Terah couldn’t see Wednesday. He was beginning to wonder if Lindsey was stable at all. Long ago he’d realized that what people recognize as sanity is really a degree of functionality rather than a clean bill of mental health. No one was rational all the time. Even Vulcans had to deal with pon farr. And they were fictional. Terah had known people who’d believed in aliens. Otherwise sane, sensible, individuals. Was believing in demons and ghosts and sprites so different? He must’ve been thinking aloud.
“In high school they told us people evolved to survive, not to reason out the universe,” Lindsey said. “Science says evolution disproves religion, but doesn’t that challenge science too? I mean, evolution’s based on rational observation, and that observation tells us reason’s a survival technique, not an end in itself. Logic’s just a tool. Even scientists fall in love.”
That word in her mouth made his heart skip across the water like a flat stone. “You mean why do scientists celebrate Mother’s Day, and things like that?”
“Yeah, an’ all kinds of things. People do stuff that’s not rational all the time. I mean, you know how guys get when they fall in love.”
Terah thought of Wendy. Then Danielle. Lindsey was right in front of him. Biology had been telling him to follow the conventions set down by society. Stay with one woman. Settle down. Be inserted into the matrix. “I wonder if it was different with hunter-gatherers.”
“Ya mean like mammoth hunters?”
“Well, I suppose so. Hunter-gatherers lived in bands of about 150 people, max. They didn’t really own anything individually, and they may have even practiced group marriage. There was no village to raise a child, but a kind of extended family.”
“Wouldn’t the group keep gettin’ bigger an’ bigger then?”
“They’d split apart when they couldn’t travel together, or when tensions grew. That’s what evolution was doing. Agriculture meant a steady food supply, but it also mean ownership. Settling down. Nuclear families. Larger numbers.”
“Sounds like a guy’s fantasy. No commitment.”
“Stop and think about it. There was commitment, but it was at the group level. Remember, we evolved to survive, as you said. The group could make up for individual weaknesses. They must’ve experienced something like falling in love, too.”
“An’ how do ya think demons fit into all this?”
Terah had been hoping to lighten the mood. Hoping against hope she’d reveal more of herself. It was well into the night. The metallic light of the moon helped, but when a cloud covered it, the woods felt threatening and strange. Even Lindsey kept the space between them minimal. “I never really gave demons much thought.”
“Before I left high school I read books about supernatural bein’s. Other kids used to make fun of me. These books made some good points, though. People have believed in—seen—ghosts in every culture throughout all time. Yet because ya can’t get one to show up in the lab, science says they can’t exist. It’s like sayin’ if ya can’t get a meteorite to fall in the lab it can’t be real.”
“But you can find meteorites.”
“‘Cause they’re physical. Science might be able to find ghosts too, if there was a way of measurin’ the supernatural. Instead of developin’ a method, they make fun of people who believe. An’ people have believed since before history began. Still do.”
Terah felt unsettled. A large cloud obscured the light, and even the few tentative sheets of illumination pressed against the sky didn’t show what was in the woods. Rationally he knew the silence was because of their passage. Animals grew still, but the lack of sound was filled with other, terrifying possibilities. The forest felt haunted. He remembered the oppressed feeling that ghosts were following him as a child, making his mother angry. “Stop clinging to me, Terry! Leave me be!” But he couldn’t. He didn’t want to be alone with what he felt all around him. That certainty of their reality felt like spiders crawling up his neck. Like a snake head thrust into his face. He shuddered violently.
“You’d think,” Lindsey went on, “that they’d be interested in what happens behind closed doors. You ever think of that? People act one way when others are around—even at Dickinsheet—but when ya close your door an’ yer alone, things change. Is it just psychology? Even psychologists must feel it. An’ from what I’ve read, there really are demons.
“Rational people report ‘em. Things movin’ on their own. Scratch and bite marks appearin’. Voices that don’t sound human, speakin’ in languages a victim doesn’t know, sayin’ things they have no way of knowin’. Instead of explorin’ it, science says they can’t exist ‘cause they don’t exist. How rational is that?”
The nighttime forest felt haunted, the silence inching toward terror. How large was this cloud? Terah felt the darkness on his skin, permeating him. He breathed it in. Lindsey was barely visible, less than an arm’s length away as they carefully made their way downhill. Even her footsteps, the only sound, had become tentative. He didn’t want to be alone. Not now, not with the reality of evil feeling so very near.
“Can you see him?” he asked, a desperate need to hear her voice.
“Wednesday? Yes. He’s right behind us.”
Terah swung around, his eyes landing on nothing but darkness. Either she was seeing things, or he was not. Whose senses should he believe? A chill convulsed him, despite the warmth of walking. “Why do you think he’s latched onto you?” he asked, his voice wavering.
“He knows about my past, I guess.” Terah didn’t know that past, but he now sensed something horrific, some nameless terror she couldn’t bring herself to name aloud. “We have some things in common,” she admitted as they reached the lowest point of the hill, ready to begin another climb. “I had a boyfriend once. But he abandoned me at the worst possible time.”
Terah thought of Danielle. When he looked up the hill, the moon slid from behind the cloud. He screamed.
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