“You’re scared to find out, aren’t you?”
“Last night I slept in the closet so the boogeyman couldn’t get me.”
He let out a little half laugh. Spread his hands, like,whoa there.“Okay, then, you can rest easy. Because there is no boogeyman,” he said. Though how reassuring that really was felt debatable at this point.
“Yeah, but there are goblins.”
“Yep.”
“And ghosts.”
“As far as I know, yes.”
She raised an eyebrow. “So you’ve never seen one.”
“Apparently you can’t see them. They just do stuff.”
“And you think that’s going to make me feel less terrified about this.”
“I did, until the words came out of my mouth. Then I realized I’d just told you invisible dead people make possible unnamed horrors happen around you,” he said with a wince.
Which of course only made things worse.
“You didn’t use the word ‘horrors’ before.”
“Yeah, but I know that’s what you’re thinking.”
“And am I right to be doing so? Do they, like, thump up your stairs and then throw you around until you’re dead? Or pull you into the television? Because I have to tell you, it’s not like whenPoltergeistcame out. The TVs weremassivethen. Now they’re so small and thin, it’s gonna be hell getting me in there. They’ll have to run me under a steamroller first.”
He went to answer her then. But she could see he didn’t know whether to laugh or be serious about it. His face was half amuse ment, half distress—so she felt it best to reassure him. “It’s okay. I was trying to be funny,” she said, and was glad she did.
He all but burst out with what he had clearly been holding back.
“All I can see behind my eyes is you being slipped into a television like a letter into a mailbox,” he said, voice threaded with amusement. Before composing himself enough to actually answer. “Which they do not really do. They’re mostly not violent, I think. They just move furniture around and try to communicate using whatever they can get their hands on.”
“So, like, refrigerator magnets and Scrabble tiles.”
“We have phones now, Cassie. They can type things.”
“Right. Right right right. That makes sense. This all makes sense,” she said firmly. While nodding. In a way she knew wasn’t convincing in the slightest to him, even before he responded.
“I feel like you’re just telling yourself that.”
“Because I am. This is all unhinged.”
“Yeah, I know. It gets easier though.”
“It must. You’re so matter of fact about it all.”
“Well, when you see your millionth weird thing, it becomes a little less startling,” he said, in a way she knew was meant to be reassuring. But honestly, all it did was kick up a hundred more questions.
“Right, but howdoyou see the weird things? Do they, like, just start appearing because you’re a werewolf? They sense your werewolfiness and are just all, ‘Hey, hello, here I am, the friendly pooping goblin that has been living under your stairs this whole time?’”
“Okay, I just gotta say goblins are not friendly.”
“Noted. Good to know,” she said, as she jotted that down.
Fast, because he was already on to the next thing.
