The Garden of Darkness (12 page)

“Down and stay,” she said, and he obeyed.

The light in the barn was dim, and the air was still. Some twenty-odd sacks hung from the rafters. Clare assumed for a second that she must be looking at some farm crop drying. Then her vision cleared.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said. “Now.”

Sarai and Mirri hadn’t had time to understand what they were seeing, but then Clare heard Jem suck in a breath.

“We’d better take a closer look,” he said. “Sarai, Mirri, you wait for us outside.” The girls did as he said without a challenge, but Clare saw Mirri look back over her shoulder. And she saw Mirri’s expression change.

C
LARE AND
J
EM
walked among the hanging bodies. Men. Women. Girls. Boys. Some marked with Pest. Some not.

“What happened here?” asked Clare. She examined a corpse with paint splashes on its hands and clothes.

“I think they helped each other die,” said Jem.

Clare raised her eyes. On the far wall someone had painted, in large scrawled letters, ‘NO CURE.’

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE GOLD HOUSE

M
IRRI AND
S
ARAI
were unusually subdued for a few days, and they didn’t want to go out on the bikes.

“I don’t like
surprises
,” said Mirri.

“Why don’t we go to the yellow house?” asked Sarai. “There might be good stuff there.” She turned to Clare to explain. “We passed this big yellow house coming in to Fallon, but we didn’t stop.”

“It wasn’t yellow,” said Mirri. “It was
gold
.”

“Yellow,” said Sarai.

“
Gold
,” said Mirri. “With a front like a skull.”

“A little scary.”

“But
gold
.”

“How about going now?” said Jem.

They tightened the wheels on their little wagons and set off for the gold (or yellow) house. They could really do with a fruitful scavenge—it seemed as if they had eaten almost everything in Fallon and were running out of places to explore for food.

Clare noticed that Mirri was looking towards the wood. As she followed Mirri’s line of sight, she caught a flash of blue moving through the trees.

“Why is she following us?” asked Clare.

“She likes to be near us,” Mirri said. “She doesn’t mean any
harm
.”

“Maybe. But we need to tell Jem she’s here.” As Clare did so, Mirri looked at her sorrowfully, as if she’d committed some kind of small betrayal.

The Cured-in-the-blue-dress came no closer, and they dropped the subject.

“I hope there’s no one dead in the house,” said Mirri as they rejoined the road.

“The dead won’t bother you,” Clare said.

“That’s what Jem says. Right, Jem? It’s not as if they went
walking
.”

“They’re re-incarnated.” Sarai said. Then she frowned. “But that’s hard to explain. My mother could explain it really well.”

Mirri and Sarai now lagged behind Clare and Jem, who were trying to remember an old movie they had each seen.

“I don’t remember the title,” said Jem. “But it was about the Nazis. The Nazis took away this old professor for saying Aryan and non-Aryan blood was the same.”

“I sort of remember. The professor had two sons, right? And one was sort of good and one was bad—but they were both Nazis.”

“I don’t know how you can be a sort-of-good Nazi. But I do remember that at the end Jimmy Stewart and what’s-her-name try and ski across the border to escape.”

“Right,” said Clare. “Into Switzerland.”

“Austria.”

“Right. But they shoot her. Right?”

“Right. She dies,” said Jem.

“I remember now. At the end, one of the brothers—”

“The sort-of-good Nazi brother—”

“Runs off into the snow. I actually cried at the end. The movie’s ancient. I saw it on the Classic Movie Channel when I was supposed to be doing homework.”

“And I thought you were a straight A student.”

“Oh, I was.”

They could see the house now. Clare, who had only heard the description, was taken aback.

“It really is yellow,” she said. “Mirri had me convinced it was gold.”

“It’s gold when the light catches it,” Jem said.

“All right. For Mirri we’ll call it gold.”

“See how it looks like a skull?” Mirri said.

Clare didn’t like the house. She noted the configuration of the windows, and she understood why Mirri had said it looked like a skull. The gold house dwarfed its ruined garden, and time, Clare saw, was hard at work on the building. Morning glories curled up the banister leading to the porch; small plants were growing out of the gutters.

Then Clare looked away only to see that the Cured-in-a-blue-dress was no longer hiding but was standing in front of a tree. Jem saw her as well.

“She’s never come so close,” Jem said, and as he spoke the Cured-in-the-blue-dress slipped behind the tree and was gone.

“So much for that,” said Sarai.

“It would be nice if she were gone for good,” said Jem.

“No, it
wouldn’t
,” said Mirri.

They turned their attention to the house.

“Well,” said Jem. “Here I go. I’ll call to you if it’s okay.”

“If you think I’m letting you go in there without me and Bear, you’re wrong.” Clare said.

“It won’t take me a minute to check it out.”

“You need someone at your back. I don’t like this place.”

“All right. But not Sarai and Mirri.”

Clare and Jem went in together, and Bear followed. For an instant, Clare thought of Michael. Michael would have
never
let her go in with him.

The door opened into a short hallway that led to a wide room where patterned blue wallpaper seemed to dance across the walls—in contrast to the slight odor of human decay. Everywhere there were display cases filled with butterflies. Each butterfly was transfixed by a pin that gleamed silver, as if a dot of mercury had fallen on its back. Wings glittered vermilion, orange, deep blue and green. Some of the butterflies had enormous shapes like eyes on their wings. Off the living room they discovered a study. The head of a doe sprouted out of the blue wallpaper above the desk. A buck with small antlers stared down at them glassily from another wall. Pairs of antlers hung above the fireplace.

“It’s a deer mausoleum,” said Jem.

“Let’s find the kitchen,” said Clare.

“And then the cellar. That’s where they put the good stuff. Pretty often. You don’t have to come.”

“Forget it. I’m in.”

The kitchen was filthy. Dirty broken dishes overflowed the sink and covered part of the floor. Bear started licking some brown stuff off a plate, and then turned away as if in disgust. Forks, knives and spoons looked as if they had been hurled at random.

Jem opened cupboards looking for food.

Cans. Huge bags of pasta. Flour, sugar, tea.

“I don’t believe it,” said Jem.

“Real food,” said Clare.

Upstairs, in one of the bedrooms, they found a corpse lying with its arms crossed over its chest as if it had been posed. The other bedrooms were empty. Once downstairs again, Jem opened the door to the basement, and Clare used her flashlight to illuminate the steep stairs. A packed dirt floor was just visible at the bottom. The air was rank with decomposition, mildew, and a smell like rust.

“Something’s dead down here,” said Clare.

“I hope it’s an animal. I don’t think I’m up to another dead body right now.”

Clare’s flashlight lit up a corner of the cellar that was separated from the rest by a partition. Bear barked once.

Clare and Jem edged around the partition, and when they saw what was hanging there, they both stepped back quickly. Clare stumbled, and Jem caught her arm. She didn’t want to look at the small heavy forms dangling from the ceiling. She remembered the bodies they had found swinging from the beams at the dairy farm.

Then Clare recognized what she was seeing.

Hams.

The hams hung in a row, eight of them, solemn and still as the corpses of infants. Clare touched the nearest one and it bumped its neighbor, and soon all of them were swaying back and forth.

Jem put his nose right up to one of the hams.

“They smell delicious,” he said. Bear sat and looked up, his tongue lolling out. He looked as if he were grinning.

“Jem, look at this,” said Clare.

The light from the flashlight had washed over an area of the cellar where the earth seemed to have been recently turned. The plot looked like a small grave.

Above them, they heard footsteps coming towards the cellar door. And then the slow creaking of floorboards stopped. The door began to close. Bear gave a low growl and leapt for the stairs, but Clare was there ahead of him. She took the steep steps two at a time, but she was still too late. The door grazed her outstretched fingers as it closed. On the other side, she heard someone fumbling with the lock.

It wasn’t a time to speak or discuss or weigh options. Clare gathered herself together and crashed into the door.

When Clare hit, the door opened just enough for her to slip her hand into the gap before it slammed back onto her fingers. The pain was excruciating. Even so, she shut it out as she crashed into the door again. This time she heard the sound of wood splintering and the door flew open.

She found herself face to face with a Cured. He was a big man.

They stood there for a moment, neither one of them moving. And then he grabbed her, slammed the basement door behind her and bolted it, shutting in Jem and Bear. He dragged Clare to the kitchen, kicked her legs out from under her and pushed her to the floor. In a moment, he was on top of her. He was breathing heavily into her face, and his breath stank of the grave.

“I’m going to kill you,” he said.

He started tearing at her clothes, ripping open her jacket and her shirt, revealing the Pest rash on her chest. She tried to push his hands away, but it was no good. As he fumbled with her clothes, Clare punched him with her good hand, hard. Her fist sank into his face as if into a sponge. She flipped the Cured over until his back was to the floor, and she was on top of him with a knee on his sternum.

She realized she was stronger than he was.

Go figure.

She stood up and kicked him in the side. Then Sarai and Mirri were in the house. Mirri ran to Clare, but Clare pushed her firmly away as the Cured slowly got to his feet. Clare kneed him in the groin. He curled into a ball and began to cry.

“What we need to do is tie him up,” Clare said. “Mirri, get some cord. Sarai, get Jem and Bear out of the cellar.”

For a brief second, Clare wished Michael were there to handle things, then she knelt down and twisted the Cured’s arm behind his back before he could get back up. His hair fell back away from his face, and she saw an orange-colored patch behind his ear.

“Hurry, Mirri,” she said. Then Sarai appeared at the top of the basement stairs with Jem. Bear was behind them.

Clare suddenly became aware that her blouse was torn open, but there was nothing she could do about it while holding down the Cured.

At that moment, Mirri appeared with a large ball of yellow nylon cord.

“Sarai, Mirri,” said Clare, “tie him up. Can you help me, Jem?”

“
I’ll
do the knots,” said Mirri. “I got a badge in knots when I was a Brownie.”

“I thought you told me you flunked out of Brownies,” said Sarai.

“That was
after
.”

“Will you hurry?” Clare shouted.

As soon as they had the man secured, Jem checked the bindings. Clare saw him looking at her, and then he hurriedly looked away. She quickly pulled her shirt closed.

“Did he hurt you?” asked Jem quietly.

“My hand,” said Clare. “That’s all. He shut the door on it.” Jem came over to her and took her hand in his own.

“You’ll need a splint.”

“It’ll be okay.” Bear lunged over to Clare and nudged Jem away. He began licking her injured hand.

“He’s jealous,” said Jem.

“Yes,” said Clare. “Well.”

“I don’t like the way that Cured’s
looking
at us,” Mirri said, glancing at Clare’s attacker.

“I doubt he likes the way we’re looking at him, either,” Clare said. “We’ll leave him here while we get all the food back to the house.”

“Then what?” Sarai asked.

“Then I don’t know.”

“We have to hurry,” said Mirri. “It’s going to get dark soon, and I don’t like the dark, and I don’t want to be in the dark near
him
.”

“He’s tied up,” said Clare.

“He’s
spooky
,” said Mirri.

There was no question that it was going to take more than one journey. Keeping together, they made two trips to the farmhouse, taking not only food supplies, but also blankets, some kerosene that Clare and Jem found in the cellar and the contents of the medicine cabinet—bandaids, surgical tape, cough syrup, Pepto-Bismol, and a bottle of prescription codeine. Clare took one of the pills, and in a little while the pain in her hand was reduced to a manageable ache.

The Cured lay and watched them as they came and went. He didn’t struggle.