The Garden of Darkness (18 page)

“Do you think there’ll be a happy ending?” Mirri asked abruptly, startling Clare out of her reverie.

They all looked at Mirri.

“A happy ending to what?” asked Jem.

“To
us
.”

“I don’t know,” said Clare, still feeling half asleep. “I don’t even know what a happy ending would look like.”

“Maybe this is it,” said Sarai.

“We should finish packing,” said Jem.

“We could just leave right now,” said Clare. “If we had to.”

“In an emergency,” said Mirri, “we could leave
yesterday
.”

Clare looked over at their handiwork. The wagons were full, but they hadn’t loaded the packs, which were propped on the floor with open mouths.

They all took a break, and the break turned into a leisurely afternoon. Clare and Jem, both daunted by the idea of leaving, prepared for dinner. They picked weevils out of the flour so that they could make dumplings and float them in canned chicken broth. Jem began opening a jam jar so that they could each have a spoonful for dessert; he banged it against the floor to loosen the lid.

Clare thought of Michael. She wasn’t sure anymore how he would have adapted to the post-Pest world.

Jem stopped trying to open the jam jar, and he stood up. He was as tall as Clare now. He would be fourteen soon.

“You know,” said Clare thoughtfully, looking him over. “We might have been friends in high school, if I had known you.”

“You? A cheerleader? I don’t think so.”

“Maybe not,” Clare said. She thought for a moment. “My world was pretty small then. Cheerleader by day. Insomniac reader by night.”

“You sleep now.”

“Now it’s safe.”

Jem did not point out the absurdity of this. Instead he said, “You wouldn’t have noticed a ninth grader.”

“Well. You weren’t invisible.”

“You could have fooled me.”

“And now my cheerleader glamour is gone.”

“Naw.”

They smiled at each other.

Sarai and Mirri came into the room with a pot full of markers and settled down to draw horses. Clare watched them closely.

“They take care of each other,” she said to Jem.

“They’re going to have to,” said Jem grimly.

“Not if we get to the Master,” said Clare. “Not if the Master has a cure.”

“Not if that.”

Mirri looked up for a moment from her drawing. “I hope you noticed Sarai,” she said. “I combed out her hair, and I think she’s
beautiful
.”

Sarai’s long hair fell in a sleek waterfall of black down her back.

“You do look beautiful,” said Clare, and, for a moment, all her vague fears about the future vanished. “Really beautiful.”

Time to go. Time to move on.

MASTER

T
HE
M
ASTER GAVE
Eliza both Cinderella Barbie and Luke Skywalker for her birthday. She politely dressed and undressed Barbie a few times, but her main interest clearly lay in the Luke Skywalker figure. Britta and Doug gave her a comforter with dolphins on it. The others gave her various tokens: a bracelet, a packet of Gummi Bears, the Barrel of Monkeys game and a field guide to birds. Britta and Doug were in charge of making the cake, but first they had to prepare dinner. Eliza went to the kitchen with them: she loved them both.

The Master followed. He found he liked following Eliza, watching her discover the hidden recesses of the mansion, being there if anything frightened her, tucking her in, just as he did Britta, almost every night—when he wasn’t away on his searches for other children. His searches would sometimes last for days.

“There’s nothing like lamb stew on a cold night,” he said as he poked around the dinner preparations. It was important to be able to do inanity. And he did inanity well—whenever he spoke, he made sure to appear very normal indeed.

“Did you figure out what killed the lamb?” Britta asked. They had found it dead in the field, its throat torn out.

“A wolf,” he said. “Or a dog.” But no dog had done this.

He had.

It was just one of those irresistible urges.

Somewhere behind the mansion the Master could hear the chugging of the generator. The oven was at just the right temperature, and Britta put in the cake. Eliza cut vegetables. A child named Dante was helping her. The Master was watching her handle the knife when it skittered off the potato she was holding and embedded itself deep in her hand.

Eliza made no sound. She pulled the knife out and the blood began to flow freely down her arm in a spiral of red against milk white.

“Put cold water on it,” said Britta. She moved quickly, a dishcloth in her hand, but the Master got to Eliza first. What he felt was not an irresistible urge but the workings of cold calculation. The blood streaming out of Eliza’s hand was enough to keep Pest at bay for six months—maybe more.

The Master was free of SitkaAZ13, oh yes, but as long as the disease was in the world, he needed—what to call it?—boosters.

Britta was the only one that the Master trusted with knowledge about the boosters. Boosters meant ingesting some blood from the right little girl. Boosters were Part One of the process that left him happy and healthy. Part Two was purely recreational. Britta didn’t know about that. He cherished her ignorance.

Eliza bled.

The Master caught Britta’s eye.

He suddenly turned away and pinned Eliza to the wall. Britta and Doug looked on as he bent down and licked the blood off her arm, moving his tongue right up into the wound.

Dante had stopped chopping vegetables, and he looked horrified, but Doug, without saying a word, went and stood against the door so none of the others could come in. Eliza was crying, but she did not scream.

The Master heard Britta as if from far away.

“You’re lucky, Eliza,” she said bitterly. “You’re lucky. And you, Dante—if you ever say a word about this, I will kill you.”

The Master knew that Dante would listen to Britta; all of the children did.

He released Eliza, expecting her to stay, somehow expecting her to go back to preparing the vegetables, but instead she stared for a moment at Britta, and then she pushed aside Doug and ran out the door. Dante began to follow, but Britta grabbed his arm.

“You won’t tell,” she said. “Ever.”

“I won’t,” said Dante, his face white. “Not ever.” Britta let him go. She turned to the Master. He smiled at her.

“They won’t tell,” Britta said. “Both Eliza and Dante are only ten. Children don’t tell.”

It was as if Britta could read his mind. She herself was only twelve, but she was mature for her age.

The Master then used his authoritative voice. He looked most carefully at Doug as he spoke. “My cure is in the blood,” he said. “And without me, your new world would fall apart. It didn’t hurt her at all.”

“Is that what we do to be cured?” Doug asked.

“No,” said the Master. “You have a different road. There’s nothing children can do to keep SitkaAZ13 at bay. But here you have a life worth living.”

“You could take some of my blood,” said Britta to the Master. He could hear the hope in her voice.

“You don’t have the right recessive genes.” He deployed the scientific terms casually. His children believed in science. Luckily for him, however, they didn’t understand it.

“You could try.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” the Master said. “Go after Eliza, Britta. That’s the best thing you can do for me.”

He walked out of the kitchen and passed through the living room, where children of various ages were sorting through some new supplies. They stopped as he passed.

“Master, Master, Master,” yelled a toddler.

“Leave him be unless he talks to you,” a boy said to the toddler. “He’s probably thinking. That’s private.”

“What are his thinks?” the toddler asked.

“Don’t know.”

“I hope he thinks about me.”

“I bet he can make things happen by thinking,” said one of the children.

The Master turned back to them.

“Thoughts are powerful,” he said.

He went down into the basement and sat in his collection room. Lately the Sargent painting had begun to disturb him, and he had been seeing more shapes in the shadows, but this time what caught his attention was the crisp and dazzling white of the girl’s pinafore as she stood, one foot in front of her, deliberate as a dancer.

This time he saw nothing in the background shadows.

All at once, he felt exhilarated. Maybe the blood from Eliza really had affected him, or maybe the pleasure of the act was healing in itself.

He waited for the house to settle into quietness before he went back upstairs again. As he turned left, into a corridor, he saw Britta and Doug come out of Greg’s room.

Greg was eighteen. He was recovering from a bad case of food poisoning. SitkaAZ13 usually picked off children by seventeen, and the Master was watching Greg closely.

Britta’s face lit up when she saw the Master.

“We were just reading to Greg,” she said.

“
Children of the Corn
,” said Doug. “Greg picked it. It’s scary.”

“I’ll check on him,” said the Master. After Britta and Doug left, however, the Master didn’t bother to open Greg’s door. The Master gave Greg a month. Two at the outside. Then SitkaAZ13 would take him.

So it goes.

As he moved through the hallways, the house fell silent. He unlocked the door to the basement and went down the steps. Sitting under the Sargent painting, he pulled a large scrapbook towards him and started looking through the pages, stopping every now and then to examine a page more closely.

Eliza was ten. She would live for some years—if he let her—before she contracted StikaAZ13.

He flipped through the book.

To create a stable social order, he would have to make sure the children lived for as long as possible before SitkaAZ13 killed them. There needed to be a new generation. And he would live on and watch each generation grow. And every now and then, there would be—a booster.

He flipped through pages of the scrapbook.

A page. Another page.

A lock of blonde hair slipped out of the book and onto the floor. He didn’t notice.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

MEMENTOS

E
VERY DAY
J
EM
had tried to pick up a signal on the radio only to end up listening to static. But finally, early one morning, he found something. Two signals. Jem turned the volume up as far as it would go, and Clare, Mirri and Sarai—who had been sorting through all their belongings—stopped what they were doing and stood still, like startled rabbits.

“I am the master-of-the-situation,” came the voice. “I can offer food, and friends and safety. I-80 at Herne Wood. I am the master-of-the-situation.” The signal faded. Clare took the radio from Jem and moved the tuner from band to band. “I’m going now,” came another voice, a whisper. “Good-bye.” And that was all.

Jem looked stunned. Clare felt as if she were hearing the last words from the old world. That ‘good-bye’ shook her. She was never going to get her world back, not even if they were all cured, not even if she found some variety of happily-ever-after—although that did not seem very likely. Life was short in the new world. There was no time for happiness.

“Those were
last words
,” said Mirri. “Weren’t they, Clare?”

“Yes. They probably were.”

“We leave tomorrow,” Jem said. “We need to move fast. I-80 is pretty far.” And Clare realized that he was looking at her, and that there was darkness in his green eyes.

As Clare and Jem finished filling the backpacks, Clare noticed that Mirri was restless.

“Do you think there’s Heaven?” Mirri asked finally.

“I don’t know,” said Clare, startled.

“I don’t think there’s Heaven. In church they talked about it all the time, but—”

“But what?”

“I don’t know. It’s pretty hard to imagine. And I can imagine a
lot
.”

Mirri started towards the front door, a Pretty Pony dangling from her hand by its mane.

“Where’re you going?” Clare asked.

“The barn.”

“Not alone.”

“Yes alone. Please, Clare. I’m going to look at my mother’s stuff. Before we leave.”

“I’m coming with you,” said Clare. “Sorry, Mirri.”

Jem sighed. “Sarai and I’ll come, too. It beats worrying.”

In the barn they saw a small owl perched on a rafter, moving from foot to foot. Clare thought it looked like it was davening. Then the owl cocked its head and spit out a pellet that hit Jem on the side of the head.

“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.