The Garden of Darkness (15 page)

Jem and Darian went into the shed. Clare heard a scuffle and a grunt and some mild swearing. Then Jem emerged, the rope securely around the pig’s neck. The pig made a move to charge him, but Clare picked up a small branch and gave it a tap on the rump, and soon it was trotting along in front of them.

Clare now realized that Darian didn’t really look all that much like Michael, not on closer inspection. It was as if Michael’s features had been blurred. Darian was handsome enough, but his face was not as symmetrical as Michael’s, and where Michael had occasionally been (Clare had to admit it) humorless, Darian didn’t look like he took anything very seriously.

On the way back, the woods seemed oppressive. Clare kept Bear at heel. The air was still, and the freshness of the day had worn off.

When they returned to the meadow, the pig, in spite of its apparent desire for liberty, seemed content to return to its pen. Darian looked at it wistfully.

“It looks delicious,” he said.

“We’ll get you some food,” said Jem.

“You’re alone?” asked Clare.

“All alone.”

“There’re four of us,” said Clare. “And a Cured. She’s under our protection.” Clare did not forget her debts.

“We haven’t met any survivors,” said Jem. “Except you.”

“They’re out there,” said Darian. “But some of them are pretty beat up.”

“And they all have the rash?” asked Jem.

“Oh yes. I saw one rash like a map of the world. Mine’s pitiful in comparison. It doesn’t look like a map of anything.”

Clare looked at him carefully—the lock of hair that strayed into his face, his soft mouth. When she caught Jem watching her, she turned away.

R
OBIN AND
C
LARE
sat in Clare’s bedroom in a drift of homework papers.

“I don’t like Michael,” Robin said, crumpling a page of algebra formulas.

“Everyone likes Michael,” said Clare.

“Not me,” said Robin

“He’s not using me, if that’s what you’re thinking. Not that way.”

“Which upsets you. Even though you know he’s practically engaged to Laura. Red alert.”

“He loves me. He just doesn’t know it.”

Robin tossed her civics book onto the floor.

“Come on,” said Robin. “Let’s get real for just a moment. He’s like a vampire battening on to a victim. He will suck you emotionally dry. And then go back to Laura.”

“He needs me as a friend.”

“He’s a vampire.”

“Have you read
Twilight
?”

“Don’t even go there.”

Robin got up off of Clare’s bed, picked up her civics book, and went home.

C
LARE WONDERED, FOR
just a moment, what Robin would have thought of Darian.

There was no sign of Mirri or Sarai when they reached the porch, Darian trailing slightly behind them. But when they opened the door, Sarai and Mirri almost fell out into their arms.

“We were
waiting
for you,” said Mirri.

“Hello, Miriam,” said Darian. “I caught your pig.”

“We call her Mirri,” said Jem.

“It’s short for Miriam,” said Mirri. Jem introduced Sarai.

They went into the kitchen, and Mirri and Sarai started to prepare Darian a plate of food. Sarai brought up some apples from the cellar; Mirri got out the jam jar and put a spoon next to it. Then she went into the pantry, stood on a chair and managed to lift down a ham. Mirri wrestled it to the big country kitchen table and started cutting slices.

“What else should I get?” asked Sarai.

“Open the can of pineapple rings,” said Mirri. “My mother always put pineapple rings on ham.”

Finally Darian sat and ate. Clare wondered how long he had been on his own.

“You’ve seen other children?” asked Jem.

“Some.”

“Tell us about them.”

“Well. The children I’ve met were mostly peculiar. Or pathetic.”

“
We’re
peculiar,” said Mirri.

“You seem all right, though,” said Darian. “Most of the children I’ve seen are seriously weirded out from the struggle to survive. I’ve watched them try to farm, a task at which they mostly fail, and I’ve watched them try to hunt, often badly, and I’ve watched them raid houses for food—which can’t go on forever.”

“So what’s your strategy for getting by?” asked Jem.

“Until things get sorted out,” said Darian, “I’m going to trade stories and news for what I need and then move on.”

“You’re a bard,” said Clare. “Like Homer.”

“Who?” Darian asked.

Clare narrowed her eyes.

Mirri was sitting close to Darian, and, while he was speaking, he absently began to finger a strand of her beautiful red-gold hair.

Clare glanced at Jem, and she could tell that he wanted to slap Darian’s hand away.

And perhaps, if Jem had, everything would have turned out differently. They moved from the kitchen to the living room, where the dark television still sat prominently on its pedestal. Mirri grabbed a cushion and flopped onto her stomach and Sarai joined her. The wound in Sarai’s side was now completely healed. Clare and Jem sat on the sagging sofa, leaving Darian the good armchair. He really looked an awful lot like Michael.

“Did you play football?” she asked him. “Before?” Jem gave her a look.

“Yeah,” Darian said. “When I was a sophomore. Before I quit school.”

“You quit school?”

“Yeah.”

Clare didn’t know anybody who had quit school. She wondered if that’s why Darian seemed so much older than they were, almost an adult. And he looked as if he were only months away from Pest. Weeks even.

“How did you end up in Fallon?” asked Jem.

“I’ve ended up lots of places,” said Darian. “And I plan to keep going. I heard all that rigmarole about everybody carrying Pest, but as far as I can make out, all Pest has done to the survivors is give them a rash. I’m eighteen and I feel fine. The Pest rash doesn’t even itch. I’ve been on the road since I was fifteen, and I’m not stopping now.”

“I’m fifteen,” said Clare thoughtfully.

“Are you in charge?” asked the boy.

“Jem is,” said Clare.

“Doesn’t really matter. I just need a place for the night and someone to okay it.”

“Can he stay?” Mirri asked, hopefully.

“Of course,” said Jem. Clare looked down and found herself gazing into Bear’s yellow diamond eyes. He knew something. He was telling her something. But she couldn’t quite hear.

A little while later Darian opened his pack and unrolled a long piece of felt with pockets in it, of the sort that some people, Clare knew, used to store knives. But in each pocket he carried souvenirs of where he had been. He showed them a handful of gems that winked green and red in his palm, glossy rooster plumes of dark green-blue and red, five acorns in their brown caps, a small clay vase, the tail of a goat. Other pockets he didn’t open. Mirri’s eyes were fixed on the gems. He poured them into her hand.

“For you,” he said. Then he looked at Sarai. “And for you.” He gave her the glossy feathers.

“These look
awfully
valuable,” said Mirri hesitatingly, as she turned the gems over and over in her hands.

“Nothing’s valuable anymore,” said Darian.

“We can’t accept gifts from you,” said Jem.

“Yes we
can
,” said Mirri.

“Thank you,” said Sarai to Darian.

“Consider it a return for your hospitality,” said Darian.

A
S EVENING BEGAN
to draw in, Darian told them of some of the survivors he’d encountered.

“Some of them have become very strange,” he said. “There’s one group of three that has a twelve-year-old girl in charge. She has the two others convinced that SitkaAZ13 is a demonstration of the wrath of God. She has a Bible, and whenever one of the two does something she thinks is wrong, she makes them wear a sign with a Bible verse on it. I didn’t stay long.

“In another place, I found a kid crying over a dead horse. He’d killed it and then realized that almost all of the meat was going to go bad. No refrigerator.”

“I’m sorry for the horse,” said Mirri. “That’s another thing you shouldn’t eat—horses. You shouldn’t eat people or horses.”

“Have you ever met someone who eats people?” Darian smiled at her.

“Well,” said Mirri. “Only one.”

There was a pause.

“I don’t think I can match that,” said Darian. “I stayed with two members of a kind of goat clan for a while, but that didn’t work out.” Darian tilted his head and looked at Clare. His hair fell in his eyes, and he brushed it back. Michael again.

“And then there’s the Master,” Darian said.

He now had their complete attention.

“What do you know about the Master?” asked Jem.

“Supposedly he protects children from the Cured or whatever there is to be protected from, and they work for him. Or so I hear.”

“That’s feudalism,” said Sarai. “We studied that in school. But there isn’t any of it around anymore.”

“We heard he has a cure for Pest,” said Jem.

“Listen, kids,” said Darian. “We don’t have Pest. We’re immune. The rest is just ridiculous—the Master’s is just another place to go.”

“Have you
been
?” asked Mirri.

“No,” said Darian. “I’ve heard it’s very nice, though. Like a summer camp. But I’m not a joiner.”

“Where is it?” asked Jem.

“Near I-80 and Herne Wood. Don’t you listen to your radio?”

“Not lately,” said Jem. “Where do you come from originally?”

“I’d rather talk about what’s happened since Pest,” said Darian. “I like fresh starts.”

Clare looked up at Jem and their eyes met in perfect understanding.

D
ARIAN SLEPT IN
the living room in his own sleeping bag that night; he seemed to take it for granted that that was the way it would be, and Clare was glad. He seemed too old not to have his own room. He just said, “I’m sacking out here.” And they watched him unpack his night things: kerosene lamp, sleeping bag, pillow. “Good night,” he said. “Good night, Mirri.”

“
I’m
his favorite,” Mirri said as they went to their room and settled in to sleep. “And I
really
like him.” Clare could barely see her face among all the stuffed animals she had scavenged.

“He likes you, too,” said Jem. But Clare had trouble making out his tone.

Jem was usually the last one awake, but that night Clare outlasted him. She remembered the days when she had spent most nights wakeful. In many ways it seemed like a long time ago, but now she was unsettled with someone new in the house.

Clare found that she was watching Jem closely as he slept—his eyes, his mouth. He was a tidy sleeper. No drool, no snoring. Thirteen was a decent sort of age.

She wondered if Darian were awake.

Do you trust him?
she asked herself.
Maybe. But I’m the oldest here except for Darian. I have to get this right.

She pictured Darian sitting comfortably in their house, telling stories. But when she pictured him, she realized that she was picturing him with blood on his shirt. In her mind’s eye, he was speaking, but as he spoke blood slowly saturated his shirt and began to drip onto the floor.

It was no fantasy; it was one of her pretty-good-guesses. And in that moment, she knew that Darian was going to die.

There was nothing to be done. Her pretty-good-guess didn’t tell her what to do or where the danger to Darian might lie. She couldn’t rescue him; she would only alarm him. And she didn’t want to sound like the Oracle at Delphi, who, deep down, everyone believed was mad.

But maybe that hadn’t been the Oracle’s fault.

And later, when it was all over, Clare was to remember something she had forgotten about the Oracle at Delphi: that, while that prophetess spoke in riddles, her riddles always proved to contain the truth—but they were fragile, complicated braided truths, weavings waiting to be unraveled. And people were so impatient that they called the Oracle mad; they had no time to see the pattern, to follow the twists of the loom.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

REDEMPTION

T
HEY WERE AWAKENED
by Sarai, screaming for them from the yard.

“Darian’s gone, and he took the pig.” Her face was grey and marked with shock, her eyes, swollen and red. “And he peed on the ground right in front of me before he left. Right in front of me. There. By the door.” As Clare looked, Bear trotted over to the damp spot, raised his leg and regained his territory.

Clare had failed; she had accepted Darian even though, in retrospect, there had been something off about him. His smile had been a little too wide. Yet there she had been, fearing for his safety and missing the danger he might pose to them all. It had never occurred to her—

“It’s going to be okay,” Jem said to Sarai.

“You shouldn’t steal from people who give you food,” said Sarai. “It’s wrong. It’s rude.”

“We’re going to get that pig,” said Jem, and Clare could hear the anger in his voice. Darian had betrayed them, and the pig was the least of it.