But Malorie is doing what she’s always done in moments like this. She’s starting to list off the reasons they’ll be fine, the reasons they’ll make it through this night. Even as Tom hears his own fears echoing in her voice.

“There’s no record of one ever attacking.”

But what does this mean? How would the person who was “attacked” live to tell about it? And all those who have gone mad…who would believe them if, just before burying their heads in the garden they once tended, they say it was their own fault, no creature made them look?

“They’re not interested in us.”

But it sounds to Tom like they are. Like they’re really very interested in them after all. There’s another on the roof now. More in the fields.

“They don’t mean us any harm.”

Yet they haven’t left, have they? Malorie’s told Tom about his namesake’s theory that the creatures only observe what they do to people. That they have no agenda. Yet at some point they would have to see the damage they cause. Right? At some point it would become a choice.

“They don’t know what they do.”

Maybe, Tom thinks. Maybe. But mindless or not, without morality or with, there’re more of them now than there used to be. And nobody has any proof of them attempting to get back to where they came from.

Even now, in the throes of horror, trembling at his mother’s and sister’s sides, swiping at his arm where he felt something touch him, Tom can’t stop himself from trying to solve them.

“What are they doing?” Malorie asks. Tom is so busy thinking that he’s forgotten the role he normally plays. He listens. Hard. He hears movement in the fields. A rustling more corporeal than wind.

“Tom, what are they doing?”

He listens through the barn’s wood walls, to places where the wind doesn’t blow unobstructed. Places occupied by something other than open air.

“Tom?”

Mom sounds scared. She always does. Despite the list of reasons not to worry, Malorie sounds like she knows this could be the one. The time when even the blindfold doesn’t protect them. The time the creatures finally get to her, get to her children, drive them insane.

Tom cocks an ear to the roof.

How many are up there? And why? If they mean no harm…if they’ve never attacked…why are they on the roof of the barn?

“I’m not sure,” Olympia says.

This is supposed to be Tom’s department. Always has been. Olympia possesses a preternatural ability to sense a creature’s exact location, but it’s Tom who can hear what they do and, sometimes, what they are about to do next.

His ear is on the loft.

He wonders, distantly, if Olympia hears it, too.

Something is in the loft.