The Garden of Darkness

by Gillian Murray Kendall

  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 th
e 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.

  Clare thought of the body upstairs. She went over to the bound Cured and looked down at him.

  “Who’s that in the bed?”

  “My wife.”

  “Is that a grave in the cellar?”

  “It’s the neighbor. He died of Pest. I didn’t kill him.” He smiled gently. “But I ate most of him.”

  “Instead of ham?” Mirri was incredulous.

  “Go outside, Mirri,” Clare said, turning to her.

  As they approached the gold house on their final trip, Sarai and Mirri stopped chattering. Jem looked grim.

  They entered the hallway and Bear’s hackles rose.

  The Cured was gone. The yellow cord lay in coils on the floor.

  “I want to go home,” Sarai said.

  “It looks like he cut the rope,” Jem said.

  “He didn’t have a knife,” said Clare. “I’m sure of it.”

  “Let’s get home,” Jem said. “We’ll be all right.”

  “We have Bear,” said Sarai. “He’s a secret weapon.”

  “From what happened in the house,” said Jem wryly, “it would seem that our best secret weapon is Clare.”

  On the way back, they skirted the edge of the road, weaving in and out of the woods, and that’s when Clare smelled it. Sweat, stink, something rancid.

  “He’s here,” she said.

  The sun was low now, and as the trees moved in the wind, their shadows flickered across the road.

  “There,” said Jem, pointing.

  The Cured was slumped under a tree, unmoving. Clare went and stood right in front of him. Bear was by her side, but he was no longer bristling.

  “He’s dead.” Clare looked into the damage of his face. The eyes were open, and the whites of his eyes were marked with pinpricks of blood.

  “This is really creepy,” said Mirri.

  Jem had joined Clare. “Maybe he just died. Who knows how long the Cured can live?”

  Clare leaned forward and touched the patch she had seen before. She gently pulled it off, making sure to use only her fingernails. It was the size of a quarter, and there was a trademark on it in tiny print: ‘SYLVER.’

  “Don’t let it come in contact with your skin,” said Jem.

  “No,” said Clare. “I don’t think that’d be a good idea.” She threw it next to the body.

  “I REMEMBER SOMETHING more about that movie,” said Clare later, as they were headed for home.

  “What movie?” asked Jem.

  “The one that had the two Nazi brothers in it. I remember that the woman skiing into Switzerland—”

  “Austria.”

  “The woman skiing into Austria is called Freya.”

  “You’re right,” said Jem. “Freya. I would never have remembered that.”

  “But I still don’t have the slightest idea of what the title might be.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “No,” she said. “It doesn’t.”

  They walked for a while in silence.

  “You know, Clare,” said Jem finally. “It’s time to move on. It’s time to find the Master. We can’t wait until it’s too late for you.”

  “I know.”

  But Clare was pre-occupied. She was still wondering about the title of the movie, and then she realized that Jem really was right. Like so many things, it didn’t matter anymore. Perhaps it had never mattered—the idea that in the pre-Pest days she could have googled the title by typing in ‘Nazi brothers Freya’ seemed only decadent. The time to live fully in the new world had come. She remembered from English class, and she had been very good in English, that Faulkner had written that the past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past—but Faulkner had been wrong. Things past were best forgotten; they were engaged in the now; they were united in a fight against death; they were caught up in the mortal storm.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE PIG

  AS THE DAYS slipped by, Clare’s hand began to heal, the Cured-in-the-blue-dress began sleeping in the barn, and the first frost came. One morning they woke to see feathers of ice on the windowpanes. The greenish tomatoes that they hadn’t yet picked hung limply from the vines. Clare noticed that Bear’s coat had become thick and dense. And all around the house, leaves scudded in whirlwinds of color as the cold wind blew.

  Jem talked about the master-of-the-situation, and all of them began to have a sense that their time at Fallon was drawing to a close. Scavenging had become a hard, desperate frustrating task.

  There was nothing fun about Fallon anymore.

  “You think it’s time to leave,” said Clare one bright cold day as Jem was slicing ham for lunch.

  “Yes. It’s time to think about how we’re going to find this Master. If he’s organized, he’ll have food. And we have to get the cure. For you. And then for me.”

  “Before I met up with you,” said Clare, “I kept hoping for an adult who would take care of everything. Now I’m not so sure that’s a good idea.”

  “Clare, you still have the rash. I have the rash. We’re all marked.”

  “I kn
ow.”

  “You’re already fifteen.”

  “I don’t think that’s so old. Even for Pest.”

  “Besides. If we can stay with the Master, it might be a good thing.” Jem cut the fat away from the ham slices as he spoke. “I don’t want to settle into one place and eat everything that’s there and then move on to a different place and eat everything’s that’s there and then—”

  “I get the gist.”

  “The Master may have a place where we do more than just try and survive another day and search for food and go to sleep every night bone-tired.”

  “Yeah. But what do we do with all that free safe time?”

  “Exist.”

  “That’s it?”

  “We could play a lot of chess.”

  “What about me?”

  “You could write a book. Like your father.”

  He finished slicing the ham as Mirri and Sarai came into the kitchen. They sat at the counter and ate without taking off their jackets. The house was drafty, and the wind rattled the windows. Bear lay at Clare’s feet and looked up as the ham was doled out.

  “Give him a bit,” said Clare. “That dry dog food we found is disgusting.”

  “Then you shouldn’t eat it,” said Jem.

  “Seriously. He needs meat.”

  “Clare,” said Jem very seriously, “we can’t support him if he doesn’t hunt.”

  “A little ham?”

  Bear had not taken his eyes from Jem. Jem gave a slice of ham to Clare.

  “You give it to him,” Jem said. “With you, he’s gentle. The last time I tried to give him a treat, he almost took my hand along with it.”

  Clare gave Bear the ham, and he nuzzled it out of her hand.

  “That dog loves you,” said Jem.

  “I know.”

  Clare wondered how the Cured-in-a-blue-dress was coping out in the barn. She knew that Mirri had smuggled the pink sleeping bag out of their bedroom to her. How Jem managed not to notice was beyond Clare—he had noticed right away when she had put an extra comforter on her own bed. He had even said something about it, although she couldn’t remember what.

  Mirri and Sarai finished eating the ham using their fingers.