Chapters (40)
- The Jane Tucker School for the Blind
- Ten Years On
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- The Blind Train
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- Safer Rooms
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- Dedication
- AFTERWORD/ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- BY JOSH MALERMAN
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- What’s next onyour reading list?
Now, folded up in the corner of the space, Malorie feels like she’s her own blindfold, worn so long she’s become it, discarded in a hole, never to be used again.
People in Indian River claim to have caught one…trapped…
Oh, yeah? Malorie thinks. I caught one, too.
Right here.
In this Safer Room.
She lowers her hands. She listens. There’s silence from the far end of the hole.
What does it do? Does it observe her passively like Tom the man once theorized? Does it wait for her to look?
She stands up. Because she has to. Because she’ll die if she remains folded in the corner of this grave.
“You’ve got to leave,” Malorie says. “You’ve got to find a way out. I can’t die with you near. You’ve already taken so much.”
She thinks of the housemates. Cynical Don, who she can still see in the cellar as Tom the man put his hand on Don’s shoulder and asked him to come upstairs for one last round of rum. Cheryl’s voice down the hall after she got scared feeding the birds. The birds that hung like an alarm system. Jules, who loved his dog, Victor, so much. Felix, who got paler and paler the longer Tom was out of the house. Tom.
Tom.
She’s tried to close the door on these thoughts. She tries now. She makes to shove the housemates into the attic. But they keep showing up around the table again, glasses of rum before them.
That’s the way she likes them best. Happy as they were allowed to be.
Tom’s wearing a makeshift helmet. Maybe he’s at the piano. Maybe they don’t have a phone book yet and so haven’t begun the process of getting out, because once that began it was like the wheels were set in motion, from point A to point B, phone book to now, Yellow Pages to Safer Room, like Tom had called Fate and said, We’re ready. Do with us what you will.
And Fate has.
Done with her.
She tries to close her already closed eyes to the memory of the bodies in the halls, upstairs and down, the living room, by the cellar door. But it’s hard. How far is she from a creature right now? The same wretched thing Olympia the woman saw as Olympia the baby was born?
And is it the very same one?
Malorie shudders. The idea. Each a private demon. To each a creature comes. Waiting for you to slip, to get lazy, to look…
DON’T GET LAZY.
Don’t look.
She tries to close her eyes a third time, a fourth. A creaking door on each layer, each chain of thought that rises from the hole she’s in. How many times can a person close their eyes? How dark can one’s personal darkness get?