Malorie

by Josh Malerman

  “How close are we?” she asks.

  “I’m packed,” Tom says.

  “I’m right there,” Olympia says.

  Malorie closes the door. She takes the broom from beside it and begins to sweep the cabin. The door was open, after all, even if only momentarily.

  “In the old world,” she says, “we had weather forecasters. People to tell us what we might expect.”

  “I brought my rain stuff,” Olympia says.

  “You should have packed everything I told you to pack and nothing more.”

  Tom hears her close to him. She sweeps around him, then under his bed.

  “Did either of you take anything else?”

  The teens know better than to hesitate when answering. They might be able to hear to the gates of camp, but Malorie can hear a lie like no one else.

  “Nope,” Tom says.

  “Just what you said,” Olympia says.

  “Okay.” Malorie stops sweeping. “You can open your eyes.”

  They do.

  Tom is stricken by how alive Malorie looks. Her eyes appear bright with memories, realizations, decisions. The bag beside her is full. She wears a hoodie and long pants, gloves and boots. In one hand is the blindfold she just removed.

  “Listen to me,” she says. “We’ve never done what we’re about to do. We’ve never been where we’re about to go. We’re really, really going to need each other.”

  It strikes Tom, suddenly, that the only thing that could trump Malorie’s safety measures, the only thing that could possibly eclipse her way of life and the life she has insisted upon for these seventeen years, is family.

  “I want you both to know I’m prepared for the fact that we may not find them. That we probably won’t. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Tom says.

  “Yes,” Olympia says.

  “I’m ready for this to end in failure. But not in our failure. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know if you do.” She breathes in, she holds it, she breathes out. She almost looks like a warrior to Tom. He lightly fingers the outside of his bag. The glasses are within. Malorie continues, “Whether we find them or not, the fact that we’re going means something. A great deal. There are people out there too afraid to attempt what we’re about to try.”

  “The train,” Olympia says.

  Malorie looks to her quickly.

  “Are you worried about the train?” she asks. “Oh, Olympia. I am, too.” Then, “Are either of you against doing this?”

  Tom can tell she hasn’t taken this into account until now. It’s all over her face.

  “I’m not against it,” he says. “I’m excited.”

  He looks to her bag, sees the census pages jutting out the top.

  Malorie shakes her head no.

  “Don’t be excited, Tom. Please. Just be alert.” She turns to Olympia. “And you?”

  “I want them to be alive,” she says.

  Malorie nods. Then she motions for the two of them to come to her, and they do. In the center of the cabin she grips each of their wrists.

  “This is the right thing to do,” she says. “Imagine you two found out I was living alone, someplace else. You’d do the same, right?”

  “Yes,” Olympia says.

  “We wouldn’t let you go,” Tom says.

  Malorie breathes deep again.

  “Okay,” she says. “Let’s go. Get the last of your things.”

  She looks to Tom’s bag.

  “You’re set?” she asks. “Nothing extra in there?”

  Tom shakes his head no. Malorie nods.

  “Okay. How many are out there?”

  “Right now?” he asks.

  Olympia cocks an ear to the cabin wall. Tom stands still. After a minute of silence, of listening, both teens respond with the same number at the same time.

  “One.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Malorie says. “There’s even one for our very first step. Let’s hope that ratio doesn’t last.”

  Tom zips his bag and puts on his hoodie. By the time his head comes through the top, Olympia’s bag is beside her, too.

  “Gloves,” Malorie says.

  But both teens are already putting them on.

  “I love you guys,” she says.

  And Tom feels it.

  He looks to her bag again and sees the tops of the white pages. He thinks of the story the man at the door alluded to. Tales of a creature caught.

  Could it be?

  “Okay,” Malorie says. “Blindfolds.”

  They put them on. As Tom closes his eyes and secures the fabric to his face, he imagines himself on a mountaintop with a box, as people all over the world line up to see what’s inside.

  Yes, see, as Tom will allow them a look with his glasses, the very glasses he built himself.

  “Now,” Malorie says, a touch of hysteria in her voice. “Now, let’s go.”

  As they cross the threshold of Cabin Three, as they take that first step toward a train none of them can know for sure will be there, it strikes Tom that he’s hearing something in Malorie’s voice that he hasn’t heard in a long time.

  Risk.

  It scares him. Because risk implies doubt. And if there’s one thing Malorie never expresses, it’s doubt in her decisions regarding the outside world.

  Stepping out, Tom feels young, much younger than Malorie. As if all her stories about the old world suddenly carry more weight. Now, here, they make up the history of someone who’s lived a life more like the worldly characters in Olympia’s books. Now, here, Malorie seems like she knows more than he does. This after years of Tom believing the opposite.

  “Come on,” Malorie says.

  And Tom knows she says it to herself.

  He listens. He moves. And no matter how hard he tries to shove this feeling away, this sense of being green, he can’t shake the doubt that rattles in Malorie’s voice.

  “Come on.”

  Risk.

  They’re taking one.

  A big one.

  Big enough to change how he sees the world.

  Already. One step from home.

  SEVEN

  Malorie feels the darkness. It doesn’t press in on her but rather slides across her arms and legs, her neck, her nose, her eyes. Yes, even her eyes feel exposed to the new world, her eyes that are not only closed but protected by the blindfold. It feels like the darkness, her personal darkness, the one she travels through, has gotten into her sleeves and boots, gloves and pants.

  Sam and Mary Walsh. St. Ignace.

  Unbelievable.

  “Do not remove your hoods.”

  She can’t count how many times she’s said this to the teens already. She does not hold their hands like she did the last time they took to these woods, heading the opposite way a decade ago. Tom and Olympia are sixteen years old now. At times one or the other walks ahead, at times they both take the lead, leaving Malorie in the back like the frightened friend traveling through those darkened halls of the county fair’s house of horrors. She and Shannon did that. Every year, if Malorie remembers right. She can still hear Shannon laughing, now, even as she listens for Tom’s footsteps, for Olympia’s directions, for the sounds of what exists beyond the small space the three of them make. She remembers reaching out to Shannon on those rides, at those booths, in that haunted house, looking for her sister at age sixteen, feeling a bond she knows Tom and Olympia feel now.

  “Guys?”

  “Yes,” Olympia says. “Right here, Mom. We’re still on the path.”

  The path, yes. One Malorie has never seen, of course. A path that school buses no doubt once used to deliver campers for the summer. It’s not hard to imagine a bus appearing, suddenly
, now, ahead, taking a turn too tightly, barreling down upon them.

  But old-world fears are silly out here. Malorie’s ear is on the creature the kids said was outside the cabin.

  “The road isn’t far,” Tom says.

  Malorie is past asking how they can hear these things. She’ll never rid herself of the image of them as babies, sleeping, blindfolded, under chicken-wire cribs covered in black cloth. She’ll never forget the two of them seated at the kitchen table, age three, their tiny heads cocked toward the amplifiers that delivered sounds from outside the house.

  They haven’t used amplifiers in years.

  “Hang on,” Tom says.

  “No,” Olympia says. “It’s nothing.”

  “Hang on,” Tom repeats.

  Malorie remains still. The bag is tight to her back. It feels light enough to carry thirty miles. She can do it. And she’ll need all the energy she can get. She doesn’t want to begin to guess what shelters, what abandoned edifices, what people they will encounter on their way.

  “Cover your faces,” she says.

  She covers her own with gloved hands. The black leather presses against the black fabric of the fold, layering the darkness.

  “Don’t let it touch you,” she says.

  She doesn’t know what it means for one to touch a person any more than she knows if one can be touched at all. But the image of Annette turning the corner in the hall at the school for the blind is as present as the images of her and Shannon at the county fair.

  “There’s nothing,” Olympia says.

  “There’s something,” Tom says. “Whether it’s a creature or not, I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?” Malorie asks. This scares her. Do they move differently now? Do they move at all?

  Something crashes through the bushes, and Malorie cries out. She reaches for the teens, instinctively, before covering her chin and mouth with the black gloves.

  “A deer,” Tom says. Malorie hears defeat in his voice. His sister was right. “If I was allowed to build my sound meter, we would’ve known that right away.”

  The “sound meter” is a failed invention of Tom’s, an idea he had for verifying what moved in the woods around camp. He believes it could’ve worked with minor tweaks, but Malorie destroyed it before he could try.

  “No talk like that now,” Malorie says, lowering the gloves at last. “Was the deer sane?”

  She thinks of Victor the dog, chewing his own legs.

  “Yes,” Olympia says.

  Still, ten years deep, and no complete knowledge of which animals go mad, which don’t, and why.

  Malorie wonders if there’s more information about this in the census pages she carries in her bag.

  They reach the road a minute later, sooner than Malorie thought they would. The service station that houses Ron Handy is two miles to their left. But they need to go right. The many roads they will take are east of here.

  Still, Malorie turns a blind eye Ron’s way. She imagines him in his own darkness there. Does he think of his sister just as she thinks of hers? Is he steeling himself for a run, south, of his own?

  She wants so badly for this to be the case. But she knows it’s not.

  “Good luck,” she says quietly, as if this is goodbye. Forever.

  As she turns to face the road again, her shoulder strikes something.

  She freezes.

  Whatever it was, it’s taller than the teens. She swipes at her arm, as if able to remove the touch of a creature.

  “Guys!” she says.

  But Olympia is beside her, guiding her, suddenly, around a tree.

  “We have to move slow,” Olympia says. “Really slow. Lots of trees this way. Remember?”

  Yes. And perhaps Malorie needed the reminder.

  “You don’t hear anything else?” she asks.

  “No,” Tom says. But Olympia remains silent a beat. Is it the hesitation of a lie? Is Olympia only being careful?

  “Nothing,” she finally says.

  “Did you lose track of the one you heard outside the cabin?”

  Hesitation again.

  “No.”

  “Where did it go?”

  “To the lake,” Olympia says.

  Despite not being able to hear the water from this distance, Malorie listens.

  “Tom?” she asks. “Did you hear the same thing?”

  “I lost track of it,” Tom says.

  “You what? You can’t do that out here. You cannot lose track of anything out here. Do you understand?”

  “Mom…”

  “Tom. Do you understand or not?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “No yeah, no sure. This isn’t the time to daydream. I need you. Olympia needs you.”

  “Okay. I’m sorry. Olympia said it’s in the lake. Then it’s in the lake.”

  Malorie listens. She thinks she can hear the open road going in either direction.

  “Fine,” she says. “Let’s go.”

  She feels the road beneath her boots but she knows they won’t be on solid footing for long. The map in her bag includes paths through woods, over farmland, across rivers.

  Sam and Mary Walsh.

  It’s impossible not to imagine them on the couch in the home she grew up in. But now, rather than a view of the garden and the street, there are blankets over the windows.

  And if they’re not at home, not in the only place Malorie can imagine them to be, what roads have they taken, and what did they hear along the way?

  “Quiet,” Malorie says, though the teens aren’t talking. “Listen.”

  And she thinks of the train. And she hopes the stop they just made, the few minutes they took to talk about the whereabouts of the creature, hasn’t made it so they miss it. Because if they do, if they miss the train by an hour, by a day…how can they be sure they’ll learn its schedule, if it has a schedule at all?

  Malorie walks. She wants to move faster than they are, faster than they can. She wants to make up the time they just took to talk. She wants to make up the ten years they spent at Camp Yadin. And the six years before that. She wants to return to the moment when her parents stopped answering their phones, when she and Shannon shared a silent look in which both agreed Sam and Mary Walsh had died.

  Malorie wants it all back. Now.

  “Mom,” Olympia says. “Be careful.”

  Her daughter’s hand comes to her wrist, guides her across a dip in the road.

  “Thank you,” she says. She wants to believe in Fate, wants to believe there is a reason for everything. That they were supposed to leave now. That no time has been lost. That a bigger purpose will be revealed in the end.

  But Malorie doesn’t think this way.

  “Hey,” Tom says. “There’s something ahead in the road.”

  Malorie opens her mouth to tell the teens to stop. But she doesn’t want to stop. And if the world is teeming with creatures now, and if they’re present with every step she takes toward her parents, then she’s going to have to live with walking among them.

  She thinks of something else she read in the census papers. Something about a town called Indian River. And the woman who runs it.

  Athena Hantz.

  She simply cannot let Tom read about that place. The descriptions, the dangers, were enough to blanch Malorie white. But Athena Hantz’s philosophy is what sticks with Malorie now. The woman claimed to live freely among creatures. No different than she lived before their arrival. And the way the census man put it, his exact words, were chilling:

  Miss Hantz claims she has “wholly accepted the creatures.” She insists they no longer drive people mad and have no intention of doing so. She believes, fiercely, they have changed over time. Her words: “They don’t punish us anymore.”

  What he wro
te next was worse:

  This philosophy, scant as it is, has garnered followers.

  And his summation was perhaps most troubling of all:

  Without being able to verify if she lives the way she claims, I only have our brief encounter to judge her by. And by my own estimation, Athena Hantz is sane.

  “Should we stop?” Tom asks. Malorie knows where this question is coming from. Has she ever not told them to stop in the presence of a creature?

  Malorie thinks of the people like the woman from Indian River. The people who populate the papers in her bag.

  Those people are unsafe. For that, every decision they make is coming from an unsafe place.

  But Malorie, now, out in the world again, must trust herself. She must believe in her own rules and the lifestyle she has forged for her teens.

  “Hoods up, cover your faces,” she says. “And keep walking.”

  EIGHT

  The teens sleep, but Malorie can’t do it.

  They walked thirteen hours today, and the map tells her they’ve only gone nine miles. It’s daunting. It’s overwhelming.

  Malorie doubts herself.

  They’re in what was once a bait and tackle shop. The map tells her the names of the nearby lakes. And the old smell of worms and water remain. The teens sleep by what was once the front register. Malorie is near them. She’s under a blanket, the cloth edges secured to the ground by her own boots. She’s on her knees, her legs sore from the walking, her nose close to the map on the ground. The flashlight shows her the legend, the mileage, and how unfathomably far they have to go. A little math helps. It’s close to an hour and a half per mile, walking blind along existing roads, through former crop fields, woods, even some swamp. Because the distance to East Lansing (if Ron is right that it’s East Lansing and not Lansing) is almost exactly twenty-one miles, this means they could have thirty walking hours to go. That would be two more days’ worth, if they put in the work they did today. In the old world, these figures aren’t much. A long weekend. But now, under the blanket, Malorie feels an urgency she hasn’t experienced before. Even leaving the house by way of the river required four years of gathering the courage to do so. Right now, she would run if she could.