The Garden of Darkness

by Gillian Murray Kendall

  “It’s probably going to get infected,” said Clare, “no matter how careful you are.”

  “Antibiotics,” said Jem. “We’ll get some at the pharmacy.”

  “How do you know this stuff?”

  “My mother the doctor. She didn’t want me to be helpless in an emergency.”

  “I don’t know, Jem. I may have to get rid of my chess-nerd image of you.”

  And at that moment, Sarai opened her eyes.

  “I don’t feel so good,” she said. But Jem smiled.

  “It’s going to be okay,” he said.

  By the time they found Sarai some juice from a 7-Eleven and some antibiotics from a pharmacy, the sun was almost gone. Clare shivered. Bear lay down as if he had no intention of leaving, but they would have to leave now, or it would be dark before she got back to the cabin. She knew that if one Cured had found his way into the hills, others would. She needed to fortify the house. Otherwise—well, otherwise the Cured would steal her food and kill her dog and murder her.

  Clare began more and more to fear the long walk home to her lonely cabin, even with Bear to protect her.

  “We should bury that man,” said Mirri suddenly.

  “We don’t have time before dark,” said Jem. “I’m sorry, Mirri. But he isn’t one of ours.”

  Jem finished arranging the supplies and roped them down with a piece of elastic cord. Sarai was able to walk leaning on Jem. Clare watched them prepare to leave. There seemed to be nothing left to say. They stood in the dim light, and leaves fluttered orange and red in the wind. Clare looked at the children but didn’t know how to ask.

  “It’s time to go,” said Jem. He wiped his face, but the dirt only smeared across his cheeks and forehead. Then he looked at Clare and Bear, and it was suddenly very simple.

  “I can pull your little wagon thing, if you want,” he said. “Or you can do it yourself. It’s not a long walk to our place.”

  “So can Clare be one of us?” asked Mirri.

  “I think she already is,” said Jem. “Okay, Clare?”

  “Okay.”

  The wind ruffled Bear’s fur. When Clare looked up, she saw that the night sky was full of stars.

  MASTER

  HE WOULD ALWAYS be a famous scientist. And the children would need a pediatrician. But he had re-named himself: now he was the Master.

  The mansion that the Master had found was far to the north of the farmhouse where Jem, Clare, Sarai and Mirri lived. It was enormous—big enough to hold any number of the children that he imagined streaming towards him. They would have seen him on television, or heard his radio broadcast. Not all of them, of course, but if just a tiny fraction of those alive knew about him, if they were on their way, well, he would have a lot of work to do. They would be malnourished, possibly injured, perhaps carrying infections other than Pest. He would have to lay in broad spectrum antibiotics as well as bandages and vitamins, splints and latex gloves. And toys, of course. He would need toys.

  But first he had to hang the art.

  The Master had discovered a lot of art already in the mansion—even some sculptures—and he happily mounted his own art collection as soon as he moved in. So far it wasn’t much of a collection, because he hadn’t been able to take more than would fit into his van, but he had managed to liberate a large painting by John Singer Sargent when the panic over SitkaAZ13 had reached its peak. There were no guards at the museum, no one to sell him a ticket—and he had simply walked in and wrestled the large dark painting off the wall. He staggered under its weight as he manipulated the piece into his car. The canvas showed a dark interior with four children, one of them sitting on the floor.

  He liked looking at them: four little girls. They didn’t try to stare him down; they were alone in the unfurnished space around them—they weren’t even playing with each other. He put the painting up in a comfortable room in the expansive basement of the mansion, and then he stood back and watched the four little girls carefully. There was, frankly, something a little odd about these painted children in their looming room. When he looked closely, he thought that there might be things hiding in the darkness at the edge of the canvas.

  He couldn’t rescue them from that darkness, of course. They had made it themselves.

  The little girls looked out from the painting.

  He wasn’t just going to rely on television or on the radio broadcast; he would search for children as well. He knew there were children, now, still alive and immured in their houses, waiting out SitkaAZ13 while their families died around them. They would be waiting for someone.

  Perhaps that’s what Sargent’s children were doing. Waiting.

  He had left the radio broadcast on a loop. He didn’t know how much good the television broadcasts had done—he had made them near the end, when most of the population would have been too sick to watch television. The newscasters had let him speak because he was the expert on SitkaAZ13, and he was acutely aware, even as he spoke into the camera, that most of the people in the room were already sick—the woman who read the news, who was waiting for her turn, was flushed and looked feverish. The man behind the camera sat down half way through.

  But the light on the camera continued to glow red as he spoke.

  And he kept looking at the light and talking to the children.

  He knew everything about SitkaAZ13—what laymen called ‘Pest.’ He knew that the children who had survived so far weren’t immune; the virus was simply lurking in their blood; they would grow into the disease. Adolescence had a little surprise for them.

  Now, in the mansion, he stared at the children in the Sargent painting.

  When the sun went down, he went outside. After climbing over a stone wall and brushing away the undergrowth that separated him from the forest, he went under the trees. The evening walk calmed his mind; he did not fear the Cured.

  He was about to turn back when he heard a voice.

  “Is anybody there?”

  He stood, silent. It wasn’t a Cured; he knew that from the perfect syntax of the sentence as well as by the tone. It was, he thought, a girl child.

  “It’s all right,” he said and moved quietly between the trees until he could see her. She was dirty, and her hair was a dark nest of snarls. He had pictured something different when he had first heard her—smooth hair, wide blue eyes. Perhaps she would look different later, when she’d had a chance to clean up. But here was a start.

  She began backing away from him.

  “I thought you might be another kid,” she said. “You’re not a kid.”

  “And I’m not a Cured. I am, though, the master-of-the-situation.” He had used the words so often on the broadcast that they came to him naturally. “You need to come with me. I can take care of you.”

  “I’ve been taking care of myself.” But her voice said otherwise, and her cheeks were hollow, as if she hadn’t eaten in a long time. Tear marks streaked the dirt on her face. She looked to be about twelve years old.

  “I told you it’s all right,” he said. “I have food. I have water. Soon other children will come.”

  She didn’t hesitate for very long.

  They went back to the mansion together, and she ate his food. He liked watching her eat. He calculated how long it would take for her blood sugar to go up, and, sure enough, as it did she became more talkative. Her name was Britta and she had watched her whole family die.

  He had watched people die—a lot of people—but after a while the deaths had become merely interesting. He hadn’t liked the chaos, though. At the end the hospital had been mobbed, and he had been afraid of his own name.

  “Why are you alive?” asked Britta. “Are you immune?”

  “I cured myself.”

  “I thought I was the only one alive in the whole world. Except for the Cured. I waited with Mother’s and Kevin’s bodies for a long time.” She stopped, and he didn’t press her.

  “You’re alive,” he said finally. “And we’ll start there.”

 
; “There’s no one left in Clarion,” she said. “I walked around for a while, but there were only bodies. Then I got scared. I thought maybe I could build a tree house and live in the woods, but I just got lost, and it started getting cold. There weren’t any berries to eat.”

  “Any Cured in Clarion?”

  “One,” said Britta. “He kept telling me to come closer. His face sagged down, and when I saw that, I ran.”

  “Very wise.”

  “You are the Master, aren’t you? Of the situation? For real?”

  He sat back in his chair. They were seated at the thick oak table in the kitchen, a table big enough to accommodate a large family. He thought that soon enough, as the children came, he would fill the places.

  “Yes,” he said. “I am the Master.”

  “I was worried you might be someone who hurts kids.”

  “Parents scare their children too much.”

  For being the first one to find him, the Master wanted to give Britta the most opulent bedroom in the mansion—the one with huge, gilt framed mirrors on the walls and oriental rugs on the floor and a bed with an intricately embroidered coverlet. But part of him knew that the room would be scary for her, and he wanted all the children to be comfortable with him. Respectful, but comfortable.

  He finally gave her a small cozy room on the second floor, a room that overlooked the gardens that he meant to become lush and extravagant with flowers. Once there were other children, they would plant and reap and delight in excess of everything: food, flowers. They would raise domestic animals. He knew that children liked baby things. He would make sure that there would be ducklings and chicks. They wouldn’t be able to resist ducklings.

  That night, Britta let him tuck her in. Then he went outside to the perimeter of the estate. Britta hadn’t wanted him to leave her alone in the house, but he knew it was possible the Cured she had seen in Clarion had followed her. If so, some clean up work needed to be done.

  The air was cool on his face. He stared into the darkness and listened. The unmown grass was fragrant and the soft, and dewy heads of clover brushed his legs. Then he heard it—a low hooting sound, as if some night bird were calling to another.

  The Cured was out there, but too far away for him to do anything about it. No matter. The Cured would soon come closer, and he would be ready.

  He went back inside and up the stairs to check on Britta.

  She lay on her side. The light from the kerosene lantern he held showed deep shadows around her eyes. He was about to close the door, but, in spite of the marks that exhaustion and fear and hunger had left on her, in spite of what must have been a deep fatigue, she woke up.

  She didn’t want to know where she was, or who he was, and she didn’t ask for her parents.

  “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.

  THE 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.

  THE 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.

  HE AND BRITTA 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.