The Garden of Darkness

Gurneys spilled out of the emergency room and into the parking lot, and figures in surgical scrubs moved among them. Enormous lights painted the night blue-white. Even at that distance, Clare could see the faces of the patients. And she heard a sound like the gentle lowing of cattle. It took her a moment to realize that she was hearing the groans of the sick.

By the time Clare and Robin got back to the house, the sky was getting light, and the stars were gone. Only Venus hung low in the pallid grey of morning.

Later that day, Clare and Robin watched from the peephole of the door when they heard Mrs. Hennie crash out of her house, taking down the screen door with her. Mrs. Hennie went into the street, staggered for a while, and lay down. She didn’t move.

“What do we do?” asked Robin.

“Nothing,” said Clare. “There’s nothing we can do. She looks dead.”

Clare wondered if Mrs. Hennie’s son, Chris, were still alive. Maybe he was watching the same scene from inside his house.

“We should see if Chris is all right,” Clare told her stepmother.

Marie was silent, and then she turned away from them.





THE HOUSE IN the rolling countryside was silent now and filled with death. Clare slept in the closet of her room that night. She hung Chupi’s cage from the hanger rack and filled his feeder with seed and checked his water. Then she rolled herself up in her old blue comforter.

She considered her situation.

She really couldn’t bury the bodies. Not only was she too small, but the very idea of leaving her father and Marie open to the ravages of strange voracious underground things made her faintly sick.

She couldn’t move them. So she would have to go somewhere else.

Elementary.





THE DAY THEY decided they would have to leave the city, the army arrived. Clare and Robin watched as soldiers came through the streets in enormous trucks. A few tanks rumbled by. All of the soldiers carried guns.

They left leaflets everywhere. When the street was clear, Robin and Clare ran out and gathered an armful.

The cover of the leaflets showed a woman wearing a surgical mask. From the crinkles around her eyes, it looked as if she were smiling. The text was all about entering quarantine centers and being under martial law and covering your mouth if you sneezed. And watching out for the Cured. That part was in big letters.

Marie took one of the leaflets from them and crumpled it up.

“The army won’t be here long,” she said.

The army wasn’t. By the evening, Pest was among them. Perhaps it had already been among them. There were gunshots in the night. No more leaflets were distributed.





CLARE ATE A can of peas. Then she made piles of all the non-perishable foods in the house. And after that, leaving Chupi as house guardian, she set out for the nearby cabin that belonged to the Loskeys. She had thought of going there before to find help, but she had been afraid of what she might find there. More sick people. More responsibilities. Bodies.

But when she got there, she found that the cabin was boarded up snugly. It appeared that the Loskeys hadn’t even been up there this summer. They were probably back in the city, and they were probably dead.





CLARE AND ROBIN stood by while Clare’s parents tried to find the BBC World Service on the radio—the television stations were all off the air, but Clare’s father had faith in the BBC. He loved the English. Finally, while he was still fiddling with the tuning, Clare and Robin went to bed. They slept late. Clare’s father woke them to say that he had finally found a news channel. The Cured were becoming more vicious. And that’s when Clare heard for the first time that all the adults who got Pest were going to die. All of them.

“You need to prepare yourself,” Clare’s father said. But Clare wasn’t sure what that meant, and she was pretty sure that her father didn’t, either.





CLARE FORCED HER way into the cabin and investigated. There was a bedroom and a kitchen with a well-stocked larder. Outside, there was a tool shed, and in it she found a little wagon with four wheels. It was time to make the move from the family’s summer house to the Loskey’s cabin.

Chupi’s cage was perched on top of the first load, and he flapped against the bars as if protesting against his status as luggage. Clare used the wagon to transport clothes and blankets and matches and food and candles and whatever else came to hand. In her parents’ house, the smell of decomposition seemed to taint all their belongings. And the house was growing dark as the day became more overcast. She almost expected to see the darkness clinging to the clothing and bedding and goods when she brought them out into the air.





CHRIS HENNIE OUTLIVED his parents. He came to the door right before Clare, her father and stepmother left, but there was no question of his coming with them—his face was flushed, and his lips were drooping. Pest.

They wouldn’t let Chris in.

“Do you want to sing?” Chris called out in a strange voice. “Do you want to sing a song with me?”