By then I was really spooked, and I understood why my laughter had turned to crying a few minutes earlier: my body innately knew that it had no desire to laugh, and that its dominant feeling in that moment was an archaic fear, the sort you feel while waiting for an imminent and unavoidable catastrophe or for the horror to appear. It was the fear of a child convinced, despite their parents’ words of reassurance and their verifications, that the monster is under the bed and will inevitably come out; the fear of the investigator who knows that beneath the next shovelful lies the first corpse of
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