Have you ever smelled fear?

I don't mean the bitter smell of sweat and urine that comes part and parcel with terror.  Those are just reactions, easy to pick up.  No, I am talking about the chemical stench of actual fear, the kind of thing that animals pick up on, even when you are trying to hide it behind a brave facade.  It's contagious, that smell.  It does something hormonally to you, to humans anyway.  It serves an evolutionary purpose.  It makes sense that back when we were living in dirt huts and using sharp sticks to kill our food that if one of us was scared, it was for good reason.  

But even knowing that didn't prepare me for it.  All of the education, all the training, the spooky briefings from the creepy elders who liked to wear black and have edgy names, all of it flew out of the proverbial window when we got to the temple.  Divided though they were, they managed to hold a perimeter around the incident site. It was hard to believe their words at first, the stories of swirling ghosts and howls that pierced your ears.  But the longer I was there, the more real it felt, the more it felt like I had been there with them.  I didn't even see what they ran from yet, and still I felt like my heart was going to pound its way outside of my chest.

I have smelled fear.

It sucks.