The Garden of Darkness

“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





EVERY DAY JEM 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.”