She takes the stairs.

“Shannon?”

She is at the top now. Trembling. Stepping down the hall, she sees sunlight coming from Shannon’s bedroom. Slowly, she comes to the open door and looks inside.

A corner of the window is exposed. A part of the blanket, having come loose, hangs.

Malorie quickly looks away. There is a stillness, and a faint hum from the television below.

“Shannon?”

Down the hall, the bathroom door is open. The light is on. Malorie walks toward it. Once there, she holds her breath, then turns to look.

Shannon is on the floor, facing the ceiling. A pair of scissors sticks out of her chest. Blood surrounds her, pooling into the tiles on the floor. It seems like more blood than her body could hold.

Malorie screams, clutching the doorframe, and slides to the ground, wailing. The harsh light of the bathroom exposes every detail. The stillness of her sister’s eyes. The way Shannon’s shirt sinks into her chest with the scissor blades.

Malorie crawls to the bathtub and throws up. Her sister’s blood sticks to her. She tries to wake Shannon, but she knows this will not happen. Malorie stands, speaking to Shannon, telling her she’s going to get help. Wiping blood from her hands, Malorie rushes downstairs and finds her phone on the couch. She calls the police. No answer. She calls again. No answer. Then she calls her parents. Still, no answer. She turns and runs to the front door. She must get help. Her hand clutches the doorknob, but she finds she cannot turn it.

Dear God, Malorie thinks. Shannon would never do this willingly. Dear God, it’s true! Something is out there.

And whatever Shannon saw, it must be close to the house.

A piece of wood is all that separates her from what killed her sister. What her sister saw.

Beyond the wood she hears wind. There are no other sounds. No cars. No neighbors. Only stillness.

She is alone. Suddenly, agonizingly, she understands that she needs someone. She needs safety. She has to figure out how to leave this house.

The image of Shannon blazing in her mind, Malorie rushes into the kitchen. There, under the sink, she pulls forth a stack of newspapers. She manically rifles through them. Breathing hard, her eyes wide, she checks the back of each one.

Finally, she finds it.

The classified. Riverbridge. Strangers inviting strangers into their home. Malorie reads it again. Then she reads it another time. She falls to her knees, clutching the paper.

Riverbridge is twenty minutes away. Shannon saw something outside, and it killed her. Malorie must get herself and her child to safety.

Suddenly, her heavy breathing gives way to an endless flow of hot tears. She does not know what to do. She has never been this afraid. Everything within her feels hot, like she’s burning.

She cries loudly. Through wet eyes, she reads the ad again.

And her tears fall upon the paper.

six

What is it, Boy?”

“Did you hear that?”

“What? What did you hear? Speak!”

“Listen.”

Malorie does. She stops paddling and she listens. There is the wind. There is the river. There is the high squawking of birds far away and the occasional shuffle of small animals in the trees. There is her own breathing and her heart pounding, too. And beyond all this noise, from somewhere inside it, comes a sound she immediately fears.

Something is in the water with them.

“Don’t speak!” Malorie hisses.

The children are silent. She rests the paddle handles across her bent legs and is still.

Something big is in the water before them. Something that rises and splashes.

Malorie, for all the work she has done protecting the children from madness, wonders if she’s prepared them enough for the old realities.

Like the wild animals that would reclaim a river man no longer frequents.

The rowboat tips to Malorie’s left. She feels the heat of something touching the steel rim where the paddle ends rest.

The birds in the trees go quiet.

She holds her breath, thinking of the children.

What plays with the nose of their boat?

Is it a creature? she thinks, hysterical. Please, no, God, let it be an animal. Please!

Malorie knows that if the children were to remove their blindfolds, if they were to scream before going mad, she still would not open her eyes.

Without Malorie paddling, the rowboat moves again. She takes hold of a paddle and prepares herself to swing it.

But then she hears the sound of the water splitting. The thing moves. It sounds farther away. Malorie is breathing so hard she gasps.

She hears a fumbling among the branches at the bank to her left and imagines the thing has crawled onto shore.

Or maybe it walked.

Is a creature standing there? Studying the limbs of the trees and mud at its feet?

Thoughts like these remind her of Tom. Sweet Tom, who spent every hour of every day trying to figure out how to survive in this awful new world. She wishes he were here. He would know what made that sound.

It’s a black bear, she tells herself.

The songs of the birds return. Life in the trees continues.

“You did well,” Malorie pants. Her voice is caged with stress.

She begins paddling and soon the sound of the Girl shuffling her puzzle pieces joins in with the sound of the paddles in the water.

She imagines the children, blinded by their black cloths, the sun embarrassing them with visibility, drifting downstream. Her own blindfold is tight against her head, damp. It irritates the skin by her ears. Sometimes, she is able to ignore this. At others, all she can think about is scratching. Despite the cold, she regularly dips her fingertips into the river and moistens the cloth where it chafes. Just above her ears. The bridge of her nose. The back of her head where the knot is. The wet cloth helps, but Malorie will never fully get used to the feel of the cloth against her face. Even her eyes, she thinks, paddling, even her eyelashes grow weary of the fabric.

A black bear, she tells herself again.

But she isn’t so sure.

Debates like these have governed every action Malorie has taken for the last four and half years. From the moment she decided to answer the classified in the paper and first arrived at the house in Riverbridge. Every noise she’s heard since has delivered visions of things much worse than any earthly animal.

“You did a good job,” Malorie says to the children, shaking. She means to reassure them, but her voice betrays her fear.

seven

Riverbridge.

Malorie has been to this area once, several years before. It was a New Year’s Eve party. She hardly recalls the name of the girl who threw it. Marcy something. Maribel, maybe. Shannon knew her, and Shannon drove that night. The roads were slushy. Dirty gray banks of snow framed the side streets. People used ice from the roof for their mixed drinks. Someone got half-naked and wrote the year 2009 in the snow. Now it’s summer’s peak, the middle of July, and Malorie is driving. Scared, alone, and grieving.

The drive over is agonizing. Traveling no more than fifteen miles per hour, Malorie frantically looks for street signs, for other cars. She closes her eyes, then opens them again, still driving.

The roads are empty. Every home she passes has blankets or wood boards covering the windows. Storefronts are vacant. Strip mall parking lots are barren. She keeps her eyes immediately on the road ahead and drives, following the route highlighted on the map beside her. Her hands feel weak on the wheel. Her eyes ache from crying. She feels an unyielding flow of guilt for having left her sister, dead, on the bathroom floor of their house.