The Garden of Darkness

But first he had to hang the art.

The Master had discovered a lot of art already in the mansion—even some sculptures—and he happily mounted his own art collection as soon as he moved in. So far it wasn’t much of a collection, because he hadn’t been able to take more than would fit into his van, but he had managed to liberate a large painting by John Singer Sargent when the panic over SitkaAZ13 had reached its peak. There were no guards at the museum, no one to sell him a ticket—and he had simply walked in and wrestled the large dark painting off the wall. He staggered under its weight as he manipulated the piece into his car. The canvas showed a dark interior with four children, one of them sitting on the floor.

He liked looking at them: four little girls. They didn’t try to stare him down; they were alone in the unfurnished space around them—they weren’t even playing with each other. He put the painting up in a comfortable room in the expansive basement of the mansion, and then he stood back and watched the four little girls carefully. There was, frankly, something a little odd about these painted children in their looming room. When he looked closely, he thought that there might be things hiding in the darkness at the edge of the canvas.

He couldn’t rescue them from that darkness, of course. They had made it themselves.

The little girls looked out from the painting.

He wasn’t just going to rely on television or on the radio broadcast; he would search for children as well. He knew there were children, now, still alive and immured in their houses, waiting out SitkaAZ13 while their families died around them. They would be waiting for someone.

Perhaps that’s what Sargent’s children were doing. Waiting.

He had left the radio broadcast on a loop. He didn’t know how much good the television broadcasts had done—he had made them near the end, when most of the population would have been too sick to watch television. The newscasters had let him speak because he was the expert on SitkaAZ13, and he was acutely aware, even as he spoke into the camera, that most of the people in the room were already sick—the woman who read the news, who was waiting for her turn, was flushed and looked feverish. The man behind the camera sat down half way through.

But the light on the camera continued to glow red as he spoke.

And he kept looking at the light and talking to the children.

He knew everything about SitkaAZ13—what laymen called ‘Pest.’ He knew that the children who had survived so far weren’t immune; the virus was simply lurking in their blood; they would grow into the disease. Adolescence had a little surprise for them.

Now, in the mansion, he stared at the children in the Sargent painting.

When the sun went down, he went outside. After climbing over a stone wall and brushing away the undergrowth that separated him from the forest, he went under the trees. The evening walk calmed his mind; he did not fear the Cured.

He was about to turn back when he heard a voice.

“Is anybody there?”

He stood, silent. It wasn’t a Cured; he knew that from the perfect syntax of the sentence as well as by the tone. It was, he thought, a girl child.

“It’s all right,” he said and moved quietly between the trees until he could see her. She was dirty, and her hair was a dark nest of snarls. He had pictured something different when he had first heard her—smooth hair, wide blue eyes. Perhaps she would look different later, when she’d had a chance to clean up. But here was a start.

She began backing away from him.

“I thought you might be another kid,” she said. “You’re not a kid.”

“And I’m not a Cured. I am, though, the master-of-the-situation.” He had used the words so often on the broadcast that they came to him naturally. “You need to come with me. I can take care of you.”

“I’ve been taking care of myself.” But her voice said otherwise, and her cheeks were hollow, as if she hadn’t eaten in a long time. Tear marks streaked the dirt on her face. She looked to be about twelve years old.

“I told you it’s all right,” he said. “I have food. I have water. Soon other children will come.”

She didn’t hesitate for very long.

They went back to the mansion together, and she ate his food. He liked watching her eat. He calculated how long it would take for her blood sugar to go up, and, sure enough, as it did she became more talkative. Her name was Britta and she had watched her whole family die.

He had watched people die—a lot of people—but after a while the deaths had become merely interesting. He hadn’t liked the chaos, though. At the end the hospital had been mobbed, and he had been afraid of his own name.

“Why are you alive?” asked Britta. “Are you immune?”

“I cured myself.”