The Garden of Darkness

When she got back to the Loskey’s, Clare left the door of the cage open, so Chupi could fly around the house if he chose.

Two days passed and Clare retrieved her list of things to do from behind some sour-smelling cans in the kitchen. Clare read it and put it back behind the cans.

She opened a jar of brown stuff that smelled nutritious but had lost its label and spread it on a stale cracker. Then Clare had a few spoonfuls of grape jelly from the preserves she found in the root cellar. She washed it down with two Cokes and went outside. The air around the shack was becoming rank, faintly skunky, and it occurred to Clare, as she went back inside, feeling slightly sick, that there were diseases other than Pest.

Her stepmother would have kept the cabin clean; her father would have dug a latrine right away. And it occurred to her that, perhaps, she had been a little spoiled in the life before Pest came.

Things had come easily to her. Clare had been hugely popular in high school—so popular that no one cared that she hung out with an oddball like Robin. They didn’t know that, really, she was an oddball too. She just knew how to play the game, and she played it because it was easier than walking around exposing what was within. She had been on the cheerleading squad; she had known what to wear and how to do her hair. Only Laura Sparks, beautiful and mean, was more popular. Now Clare was alone, and all her charm and her ability to do breathtaking back flips could do nothing to help her. Nor, she thought, could her steady habit of reading. Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year was like a joke in the face of Pest.

Clare found her list again and underlined ‘Dig Latrine,’ but she knew that underlining accomplished nothing. As the evening became chilly, she pulled Michael’s Varsity jacket tightly around her. Chupi seemed restless, and Clare thought that his new life must seem as strange to him as hers was to her.

As the light began to fade, she finally let herself think about Michael.





“WE COULD BIKE over to Michael’s and see if he’s back,” said Clare one evening.

“We could.”

Clare and Robin left the house at three in the morning. And it was like going out into Hell.

Fires burned in the street, and they heard howling and shrieking from somewhere in the city.

By the time they reached Michael’s, clouds covered the moon; a light drizzle had begun, and the bikes gleamed when Clare turned on her flashlight.

Michael’s house was dark. The door was open and hung at an angle. When they went inside, Robin just pointed. The body of Michael’s dog, Hammer, lay on the rug.

They found Michael in his room lying on his back, dead. Michael’s Varsity jacket was on the bed. Mindlessly, Clare picked it up and put it on.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said, blankly. “He and I were best friends.”

“You and I are best friends,” said Robin. “You and Michael were something else.”

Clare said nothing but pulled a sheet off Michael’s bed and covered his body. She wanted to embrace him, but Robin held her back.

“I’m always going to love him,” Clare said.

“Yeah,” said Robin. “But no hugs. He’s decaying. It’s like that story we read in English.”

“‘A Rose for Emily.’”

“Yeah. That.”

And at that moment, in the stinking apartment, with Michael dead in front of her, Clare had one of what Robin called her pretty-good-guesses (because neither of them believed in prescience). She saw herself in a garden, alone under a full moon, and someone was walking towards her.





CLARE THOUGHT OF the people behind boarded up windows, in the alleyways, in beds and on floors, lost to delirium in cars, all still engaged in the process of dying. By the time she had walked back to the cabin, it was dark. She hadn’t seen any Cured, but she locked down the cabin every night anyway.

It occurred to Clare that she could give up trying to make a life of it here: she could move from house to house, fouling them and then leaving when she had exhausted their larders. There was no one to care, no one to tell her to pull herself together.

She really needed to pull herself together.

Abruptly, Clare thought of her friend Mary. She, Robin and Mary had been close before Mary had moved to Canada. Clare wondered if perhaps Mary had lived, too. There was no reason in the world for Clare to think that she was the only one to have delayed-onset Pest. Maybe Mary was out there somewhere trying to get by, trying to survive.

Or maybe Mary had lived through Pest only to kill herself.

What an odd thought to have.





THE NIGHT BEFORE they were all to leave for the country, Robin and Clare saw a lone woman walking the street in a long ball gown. She wore necklaces and bracelets and earrings that jangled and glittered in the moonlight. They watched her until she was gone.