As Malorie exits the common room, as she enters the hall that leads to the large kitchen in back, she can almost smell the venison Dad cooks, can hear Mom flip a page, can sense Shannon’s deliberations. Nobody liked playing games with Shannon.
“If you think your mom is a perfectionist, Tom,” Malorie says, “you shoulda met your aunt.”
By the time she enters the kitchen, she’s no longer in the home she grew up in; now she talks to Tom the man in the house she fled twelve years ago, talks about Gary.
“Stop it,” she tells herself. It isn’t easy. Yet years of this back-and-forth, a decade and a half of horrific memories springing like attractions in a haunted house at the Marquette County Fair, have lessened the grip these bad thoughts have on her. Despite what Tom her son might believe, Malorie does not live in fear.
She swipes the knife in front of her face as she exits the kitchen and takes the stairs to the lodge’s basement. She does this because more than once she’s passed through a web at the head of the steps. And more than once she’s brought the brown spiders back to Cabin Three.
“If anybody is down here, they’re gonna get stabbed.”
Despite the fold, despite her eyes being closed, Malorie still senses that she’s entered utter darkness. The unmistakable cellar smell of cold concrete and mold. It used to be she’d hurry to find the dangling cord, to bring light to a space like this. But if there’s one thing the new world has incrementally destroyed, it’s a fear of the dark.
She crosses the mostly open area and tells herself she’s only here to grab canned goods. Could be her and Shannon retrieving cranberries for the Thanksgiving meal Mom and Dad cook together upstairs. Could be the canned goods Tom the man showed her the first morning she woke in the house on Shillingham. Or it could be what it is: Malorie searching the shelf for beans, able to pick them out among the other cans because the lids are different.
“Used to be a lot more on this shelf.”
No question about that. And it feels good to assess, to do what she normally does, while listening for movement and keeping her nose open for a squatting human being who most likely pretends to be with the census.
“Who does he think he is?” she asks, unable to find the beans after all. Sometimes the gloved fingertips make this sort of task a little harder. “What did he expect me to do? Just let him in?”
As she removes the glove, as the county fair house of horrors vision of a creature reaching out and touching her exposed hand momentarily rattles her, she wonders how a man can claim to be from the census in a country where there is no organization anymore.
She finds the beans quickly and slips the glove back on.
She turns to face the basement.
Did she hear something? Something above?
The teens know the rules, but of course that doesn’t mean the teens follow them. When Malorie sweeps the camp, they are to remain in Cabin Three. It’s a waste of time to investigate sounds made by either Tom or Olympia while she’s out making sure the three of them are still alone.
“If anybody’s here,” she begins. But she doesn’t finish this time. Despite the fact that she’s gotten very good at living with fear, she’s still not immune to moments of abject horror. Like when she’s standing in the basement of an abandoned camp lodge, and a man she did not see the face of was just moments ago knocking on her cabin door.
The image of a gun spins in her personal darkness. Olympia thinks they should get one. She cites the thousand books she’s read and how guns have saved more than one character’s life. But Malorie has been strict on this from the beginning. The last thing she wants in this camp is a tool Tom might use in the name of progress. It’s not hard to imagine opening a cabin door and getting shot at by a pre-prepositioned rifle, as Tom prides himself on a triumphant invention. And, of course, it’s not only Tom she doesn’t trust with one. It’s any of them, in the event one should see something they shouldn’t.
Yet, here, now, it feels like something more than her sense of purpose and a sharp knife could be helpful.
She listens.
She smells.
She waits.
She has done these three things so often over the last ten years that she hardly remembers a time when she didn’t. Sometimes, her new-world behavior seeps into her memories of the old. Didn’t she sniff the air every time she entered Shannon’s bedroom as a child? Didn’t she ask Mom and Dad if their eyes were closed when they came home from the store?
There is no past and present behind the fold. No linear lines of any kind.
The beans in one hand, the knife in the other, and the searching stick under her arm, Malorie crosses the basement again and arrives at the stairs quicker than she thought she would.
She’s scared.
It’s not the nicest thing to realize. Because once it begins, once the initial, hot tendrils tickle your arms and legs, flow down your back and calves, it’s hard to stop the feeling from growing to its full size: panic.
She turns to face the open basement. Did something move deeper in as she came farther out? No man is down here. She believes Tom and Olympia are right that he left, because their ears have never let her down before.
But does something share this space with her?
She hears Tom the man begging to be let into the attic as she gave birth to, if not his son, his namesake.
The kids know the rules, yes. They know to keep still until she returns from her sweep. Unless, of course, there’s an emergency.
“Fuck you,” she says to the open space. To the creatures, too.
Because sometimes it helps.
Then she’s hurrying up the stairs just like she and Shannon used to do as kids. Cranberries or a book in hand, the girls would race, side by side, elbowing each other to get to the top first. Malorie remembers falling on the stairs once, scraping both elbows, seeing between the steps the face of her old stuffed Sylvester the Cat and taking the rest of the steps at a screaming run.
Now she’s up in the kitchen again. She’s breathing hard. She’s trying to understand how a man could call himself part of any census. She’s thinking about what he said about someone catching a creature.
“Why did you have to say that in front of Tom…”
Because Tom will not only believe something like that, he’ll want to be near it.
She takes her steps slow on the way back to the common area. She pauses to listen between each. A thing she’s discovered in the new world is the brief intake of breath a person takes before speaking. And the sound they make when they shift their weight from one foot to another.
Does she hear any of this now?