Malorie

by Josh Malerman

  It’s true.

  “Is it good?” she asks.

  “No,” Shannon says. “It’s really not.”

  They laugh again.

  Dad sits down, cross-legged, in the pine needles and dirt.

  Mom joins him.

  Shannon, too.

  Then, thinking these three are the only three she’ll ever let into her new clubhouse, Malorie sits, too.

  And they talk.

  And Malorie, a young girl yet, thinks how a parent will always find their kid. Even if they run away. Even if they’re hiding in the dark. And she knows, without a teacher telling her so, that this lesson will stick with her for the rest of her life.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Malorie wakes.

  Smells dirt.

  An old-world instinct tells her to open her eyes.

  A sense of cold air, of being outside, tells her not to.

  “What…”

  She feels the cold air on her eyelids. She hasn’t felt this in a decade or more.

  The outside world on her naked eyes.

  “What…”

  She raises her arms, feels nothing above her. She reaches out to her sides. Feels dirt.

  She smells it. The dirt. A cellar smell.

  Her head hurts in a way it hasn’t before. This isn’t a headache. This isn’t lack of sleep. This is an injury.

  And she’s not wearing her fold.

  She sits up, arms extended, as though prepared to strike whoever must be near.

  Someone put her where she is.

  But nobody moves. Nobody breathes. Nobody speaks.

  She crawls far enough to discover a dirt wall. She stands. Her head aches. She reaches up the length of the wall but can’t find the top.

  Dizzy, she stumbles across the space. The lack of the fold is horrible. The sense of a sky above. The vulnerability.

  She gets to a second wall and reaches for the top. Can’t find it.

  It’s damp here. Cellar damp.

  She remembers a familiar voice at the back of the train.

  “No,” she says. Because it’s too terrible. The voice she believes she heard. How many times has she been wrong about hearing that same cadence of speech? How often did she wake to discover it was only Gary speaking from the other side of partially opened doors in dreams?

  “No.”

  But maybe. Maybe.

  She touches her head, feels a lump. She was struck. On the platform. She remembers it.

  “Oh, God.”

  The train. And Tom and Olympia still on it.

  Traveling away from her now.

  “HEY!” she calls. She has to.

  She was struck. Hit in the head. Thrown off the train.

  Right?

  She breathes in, but she can’t hold it. She can’t calm down.

  She hurries across the space, finds a third wall. Can’t reach the top.

  All dirt.

  A hole in the ground?

  Words from the census pages rise to her mind’s eye.

  Safer Rooms.

  Efforts by men and women to build bunkers in the event the creatures completely take over.

  Have they taken over? Is she the last sane woman alive?

  She moves faster. Finds a fourth wall. She scrambles to touch all four again.

  The space is big. Bigger than any grave. But a hole in the ground all the same.

  “Help!” she calls. But she doesn’t want to do this, doesn’t want to give herself away. She needs to listen. She needs to think.

  Whatever’s happened…she’s survived.

  She digs at the walls. She has to get out of here. Has to find her teens. Has to get back to the train.

  Now.

  She tries to tell herself it’s one thing at a time. Get out of this hole first. Then find her kids.

  She can’t breathe steady. Can’t control it.

  “Tom!”

  She shouldn’t do this. There could be anybody above. The people who’ve trapped her. She remembers the name Nathan. She remembers Gary’s voice.

  Or does she?

  And does he wait above? Does he look down on her in the hole?

  Or did they put her here to get her out of the way?

  “TOM! OLYMPIA!”

  She scrambles up the wall but finds no purchase.

  She remembers Tom leaving the train cabin, his face red from where she slapped him.

  “Oh, no,” she says.

  Because whatever this is, whatever’s happened, it suddenly feels like she’s the reason it did.

  “Tom,” she says, as if her son were in this room (safer room?) with her. “Tom, please. Don’t be angry. Don’t do anything unsafe. Please, Tom, don’t be unsafe.”

  Please,

  Tom

  don’t go mad.

  She recalls the name Indian River, spoken in a familiar voice. Just before being shoved from the train. But the moment she thinks it was Gary, the voice shrinks further into her head, a spider avoiding detection.

  Indian River, she knows, is no place for her. It doesn’t matter if they’ve caught a creature there or not. The kind of community that would celebrate something like that is…

  “Fucking insane,” she says. And her voice is rising with panic and guilt.

  Her breathing picks up again. She can’t sit still. She tries climbing the walls.

  Oh, Malorie shouldn’t have brought Tom and Olympia to the train. She shouldn’t have let them taste the new world. Certainly not a train. She didn’t have to bring them. There were options. She could’ve searched for her parents on her own.

  But now…

  This is Malorie’s fault.

  The things people say about her are true. Paranoid. Overbearing. A helicopter mom. And here she thought there was no other way to be. Here she couldn’t be any other way.

  She remembers swatting a two-year-old Tom with a flyswatter when he woke with his open eyes. She remembers slapping his face in the cabin on the train. She remembers yelling, so much yelling, so much saying no no no, Tom, NO!

  But if you tell someone no enough times, they start thinking yes, just to hear something else, just to hear a different word, they start thinking yes.

  Malorie imagines Tom’s young face standing before a group of new-world lunatics, the lot of them excited to pull back a tarp, to show him what they’ve caught. That’s the world Tom wants. Like the one in Indian River. She sees his blue eyes, huge now in her mind, his black hair, hair like hers. Young Tom bracing himself for that fabulous rebellion, making small fists to fool himself into feeling bigger than he actually is. She sees something in his mind, his brain, the spot where actual insanity begins. She hears it flutter, coming alive.

  She imagines the tarp pulled back.

  She sees Tom’s eyes go wide, wider.

  Because that’s why they’d want Malorie out of the way, right? The people who put her here? Why else if not to get to her kids?

  She opens her mouth to say the name Gary, but she won’t do it. Can’t.

  She scrambles up the wall, imagining Tom as he tilts his head with curiosity toward the thing under the tarp, Tom’s last stand, the last attempt at assimilation, as the origin of insanity takes flight, a bird as black as his hair and as blue as his eyes, flying up into the infinity of his own mind. He attempts to grab it, to put it back in its box, to stop the sound of those fluttering wings, insanity afoot, a young man gone mad, a mind not yet mature enough to recognize his thoughts as being wrong, as cracked, as flown. She imagines him thinking he’s succeeded, that he beat the creatures that have held him down so long, the thieving entities that stole views, any views, all views, them all.

  And at exactly the moment he believes he’s done it, that he’s stopped himself from going in
sane, he brings his fingers to his face.

  And he rips.

  And he tears.

  And he screams the awful scream of a man made mad. Not even old enough to understand what’s being taken in the feet of that bird, taken out of reach, so high, out of sight now, out of earshot, too.

  Even for Tom.

  Malorie digs at the dirt. She has to get out of here. Now.

  She thinks of the housemates, Felix and Cheryl, Olympia and Don. She thinks of Victor barking at blackened drapes.

  She digs.

  Whose voice did she hear? One of the housemates?

  She feels naked without her fold. Completely exposed. She remembers Annette turning that corner, knife in hand, her red hair like blood from her head exploding back, back toward what drove her mad.

  She digs at the walls. She jumps.

  She cannot calm down.

  “TOM!”

  All he does is listen! All he does is hear! He’s done it better than anybody else for sixteen years!

  He’ll hear her. He must.

  Except…he’s on a train. With…with…

  She walks right, too fast, and strikes a dirt wall. She flattens her hands to it and reaches up, up, up.

  She imagines a square, high in the sky, an exit from the hole she’s fallen into.

  She thinks, Safer Room.

  Are there ways out of these rooms? Or is the idea…to die on your own terms…without going mad?

  A stirring behind her and Malorie spins, eyes tight, arms up. She’s shaking. Breathing too hard.

  She listens.

  It moves.

  “Stay away!” She yells.

  And her voice is hysteria. A black and blue bird considering flight.

  Either she’s heard this sound before or she’s so scared (Tom, Tom and Olympia, Olympia) that she’s mistaking this sound for one like it, one she heard behind her in an attic, as she gave birth to the very boy she now desperately wants to find.

  Motion close to her right side. Malorie spins, backs up.

  “Oh, please, no,” she says. Because she believes it now. Because she knows it.

  This isn’t a person down here with her.

  “Stay away.”

  She flattens herself to the closest dirt wall.

  She doesn’t imagine a man. She doesn’t imagine a woman. She doesn’t allow herself to imagine at all. Rather, in her mind’s eye, she sees an uncovered tarp and beneath it, a thing she has been raising her children to avoid at all costs, in every way, at every moment of every day.

  “Stay away.”

  Malorie is not alone down here, no.

  “STAY AWAY!”

  She pulls the hood tighter over her head.

  There’s no recorded instance of a creature initiating contact, forcing someone to look at it.

  But what if one were to fall into the same hole you were thrown into?

  “Don’t come near me.”

  Over time, Malorie has come to believe the creatures aren’t saddled with the same limitations human beings are. Would a falling tree crush one? How about a car driven by a blindfolded woman? Because she’s never heard proof of a dead body, a creature deceased, it’s impossible to imagine one in a perilous state. But now, here…is it as stuck in the Safer Room as she is?

  This means something to her. Something bigger than this moment allows for.

  It moves across the hole, Malorie tracks it, and she turns to the wall, tries to climb again.

  She jumps but touches no edge.

  A deeper stirring. Something sliding across the dirt. Something wet? A bright sound? She wishes Tom were here to tell her what it is. Oh, how many times did he teach her when they were out in the world? How many times did his ears save them, guide them, tell them what to do?

  “Please,” Malorie says. But this thing deserves no pleading.

  Something brushes against the sleeve of her sweatshirt.

  She screams, falls to the ground, her gloved hands over her face.

  Would it try to take her hood? Her gloves? Her last vestiges of armor?

  The thing retracts, back to the far side of the Safer Room.

  Malorie remains still. And it feels like Tom and Olympia are slipping away.

  Forever.

  How long could she have been expected to protect the kids? As if Malorie herself is a walking blindfold. Malorie made of black fabric, her dark hair the fount by which she springs. How long could she have been expected to keep Tom and Olympia safe? One year? One day? Ten years? Ten afternoons? There is no right and there is no wrong anymore. She knows this. Motherhood isn’t what it was seventeen years ago, when it was the last thing in the world she considered. Motherhood isn’t even what it was ten years ago, when the toll of surviving began weighing on those who survived so that their sanity would be tested the old way, brutal, cruel, and slow.

  Now, folded up in the corner of the space, Malorie feels like she’s her own blindfold, worn so long she’s become it, discarded in a hole, never to be used again.

  People in Indian River claim to have caught one…trapped…

  Oh, yeah? Malorie thinks. I caught one, too.

  Right here.

  In this Safer Room.

  She lowers her hands. She listens. There’s silence from the far end of the hole.

  What does it do? Does it observe her passively like Tom the man once theorized? Does it wait for her to look?

  She stands up. Because she has to. Because she’ll die if she remains folded in the corner of this grave.

  “You’ve got to leave,” Malorie says. “You’ve got to find a way out. I can’t die with you near. You’ve already taken so much.”

  She thinks of the housemates. Cynical Don, who she can still see in the cellar as Tom the man put his hand on Don’s shoulder and asked him to come upstairs for one last round of rum. Cheryl’s voice down the hall after she got scared feeding the birds. The birds that hung like an alarm system. Jules, who loved his dog, Victor, so much. Felix, who got paler and paler the longer Tom was out of the house. Tom.

  Tom.

  She’s tried to close the door on these thoughts. She tries now. She makes to shove the housemates into the attic. But they keep showing up around the table again, glasses of rum before them.

  That’s the way she likes them best. Happy as they were allowed to be.

  Tom’s wearing a makeshift helmet. Maybe he’s at the piano. Maybe they don’t have a phone book yet and so haven’t begun the process of getting out, because once that began it was like the wheels were set in motion, from point A to point B, phone book to now, Yellow Pages to Safer Room, like Tom had called Fate and said, We’re ready. Do with us what you will.

  And Fate has.

  Done with her.

  She tries to close her already closed eyes to the memory of the bodies in the halls, upstairs and down, the living room, by the cellar door. But it’s hard. How far is she from a creature right now? The same wretched thing Olympia the woman saw as Olympia the baby was born?

  And is it the very same one?

  Malorie shudders. The idea. Each a private demon. To each a creature comes. Waiting for you to slip, to get lazy, to look…

  DON’T GET LAZY.

  Don’t look.

  She tries to close her eyes a third time, a fourth. A creaking door on each layer, each chain of thought that rises from the hole she’s in. How many times can a person close their eyes? How dark can one’s personal darkness get?

  “You…” she says. She thinks of the voice at the back of the train. Two men, right? One spoke to another? One spoke, one pushed? She shudders. No stopping that. Not right now. And never again. Not when she thinks of Rick at the school for the blind and the people there who, before Malorie arrived, gouged their eyes out to guarantee a l
ifetime of safety.

  A lifetime of darkness, too, she thinks. Where memories overlap. Where one begins to forget where the old world ended and the new one began.

  She presses against the wall. No space for these thoughts right now. Not in this room, not in her head. How high is the ledge?

  “I’m not going to look,” she says, her voice betraying every ounce of fear she feels. “I’m never going to look.”

  Then, an insane thought: the temptation to look.

  She steps from the wall. She holds her arms out, as if telling the thing to take her. Tear off her sleeves. Touch her. Try to make her look.

  She stands this way long enough to lose her nerve. She lowers her arms. She backs up to the dirt.

  Did it take a step forward as well?

  Malorie breathes in. She holds it. She breathes out.

  She feels like she’s losing her mind. The old way.

  She opens her eyes. Not her actual eyes, but the eyes she’s closed behind those eyes, and the eyes behind those, and those, and more. She feels a fluttering, a fanning of doors opening, in rhythm with her heart.

  This, she knows, is how Tom thinks, always. Because she can’t hide down here. Because there’s no other choice but to do something.

  She needs to push back.

  “You’re caught,” she says. “No better off than I am. But you don’t deserve to watch me fail. You showed up uninvited and you took everything from us. You stole our sisters, our parents, our kids. You took the sky, the view, you took day and night. A look across a street. A glance out a window. You’ve taken a view, every view, and with that, perspective. Who do you think you are, coming here, taking, then sitting silent, watching me go mad? I hope you’re hurt. I hope you’re stuck in here. I hope you get taken from you what you’ve taken from us. How can I be a mother in this world, your world? How am I supposed to feel, ever, in a world where my kids aren’t allowed to look? They don’t know me. My kids. They know a weathered, paranoid woman who cringes at every suggestion they make. They know a woman who says no so many more times than she says yes. A thousand times no. A hundred thousand times no. They know a woman who tells them what they’re doing is wrong, every day, all night. I was different before you. My kids will never know that person. I’ll never know that person again. Because even if you left now, even if you vanished as suddenly as you came…I’ve been through it. You dragged me through it. You dragged us all so that we don’t resemble who we used to be and, Goddammit, who we were supposed to be. What’s worse? Robbing someone of their childhood or taking away the person they were on their way to becoming? Because I can’t tell! I can’t tell who has it worse between me and my kids.” Her voice grows hoarse. Half defeat. But half not, too. “There is no ignorance anymore and there is no bliss. We’ve all been scarred. This woman before you? This isn’t me! This woman who lives in darkness, who cries behind closed eyes, who hasn’t had fun in seventeen years. This isn’t…me. This woman who can hardly call herself a woman at all because she feels more like a living blindfold. A machine that says no no no no no no no no. You wanna go outside, Tom? No. You wanna make a joke, Tom? No. Because what’s there to laugh about? What’s there to smile about? What’s there to turn on its head, other than…you? You. I caught them playing ‘creature’ once. Running between cabins, saying, Don’t look at me! I should’ve let them do it. I should’ve let them have fun. But I couldn’t. And I can’t be sure that, given the chance, I’d let them do it now. I’m a machine. Because you took the human. You took the glances, the winks, the eye-to-eye knowledge, the seeing somebody in a park, on a walk, on a drive. You took every relationship we were ever supposed to have and now you sit in this fucking hole with me and watch me go mad. Well, fuck you! Fuck you all! Get out! Go on and let me die alone. You don’t deserve to watch the end of me just like I didn’t deserve to be there at the beginning of you. Leave! Get out of here! Stop watching us go mad! Stop standing in plain sight so we have to close our fucking eyes, stop! Go back where you came from! You’ve seen what you do to us! It’s been seventeen years, seventeen years. What more do you need? Can’t you see that you hurt us? That you take from us? That you’ve ruined this place you’ve come to? I’m a mother! But I can’t do anything except keep them away from you. You. You’re terrible. You’re greedy. How much can you take? When is it enough? You want and you want and you take and you take and now my son is left with no choice but to want to beat you, my daughter with no choice but to accept you, and me…”