Chapter Text
The second time they encounter Jack Baker (the fourth time for Ethan) is five minutes later, in the second-floor bathroom. There, Dean takes the opportunity to relieve himself after feeling for a while that his bladder was about to explode. They also find a strange wooden figure in a bathtub filled with a disgusting dark substance.
They spend about five minutes there, discussing what to do with the wooden figure, with Ethan showing them how many of the curious bronze coins he has found so far, under the critical gaze of Sam and Dean, before they decide to leave again to continue their adventure.
Dean is the one who opens the bathroom door to leave and is met with Jack's fury firsthand, being lifted into the air by the old man's arm.
"Dean!" Sam shouts in a panic.
He feels his stomach churn as he looks at Jack's deformed face, missing a large piece of his skull, which somehow regenerates with a disgusting squelching sound. Jack's powerful arm throws him back hard, where fortunately Sam was there to catch him. They both stagger, and as they try to regain their balance, Ethan shoots Jack repeatedly.
They decided to flee as soon as they realized that blowing his brains out with a barrage of bullets was useless. The image of Jack's brain regenerating will haunt him for the rest of his life. Perhaps these people weren't as human as he initially thought.
He focuses on continuing to run, the door leading to the first floor in mind, but stops when he sees Ethan going the opposite direction.
"Ethan..." Jack hums. Dean notices that the guy isn't running, but he is taking long strides. He's perhaps Sam's size, if not bigger, so they have no advantage against him.
Jack doesn't give the brothers a second glance as he goes after Ethan. Sam and Dean then follow Jack, trying not to attract his attention, and catch sight of Ethan stopping in front of a ruined staircase, the direction of which they don't know.
"Go to the door!" Ethan yells just before jumping down the gap.
Jack pauses for a second, looking down, then lets out a raucous laugh that reverberates throughout his body. In his hand, he holds a large spiked roller, which he points menacingly at them. "You are next," he says through gritted teeth. The sound of his boots hitting the floor below is so loud they can hear it clearly.
Dean turns to look at his brother, genuinely worried. "What the hell, Sammy?" Sam shares the same expression on his face.
"Come on, let's go," Sam urges, grabbing his arm and leading him down the hallway.
They'll find Ethan again; he's strong, he's proven that, but for now, they need to find a way out.
On the stairs, Grandma's gone, and frankly, screw her too.
They hurry downstairs and Sam heads toward the room with the light and the column, holding the strange wooden sculpture in his hands. "I hope this works," he mutters under his breath, placing the figure on the column and watching the shadow it casts on the picture on the opposite wall.
"Ah, I get it," Dean nods, remembering the video where Mia did the same thing in another house. "Who the hell builds this stuff?"
When Sam finally manages to make a bird in the shadow, the wall opens to reveal a narrow space between two wooden walls.
The brothers exchange a worried look.
"I won't fit through there," Dean says.
"Dude, you think I will?" Sam replies in frustration. "Where the hell is Ethan?" He finally asks no one in particular, thinking that Ethan's body could fit perfectly there.
***
For a few minutes, his only task becomes slinking around the house. For a while, he tries to run as fast as the confined space allows, feeling Jack's heavy presence close behind him.
"Ethan..." the old man croons his name every now and then. "Don't think you'll escape from me, boy."
When Ethan crawls past the destroyed stairs for the third time, Jack has stayed behind, searching for him in the living room. He's finally lost him. He continues to hear him in that part of the house, and that's his cue to go down the hallway that will lead him to the main house. He tries to walk as fast as possible without making a sound with his footsteps so as not to alert the madman.
"Where the fuck are you?" That's the last growl he hears from Jack, his voice fading away between the walls that separate them.
He opens the double doors with extreme care, unable to suppress a wince at the slight creak of the hinges, expecting Jack to turn the corner at any moment. However, it's from the opposite side that he hears footsteps rapidly approaching.
"Oh, my God, you're OK," Sam's worried voice says. He places his large hands on Ethan's shoulders, clearly grateful to see him rejoin them. Dean is right behind him, his face mirroring Sam's expression.
"Yes, I am," he reassures them, his voice slightly shaky. "We need to get somewhere safe. Jack's distracted right now, but it won't last long," he says, walking away from the door.
"We found something," Dean announces, and Ethan looks at them hopefully. He follows the brothers to the room with the cinematograph. They've cleverly used the wooden figure in front of the light emanating from it, and this has opened a secret passage behind the wall. "But we can't fit through there, we already tried."
"I can see that," Ethan says, looking at the boys' threadbare shirts. They ignore his comment.
"Ethan," Sam says, suddenly sounding embarrassed. "Can you fit through?"
Ethan turns to the passage. It's a very narrow space, supported entirely by old wood, but he knows at a glance that he'll fit. Testing it out, he approaches under the brothers' watchful eyes and slips through gracefully. From the entrance, he can see light on the other side.
He turns to face the boys. "I think there's a room over there," he says, trying to sound confident in his theory. "Wait here. I'll try to find another way to reach you. For now, find a safe room; Jack will be here any minute."
"Don't worry, we'll be fine. Stay safe."
Ethan nods once before turning his head toward the end of the passageway and beginning to slide down with great ease, his thin body barely touching the grimy walls. He can barely see around, but that's probably for the best. He wouldn't want to run headlong into a giant spider.
When he finally emerges from the passageway, more wood surrounds him in a slightly more open area. The enormous cobwebs confirm that no one has been through here in a long time, but he still proceeds carefully down the small corridor, alert in case any of the other inhabitants appear.
When the short corridor ends, he finally confirms his suspicions upon seeing the room he's reached. It has a fireplace, a refrigerator, and sofas to relax on. The taxidermied animals displayed as decoration, and the beer bottle on the coffee table next to the ashtray, make him think this is Jack's special room, probably for escaping his family after a hard day at work. Does kidnapping, torturing, and murdering people count as hard work?
Inside the refrigerator in the room, he finds more beer bottles, all unopened. Has Jack been here recently? Before the three of them arrived, he'd been sitting in the blue recliner with the only bottle outside the refrigerator in his hand, trying to finish it and relax, before the alarm sounded, signaling an intruder entering the swamp. It's not hard to imagine the scene.
He takes the chemical fluid from inside the refrigerator to make some more medicine, just in case, silently praying he won't run into the crazy old man again.
His steps stop abruptly as he turns left. In front of him is a dusty white door, and he immediately grimaces. He can't tell if it's a handcrafted figure or another of the family's taxidermied animals, but the sight of the two-headed raven, clearly hung there on purpose, sends a shiver down his spine. In any case, the door doesn't open, so he continues across the room, heading for the second door to continue on his way. Where exactly? Only fate knows.
The next room—he doesn't really know what it was used for—has some things that might be useful, like gunpowder, and one of the coins with the pelican that are scattered throughout the house. On one of the walls are several photographs with text underneath or beside them, listing relevant physical information about each person. It seems these are the victims. And as a reminder of each of their horrible sins, someone went to the trouble of visiting the entire town to collect the posters and decorate this room with them. Did they try, in a rather sadistic way, to make their own trophy wall?
There's a whiteboard with a drawing. It could have been done by a child, or the least talented person at drawing because jeez… But it's not the lack of talent in the doodle that catches his attention, but the name Mia written right next to the girl drawn there. What look like flies are swarming around her, and to her right is a small house. Perhaps that's where Marguerite trapped his wife? On the same whiteboard, he finds a sheet of paper with a kind of logbook, listing three dates in June, July, and August, and possibly describing some of the people they kidnapped who met their end in that house. Maybe this is the trophy room after all.
Ethan continues on his way and stops in front of the next door. This time he hesitates to open it. Around the door is a black gunk, similar to what was in the bathtub with the wooden figure, maybe the same one. And he doesn't feel very safe touching it, but come on, he's already lost an arm; it's not like his body is exactly clean right now.
As he steps across the threshold, he immediately regrets it. The room is dark and practically carpeted with that black shit, and a musty smell immediately fills his lungs. Ethan quickly covers his nose and mouth, now worried about the millions of spores he just inhaled. He doesn't want to die from a lung infection, thank you very much. (Author's note: oh well...)
While inwardly cursing Mia for the situation she'd put him in, he steels himself and, after the next five steps, he's certain his soul has just left his body.
"What the..." he says as soon as he sees someone, something, getting out with a growl from the wall. That thing was glued to the black stuff, and as soon as it sensed Ethan, it decided to come out of hiding. He immediately takes several steps back, and when the black creature lunges at him, Ethan raises his pistol and with three shots blows its head off, jumping back as it lands at his feet.
He lowers the pistol with trembling hands. Thank God they didn't shake when he decided to fire because, damn, that thing had the biggest claws he'd ever seen on any animal.
Ethan looks at it closely. It was big, maybe over two meters tall, covered from head to toe in the black thing. What the hell had he just stumbled upon? It had come after him. What was its objective? To kill him? To eat him?! Did the Bakers know that demon inhabited their house?!
"Jesus Christ," he sighed, a hand on his chest, still trying to process everything. His heart was racing, and his hands and legs wouldn't stop shaking, feeling like this again since Mia's attack. She had scared him half to death with the clear possession she'd suffered, but hell, she was Mia, still the woman he married. This thing, on the other hand, he wasn't sure if it was even an animal.
He had to find Sam and Dean quickly, he suddenly remembered. Hoping Jack Baker hadn't caught them, Ethan walked toward the next door, stepping over the creature and basically speeding out into the light.
Only the hallway near that last room had traces of the black shit. Ethan paused for a moment to analyze the root-like structures spreading across the floor and walls. Mold? It seems so, and he wouldn't doubt it taking into account all the humidity surrounding the house. But what kind of mold produces humanoid creatures over two meters tall?
In front of him is a door, and he finally feels a small surge of joy. The door has the same scorpion figurines as the main hall door, and looking through the small window above it and noticing part of the large chandelier and the second-floor stair railing, he confirms that this is the door he needs to open to reunite with the Winchesters. But, of course, it's locked from the inside, too.
He presses an ear to the door, hoping to hear something. "Hey, guys?" He knocks, still with his head pressed against it, but no one answers. He immediately becomes worried.
He doesn't let himself be consumed by pessimism and turns down the next hallway. He comes to a staircase leading to the basement, and another door. A quick glance in that last room tells him there's no key, so he simply goes down. He looks with disdain at more mold near the stairs, but doesn't stop.
He treads carefully. The black shit is everywhere, and he doesn't even feel bothered to inhale it anymore. He doesn't understand how these people can live in a place like this, but hey, he remembers Jack forced him to swallow garbage a while back, and he stops questioning their disgusting way of life.
The monster comes back to him as he ventures deeper into the hallways, now actually praying to find some damn key. It had come out of the black thing, but the space where it was hiding was much more heavily carpeted than the rest of the room, creating a large bulge to form some kind of cocoon. And those cocoons were practically in every corner of the basement.
His footsteps are careful though it's impossible not to step on the roots of that thing. For now, he doesn't know if touching it is what's really attracted it to him, but he feels a slight suspicion when, turning a corner, he comes face to face with another monster just like the first. He immediately lets out a small yell in fright, and that thing roars loudly in his face. Ethan tries to back away, but a claw manages to graze his arm. Its head explodes after several shots; this time his aim is off repeatedly, his hands trembling uncontrollably.
When the monster is dead on the floor, Ethan stares at his forearm and the open wound, small jets of blood oozing out. He curses under his breath as the pain begins.
Never mind, there's another door he needs to check. With the brothers in mind, he quickens his pace. He has to get back to them quickly, probably worried after hearing all those shots. When he enters the room, he sees only a black mass moving toward him.
"Fuck!"
***
Dean stares at the wall in front of him, his brow furrowed. Nearly twenty minutes have passed since they forced Ethan to leave them, and with every passing second, he regrets it. They could've found another way to escape Jack, and yet they chose to send the weakest one to do the job.
About five minutes ago, they heard the last shot, and nothing more. It was impossible for him not to worry about the blond guy.
Sam sat leaning against the opposite wall, both hands in his long hair, probably thinking the same as Dean at that moment.
The area was small; only two steps separated him from his brother.
Hearing Jack coming downstairs, he growled at them as soon as he saw them sitting on the dirty couch, "Getting comfy, motherfuckers?" They managed to run toward the statue with the shotgun in its hand. Sam grabbed it quickly, the door slamming shut behind Dean in a second, and Jack growling and banging on the hard metal from outside.
"You're not getting away. You're all staying here. We'll make a big family," he laughed at them. Sam kept the shotgun pointed at him the whole time.
Jack stood there for several minutes, watching them through the woodwork covering the windows. It was the first shot that alerted him, and with one last warning to the brothers, he finally stepped back. "See you out there," he laughed once more.
They tried to relax, each against a wall, the weapon on Sam's lap. They listened intently to each shot. Dean counted nineteen in total.
"We have to try to get in through that gap," Sam said after the long silence, waiting for another sound that didn't come. Dean knew what was going through his brother's mind. If Dean was worried about something, his younger brother suffered those feelings twice, maybe three times as much. Of course, he had grown attached to Ethan in just those few hours they had known him.
At Dean's silence, Sam stood up, and as he was about to place the shotgun in the statue's hands, Dean stopped him putting a hand on his chest. He had heard a door opening and closing. Thinking Jack had returned, he gestured to Sam to be quiet.
"Dean? Sam?"
As soon as they heard that trembling voice, Sam put the shotgun back in its place and the door burst open. They rushed over to Ethan. He looked even more disheveled than before, and Dean noticed blood on his left sleeve.
"Are you okay? What happened back there?" Sam asked anxiously.
Ethan looked at him with his large eyes, now impossibly even larger, terrified.
"We have to find Mia, and get out of here, fast."
"Do you have the heads? Jack went upstairs," Dean informed him.
Ethan shook his head. "It's not Jack, something's... there's stuff—there's—shit... on-on the walls, on the floor. The basement's infested!"
Dean grabbed Ethan's wrists, whose limbs were flailing in the air as he explained, trying to calm him down. "Ethan, Ethan, you're not making any sense right now, buddy. What. Happened. There?"
Ethan finally took a breath and exhaled shakily, then proceeded to tell them.
***
They were both speechless, Ethan watching them to gauge their reaction.
"Wha- what is this?" Dean asked, still staring at the thing filling the room.
Sam had squatted down, one of the flashlights they'd managed to find illuminating it.
"I think it's mold," he replied, moving a little closer to it.
"Don't fucking touch it, Sammy," Dean scolded him.
"I'm not touching it! I'm just observing."
Dean sighed. "And you're saying something came out of here?" He asked, turning to Ethan.
"A monster, a creature, I don't know. But it was big, taller than Sam, and it had huge, sharp claws."
"And you killed it."
"Yeah."
"Where is it?"
"It's... well, I... it fell there!" He pointed frantically to a spot almost in the center of the room, moving closer to show them exactly where. There was nothing there but a dark smear. "Here! It fell right here. I shot it, blew its head off."
Sam looked at him carefully. "Are you sure it was dead?"
"I blew its head off!" he repeated, this time desperately.
"Okay, okay. Ethan, we believe you, man. Seriously." Dean said calmly, gesturing for Ethan to come closer. The blond did, looking unsure about the whole situation. "Where were the rest?"
Ethan walks out of the room, the brothers following him, toward the hallway where the stairs down are located. He stops at the start, pointing with his index finger. "Down in the basement." Sam and Dean look down at what little they can see of the place. "I found this too," he says, pulling a map of the house and a key from his pocket, handing the latter to Sam, who was standing closest to him. Sam starts examining it. "It says it's for the dissection room. It's all I found."
Sam looks at his brother. "It wouldn't hurt to take a look."
Dean agrees.
"Yeah." He snatches the key from Sam's hand. "You guys go hide from Jack somewhere. I'll go find that room." Then he turns to Ethan, extending his hand toward him and the gun in his pocket. "Can I?"
Ethan looks at him uncertainly, but pulls the gun out of his pants, placing both the key and the map in Dean's hands. "Are you going alone?" That question and Ethan's tone of voice indicate to him that his uncertainty is about Dean's safety, not because of any kind of distrust he had towards Dean for carrying weapons.
Dean almost snorts humorously, checking the pistol's magazine. "Don't worry, buddy. I've killed worse."
He smirks at Ethan's surprised expression. Then he turns to his brother. "Take him somewhere safe. I'll find you, guys, in a few minutes." Sam nods once, and that's enough for Dean to head off on his own.
***
When it's just Sam and Ethan, the latter looks at him with his big, Bambi eyes, waiting for something.
"Come on, the only safe place seems to be with the statue," the taller man says, gesturing for Ethan to follow him.
They both go back to the living room. It's silent. There doesn't seem to be any sign of Jack Baker anywhere. Sam gestures for Ethan to come in, but the blond stops in front of the statue before entering, squinting at the gun.
"I have an idea."
A few minutes later, they successfully open the room with the scorpion on the second floor, using the same key Ethan had used earlier. Ethan turns to Sam as he picked up the shotgun that had been resting on the window above a vanity, a smile spreading across his face and his eyes gleaming.
Finally, they have a second weapon, though their joy quickly fades when, upon inspection, Sam notices it's broken and unusable. Sam, however, has a better idea for it.
While Ethan searches for supplies for his inventory, focusing on finding ammunition and medicinal herbs that were inexplicably scattered throughout the house, Sam begins reading the notes he can find in the room.
One of them indicates the locations of the three heads. They had easily found the first one, inside a book in the next room; the second is apparently hidden inside Grandpa's clock; and the third, Sam crosses his fingers, is in the dissection room, where Dean had gone earlier. He immediately tells Ethan to hurry up with his materials.
Another document hidden in a drawer catches his attention. It's a letter from the doctor addressed to Marguerite Baker—Sam remembers she's the mother. In it, he urgently asked her to come to the hospital for further medical tests. Fungal structures had been found in her brain, which appeared to be related to mold.
So all the dark substance surrounding the house is indeed mold. If they found traces in Marguerite's body, that meant she was infected with it. Could they get infected too?
"What did Dean mean when he said he's killed worse?" Ethan suddenly broke the silence. Sam stops his train of thought. "Honestly, I don't think there's anything worse than the creatures here. And I'm also referring to the family."
"Yeah, we... We're hunters. Family business."
Ethan raised an eyebrow. Even with blood and dirt on their clothes, they were the best-dressed hunters he'd ever seen.
"Family business?" He repeated Sam's words. The blond man is sitting on the bed, opening a bottle and slowly pouring more medicinal liquid. "No offense, but I still don't think hunting a deer compares to killing one of the creatures here."
Sam nodded. "It doesn't compare. We don't hunt animals, Ethan. We hunt monsters."
They had long since crossed the line regarding keeping the family business a secret. After what Ethan had seen here, there's no need to deny what the Winchesters do.
Sam sees Ethan slowly stop what he was doing. "Are you guys with the BSAA or something? TerraSave?"
The question confuses Sam. "What? No, we're not part of any organization."
"So you're mercenaries?"
Sam shakes his head no. "We hunt monsters, Ethan. Witches, ghosts, demons. Angels, occasionally."
Ethan stares at him, stunned, for a moment. Sam starts to regret telling him; maybe the blond guy wasn't open enough to receive that information. Then, a chuckle escapes Ethan. And that chuckle turns into laughter.
Sam frowns.
"Oh, my God. You have to be kidding, Sam. Are you serious? Witches?" And he laughs again. And he keeps laughing, Sam's serious face watching him. When a minute passes and Sam remains silent, Ethan slowly subsides his laughter. "Sam, what? Are you for real? Demons? Ghosts? So you're kind of Ghostbusters?"
"Well, sometimes we hunt ghosts, sometimes they're other kinds of monsters..."
"And you call yourselves, guys, hunters?!" Ethan burst out laughing again, but this time he covered his mouth to stop himself, under Sam's annoyed gaze. "I'm sorry, okay! I'm just... Sam, c'mon." He said, incredulous, as if trying to show him he wasn't going to fall for his joke.
"What?!"
"What? I mean, how, why... What?!"
"Okay. Look. I know it sounds stupid, especially if you've never come across this kind of stuff," he says as Ethan nods. "But it's real! My older brother and I have been doing this for over ten years. Anything you can imagine, vampires, werewolves, fairies." Ethan narrows his eyes, increasingly confused by each creature Sam mentioned. "It's all real, I swear."
They sat in silence for a while in the room. Sam checked the shotgun again to see if he could fix it, though without tools he couldn't do much.
"That's why we came here. We read online that dozens of people had gone missing, and we wanted to investigate. That's what we do: find a case, kill the monster, save the family. Of course, we didn't count on the monster, in this case, being the family itself, along with some pets I still don't understand what they are, and being trapped with you, unable to get out."
"You were expecting a ghost," Ethan mutters, trying to process it.
"We had our suspicions. Was it a lot?" he asks, seeing Ethan's still rather confused face.
"I... I don't know what to say, honestly. As you can see, it's the first time I've ever seen a monster. Sorry for laughing in your face, Sam, I thought you were joking."
Sam shook his head. "I'd never joke about something like that."
Perhaps it was his tone, or his completely serious expression, but Ethan looked at him with fear for the first time.
Noticing his position, Sam took a few steps back, clearing his throat. He had leaned over Ethan unintentionally, intimidating him with his size. The blond man, still sitting on the bed that perhaps belonged to the grandma, looked smaller than he actually was.
Sam reached out to him then.
"Come on, we have to find the second head."
He gave Ethan's hand a firm squeeze as his took Sam's finally, helping Ethan up from the bed.
***
In reality, Dean might not have fully understood what he was about to face, because seeing the monsters face to face had given him one of the biggest scares of his life. Their big size, large head and limbs, not to mention their sharp claws and teeth, made come to mind some of the monsters he and Sammy had killed before. But, for some reason, it didn't compare to the feeling that settled in his stomach when, relieved to have found another dog head, Jack Baker himself had surprised him from behind, kicking him down from a second floor with tremendous force.
He was furious. They both were. Dean because, damn it, he almost had the fucking red dog in his hands when Jack appeared out of nowhere to grab it before him, completely unaware of Dean's in the room, muttering something about how she didn't want Jack as her father anymore, but wanted him. Who Jack meant, he wasn't sure, but the warning that he would make him suffer was enough to put Dean on alert.
As for Jack's fury... Dean wasn't sure of the reason either, but Ethan came to mind, remembering how Jack seemed to only want to go after him.
When Dean falls to the ground on his back, Jack falls at his feet. Dean quickly gets up, immediately firing bullet after bullet at Jack's head. He can't understand why the old man isn't even flinching.
"You ain't getting away!" he said mockingly, trying to grab Dean.
Then, after a shot to his eye, Jack falls on one knee. Dean stares in horror as the old man's neck rips open, a gigantic mass of what appears to be his own flesh spilling out. The tumor, with what looks like teeth, is pulsing, alive. Dean's utterly disgusted.
He might have thought he had defeated him, but then Jack, letting out a grunt from the effort, stands up, his classic maniacal laugh out of his lips.
He could've gone after Dean, obviously planning to finish him off, but instead, he turns around and easily removes a chain link fence guarding two chainsaws.
Jack grabbed the larger one, shaped like scissors, laughing with pleasure.
"Groovy!"
"Fucking shit," Dean replied, taking steps backward to dodge Jack's attacks. He was genuinely worried about losing an arm like Ethan. He kicked one of the bags hanging from the ceiling (dead bodies inside each one of them, obviously), sending Jack backward with the force of the blow, and used that distraction to go after the other chainsaw.
"That's a boy, that's a ticket!" Jack exclaimed excitedly when he saw Dean start the tool.
For the next few minutes, it was a bloodbath, attacking and dodging Jack's weapon. He took deep cuts and watched Jack repeatedly fall to one knee, his disgusting tumor sticking out in the air—moments Dean used to his advantage, holding his chainsaw there and tearing that gross mass apart.
The last time, tired and trying to restart the chainsaw once again, Jack looked to be in the same condition as him.
"You're gonna get it now!" Jack threatened, swinging the scissors from left to right.
After a few attacks and holding the tool to Jack's head as he screamed in pain, the old man finally fell again, and this time, Dean felt no remorse whatsoever as he completely severed him. So much so that Jack's upper half, as if it were nothing, exploded, filling Dean and the room with his blood and other fluids he didn't want to think about.
The situation was so bizarre that Jack's legs rose up, like a headless chicken still running after losing the most important part of its body. They walked for a few seconds before finally slamming to the floor. Blood gushed from the severed half.
"Fucking stay down," Dean groaned. Perhaps in shock.
The important thing was that he finally had the red head, that Jack Fucking Baker was dead, and that he could finally go back to Sam and Ethan.