JOHN WINCHESTER’S JOURNAL#

1983#

November 16:#

I went to Missouri, and learned the truth. And from her, I met Fletcher Gable, who gave me this book and said: "Write everything down." That’s what Fletcher told me, like this new life is a school and I’ll flunk out if I don’t have good notes. Only if I flunk out of this school, I’ll be dead. And the boys will be orphans. So I’m going to go back to where this started.

Two weeks ago my wife was murdered. I watched her die, pinned to the ceiling of Sammy’s room, blood dripping onto his cradle until she burst into flames —looking at me as she died. The week before that, we were a normal family… eating dinner, going to Dean’s T-ball game, buying toys for baby Sammy. But in a instant, it all changed… When I try to think back, get it straight in my head… I feel like I’m going crazy. Like someone ripped both my arms off, plucked my eyes out… I’m wandering around, alone and lost, and I can’t do anything.

Mary used to write books like this one. She said it helped her remember all the little things, about the boys, me… I wish I could read her journals, but like everything else, they’re gone. Burned into nothing. She always wanted me to try writing things down. Maybe she was right, maybe it will help me to remember, to understand. Fletcher seems to think so.

Nothing makes sense anymore… My wife is gone, my sons are without their mother… the things I saw that night, I remember hearing Mary scream, and I ran, but then… everything was clam, just for a second —Sammy was fine— and I was sure I had been hearing things —too many horror movies too late at night. But then there was the blood, and when I looked up, my wife…

Half our house is gone, even though the fire burned for only a few hours. Most of our clothes and photos are ruined, even our safe —the safe with Mary’s old diaries, the passbooks for the boy’s college accounts, what little jewelry we had… all gone. How could my house, my whole life, go up like that, so fast, so hot? How could my wife just burn up and disappear?

I want my wife back. Oh God, I want her back.

I thought at first that we would stay. Mike and Kate helped me take care of the boys at first, and Julie’s been great too, but I tried to tell them —tell Mike— what I think happened that night. He just looked at me, this look… like he’s sure I’m crazy. He must have told Kate something too. Out of nowhere she said the next morning, I should think about seeing a shrink. How can I talk to a stranger about this? I never saw shrink for everything I went through in the Marines, and I got through that. My friends think I’m going insane. Who knows, maybe I am…

The police quit on the case as soon as they couldn’t pin it on me. They don’t care that she was on the ceiling, they don’t care about the blood on her stomach or about any of the things I’ve seen since then. They want a tidy answer. Doesn’t matter to them whether it’s the right one. The last time I talked to them, a week after she died, they asked me the same questions they asked me the night of the fire. Where was I? How was my relationship with Mary in the weeks prior to the fire? Any problems with the boys? I can tell where they’re going.

Mary’s uncle Jacob had a funeral for her in Illinois, where she was from. I didn’t go. Why? There was nothing to bury, and I don’t think I could have listened to what anyone there would have said. I’ve been drinking too much, trailing off in the middle of sentences. I hear things at night while I sit in Sam and Dean’s room. Everything lately feels like those instances when you remember a dream a few days after you had it, but then you can’t remember if it was a dream or if it actually happened. I keep going over that night in my head… why did I ever get out of bed? I left my wife by herself to go watch TV, and she died. I’m so sorry, Mary.

Dean still hardly talks. I try to make small talk, or ask him if he wants to throw the baseball around. Anything to make him feel like a normal kid again. He never budges from my side —or from his brother. Every morning when I wake up, Dean is inside the crib, arms wrapped around baby Sam. Like he’s trying to protect him from whatever is out there in the night.

Sammy cries a lot, wanting his mom. I don’t know how to stop it, and part of me doesn’t want to. It breaks my heart to think that soon he won’t remember her at all. I can’t let her memory die.

Woke up yesterday morning with a nasty hangover… Wasn’t in the mood to do much of anything, much less have a heart-to-heart with Mike, who jumped on me the second I walked into the kitchen. I guess that’s his right, since it was his house. He was going on about how I have to get myself together, for the boys… but he seemed more concerned about the garage than anything else. Accusing me of phoning it in, you’ve barely been in to work… No kidding I’ve barely been in to work… My wife is dead, something horrible happened to her, maybe my boys are at risk too… how can I forget about all that and go to work, for God’s sake?

Anyway, I told him he could have it. That stopped him cold. "You’re telling me that you’re gonna give up your life’s work over this?" Watch me, Mike. It’s yours.

I walked out of the house with Mike’s check in my hand. He wasn’t so worried about me that he wouldn’t let me go. Do I blame him? I don’t know, I took the boys back to Julie’s and went to the first check-cashing place I could find. Walked out with enough cash to fill the back of the car with security. Two 12-gauges —Winchester 1300 pump and Stevens 311 side-by-side, Spread of sidearms— good old Browning 9 mm, .44 Desert Eagle, snub Ruger SP101, and a little pocket .22. That’ll do for a start.

Haven’t ever written anything this long in my life. Hope I never do again.

Went to see Missouri for the second time, and I can’t explain it… it was like we’d been friends for years. She knew every detail, not just of my life, but also of me… my thoughts… fears. She was the first person who didn’t look at me like I was crazy wen I told her my story… she just listened and nodded, and then she told me she believed me.

She also said that if I wanted answers, I’d need to make a sacrifice. A blood sacrifice. So I pulled out one of my own fingernails, like I did that every day. She had a vision, and we found a bloody mess in a neighbor’s house along with the words WE’RE COMING FOR THE CHILDREN written in blood. I don’t remember anything between that and finding Sam and Dean safe back at Julie’s, thank God, but Julie… Julie was dead. Something just tore her apart. Missouri found a tooth in her body, I tried to draw it but I can’t draw. I took the boys, said good-bye to Missouri, and got the hell out of Lawrence. If I never go back, it’ll be too soon.

Not for Dean, though. The first thing he wanted to know was when we would go home. But we don’t have a home anymore, Dean. The sooner you get used to that, the better. We don’t have a home until we find what killed your mother.

First stop, Eureka. Fletcher said we should start there.

November 19:#

I’m going to try to write this down just as it happened, no matter how unbelievable. Because if I can’t believe it myself —if I can’t rationally write down what I saw— how is anyone else ever going to believe it?

Jacob showed up looking for the boys. I talked him into coming with me to a cemetery where I thought there might be some answers, and I got him killed. The hellhound —that’s what Fletcher calls it— came out of a crypt and it tore holes in him like I haven’t seen in a human being since Vietnam. Then H was there, I don’t know who he is, but he saved my life like I couldn’t save Jacob’s. But he wouldn’t let me take Jacob to a hospital. He said Jacob was dying, and that whatever we were looking for, it was keeping him alive to prolong his suffering. I didn’t want to believe him, but he’d been right about what happened up until then… There was nothing we could do, H said, and God help me I went along with him, and I stood there and watched while my car rolled into a quarry with Jacob dying inside.

And all H said was, "Guess you got a new car." That cold-blooded bastard. I may learn from him, but I’ll never like him, and I’ll never trust him. He started talking about demons, Hellhounds, demons…

I let Jacob die. Could I have saved him? Maybe not, maybe H was right. But I didn’t even try. What am I becoming? I always tried to conduct myself so that if the boys asked me why I did something, I wouldn’t have to lie to them. But what am I going to say if they ever ask me about their uncle Jake?

November 20:#

I killed a man in cold blood tonight.

No, I killed a shapeshifting monster tonight to protect all of the people who don’t know things like that exist. But it would have looked like a man to any of those people. And Dean saw it happen.

It looked like Ichi, a hunter H took me out with. We were looking for a heeler, a kind of… something. Not a man. It attacks, kills, then springs away before anyone can react. Springheel Jack, Jack the Ripper, was a heeler, according to H. But H is the same guy who had me roll Jacob into a quarry, still alive. He was going to die. I know he was going to die. But he was still alive.

And then tonight, Dean walked out of the roadhouse right when I put the final bullet into the shapeshifter’s head. And he said, "Why’d you kill him, Dad?"

How am I supposed to answer that? Because he wasn’t a man, he was a monster who looked like a man? My boy walked out the door and saw me shoot someone in the head. Maybe I’m the monster who looks like a man.

Back up. Write everything down.

H said he was going to start showing me the ropes. There are people who hunt monsters. They have a kind of network, moving through places like Bill and Ellen’s roadhouse. Bill is a hunter, and they have a little girl, Jo. She’s not much older than Sammy. The hunters swap stories about what they’ve seen. They’re all damaged, broken. They hate the things they hunt. I’m just like them.

Ellen’s niece watched the boys while H took me and Ichi out looking for this shapeshifter. Mary, you know I would never leave the boys with strangers I couldn’t trust. You know that, right? I never would.

November 21#

The boys are with Pam and Bill in Elgin. I haven’t spent a whole night away from them since Mary died, and I can feel it like a hook in my gut, wanting to get back to them, protect them. But H says I need to talk to Mary again, and if he can make that happen…

He goes on about demons. A demon killed his wife, he says, and just expects me to believe it. But what he looks like to me is someone who let grief turn him into a monster. Whatever happened to his wife, it doesn’t excuse what he’s done. And I can’t let myself turn into him. I’m not a hunter. I’m a husband and father who wants revenge for his wife.

Here’s what I wish I could say to Dean —Your brother’s too young to understand any of this, but you’re beginning to. And that scares me. Since your mother died, I’ve seen unspeakable things, and now you’ve seen them and that’s my fault. I feel the darkness of the road I’m traveling on now. It’s not a place for you. One day you’ll see— I had to leave you today… but when I’m done, I promise you; the day will come when I never have to leave you again. Until then, I can only pray that you’re strong enough to look after Sam. One of us has to be.

November 24:#

We’re on the way to somewhere, H and me, but I’m the rookie and I don’t get to ask where. He says he’s taking me to meet someone who’s going to let me talk to Mary, but before that we need to do a couple of things.

A hunter never passes up a hunt.

Never.

This is what H says. So tonight we took on a strange kind of undead thing. H said it was a revenant, maybe? I don’t know what that is. Yet. I’ll find out.

People called it Doc Benton. He wanted to live forever, and when he couldn’t make alchemy work, he turned to organ theft instead. He kept himself alive by replacing each of his organs, as they failed one at a time, with organs harvested from unlucky locals. According to H, this has been going on since 1816. The doc was trouble, until I took him apart with a chainsaw after H burned the corpse of his most recent victim. Lesson: burning the victim weakened the doc by depriving him of the power he’d gotten from those organs. According to H, you can solve a lot of problems with gasoline and a match.

I need to learn more about revenants. I need to learn more about everything.

November 25:#

Today, in a town called Blue Earth, Minnesota, I met a crazy priest who brought Mary to me. His name is Jim, but what he did wasn’t like any church ritual I’ve ever seen, and I doubt he learned it in a seminary. He cut himself, and his blood turned into fire, but it didn’t burn him. And then the fire turned into Mary.

Mary.

She said my name. I think she said some other tings too, but hearing her voice say my name again… I can’t describe what that was like. But it only lasted a few seconds and then she turned into a… I don’t know. Like the Black Shuck, a devil dog. A hellhound. It spoke to me, and said, "Soon you will come to me."

After it was gone, Jim looked at the hellhound’s tooth. There are numbers on it: 1127. Mary died at 11:27, according to the police report. H and Jim agreed that the number were some kind of coordinate carved into the tooth, but what does it mean?

Written in blood: In olden times in the West people used to say "I put my hand and seal" on a document when signing it. In the East this was literal in some cases. The emperor of Japan in ancient days "signed" important documents by dipping his hand in blood and putting a full bloody handprint on the page. In the history of pacts with the Devil, people were supposed to sign their names in blood. I have seen a couple of alleged pacts from earlier centuries and neither, as far as I can tell, was signed in blood, though they do bear signatures of people. Blood undoubtedly stressed the seriousness of the signing. You were giving away your soul. "The Blood Is the Life."

November 27:#

1,700 miles in 24 hours flat, me and H handing the wheel back and forth, from Blue Earth to Tempe. Fletcher Gable. He showed us a map of cemeteries —Devil’s Gate, he called them. Places where demons can get through our world. I don’t know about demons, but the map was divided into sectors, and cemetery #112 in Zone 7 was in Hope, Colorado, near the Four Corners.

I don’t know how to explain what happened there. The Fore Inn, set on the edge of a town full of dead bodies, hallucinations… we found the inn, and there was the hellhound, the Black Shuck, and it came to H like a spaniel. He said he didn’t kill Mary, but he set the dog on me, and said he knew "some of the players involved." But they weren’t demons, he said. I killed the dog, and then H changed his whole tack. Said that everything he’d done, even siccing the dog on me, was a way to get me to hunt. He said he wasn’t H, he was something else in a hunter’s body. A man’s body. All I could thing of was shooting the shape-shifter outside the roadhouse with Dean as a witness. I killed H, and I burned the hotel. I’m writing this at a rest stop on I-76 outside Julesburg. I killed H, and I’ll goddamn well hunt, all right, I’ll hunt, and the boys will hunt, an we will find whatever killed Mary and we will send it to Hell. And on the way, we will kill every monster and ghoul and ghost and demon and anything else. My boys will not grow up to experience what I have. They will not lose what I have lost.

This black dog, or the divel in such a likenesse (God hee knoweth al who worketh all,) running all along down the body of the church with great swiftnesse, and incredible haste, among the people, in a visible fourm and shape, passed between two persons, as they were kneeling uppon their knees, and occupied in prayer as it seemed, wrung the necks of them bothe at one instant clene backward, in somuch that even at a moment where they kneeled, they strangely dyed.

November 29:#

We’re gone from Elgin. Where to, I don’t know. Wherever I can learn what happened to Mary, and kill whoever didi it. The hunters are out there. One of them must know something about what happened to her. I’ll head back to roadhouse first. Bill and Ellen will let us stay for a while. After that, who knows?

Never been much for books, but then I never was much for keeping a journal, either. Things have changed. I started looking for old books like Fletcher has, like I saw some of the hunters reading at the roadhouse. I need to learn. Know your enemy. And I started digging around libraries. I’m collecting old police files, going through microfiche… looking for any fires, arsons, with similar MOs to our fire. I’m gonna find this thing that killed my wife, and when I do… God forgive me…

December 11:#

Sammy has finally started sleeping through the night, and now that Dean shares a bed with him, he’s out like a light too. But me… I close my eyes and she’s there. It always starts the same, I’m seeing her as she was before that night, beautiful and happy and alive. And I’m not seeing it, I’m living it, it’s like I’m there… it’s so real, I know I can reach out and touch her. And so I do… I reach out… and suddenly I’m back to that night, to the blood and the fire and Mary, Mary is on the ceiling, and how did she get on the ceiling… she can’t be on the ceiling…

Here’s the weird part. When I wake up, sweating and panting… I swear there is something there. I can feel it, hovering over me, over my boys. It’s watching, it’s watching, I think it’s even mocking me… You couldn’t stop this. You couldn’t keep her safe. You can’t keep them safe.

December 14:#

I actually fell asleep last night… then woke up in a cold sweat five minutes later. Feeling that presence again… and thinking. I’ve been reading about fires, how they start, how quickly they spread… but one of the books talked about strange fires, fires with no explanations… it said that some people believe fire can be controlled by certain evil entities, beings, and used to harm people. It’s crazy, the stuff of fairy tales… when I went back to Sammy’s room that night, when I tried to get to Mary… the fire leaped out. Leaped out at me… like it had a purpose, like it wanted to keep me away, to stop me from reaching her. Like someone was controlling it.

December 20:#

I’m beginning to understand that there’s nobody else but me. Other hunters have seen things. A guy named Frank Gutierrez told me with a straight face that Route 666 is thick with devil dogs. But every hunter’s got a different story, and none of them have seen exactly what I’ve seen. If I want answers, I’m going to have to find them myself. Been reading about black dogs. Black Shuck. Old English scucca = demon. Also known as barghest, as a death omen.

Black dogs haunt roads. Sometimes they have a headless woman with them, or are headless. To see them means you will have a death in the family. Most of the written stories are British, but I’ve been asking around a little. Everybody’s got a black dog story: in Macon County, Tennessee; Meriden, Connecticut; Long Island, Oregon.

December 25:#

Didn’t sleep again last night. Woke up in a cold sweat and realized it was Christmas. Where’s Mary? That was my thought all night, and it stayed in my mind all day. Christmas without my wife seems unreal. Our celebration was clumsy… a crooked two-foot-tall plastic tree, a bunch of junk food stuffed in the stockings, and a pile of sports equipment for the boys… football, basketball, soccer ball. My attempt to bring back some normalcy. Already Dean is too big for T-ball, this year we’ll be going to real Little League games. Or rather, I’ll be going to the games. Alone.

Mary will never see Dean hit a home run. She’ll never see Sammy walk, or hear him say his first words. She won’t take Dean to his first day at school, or stay up all night with me worrying the first night he takes the car out. It’s not right that she’s not here, and that’s all I could think about today. I’m so angry I can barely see straight —I want my wife back.

The police have officially declared our case closed. What a Christmas present, huh?

December 29:#

Back at the roadhouse. We’re going to stay here for a while. I can’t just drive around in circles. The boys need a place they can think of as home, even if it doesn’t last. And I need a place where I can learn what hunters do. The only holiday spirit I have is bloodlust. I want to kill. The last time I remember feeling like this was Vietnam. But I think we can stay here for a while to get our feet on the ground. Or I can get my feet on the ground, anyway; I don’t know what it will take for the boys to feel normal again. Dean hasn’t been the same since he saw me kill that shape-shifter. I don’t know how to talk to him about it. He’s no even five years old. Most kids his age don’t even have a clear idea what death is, and he’s seen it up close and personal. What do I say to him? How old does he have to be before I tell him the truth?

1984#

January 1:#

Today a new year begins. Mary loved this time of the year; she loved the idea of a fresh start for everyone. She always made a resolution, once a year, and unlike most people, she kept hers. And every year she tried to talk me into making one, but I could never see the point. I wish I could have seen her diary. Maybe it would help me remember her. Maybe it would clue me in to some of her secrets. Maybe that’s the point of a diary. Keep your stories, your life, from dying. So that other people don’t forget.

God I wish the boys could have known Mary longer.

This year I’m finally making a resolution. I’m going to find out what happened to my wife.

January 24:#

Dean turns five today. I was thinking about where we’re going to be in the fall, because he should start school. Then I realized that I can’t leave him at school. Anything could happen. Maybe a place that has half-day kindergarten. Maybe that I could do. I know I should. I know he should be able to run around with other kids, who don’t know how to field-strip the Browning. Well, Dean doesn’t either, yet. But he’s learning. He’s got a talent for guns. I can see it already. And he’ll need it.

May 2:#

Sammy is a year old. We spent his birthday in the mountains because I had to meet a guy named Daniel Elkins. The hunter culture is weird about how it breaks in new blood. Everyone you meet says you should go meet someone else, and learn something else, and everytime you meet someone else they take you out to hunt their favorite kind of monster. This guy Elkins lives in a cabin out in the middle of nowhere in Colorado, and according to him, he’s the greatest vampire hunter alive.

Vampires.

They’re real. I’ve never seen one, but Daniel says they’re real, and I believe him. He also says that the hunter’s journal is for research as much as for recording day-to-day whatever. So I copied this from a book called the Harleian Miscellany:

We must not omit Observing here, that our Landlord seems to pay some regard to what Baron Valvasor has related of the Vampyres, said to infest some Parts of this Country. These Vampyres are supposed to be the Bodies of deceased Persons, animated by evil Spirits, which come out of the Graves, in the Night-time, suck the Blood of many of the Living, and thereby destroy them.

Vampires, four hundreds years ago. There are other records, even older. Peter Plogojewitz, the Shoemaker of Silesia…

May 17:#

This would have been our sixth anniversary. Six is iron. Sammy took his first steps yesterday. He walked toward Dean, then fell flat on his face and started crying. Life is tough, kid. Do I sound like a proud dad? I am.

November 2:#

Mary has been dead for a year. I’m never going to be over it, and I wouldn’t want to be. But I’ve spent the last year getting better at revenge.

Maby this is a good time to write down everything I’ve learned about Lawrence.

I’m learning about hauntings. Everyone I’ve talked to and read thinks they know evertything about hauntings, but they all say something different. Or so vague that it doesn’t mean anything. I read this and that, and tell myself that if I keep doing it, I’ll start to see the patterns.

In the world of spirits is always a very great number of them, as being the first sort of all, in order to their examintion and preparation; but there is no fixed time for their stay; for some are translated to heaven and others confined to hell soon after their arrival; whilst some continue there for weeks, and others for several years… Ebenezer Sibly

This reminded me of Doc Benton. From William of Newburgh:

As soon as this man was left alone in this place, the devil, imagining that he had found the right moment for breaking his courage, incontinently roused up his own chosen vessel, who appeared to have reposed longer than usual. Having beheld this from afar, he grew stiff with terror by reason of his being alone; but soon recovering his courage, and no place of refuge being at hand, he valiantly withstood the onset of the fiend, who came rushing upon him with a terrible noise, and he struck the axe which he wielded in his hand deep into his body. On receiving this wound, the monster groaned aloud, an turning his back, fled with a rapidity not at all inferior to that which he had advanced, while the admirable man urged his flying foe from behind, and compelled him to seek his own tomb again; which opening of its own accord, and receiving its guest from the advance of the pursuer, immediately appeared to close again with the same facility. In the meantime, they who, impatient of the coldness of the night, had retreated to the fire ran up, though somewhat too late, and, having heard what had happened, rendered needful assistance in digging up and removing from the midst of the tomb the accursed corpse at the earliest dawn. When they had divested it of the clay cast forth with it, they found the huge wound it had received, and a great quantity of gore which had flowed from it in the sepulchre; and so having carried it away beyond the walls of the monastery and burnt it, they scattered the ashes to the winds.

Everyone agrees that you have to burn them to make sure they stay dead. Should have burned Doc Benton, too, but I’m guessing the chainsaw did the trick.

1985#

January 1:#

New Year’s Day. Mary, I promised last year that I would avenge you. I promise again. I’ll promise it every year until it happens. I’ll never forget.

January 24:#

Dean’s sixth birthday. It’s been more than a year since he saw me kill a shape-shifter. He doesn’t ask about it anymore. And he stopped asking when he’s going to go to school. I tried to do it last fall, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t risk it. Maybe this year, now that he’s a little older, now that he knows a little more about things. I’ve been teaching him. Not the worst stuff, but enough so he knows that there are things that go bump in the night.

Myling. Scandinavian child spirit, also called utburd. Typically the souls of murdered children, or children who died unbaptized. They will ride travelers at night and demand to be taken to a graveyard so they can rest, buy they get heavier and heavier as the graveyard gets closer, until the person carrying them is driven under the earth by their weight. This belief is derived from the practice of leaving unwanted or deformed infants to die of exposure. Generally they haunt the location where they were abandoned, but folklore also notes their presence in the dwellings of those who killed them —usually a family member. If their remains can be located and buried in hallowed ground, they will disappear.

May 2:#

Sammy is two today. Two years in a row we’ve spent his birthday in Colorado, where I had to stop by Daniel’s. Still never seen a vampire, but Elkins is such a hermit that because I talk to him, other hunters are starting to ask me to pick his brain for them.

Crosses won’t repel them, and sunlight won’t kill them. They can go outside. They need blood to survive, and prefer human blood, but can survive on other mammals if there are no humans around. The only way t be sure of killing them is beheading —although the blood of a dead man is like poison to them. I won’t kill them, but it weakens them, makes them slow and sick.

Daniel says they’re extinct, but he keeps an eye out anyway, and he thinks I should know enough about them to take one on if there are any left. He gave me a copy of this article, in case it was ever useful.

May 17:#

This would have been our seventh anniversary. Wool and copper.

September 7:#

Today was Dean’s first day of school. I put him straight into first grade. He’s almost seven, and I just told the school that he’d been in kindergarten back in Kansas. They didn’t press too hard when I told them that the kids had lost their mother, and we’d been moving around. I think we’ll stay here for a while. Or try, anyway. I felt normal again while I was taking Dean to school. He asked on the way in whether kids in school learned the same stuff he’d been learning. I had to tell him that maybe it wasn’t a good idea for him to talk about Dad’s job on the playground.

He came home on the top of the world, and he brought me worksheets with the names of different parts of a fish, different numbers of apples and oranges added together… this is what it should be like. Why can’t it?

Sammy wants to be in school too. I can’t even imagine staying in one place for long enough that he’ll start here. Three years seems like forever.

November 2:#

Mary has been dead for two years. I’ve been on the road for three days, cleaning up a haunted building in San Francisco. Already, these are starting to seem like an everyday chore to me. You get the story, you find the remains, you burn them and salt them. End of story. These were two girls, and the whole ride back to the roadhouse I was thinking that I’ll never have girls. Dean saw something on my face, or maybe it was just that he knew what day it is. When I got here, he came up to me and asked if I’d had a tough hunt. I couldn’t talk for a minute.

November 14:#

Took Dean shooting. If he’s big enough to try to comfort me, he’s big enough to start learning the tools of the trade. I only let him fire the .22, but he is a deadeye marksman. My drill sergeant would have taken him over me in a second. Times like this, I sure am proud of my boy. I have a feeling it’ll be different with Sammy. Maybe he’s just too young to show it, but I don’t think he’s got the same kind of killer instinct.

1986#

January 1:#

Happy New Year. This year, Mary, I will find out what killed you.

January 24:#

For his seventh birthday, I took Dean shooting again. He wanted to fire one of the big guns —that’s what he called them. I let him shot the Browning, but I steadied his hands. Sammy wanted me to help him make Dean a card. It was like a normal day, like we were a normal family with a mom who was off shopping or at work or something. Instead of dead. That illusion never lasts. I can’t afford to let it.

January 29:#

April 16:#

There’s a reason why they call it Devil’s Gate.

We were supposed to turn Devil’s Gate into a devil’s trap. But I made a mistake, and Bill died.

It’s a slot canyon, used to flood all the time (Arroyo Seco isn’t always seco) until they put in a spillway and built the reservoir. But odd things happened there. Four kids in three years, from 1957-1960, vanish without a trace. Other people see things. No one will talk about it. Bill was sure that something had come up through the canyon thirty years ago, and was about to again. Some kind of hellspawn. So we went there to catch it in the act and take care of it. Hellspawn, that’s the word he used. I don’t know if I believe in Hell. But I do remember the Black Shuck, and the way Mary’s spirit was transformed in Blue Earth. That came from somewhere. Was it a demon? I don’t know if I believe in demons. I’ve seen people who thought they were demons, and acted like demons —but how would you know the difference between a demon and a shape-shifter? How would you kno?

I’m avoiding it. This is how Bill died.

At the mouth of the spillway we found this godawful fluid trickling straight out of the concrete. Dark brown, stinking of sulfur. It burned your fingers to touch it. Bill drew a figure around it, he called it a Devil’s Trap from a book called the Key of Solomon. Psalm 90:13. He used charcoal to draw the trap on the wall of the spillway around the sulfur, and then I laid it out on the ground in front of the tunnel, using salt. Kosher salt, no added iodides. Bill said this was important. He started watching the sky as the sun set. The first stars would tell him when the hellspawn was coming through, he said. I looked up with him, but the stars just looked like stars to me. I have so much to learn. There I was in Pasadena, the boys back at the roadhouse. I wasn’t being a father. I was being a hunter. I was hunting. And while I looked up at the sky, I made a simple mistake. I didn’t pay attention to where my feet were, and I scuffed the salt. Just a little. But enough that when something came out of the mouth of the tunnel, nothing stopped it.

It looked like smoke, and sounded like a million flies. Bill looked down from the stars just in time for it to flow right into him. He started jerking like a condemned man in the electric chair, and two voices were coming out of his mouth. One was the thing, the hellspawn. I don’t know what language it was speaking, but its voice was horrible. It was the sound cancer would make if it could talk. And Bill, he kept saying over and over again, John, shoot me, shoot me, John.

So I did.

It was the worst mistake I ever made. It was careless and stupid and it got a good man killed. A husband and father, and a damned good hunter, and I don’t know how I’m going to explain this to Ellen. And Jo, poor Jo. She’s four years old. How am I going to tell her? I can’t just let Ellen do it. I’m responsible. It was over in less than a minute, Bill Harvelle dead and me standing there with a gun in my hand listening to the echo of the gunshot in the hills and the echo of that awful hellspawn voice in my head.

And to the end, Bill was teaching me. With his body dying and something inside him, he staggered over to the sulfur-stinking wall and let the smoke back out —straight into the Devil’s Trap on the wall. Then he took a step back, careful not to do what I did, and then he sat down and died leaning against the spillway wall under the Devil’s Trap he’d drawn. He saved my life even though I took his. It was a hunter’s death.

I copied the Devil’s Trap, but I didn’t need to. I couldn’t forget it if I wanted to.

May 2:#

Tahlequah, OK. Sammy is three years old today. We celebrated with an ice-cream cake. He was still wearing most of it when he fell asleep. Dean’s sleeping too, the two of them in the bed. The room only has one bed. I’ll sleep on the floor, if I sleep at all. Some night it’s enough to watch them sleep, and know that if they start to have a nightmare I’ll be right there to stop it.

May 17:#

This would have been our eighth anniversary. Eight is bronze.

September 5:#

Dean started second grade. I watch him like a hawk. He makes me swear that I’ll take good care of Sammy before he’ll go to school. God, I love that kid. I have the day with Sammy while Dean is learning whatever kids learn in second grade. Sammy’s a very different kid. He hasn’t taken to the idea of hunting bad guys, and he’s still too young to really understand what it means to avenge his mother. To him, her death just means she’s not here, and he doesn’t remember her. For him, Mary is a word. A mother, to him, is something he never had —but he’s still supposed to be sad that she died. I don’t think he gets it. How could he, really?

October 30:#

I saw an exorcism today. Or something that looked like an exorcism. According to Jim, there really are demons. I don’t know if I believed that —he’s a pastor, so of course he does, but… demons? From Hell? Even after the things I’ve seen these past three years (almost), I can’t quite make demons fit. But between watching what happened to Bill at Devil’s Gate, and what I saw today… i don’t know.

Jim knows I have the journal. After he was done, and the girl was looking around like someone, who’d just woken up from the worst nightmare you can imagine, he took me back to his church and had me copy down a shorter version of the Rituale Romanum exorcism ritual. Usually, he said, you don’t have to read the whole thing. Most demons can’t hold out that long. But he wants me to copy the whole thing just in case. So I’m going to. I don’t know if I believe in demons, but I’m not sure I can disbelieve them anymore, either.

In the expulsion of demonic forces or energie residing in an individual, soul possession, command of one’s motor and abilities.

The Rituale Romanum was widely used in the midto late 13th century in most of eastern Europe until the church banned its use in the beginning of the 14th century. Initial studies indicate that this anti-curse was particularly helpful in ridding the individual of unwanted guests. The first part of the ritual expels the entity from the host. The second half of the ritual banishes the spirit back from whence it came. Repeat the incantantions as follows:

On the completion of the first part of the incantantion the demon may take one or more of several forms ranging from liquid to gaseous to corporeal to any combination of the aforementioned. Great care must be taken in performing the second part of the ritual. The demon upon expulsion can become very powerful without the need of a host. Beware that the spirit can enter a host through any opening in the host. Keep your eyes open and mouth shut.

In Michigan, they call October 30 Devil’s Night.

November 2:#

Mary has been dead for three years. She doesn’t know that Sammy has learned the alphabet, and likes to catch bugs. She doesn’t know that Dean watches his little brother like a hawk every minute, with an expression on his face that says he’s willing to die to keep Sammy safe. She doesn’t know that it’s because I have drilled it into Dean and Sammy is his responsibility. He’s eight years old, and I’ve told him his brother’s life is in his hands. Mary, I didn’t have any right to do tha. But what else could I do?

1987#

January 1:#

Another New Year. Another promise. I will find it, Mary. And kill it.

Tracked down the complete Rituale Romanum, the version the exorcists like to use when they have plenty of time. Hope I’ll never need it.

January 24:#

Dean turns eight today. Second grade is treating him well. I hope we can stay. He’s at school, and they’re going to have a little party for him. Then when he gets home, we’re going to do the family thing. We’re going to Chuck E. Cheese’s, and we’ll eat pizza and play video games until the kids go nuts.

May 2:#

Sammy is four today. And sure enough, we’re in Colorado. That’s three out of four birthdays we’ve been visiting Daniel. The mountains are a good place to spend early May. Maybe we should make a tradition of it —but I have a feeling that we’re not in any place to start traditions. I had to pull Dean out of school when I got a note from Ellen that someone passing through the roadhouse had just exorcised a demon that knew where we were.

I think hunters call something a demon when they don’t know what it is. The word is easy to throw around. But whatever it was, if the Winchesters were on its mind, it’s the enemy. So we’re moving for two reasons. One, the enemy knows where we are. Two, I’m going to go after him where he is… as soon as I figure that out. So we’re in Colorado, on our way to Texas. Dean understands.

Sammy gets Daniel’s books down from the shelves and pretends to read them. He can pick out some words, but what he’s really after the pictures. Like any kid his age. We stopped by here because I took out a strange kind of revenant in April, one I’ve never seen before. It was in Greektown, Detroit. Daniel figured it out right away.

May 17:#

This would have been our ninth anniversary. Pottery. How is six years iron and nine pottery? I wonder if we would have had more children. Mary talked about a girl sometimes. I would have liked having a daughter.

It’s summer, we’re on the move. Already I’m trying to figure out what to do about school in the fall. I’m starting to figure out that you can move a kid from school to school every month, and the schools deal with it because they have to. A part of me wonders how the kid deals with it.

But sons have to be soldiers. And soldiers adapt.

July 13:#

From the mouths of babes… we were in Portland, Maine, because I’d heard of a Miqmaq shaman named David Fowler who lived there. I told him some of my story, and he agreed to raise a manitou and let me ask it some questions. We went down into the basement of his house and he started getting the divination ready. I’m the only white man who’s ever seen it, he said, and he was only doing it for me as a favor to the other hunters he knew. He burned sacred tobacco, and some other herbs I didn’t recognize. The room got more smokey than it seems like it should have. The manitou appeared, and I got right to the point, I asked it who or what killed Mary. And then things went wrong.

I still don’t know whether Fowler made a mistake, or whether a different spirit rode up into our world with the manitou. But whatever happened, it turned out into something physical and real. Like a bear, kind of. And before I could stop it, it killed Fowler. It almost killed me too, but I fought it. I don’t know if I would have won, because the spirit let go of its form, animated Fowler’s body, and went out through the basement window. I got the hell out of there and picked up the boys. We were almost to the New Hampshire state line and I’d told Dean a little about what had happened, because I was so frustrated and ashamed that I had to talk to someone. Sammy was asleep the whole time.

Then Dean asked me one of those killer questions that little kids come up with. “Dad,” he says. “Won’t the manitou go after other people now?”

That’s a hard thing to face. Not that he asked the question, or that he was right, but that he had a better sense of right and wrong than I did. We were back at Fowler’s house an hour later, and that night I tracked him down and killed him. He was prowling around the edges of a Cub Scout campout in a place called Bradbury Mountain. God knows what would have happened if Dean hadn’t spoken up.

I came this close to going completely off the rails. I almost let this quest overwhelm what I know is right, and a bunch of kids almost died because of it. A hunter never passes up a hunt, and a hunter never bails out on a hunt. That will never happen again. Never. I will not fail Mary’s memory, and I will not fail the boys.

The Miqmaq chenoo is a winter spirit with a heart of ice, created from a human which wants to kill those it loves. In the period of transformation, the person who is becoming a chenoo eats snow and refuses other food. He will be ill-tempered and angry. After the transformation, the chenoo will attack and kill other members of the tribe —or anyone else. If it is killed, the body must be completely burned, or else the smallest part of it can be used to create another chenoo. Much in common with the wendigo legends found farther west. I don’t know if that’s the kind of spirit that caught Fowler. It was summer; I don’t think so. But when I went back to his house, I took a book. I read a dead man’s book. Next time I’ll be ready.

November 2:#

Mary has been dead for four years. Dean asked me today what she looked like. He never talks about her on any other day but this one. I couldn’t even show him a picture, so I told him what you tell a boy who asks about his dead mother. I told him that she was beautiful and kind and she loved him and Sammy more than anything in the world.

1988#

January 24:#

Dean turns nine today. We’re on the move, so he might not finish third grade. He calls himself the New Kid all the time. He’s bee in three schools already this year. Who knows how many more?

April 14:#

May 2:#

Sammy is five today. Thank God. He almost didn’t make it.

I could blame Dean, but it’s my fault. There’s enough blame to go around. I missed the kill, and I left Dean watching Sam, and he couldn’t pull the trigger when he needed to. I haven’t taught him well enough. If he is weak like that again, my boys will die… but what kind of father am I to put a nine-year-old boy in a situation where he might have to kill to protect his brother?

I’m the kind of father I have to be. I’m the kind of father who teaches his boys that no man or monster can kill their mother and get away with it. I’m the kind of father who shows them that when it comes to family, you go to the ends of the earth to put things right.

We’re in Wisconsin, so we might as well skip over to Blue Earth and check in with Jim. He’ll want to know about this, and maybe it’ll do me good to talk to him.

May 17:#

This would have been our tenth anniversary. Tin.

September 28:#

Here Perimedes and Euylochus held the victims, while I drew my sword and dug the trench a cubit each way. I made a drink-offering to all the dead, first with honey and milk, then with wine, and thirdly with water, and I sprinkled white barley meal over the whole, praying earnestly to the poor feckless ghosts, and promising them that when I got back to Ithaca I would sacrifice a barren heifer for them, the best i had, and would load the pyre with good things. I also particularly promised that Teiresias should have a black sheep to himself, the best in all my flocks. When I had prayed sufficiently to the dead, I cut the throats of the two sheep and let the blood run into the trench, whereon the ghosts came trooping up from Erebus —brides, young bachelors, old men worn out with toil, maids who had been crossed in love, and brave men who had been killed in battle, with in battle, with their armour still smirched with blood; they came from every quarter and flitted round the trench with a strange kind of screaming sound that made me turn pale with fear. When I saw them coming I told the men to be quick and flay the carcasses of the two dead sheep and make burnt offerings of them, and at the same time to repeat prayers to Hades and to Proserpine; but I sat where I was with my sword drawn and would not let the poor feckless ghosts come near the blood till Teireias should have answered my questions.

… souls after death do as yet love their body which they left, as those souls do whose bodies want due burial or have left their bodies by violent death, and as yet wander about their carcasses in a troubled and moist spirit, being, as it were, allured by something that hath an affinity with them…

Necromantic conjuration from Reginald Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft. Seals of the Earth necessary to bring the spirit.

Sibly, necromantic conjuration. At the tomb or grave, after inscribing the protective circle: “By the virtue of the holy resurrection, and the torments of the damned, I conjure and exorcise thee, spirit of N. deceased, to answer my liege demands, being obedient unto these sacred ceremonies, on pain of everlasting torment and distress. Arise, arise, arise, I charge and command thee.”

November 2:#

Mary has been dead for five years. We were married for five years. I feel like I’m serving a sentence sometimes, and the only way to get out of this prison is to find whoever or whatever took her away from me.

December 5:#

Dean’s teacher called to tell me that he got a subscription to the Weekly World News, and had it delivered to school. How is he paying for it? I could ask him, but he’s already too sharp to give me a straight answer. And I could force him to, but there’s no point. If that makes him feel more at home in his world…

December 27:#

A variation, supposed to be for summoning and speaking to angels. But I’ve never met a hunter who believed in angels. Not even the ones who have seen demons.

1989#

January 24:#

Dean turns ten today. Reagan out of office. A crazy hunter told me a couple of years ago that Reagan was an avatar of the Antichrist because each of his name was six letters: Ronald Wilson Reagan. Reagan also lived at 666 St. Cloud Road.

May 2:#

Sammy is six years old today. He’ll start kindergarten in the fall. Wherever we are. He’s such a different kid than Dean. Quiet, watchful. He’s learned that there are things to fear in the world, but where Dean wants to fight them, you get the sense that Sammy watches, learns. He’s figuring something out. But when Sammy does ask a question, it’s a good one.

May 13:#

May 17:#

This would have been our eleventh anniversary. Steel.

June 10:#

July 4:#

This is how you spend your holiday weekends when you’re a hunter.

I got Sammy and Dean into a day camp not too far from Blue Earth, so I could consult with Pastor Jim about a few things while the boys got to be regular kids for a while. Should have known that not even summer camp could be normal for the Winchesters. On the fifth day of the camp, Dean was canoeing through an easy rapids on the Blue Earth River. Things went bad. Dean swore to me when he came back that he’d seen something —only he said “someone”— capsize the canoe. I didn’t think about it too much… until the next week, when another canoe went over and the counselor paddling it died. I spent a couple of days looking into it, and ran across a Cree legend about humanoid tricksters called mannegishi. They live in river rapids and like to tip canoes, but they usually don’t get malevolent unless the locals do something to make them angry. So what was it?

Turns out the camp is expanding, and part of the work involved blasting some riverside rock formations that used to have pictographs showing the Cree’s reverence for the little bastards. The mannegishi didn’t like having those gone, and started to take it out on the campers.

I’d have killed every one of them for coming after Dean, but the truth is they had a right to be mad. So I kept my head and got Jim to put me in touch with a Cree medicine man who lived over in South Dakota. I complained about the distance, and Jim told me to shut up and be happy I didn’t have to go to Montana or Saskatchewan, where most of the Cree live now. The medicine man called himself Joey Tall Pine, which I figure is a moniker he took on for the tourists, but after the last six years, I’m the last guy in the world who gets to complain about someone using an alias. I gave him a ride back to Blue Earth and we went down to the rapids that night (now two days ago). He talked things over with the mannegishi, and they struck a bargain. They’d stop going after kids at the camp if Joey redid some of the pictographs somewhere and guaranteed that they wouldn’t be destroyed. Jim stepped in and said, hey, I don’t have nearly enough aquatic tricksters in the creek behind my house. Presto —mannegishi in Jim’s creek, and Joey Tall Pine got to exercise his pictographic talent.

Part of me still wants to kill them, because of what happened to Dean, but when I take a minute to cool off I realize that it’s the camp’s fault. Some day camp, wrecking pictographs so they can expand their boat launch. The boys are going someplace else next week, for as long as we can stay.

Anyway, it’s over now. Fireworks going off, I’ve got a couple of beers in me, the boys are asleep in a tent out in Jim’s backyard. For the moment, the battle pauses. Mary, I can’t fight every minute.

August 18:#

Other water spirits I’ve read up on:

Vodyanoy. Russian male water spirit, sometimes said to be a shape-shifter but more often appears as an old man, skin freckled with scales, a green beard tangled with much and underwater plants. May live in whirlpools. In larger bodies of water, often lives in sunken ships, served by the drowned ghosts of the ships’ crews. Drowns people to serve him as slaves, but also protects fishermen who appease him by giving him the first fish of their catch. Likes butter and tobacco.

Also likes the rusalka, and often either marries one or takes several as servants or concubines. Rusalki are spirits of women who are murdered or die by suicide in the water —sometimes children who were drowned by their mothers. (See Woman in White.) The adult versions sing to seduce passersby or sailors, then draw them underwater to become their spirit lovers. Lore sometimes suggest vampiric qualities. Some rusalki will vanish if their deaths are avenged. Can also be dispelled if kept out of water long enough for her hair to dry completely. The child versions can be dispelled by baptism with holy water.

Have heard of vodyanoy from hunters in Alaska. Never seen one. Shoshone legends from Wyoming tell of Water Ghost Woman, who beguiles hunters and travelers with sexual attraction, also shoots them with spirit arrows.

The Germanic Nix combines attributes of voydanoy and rusalka. In human forma, the Nix is usually male and handsome, and dangerous to unmarried women and unbaptized children. Most active at summer and winter solstice (Christianized versions of the legend say Christmas Eve). Plays music to beguile its target. Also an omen of drowning —similar to banshee— can be heard screaming from the water, signaling that someone is going to drown there. Like vodyanoy, the Nix likes tobacco, and also vodka. Can be made to appear by dripping blood into water, or by sacrificing a black animal.

Once, in Pinckney, Michigan, I suckered a Nix by using a Black Shuck as the sacrifice. That was a show, a demon dog tangling with a water spirit. The Shuck won, and I sent it back to Hell for its trouble.

Sometimes the Nix appears as a horse called Bäckahästen, which, if ridden, will leap into the nearest body of water, drowning the rider. Overlap here with Celtic/Scottish stories of the kelpie and each uisge. Kelpies appear from the fog near rivers, and, if ridden, drown their riders. The each uisge can be ridden safely as long as it can’t see or smell water. The minute it does, it drags the rider in and devours him, leaving only the liver.

This last detail I thought was just storyteller’s elaboration until I tangled with an each uisge at the Quabbin Reservoir in Massachusetts. That one took human form, too, and looked like a handsome young man who always had weeds in his hair. I was lucky to get out with my liver.

I used to like swimming, but that’s one more thing I lost to the job. Water spirits don’t need much water, either. See British legends of Jenny Greenteeth or Peg-o’-the-Well. Egyptian El Nadaha (“the caller”) lures children into canals to drown them.

Also have heard from other hunters about a hundred old racetrack in Goshen, NY. A horse and rider who drowned right after the turn of the century come back and ride across the lake, sometimes chasing or threatening people in the area. Bäckahästen, sounds like? But I haven’t seen anywhere else that a human could be transformed into one.

November 2:#

Mary has been dead for six years. Today I overheard the boys talking about her, about her death. Sammy’s old enough now to be asking hard questions, and I think that’s making Dean think about some things that he’d put away until now. He’s a tough little kid, Dean. Like me. But he’s also like me in the way the holds things in. Now his little brother is asking him things and he’s got to figure out a way to protect Sammy while Sammy’s questions put him through the emotional wringer all over again. And what do I do? They were talking to each other. If I butt in, they’ll clamp up. They’ve got the kid bond, the kind that keeps adults out. They’d tell me what I wanted to hear, but the truth is I can’t get at the real way they feel about their mother, because I can’t let them get at my feelings. It kills me every day. There’s no way to tell them that. We have to go on and find whatever killed their mother, my wife. Mary.

For the boy’s sake, I’m going to try to stay in one place for longer. Keep the hunting trips to a few hours’ drive. At least until I have a firmer lead on what killed Mary. Then all bets are off.

1990#

DAY		NIGHT
1	Yain	Beron
2	Janor	Barol
3	Nasnia	Thami
4	Salla	Athar
5	Sadedali	Methon
6	Thamur	Rana
7	Ourer	Netos
8	Thamic	Tafrac
9	Neron	Sassur
10	Jayon	Agle
11	Abai	Calerva
12	Natalon	Salam

January 24:#

Dean turns eleven today. He asked for his own gun, and I got him one. A Seecamp LWS .32 automatic, the smallest gun I could find that offered any kind of stopping power. Dean and I poured silver slugs for it ourselves, and we loaded it with alternating silver and Winchester hollow-points. He’s got it in his pocket now.

May 2:#

Sammy is seven today. I think we’re going to get him through the first grade this year. He’s a smart little kid, but we’ve moved around so much that he’s a little behind in school. And I haven’t been doing the stuff I need to do with him on that front. I need to be better around reading to him —stuff other than field manuals and weird newspaper headlines. He’s okay at math, and he knows some scientific stuff, because e’s seen people doing some weird experiments at the roadhouse and Pastor Jim’s, but he neds your basic little kid school stuff. I’d ask Dean to do it, but there’s only so much you can pile on a kid. Having Sammy’s life in his hands is enough for Dean; he can’t be responsible for home-schooling Sammy too. God. This is more time I’m reminded how much we need Mary.

May 17:#

This would have been our twelfth anniversary. Silk.

October 3:#

November 2:#

Mary has been dead for seven years.

December 25:#

Battled a nasty little bugger today. Kicked the best back to wherever it came from. But as I looked into that stinking mouth, I wondered for the hundredth time: when’s my time gonna come? And if something happens to me, who’ll take care of the boys? Dean tries to be the big man a lot, but he’s not even twelve. And Sam’s just seven. Just trying to do this without you is hard enough, Mary… Mary…

Mary…

Focus. The Beast of Bray Road. It’s the Black Shuck and the hellhound all over again. Where do these black dogs come from? Agrippa had a black dog, said to be his familiar —he freed it from his deathbed and it trotted outside, never to be seen again. If you can believe anything anyone says about Agrripa. Even Churchill called his depression his black dog. What was really getting to him? He maybe needed a hunter around.

Some Christmas.

1991#

January 3:#

Something new yesterday. I took out a nest of succubi —at least that’s what everyone I talked to says they were. Sexually predatory, voracious demons. They can change their appearance, and they all transformed to look like Mary at one point. God help me, I was weak. It was like seeing her again, in the flesh, and I let myself believe for just a minute. Or not believe, really. I agreed to their deception. And then, when I’d gotten my head straight again, I killed them. All of them. Was going to stay here for a while, but I think we’ll need to be on our way. I’m going to stay in the West. Maybe New Mexico next, so we would be close to Daniel. I’m learning a lot from him, even though I’ve still never seen a vampire.

Succubi exist across world mythologies. Judeo-Christian versions have them as female demons who harvest semen that incubi (male version) then use to impregnate women with children who are more readily possessed by demons —or who are more likely to become witches. Birth defects were also said to be the result of incubi. A parallel European tradition, of the night-mare, is a creature which rides the sleeper, partially suffocating him and at the same time causal sexual dreams. The four succubi named in the Zohar are Naamah, Lilith, Elsheth Zenunium, ang Agrat Bat Mahlat. Naamah was regarded as the inventor of divination, and in some traditions as a patron spirit of music.

In certain strains of Hebrew myth, incubi and succubi are generally called lilin and lilith. They are said to be the children of Lilith, and to die at a rate of one hundred per day because she would not come back to Adam. They can prey on children —boys until circumcision at eight days, and girls for twenty days— but also attack women by causing infertility and difficult births, even miscarriages. Men become victims of the lilith by being ridden at night, the seed being used to create more demonic children.

An amulet inscribed with the initials of the three Magi —Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar— is said to protect children from lilin and lilith.

Other traditions include Greek empusa, which attacked travelers but also drained their life force through intercourse, and Turkish Al Basti (which also kidnaps horses). Martin Luther referred to Melusine as a succubus, but she doesn’t seem to fit the mold; Melusine is more of a swan-maiden/selkie/kitsune type.

The succubi I killed said something about having plans for the Winchesters. Guess they’ll have to cancel those plans.

January 24:#

Dean turn twelve today. School has started again, but we’re going to move on. Next week, the Winchesters are going to be residents of Albuquerque. Dean’s going to be a normal sixth grader for at least the next couple of months. He even talked about wanting to play baseball this spring, but I’m not sure he’s serious. I think he’s taking his cues from me, talking about everyday stuff when I try to keep us in one place. Then when we’re on the road again, all he can talk about is hunting.

March 17:#

In the last week, Sammy has played a sunbeam in the school play and I killed a demon inhabiting the body of an old woman. It knew something the succubi, I think. We’re being followed. Or are we? Am I getting paranoid? I have every reason to be, but it’s something I have to guard against. The boys are doing well. Sammy’s talking about doing a science project to enter in the fair next month. He’s really taken to his teacher, Ms. Lyle, and she’s encouraging him. Smart kid, Sammy. It was warm today, and the boys kicked a soccer ball around. That’s one of the nice things about Albuquerque. I picked up a job working construction. Feels good to be punching a clock again, actually. The regular rhythm of it. Part of me needs that. I thought about going back to turning wrenches, but it didn’t feel right. I think a lot of things died in Lawrence, and that dream was one of them.

April 1:#

Monday, I walked away from another job, and my younger son almost was kidnapped by some kind of demon. Sammy qualified for the New Mexico Science Fair, and his teacher, Ms. Lyle, said she’d take him. Only she started to take him somewhere else. I don’t know where, but I caught up to her at a crossroads. She would have killed me, and taken Sammy, but Dean came through. I don’t have any words for how proud I am of him. His brother’s under some kind of spell, there’s a giant monster made out of train parts coming after me, and he has the presence of mind to find this journal and read the exorcism out of it. I almost lost both of my boys today. Ms. Lyle, or the thing calling itself Ms. Lyle, wanted Sammy for something. It reminds me of the variant stories about succubi/lamiae taking children children, or killing children. And if I’m honest with myself, I have to take that train of thought all the way: the stories also say that succubi come to claim the children that have been fathered by incubi, which is ridiculous.

I still don’t know what Ms. Lyle wanted. She just said Sam was special.

We’re on the road again. How am I going to explain to Sammy that we’re not going back to school? How am I going to explain Ms. Lyle?

To top it all off, I had to give Sammy a sharp lecture on not talking to strangers. While I was on the phone with Bobby, he just got out of the car and went up to a black Seville. I read him the riot act —Dean too, since he let it happen and it’s his job to watch Sammy. All Sammy would say about it was that the guy wanted to know where we were going.

April 7:#

In Sioux Falls to meet Bobby, boys along since it’s not safe for them to be in Albuquerque anymore. Between the two of us, Bobby and I hashed out what’s been going on with Ms. Lyle and the others. Bobby thinks I’m a fool for not wanting to believe that demons really exist, and he’s not shy about telling me. Probably he’s right. All the signs were there with Ms. Lyle. But if you buy demons, you have to buy Hell, and if you buy Hell, you have to buy Satan, which means you have to buy God, right? I can’t sign on to one belief if it means I have to take the others. Only Bobby says that he’s never run across a demon who’s laid eyes on the Devil. Most demons apparently don’t even believe he exists. The way Bobby put it is that demons are a lot like us where belief is concerned. I don’t see it that way. If demons exist, they are nothing like us.

But I guess I think they do exist. And I think Ms. Lyle was one. I was in bed with her… that thing… and it was a demon. I let it trick me away from the mission. I let myself be led, I let myself be convinced that everything can be normal again, and it was all a tactic. She wanted something from me, and she thought she knew how to get it.

And she was almost right. I’ve been lonely since Mary… I wanted to be touched. Just contact. And looking back, it makes me sick.

Have been reading up on crossroads out of Bobby’s library. There’s a nearly universal folk-magic tradition that crossroads are gateways between worlds. Robert Johnson: “I went to the crossroads/trying to flag a ride.” And then he writes “Hellhound on My Trail,” too. Wonder if he knew something… plenty of stories that he sold his soul to the Devil, but people have been saying that about musicians since medieval times. Another medieval note: criminals and suicides used to be buried at crossroads. A sacrifice to the spirits that used those gateways?

Papa Legba in voodoo magic is the loa of crossroads. You go to him if you want to talk to the iwa, the gods (going back to Yoruba traditions). He is the gatekeeper, also perhaps a psychopomp —like Eshu (sometimes called Ellegua in the Yoruba/Lukumi, later Exu in Brazilian folk magic). Eshu is the patron of travelers, god of crossroads. He’s also a trickster, sometimes a cruel one. Both Eshu and Papa Legba must be the first of any spirits invoked if a magical or divination ritual is going to work. His symbol, called a veve:

Veve is inscribed on the floor in some kind of powder. It can be anything from flour to gunpowder, depending on the ceremony. Hoodoo traditions prescribe certain actions at crossroads to gain gifts in music, love, or power. Or money.

April 18:#

Went to see Silas last night. He’s an old friend of Bobby’s, some kind of soothsayer who sells tires. I went to his place and his daughter told me he’s been in a coma… since last November 2, the seventh anniversary of Mary’s death. When I went to see him at the hospital, he snapped out of it long enough to tell me a couple of things I didn’t want to hear.

One, he thinks that Sammy’s special somehow.

Two, Dean and I need to be ready “for what’s to come.”

Then he was gone again, out cold. What the hell does it mean? Why Sammy? What does he have to do with any of this? And what is coming? Silas either couldn’t say anything else, or wouldn’t. He said I brought him out of his coma, and then he was gone back into it.

Tomorrow I’m going to leave Sammy with Bobby so I can take Dean deer hunting. It’s out of season, but the Dakotas are lousy with deer and Dean needs to pull a trigger to sharpen him up. Also I need to think about Sammy. Why was Ms. Lyle so interested in him?

More voodoo. The houngan (man) or mambo (woman) is the priest. You need them to talk to the loas, also called orisha (loas also known as iwa —African and New World terminologies mix freely). Orisha are said to be beings who manifest aspects of the natural world, and aspects of a nameless god. So they straddle the physical and spirit worlds. The bokor is a magician-priest who can do both divination/séance magic and darker magic: hexes, charms, etc. They’re usually for hire. Bobby says that it’s possible to be both houngan and bokor. Bokor are the ones who make zombies.

Ogun is the loa (or maybe iwa, or orisha?) of iron, smithy, hunting, fire, etc. He’s a warrior. His veve:

I’ve been hearing about a magical gun. The story goes that Samuel Colt one Halloween night made a gun and thirteen bullets that could kill anything. Wonder if that gun exists, or if it’s just a hunter legend. And if it exists, I wonder where it is… Ogun would know. Tomorrow, after Dean and I go hunting, might be the time to ask him. Go to New Orleans? Must be a bokor down there who would do a hunter a favor.

Other veves:

Baron Samedi, loa of the dead, stands at crossroads. Also loa of sex, known for his coarse apetites. Eros and Thanatos, all in one, dressed in tux and top hat. If you want to talk to him, bring plenty of booze and tobacco.

Maman Brigitte, Baron Samedi’s wife, vulgar like her husband, likes to drink hot peppers. Protects gravestones if they are sanctified to her. She and Baron Samedi are related to the Ghede, a family of spirits that have to do with cemeteries, funerals, death, etc. Different traditions spell out the relationship differently. Either Samedi is a Ghede, or he created them or brought them to life, or he is an aspect of them and they speak through him.

I have to sleep. Up early tomorrow.

April 19:#

The hunting trip was nearly a disaster. Dean missed his shot. I sent him after the buck, a beautiful twelve-pointer, and he dropped the gun when he tripped on the trail. Then out of nowhere comes Sammy, who picks up the gun and lays that big boy out. A seven-year-old… well, almost eight.

Then he tells me that he thought the deer had taken Dean’s gun, and that Sammy had to protect him.

It’s moments like those that kill me. I taught him that, Dean too. I taught them that everything should be seen as a threat. And now Sammy sees a deer and thinks it’s trying to hurt his brother.

God.

Things got worse from there because Sammy told me he’d gotten up, wanting to come after me and Dean, and found the man in the black Seville outside Bobby’s house. He rode in the Seville to the trailhead, and found us from there. I don’t even know how to get my head around that. I feel like I should punish him somehow, but the truth is I should be punishing myself.

We get home, and Bobby tells me to go see Silas again. I didn’t want to do it, but when I got to his house, there he was, awake and standing in his front door like he’d never been sick in his life. I don’t know how to explain it. He said again that Sammy was special, and he wanted some time to talk to Sam and understand what was happening. So Dean and I left for an hour, and on the way back I saw the Seville.

When we got to Silas’ place, there was Sammy, sitting on the porch. He said he and Silas talked for a while. I went inside, left Dean out with his brother to catch up. Inside… I’ve never seen anything like it. Or if I have, it was after an artillery strike in Nam. Silas was just in pieces, little bits of him stuck to the walls and the floor. Scrawled in blood on the kitchen cabinets, the words KILL HIM.

Now I’ve got to find the sonofabitch that killed Silas, too.

April 20:#

Been on the run, running harder even than usual. The driver of the Seville called himself Anderson, said he was a hunter… and he was hunting Sam. He said Sam had killed Silas, but there’s no way that can be true. No little boy could have done what I saw in there. But Anderson wouldn’t listen, and now in the last twenty-four hours I’ve committed kidnapping, grand theft auto (well, semi), and murder. That’s five hunters I’ve killed, if you count H —but who really knows what he was? And I don’t know that Anderson was what he said he was, either. He passed up two chances to take Sammy out. I didn’t give him a third. And I didn’t give any of three Dowry brothers a chance at all.

It was Dean who dilled Anderson. My oldest son is blooded. All I ever write about is death. Because all I ever see is death, and you know what? I did that to myself. It’s got to end, but it can’t end until I settle what happened to Mary.

May 2:#

Sammy is eight years old today. Happy birthday, kiddo. No matter what the demons and soothsayers and lunatic albinos say, you’re special to me just because you’re my son. And I’m never going to let anything happen to you.

Ms. Lyle was after Sammy because he has something she wants. She said he was special. So did Silas. What’s different about him? He’s just a boy. My boy.

Have started reading about demonology because of Bobby. I still have a hard time believing it. So far I’m sorting through a couple of different books that he says are important.

May 17:#

This would have been our thirteenth anniversary. Lace. Eleven is steel, twelve and thirteen are silk and lace? Feels like it should be the other way around, that steel should come later. Or maybe once you’ve got the steel to keep a marriage going, then you get to enjoy the silk and lace.

I’ll never know.

November 2:#

Mary has been dead for eight years. I’ve been learning about reapers. There’s more than one, and it’s not always a hooded skeleton with a scythe, but that’s where I’ll start. The traditional Grim Reaper is a skeleton or solemn-looking man carrying a scythe, who cuts off people’s lives as though he were harvesting grain. Death personified is a figure or fictional character which has existed in mythology and popular culture since the earliest days of storytelling. Because the reality of death has had a substantial influence on the human psyche and the development of civilization as a whole, the personification of Death as a living, sentient entity is a concept that has existed in all known societies since the beginnings of recorded history. In the United States, Death is usually shown as a skeletal figure wearing a midnight-black gown with a hood, while in Europe he is often depicted similarly but dressed in white, which is the traditional color worn at funerals in many places.

… and not long afterward he consecrated after his death another of his sons, called Muth, whom he had by Rhea; this (Muth) the Phoenicians esteem the same as Thanatos [“Death”] and Pluto.

But earlier in a philosophical creation myth Sanchuniathon has referred to great wind which merged with its parents and that connection was called Eros (Desire):

From its connection Mot was produced, which some say is mud, and others a putrescence of water compound; and out of this came every germ of creation, and the generation of the universe. So there were certain animals which had no sensation, and out of them grew intelligent animals which were called “Zophasemin,” that is “observers of heaven”; and they were formed like the shape of an egg. Also Mot bust forth into light, and sun, and moon, and stars, and the great constellations.

December 25:#

Sometimes I think Sammy’s been reading this journal.

But he’s not going to read it tonight, because here we are, Christmas night, and there’s two hundred miles of scrub prairie and desert between me and them. No Christmas tree, no carrots and milk for Santa and the reindeer. A couple of days ago I handed them presents, and they gave me a set of night-vision goggles that Dean must have pinched from a gun show we passed through in Amarillo a couple of months ago. They’re growing up without me. And they’re both starting to act out a little, because we’re apart so much. Sam gets resentful and has some trouble handling his temper. Dean tries to fix everything and keep us together as a team. Neither of them should have to do those things.

After this year… the succubi and Ms. Lyle (Lilith?), Silas… this has been a rough one. They came after my boys. We made it, but they’re going to keep coming. This enemy doesn’t quit until they’re dead, and I don’t even know who’s sending them. How do I fight them?

And how do I avoid this question: Would the boys be better off somewhere else, with someone else, living normal lives?

No. I’m their father. They belong with me.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

1992#

January 24:#

Dean turns thirteen today. For his birthday we went out to dinner at a greasy spoon called Mama Janer’s, in Flint, Michigan. It’s freezing and miserable here, and we’re headed farther north to check out some things I’ve been hearing about shape-shifters in the North Woods, from Michigan all the way across through Minnesota. Odd for them to be active this time of year, since there aren’t that many people outside for them to prey on. It makes me think something big is happening.

Outside L’Anse, in a roadhouse full of Indians from the lumber camp down the way, I overheard this:

There was a white woman named Jennie who had an Indian working for her —a shiftless, lazy Sioux. She hated him so much that if he was at the table, she wouldn’t sit down, but he bragged down around the docks that he was going to have her. All I have to do, he said, is go into the woods and find the right root, and you’ll see. I’ll have that Jennie. Well, all of his buddies down at the docks, they made fun of him, but pretty soon he started leaving little candies around the table, and Jennie would eat them when he wasn’t around so he wouldn’t know she was doing it, and wouldn’t you know it, all of a sudden —wasn’t but a couple of months later— she up and married him. Then, when he had her in his power, he treated her real bad, almost starved her to death. He worked his bearwalk on one of her relatives, too, and that was enough. They took care of him, and we didn’t ever see him around here no more.

March 30:#

I thought the lesson was learned back in Wisconsin, but the same thing almost happened again. I left the boys next at the beach in Two Lakes State Park and went looking for a skin-walker, and then it was Ichi all over again. Only this time the skinwalker took on the appearance of a park ranger it had killed, and nearly got the boys to come with it because they trusted the uniform. I still can’t completely trust them on a hunt. I took it down, and lit into the two of them. Especially Dean. I have to be hard on him because one of these days I’m not going to be around, and he’s the one who’s going to have to look out for his brother. He’s a badass, though. I thought I was tough when I was thirteen, but Dean would have kicked my ass six ways to Sunday.

April 27:#

May 2:#

Sammy is nine years old today. Last year on his birthday we were getting the hell out of Albuquerque. This year I nearly lost the boys because of the skinwalker. They’re both learning, but they’ve got a lot still to learn.

May 11:#

This list is beings that can change their shape at will, or who undergo recurrent changes.

May 17:#

This would have been our fourteenth anniversary. Ivory.

June 21:#

Last night, Sammy woke up in the middle of the night telling me he was afraid of the thing in the closet. I went and looked. There was nothing in the closet, but I’ve seen too much not to believe that there could be. So I handed Sammy the .45 and told him the next time he saw the thing in the closet, he knew what to do. I don’t think I’ll win any award from parenting organizations, but five nights running now Sammy has slept without nightmares. Sometimes a .45 under your pillow is all you need.

Daniel says vampires can’t change their shapes. Says that’s all an invention of Bram Stoker.

November 2:#

Mary has been dead for nine years. Nine years I’ve been on this quest, and I’ve accumulated so much stuff I needed t rent a storage space for it.

December 9:#

1992#

January 24:#

Dean turns thirteen today. For his birthday we went out to dinner at a greasy spoon called Mama Janer’s, in Flint, Michigan. It’s freezing and miserable here, and we’re headed farther north to check out some things I’ve been hearing about shape-shifters in the North Woods, from Michigan all the way across through Minnesota. Odd for them to be active this time of year, since there aren’t that many people outside for them to prey on. It makes me think something big is happening.

Outside L’Anse, in a roadhouse full of Indians from the lumber camp down the way, I overheard this:

There was a white woman named Jennie who had an Indian working for her —a shiftless, lazy Sioux. She hated him so much that if he was at the table, she wouldn’t sit down, but he bragged down around the docks that he was going to have her. All I have to do, he said, is go into the woods and find the right root, and you’ll see. I’ll have that Jennie. Well, all of his buddies down at the docks, they made fun of him, but pretty soon he started leaving little candies around the table, and Jennie would eat them when he wasn’t around so he wouldn’t know she was doing it, and wouldn’t you know it, all of a sudden —wasn’t but a couple of months later— she up and married him. Then, when he had her in his power, he treated her real bad, almost starved her to death. He worked his bearwalk on one of her relatives, too, and that was enough. They took care of him, and we didn’t ever see him around here no more.

March 30:#

I thought the lesson was learned back in Wisconsin, but the same thing almost happened again. I left the boys next at the beach in Two Lakes State Park and went looking for a skin-walker, and then it was Ichi all over again. Only this time the skinwalker took on the appearance of a park ranger it had killed, and nearly got the boys to come with it because they trusted the uniform. I still can’t completely trust them on a hunt. I took it down, and lit into the two of them. Especially Dean. I have to be hard on him because one of these days I’m not going to be around, and he’s the one who’s going to have to look out for his brother. He’s a badass, though. I thought I was tough when I was thirteen, but Dean would have kicked my ass six ways to Sunday.

April 27:#

May 2:#

Sammy is nine years old today. Last year on his birthday we were getting the hell out of Albuquerque. This year I nearly lost the boys because of the skinwalker. They’re both learning, but they’ve got a lot still to learn.

May 11:#

This list is beings that can change their shape at will, or who undergo recurrent changes.

May 17:#

This would have been our fourteenth anniversary. Ivory.

June 21:#

Last night, Sammy woke up in the middle of the night telling me he was afraid of the thing in the closet. I went and looked. There was nothing in the closet, but I’ve seen too much not to believe that there could be. So I handed Sammy the .45 and told him the next time he saw the thing in the closet, he knew what to do. I don’t think I’ll win any award from parenting organizations, but five nights running now Sammy has slept without nightmares. Sometimes a .45 under your pillow is all you need.

Daniel says vampires can’t change their shapes. Says that’s all an invention of Bram Stoker.

November 2:#

Mary has been dead for nine years. Nine years I’ve been on this quest, and I’ve accumulated so much stuff I needed t rent a storage space for it.

December 9:#

1994#

January 24:#

Dean turns fifteen today. A week ago he helped me take out a spirit haunting a grocery owned by an Indian family in Erie, Pennsylvania. It was like any other spirit —you find the remains, you salt, you burn. But also it wasn’t. I’m learning that all spirits have some things in common, but it matters who they’re haunting. It matters what their traditions were when they were alive. Have been reading about Indian mythology. Gods upon gods, thousand of them, and each of them has attendant monsters and demons. Some of the ones that keep popping up, not so much mythology as folklore, are pishacha and acheri.

Pishacha eat human flesh and are supposed to be the sons of anger. They haunt cemeteries and places where cremations have taken place. They can change their shape, and in some stories they can also become invisible. Sometimes they attack and eat their victims, other times they possess them and drive them insane. I’m reminded of the unnamed demon in the Testament of Solomon who creeps “beside the men who pass along among the tombs, and in untimely season I assume the form of the dead; and if I catch any one, I at once destroy him with my sword. But if I cannot destroy him, I cause him to be possessed with a demon.”

Acheri is a demon that disguises itself as a little girl. From Indian folk tradition. Acheri are said to inhabit the mountains and murder travelers who are taken by its helpless guise. A protection against them is to wear a red thread around the neck (this was also said to protect small children against sorcery in some European countries).

Red thread: Kabbalah? According to the rabbis, there’s no mention in the Torah or Talmud about red strings, also no mention in written Kabbalah. But an old folk superstition states that tying a red string around the body is a segulah, a protective act. Some Orthodox Jews tie red strings on the cribs of infants to ward off evil spirits or the evil eye. Scholarly Jewish tradition considers the red string a superstition that veers dangerously close to impiety, even idol-worship.

Sefer Yetzirah: Everything derived from the Word, the creation of language, from which comes every aspect of physical world. Seven pairs of contrasts:

There were formed seven double letters, Beth, Gimel, Daleth, Kaph, Pe, Resh, Tau, each has two voices, either aspirated or softened. These are the foundations of Life, Peace, Riches, Beauty or Reputation, Wisdom, Fruitfulness, and power. These are double, because their opposites take part in life; opposed to Life is Death; to Peace, War; to Riches, Poverty; to Beauty or Reputations, Deformity or Disrepute; to Wisdon, Ignorance; to Fruitfulness, Sterility; to Power, Slavery.

No good, no evil. The way a man lives his life in relationship to natural and divine order dictates whether he will perceive good or evil.

Tree of Life described in Sefer Yetzirah, but more in Zohar —belief among esoteric theologians that it corresponds with Tree of Life mentioned in Genesis. Two versions. One has 10 Sephirot, 22 connections; the other 11 and 24. Individual characteristics of Sephirot and pathways hotly contested.

Above the first Sephirah, Keter, is the Ayn Sot Aur, the beginning point that no mind can comprehend but that we need to grant so that there can be a beginning point. With Keter, Binah, Chakhmah, time and space begin. These are the Crown, Wisdom, and Understanding —rest of creation comes from these.

Tetragammaton arranged in different ways can be tetraktys, as in Pythagorean mysticism. From tetraktys, quincunx was derived. Pythagoras also always used the pentagram with two points upward —this considered evil by medieval scholars/alchemists/demonologists.

May 2:#

Sammy is eleven years old today. When Dean turned eleven, he wanted a gun of his own. Sammy asked me for a computer. That right there tells you all you need to know about the differences between them. I got him his computer, too. A Macintosh Performa. It’s in the trunk right now, but every time we spend a night under a roof he’s going to want it plugged in, I can tell. He was telling me about the Internet today. I’m not sure I understand what he’s talking about, but according to Sammy, everything you could ever want to know is on the Internet somewhere, and if you have a computer you can find it. Looks like Team Winchester just took a big leap ahead when it comes to gathering information. Every army needs intelligence. We subscribed to Prodigy, which, according to Sammy, is the best way to get to the World Wide Web. I used one of the credit cards Bobby helped me get.

May 17:#

This would have been our sixteenth anniversary. No traditional gift, or substance. Except in England, it’s tungsten. Tungsten? How is that romantic?

October 31:#

Witches known to change into rabbits, cats, other familiar animals. Halloween costumes a surviving remnant of the belief that transformed witches would be abroad before All Hallow’s Eve…

November 2:#

Mary has been dead for eleven years. Eleven: doubled 1, said to represent a strand of DNA. Also balance. Primer number. First number you can’t count on your hands. Eleventh of the major arcana is Justice.

Revelations 11:11: “And after three days and a half the Spirit of life from God entered into them, and they stood upon their feet; and great fear fell upon them which saw them.”

December 11:#

Wendigo knows how to fast long winters —hibernates for years at a time— will hunt when necessary. Legends from local lore state that it’s hundreds of years old —was once a man, and turned into cannibal, possibly from conditions such as harsh winters cut off from supplies. Miner/hunter/courier DeBois: conditions of isolation & depravity turned him into a monster. Different cultures around the world carry similar legends. Cannibalism endows the consumer with certain powers such as heightened senses, strength, speed, agility.

Desperate, lonely —what price survival? Eats members of his own tribe. Always hungry, alone, numb. Less than human. Can never return, senses gone in normal sense. Wendigos are feared in history —petroglyphs are clear depictions— North American versions: gigantic spirit, over fifteen feet tall, glowing eyes, long yellow fangs, overly long tongue, most have yellowish swallow skin. Some are matted with hair, lanky, and driven by hunger. Can be male or female, but always hungry. Some versions of the legend have them growing in size with every meal, so there’s always more to feed. Others say wendigo has a heart of ice which must be shattered or melted to kill it.

Cannibalism plus magic equals a dark, dark road. I’ve never seen anything so hungry. Every motion and sound and breath of the wendigo is about hunger. It’s stealthy when stalking is prey, blinding fast when pouncing, savage and ravenous when eating.

I wish I didn’t know about that last part, but you see things in this job.

Algernon Blackwood didn’t know the half of it.

1995#

January 13:#

Verstegan says werewolves “are certayne sorcerers, who having annoynted their bodies with an ointment which they make by the instinct of the devil, and putting on a certayne inchaunted gridle, does not only unto the view of others seem as wolves, but to their own thinking have both the shape and nature of wolves, so long as they wear the said girdle. And they do dispose themselves as very wolves, in worrying and killing, and most of humane creatures.” Verstegan hints that the werewolf has no conscious memory of its actions while it is transformed —“to their own thinking.” Other accounts, not Verstegan’s, have this hand-in-hand with a belief that werewolves can only transform while they are asleep.

January 24:#

Dean turns sixteen today. We’re in Montana, and I think we’re on the trail of a werewolf. That bow-hunting practice is going to come in handy. Sometimes you can’t use a gun, and this is one of them. Tomorrow we’re going out on a hunt, and I’m going to let him take the lead.

January 25:#

Bull’s-eye. Dean is a helluva shot with anything. He’s coming into his own as a hunter.

Werewolves will avoid wolfsbane when they can, as well as holy artifacts and silver. Being stabbed or cut with a silver knife can sometimes force a werewolf to revert to human shape. The silver bullet legend is probably true, but not all hunters believe in it. You hear grumbles around the gathering places. I was at the roadhouse not too long ago and heard three hunters complaining that either they’d done something wrong when they made their silver bullets, or that some werewolves just weren’t affected.

Lycanthropy might have a cure. According to some traditions, killing a particular werewolf removes its curse on all those it’s bitten —severing the bloodline, in a way.

He who desires to become an oborot, let him seek in the forest a hewn-down tree; let him stab it with a small copper knife, and walk round the tree, repeating the following incantation:

April 20:#

Going to Oklahoma City. More than two people involved? Word already out among hunters that McVeigh had some questionable associates. Possible supernatural angle. Sightings in the area in days before explosion. Daniel says he’s heard something about freak weather. 35º 28' N 97º 32' W

May 2:#

Sammy is twelve years old today. He’s a handful. Spends all of his time on the computer, unless he’s arguing with me. I can’t understand him, and he doesn’t try to understand me. Typical father-son trouble, but it feels worse because neither one of us can talk about what happened to his mother. He wants to be in one place, live a normal life. The older he gets, the more he wants it. But the older he gets, the more I’m going to need him to help on the hunt. He’s got to understand that. We will finish this quest, and he’s going to be a part of it.

May 17:#

This would have been our seventeenth anniversary. If we’d been British, turquoise. But Americans don’t believe in seventeenth anniversaries, I guess. And I never got to have one. Turquoise carvings place in Native American graves to attract good spirits and guard the grave. Also, turquoise tied onto a bow was supposed to make you shoot more accurately.

November 2:#

Mary has been dead for twelve years. Biblical necromancy, from II Samuel:

November 13:#

Sammy’s soccer team won a division championship. On to the state playoffs. I’m proud as hell of him, and I’m sad too. He’s battling to keep himself together the only way he knows how —by rebelling. Only because he’s Sammy, he rebels toward being normal. I get it, even if I can’t let it keep happening. We owe Mary too much to give up now. But I’m going to keep this trophy.

December 1:#

Qliphoth originally described as that which separates the human form the divine design in the Tree of Life… or worldly residue of once-holy sparks of divine being. Later seen as evil or fallen versions of sephirot, or as necessary result of Adam and Eve eating of the Tree of Knowledge, creating an imbalance in the universe that was restored by creation of qliphoth. Diagram here expanded to incorporate ideas from medieval demonology. Qliphoth sometimes characterized as coming into being whenever sin or evil occurs, and manifesting as misfortune, disaster, or demonic entities.

Babylonian Talmud count the number of demons as 7,405,926? Figure from Weir, Pseudomnoarchia Daemonum. 1111 x 6666. Doesn’t divide evenly into 666. Or 616.

1996#

January 24:#

Dean turns seventeen today. We went shooting. Then I sent him out on his first hunt. I’ve let him take the lead before, but I’ve always been there to back him up. This time he’s on his own. Partly it’s a test, and partly I wanted some time with Sammy. Should be no problem for Dean. Ghosts of two nuns haunting St. Stephen’s Indian Mission in Riverton, Wyoming. Simple salt-and-burn mission. Nuns in love with each other, then discovered. Killed themselves. We scoped the situation out, figured that something must be left behind that’s now a focus for the haunting. Bible, rosary beads, some small article that’s hidden somewhere in their room. I figured Dean would take care of it no problem, but I still stayed close by with Sammy.

The boys are old enough now that we can start spending a little more time in one place. Thinking California, maybe. When I need to fly solo, they’re big enough to stay home by themselves for a while without me worrying. When we go on a hunt together, they can bring their homework. That’s what I wanted to talk to Sammy about. It’s going to be hard enough getting his bullheaded self through adolescence without also having to fight every other day about how he wants to be Jimmy Normal. We can make this work if we do it together —but he’s going to have to know that everyone pulls their weight. Mary comes first.

Dean took care of the nuns just like I thought he would, but I don’t think I’m going to be sending him on any more solos soon. That one was a little tense.

March 11:#

Called Fossilman by the locals, but possibly Cannibal Owl? Oka-moo-bitch, Shoshone legend of being that would take bad children, and sometimes unwary hunters. Associated folklore of children learning magic or hunting while in Owl’s captivity, sometimes learning to turn his tricks against him. Shoshone, Paute, Shuswap.

To Shoshone, petroglyph sites known as Poha Kahni, House of Power. Spirit world closer to the surface there. After ritual bath in a hot spring, the shaman went to Poha Kahni and entered a trance to journey in the spirit world and capture power, or return with knowledge or kidnapped souls.

May 2:#

Sammy is thirteen today. He’s finishing sixth grade, a year late and with all the grudges to show for it. When Dean hit this age, I started to worry about girls, booze, drugs… all the regular stuff. With Sammy, I don’t worry about that. What worries me is that he’s got so much bottled up inside him that when it comes out, he won’t be able to control it. I think that’s part of why he has the dreams. He’s different, my Sammy. I think he’s a little haunted by being in the room with Mary when she was killed. He feels like he should remember something, or be able to offer a clue. God, it must be terrible to know you witnessed something but that you’ll never be able to remember it or tell anyone about it. I think he also wonders about Ms. Lyle. Dean and I never told him the whole story.

June 17:#

May 17:#

This would have been our eighteenth anniversary. Bismuth. A brittle metal, silvery white with tinges of pink and other colors.

August 21:#

From Agrippa: “And so we must understand that which Psellus the Platonist saith, viz. That Dogs, Crows, and Cocks conduce much to watchfulness: also the Nightingale, and Bat, and horn Owle, and in these the heart, head, and eyes especially. Therefore it is said, if any shall carry the heart of a Crow, or a Bat about him, he shall not sleep till he cast it away from him. The same doth the head of a Bat dryed, and bound to the right arme of him that is awake, for if it be put upon him when he is asleep, it is said, that he shall not be awaked till it be taken off from him. After the same manner doth a Frog, and an Owle make one talkative and of these specially the tongue, and heart; So the tongue also of a Water-frog laid under the head, makes a man speak in his sleep, and the heart of a scrich-Owle laid upon the left breast of a woman that is asleep is said to make her utter all her secrets. The same also the heart of the horn Owle is said to do, also the sewet of a Hare laid upon the breast of one that is asleep.”

November 2:#

Mary has been dead for thirteen years. Longer than I knew her. What does it say about me that I’ve devoted more of my life to her death than I ever did to her life? If I could only see her again, just once, so I could ask her if she thinks I’m doing the right thing… but remember what happened at Jim’s that first time. Would it be her? How would I know? Also remember Ms. Lyle.

Life is about remembering the dead and making sure you protect the living.

Met an alchemist who believes that the souls of the dead can be pinned into homunculi. Offered to do this for me and Mary. I turned him down, but it wasn’t easy. Spirits that can’t go on turn bad, and I couldn’t stand to see that happen to her. I’ve seen it happen to too many other people who were loved.

November 14:#

Got this one from one Emil Besetzny, who published a book in 1873 about homunculi created by John Ferdinand, Count of Kuffstein (if there wasn’t a place called Kuffstein, someone would have to make it up), in about 1775. Besetzny’s sources were apparentluy Masonic manuscripts and the journal of the count’s butler, who went by the name of Kammerer. The count’s collaborating alchemist was a Rosicrucian monk by the name of Abbé Geloni.

And about golems: Most golems can’t speak. Idea is that if granted speech, they would have soul, and that an imperfect creation (created by man rather than God) would have an imperfect soul and be dangerous.

Eleazar of Worms mentions golems in commentary on Sefer Yetzirah:

To control the golem, the creator writes one of the names of God on its forehead, or on a tablet under its tongue. This can then be erased or removed. Or the creator could write the word Emet (ajx “truth”) on its forehead. By erasing the first letter in Emet to form Met (jx “dead”) the creator would destroy the golem.

According to Kabbalah, a golem can never disobey its creator.

1997#

January 7:#

January 24:#

I gave Dean the Impala today for his eighteenth birthday. The car is 30 years old now, amazing it runs as well as it does. I’ve taught Dean a lot of what I know about working on cars, which was everything until 1983. Haven’t kept up since then, all the computers and emissions spaghetti drives me nuts. Give me a fat 327, no electronics, just pistons, crankshaft, and a gas pedal. That’s a car. And now it’s my son’s. He knows I’ll still be driving it, but he’s a man now, and since he’s already made his share of kills, this was the only rite of passage I could think of. He goddam well better take care of it.

February 23:#

April 28:#

Heard from Bobby today. He and a group went up to some fly-speck town in South Dakota because there were rumors about demonic possession there. Looks like nothing happened. The place was clean. I talked to Bobby for a long time about demons. I’m starting to think that I don’t have any choice but to believe in them.

April 30:#

Exorcism for an area or community. Takes the form of a prayer to St. Michael the Archangel, which is kind of ironic because there’s no such a thing as angels. Ask any hunter. Demons, now those are real. So when you call out to an angel that doesn’t exist, what are you really calling out to? I don’t know if I would trust this one.

Four classes of demons in Judeo-Christian demonology, corresponding to cardinal directions and four elements. Also four seasons.

Waite, The Occult Sciences: “Much that passed current in the west as White (i.e. permissible) Magic was only a disguised goeticism, and many of the resplendent angels invoked with divine rites reveal their cloven hoofs. It is not too much to say that a large majority of past psychological experiments were conducted to establish communication with demons, and that for unlawful purposes. The popular conceptions concerning the diabolical spheres, which have been all accredited by magic, may have been gross exagerations of fact concerning rudimentary and perverse intelligences, but the wilful viciousness of the communicants is substantially untouched thereby.”

May 2:#

Sammy is fourteen years old today. He’s been having strange dreams again. I’ve tried to keep an eye out for any signs that he’s more than a regular kid, but I don’t see them. He’s sensitive, has a lot of imagination, but that’s about it. Plus now that he’s hitting adolescence, he’s a giant pain in the ass. Dean just chased girls and snuck around with beers in his coat pockets. That was teenage trouble I could understand. But Sammy just shuts down sometimes. Won’t talk to anyone, and when he does, it’s only because he wants to argue about something. He’s got all the willpower us Winchesters are known for, but in him it sits quietly. You don’t notice it’s there until he decides he feels strongly enough about something that he won’t compromise. Then you might as well wrestle angels.

May 17:#

This would have been our nineteenth anniversary. Nobody thinks nineteen is worth a traditional gift.

Number is sacred in Islam and Baha’i. 19 Arabic letters in the Basmala, 19 months of 19 days each in the Baha’i calendar. Solar eclipses tend to be 19 years apart. Babylonians considered the 19th day of every month to be unlucky.

May 23:#

June 3:#

June 16:#

Got one of my boys through school. Dean is graduated. Seems like a miracle, after I don’t know how many schools, but it happened. He’s got his diploma.

Looks like Sammy’s going to take an extra year. He’s just going to be starting ninth grade next fall, because we were moving so much when he was in second, third, fourth grades that we lost a year and I don’t think we’ll be able to get it back. I haven’t talked to him about it, but he must know it’s going to happen. Couple of times I’ve tried to talk to school administrators about double-promoting him, but then they want to see test scores, gifted enrollments, that kind of thing. I don’t have any of that. What I do have is a borderline-genius kid who’s going to be nineteen when he graduates high school.

July 24:#

Tacitus on worship of Nerthus:

On an island in the sea stands an inviolate grove, in which, veiled with a cloth, is a chariot that none but the priest may touch. The priest can feel the presence of the goddess in this holy of holies, and attends her with deepest reverence as her chariot is drawn along by cows. Then follow days of rejoicing and merry-making in every place that she condescends to visit and sojourn in. No one goes to war, no one takes up arms; every iron object is locked away… After that, the chariot, the vestments, and (believe it if you will) the goddess herself, are cleansed in a secluded lake. This service is performed by slaves who are immediately afterward drowned in the lake. (Germania)

August 22:#

November 2:#

Mary has been dead for fourteen years.

Death is the separation of the soul from the body. The creation of a zombie is the rebinding of body and soul via necromancy. The animated body can move, speak, even think, but it still can’t outrun physical decay. Zombies don’t last very long, and the more able they are to think, the more they suffer from the same derangement that eventually gets any spirit that’s been prevented from moving on. It’s a rule: if spirits can’t move on, the tug of the afterlife sooner or later drives them mad.

I guess this is all supposed to make me feel better about her being dead.

Agrippa: “In like manner they say, that a cloth that was about a dead Corpse hath received from thence the property of sadness, and melancholy; and that the halter wherewith a man was hanged hath certain powerful properties”

1998#

January 24:#

Dean’s nineteenth. I was coming home from Vietnam right after my nineteenth. Dean’s war isn’t going to end like that. Had a dream last night that I found Mary’s murderer, and knew that I would have to die to take him out. That’s all right if it protects the boys.

Aum (“God’s voice is Aum”), swastika (before Nazis, considered a good-luck symbol), ourobouros (derived from Miky Way, also Platonic idea of first living creature), Star of David (triangles chiral —Seal of Solomon?), ankh (hieroglyph “life”)

April 17:#

May 2:#

Sammy is fifteen today. He’ll start high school this fall. Next spring he’ll have a driver’s license. Can’t wait to have the boys fighting over the Impala. It’s a little easier with Sammy lately. He seems more committed. Maybe that’s because he’s able to have more control over being in school, having a friend here and there. I try not to tell him what I really think, which is that he’s shirking sometimes. Winchesters don’t quit. I don’t think he’s quitting, but he gets stubborn, and then he won’t listen to anything I say. He and Dean don’t get along as well as they used to. Could be Sammy’s getting tired of being the little brother, and always having Dean take the lead.

Could be it’s time for Sammy to go out on his first solo. I should look around for something simple, like I did for Dean. Don’t know why I’m so worried, really. Sammy’s never hesitated when push came to shove.

May 5:#

Sneeze on Monday, sneeze for danger. Sneeze on Tuesday, kiss a stranger. Sneeze on Wednesday, sneeze for a letter. Sneeze on Thursday, something better. Sneeze on Friday, sneeze for woe. Sneeze on Saturday, a journey to go. Sneeze on Sunday, your safety seek —for Satan will have you for the rest of the week!

May 17:#

This would have been our twentieth anniversary. China. Mary and I never had china. We barely had Conrningware. Twenty: four fives. Number of digits on the human body.

July 11:#

August 4:#

Back from Orlando with Sammy. Dean gave me some shuck and jive about how he blazed through five states while we were gone, but the Impala’s odometer has barely budged. I’m guessing a girl is involved.

September 14:#

October 31:#

November 2:#

Mary has been dead for fifteen years. I feel like I’m getting closer. Every year I learn a little more. Every supernatural being I put away teaches me something. Every hunter I talk to fills another gap.

December 12:#

December 28:#

Howling of dogs a death omen. From Egyptians? Jackal-headed Anubis conducted souls to the afterlife. Mesoamerican and Native American, also African belief that dogs led spirits to the underworld. Persians kept dogs by their deathbeds to ward off evil spirits that might prey on departed souls.

1999#

January 1:#

Figure I would try to put together a sort of Revenant 101. The lore is all over the place, so probably some experimenting is needed to settle on best tactics. The European sources say revenants, including vampires, may be destroyed by:

January 24:#

Dean turns twenty today. He’s in Ohio somewhere, hasn’t called in a couple of days. Tracking a possible poltergeist. He’s supposed to call in every night. Mission discipline is critical.

March 21:#

May 2:#

Sammy is sixteen years old today. God knows he’s got plenty of torments. Now he’s got a driver’s license, too. Doesn’t make much difference. He’s known how to drive since he was nine.

May 17:#

This would have been our twenty-first anniversary. Mary, I’ve been doing this for almost sixteen years, and sometimes I feel like I’m not any closer to an answer than I was when I watched the house burn in 1983. What am I doing? I’ve thrown everything away for this, to join an underground tribe of hunters and spend my nights watching exorcisms and killing spirits… and what have I done to the boys? They don’t have friends, not the way I did. I lived in the same town the whole time I was growing up. Now they’re almost grown, and they’ve seen every back road and abandoned farmhouse in the country, but they don’t have roots. We’ve never been back to Lawrence.

Wonder how may exorcisms I’ve seen. Maybe fifty, sixty? How many of them were real demons, and how many were some other kind of prankster spirit? Anything can call itself a demon. I’ve smelled the sulfur, though. I’ve seen the holy water and the Devil’s Traps work. The whole thing might be easier if the demons weren’t so cagey about the Big Guy down there. If they’ve never seen him, and most of them don’t believe he exists, then hey, there’s no fallen angels ruling over Hell. So no angels, period. And then what are demons? And what is Hell? They (creatures that say they’re demons) say it exists.

November 2:#

Mary has been dead for sixteen years. The century’s ending, by popular reckoning. Wonder what’s waiting on the other side.

Koran, sura 72, al-Jinn:

Say (O Muhammad): It is revealed unto me that a company of the Jinn gave ear, and they said: Lo! we have heard a marvellous Koran, which guideth unto righteousness, so we believe in it and we ascribe no partner unto our Lord. And (we believe) that He —exalted be the glory of our Lord!— hath taken neither wife nor son, And that the foolish one among us used to speak concerning Allah an atrocious lie. And lo! we had supposed that humankind and jinn would not speak a lie concerning Allah —and indeed (O Muhammad) individuals of the jinn, so that they increased them in revolt against Alla; And indeed they supposed, even as ye suppose, that Allah would not raise anyone (from the dead). And (the Jinn who had listened to the Koran said): We had sought the heaven but had found it filled with strong warders and meteors. And we used to sit on places (high) therein to listen. But he who listeneth now findeth a flame in wait for him; and we know not whether harm is boded unto all who are in the earth, or whether their Lord intendeth guidance for them. And among us there are righteous folk and among us there are far from that. We are sects having different rules. And we know that we cannot escape from Allah in the earth, nor can we escape by flight. And when we heard the guidance, we believed therein, and whoso believeth in his Lord, he feareth neither loss nor oppression. And there are among us some who have surrendered (to Allah) and there are among us some who are unjust. And whoso hath surrendered to Allah, such have taken the right path purposefully. And as for those who are unjust, they are firewood for hell.

2000#

January 1:#

Y2K didn’t end the world. New Year’s Eve almost did Dean in, though. He’s upstairs, immobile. I don’t feel good myself.

January 17:#

January 24:#

Dean turns twenty-one today. I’d buy him a beer if I thought it would be something new. He’s also old enough to buy his own guns now. I tried to raise him right, and looks like I did. He’s a scam artist, a ladies’ man, and an absolutely loyal son. He knows what’s right and doesn’t hesitate to do it. I’m proud of him. Now that he’s hunting on his own I don’t see as much of him, but I know he’s out there. When I call him in on a job, he’s right there every time. I’ve spent the last sixteen years afraid that I was going to screw him up somehow. Maybe now I can forget about that.

February 5:#

February 28:#

April 30:#

May 2:#

Sammy is seventeen years old today. I’m going to guess that he’s the only sophomore in the United States who has read the Clavicula Solomonis and made parts of it work. Bought him a new computer. He’s a zealot about having a Macintosh. Also he’s a walking dictionary of the occult and esoteric. There’s a lot of his mother in Sammy. God, I wish he had some way to know that other than me telling him.

May 15:#

Barrett on a spirit book: This book being thus perfected, let it be brought, in a clear and fair night, to a circle prepared in a cross-way, according to the art which we have before delivered; and there, in the first place, the book is to be opened, and to be consecrated according to the rites and ways which we have before delivered concerning consecration, which being done, let all the spirits be called which are written in the book, in their own order and place, conjuring them thrice by the bonds described in the book that they come to that place within the space of three days, to assure their obedience and confirm the same, to the book so to be consecrated; then let the book be wrapped up in a clean linen cloth, and bury it in the midst of the circle, and stop the hole so as it may not be perceived or discovered: the circle being destroyed after you have licensed the spirits depart before sun-rise; and on the third day, about the middle of the night, return and make the circle anew and on thy knees make prayer unto God, and give thanks to him; and let a precious perfume be made, open the hole in which you buried your book and take it out, and so let it be kept, not opening the same. Then after licensing the spirits in their order and destroying the circle, depart before sunrise.

May 17:#

This would have been our twenty-second anniversary. Every year, the more I learn about communicating with the dead, the harder it gets not to talk to you, Mary. I dream about it, I stop myself at least once a week from digging out a ritual and bringing you to me, even if it’s only for a few minutes. Then what happened with Jim stops me. I don’t think I could stand to see that happen again. You’re alive to me because I think of nothing but avenging you. That’s the way it has to be.

June 3:#

September 15:#

October 11:#

EVP: Can record voices of the dead, sometimes unintentionally. Not always intended as communication. Sometimes it’s more like eavesdropping. Worth a shot in most hauntings, from what I hear. Either you get nothing, so you lose nothing, or you hear something that helps identify the spirit. Spooky collection of recordings at the roadhouse, but it’s been, what… ten years since we were there?

November 2:#

Mary has been dead for seventeen years. She’s watching. Time doesn’t pass in heaven.

Or in Hell?

December 8:#

2001#

January 24:#

Happy 22, Dean. Hope you’re enjoying Arkansas.

March 18:#

May 2:#

Sammy is eighteen years old today. Surprised he didn’t take off. We’re not getting along too well. He hunts when we need him to, but he’s never committed himself the way Dean did. Dean’s never known any other way to live, or if he has, he doesn’t act like it. He’s playing the role he was born to play. Sammy’s the younger brother. He doesn’t know what his role is, even though I can tell him until I’m blue in the face and we’re both ready to kill each other. He’s got one more year of school and them I’m drafting him full-time into the family business. I’ve given him more slack than I ever gave Dean, more than I would have ever gotten from my dad. He needed it. Now he’s a grown man, or almost. Time for him to step into what’s expected of him. Dean never even thought about college. We used to joke about it once in a while. But Sammy still believes he can have a normal life, but they’re both more useful to the world as hunters than… what, lawyers? Dentists? Sammy’s convinced himself that smart kids have to go to college. Part of my job is to convince him that college would be a waste of his smarts. And I gotta hand it to him on the brains front: there’s nothing he can’t find on the computer. I still dig around in actual books, libraries, newspapers. It’s all keystrokes and search words for Sammy. He’s done a good job hiding our trail on all the credit cards.

May 4:#

La Cueva, near Mesilla NM. Hermit with healing powers lived in this cave. Was murdered, and found on a crucifix wearing a gridle of spikes. Murder unsolved, but hermit’s ghost said to appear on Friday nights at sundown.

May 17:#

This would have been our twenty-third anniversary. Now the new century is really here, and I’m still on the hunt. Getting closer? Bobby threw me this curveball the other day:

Admitting that demons exist might not be the same as believing in demons —esp. since the demons don’t even believe. Even if they aren’t demons, if they think they are —if they’re some kind of spirit that believes itself a demon— then they’re going to act like demons are supposed to act.

In other words, even if demons aren’t real, as long as there are malevolent spirits that think they’re demons and act like demons, they’ll need to be fought like demons. Kind of a spin on the thoughtform, created from belief…?

Sounds too complicated to me. Either there are demons or there aren’t.

Another Seal of Solomon:

June 20:#

John Dee. 1527-1608. Chose coronation date of Queen Elizabeth, signed his letters to her with 007. Knew Mercator, Tycho Brahe. Propaedeumata Aphoristica, 1558. Quinti Libri Mysteriorum. Monas Hierglyphica, 1564. Enochian language and alphabet. Tried to syncretize Hermetic, Pythagorean, Christian traditions, Kabbalistic belief that numbers were the basis of reality and understanding. Gravestone disappeared after his death.

July 18:#

Enoch one of the Judeo-Christian tradition’s crazy magnets. Supposedly taken up into heaven at the age of 365, transformed into the angel Metatron. In Islamic tradition, Idris. Pre-Judaic Watchers tales have Enoch as one of the angels who taught men the first sciences, and how things worked. In variant stories, Enoch is a giant —son of the fallen angels? Nephilim? Great-grandfather of Noah. Brought writing and arts, therefore considered a father of language. Dee picks up on this, tries to recover original Enochian language.

You have to be soft-headed to believe in angels. But I’ve written down every random esoteric thing I’ve run across, just in case it might be a clue. Someone who didn’t know me before reading this journal would think I was crazy.

September 11:#

Shaken. 11 is the number of sin, between the perfection of 10 —digits on the fingers— and the holiness of 12 —Zodiac signs, apostles, hours of day and night… I can’t believe that a handful of religious nuts with boxcutters could do something like this. There must be more to it. Have been on the phone with every hunter I know today, and it’s unanimous. Everyone’s talking demons, nobody has any details but nobody thinks that what’s on the surface is all there is. I’m going to New York to look around. Meeting a couple of other guys there.

September 15:#

God, the spirits in Shanksville. The story coming out is bull.

Looking for sigils that resemble any of these.

November 2:#

Eighteen years.

December 19:#

2002#

January 24:#

Dean turns twenty-three today. It’s a good age, twenty-three. You’re starting not to be a kid anymore, and you’re still young enough that you feel invincible physically. Forty-eight doesn’t feel like that at all.

February 2:#

Demon’s Alley, West Milford, NJ. Entire neighborhood of abandoned houses. Stories of cult massacre, ritual sacrifice. Unable to substantiate.

March 3:#

Leonardo NJ. Dempsey house. Murder/suicide, bodies burned in basement boilers. Haunted by policeman who killed family, also his wife and children. The rope was hard to burn.

March 8:#

Sam told me and Dean today that he is going to Stanford. I told him that if he goes, he better stay gone. I think Dean would have taken a swing at him if I hadn’t kept my cool. Barely. Trying to work out what to do about this. We can’t tolerate any of us quitting. We’re better as a team. I’ve protected Sammy his whole life, and so has Dean. Could be I’ve gone too easy on him. Dean always responded to discipline because he believed in the mission. I thought that by giving Sammy more room, I’d let him find his own way to dedication like Dean’s. Doesn’t look like that worked out. Now he’s a straight-A student, computer whiz… I think he’s gone a little soft. How many tight spots have we been in since he was a baby? And now he’s going to college? He can go to hell, is where he can go.

March 29:#

I got a call from Missouri. Stull Church was torn down last night by persons unknown. The building was rickety as hell, but still I can’t help wonder if it’s related somehow… but if it is, why now? There’s nothing about the date, nothing else going on in the area that I’ve heard about. Its spirits will still be there, though. They don’t care about the building. Whatever goes up in the church’s place is going to have bad atmosphere. Wonder if the foundation was torn out, and what might be in there.

April 10:#

Daeva: Zoroastrian creatures/demons. Once characterized as false gods, later demons of chaos and disorder. More recently believed to be incarnations of pure evil. Younger Avesta opposes them to the gods of light? Named daevas: Angra, Mainyu (later Ahriman), Sarva, Indra, Nanghaithya, Tauru, Zairi, Nasu. Also another demon, Paitisha. Daevas vulnerable to fire, and drawn to the physical processes of the human body. Also they are attracted by speaking during meals. Tradition in medieval Zoroastrianism discouraged eating after dark, since daevas were out then. Book of Arda Wiraz describes them spreading across the Earth at nightfall, causing destruction —both personal and on a larger scale. Daevas sometimes blame for natural disasters that happened at night. Occasionally they are given incubus-like properties. About three dozen daevas named in Zian texts, and more referred to.

May 2:#

Sammy is nineteen today. He’s got some decisions to make.

May 17:#

This would have been our twenty-fourth anniversary. Funny how after twenty years, there’s a five- or ten-year gap between special gift years. What would I have given you, Mary? A clock, for 24 hours in the day? A Tanakh, which has 24 books? A piece of 24-karat pure gold jewelry? Gold doesn’t come until 50 years, though. Getting a little too drunk to keep coming up with ideas.

June 13:#

Sam graduated. He didn’t go to the ceremony. I think he’s still carrying a grudge that it took him an extra year. What do yo want me to do, Sammy? Should we have stayed in Lawrence while whatever killed your mother came back for you? Should we have sat around fat, dumb, and happy even though war had been declared? How long would we have lasted that way?

July 30:#

Now in Hibbing County, Minnestoa —this county has more missing persons per capita than anywhere in the state. Very few of these cases have been solved. There are people here who speak of a “phantom attacker.” Is Hibbing a possible hunting ground? Why are there so many missing from here? Some of these date back generations. I have spoken to a few of the locals, there are rumors about a dark figure who comes out at night, takes a victim, and vanishes. No trace of victims. Some people hear unusual sounds close to the place the victims have disappeared. Is this just a local legend or some kind of phantom? (Like Springheel Jack, phantom gassers, etc.?)

A few people here will talk but no one seems to know anything. You can tell they are scared. The police have nothing to go on. Talked to an officer who said all those cases are unsolved. There is absolutely no evidence, and no bodies have ever been found. This is likely a phantom attacker of some kind, I am almost certain. The local folklore is similar to Springheel Jack, for example. In London, he terrorized people starting in 1837… strange sightings of a cloaked figure that breathed blue-white fire. It targeted women mostly. Never solved and is still a mystery. Other legends of this type include Nain Rouge, Mothman, and phantom gassers. There are definitely similarities to this Hibbing area phantom.

August 31:#

Sam left. I told him that if he was going, it was permanent. I meant it.

November 2:#

Mary has been dead for nineteen years. I haven’t kept the family together, Mary. I’m sorry. Sam’s gone because he’s headstrong and because I couldn’t make him understand how important this is to all of us. Now Dean tells me he’s cut off contact with Sam, and it’s killing me. I can’t stand the idea of the boys separated. It’s one thing for me to take a stand. I’m the father, I have to lay down the law for the family. Maybe that’s the Marine in me talking, and maybe it’s not the right thing to do all the time, but it’s gotten us this far. Now I’m questioning myself. Brothers have to stick together.

2003#

January 24:#

Dean turns twenty-four today. I was twenty-four when I married his mother. Sorry, kid. Every boy has to cut the apron strings sometime, and for you it’s not going to be until we kill off a supernatural entity that seriously need killing. Then we’ll all be free of your mother’s ghost. We’ll be able to live normal lives. But maybe not. Maybe we’ve all been hunters too long now.

March 20:#

Wars and rumors of wars.

Babylonian demon-bowls found facedown, or two glued together. Inside, skull fragments, inscribed eggshells. Bowls inscribed with Persian charms, ourobouros symbols, bound demons, human figures breaking free of demonic influence. Placed in corners of rooms to trap demons, which were believed to enter at corners of rooms. Could also be used aggresively to guide demons to an adversary. Buried in cemeteries or on the desired target’s property.

May 2:#

Sam’s twentieth birthday. He’s in California. Dean and I are packing up to get the hell out of Athens, Ohio, which as of this morning is free and clear of haunted sorority houses. I heard Dean talking about Sam on the phone earlier, but he didn’t say anything about the conversation to me. I can’t bring it up to Dean, either, especially not the mood he’s been in. Usually after a hunt he’s on fire, like the killing is a buzz. Today you can’t talk to him. If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was because of a girl, but we’ve only been here a couple of weeks. It’s not like Dean to fall hard for a girl that fast. He was spending a lot of time with a reporter —think she was a reporter. A looker. Could be anything, though. Hard to tell how he’s reacting to Sam going AWOL. Dean’s like me. He doesn’t talk. He acts. We act.

May 17:#

This would have been our twenty-fifth anniversary. That’s silver. Associated with the moon in alchemy —maybe that’s why silver bullets take out werewolves.

June 13:#

Dean heard about a succubus in Brooklyn from Richie. He lit out after it like he bore it a personal grudge. I’m getting more and more sure that he had some kind of girl trouble in Ohio, and every female spirit and demon in North America’s going to suffer for it. Just hope he keeps his head.

July 30:#

US Route 491 dedicated today. Formerly Route 666, The Devil’s Highway. A Navajo medicine man did a ceremony to remove the curse. What do the Navajo care about the Number of the Beast? I’m going to have to go down there again and see. Wonder if the black dogs will give up on the road now. Were they thoughtforms all along, conjured up by all the people who made the connection between the number and the Devil? Was it the name of the road? Or were they real?

October 9:#

In Kittanning, Pennsylvania. Poltergeist in a playground built on an old cemetery. Of all the stupid places to put a playground. Sixth or seventh time I’ve dealt with a poltergeist, enough to know that the psychokinetic theory about girls and puberty is a load of crap. Usually I don’t do this, but I’ve kind of gotten friendly with one of the locals, Jerry Panowski. One of his kids has been targeted a couple of times. For some reason he’s easy to talk to. Most of the civilians you meet either don’t want to know about the supernatural or blame you for bringing it into their lives once you tell them about it. Jerry’s not like that. He understands, I think. Maybe he understands better than I do. Still feel conflicted about Sam. I don’t think I did the wrong thing, but I also don’t want him out there alone and vulnerable. I’ve been through Palo Alto half a dozen times in the past year, just to make sure he’s okay. I look around, see if there’s any sign of anything happening that shouldn’t be. He’s my son. I can’t abandon him. But I also can’t go back on what I said. You don’t stop loving a kid, but you also can’t let love blind you to what’s right.

October 27:#

Reading around about Samhain, and came across a creature called a puca. It seems to be a distant cousin of the Wild Hunt (also source of the character of Puck?). Quebec version, chasse-galerie, where an unlucky lumberjack gets taken for a ride with the devil on a haunted canoe. Wild Hunt riders recruit accidental viewers to join them, and some can never leave. Often there’s a warning not to leave until a certain event has occurred, and the new rider alights to find that centuries have passed. (Typical of visits to the lands of fairies, where time doesn’t pass at the same rate… see also kitsune stories from Japan.)

Perhaps puca takes riders through time…? To the underworld? Puca said to be able to answer questions, especially on November 1. Would like to know more. Creatures with this kind of ability have answers, and answers are what I need.

November 2:#

Mary has been dead for twenty years. Spent the anniversary at the Winchester Mystery House. After some looking around, I found a distant family connection. Some great-great-uncle, parallel descent. Genealogy isn’t my strong suit. House built after Sarah Winchester got advice from a medium after her husband and daughter died. Medium said the family was haunted because Winchester guns had killed so many people. Sarah had to build a house to distract and trap the spirits, and keep building in 1882, didn’t stop until she died in 1922. Construction was around the clock. House built up to seven stories as of 1906, partially collapsed in the earthquake. Now four stories. Approximately 160 rooms, no one is quite sure. Stairs lead nowhere, doors open onto nothing, hallways wind around into dead ends, secret passages are everywhere. No blueprint or complete plan exists. Sarah would tell the workmen what she wanted done from day to day, sketching partial floor plans on napkins or pieces of paper. Some of those survive.

Number 13 is everywhere. 13 palm trees in front of the house, wall hooks are set in rows of 13, stained-glass window custom from Tiffany with 13 stones. Chandeliers to fit 13 candles. Spiderweb motif —she thought it was lucky. From story of Saint Felix (lucky)?

525 South Winchester Boulevard. Multiple of 5. 25 times 21. Interesting numbers in there. Sarah chose the address for a reason. Fives are strong, and 21 (3×7) powerful in numerology. Plus the number adds up to 12, and it’s symmetrical.

Spotted a valknut, redone as crescent moons. Old Viking symbol related to Odin’s powers over the mind, became a symbol of the Trinity in medieval Europe. Also invokes moon symbolism.

This Winchester saga is an interesting flip side to the story of the Colt. Wonder if Samuel Colt was haunted.

2004#

January 24:#

Dean turns twenty-five today. There was a report on CNN this morning, of a vampire, strigoi, dug up and its heart burned, in Romania less than a month ago.

February 18:#

Serious bad mojo, from a houngan in New Iberia: Get bad vinegar, beef gall, filet gumbo with red pepper, and put names written across each other in bottles. Shake the bottle for nine mornings and talk and tell it what you want it to do. To kill the victim, turn it upside down and bury it breast-deep, and he will die.

April 2:#

Black Angel, Iowa City. Oakland Cemetery. Pregnant women miscarry, touching can be fatal, walking under wings.

May 2:#

Sammy is twenty-one years old today. May he go and get hammered like the college student he is. Was there again last week to keep an eye on him, and he’s got a new girlfriend.

May 12:#

Sancte Michael Archangele, defende nos in proelio contra nequitiam et insidias diaboli est præsidium. Imperet illi Deus, supplices deprecamur: tuque, princeps militiæ cælestis, Satanam aliosque spiritus malignos, qui ad perditionem animarum pervagantur in mundo, divina virtute. In infernum detrude. Amen.

Imprecatory exorcism. Should only be done by a priest if possible. If not, all bets are off. Sign of the cross at X. Supposed to work just as well if not better than the Rituale Romanum

Exorcizo te, omnis spiritus immunde, in nomine Dei (X) Patris omnipotentis, et in nomine Jesu (X) Christi Filii ejus, Domini et Judicis nostri, et in virtute Spiritus (X) Sancti, ut descedas ab hoc plasmate Dei (name), quod Dominus noster ad templum sanctum suum vocar dignatus est, ut fiat templum Dei vivi, et Spiritus Sanctus habitet in eo. Per eumdem Christum Dominum nostrum, qui venturus est judicare vivos et mortuos, et saeculum per ignem.

Wet fingertips with saliva, and touch the ears and nostrils of the possessed.

May 17:#

This would have been our twenty-sixth anniversary. Two days ago, like some awful kind of early present, I got a call from Bobby. It was a long conversation, and by the end of it, I was a confirmed believer in demons, because after twenty-one years, we might just have a real lead on what happened to Mary. All the things I’ve seen, and I wrote them off to other kinds of phenomena… Goddamnit. I should have been listening all this time. How much closer would I be? Years of lost time to make up for. For a while I thought it might have been Lilith, but now I know better.

I haven’t told Dean yet. Can’t take the chance that he’d try something he’s not ready to do. I’ve already lost Mary, and Sam. I can’t lose Dean too.

October 3:#

November 2:#

Mary has been dead for twenty-one years. At last I’m getting closer. If it was a demon that killed her, and I think it was, I’m going to nail down which one. Then I’m going to make it suffer.

November 23:#

Still tracking the Colt. It’s out there somewhere. Word is that a hunter has it, but nobody I know will say who. Someone’s hiding it. Why? If If had it, all I’d need is one bullet. A gun that can kill anything… one bullet, for the demon that killed Mary. Then I could put down all my guns, and rest.

December 7:#

December 31:#

2005#

January 1:#

I’m fifty years old, and Mary has been dead for twenty-two of those years. I only knew her for seven. Every year those two numbers get farther apart, because only one of them can change. This year I will find who killed her. This year I will end this and let it all go. Dean turns twenty-six in three weeks. When I was twenty-six, I’d spent two years as a soldier. Dean’s been a soldier his whole life. When I was twenty-six, I’d been married for two years and had a toddler. Dean’s never been with a woman for more than a couple of weeks at a time. I’ve prevented him from being a father.

By the time Sammy turns twenty-six, I swear this will be over.

January 5:#

Twelfth Night (by the old calendar, when a day started at sunset). The Lord of Misrule is out there somewhere, making peasants out of kings, and behind him the ghosts of Samhain and Saturnalia. I talked to Jim tonight, and the conversation has me spooked. Why? The first time I met the guy, he showed me Mary’s spirit and it turned itself into the guise of a hellhound. Since then, the things we’ve seen… Why should anything I see or hear from Jim spook me after that? Don’t know. When I hung up the phone, I felt like… not like someone had walked over my grave, but like I’d just walked over his. I asked him if he was okay, he said he’d never been better. Maybe I’m jumping at shadows, but I’m worried about him.

March 21:#

Saturnalia. Agrippa’s seals of Saturn:

January 24:#

Dean turns 26 today. When I was 26, he was a baby. Generations pass. Not handing off the family business to him anytime soon, though. He’s got his piece of it, and we’re both pulling toward the big goal. I’m starting to tell him more about the demon problem. He doesn’t have the head for esoterica that Sam does, but what Dean wants to learn, he learns.

April 7:#

May 2:#

Sammy is twenty-two today. Saw in a Colorado paper that a couple of hikers have gone missing at a place called Blackwater Ridge. Twenty years ago, maybe, eight people were killed up there. Cops called it grizzly attacks.

May 17:#

This would have been our twenty-seventh anniversary.

… to allaje his courage, let him hold a hazell bat [ro, staff, or stick] in his hando, wherewithall he must reach out toward the east and south, and make a triangle without besides the circle; but if he hold not out his hand unto him, and he bid him come in, and he still refuse the bond or chain of spirits; let the conjuror proceed to reading, and by and by he will submit himselfe, and come in, and doo whatsoever the exorcist commandeth him, and he shalbe safe. If Bileth the king be more stubborne, and refuse to enter into the circle at the first call, and the conjuror shew himself fearfull, or if he have not the chaine of spirits, certeinelie he will never feare nor regard him after. Also, if the place be unapt for a triangle to be made without the circle, then set there a boll of wine, and the exorcist shall certeinlie knowe when he commeth out of his house, with his fellowes, and that the foresaid Bileth will be his helper, his friend, and obedient unto him when he commeth foorth. And when he commeth, let the exorcist receive him courteouslie, and glorifie him in his pride, and therfore he shall adore him as other kings doo, bicause he saith nothing without other princes. Also, if he be cited by an exorcist, alwaies a silver ring of the middle finger of the left hand must be held against the exorcist face.

Dean: 785-555-0179. As of June 1.

June 19.#

July 20:#

Bingo. California, New Jersey, Arizona. House fires. In each case, a mother killed and one of the survivors a six-month-old baby. Need to go back and see if there were others on 11/2/83. Either way, this is a hard lead. Looking at locations, survivors, other associated phenomena. Unusual weather, spikes in violence or crime. Any of those things can signify demonic involvement. But the fires are enough. Six of them, within a couple of days, each with a six-month-old involved. You gave yourself away, you bastard.

Almost twenty-two years I’ve been after you. It’s not going to be twenty-three. I’m going to look into your yellow eyes and watch you die.

I want to tell the boys, but won’t just yet. Dean might go off half-cocked, and Sammy… I was about to write that he wouldn’t care. Maybe that’s not true. But he might not care enough, and I don’t think I could stand knowing that.

August 14:#

Last three weeks: Tallahassee, Baton Rouge, Jackson, Birmingham, Atlanta. State records offices all look the same. Then same thing across the Rust Belt: Columbus, Lansing, Harrisburg, Indianapolis. Libraries in every county seat in West Virginia, looking for patterns in the weather records. Feel like I’ve been everywhere, like I’m living in a Johnny Cash song, only with demonic evil. Come to think of it, “Ghost Rider in the Sky” is a version of the Wild Hunt, isn’t it?

September 19:#

Autumnal equinox might be the next big breakthrough. Will know in 48 hours. Haven’t slept in more than 24 already. Remember old battlefield advice. Eat when you can, sleep when you can, because you never know when the next time will come. Should sleep. Not hungry.

October 3:#

Equinox a bust. Dean in New Orleans. Me in Jericho, CA. Trail of the demon that killed Mary cooling a little. People keep going missing from the area right around a bridge here. Started to look around, and it has all the hallmarks of a Woman in White. Almost feel like I should drop this one and keep running the demon down. But to do that, I’d have to let people die. And after all these years, I remember what H told me: A hunter never passes up a hunt. I had to kill him, but he was right about that.

October 4:#

October 5:#

Glowing eyes: Allocer, Balam, Flauros, Hellhound, puca, leszy, wendigo

October 6:#

Too much news about exorcists, exorcism lately. It must mean something. Something’s on the move, something big.

Azazel: first mentioned as the intended recipient of a scapegoat cast out on Yom Kippur. Leviticus 16:8. Name connotes strength, impudence —cognates have been translated as variants of Angel of Death. Book of Enoch says Azazel was one of the fallen angesl who fathered the Nephilim of human women. Enoch also claims Azazel was the first to show men how to make metal weapons and armor. (Also cosmetics, so blame him for that too.) “To him ascribe all sin.” Conflict here with the stories of Enoch himself given in the Book of the Watchers. Enoch himself supposed to be an angel descending, to give gifts of knowledge and science. Azazel always associated with goats. Also sometimes with the Lilim.

October 28:#

Got a phone call from the roadhouse, and the last piece fell into place. I’m on the trail. Twenty-two years, and I’ve finally found the sonofabitch. Now I’m going to take him down.

Acknowledgements#

This book would not exist without Eric Kripke, Rebecca Dessertine, Cathryn Humphris, all the writers of Supernatural, Chris Cerasi, Kate Nintzel, Dan Panosian, and every scholar and investigator of the occult and strange whose work gave me such a rich field to explore. It also would not exist without the dedicated fans of the show. Thanks to each and every one of you, and to whomever I have inexcusably forgotten.

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