Malorie(64)

And at exactly the moment he believes he’s done it, that he’s stopped himself from going insane, he brings his fingers to his face.

And he rips.

And he tears.

And he screams the awful scream of a man made mad. Not even old enough to understand what’s being taken in the feet of that bird, taken out of reach, so high, out of sight now, out of earshot, too.

Even for Tom.

Malorie digs at the dirt. She has to get out of here. Now.

She thinks of the housemates, Felix and Cheryl, Olympia and Don. She thinks of Victor barking at blackened drapes.

She digs.

Whose voice did she hear? One of the housemates?

She feels naked without her fold. Completely exposed. She remembers Annette turning that corner, knife in hand, her red hair like blood from her head exploding back, back toward what drove her mad.

She digs at the walls. She jumps.

She cannot calm down.

“TOM!”

All he does is listen! All he does is hear! He’s done it better than anybody else for sixteen years!

He’ll hear her. He must.

Except…he’s on a train. With…with…

She walks right, too fast, and strikes a dirt wall. She flattens her hands to it and reaches up, up, up.

She imagines a square, high in the sky, an exit from the hole she’s fallen into.

She thinks, Safer Room.

Are there ways out of these rooms? Or is the idea…to die on your own terms…without going mad?

A stirring behind her and Malorie spins, eyes tight, arms up. She’s shaking. Breathing too hard.

She listens.

It moves.

“Stay away!” She yells.

And her voice is hysteria. A black and blue bird considering flight.

Either she’s heard this sound before or she’s so scared (Tom, Tom and Olympia, Olympia) that she’s mistaking this sound for one like it, one she heard behind her in an attic, as she gave birth to the very boy she now desperately wants to find.

Motion close to her right side. Malorie spins, backs up.

“Oh, please, no,” she says. Because she believes it now. Because she knows it.

This isn’t a person down here with her.

“Stay away.”

She flattens herself to the closest dirt wall.

She doesn’t imagine a man. She doesn’t imagine a woman. She doesn’t allow herself to imagine at all. Rather, in her mind’s eye, she sees an uncovered tarp and beneath it, a thing she has been raising her children to avoid at all costs, in every way, at every moment of every day.

“Stay away.”

Malorie is not alone down here, no.

“STAY AWAY!”

She pulls the hood tighter over her head.

There’s no recorded instance of a creature initiating contact, forcing someone to look at it.

But what if one were to fall into the same hole you were thrown into?

“Don’t come near me.”

Over time, Malorie has come to believe the creatures aren’t saddled with the same limitations human beings are. Would a falling tree crush one? How about a car driven by a blindfolded woman? Because she’s never heard proof of a dead body, a creature deceased, it’s impossible to imagine one in a perilous state. But now, here…is it as stuck in the Safer Room as she is?

This means something to her. Something bigger than this moment allows for.

It moves across the hole, Malorie tracks it, and she turns to the wall, tries to climb again.

She jumps but touches no edge.

A deeper stirring. Something sliding across the dirt. Something wet? A bright sound? She wishes Tom were here to tell her what it is. Oh, how many times did he teach her when they were out in the world? How many times did his ears save them, guide them, tell them what to do?

“Please,” Malorie says. But this thing deserves no pleading.

Something brushes against the sleeve of her sweatshirt.

She screams, falls to the ground, her gloved hands over her face.

Would it try to take her hood? Her gloves? Her last vestiges of armor?

The thing retracts, back to the far side of the Safer Room.

Malorie remains still. And it feels like Tom and Olympia are slipping away.

Forever.

How long could she have been expected to protect the kids? As if Malorie herself is a walking blindfold. Malorie made of black fabric, her dark hair the fount by which she springs. How long could she have been expected to keep Tom and Olympia safe? One year? One day? Ten years? Ten afternoons? There is no right and there is no wrong anymore. She knows this. Motherhood isn’t what it was seventeen years ago, when it was the last thing in the world she considered. Motherhood isn’t even what it was ten years ago, when the toll of surviving began weighing on those who survived so that their sanity would be tested the old way, brutal, cruel, and slow.

Now, folded up in the corner of the space, Malorie feels like she’s her own blindfold, worn so long she’s become it, discarded in a hole, never to be used again.

People in Indian River claim to have caught one…trapped…

Oh, yeah? Malorie thinks. I caught one, too.

Right here.

In this Safer Room.

She lowers her hands. She listens. There’s silence from the far end of the hole.

What does it do? Does it observe her passively like Tom the man once theorized? Does it wait for her to look?