Malorie(30)

“Gloves,” Malorie says.

Tom puts on his gloves.

He listens. He can’t tell. He listens. He doesn’t know.

He listens.

Malorie grips his wrist harder, and he thinks it’s because he’s breathing heavy. He imagines a woman tied to a tree in Indian River. He imagines her pretending not to be mad. He can see the town feeding her soup as she feigns sanity, as she waits for the day when they will inevitably cut the ropes that bind her.

“There’s nothing in here,” Olympia says.

As if she knows. As if she could see Tom’s head, turning this way and that, trying so hard to get a lock on a sound, anything, here in the barn.

Malorie doesn’t ask her if they’re still outside because, Tom knows, even his mom can hear that much.

The grass flattens. The barn creaks.

“Just wait,” Malorie says.

And her voice is a solid object in Tom’s dismay.

It’s not hard to imagine himself choking her, cracking Olympia’s skull, had he opened his eyes another sliver when facing the one by the side of the barn.

What was he thinking? What was he doing?

Olympia said there isn’t one in the barn, Olympia said there isn’t one in the barn, Olympia said— “They’re not moving,” Olympia says.

“They’re not trying to get in?” Malorie asks.

“No. But they’re not leaving, either.”

Tom can’t stop thinking about his arm. He brushes at it again. He imagines something traveling into him, into his blood, pumping toward his mind. Something strong enough to make him want to hurt the two people he loves. Strong enough to drive him mad.

Yet nothing is happening.

Is it?

Malorie has scared the teens deeply with her descriptions of what real madness could be. Like how the madman doesn’t know his mind is cracked, how that’s what makes him mad. And how, maybe, just maybe, when they touch you, you go mad slowly instead.

Did he see one outside? Were his eyes open wider than he thought they were?

Is he mad without knowing he’s mad?

Tom is having trouble breathing. He has to stop feeling this way. This scared. He’s so tired of being told he’s supposed to be scared. He thinks of the people of Indian River. Are they afraid? Do they live in fear? When they hear quiet steps in the dark, when they hear something on the roof of the barn…do they fall to pieces the way Tom does now?

He digs deep, into himself, searching for strength. He’s looking for the part that was thrilled by the pages he read outside. He tries to relate to the teen he just was, standing near the barn, eyes partially open, a creature so close. Where has that teen gone? And how did he vanish so fast?

“I count thirteen,” Olympia says.

But Malorie is doing what she’s always done in moments like this. She’s starting to list off the reasons they’ll be fine, the reasons they’ll make it through this night. Even as Tom hears his own fears echoing in her voice.

“There’s no record of one ever attacking.”

But what does this mean? How would the person who was “attacked” live to tell about it? And all those who have gone mad…who would believe them if, just before burying their heads in the garden they once tended, they say it was their own fault, no creature made them look?

“They’re not interested in us.”

But it sounds to Tom like they are. Like they’re really very interested in them after all. There’s another on the roof now. More in the fields.

“They don’t mean us any harm.”

Yet they haven’t left, have they? Malorie’s told Tom about his namesake’s theory that the creatures only observe what they do to people. That they have no agenda. Yet at some point they would have to see the damage they cause. Right? At some point it would become a choice.

“They don’t know what they do.”

Maybe, Tom thinks. Maybe. But mindless or not, without morality or with, there’re more of them now than there used to be. And nobody has any proof of them attempting to get back to where they came from.

Even now, in the throes of horror, trembling at his mother’s and sister’s sides, swiping at his arm where he felt something touch him, Tom can’t stop himself from trying to solve them.

“What are they doing?” Malorie asks. Tom is so busy thinking that he’s forgotten the role he normally plays. He listens. Hard. He hears movement in the fields. A rustling more corporeal than wind.

“Tom, what are they doing?”

He listens through the barn’s wood walls, to places where the wind doesn’t blow unobstructed. Places occupied by something other than open air.

“Tom?”

Mom sounds scared. She always does. Despite the list of reasons not to worry, Malorie sounds like she knows this could be the one. The time when even the blindfold doesn’t protect them. The time the creatures finally get to her, get to her children, drive them insane.

Tom cocks an ear to the roof.

How many are up there? And why? If they mean no harm…if they’ve never attacked…why are they on the roof of the barn?

“I’m not sure,” Olympia says.

This is supposed to be Tom’s department. Always has been. Olympia possesses a preternatural ability to sense a creature’s exact location, but it’s Tom who can hear what they do and, sometimes, what they are about to do next.