Roads of Reckoning

Bloody Mary

Sam jerks awake in the front seat of the Impala. I look up from my book. He sits up and looks around, almost looking for someone, and back at me.
"I take it I was having a nightmare?" He asks me. I nod.
"Yeah, another one?"
"Hey at least I got some sleep."
Dean looks over.
"You know, sooner or later we're gonna have to talk about this."
"Are we here?" Sam asks, changing the subject. I nod.
"Yep. Welcome to Toledo, Ohio." Sam picks up a newspaper.
"So, what do you think really happened to this guy?"
"That's what we're gonna find out." I say.
"Let's go." Says Dean, getting out of the car.

We head into room 144, marked Morgue. There's two desks. The empty one has a name plate that says Dr. D. Feiklowicz. At the other one sits the morgue technician.
"Hey." He says looking up. "Can I help you?"
"Yeah. Were the, uh...med students." Dean says.
"Sorry?"
"Ho, Doctor~" Dean stumbles over the name.
"~Figlavitch didn't tell you? We talked to him on the phone. He uh, we're from Ohio State. He's supposed to show us the Shoemaker corpse. It's for our paper."
"Well, I'm sorry, he's at lunch." He says, looking back down to his papers.
"Oh well he said, uh~ oh well you know, it doesn't matter. You don't mind just showing us the body, do you?"
"Sorry I can't. Doc will be back in an hour. You can wait if you want."
"An hour? Ooh. We gotta be heading back to Columbus by then." Dean looks to Sam and I.
"Yeah." I say.
"Uh, look man, this paper's like half our grade, so if you don't mind helping us out..."
"Uh, look man...no." He says, and I frown. Dean turns to us and mumbles.
"I'm gonna hit him in his face I swear." Sam hits Dean on the arm. He steps in front of Dean and opens his wallet and pulls out some twenties. He lays a few of them, at least five, down of the technician's desk. The tech picks up the money.
"Follow me." The morgue tech gets up and leave. Dean grabs Sam when he tries to follow.
"Dude, I earned that money."
"You won it in a poker game." Sam follows the tech.

"Now the newspaper said his daughter found him. She said his eyes were bleeding." Asks Sam. The tech pulls back the sheet.
"More than that. They practically liquefied."
"Any sign of a struggle? Maybe somebody did it to him?" I ask.
"Nope. Besides the daughter, he was all alone."
"What's the official cause of death?" Sam asks.
"Ah. Doc's not sure. He's thinking massive stroke, maybe an aneurysm? Something burst up in there, that's for sure."
"What do you mean?" I ask.
"Intense cerebral bleeding. This guy had more blood in his skull than anyone I've ever seen."
"What would cause something like that?" Sam asks.
"Capillaries can burst. See a lot of bloodshot eyes with stroke victims."
"Yeah? You ever see exploding eyeballs?" Dean asks.
"It's a first for me, but hey. I'm not the doctor."
"Hey, think we could take a look at that police report? You know for, uh, our paper."
The tech hesitates.
"I'm not really supposed to show you that."
Sam pulls out his wallet again.

We walk down the stairs outside.
"Might not be one of ours. Might be some freak medical thing." Says Sam.
"How many times in Dad's long and varied career has it actually been a freak medical thing and not some sign of an awful supernatural death?" Dean asks.
"Uh, almost never" Sam concedes. "Alright, let's go talk to the daughter."
•———————————————————————•
We walk into a funeral. There is a picture of Steven Shoemaker on the desk. Everyone is in black except us.
"I feel like we're underdressed." I say looking around. We walk towards the back of the house to the backyard. We approach a woman.
"You must be Donna, right?" Dean asks. She nods.
"Hi, uh ~ we're really sorry." Sam says.
"Thank you."
"I'm Sam. This is Dean and Demi. We worked with your dad."
She looks at us, confused.
"You did?"
"Yeah. This whole thing. I mean, a stroke." Says Dean. One of her friend steps in.
"I don't think she really wants to talk about this right now." Donna shoos her away.
"Were there any symptoms? Dizziness? Migraines?" I ask. Donna shakes her head. Her sister turns around.
"That's because it wasn't a stroke."
"Lily don't say that." Says Donna. "I'm sorry, she's just upset."
"No. It happened because of me." Lily says.
"Lily." Sam gets down on eye level with Lily. "Why would you say something like that."
"Right before he died, I said it."
"You said what?"
"Bloody Mary, three times in the bathroom mirror. She took his eyes, that's what she does."
"That's not why Dad died. This isn't your fault." Donna says.
"I think your sister's right Lily. There's no way it could have been Bloody Mary. Your dad didn't say it did he?" I ask. Lily shakes her head.
"No I don't think so."
•———————————————————————•
We sneak away to the upstairs bathroom. Sam pushes the door open. There is still some dried blood on the floor.
"The Bloody Mary legend...Dad ever find any evidence that it was a real thing?" Sam asks. Dean just shrugs and walks into the bathroom. I stoop to the floor to inspect the dried blood.
"I mean, everywhere else all over the country, kids will play Bloody Mary, and as far as we know, nobody dies from it." I say as I stand.
"Yeah well, maybe everywhere it's just a story, but here it's actually happening." Says Dean.
"The place where the legend began?" Asks Sam.
Dean shrugs and opens the medicine cabinet.
"But according to the legend, the person who says B ~" Sam stops and I notice he's looking at the cabinet mirror, and he closes it. "The person who says you know what gets it. But here~"
"Shoemaker gets it instead." I finish. Sam looks at me.
"Right."
"Never heard anything like that before. Still, the guy did die in front of the mirror, and the daughter's right. The way the legend goes, you know who scratches your eyes out." Says Dean.
"It's worth checking into." Sam says.

We leave the bathroom and are confronted by one of Donna's friends.
"What are you doing up here?"
"We ~ we, had to go to the bathroom." Dean says.
"Who are you?"
"Like we said downstairs, we worked with Donna's dad." I say.
"He was a day trader or something. He worked by himself." She says. Dean looks at me. "And all those weird questions downstairs, what was that? So you tell me what's going on, or I start screaming."
Sam steps in.
"All right, alright. We think something happened to Donna's dad."
"Yeah, a stroke." The friend says matter of factly.
"That's not a sign of a typical stroke. We think it might be something else." Sam says.
"Like what?"
"Honestly? We don't know yet. But we don't want it to happen to anyone else. That's the truth."
"So if you're gonna scream. Go right ahead." I say.
"Who are you, cops?" Sam looks back at us.
"Something like that." I say.
"I'll tell you what. Here." Sam reaches into his pocket and pulls out a paper and pen and writes down his cell number. A pang of jealousy runs through my mind.
"If you think of anything, you or your friends notice anything strange, out of the ordinary...just give us a call." Sam hands her the paper and we disappear down the hallway.
•———————————————————————•
"All right." Says Dean as we walk into the library. "Say Bloody Mary really is haunting this town. There's gonna be some sort of proof ~ like a local woman who died nasty."
"Yeah but a legend this widespread it's hard. I mean, there's like 50 versions of who she actually is. One story says she's a witch, another says she's a mutilated bride, there a lot more."
"All right, so what are we supposed to be looking for?" I ask.
"Every version's got a few things in common. It's always a woman named Mary, and she always dies right in front of a mirror. So we gotta search local newspapers ~ public records as far back as they go. See if we can find a Mary who fits the bill."
"Well that sounds annoying." Dean says.
"No it won't be so bad, as long as we..." We stop in front of the computers, out of order messily scrawled on their screens. Sam chuckles. "I take it back. This will be very annoying."
•———————————————————————•
Back in our motel room, Dean and I sit at the table, books open to all pages. I look over at Sam, he's asleep on the bed. He stirs and jerks awake.
"Why'd you let me fall asleep." He growls.
"Cause I'm an awesome brother. So what did you dream about." Dean asks. I search Sam's face and he looks at me.
"Lollipops and candy canes." I look back to my book.
"Yeah sure." Says Dean.
"Did you find anything."
I shake my head.
"Besides a whole new level of frustration?" I ask as Sam sits up. "No. We've looked at everything. A few local women, a Laura and a Catherine committed suicide in front of a mirror, and a giant mirror fell on a guy named Dave, but uh, no Mary." I look back at Sam and he falls back onto the bed.
"Maybe we just haven't found it yet."
"I've also been searching for strange deaths in the area, you know... eyeball bleeding, that sort of thing. There's nothing. Whatever's happening here, maybe it just ain't Mary." Says Dean. Sam's cell rings and he answers. A look of concern spreads across his face.
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