“Go on,” Tom says.
Tom can read on his own, of course, but he’s lazy. And he can’t sit still for long. Tom, Olympia knows, needs to move. He needs to be in motion. He needs to be doing something.
“A man in Texas attempted to look at one under water,” Olympia reads. “Seventeen people were present for this. The group believed a creature to be wading in the lake behind the campsite where they stayed. The man volunteered to go under, to look. He went mad down there and never came up again for air.”
“Someone held him down,” Tom says. “Nobody could just…stay under water till they died. Not if they could get up. Impossible.”
Olympia nods. But she isn’t so sure. The stories Malorie has told them, coupled with the memories of the entire school for the blind going mad at once, mean anything is possible.
“But what is madness,” Olympia asks, “if not something out of the ordinary?”
“Okay,” Tom says, pacing, “but this is different. The body would take over. Right? Even if you wanted to drown yourself by sitting on the bottom of a lake…the body would swim to the top.”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t either. But that one feels fishy to me.”
“Are you listening?”
He looks to her, gravity in his eyes.
“Of course I’m listening,” he says. “Always.”
Listening for Malorie. Neither wants to be caught doing this.
“A woman in Wisconsin attempted to look at one through an eclipse viewer,” Olympia reads. Tom looks considerably more attentive now. “After many discussions with her peers in which they attempted to dissuade her, she tried it alone at dawn on a clear, spring morning. She went mad immediately.”
“Okay,” Tom says, “but how do we know she only looked through the viewfinder?”
“I think that’s implied.”
Tom laughs.
“Well, if there’s one thing Mom has taught us, it’s that ‘implied’ isn’t good enough.”
At the mention of Malorie: “Are you listening?”
“Olympia. Go on.”
She silently reads ahead the next few handwritten lines. “This is interesting,” she says. “Sick people at a compound in Ohio, knowing they were going to die, volunteered to test out theories of how to look at the creatures.”
“Wow,” Tom says. “That’s brave.”
“Totally. One man went mad watching videotape of the outside world.”
“Like Mom’s story.”
“Yep. One man went mad looking at photographs taken of the outside world. Another went mad looking at the negatives. What are negatives?”
“I don’t know,” Tom says.
“A terminal woman went mad walking the outside world with two prisms, former paperweights, held to her eyes.”
Olympia shudders. These Ohio stories describe a sad group of sick people in hospital gowns, wandering otherwise empty streets, willing to die for answers.
“Willing to die for progress,” Tom says. “Terminal or not, that’s noble.”
Olympia agrees.
“There are fifty pages of this kind of stuff.”
“And I wanna hear every one of them.”
“Are you—”
But before she can finish her question, Tom points a finger at her.
“Go on,” he says.
“A woman walked the streets of Branson, Missouri, wearing blinders, the type once used for horses, testing the idea that it’s the peripheral vision that drives one mad.”
“This isn’t going to end well.”
“Nope. She went mad and broke into a theater. Killed a family hiding out there.”
A crack of a stick outside, and both teens close their eyes. They do not speak; they hardly breathe. Both listen as far as they can.
Olympia thinks she knows what it is, but Tom says so first.
“A deer.”
They both open their eyes.
“Sane,” Olympia says.
Tom shrugs. “I would have to know for certain how a sane deer behaves first.”
“Could be a moose. Could be a lion.”
Tom opens his mouth to refute her, but Olympia smiles as he thinks it over. She flips through the pages.
“Locations,” she says. “Towns that are…”
But she goes quiet.
“Towns that are what?” Tom asks.
As Olympia begins to flip the page, he hurries across the cabin and sits beside her on the bed.
“Don’t skip over anything,” he says. “Come on.”
Olympia shows him.
“The cities are arranged by how ‘modern’ they are.”
“Modern?” Tom asks.
“I think they mean to say…how forward-thinking.”
She sees the lights turn on in her brother’s eyes, and she feels almost mean for having showed him. She suddenly wishes the man hadn’t come to the door at all.
“Are these places where people have tried capturing one?”
He’s excited now. Olympia makes to keep the pages from him, but to what end? She hands them over.
“Holy shit,” Tom says. “Get this. A couple in northern Illinois claimed to have trapped a creature in their toolshed. They brought me to the shed and asked that I put my ear to the door. I heard movement inside. Then I heard crying. I feigned being impressed and eventually thanked the couple and said goodbye. But later that night I returned and released their twelve-year-old son from the shed.”
“God,” Olympia says. “That’s terrible!”
“Terrible. And get this: A man in Pittsburgh claimed to have buried three creatures in his backyard. He showed me where the ground was soft. When I asked if I might dig them up, he threatened me at gunpoint, telling me that if I told anyone what he’d done to his family he’d shoot me. This is not an easy job I’ve taken on.”
“Jeez,” Olympia says. “And no evidence of an actual catch.”
Tom sees the name of a town, Indian River, and a person, Athena Hantz, but he can’t let Olympia’s last statement just slip by.
“No. But that doesn’t mean anything. Someone’s got one out there, Olympia. You have to remember: there are so many people in the world. We just live in one little camp in one little part of Michigan. Know what I mean?” When he pauses, Olympia sees distance in his eyes, as if he’s on the road to other places. “Someone’s done it. And I wanna know who.”