The Garden of Darkness

“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.





AS 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.





DARIAN 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