The Garden of Darkness (9 page)

“Is everything all right?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Leave the door open.”

He did. When he checked back later, she was in a deep and lovely sleep.

He was still excited from the day. He picked up his baseball bat and took a chair—it looked like an antique, perhaps Louis Quatorze—and sat outside near the perimeter of the grounds.

He wanted to kill something.

The Cured hooted softly. It was a lonely sound.

When the Cure had started to go terribly wrong, he had feared that the unfortunate recipients of it might band together, but that didn’t seem to be happening.

And one Cured, well, one Cured he could hunt down.

T
HE NEXT DAY,
he and Britta took the truck that had been sitting, keys in the ignition, in the long drive of the estate. They didn’t go to Clarion; he didn’t want Britta reminded of the past. He would build society from the ground up, and that meant leaving the past behind.

So they went to Sennet, where there were very few bodies in the streets. Most people, it seemed, had been content to die at home. He kept watch for the Cured, baseball bat in hand, while Britta checked out stores and restaurants.

They finally found a warehouse of food. Britta spilled over with joy. He was less satisfied. The cartons all contained cans of soup—tomato, minestrone, beef with barley, mushroom. He didn’t plan on feeding himself and the children on soup alone. The mansion needed luxuries, luxuries for the young children—candy bars and licorice and gum—and luxuries for himself and the older ones—caviar, paté, smoked oysters. His world needed to be enticing. Soup might get them through the winter, but soup wasn’t interesting. And he wanted live animals to raise for food; he wanted chickens, pigs, sheep. He didn’t fear butchering them; if there was anything he knew how to do well, it was how to wield a knife. And he knew anatomy.

The mansion had already been well stocked. He and Britta made trip after trip until the storeroom was full.

“We’ll go back to Sennet tomorrow,” he said to Britta.

“Don’t we have enough for the winter already?” she asked.

“Are you doubting me?”

Britta hung her head.

“No, sir.”

“It’s all right,” he said after a moment. “There
is
enough for us. But I think that soon there’ll be more. More children.”

That was the day that they found the farm. It stank of dead animals—they saw the carcasses of sheep and the bodies of two horses, now bloated and flyblown. But there were still chickens and ducks foraging in the farmyard, and it was Britta who spotted some sheep and a cow in a far meadow.

“They made it through,” she said.

“We can get the chickens and ducks to settle in closer to home,” he said. He looked at the stalls where the horses lay. “We need to get all the live animals away from this open graveyard. There’s potential contagion here.”

“Can’t we bury the dead ones?” Britta asked.

“No.”

“My parents didn’t get buried.” Britta seemed to wait for him to say something, but he was silent. “They’re still in my house in Clarion. When they died, there was no one to call. I don’t suppose—”

“No.” He turned his back to her. Thinking ahead was the only way to survive. He supposed it must be hard for her to think of her parents rotting away, but they would as soon rot underground. As for the psychological trauma unburied parents might elicit, well, there weren’t any more psychiatrists in the world. Britta would just have to get over it.

When they returned to the mansion, she somehow slipped away from him. The light was fading, and he was listening for the sound of the Cured when he realized that she was gone. He knew she wouldn’t have left the grounds, but he was angry. Solitude was, in the world he was going to build, a luxury for the very few.

He found her in the grounds sitting on the edge of an old fountain. In the center of the basin, a naiad with a fish woven around her stood frozen, pouty lips open where the jet of water was meant to emerge.

“You shouldn’t go out alone,” he said. He was careful to sound calm. Reasonable.

“Let’s go back to the house,” she said quickly, and he tried to let it go.

But the anger remained. It needed an outlet.

That night he went hunting for the Cured that had followed her. He took the baseball bat and a gym bag. Sometimes rhymes got stuck in his head as he went on the hunt, and now he muttered to himself as he walked:

He left it dead, and with its head, he went galumphing back
.

The soft hooting sound was much closer now, and he listened carefully to gauge the direction it was coming from as he ducked under the trees; twigs and leaves crackled under his feet as he went, and, shortly, the hooting stopped.

It went against instinct, but once he had gained a clearing he called out to the Cured.

“I’m waiting for you. Maybe I can help you.” He put down the bat, hiding it in the long grass. “I mean you no harm.” He had no way of knowing if his words would mean anything to the Cured, but he had seen cases in which some higher brain function remained. All of the Cured were, of course, insane. An unfortunate side-effect of the treatment. And the Cure had had so much potential.

He heard the soft sounds again, very near this time.

And then the sounds changed. The gentle hooting was gone.

He was almost taken by surprise when the Cured entered the clearing.

“Help,” it said. Its hair was matted, and its face was disfigured by the thick scars and lesions of Pest. This one must have been in the intermediate stages when the Cure was administered.

“You don’t need to live like this,” the Master said.

“I need to eat,” it said. “I hate everything.” Then it took a breath and made the strange hooting noise again.

“I can take the hate away,” the Master said. The Cured moved closer.

And the Master picked up the bat and started swinging.

T
HE MOON WAS
high when he got back to the mansion.

He left it dead

He wiped the bat clean on the grass. He had already cleaned the hunting knife before sheathing it—scalpels, in his early experiments, had proved too small to be useful.

And with its head

He buried the full gym bag and then patted down the disturbed ground.

He went galumphing back
.

Once in the house, he washed his hands and arms and face and cleaned under his fingernails. Then he went up to Britta’s room.

She slept. Sound. Safe.

H
E AND
B
RITTA
worked hard the next day so that the mansion would be inviting when the other children came. They then spent the evening in his collection room in the basement. He thought that Britta looked a little like the girl wearing a pinafore standing in the background of the Sargent painting. Britta sat, looking tiny, in an overlarge armchair opposite him. She looked very alone.

“Britta?”

“Yes?”

“We’re going to build a new world here. You’ll lead it for me. You’ll help me teach the other children, when they come.”

“You’re Master,” she whispered, giving him, finally, the name.

He smiled at Britta, as if they now shared a secret.

“I’ll keep you safe,” he said.

Then the Master looked up at the painting of the four little girls. He tried to read the future in their faces, but the shadows around the glowing children only seemed to mock him.

CHAPTER NINE

THE FARMHOUSE

T
HEY MOVED SLOWLY
, and Jem and Clare took turns helping Sarai, who, after some painkillers that Jem had found in the pharmacy, was both still in some pain and woozy from the drugs. When they reached the farmhouse that Jem, Mirri and Sarai had claimed as their own, it was full dark.

Once they had settled Sarai in bed, Clare collapsed on a sofa, Bear at her feet. She was too tired to worry about the Cured or the master-of-the-situation’s cure or what was going to happen next. She noticed vaguely that the others slept in the same room, but before she could really take in the arrangements at the farmhouse, she was in a dreamless sleep.

In the morning, Mirri and Jem showed her around while Sarai slept; Sarai had a low fever, but there was no redness around the stitches, and she slept soundly.

“The penicillin should kick in and get rid of that low-grade fever,” said Jem.

“Sure?”

“Sure. And if I’m wrong, we’ll give her Cipro.”

Clare didn’t know what Cipro was, but her confidence in Jem had grown steadily. Sarai would be all right.

When they went outside, Bear gave Clare an almost begging look, and she released him to go and explore the area. Now in the full light of day, Clare could see that the farmhouse had a wide porch. A barn next to it was tilted at what seemed like an impossible angle, and its red paint was peeling in long and interesting looking strips. In front of the house, a flower garden bloomed with golden marigolds and red and orange zinnias; nearby, a stone wall overflowed with phlox no longer in bloom but still full of vigor. Nothing had been pruned or weeded.

“The vegetable garden’s in back,” said Jem.

“The garden’s
work
,” said Mirri. “But we’ll take you scavenging. We break into all kinds of houses looking for food. That’s
fun
. Except for the dead bodies.”

Jem had a stick in his hand and was brushing the top of the grass with it. A grasshopper jumped out of the way, and he watched it go.

“Sometimes I can’t believe the world is still working at all,” Jem said. “Trees, grasshoppers, flowers. Pest hasn’t touched them.”

“If humans get going again,” said Clare, “maybe we’ll let everything thrive this time.”

“And we’ll have Peace on Earth,” said Mirri, primly.

“‘Peace on Earth,’” said Jem. “I don’t know about Peace on Earth. But it’s a nice day.”

It
was
a nice day. Clare wondered how many nice days she had left; she thought about the messages broadcast by the man who called himself the master-of-the-situation. The Master. If he didn’t have a cure, Sarai and Mirri would be, at the most, fourteen and twelve when Jem died. Clare would have died a few years earlier. If there were a cure, they needed to find it.

“We’re not staying here forever,” Mirri said as if reading her thoughts. “Jem says we’re sinking into leth-ar-gy here. That’s one of Sarai’s vocab words. He also says that eventually we’re going to run out of food. But Jem doesn’t think we’ll really need a cure for a while because he’s only thirteen.”

“I may be mistaken,” said Jem. “We may need to move sooner than I thought.” He glanced at Clare and then looked away.

“Well,” said Mirri. “Clare’s fifteen, and she’s all right.”

“She’s all right
now
,” said Jem.

Clare realized with a start that there was a woman in front of the barn, sitting on chair. Clare couldn’t make out her face, but her clothes were a bright splotch of blue.

“It’s the Cured-in-a-blue-dress,” explained Mirri.

“A Cured?” Clare stopped walking.

“She’s not like the other Cureds,” said Mirri quickly.

“We’ve gotten used to this Cured,” said Jem. “And so far, so good.”

“Used to her?” asked Clare.

“She followed us here,” said Mirri. “She doesn’t attack. She’s a
pacifist
Cured.”

“She picked up our trail after we found Mirri,” said Jem. “She doesn’t seem to want to harm us. She never comes close, but she won’t go away.”

The woman in blue stood up, and even at that distance Clare thought she saw the marks of Pest. The woman’s face looked like someone had put a thumb down and smeared it.

“She’s kind of like one of the family,” said Mirri.

“No,” said Jem. “She’s not.”

Clare looked from Jem to Mirri. She had the feeling that they’d had this argument before.

“Aren’t you at least a little afraid of her?” asked Clare.

“No,” said Mirri.

As they got closer, Clare could see the woman’s face more clearly. Her eyes and mouth had a beautiful shape, and Clare was strongly reminded of someone, but she couldn’t quite pinpoint whom. The rest of her face was marred, and Clare recognized that the course of Pest had been arrested during the final stages. The thick ropes of scar tissue matted the woman’s nose into her cheeks, and the marks of Pest on her neck were black. Her swollen knuckles had curled her hands into dirty claws.

Mirri stole a look at Clare’s face.

“She won’t hurt you,” she said. “I
know
it. She’s never tried to hurt any of us.”

“You need to be careful,” said Jem. “She’s not a pet.”

“I wasn’t thinking of her as a
pet
,” said Mirri.

It was at that moment that Bear rejoined them. He had the desiccated body of a long-dead squirrel in his mouth, and he dropped it at Clare’s feet. He then looked up at her, tongue lolling out, as if waiting for approval.

“That’s pretty disgusting,” said Clare, but she stroked Bear’s head as she spoke.

Bear snuffed the air and, in a moment, his body stiffened, and he made a move as if to lunge forward. Clare knew he had become aware of the Cured-in-a-blue-dress.