Malorie doesn’t answer. This woman may be armed.
“You can’t go that way,” the woman says.
Malorie feels a hand on her bare wrist. She pulls back, cracks her elbow against the bricks.
“What’s wrong with you?” the woman says. “Do you think I’m mad?”
Malorie walks from her, arms out, prepared to be hurt. She moves toward the end of the hall, where she knows a glass case dominates the wall, a thing that once held trophies, accomplishments, proof of progress in a school for the blind.
She connects with it before she can stop herself.
Her shoulder cracks it first, the cuts coming fast and warm, the pain loud. She cries out but her voice is inhaled by the rising chaos in the halls.
She does not stop moving. And she still doesn’t call their names. Touching the wall with fingers painted freshly red, she approaches the wailing, the shouts, the metal on metal, the fists on fists.
Someone brushes against her shoulder and Malorie turns quickly, pushes at them, shoves nothing.
Nobody is there. But she feels cold. Doesn’t want to be touched by anyone.
By anything.
She thinks of Annette, blind but mad.
Yes, a person could go mad in the old world way. But Malorie knows the look of the particular madness delivered by the creatures.
Annette did not simply snap. And if the woman cannot see…what happened?
“Mom!”
Malorie stops. Is it Olympia? The urgent but distant cry of the girl she did not give birth to but has raised as a daughter all the same?
“Somebody turn off that music,” Malorie says, needing to say something, needing to hear a familiar, sane voice as she drags her fingers along the bricks, as she feels the pegboard where community notices alerted people to school events for the last two years.
Ahead, a scream. Behind, the cracking of wood. Someone bounds past her. Someone follows.
Malorie does not cry. She only moves, her knees weak, her shoulder bright with the fresh injury. Her ears open for an echo of the voice that cried mom, one of her own, perhaps, rising to the surface for air, before sinking back into the raging waves ahead in the hall.
She tells herself to move with purpose, but slow. She needs to be sharp, needs to be standing.
A boy cries out ahead. A child. Sounds like he’s gone mad.
She breathes in, she holds it, she breathes out. She walks toward the maddening volume, the sounds of an entire community losing their minds at once. A second child, perhaps. A third.
“They got in,” she says. But she doesn’t need to say it. And this time her own voice brings her no comfort.
To her right, a door rattles. Ahead on the left something on wheels crashes against the bricks. People scream profanities. Malorie tries not to allow herself to imagine what these scenes must look like. The expressions on the faces of the men and women she has shared this edifice with for two years. The chips in the bricks. The wreckage. The bruises and the blood. She tries to deny herself even the memory of sight, as if imagining what happens in the space might drive her mad.
She refuses to imagine a creature. She will not even allow herself that.
Something clips her bad shoulder. Malorie covers it with her hand. She doesn’t want to be touched. Is thinking that Annette was touched. Is worried, horrified, that the creatures have begun…touching.
But this was a piece of wood perhaps. Another brick. A finger sent sailing from a hand.
A woman howls. A child speaks.
Speaks?
“Mom.”
A hand in her own.
It doesn’t take more than a second for her to recognize the hand as Olympia’s.
Mania fattens ahead.
“This way,” Olympia says.
Malorie doesn’t ask her daughter why they are walking toward the violence rather than from it. She knows it’s because Tom must be on the other side of this scene.
Even at only six years old, Olympia leads.
Malorie cries. She can’t stop it from happening. As if, in her personal darkness, she is being lowered into the house at the moment when Don tore the drapes down. As if she never took the river to the Jane Tucker School for the Blind. As if she is falling, on her back, through the attic floor, into the hideous events below.
Tom the man died that day. The namesake of her son. Yet Malorie did not bear witness. She was removed, if such a word applies, safer in the attic than those below. But here, now, she hears the carnage up close, no floors between her and it; ordinary people turning. Once civil men and women now cracked, cursing, hurting each other and hurting themselves.
Something enormous crashes. Glass explodes.
Malorie wouldn’t be able to hear her daughter if she spoke. They are in the eye of it now.
Olympia’s grip tightens.
Someone thumps against Malorie, shin to shin. Then, bricks again, against her bad shoulder. She recognizes some of the voices. They’ve spent two years here. They know people. They’ve made friends.
Or have they?
As Malorie steps deeper into the madness, she hears a distant question, asked in her own voice, her own head, asking if she was righteous in her staunch safety precautions, the fact that she was often chided for wearing her blindfold indoors. Oh, how the people of this place were offended by her measures. Oh, how it made the others feel as if Malorie thought herself better than them.
“Tom,” Olympia says.
Or Malorie thinks she hears it. The same name of the man she most admired in this world, the optimist in a time of impossible despair. Yes, Tom the boy is much like Tom the man, though the man was not his father. Malorie can’t stop him from wanting to fashion stronger blindfolds, from covering the windows with layers of wood, from painting false windows on the room they’ve called their own for two years.
But she can stop him from doing it.
Someone hits Malorie on the side of the head. She swings out, tries to push the person away, but Olympia pulls her deeper into the derangement.
“Olympia,” she says. But she says no more. Cannot speak. As now bodies press against her, objects break above and behind her, words are sworn close to her ear.
It can sound like a celebration if she wants it to, the screams no longer of terror, but excitement. The heavy thuds only heavy feet upon a dance floor. No anguish, only cheer.
Is this how Tom the man chose to see this world? And if so…can she do it, too?
“Tom,” Olympia says. This time Malorie hears it clearly, and she understands they are on the other side of the violence.