kit’s face split into a grin. “laura richards? criminal psychologist?” he said, echoing the opening words of her tv series. “she’s, like, the leading expert on the psychology of violence in the uk. she’s incredible.” kit could go on about laura richards forever; her entire series was basically about how shitty, abusive men become killers, and how domestic violence is one of the greatest predictors of homicidal behavior. he tsked, “yeah, i know. but my lungs don’t give a shit about anything besides, like, pollen. if there’s pollen they go batshit.” also dust, and the cold, and cigarette smoke, and exercise. asthma really was a fucking bitch.
he nodded, taking his foot off his lap and stretching that leg out in front of him. “i mean, yeah. ribs vary in size, y’know? some are really big and some are really small.” kit licked his lips, his mind finally realizing what, exactly, the implication of human remains were. “it’s… it could just be, like, regular remains, y’know? maybe they were buried, like, hundreds of years ago or something.” kit hoped. this whole conversation was suddenly feeling quite real, and he pulled his legs closer to himself, folding them, and crossing his arms in front of his body.
“oh, of course,” kit insisted. “it’s- supernatural activity definitely impacts our senses. i mean, during demonic encounters, people say they smell sulfur, or when people walk through haunted houses they feel cold patches.” the spiritual realm and the physical realm were a lot more linked than most people thought. kit was pretty sure he’d seen in a documentary once about string theory, that explained that alternate universes were both infinitely far and mere millimeters away. that’s roughly how kit thought the spirit realm worked, except, sometimes, they could connect. he had to pull himself back to reality; he couldn’t think about that shit when he was high.
kit followed her story with the rapt attention only someone who was completely baked could muster. she had a point; the bear was a totally implausible thing, though kit had been prepared to accept it as another bizarre harbinger. or perhaps the bear had even run away in fear of something. but, what else could it be? “whaddya think?” he prodded, leaning in towards her. at the mention of edith lynch, kit leaned in even closer, uncomfortable close, eyes wide and unblinking and fascinated, visibly on the edge of his seat. the theory was… bleak, definitely bleak, but kit couldn’t deny it. “i think you’re right. i think you’re exactly right. these,” he leaned back, gesticulating wildly with his hands. “these massive… spiritual… demonic activities require a lot of… of energy. maybe they can’t start it out of nowhere. maybe it… whatever it is… maybe it…” kit run a hand through his hair, tufts sticking up as he pulled it away, completing the crazy conspiracy theorist look. “maybe it’s like a tulpa. like, there’s this theory that the men in black aren’t people, or aliens, but tulpas that feed off of fear and paranoia. what if this… this demon or whatever, what if it gets energy the same way? what if it needs to feed off fear in order to get stronger. so it can do, like, little things in the physical realm,” kit held his hands about two inches apart, “and then harnesses those emotions until it can do bigger, and bigger, and bigger,” kit slowly expanded the space between his hands with each adjective, “things until…” he put his hands down, growing quiet. this was the end, wasn’t it? it was obvious. he glanced up at jess. “until there’s a new edith lynch.”
If Jess’s head hadn’t been in a cloud of cotton balls, she might have remembered to note the name down and save it for later. Instead, she just grinned widely at Kit, inspired by his passion. “We’ll have to watch it sometime,” She told him, hoping he’d be the one to remember so she didn’t have to. Jess was less into murders and more into the Bigfoots of the world. Killing didn’t get her senses and curiosity going, unexplainable situations did. “I get that. Bodies suck big time.” She admitted, looking down at her jeans and the fraying holes in them, picking at some thread. Hell, if she could have had a different body with different organs, something flat and lean, she would have. But maybe that was a conversation for another time, not now while raccoon bones and dead nuns were floating around in her head.
“Maybe.” She agreed, “But don’t bones turn to dust eventually? I mean, if they don’t fossilize? I don’t know, how long can bones be buried for before they break down? Do they break down?” She wondered, no clue about bones after they hit the hundred-year mark. Nodding some more though, Jess stopped playing with her jeans and looked beside herself at the raven-haired boy. “I mean, it was no sulfur but that was my first thought... First thought after a dead body, anyway, which we found out it was so most of us were right in that aspect.” She commended the BAU team and their skepticism that never ruled out the bizarre and unusual. “I’m still trying to think of reasons for the scream, by the way.” She brought up. “It’s weird that nobody really talks about it anymore, but it was really freaky. I mean I didn’t hear it, which is just - you know, a killer.” Because how frustrating was it to investigate something she didn’t even experience but a lot of other girls in the dorms did, “But it happened. Too many people heard it for it to just be someone’s imagination. Or something made up.” She pressed, that little part of the entire mystery bugging her the most. She wanted to know what it was, why it happened, what it could have been. Woods don’t just scream at you in the dead of night for no reason. Was it just the wind? Who was to know?
She listened to Kit’s tulpa theory, nodding slowly but wondering if it was too outside the box. Jess didn’t believe things happened like they did in movies. If aliens existed, she wasn’t so sure they’d come down in big space ships with green faces and probing fingers either. She was probably the only person in the world who had enjoyed Bird Box though, so that spoke volumes on what her conceptual ideas looked like. “You might be right but I think if you were, more people would feel it, don’t you think?” She frowned, wondering what else laid in the history of the school that they didn’t know about. “I...” She began, looking out suddenly at the trees and feeling her skin prickle at the thought. Jess swallowed, looking into the darkness with wide eyes, fear in her gut although she sat with ease. “I feel like somethings out there. I told Jace, I don’t know what but I just feel like there’s something going on and the school is covering it up almost like they’ve done it before.” She looked at Kit then. “Don’t you think it’s weird how quick they sent us to Stowe? Almost like they have an emergency plan for when weird shit happens?”
