The Garden of Darkness

He liked to debrief the children here. He found that the room overawed them. Of course, they were always even more overawed by him.

The Master considered Charlie. He liked the idea of him, and the news about the children left in the city was useful. Those children would swell his numbers and, once at the mansion, they would soon fit in—and would then pose no outside threat to his authority. There would be useful ones among them—ones carrying those lovely recessive genes. And he could always use more children to tend the farm and clean the fountain and beat the dirt out of the tapestries that hung in some of the rooms. He wondered, since the offer of a cure from SitkaAZ13 hadn’t been enough to bring them, what kind of incentive he could offer to these city children. Perhaps they would simply tire of playing at being adults.

He looked closely at Charlie, who was disheveled and needed a bath.

“Did they try and stop you from coming here?” the Master asked.

“Naw. They don’t care none what a kid do. I could even have left more early and come with the ones what passed through. The girl what had the dog. And that boy what scairt me. But I thought they wasn’t right for me. Thought they’d be here before me, though.”

“Things happen,” said the Master, wondering what might have happened.

“Things does. And them two made things happen.”

“It’s too bad you couldn’t all come.” The Master’s thoughts were half with Charlie and half on the upcoming hunt.

“I almost dint come at all. And I tell you—I dint want to go with that girl and dog. That dog were scary. I nairt seen a dog so big.”

The Master discounted some of what the children told him and sometimes—not often, but sometimes—by so doing he missed crucial bits of information—bits of information that could have changed everything.

This was one of those times. He simply didn’t think much more about the boy and the girl and the dog. If they were coming to him, he would watch for them. That’s all. After all, a girl. One never knew. He might need to find out a little more about her.

But had he drawn Charlie out on the subject, the entire trajectory of events might have been changed. He would have moved more quickly. And if he hadn’t managed to get the girl to come with him alone, he would have been at the mansion when she arrived with the others.

“I’m glad you decided to join us,” the Master said to Charlie. He decided that Charlie would, after all, be an appropriate participant in the hunt and sent him to the kitchen to get something to eat. Charlie may have had shallow brown eyes, but he had his uses too.





DOUG, CHARLIE AND Dante were the children who finally set out with the Master to hunt the Cured.

The going was hard at first. The Cured retreated in front of them, and soon they found themselves stumbling through the razor-sharp head-high grasses at the edge of a marsh. The Master could see the deserted nests of red-winged blackbirds, and he thought to himself that the marsh would be teeming with life come the spring.

As a child, he had once killed some songbirds and nailed them to the garage door. His ferocious blue-eyed Mama had hit him, and he had never done it again. Now he found he looked forward to seeing the black and red birds building their nests, keeping their tasty little eggs warm.

His mother had been wrong. There was nothing the matter with him.

They found the first Cured in the sparse trees, and he went down without a fight. One minute he was alive, the next, the Master had killed him. The Master itched to open his bag and take out his supplies and take off the creature’s head.

But not, he finally thought, in front of the children.

They went deeper into the marsh. It was Dante who brought the second Cured to bay. By the time the Master caught up to them, this Cured had his back to a tree, and Dante faced it with his long knife pointed at the creature’s throat. Doug and Charlie were nowhere to be seen, but the Master could hear sounds in the underbrush further on.

“Go ahead,” said the Master.

Dante breathed heavily. The Cured was cringing, pale as a corpse; mucus came from its mouth and trailed into the scraggle of hair on its face. It was pathetic. The Master saw Dante hesitate. He started to lower the knife, and then he looked the Master full in the face.

“What if it has a soul?” he asked.

The Master didn’t have time to answer because, at that moment, Doug and Charlie arrived. In a moment, the Cured was on the ground holding its hands in front of its face—but what Charlie lacked in grammar, he certainly made up for in enthusiasm. Doug and Dante did nothing; the coup de grace belonged to Charlie. The Cured died fast. But the Master was worried.

A soul?