Nevermore (8 page)

Forcing himself to breathe regularly again, Dean turned away and looked at the rumpled bed.
No
way in hell I’m going back to sleep.
Much as it pained him to be up at this hour, it seemed he was Never

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stuck. Besides, he had the world’s best coffee waiting for him.

One piping hot shower in Manfred’s incredibly cool claw- foot bathtub later, Dean changed into the last set of fresh clothes he had and, making a mental note to ask Manfred where the nearest Laundromat was, went downstairs in search of coffee, being sure to grab Dad’s journal on the way.

Of course, once the coffee was made, he just
had
to explore Manfred’s vinyl collection in more depth. He’d taken a glance last night—well, okay,
more
than a glance. Sam had yelled at him for only checking the EMF readings in the living room and neglecting the rest of the house, to the point where his younger brother almost took the EMF reader away from him.

They hadn’t actually found any EMF, but that wasn’t completely unexpected. The spirit hadn’t shown since Sunday. Not all spirits left a ton of EMF around, and this one wasn’t a constant presence, but a recurring one. Tonight, after Scottso’s show, would be the acid test.

Until then he intended to hear music the way it was
meant
to be played.

The problem was picking just one. Every time he saw one LP, he was all set to put it on when another caught his eye. He’d made a pile that included
Dark Side of the Moon, The Most of the
Animals, Houses of the Holy, Dressed to Kill,
72 SUPERNATURAL

Metallica, The Who By Numbers,
the Australian version of
Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, Thick as
a Brick
, and
In-A-Gada-Da-Vida
—and he hadn’t even gotten to the blues albums yet. He kept fl ipping through the records even after he settled on putting
In-A-Gada-Da-Vida
on, playing air guitar to the classic riff that opened the seventeen-minute title track.

Sam’s voice came from upstairs, getting louder alongside the creak of the old wood of the stairs under his brother’s weight. “Yeah, okay. Thanks so much, I really appreciate you letting me come on such short notice. Yeah. Great. Thanks!

’Bye.”

Dean looked up to see Sam pocketing his Treo and walking into the living room while saying,

“You’re up early. Not used to you walking around before ten.”

“Yeah, I been up for a little bit.” Dean looked down at his watch and realized that it was almost nine-thirty. He’d completely lost track of time looking at the albums. While he intellectually understood the value of digital recording, the death of the vinyl record had seriously messed with the ability of artists to create cool album covers. No booklet in a dinky CD jewel case was ever going to match the artistry of the woodcut in
Stand Up
or the complexity of
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts
Club Band
. Would anybody have remembered the Never

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prism on the cover of
Dark Side of the Moon
if it had only been a few inches big?

He didn’t bother sharing these thoughts with Sam, though, as it would only serve to piss him off. The boy didn’t appreciate real music. So he asked, “Who was that on the phone?”

“A guy named Anthony who works for the Bronx County Historical Society and gives tours of the Poe Cottage. I looked it up on the web—

Manfred’s got a wireless network, and he gave me the key—and they’re only open by appointment.

So I called, and they’re free today. I’ll be heading over around noon.” He grinned. “I’d ask if you wanna come with, but seeing as how you’ve been re united with your one true love and all . . .” Dean pulled down
Zoso
and said, “Look, Sammy, you can have your CDs, your MP3s, your AVIs, but I’m telling you—”

“AVIs are movies, Dean,” Sam said with a grin.

Ignoring him, Dean went on: “But I’m
telling
you, there is no substitute, none, for the beautiful sound of a needle on vinyl.”

Just then the record started to skip, Doug Ingle singing “always be” over and over again.

Sam’s grin practically split his face in half. Dean scowled at him, then walked over to the turntable and nudged the needle, and it skipped ahead to a guitar chord.

“Let me guess,” Sam said, “next you’re gonna 74 SUPERNATURAL

extol the virtues of leeches as a method of healing the sick? Or, I know! Why horse-drawn chariots are better than cars!”

“Bite me, Sammich.” Dean went over to the easy chair. “I’m gonna go through Dad’s journal, see if I can find anything that matches this ritual.” Sam nodded. “After I’m done at the cottage, I’ll check the house where the guy was bricked up and the street where the kids were beaten to death.”

“Yeah,” Dean said, “maybe you’ll fi nd something the cops missed.”

“I doubt it,” Sam said sincerely. “Dude, we’re talking about the NYPD here.”

“So?” Dean had a lot more experience with cops than Sam, and his considered opinion was that they were fine as long as a case followed a pattern. The thing was, what he and Sam dealt with didn’t follow any kind of pattern—or at least not a pattern any cop would ever look for—so police always looked in the wrong places, didn’t see the right things, and jumped to the wrong conclusions.

“Sam, cops go for the familiar. Don’t believe the crap you see on TV—most of the time, the fi rst suspect they have is the one they arrest. Something like this, they’re not gonna see the forest
or
the trees. Trust me, I’m willing to bet you ten bucks you find something they didn’t.”

Sam just snorted, and then went into the kitchen, Never

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Dean assumed in search of a cup of coffee that he would violate with too much milk and sugar.

Dean turned his attention back to the record collection.
Is that actually a copy of
Music from Big Pink
? Awesome!

The hardest part was finding somewhere to park the Impala.

The Poe Cottage was located at the intersection of the largest thoroughfare in the Bronx, the aptly named Grand Concourse, and another major street, Kingsbridge Road. According to the Internet research Sam had done before leaving Manfred’s place, Kingsbridge Road used to be a horse path that led to the King’s Bridge, which went over the Harlem River to Manhattan. He had also found a Poe enthusiast’s web site, which had actually mentioned both murders and their connection to the author. He left it up on the screen for Dean to look at—assuming his brother could tear himself from Manfred’s record collection, which Sam fi ercely doubted.

A park sat in the midst of the intersection, stretching across several blocks, and it included a bandstand and a playground, both looking rather new, and a small white cottage that looked incredibly out of place. He understood why Dean had been so reluctant to believe that there was such a 76 SUPERNATURAL

place in the Bronx. The whole city—aside from Manfred’s neighborhood in Riverdale—seemed geared toward cramming as many buildings as close together as possible. Even in neighborhoods with houses, they tended to be rammed up against each other.

And yet, there in the midst of a tangle of streets that were lined with apartment buildings at least five stories high, and often higher, was this park and this cottage.

Sam maneuvered around several side streets, most of them one-way, as well as the two big streets, and tried desperately to find a spot in which the Impala would fit. He drove around for ten minutes, getting particularly frustrated with the roller coaster of emo-tions as he’d see an empty space, only to discover that it was a fire hydrant, then find another, only to see another hydrant.
How many damn hydrants
does this city
need
, anyhow?
On those rare occasions when the empty space wasn’t a hydrant, it was way too small to fit the Impala.

While he was driving, Sam also noticed that the people were making the best of the crowded situa-tion. While he and Dean moved around a lot with Dad, they tended toward smaller towns, in part because Dad felt that they had better public school systems than the ones in big cities—though Sam’s later research revealed that not to be nearly the universal constant Dad had insisted. As a result, Never

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his experiences with big cities were few and far between.

The thing that struck him the most was the diversity and the harmony, which was on par with what he’d seen at Stanford—but you expected that at a college campus, especially somewhere like Stanford. Here, he saw people from about twelve different nationalities walking the streets, using the small storefronts on the ground floors of the apartment buildings, playing in the playground in the Poe Park, chatting with each other, saying hi on the street, and so on. His (admittedly minimal) experience with larger cities was that ethnic groups tended to congregate in partic u lar neighborhoods, but he wasn’t seeing as much of that here in the Bronx as he’d expected.

Like Dean, his primary reference point for the borough was the infamous 1981 movie
Fort Apache,
the Bronx
, so he’d imagined a place fi lled with burned-out buildings, roving street gangs, and the like. What he’d seen so far, though, indicated a place that had the crowds of a big city, but within the neighborhoods were still communities.

Or maybe I’m just romanticizing the
whole

thing
, he thought with a laugh as he passed yet another open spot in which maybe a Mini Cooper could fi t, but not any car built in 1967.

Finally, he saw someone pulling out of a spot at the corner of East 192nd Street and Valentine 78 SUPERNATURAL

Avenue, right on the border of the park. It was a spot with a parking meter, which was annoying, but at least that meant the Impala would fi t. The meters had been installed decades ago and were spaced according to typical car size at the time.

The Impala was pretty close to normal size when it was first released, so he was easily able to slide into the spot.

Dipping into the laundry supply, he put in two quarters, which would keep the spot legal for an hour. Given the size of the place, he couldn’t imagine his tour would last any longer than that.

Sam locked the Impala and then walked through the Poe Park, past the bandstand—empty on this chilly November afternoon—and the playground—

where six kids were playing and screaming and gig-gling, while four women kept an eye on them. As he passed, he heard the women conversing with each other in what he was pretty sure was Spanish.

The Poe Cottage stood out even more close up than it did from the road. From what he’d seen on the Bronx County Historical Society’s website, it had been built in 1812, and Poe lived in it with his wife and mother-in-law from 1846 to 1849.

As he approached the front door, he reached into his coat pocket and turned on the EMF meter.

He wouldn’t take it out in front of the tour guide, but hoped he might have a chance to glance at it when the man wasn’t looking.

Never

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Standing in the doorway was the tour guide in question: a short African-American man wearing a beige trench coat. “You Anthony?” Sam asked as he approached.

“Yeah,” the guide said. “Glad you could make it.” Grinning sheepishly, Sam said, “Yeah, sorry, couldn’t find anywhere to park. And I drive a boat, so it’s even harder.”

Anthony’s head tilted. “What do you drive?”

“A ’sixty-seven Impala.”

Smiling, Anthony backed away from the wooden door and let Sam into the dark front room of the cottage. “I feel your pain. My Pop had a ’fi fty-seven Buick. Spent half his life tryin’ to fi nd somewhere to park the stupid thing. Anyhow, welcome to the Poe Cottage.”

Sam looked around and saw various old kitchen utensils, a fireplace, and, right by the front door, a desk with postcards and other souvenirs. Behind the desk was a glass case filled with books that ranged from collections of Poe’s writing to books about New York in general and the Bronx in partic u lar.

“Before we start,” Anthony said, “we usually ask for a ten dollar donation for individual tours.”
Of course you do
, Sam thought, trying not to sigh. Once again he dug into his pocket, hoping that the ten he gave Dean at the bridge wasn’t his last big bill.

Luckily, it wasn’t. He found a twenty in the 80 SUPERNATURAL

money clip and handed it over. Anthony reached under the desk with the postcards, pulled out a cash box, and retrieved a ten for him.

“What’d you do to your hand?” Anthony asked, indicating Sam’s cast with his head.

Where Dean probably would’ve had some kind of smartass response, Sam found he couldn’t think of anything funny enough for a total stranger. And the truth would hardly suffi ce.
Oh, well, I broke
my hand when I was fi ghting a zombie in a grave-yard. See, I was trying to lure her back to her
grave so my brother and I could impale her in it so
she’d die again. No, I’m not crazy, and why are
you backing slowly away from me like that?

“It’s a long story,” he mumbled.

That seemed to satisfy Anthony. “Okay. Well, this is where Edgar Allan Poe lived for the fi nal years of his life.” He proceeded to tell Sam several things he already knew from reading the website.

“Unfortunately,” Anthony added, “you can’t really appreciate the view now.” He moved past Sam to reopen the door. “But if you look over there—” He pointed to the left. “—you can see that it goes downhill right at Valentine Avenue?” Sam nodded. He’d actually gone down that hill briefl y in his endless search for a parking spot.

“The cottage was right on the top of the hill, and you could see all the way to the Long Island Sound from here. This isn’t where it was originally Never

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built.” Now pointing across Kingsbridge Road, he said, “You see that apartment building with the yellow façade? It was about there. It was moved here when the park was built. This whole area