~5.20~

Laurie had always had an active imagination as a youngster. She’d believed in Santa Claus for a few years longer than most of the children she shared classes with, because she’d never questioned the impossibilities. Her mind had been quite agile enough to deal with the utter contradictions posed by such a being’s existence.

When a book… even the most ridiculous children’s book… presented itself as a story that had really truly happened, she had always been willing to take it at is word.

Even when it didn’t, young Laurie had tended to suspect that maybe it had really happened somewhere, at some time.

She’d believed in monsters, too. Under the bed. Inside the closet. Under porches, after one Halloween prank from her brother. Even knowing his hand had grabbed her, she still believed there could be monsters.

That child had grown into a sucker… no other word for it… for urban legends and tall tales. Eventually, she’d come to accept that Bloody Mary wouldn’t come no matter what you did in front of a mirror in a dark room. She’d never tried it, if only because by the time she wasn’t terrified by the thought of doing so, she’d already resigned herself to the fact that it and all the other stories she’d heard and collected and breathlessly repeated were just that: stories.

She’d never grown out of her fascination with them, though, and in time she’d acquired a more mature taste. Parapsychology. It was a real thing. Colleges gave degrees for it. There were no ghosts dragging people down to hell, but there were hauntings. They’d been reported, studied, verified. There were unexplained phenomena. Nothing too big and obvious and flashy, of course, but that was probably what kept it unexplained.

Her mature fascination had led her to this, but now, standing out in the cold and paralyzed with fear and indecision, she wondered if she’d really grown up, or had she only painted a grown-up veneer over her childhood fears?