The Garden of Darkness

“Are you doubting me?”


Britta hung her head.

“No, sir.”

“It’s all right,” he said after a moment. “There is enough for us. But I think that soon there’ll be more. More children.”

That was the day that they found the farm. It stank of dead animals—they saw the carcasses of sheep and the bodies of two horses, now bloated and flyblown. But there were still chickens and ducks foraging in the farmyard, and it was Britta who spotted some sheep and a cow in a far meadow.

“They made it through,” she said.

“We can get the chickens and ducks to settle in closer to home,” he said. He looked at the stalls where the horses lay. “We need to get all the live animals away from this open graveyard. There’s potential contagion here.”

“Can’t we bury the dead ones?” Britta asked.

“No.”

“My parents didn’t get buried.” Britta seemed to wait for him to say something, but he was silent. “They’re still in my house in Clarion. When they died, there was no one to call. I don’t suppose—”

“No.” He turned his back to her. Thinking ahead was the only way to survive. He supposed it must be hard for her to think of her parents rotting away, but they would as soon rot underground. As for the psychological trauma unburied parents might elicit, well, there weren’t any more psychiatrists in the world. Britta would just have to get over it.

When they returned to the mansion, she somehow slipped away from him. The light was fading, and he was listening for the sound of the Cured when he realized that she was gone. He knew she wouldn’t have left the grounds, but he was angry. Solitude was, in the world he was going to build, a luxury for the very few.

He found her in the grounds sitting on the edge of an old fountain. In the center of the basin, a naiad with a fish woven around her stood frozen, pouty lips open where the jet of water was meant to emerge.

“You shouldn’t go out alone,” he said. He was careful to sound calm. Reasonable.

“Let’s go back to the house,” she said quickly, and he tried to let it go.

But the anger remained. It needed an outlet.

That night he went hunting for the Cured that had followed her. He took the baseball bat and a gym bag. Sometimes rhymes got stuck in his head as he went on the hunt, and now he muttered to himself as he walked:

He left it dead, and with its head, he went galumphing back.

The soft hooting sound was much closer now, and he listened carefully to gauge the direction it was coming from as he ducked under the trees; twigs and leaves crackled under his feet as he went, and, shortly, the hooting stopped.

It went against instinct, but once he had gained a clearing he called out to the Cured.

“I’m waiting for you. Maybe I can help you.” He put down the bat, hiding it in the long grass. “I mean you no harm.” He had no way of knowing if his words would mean anything to the Cured, but he had seen cases in which some higher brain function remained. All of the Cured were, of course, insane. An unfortunate side-effect of the treatment. And the Cure had had so much potential.

He heard the soft sounds again, very near this time.

And then the sounds changed. The gentle hooting was gone.

He was almost taken by surprise when the Cured entered the clearing.

“Help,” it said. Its hair was matted, and its face was disfigured by the thick scars and lesions of Pest. This one must have been in the intermediate stages when the Cure was administered.

“You don’t need to live like this,” the Master said.

“I need to eat,” it said. “I hate everything.” Then it took a breath and made the strange hooting noise again.

“I can take the hate away,” the Master said. The Cured moved closer.

And the Master picked up the bat and started swinging.





THE MOON WAS high when he got back to the mansion.

He left it dead

He wiped the bat clean on the grass. He had already cleaned the hunting knife before sheathing it—scalpels, in his early experiments, had proved too small to be useful.

And with its head

He buried the full gym bag and then patted down the disturbed ground.

He went galumphing back.

Once in the house, he washed his hands and arms and face and cleaned under his fingernails. Then he went up to Britta’s room.

She slept. Sound. Safe.





HE AND BRITTA worked hard the next day so that the mansion would be inviting when the other children came. They then spent the evening in his collection room in the basement. He thought that Britta looked a little like the girl wearing a pinafore standing in the background of the Sargent painting. Britta sat, looking tiny, in an overlarge armchair opposite him. She looked very alone.

“Britta?”

“Yes?”

“We’re going to build a new world here. You’ll lead it for me. You’ll help me teach the other children, when they come.”

“You’re Master,” she whispered, giving him, finally, the name.

He smiled at Britta, as if they now shared a secret.