The Garden of Darkness

by Gillian Murray Kendall

  “What do you think?” asked Robin.

  “You can’t possibly believe him,” said Clare.

  “He’s still alive,” said Robin. “Why not believe him? What else do we have to believe?”

  “We could believe that some adults are going to survive.”

  “Everyone says all the adults are going to die, Clare,” said Robin. “My parents died. Example A.”

  “My parents are fine,” said Clare.

  Robin looked at Clare contemplatively.

  “I think this master-of-the-situation should be part of our plan,” she said.

  “We don’t have a plan,” said Clare. “Our plan is my father and Marie.”

  “I just meant that he could be Plan B,” said Robin.

  CLARE RAN HER hand lightly over her rash.

  Plan B.

  That night, the Loskey’s double bed looked too big and exposed. Clare slept in the closet, curled in Michael’s letter jacket, Chupi’s cage above her.

  At first Clare couldn’t sleep. She realized that she would have to learn to be alone. Clare, not for the first time, missed Robin terribly. And she also knew with certainty that she was never, in the course of her life, going to find out what had happened to her.

  As Clare finally began to doze, she wondered if all the wild animals had died, too. But the next morning, when she left the Loskey place for another trip back to the house of the dead, Clare saw, brilliant in the sunshine, an enormous stag browsing in the cabbage patch. He raised his head and seemed to look right through her, as if she weren’t there, as if she were no more than a ghost of the past.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  AND THE OLD WORLD WAS GONE

  CLARE SLEPT FOR twelve hours, this time in the double bed, and when she woke, the covers were sweat-soaked and tangled around her. Her dreams had been terrifying, and she rubbed her face hard, checking to see if the marks of Pest had begun to manifest. They had not. She had to pee and discovered, much to her disgust, that there was a blockage in the toilet. The plunger was useless. She tried pouring a bucket of water into the tank and then flushing, but the toilet immediately overflowed. Clare fled the bathroom.

  She went to the kitchen and ate a can of tuna fish. When she filled Chupi’s feed bowl, she noted that he looked listless. She took him out of the cage and put him on her shoulder, and he perked up a bit and pecked at her earring and then pulled at her hair. When she put him back, he immediately tucked his head under his wing. Chupi didn’t like change; Clare wished she could block out the world as easily. She sat at the rough table and started making lists of things to do. Lists kept her mind from the still forms under the bedclothes in the other house. And from the emptiness that was Robin’s absence. And from the thought of Michael dead. She wrote:

  Food

  Water

  Things for winter

  Fix toilet or

  Dig Latrine

  Then, with a sigh, she added ‘Tampons.’ And, after that, she added ‘Tylenol.’

  That afternoon, Clare went to Sander’s Hill, the one place from which the city was clearly visible. She had taken Jane Eyre, and she also took Chupi, who liked to peck at the margins of the book, leaving behind holes that seemed full of meaning.

  The city below her was rotting, but it wouldn’t rot forever. Clare pictured the days and weeks and months to come. She envisioned nature creeping through the streets and covering the buildings like a blanket.

  When she got back to the Loskey’s, Clare left the door of the cage open, so Chupi could fly around the house if he chose.

  Two days passed and Clare retrieved her list of things to do from behind some sour-smelling cans in the kitchen. Clare read it and put it back behind the cans.

  She opened a jar of brown stuff that smelled nutritious but had lost its label and spread it on a stale cracker. Then Clare had a few spoonfuls of grape jelly from the preserves she found in the root cellar. She washed it down with two Cokes and went outside. The air around the shack was becoming rank, faintly skunky, and it occurred to Clare, as she went back inside, feeling slightly sick, that there were diseases other than Pest.

  Her stepmother would have kept the cabin clean; her father would have dug a latrine right away. And it occurred to her that, perhaps, she had been a little spoiled in the life before Pest came.

  Things had come easily to her. Clare had been hugely popular in high school—so popular that no one cared that she hung out with an oddball like Robin. They didn’t know that, really, she was an oddball too. She just knew how to play the game, and she played it because it was easier than walking around exposing what was within. She had been on the cheerleading squad; she had known what to wear and how to do her hair. Only Laura Sparks, beautiful and mean, was more popular. Now Clare was alone, and all her charm and her ability to do breathtaking back flips could do nothing to help her. Nor, she thought, could her steady habit of reading. Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year was like a joke in the face of Pest.

  Clare found her list again and underlined ‘Dig Latrine,’ but she knew that underlining accomplished nothing. As the evening became chilly, she pulled Michael’s Varsity jacket tightly around her. Chupi seemed restless, and Clare thought that his new life must seem as strange to him as hers was to her.

  As the light began to fade, she finally let herself think about Michael.

  “WE COULD BIKE over to Michael’s and see if he’s back,” said Clare one evening.

  “We could.”

  Clare and Robin left the house at three in the morning. And it was like going out into Hell.

  Fires burned in the street, and they heard howling and shrieking from somewhere in the city.

  By the time they reached Michael’s, clouds covered the moon; a light drizzle had begun, and the bikes gleamed when Clare turned on her flashlight.

  Michael’s house was dark. The door was open and hung at an angle. When they went inside, Robin just pointed. The body of Michael’s dog, Hammer, lay on the rug.

  They found Michael in his room lying on his back, dead. Michael’s Varsity jacket was on the bed. Mindlessly, Clare picked it up and put it on.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said, blankly. “He and I were best friends.”

  “You and I are best friends,” said Robin. “You and Michael were something else.”

  Clare said nothing but pulled a sheet off Michael’s bed and covered his body. She wanted to embrace him, but Robin held her back.

  “I’m always going to love him,” Clare said.

  “Yeah,” said Robin. “But no hugs. He’s decaying. It’s like that story we read in English.”

  “‘A Rose for Emily.’”

  “Yeah. That.”

  And at that moment, in the stinking apartment, with Michael dead in front of her, Clare had one of what Robin called her pretty-good-guesses (because neither of them believed in prescience). She saw herself in a garden, alone under a full moon, and someone was walking towards her.

  CLARE THOUGHT OF the people behind boarded up windows, in the alleyways, in beds and on floors, lost to delirium in cars, all still engaged in the process of dying. By the time she had walked back to the cabin, it was dark. She hadn’t seen any Cured, but she locked down the cabin every night anyway.

  It occurred to Clare that she could give up trying to make a life of it here: she could move from house to house, fouling them and then leaving when she had exhausted their larders. There was no one to care, no one to tell her to pull herself together.

  She really needed to pull herself together.

  Abruptly, Clare thought of her friend Mary. She, Robin and Mary had been close before Mary had moved to Canada. Clare wondered if perhaps Mary had lived, too. There was no reason in the world for Clare to think that she was the only one to have delayed-onset Pest. Maybe Mary was out there somewhere trying to get by, trying to survive.

  Or maybe Mary had lived through Pest only to kill herself.

  What an odd thought to have.

  THE
NIGHT BEFORE they were all to leave for the country, Robin and Clare saw a lone woman walking the street in a long ball gown. She wore necklaces and bracelets and earrings that jangled and glittered in the moonlight. They watched her until she was gone.

  Then the woman’s place was taken by people with lesions on their faces, parading through the streets in a macabre farewell to the world.

  “It’s more than time to go,” Clare’s father said as they watched. Shortly after that, the streets were curiously empty. It was as if, in the face of disease, people had finally retreated into their houses, to hide out until they died.

  FNALLY CLARE DID dig a latrine, but she did so only to then realize that she was eventually going to run out of food. When she had found the cans and preserves in the root cellar she had thought she could never run out. She had also found gardening tools, packets of seed, bags of dry corn, gallons of water, a bow and some arrows. The bow must have been Mr. Loskey’s; it was too taut for her to pull back.

  It was as if the Loskeys had been preparing for some kind of apocalypse (and when it had come they had missed it). Clare, on the other hand, had survived the initial onslaught of Pest and now she had a choice: scavenge, clean up, shape up and brush her teeth. Or give up on life and just go to bed and die.

  But her death would mean the death of Chupi, too, which didn’t seem fair. She went to change Chupi’s water, and she saw he wasn’t in his cage. He didn’t seem to be in the house, either. She opened the front door, just in case he had somehow flown to the porch as she had left for Sander’s Hill. As she stood in the doorway, he flew out of the living room and over her head. He perched on the tree in front of the cabin. He had been inside the whole time.

  “Chupi.”

  She went to the tree.

  “Chupi.”

  He behaved as if he couldn’t hear her. He flew to the copse of trees by the driveway. She followed, calling him, until he flew well beyond her. And then she simply stood and called and watched as Chupi flew from tree to tree until finally she stopped calling, and then she could no longer see him, and he was just something more that had moved beyond her horizon. And so the old world was gone.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ON THE PASSENGER PIGEON

  SOMETIMES CLARE SAT on the porch with a pair of binoculars and scanned the trees for Chupi. She didn’t expect to see him; it was just comforting to look. Clare thought she was learning an essential lesson about life: post-Pest, one’s world just got smaller and smaller. Everything one loved went away.

  At least she had the garden. In the garden where she had seen the stag, there were pumpkins the size of basketballs, monstrous zucchini and magic wands of summer squash. There were cornstalks and cabbages, a yellowing vine of cherry tomatoes and a batch of sprawling cucumbers. Every day she did a little work in the garden, and it was the only time she came close to feeling fine. She wasn’t sick. She wasn’t well. But at least the Pest rash wasn’t spreading.

  Clare was weeding the garden when she first heard the noise. It was a low sound, a snuffling sound, a growling sound. The kind of sound a large animal might make. The absurd thought that it was Pest itself, somehow embodied, took hold of her. She was overcome with terror.

  The thing making the sound was big, that was certain. Very big.

  The sound was coming from the area of the garden where the cabbages were starting to go to seed. She started to relax. The stag, she thought. It’s a deer. Deer liked cabbages.

  That’s when she saw the dog—a dog big as a bear, steel blue, almost black, like the color of the gun her father had kept in his safe. For just a moment, they stared at each other across the wide expanse of green. Clare realized that, given the size of the dog, it made absolutely no difference that it was on the other side of the garden. She would never be able to outrun it.

  It never even occurred to her to placate the animal by saying something like, “Good doggie! Good doggie!” The animal’s face was running with pus or foam, and it looked like it had never had an owner’s care in its life. It didn’t have a collar.

  Clare knew the dog would kill her. She wondered, for a moment, how much it would hurt.

  Clare ran.

  She had once been on a nature hike with her cheerleading friends and a shy naturalist who explained with great seriousness that one should never run from a bear. Clare now strongly suspected the same thing applied to dogs, but it made absolutely no difference, and, besides, she almost made it to the cabin. But Clare made the mistake of slowing enough to turn and look over her shoulder. The dog was as enormous as she had thought and was coming for her with teeth bared.

  Clare kept running. She was almost to the door.

  Then she fell, heavily.

  The dog pulled itself up, as if in surprise. Then it came on. The animal was heavier and bigger than she was—there was no chance that she would be able to overpower it. Clare was just starting to put a hand up to defend herself when it leapt at her. Its breath was rank, as if it had fed on corpses, and she felt teeth closing on her arm.

  She stared up into the dog’s yellow eyes, eyes running with mucus, and at that moment she found herself thinking—strange as it was—about the stag she had seen in the honey light of a morning that now seemed long ago.

  Without thinking, she blew into the dog’s nostrils.

  “Bad dog,” she said.

  One of her arms was trapped under the dog while its teeth were buried in the flesh of the arm that covered her throat. She had blown all the air out of her lungs with those two words, and now she couldn’t breathe in.

  She felt the animal pause. Clare managed to free her pinned arm, and she used it to beat the dog on the side of the head. The dog shifted his weight, and suddenly she could take a breath.

  “Bad dog,” she said again.

  For a moment, Clare could feel the dog’s anger and hunger, and then, as if he felt her thoughts tangling up with his, the anger began to dissipate into confusion.

  They stared into each other’s eyes. The dog lowered his eyes first. Then it slowly crept back off of Clare’s chest, whining. She gasped, gulping up air, and sat up.

  “Dog,” she said. “I’m the boss of you.” It didn’t seem to matter that they were kindergarten words. She gave him a final cuff. The giant animal sat back on its haunches and then leaned forward and began to lick the wounds it had inflicted on her arm.

  She was no longer afraid. She wanted to put her arms around his neck, but she knew it wasn’t time for that yet. Right now they were busy determining what their relationship would be now and forever.

  Clare started to get to her feet, but the dog, with gentle enthusiasm, knocked her over in order to lick her hurt arm more thoroughly. Clare found herself wiping away the mucus from its eyes and mouth. The mouth that a moment before had been about to take her throat out. She was, suddenly, surprisingly, overcome by tenderness.

  And she realized that it wasn’t just that she had found something instead of losing something more; she had done one better than that. She had been found.

  CLARE AND ROBIN, in preparation for the trip to the country house, put freeze-dried food and other essentials in four knapsacks. If something happened to the car, they wanted to be able to keep on the move.

  But sometime in the night, while Clare slept, Robin disappeared. In the morning, she was simply gone. Long after it was time to go, they waited for her, helplessly. Around them, the city seemed to be asleep; old newspapers and litter blew across their yard. Mrs. Hennie’s body still lay in the street.

  But Clare knew, after the first hour, that Robin must be dead.

  Later Clare was to think that she should have done or said something more as they left without Robin. Certainly she should have somehow known that the last seconds of her childhood were coming to an end, and that she would spend the rest of her life making up for her desertion.

  A STRING OF saliva fell from the dog’s mouth onto Clare’s forehead.

  “Yuck,” she said, as he drooled on her some
more. “I thought you were rabid, but you’re just a mess.” She wondered where the dog had come from. Certainly it was larger than any city dog had a right to be. Perhaps his owners had lived in Fallon. The giant dog nosed at her again and then lay back to expose his belly.

  “You’re like a bear,” she said. And that’s what she called him: Bear. She looked into his yellow diamond eyes, and she realized that he was going to be there for her at the end—though of what, she couldn’t yet say.

  She walked from the garden back to the cabin with her hand on Bear’s neck. He had dog breath, she decided. Not corpse breath. After giving him a can of Spam, which he ate dubiously, she pulled all the burrs and briars and ticks out of his fur. He almost purred with pleasure. And she realized that she couldn’t help it—she loved this killer dog. More than that, something had passed between them. This killer dog loved her.

  Then she thought of all those people who were probably dead. Robin. Mrs. Scherer, her piano teacher. Caroline and Maggie and Heather. Miss Hill, the most popular teacher in school, whose husband had died in the Vietnam war. Gail, at the art gallery. Larry Garr, her father’s editor. Mr. Highfil, the biology teacher, who went on and on about the importance of hand washing.

  Hand washing had done nothing to stop Pest.

  She thought about Michael. He had confided in her about everything. He was proud of her gymnastic abilities as a cheerleader. He was even proud of her straight A report card, which he seemed to find inexplicable.

  But he hadn’t been in love with her. He had loved Laura Sparks, with her Angelina Jolie lips and her C+ report card and her Cliff Notes and her pep, which was always on tap.