Jacob and Calvin are discussing mirrors. Reflections. The possible mind of impossible creatures. Tom wants to get lost in their words. He could listen to them for weeks.
But Malorie, as is her nature, keeps coming back up.
“She’d go for me first,” Henry says with a chuckle. “She’d ask who took you here, and when I raised my hand…”
“She wouldn’t see it,” Tom says.
“That’s right!” Henry says. His laughter is louder than the discussion between the two volunteers.
He thinks this is funny, but it’s not. Not right now.
“Eventually she’d find out,” Henry says. “And she’d come for me. Except…like you bring up, where would she know to look? And doesn’t that sum everything up, Tom? Here, a woman so righteous, yet completely inert. Well, she’s done it to herself, I say. She’s so deep in the dark she wouldn’t know if safety were sitting right beside her.”
Not now, Tom thinks. Not now.
“My God, if she had her way, you’d be locked in a crate like veal. She ever tell you what veal is, and how it was raised? Probably not. She probably didn’t want you knowing that’s what was happening to you.”
Allan enters the tent. He says the two-way mirror is ready. He says something about a park. Jacob and Calvin stop talking.
Tom can’t help but imagine them mad.
“…like a caged animal, Tom. And what kind of life is that? And who, then, would have put you in a worse position? The things outside…or your very own mother?”
Jacob and Calvin smile Tom’s way as Allan escorts them outside.
“Wait,” Tom says, but they’re already out of the tent.
“Who indeed?” Henry says. “And it makes you wonder, it makes you ask, who is the monster? Not I, Tom. Not us. Indian River has accepted me. Just as it accepts everyone. Your mother would say a place like this must draw the psychos. And maybe it has. But a madman at ease is safer than a sane woman unsettled. The creatures may be monsters, but as evidenced by your mother and the life she deemed fit for you…those nasty things are not the problem. Man is the creature he fears.”
The words rattle in Tom’s head like broken sticks outside Cabin Three at Camp Yadin. Tom hears them, yes, thinks he even knows what they are, yes, but his mind is on other things.
Amazing things.
Outside, Athena Hantz calls for him. And beyond her voice, the sound of a community celebrating.
Already, Tom thinks.
Before even trying it.
And isn’t that everything he’s ever wanted? To celebrate the effort? The results be damned?
“Best be going,” Henry says. But his hand is still on Tom’s shoulder, keeping him rooted to the ground. “You thought you cut the apron strings by leaving the train…” Henry laughs. Not the happy kind. “You’re about to positively slash them.”
THIRTY
Malorie smells rot seconds before Olympia tugs on her arm.
“Mom…”
Malorie stops walking. It’s harrowing enough to grasp the reality that her daughter can look, but the gravity in Olympia’s voice chills her.
“How bad is it?”
They’ve reached Indian River. It’s as black as it’s ever been behind Malorie’s blindfold.
“Well,” she says, “in sight, from where we stand, and we’re just at the border, literally…”
“Olympia. Out with it.”
“Bodies, Mom. So many bodies.”
Malorie knows that, right now, this moment, she has to be as strong as she’s ever been.
“And there’s…” Olympia’s voice trails off the way it does when someone is observing something bad. “Flags. Plastic flags…pinned to each of their chests.”
“What do you mean?” But it doesn’t matter. Whatever Hell unfolds before them, they must go through it.
“Heroes,” Olympia says. “Tributes, I think. To the fallen.”
Malorie thinks, Sacrifices.
“It’s bad,” Olympia says. “I’ve never seen…so much…”
It smells to Malorie like an entire graveyard’s worth of bodies never buried.
“Okay,” Malorie says. She’s trying to remain calm. She must. “Do you see your brother?”
“No,” Olympia says, her voice shaken. “It’s not like that. The road leads toward buildings. Bodies in the road.”
“Don’t look at them. Don’t think of them. Do you see Tom ahead?”
Malorie hardly recognizes the stability in her own voice. A thought flutters distantly; all her paranoid preparations, all her rules, have led to this moment in time.
Is she ready? Has she done right by herself, by her teens?
“No.” Olympia stifles a cry. “Oh, Mom. These people killed themselves. Their faces are torn apart. These people…”
“They went mad,” Malorie says. She breathes in. She holds it. She breathes out. “But we need to move. We need to go. Now.”
She feels Olympia’s hand in her own. The sun, still up, gets hotter. The smell gets worse.
They walk. And every time Olympia squeezes her hand, Malorie imagines another atrocity in the road.
“So now,” Olympia says, audibly shaking, “there are…things, too.”
Malorie stiffens.
“Creatures?”
“No. Like…makeshift things. Things Tom would’ve made. I don’t know what any of them are. Things made of wood and plastic, rope…metal…”
Malorie wants to move faster, to whip through this insanity, to find Tom now. The census papers talked about the risks this community is willing to take. She knows these broken objects are failed experiments left to decay with those who went mad.
“What do you see?” Malorie asks. “Talk to me.”
“Street signs. A gas station. Storefronts. I don’t know. Mom. No people. Wait…”
Olympia stops.
“What is it?”
“Can you hear that?” she asks.
Malorie listens. Hard.
“No. What do you hear?”
“People. Cheering. I think.”
Malorie starts walking again, and Olympia guides her along a curve in the road.
The stench is worse. Yet, somehow, this suddenly feels horribly right to Malorie. How long has it felt like she’s been walking through Hell? How many years? And how long has she seen the new world as a place of death and decay from the darkness behind the fold?
In its terrible way, this is exactly where she’s supposed to be. Indian River. An eventual point in time, a location in space, where the last seventeen years have carried her.
“So many bodies,” Olympia says. “So many…”
Are the failures so commonplace that the people who sacrifice their sanity and lives are simply wheeled to the lawn and dumped at the city gates, left to rot under the sun?
“Bones,” Olympia says.
Malorie was expecting this. The closer they get to town, the older the corpses. Like all graveyards, this one grows out.
And at the center of it, its source, she hears the voices now, too.
Cheering. There is no doubt.
“It’s going to be okay,” Malorie says. But she hears the lie in her voice.
Who waits for them downtown in a community like this? Who stands guard?
In her memory, she hears Victor the dog destroying himself in the emptiness of a dive bar.
“It’s going to be okay,” Malorie says.
“Bones,” Olympia repeats.
Malorie’s never heard this level of fear in her daughter’s voice. She doesn’t want to know what Olympia sees. Yet she’d rather see it for her. She’d willingly carry these memories herself.
A crowd cheers. A central voice erupts. A woman speaking through a megaphone.
Malorie thin
ks of the name from the census pages: Athena Hantz.
The amalgamation of barker and bad sound reminds Malorie of the Marquette County Fair.
Possibly the most unsettling aspect of all, for Malorie, is that, despite what Olympia sees…it sounds festive.
“Ahead,” Olympia says. “The buildings, the sidewalks, lined with more bodies. Oh, Mom. Oh, no. A kid.”
Malorie wants to demand why, why? What kind of community dumps the dead in the streets?
But she knows the answer.
One gone mad.
Altogether.
Unsafe.
An explosion of cheers tells Malorie the crowd is to the right of her, but the sound is still muffled. Distance to go.
“Step down,” Olympia says.
“It’s going to be okay,” Malorie says again. It’s all she can say. For all the preparations and hard work, for all the surviving she’s done, she has no better words for her daughter at this time.
She’s shaking.
But she tries. Because when they get to this crowd of people, when they finally reach the heart of Indian River, she’s going to need her wits.
They’re here for Tom.
“Up again,” Olympia says. “Onto the sidewalk.”
Her daughter guides her serpentine, and Malorie knows it’s because they’re avoiding the dead. How many have scissors in their chests? How many are surrounded by puddles of blood?
The crowd is more emphatic now. The woman’s voice through the megaphone. They sound hungry for whatever’s about to happen.
What’s about to happen?
Malorie can’t make out the words. Her mind is barely able to keep these elements together: the dead, a crowd, Gary, this town, her son.
Indian River is everything she is not and has never been.
People laugh. An eruption of genuine laughter. People jeer…a joke? The voice again. Riling up the crowd. Do the people wear folds?
Is everyone in Indian River out of their fucking minds?
“Stop,” Olympia says.
She pulls Malorie to the side of a building.
“What is it?” Malorie asks, shocked by the calm in her own voice. A calm she does not feel.
“So…Okay. So…”
“What is it?”
“It’s a park in the center of town. And a lot of people are in the park. Blindfolded.”
“Calm down, Olympia. We’re going to get your brother. We can do this.”
“Okay. And…and there’s a stage. Flags. Banners.”
Malorie’s heart breaks before Olympia says the words.
“And Tom’s on the stage,” Olympia says. “He’s standing next to…a mirror.”
The words feel plucked from Malorie’s personal darkness. As if they are made of the dark itself.
“Is he blindfolded?”
She didn’t mean to yell it.
“I can’t tell.”
“You what?”
“Mom, I can’t tell…”
“Okay we need to—”
“There’s a creature on the lawn in front of the stage. I don’t know how to explain this, Mom. Like it’s…waiting to see what happens.”
Malorie is already moving before Olympia finishes.
She doesn’t grab her daughter by the wrist, doesn’t want her to follow. She doesn’t attempt to look strong, to appear dangerous, to threaten. She only walks, arms out, stabilizing herself, readying herself for a curb, a gradation, a hill, a body.
People clap around her. People call out. Someone yells something about breaking through. Someone praises God. So many voices. Hysterical, absurd, convinced.
“TOM!”
Malorie yells his name but others are doing it, too.
Calling for Tom.
Tom on a stage, a creature in the crowd.
“TOM!”
She knows he can hear her. She knows he could’ve heard them at the gates of town if he’d wanted to listen that far.
So many people. Infinite voices.
“TOM!”
She trips on what feels like a curb, almost falls, rights herself.
Someone says something about freedom.
“TOM!”
Like she’s calling out to Tom the man, telling him to get up into the attic, don’t stay downstairs where Gary…Gary…Gary…
“Malorie.”
A voice, at her side. At her ear.
“Get away from me!”
She shoves him. Kicks the open air.
Then, a sea of people. Chants. Cheers.
“Malorie,” Gary says (she knows it’s him, it’s always been him, behind the fold with her, always, forever), “Tom doesn’t want you here. Tom is growing up now. Right now.”
“TOM!”
She shoves but can’t find him. She kicks but he’s not there.
“He’s looking at one right now,” Gary says. “It’s incredible, Malorie. Looking through a device of his own making.”
Malorie moves fast, too fast, swings at Gary, misses, as the voice of the one she believes to be Athena Hantz speaks through the megaphone, tells the people of Indian River that Tom is looking at the creature, that he and the creature look at each other right now.
“TOM!”
But Malorie is falling. As Gary’s laughter is swallowed by a burst of unbridled cheer from the people around her.
And from the stage…suddenly, softly, somehow heard by Malorie as she hits the ground.
“Mom?”
Tom.
He’s heard her.
And he sounds…
“Sane,” she says, planting her palms on the grass, getting to her knees. Her elbows shake, her wrists shake, her entire body rumbles with the horror of her son gone mad and the unfathomable possibility that he hasn’t.
“Mom?” he says. Then, “Malorie!”
Malorie is up. But the crowd is too loud. She’s losing track of him in a wash of lazy, dangerous strangers.
Someone is at her by the elbow, forcing her back the way she came.
Gary
Gary Gary Gary
Malorie makes to push but Olympia’s voice stops her.
“Mom, Mom. He’s okay. Tom. He’s looking…and he’s okay.”
The people around her explode with a cheer Malorie has long thought reserved for the day human beings discover a way to look at the creatures safely.
And has that happened?
And is today that day?
And is Tom the one to have done it?
Tom the man appears in her mind’s eye. A man who so desperately wanted the world to cheer just like this.
“CLOSE YOUR EYES!” Malorie yells. And her voice is torn fabric.
Olympia guides her, but even Olympia seems enamored with what has happened.
Where’s Gary?
“Where’s Gary?”
“Mom!” Olympia is crying. Elation in her voice. “Mom! Tom did it!”
“Where’s Gary?”
Then…a voice.
A man’s. But not Gary’s. As if in a dream tortured so long it’s become a nightmare, Malorie hears the voice of her father.
It comes from deep within the darkness, her darkness, a depth even she has never been. She tries to repudiate it, to shove back, to refuse it just as she tried to shove Gary moments ago.
Now isn’t the time for false hope. Now isn’t the time to dream again.
“Malorie?”
But it is Dad’s voice. Real or imagined.
“Who…” Olympia begins to ask.
“What’s going on?” Malorie asks.
“Who…” Olympia says again.
“Malorie Walsh?” the man asks.
Dad’s voice again. Out of the darkness. Close to h
er ear.
“Oh, my God…” Malorie says. She grips Olympia’s arm for support.
When it becomes real, the truth of it, Sam Walsh, here, his fingers to her face, it hurts. It’s so powerful, the implications of this voice, this real voice, that it turns the light on behind her fold for the first time in seventeen years.
“Help,” she says. Because she can’t take it. All of this. At once.
Sam Walsh speaks again.
“I heard the boy call your name,” he says. “And your voice…I recognize your voice…”
Fingers again, on her face.
“Mal?”
Malorie breathes in. She holds it.
She hopes.
“Dad?”
The familiar hands are on her shoulders now. Olympia is saying something impossible, telling her this could be her dad.
And Olympia can see him.
“Oh, my God, Mom,” Olympia says. “Oh, my God…”
“I’m Sam Walsh,” her father’s voice says. “Are you Malorie?”
Malorie falls to her knees. This can’t be. It’s simply too much. There are so many voices out here. Tom’s on a stage. Olympia’s by her side.
And her father…
She wants to tear the fold from her face.
But even now…she lives by it.
The man is beside her, low. He’s on his knees. Olympia describes the impossible scene. She tells Malorie yes, yes, as a crowd who leaves their dead unburied cheer for her son, her son who may be going mad, even as Olympia tells her he’s not, even as Olympia sounds excited by all of this, by Tom, but also by this man, this familiar touch and smell and sound, beside her, the two of them together on their knees in an impossible street in Hell.
“Mal,” her father says, this time with confidence. “Oh, my God. Malorie.”
They’re hugging. Malorie’s fold is wet with tears. Her fingers don’t feel strong enough to grip his shoulders, but that’s what they’re doing. They’re digging into him, deep as she can make them go.
“Dad…”
“Malorie.”
Sam Walsh is crying. He’s trying to talk, and she feels a fold on his face, and she laughs because Dad has lived by the fold, too. Because Dad is alive.
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