Malorie

by Josh Malerman

  “Where?” Athena asks.

  “The old Farmer Jack. The grocery store office, just like the kid’s mom said.”

  A moment of silence follows. Athena looks to the glasses. Tom does, too, sees her eyes reflected in them.

  She looks happier than Malorie ever has.

  “Do you have one here?” Tom suddenly asks. He can’t help but ask it. The census papers said the people of Indian River claimed to have caught one.

  He doesn’t need to explain what he means. These people understand.

  “If you mean do we have one locked up in some sort of cage, then no,” Athena says. “But there’s no shortage of creatures in Indian River.”

  Tom hears heavier activity outside. Malorie’s words begin to rise in his head and he cuts them off, can almost see the blood of them, slashed.

  “Get the mirror from the grocery store,” Athena says. She hasn’t taken her eyes off Tom, and for a second he thinks she’s telling him to do it. But a man near the back of the tent moves to the door.

  Are they going to test his glasses? Right now?

  You’re going to.

  “So this is how it works,” Athena says. “We have volunteers. A long list of them. People who have decided it’s wiser to risk their lives than to hide behind a blanket. People like you, Tom.”

  “Someone’s gonna look through my glasses?” Tom asks. “I don’t want someone to get hurt because of me.”

  Athena doesn’t laugh, doesn’t smile, doesn’t move to calm his fears, either.

  “These two”—she fans palms toward the men seated on either side of her—“are up next.”

  Tom doesn’t know what to say. It’s one thing to reveal his invention, and it feels good for it to be received this way. Yet…these men right here?

  They’re already standing up. Already getting ready.

  “Don’t worry,” Henry says, suddenly at Tom’s side. “This is what they live for here.”

  Athena rises from the stool and offers Tom her hand.

  “I’d like to thank you for coming to Indian River,” she says. “And for having the balls to present your theory.” Then, smiling: “Make them do something we can relate to. Make them consider themselves…make them look within…like we do. What’s more relatable than self-reflection? Absolutely brilliant, Tom. You belong here. With us. Did you know that? Don’t answer. This is a big moment for you. For me, too. Welcome, Tom. Welcome to Indian River.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The warring emotions within her are so extreme that Olympia endures actual, physical pain.

  She’s told her mom her secret.

  She told her!

  And Malorie reacted with…pride? She reacted well. As well as she could have, given the circumstances. And it’s those circumstances that cause the war within.

  Tom.

  Gary.

  Olympia doesn’t think Tom will have enough time in Indian River for something truly terrible to happen. They’re on their way, after all; it’s not like Tom vanished years ago and they just discovered his name on the census as being accounted for in a notoriously unsafe town. No. He’s just ahead. Out of sight, yes. But he can’t be too far.

  The people there will have to get to know him before they can ask him to be a part of anything perilous.

  But then again, what does she know? Tom could walk into the very building in which they’ve caught one, if they actually have done so. Olympia doesn’t think that’s possible. She’s seen them. Most of her life. And, to her, they don’t look like something to be caught.

  “This way,” she says, gripping Malorie’s gloved hand and leading her around a dead body in the road. It’s an old man. He looks like he could be a hundred years old. There’s a tent twenty feet away. She thinks the man lived there. There’s no sign of self-immolation.

  Old age, she thinks. But she does not say. Now isn’t the time.

  And when is? When has it ever been the time?

  “Do you see him?” Malorie asks.

  Tom.

  Tom left the train.

  This is too much. This is bad.

  “No,” she says. “But he can’t be far.”

  “How long?” Malorie asks.

  They’re moving fast, Malorie’s words are breathless, but Olympia knows what she means.

  “Since I was six.”

  Yes. At the school for the blind. It was her first time, and she can see it today, in her mind’s eye, as if it’s happening again. The man Rick who called the night Olympia and Tom were born, he’d just asked her to get a basket from the room everyone called “the supply shed.” Just a regular classroom down one of the many brick halls in the school she was just beginning to call home. They kept paper and tools and a ladder and scissors and just about everything in that room. Olympia was happy to be asked to do it.

  Are you big enough to get me a basket? Rick had said. And Olympia was all smiles. It didn’t matter that Rick couldn’t see that smile or that most of the people in the building would never see her face at all. She was glad to play a part, any part, at all.

  But on the way to the room, at the far end of the hall, she saw one.

  She knew what it was right away. Even at six she understood it was the thing Malorie had raised her to fear. Yet, gazing upon it, she didn’t feel any worse than she did when she woke up that morning. She was scared. But that was all. And the fear never quite eclipsed any she’d known before. Not even the fear she felt when Malorie told her they were taking a river they’d never even swam in.

  More importantly: she didn’t feel crazy. Nothing like that at all. Maybe she was too young to know what mad might feel like, but she wasn’t too young to think.

  In fact, the only thing she was worried about, really, was the idea that someone else might see it, too. That someone else would come around the corner and go mad and hurt everybody. Malorie talked about that potentiality all the time.

  Then someone did come.

  Annette.

  Olympia had long wondered about the red-haired woman who told everyone she was blind. She wondered because one night, late, Olympia left their bedroom (a converted classroom like all the rest) to use the bathroom alone. And there, in the stall, seated, she heard someone else enter. Someone who thought they were alone, too.

  Olympia, embarrassed, already keeping secrets even then, though not of the magnitude she soon would, heard a match strike and saw a candle come to light, illuminating a sphere in the otherwise pitch-black darkness of the restroom. She peered through the stall door and saw the woman holding the candle to the mirror; saw Annette looking at herself.

  Annette. Blind.

  But looking.

  So why pretend? Even then, so young, she guessed it had something to do with wanting to be unbothered. Wanting people to leave her alone. Wanting people to consider her safe in a world where anybody who can see is liability. Malorie herself spoke of Annette without fear. This meant something. In what Malorie called “the new world,” going unnoticed was good. For this, after a time, Olympia came to believe that Annette was simply still trying to be good.

  In a world without personal possessions, secrets were precious indeed.

  She saw the woman’s face clearly in the glass, floating features in the otherwise dark space. Olympia’s heart hammered in her young chest as she watched the woman’s eyes for the first time, saw them connect with her reflection in the glass, saw the relief in Annette’s face for being allowed to look, here, where she was sure she was alone.

  Then Annette looked at Olympia.

  Olympia wanted to gasp, wanted to cry out, wanted to say oh, no, don’t worry, I’d never, I’d never ever, I’d never ever tell a soul that you aren’t blind!

  But Annette only stared. Then she blew out the candle, and the face seemed to vanish, a wisp of smoke, features swallowed
by darkness once again.

  Olympia didn’t move. Nor did she hear the woman, who was much older than Malorie, move. The two remained still in the darkness for what felt to Olympia like a very long time.

  When Annette did move again, Olympia steeled herself, ready for the stall door to be thrust open, or worse, to creak slowly, as the old woman’s wrinkled hands entered the dark rectangle, searching for the body belonging to the pair of eyes that had caught her.

  The girl who knew her secret.

  But Annette did not come. Rather, her bare feet slapped the tiled floor on the way out of the bathroom, and Olympia remained still long after that same door swung closed.

  “Don’t look,” she said to Annette, later, months later, as she set out to get the basket for Rick. As Annette rounded the corner. “There’s one at the end of the hall.”

  Annette’s red hair hung vibrant to a powder-blue robe.

  “Look?” she asked. “But I’m blind.”

  “Oh,” Olympia said, because she didn’t know what else to say and because, too, she’d just seen a creature for the first time in her life. Even the word creature was starting to feel like the wrong name for what lurked at the end of the hall.

  Then Annette looked.

  Years later, now, leading Malorie up the road to Indian River, as her body seems to physically swell with the uncertainty of a brother who has fled and a mother who now knows she is immune, Olympia finds the room within herself to feel that lack of closure, that lack of understanding, once more: why did Annette look when someone told her not to?

  Was it because Annette had seen her in the glass in the bathroom and wanted to discredit what Olympia knew to be true? Was it because the voice that warned her was young and Annette, so old, had simply had enough of taking orders, of living the way people had to in the new world?

  Or maybe, Olympia still thinks, maybe the woman was curious. And nothing more.

  She tells Malorie this story now. But saying it out loud doesn’t add any clarity. And Malorie doesn’t give her any opinions.

  Mom, Olympia knows, is only thinking of Tom.

  “You saw the massacre at the school for the blind,” Malorie says.

  “I did.”

  Olympia guides Malorie around another turn. Still no sign of Tom ahead. It’s possible Gary knows a shortcut to the community. Malorie said so.

  “I’m so sorry,” Malorie says. “I should’ve helped you with that. I could’ve.”

  She hears the sorrow in her mom’s voice, and she doesn’t like it. The last thing she wants is to make Malorie feel worse. About anything.

  Here, they rush to her son.

  Here, they’ve gotten off the train that might take them to her parents.

  Malorie, Olympia knows, has suffered enough.

  “No,” Olympia says. “Honestly, Mom. You’ve been the best mom in the world to us.”

  Malorie grips her hand, and Olympia squeezes back.

  Around the next turn, she sees it. Just as she’s seen so many of them through the years. There were dozens on the rudderless hike from the school for the blind to Camp Yadin. That journey remains the most frightening of Olympia’s life. It marked the beginning of guiding her family in secret.

  This way, guys.

  Look out, guys.

  Uphill now.

  I’ll go ahead a little. Don’t worry, I like doing it.

  You hear that, Tom? So do I.

  But she hadn’t heard it. She’d seen it. All of it.

  Her ears are no match for her brother’s. Another secret.

  “Anything?” Malorie asks.

  Olympia still considers that first walk, six years old, as the time she became a woman. She’s read enough books to know that the good ones tell of a character who experiences something that changes their life. For her, it was coming to grips with immunity alone.

  And how many more did she see once they got there? Really, how many through the years? How many creatures, if that’s what they must be called, stood outside their cabin, stood within others, roamed the lodge and its kitchen? How many did she find in the basement of the lodge as Malorie fished for canned goods on the shelves, believing her daughter to be blindfolded, too?

  Oh, there were so many times she wanted to tell Malorie about Annette; wanted her mom to know the woman was not touched, that they didn’t have to wear sleeves, hoods, gloves. Oh, how she wanted Malorie to know her secret. The truth.

  But even now, as they turn with the road, as a creature is revealed to be standing ahead, Olympia’s instinct is to say nothing, only to guide.

  But things have changed. And maybe people experience more than one life-changing event.

  “There’s one about forty feet away, Mom.”

  Malorie comes to a stop.

  “Close your eyes,” she says.

  But Olympia doesn’t close them. Instead, she eyes a way around the thing, just as she has done so many times before.

  The path curves this way, when it did not.

  There’s an object in the road, when it was everything Malorie feared.

  “Olympia,” Malorie says.

  But this is something Malorie will have to get used to.

  “It’s in the center of the road,” Olympia says. “Follow me, we’ll go around it.”

  She hears Malorie’s breathing intensify. She knows her mom is as afraid as she’s ever been.

  “I won’t go mad,” Olympia says. “I promise.”

  It sounds so silly to say, yet Malorie squeezes her hand again.

  And Olympia leads.

  She guides Malorie around it, but near it, coming as close as Olympia’s ever come, emboldened by her reveal.

  “Okay,” she says. “It’s behind us. But…”

  “There are more ahead,” Malorie says.

  “Yes,” Olympia says. “So many that we’re going to have to take this slow.”

  “Olympia.” Malorie pulls on her arm.

  But Olympia understands Malorie is only scared.

  And if she’s not keeping secrets anymore, she may as well admit that she’s scared, too.

  She pulls back on Malorie’s hand.

  “Tom,” she says.

  Malorie breathes in, holds it, breathes out.

  “All right,” she says. “Guide us.”

  Then Olympia, with pride, new, changed, does that.

  TWENTY-NINE

  This is everything Tom has ever wanted. The opposite of the life he’s lived.

  A community where people are trying.

  It’s all he’s ever asked Malorie to be okay with. Trying. New things. New ways. He knows not to look. And here he won’t be told what he already knows ever again.

  Henry understands. Oh, boy, does he. It was Henry who said go, go to where the people think like you do. Be bold as you were born to be! And how those words connected with Tom. They electrified him in a way Malorie never could. Nobody has ever spoken to him like Henry does. Not Mom, not Olympia, not anybody at the school for the blind. The more Tom thinks about it, the more he believes the train was an intervention of Fate. Olympia’s told him about Fate before. Without that knock on the door by the census man, and without Tom asking him to leave the papers, he never would’ve heard about Indian River, Malorie never would’ve seen her parents’ names on the page, and he never would’ve met Henry. It scares him how close he was to spending the rest of his life at Camp Yadin, never knowing there was a whole world that felt like he does.

  And they really, really do.

  The man, Allan, has already retrieved the two-way mirror. He and some others are testing it out inside a large ten-person tent right now. Tom is in the next tent over, where the two volunteers, Jacob and Calvin, have been discussing the philosophy of Tom’s invention for a while. They’re next on the list, Hen
ry reminds Tom, and the people of Indian River can’t wait to try new ideas.

  Tom knows why. It’s because they want to be a part of something bigger than the life Tom was leading. It’s because they understand that, yes, someone might get hurt, but someone might also not. The people of Indian River want to be the ones to break down the door, the ones who discover a safe way to look, who return sight and seeing to a world that’s already mourned the loss of both.

  Doesn’t Malorie get it? Could she really stand where Tom stands now, mere feet from the people who discuss what might be their last moments alive? Could she be this close to a breakthrough and not feel the excitement Tom feels? He knows the answer to this, and it makes him feel sick. If Malorie were here, it wouldn’t be happening. She’d get hysterical. She’d demand everyone close their eyes. She’d take him by the arm and drag him out of this tent, one gloved hand over his face.

  Maybe she’d even hit him again.

  “Your mother,” Henry says, once again seeming to sense where Tom’s head is at, once again proving he already knows Tom better than his own mom does, “wouldn’t get any of this at all, would she?”

  “Not at all,” Tom says.

  But he doesn’t want Henry bringing Malorie up right now. He doesn’t want to think of her at all.

  “She’d scream bloody murder at every single person in this town,” Henry goes on. “She’d call them all crazy, and she’d include you in that assessment.”

  Tom nods. But he really doesn’t want to talk about this right now. He just wants to listen to Jacob and Calvin, hear what they have to say, add to their conversation. Their ideas. Their bravery.

  Jacob says, “It’s different than looking at the reflection of one in the mirror because, for starters, you might see something in your peripheral vision that isn’t reflected in the limited shape of the glass.”

  Calvin says, “In this case it’s all about forcing the creature to do something fathomable.”

  They’re talking about his ideas!

  It’s everything Tom’s ever wanted.

  “God, it’s like I can hear her voice already,” Henry says. “The shrill bemoaning of the new world. The endless rules. You’ll see.” He plants a heavy hand on Tom’s shoulder, and Tom wants him to remove it. “When you finally get to view one, you’ll see just how paranoid your mother has been.”