Malorie(27)

Now, he hears the deep, elongated breathing of his mom and sister. Both are exhausted, as well both should be. They’ve come twenty-four miles over varied terrain, the sun beating down upon their long sleeves, hoods, blindfolds, and gloves. They’ve eaten what rations Malorie collected from camp and drank filtered water from ravines, rivers, and cricks. And while all three were active around Yadin, none of them have walked this much in a decade.

Tom, who has been lying on a floor of harsh, wilted hay, gets up. He moves quiet as he can, aware that, while Malorie won’t wake to the noise, Olympia easily could. Despite planning to do the very thing Olympia loves doing, he doesn’t want his sister to know what he has in mind.

Reading.

He takes crouched steps, one at a time, his arms extended, his fingers searching in the darkness for Malorie’s bag. He knows where it is. He’s kept his ear on the spot, the exact spot, since she set it there twenty-five minutes ago.

A flutter from the loft, and Tom cocks his ear toward it. He already knows it’s only a bird. But will it flap its wings? Will it wake Malorie?

He finds the straps that have kept the bag tight to Malorie’s back for the duration of their walk. He lifts it from the hay with care.

He pauses. He listens. He hears nobody outside the barn.

The door does not creak when he opens it. He slips outside, already removing the flashlight from his pocket, already pulling out the rolled blanket.

Eyes closed, he moves swiftly to the side of the barn, covers himself and the bag with the blanket, secures it to the ground with his knees and elbows, and turns on the light.

He opens his eyes.

It strikes him that, even if something had gotten under the blanket with him, he wouldn’t care. He believes he’d have heard it before seeing it, would’ve had time to close his eyes.

He’s so sick of being afraid of the creatures.

Sick of living by the fold.

The white tips of the pages appeal to him like so many invitations, asking him to read, read on, read on till morning.

He knows exactly where he wants to begin. Back in Cabin Three he caught a glimpse of a section, words that jumped out at him, before he was distracted by Olympia. Those words have whispered to him since.

He removes the stack from the bag and flips through until he reaches the page headed: INDIAN RIVER.

It’s a city in northern Michigan. And the description of it is everywhere Tom wants to be.

He reads:

Indian River, Michigan, has become one of the most progressive communities I’ve yet to encounter. Their citizenry numbers three hundred. Most sleep in tents and what was once a plain, two-story brick office building. But none spend their days indoors.

Tom’s heart picks up speed. Already he can tell these are his kind of people. The kind that push back against the creatures.

A town of many inventions, Indian River is not for the faint of heart. One man claims to have caught a creature, but this was not corroborated by anyone else I spoke to. NOTE: Almost everyone I asked told me they hoped he had.

“Yes!” Tom half cries out, half whispers. He can’t help it. A whole town of people who want to hear a creature was caught?

And maybe, just maybe, one was.

The de facto leader of the town is a woman named Athena Hantz. It was difficult for me to gauge her age as she has the passion of the young and the fortitude of someone much older. Miss Hantz claims she has “wholly accepted the creatures.” She insists they no longer drive people mad and have no intention of doing so. She believes, fiercely, they have changed over time. Her words: “They don’t punish us anymore.”

Tom’s eyes widen. This is heavy stuff. The idea that the creatures have changed…

He thinks of the man from the bait shop. He didn’t die when he left. This after saying he was close to looking.

Did he look?

Tom reads:

Without being able to verify if she lives the way she claims, I only have our brief encounter to judge her by. And by my own estimation, Athena Hantz is sane.

Tom nods along with the words. He’s impressed the census man felt compelled to include this. He wants to wake his mom, to show her, to say, see, see? Not everybody who thinks differently than Malorie is mad!

Athena Hantz.

Without any idea what she looks or sounds like, Tom imagines Athena Hantz is his mother instead. What would it mean for him to have been raised by a person like this in a place like that?

Indian River already feels more like home than Camp Yadin ever did.

He reads on:

In every corner of this community, somebody is attempting something new. For this, they’ve had their share of tragedies.

Tom nods. Of course they have. They had to have. That’s how invention works. Failures are guaranteed.

Doesn’t Malorie understand that? Doesn’t she get that you can wear a blindfold your entire life, but all you’re doing is perpetuating the lie that you cannot see?

One such instance occurred while attempting to “slow down” the process of insanity by securing a volunteer to a tree and leaving her outside to “watch all night.” The thinking here was that, if the person who has gone mad does not receive immediate gratification, perhaps the initial urge will subside, and the feelings of wanting to hurt herself or another would eventually go away. The community of Indian River fed soup to a madwoman this way, a woman tied to the tree, who did not, it turns out, avoid the known demise. Rather, she pretended to, ten days tied to the tree, and when the others cut her loose, finally, she lashed out. NOTE: While this sounds foolish and is something most survivors would never consider, the people of Indian River did learn from this experience. The initial, manic urge did indeed subside. But, unfortunately for those involved, it was replaced with cunning. This begs the question: who else out there has seen a creature but was incapable of carrying out their immediate fantasies? Who else out there is feigning sanity? I do not know if Athena Hantz was present for this experiment.