Malorie(9)

She gets to Cabin Eight quickly. She opens the door. Her hands are gloved, her arms and neck covered by the hoodie. She wears sweats and thick socks.

She thinks of Annette. The blind woman who went mad. Creature-mad.

How?

Before entering the cabin, she smells the air. If there’s one sense that has gotten better through the years it’s her sense of smell. She can tell when a storm is coming, when woods aren’t far off. She can tell if something’s died outside and whether a person has called a small space home.

At the threshold to Cabin Eight, she smells nothing but the empty must of wood and bunks without mattresses. Still, knife raised, she enters.

Camp Yadin has been good to her. So good. When they arrived, there were enough canned goods to last months. And seeds to begin gardens beyond that. Tools and toys. Shelter and a piano. A sailboat for the small lake. Paths to walk for exercise. Malorie knew they’d be staying for some time. But ten years have passed fast.

Tom and Olympia are not only teenagers now, they’ve been teenagers for a while.

She uses a thick stick to check the spaces between bunks, to poke under them. More than once she’s been surprised by an animal calling a cabin home. But, in the new world, she’s come to fear animals least of all. In her many interactions, she’s discovered that acting angry makes them run. Even the mad ones (if she can ever be sure whether or not an animal is sane). Insects are more mysterious. Malorie doesn’t know if spiders go mad. But she has found webs, here in camp, built in unsettling patterns, suggesting something was seen, something was close.

Of course, creatures have traveled the paths of the camp many times. Tom and Olympia have pointed them out from inside Cabin Three.

“Anybody here and you’re gonna get stabbed,” Malorie says.

She says these things to hear her own voice. She understands that, if the man who claimed to be from the census was actually in this bunk, if he was, say, crouched upon one of the beds she pokes beneath, he could easily kill her. But the kids say he left. And she has to believe that much.

Cabin Eight clean, she exits and takes the rope that leads to Cabin Nine. It’s hot outside, the hottest day she can remember, but she isn’t taking the hoodie off.

She thinks of Annette.

The kids don’t believe you can go mad by way of touch. But the kids don’t make the rules around here.

Malorie can still see the red-haired woman turning the corner of the bricked hall. The blue robe like blue wind, Annette’s mouth contorted in a way only madness can shape. Malorie can still see the knife.

Her own knife touches the door to Cabin Nine before she does. She uses the tip to push it open.

She smells the air at the threshold.

All senses now, it seems. Sight, smell, touch. The creatures have rearranged how a person experiences reality. This is not new, of course, but Malorie, ever a child of the old world, will never get used to it. And if it’s a matter of not being able to comprehend the creatures, as Tom the man once hypothesized, if it’s a matter of going mad at the sight of something our minds simply cannot assimilate…why not the same fate by way of touch? Wouldn’t any encounter by way of any of the senses constitute an experience with an impossible thing, a thing our minds cannot fathom?

She imagines wearing nose plugs, headphones to cancel sound.

She shudders as she enters the cabin. She thinks of Gary. How can she not? There was a time on the river when the fold was pulled from her eyes. And while she believed it to be a creature at the time, an unfathomable being wading in the water, what if it was Gary instead? It’s not hard to imagine the man, shirtless, up to his waist, having tracked her for four years, having camped outside the home in which she raised the kids. It’s not hard to imagine Gary in that river just like it’s not hard to imagine him here, standing in this cabin she will not look into.

Maybe he waves.

Malorie uses the stick to poke under the bunks. The tip of it connects with something and, because she’s piqued, because she’s thinking of the dramatic, bearded demon from her past, she’s chilled by the unknown object before realizing it’s only a visor. Part of a helmet Tom had been hell-bent on making last summer.

Touching the visor with gloved fingers, she thinks of Annette again, or maybe it’s that she’s never stopped thinking of Annette and Gary, two horrible mysteries, as if the two had somehow raised her in the new world, the untrustworthy father and the mad mother who, together, birthed the overly protective, ever-on-edge Malorie of today.

“If anybody’s in here, you’re gonna get stabbed.”

But nobody’s in here. She can tell. And she’s done a thorough sweep of the bunks, above, below, and between them.

She exits Cabin Nine and takes the rope to the lodge. There are many rooms in the lodge, including the kitchen and a basement, where much of the salvation for the past ten years has come from.

Sliding the fingers of her left hand along the rope, the knife held tight in her right, she tries to remember if she was touched when the fold was pulled an inch from her face on the river. And if she was…if something brushed against the bridge of her nose…what was it?

And who?

The walk to the lodge is uphill, but Malorie is in good shape. The best shape she’s ever been in. She and her sister, Shannon, were never much for sports, despite Mom and Dad encouraging them to try. The girls would’ve rather walked around town than throw a ball, and neither had ever even attended so much as a high school football game. Yet here she is, able to hike for miles in a day, able to hold her own should someone be in the lodge ahead, confident with a knife and her ability to defend herself.