“Go on,” Tom says.
Tom can read on his own, of course, but he’s lazy. And he can’t sit still for long. Tom, Olympia knows, needs to move. He needs to be in motion. He needs to be doing something.
“A man in Texas attempted to look at one under water,” Olympia reads. “Seventeen people were present for this. The group believed a creature to be wading in the lake behind the campsite where they stayed. The man volunteered to go under, to look. He went mad down there and never came up again for air.”
“Someone held him down,” Tom says. “Nobody could just…stay under water till they died. Not if they could get up. Impossible.”
Olympia nods. But she isn’t so sure. The stories Malorie has told them, coupled with the memories of the entire school for the blind going mad at once, mean anything is possible.
“But what is madness,” Olympia asks, “if not something out of the ordinary?”
“Okay,” Tom says, pacing, “but this is different. The body would take over. Right? Even if you wanted to drown yourself by sitting on the bottom of a lake…the body would swim to the top.”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t either. But that one feels fishy to me.”
“Are you listening?”
He looks to her, gravity in his eyes.
“Of course I’m listening,” he says. “Always.”
Listening for Malorie. Neither wants to be caught doing this.
“A woman in Wisconsin attempted to look at one through an eclipse viewer,” Olympia reads. Tom looks considerably more attentive now. “After many discussions with her peers in which they attempted to dissuade her, she tried it alone at dawn on a clear, spring morning. She went mad immediately.”
“Okay,” Tom says, “but how do we know she only looked through the viewfinder?”
“I think that’s implied.”
Tom laughs.
“Well, if there’s one thing Mom has taught us, it’s that ‘implied’ isn’t good enough.”
At the mention of Malorie: “Are you listening?”
“Olympia. Go on.”
She silently reads ahead the next few handwritten lines. “This is interesting,” she says. “Sick people at a compound in Ohio, knowing they were going to die, volunteered to test out theories of how to look at the creatures.”
“Wow,” Tom says. “That’s brave.”
“Totally. One man went mad watching videotape of the outside world.”
“Like Mom’s story.”
“Yep. One man went mad looking at photographs taken of the outside world. Another went mad looking at the negatives. What are negatives?”
“I don’t know,” Tom says.
“A terminal woman went mad walking the outside world with two prisms, former paperweights, held to her eyes.”
Olympia shudders. These Ohio stories describe a sad group of sick people in hospital gowns, wandering otherwise empty streets, willing to die for answers.
“Willing to die for progress,” Tom says. “Terminal or not, that’s noble.”
Olympia agrees.
“There are fifty pages of this kind of stuff.”
“And I wanna hear every one of them.”
“Are you—”
But before she can finish her question, Tom points a finger at her.
“Go on,” he says.
“A woman walked the streets of Branson, Missouri, wearing blinders, the type once used for horses, testing the idea that it’s the peripheral vision that drives one mad.”
“This isn’t going to end well.”
“Nope. She went mad and broke into a theater. Killed a family hiding out there.”
A crack of a stick outside, and both teens close their eyes. They do not speak; they hardly breathe. Both listen as far as they can.
Olympia thinks she knows what it is, but Tom says so first.
“A deer.”
They both open their eyes.
“Sane,” Olympia says.
Tom shrugs. “I would have to know for certain how a sane deer behaves first.”
“Could be a moose. Could be a lion.”
Tom opens his mouth to refute her, but Olympia smiles as he thinks it over. She flips through the pages.
“Locations,” she says. “Towns that are…”
But she goes quiet.
“Towns that are what?” Tom asks.
As Olympia begins to flip the page, he hurries across the cabin and sits beside her on the bed.
“Don’t skip over anything,” he says. “Come on.”
Olympia shows him.
“The cities are arranged by how ‘modern’ they are.”
“Modern?” Tom asks.
“I think they mean to say…how forward-thinking.”
She sees the lights turn on in her brother’s eyes, and she feels almost mean for having showed him. She suddenly wishes the man hadn’t come to the door at all.
“Are these places where people have tried capturing one?”
He’s excited now. Olympia makes to keep the pages from him, but to what end? She hands them over.
“Holy shit,” Tom says. “Get this. A couple in northern Illinois claimed to have trapped a creature in their toolshed. They brought me to the shed and asked that I put my ear to the door. I heard movement inside. Then I heard crying. I feigned being impressed and eventually thanked the couple and said goodbye. But later that night I returned and released their twelve-year-old son from the shed.”
“God,” Olympia says. “That’s terrible!”
“Terrible. And get this: A man in Pittsburgh claimed to have buried three creatures in his backyard. He showed me where the ground was soft. When I asked if I might dig them up, he threatened me at gunpoint, telling me that if I told anyone what he’d done to his family he’d shoot me. This is not an easy job I’ve taken on.”
“Jeez,” Olympia says. “And no evidence of an actual catch.”
Tom sees the name of a town, Indian River, and a person, Athena Hantz, but he can’t let Olympia’s last statement just slip by.
“No. But that doesn’t mean anything. Someone’s got one out there, Olympia. You have to remember: there are so many people in the world. We just live in one little camp in one little part of Michigan. Know what I mean?” When he pauses, Olympia sees distance in his eyes, as if he’s on the road to other places. “Someone’s done it. And I wanna know who.”
“Tom. Come on. Don’t be a fool.”
But Olympia understands. A list like this is all and everything Tom has ever wanted. Places where people think like he does. Places far from an abandoned camp harboring a mother with as many rules as she has blindfolds.
“Do you have a book of maps?” he asks her.
“In the library. Of course. Why? You thinking of heading somewhere more progressive?”
Tom laughs, but she hears frustration there.
She takes the pages back.
“Lists,” she says, happy to move on for now. Tom, she knows, will be reading these pages for months to come. Maybe even years. “So many lists. Streets. Incidences. Temperatures. Names.”
“Names?”
“I would think you would be more interested in the achievements than the actual people involved.”
Tom elbows her gently.
“Let me see the names.”
She shows him. Tom squints. Olympia knows this face well. Tom is connecting dots.
“Survivors,” he says.
“How do you know that?”
“Look.”
He points to a legend at the bottom of the first page of names. Symbols beside words like seen and spotted, rumored and…
“Alive…” Olympia says. “Oh, wow.”
They both sit a little more erect on th
e bed.
“Check if we’re in there,” Tom says. “Go to Michigan.”
Olympia shakes her head.
“We won’t be. We would’ve been if Mom had let him in.”
“Ah. Right.”
But Olympia goes to Michigan anyway. There are dozens of pages for the state, as there are for most of the states in the Midwest.
“That’s a lot of people,” Tom says. “See? Someone’s caught one.”
“Well, if you consider the population seventeen years ago, this isn’t that many. Remember when Mom told us about the phone book? And all the calls they made?”
“Yeah.” Tom gets it. “And that was just for their immediate area.”
“Exactly.”
They flip through the names. Some are illegible. Others stand out.
“I got an idea,” Tom says.
He hops up off Olympia’s bed and goes to the dresser beside his own. From the top drawer he takes a pencil.
“Let’s put our names in there anyway,” he says.
Olympia is relieved. She’d been worried the list of modern cities might send her brother into weeks of self-reflection. Tom has gone quiet before. Especially when he starts thinking of the world outside the camp. Despite Malorie referring to him as “her optimist,” Tom actually has long bouts of visible consternation. Olympia has read all about characters who get quiet when they get serious. But then again, she’s also read of hundreds who’ve changed by the end of the story. And changed those around them.
Tom is beside her again. He takes the book from her and flips to the last page of Michigan names.
He writes Camp Yadin near the bottom of the page, where there’s room. He writes his own name. He hands Olympia the pencil.
She likes this idea. She’s smiling as she reads the seemingly infinite list of people. But her smile begins to sag as two names leap out at her, two that are familiar to her, though Malorie hardly ever refers to them by their actual names.
“What’s up?” Tom asks.
Olympia is already flipping the page back, checking the name of the city where these two people were found.
“Olympia, what’s going on? You look scared.”
She doesn’t even realize she’s looking Tom in the eye now; all she sees are the two names written in chicken-scratch and the name St. Ignace like a banner, swinging weakly in a world decimated by creatures who drive you mad when you see them.
“Olympia, are you okay?”
“We have to get Mom, Tom.”
“She’s sweeping the camp. Besides, I don’t want her to know about this—”
“We have to get Mom now.”
THREE
Malorie thinks of Gary.
It makes sense. A man arrives at the camp. He knocks. He speaks from the other side of the door. All good intentions, of course. Until you let him in, of course. Then he makes friends with the others, ingratiates himself to the point where your own kids turn on you, and presto, you’ve welcomed an old-world madman into your life.
It’s not hard to imagine Tom gravitating toward a man like Gary. A man who claims to know the truths of the new world. Nor is it difficult to imagine Olympia wooed by a stranger’s tales of traveling the country, keeping notes on everything he’s learned.
“Sweep the camp,” she says. Tom and Olympia have assured her the man is gone, and truly, there’s no better alarm system than their ears. Still, Malorie wants a look around. Did this man really just arrive, or had he been squatting in one of the other cabins for weeks? Tom was outside when he came. Does this mean something? All three of them were together when he knocked. Does this?
She gets to Cabin Eight quickly. She opens the door. Her hands are gloved, her arms and neck covered by the hoodie. She wears sweats and thick socks.
She thinks of Annette. The blind woman who went mad. Creature-mad.
How?
Before entering the cabin, she smells the air. If there’s one sense that has gotten better through the years it’s her sense of smell. She can tell when a storm is coming, when woods aren’t far off. She can tell if something’s died outside and whether a person has called a small space home.
At the threshold to Cabin Eight, she smells nothing but the empty must of wood and bunks without mattresses. Still, knife raised, she enters.
Camp Yadin has been good to her. So good. When they arrived, there were enough canned goods to last months. And seeds to begin gardens beyond that. Tools and toys. Shelter and a piano. A sailboat for the small lake. Paths to walk for exercise. Malorie knew they’d be staying for some time. But ten years have passed fast.
Tom and Olympia are not only teenagers now, they’ve been teenagers for a while.
She uses a thick stick to check the spaces between bunks, to poke under them. More than once she’s been surprised by an animal calling a cabin home. But, in the new world, she’s come to fear animals least of all. In her many interactions, she’s discovered that acting angry makes them run. Even the mad ones (if she can ever be sure whether or not an animal is sane). Insects are more mysterious. Malorie doesn’t know if spiders go mad. But she has found webs, here in camp, built in unsettling patterns, suggesting something was seen, something was close.
Of course, creatures have traveled the paths of the camp many times. Tom and Olympia have pointed them out from inside Cabin Three.
“Anybody here and you’re gonna get stabbed,” Malorie says.
She says these things to hear her own voice. She understands that, if the man who claimed to be from the census was actually in this bunk, if he was, say, crouched upon one of the beds she pokes beneath, he could easily kill her. But the kids say he left. And she has to believe that much.
Cabin Eight clean, she exits and takes the rope that leads to Cabin Nine. It’s hot outside, the hottest day she can remember, but she isn’t taking the hoodie off.
She thinks of Annette.
The kids don’t believe you can go mad by way of touch. But the kids don’t make the rules around here.
Malorie can still see the red-haired woman turning the corner of the bricked hall. The blue robe like blue wind, Annette’s mouth contorted in a way only madness can shape. Malorie can still see the knife.
Her own knife touches the door to Cabin Nine before she does. She uses the tip to push it open.
She smells the air at the threshold.
All senses now, it seems. Sight, smell, touch. The creatures have rearranged how a person experiences reality. This is not new, of course, but Malorie, ever a child of the old world, will never get used to it. And if it’s a matter of not being able to comprehend the creatures, as Tom the man once hypothesized, if it’s a matter of going mad at the sight of something our minds simply cannot assimilate…why not the same fate by way of touch? Wouldn’t any encounter by way of any of the senses constitute an experience with an impossible thing, a thing our minds cannot fathom?
She imagines wearing nose plugs, headphones to cancel sound.
She shudders as she enters the cabin. She thinks of Gary. How can she not? There was a time on the river when the fold was pulled from her eyes. And while she believed it to be a creature at the time, an unfathomable being wading in the water, what if it was Gary instead? It’s not hard to imagine the man, shirtless, up to his waist, having tracked her for four years, having camped outside the home in which she raised the kids. It’s not hard to imagine Gary in that river just like it’s not hard to imagine him here, standing in this cabin she will not look into.
Maybe he waves.
Malorie uses the stick to poke under the bunks. The tip of it connects with something and, because she’s piqued, because she’s thinking of the dramatic, bearded demon from her past, she’s chilled by the unknown object before realizing it’s only a visor. Part of a helmet Tom had been hell-bent on making last summer.
Touching the visor with gloved fingers, she thinks of Annette again, or maybe it’s that she’s never stopped thinking of Annette and Gary, two horrible mysteries, as if the two had somehow raised her in the new world, the untrustworthy father and the mad mother who, together, birthed the overly protective, ever-on-edge Malorie of today.
“If anybody’s in here, you’re gonna get stabbed.”
But nobody’s in here. She can tell. And she’s done a thorough sweep of the bunks, above, below, and between them.
She exits Cabin Nine and takes the rope to the lodge. There are many rooms in the lodge, including the kitchen and a basement, where much of the salvation for the past ten years has come from.
Sliding the fingers of her left hand along the rope, the knife held tight in her right, she tries to remember if she was touched when the fold was pulled an inch from her face on the river. And if she was…if something brushed against the bridge of her nose…what was it?
And who?
The walk to the lodge is uphill, but Malorie is in good shape. The best shape she’s ever been in. She and her sister, Shannon, were never much for sports, despite Mom and Dad encouraging them to try. The girls would’ve rather walked around town than throw a ball, and neither had ever even attended so much as a high school football game. Yet here she is, able to hike for miles in a day, able to hold her own should someone be in the lodge ahead, confident with a knife and her ability to defend herself.
She doesn’t want to think about Annette. She doesn’t want to think about Gary. But she can’t stop them from coming. As if they’re constantly standing outside the cabin door of her mind. Constantly knocking.
Could you let me in for an hour or two?
Malorie Page 3