Malorie

by Josh Malerman

  Malorie is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Josh Malerman

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  DEL REY is a registered trademark and the CIRCLE colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Malerman, Josh, author.

  Title: Malorie: a Bird Box novel / Josh Malerman.

  Description: New York: Del Rey, [2020]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019059282 (print) | LCCN 2019059283 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593156858 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593156865 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984820143 (international edition)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Horror fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3613.A43535 M35 2020 (print) | LCC PS3613.A43535 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019059282

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019059283

  Ebook ISBN 9780593156865

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Edwin Vazquez, adapted for ebook

  Cover design and illustration: Blacksheep/Orion Books, based on images © Shutterstock and Depositphotos

  ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  The Jane Tucker School for the Blind

  Ten Years On

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  The Blind Train

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Safer Rooms

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Dedication

  Afterword/Acknowledgments

  By Josh Malerman

  About the Author

  Malorie stands flat against the brick wall of a classroom. The door is locked. She is alone. The lights are off.

  She is blindfolded.

  Outside, in the hall, violence has begun.

  She knows this sound, has heard it in nightmares, has heard it in the echoes of a fallen house full of sane people tearing one another apart as she gave birth to her son.

  Tom is out there in the violence right now. Malorie doesn’t know where.

  She breathes in. She holds it. She breathes out.

  She reaches for the door, to unlock it, to open it, to find her son and daughter among the screams, the hysteria, the frenzy. Something cracks on the other side of the door. Sounds like someone slamming their head against the hall wall.

  She pulls back from the doorknob.

  When she last saw Olympia, the six-year-old was reading braille books in the Tucker Library. A dozen others were there, listening to the classical music played through the school speakers by way of the record player in the office.

  Malorie listens for the voices of those people now. She needs to know if this violence has reached the library. Reached her daughter. If it has, she will look for Tom first.

  She listens.

  Her kids have taught her a lot about listening since arriving at the Jane Tucker School for the Blind. And while Malorie will never hear the world they do, she can try.

  But there’s too much noise out there. Chaos. It’s impossible to discern one voice from another.

  She thinks of Annette. The blind woman, much older than herself, whose name she heard screamed, moments ago, as Malorie, hungry, walked the hall to the cafeteria. Before Malorie had time to process the nature of the scream, Annette herself came around the corner, blue bathrobe and red hair trailing like spinning sirens, knife in hand. Malorie had time to note the woman’s open, unfocused eyes before closing her own.

  Malorie thought, She’s blind…how is she mad?, then she went still. Annette passed her, breathing heavy, moving fast, and Malorie, hearing the first guttural howls from deeper in the school, stepped blind into the nearest classroom and locked its door behind her.

  She reaches for the knob again now.

  The last she saw of Tom he was in what was once the staff lounge, pieces of a new invention at his knees. Malorie is responsible for those pieces. Only six, Tom the boy invents like Tom the man, his namesake, once did. Often Malorie’s instinct is to humor this impulse. She feels a mother must. Or perhaps, a mother should have, in the old world. Now, here, she always destroys what Tom’s made and reminds him that the blindfold is the only protection any of them will ever need.

  Yet, Annette is blind.

  And now mad.

  Malorie hears a sudden obscenity from the other side of the locked door. Two people are fighting in the hall. It’s a man and a woman. And it’s not difficult to put visual images with the sounds they make. Clawing, scratching. Fingers in eyes and fingers down throats and the cracking of a bone and the tearing of what sounds like a throat.

  Bare-handed?

  Malorie doesn’t move. A body slams against the wood door and slides to the tiled floor. Whoever’s won the fight, he or she is panting just outside.

  Malorie listens. She breathes in, she holds it, she breathes out. She knows there’s no stopping the panic. She wants to hear farther up the hall, past the breathing, to the screams of the people who live here, to the exact things they say, to the exact location of her kids. She remembers giving birth in the attic of a home, a place much smaller than this. She recalls a cry from below: Don tore the drapes down!

  Who tore them down here?

  In the hall, the breathing has stopped. But the distant sounds of fists on wood, fists on fists, and the last vestiges of sanity are getting louder.

  Malorie unlocks the classroom door. She opens it.

  There is no immediate movement in the hall. No one erupts toward her. No one speaks at all. Whoever won the fight, they are gone now. Howls erupt from deeper in the building. Muffled death knells, last words and wishes. There is the smacking of fists, the cracking of wood. There is yelling and gibberish, doors slamming open and doors slamming closed. Children cry out. The music from the office continues.

  Malorie steps over the body at the open door’s threshold. She steps into the hall, keeping to the wall. An alarm sounds. The front door to the school is open. The rhythmic throbbing is so at odds with the classical music that for a confused second Malorie feels like she�
��s already lost her mind.

  Her kids are somewhere in this furor.

  Shaking, she tries to close her eyes a third time, behind her already closed lids, behind the fold wrapped tight to her head, closing her mind to the idea of what this all must look like.

  She slides along the brick wall. She does not call out to Tom or Olympia though it’s all she wants to do. She breathes in, she holds it, breathes out. The bricks prickle her bare shoulders and arms, tugging at the fabric of the white tank top she wears. The alarm gets louder as she approaches the end of this hall, approaches the very place from which redheaded Annette came rushing with a large knife in hand. People scream ahead. Someone is close. Heavy, clumsy boots on the floor, the grunt of someone not used to this much effort.

  Malorie goes still.

  The person passes her, breathing hard, muttering to himself. Is he mad? Malorie doesn’t know. Can’t know. She only slides along the wall, finding herself, incredibly, feeling a slim sense of gratitude for the two years they have lived here. For the respite from the road. But that indebtedness is a marble fallen to a beach of glass orbs, never to be found again. A horror she’s long expected has arrived.

  Don’t get lazy.

  Her three-word mantra means nothing now. Proof: she’s already gotten lazy, she doesn’t know where her kids are.

  A metallic bang thunders throughout; the music and alarm get louder.

  Malorie doesn’t try to calm the children she hears. She doesn’t reach out in her darkness to help them. She only slides, so flat now the bricks draw blood.

  Movement ahead, coming at her, quick, flat steps. She holds her breath. But this person does not pass.

  “Malorie?”

  Someone with their eyes open. A woman. Who?

  “Leave me alone,” Malorie says. “Please.”

  She hears the echo of her own voice pleading, six years ago, in the attic in which she gave birth.

  “Malorie, what’s happened?”

  Malorie thinks it’s a woman named Felice. All that matters is whether or not this woman is mad.

  “Did they get in?” the woman asks.

  “I don’t—”

  “Everybody’s mad!” the woman says.

  Malorie doesn’t answer. This woman may be armed.

  “You can’t go that way,” the woman says.

  Malorie feels a hand on her bare wrist. She pulls back, cracks her elbow against the bricks.

  “What’s wrong with you?” the woman says. “Do you think I’m mad?”

  Malorie walks from her, arms out, prepared to be hurt. She moves toward the end of the hall, where she knows a glass case dominates the wall, a thing that once held trophies, accomplishments, proof of progress in a school for the blind.

  She connects with it before she can stop herself.

  Her shoulder cracks it first, the cuts coming fast and warm, the pain loud. She cries out but her voice is inhaled by the rising chaos in the halls.

  She does not stop moving. And she still doesn’t call their names. Touching the wall with fingers painted freshly red, she approaches the wailing, the shouts, the metal on metal, the fists on fists.

  Someone brushes against her shoulder and Malorie turns quickly, pushes at them, shoves nothing.

  Nobody is there. But she feels cold. Doesn’t want to be touched by anyone.

  By anything.

  She thinks of Annette, blind but mad.

  Yes, a person could go mad in the old world way. But Malorie knows the look of the particular madness delivered by the creatures.

  Annette did not simply snap. And if the woman cannot see…what happened?

  “Mom!”

  Malorie stops. Is it Olympia? The urgent but distant cry of the girl she did not give birth to but has raised as a daughter all the same?

  “Somebody turn off that music,” Malorie says, needing to say something, needing to hear a familiar, sane voice as she drags her fingers along the bricks, as she feels the pegboard where community notices alerted people to school events for the last two years.

  Ahead, a scream. Behind, the cracking of wood. Someone bounds past her. Someone follows.

  Malorie does not cry. She only moves, her knees weak, her shoulder bright with the fresh injury. Her ears open for an echo of the voice that cried mom, one of her own, perhaps, rising to the surface for air, before sinking back into the raging waves ahead in the hall.

  She tells herself to move with purpose, but slow. She needs to be sharp, needs to be standing.

  A boy cries out ahead. A child. Sounds like he’s gone mad.

  She breathes in, she holds it, she breathes out. She walks toward the maddening volume, the sounds of an entire community losing their minds at once. A second child, perhaps. A third.

  “They got in,” she says. But she doesn’t need to say it. And this time her own voice brings her no comfort.

  To her right, a door rattles. Ahead on the left something on wheels crashes against the bricks. People scream profanities. Malorie tries not to allow herself to imagine what these scenes must look like. The expressions on the faces of the men and women she has shared this edifice with for two years. The chips in the bricks. The wreckage. The bruises and the blood. She tries to deny herself even the memory of sight, as if imagining what happens in the space might drive her mad.

  She refuses to imagine a creature. She will not even allow herself that.

  Something clips her bad shoulder. Malorie covers it with her hand. She doesn’t want to be touched. Is thinking that Annette was touched. Is worried, horrified, that the creatures have begun…touching.

  But this was a piece of wood perhaps. Another brick. A finger sent sailing from a hand.

  A woman howls. A child speaks.

  Speaks?

  “Mom.”

  A hand in her own.

  It doesn’t take more than a second for her to recognize the hand as Olympia’s.

  Mania fattens ahead.

  “This way,” Olympia says.

  Malorie doesn’t ask her daughter why they are walking toward the violence rather than from it. She knows it’s because Tom must be on the other side of this scene.

  Even at only six years old, Olympia leads.

  Malorie cries. She can’t stop it from happening. As if, in her personal darkness, she is being lowered into the house at the moment when Don tore the drapes down. As if she never took the river to the Jane Tucker School for the Blind. As if she is falling, on her back, through the attic floor, into the hideous events below.

  Tom the man died that day. The namesake of her son. Yet Malorie did not bear witness. She was removed, if such a word applies, safer in the attic than those below. But here, now, she hears the carnage up close, no floors between her and it; ordinary people turning. Once civil men and women now cracked, cursing, hurting each other and hurting themselves.

  Something enormous crashes. Glass explodes.

  Malorie wouldn’t be able to hear her daughter if she spoke. They are in the eye of it now.

  Olympia’s grip tightens.

  Someone thumps against Malorie, shin to shin. Then, bricks again, against her bad shoulder. She recognizes some of the voices. They’ve spent two years here. They know people. They’ve made friends.

  Or have they?

  As Malorie steps deeper into the madness, she hears a distant question, asked in her own voice, her own head, asking if she was righteous in her staunch safety precautions, the fact that she was often chided for wearing her blindfold indoors. Oh, how the people of this place were offended by her measures. Oh, how it made the others feel as if Malorie thought herself better than them.

  “Tom,” Olympia says.

  Or Malorie thinks she hears it. The same name of the man she most admired in this world, the optimist in a time of impossible desp
air. Yes, Tom the boy is much like Tom the man, though the man was not his father. Malorie can’t stop him from wanting to fashion stronger blindfolds, from covering the windows with layers of wood, from painting false windows on the room they’ve called their own for two years.

  But she can stop him from doing it.

  Someone hits Malorie on the side of the head. She swings out, tries to push the person away, but Olympia pulls her deeper into the derangement.

  “Olympia,” she says. But she says no more. Cannot speak. As now bodies press against her, objects break above and behind her, words are sworn close to her ear.

  It can sound like a celebration if she wants it to, the screams no longer of terror, but excitement. The heavy thuds only heavy feet upon a dance floor. No anguish, only cheer.

  Is this how Tom the man chose to see this world? And if so…can she do it, too?

  “Tom,” Olympia says. This time Malorie hears it clearly, and she understands they are on the other side of the violence.

  “Where?”

  “Here.”

  Malorie reaches out, feels the doorjamb of an open classroom. It smells of people in here.

  “Tom?” she says.

  “Mom,” Tom says. She hears the smile in his voice. She can tell he’s proud.

  She goes to him, crouches, and feels for his eyes. They are covered with what feels like cardboard, and Malorie thinks of Tom the man wearing a helmet of couch cushions and tape.

  The relief she feels is not tempered by the chaos in the halls. Her children are with her again.

  “Get up,” she says, her voice still trembling. “We’re leaving.”

  She steps farther into the room, finds the beds, removes three blankets.

  “Are we taking the river again?” Tom asks.