Archive of Our Own

There was an old foundation in amidst the trees, jutting out of the side of the hill leading down to the parkway. Dean kicked at the corner of it with the heel of his boot and looked across the shallow valley, but unlike the remains of the old footbridge running next to Cabin John Bridge, there was no matching shadow on the other side. He looked back down at the foundation and started around it in a tight circuit. The whole thing was only maybe ten feet by ten feet, barely large enough for a double bed, with a thin crack running down the middle and a set of concrete steps leading up the hill away from it. He crouched down when a flash of waning sunlight reflected off a passing car made something in the steps sparkle, running his fingers over the surface. There were marbles set into the concrete, and Dean's fingers ran across the impression of an old pair of scissors that had since been pried back out.

"Huh." He straightened back up. "Sammy, get a load of this thing."

He looked up when no one answered. Sam wasn't leaning against the tree where Dean had left him. Dean rolled his eyes, adjusting the straps of his backpack, then turned slowly to scan the trees. Sam knew better than to wander off too far, and the thin little trees weren't crowded together thick enough to hide even a pipsqueak like him. Dean spotted him a bit further down the hill, close to the side of the massive brick structure that was the Cabin John Bridge, crouched low to the ground and sifting through the leaves.

"Tell me he's not collecting more slugs for science class," Dean grumbled, and started towards Sam. He took a breath, readying his best Dad impression -- would serve the kid right for not paying attention to his surroundings -- when another shape peeled away from one of the thicker trees, moving in Sam's direction.

The old man was about Dad's height and build, far thicker than Dean might have guessed, considering how well he'd hidden in the trees, with a bright shock of white hair and ruddy cheeks. He stepped up in front of Sam, blocking Dean's view. Dean clenched his teeth, anger bubbling up in his belly as he swung his backpack around his shoulder and reached his arm inside.

"You put that back," the old man hissed, looming over Sam. "You put it back and you forget you ever laid eyes on it!"

The leaves crunched under Sam's feet as he straightened. Whatever he was planning to say, Dean beat him to it.

"Hey asshole." He leveled the barrel of his sawed off with the back of the man's head. "Get the fuck away from my brother."

The man turned, staring wide-eyed down Dean's double barrel, then looked up to meet Dean's eye. Dean smirked and wiggled his eyebrows, just begging the man to call his bluff. The man's cheeks burned a darker red.

"Get rid of it," the man said, looking from Dean back to Sam, as though he didn't have a fucking gun to his head. "And maybe you won't screw us all." He glared at Dean one more time before turning and storming back up the hill.

Dean watched him until he lost him amidst the trees, then continued watching as he counted to ten. When he didn't see any further sign of him, he tucked the shotgun back into his backpack.

"What the hell was that about?" He asked Sam, expecting confusion, or maybe some of the morose poutiness that was Sam's default mood, these days. Instead, Sam's eyes were bright and excited -- and focused down at something shiny in his hands.

"Dean, look." Sam's voice had gone breathy with awe. He held the object up for Dean to see, hands cupped gingerly beneath it. Dean frowned and leaned in closer. It couldn't be.

"It's pirate gold," Sam said. He turned the thick coin between his fingers. "Dean, I just found the Cabin John treasure!"

*

"Run that by me again?" Dad asked, sitting half-slumped at the table. The job he was working currently didn't involve a lot of grave digging yet, but researching a haunted canal took a lot of footwork even when you'd managed to narrow it down to one of three locks, and Dean didn't envy his father trying to navigate around here. He'd always found the East Coast pretty claustrophobic, curled up too tight at the edges, the horizons too short and too high. Everything was packed in, the towns so close together that they all blended into one long stretch of houses and strip malls and office buildings, separated only by thin little strips of narrow trees that wouldn't last five minutes in a Midwestern storm. Hell, Dean could practically spit on Virginia from the house Dad's client had set them up in. Could probably spit on DC, too, but then the Feds might end up swarming up their asses.

Sam rolled his eyes towards the ceiling as though he thought Dad was being deliberately dumb. "In the eighteenth century, Cabin John Creek was called Captain John's Run, after a pirate captain who fled up the Potomac River to hide his treasure. He lived with the local natives for awhile, and then disappeared without retrieving his gold."

Dad shot Dean a look. Dean shrugged and scuffed at a spot on the floor with his toe. Dad turned back to Sam. "And how do you know this?"

"I read, Dad."

"Right." John leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. "And you're sure you didn't just find a subway token or something."

"The Metro takes farecards."

"Right. Of course."

Dean cleared his throat, and when Sam caught his eye, lowered his chin meaningfully. Sam rolled his eyes again.

"And then as soon as I picked it up this spooky old guy showed up going 'Beware, beware!'"

Dad's eyes went wide. His jaw tightened. "Dean --"

"I made him leave it outside in a bucket of holy water," Dean said. "Surrounded by salt. I figured we could check it for curses."

"Should have left it where it was and marked the spot," Dad straightened in his seat, turning his head to look at Dean.

Dean looked back at the floor, shame burning his cheeks. "Yes, sir."

"There wasn't any more gold out there," Sam said. "I checked."

"Dean will check again tomorrow while you're in school," Dad said. "Now both of you go get some goddamn sleep."

"Yes, sir."

"Dad, it's only --" Sam broke off with a squawk as Dean grabbed the back of his shirt and shoved him towards the bedroom. Dad and Sam could go at it all night, and Dean just didn't want to deal with it right now. The sooner they got out of the whole godforsaken area, the better, and Dad couldn't focus on wrapping up the case if Sam kept bothering him.

The house they were staying in was a little two-bedroom affair, something Sam insisted on calling a "Sears" house, like he expected to walk into the bathroom and find a whole lingerie section. The man who'd hired Dad to check out a handful of incidents along the canal owned the place. Room and board wasn't supposed to have been included in the deal, but the man was trying to get the house ready for sale, so Dad had offered Dean as a handy-man of sorts. Dean winced as Sam slammed the bedroom door open. He'd just finished painting the place a couple days ago.

"It's only ten, Dean. What the hell?"

Dean eased the door closed behind him. The house wasn't big enough for Dad to have missed that little fit. Not that Sam's moods were new. He'd been in a funk for ages now, alternating between ignoring Dad and Dean or lecturing them on the way families were supposed to work.

"What the hell's with you?" Dean shot back. "Picking up random crap in the woods? Trying to bring it home with you? You know better than that!"

"It's gold, Dean! Real pirate gold! Do you know what we could do with that?!"

"Get our asses handed to us by real pirate ghosts?"

"Get our own place and live like real people!"

Dean groaned, sinking down onto his bed. Sam had been on this tack since Dean had turned eighteen the year before, and Dean was goddamn tired of it, too tired to get into the argument all over again. "Dude, it was just sitting in the leaves out there. If it was pirate gold, don't you think someone else would have found it by now?"

Sam sat down across from Dean on his own bed and pulled a battered spiral notebook out from under his pillow, flipping it open to a page covered in his messy scrawl. "They were definitely looking. There was even a clause in some of the earliest property deeds that specified that the seller got half of any treasure the buyer found on the lot."

"Why the hell do you even know that?"

"I researched the area when we got here," Sam said.

"Why?"

Sam gave Dean a look like he was the biggest idiot on the planet. "To find out about any local ghosts."

"Like, say, angry pirates?"

"Dean."

"You were warned off that thing by a crazy old man, Sam."

"Maybe he wanted it for himself!"

"Maybe he knows about the curse!"

"There is no curse!"

"Both of you, shut up!" called Dad from the living room. Dean glared at Sam.

"Great, now you got us in trouble."

"Yeah, 'cause he was totally only yelling at me."

"Boys!"

Sam huffed and lay down on top of his covers in his bed, thumping his head into the pillow with a vengeance. "He couldn't yell at us if we moved out," he hissed.

Dean flicked him off.

*

Dean wasn't sure what woke him. He opened his eyes to bare slivers of moon coming in through the tree shrouded window. A breeze whistled softly across the corner of the house, and Sam snored in the other bed. Dean threw glances at the window, each time struck with the certainty that he would see someone -- the old man from the woods, perhaps -- staring in at them. Each time he saw nothing but moonlight and branches. He made a mental note to install the blinds in the morning, then rolled over and tried to get back to sleep.

After a few minutes, his body let him know that he was in no way about to fall asleep without getting up for a piss first, and he levered himself up, wiping his hand over his face. He shot another glance at the window, then slipped through the door, careful not to make enough noise to wake Sam.

The bathroom was at the end of the hall at the back of the house, directly opposite the front door. As Dean stepped back into the hall and turned out the light, he was struck again with the sense that someone was watching him. He started to shake it off, then looked up toward the front door and froze.

Half of a man-shaped shadow lay across the sheer curtain covering the window in the upper half of the front door, silhouetted by the glow of the streetlight across the street. Dean crept down the hallway, eyes locked on the unmoving shadow until he ducked sideways into the living room. He grabbed a pistol from Dad's duffel, then stepped up to the far side of the living room window, pressing his back against the wall to stay as invisible as possible as he peered out toward the front porch. The angle was wrong to tell much more than that there was someone standing there, just to the side of the door, looking out at the street. Dean checked the magazine in the pistol and made his way back to the door, holding the gun ready as he wrapped his free hand around the door knob. He threw the door open as sharply as he could, raising the gun to the figure's head.

"Put that thing away, son," Dad said. "You're going to hurt someone."

Dean exhaled like someone had just pulled the plug on his lungs and lowered the gun. "Jesus, Dad. What the fuck are you doing out here?"

Dad didn't look in his direction. His gaze was locked on the gap between the two houses across the street, a gap that led straight back into the wooded valley by the bridge. "Just needed some air."

Dean tucked the gun away in the back of his sweatpants, then rubbed his hands together. His breath came out in a little white puff. "Are you kidding? It's freezing out here."

Dad chuckled. "How the hell did I ever raise a mother hen?" he asked, still not looking at Dean. He flipped something over between his fingers. Dean looked closer as the thing caught the light.

"Sam's coin," he said. "Not cursed after all, huh?"

Dad looked down, his brows going up like he was surprised to see it there. "Guess not," he said. "Not gold, either." He reached out and rapped it against the side of the house. Dean wasn't sure what gold was supposed to sound like when someone did that, but he guessed that the solid little *tink* wasn't it. "Gold plate, maybe. Some kid's souvenir."

"Sam'll be pissed."

"Sam needs to get his head out of the fucking clouds, or he'll never make it on his own."

Dean frowned. "Why the hell would Sam have to make it alone?"

Dad shrugged. "Just saying." He flipped the coin into the air and caught it in his fist. "Go the hell back to bed, Dean. I'll be in in a minute."

Dean nodded slowly. "Yes, sir." He pushed the door open behind him, then paused. "You'll get the canal thing worked out soon?"

"End of the week at the latest."

Dean nodded. "Okay." He hesitated again, then stepped back into the house. The end of the week wasn't too bad, not on a job that stretched over two miles of canal covered in bike trails and camp grounds. Sam would be pissed to have to leave again, but what else was new? This area was getting to Dad and Dean both. It'd be better for all of them to just finish up and get the hell out.

He'd still go out and check out where Sam found that coin, though. Just in case.

*

The next morning, when Sam and Dean got up at their usual time of way-too-early so Sam could catch his bus, Dad was already gone. Sam rushed out the door almost immediately, barely pausing long enough to catch the pop-tart Dean threw him, and Dean was left to his own devices again.

Most hunts, he'd be at Dad's side while Sam did his school thing, but hunt research didn't leave much time for handyman work, and Dean had to make sure they were keeping up Dad's end of the bargain for the house. So he found himself alone more often then not.

Dean hated to be alone.

After weeks of spending upwards of eight hours a day on his own in the house, he was starting to get paranoid. The feeling like he was being watched was almost ever-present, now, no matter how much salt and iron he scattered around, or how many verses of Latin he muttered.

Of course, it might also have been the area. Everywhere you turned here there was another bloody battlefield, another historical marker. Everything from the Revolutionary War to the Civil Rights Movement had left a mark and a body count all up and down the Potomac River, and the surrounding neighborhoods were absolutely steeped in it. It all just felt so old, and in Dean's experience, that kind of old always meant nasty.

He finished hanging the blinds in the bedrooms in short order, noticing as he did that Dad's bag of clothes didn't seem to have been touched since the day before. Neither did the bed, but Dad always made that up like he was still in boot camp, anyway. Dean took it as a good sign -- Dad must have made a breakthrough on the canal case last night, which meant they might not even have to stick around till the end of the week.

Lunch was a dry baloney sandwich, eaten standing up in the kitchen. They'd run out of mayo two days ago, and Dean hadn't taken the time to go get another jar. No point to it, now, since they'd be leaving soon. A jar of mayo was no good on a long car trip. Sam had left his notebook, full of his notes on local history, sitting on the kitchen counter. It wasn't the sort of thing Sam left just lying around, so Dean figured he wanted him to read it. He flipped through it, skimming over a few details -- the bridge was originally called the "Union Arch", built as part of the DC Aqueduct in the height of the Civil War, it had a bunch of politicians' names on it, all the geeky stuff that only a kid like Sam would be interested in -- then paused when he noticed a shakily drawn copy of a local map from circa way the fuck before modern times. Dean shoved the last of his sandwich into his mouth as he turned the notebook lengthwise to get a better look at the map. It was about the crappiest map he'd seen outside of directions to a high school kegger, but he could still pick out some key details: the river, of course, a broad swath filled in with little squiggly lines representing rippled water, and the canal running smooth and even next to it. The creek led the way northwest in a single line branching out from the river, and two little loops running over it were labeled "CJ BRIDGE" in all caps. The road leading across it, what was now MacArthur Boulevard, the main drag through town, was titled "Conduit Road", and beside that, right flush up against the side of the creek, was a big sprawling mass of hashmark lines titled "Cabin John Bridge Hotel". It sat right smack on top of the street they lived on now.

"Fuck," Dean muttered. He brushed his hands across the back of his jeans, sending crumbs flying, and pushed away from the counter. "Pirates weren't enough? We've gotta have a creepy old hotel, too? A thousands bucks says that place was haunted." He glanced up, waiting for a sarcastic reply, and remembered he was the only one here. "Fuck," he said again.

No wonder he always felt like he was being followed.

Dean flipped through the rest of the notebook without finding much else. The hotel had burned down in the 30s, but Sam hadn't made note of any suspicious circumstances, which either meant the place was clean -- which Dean doubted -- or the sources Sam had found were too busy crowing about the pirate to bother with anything else. Come to think of it, Dean and that pirate had business to settle. Dad had ordered him to double check the spot where Sam found the coin, and while he was pretty sure he'd find a grand total of absolutely nothing, Dean wasn't about to ignore a direct order. He grabbed his backpack from the bedroom, making sure he was stocked on salt, kerosene, and ammo, and set out towards the woods.

It wasn't so much raining out as aggressively misting, drizzling in such a way that everything ended up with a thin sheen of wetness rather than active puddles or streams. The leaves coating the ground slipped instead of crunched, and they stuck to Dean's boots and jeans like soggy stickers. He didn't have to go far. The neighborhood they were staying in -- Cabin John Gardens, of course, everything in this damn place had to be named Cabin-freaking-John -- ran right up against the creek valley. He set off down the hill cautiously, his head down as he watched his step. The leaves and rain made it just slick enough to send a person sliding all the way down to the parkway below, and the last thing Dean needed was to end up a muddy wreck in the middle of a busy road. He found the marble studded steps first and stepped out into the middle of the cracked foundation, looking around to pinpoint the spot where Sam had run into the old man. He nearly jumped out of his skin when he saw a shape peel away from the shadows of the trees.

This place was turning him into a nervous wreck.

Dean didn't reach for his gun. It was bright enough out still that he could easily see that this wasn't the old man who'd threatened Sam. He set his jaw instead, jumping down from the foundation to storm across the woods right up to the figure in question.

"What are you doing here?"

Dad didn't turn to look at him, just kept his eyes on the ground cover as he shifted sticks and leaves aside with his foot. "What's it look like I'm doing here?"

"I've got this, Dad." Dean's hand tightened on the strap of his backpack and he stared at the side of his father's face, trying to will him to look up. "You told me to get this. I've got it."

Dad shrugged, finally looking up. "You trying to tell me my business, Dean?"

Dean swallowed, all the anger he'd been feeling drying up at the dark look on his father's face. "No, sir. But I --"

"Go home, Dean."

"But Dad --"

Dad's eyes were back on the ground again, and he crouched down to run his hand over the damp dirt. "Go. Home."

Dean felt like he'd been hit in the chest. Both his hands spasmed against the backpack strap and he took a few steps back. "Right, I guess I should. . . ." He trailed off. Dad didn't even look like he was still listening. "Right." He stepped back a few more steps, then turned and forced himself to walk calmly back through the woods.

He was eighteen years old, only a few months shy of nineteen. He could handle a simple change of plans. The gold must have been connected with the canal somehow. Dad was working on a pattern, he always got grumpy when his train of thought was interrupted.

And if the very air in the woods felt oppressive, like it was bearing down and breathing on Dean's neck -- well. That was just what old places did.

*

Dad didn't make it home for dinner that night, which wasn't unusual. He didn't make it back before Sam decided to send himself to bed, which was, and he was out the door before they got up again the next morning.

The night after that, Dad was late enough that Dean started to worry he wasn't going to come back.

The third day, Dean broke down and bought a jar of mayo. He was just popping it open to make his lunch when Dad stormed in, making a beeline for his bedroom.

"Grab the guns," he said, while Dean could only stand in the door to the kitchen, mayo jar clenched in his hands. "The hunt ends tonight."

Dean practically threw the unopened mayo jar back on the counter, then rushed to gather up everything he and Dad might need to take out -- whatever was attacking tourists on the canal.

Well. Dad would give him the details on the way. He'd never throw him into a hunt blind.

*

"I left him a note," Dean said as he climbed into the car. Dad nodded absently, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel, then frowned.

"Who?"

Dean stared, hand frozen on the car door. "Sam."

"Right," said Dad.

Dean yanked the door shut, still staring at Dad. It was one thing to leave Sam out of the dirty work of hunting -- he'd only bitch about it the whole time, anyway -- but Dad almost seemed like he didn't care about Sam at all. "We could wait," he said finally. "He'll be home soon. It's not even dark out, yet."

Dad shook his head. "Wasted enough time already." He glanced over, and Dean didn't recognize the look on his face. "You left him a note," he said, and he pulled the car out onto the road.

Dean nodded without saying anything else. It must've been a tough hunt to research -- Dad was in a hell of a mood. He'd feel better once they ganked the bastard.

The drive wasn't long -- was barely worth driving, really, just across the neighborhood and down the parkway a ways before they pulled into one of the little lock parking lots that dotted the road like tiny rest-stops. Dad parked the Impala front and center, the only car in the lot. It was cold out, and had been doing that misty-rainy thing again all day, and apparently no one wanted to catch up on local history on a rainy weekday afternoon in November. Dean headed for the trunk to grab the equipment bag as usual, but Dad beat him to it, practically throwing a shovel at Dean's head.

Spirit then. Salt and burn, easy as pie.

"Come on." Dad led the way down towards the tow path, a long gravelly stretch that ran down the side of the canal next to the river, the width of a single modern road lane. They crossed over the canal on a little wooden bridge just upstream of the lock itself, and Dean paused for a moment to stare at the water pouring through the open slots in the giant wooden doors that formed the upper lock gate. The gate was worked by massive wooden balance beams that stretched out like wings on either side of the gate. Years of exposure had weathered the beams, leaving them dark, slick, and pockmarked. Dean couldn't imagine having to wait for a team of workers to wrench the lock open and closed just to get up river, yet the canal went on like this for hundreds of miles.

"Dean!"

Dean snapped his head up. Dad was waiting for him on the tow path. He shook himself. "Sorry."

Dad pointed at his feet. "Dig."

"The middle of the path?!" Dean protested, then grimaced when Dad's face darkened. "Yes, sir." He came over, looking down at the spot Dad had indicated. As far as he could tell, it was just like all the other spots on the path. "Old one, huh?" he guessed. "One of the workers kick it while building this bitch?"

Dad didn't answer until Dean had tossed his first shovelful of gravel aside. "Lockkeeper," he said, and nodded to the ancient-looking white cottage that sat by the lock.

"Huh." Dean knew there was more, but Dad didn't elaborate, and the precise details were less important than digging the grave, so he just kept digging. It was slow going. The constant damp of the last few days had softened up the top layer under the gravel, but the tow path was densely packed beneath that, beaten down by more than a century of use, and Dean had to do a lot of chopping to loosen the soil enough to clear it off. He paused for breath between shovelfuls and glanced up in the direction of the parking lot, and the parkway behind it. "We have a permit for this?" he asked. "I'm feeling super-exposed, here."

"Dammit," Dad grumbled, and he yanked the shovel from Dean's hand. "Stand guard then. You're digging too slow."

Dean couldn't help but gape at him, then put up his hands in surrender. "Yes, sir." He went to grab his shotgun and a canister of salt from his bag, then moved over to lean against one of the balance beams on the upper gate. Dad's mood was rubbing off on him -- he felt almost itchy under his skin, and the feeling they were being watched had magnified several hundred times since they'd left the house.

It was rapidly approaching full dark and Dean's ass had gone numb on the beam when he finally heard something out of Dad that wasn't digging.

"Dammit," Dad said, throwing the shovel aside. "It's not here."

Dean wished he was back home with Sam, just now. "Maybe they moved the grave," he suggested.

Dad looked up. "What gra--"

"Behind you!" Dean shoved himself up and forward, eyes locked on the angry, spectral figure straight out of a historical reenactment that had flickered into existence behind Dad. Dad dropped, going for the shovel -- not pure iron, but could work in a pinch -- and Dean swung his salt can by the base, sending white crystals flying and scattering the spirit.

"Lockkeeper?" he guessed.

"That's the bastard," said Dad.

Dean turned to scan the area and caught little more than a glimpse of a pale blue hand before he was hurled backward. The spirit was a quick son of a bitch. He grunted as his body smacked into the balance beam, folding him almost in half across it. Breath and sense knocked out by the impact, Dean stared down at the water in the lock chamber, black and glimmering in the faint ambient light that washed everything this close to the city.

Dad shouted, the words incomprehensible, but the anger clear as day. Dean raised the gun he'd somehow managed to keep a hold of and fired a round of iron shot at the nearest source of light.

Either he missed, or the spirit was impossibly fast. A moment later, Dean was airborne again, this time tumbling back over the edge of the stone-lined lock chamber and down into the water below.

The impact was like being slapped over half his body by a board covered in sandpaper. It drove what little breath Dean had managed to get back from his lungs, to be immediately replaced by foul freezing canal water and silt. His body smacked into the stone floor of the chamber and jerked, his arms and legs flailing spasmodically as he searched for anything to grab on to. He scrabbled at the chamber floor, choking and panicked, before managing to slam his feet down and send himself up.

He breached the surface spewing water and staggered, all but blinded by the mud in his eyes and the pain in his chest. He flailed again as he tipped sideways, washed in the suddenly furious and circular current. The windows in the upper gate were open in full now, sending a swamping cascade of canal water down on top of him, and the lower gate, left open for what had to be at least fifty years, was creaking closed, leaving Dean stranded in what amounted to a large, flooding hole in the ground. He turned, barely able to keep his feet as the water rose up around his rib cage, searching for something to grab onto. A second current, this one on the floor, started flooding the chamber even faster, and Dean soon found it difficult to keep his head above the water level.

Why the hell couldn't the ghost be haunting one of the dry locks?

The walls of the lock chamber were slick and slimy and entirely unscalable, but when the current succeeded in forcing Dean back into the lower lock gate, his grasping hands discovered that the heavy wooden doors were built with crossbeams refurbished recently enough for him to wrap his hands around without slipping off, and he dragged himself up, slipping and gagging, until he finally managed to claw his way back onto solid ground. He lay prone on the grass on the parkway side of the canal, and when he finally stopped feeling like he was going to puke up his internal organs, he looked up to take stock.

Dad stood above him, Dean's gun in one hand, the shovel in the other, equipment bag on his back. He held the gun at ready, scanning the lock and the tow path, body on high alert, every inch a capable, powerful hunter. Dean shivered and spat, then rolled slowly to his knees.

Dad stood watch the whole time Dean needed to get back to his feet, and the sight of it kept something warm in Dean's chest, despite the way he shivered in the cold air. He wavered once, then straightened as much as he could with his aching ribs and stomach.

"More research?" he croaked. Dad looked him over, eyes pausing on the slump of Dean's shoulders, his arms wrapped over his chest, his water-logged boots. Then he turned and led the way back to the car.

More research it was.

*

The spitting, misting rain finally coalesced into a real downpour by the time Dad pulled up in front of the house. Dean paused before going into the house to stand in it, though he was already shuddering hard from the cold and the wet, turning his face up towards the sky and letting the fat, heavy drops wash away some of the black and green slime that still coated him. Dad gave him the fish eye as he walked past, but left Dean to it, pushing his way past Sam into the house with his shoulders slumped. Dean would be in for it when he finally went in, he knew. Dad had been planning to lay this one to rest, and Dean had screwed it up.

He wasn't sure how he'd screwed it up, but by the look on Dad's face, it'd been a doozy.

Dad and Sam had what looked like a minor skirmish over the door, then Sam made his way out onto the front porch, just to the edge of the stairs leading down to the yard. He stood there, out of the rain, with his arms crossed over his chest.

"You fixed the water heater two weeks ago," he called.

Dean tilted his head back down to look at him, wiping water from face and probably leaving streaks of slime across his cheeks. "And who do you think is going to have to clean the bathroom when I'm done?"

"So that's why you like it when we stay in a motel with a maid service."

"Preferably a h-hot one." Dean's voice wobbled, his shivering reaching the point of ridiculousness where he started to sound like he was speaking into a low speed fan. "S-somehow, you don't quite c-cut it."

"Jesus, Dean." Sam stepped out off the porch, and his hair swamped into his eyes in a matter of minutes. "Get your ass inside, already."

"Y-you're not the boss of me," Dean muttered, but let Sam usher him into the house, anyway. He stopped to peel his boots off on the porch, at least. It was bad enough he'd have to clean slime off the bathroom. They didn't really have a vacuum up to handling the mess if he stomped it all over the carpet.

Dean climbed into the shower with all his clothes on and stood beneath the hot spray until he started to feel like a lobster. Sam's shampoo stung his fingers and eyes as he worked it through his hair, trying to strip away the last of the clinging muck from the canal. By the time he was done, the shower looked like it'd been attacked by the love child of Slimer and the black oil from The X-Files, but at least he felt mostly human again. Sam had set out a fresh set of clothes by the door, and Dean took his time toweling off and pulling them on.

He was in no hurry to face Dad again.

He got back to the living room to find Dad slumped on the couch, a mess of papers, notes, and maps spread out on the coffee table in front of him, and Sam standing in the archway to the kitchen, arranging first aid supplies on the counter.

"Shit," Dean said. "Did Dad get hurt?" Dad hadn't been limping or anything, but he'd been up against the spirit of the old lockkeeper alone for however long it took Dean to climb back out of the lock, and there was no telling what it might have done to him.

Sam looked at him like he was an idiot. "It's for you," he said, holding out his hand, palm up. Dean frowned at him, and Sam rolled his eyes and grabbed his arm, tugging it up until Dean held it extended out in front of him.

The scrapes on his knuckles from the stone floor of the lock chamber were bleeding sluggishly, welling up bright red that webbed out through the folds and seams of his skin. Sam winced sympathetically and wiped them down with rubbing alcohol before laying a square of gauze over top of them. He turned Dean's hand carefully, and it was Dean's turn to wince. The insides of his fingers and his palm were riddled with small, wicked-looking splinters from the lower lock gates, gone unnoticed thanks to the adrenaline and the cold. A longer, thin sliver had jammed itself down under his middle finger nail, and now that he'd noticed it, it began to throb.

"What the hell did you guys do?" Sam asked. Dean shot a look towards Dad, who hadn't looked up from his research. "I mean, I can guess you went for an unscheduled swim, but. . . ."

"Spirit threw me into the lock," Dean mumbled, wincing again as Sam took a pair of tweezers and gently worked the splinter out from beneath Dean's nail. The persistent damp of the canal, the rain, and then the shower had expanded both the wood and Dean's skin, making it tough for him to get a grip on it, and Dean finally had to look away.

"That must've sucked," Sam said.

"Yeah. Then it shut the thing and started flooding it." Dean shot another glance at Dad. "Didn't realize it was that powerful."

"Isn't that the kind of thing you kind of want to know going in?" Sam asked.

Dad grunted and slammed his book shut. Dean pulled his hand back out of Sam's grip, pressing the gauze into his knuckles as he cradled it to his chest.

"Can you go check on that water heater?" he asked. "I think it's acting up again."

"Dude, I haven't even started on your other hand --"

Dean grabbed Sam's shoulder and pushed him towards the back of the house. "I'll deal with it."

Sam stumbled, shooting a glance from Dean to Dad. "Fine," he said. "Guess I'll start cleaning out the tub, too." He continued shooting glances at them even as he walked down the hallway and into the bathroom, closing the door behind him. Dean turned to face Dad full on.

"I screwed up," he said.

Dad looked up at him from the couch, eyes roving over him before narrowing in on where Dean kept his hands tight to his chest. "Yeah," he said.

Dean tried not to flinch.

Dad sighed. "It's my fault," he said, and Dean felt some of the tension bleed out of his shoulders. Dad's eyes went back down to his research, and he shoved it all together before Dean could get a good look at what he'd found. "I should have known I'd have to do it alone."

Dean couldn't hold back the flinch this time. He hadn't done that badly, had he? It wasn't like Dad had filled him in on all the details. Hell, Dean had been lucky to get "lockkeeper" out of the man.

Which was really, really strange. Dad was usually as bad as Sam, when it came to knowing every little insignificant detail about a case. Dean was the impetuous one.

"Dad --"

"Doesn't matter," Dad said. He stacked his papers in a rough pile, then shoved them into his bag. "I know where the bastard's hiding it, now." He looked up at Dean again, and though he was warm enough after his shower, Dean shivered. "Don't follow me."

"Dad --"

Dad was out the door and slamming it before Dean had even quite finished the single syllable.

Dean's back hit the wall, and locking his knees was the only thing that kept him from sliding down it. He couldn't breathe. Even after the Striga, Dad had never looked at him like that. And he sure as hell hadn't walked out before he knew his kids were totally safe. Dean looked down at his hands, at his bloody knuckles and the splinters still dotting his fingers. None of it was life threatening, but Dad hadn't even checked.

How the hell had Dean managed to screw things up this badly?

"Dean?"

Dean heaved a breath, pressing his arm around his ribs as his bruises began to make themselves known. Sam peered out at him through the door to the bathroom.

"Yeah," Dean said.

"Did -- did Dad just leave?"

Dean flashed his teeth and hoped Sam thought it was a smile. That's right, Dad had left. Dean had managed to lose Sam's only remaining parent. He took another breath and let a lie slip out, issuing it forth like a leaky tire. "Nah," he said. "He just needs some air."

Sam stared at him. Dean stared back, braced for the questions, the demands for the truth. The house wasn't that big -- Sam had to have heard every word Dad and Dean had said. Instead, Sam just nodded, his shoulders drooping. "Okay," he said, looking all of five years old, accepting the lie because the truth was clearly so much worse. "Thanks."

Dean had to look away. "Yeah," he said again. "Whatever. Now get over here. These splinters aren't going to tweeze themselves."

*

Dad didn't come home that night. Dean knew -- he'd stayed up, waiting for him.

The next day, Dean took it easy. He didn't have much of a choice, really, the way his both his hands and his ribs yelled at him any time he tried to get any work done. Instead, he bummed around and tried to pretend he wasn't watching out the front window, waiting for the Impala to pull up. But Dad didn't come home during the day, either.

"It's not really cold out," Sam told Dean over a dinner of baloney sandwiches.

"Hm?" Dean pulled his gaze from the front hall and stared at Sam.

"It's, like, fifty-five degrees," Sam said. "And it's stopped raining."

It had. Dean had noticed in the approximately two minutes he'd spent attempting to rake leaves in the front yard, in between bouts of crippling worry. "Okay."

"And, anyway, Matt and Kelly both said that it never snows here before Thanksgiving."

Sam had officially lost Dean. "Are you seriously talking about the weather?"

Sam shrank an inch in his seat. "I'm just saying."

"Who the hell are Matt and Kelly?"

"My friends. Matt lives down the street."

Leave it to Sam to actually manage to make friends in this yuppie commune. "And you talk to them about the weather."

"I'm just saying." Sam slapped his sandwich back onto his plate. "It's nice out, so you don't have to worry about Dad."

Dean blinked, careful to keep his expression neutral. "Who's worrying?"

"He does this all the time," Sam continued as though Dean hadn't spoken. "He'll be back when he's done with the hunt, and he'll drag us off somewhere else."

Oh, Dean was not listening to another "Dad sucks" tirade. Not now. "Sam, so help me --"

"I'm just saying --"

"Well don't."

Sam stared at him. Dean held his gaze, refusing to budge until Sam dropped his eyes and started on his sandwich again.

Dean's eyes drifted back to the door. The skin between his shoulder blades prickled. Sam was right, Dad did this sort of thing all the time. Except he hadn't since Dean had dropped out of school to help out. He hadn't promised not to, but it'd been unspoken.

Hadn't it?

Dad didn't come home that night, either.

The next day dawned bright and cool, the temperature having dropped at least fifteen degrees overnight. Dean threw a hat and gloves at Sam along with his morning pop tart, and waited just long enough to be sure he'd caught his bus before heading out into the neighborhood. He didn't mind colder air, usually, but his first few breaths today made his lungs ache deep down. He blamed his unscheduled canal bath, and didn't look forward to walking back down to the lock. They were still a few dozen poker games short of the cash Dad needed to get himself a second vehicle though, so Dean was stuck with his own two feet for a little longer.

He headed off through the neighborhood, hands in his pockets, trying his damnedest to look like just another happy yuppie out for a walk instead of the hoodlum they probably all thought he was. He was nearly to the end of the houses and wondering how best to cross the parkway when he saw her, parked haphazardly against the curb, gleaming in the early morning sun.

Son of a bitch. This whole time, and Dad had only been a few blocks away.

Dean jogged up to the Impala, running his hand over the roof as he scanned the nearby houses. One sported a flag with turkeys all over it, another was already rocking a wreath on the door. Unless Dad had decided to hook up with a housewife, he wasn't likely to be in either of them. "What the hell?" Dean muttered, bending down to look inside. "Why did Dad --" He broke off, swallowing hard.

There, in the driver's side foot well, just barely visible through the window, were Dad's keys.

"Shit." Dean tried the door and wasn't sure whether to be relieved or more worried that Dad had remembered to lock it. He dug into his pocket for his spare -- never leave home without it -- and popped the door open, leaning in to see if Dad had left any other clues about where he was, or where he was going. When he didn't turn up anything, he straightened up and took another look at the houses, wondering if it was too early to try knocking on doors, see if any of them knew anything, or at least knew how long the Impala had been sitting there. He caught a glimpse of something sparkling through the trees and remembered the canal. Dad had been seriously anxious about ganking the lockkeeper. Dean could always come back to ask questions.

Though it couldn't possibly be more than half a mile away, it still took Dean ages to get down to the lock. The parkway was packed with traffic trying to make its way into the city, and the tiny parking lot was nearly full when Dean finally managed to pull in, cutting off an SUV about four times larger than anyone could possibly need this close to the city. Dean ignored the blaring horn and the shouted curses as he parked, and set off along the path to the lock proper at a jog. He slowed to a stop as he approached the footbridge crossing the canal. A small crowd had gathered, a young couple with matching mountain bikes and gear, an older man with two black labs, a woman in sweats, and a couple teens in high school gym shirts. They were all looking across the bridge to the tow path, and talking loud enough that Dean knew what he'd find before he even made it all the way over.

The tow path had been dug up, not just where Dad and Dean had dug for the lock keeper's grave, but all up and down the length of the lock and a good twenty feet away in either direction. Where the first hole had been fairly neat, with clearly defined sides, the excess dirt and gravel contained to a small pile on the river side of the path, the new holes where ragged and hurried, dirt flung every which way.

Rumors about the source of the holes were flying back and forth between the visitors: it was a crime scene investigation, or a serial killer, an alien experiment, an archeological survey. Someone even proposed it was "John of the Cabin, back for his gold". Dean was about to ask about that last one when a couple of joggers rounded the corner downstream, and the crowd erupted into shouts, waving their arms to get their attention and warn them of the potholes up ahead. The two labs, riled up in the excitement, set to barking and bounding around the man holding their leashes, and by the time he managed to calm them down, the woman in the sweats had pulled out a cellphone and was talking about calling the cops.

Time for Dean to get back out of there.

*

Dean hated research. Given the chance, he would gladly foist it off on either Dad or Sam, or even Pastor Jim or Bobby to do. But Sam was at school and Dad was missing and neither Pastor Jim nor Bobby could help a whole lot with local lore, so Dean made his way to the library -- only to get immediately rerouted north when he mentioned the Cabin John pirate treasure.

"You're working with Dawson, right?" The librarian asked.

It took Dean a second to remember if that was Dad's current alias. "Yeah, that's right. He wanted me to double check his sources."

"I'll tell you what I told him, then. You want that kind of detail, you're best off going to the Historical Society."

The Historical Society turned out to be a house museum a good ten miles north, a haven for little blue-haired ladies not quite a full block from the local court house. It took him ten minutes of driving around before he found the tiny gravel parking lot between the house and the library, which was tucked into a converted barn and run by a single, harried-looking young woman not much older than Dean himself.

"Hey," he said, flashing her a grin, his charm turned up to eleven. "What can you tell me about Cabin John?"

She looked him over, apparently unimpressed. "You're with Dawson?" He nodded, and she shut the text she'd been flipping through when he entered. "Thought so. We don't get that many guys like you two coming in here."

"I guess not."

"Well, I don't know how much more I've got for you." She walked across the library, just a single, cramped room, and pulled down a few books. "Just the same memoirs and lock house records Dawson asked about."

Dean leaned against the counter. "Actually, I was wondering what you might have on John of the Cabin?"

She looked up, raising an eyebrow, and looked him over again. "Best way to get that kind of information is to talk to a local. Let me give you Linda's number."

And soon enough, Dean was back in the car, this time driving ten miles east through unbroken suburbia until he pulled up in front of the tiny, single story house along an access road with an overgrown lawn and a bright orange mailbox.

"This is local?" he muttered. Linda, a cheerful blond woman just over the hump of middle age, appeared in the doorway to the house, holding an enormous, shaggy black dog back by the collar. The dog took one look at Dean and began to howl. "Yeah, this'll be fun."

"Don't mind Ox, here," she said by way of greeting. "He makes a lot of noise, but he's really a big, slobbery sweetheart. You must be Dean. I'm Linda."

"Yeah," Dean said, accepting her free hand while trying not to give Ox the fish-eye. The dog was massive, coming up nearly to Linda's hip. His wagging tail looked like it could take out a chupacabra. "They told me at the Historical Society that you knew about Cabin John."

"That's right." Linda hauled back on Ox's collar, dragging him back like he was no more than a rambunctious puppy. "Come on in."

Linda, it turned out, had lived most of her life in Cabin John, before property values skyrocketed and she couldn't afford it, any more. She still kept up with the latest news, though, and was working on a book about its history. "Just because you leave a place," she said, "doesn't mean it leaves you."

As for John of the Cabin, she explained, it depended on who you asked. The name was usually given to a legendary old hermit, said to have lived by himself down by the river in the days before the bridge was built. One story said that he was the husband of the Female Stranger, a woman who arrived, died, and was buried under mysterious circumstances in Alexandria, Virginia. He'd been so filled with grief that he'd taken a boat across the river and up the creek to the then unsettled area that would become Cabin John, to live out his life in mournful solitude.

Really, she'd used those words. "Mournful solitude."

The other popular legend was the one that Sam had found, that John was a pirate who'd come up river to bury his gold. This one she backed with turn of the century newspaper reports about the hermit seen wearing a coonskin cloak and playing a banjo, that he was covered in tattoos and was saving his gold so he could return to his wealthy lover and buy her hand in marriage.

Dean suspected that the wealthy lover bit was Linda's own addition. She seemed pretty keen on John as a romantic figure.

"So if there's this treasure around," Dean asked. "Why hasn't anyone found it? It's not like there's a lot of places left that it could be."

"Well," Linda said. "Maybe someone did. Folks used to be really superstitious, especially in that area. There were those that said that anyone who found even a single piece of John's treasure would be cursed, chased by Old John himself for the rest of their days. People wouldn't even cross that old bridge after dark for fear of him."

"Spooky," Dean said.

"And you know," Linda continued, leaning back in her seat and scratching Ox behind the ears. "There was that lockkeeper."

Dean bolted upright. "Yeah?"

"It was 1918, I think, late summer. They found one of the lockkeepers in the canal one morning, just floating in the lock with both the gates closed. They suspected foul play, but were never able to even find a suspect. All they knew was he'd been bragging to the folks up at the hotel by the bridge -- there wasn't much of a neighborhood in the area, back then -- that he'd come into a tidy sum of money, but he never would tell anyone how. None of his relatives knew a thing about it. There's those that say he was the first one to find John of the Cabin's treasure, and the first to suffer the curse."

Dean's mouth hardened, though he did his best to keep up his pleasant, history-buff demeanor. "This lockkeeper, he was buried by the lock?"

"Oh heavens no. He'd be buried somewhere in Bethesda, I should think."

Dean nodded, pushing himself to his feet. "Thanks. I think that's all I need."

Ox, who'd settled in next to Linda, bounced up as well, tail wagging all over again. Linda wrapped her hand in his collar like an afterthought. "Not at all. I hope that'll work for your book."

"Oh yeah, totally," Dean promised. "The readers are going to eat it right up." He smiled as brightly as possible, even as he made a beeline for the door. Let her think that he was anxious to get started writing, or that he had a hot date to get to. Hell, she could think he was intimidated by her dog, if she wanted. It wasn't important. He had bigger problems to deal with.

Dad hadn't brought Dean to the canal to dig up the lockkeeper's grave. He'd been there to dig up the treasure. The one that Sam had found a piece of, and brought into their house.

*

It should have only taken maybe twenty minutes to get back to Cabin John from Linda's house, if the highway hadn't transformed itself into a parking lot. Dean wasn't familiar enough with the area to try and navigate the winding side roads without a good map or directions, so he was stuck in inching traffic almost all the way back to the river. By the time he got home, it was nearly dark out, and Dean had called the other drivers every terrible name in his repertoire at least three times.

Sam was waiting for him on the front porch, his arms draped over his raised knees, his mouth turned down in an epic frown. Dean winced. The kid was pretty clearly pissed, and rightfully so. Dean was never gone when Sam got home from school, not without leaving a note or something. He pulled up into the driveway and got out, shoving his hands into his pockets, and waited for the inevitable explosion.

Sam stared at him for a long moment, squinting into the twilight. He frowned. "Dad let you have the car?"

"No," said Dean. He leaned back against the Impala. "What happened to that coin you found?"

Sam shrugged. "I don't know, you guys got rid of it, or something."

Dean nodded. "I think Dad has it." He kicked at the leaves that always seemed to coat the lawn no matter how often he raked them. "I think it's cursed."

"So it is pirate gold?"

"Looks like." Dad had said it wasn't real gold, but Dean was pretty sure now that was the curse talking, trying to keep Dean from getting too interested in it. "I think Dad's cursed," he said. "I think he's possessed by John of the Cabin."

Sam frowned harder, his lips drawing together in the beginnings of what Dean was sure would someday be a truly epic bitch-face. "Dad ran off because he's possessed by the ghost of a crazy pirate hermit."

Dean nodded.

"And you still don't think we should disown him."

Dean groaned. "Shut up, Sam. Are you going to help me find him and bring him back, or not?"

Sam pushed himself to his feet and slouched forward a few steps, then looked up, swiped his hair out of his face, and huffed a dramatic sigh. "But only 'cause if I didn't, you'd go out and get your ass cursed or killed, too."

Dean wrapped one arm over his shoulders and dragged him in for a half-hug, half-noogie, relief fluttering low in his chest. "Good. I'd hate to have to ground you for being a little bitch."

*

Dean led the way back into the woods, headed for the old foundation. Sam trailed behind, occasionally stooping to look down at the leaves.

"We should call Uncle Bobby," Sam said. "He could track him."

"Uncle Bobby could track Dad in a real forest," Dean said. "These woods are, like, three inches thick."

"Dude," said Sam. "You know this is a park, right?"

"Parkway, Sam. There's a difference." Dean slowed as they got near the foundation, throwing a hand out to keep Sam from tromping right on by him.

"What?"

Dean nodded forward, then tugged Sam with him to move behind one of the trees, not that it made for much cover. The foundation wasn't just a foundation, any more. Someone had started building on it, slapping together a lean-to made of milk crates and roofing sheets. It didn't take a genius to guess who it was.

Sam leaned around the tree the other way. "Is that --"

Dean lifted his hand, cutting Sam off. "Shut up," he hissed. He nodded again, this time further down the hill, towards the bridge. "Look."

A shadow unfolded itself from the growing darkness under the bridge, made birdlike by the shape of the furs practically dripping from its form. It stood upright, stretching its arms, silhouetted against the dying sun bleeding into the valley, then turned uphill, towards the ramshackle shelter. A flash of reflected light from a passing car illuminated the figure's face, and for a moment, Dean didn't even recognize him.

Son of a bitch. Dad actually almost looked happy.

"Is he wearing fur?" Sam squawked. Dean reached a hand back to smack him, but missed. He wasn't taking his eyes off their father.

Dad paused on the hill, his face once more in shadow. He lifted his arm again, this time holding something out, towards the tree where Dean and Sam were hiding. Dean stared. There was no way. Absolutely none. It couldn't be --

Sam grabbed him around the waist, managing to yank Dean to the ground despite the fact that Dean still had almost a foot on him in height. The tree above them exploded in a shower of bark as the gunshot echoed through the valley.

"Yeah," Sam breathed, picking his head up out of the leaves. "Dad's cursed."

"Fuck," said Dean. "You are never allowed to bring treasure home again."

*

Dad didn't follow them out of the woods, which Dean supposed he had to be thankful for if the old man was going to keep shooting at them. They made it up to the edge of the road that ran across the bridge, and Dean sat down on the edge of one of the three historical plaques that detailed the construction of the bridge and the history of its hotel.

They made no mention at all of John of the Cabin, or of any curses.

Sam sat down on low stone wall that supported the plaques. "I vote we go find the crazy old warning dude."

Dean nodded. He hadn't really started to think about what to do next beyond "get Dad the fuck back".

"Hey," Sam said, bumping his shoulder against Dean's arm. "If it makes you feel any better, I don't think Dad recognized us."

Dean snorted softly. "That make you feel any better?"

Sam sighed. "No."

"Okay, then." Dean pushed himself to his feet, feeling about as old as the bridge itself. "Crazy old warning dude it is."

Not that they had much to go on when it came to tracking the crazy old warning dude down. Dean was sure the whole town was chock full of crazy old dudes wandering around scaring kids in the woods. Sam, who'd apparently spent way more time talking to the locals than Dean had realized, led them off down the side of the road to the local convenience store.

Dean raised his eyebrow. "'Captin's Market'? Dude, even I know that's wrong."

"Shut up," Sam said. "It's been here forever. Come on."

Dean wasn't sure, but followed Sam's lead. Sure enough, they managed to land a name for the guy -- Tuohey, which Dean was still pretty sure was supposed to be a spitting noise, not a name -- and a possible location. It seemed that when he wasn't terrorizing kids in the woods, he liked to help out at the community center, where Dean supposed he could terrorize kids indoors.

The community center was, of course, along the same road that ran across the bridge, and Sam and Dean hiked their way back down it, kicking their way through leaves and stepping aside occasionally to allow people on bikes and walking their dogs to pass.

"These people are far too into exercise," Dean decided as they waited for their chance to cross the busy street.

"I like it," Sam said.

"Yeah, well, you would."

After a few minutes of asking around -- Sam had apparently at least spoken to everyone in town -- they found Crazy Old Tuohey in a small gym in the back, coaching some local kids in a game of basketball. "Too into exercise," Dean muttered again. Sam elbowed him in the chest.

Tuohey glanced up from the game, spotted them, and started booking it -- in his rickety old man way -- off the court and through the building. Dean scowled. "Hey!" He started after him, intent on tackling him to the ground if need be, but Sam managed to loop around another hallway and cut him off, instead.

"We just want to talk," he said.

"I talk to you, kid," said Tuohey, "your brother will shoot me."

"Might shoot you if you don't," Dean said.

"It's about what you said in the woods," said Sam.

"You picked it up," Tuohey said. "You picked it up and you took it home, didn't you? Well you got what you deserved, kid. I don't need you bringing it down on my head, too." He tried to turn away, only to find himself facing down Dean instead of Sam. Dean set his feet, refusing to budge.

"It has our dad," Sam said quietly. Tuohey dropped his head and cursed.

"Well I'm sorry then, kid. But there's nothing I can do."

"All we're asking is that you talk." Sam slipped around, stepping up in front of Dean. "Please."

"And you don't have it on you?" asked Tuohey. Sam shook his head. "Fine. Don't suppose either of you is old enough to buy me a damned beer, first?"

*

"So here's the deal," said Tuohey, in between sips of his beer. "My name isn't actually Tuohey. They just started calling me that back in the day, because I used to always hang around Tuohey's Tavern, down near the fire house. I grew up here, see, lived here all my life. My pop moved us in back when this was set up for the naval engineers, before all those trees and roads sprung up all over. Folks back then didn't think much of those of us kids living around here. Called us 'river rats' or worse. Used to blame us for all kinds of crap -- and, well, we got up to most of it. But the worst rap we ever got was for the disappearances. Folks would go down by the creek, specially around sunset or after dark, and they wouldn't come back up. Didn't happen too often, mind you, but enough to give us a reputation. Folks wouldn't cross the bridge from Glen Echo after dark, and those that didn't blame ghosts said it was because of us.

"Well, my friends and I got to noticing that some of those disappearances were happening around the same part of the woods, down there by that old foundation. It's been there longer than I can remember, always bare like that, and broken. So we figured we'd go in and find out what was going on. My buddy Johnnie and I went down to take a look around after school some days, but we didn't find much of anything, not till Johnnie started going weird on me. Started heading down into those woods at all hours, not telling anyone where he was going. Then one day, like that," Tuohey snapped his fingers, "he just stopped showing up at all. I'm sorry to say I gave up on him. Figured he'd run away, headed into the city or maybe up north. But going down into the woods wasn't any fun without him, and the disappearances tapered off, and I didn't think much more about it, not for a long, long time. Then about thirty years ago, folks came in wanting to do a book about this place, and asked me to help them out with their research.

"Now I'm sure you boys have heard of the old Cabin John Bridge Hotel by now, right? Hell, there's signs about it all over the damn place, it's kind of hard to miss. Well, seems the weird little . . . quirks of that area started up a lot earlier than I realized. There's not much of an official record of it, of course, but folks reported from time to time seeing strange things down by the bridge while they were staying there, and they had more than one nasty murder happen, especially in the basement. Some stories even talk of employees going batty, turning paranoid on each other. And reading those things, it took me back to those river rat days, out in the woods with Johnnie. So I figured I'd take one last look at the area, see what I could find."

Tuohey looked straight at Sam here, eyes dark and cold. "I think you can guess what I found."

"Treasure," Sam breathed. Dean rubbed his forehead and took another sip of his own beer.

"That's right. Not much of it, just a coin. But I knew the moment I touched it that it was part of the legendary treasure. I took it home with me and tucked it into my safe. I kept telling myself I'd let someone know, get a whole survey crew out there to check the whole area. Who knows what they'd find, under all those leaves? I was doing okay by then, not rich, but comfortable, you know? I had a good life built up, and it'd be real good for the community. But I couldn't bring myself to speak up. And the longer it went on, the harder it was to think about anything but finding that treasure for myself.

"I got real paranoid, always looking over my shoulder. I was convinced everyone I knew, even my closest friends, were stalking me. I thought they knew, about the coin, about the treasure. They knew and they wanted it for themselves. Reached the point where I started thinking the only way to keep the treasure was to get them out of the picture. I actually started thinking those things. About my friends."

"How'd you stop it?" Sam asked. Dean shifted in his seat, tensing, half expecting the answer to be "I didn't", followed by the old man pulling a weapon. Instead, Tuohey just took a long gulp of beer and hung his head.

"I don't remember how it happened, really, but the tavern burned down. Right next to the fire station, but completely wiped out. I didn't lose any friends in the fire, but I knew I was damned lucky. Something about that snapped me out of it. I realized that those thoughts, that paranoia, they weren't mine. Something was in me, thinking those thoughts for me. Something that had taken Johnnie and probably the hotel employee and who knew how many other people. Anyway, I knew that the disappearances always happened in that one part of the woods, and I'd heard that spirits couldn't cross flowing water --"

"That's not actually true," Sam said, and Tuohey frowned.

"I'll tell you what's damn well true, boy. I took that coin down to the river and threw it as far across as I could. I knew it wasn't gone-gone, but it stopped bothering me after that. So I stick around here, and I keep an eye on those woods, and everything was fine right up until you managed to dig up another coin."

Sam colored. "I didn't have to dig. It was right there."

Dean tilted his head, frowning, as he went over the details of Tuohey's story in his head. "Hey," he said, and Tuohey and Sam both looked startled, as though they'd forgotten he was still sitting there. "You never said. What's your real name?"

"It's John," Tuohey said. "John Poole."

*

"John's a really common name, Dean," Sam said, once Tuohey was gone and they were back home in their own living room.

"And we know for a fact that three people who have it have been possessed by a spirit called 'John of the Cabin'." Dean opened Sam's notebook to the page on the old hotel and set it on the coffee table above his own quickly scrawled notes from his trip to see Linda, then pulled out an area map.

"Right. And I'm going to get possessed by Samuel Beckett."

"Don't be an idiot. You can't get possessed by TV characters." Dean smirked. "You keep your face like that, and it'll freeze that way."

"Anyway," Sam said, clearly making an effort to wipe the bitch off his face. "So Dad and the foundation and the treasure activity is all around here." He circled the woods southwest of the bridge with a red pen. "And the lock is down here. Hey, was the lockkeeper a John?"

Dean shook his head. "His name was George. But he might've been offed by a John."

"Or a Larry."

"Tuohey says he tossed the coin somewhere around here," Dean said, marking a spot about a quarter mile east of the lock. "And the tavern was over here."

"And the hotel was here," Sam said. "Other than generally all being in town, I don't see a pattern."

"Well, other than the lock and the coin toss, they're all west of the bridge," Dean pointed out. "And except for the tavern, they're all south."

"Maybe it's the water thing, like Tuohey said. The creek and the canal and the river. Maybe the spirit can only cross the water when its possessing somebody."

"That's a whole lot of maybes, Sam." Dean rubbed his forehead. "And like you said, spirits aren't deterred by running water."

"They might be if they think they are. That superstition was pretty common a hundred years ago, and most of the legends say John was a sailor, even the ones who don't call him a pirate. He would have a lot of water-based beliefs."

"Okay, fine. But then what's keeping it from hanging out up here?" Dean circled the much larger expanse of woods northwest of the bridge.

Sam's eyes went wide. "The aqueduct."

"What?"

Sam traced the line of the road that ran over the bridge with his pen. "MacArthur Boulevard used to be called Conduit Road. Because under it is the pipeline for the DC aqueduct. That's why they built the bridge in the first place!"

"Dude, it can't cross an underground pipe?"

"That'd explain why it never comes into the neighborhood, too, Dean. Why it's contained to that one small area."

Dean nodded slowly. "Okay. It's worth a shot. It's not like we're going to find the grave of a guy that most people can't even agree existed. We can work with that."

Sam grinned. "And I think I know how."

*

As Linda had predicted, George the lockkeeper had been buried in an old churchyard in Bethesda. Once they found his grave, it was child's play to go out to it in the middle of the night and summon him up for a chat.

Well, as child's play as any summoning ever was. One of those really complicated games that kids play with too many rules that change on a moment's notice.

George seemed to recognize Dean; he lunged for him first thing, his mouth twisted into a sneer, and Dean couldn't help but fall back a step, hands going protectively to his ribs, which still twinged when he twisted too fast. The containment symbol they'd gotten from Uncle Bobby held, though, and George couldn't do anything but glare at them as Sam stepped up to play diplomat.

"We know you're pissed," he said, while Dean stood by with the salt and iron. Call him cynical, but he didn't think much of a ghost's ability to reason. "We are, too. John of the Cabin took our dad."

George flickered and snarled. Dean glared. Sam sighed.

"Look, just tell us where you hid the treasure. We can make sure that he never bothers you again."

By salting and burning your ass, Dean added mentally. He flashed his teeth at George.

George snarled harder and started clawing at the air where the containment spell closed him in.

Sam sighed. "Let's try this again."

*

Dean had been standing right there, and he still wasn't sure just how Sam had managed to talk George into telling them where the treasure was. They trooped out to the canal the next morning, well after daybreak when Dad seemed to prefer to keep to the shadows of the bridge. There was a long metal footbridge spanning the canal between locks, and following George's directions, they made their way across the tow path and down onto the overgrown banks of the Potomac. Dean surveyed the river while Sam dug. "How about there?" he asked, pointing out towards the center of the river, where a few rocks broke the surface.

"We need something a little bigger," Sam said. "I think I saw something closer to the lock."

Dean nodded, turning around and scanning the tow path through the trees. "You know, this thing's been buried here almost a hundred years. What makes you think it hasn't been washed away already?"

Sam shrugged. "It might be. But I figured this was easier than trying to sneak past Dad and snatch another coin over by the bridge."

"If we have to, I'll distract him," Dean offered.

"Great. You can 'yes, sir' him into submission while he shoots you to death."

Dean sighed. "You're really not going to lay off him, are you?"

Sam peered up at him through his bangs. Dean nodded.

"Yeah. That's what I thought."

Dean took over the digging when Sam's arms got tired, and they struck gold, as it were, about half an hour later, when Dean jammed the shovel between the roots of one of the trees to further break up the ground. He spotted the rotten remains of the burlap sack that George had buried the gold in and called Sam over, though he knew the moment he spotted it exactly what he'd found. It was disconcerting, the way "pirates" and "treasure" seemed to just slink into his brain.

"Right," he said, tucking one of the coins into a salt-filled pouch. "Let's go rent us a boat."

*

"Are you ready for this?" Dean asked as they stood at the very edge of the woods, staring down into the dark valley. The sun had set hours ago -- they'd needed to wait until it was late enough that no one would get caught in the crossfire. When Sam didn't answer, Dean glanced over, half expecting to see him staring down at the coin. Instead, Sam was looking up, his head tilted back like he was star gazing.

"The sky's orange," he said. Dean looked up to see that he was right. It was faint, a dusky shade broken up here and there by wisps of dark gray and black, but it was undeniably orange.

"Huh," Dean said. "That's good, right? Red sky at night, sailor's delight?"

"It's not red," Sam pointed out. "I've seen it other nights, too. Like when you and Dad went out to the lock."

"So, what, you're saying it's an omen?"

Sam scowled at him. "It's the light from the city reflected off the clouds, Dean. It means it's going to rain."

"Right," said Dean. "I keep forgetting it's the freaking monsoon season. Guess we'd better get on with it, then."

The first part was to get Dad's attention.

"Hey! Cabin Boy!" Dean waved his arms in the air, then shone his flashlight on the coin in Sam's hand.

That was the easy part.

Part two was leading Dad to the river without losing him, getting caught, or being hit by any cars. Considering that this required them getting Dad to follow them up into the neighborhood, across another bridge over the parkway, down the canal to one of the foot bridges, and then out onto the river itself in the canoes they'd rented and stashed earlier, that part wasn't so easy.

The third part was the banishing ritual itself, another present sent along from Bobby. They'd set up a containment circle on the island just before sunset. All they had to do was get Dad into it, and then Sam would recite the spell and sprinkle some salt and essential oils around, and that was it. They'd have Dad back.

That was, of course, the hard part.

The wind picked up almost the moment they set foot on the island. The Potomac River valley was wide and deep in this area, and the wind whipped through it mercilessly. The tiny island, no more than ten feet across at its widest point, had absolutely no cover or windbreaks. Dean eyed the containment circle warily. Painted on with a mixture of salt and lamb's blood, it wasn't likely to blow away, but the rapids around the island were rising steadily, and Dean was no longer sure it was far enough from the waterline to keep from being washed away.

Dad arrived just moments later and fired his shotgun. Dean reminded himself that they had bigger things to worry about than the storm as he dropped to the ground. Dad fired again, then shouted in a language Dean didn't recognize. Sam shouted back from where he was crouched low to the ground with his backpack -- Dean assumed it was English, but didn't catch the words -- and threw the coin into the middle of the containment circle. Dad's eyes locked onto it. He stepped forward, toes at the very edge of the circle as he reached out for the coin.

Dean let out a roar of frustration and rage and rushed Dad, slamming into him from behind and knocking him forward into the circle. Dad's shotgun skidded out of his hands, teetering on the edge of the island for a moment before dropping into the river. Dean sat up and crabwalked out of the circle, watching as Dad tried to chase after him but was brought up short.

"Now, Sam!" Dean shouted, and no sooner had the words left his mouth than it started to rain. There was no build up this time. No day-long drizzle or light patter, just two fat drops, one landing on Dean's shoulder, the other on one of the painted lines of the circle, and then it was pouring, blowing about in sheets. It took only seconds before the circle washed away and John of the Cabin pounced.

He came for Dean, practically landing on top of his chest. His knees pressed into Dean's already bruised ribs, squeezing the air from Dean's lungs, and he reached for Dean's throat.

"Do it, Sam!" Dean hissed, using up some of the last of his air to get the command out as he grabbed onto Dad's wrists and tried to shove him away. He couldn't get the right leverage to hold him back for long. Dad's hands locked tight around his throat, and Dean gagged.

Between the dark, the driving rain, and the spots rapidly forming before his eyes, Dean didn't see Sam coming up until he was practically on top of them, wrapping one scrawny arm around Dad's neck. Dad roared and twisted, letting go of Dean to throw Sam off his back and across the rocks. Dean watched in horror as Sam's head hit one of the canoes and he fell into the now raging river.

"No," Dean choked. He struggled against Dad, trying to worm his way out from under him and get to Sam. It took him more than a few moments to realize that Dad wasn't fighting back.

"Sam?" Dad said, and Dean's heart surged into his throat. "Sam." Dad swayed once, his body shuddering as a wave of freezing air passed over Dean. "Sam!" And then Dad was up and running, splashing down into the rapids, and Dean could only lie there and try to remember how to breathe.

He should have known. No ghost was any match for Dad when Sam was in trouble.

He managed to roll over to his hands and knees, and nearly lost his dinner at the pain the movement sent through his chest. He shoved it to the back of his mind. Dad had been living in the woods, eating who knew what and probably not sleeping much at all for days, now. He was in no condition to be fishing Sam out of the water, especially not if Sam had lost consciousness.

They needed him, and Dean was not about to let them down.

He made it to his feet, though he wouldn't bet on how straight his path was as he headed for where Sam had gone under. He paused just a moment at the first canoe to catch his breath, then stumbled his way into the water, clinging to the edge of the boat for balance and for a guide. Water slapped him in the face from every angle, the rain above, the river below, the wind sending both of them about in torrents. He struggled to focus through it and scanned the roiling surface of the river.

"Dad?" he called. "Sam?!" When he didn't hear an answer, he took as deep a breath as he could manage, then dropped below the surface.

It was almost a relief, getting out of the wind and rain, though the water tugged and pressed at him, trying to shove him back against the rocks. He kept his hand wrapped around the edge of the canoe, nearly capsizing it as he used it as his anchor. He opened his eyes, but couldn't see a damn thing.

There was no way he was going to find them. Not like this.

He surfaced, grabbing onto the canoe with his other hand as he tried to regroup. He'd completely lost all sense of time -- for all he knew, Dad and Sam could have been under for hours, yet. He could have been lying on the rocks wasting time while his family drowned, all thanks to some dumb ass pirate with his dumb ass treasure --

Something brushed against his leg in the water, and Dean would have lashed out if he hadn't been so very nearly beaten. He froze instead, waiting to see if it had been a ghost or a fish, if it tried to grab him or if it just vanished into the currents. Then Sam broke the surface, heaving in a tremendous gasp, and flailed at the water. "Dean!"

"Sam!" Dean lunged forward in the water, losing his grip on the canoe in his desperation to get to his brother.

"It's Dad," Sam said, and Dean realized one of his arms was still under water and he was struggling to drag it upward. Dean made it to his side in a few strokes, his feet still brushing the ground. He put one arm around Sam's waist to help keep his head above water, then grabbed for what Sam had been holding on to. He got a handful of wet fur and pulled, yanking Dad up against his chest. He nearly cheered when Dad coughed, then turned to look back to the island. They'd managed to drift several yards down river, but it was still closer than either shore. Not that it mattered, if they still couldn't reach it. Dean looked the other way and spotted a single rock jutting up above the surface just a few feet away. He caught Sam's eye and nodded to it. Sam nodded back, and between the two of them, they managed to maneuver over to it. Sam clambered up on top of it and grabbed for Dad, pulling him up just far enough to keep his head mostly above water.

"Go get the canoe," Sam said.

"Way ahead of you," Dean answered, and he struck out back towards the island. He was swimming against the current, now, and his lungs felt fit to burst, but he'd be damned if he was going to drown and leave Sam and Dad stranded on a rock in the middle of a river.

The canoe he'd been hanging on to had been swept away by the current, but the other one was still wedged up onto the shore line, only its back end dragging in the water. Dean grabbed on to it and was about to climb up onto the island itself when he caught a flicker out of the corner of his eye.

John of the Cabin stood in the center of the island. His hair was a wild bird's nest of tangles sticking out every which way, and deep black tattoos snaked up his neck and over his hands. He wore a long cloak of raccoon skins that draped over his arms and swirled in the wind. His eyes were wide and round and a solid, milky white that stared straight into Dean, making his shoulders twitch and his neck prickle. This was the thing that Dean had felt watching them since they arrived, standing there on that island now, waiting for Dean to come out of the water where he could get him. In his hands, he clutched the gold coin like it was the whole world.

Dean flicked him off and dragged the canoe off the island, swimming it back downriver to the rock where Sam and Dad waited.

When they reached the shore, Dad fully awake again, coughing and grumbling, they all three leaned against each other as they stumbled their way onto the tow path, not far from one of the locks. Sam looked around and groaned.

"I just realized," he said. "We still have to walk home."

*

By unspoken, unanimous decision, Sam got the first shower. Dean figured he and Dad were still pretty freaked about him knocking his head and falling into the river, and by the time they'd gotten home, the kid had been shivering like it was his job. Dad threw one of the wool army blankets at Dean and claimed one for himself, and they both settled into the living room while they waited, Dean with a cup of coffee, Dad with a bottle of whiskey.

Dean wanted to ask if Dad was okay. He wanted to ask how much Dad remembered. He wanted to know so many things that they all got backed up in his throat and all he could do was cough roughly into the blanket. Dad looked up at him, eyes heavy lidded and bleary.

"That doesn't sound good," Dad said. Dean looked away.

"It's fine."

"You sure about that?" Dad's voice was hard and rough, and just about the best sound Dean had heard in ages. "I seem to remember this wasn't your first unscheduled bath, this week."

"So you do remember."

Dean heard Dad set down his whiskey. He still wasn't looking up from his own cup of coffee. "Yeah, son. I remember."

Dean closed his eyes and braced himself. "I'm sorry."

Silence. It went on long enough that Dean glanced up, just to make sure Dad hadn't passed out on him and missed the apology. He found Dad studying him, his expression inscrutable. "For what?"

"I never should have let Sam bring that coin home. Shouldn't have let him pick it up in the first place. I should have noticed something was weird with you and gotten you help sooner. I should never have let Sam come out to the island with us. I --" Dean cut off when Dad raised a hand.

"Sam's fine," Dad said. "I got nothing worse than a good hangover will cure." Dad narrowed his eyes. "From the looks of it, you've got an appointment with at least a week's worth of antibiotics. Wipe out whatever that canal water left in your lungs."

Dean looked down again. "Yes, sir."

"Now what's the story with the ghost? He gone for good?"

Dean shrugged. "He won't cross running water, not without someone to possess. He's trapped on the island."

Dad hummed thoughtfully. "You sure about that?"

Dean shrugged. "Pretty sure."

"Pretty sure doesn't cut it, Dean. That spirit is dangerous."

Dean's jaw clenched. "There's nothing else we could do. We couldn't find his grave. For all we know, he was carried off by wild raccoons when he died.

"Did you try?"

"Honestly, I was pretty much just focused on getting you back."

Dad looked at him silently for several seconds, then gave a slow nod. "The lockkeeper?"

"Him we salted and burned."

Another nod. Dad picked up his whiskey and took a long sip. Dean cradled his coffee, letting the steam and the heat soothe his face and throat. In the shower, they could hear Sam singing softly -- and terribly -- to let them know he hadn't passed out and smashed his head open.

"You did a good job on this place," Dad said.

Dean raised his eyebrow. "Thanks."

"Think you're just about ready to get out of here?"

"Yes, sir." Dean didn't think he'd ever meant anything more in his life than he did those words. "Nebraska sounds good."

Dad's lips curled, just barely visible under his facial hair. "Alright. We'll see if we can't find something in Nebraska."

Dean smiled, even as he let out another hard, wet cough.

"Just as soon as you get over that pneumonia," Dad said.

Dean groaned and curled tighter into his chair.

The end