.”
“Stop who crying?”
“Babies. Babies in the next room.”
Sam checks with Dean; neither of them can hear babies. “What else do you hear?”
“Please stop,” Floyd mutters. He covers his ears. “Stop.”
Dean steps forward with a map before they lose him entirely. “Hey, Floyd. You were hiking three days ago, right?” Sam helps haul Floyd into a sitting position so they can dump the map in his lap, gently pulling away his hands from his ears. He looks around wildly until Dean repeatedly snaps his fingers in front of his nose. Dean moves his hand down to tap at the map.
“Where were you hiking, huh, Floyd?”
Sam thinks they won’t be able to get an answer out of him but eventually Floyd’s half-open gaze pauses on a specific spot and he laboriously presses a finger down near one of the bends of the river.
“Alright,” Dean breathes. He doesn’t bother to move Floyd’s finger before marking the spot. “Alright, you did good, Floyd. You did real good. Just hang in there.”
Floyd groans and his eyes roll backwards, unresponsive to Sam’s prodding or questions. Sam eases him down horizontally again. Dean tosses him the salt and they make a circle. They place iron above the doorway and cat’s eye shells on the tables. Purification incense burns in all four cardinal directions. Dean lays out an assortment of knives and they wait.
When the last rays of sunlight die from the sky Floyd sighs and doesn’t breathe in again. Dean shoves the books off the table and curses a blue streak.
-----------------------------------
In the morning Sam checks with the coroner while Dean updates Bobby. As they expected the cause of death is attributed to exhaustion. Dean’s conversation with Bobby is equally short; he reports the three-day time frame and sound of crying babies to add to their list of symptoms and Bobby promises to hit the books.
Soon after Sam and Dean lace up their hiking boots and hit the pavement. In addition to weapons they pack a map and compass each, flashlights, extra batteries, chalk, canteens, high-calorie snacks, first aid. Given that two of the other hikers were here specifically to search out caves, they expect this trek will lead them underground at some point.
They drive into the state park in grim silence. Sam eyes how Dean strangles the steering wheel and waits until they’ve pulled off to the parking at the head of the trail. “There was nothing we could do to help him.”
“Yeah,” Dean growls, hands twisting to make the wheel faintly squeak. “But he didn’t deserve to die like that when were sitting right there.”
Sam doesn’t have anything to say against that. After a moment of silence Dean kills the engine and swings open his door. “Let’s go hunt this bastard down.”
There are a handful of trails in the area Dean circled last night but they had decided to start with the one that winds furthest away from the river. If the creature was on a more accessible trail the number of fatalities would have been higher. Small mercies, Sam supposes.
Including short rest breaks the trek outbound should take two hours but Sam and Dean periodically sweep sections beyond the path so it takes nearly twice that. At the beginning it was cool enough for a pleasant breeze. Now as the sun climbs higher sweat begins to prickle Sam’s brow. Summer insects call raucously and the leaves rustle with birds and other small animals. It is occasionally hell on the nerves given they have no idea what the creature they’re hunting looks or sounds like.
As they begin the gradual arc that will turn them back towards their car, Sam spies freshly furrowed dirt that must have been overturned by the half-rotted tree trunk sunken in one end of the rut. The other end disappears behind a thick cluster of thorny bushes. Sam pushes them aside and sees the faint remnants of a path wind between a narrow gap in the thorns and away into the woods, nearly invisible from elsewhere on the trail.
Sam whistles and waves for Dean to come over. “Look,” he says softly when Dean is close enough for them to talk quietly. “Someone cleared an old path recently.” He gestures to the half-rotted tree trunk and then to the abandoned trail.
Dean can read the same evidence Sam did. He jerks his head towards the path, already half-stepping towards it. “Let’s have a look.”
They pick their way through the thicket then down a hill and up another, digging their hands into the loose soil to grab at tree roots to keep themselves balanced. More than a few trees are nearly parallel to the ground, their grip in the soil tenuous at best. It’s likely why the trail was closed in the first place. At the top of the next hill they nearly lose the trail again until Dean spots a thin alley cleared of vegetation in the valley.
Sam sips frequently at his water bottle, wishing for the breeze from earlier to come back and cool the sweat dripping down his nose. Shaded as they are beneath the trees the sun’s heat still bakes them slowly as it radiates down from the canopy. The breeze earlier in the day has been replaced by a stuffy stillness. Even the animals have quieted down, taking shelter against the oppressive heat.
Just when Sam’s ready to call Dean over for their next break Dean whistles and waves with a vigor that means he’s found something. They’re currently in the narrow valley between two sets of hills, weaving from the base of one slope to the other as they make their way along. What Dean spotted is embedded into the side of one of the hills where most of the dirt has eroded away, leaving a scoured cliff of limestone trailed by creeping vines.
The cliff face is pocked by shallow divots from erosion – and there, beneath a vertical seam, is a dark hole in the limestone that seems to absorb all light. Dean cocks an eyebrow at him. Should they go in?
Sam nods.
They approach carefully, stepping around dry twigs and slowly past crunching piles of leaf debris. They each have a flashlight in one hand and a gun in the other.
The entrance itself is wider than it is tall but once illuminated they can see the ceiling rises a dozen yards beyond the initial entrance to something approximating a reasonable height. Dean goes first, crawling on his belly with both arms outstretched in front of him. Sam watches Dean dig his toes in to push himself onwards, ready to dive in and pull him out by his boots if necessary.
Suddenly Dean’s boots tip upward, brushing against the ceiling, and he slithers out of sight. Sam’s heart races momentarily despite the steady light of Dean’s flashlight bobbing along. There’s a scuffle of fabric against stone and then Dean stands up fully, head barely brushing the ceiling. Had the floor remained level he would hardly have been able to sit up straight on his knees.
He pans his flashlight right-to-left then back again before turning around, waving at Sam to come through.
Sam hoists himself onto the ledge of the entrance and copies Dean’s movements, inching along on his belly in an army crawl. With his sleeves pushed up the dirt powdered on top of the stone clings to his forearms. The point where Dean – and now Sam – slithered down is a welcome relief, even though Sam needs to stoop over to prevent his head from colliding with rock.
The small room they ended up in is roughly hexagonal in shape with a ceiling that had fallen away in large circular swaths and walls carved out by centuries of erosion. With his back to the entrance Sam can see two other passages disappearing into the earth, one sloping downwards nearly in line with the exit and one to his left that seems to curve back towards the cliff face.
Dean, attention drawn by something on the walls to Sam’s right, glances over at Sam to confirm he’s on his feet and waves him over. On the walls are a set of colorful pictographs in reds, yellows, blacks, grays, and whites. Clumps of crosshatching, chevrons, zigzags, and concentric circles paint an unintelligible but striking swath over the uneven walls from knee to shoulder height. Dean takes out his phone and snaps a couple photos but from his face the quality is lacking.
“Maybe this is marking a burial ground,” Sam murmurs. Their research had identified a handful of long-discovered burial caves already existing in the area, and at this point a disturbed spirit makes more sense than a creature.
Dean reaches out and scratches some of the paint from the edge of a red circle. “It’s not spray paint. What?”
Sam rolls his eyes and sighs because trust Dean to touch the prehistoric art. “Let’s go.”
Down the sloping passage across from the main entrance the temperature drops steadily. Sam ducks carefully around protruding stalactites in the sections of the passage too low for him. Dean smirks but there are a few spots he has to duck just as low as Sam to get through – once they even have to crawl on hands and knees. The traversable width of the passage changes as well, pressing in so close they have to slip sideways through a honeycomb row of limestone pillars and expanding out so far Sam and Dean could each outstretch their arms and touch neither each other nor a wall.
Closer to the entrance Sam had been able to hear wind flowing from the cave and the occasional chirp of a cricket wandering the darkness. Further down those sounds have ceased, leaving an eerie stillness. Small noises – Dean’s gun clacking against the wall as he brushes up against a narrow squeeze, the carabiner on Sam’s canteen banging against its lid – whisper back from the gloom. Soft scratches of insects crawling on stone and occasional echoed drops of water from distant still-forming stalactites are the extent of the ambient noise.
They encounter two other rooms, each with a wall patterned with colorful geometric shapes. One room branches out to other passages. Dean marks which way they went with a heavily drawn chalk arrow opposite the wall paintings. At a third point the top of a chimney drops out from the steep side of the primary passage, narrowing into a vise that plunges into darkness. Even illuminated by flashlight it keeps its mystery, sheering around a discolored outcropping of rock without flattening into any sort of landing.
Sam inspects the edges of the chimney for nicks or gouges in the stone that could imply something large habitually slithering through. He doesn’t see any. Dean still chalks a biohazard sign above the tunnel, ignoring Sam’s eye roll, and scatters salt around the entrance. They can come back tomorrow and see if it’s disturbed if they don’t find any better leads.
They climb on. Sam loses track of how long they’ve been down here – long enough for him to start shivering beneath his thin summer clothes. There are no corpses to salt and burn, no strange phenomena to investigate. There have been no indications of inhabitation besides the old cave paintings. Dean’s EMF meter is quiet in his pocket. Even if this is the right location, their target has left no clues for them to find.
When they reach the third room Sam spots a sloping ledge that will act well enough for a bench. Sam touches Dean’s shoulder lightly, jarring him out of his focused stare down the continuing passageway. Trying his best to hide his twitching lip from Dean’s stink eye, Sam walks pointedly towards the bench to signal he needs a break. Against a wall they can keep an eye out for anything approaching and the room is large enough for them to maneuver if necessary.
Once sitting against the cool limestone Sam swaps a handful of peanuts for some of Dean’s M&Ms and they each wolf down an energy bar. The food goes a long way in revitalizing Sam but when he checks the time Sam knows they need to start heading back. They’ll reach the car narrowly before dark but they’ll definitely miss dinner time. Sam elbows Dean and taps his watch. Dean does his own calculations and scowls, leaning away from the next passage regretfully.
Sam clasps his shoulder and takes one more swig of water before packing away his trash. Dean does the same then pulls out a canister of salt. He pours a thick line across the entrance of the room as they leave, much like he did to the chimney passage they had inspected earlier. He lays a few more lines at choke points in the tunnel, swapping Sam for his full canister halfway through. If anything stirs in this cave at night they’ll be able to spot its passing if not deter it from leaving altogether.
Returning to the mouth of the cave is easier now they’re retracing known ground. At the abrupt ceiling dip between the first and second rooms where the vertical clearance shrinks to less than two feet, Sam’s palms aren’t nearly as sweaty coming back as they were his first time through. Then they had been so slick they slid against the stones while Sam pictured nightmarish scenarios of the ceiling continuing at this height for hours, or compressing even further so he wouldn’t even have the space to turn his head. Now he clears the forty yards of crawlspace focusing on how nice fresh air will feel against his face.
Dean hauls him up on the other side, body just as tense as Sam. They haven’t spoken almost all day, wary of drawing something out before they could complete their recon. Compounded with the close confines of the cave the stress is affecting Dean as much as it is Sam. Their pace quickens as they approach the first room, able to pick out the light peeking through the darkness beyond the radius of their own flashlights.
After the steep incline into the first room there’s only the entrance to tackle, Sam and Dean sliding on their bellies with hands extended in front to pull themselves forward. Dean doesn’t bother to catch his fall off the short ledge onto the loamy earth on the other side, simply tucking and rolling himself away to clear space for Sam. He lays spread eagle watching until Sam is on his feet, then jumps up as well.
Sam feels his chest expand fully for the first time in hours, drawing a great breath of air through his nose and marveling at the smells of flowering plants, damp mud and decomposing vegetation he wouldn’t be able to notice had he not been in a different kind of environment the minute previously. The sun is inching closer to the horizon, and Sam is sure if it was at its full strength his eyes would be stinging from the change in brightness.
“Oh,” Dean groans, dropping his caution for a minute to revel in the breeze that billows his shirt, “That feels so damn good!” He shouts the last word and throws his arms upward, smacking the thin whippy branches above his head.
Sam laughs even as he checks to see if anything heard that. It sure does.
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It’s harder to pick out the old path in the fading light but they get to the main path without wandering astray and reach the car just as the last streaks of red-orange daylight fade from sight.
Sam is rolling down the window to the Impala before Dean even pulls onto the road, still reveling in the feeling of fresh air against his face and a wide expanse of sky. He’s tempted to hang his head out the window like a dog.
“Ok,” Dean says, one hand on the steering wheel and the other cranking down his own window, “So what do we got?”
Sam pulls his head away from the window and starts ticking off points on his finger. “Someone recently cleared an old hiking trail. Five of the people that decide to go down it end up seeing a cave off-trail and go in to explore. Native American drawings in the cave are consistent with other findings in the area. It’s possible whatever’s happening may be related to a local myth or legend – except we don’t have any of those that fit the pattern of killings. Visual inspection of the cave didn’t reveal any signs of burial grounds or inhabitation by anything corporeal. Walking around didn’t seem to disturb whatever caused the affliction that the other hikers suffered.”
“So,” Dean says, picking up the thread, “Maybe more than five people found this cave, and left unharmed. We haven’t explored it all. Whatever it is could have a territory in the cave. We didn’t find any remains or other signs people were actually living there, so maybe the paintings were warnings about something deeper in the cave. I took some pictures. We can send them to Bobby tomorrow and see what he finds.”
“Hm,” Sam says. He hadn’t thought about the lack of other artifacts – no fire pits, decomposed remnants of tools, or shards of pottery. “So it could still be corporeal. But then how did it kill Floyd?”
“I’ve been thinking about that – what about some kind of poison?”
Sam raises his eyebrows and shrugs. It’s certainly plausible.
“The five hikers,” Dean extemporizes, “get bit or, I dunno, touch some kind of giant slime trail or infected puddle of water. They don’t realize it, and touch their eyes or eat some food, and bam. The poison works its way through their system until it kills them three days later.”
Sam considers this against what they already know. “Wouldn’t that have shown up in the tox screen?”
Dean shakes his head. “Not yet. They ran the typical stuff and came back negative but the full screen is still in the backlog at the lab. And that’s assuming whatever it is even gets picked up by the screen.”
“So we’re, what, hunting some kind of giant snake?”
Dean shrugs. “If it works in Harry Potter…”
Sam’s head whips around so fast he nearly breaks his neck. “What?”
Dean looks away from the road to meet Sam’s look blankly. “What what?”
“If it works in…”
Dean glances at Sam again, and immediately puts on the face he wears when he’s about to protest complete innocence to something. All of a sudden the empty road demands the lion’s share of his attention.
“Isn’t there a snake in one of those books? I’m just trying to put it in geek terminology to make it easier on your overheating noggin, dog-boy.” Dean tilts his head knowingly towards the window.
“No,” Sam corrects him – gleefully. “That wasn’t a reference for me. That’s what made you think of a giant snake in the first place. Because you felt like you were crawling around in the Chamber of Secrets today.”
“Chamber of whose secrets?” Dean adds a saucy wink, clearly trying to switch tactics since counter-accusation didn’t work. No way is Sam accepting that either.
“Salazar Slytherin. Which you already know, seeing as you read Harry Potter.”
“Did not!”
“Quit being such a Malfoy!”
“Hey!”
“Ha!” Sam crows, throwing his head back against the seat. “You totally did.”
Dean shifts uncomfortably, sliding his hands along the steering wheel until he decides to accept he’s been found out. “Just ‘cause your stupid books were the only thing to read,” Dean mutters, “Hermione”
Sam sits back smugly and grins. “You’re welcome.”
“Anyway,” Dean grumps, “can we get back to the giant snake? You know, the one that’s poisoning people right under our noses?”
That refocuses Sam’s attention but doesn’t completely make the smile drop from his face. “Yeah, ok. So if they’re poisoned, something may show up in the tox screen. I’ll mention it to Bobby, see if there’s any lore about something similar.”
“Thank you,” Dean says, exaggerating the first word.
Sam tries to come up with another theory but honestly ‘giant Harry Potter snake’ is the best option he’s heard so far. After a minute of silent reflection, Dean grunts to signal the matter is settled and punches the power button of the tape deck. Sam lets the comforting hum of the Impala and Dean crooning to Steely Dan fill the silence the rest of the way back to their motel.
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Sam calls Bobby while Dean jumps in the shower, snagging Dean’s phone to text the pictures of the cave paintings despite the horrible glare their flashlights had caused. Then he passes along their snake idea.
“Hm,” Bobby says, pages rustling in the background. “If a snake is what you’re looking for then I’d say a colo colo is your best bet – but I’ve never heard of one that far north much less living in a cave.”
“Colo colo?” Sam repeats, jotting the name down.
“Mmhm, it’s a South American creature with a snake’s body and a rat’s head. But they usually live in houses, and folks only die when they stop getting fed on.”
Sam surveys the books they have available and misses the comprehensive indexes of his college textbooks with a passion. “Thanks, Bobby, I’ll see what we can dig up.”
“Yeah,” Bobby says distractedly, still flipping through pages. “You do that. I’ll make some calls tomorrow about those paintings you found, see if any of those squiggles stand for ‘snake rat creature.’”
“Thanks,” Sam says heartfelt. Over the years Bobby has cultivated contacts in multiple tribes who specialize in their culture’s lore – most of which isn’t even written down much less in a book Sam and Dean possess. A network like that is worth its weight in gold for a hunter.
“No problem. Now shut the hell up so I can get back to sleep.”
Sam hangs up the phone laughing. He wonders if Bobby had fallen asleep in his library, or if his bedroom was just as stuffed with books as the first floor of his house.
He tosses Dean’s phone on the table and boxes the words ‘colo colo’ a couple times before taping it to the wall that touched the table. After his online searches return nothing but a soccer team and an Indonesian condiment Sam moves on to the more esoteric books in their collection. When Dean comes out of the bathroom he’s made some progress stacking them into piles reflecting the likelihood of finding a South American myth in them.
Scrubbing his hair dry with one of the washcloths, Dean quickly identifies the new addition to their wall of clues. “Colo colo? Bobby tell you that?”
“Yep,” Sam says, deciding to add Menhirs, Dolmen, and Circles of Stone: The Folklore and Magic of Sacred Stone to the unlikely pile. “Some kind of snake rat hybrid from South America.”
Dean shrugs and tosses his wet towel onto the foot of his bed. “Basilisk meets Scabbers, then. Alright.”
Sam snorts and points him to the piles of books. “Bobby will ask around about the paintings. I’ve been putting the ones that might cover South American myths in that pile.” Dean takes the other seat while Sam vacates his own, eager to shower off the sweat crusted on his face and arms.
When he comes back out Dean has not only sorted the books but already began leafing through the first one, using a folded sheet of note paper to keep pace with his eyes as they move down the lines of text. Sam shifts guiltily, eyeing his bed across the room. He was planning to leave that research for tomorrow but if Dean is awake then Sam should be too.
Dean rolls his eyes without even looking up. “Dude, I can hear you getting constipated from over here. Go to sleep, I’ll finish this one up before turning in.”
“You sure?”
Dean snaps on the lamp beside him and finally looks up to smile. “Yep. You look beat, Sam. Go to sleep.” Sam hits the overhead lights and does that, hardly even remembering his head hitting the pillow.
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Sam wakes up in the morning to Dean lounging on the other bed with a pile of books surrounding him. He blinks a couple times to make sure his mind has caught up to what his eyes are seeing then asks hoarsely, “Did you stay up all night reading?”
Dean hums and flips another page. “Wasn’t tired. How was your beauty sleep?”
“Ugh,” Sam groans, rolling onto his back with an arm across his eyes. He hadn’t thought the cave exploration had drained him that much but Sam feels like he could sleep for another ten hours. It’s an unusual inversion of their normal roles. “What time is it?”
“’Bout eight.”
“Hn.” Eight isn’t terribly late but Sam should start working. He reaches out with his other arm and blindly gropes until Dean slaps a book in it.
“Also,” Dean says, crinkling a bad he had stashed next to him so Sam can hear, “I got breakfast.”
Sam sits up for that. Dean passes him a paper bag from the good bakery across town with a cooled apple danish inside. Then he nudges one of the coffee cups on the nightstand over to his side. “You’re awesome,” Sam says, chowing down.
Dean smirks. “That’s just my bribe to make you do the rest of the research.”
“Find anything yet?” Sam asks around a mouthful of Danish.
Dean sighs and points to three books placed on the pillow next to him. “Those three mention colo colos, but they’re not very consistent about what it looks like – one says it’s an unusually large rat, another says snake with a rat face like Bobby mentioned. Third one says it’s got feathers.” Dean shakes his head. “Whatever its fugly mug looks like, they all agree that its call sounds like a wailing baby –“ Dean raises his eyes significantly before looking back at the book he was reading and paraphrasing, – “and it feeds on the ‘saliva of the residents’ of a house it infests, making them feel exhausted and bringing disease to the household.”
“Disease as in exhausting them to death?”
“That’s what I’m thinking. Except this thing didn’t set up shop in a house, so instead of feeding on one family it’s snacking on anybody who comes into its cave.”
“Snacking on them by… eating their spit?”
Dean makes puckered kissing face. “Get your game face on, Sammy, this one’s just looking for love.”
Sam throws his coffee lid at Dean who unfortunately bats it down easily. “Gross. So you think the five hikers took a nap and this thing came crawling out and infected them?”
Dean shrugs. “Ducking into a cave for a nice midday nap to escape the heat? Yeah, maybe.”
Sam can buy that one, too. “Anything on how to kill it?”
Dean holds up two fingers. “One,” he says, ticking the first one with his other index finger, “burn down the house around its ears. That one is a problem there because –“
“—you can’t set fire to limestone. Smart. So what’s two?”
“Two is some kind of exorcism ritual performed by a tribe shaman. There hasn’t been anything specific about what’s in the ritual yet but,” Dean sweeps his arms above the books on his bed, “Hopefully we can find something because I don’t exactly know any Chilean mystics. How’s your Spanish?”
Sam shrugs. “Worse than my Latin but I can get by.”
“Great,” Dean says and points to the book Sam had tucked against his side while he was eating. “I stopped by the library. You can start on the untranslated ones.” Sam takes a fortifying draught of coffee and cracks open the first book.
“Dean?”
Dean takes a sip of his own coffee before answering. “Yeah?”
Sam pulls out the reservation slip from the card slip taped to the inside cover. “Who’s Dwayne Riley?”
Dean snickers.
“Dude!” Sam sighs and folds the slip before tucking it back, just in case a maid got nosy. The last thing they needed was local trouble from library book theft.
“What? They only open at nine. Dwayne probably won’t mind, I left him like five other mythology books.”
Sam decides it’s better not to engage. With one last aggrieved look he flips to the index and tries to remember his conjugations.
They research into the early afternoon, Sam slowly working his way through the new books – two others which were also reserved for Dwayne. Dean took the rest of the books Bobby sent with them. By early afternoon Dean had moved to an open legged sprawl on the ground by the foot of his bed with books scattered in front of him and Sam was at the table with his feet propped up on Dean’s chair, a book in his lap and his laptop opened to a translation site.
“Hey,” Dean says, interrupting his own mindless humming. “You hungry?”
The only thing Sam ate since lunch yesterday had been the danish Dean brought him for breakfast. “Yep. Food?”
“Food,” Dean agrees, standing up and stretching with a groan. “Then maybe a nap. Any luck?”
“Nope. You?”
“Same. Why tell people there’s an exorcism and not give them the damn recipe?”
Dean scowls at the books like he’s considering a good kick will solve his problem. A break is definitely in order, Sam decides. Every hunter gets sleepless nights but they tend to leave Dean easily frustrated. “Want to try the barbeque place?”
“Yeah,” Dean says, clenching his fists for a moment until his equilibrium is regained. “Let’s get some ribs and then call Bobby.”
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The restaurant is a needed break. By the time they get back to the motel Dean has gone from frustrated to covering jaw cracking yawns behind his arm. After they call Bobby Sam’s going to insist he take a nap. Sam can use the break from Spanish, and Dean needs to sleep to be sharp enough for a hunt.
They call on Dean’s phone and put in on speaker, sitting side by side on Dean’s bed so they can both hear.
“Yeah?”
“Hey, Bobby,” Sam says. “How’s it going?”
“Sam, Dean. I was getting ready to call you. One of my buddies just got back to me about those cave paintings you saw. Do you remember how many colors it was in real life? The colors in the photo are all washed out.”
Dean pulls up the picture on his cell and they try to remember. “Yellow, red, black. Three, Bobby.”
“No –“ Sam corrects, remembering a series of chevrons that had disappeared in the photo’s glare. “There was white, too, so four.”
“Just black or black and gray?”
Dean smirks. “Looking for something to match the color scheme in your library?”
“Yeah, Bobby,” Sam says, since he’s the one with the phone. “Gray and black. Why?”
Bobby inhales long and slow. “Well.”
Sam and Dean both perk up because that’s Bobby’s sound for when he’s about to launch into a long explanation.
“You find something?” Dean asks.
“It’s not a colo colo.”
“Not –“ Sam silently mirrors Dean’s dismayed expression to have lost half a day of research on the wrong thing. “But Bobby, the death by exhaustion and baby crying both fit!”
“Now hear me out. Like you say it almost matches so I thought I was sending you in the right direction. But I spoke to a friend who specializes in prehistoric American art. He thinks your pictures weren’t made by humans at all but by creatures called uwani azi. The name translates to ‘rock babies,’ on account of their humanlike crying. They’re cave spirits that use five colors to paint on the walls of caves they inhabit. Sound about right?”
“Shit Bobby – yeah, could be.” Dean sighs and leans back, balancing the phone on his chest.
Sam presses, “How do you know it’s not a normal cave painting?”
“According to him humans didn’t really use more than three colors back then – and mostly they used one or two. With everything else you’ve told me, these things fit the profile much better than that snake theory you had. Wait until you hear the rest of the lore.”
Sam leans forwards and drops his head onto his hands. What a waste their research had been. At least they hadn’t gotten as far as getting the ingredients to an exorcism that apparently wouldn’t have ever worked. “Alright. What do you have?”
There’s a rustle as Bobby likely shifts the phone to the crook of his shoulder, his voice coming in louder than it was previously. “Uwani azi are normally harmless which is why there hasn’t been a recorded attack for decades. There’s only one thing humans can do that piss them off – touching their art. After you do that, they afflict you with some kinda curse that prevents you from sleeping for three days before killing you. Just like what happened to your hikers.”
Sam slowly turns to look at Dean who is already staring back at him. Dean weakly raises his hand and tries to buff out his fingertips on his shirt, far too little too late. On the phone Bobby continues unaware that Sam and Dean are hardly listening anymore.
“You can’t actually kill an uwani azi, but the good news is you can cleanse the caves if you wash the paintings off using water drawn from within the cave itself. Although from what you were saying about its location, it may also be good to just collapse the cave entrance before anyone else stumbles into it because I’m not sure what’s stopping them from drawing in the same cave again once you leave.”
“Hey Bobby,” Sam says, still maintaining eye contact with Dean, “What about people that already touched the paintings?”
“Why? Did you find another hiker already?”
“Not exactly.”
Bobby catches on quickly. “Which one of you idjits touched it?”
Dean winces. “Bobby –”
“I should have known,” he growls.
Dean tries to defend himself, protesting, “I wanted to make sure it wasn’t just kids leaving graffiti on the trails!”
Bobby huffs unmoved. “Do you two philistines know why you never touch things at museums? It’s because you don’t know what kind of mojo has kept it around that long!”
“Oh, come on, it’s not like there was a glass case around it! They didn’t want people touching it they can put it in caves humans can’t reach!”
“Bobby,” Sam interrupts, before Bobby or Dean can get more belligerent, “Is there a cure?” He holds his breath while Bobby thinks.
“Not for sure. If I had to guess I’d say you can cleanse yourself with the same water you use to wash the walls – but it has to come from water within the same cave system the drawings are in. You’re gonna need something bigger than a puddle.”
“Ok,” Sam says, getting a handle on his racing thoughts. More research is useless; with such a close match they would have already found them if they were in the books. Bobby’s information is the best they have. Sam’s options are to go all-in or come up with a different solution out of thin air in two days. It’s not a hard choice. “Water from the caves,” Sam repeats, thinking back. “There were drips echoing yesterday, so there has to be water somewhere in there.”
“That’s good,” Bobby says.
They just have to explore every depth of the cave in the next day and a half until they find it. Sam swallows. “Thanks. We’ll talk to you later.” He gets up and starts packing – all the energy bars they have left, dense caloric snacks, extra socks and batteries.
Dean sits up from his exhausted sprawl to watch Sam. How had he not noticed the deep purple underneath Dean’s eyes earlier?
“Sam? What are you doing?”
Sam lobs Dean’s half-full backpack towards him. “Packing. We can get to the cave within four hours and start looking. I want as much leeway as we can get on this one.”
“What, now? You planning on looking all through the night?”
Sam shrugs. “Not like it matters underground.”
Dean concedes that one although he looks a bit unnerved at the reminder of how dark it could be. Sam snags the canteens and refills them from the bathroom tap while Dean starts packing their heavy ordinance – consecrated iron, silver, anything that has the chance of stopping a rock creature in its tracks.
“Bobby,” he calls to the phone still lying on his bed, “We’ll call you in a day or two.” Dean’s voice lilts at the end so his statement turns into a question.
“Both you boys better,” Bobby agrees quietly. “The minute you’re back.”
“Yeah. Take care.” Dean hangs up as Sam screws the lids on their canteens. In short order they were ready to head out the door.
“You good to drive?”
Dean scoffs. “This isn’t the first time an art school wannabe kept me up all night.” He tosses Sam a bag of half the ammunition with a smirk, tucks away his pearl handled pistol and jiggles his keys. Sam snags his own pistol from the drawer and follows him out. He checks the clock on the nightstand before shutting the door.
It’s half past three in the afternoon. Dean has a day and a half to live.
(Part Two)