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.
She doesn’t want to think about Annette. She doesn’t want to think about Gary. But she can’t stop them from coming. As if they’re constantly standing outside the cabin door of her mind. Constantly knocking.
Could you let me in for an hour or two?
Or ten years.
By the time she reaches the stone steps, she’s so encumbered with thoughts of mad people and creatures, isolation and her kids, that she has to remind herself what she’s doing.
She uses the knife to open the lodge door.
She steps over the threshold.
Annette stepped over the edge.
And what held her hand on the way?
Malorie smells the air. She listens. She has no doubt that, over the course of the past decade, she’s stood close to many creatures. It’s a fact of the new world she’s had to accept. Tom and Olympia tell her there are many more now than there used to be. The man at the door said the same. But how many is that? And how much space do they now occupy?
She enters the lodge. Despite the high ceiling and open room, it’s always hottest in here. Malorie thinks it’s because of the tall windows, despite having painted those windows black long ago. Still, she’s reminded of the saunas, so prevalent in the Upper Peninsula where she was raised, the steam boxes her mother and father insisted on each night before bed. By the time she’s crossed the former common area where campers once took meals, she longs for the lake she and Shannon leaped into, following those saunas, running from the steaming rocks.
She stops. She thinks she’s heard something. Movement. Something outside the lodge. But Camp Yadin plays tricks. Branches fall. Wind blows. Cabins creak.
She waits. She listens.
It is not lost on her how vulnerable she is at this moment. The man who claimed to be from the census could be standing in the corner of this room, preparing something. A creature could be inches from her face, observing, still, the effect they have on the people they should never have crossed paths with. But seventeen years into the new world, Malorie decides to treat her personal darkness differently. While she’s certainly as staunch as the others at the school for the blind claimed she was, and while she may be partially paranoid, as her own son said while in a fit of rage, she’s also able to pretend that the darkness she exists in does not include creatures and camps, life and death. Rather, she imagines she’s walking through the home she grew up in. Dad is by the stove in the kitchen, listening to a game on a small radio that Mom tells him he keeps too close to the burner. Mom reads a book, sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for Shannon to take her turn at Scrabble.
This is a much nicer reality. And who’s to say what’s real in the dark?