Malorie

by Josh Malerman

  Mom?

  And Malorie does. Or close. She remembers Tom the man, her son’s namesake, instead.

  The incredible man enters her mind’s eye with startling detail, and she’s momentarily embarrassed he witnessed her striking her son.

  Tom, she thinks, I’m sorry.

  But does she say it to the man or to the son? She’s crying now, in Olympia’s arms, behind her fold, crying at the echo of Tom the man’s scream to be let into the attic where Malorie is in labor. As the creatures Gary convinced Don to let inside walk the house below.

  “It’s okay,” Olympia says. “We’re gonna get there safe. We’re gonna—”

  “No,” Malorie says. “We’re not. Not this time. We pushed our luck. We shouldn’t have left. We had it good. We survived the house. The school. We had it good and I got greedy. I saw the names of my parents and I lost my mind. I got lazy, Olympia. I got lazy.”

  Her voice cracks with the last of these words. Olympia makes to say something, but Malorie is already removing her daughter’s hands from her shoulders.

  She feels pride for the gloves Olympia wears.

  Even now.

  Then she’s out the door, too. Off to find him. Tom, who, of all the people on this train, would be most excited about a caught creature in a box.

  And the proof of progress such a horror would be.

  NINETEEN

  Tom’s eyes are open. Because damn it all. Why not? The man who runs the train walks with eyes open. And he’s ridden it every single time it’s gone! Malorie’s crossed a line. That’s all there is to it. Maybe it all made sense when they were little kids, when they were going to take the rowboat to the school. Maybe then Mom had reason to be the way she is. But today? Here? They’re out in the world now. Tom has never felt, heard, smelled, or seen anything like this. He’s walking the hall. Doors to his left. A black wall to his right. It all shakes. It rattles. Why? Because they’re on a train. A thing he and Olympia have never done before. Christ, they haven’t done anything before!

  Malorie has gone too far.

  It’s the first time she’s struck him since using a flyswatter when he and Olympia were babies, teaching them to wake with their eyes closed. And this wasn’t a lesson. This was anger. Darkness, darkness, darkness. Doesn’t Malorie get it? Whether you were born into this world or not, you’re told how it used to be. And then? Then, you want to know that world for yourself.

  You want to see it.

  The door opens at the end of the hall, and a woman steps through. Her eyes are closed until the door shuts behind her. Then she opens her eyes. She sees Tom and smiles nervously. He wonders if she thought, for a second, that he was a creature. He doesn’t know what to make of her. How many women has he seen in his life? How many men? Back at the school for the blind there were lots of people. But Tom was six years old. He’s sixteen now.

  Doesn’t Malorie get it?

  Tom waves. He didn’t mean to do it. It just happened. The woman, older than him but not quite as old as Malorie, nods back. She’s walking toward him. He’s walking toward her.

  He thinks he’s got to say something, because he’s electrified by this moment. His face is still red from being hit and yet he’s as excited as he’s ever been.

  He realizes, suddenly, ecstatically, how true this is.

  This really is the most liberated he’s ever felt in his life.

  And all he had to do was walk out on Malorie to find it.

  He makes to speak, he opens his mouth, but the woman slides open the door to her right and slips into the cabin.

  She closes the door.

  He wonders if there’s someone in there who makes endless rules, too. He wonders if she closes her eyes in there, pretends she didn’t just have them open in the hall.

  Tom smiles. Wow. It feels good.

  He removes his gloves and hoodie. He doesn’t want them anymore. He lets them fall to the floor of the hall just as he would let his clothes fall to the side of his bunk back in Cabin Three of Camp Yadin.

  It feels great.

  He slides the door open at the end of the car. He closes his eyes.

  Doesn’t Malorie get it? The man told them what to do. What was safe. And Tom is doing it. That’s all there is to it. That’s all there’s ever been to it. They don’t have to stay in their room the whole trip. They don’t have to wear their folds and their gloves. They don’t have to be so scared.

  But Malorie has no sense of this. No instincts at all.

  The thought of it makes him mad again. Madder. But he doesn’t want to be angry. He wants to be free.

  He passes between cars. Opens the next door. Lets it slide closed behind him.

  He opens his eyes.

  Another hall. Doors to his left. People hiding like Malorie hides. Tom isn’t going to hide anymore. Tom isn’t going to live by Malorie’s rules anymore. Tom isn’t ever going back to Camp Yadin again.

  He pauses. His heart beats powerfully with the realization that he really isn’t ever going back again.

  Back to the only place they’ve ever really called home.

  Never going.

  Back.

  Again.

  “Good,” he says.

  A door opens to his left. A man steps out. He closes the door behind him.

  “Hello,” he says.

  Tom can hardly believe it. It’s what the world is like in his sister’s books. People step out their front doors and wave to one another and ask how their days have been.

  “How’s your day been?” Tom asks.

  The man, much older, eyes him suspiciously. Is it because he wonders what a sixteen-year-old is doing walking the train alone? Does the man think Tom is being unsafe? Can he tell Tom was just slapped?

  Tom brings a hand to his face.

  “Good,” the man says. He doesn’t move. Just stands in front of the closed door to his room as if Tom might slip inside and take something.

  Tom passes him. He reaches the end of the car, looks back, sees the man still standing there, still facing him. Only now his eyes are closed.

  Tom closes his own. Opens the door. Steps between the cars.

  And stops.

  He pulls his glasses from his pocket and places them on his face.

  The air swirls here. A small cyclone between cars. Windy enough to blow a blindfold from a face if you don’t have it tied tight enough.

  The wind goes up the short sleeves of his shirt, down the neck.

  It feels incredible. Standing outside as the world whips by. He’s not walking. He’s not rowing. He’s not being told what to do.

  He opens his eyes. He turns his head to the left.

  Through the glasses, his glasses, he sees the world passing.

  Trees. Signs. They don’t stay in sight quite long enough for him to read. But he sees letters. Outside. In the real world.

  He smiles.

  This is incredible.

  He looks right.

  More of it, only the horizon seems to stretch into forever in this direction.

  Are there any creatures out there? Is he looking at one now? Through the glasses he made? The exact kind of glasses that could be written about in the census man’s book of discoveries?

  The feeling is overwhelming. Who cares if he got slapped? He almost wants to thank Malorie for doing it. He wants to thank her for giving him reason to leave her side.

  Indian River.

  The city name comes to him in giant letters, surrounded by trees and street signs. He imagines Indian River has horizons like the one he’s looking at now. Endless sights and a lot of people who want to see them.

  Athena Hantz.

  A woman who doesn’t think like Malorie. A woman who thinks like him.

  The world passes. Greens and browns. Signs. Homes. A f
ence.

  It’s wonderful.

  Tom feels like he could do anything. Absolutely anything he’s ever wanted to.

  The door opens in front of him. He looks to see a man coming toward him, a man with his eyes closed. But this isn’t just any man. This is Dean Watts.

  Tom steps aside, watches as Dean Watts, the owner and creator of this very train, passes him, opens the next door, steps through, and slides it closed again.

  The feeling is unbelievable. Like he’s fooled even the smartest man on the train. The man who brought the train back from the dead.

  He doesn’t want this moment to end. He wants it to last another sixteen years. Outside, eyes open, free.

  He steps to the end of the platform between cars. This is where someone would jump if they wanted to. This is where Dean might’ve thrown someone off, too.

  Tom sits, cross-legged, glasses on. The wind comes at him, and he raises his arms.

  He feels it. All of it. Every bit of this moment in time.

  Nobody is out here with him. Nobody passes between the cars.

  And nobody, absolutely nobody, tells him what to do.

  TWENTY

  Malorie knows it’s Dean before she runs into him, before he speaks. She’s not convinced her other senses have gotten stronger in the new world, but she can smell certain people and places seconds before reaching them.

  “Malorie,” Dean says. “Are you well?”

  She doesn’t want to tell him what she heard. The casket in storage. She doesn’t want a panic. She only cares about finding Tom and getting out of here before it all goes mad.

  “No,” she says. She hates that there’s fear in her voice. She hates that she’s speaking to what would have once been considered an intelligent, interesting person, and all she can do about is be afraid.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “This whole thing is wrong,” she says. “The train. Thinking we can push back. All of this is insane.”

  “Hey, Malorie. Wait…”

  “I’m finding my son and we’re getting off. We’re walking home because back there, when my teenager storms off angry, I know where he’s going and who he’s with.”

  She makes to pass him. Dean doesn’t reach out to stop her, but his voice does.

  “Don’t you think that, now that they’ve seen the train, now that they’ve ridden it, it won’t be the same back home?”

  Malorie doesn’t have time to do this right now. She needs to keep moving, needs to make sure her son, who she’s protected for sixteen years, doesn’t do something dangerous.

  Oh, my God, she thinks. You hit Tom.

  It’s like she just hit him again. And again now. The memory of it feels more like a realization every time it returns. And the only color she can see is the color of a face that has been slapped.

  “Are you sure he went this way?” Dean asks.

  “Yes. No. I don’t know.”

  “I just came from the dining car,” he says. “And I didn’t see him.”

  This is somehow worse. Like the train itself swallowed him. As if, by severing the umbilical cord (because that’s what it felt like, even to Malorie), Tom stepped into Malorie’s personal darkness and was pulled so deep she’ll never see him again.

  “He’s here somewhere,” Dean says. “We’ll find him. So don’t worry. I’ll help.”

  Malorie doesn’t want help. She doesn’t want to be here at all. It’s because of men like Dean Watts that everyone goes mad in the end. It’s the people who think beyond the fold.

  Tom the man appears then, in the dark. He stands before the couch in the living room of the house where Malorie met him. At his feet are the pieces of a helmet he’s failed to keep together.

  “I’m not gonna be able to get anything done until you find him anyway,” Dean says.

  “Okay,” Malorie says. “Help me then.”

  Because Tom the man wasn’t the reason that house went mad. That outcome, that blood, stains the hands of Gary. Gary, who convinced Don to tear the drapes down. Gary, who entered the house like a little, lethal spider in thespian’s clothing. It’s been sixteen years and she still shudders at the thought of him. Of his voice. His face. His beard. His jacket. His notebook. His words. His chalky white hands upon Don’s shoulder. Whispering in Don’s ear like a demon. Telling him the creatures aren’t real, mankind has lost their collective mind. Man is the creature he fears.

  Malorie walks up the hall, fast. Dean is close behind.

  “You two had a fight?” he asks.

  “Something like that.”

  “Well,” Dean says. “My eyes are open. And I can tell you he isn’t in this hall.”

  “How about the cabins? Is he in someone else’s room?”

  “Whose would he be in?”

  They’ve reached the end of the hall. Dean opens the door.

  The air comes at her, fresh and cool, and Malorie, blind, turns her head left, imagining Tom leaping from the moving train, stepping off between cars.

  She hears the sound of the slap, her hand against Tom’s face.

  “He’s not in this hall, either,” Dean says as they enter the next car. “But there’s something ahead you’re not going to like.”

  “What?” Malorie freezes. She thinks of the casket in storage.

  “Sorry,” Dean says. “It’s just clothing. But…a hoodie and some gloves. And, yes, a blindfold, too.”

  “Oh, God.”

  Because now Tom didn’t just storm off. Now he’s discarded the armor.

  Malorie can’t think straight. She needs to find him. She needs to get off this train.

  And she can’t keep what she heard to herself anymore.

  “I overheard someone talking about a creature on board,” she says, her voice rattled, nearly hoarse. “Someone in one of the cabins said something about a creature in one of the caskets in storage.”

  Dean is quiet. Is he studying her? Is he weighing how paranoid she really is? And the next words he speaks…Will they placate? Will they humor? Will they dismiss?

  “I’ll check storage,” he says. Firm. Decisive. Serious. “You keep going ahead. Find Tom.”

  “Okay.”

  Then he’s gone. And Malorie kneels to pick up the clothing Tom has left behind.

  “He shed his skin,” she says. Or thinks. She doesn’t know.

  But what if his skin is all that protects him from the new world?

  She can barely stop from falling apart. The train rocks. Dean’s footsteps grow quiet behind her before she hears a door open and close. She’s alone again. Looking for her son. No, not looking. Never looking. Never looking at all.

  And isn’t that exactly why Tom wants to get away from her? From this life? Isn’t that exactly why anybody, even those born into it, would want to shed their skin?

  She continues. She calls out his name. She knocks on the nearest door, and a voice from within says they don’t need anything. She tells them she’s looking for her son. The voice, a woman, tells her he’s not in there with her.

  Malorie continues.

  The train sways.

  She knocks on the next door. Nobody responds this time. She imagines Tom standing silently inside. She tries the door. It won’t slide. It’s locked. Now a voice comes. Tells her they don’t need anything. She says she’s looking for her son. We’re on a train. First time ever. Please. Help. Is he in there? No, they say. No, go away. Please.

  Malorie continues. She reaches the door. Near to shaking now, she steps between the cars. But before entering the next one, she checks how much space is here, how much room. Could a sixteen-year-old boy fit through the space between cars? Could he jump from here?

  The wind crawls up the long sleeves of her sweatshirt. Like the fingers of the creatures she’s never been allowed to look at.

/>   If they have fingers. If they have anything at all.

  She doesn’t know. Doesn’t know a thing about them.

  Still.

  She enters the next car.

  Has Dean found anything in storage? An empty casket? Or worse, much worse, a creature in a box, and Dean Watts too proud of his train to be careful when he opened it?

  Has Malorie sent Dean to his madness? Has she sentenced them all?

  It’s not difficult to imagine Dean beside her again. Suddenly. Forcefully. He’d be saying the same things he was saying before. Using the right words. But she’d hear it. The madness in him. Possibly before he heard it himself.

  She knocks on the nearest door in the next car.

  “Yes?” It’s a young woman. She sounds scared. Malorie hears her whisper to someone. Is it Tom?

  “I’m looking for my son,” she says. “He’s sixteen. Is he in there? Have you seen him?”

  “Please, go away,” the woman says.

  Malorie feels a sudden stab of rage. She wants to tear the door down, wants to storm into the young woman’s room and ask her how she could possibly only be thinking of herself at a time like this.

  “Please,” the woman says. Firm. “Go away.”

  And she sounds a lot like Malorie used to. Back when a man on a boat approached her and the kids on the river. Back when people knocked on the door to their room at the school for the blind. Even as recently as when the census man came.

  “I’m sorry,” Malorie says. And it feels like she’s saying it to herself, telling herself she’s sorry for losing sight of Tom. Sorry for slapping her son. Sorry for turning into the paranoid person she’s become.

  She stumbles from the door, visions of herself and Tom and Olympia tucked safely inside. As if she’s leaving that possibility now. Leaving security and safety at last. Becoming, in the end, unsafe.

  If they’d run for the train a year earlier, would this be happening? Would Tom have reached his end with her?

  And her with him?

  She can’t think about that. Not now. The names of her parents burn bright in her head, burn the very pages they appeared upon, and Tom vanishing into the darkness of a moving train cannot eclipse this.