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tm john r s cr winjohesntael u alex irvine illustrations by dan panosian and alex irvine supernatural tm created by eric kripke

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contents 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 1 16 21 29 36 47 55 64 69 88 98 107 116 126 135 154 163

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2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 acknowledgments other books by alex irvine credits cover copyright about the publisher 171 182 188 193 198 206 218

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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 an 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 any sense anymore my wife is gone 1

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my sons are without their mother the things i saw that night i remember hearing mary scream and i ran but then everything was calm 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 boys 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 a 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 2

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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 3

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cold you re telling me 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 a stevens 311 sideby-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 when 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 a anything between that and finding sam and dean saf dean safe back at julie s thank god but julie wa julie was dead something just tore her apart miso souri found a tooth in her body i tried to draw it but ic 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 4

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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 coldblooded 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 5

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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 loo som something not a man it attacks kill kills then springs away before anyone can react springheel jack any jack the ripper was a heeler acjack cord c cording to h but h is the same guy who had me roll jacob into a guy quar ry quarr still alive he was going to die i know he was going to die but he wa still alive was a and then tonight dean walked out of the roadhouse right whe i put the final bullet into the right when shape-shifter 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 6

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out looking for this shape-shifter 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 7

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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 p people called it doc benton he wanted to live forever and when want he c couldn t make alchemy work he t turned to organ theft instead he kept himself alive by replacing each of his organs as they ing failed one at a time with organs ha harvested from unlucky locals a according to h this has been g going on since 1816 the doc was trouble until i took him apart with a chainsaw after h corp burned the cor pse 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 8

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she said my name i think she said some other things 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 numbers 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 gates he called them places where demons can get through to 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 9

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i don t know how to explain what happened there the fore wha inn set on the edge of a town inn full full of dead bodies hallucination we found the inn and tions the there was the hellhound the bla shuck and it came to black h like a spaniel he said he di didn t kill mary but he set th the dog on me and said he k knew some of the players i involved but they weren t d demons he said i killed the og hi dog and then h changed his whole tack said that everything d the d he d done even siccing the dog on me was a way to get me to nt wasn t h h hunt he said he wasn t h he was something else in a hunter s body a man s body all i could think 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 and 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 runing 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 10

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