The Dark Forces of the Devil's Hotel

Invariant

Sam was at a bit of a loss.

The books that Austin Bishop had given them when they'd arrived at his establishment provided a lot of history on the village, history that was somehow not available online, no matter how deep Sam dug. However, a lot of the information was also contradictory. For example, every book had a different date for when the town was founded, only half of them mentioned any kind of fire in recent years, and none of them mentioned the Rose Hotel.

Despite this, there was still consistency across the works. Sam just found it in an unconventional place.

The writing style between the books was practically identical, with some highly complex sentences being exactly the same across all of them. Yet, each one was published under a different name.

It could have easily been a coincidence. A strange one, yes, but a coincidence, nonetheless. A person with a different life might not have looked into it any further.

Since Sam was a hunter, he knew looking into it further would yield something stranger beneath the ordinary surfaces of the books.

He glanced at the time, realizing that it was late, and that Dean was still out trying to interview the town's people. Sam hoped his delayed return was because he'd found something and not because his endeavour had gone south. Out of concern, Sam sent him a quick text to ask if he was okay before returning to his research. If Dean didn't answer or return within ten minutes, Sam resolved to go out and look for him.

Firstly, Sam decided to write down all the common sentences across the books, some of which he'd already been making note of. In total, he found that there were twenty, which seemed like a strangely perfect number.

Initially, Sam didn't know where to go with this, but had an idea once he glanced at the stack of newspapers that he had not yet gone through. There were quite a few there, and Sam decided to check the dates.

They were all twenty years apart, a repetition of this pattern stretching back all the way back to 1869, which was the only edition of the paper to mention the hotel.

The identical sentences of the books were connected to the patterns of the newspapers.

Sam got to work analyzing the sentences, understanding that the inky, dark letters had to be hiding darker secrets.

He eventually settled on taking the first letter of each sentence and attempting to find a pattern. It was simple, but it was best to start that way.

The letters were just letters at first, alphabet soup on an otherwise blank piece of paper that provided no substantial meaning. That is, until Sam took a look at the last letter of each sentence, finding that each last letter corresponded with a first letter. They were clues that indicated the order of those first letters.

Sam rearranged them accordingly, giving order to this game of scrabble.

True blood revives them.

Sam had no idea what that meant. Not entirely, anyways. He was certain it had to do with the hotel, as that much was obvious. It was also blatantly apparent that this was indicative of the rumours of ghosts and demons at the Rose Hotel being more than just rumours. But what exactly was lurking there? And what exactly was meant by 'true blood?'

Sam turned back to the newspapers again, this time looking for reports of missing people or murders. Austin had said that such kinds of commotion were out of the ordinary for the town, and at first glance Sam saw why he made such a claim. There were no obituaries in any of these papers, strangely, nor were there pictures of any missing persons.

It was then that Sam realized that maybe there were no missing or dead people listed because they weren't from Evergreen East.

Sam quickly turned back to his computer and searched for any more information, just as Dean walked in the door, seven minutes after Sam had texted him.