She doesn’t think she can finish. But she feels like she must.
“And me…I’m the one who survived long enough to go mad in the end.”
Malorie doesn’t remember falling back down to the dirt. She doesn’t remember lying curled up where two dirt walls meet. But here she is. Above her, the ledge could be as high as a hundred feet. Taller than the house she gave birth in.
She cries. She punches the ground. And she feels it, too, when something is near again.
“Stay away.”
She remembers a silly game Shannon loved to play. Her sister called it the third-eye test. You closed your eyes and someone slowly brought their finger to the space between your eyes and you said when you could feel it. The farther the person’s fingertip was from your skin proved how active your third eye was. How liable you were to feel things that aren’t of this world. Malorie feels the thing now. But it’s not a fingertip. It’s an entire presence, big as her own, maybe bigger, filling the rest of the Safer Room so that she has no choice but to remain curled up on the dirt. She’s hot and cold with it, and she thinks of Shannon’s fingertip, belonging to the same finger, the same hand that gripped a pair of scissors she drove into her own body.
“STAY AWAY!”
Her voice cracks; she’s reached her limit. She can’t speak or scream anymore. And while she still cries, her eyes have gone dry.
The presence gets closer yet, loaded air presses, and she can’t breathe evenly. She’s hyperventilating. She gets up because she’s too afraid to stay down. And she’s flatter this way, against the wall of dirt.
This creature may as well be the only creature on the planet, all of them the same thing, the point of perspective, the one place Malorie can’t look.
Everywhere.
She turns to the wall, tries to steady herself. Tries to calm down.
It’s close. Too close. Against her? Is it pressing against her?
It’s going to kill her.
Right now.
It’s going to rip the fold from her face.
Right now.
It’s going to force her to look.
LOOK.
Right now.
She wants to scream, but she can’t. She wants to run, but she can’t.
She raises an arm, reaching for the same ledge she hasn’t been able to reach yet.
And she cries out when a hand takes her own.
Malorie, nearly delirious, almost pulls away. But no, this is skin. This is bone. This is human. This is help.
“Mom!”
She recognizes the voice, because in an unfair way, this is not out of context. She’s heard this same voice with her eyes closed too many times to count.
“There’s a root to the left of you,” Olympia says. “You can use it for your left foot. Then I’ll pull and you should be able to—”
What is Olympia saying? What the fuck is Olympia saying?
Malorie feels to the left, finds the root. How did she not feel this before?
And how does Olympia know where it is?
“Ready, Mom?”
“No, Olympia…what’s happening…how did you…”
“Come on, Mom. You step up and I’ll pull and you’ll be able to—”
When Malorie cuts her off, her voice comes much calmer than she means for it to sound.
“How did you see the root, Olympia?”
There is a creature with Malorie in this hole. This grave. This Safer Room.
“Mom…” Then…the loaded silence of a sixteen-year-old girl who has been keeping secrets.
“Olympia. I need you to tell me how you knew this was here. And I need you to tell me now.”
Malorie, parenting. Still.
“Mom,” Olympia says, “there’s no creature in there with you.”
What?
“You do not know that.”
“I do. You’re alone down there.”
“You can’t know that!”
Quiet from above. The sound of a daughter about to tell her mother the truth.
“I’m looking into the hole, Mom. I can do that. I can look.”
Malorie pulls her hands away.
“Olympia…”
As if learning Olympia is able to see could drive Malorie mad all on its own.
Then, tears from above. Olympia is crying. And Malorie recognizes this brand of cry.
Shame.
She reaches up again and finds Olympia’s hand. She uses the root as her daughter pulls. Malorie feels the ledge, just out of reach this whole time.
Her fingers dig into the lip of the hole and Olympia grabs both her wrists. Before Malorie has time to process what Olympia’s just told her (but already accepting it because it rings a bell, doesn’t it? Rings many), she is flat to the ledge, pulling herself forward.
With an effort and a strength she did not know she still has, Malorie is fully out of the Safer Room at last.
She spends hardly any time at all on the ground, exhausted, before she gets up. Again, Olympia’s hand is there to help. A hand that has helped Malorie thousands of times over the course of what feels like thousands of years.
“You…”
She hugs Olympia hard.
“I thought you would be upset,” Olympia says. Crying still. “I thought you would be scared. I thought people would be afraid of me.”
Malorie, eyes closed, grips both Olympia’s shoulders.
“You’ve seen them?”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“All of them.”
“What does that mean? What does that mean?”
“Every one of them that was near enough for me to see.”
“Olympia…how long have you been able to look?”
In her mind’s eye, Malorie sees Olympia’s mother in the attic. She witnesses the woman’s face as she sees the creature standing behind Malorie. Hears it as Olympia the woman tells the creature it’s not so bad. Sees the baby still connected to the mom between the mother’s legs, the mother who begins to lose her mind.
“Always,” Olympia says. “I’m so sorry.”
Malorie takes her daughter’s face in her hands.
Was she really all alone in the hole? Was she so close to going mad…
…the old way?
“Oh, my God, Olympia. Don’t say you’re sorry.”
What has Olympia seen over the years? What has she been shouldering?
“I think it has to do with my mom,” Olympia says. Crying still. “And what you told me about me being born when she saw one.”
Malorie agrees. But she’s too stunned to say so.
“You’ve seen everything. For years.”
“Yes.”
“And you followed me here.”
“Yes.” Trepidation in her voice. “Sort of. I found you.”
“How?”
“Dean said you weren’t on the train.”
“So you got off…”
“Yes.”
“Where’s Tom? Where is he?”
It’s too much to fathom at once. Olympia is immune.
Tom…
“He wasn’t on the train, either.”
“Oh, God.”
“Dean said he might be with a man…”
“What man, Olympia? What man?”
She hears Olympia swallow, as if bracing herself to speak a hard truth.
“Henry.”
“Who?”
“It’s a man who…”
But it doesn’t matter what Olympia says next. It doesn’t matter that her daughter’s words line up with what she knows to be true.
…he was just like the man you always talk about, the man named…
“I heard his voice just before be
ing shoved from the train,” Malorie says. Her voice is steel. Her voice is unbreakable. “Gary.”
Her own private boogeyman, hiding, these sixteen years.
“Did you ever see him around camp?” Malorie asks. And her voice is flint.
She is already preparing herself to murder this man.
“No.”
Malorie breathes in, she holds it, she breathes out.
“Listen to me,” she says. “I heard him mention Indian River. Do you know what that place is?”
“Yes.”
“Because Tom told you?”
“Yes, mostly. I read some myself.”
“Okay.”
But it’s not okay. Because whether Gary has been watching them or not for all this time, whether he called a corner of Camp Yadin home or slept in the damp cellar of the lodge, he’s never lost track of Malorie.
She knows this now.
“You’re immune,” Malorie says. “Just like he is.”
“Mom, don’t say I’m like—”
Malorie cuts her off, her mind light-years from where she stands.
“No, this is good. This makes us even. Do you know where Indian River is?”
“No. But we can find it. Mom, I don’t like how you sound. We can’t—”
“We can, Olympia. We can do absolutely anything we want to.”
She’s standing, Olympia’s hand in hers.
“You’re not wearing sleeves,” Malorie says.
“We don’t need to.”
“But…”
“We don’t need to. I promise.”
“How could you let me think we did?”
Immediately after asking it, Malorie wishes she hadn’t. She wants to know everything, all of it, all at once. But for now, she needs to find her son.
“Lead me,” she says. “Take us to Indian River.”
“Mom…”
“Olympia, we need to go this second.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Malorie feels hands at her neck. Olympia is pulling her face closer.
“Here,” her daughter says.
Then Olympia is tying fabric around Malorie’s eyes. Tying the fold, her fold, tight to her head.
“I’ve never killed anyone before,” Malorie says, speaking her thoughts.
“Mom, we don’t have to do this.”
“We do.” And her voice is resolve. Her voice is truth. “Because if we don’t, he’ll hide in the dark, our dark, forever.”
Malorie turns once toward the hole.
Olympia is immune. Olympia can see. And she says the hole was empty.
But Malorie doesn’t feel mad anymore. Doesn’t feel like she could ever go mad in any way ever again.
“We have to hurry,” she says. “The real monster’s got Tom.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
“Well, they’re really just a pair of glasses,” Tom says, his voice shaking with nervousness. “I made them out of this…this…do you know what a two-way mirror is?”
The woman sitting before him on a stool nods. She sits on the very edge of the wood, her veined hands gripping her knees, a long brown ponytail with streaks of gray reaching past her shoulders.
Tom hasn’t seen her enormous eyes blink since Henry brought him into the tent.
This is Athena Hantz.
“Okay. Good,” Tom says. “Yeah…in the office of the camp we lived in, we lived there forever, it felt like. You ever feel like that? Yeah? Okay. Well, in the office was this two-way mirror so that the camp director could look down at the campers eating or at whatever was happening in the main lodge area without everyone being able to see him.”
He pauses. Is she following this? Are any of them?
Two men younger than Malorie sit on the ground, flanking Athena. There are others in the tent, too.
Tom hears constant motion outside the tent. Indian River is active.
“Go on,” Athena says. “This is interesting.”
“Yeah, okay,” Tom says. He pauses again because he wants to make sure he words this next part right. “So…my mom, she told me those two-way mirrors were in grocery stores, back when people could look around freely, you know? And she said they were in a lot of movies. Detective movies? I can’t be sure. Anyway, she also told me that the man I was named after, Tom, he sounds like a cool guy actually. Like someone I would’ve been friends with. Well…he was the first to tell my mom that maybe the creatures are…infinity. It’s hard to explain.”
“We know the theory,” Athena says.
“Yeah, okay,” Tom says. “Well…so…if the creatures are something we can’t understand, because our heads can’t comprehend what they are…what if we could like…what if we could make them do something we can relate to? That’s what I was thinking. If we could make them do something, anything, that makes sense to us, or is familiar to us…well, maybe then we could understand them. Even if it’s only a little bit.”
The two seated men exchange a look. Tom thinks they probably think he’s crazy. Or not smart. But when they look back to him, both appear to be wholly interested.
Athena reaches out, taps Tom’s knee.
“Go on,” she says.
“So…one thing I was thinking was…one day I was in the office and I thought, man, what if I looked through the glass and saw a creature in the lodge. Right? Well, I guess I’d go mad. Mom would say so, anyway. I think most people would. And my sister, she has this idea that the creatures have no face…not like ours, I guess? She says they’re all face and all not at the same time. That’s her theory anyway. So it struck me that…if a creature was in the lodge…and if it was reflected, right? If it looked at the glass…which, if it’s all face, on all sides, then if it was reflected at all it would be looking, right? Well, in this case, it wouldn’t see me. You know? It would see itself. In the mirror.”
The people in the tent are silent. Henry smiles as if he thought of this idea himself.
Athena’s eyes seem to be frozen on Tom. As if he’s talking to a photograph.
“And I got to thinking…if a creature saw itself…wouldn’t it…couldn’t it maybe…consider itself? I don’t know if that’s the right word exactly. But…maybe it would look at itself and be forced to consider what it is. And while it did look…at itself…while it did consider…what it is…maybe that’s something I could understand. That’s something I could relate to. Making it…you know…safe…to…to look at it.”
He could talk for hours about this subject, but for now, he feels done. Or like he’s told them what the glasses are supposed to do, and either they think he’s crazy or they don’t.
“So I cut up the two-way mirror and made glasses out of them.”
He feels like he can hear the seconds ticking. Then:
“Genius,” Athena says. “Absolutely genius.”
“Like I said,” Henry says.
One of the seated men raises a finger, as if about to debate. Then he lowers it.
“Well, I think that’s one of the brightest ideas I’ve ever heard,” he says.
“Really?” Tom says. “You do?”
“Have you tried them out?” Athena asks.
“No.” He feels ashamed of this answer.
“That’s okay,” she says. “You’re going to.”
Her face looks like one large smile. As if she has a second, hidden smile behind her lips.
“May I?” she asks, reaching for the glasses.
Tom hands them to her. She hands them to the man seated to her right. Her eyes remain fixed on Tom.
You’re going to.
What did she mean?
The man tries the glasses on.
“We’ll have to modify these,” he says. “Make sure there’s no peripheral vision.”
“They’re the safe
ty brigade,” Athena says to Tom. “I rather liked them the way you had them. Risky. And do you have the rest of the mirror?”
“No,” Tom says. He wishes he did.
“We do,” a man standing deeper in the tent says.
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