Writers block is an evil bitch…

Pictures on the Wall: Chapter Seven

Sam’s mind went blank. He couldn’t form a thought beyond Dean’s been taken into a picture and I won’t be able to see which one he’s in… The pit of his stomach fell, the gut wrenching feeling that everything had gone horribly wrong leaving him lost. He didn’t know where to start.

It took a shock to snap Sam into action. The noise of something bumping in the hallway had him out of the room in record time. Sam almost tripped over his own feet in his rush to get into the hallway. He turned and saw a figure moving in the gloom way up ahead. Sam called out his brother’s name before he could make sure it was even Dean.

Whoever it was, they didn’t stop. The figure disappeared, a door right at the end of the hallway clicking shut. Sam ran down the corridor and skidded to a stop, grabbing the handle before he went by. A small sign to the door’s right read Closet. Staff Only. Sam knocked on the door. “Dean?” But no one answered. Part of him wasn’t surprised. Why the hell would Dean be going into a closet anyway? Sam tried the handle but the door was locked. “Crap.”

Sam had two options. He could run back to the room and grab something to pick the lock with or kick the door down to avoid wasting time.

As much as he hated vandalism, Sam went for the second option.

The door was cheaply made and splintered with ease. The hole Sam made revealed something unexpected. There was no closet beyond the door. A dilapidated hallway was revealed instead, the air within breathtakingly frigid.

The icy fog stirred far down the hallway, a dark figure disappearing once again into shadow. Something uneasy stirred in Sam’s stomach. Was it really Dean?

Sam didn’t call out again, just followed the person (Dean?) going ahead of him. Sam felt woefully unprepared for whatever lay ahead, but he couldn’t go back now.

The hallway’s carpet ended abruptly, like someone had torn it away and left the bare stone to show. The old green wallpaper ended not too long after, revealing walls once white now stained with damp. Another door opened and closed in the gloom, the air vibrating with the sound. Sam picked up the pace, jogging to find the door.

He found it not too long later, a massive wooden door that was thankfully unlocked. Sam opened it and stopped. He wasn’t where he thought he was. The room Sam had discovered, a strange sort of lounge, was huge – about the size of two large motel rooms knocked into one. And the walls were covered in pictures, the walls behind almost invisible. The low ceiling, dim lights, heavy wooden browns and aged leather maroons made the room claustrophobic. The air was laden with aged dust and it stirred as Sam walked forward to look at the walls. But it was the insanely huge collection of pictures that made the room truly oppressive. Framed photos everywhere, all of them nature shots.

“They started pointing, all of them.”

Sam, heart lodged somewhere between his chest and his mouth, let out a “Jeez!” (the pitch of which was shamefully high). He spun around and found Dean sitting in an old leather chair, his green eyes drifting around the walls. “Dean? How…?” Wrong question. “Why are you awake?” …Actually, maybe how was a good question, because Sam was pretty sure Dean’s drug intake should’ve had him sleeping until some time the next day.

“They’re in all the pictures. Some of them go between but some have new people.” Dean turned blank eyes on his brother. “How could no one notice so many people just… gone?”

“We noticed,” Sam pointed out.

Dean just turned away. “Losing years is unfair, isn’t it?”

“What are you…?”

The door opened and in came Richard Hawkins, breathless and sweating. His eyes were wide with disbelief, his whole body shaking. “N-no,” he said, swallowing hard and groping to sound calm. “No, no, you can’t be in here. This is a private room. Please, you hafta leave now.” But he sounded nowhere near calm, instead his tone one far closer to absolute panic. “I’m sorry, but really, you can’t…”

Sam went for the politely direct approach. “Sir, please, you have to tell us what’s happening here.”

“Happenin’?” The man tried to look confused but he only came off as panicked. “Whaddya mean?”

“There’s something wrong with them, all of them,” Dean said, his voice heavy with congestion. “They’re getting worse. I see them and sometimes I hear them.”

“You… you s-see them?” Hawkins stuttered.

Dean didn’t seem to hear him. “They’re trying to get out. Sometimes their hands reach out and I think that maybe I could grab them and pull them out but they’ve been in there a long time and what…” Dean broke off, laughing a little. “What if they turn to dust huh? Then they’ll just…fall apart.”

Sam stared at Hawkins, at the man’s understanding of what Dean was telling him. He watched as Hawkins’ shoulders slumped, the tension seeming to flood right out of him. For a moment Sam thought the man would fall to his knees but Hawkins grabbed onto the wall and kept himself upright. “How long?” Hawkins asked. “How long’ve you been seein’ ‘em?”

“Feels like forever.”

“Hey!” Sam had heard enough. He stepped around his brother’s chair, grabbed Dean’s shoulders and shook him hard. “Snap out of it!”

Dean just cracked up, laughing as though Sam had told him the world’s funniest joke. But the hilarity didn’t touch Dean’s eyes, his gaze deadened somehow, blank and glazed. Unable to stand the weird, almost barking noise of his brother’s hysterics, Sam raised his hand and slapped Dean hard.

The laughter stopped instantly. Dean’s head stayed turned to one side, his eyes staring unblinkingly into space.

Sam returned his hands to Dean’s shoulders. “You with me?”

Dean sucked in a breath, blinked and turned drastically different eyes on his brother. “Dude, what the hell?!” He reached up to touch his stinging cheek. “You got a reason for doing that?”

“You weren’t… I don’t think you were you.”

“Damn Sammy. One minute you’re all ‘Get some sleep Dean’ and the next you’re slapping me like… uh…” Dean’s fuzzy brain refused to provide a witty retort. He was too busy looking around. “Okay, so, this isn’t the right room.”

Hawkins finally interrupted. “When did it start?” He asked. “When did you start seein’ ‘em?”

When Dean didn’t answer, Sam did it for him, “Pretty much since we got here. At first I thought it was just hallucinations or something from the flu but…”

Hawkins straightened and looked to Sam for answers. “Has he slept?”

“Sort of.”

“Sort of?”

Sam hoped Dean wasn’t paying any attention. “I drugged him, twice now. It…uh… worked better the first time.”

Hawkins smiled, the expression bitter and twisted. “Yeah, I used to do that too. Worked like a charm for about a week. Then, just like that,” he snapped his fingers, “nothin’.”

“You… you know about this?”

Sam felt a chill shoot down his spine when Hawkins stared at him, his gaze dark and unrelenting. “Boy, I ain’t slept in over ten years.”

“Wh-what?”

Hawkins shrugged. “You heard me.” He smirked mirthlessly. “I mean, didn’t ya ever wonder why I was always on duty? I run this place by myself. Easy to do that when ya can’t sleep.”

“Ten years? But how’s that possible?” Sam’s insomnia was thrown into perspective. “So… wait, you see them too?”

“Yeah,” Hawkins replied. “Yeah, I see ‘em.”

Sam felt completely off kilter, disbelief and anger making everything seem to shake under his feet. He held out his hands, more for balance than to make his point. “You knew about all of this and you haven’t tried to stop it? You’ve let people just be taken? Why?”

Hawkins shifted uncomfortably under Sam’s scrutiny. “It ain’t so simple…”

“Have you even tried to stop it?” Sam demanded.

Throwing up his hands, Hawkins laughed. There was no humour in his tone, just total bitterness. “Nothin’ works and I’ve tried more times than you can imagine. And this room…” Hawkins walked a little closer to Sam and Dean. “The pictures gather ‘ere. They move.”

“Those people want out,” Dean said quietly from behind. He rubbed his hands over his face, wincing as he brushed the place Sam had slapped. “They’re getting angry and that’s gonna make them dangerous.”

“I know that!” Hawkins cried. “But… it’s not that simple!”

“So you leave them there,” Dean surmised.

Hawkins shrugged. “There’re worse things, aren’t there, in the world today? They could be dead. Besides, my father…”

“We can help,” Sam cut in. “It’s what we do.”

Hawkins looked anything but hopeful. “How?”

Sam gave a brief overview of his current theory – somewhere in the motel Hawkins had to have relics of an ancient Native culture that were doing this to the motel’s guests. Hawkins, who seemed to be growing increasingly reluctant to do anything, at the very least agreed to let the brothers examine his other private rooms.

They left the picture room behind, Sam keeping a firm grip on his drowsy brother’s shoulders. Dean was watching the pictures as they walked out, watching the hands that reached out, watching the faces of the people that flickered and changed for the much, much worse. Every so often, Sam would nudge him or physically drag him when his footsteps slowed or stopped entirely. Every time Sam had to move him, Dean muttered a “Sorry,” and tried to force himself to stay in the moment.

Sam addressed Hawkins. “You need to tell us everything about how and when the photos were taken.”

“My father…”

“Did he have the same problem as you?”

“…I…I’m not sure… Maybe… I…”

“You need to get sure.” Dean told the man. “They’re not happy.”

“I know,” Hawkins replied quietly. “They’ve been gettin’ worse for a while now.”

Sam felt a familiar dread. “You think something’s gonna happen Dean?”

Dean rubbed his eyes and breathed out a tired breath. “Mm, maybe.” He blinked hard before pinching himself hard. He hated that drowsy, disconnected feeling – especially when sleep was impossible. “Dude we are not trying the drugging thing again, okay?”

Sam laughed. “Okay.”

“What d’you two think you can do then?” Hawkins asked as he led the brothers back into the main part of the motel. “You think you can get ‘em all out?”

“Yeah, maybe,” Dean said. He coughed to clear his throat. “Did he ever go to a place with a train wreck? Did he take pictures somewhere like that?”

Hawkins looked back over his shoulder, suspicion all over his face. “How did you know that? I don’t keep those photos on display anywhere but in my bedroom. Dad said those ones were for the family only…”

“And you never wondered why he might’ve said something like that?” Dean asked, sniffing hard to dislodge the gunk clogging his nose. Nausea struck back, the effort of keeping his stomach calm exhausting. And damn, since when had walking made him so breathless? “Seriously? Nothing made you think ‘huh, Dad might be up to something kinda weird’?”

“He was my Dad,” Hawkins said, looking at Dean emotionlessly. “How many people are willin’ to actually sit there and decide that yeah, their Dad made a huge mistake and it was terrible of him to do it?”

Dean merely looked at Sam.

“Look, there’s gotta be something significant of your dad’s here, something other than the pictures,” Sam said, ignoring his brother’s stare. “Did he ever bring anything unusual home with him?”

“Unusual like what?” The man sounded like a petulant teenager.

Dean would’ve smacked Hawkins if he wasn’t feeling so unsteady. “Just take us to your room,” he demanded instead, shivering despite the fever he was running. “We know what to look for.”

When Hawkins finally showed them into his private rooms, Dean sat himself down on the first chair he saw with a small sigh of relief. Sam looked at him once before moving off to search for things that didn’t belong. Hawkins just walked around aimlessly, apparently lost in thought.

Dean looked around and soon his eyes settled on a picture, one of a group of buildings half collapsed and set against a beautifully snowy background. He watched people stumble in, people who were dressed for summer and had no protection against the snow. Dean watched them drop dead. Parents and their little girls – all dead in moments, like someone had hit fast forward so they could kill them quicker. Lifeless eyes watched Dean until the picture blurred out like a bad TV signal. When the picture returned, the bodies were gone and the snowy scenery was devoid of people again. Four lives lost, just like that. Dean looked away.

“I’d cover ‘em up but it never works.” Hawkins stepped up to the chair Dean had taken. “You’ve seen the hands?”

Dean nodded. He’d seen the hands all right.

“Yeah, they make sure you always see,” Hawkins replied. “They know and they don’t like being hidden away.”

Dean couldn’t find the energy needed to reply so he just watched the other pictures come to life and heave with activity. He coughed, a nasty wet sound emanating from deep in his chest. It hurt too, like something was tearing into his lungs and throat. Everything ached and his vision was way too unsettled. He was so ready to start feeling better. The haze he was in…

…The voices were in the depths of it, whispering and pleading and all of them making demands he didn’t know how to help with. All of them wanted to tug him down, pull him right out of this world. But there was more, an undercurrent of something that was like a warning but the words weren’t coming through. He wanted to listen harder but he could feel Hawkins staring at him. “Look somewhere else,” Dean muttered, shifting uncomfortably. “Don’t think freaky insomnia makes us friends.”

Sam came back before Hawkins could reply. “Where did you get this?” the younger man asked. He was holding up a chipped and cracked bowl, the handmade pattern some kind of bird. “You’ve got stuff like this everywhere – bowls, tools, weapons… all of it ancient. Where did you get it?”

“Dad brought it all home,” Hawkins replied. “He sometimes found stuff like that on his photography trips. He was into preservation and didn’t want anyone to steal important artifacts or…”

“Or get cursed by them?” Dean grumbled.

Hawkins said nothing.

“Where did he find it?” Sam went on, holding up the bowl. “It’s important. It might explain everything.”

Hawkins shook his head. “I dunno, sorry.”

“Weird,” Dean muttered. “I don’t believe you.”

“Okay, what about your dad?” Sam walked forward, placed the pot on the coffee table and began pacing. “Where is he?”

“He died. I told your brother…”

Sam cut Hawkins off. “Did you bury him?”

“Yeah, in a family plot in the town cemetery. The family’s been ‘ere for generations and…”

“Did you bury him with anything?”

“Some of his photos and…”

”Let me guess,” Dean butted in. “You buried him with his camera.”

“One of ‘em, yeah.”

Sam looked at Dean. “Could that be it? The camera?”

“Knowing our luck? Yeah.” Dean sniffed and coughed to clear his throat. He rested his heavy, hot head in one hand. “The camera might be keeping some kind of curse alive, trapping all the people in the pictures.”

“Then we need to destroy it.”

“Great” Dean groaned. “Digging up a body in this weather is gonna suck.”

“We’ll probably need machinery,” Sam commented.

“Diggin’ up a body?” Hawkins cried, looking horrified. “What’re you talkin’ about?”

Sam explained as quickly as he could. Hawkins, unsurprisingly, didn’t approve. “No. You ain’t gonna go and dig my father’s body up! No!”

Dean shot Hawkins a look. “You haven’t slept in ten years, the pictures in your hotel are full of missing people and you’ve done nothing about it. How about you shut up and let us do our job?”

“Dean…” Sam cautioned.

“You want me to calmly stand by while you kids dig my father up?”

“Yeah, pretty much,” Dean replied.

Sam broke in before Hawkins could speak. “I’m gonna take some pictures of the other artifacts. I need to look them up, see if we can get more information that way too. I’ll get the pictures of the train site too.”

Sam looked at Hawkins, expecting further resistance. But it seemed Hawkins was too occupied trying to get his head around the idea that they wanted to exhume his father’s long-since dead body. He was leaning heavily on a bookcase, his back turned to the brothers. Hawkins was shaking his head, muttering to himself under his breath. Sam’s gaze trailed over to his brother but Dean was already back in his daze, eyes staring blankly at the wall.

“You want this to end, don’t you?” Sam said to Hawkins. “Don’t you want these people free?”

“You don’t understand,” Hawkins answered, walking away from his bookshelf and over to a desk situated in front of a wide window. He groped around in a drawer as he added, “You don’t get it at all, do you?”

Dean didn’t notice what Hawkins was doing until it was too late. He heard the start of Hawkins’ actions before he could even think to move. It was the sound of Sam crashing into a wall that pulled Dean to his feet. He looked over, clutching the chair to stop himself from tipping over. Sam was on the floor looking up at Hawkins in disbelief. Dean knew he needed to move but he also knew that he would fall flat on his face if he let go of the chair.

“What are you doing?” Sam asked, his eyes shifting from Hawkins’ face to what he held in his hands.

Hawkins was holding an outdated camera, a relic from the fifties. But that wasn’t the weird part. The bizarre symbols were etched into the casing. “I can’t let you mess with this. You don’t understand. Maybe I could’ve talked you out of it but then you start talkin’ about diggin’ up my Dad like it ain’t nothin’ and I can’t let you do it. I can’t! You just don’t get it!”

“I probably understand better than you do,” Sam said, his tone pacifying and his hands held up. “Just let us help those people.” His eyes flickered to Dean’s, the message clear. Don’t say anything.

“There’s a bigger picture here boy, much bigger!”

A far too familiar sense of foreboding thrummed through Sam. “What do you mean?”

“Two more,” Hawkins said, shaking hands raising the old camera. “Just two and then it’ll be done.”

Sam slid forward. “What are you talking about?”

“My father… he was so passionate ‘bout protectin’ it all. Then he found that old train and all those things in it. When he learned what he could do with it, all’ve this began.”

“Do with what?” Sam asked, switching his attention between Hawkins and his swaying brother. “What did he find on that train?”

“The magic.” Hawkins raised haggard eyes. “You gotta understand kid, if there was a way to free them all and stop it, I would’ve found it by now. You think I ain’t never looked? I did! I spent years and left Dad to take the pictures of the guests. But then he was dyin’ and he begged me to do it. So I did, and for a while I kept lookin’ for ways to save ‘em. But there ain’t no way! There’s nothin’.” He lifted the camera up a little. “Sometimes you jus’ gotta do what your dad tells you to do.”

Dean tried to move but it was no good. “Crap,” he muttered, falling heavily to his knees. He was pretty sure he would’ve blacked out if not for his unique version of the flu. “You son of a bitch, you’re the one who’s doing it. You just gave up and left them there! You even did it to little kids! How could you pick and chose lives like that? What gave you or your dad the right?”

“I’m sorry boys, really I am. Dad put this all on me and if I can finish his dream for him, maybe it’ll be okay. It might all work out!”

“What might work out?” Sam asked, ever curious to know all the answers.

“Conservation kiddo. Preservation of beautiful nature.” Hawkins had a strange little smile on his face. “Someone’s gotta protect it.”

“At the cost of lives?” Sam shot back.

“Sam…”

Dean didn’t have a chance to finish his warning. The camera clicked. The photo of Sam was taken.

It was like blinking. Sam was there, then he wasn’t. Simple as that.

Hawkins turned to Dean. “If there was another way…”

“You son of a bitch,” Dean hissed, flu blunting the anger his voice could deliver. He shook with rage, every instinct screaming at him to do something. His body’s weakness kept him down. Dean punched the carpet. It was all he could do. “You’ll regret this you bastard, believe me.”

“You’re the last one. It’ll end with you. No more after this, I promise.”

Then Dean was blinded by the flash of the camera as it took his picture.

TBC…

Ugh, I am so sorry I took forever with this one. There was me thinking Christmas break would lead to tons of writing. Alas, instead it lead to the Wii, my birthday and a trip to my friend in Illinois – all of which were awesome but on top of general writers block, left little time to be creative.

And now it’s a new semester…

This story is almost done and dusted though! I’ll do my best to update faster next time.

Thank you all for being patient!