The Garden of Darkness Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
     
     
    C LARE 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.
     
     
    T HE 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.
    Then the woman’s place was taken by people with lesions on their faces, parading through the streets in a macabre farewell to the world.
    “It’s more than time to go,” Clare’s father said as they watched. Shortly after that, the streets were curiously empty. It was as if, in the face of disease, people had finally retreated into their houses, to hide out until they died.
     
     
    F NALLY C LARE DID dig a latrine, but she did so only to then realize that she was eventually going to run out of food. When she had found the cans and preserves in the root cellar she had thought she could never run out. She had also found gardening tools, packets of seed, bags of dry corn, gallons of water, a bow and some arrows. The bow must have been Mr. Loskey’s; it was too taut for her to pull back.
    It was as if the Loskeys had been preparing for some kind of apocalypse (and when it had come they had missed it). Clare, on the other hand, had survived the initial onslaught of Pest and now she had a choice: scavenge, clean up, shape up and brush her teeth. Or give up on life and just go to bed and die.
    But her death would mean the death of Chupi, too, which didn’t seem fair. She went to change Chupi’s water, and she saw he wasn’t in his cage. He didn’t seem to be in the house, either. She opened the front door, just in case he had somehow flown to the porch as she had left for Sander’s Hill. As she stood in the doorway, he flew out of the living room and over her head. He perched on the tree in front of the cabin. He