You guys, Sam just went batty on me. Apparently he's all traumatized or something woahh...
>“Like a real goat from pictures except it had more legs and its eyes were red and it was really mad and goats in pictures usually just look hungry not mad.”
Okay, nothing immediately springs to mind that really fits that description (mostly it’s the extra legs thing that’s throwing him off, because lots of goat-monsters have red eyes or look pissed off, but he doesn’t think they usually have any more legs than the normal ones do?), but she has enough detail that she’s probably not just imagining things. If it were green and had tentacles and wings or something, yeah, that kind of detail would probably be imagination, but in this case it seems valid.
Part of him hates how automatic this all is - the way he starts thinking about what books and websites to check first, they way various legends and myths run through his head, the way he’s already making a mental list of everything he remembers being used to kill various goat-monsters in those legends, and then cross-referencing that against the mental list of things they have in the trunk of the car or could easily get versus the things Dad took with him, things kept in his truck. He hates that it’s so ingrained in him, that it’s become almost completely normal to him to hear a little girl saying a goat stole her sister.
But then again, part of him is glad he can be useful, because he knows first-hand what it’s like to be stolen away from where you belong and put in harm’s way, and he knows what happens to almost anyone grabbed by a monster of any kind, and if he can help... he’s not going to just turn away and go back to his homework, when there’s a little kid out there, possibly about to become goat-chow.
Then a woman shows up, clearly upset and she starts speaking immediately, obviously close to this girl, her mother or aunt or someone, and Sam supposes that makes sense - with one child missing already, the other running off would be a logical cause of stress. It makes sense, but Sam bristles a little at the way she’s speaking, dismissing the girl’s story so quickly. He knows she just doesn’t know what’s out there, doesn’t believe in goat monsters that steal children, or probably anything else that’s out there in the dark or apparently in broad daylight, snatching kids... but it’s still annoying, almost as annoying as if it were him she’s dismissing, and not Abby.