Malorie

by Josh Malerman

  Or ten years.

  By the time she reaches the stone steps, she’s so encumbered with thoughts of mad people and creatures, isolation and her kids, that she has to remind herself what she’s doing.

  She uses the knife to open the lodge door.

  She steps over the threshold.

  Annette stepped over the edge.

  And what held her hand on the way?

  Malorie smells the air. She listens. She has no doubt that, over the course of the past decade, she’s stood close to many creatures. It’s a fact of the new world she’s had to accept. Tom and Olympia tell her there are many more now than there used to be. The man at the door said the same. But how many is that? And how much space do they now occupy?

  She enters the lodge. Despite the high ceiling and open room, it’s always hottest in here. Malorie thinks it’s because of the tall windows, despite having painted those windows black long ago. Still, she’s reminded of the saunas, so prevalent in the Upper Peninsula where she was raised, the steam boxes her mother and father insisted on each night before bed. By the time she’s crossed the former common area where campers once took meals, she longs for the lake she and Shannon leaped into, following those saunas, running from the steaming rocks.

  She stops. She thinks she’s heard something. Movement. Something outside the lodge. But Camp Yadin plays tricks. Branches fall. Wind blows. Cabins creak.

  She waits. She listens.

  It is not lost on her how vulnerable she is at this moment. The man who claimed to be from the census could be standing in the corner of this room, preparing something. A creature could be inches from her face, observing, still, the effect they have on the people they should never have crossed paths with. But seventeen years into the new world, Malorie decides to treat her personal darkness differently. While she’s certainly as staunch as the others at the school for the blind claimed she was, and while she may be partially paranoid, as her own son said while in a fit of rage, she’s also able to pretend that the darkness she exists in does not include creatures and camps, life and death. Rather, she imagines she’s walking through the home she grew up in. Dad is by the stove in the kitchen, listening to a game on a small radio that Mom tells him he keeps too close to the burner. Mom reads a book, sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for Shannon to take her turn at Scrabble.

  This is a much nicer reality. And who’s to say what’s real in the dark?

  As Malorie exits the common room, as she enters the hall that leads to the large kitchen in back, she can almost smell the venison Dad cooks, can hear Mom flip a page, can sense Shannon’s deliberations. Nobody liked playing games with Shannon.

  “If you think your mom is a perfectionist, Tom,” Malorie says, “you shoulda met your aunt.”

  By the time she enters the kitchen, she’s no longer in the home she grew up in; now she talks to Tom the man in the house she fled twelve years ago, talks about Gary.

  “Stop it,” she tells herself. It isn’t easy. Yet years of this back-and-forth, a decade and a half of horrific memories springing like attractions in a haunted house at the Marquette County Fair, have lessened the grip these bad thoughts have on her. Despite what Tom her son might believe, Malorie does not live in fear.

  She swipes the knife in front of her face as she exits the kitchen and takes the stairs to the lodge’s basement. She does this because more than once she’s passed through a web at the head of the steps. And more than once she’s brought the brown spiders back to Cabin Three.

  “If anybody is down here, they’re gonna get stabbed.”

  Despite the fold, despite her eyes being closed, Malorie still senses that she’s entered utter darkness. The unmistakable cellar smell of cold concrete and mold. It used to be she’d hurry to find the dangling cord, to bring light to a space like this. But if there’s one thing the new world has incrementally destroyed, it’s a fear of the dark.

  She crosses the mostly open area and tells herself she’s only here to grab canned goods. Could be her and Shannon retrieving cranberries for the Thanksgiving meal Mom and Dad cook together upstairs. Could be the canned goods Tom the man showed her the first morning she woke in the house on Shillingham. Or it could be what it is: Malorie searching the shelf for beans, able to pick them out among the other cans because the lids are different.

  “Used to be a lot more on this shelf.”

  No question about that. And it feels good to assess, to do what she normally does, while listening for movement and keeping her nose open for a squatting human being who most likely pretends to be with the census.

  “Who does he think he is?” she asks, unable to find the beans after all. Sometimes the gloved fingertips make this sort of task a little harder. “What did he expect me to do? Just let him in?”

  As she removes the glove, as the county fair house of horrors vision of a creature reaching out and touching her exposed hand momentarily rattles her, she wonders how a man can claim to be from the census in a country where there is no organization anymore.

  She finds the beans quickly and slips the glove back on.

  She turns to face the basement.

  Did she hear something? Something above?

  The teens know the rules, but of course that doesn’t mean the teens follow them. When Malorie sweeps the camp, they are to remain in Cabin Three. It’s a waste of time to investigate sounds made by either Tom or Olympia while she’s out making sure the three of them are still alone.

  “If anybody’s here,” she begins. But she doesn’t finish this time. Despite the fact that she’s gotten very good at living with fear, she’s still not immune to moments of abject horror. Like when she’s standing in the basement of an abandoned camp lodge, and a man she did not see the face of was just moments ago knocking on her cabin door.

  The image of a gun spins in her personal darkness. Olympia thinks they should get one. She cites the thousand books she’s read and how guns have saved more than one character’s life. But Malorie has been strict on this from the beginning. The last thing she wants in this camp is a tool Tom might use in the name of progress. It’s not hard to imagine opening a cabin door and getting shot at by a pre-prepositioned rifle, as Tom prides himself on a triumphant invention. And, of course, it’s not only Tom she doesn’t trust with one. It’s any of them, in the event one should see something they shouldn’t.

  Yet, here, now, it feels like something more than her sense of purpose and a sharp knife could be helpful.

  She listens.

  She smells.

  She waits.

  She has done these three things so often over the last ten years that she hardly remembers a time when she didn’t. Sometimes, her new-world behavior seeps into her memories of the old. Didn’t she sniff the air every time she entered Shannon’s bedroom as a child? Didn’t she ask Mom and Dad if their eyes were closed when they came home from the store?

  There is no past and present behind the fold. No linear lines of any kind.

  The beans in one hand, the knife in the other, and the searching stick under her arm, Malorie crosses the basement again and arrives at the stairs quicker than she thought she would.

  She’s scared.

  It’s not the nicest thing to realize. Because once it begins, once the initial, hot tendrils tickle your arms and legs, flow down your back and calves, it’s hard to stop the feeling from growing to its full size: panic.

  She turns to face the open basement. Did something move deeper in as she came farther out? No man is down here. She believes Tom and Olympia are right that he left, because their ears have never let her down before.

  But does something share this space with her?

  She hears Tom the man begging to be let into the attic as she gave birth to, if not his son, his namesake.

  The kids know the rules, yes. They know to keep still until she returns
from her sweep. Unless, of course, there’s an emergency.

  “Fuck you,” she says to the open space. To the creatures, too.

  Because sometimes it helps.

  Then she’s hurrying up the stairs just like she and Shannon used to do as kids. Cranberries or a book in hand, the girls would race, side by side, elbowing each other to get to the top first. Malorie remembers falling on the stairs once, scraping both elbows, seeing between the steps the face of her old stuffed Sylvester the Cat and taking the rest of the steps at a screaming run.

  Now she’s up in the kitchen again. She’s breathing hard. She’s trying to understand how a man could call himself part of any census. She’s thinking about what he said about someone catching a creature.

  “Why did you have to say that in front of Tom…”

  Because Tom will not only believe something like that, he’ll want to be near it.

  She takes her steps slow on the way back to the common area. She pauses to listen between each. A thing she’s discovered in the new world is the brief intake of breath a person takes before speaking. And the sound they make when they shift their weight from one foot to another.

  Does she hear any of this now?

  Malorie waits. She thinks of the man’s voice and, while she doesn’t want to admit it, she believes his aim was true. She’ll never believe she’s gotten to the point where she can judge character from behind a blindfold. And she’ll never make the mistake Don made with Gary. But she’s open-minded enough to think perhaps a census has to start somewhere.

  As she crosses the space, she resists a sense of guilt, for having denied the man his hour or two, for not listening to what he had to say, for not telling him her own stories. Maybe she knows things others don’t. Maybe she could’ve helped.

  “No,” she says, as she reaches the lodge door. No, because no matter how much the new world improves around her and her teens, she will always, always rely on the fold and the fold alone.

  She opens the door, takes a step, and bumps into a person.

  She makes to swing the knife, but Olympia speaks before she does.

  “Mom! It’s me and Tom!”

  It takes Malorie a second before she believes it. All these thoughts of Annette and Gary, creatures and a man who says he’s one thing but could be another.

  “What are you doing?” Malorie asks. Her voice sounds red. “You know the rules!”

  “It’s an emergency,” Olympia says.

  “Mom,” Tom says. “Seriously. You need to hear this.”

  “It’s the man at the door,” Malorie says.

  “No,” Olympia says. “Not exactly.”

  Malorie waits. She listens.

  “The man left the literature,” Tom says.

  “What?” Malorie asks.

  She imagines pictures of creatures. She imagines the teens losing their young minds by way of a photograph left on the porch.

  “You didn’t—” she begins. But Olympia cuts her off.

  “Mom. There are pages and pages, lists of survivors.”

  Malorie feels something dark swirling inside her. Did they find Gary’s name on that list?

  “Come on!” she says. “Speak!”

  When Olympia does, she’s standing closer to Malorie, and Malorie knows it’s because her daughter believes she might need a stabilizing hand.

  “In St. Ignace, Michigan, Mom,” Olympia says.

  “What? What about it?” But St. Ignace is in the Upper Peninsula. Where Malorie is from. And the city name, coming from Olympia’s lips, coupled with the word survivors, suggests something Malorie is not prepared to hear.

  “Your parents’ names are on the list, Mom. Their names are on the list of survivors. Your parents are alive.”

  FOUR

  Malorie can’t sit still in what was once the lodge’s main office. The desk still harbors some of the items the long-ago director used daily. A magnetized rectangle for paper clips. A yellow pad for notes. A calendar seventeen years old. There was once a two-way mirror in here, so the campers couldn’t see the director observing them eating below in the common area. But that mirror has long been tucked beneath Tom’s bed, materials for proposed inventions Malorie won’t let him build, and a black cloth hangs in the open space instead.

  She refuses to believe the news. Even the possibility of it. Then she believes it. Then she refuses. Believes it again. She’s seen the names with her own eyes now. Sam and Mary Walsh. Common names, she tells herself. So many Sams. Even more Marys. And Walsh…

  But the exact combination, and the fact that they are listed in the Upper Peninsula, is actually hurting her. It’s a variety of pain, in her stomach, her bones, her heart, she’s never known before. Seventeen years ago Shannon accompanied Malorie to buy a pregnancy test. The world had already changed irrevocably by then, but the sisters didn’t know it yet. The last time Malorie spoke to her parents, she told them of the baby. Then Sam and Mary Walsh stopped answering their phone.

  Seventeen years.

  Tom and Olympia know to leave her alone with this. They are in what used to be the secretary’s office, the outer office, as Malorie sits, then stands, then sits, in here, the pages spread before her on the desk. The door is shut. She swept the room before removing her fold.

  She reads the names again.

  “How?”

  Even this word hurts. She should be moving. North. Toward them. This is every griever’s fantasy, to see Mom and Dad once more. To say the things she never said.

  She should leave. Now.

  But…is this real?

  And how old is this list? How many years gone? The pages suggest the man who claimed to be from the census traveled most of the Midwest. And how long has that taken? Is such a thing even possible? And is this his first visit to Michigan? Or did he note these names, the names of Malorie’s parents, a decade ago?

  Oh, she should’ve let him in.

  The Sam and Mary Walsh Malorie knew lived near the Wisconsin border. They’d have no reason to go to St. Ignace, to the bridge that unites Michigan’s two peninsulas. Even when facing the end of the world. Especially then. Shannon used to joke that the Upper Peninsula is the end of the world. So why would Sam and Mary have migrated south?

  Did they come…looking for their daughters?

  She can’t breathe. It’s simply too heavy. She feels like she could faint. Or worse.

  She paces the office, her eyes darting back to the names on the page. She can’t calm down, can’t formulate a single solid opinion. She imagines Sam and Mary Walsh surviving as long as she has, the sorrows and horrors they would have endured, the unfathomable stress of living in a world so different than the one they raised their children in.

  She wants Tom the man to be here with her. She wants to hear what he would say.

  Did she and Shannon give up on their parents too soon? Neither had anything to go on other than the silence from Sam and Mary’s end and the thought that, perhaps, their parents were not the survivor type.

  But was Malorie? When this all began…was she the survivor type?

  “Fuck.”

  “Mom?”

  It’s Olympia, from the outer office.

  Maybe Mom and Dad have changed, too. If there’s one thing Malorie has learned while raising these kids, it’s that parenthood is not static. Parenthood does not stand still. And the mother of two teens in the new world undergoes alterations, sudden instinctual thrusts, almost as powerful as the creatures she protects them from.

  “No,” Malorie says. Because…there’s just no way. No way her parents are still alive in Michigan, gardening blindfolded and painting their windows black. There’s no way they’ve endured the horrors she has and still hold hands the way they once did, always did, sitting beside each other on the couch.

  She feels dizzy. Faint. She sits
on the edge of the old desk and stares into the abyss of her past, her childhood, life in the old world, so long ago now and so severely, maddeningly different.

  Seventeen years.

  Seventeen years ago she found out she was pregnant with Tom. Only he wasn’t “Tom” yet. Malorie had yet to meet her son’s namesake, the man who had such a profound impact on her that she still asks him, silently, for advice on every decision she makes, sixteen years after his death. Is it possible her parents are alive? In a world where they didn’t even meet the man she named her son after? And if so, what unspeakable occurrences have they lived through?

  Who has helped them survive?

  “They’re not alive,” she says. Because there’s just no way. It’s too much, too huge. Every time she hears Olympia giving her the news, the names, Malorie hears the smile that must have been present on her daughter’s face. It’s driving her mad. Doesn’t her bright, impossibly hopeful daughter know that what she told her is actually untrue? They simply can’t be alive. The list is wrong. There are a thousand Sam and Mary Walshes. There’s no census. The man somehow got her parents’ names and wrote them onto the pages, Trojan-horsing his actual intent; getting Malorie and her kids to leave the safety they’ve finally found.

  The man is trying to destroy the peace and security of Camp Yadin.

  Maybe, just maybe, the man was actually Gary.

  Malorie punches the desk. Then she gets behind it, looks hard at the names on the page. It’s been a long time since she rifled through Gary’s briefcase and found his dangerous thoughts written down, but she doesn’t think she’ll ever forget the tilt of his hand, the dark electricity that was present on every page.

  She studies the handwriting.

  And she knows.

  This is not Gary’s writing. It’s not even close to the same.

  She looks to the office door, thinks of her teens on the other side. She knows they must be imagining a journey out, similar to their journey in, ten years gone. Tom must be excited by this. Olympia is probably already preparing.

  But do they really believe this list? Has she raised them to be so naïve? This impossible, absolutely insane list of…of…