Run Like the Devil • L.S. • Larry Supernatural AU

Chapter 7

The house had the appearance of having been built with Lincoln Logs, and every time he approached it, Louis would remember the set he had gotten for his birthday when he was six, which he would play with for hours, building the same cabin over and over again with minor variations. Niall had bought it some years ago, at auction, under circumstances he became bizarrely evasive about when asked, and since his injury had rarely left it for more than a couple of days at a time. "No place like home," he'd say.

The lot was about five acres, all told, the majority of it wild and forested with pine trees that cradled and shielded the cabin from sight until you were practically on top of it, in the long gravel-and-dirt driveway that led to the house on the left and to something of a salvage yard on the right, and behind them both there was a fairly large pond with quite a few fish that would occasionally attract a bald eagle or two. The soil around it was slate-rich and dark, cool no matter the temperature, and while it wasn't safe to swim in—some kind of hideous algae thing that would apparently poison anyone who tried—in the summer, Louis would often sit on the bank and submerge his calves, watching the gentle way the water distorted them, the way the sunshine bounced off the placid surface, or how rain would turn it tumultuous and disturbed, licking up the banks and into the grasses, drowning them. Niall also swore there was a selkie at the bottom, and Louis was only mostly sure he was joking.

The house itself sat in a small clearing, square with a high-vaulted, green metal roof that gave it a verticality that imitated the thicket around it. On two sides, it was surrounded by a raised deck: orange-toned pine, warped a little from years of rainfall and footsteps, and obviously a later addition to the building. Niall was always talking about painting it—that is, getting Louis and Zayn to paint it—so that it didn't stick out like such a sore thumb from the grayish-brown birch that made up the rest of the house, but painting wasn't feasible given the condition of the wood, and staining the entire house would be a project beyond any of their capacity.

Smaller renovations, though, Niall would throw himself into with a fervor: the first year, he had built shelving into nearly every free wall, lining them with the truckloads of books—literally, he had filled up the flatbed of the pickup (Barbara, a '78 Chevy, bright blue and reliable) five times over. He had repaired all the broken hinges on the kitchen cabinets, and filled the pantry with every herb and crystal imaginable, yarrow and witch hazel and rosemary and ashes and a million tiny bones only he could seem to identify. He had spent a few dry weekends painting the doors, window-frames, and shutters a light yellow-green that from a distance looked like small, young sprouts growing insistently through the walls, and soon plants of a dozen varieties were actually growing throughout the house, vibrant and alive. The bathroom got new tile and grout.

The space under the deck, though, had been the main draw of the house, and was its major project. A previous owner, during the Cold War, had built what could only be described as a makeshift nuclear bunker. It was fairly unassuming from the outside; the latticework, in the same pine as the rest of the deck, suggested a space for tool storage, probably home to a family of raccoons or something else of the like. Near the back of the cramped space, though, was a trapdoor, difficult to make out in the dark and blending into the dirt, that required quite a bit of strength to open, as well as the combination to a hefty lock. Once it was open, a small metal ladder lead down into the complete darkness, which was incredibly unnerving, but which ended at about ten feet, and when you found the lightswitch on the right, it wasn't a gaping chasm at all, but a small, cramped, concrete box with a set of metal-framed bunk beds, a bucket, and a couple shelves stocked with dry and canned goods.

The bunker was clearly built to withstand a nuclear blast; Louis had to admit that this was a good place for it, too, nestled in the middle of nowhere in a mountain range that would in itself provide some protection, but not from anything supernatural—particularly demonic—and so Niall made it his project to fix that; in his own words, "turn it int' summat the cunts can't even fuckin' look at." Iron rods reinforced the walls, and sections of PVC pipe filled with rock salt and "a few other bits 'n' bobs" lined the floor and ceiling. (Later, Louis would also learn that the same general principle had been used to bury a permanent salt line about a foot down around the entire house, when he'd been trying to dig a hole for a fire maple Niall had asked him to plant and had hit something so hard it rattled his teeth, and Niall had laughed at him and said, "Sorry, sorry, forgot it was there. A few feet back and you're grand"). Sigils and symbols of every variety imaginable were carefully painted on each wall, with particular attention to a huge, intricate Devil's trap on the floor, but all of these precautionary measures were "a bit of an eyesore, really," and so Niall had put up drywall and laid down carpet. The ceiling had been his next project when he'd been injured, and so he never really got around to covering the gloomy grey concrete, and when he wanted something put down there he got Louis to do it.