Supernatural: Bobby Singer's Guide to Hunting (7 page)

“Bullshit.”

Not to say I didn’t feel for the woman, but there’s a certain art to prodding people into confessions. I could tell that Mrs. Greyson
wanted
to tell me more, but she was censoring herself. Thinking about her responses too much. I needed to get her agitated, make her talk faster, without the filter.

She went through the usual motions, “Who do you think you are?” and “You’re a guest in my house” and “In my day . . . ,” but none of them convinced me that she wasn’t involved in Georgiana’s death.

I asked more direct questions, like, “What was Prious doing in that house in the first place?” which she dodged for a while, until, finally—

“She shouldn’t have been there. She should’ve known that what she was doing was wrong without us telling her.”

Behind me, the front door creaked open. Balls. I’d convinced Alberta the night before to join me at Mrs. Greyson’s house, but not for another half hour—I wanted time to get to the bottom of things, get Greyson on my side and ready to talk sense into Alberta. I needed at least another five minutes, I was just getting to the good stuff. Except, it wasn’t Alberta. I heard the sound of a cane scuffing on the old hardwood floors. The uninvited house guest ambled in, didn’t notice me sitting in the dimly lit sitting room until he was right beside me.

It was the widower from the nursing home, with the burned-toast skin. A man who claimed to only know the deceased women because they lived down the hall from him. Suspicious as hell that he’d show up out of the blue.

“Oh,” he said. “I’ll come back when you don’t have company, Mrs. Greyson.”

These were the options, as I saw them in that moment:

Maybe you’re smarter than me. But me, facing those options . . . like hell I was gonna let him go. I beat him to the door, closed it. Bolted it. Made it clear that he wasn’t going anywhere, which he wasn’t psyched about. Whether he or Alberta was the culprit . . . that I didn’t know. I had to ask more questions.

It became clear very quickly that Mrs. Greyson had no idea who the old widower was, or what he was doing there. One more strike against the guy. He claimed innocence, saying that Mrs. Greyson’s memory wasn’t what it used to be (happens to the best of us). That they were fast friends, and that he had no idea she had a connection to the burned women. Likely story, buddy.

He claimed his name was Omar Adams, that if we called any of Mrs. Greyson’s friends, they’d back up his story. I decided to call his bluff, went to the next room to get the phone—remember, this was the eighties—with the real intention of getting a knife from the drawer. I had a gun in my jacket, just in case, but the situation felt like it was getting away from me and I wanted to cover my bases. When I reached for the knife block, Omar’s hand was already on the butcher knife. He hadn’t even been in the room a second earlier.

“I thought you were going to make a phone call?” he asked. I noticed that he wasn’t holding his cane. He didn’t seem to need it.

The doorbell rang. Cut the tension like the knife I now couldn’t grab. This time, it
was
Alberta at the door. She’d shown up early after all.

I went to the door, unlatched the dead bolt, now realizing how pointless it had been to lock it in the first place. The widower had teleported himself into the kitchen, I was sure of it. My eyesight ain’t perfect, but I know when somebody goes from being not there to there in an instant. What’d that make him? At the time, I didn’t think angels existed, certainly didn’t know they could teleport. So what? A ghost? Sure didn’t look like one.

As Alberta walked into the sitting room, I reached into my jacket, found the cool metal of my pistol. If I was facing a creature that could both teleport and spontaneously combust people, the only advantage I had was that of surprise. I needed to act.

The widower wasn’t surprised. Not even a little.

Before I could level the gun on him, I felt my feet lift off the ground, and I was ratcheted backwards, over a chair, into the hall, banging past obstacles on the way. I fired off a shot, but the bullet dug ineffectually into the wooden banister leading up to the second floor. My body slammed into a wall with incredible force, my head swimming from the impact. I wobbled forward, tried to level the gun once more . . . and that’s when everything went dark.

. . . . .

When I woke up, I felt the warm trickle of blood down my back. I couldn’t see anything—figured I must have been in the basement. The old house had a storm cellar that had been sealed up for years, which I found when doing recon work on the place before I went inside. Seemed like a discreet place to dump a body, if need be. Didn’t think it was gonna be
my
body getting dumped.

Across from me, something stirred. Weight shifting in a chair.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” the darkness said.

“Like hell,” I said. “Don’t toss me through a wall next time.”

“I have a right to defend myself,” the voice said. The widower’s.

“What’s your real name?” I asked the darkness.

“Anansi,” the widower replied, hesitantly. “Maybe you’ve heard of me.”

I certainly had heard of Anansi. He was a trickster god from West Africa, had made the crossing to the Americas with a slave ship in the 1700s, if you believe the legends. Which, of course, I do. He was a keeper of knowledge in the old world, and was known for telling stories—they called ’em Spider Tales, or
Anansesem
. Was famous for playing tricks on people, teaching ’em lessons. Lore said he took the form of a massive spider when he wasn’t blending in with humans, which seemed about right—there was something about his face that seemed spiderly. I made a remark to that effect, asked why he wasn’t out spinning a web.

A match was struck in front of me, the light from it illuminating the crags and valleys of Anansi’s face. “Ah, yes. I recognized you as a hunter . . . from your smell. You smell like death, like killing. I thought you’d have recognized
me
sooner,” he said, pointing to his face. “My mask isn’t very subtle. I’m a
black widow
er.” He smiled. The “
Get it?
” was implied.

Why do monsters always gotta make bad puns? I’ll never understand it. I moved on. “One of the Prious kids summoned you?”

Anansi laughed. “No, no. No one summons me, anymore. I go where I go, and right now, I’m here.”

“Blowing up old ladies.”

“Just deserts. The wheel just brought back to them what they put on it.” Anansi leaned forward. Squinted his eyes at me. “You don’t agree?”

“Can’t be sure,” I said. “I don’t even know what they did.”

“They burned a woman alive,” he said. “That’s bad for your energies. I can smell that, too. Good sense for these things.”

I asked him how we was so sure. He laid out the whole story, which he’d gathered from eavesdropping on their bridge games for the last five years—see, Anansi was retired. He’d given up his ways. Taken up life as a human in a nice little retirement home, only to be drawn back into service by the cadre of old women whose secret he overheard.

Georgiana Prious had been dating, in secret, the son of one of the women—a man by the name of Arden Baldwin. Arden had met Prious while at a social function at the home of one of his mother’s friends, where Georgiana was employed as a part-time housekeeper. They knew that their relationship wouldn’t get a good reaction from the Baldwin family, not because of her race, but because of her position—a servant, more or less. The Baldwin family was wealthy, as far as Arkansas went, and his familial duty as a firstborn son was to marry well and keep the family money in good (already rich) hands.

One day, a group of six women gathered to discuss an upcoming church event—because they were all good Christian women, of course—and came upon the secret relationship between Georgiana and Arden. Mrs. Baldwin was less than tickled by her son’s dalliance, and sat him and Georgiana down—forcibly. Neither of them was going anywhere until they agreed to call off their little fling. Problem was, love don’t work like that, and neither was receptive to the idea . . . until the family money came into play. Mrs. Baldwin, at the prodding of several of her friends, told Arden in no uncertain terms that he’d be thrown off the gravy train if he didn’t renounce his servant girlfriend there and then. But the whole while, Georgiana, who was terrified, of course, was figuring a way to escape. While Arden was weighing his options, Georgiana bolted, and Mrs. Baldwin chased her. I don’t have all the details of the next part, but what I do know is that things went from bad to worse. At the end of a scuffle, Mrs. Baldwin was standing over the unconscious body of Georgiana, and a tipped over lamp had sparked a small fire. They had a choice—I’m sure for a rich lady with everything to lose, it seemed like an obvious one. She and her gaggle left the girl inside to burn.

Part I don’t get? Why that idjit Arden didn’t speak out. I get it was his mother, but still . . . if he loved that girl, he shouldn’t have let things get so pear-shaped. She had kids, for God’s sake.

So there I was, sitting across from Anansi, head still foggy from the earlier violence. The whole story now told. From what I’d heard, it did sound like the women deserved it. I asked him what he was going to do with Mrs. Greyson upstairs.

He sniffed the air, asked me a question: “You can’t smell it?”

I could. Smoke. Mrs. Greyson was already dead.

This is where the no-win scenario kicks in. The trickster had already done all the damage he was gonna. He’d killed all six women responsible for Georgiana’s death and the cover-up. And in a way, he might have been right to—weren’t they the villains in the story?

So I got no idea why I did what I did next, and I honestly can’t say if I’d do the same thing if I was in the same position now. . . .

I leaned far forwards, put my head in my left hand, like I was overcome by emotion from his story (he was a storyteller, I knew he’d buy it)—and I used my right hand to reach down to my boot, out of Anansi’s sight. There, I kept a silver dagger, for occasions just like this. With one swift move, I pulled the dagger from its sheath, swung upwards, and stabbed it into Anansi’s lower jaw, so the blade went all the way from his chin to his forehead, the tip splitting out of his skull like one of those sandwich toothpicks.

Anansi spasmed, fell to the side, his eyes wide—that time, he
was
surprised.

I’d love to say I double-checked the lore, stayed behind to clean up the scene, or even checked in on Alberta, whose fate I still don’t know. I didn’t do any of those things. I ran. I got in my car and got home as soon as I could.

What I didn’t know then—it takes a lot more than that to kill a trickster. . . . And there’s no reason the thing you’re hunting can’t follow you home.

The Crusher

BY THE TIME I GOT BACK
to Sioux Falls, I regretted my speedy exit from Calico Rock. If there was one thing I’d learned from Rufus, it was that . . . well, I mostly learned how to be an alcoholic from Rufus, but if there was another thing, it was that you can’t cut corners. In fact, that was Rufus’s #1 rule, but I’ll get to the rules later, if I can still remember them.

When I pulled into the salvage yard, I went right inside to my library. I knew I’d read about tricksters in one of my lore books, but I also knew it was gonna be a long night of reading before I tracked the stats down. This was before the Internet, see, and we couldn’t just Google the name of the monster and get some occult nerd’s website detailing all the ways to gank it. Still had to do things the old-fashioned way, with sleepless nights and paper cuts and the smell of mildewy paper from the old books. Mighta taken longer, but I preferred it that way—which is probably why my house still looks the way it does. If Sam had his druthers, my whole library would be digitized and searchable by now, but that’ll happen just as soon as my ass grows wings and flies to Jupiter. I guess flying to Uranus woulda been a funnier joke, but I think there were enough asses in that sentence as it was.

Anyway, I went inside, got right to research. If I ever had the bad luck to run into a trickster again, I was gonna be prepared. The next morning, I finally found the book I was looking for—a giant encyclopedia called
Gods of the African Jungles & Plains
, by a scholar named Michael Cowan who specialized in these things—I met the guy in person last year, found out he had a run-in with a trickster back in the seventies, while on an aid mission to a remote village in what was then Zaire. He took one too many jabs at the smell of the dung huts, offending the trickster. ’Course he didn’t know it was a trickster at the time. For all I know, it mighta been Anansi he offended, since there’s nothing stopping a demigod from flittin’ back and forth across continents whenever he pleases. Anyway, when Michael got back to the States, none of his family recognized him, and I mean not even a little. His son thought he was a home invader when he came in through the kitchen window (his keys didn’t seem to work anymore) and almost shot him with his own hunting rifle. Another man was living in his house, driving his car, sleeping with his wife . . . and everybody was acting like he was the crazy one. Eventually, his doppelgänger revealed himself to be the trickster, and demanded penance from Michael. In exchange for returning his life to normal, the trickster wanted Michael to live in a dung hut, like the ones he’d made wise cracks about in the village he’d visited in Zaire. Facing that or losing his entire life and everyone in it forever, Michael chose the hut. Still lives in it. For all his belly-aching about it, the hut smells better than you’d think. That’s what drove him to compile all of the trickster lore, to save others from the same fate. Inside the book, I discovered this:

That’s Anansi in his native form—bit uglier than the old widower I’d met the day before, but in a way I could see the resemblance. What I read about him scared the piss outta me—according to lore, a trickster can only be killed with a wooden stake dipped in the blood of its victim, and I certainly hadn’t done that to Anansi. Made me wonder—if Michael Cowan researched everything there was to know about tricksters, why hadn’t he ever killed the one that’d sentenced him to life in a house made of shit bricks? Probably because of this next bit:

Okay, so, maybe you read that and thought, “Guess I’d better steer clear of tricksters,” but what I took from it was that I’d better find a pointy stick and the blood of one of those spontaneously combusted grandmas from Calico Rock so that I’d have a fighting chance against Anansi if I ran into him again. That meant turning right around and driving cross-country again, probably breaking into a morgue or digging up a grave, just on the off chance that Anansi doesn’t give up his self-imposed retirement. Them’s the breaks.

I put some ribs on the barbecue (for courage) and planned out my strategy—I was gonna try to get to Mrs. Greyson’s body before it was interred or cremated—if I was too late, the job’d be a whole lot messier. Nobody likes digging up six feet of dirt, much less poking and prodding a mangled corpse. I re-packed my duffel bag full of weapons and other hunting implements and made my way out into the junkyard, where I’d parked.

The sun was setting over the twisted wrecks of cars in the salvage yard—I’d somehow spent the entire day scouring through books without realizing it. Happens more often than I’d like. A wolf’s howl caught my attention, coming from the forest behind the yard. Wolves aren’t unheard of in South Dakota, but they’re uncommon in these parts. Especially back then, before the ”Save the Wolves” effort was in full swing. You were more likely to see a farmer standing over the carcass of a wolf he’d just killed than hear a wolf in the wild. Hearing it was odd, but I didn’t think anything of it until I heard the exact same howl again only seconds later—and this time it was behind me.

It’s a little spooky for
anything
to move that fast, much less a creature with fangs and a taste for bloody red meat, so I decided I should play things safe and pulled a .22-caliber rifle out of my duffel. That kind of firepower would drop a wolf no problem. I got near my car, felt like I was home free . . . then I heard the whimpering. I spun around, fast as I could, scanning the whole yard—I thought it musta been an injured animal, deer, coyote, maybe even a dog, but I couldn’t see anything. The critter whimpered again, this time a little deeper, sadder. It was in pain, whatever it was, and it was close.

Enough of this “circle of life” hogwash
, I thought, and went back to my business, only to be greeted by the strangest sight as I rounded the car to get to the trunk. A bite was taken out of its ass. I don’t mean that metaphorically—something had chomped off the left rear end of the car, slashing into the tire and leaving rent metal with large fang-marks where the bumper, tail lights, and rear quarter-panel had been.
It was the car that was whimpering
. It was friggin’
making noises
like it was a hurt kitten.

Even for me, that crap wasn’t normal.

I did the only thing that made sense—I raised my rifle and got ready to shoot it. Hunter rule #27: if a big inanimate object that should never be alive suddenly is alive, you kill it, ASAP. When I got the car in my sights, it growled at me. Deep and guttural, like a bear or a lion.
Great, I pissed it off
.

As I pondered how screwed I was, I realized there was no way a .22 was going to kill something that weighed thousands of pounds. My best options:

Then I remembered that it was a car (let’s pause for a big WTF here . . . okay, we can continue), and even with one tire popped, it could still outrun me. Outdrive me. Whatever. It could go faster than me, run me down, and squish my head like a grape.

With my rifle still trained on the car, I took a few steps back. My foot ran into the hub cap of a junked old jalopy that’d been sitting in the yard collecting rust for a decade—and the jalopy
barked
at me.

A set of high beams hit me, nearly blinding me. Then another, and another, and another. A dozen engines rumbled to life all over the junkyard. Whatever had happened to my car, it had happened to all of the cars, and none of ’em seemed pleased to see me. In the moment, all I could think was that I shoulda taken better care of them. One of ’em I’d taken all the seats out of, one of ’em didn’t have any side panels or doors, one of ’em had been stripped of all its wiring . . . they were going to kill me, and I couldn’t help but marvel at how ironic a death that would be, run down by the cars I’d spent my life tearing apart . . . so, of course, it had to be the trickster. Anansi must have followed me home, and was trying to take vengeance on me for what I’d done to him.

If I could have talked with the guy, maybe we could have worked something out. After all, I hadn’t successfully killed him, so no harm, no foul, right? What’s a little stabbing between friends? I doubted he’d see things that way, but at the time it seemed like it was worth a try. Instead, I tried to plot a course through the pack of rabid junkers between me and my house, but they were moving now; they rolled around on steel rims and bald, flat tires. The sound was terrible—a mix of diesel engine rumblings and the scraping of metal on metal, along with low groans and whispers. The
cars
were
whispering
. Talking to each other, plotting out ways to corner me and kill me and get me back for all the things I’d done to them. I was like a toddler having to answer to his mistreated toys.

Behind me, another wolf-like howl cut above the din of the cars. It was different than the noises that the cars were making—somehow more savage and beastly. Odder than the howl was the cars’ reaction to it—several of them flinched back, their reverse lights coming on as they retreated away from the howl. Whatever it was behind me, they were afraid of it, and it seemed reasonable that I should be, too.

At moments like that, you’ve gotta ask yourself some tough questions, such as:

That last one is a bit of a pill, isn’t it? Never an easy answer. An army was in front of me, bloodthirsty steel monsters that I didn’t understand and couldn’t predict. Behind me . . . mystery. Something bigger, fiercer. Angrier?

I chose the mystery. I turned tail and ran as fast as I could, into the darkness at the far end of the salvage yard. At the extreme edge there’s a chain-link fence topped with razor wire—don’t want anybody sneaking in—that would impede my escape. Luckily, my extracurricular activities meant that I didn’t have the time to constantly maintain the fence, and I knew there were at least a couple spots where I could squeeze through a break in the chain. As I got further from the headlights of the cars, I realized that they weren’t chasing me. They’d huffed and puffed when I first started to run, but none of them was brave enough to follow. Talking about cowardly cars . . . this still sounds ridiculous, twenty-some years later. But they were. They were alive, and they were chickenshit—scared of whatever it was that prowled the dark end of the lot.

A lot of people, knowing all that, would rather take their chances with the cars than hang out by the mysterious howling beast. After all, the cars were junkers—broken down, some didn’t even have engines. Not that their engines mattered much when they were being supernaturally propelled, but they certainly weren’t moving as fast as they would have if they were fresh off the dealership asphalt.

This’d be a good time to tell you how my trade works. There’s money in scrap metal, more than you’d think there would be. Something like 80 percent of all aluminum that’s ever been produced is still in use, ’cause of the magic of recycling and reclamation. Metal doesn’t change. It doesn’t get weaker with time, it doesn’t break easy, it doesn’t need to be coddled and babied to last. Sound like anybody you know? People bring me their cars—I buy ’em for cheap, and can make a good living off of selling the bits and pieces back to people that need ’em. Most any wrecked car can still be useful, even if the outside looks like it’s been through hell. If only people were that resilient. Now, I told you all that so I could explain the exception—sometimes, a car’s been through enough. It’s too old, too rusty, too dented to pound back into shape. Every good piece stripped off, sold to the highest bidder. Obsolete to the point that nobody will ever come looking for its parts again. That’s a sad thought, right? The day will come when nobody will ever ask about you, ever again. That happens to cars sitting in my junkyard all the time, and when it does . . . they go to the crusher.