The Garden of Darkness

by Gillian Murray Kendall

  Clare silently contemplated the winking coals as the fire began to die down. Then she sighed. “I’m just not that old.”

  Jem ignored her comment.

  “When we go,” he said. “We need to go at a faster pace. If Mirri and Sarai can.”

  “Mirri and Sarai would follow you at any pace. Anywhere.”

  “And you?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What’s ‘yes?’”

  Clare smiled.

  “You look like the Cheshire cat,” said Jem. “And your answers are just as cryptic.” Clare could tell he wasn’t really troubled by her reply.

  They sat by the woodstove companionably.

  “My birthday’s coming up,” said Jem. “Soon, actually.”

  “You didn’t tell me.”

  “It didn’t seem like an auspicious occasion.”

  “Fourteen. You’re catching up to me.”

  “When’s your birthday?” asked Jem.

  “May fourth.”

  “Alice. That sounds about right.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That’s Alice Liddell’s birthday—the girl who inspired Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”

  “You know the weirdest things.”

  “I like Lewis Carroll. And we’ve certainly gone down the rabbit hole.”

  THE NEXT DAY they were up and on the road early. As they walked in the cool air of the morning, Mirri dropped back to flank Clare.

  “Will we be together at Master’s?” she asked.

  “We’ll stick together,” said Clare, giving her backpack a hoist, “until world’s end.”

  “The world’s already ended. I just don’t want us to come apart when we reach where we’re going. So do you promise we’ll always be together?”

  Clare promised. Perhaps Clare should have considered the difficulties that might lie ahead of them, and perhaps she should have sensed the weight of the promise, but it didn’t really matter. She would have promised anyway.

  The next day it snowed lightly for a while before the snow turned to steady rain, which, while camped miserably under a lean-to, they tried to wait out. They set up the tent, but the rain dripped steadily onto the roof until it was saturated.

  “And I didn’t even keep the warranty,” said Jem, but nobody laughed. Sarai was shivering, and Clare wrapped her in two sleeping bags. Sleep was sporadic that night.

  The rain did not let up the following day, and they were becoming very tired, wet and quarrelsome when Mirri spotted a house amongst a copse of trees.

  “We’ll try it,” said Jem.

  The ceiling in the living room leaked, but the biggest bedroom was dry, and so they moved all the blankets and comforters and sleeping bags they could find inside it.

  “Notice something?” Clare asked Jem.

  “Yeah,” said Jem. “No bodies.”

  “Nice change.”

  It was four in the afternoon. They all put on whatever dry clothes they could find and huddled together under the covers in the middle of the room. They finally slept soundly, lulled to sleep by their exhaustion and the murmur of the wind and rain.

  And it rained.

  When Clare woke up, it was still raining. She found herself curled around Sarai, who was holding on to Mirri for warmth. Jem’s arm was around her waist. She tried to disengage herself without waking any one of them up. They didn’t stir. They had slept through the late afternoon and the night.

  Clare started making breakfast, and the rest of them soon came to the kitchen, drawn by the smell of hot food. Everybody’s mood improved as they ate.

  “Beans, beans,” sang Mirri. “The musical fruit; the more you eat the more you toot!” Sarai giggled, and she wasn’t usually a giggler.

  “The more you eat,” Sarai joined in, “the more you see that beans, beans are the fruit for me!” Mirri peered at Clare as if to see if she were shocked. Jem laughed.

  “Let’s do the cemetery song,” said Sarai.

  “That’s the best,” said Mirri.

  Sarai began. “If you laugh when hearse goes by, you will be the next to die; they wrap you up in a bloody sheet—”

  “And bury you a hundred feet deep.”

  “Chorus!”

  “The worms go in, the worms go out. The worms play pinochle on your snout. Your stomach turns a ghastly green, and pus pours out like sour cream; you spread it on a piece of bread, and that’s what you eat when you are dead.”

  “Second verse!”

  “That’s all right,” said Jem. “We’ll stick with the first verse.”

  “Do you know the one about diarrhea?” Sarai asked Mirri.

  “No,” said Mirri. “Teach me.”

  “Other room,” said Clare.

  They stayed in the house and spread their wet clothing across chairs to dry. And still it rained.

  Clare and Jem started preparations for leaving, assuming that the rain had to give at some point. A plague and then a deluge. If there were a God, he had their attention.

  The packing made Sarai and Mirri unhappy, but when Clare told them that it was Jem’s birthday, the girls were ecstatic. Packing ceased.

  Together they made a carrot cake—with flour, orange food coloring and a couple of very old carrots they found in the pantry. In the evening, they cooked it over the wood stove. It tasted terrible, but Jem loved it. Mirri handed him one of the two Breyer model horses she had hidden in her bag; Sarai gave him, very quietly, a locket with a wisp of her hair in it.

  “So you won’t forget me,” she said. “Ever.”

  Clare herself had been carrying around a gift for Jem ever since they had found the gold house. Luckily she had packed it in plastic so it had stayed dry. She had intended to give it to him earlier but had never found the right time.

  “Let’s go outdoors,” Jem said once it had stopped raining. “You can’t say ‘no.’ It’s my birthday.”

  He took Clare by the hand, and they went out into the night. It was very cold. The stars were brilliant flecks of ice in the black sky.

  “Here.” Clare gave him the package under her arm. He opened it.

  “Peter Pan,” he said. “With illustrations by Arthur Rackham. This is amazing, Clare.”

  “Who knows?” said Clare. “Maybe you’ll never grow up. Maybe you’ll be fourteen forever. Maybe this is your last birthday.”

  Clare was sorry she’d said those words the moment they left her mouth. But they were already out there, and she knew no way to propitiate the gods of ill-wishing.

  MASTER

  THE MASTER PADDED down the hall quietly. Eliza had been acting as if she feared him. She had given him her blood, and the act should have been a privilege for her. Eliza was lucky to be the right type. The completion of Part One: at its best, the act should be a duet. And even after Part Two, there would still be plenty of children like her to pair up, and those children would produce more with the recessive genes.

  Britta, he knew, would have given anything to trade places with Eliza. Britta would have drained her own veins, if that were what it took to keep him happy and alive. For Britta, even Part Two, the recreation, would have been consensual.

  In the basement, his scrapbook lay open to a blank page.

  He stood in the dark hallway of the mansion, and in his hand was a pair of surgical scissors.

  He went past what had been Greg’s room. Britta and Doug had finally read Greg all of The Stand (Greg’s choice) and a large portion of Middlemarch (Britta’s choice) before SitkaAZ13 took him. Greg had died horribly, as if the disease were making up for the long reprieve it had given him. The Master let only Britta tend him; he didn’t want his children to fear Pest. They were going to have to live their lives with Pest in their future, but the Master wanted them to get used to the idea gradually. There was nothing like denial.

  Greg had almost made it to nineteen. Unheard of, really.

  When the Master and all of his children had gathered together to bury Greg, the older children had
looked restless. They were, the Master knew, waiting for him to say something about their cure. But the Master needed time, more time—time to train them. Their life with him would be good, rich and fulfilling. They would live well. But they would have to learn to accept that they would not live long.

  The Master moved forward with confidence. He knew that the others were all outside looking at the newly hatched ducklings. The Master came down the corridor to Eliza’s door. He fingered the scissors in his pocket.

  He thought of the cellar. The open page waiting in his scrapbook. He could imagine the feel of the paper’s grain under his fingers. Eliza would never feel the pain of SitkaAZ13. He wouldn’t force her to live that long.

  The Master didn’t knock.

  In Eliza’s room the bedclothes were tangled. The window was open.

  Eliza was gone.

  He knew she wouldn’t be back, and, in some ways, he was relieved—she had proved difficult; he wouldn’t go after her. But he enjoyed picturing her struggling through the forest, growing weaker, becoming an easy target for a Cured. He thought of her death; he thought of it again and again and again.

  Back in his cellar, he looked at the creamy page of the scrapbook. He decided to keep that particular page blank.

  He hoped the birds got her eyes.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  SHEBA

  THE RAIN WAS depressing. They heard a crash outside the house and ran out only to find that the gutters had fallen. They may have been out-running death, but there seemed to be no way to outrun the persistent rain.

  “There’s something fundamentally optimistic about us,” said Clare. “Instead of wintering over here, we’re heading into the heart of winter and following an impromptu map made according to second-hand directions given to us by a man-boy whom we don’t know whether or not to trust.”

  “Yeah,” said Jem. “What could go wrong?”

  “We’re taking a chance.”

  “Everything’s a chance,” said Sarai softly.

  But finally the rain stopped.

  It was Mirri who discovered the horse. They were almost ready to leave when she ran into the house, wide-eyed and out of breath.

  “I found a horse,” she said, panting. “I ran all the way here. It’s in the woods behind the house. It’s big.”

  “Let’s go take a look,” said Clare.

  “Are you sure it wasn’t a deer?” asked Jem.

  “It’s a horse,” said Mirri. “It’s much bigger than a deer.”

  “Horses and deer look a little alike,” said Jem.

  “It’s a horse. It doesn’t look anything like a deer.”

  “All right,” said Jem.

  “The horse is going to run away while we’re talking.” Mirri danced from foot to foot with impatience.

  “Let’s go,” said Clare.

  “Maybe I could have it as a pet,” said Mirri.

  “We can’t afford to have pets,” said Jem. “Except Bear.”

  “Bear’s not a pet,” said Clare. They all looked at Bear, who was standing behind her. It was true that he did not, in fact, look like anyone’s pet.

  THE TREES GLITTERED in the sunlight. They startled a deer as they went through the meadow, and, for a moment, Clare thought it was the horse Mirri claimed to have seen. Then she saw it was too small and too fast and its tail flipped up, like a white flag. Bear wanted to spring after it, but Clare kept him by her side.

  It was cold, and their breaths hung in the air. And that’s how Clare first noticed the horse: as a plume of vapor coming and going a little beyond the first of the trees.

  “It’s just there,” Clare said. “Before the old-growth forest.”

  “I don’t see anything,” said Sarai.

  “There,” said Mirri. “Can’t you see him?”

  The horse was now a brown blur among the trees.

  “We’re going to have to be really quiet,” said Clare. “I’ll see if I can get Bear to herd it towards us.” Clare looked down at Bear, and he looked up at her with his yellow eyes. She was fairly sure that what he would really want to do was eat the horse.

  Then the animal moved into clear view. Even at this distance, Clare could see that the beast was an old sway-backed country horse without an ounce of breeding in him. She thought he had probably been used for farm labor from the day he was born. He was like the big shaggy animals she had seen at horse-pulls at country fairs, except that he was now nothing but a walking set of bones in a hide.

  “That horse doesn’t look so good,” said Sarai.

  “We have to move slowly,” Clare said.

  The horse saw them, and its ears pricked forward. Then it took a step towards them.

  Clare let Bear go, and he moved in a wide semi-circle in order to get behind the animal. He gave a low growl as he approached.

  The horse spooked and leapt sideways with an agility that belied its condition. Clare called Bear back, and he came reluctantly.

  “We’re not going to catch it,” said Sarai. She was biting her nails.

  “Try clucking,” suggested Jem.

  Clare clucked.

  “It’s a she,” said Sarai suddenly.

  “How do you know?” asked Mirri.

  “I looked.”

  Mirri looked at Sarai with newfound respect.

  “I have an idea,” Mirri then said, “give it some food.”

  “Excellent idea,” Clare said to Mirri. “First get a rope. Then get us some of the carrots that we found in that bin.”

  (“Not the carrots,” hissed Jem. “We can eat the carrots.”

  “Yes, the carrots,” Clare hissed back).

  Clare told them to move back into the meadow. After Mirri came with the carrots and the rope, she obediently backed away as well.

  “Horses are a girl thing,” Jem said as he went into the meadow with Mirri.

  “Coward,” said Clare.

  She stood quietly with her arms outstretched and the food in her hands.

  The horse looked interested.

  Clare gave a sigh, like the sound of a horse breathing.

  The horse came a step closer. Then, abruptly, she came to Clare and, lowering her head, began to eat the carrots. Soon there were chunks of carrot and strands of horse saliva on Clare’s hands. The horse breathed on her and then rubbed her huge head on Clare’s shoulder. Clare patted the horse while slipping a rope around her neck.

  “Well,” said Jem as they walked back. “It looks like we have a horse. I notice that it’s a wet horse. A smelly horse. But a horse nonetheless.”

  “We’re all wet,” said Clare. “And we all probably smell, too.”

  Once Clare had patted the horse some more and told her what a good horse she was, the animal became completely docile, as if this were what she had been waiting for. She shambled along with them, head thrust out a bit towards the carrots that Clare was carrying.

  The rain began again.

  Mirri couldn’t stop looking at the horse.

  “She’s absolutely beautiful,” she said.

  Clare looked back. Every bone showed through fur that was, in places, matted and filthy. In other places, there was no fur at all where the horse had either rubbed it off or it had fallen out. She was knock-kneed and part of her tail was missing.

  “Yes,” said Clare. “She absolutely is.”

  “Useless, though,” said Jem sadly.

  “Nope,” said Clare. “Now all we need is a harness and a cart, and scavenging will become much easier”

  “You’re brilliant, Clare,” said Jem.

  “Does that mean we’re not going to eat it?” asked Mirri. “Because I don’t want to do that.”

  “Can you seriously see one of us walking up to this docile creature and slitting her throat?” asked Clare.

  Jem considered. “No. Actually, I can’t.” The rain stopped, and they took the horse into the nearest barn to feed and groom her. She shivered with pleasure as they brushed her fur. Clare named her Sheba. In a corner of
the barn, near the horse box, hung an old mildewed harness that would do until they could find something better.

  “We’re lucky,” said Clare.

  “The whole thing’s already written,” said Sarai and nodded, sagely.

  Throughout the exclamations and excitement, Sheba stood and chewed thoughtfully on moldy hay. She wasn’t picky about her food. Clare looked her over. If they needed muscle, Sheba, once she had bulked up, would be able to provide it.

  The next day, they found a horse cart in the third barn they searched.

  It was time to get the harness onto Sheba and see if they could set her up in the traces. But it wasn’t as easy as they had hoped it would be. Sheba was entirely cooperative and simply stood by the cart. She seemed to be waiting to be hitched up, but the harness was tangled, and it wasn’t easy to figure out where all the bits of leather went.

  Sheba became restless as morning passed into afternoon.

  They paused for lunch.

  “Well, we’re not leaving today,” said Clare.

  “It’s just a matter of patience,” said Jem. “It’s not as if we’re trying to get the electricity on again, or restart a nuclear reactor. We’re just trying to hitch up a horse; people did this for hundreds of years. It should be imprinted on our genes.”

  Clare made an effort to clean the harness and then, after lunch, they put it on the ground in the pattern that they felt it should go on the horse. This time the process went more smoothly. Mirri gave Sheba treats to keep her still. It took hours to get the harness hitched to the cart, but they were finished before dusk. By the time they were done, however, Mirri’s treats were no longer keeping Sheba still, and she was pawing the ground and shaking her mane.

  “That’s about as annoyed as she gets,” said Clare. “Personally, I’d be halfway to the meadow by now.”

  “I wonder what she thinks of us,” said Mirri.

  “She thinks we’re idiots,” said Clare.

  “Now what?” asked Jem.

  “Now we take it all off and do it again early tomorrow,” said Clare.

  There was a collective groan.