The Garden of Darkness

by Gillian Murray Kendall

  “That hurt,” said Jem mildly.

  Sarai was already dissecting the furry pellet with a stick. “It’s full of little bones.”

  “Mouse bones,” said Jem, rubbing his head. “Probably.”

  The barn was vast. The lower half was cluttered with items that must have been accumulating for generations: fence-posts, old furniture, tools, a hay wagon. But all this was dwarfed by vast and empty space as the building soared up past the loft, past great old timbers, to the ancient roof.

  They went past the broken furniture and over to the pink sleeping bag that Mirri’s mother had used. Mirri’s mother—Dinah—had made a sort of nest there. Clare pulled up the sleeping bag and underneath it she saw something she wasn’t expecting.

  The unicorn pen that Mirri thought she had lost. One of the tortoiseshell combs that Clare sometimes used to control her hair. Jem’s pocket flashlight. She saw that there were other things there as well. Toys, bits of cloth, a pocketknife, a silver ring Clare thought she had misplaced.

  “She was looking out for all of us,” said Clare. “Not just Mirri. All of us.”

  They stood, mute.

  Then, quietly, Mirri gathered up the little objects; Clare helped her. They walked back to the house.

  Behind them the barn loomed like a cathedral.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  MOOSE

  IT SNOWED IN the night, but not enough to keep them from leaving. In the morning, Mirri put some more rocks on her mother’s grave. Jem carved all their initials on the inside of the front door. Clare caught Sarai putting some more books into her backpack, which were going to add substantially to the weight, but she said nothing, instead transferring them to her own when Sarai wasn’t looking.

  Right before they set out, Jem emptied Mirri’s pack to see if anything could be discarded. He had worried that her pack was too heavy. What he discovered was that the bottom of Mirri’s pack was filled with Pretty Ponies, her favorite unicorn footie pajamas, a copy of The Secret Garden, a seashell jigsaw puzzle and the Old Maid playing cards. Clare watched from the doorway, wondering how this was going to play out.

  “Mirri,” Jem said. “You know better. That space could be used for food.”

  “Don’t you want me to have any stuff?”

  Clare watched Jem debate with himself.

  “All right,” he said finally. “All right for now.”

  “Wuss,” whispered Clare as he came over to her.

  “You try saying ‘no’ to Mirri.”

  “Well,” Clare said. “At least we have enough food to get to the next stop.”

  “I just hope we find fresh supplies along the way. I don’t want us to get beriberi.”

  “You worry about everything.”

  “Or rickets.”

  “I like rickets,” said Mirri. “They chirp like hoarse birds.”

  “That’s crickets,” said Sarai. “Rickets makes your legs fall off.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” said Jem. “Quit stalling and let’s go.”

  Jem took the lead. At the end of the long driveway, he stood for a moment before turning left. They would pass through Fallon and then resupply themselves in the city, where it would be easy enough to pick up the I-80 to Herne Wood.

  As they stepped onto the road, Jem abruptly laughed and said, “Well. Now we’re off to see the Wizard.”

  “I just hope that he isn’t a little man behind a big curtain,” said Clare.

  “The Master has to have the cure,” said Jem. “Why wouldn’t he have the cure?” Clare was going to respond lightly, and then she saw the grim resolution in Jem’s dark green eyes.

  Bear suddenly ran out ahead of them, snuffed at the air, and then fell back to Clare.

  They passed the skeletonized remains of the Cured that Mirri’s mother had killed. Now they were at the farthest point of their scavenging area.

  They walked.

  Shadows began to creep down the road in front of them, and when they found a house set back from the road and with no dead smell to it, they stopped for the night. Clare and Jem searched the house for signs of other occupants, but the place was empty. No dead. No Cured. No living children.

  They made a big nest in the living room out of comforters and blankets, and, before the light was entirely gone, Clare got a fire going in the woodstove. She looked at their nest and suddenly felt bone-tired. Mirri looked unhappy.

  “How’re the feet?” Clare asked.

  “Don’t know,” said Mirri. “I can’t get my shoes off.”

  “That’s not good.” She saw that Mirri’s ankles were swollen. “Does it hurt?”

  “Yes,” said Mirri. “It hurts like a dog.”

  Clare elevated Mirri’s feet and massaged her ankles until the swelling started to dissipate.

  The next morning, Mirri’s feet showed minimal signs of swelling. They stopped early for lunch at a place where the road was bordered by trees. Under their shade, a light coating of snow covered the ground, and Clare thought she could make out deer tracks.

  Bear went to investigate.

  Jem shook out a tarp for them to sit on, set up the tiny camping stove and started heating up some Spam. Mirri lay on her back with her ankles in the air, just in case. Sarai read one of her precious books. Clare sat with Jem.

  “You know what’s weird?” she asked.

  “What’s weird?” He used his pocketknife to cut the Spam into small blocks.

  “They’re out there. Kids. If we survived, there have to be others. But where are they?”

  Jem looked at her seriously. “They’re hiding. Or making their way to the Master. Or maybe a lot of them just couldn’t make it in the post-Pest world. Accidents happen all the time, and there aren’t any more doctors.”

  Clare leaned against Jem. He was warm.

  “God, I hate Spam,” she said.

  Bear loped towards them, and Clare started as she saw the trail of bright red blood he left in the snow. When he reached her, she searched through his fur for an open wound, but found nothing. His muzzle, however, was covered with clots of blood and tissue.

  “It’s not his blood,” Jem said.

  “Is he all right?” Mirri asked.

  “He probably killed something,” said Clare. “He has to eat, too.”

  “It looks like he killed something big,” said Jem.

  “Maybe a deer?” asked Clare.

  “Maybe.”

  “I bet he couldn’t eat a whole deer,” said Mirri.

  Clare and Jem looked at each other.

  “Fresh meat,” said Clare.

  After putting away the food, they followed Bear’s trail, the dots of bright blood stark against the white of the snow. Where the snow had melted, it was harder to follow the trail, but the further they got, the more blood marked the ground. Bear quietly followed Clare, who kept him close.

  Soon they found the carcass. Bear had pulled out the entrails and gorged on the soft parts of the animal. The animal’s fur was grey, and it had outlandish, peculiar antlers.

  “What is that?” asked Mirri.

  “It’s a moose,” said Jem. “And I have no idea how Bear brought it down.”

  “It’s enormous,” said Sarai.

  “I suppose now we drag it with us,” said Mirri. “But it seems kind of big.”

  “It’s too big,” said Jem. “We’ll have to cut it up and take part of it. I brought a knife, but it’s not very sharp.” Jem studied the moose, and Bear watched him with his yellow diamond eyes.

  “How do we get at the steaks?” Mirri asked.

  “We need to pull back the pelt to get at the meat underneath,” said Jem.

  Clare looked at him as if he were speaking Esperanto.

  “But first,” he added. “We need to cut its throat to drain out any blood that might be pooling. Clare, why don’t you take Mirri and Sarai someplace?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” said Mirri.

  “I wouldn’t miss this for the world,” said Sarai.
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br />   “How do you know how to do all this?” asked Clare.

  “I went hunting with my brother. Hated it. At the time, I wanted to throw up while he was dressing the kill. But this time it’s different. I’m different.”

  Michael had always said that the school chess players, championships or no, were nerds, and that nerds didn’t do anything physical. Like play football.

  Clare wished Michael were here now to see this.

  And then she realized, with some confusion, that this was a very different way of wanting Michael than anything she had felt before.

  After he slit the throat of the moose, Jem slipped the knife between the pelt and the body.

  “Now we all pull,” he said, and, with some effort, the pelt began to peel away. When they were finally done, they had two haunches of moose and a slab of fatty meat from its chest. Crows watched them from the trees.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Jem. “I want to be settled in somewhere before dark.”

  The meat was heavy and bloody, and soon they were bloody too. Mirri pushed a strand of hair from her face and left a smear. Jem’s shirt was soaked through, a solid red, and his hands were covered with drying blood. He tried to wipe them in the patches of snow, but that made them quickly numb and cold. Clare tried to warm his hands with her own, but it did nothing except smear the blood onto hers.

  “There’s something Lady Macbeth-ish about this,” said Jem.

  “Ninth grade is kind of young for Macbeth,” said Clare. “I’m surprised.”

  “My mother used to read Shakespeare aloud to me at night when I was very small. She thought it would improve my mind.”

  “That must have been pretty dreary.”

  “It was absolutely terrifying. After Macbeth I slept under my bed for a week. I mean it.”

  “I was wondering,” said Mirri. She stopped. She looked at what they had culled of the carcass as the others waited for her to go on. “Once people are dead, do they still count? Or are they just lost in a pile of bodies, in the thousands of bodies, in the millions of bodies?”

  They stared at her.

  “What I mean,” she said, “is that we buried my mother and we remember her. But what about all the others? Are they just nothing?”

  “I don’t like the question,” said Sarai.

  “Nobody’s nothing,” said Clare. “Nobody. I mean it.”

  “How do you know?” asked Mirri.

  “I just know.”

  As they were trudging back to the camp with the meat, they saw, half covered by leaf litter, the partially skeletonized body of a man. Clare stopped long enough to make a tiny cairn out of pebbles.

  “Your thoughts?” asked Jem.

  “That I could almost weep over the amount of meat we had to leave behind,” said Clare, turning away from the cairn.

  “I meant about the body.” Jem seemed disturbed. “Because that’s all it is. Just another body. Mirri’s right. In the end, we’re nobody.” Clare put a hand on his shoulder, but it was Mirri who had the last word.

  “I don’t think that anymore,” said Mirri. “You’re forgetting, Jem. Clare said that everybody counts. Everybody. And Clare would know. Because she’s Somebody.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  VISITORS

  THE HOUSE WAS small and cozy. Outside, pumpkins rotted in the remains of a large garden, the black rinds caved in. Brown stalks of corn rustled in the rising wind. Mirri found one perfect cherry tomato that must have escaped the frost by being buried in leaves. She gave it to Sarai, who gave it to Jem, who gave it to Clare, who gave it back to Mirri, who popped it in her mouth.

  This time they picked the smallest bedroom for their nest.

  The other bedroom was occupied, but before they unpacked, Clare and Jem rolled the body into sheets, took it out back and sprinkled dirt on it. The ground was too hard for any real digging.

  “It’s too much like taking out the trash,” Jem said.

  “We can have a funeral,” said Clare. “Mirri will love it.”

  And so they did. Mirri made up some tributes. Clare thought that it was not unlike allowing a small child to make a ceremony out of flushing a goldfish, but she kept those thoughts to herself. She had been the one to say it as they were walking through the woods: that body was Somebody.

  Later that evening they had the moose steaks, and the steaks did not disappoint. They were gamey and strong, tough but delicious, and challenged the mouth in a way that food from a can never would.

  “It’s like eating Mother Nature,” said Mirri.

  “That’s a really disturbing image,” said Jem.

  “I kind of know what she means,” Clare said.

  “Can I have some more?” asked Sarai.

  Later that evening, Jem found a chess set. The board was outsized with large pawns and knights and kings and queens—pieces that fit nicely in the hand. The bishops all wore different frowns. The castles were many-turreted.

  Jem challenged Clare. She sat down to play with great misgivings—Jem was, after all, on the chess team; he had almost won at the nationals and she doubted she could give him a good game. But when she moved her first piece, he looked up at her, startled and happy.

  “The Fried Liver Attack!” he exclaimed. “This is going to be interesting. It’s a gutsy move.”

  “Fried liver?”

  “You haven’t beaten me yet. Although this is going to keep me on my toes. Just let me think.”

  “I only made one move,” said Clare.

  He trounced her in four. The next game she moved a pawn, and, once again, he became animated.

  “The Benko Gambit! You sure know how to start a game. You were holding back on me, weren’t you?”

  “No, I really wasn’t.”

  “When Svein Johannessen made the Benko Gambit, Bobby Fischer declined—and I’m going to decline, too.”

  “I don’t know what I’m doing. Really. I played Michael a few times, but he always beat me.”

  “Michael won?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.” Jem looked disappointed. “Maybe I should spot you a few pieces.”

  The others decided they wanted to play chess, too, but they finally went to bed after Sarai, checkmated in five moves by Mirri, threw the white king across the room, instantly beheading him.

  As Clare began to doze off, she realized that it was snowing outside.

  “Think the snow’ll cause problems?” she asked Jem quietly.

  “I guess we’ll see,” he said.

  BUT THE NEXT morning, before they could leave, Noah, Rick and Tilda arrived on their doorstep. And then, sometime that night, Noah died.

  THEY WATCHED THROUGH the side window as the three strangers came up to the front door and rang the doorbell. At the sound, Bear leapt to his feet and began barking at the door.

  “Go to the bedroom,” Jem said to Mirri and Sarai. “We’ll call you when it’s safe.” He turned to Clare. “Do you think it’s safe?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Maybe we should have a gun.”

  “We have Bear. If we had a gun, we’d end up shooting ourselves by mistake.”

  They watched, half-hidden by the curtain, as the largest of the strangers began knocking lightly at the door.

  “They’re very polite,” said Jem. “That’s something.”

  “I’m going to open the door,” said Clare. Bear stopped barking and walked with her, not at her heel, but with his head in front of her and with his teeth bared.

  Clare pulled the door open, and three strangers dusted with snow filled the doorway. She felt Bear relax when he saw them. He even stretched his neck out over the threshold to sniff the smallest traveler who, Clare realized, was a little girl who must have been about Mirri’s age. The tallest of them held out his hand to Clare.

  Bear went back to attention.

  The two boys seemed to be a year or two older than Clare. The one they learned later was named Rick carried a string of what looked like dried meat woun
d around his pack. He stared at Clare’s face hard before he turned away and put down his pack. The other boy, who was called Noah, carried the heaviest gear. He was loaded not only with a pack and sleeping bag, but a tent. Tilda, the little girl, carried a knapsack almost as big as herself. Clare doubted that they were related; Pest made new families.

  It had stopped snowing but there were several inches on the ground. Still, Jem and Clare didn’t invite them in, even as the introductions were made.

  “We don’t mean you any harm,” said Noah once they had exchanged names. “Maybe you could tell your dog that. He’s—large.”

  “He bites,” said Clare.

  That was when Tilda started crying.

  “Hey,” said Rick. “Just tell the dog to stand down.”

  Clare felt abashed. “All right.”

  “Klaatu Barada Nikto,” said Jem to Bear in a stern tone. Clare stifled a laugh.

  Tilda stopped crying and stared at him.

  “What’s that mean?” asked Noah.

  “It’s from an old movie,” said Clare. “The Day the Earth Stood Still. The remake’s awful, but the original’s a real classic: in it—”

  “It means that Clare won’t let her dog hurt you if you’re good guys,” said Jem.

  “We’re law abiding,” said Rick. “We don’t even jaywalk.”

  “We won’t stay long,” said Noah. “We’re headed south. For now.” He spoke quickly.

  Clare put her hand on Bear’s head, and she felt him relax again. Jem’s voice hadn’t made him change his stance at all, but he was attuned to Clare’s moods. She looked the travelers over one more time, slowly and carefully, then she opened the door wider and let them in. She saw Jem narrow his eyes as he watched Rick closely, and she wondered what that was about. Maybe later Jem would tell her.

  They called Sarai and Mirri from the bedroom, and it was only minutes before Tilda went over to them, and the three began playing with Mirri’s Pretty Ponies. Then Tilda looked up at Clare.

  “Can we stay with you here tonight?” she asked in a quiet voice. “It’s nice and warm in here.”

  “We wouldn’t impose on you; we’d go in the morning,” said Rick. “And we have some food we can share. If it’s all right, Clare.”