“But we come out again,” he pointed out. “If we die, we don’t stay dead.”
“Well, some of us don’t.” She’d sat up, too, arms curled around her knees. “If we believe Otter-Tooth’s journal and that skunk Wendigo Donner, some of their companions made it through the stones but came out dead. And there are all those incidents in Geillis Duncan’s journal—strange people, often in odd clothes—turning up dead near stone circles.”
“Aye,” he said, with the faint internal squirm that affected him when his green-eyed five-time-great-grandmother was mentioned. “So … you think you have a notion why that doesn’t happen to everybody.”
“I’m not sure it amounts to that much,” she admitted. “But it kind of goes along with what you were saying about what Christians believe—that we go on living after death. If you think about what it feels like”—she swallowed—“in there. You feel like you’re coming apart but you’re trying as hard as you can not to; to keep your—your sense of your body, I guess.”
“Yes,” he said.
“So maybe what we are in—there—is the immortal part of us; souls, if you like.”
“As a Christian minister, I like it fine,” he said, trying for some semblance of normality in this conversation. Like it or not, he was remembering that spectral cold, and the skin down his arms and legs prickled with gooseflesh. “So …？”
“Well, see, I think that’s maybe where the gemstones come in,” she explained. She moved closer to him, putting a warm hand on his bare and prickling leg. “You know what it feels like when they burn up—when the chemical bonds between their molecules, or maybe their atoms or subatomic particles, are breaking. And when you break a chemical bond, it releases a lot of energy. Since it’s releasing that energy inside our—our clouds of dissolving stuff, maybe …？”
“Maybe that’s what keeps the bits of our bodies together, you’re saying?”
“Mm-hm. And—this just occurred to me …” She turned to him, eyes widening. “Maybe you can lose a few bits in transit, but still make it out—just with a little damage. Like an irregular heartbeat.”
Neither of them spoke for a bit, contemplating.
“You are hiding that book, right?” he asked. This discussion was disquieting enough; thought of having the same discussion with Jemmy made his stomach turn over.
“Yes,” she assured him. “I was hiding it in the bottom of my sketchbox, but even Mandy knows how to open that now.”
“Maybe they wouldn’t be interested. I mean, it’s not got a title or pictures …”
She shot him a sharp glance.
“Don’t you believe it. Kids snoop. I mean, maybe you didn’t, being a goody-good preacher’s lad …” She was laughing at him, but dead serious underneath. “But I went through my parents’ stuff all the time. I mean, I knew what size my mother’s brassieres and panties were.”
“Well, that would have been well worth knowing … No, I did, too,” he admitted. “Not about the Reverend’s underpants—he wore long johns, with buttons, year-round—but I learned a lot of really interesting things I wasn’t supposed to know, mostly about the Reverend’s congregation. He gave me my dad’s letters from the War when I was about thirteen—but I’d read them two or three years before, from his desk.”
“Really?” she said, diverted. “Did you wear long johns with buttons, too?”
“Me and every other young lad in Inverness in the 1940s. You know how cold it gets up there in winter—but actually, when I was about thirteen, I found a trunk of my dad’s old RAF uniform stuff that they’d sent home when he—disappeared.” He swallowed, stabbed by the unexpected memory of the last time—and it was the last, he was sure—he’d seen his father. “There were a few pairs of underpants amongst the other things; the Reverend told me the fliers called them ‘shreddies,’ God knows why—but they looked like what you’d call boxer shorts. I took to wearing those, in the summers.”
“Shreddies,” she said, tasting the word with pleasure. “I’m not sure whether I’d rather see you in those or in the button-front long johns. Anyway, I’ve been hiding it in Da’s study. Everybody’s afraid to mess around in there—except Mama, and I suppose I ought to show this to her, anyway. When I’ve thought it out a little further.”