Page 5 of Tell Me Why
“I know you’re not,” he said.
“You’re lying,” he said. “I know they’re here. You can’t just… They’re here.”
“Iknowthey’re here,” Tina said. “I’m making sure they leave and don’t come back again.”
She didn’t want to say out loud that she was trying to avoid having the fightherebecause it was liable to wreck the place, because that was just baiting the bennaxes on.
They’d do it just to spite her.
“It’s not in my head,” he said.
“Iknow,” she said.
He seemed to deflate a fraction.
He thought that she was playing a game, trying to convince him that a figment of his imagination had left by giving orders to an empty room.
He hadn’t seen them yet.
There was a piece of her that thought that letting him think that they really were in his head would be in his best interests, becauseknowingwhat had taken him might very well be worse; knowing that the world wasn’t what he’d believed it to be could be harder than feeling as though he couldn’t entirely trust himself.
On the other hand.
Tina believed in the truth.
She heard the bennax scritch behind the couch, and she dove, two big steps, over the back, rooting around and just narrowly finding the creature’s ankle.
She hauled it out and held it, upside down.
“Three of them,” she said. “I can hear all three, here in the house, and they’re going to get into the back of my car and I’m going to drive them away and if you ever hear them again, I’m going to come back and make sure that they regret it for the rest of their miserable lives.”
Ellen was standing just beyond Harold, grasping the corner as she leaned against the wall for support, looking as though she might have passed out, otherwise. Harold had just a fraction of a moment of terror, then he straightened.
“They’re real,” he said, and Tina nodded.
“Everything happened exactly the way you think it did,” she said. “I just wouldn’t recommend trying to convince anyone else. You’ll never be able to prove it, and no one will trust your senses. Make something up, be evasive, whatever you want, when they ask you what happened. But the two of you… you know it was real. It was.”
And then he was big again.
The contractor, physically settled, confident.
“Thank you,” he said.
Tina nodded.
“You’re welcome.”
It felt good.
She’d done it right.
People could handle the truth, even if they were alone in it.
She smiled, turning her attention to the bennax in the exact moment that it stopped squirming, trying to get away, and twisted its head to look at her.
“Don’t you dare,” she said.
It did a sit-up and bit her elbow.
