Malorie

by Josh Malerman

  Does it matter?

  Movement outside. He can hear Olympia has already joined Malorie in the center of the barn. No sudden noises out there, no banging, no knocking. All quiet, deliberate steps. The creatures closing in.

  He brushes frantically at his arm. He rolls his sleeves down.

  His mind is whirling, too fast to hold. Malorie believes you can go mad by touch.

  Is it true?

  Is it?

  “Mom,” he says, horror in his voice. But he doesn’t care about hiding it. He needs her. Wants her near. Wants her to say he’s fine.

  He believes, with complete certainty, that if he wasn’t fine, if he did start losing his mind, Malorie would remain hidden from him just like she hides from the creatures.

  “MOM!”

  Her hand is on his wrist. She pulls him to her. He feels Olympia there, the three of them, crowded together.

  “Gloves,” Malorie says.

  Tom puts on his gloves.

  He listens. He can’t tell. He listens. He doesn’t know.

  He listens.

  Malorie grips his wrist harder, and he thinks it’s because he’s breathing heavy. He imagines a woman tied to a tree in Indian River. He imagines her pretending not to be mad. He can see the town feeding her soup as she feigns sanity, as she waits for the day when they will inevitably cut the ropes that bind her.

  “There’s nothing in here,” Olympia says.

  As if she knows. As if she could see Tom’s head, turning this way and that, trying so hard to get a lock on a sound, anything, here in the barn.

  Malorie doesn’t ask her if they’re still outside because, Tom knows, even his mom can hear that much.

  The grass flattens. The barn creaks.

  “Just wait,” Malorie says.

  And her voice is a solid object in Tom’s dismay.

  It’s not hard to imagine himself choking her, cracking Olympia’s skull, had he opened his eyes another sliver when facing the one by the side of the barn.

  What was he thinking? What was he doing?

  Olympia said there isn’t one in the barn, Olympia said there isn’t one in the barn, Olympia said—

  “They’re not moving,” Olympia says.

  “They’re not trying to get in?” Malorie asks.

  “No. But they’re not leaving, either.”

  Tom can’t stop thinking about his arm. He brushes at it again. He imagines something traveling into him, into his blood, pumping toward his mind. Something strong enough to make him want to hurt the two people he loves. Strong enough to drive him mad.

  Yet nothing is happening.

  Is it?

  Malorie has scared the teens deeply with her descriptions of what real madness could be. Like how the madman doesn’t know his mind is cracked, how that’s what makes him mad. And how, maybe, just maybe, when they touch you, you go mad slowly instead.

  Did he see one outside? Were his eyes open wider than he thought they were?

  Is he mad without knowing he’s mad?

  Tom is having trouble breathing. He has to stop feeling this way. This scared. He’s so tired of being told he’s supposed to be scared. He thinks of the people of Indian River. Are they afraid? Do they live in fear? When they hear quiet steps in the dark, when they hear something on the roof of the barn…do they fall to pieces the way Tom does now?

  He digs deep, into himself, searching for strength. He’s looking for the part that was thrilled by the pages he read outside. He tries to relate to the teen he just was, standing near the barn, eyes partially open, a creature so close. Where has that teen gone? And how did he vanish so fast?

  “I count thirteen,” Olympia says.

  But Malorie is doing what she’s always done in moments like this. She’s starting to list off the reasons they’ll be fine, the reasons they’ll make it through this night. Even as Tom hears his own fears echoing in her voice.

  “There’s no record of one ever attacking.”

  But what does this mean? How would the person who was “attacked” live to tell about it? And all those who have gone mad…who would believe them if, just before burying their heads in the garden they once tended, they say it was their own fault, no creature made them look?

  “They’re not interested in us.”

  But it sounds to Tom like they are. Like they’re really very interested in them after all. There’s another on the roof now. More in the fields.

  “They don’t mean us any harm.”

  Yet they haven’t left, have they? Malorie’s told Tom about his namesake’s theory that the creatures only observe what they do to people. That they have no agenda. Yet at some point they would have to see the damage they cause. Right? At some point it would become a choice.

  “They don’t know what they do.”

  Maybe, Tom thinks. Maybe. But mindless or not, without morality or with, there’re more of them now than there used to be. And nobody has any proof of them attempting to get back to where they came from.

  Even now, in the throes of horror, trembling at his mother’s and sister’s sides, swiping at his arm where he felt something touch him, Tom can’t stop himself from trying to solve them.

  “What are they doing?” Malorie asks. Tom is so busy thinking that he’s forgotten the role he normally plays. He listens. Hard. He hears movement in the fields. A rustling more corporeal than wind.

  “Tom, what are they doing?”

  He listens through the barn’s wood walls, to places where the wind doesn’t blow unobstructed. Places occupied by something other than open air.

  “Tom?”

  Mom sounds scared. She always does. Despite the list of reasons not to worry, Malorie sounds like she knows this could be the one. The time when even the blindfold doesn’t protect them. The time the creatures finally get to her, get to her children, drive them insane.

  Tom cocks an ear to the roof.

  How many are up there? And why? If they mean no harm…if they’ve never attacked…why are they on the roof of the barn?

  “I’m not sure,” Olympia says.

  This is supposed to be Tom’s department. Always has been. Olympia possesses a preternatural ability to sense a creature’s exact location, but it’s Tom who can hear what they do and, sometimes, what they are about to do next.

  His ear is on the loft.

  He wonders, distantly, if Olympia hears it, too.

  Something is in the loft.

  The bird suddenly explodes into flight, squawking, crying, singing a song that makes no sense, has no rhyme, has no end. Malorie grips Tom’s wrist harder as the bird flails through the barn and strikes a wood wall. It falls to the hay, rises, and flies madly into the wall again.

  It falls. Again. Rises. Again.

  Flies madly into the wall.

  “There’s one in the loft,” Tom says.

  Malorie stands up.

  “Now,” she says. “Now.”

  The teens rise without argument. Tom finds his bag quick in the darkness, but the few seconds he’s away from Malorie are bad ones. Like the thing from the loft could come down.

  Like it wants to touch him.

  Malorie says, “Why are the pages out of my bag?”

  As he moves, Tom imagines himself living in Indian River. He imagines waking in a town with other people, people ready to invent.

  “Tom?” Malorie says.

  “Mom,” Olympia says. “It’s moving.”

  It is. Tom hears it, too.

  “Go,” Malorie says.

  Then Tom asks it. Because he can’t not.

  “Are you bringing the pages with you?”

  He has to know. He can’t leave them here.

  But Malorie doesn’t respond. Instead, Tom feels a hand on his wrist. Her hand. Her fingers
ride up his arm, to make sure he’s rolled down his sleeves. He has.

  But it reminds him of being touched.

  He shudders.

  This time, though, he forces the feeling, the fear, out. And, for a moment, it works. For a hideously unfamiliar moment, Tom feels fearless in the face of so many creatures, as his mom pulls him toward the barn door, as Olympia breathes steadily beside him.

  Malorie slides the door open. Tom feels the cold night, colder yet, rush into the barn, touching his nose, his mouth, his chin.

  “Olympia,” Malorie says.

  It’s obvious that she isn’t looking to Tom for help. Why not? Can she tell he was touched by something? Does she think he’s going mad?

  “There’s one blocking the door,” Olympia says.

  The loft behind them creaks.

  “Back up,” Malorie says.

  “Wait,” Tom says. “It’s moving.”

  He hears it stepping out of the way.

  “Go,” Olympia says. “Now.”

  Malorie moves first, Olympia right behind her. But before leaving the barn, Tom turns his blindfolded face to the loft.

  The ladder creaks.

  Footsteps in the hay.

  He thinks of Athena Hantz just as a hand, Olympia’s, reaches into the barn and pulls him outside.

  “Cover your faces,” Malorie says. And her voice is unabridged hysteria.

  As he listens to her, as he moves, fleeing the barn, he tries hard to hang on to the feeling he had, the fearlessness, that moment, just now, inside the barn when he felt brave.

  It was extraordinary.

  And now it’s gone.

  But he believes he can feel it again.

  Indian River.

  The community’s name sparkles in his personal darkness. As if the letters that make up the words are forged in fire, enormous bright squares beckoning him, telling him, hey, hey, we’re scared, too, but either you live a partial life or you experiment.

  You test.

  You invent.

  Indian River.

  We’re allowed.

  Come on.

  Come on.

  “Tom!” Malorie calls. “Come on!”

  Then he’s moving, the stealthy sounds of what swarms the barn receding. He catches up to his mom and his sister as their shoes crush the gravel of the shoulder before leveling out on the old unused country road.

  They walk. They don’t speak. They listen. They move fast.

  And when enough space has gotten between them and the place they hoped might provide a night of sanctuary, Malorie’s voice cracks the silence.

  “No,” she says.

  Tom knows what she means. He knows she’s answering what he asked before they left the barn. She’s saying she didn’t take the pages.

  But Tom hears something in Malorie’s voice that she claims to hear so often in theirs.

  A lie.

  He hears the crinkle of paper in her bag, too.

  And as the three continue toward a place that may or may not harbor a mode of transport large enough to carry them north, Tom feels gratitude, to the pages, for teaching him, already, that while it’s okay to be scared, you’ve got to push back while you tremble.

  He’s in the big world now. This isn’t Camp Yadin.

  In the distance, behind them, he hears the creaking of the barn, as if more creatures now walk on its roof.

  Do they look to the fleeing trio? Do they know what they do?

  It doesn’t matter to Tom. Not right now. As he walks, in step with Malorie and Olympia, it doesn’t matter what the creatures mean to do.

  All that matters is what he means to do.

  From here on out. In the big world.

  He’s not mad.

  He’s fearless. He’s fighting back.

  He’s allowed.

  ELEVEN

  Olympia is keeping secrets.

  She’s done it for years now, almost as long as she can remember. She was doing it at the Jane Tucker School for the Blind, and she thinks it’s possible it was even before then. In the house she was born. Maybe even the minute she was born. She’s read enough books to know that it’s not totally shameful to keep secrets and that some secrets are better kept in the interest of maintaining balance with the other people around you.

  Yet, every day, it feels worse.

  She knows Tom was outside the barn, reading, when the creatures came last night. She doesn’t think they were drawn to him just because they saw him; she believes they can sense the fact that her brother wants to figure out how to beat them.

  Maybe they can tell Tom wants to make contact, of any sort?

  She knows Tom brought the glasses from under his bed. She doesn’t know if they’ll work, but she definitely doesn’t think he should try.

  Secrets. Tom doesn’t know she knows. And Malorie doesn’t know he has them.

  But Olympia knows. Lots of things.

  Sometimes this infuses her with a sense of great importance. Other times it makes her feel like she’s a liar. Like she hasn’t been truthful with Malorie and Tom over time.

  She hasn’t.

  It’s impossible to lie to herself, though she’s read of characters who benefit from doing it. Like how they understand the people they care about are complex, and so they ignore some of the bad stuff about each other. And why not? Does it matter that Tom resents Malorie? Does it matter that Malorie is growing distant from Tom? The old world is wholly different than the new, yes, but Olympia’s discovered that people mostly remain the same. The characters in her books aren’t so different from those in her life.

  Today, they walked until the sun came up, and now it’s begun its long descent.

  But they’re close.

  They walk slow because they’re tired and they’re hot and at turns it all feels like a fool’s errand. There are no road signs telling them the train is close. No billboards like in the books.

  But they walk. And they hope. And Olympia does all she can to make her mom feel at peace with her decision to do this.

  She wants so badly for Malorie’s parents to be alive. They are, she supposes, her grandparents, whether by blood or not, and she’s read enough about grandparents to know the impact they can have on a teenager’s life.

  Oh, how she wants them to be alive. In St. Ignace. Or closer. Waiting on the platform for their family. Like grandparents used to do.

  “Only two miles to go,” Tom says.

  They’re walking as fast as they safely can.

  Olympia hears the pep in her brother’s voice. He’s been mostly quiet today. She wonders if he assumes they take his silence to mean he’s listening. But Olympia knows better. Tom goes quiet when he’s planning. Back in Camp Yadin that usually meant he was coming up with the materials he’d need for a new helmet, protective body armor, heavier gloves. But out here, she wonders.

  Does it have to do with what he was reading outside the barn last night?

  Malorie doesn’t speak much either, but it’s not hard to guess at what she’s thinking. Malorie believed her parents dead for seventeen years. This means, of course, that she’s already grieved. It’s hard for Olympia to imagine a world where blindfolds weren’t central to a person’s wardrobe, but if she opens her mind, if she really puts herself in Malorie’s place, she can do it. She thinks: what if the world was turned so upside down that she, Olympia, didn’t think Malorie could’ve survived? After seventeen years, weren’t Malorie’s parents dead anyway?

  Dead to Malorie?

  “How are we going to find it once we get there?” Olympia asks. Something to say. Then she wishes she didn’t. She knows this answer. Malorie will say they’ll listen, of course. And if they encounter any people, they’ll have to ask what they know.

  “We’ll listen,” Malorie sa
ys. And, on cue, “We’ll talk to people.”

  Olympia senses Tom’s reaction, knows it’s coming before it does.

  “Maybe,” he says. As in, maybe you’ll let us talk to people.

  Malorie stops walking. Olympia wants to shuffle her along, tell her not to worry about Tom. Now’s not the time. We’re so close.

  “I’ll say who we talk to,” Malorie says. “And you’ll listen when I do.”

  Tom stops, too.

  “Sure, Mom. Okay.” Anger in his voice.

  “Yes, completely fucking okay.”

  “You act like I don’t listen,” Tom says. “You act like we don’t do every single crazy thing you tell us to!”

  “Listening isn’t good enough,” Malorie says. “Believing that what I’m saying is right, that’s what matters.”

  Olympia steps from them to the side of the road. Maybe they just need to have it out finally.

  “We have minds of our own!” Tom yells.

  “Jesus Christ, Tom,” Malorie says. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes I do!”

  “No. You don’t. You’ve lived a completely sheltered life.”

  “Well, whose fault is that?”

  “Not mine!” Malorie screams. They’re screaming now.

  Olympia steps farther, onto neglected grass tall enough to touch her gloved hand.

  Her heel connects with something soft.

  “It’s one hundred percent your fault,” Tom says. “We live by your rules.”

  “That’s right. You live. You’re alive. Thanks to my rules.”

  “Mom! You won’t let us talk to anybody but you!”

  “What’s somebody else gonna do for you, Tom? Teach you how to tie a better blindfold?”

  Olympia kneels in the tall grass, to feel for what she nearly stepped on.

  “That’s so close-minded, Mom!” Tom says. “It’s just…it’s insane!”

  “Tom, you will listen to me…”

  “Maybe I won’t!”

  Olympia touches it then withdraws her gloved hand.

  “I’m sick of it!” Tom says.

  “You?” Malorie yells. “You aren’t allowed to be sick of anything!”