“Who feels like swimming?” Mariella asked.
“Or freezing and dying,” Seth said.
“At least we have the beach to ourselves,” Jenny pointed out.
“Let’s make the most of it.” Mariella took a joint from her coat pocket and lit it up. She and Seth passed it back and forth, coughing, while Jenny watched the dark waves roll in under the shimmering night sky.
“Tell me something, Jenny,” Mariella said as she exhaled blue smoke. “You have the memories. What are we, really? I mean...we have something supernatural, but obviously we’re not, um...vampires or werewolves or...zombies...”
“I’m a werewolf,” Seth said. “I’ve just never mentioned it before. But with the full moon, I think I should warn both of you.”
Jenny tried to figure out how to answer Mariella’s question. She pointed out at the sky over the ocean. “What do you see up there?”
“Stars,” Mariella said.
“Beyond that?”
“Nothing. Darkness.”
“The darkness beyond the stars,” Jenny said.
“What does that mean?”
Jenny thought about it. “In almost every ancient myth, the universe begins in darkness and chaos, and then order and light take over.”
Mariella nodded quickly. She’d attended a Swiss boarding school, Jenny knew, so she must have studied classics there. Jenny had studied classics herself, in the actual classical age.
“Imagine...” Jenny closed her eyes. “Imagine the entire universe is just a single mind. At first, it’s all alone, and it knows nothing, and there’s no one else to explain anything, so for a very long time, it’s just confusion, fear, nightmares, lost in its imagination. But, after a very long time, a small little portion of the mind sorts itself out and becomes....sane. The little patch of light grows, turning the raw chaos around it into order. An ordered universe begins to emerge.”
“Man,” Seth said, pulling on the joint, “Are you sure you haven’t smoked any of this?”
“Quiet, Seth. So, there are these isolated bits of chaos left scurrying around in the new, orderly universe,” Jenny said. “That’s us. Have you ever read any H.P. Lovecraft?”
Mariella shook her head. She was listening intently.
“It doesn’t matter,” Jenny said. “So our kind had nowhere left to go but to infiltrate the living. And here we incarnate again and again.”
“But why?” Mariella asked. “Do we have a purpose?”
“Our purpose is to destroy the new order and bring back the original chaos, where we thrived instead of scurrying around like rats in the basement,” Jenny told her.
“That’s all we want? Destruction?” Mariella asked.
“We don’t have to be that way. We have a choice,” Jenny said. “Many times, I used plague as a weapon of war...some king or emperor would send me to destroy the armies or the cities of their enemies. And it was fun, to my old self. But I will never do that again, not for anyone. No man will use me as his weapon again.”
Mariella nodded, thinking things over, the moonlight making her green eyes glow like a cat’s. Seth was gaping silently out at the waves.
“It’s all waves,” Seth whispered. “One after another, it’s all just waves, waves in the universe of the ocean...or the ocean of the...what was I saying?”
“I think the mushrooms are starting to work,” Jenny said, and Mariella laughed. She kept laughing, and Seth started laughing, and Jenny shook her head, watching them stumble around the beach, laughing so hard they toppled over into the cold, wet sand.
“Okay, kids,” Jenny said. “Let’s go back in time. We’re trespassing, so try to keep quiet.”
A wooden fence surrounded the nearest field of standing stones, but a few boards were missing, so they were able to slip right through. That was lucky, because Jenny doubted Seth or Mariella could climb a fence in their current state. They kept bumping into each other and giggling.
“Sh!” Jenny whispered. She pointed to the small farmhouse on the far side of the field. “Someone might be home. Stay quiet.”
“I wonder who lives there,” Mariella whispered.
“Old French ghosts,” Seth whispered, and they both laughed, and Jenny had to shush them.
They found themselves in the middle of nine perfectly straight rows of tall standing stones stretching away into the distance, where Jenny could make out the remains of what looked like a megalithic house, with a few gigantic stones for walls and equally large stone cross-pieces across the top. She wondered why Stone Age people had built such things.