Malorie(66)

She doesn’t think she can finish. But she feels like she must.

“And me…I’m the one who survived long enough to go mad in the end.”

Malorie doesn’t remember falling back down to the dirt. She doesn’t remember lying curled up where two dirt walls meet. But here she is. Above her, the ledge could be as high as a hundred feet. Taller than the house she gave birth in.

She cries. She punches the ground. And she feels it, too, when something is near again.

“Stay away.”

She remembers a silly game Shannon loved to play. Her sister called it the third-eye test. You closed your eyes and someone slowly brought their finger to the space between your eyes and you said when you could feel it. The farther the person’s fingertip was from your skin proved how active your third eye was. How liable you were to feel things that aren’t of this world. Malorie feels the thing now. But it’s not a fingertip. It’s an entire presence, big as her own, maybe bigger, filling the rest of the Safer Room so that she has no choice but to remain curled up on the dirt. She’s hot and cold with it, and she thinks of Shannon’s fingertip, belonging to the same finger, the same hand that gripped a pair of scissors she drove into her own body.

“STAY AWAY!”

Her voice cracks; she’s reached her limit. She can’t speak or scream anymore. And while she still cries, her eyes have gone dry.

The presence gets closer yet, loaded air presses, and she can’t breathe evenly. She’s hyperventilating. She gets up because she’s too afraid to stay down. And she’s flatter this way, against the wall of dirt.

This creature may as well be the only creature on the planet, all of them the same thing, the point of perspective, the one place Malorie can’t look.

Everywhere.

She turns to the wall, tries to steady herself. Tries to calm down.

It’s close. Too close. Against her? Is it pressing against her?

It’s going to kill her.

Right now.

It’s going to rip the fold from her face.

Right now.

It’s going to force her to look.

LOOK.

Right now.

She wants to scream, but she can’t. She wants to run, but she can’t.

She raises an arm, reaching for the same ledge she hasn’t been able to reach yet.

And she cries out when a hand takes her own.

Malorie, nearly delirious, almost pulls away. But no, this is skin. This is bone. This is human. This is help.

“Mom!”

She recognizes the voice, because in an unfair way, this is not out of context. She’s heard this same voice with her eyes closed too many times to count.

“There’s a root to the left of you,” Olympia says. “You can use it for your left foot. Then I’ll pull and you should be able to—”

What is Olympia saying? What the fuck is Olympia saying?

Malorie feels to the left, finds the root. How did she not feel this before?

And how does Olympia know where it is?

“Ready, Mom?”

“No, Olympia…what’s happening…how did you…”

“Come on, Mom. You step up and I’ll pull and you’ll be able to—”

When Malorie cuts her off, her voice comes much calmer than she means for it to sound.

“How did you see the root, Olympia?”

There is a creature with Malorie in this hole. This grave. This Safer Room.

“Mom…” Then…the loaded silence of a sixteen-year-old girl who has been keeping secrets.

“Olympia. I need you to tell me how you knew this was here. And I need you to tell me now.”

Malorie, parenting. Still.

“Mom,” Olympia says, “there’s no creature in there with you.”

What?

“You do not know that.”

“I do. You’re alone down there.”

“You can’t know that!”

Quiet from above. The sound of a daughter about to tell her mother the truth.

“I’m looking into the hole, Mom. I can do that. I can look.”

Malorie pulls her hands away.

“Olympia…”

As if learning Olympia is able to see could drive Malorie mad all on its own.

Then, tears from above. Olympia is crying. And Malorie recognizes this brand of cry.

Shame.

She reaches up again and finds Olympia’s hand. She uses the root as her daughter pulls. Malorie feels the ledge, just out of reach this whole time.

Her fingers dig into the lip of the hole and Olympia grabs both her wrists. Before Malorie has time to process what Olympia’s just told her (but already accepting it because it rings a bell, doesn’t it? Rings many), she is flat to the ledge, pulling herself forward.

With an effort and a strength she did not know she still has, Malorie is fully out of the Safer Room at last.

She spends hardly any time at all on the ground, exhausted, before she gets up. Again, Olympia’s hand is there to help. A hand that has helped Malorie thousands of times over the course of what feels like thousands of years.

“You…”

She hugs Olympia hard.

“I thought you would be upset,” Olympia says. Crying still. “I thought you would be scared. I thought people would be afraid of me.”