“Ready, Mom?” Olympia says. Still mediating. Still attempting to sidestep the fact that Tom just blew up at Malorie.
Malorie doesn’t respond. She only walks, knowing the teens can hear her, can pinpoint her exact location with their ears.
And as she walks, she hopes her parents have done exactly what Tom has suddenly accused her of.
She hopes they live by the fold.
She hopes all they do is survive.
TEN
Tom waits for Malorie to fall asleep. Even in the dark, it’s not hard for him to determine. Malorie and Olympia don’t always snore, but both breathe differently when they go under. Tom believes he can hear it when they dream. Often, back in Camp Yadin, this idea comforted him and eased him into his own deep slumber.
They’re in a barn. Olympia found it a mile and a half after Malorie asked that they abandon the road and walk “in tandem” until they found a place for the night. Tandem, for these three, means Malorie sticks to the road, Tom walks some forty feet into the grass, Olympia forty feet beyond him. The teens can hear how close each are to one another, and the sound of Malorie’s shoes makes it so they don’t go too far to get back. When Olympia called out what she’d found, a dirt drive first, then the barn itself, Tom began planning.
It’s all driving him a bit mad.
He understands Malorie grew up in a world where it was normal to look outside, to see the barn, and therefore to detect any sign of danger. But he doesn’t think she really understands that he and Olympia can do the same thing with their ears. She’s praised them for it through the years, but her bottomless precautions reveal what she really thinks: they’re vulnerable children without her. Tom’s out in the world, for the first time since he was six years old, and the last thing he wants more of is Malorie. He can hear if something is near a barn. It’s more than sound. It’s instinct. One Tom and Olympia trust like Malorie once trusted her eyes.
Now, he hears the deep, elongated breathing of his mom and sister. Both are exhausted, as well both should be. They’ve come twenty-four miles over varied terrain, the sun beating down upon their long sleeves, hoods, blindfolds, and gloves. They’ve eaten what rations Malorie collected from camp and drank filtered water from ravines, rivers, and cricks. And while all three were active around Yadin, none of them have walked this much in a decade.
Tom, who has been lying on a floor of harsh, wilted hay, gets up. He moves quiet as he can, aware that, while Malorie won’t wake to the noise, Olympia easily could. Despite planning to do the very thing Olympia loves doing, he doesn’t want his sister to know what he has in mind.
Reading.
He takes crouched steps, one at a time, his arms extended, his fingers searching in the darkness for Malorie’s bag. He knows where it is. He’s kept his ear on the spot, the exact spot, since she set it there twenty-five minutes ago.
A flutter from the loft, and Tom cocks his ear toward it. He already knows it’s only a bird. But will it flap its wings? Will it wake Malorie?
He finds the straps that have kept the bag tight to Malorie’s back for the duration of their walk. He lifts it from the hay with care.
He pauses. He listens. He hears nobody outside the barn.
The door does not creak when he opens it. He slips outside, already removing the flashlight from his pocket, already pulling out the rolled blanket.
Eyes closed, he moves swiftly to the side of the barn, covers himself and the bag with the blanket, secures it to the ground with his knees and elbows, and turns on the light.
He opens his eyes.
It strikes him that, even if something had gotten under the blanket with him, he wouldn’t care. He believes he’d have heard it before seeing it, would’ve had time to close his eyes.
He’s so sick of being afraid of the creatures.
Sick of living by the fold.
The white tips of the pages appeal to him like so many invitations, asking him to read, read on, read on till morning.
He knows exactly where he wants to begin. Back in Cabin Three he caught a glimpse of a section, words that jumped out at him, before he was distracted by Olympia. Those words have whispered to him since.
He removes the stack from the bag and flips through until he reaches the page headed: INDIAN RIVER.
It’s a city in northern Michigan. And the description of it is everywhere Tom wants to be.
He reads:
Indian River, Michigan, has become one of the most progressive communities I’ve yet to encounter. Their citizenry numbers three hundred. Most sleep in tents and what was once a plain, two-story brick office building. But none spend their days indoors.
Tom’s heart picks up speed. Already he can tell these are his kind of people. The kind that push back against the creatures.
A town of many inventions, Indian River is not for the faint of heart. One man claims to have caught a creature, but this was not corroborated by anyone else I spoke to. NOTE: Almost everyone I asked told me they hoped he had.
“Yes!” Tom half cries out, half whispers. He can’t help it. A whole town of people who want to hear a creature was caught?
And maybe, just maybe, one was.
The de facto leader of the town is a woman named Athena Hantz. It was difficult for me to gauge her age as she has the passion of the young and the fortitude of someone much older. 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.”
Tom’s eyes widen. This is heavy stuff. The idea that the creatures have changed…
He thinks of the man from the bait shop. He didn’t die when he left. This after saying he was close to looking.
Did he look?
Tom reads:
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.
Tom nods along with the words. He’s impressed the census man felt compelled to include this. He wants to wake his mom, to show her, to say, see, see? Not everybody who thinks differently than Malorie is mad!
Athena Hantz.
Without any idea what she looks or sounds like, Tom imagines Athena Hantz is his mother instead. What would it mean for him to have been raised by a person like this in a place like that?
Indian River already feels more like home than Camp Yadin ever did.
He reads on:
In every corner of this community, somebody is attempting something new. For this, they’ve had their share of tragedies.
Tom nods. Of course they have. They had to have. That’s how invention works. Failures are guaranteed.
Doesn’t Malorie understand that? Doesn’t she get that you can wear a blindfold your entire life, but all you’re doing is perpetuating the lie that you cannot see?
One such instance occurred while attempting to “slow down” the process of insanity by securing a volunteer to a tree and leaving her outside to “watch all night.” The thinking here was that, if the person who has gone mad does not receive immediate gratification, perhaps the initial urge will subside, and the feelings of wanting to hurt herself or another would eventually go away. The community of Indian River fed soup to a madwoman this way, a woman tied to the tree, who did not, it turns out, avoid the known demise. Rather, she pretended to, ten days tied to the tree, and when the others cut her loose, finally, she lashed out. NOTE: While this sounds foolish and is something most survivors would never consider, the people of Indian River did learn from this experience. The initial, manic urge did indeed subside. But, unfortunately for those involved, it was replaced with cunning. This begs the question: who else out there has seen a creature but was incapable of carrying out their immediate fantasies? Who else
out there is feigning sanity? I do not know if Athena Hantz was present for this experiment.
Tom has to stop to consider this one. It’s all so amazing. While he’s factored in ways of viewing the creatures, he’s never considered altering the actual effect they have on people. As if madness were a malleable thing, a thing to be tamed.
He remembers the time he opened his eyes outside, a time Malorie doesn’t know about, but Olympia does. A creature had passed through camp and Tom, angry, restless, inspired, got close to the ground where it had just stood. There, he cupped his hands over his eyes and looked to the grass. He needed to know if the imprint of a creature, the effect of the creature on its immediate environment, would have the same effect as seeing one outright. He rationalized the danger away by telling himself Malorie and Olympia needed to know. The whole world needed to know. Because if an imprint left behind could drive one mad, perhaps there weren’t as many creatures in the vicinity, or on the planet, to begin with. Maybe their absence, but recent presence, could be just as bad.
He feels some embarrassment for the experiment now. While the census pages describe incredible feats, he knows in his heart his own precarious moment wouldn’t have helped anyone, because nobody knew he was experimenting.
This is one of the many trials of living with Malorie Walsh. Not being permitted to speak of such things.
He reads on:
The people of Indian River do not drink. It’s a community ordinance. But they do smoke marijuana. I’ve yet to come upon a community who values the elasticity of the human imagination quite like this one. It’s a difficult town to describe, in ordinary terms, as they do things here that are not done anywhere else. Depending on one’s personal stance, Athena Hantz’s description of her own town is either spot on or chilling: “We’re allowed,” she told me. When I asked her what she meant by that, she only smiled.
“Hell yeah,” Tom says. “Hell. Yes.”
They do things here that are not done anywhere else.
It’s invigorating. Electrifying.
We’re allowed…
Indian River is north of Lansing. Tom checked Malorie’s map twice before they left Yadin. It’s on the way to Mackinaw City.
Could he…might he…will he get to experience this city, these people, in person?
He wants to cry out. He wants to throw the blanket aside and run, loud, through the fields that no doubt lie beyond the barn. He wants to feel the night upon him. The open air. The freedom of the people who live in Indian River.
And he wants to see it. The world. The stars, the sky, the moon, the darkness.
He wants to see the night. This night. Every night. The night he learned about Indian River and the people who live there. The night he discovered others do think like he does. What’s the word Olympia uses for this kind of thing?
Relate.
Yes. Tom relates. It’s enough to make him want to climb to the top of the barn and scream hallelujah. The world isn’t made up of people who only think like Malorie. The world isn’t made up of people who only live by the fold. Not everybody will remind you, over and over, to wear your blindfold and your hoodie and your gloves when you’re the one who ought to be reminding them since you were the one born into this world in the first place.
“YES!”
He’s said it too loud. He doesn’t care. Let Mom come blindly flailing, feeling for the outer walls of the barn. Let her come shuddering into the night, this night, his night. There are people out there who think the way he does! There are people who understand that sixteen years could easily become thirty-two, then sixty-four, and…and…and an entire lifetime gone, sucked up into the paranoid rules of the Goddamn creatures.
He wishes Athena Hantz was his mom.
He flips the pages, wants to keep reading, doesn’t need to sleep. He’s sixteen years old, he’s hungry for a new life, he’s wide awake under a night’s sky that’s no different than day’s to him. He thinks of the train, wants it to exist as badly as Malorie does. He imagines people like the people of Indian River riding that very machine. He imagines like-minded strangers discussing more than just black fabric.
He brings the pages closer to his nose.
He hears footsteps coming around the side of the barn.
He turns off the light.
Huddled beneath the blanket, his first instinct is to keep the papers close to his chest. He realizes, with sudden clarity, that it’s more important to him to hold on to these pages than it is to warn Malorie and Olympia that something is near.
He closes his eyes.
He listens.
Whatever it is, it’s close. It moves slow. He doesn’t think it’s an animal, but it’s hard to tell in all this open space. Inside a house there’s an echo, dimensions, a blueprint.
Outside it’s different.
Whatever it is, it steps closer. Tom doesn’t want to feel afraid, but that’s what he is. He wants the fear within him to pour out, to leave him, to flow back toward the road, back to Camp Yadin, back to the school for the blind, back to the house he was born in.
Another step in the grass. It’s a creature. He knows this now.
The sky is silent; his mom and sister breathe steady on the other side of the wood wall. He slowly removes the blanket from his head. The cool night air chills him, and he doesn’t want to tremble in the presence of a creature.
We’re allowed, he thinks.
Yet he shudders.
He stands. He rolls up the sleeves of his hoodie.
“Touch me,” he says. “I dare you.”
His own voice frightens him. The audacity to dare a creature.
Whatever it is, it’s stopped. It’s near the wall. Just as Tom is.
“Touch me,” he says again. “Prove Mom wrong.”
He raises his bare arms to it.
All he has to do is open his eyes. All he has to do is look. Once. See what it does to you. Then he’d really be able to invent something, to make real change. Because if he doesn’t know what they do, how can he stop them from doing it?
He knows all the theories. Most people, like Mom, believe the creatures are beyond human comprehension. That seeing one is like glimpsing the void, infinity, or the face of God.
But Tom wonders…what if they’ve changed? And what if it’s just a matter of accepting them?
He thinks of his glasses in his bag in the barn. He thinks of Athena Hantz.
The creature isn’t moving. Dark wind blows, and Tom imagines it blowing his eyes wide open. Blame it on the night. The night came and lifted his eyelids the way people once raised the blinds in their homes in the morning. Malorie’s told him and Olympia about those days, when her own parents would fill the house with light, how it felt so much bigger because you could see, see, SEE the world outside. And how you felt like that was yours, too, the world outside your home.
Tom begins to open his lids. He’s actually doing it. His eyes roll back in his head so that only the whites are showing. He hasn’t looked yet. But he’s standing before a creature with his lids parted.
The feeling is incredible.
He doesn’t speak. And the creature doesn’t move. Arms extended, eyes rolled back, Tom feels invincible, like he’s going to be the first person on the planet to capture a creature.
Something brushes his arm.
Tom closes his eyes. The bird in the barn loft takes flight. Tom ducks at the sound. He swipes at his arm. Swipes again. Malorie’s words, Malorie’s worst fears, come rushing at him in the darkness of his own imagination. The flapping wings echo in the barn, loud. For a moment he mistakes it for the creature rising into the sky.
Neither Malorie nor Olympia speak from within.
Is the creature still in front of him?
Was he touched? Is he going mad?
“Where are you?”
&nb
sp; Tom isn’t able to articulate how he knows this, but it doesn’t feel like the creature is standing where it was. Is it closer now? Farther? Did it flutter away, after all?
Or did it step right to him and…touch…
He goes cold. All over.
What was he just doing, standing before a creature with his eyes partially open? What if he’d seen one? What would he have done to his mom, his sister, himself?
He swipes at his arm again, then bends quick and picks up the blanket.
Grass flattens behind him. To his left, more. Two places now. Three. Something in the distance. Something coming around the side of the barn.
Something on top of the barn.
“Oh, shit,” Tom says.
He’s not shuddering any longer. Now he’s full shaking.
He hears more of them, more steps deep in the fields. A second on the barn. Is one above him on the wall? Literally, on the wall of the barn?
“Oh, shit,” he says again because it’s all he can think to say. He moves fast, grabbing Malorie’s bag, remembering to grab it despite the dread spreading within.
Dread…or madness?
Another behind him. How many?
He moves quick to the barn door. He enters.
“Mom,” Tom says. “Olympia. Get up!”
Olympia doesn’t stir. She’s already awake.
“I hear them,” she says.
Tom, eyes closed, slides the barn door shut behind him.
Malorie is awake now.
“How many?” she says. And her voice is a solid straight line in the darkness.
“A lot,” Olympia says.
Malorie doesn’t tell them to keep their eyes closed. She doesn’t tell them to put on their hoods.
“Come here,” she says. “Both of you.”
Tom goes to her in the darkness. He sets her bag close to where he believes it was. Will she notice if it’s not in the exact place? Does it matter? He’s counted ten of them outside. Three on the barn. Seven in the grass. Does it matter if Malorie discovers he was reading?
That he was touched?
Almost to her, he realizes he’s still holding the pages. He can’t slide them back into the bag now without her hearing.
Malorie Page 9