But she doesn’t want to lie down. She wants to sit with Tom and Don and the others and believe, for a moment, that the house could still be what it set out to be. A place for strangers to meet, to pool their resources, gather strength in numbers, to face the impossible, changing world outside.
Then, it’s all just too much. A third wave of nausea hits and Malorie, standing, stumbles. Jules appears, suddenly, by her side. He is helping her up the stairs. As she enters her bedroom and lies down, she sees the others are in the room with her. All of them. Don, too. They are watching her, worried about her. Staring. They ask if she is okay. Does she need anything? Water? A wet cloth? She says no, or thinks she says no, but she is drifting. As she falls asleep, she hears a sound, coming through the vent, the sound of Victor again, growling, alone, in the kitchen.
The last thing she sees before closing her eyes are the housemates in a group. They are watching her closely. They look to her belly.
They know the moment has come.
Victor growls again. Don looks toward the stairs.
Jules leaves the bedroom.
“Thank you, Tom,” Malorie says. “For the bicycle horns.”
She thinks she hears the bird box, banging lightly against the house. But it is only the wind against the window.
Then she is asleep. And she dreams of the birds.
forty-one
The birds in the trees are restless. It sounds like a thousand branches shaking at once. Like there’s a dangerous wind up there. But Malorie doesn’t feel it down here on the river. No. There is no wind.
But something is disrupting the birds.
The pain in her shoulder has reached a level Malorie has never experienced before. She curses herself for not paying more attention to her body these last four years. Instead, she spent her time training the children. Until their abilities transcended the exercises she came up with.
Mommy, a leaf fell into the well!
Mommy, it is drizzling down the street and it heads our way!
Mommy, a bird has landed on the branch beyond our window!
Will the children hear the recorded voice before she does? They must. And when that happens, it’ll be time to open her eyes. To look at where the river splits into four channels. She’s to pick the second from the right. That’s what she was told to do.
And soon she’ll have to do it.
The birds in the trees are cooing. There is activity on the banks. Man, animal, monster. She has no idea.
The fear she experiences sits firmly upon the center of her soul.
And the birds in the branches directly above them are now cooing.
She thinks of the house. The last night she spent with the housemates, all of them together. The wind was loud against the windows. There was a coming storm. A big one. Maybe the birds in the trees know it. Or maybe they know something else.
“I can’t hear,” the Girl suddenly says. “The birds, Mommy. They’re too loud!”
Malorie stops rowing. She thinks of Victor.
“What do they sound like to you?” she asks both children.
“Scared!” the Girl says.
“Mad!” says the Boy.
The closer Malorie listens to the trees, the worse it sounds.
How many are up there? It sounds like infinity.
Will the children hear the recording beneath the cacophony above?
Victor went mad. Animals go mad.
The birds do not sound sane.
Slowly, blindly, she looks over her shoulder toward what follows them.
Your eyes are closed, she thinks. Just like your eyes were closed every time you got water from the well. Every time you attempted to drive to fetch the amplifiers. Your eyes were closed when Victor’s weren’t. What are you worried about? Haven’t you been in close proximity before? Haven’t you been so close to one that you believed you could smell it?
She has.
You add the details, she thinks. It’s your idea of what they look like, and details are added to a body and a shape that you have no concept of. To a face that might have no face at all.
The creatures of her mind walk horizonless, open fields. They stand outside the windows of former homes and gaze curiously at the glass. They study. They examine. They observe. They do the one thing Malorie isn’t allowed to do.
They look.
Do they recognize the flowers in the garden as pretty? Do they understand which direction the river flows? Do they?
“Mommy,” the Boy says.
“What?”
“That noise, Mommy. It sounds like someone talking.”
She thinks of the man in the boat. She thinks of Gary. Even now, so far from the house, she thinks of Gary.
She tries to ask the Boy what he means, but the voices of the birds rise in a grotesque wave, nearly symphonic, shrieking.
It sounds like there are too many for the trees to hold.
Like they make up the entire sky.
They sound mad. They sound mad. Oh my God they sound mad.
Malorie turns her head over her shoulder again, though she cannot see. The Boy heard a voice. The birds are mad. Who follows them?
But it no longer feels like something is following them. It feels like that something has caught up.
“It’s a voice!” the Boy yells, as if from a dream, his voice penetrating the impossible noise from above.