Supernatural: The Unholy Cause (18 page)

“You said you saw that tattoo on her wrist. That’s not actually Santeria in the traditional sense. For generations now, the Daniels family has been practicing their own twisted version of backwoods witchcraft. It started with her great-great-great-great grandfather, who came up from the Louisiana bayou back before the war and set up shop outside of Mission’s Ridge. Not long after that, local people started disappearing.”

“That was Daniels’ ancestor?”

Tommy nodded. “He started abducting people, slaves and children mainly, to experiment on them. There were rumors of human sacrifice, cannibalism, and vivisection using human subjects while they were still alive and conscious. Daniels was trying out some of the... variations on African rituals he’d learned back in New Orleans.”

He dragged on the cigarette again. It was almost halfway gone already.

The kitchen felt darker now.

“After a year or so,” he continued, “some of the locals got together and lynched him for it. Hung him up and burned him alive. It’s all in the public record, if you care to dig a little. On the night he died, his infant son was whisked away and raised by another family. He grew up to be a Civil War doctor named...”

“My God.” McClane scraped back his chair and stood up. For the first time he actually looked shaken. “Aristede Percy,” he looked at Sam, “you said when you were reading Beauchamp’s journal that he was the Civil War doctor who supposedly used the powers of the noose to bring Jubal back to life.”

McClane sank back into his chair, his face alive with the possibilities the connection opened up.

“Tomorrow marks the two hundred-year anniversary of Daniels’ lynching,” he added. He opened the pack of cigarettes again, considered it briefly then put it away. “The noose’s power will most probably be at its peak. We’ve already seen its effects, even though the actual rope has yet to be recovered.”

“It’s out there somewhere, though,” Sam said.

McClane nodded. His face was a grim mask.

“And Jacqueline Daniels won’t rest until she finds it.”

“She’s the sheriff,” Sam said. “How do we stop her?”

“You have to get to it first. Use a special weapon and cut the thing to pieces.”

“Like a supernatural weapon.” Dean half-laughed, then looked glum. “We had one of those once.”

“You mean this?”

McClane reached into a leather sheath on his belt and took out Ruby’s demon-killing knife, sliding it across the table to Dean. The sight of it made Dean’s face light up with such enthusiasm that he almost looked childlike.

“Where’d you get that?”

“Let’s just say I’ve got a few connections in the sheriff’s office. Stuff disappears from the evidence cage all the time. Thankfully, Sheriff Daniels doesn’t have any idea what this particular item is capable of. If she did...” McClane shuddered, letting the thought drift away unarticulated.

“So we’ve got the knife back,” Dean said, his mood darkening again. “What about the Impala?”

“In the impound lot. We can see about getting it in the morning. I’ll talk to Raymond Ungeroot—he’s one of the deputies down there. Also my nephew.” Dean tossed him a look, and Tommy looked a little chagrined. “What can I say, it’s a real small town.”

“Any idea where the noose is?” Dean asked.

“On that score,” McClane said, shaking his head, “I got nothing.”

“No,” Sam said, “but I might. We’re going to need a ride into town.”

The old church was silent.

Sam and Dean approached the front steps, both holding flashlights that Tommy McClane had supplied.

Somewhere in the distance a dog yapped twice, howled and fell quiet. It was two a.m., and the narrow side streets of the town had lapsed into a thick, narcoleptic stillness that was as close to slumber as it was going to get.

“First Pentecostal Church of Mission’s Ridge,” Dean read, and then he turned to Sam.

Sam shone his flashlight on the cornerstone, looking at the date.

“Year of Our Lord 1833. It’s the oldest remaining building in town. The one structure the Union army didn’t torch after General Meade whipped the Rebels out on the hill.” He gestured around the side. “And according to what Sarah Rafferty told us, this is where it all changed for Dave Wolverton—on Phil Oiler’s wedding day. I think he and Phil were wandering around down there, and found the noose.”

“And what, decided to take turns trying it on?”

“Authentic Civil War relic,” Sam said. “They probably couldn’t resist.”

He and Dean walked along the outside of the church, following its outer wall toward a back alleyway.

“Careful,” Sam said, shining his light on the steel tracks running off into the distance.

“Railroad tracks?” Dean mumbled. “Here?”

“Remember that armored train? It ran right through town—and right past here.”

“Crazy,” Dean shrugged. “Well, let’s go to church.”

The clapboard exterior was massive, seeming to occupy limitless space in all directions. Around the back, Sam’s flashlight picked out a narrow utility stairwell leading down. A plain white door with a square window stood at the bottom.

Navigating the steps, Dean bent over and picked up a loose brick, wrapped his jacket around it, and punched it through the glass. The window burst and glass tinkled down inside the door. Dean reached through—avoiding the shards—found the knob and turned it.

Feet crunching over broken glass, they stepped inside.

Sam went first, shining his flashlight along the walls. Heavy shreds of cobweb hung from the ceiling, and the air was thick with dust. He realized they were standing inside a storage space, a wide, musty room filled with old Bibles and hymnals and racks of choir robes. An old pipe organ towered against the wall, partially disassembled.

There was a sharp clicking noise.

Spinning around, Sam caught a glimpse of a figure leaning over them from above and pointed his flashlight at it.

His heart pounding, he stared at the bloodied face and hands of the wooden statue peering down from its crucifix. The expression on the statue’s face was a combination of suffering and infinite gentleness.

“Jesus,” Dean breathed. “What’s he doing in the basement?”

Sam shrugged.

“Maybe there’s been a shift in the dogma.”

Dean just gave him a puzzled look.

“Which way from here?”

Sam looked at the far end of the storage room, where several divergent hallways ran out in what looked like a half-dozen different directions. Back at the McClanes’ house, Tommy had told them that the church basement was a labyrinth of corridors and sub-chambers, many of which hadn’t been thoroughly cleaned out for a century or more.

Half the stuff in the Historical Society came from there
, he’d told them.
But there’s still whole rooms that people haven’t checked out since the Union Army came through. If the noose is anyplace, you’ll most likely find it in one of those.

They kept walking, neither of them speaking. Dean took half a dozen steps forward and stopped, stomping his foot.

“It’s metal under here,” he announced. “Hollow.”

“You mean there’s another layer underneath us?”

Dean shone his flashlight down.

“Might be,” he said. “It’s a heavy metal, too, like iron. Lead, maybe. Except...” He sniffed. “...it smells like ammonia.”

“Ammonia sulfate was an early fire retardant,” Sam said. “Going back to the nineteenth century. They used it in circus tents and army forts. Somebody had something important to protect down there. See if you can find—”

“A way down?” Dean swung his flashlight directly in front of him, clearly revealing a wide trapezoidal door with a ringbolt. “Like this?”

“Yeah,
just
like that.”

They each grabbed the ring and pulled, swinging the trapdoor upward. The steps leading down were ladder-steep and descended so sharply that they had to clamp their flashlights under their arms so they could hang on with both hands to keep from falling.

The steps ended abruptly, and left them standing in a dank and airless cube. The walls were lined with what appeared to be lead, grafted together with bolts and rivets. Tufts of what looked like spider webs festooned the upper edges. From where they stood, they did a slow, circular inspection of the space.

The glow of their flashlights seemed to wither in the outermost pockets of darkness, as if the room itself was sucking the light away in great hungry slurps. Even with the flashlights, there was no way they could see every recessed area at once. Anything could have been waiting for them there.

“What is this?” Dean asked, his voice flat and hollow, as if he were talking inside a tin can.

“It looks like an old operating room.” Sam’s flashlight found a table with leather restraints and metal buckles. “Aristede Percy’s old office, I’m guessing.”

“In the sub-cellar of a church?”

“Nobody’d think to look down here, would they? And Doc Percy must have figured that even the Union army would leave it be.” His flashlight played along the walls, and he realized that what he’d first thought were cobwebs were actually lines etched into the surface. “Dean, check this out.”

“Diagrams.” Dean glanced back at Sam. “Doc Percy’s amazing rope tricks.”

And they were—hundreds of technical drawings, painstakingly detailed, depicting every imaginable type of knot. It was as if Dr. Percy had run through his entire vocabulary of bends, twines, loops and hitches in pursuit of the one true Judas noose.

“I think we’re close, Dean,” Sam said.

“I think we’re more than close.”

Dean pointed his light forward, the beam settling in the middle of the room. At the dead center Sam saw a hole in the lead plates where the otherwise seamless surface had been left open to reveal a square of raw black earth, three feet wide and three feet long. The metallic edges of something heavy and square gleamed inside the dirt, a box the size of a tombstone, its exterior illuminated in the same way Beauchamp’s coffin had shone—with its own unearthly radiance.

“That’s a reliquary,” Sam said. “I’ll bet that’s what the demons were looking for out on the battlefield.”

Dean walked over and hunkered down next to it, wiping the dirt away.

“Someone’s been down here recently. It’s already been dug up, removed, and put back in.”

Sam bent down beside Dean, found a long metal handle on his end of the box, and they both pulled. The reliquary came out of the dirt without much resistance, and they set it on the lead floor.

“Be careful,” Sam said.

“If this is just full of more bones, I’m gonna be so pissed,” Dean said.

Together, they lifted the lid.

It wasn’t full of bones.

The brass interior of the box was so intricately engraved with tiny lines of text and symbols that it reminded Dean of circuitry, the prehistoric ancestor of the modern microchip. Looking at the lid made his head throb. It was as if his mind was trying to take in all the thousands of lines of tiny words without his eyes realizing it—as if the codes and charms of the reliquary were actually leaping fully formed into his consciousness.

He shut his eyes and turned away.

Get out
, he thought, shaking his head hard.
Get the hell out of my head, box.

“Dean,” Sam’s voice was saying. He sounded shaken as well. “Look.”

With a grunt, Dean opened his eyes again and looked down, careful to avoid the reliquary’s inner lid. In the middle of the box, curled like a snake on red velvet, he saw the noose itself. Thick, rough rope, stiff with age, its knots dark with a century and a half of spilled blood.

“So that’s it,” he said. “That’s the noose that Aristede Percy tied.”

“It really does have seven coils,” Sam said, lifting the noose up and holding it. “Except the seventh one’s hidden, see? It—”

He froze, the flashlight slipping from his hand, striking the lead-lined floor and rolling in a lazy half-circle to the wall.

Dean aimed his own flashlight at his brother. Sam was staring at him wide-eyed, the noose still held loosely in his fingers, his expression a portrait of sheer, unvarnished panic, its message horribly clear:
I can’t breathe.

Under his chin, a ring of shadowy indentation rippled against his throat, squeezing off his windpipe, as if invisible tension wires were cranking tighter into his skin. Sam’s eyes bulged, mouth opening and closing, unable to produce more than muted glottal clicks.

He fell to his knees.

“Hang on, Sam. Hang on, bro. I’m gonna cut you out of this thing, once and for all.”

Being careful not to touch the noose, Dean used his flashlight to knock it from his brother’s hand. It hit the floor with a heavy
thwop
, as if it was sopping wet.

Wedging his flashlight under his arm, Dean reached back to the sheath on his belt, groping for the demon-killing knife.

But the sheath was empty.

The knife was gone.