The Garden of Darkness

THE UPPER FLOORS of the house were light and airy. Clare could smell beeswax and polish and pine. The atmosphere was hushed.

“Let’s keep prowling,” said Jem.

Finally they found a door that was locked. It was low and uninviting and painted an ugly yellow.

“Maybe we shouldn’t do this,” said Dante. He suddenly seemed nervous, less confident, younger.

Jem pushed at the door, but it didn’t give way. Ramah finally spoke up.

“I’m going back to the sewing room,” she said. “It has what I need.”

Ramah returned and picked the lock neatly with a bent pin and a narrow knitting needle. Clare had the curious sensation that they were doing something very much against the will of the place itself. The corridors didn’t seem so airy now; the house seemed to close around them.

Then the door swung open.

“That’s excellent,” said Clare to Ramah. “Any other special skills?”

“Oh, yes.”

Windows lined one side of the room, and the light was so bright that they had to squint. Jem quickly closed the door behind them. From the windows, they could see the Master’s entire domain—from the fountain in the courtyard to a small pond behind the gardens. Beyond that were rolling hills. On the floor of the room, piles of books had apparently spilled over from a small bookcase. Clare leafed through them. Some of the titles were familiar to her: Great Expectations, Lolita, The Screwtape Letters. Then there were textbooks on medicine and psychology. She opened one of the medical texts and found that, at the top of the first page, someone had written ‘SYLVER.’ She showed the others.

“That’s what’s written on the Cure patch,” said Jem to Dante. “What’s it doing here?”

But Dante didn’t know.

At the other end of the room was a wooden angel that looked as if it had stepped out of the fourteenth century. The angel’s face was painted, and the rest was covered with gilt. It stood with wings folded, as if it had been caught at a moment of rest. At the foot of the angel was a small box.

“Maybe we shouldn’t have come in here,” said Dante.

Ramah, with one finger, lifted the lid.

Photographs.

There were hundreds of them, and all of them were of children. Some of the children were in a playground; they were caught forever in a moment on the teeter-totter, frozen going down slides, stopped in the arc of a swing. Ramah examined one carefully.

“It’s a close-up,” she said. “But these children aren’t looking into the camera.”

Jem shuffled through the photographs again, taking a moment to look at each one. Then he put them down.

“What?” asked Clare.

“It’s just that they all have blue eyes,” said Jem. “The photographs focus on their eyes. Sometimes the eyes are all you can see clearly.”

“I don’t like this,” said Ramah.

Clare, still under the influence of the hot shower, wasn’t ready to be suspicious yet.

“They’re just photographs,” she said.

Dante nodded in agreement.

Then Clare turned away and found herself staring into the eyes of the angel. The eyes had been painted a pale blue. They gazed out at the room as if nothing in the world could disturb the angel’s rest, as if everything in the universe had been weighed and measured and dismissed. At the base of the statue was the word ‘SYLVER.’ Clare couldn’t understand the expression on the angel’s face at first, and then she realized that it was all in those eyes: blank, flat, perfectly indifferent. There was no room in those eyes for sentiment or affection or love.

She had found the snake.





CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR





HELL





INITIALLY THERE WERE four tables at dinner, but Doug and Britta found another for Jem, Clare and Ramah. Bear went under the table and lay down. Dante, as soon as he entered the room, came and sat with them. Each of the other tables was headed by an older child. Clare picked up a fork and put it down again when she noticed that nobody had begun eating. Then Britta delivered the observation: “We are Master’s children,” to which all the others replied, “Each of us is his.”

“Creepy,” Ramah whispered.

“But grammatically correct,” said Clare.

“I hope the Master has the cure,” said Jem. “Because this is over the top, and I want to go home.”

They ate pasta and salad. Bear slept at Clare’s feet after refusing the scraps that she tried to give him. He was going to have to go hunting soon. As the meal began to draw to a close, Clare said, “I need to let Bear out.”

“I’ll tell Britta,” said Dante. He returned a moment later. “It’s okay,” he said. “I get to be your escort.”

“Do you check with her about everything?” Jem asked.

“Only when Master’s not here.”

“You don’t look very happy,” said Clare.