Malorie(10)

She doesn’t want to think about Annette. She doesn’t want to think about Gary. But she can’t stop them from coming. As if they’re constantly standing outside the cabin door of her mind. Constantly knocking.

Could you let me in for an hour or two?

Or ten years.

By the time she reaches the stone steps, she’s so encumbered with thoughts of mad people and creatures, isolation and her kids, that she has to remind herself what she’s doing.

She uses the knife to open the lodge door.

She steps over the threshold.

Annette stepped over the edge.

And what held her hand on the way?

Malorie smells the air. She listens. She has no doubt that, over the course of the past decade, she’s stood close to many creatures. It’s a fact of the new world she’s had to accept. Tom and Olympia tell her there are many more now than there used to be. The man at the door said the same. But how many is that? And how much space do they now occupy?

She enters the lodge. Despite the high ceiling and open room, it’s always hottest in here. Malorie thinks it’s because of the tall windows, despite having painted those windows black long ago. Still, she’s reminded of the saunas, so prevalent in the Upper Peninsula where she was raised, the steam boxes her mother and father insisted on each night before bed. By the time she’s crossed the former common area where campers once took meals, she longs for the lake she and Shannon leaped into, following those saunas, running from the steaming rocks.

She stops. She thinks she’s heard something. Movement. Something outside the lodge. But Camp Yadin plays tricks. Branches fall. Wind blows. Cabins creak.

She waits. She listens.

It is not lost on her how vulnerable she is at this moment. The man who claimed to be from the census could be standing in the corner of this room, preparing something. A creature could be inches from her face, observing, still, the effect they have on the people they should never have crossed paths with. But seventeen years into the new world, Malorie decides to treat her personal darkness differently. While she’s certainly as staunch as the others at the school for the blind claimed she was, and while she may be partially paranoid, as her own son said while in a fit of rage, she’s also able to pretend that the darkness she exists in does not include creatures and camps, life and death. Rather, she imagines she’s walking through the home she grew up in. Dad is by the stove in the kitchen, listening to a game on a small radio that Mom tells him he keeps too close to the burner. Mom reads a book, sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for Shannon to take her turn at Scrabble.

This is a much nicer reality. And who’s to say what’s real in the dark?

As Malorie exits the common room, as she enters the hall that leads to the large kitchen in back, she can almost smell the venison Dad cooks, can hear Mom flip a page, can sense Shannon’s deliberations. Nobody liked playing games with Shannon.

“If you think your mom is a perfectionist, Tom,” Malorie says, “you shoulda met your aunt.”

By the time she enters the kitchen, she’s no longer in the home she grew up in; now she talks to Tom the man in the house she fled twelve years ago, talks about Gary.

“Stop it,” she tells herself. It isn’t easy. Yet years of this back-and-forth, a decade and a half of horrific memories springing like attractions in a haunted house at the Marquette County Fair, have lessened the grip these bad thoughts have on her. Despite what Tom her son might believe, Malorie does not live in fear.

She swipes the knife in front of her face as she exits the kitchen and takes the stairs to the lodge’s basement. She does this because more than once she’s passed through a web at the head of the steps. And more than once she’s brought the brown spiders back to Cabin Three.

“If anybody is down here, they’re gonna get stabbed.”

Despite the fold, despite her eyes being closed, Malorie still senses that she’s entered utter darkness. The unmistakable cellar smell of cold concrete and mold. It used to be she’d hurry to find the dangling cord, to bring light to a space like this. But if there’s one thing the new world has incrementally destroyed, it’s a fear of the dark.

She crosses the mostly open area and tells herself she’s only here to grab canned goods. Could be her and Shannon retrieving cranberries for the Thanksgiving meal Mom and Dad cook together upstairs. Could be the canned goods Tom the man showed her the first morning she woke in the house on Shillingham. Or it could be what it is: Malorie searching the shelf for beans, able to pick them out among the other cans because the lids are different.

“Used to be a lot more on this shelf.”

No question about that. And it feels good to assess, to do what she normally does, while listening for movement and keeping her nose open for a squatting human being who most likely pretends to be with the census.

“Who does he think he is?” she asks, unable to find the beans after all. Sometimes the gloved fingertips make this sort of task a little harder. “What did he expect me to do? Just let him in?”

As she removes the glove, as the county fair house of horrors vision of a creature reaching out and touching her exposed hand momentarily rattles her, she wonders how a man can claim to be from the census in a country where there is no organization anymore.

She finds the beans quickly and slips the glove back on.

She turns to face the basement.