At first he accepted it, then rationality kicked in, rejecting his senses. Immediately they disappeared. Rationality trickled in, telling him it was mere hunger, and general depredation. The cave hadn’t been full of little people. They did not exist, so it couldn’t have been.
“Yer awake. Come join the party,” Lindsey said.
Terah blinked, cold upon awaking in his clothes. “What party?”
“Can’t ya see the sídhe? Oh, I forgot. Yer trained not too.”
He yawned, stomach protesting loudly. “We’ve got more immediate needs.”
She reached over and handed him something. “Try this.”
“What is it?”
“They brought it. The Irish say the sídhe live across the western sea. They’re still here, if ya land near one of their mounds.”
Terah feared she might’ve gone insane, but his hunger was intense. He tried the mash, presented on dry leaves. It was good. Once he started, Terah couldn’t stop. He ate his fill, trying not to think where it’d really come from, or what it was. He emptied his water bottle and sighed. “Even if I’m going crazy, I’m glad for this last supper.”
“They’ll take that as a thank you.”
He had to go out to relieve himself. Lindsey called out, “Just don’t do it on any mounds.”
When he returned he apologized. “I didn’t mean to sleep away the daylight.”
“The rain’s stopped an’ we can walk a bit. Maybe find a bit more spacious accommodation. The sídhe tell me to head west.” She thanked her imaginary friends.
Terah extinguished the fire and stepped out into the dark. The air had a spring freshness to it after the rain. It was difficult not to feel optimistic with a brilliant Jellicle moon in a clearing sky. Still, curiosity was tearing him apart. “How can you accept their reality so easily?”
“How come you can’t?” They began moving west.
“I didn’t really see them.”
“But you ate the food they gave us. Ya know, when I was a little girl one of my teachers told us that not everyone perceives colors the same way. He said, ‘What you’re seein’ as blue someone else might be seein’ as red. How’d you know?’ An’ that bothered me. For days I was mopin’ around, wantin’ everyone else to see the same red I saw. Finally Mom slapped me. She didn’t like such useless worries.
“That taught me something, though. We don’t all see the same things. How do we know what’s real? Before you came to the asylum had ya ever seen a ghost?”
“No. But that’s different. I did see them there.”
“What about all the years of yer life up to that point? Had you never been anywhere there were ghosts? If you hadn’t learned to see ‘em, how’d ya know?”
“Life’s complicated enough without them.”
“But that’s a cop out! If they’re real, why din’t you see ‘em?”
They walked on in silence for a while. The wispy clouds broke away from the moon and with their eyes adjusted the traveling was easy, even over rocky ground. Terah was glad Lindsey was beginning to talk a little about her past. He’d yoked himself together with her and he knew little about her. Her reception at Dickinsheet had been an affirmation of her stability, in a way. Her refusal to give much away, though, put him at a disadvantage. “How old are you, Lindsey?”
She walked on in silence so long that we began to wonder if she’d heard him. “Well, I first came to Dickinsheet,” she began, “in what would’ve been my senior year. I guess that would’ve put me at seventeen. Spent several months there—let’s call it a year. That’d make me eighteen at that time. I spent a couple a years at Honest Oahusha until some bum came and convinced me to move out. That’d make me twenty.”
“When’s your birthday?”
“I was there when I was born, but how’d I know what day it was? I guess you’d tell me to accept what other people say about it.”
“Are you always so fixated on evidence?”
“You wanna slap me too? We have to figure things out for ourselves. When we learned about mythology in high school, our teacher said that people in Iceland still believed in elves. Even highways had to be diverted so they wouldn’t disturb places elves lived. I presume there are adults in Iceland.”
“Yes, but that’s different.”
“How?”
Terah realized he had no answer. Icelanders had the reputation of being rational and very literate. He couldn’t claim they were uneducated. He also knew from his own research that just about everywhere in the world people believed in supernatural beings. Even his own feelings of attachment to this girl weren’t exactly rational. If they’d met when Danielle was still alive, or when he had the backing of an institution to say that he spoke with authority, he may have thought she was cute, but he’d never have supposed that they’d spend months together in the woods, connected, but separate.
“It’s their culture,” he replied weakly.
“An’ ours is better? Ours that has people like us livin’ as outcasts while rich bastards run everything? That’s rational, I suppose?”
The walking had warmed Terah up again. He changed the subject. “How do we go about restocking, now that we’ve left all our supplies at Dickinsheet?”
“Same way I did at the asylum. We need to scope out the local situation an’ figure what we can get away with. If there’s food pantries they won’t question our need. That’s a place to start. An’ by the way,” she stopped and turned to face him. “If we do run into other people, I’m yer daughter. Got that? We can go back to usin’ Mich and Cal.” She started down the next hill. “Maybe if we move at night Wednesday won’t be so pesky in the daylight.”
“Has he—“
“You thought the bear was the worst thing in the fishin’ shed.” She glanced over her shoulder. In the moonlight he could see real worry on her face as she scanned the woods behind them. “Good thing you can’t see demons.”
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