THEN:

Jellico, Tennessee

Amelia was not having fun on her summer vacation. She'd been excited about spending three weeks in the country with Uncle Mike and Aunt Alice, but the country turned out to be so boring and it was hot and there were bugs and her cousins didn't have a computer and there was only one TV and it only got three channels and she hated hide-n-seek but she was a guest and so she had to play to be polite.

"Ninety-five… ninety-six…"

Timmy counted so slow. Amanda had changed her hiding place three times, but there was nowhere good but bushes and there's bugs and spiders and lizards in bushes.

She looked towards the old house farther across the field. Aunt Alice said they'd all get a switching if they went anywhere near it, but it was the only good hiding place out here where they were having a picnic. Amelia wasn't sure why they drove all the way out here to eat outside. It was just outside, like their yard but with more stickers and bugs.

She made a run for the porch as Timmy's voice droned on behind her.

"Ninety-seven… ninety-eight… ninety-nine… one hundred! Ready or not, here I come!" Timmy lifted his head and gave a gleeful cackle. "I see you, Amelia!"

Then he screamed. A shrill, drawn-out, piercing shriek of pure terror that brought his brother scrambling out of hiding and his parents tearing across the field from where they'd set up a grill and a picnic blanket.

Two Days Later:

Dean flipped his phone open. "Hey Bobby, what's up?"

"You fellas up to the eyeballs in anything right now?"

Dean glanced over at Sam, who lifted his head from his newspaper and shook his head.

"Nope," Dean relayed to Bobby. "We just washed off the smoke from wasting a vengeful, so we're wide open."

"I heard from a friend of a friend about a possible case down in Tennessee. A six year old girl, Amelia Baldwin, has gone missing, vanished into thin air in the middle of an open field in front of her eight year old cousin. They've eliminated all the normal possibilities."

"You think the kid's telling the truth, the girl didn't fall into an old well or wander off or something?"

"If I didn't, I wouldn't be callin' ya," Bobby grumbled. "I'd go but I threw my back out pulling an engine yesterday. Can't hardly get up outta my damn chair to take a piss."

Dean and Sam shared a glance and a mutual sympathetic wince.

"Ouch," Dean commiserated. "Bobby, one of us could swing up there, help you out till you're movin' around ok again."

"Yeah, it's no problem, Bobby," Sam seconded, leaning towards the phone as Dean held it out. "This case sounds like something either of us can handle alone."

"I don't need no damn home-nurse," Bobby snapped, then continued in a more genial, if equally gruff, tone. "'Sides, if anybody's ever gotta help me on and off the damn crapper, she's gonna be a helluva lot easier on the eyes than either of you idjits."

"Ok, ok," Dean chuckled. "Suit yourself. Where in Tennessee are you sending us?"

"Little town near the Kentucky border, called Jellico. The kids say Amelia was running across an open field towards an empty house when she vanished into thin air. They could hear her crying for a while, but they couldn't pinpoint her voice and she was too hysterical to give them any clue where she is. The well was capped years ago with a concrete slab and they searched the field and the entire house from attic to cellar. Beats the hell outta me what happened to her."

"That's not reassuring," Dean said. "Not sure we'll have any better luck figuring it out, but we'll check it out."

"Appreciate it," Bobby answered. "Here's the contact details…."

NOW:

It took Bobby's directions, plus another set including the phrase 'where the Silers' barn used to be' and most of the morning, but finally they rounded the last curve in a long, overgrown dirt road and braked at the promised gap in a sagging, rusted barbed wire fence.

"I can see why they warned the kids away from this place," Dean commented as he got out to open the make-shift gate that was also made from three strands of decrepit barbed wire.

Sam got out and went around back to open the trunk. There was no way Dean was going to subject the car's paint to the brush that choked their path from that point on. "If this was anywhere else, that'd be considered a haunted house for sure."

Dean surveyed the rectangular two-story house decaying in briar-guarded solitude several yards across an untended field. Unadorned as a kindergartner's drawing, it had a door centered in the long side, protected by a sagging porch held up by cedar poles that still sported stubs of branches amputated decades before. Its windows were missing most of their glass and he wasn't sure if it had ever been graced with a coat of paint. "Considering what the Baldwins claim happened to Amelia, it might be."

"If it is, then it's like no haunting I'm familiar with," Sam shrugged as he shouldered a shotgun, his eyes flicking from darkened window to window.

"Me either. I thought this sort of mid-air disappearance was nothing but a campfire story." Dean unzipped a duffle and reached in for their EMF reader.

Sam nodded. "As far as I know, yeah. Humans don't dematerialize without explosives being involved."

Dean switched on the EMF meter. It lit up like a Christmas tree and emitted a piercing squeal that had him grabbing for the volume button.

Dean's eyebrows lifted at the reading on the screen. "Holy crap! It's maxed out!"

"And there's no power running to the house." Sam pointed. The weather-head up near the roof had the severed remains of frayed, ancient wires sticking out, their insulation rotted off.

"This place hasn't seen an electric light since D-Day," Dean said, squinting at the weather-head and over to a disconnected, leaning power pole, swamped in honeysuckle. "Whatever's putting off that massive field isn't fueled by TVA's generators. If the field is this strong outside, going into that house means stepping into an enormous fear-cage."

"So we won't know what's real and what's our neurons shorting out," Sam said.

"Somehow that doesn't sound like a fun afternoon," Dean said as he traded the EMF for a shotgun. "I can't think of anything short of TVA's generators that would throw off that much EMF. Especially nothing that would be sitting in a rundown house in the middle of an abandoned farm."

Sam grimaced. "Me either, but regardless of the source, we need to shield ourselves from that field. If we go charging in there unprotected, we'll have the mother of all panic attacks or worse, start hallucinating."

"So what are you suggesting? Tin foil beanies?"

"Close," Sam grinned. "Lead foil. It'll block EMF just like it blocks x-rays."

"Question is, where are we gonna find lead foil out here in Outer B-F, Tennessee?" Dean asked.

"A hospital imaging department would be best, but a large dentist's office might have enough too."

"Last town that big was about twenty minutes down the road. Let's go, Inspector Gadget." Dean laid his shotgun back into the trunk and closed it after Sam stowed his gear.

Sam spared a glance back as they pulled away. There was nothing to see but a derelict house about five years away from rotting to the ground. Nothing more foreboding than the sun glinting off shards of broken window glass.

-oOo-

Ok, it was a serious situation. They were facing the Big Bad Unknown. And they couldn't stop grinning at each other.

"You look like Magneto's dorky grandson!" Dean chuckled.

"The the worst scifi convention costumes ever," Sam agreed, giving his duct-tape and lead-apron helmet a shove as it tried to slide over his eyebrows again.

"Let's do this before somebody sees us." Dean's smile slid off his face when he looked towards the house.

"Dude, if I bite it in there, please remove the helmet before you carry me out," Sam said. His grin evaporated as he turned towards the shabby house too. Where something waited for them, throwing off energy like a runaway reactor.

Dean's jaw clenched as they made their way through the over-grown grass and brambles to the precarious looking porch. Almost shoulder to shoulder, like they always were.

Sam stopped in his tracks. "Dean?" He pivoted. Dean had been not much more than an arm's length from his side, and his brother's trampled path through the weeds was clear. Right up to the point it ended. "DEAN!"

Sam went to his knees at the end of Dean's tracks. "DEAN!" He frantically parted the grass and blackberry canes, thinking maybe there was old well opening, or a storm cellar, but all he found was solid earth.

He even looked up into the overhanging mulberry. "DEAN!"

"sam!"

Sam went rigid, straining his ears.

"sam!" Dean's voice called again, distorted, faint, but unmistakable. "sam where are you?"

Sam turned his head from side to side. He couldn't get a fix on Dean's voice. It sounded as though he was in mid-air. "Dean! What do you see? Where are you?"

"i... i don't know! nothing makes sense. i can't get oriented!" Dean's voice, faint and distorted as it was, carried an edge of panic.

Anything that could panic Dean made Sam's blood frost over. "Did you fall in a hole?"

"no- i was there, then i was here- where ever here is. i don't know how."

"Ok. Ok, listen. Don't move. Stay right where you are. I'll figure out some way to get you back."

"i'll try. i don't know if i can stay in one spot. i can't tell if i'm moving or standing still." Dean gave an unmistakable heave. "it's making me sick."

"Close your eyes and crouch down. Hang onto something if you can. I'll get to you- you sit tight and keep talking!"

"easy to for you to say. you're not the one inside a kaleidoscope in a blender!"