He chewed on his lip and watched the streetlights.
"Time after time, history demonstrates that when people don't want to believe something, they have enormous skills of ignoring it altogether."
"You're saying that the entire human race is in denial," he said.
"Most of the time," I replied. "It's not a bad thing. It's just who we are. But the weird stuff doesn't care about that-it keeps on happening. Every family's got a ghost story in it. Most people I've talked to have had something happen to them that was impossible to explain. But that doesn't mean they go around talking about it afterward, because everyone knows that those kinds of things aren't real. If you start saying that they are, you get the weird looks and jackets with extra-long sleeves."
"For everyone," he said, voice still skeptical. "Every time. They just keep quiet and try to forget it."
"Tell you what, Butters. Let's drive down to CPD and you can tell them how you were just attacked by a necromancer and four zombies. How they nearly outran a speeding car and murdered a security guard who then got up and threw your desk across the room." I paused for a moment to let the silence stretch. "What do you think they'd do?"
"I don't know," he said. He bowed his head.
"Unnatural things happen all the time," I said. "But no one talks about it. At least, not openly. The preternatural world is everywhere. It just doesn't advertise."
"You do," Butters said.
"But not many people take me seriously. For the most part even the ones who accept my help just pay the bill, then walk out determined to ignore my existence and get back to their normal life."
"How could someone do that?" Butters asked.
"Because it's terrifying," I said. "Think about it. You find out about monsters that make the creatures in the horror movies look like the Muppets, and that there's not a damned thing you can do to protect yourself from them. You find out about horrible things that happen- things you would be happier not knowing. So rather than live with the fear, you get away from the situation. After a while you can convince yourself that you must have just imagined it. Or maybe exaggerated it in the remembering. You rationalize whatever you can, forget whatever you can't, and get back to your life." I glanced down at my gloved hand and said, "It's not their fault, man. I don't blame them."
"Maybe," he said. "But I don't see how things that hunt and kill human beings could be there among us without our knowing."
"How big was your graduating class in high school?"
Butters blinked. "What?"
"Just answer me."
"Uh, about eight hundred."
"All right," I said. "Last year in the U.S. alone more than nine hundred thousand people were reported missing and not found."
"Are you serious?"
"Yeah," I said. "You can check with the FBI. That's out of about three hundred million, total population. That breaks down to about one person in three hundred and twenty-five vanishing. Every year. It's been almost twenty years since you graduated? So that would mean that between forty and fifty people in your class are gone. Just gone. No one knows where they are."
Butters shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "So?"
I arched an eyebrow at him. "So they're missing. Where did they go?"
"Well. They're missing. If they're missing, then nobody knows."
"Exactly," I said.
He didn't say anything back.
I let the silence stretch for a minute, just to make the point. Then I started up again. "Maybe it's a coincidence, but it's almost the same loss ratio experienced by herd animals on the African savannah to large predators."
Butters drew his knees up to his chest, huddling further under the blanket. "Really?"
"Yeah," I said. "Nobody talks about this kind of thing. But all those people are still gone. Maybe a lot of them just cut their ties and left their old lives behind. Maybe some were in accidents of some kind, with the body never found. The point is, people don't know. But because it's an extremely scary thing to think about, and because it's a lot easier to just get back to their lives they tend to dismiss it. Ignore it. It's easier."
Butters shook his head. "It just sounds so insane. I mean, they'd believe it if they saw it. If someone went on television and-"
"Did what?" I asked. "Bent spoons? Maybe made the Statue of Liberty disappear? Turned a lady into a white tiger? Hell, I've done magic on television, and everyone not screaming that it was a hoax was complaining that the special effects looked cheap."
"You mean that clip that WGN news was showing a few years back? With you and Murphy and the big dog and that insane guy with a club?"
"It wasn't a dog," I said, and shivered a little myself at the memory. "It was a loup-garou. Kind of a superwerewolf. I killed him with a spell and a silver amulet, right on the screen."
"Yeah. Everyone was talking about it for a couple of days, but I heard that they found out it was a fake or something."
"No. Someone disappeared the tape."
"Oh."
I stopped at a light and stared at Butters for a second. "When you saw that tape, did you believe it?"
"No."
"Why not?"
He took a breath. "Well, because the picture quality wasn't very good. I mean, it was really dark-"
"Where most scary supernatural stuff tends to happen," I said.
"And the picture was all jumpy-"
"The woman with the camera was terrified. Also pretty common."
Butters made a frustrated sound. "And there was an awful lot of static on the tape, which made it look like someone had messed with it."
"Sort of like someone messed with almost all of my X-rays?" I shook my head, smiling. "And there's one more reason you didn't believe it, man. It's okay; you can say it."
He sighed. "There's no such things as monsters."
"Bingo," I said, and got the car moving again. "Look, Butters. You are your own ideal example. You've seen things you can't explain away. You've suffered for trying to tell people that you have seen them. For God's sake, twenty minutes ago you got attacked by the walking dead. And you're still arguing with me about whether or not magic is real."
Seconds ticked by.
"Because I don't want to believe it," he said in a quiet, numb voice.
I exhaled slowly. "Yeah."
Dead silence.