The Garden of Darkness Read Online Free PDF

had been inside the whole time.
    “Chupi.”
    She went to the tree.
    “Chupi.”
    He behaved as if he couldn’t hear her. He flew to the copse of trees by the driveway. She followed, calling him, until he flew well beyond her. And then she simply stood and called and watched as Chupi flew from tree to tree until finally she stopped calling, and then she could no longer see him, and he was just something more that had moved beyond her horizon. And so the old world was gone.

CHAPTER FIVE
    ON THE PASSENGER PIGEON
     
     
    S OMETIMES C LARE SAT on the porch with a pair of binoculars and scanned the trees for Chupi. She didn’t expect to see him; it was just comforting to look. Clare thought she was learning an essential lesson about life: post-Pest, one’s world just got smaller and smaller. Everything one loved went away.
    At least she had the garden. In the garden where she had seen the stag, there were pumpkins the size of basketballs, monstrous zucchini and magic wands of summer squash. There were cornstalks and cabbages, a yellowing vine of cherry tomatoes and a batch of sprawling cucumbers. Every day she did a little work in the garden, and it was the only time she came close to feeling fine. She wasn’t sick. She wasn’t well. But at least the Pest rash wasn’t spreading.
    Clare was weeding the garden when she first heard the noise. It was a low sound, a snuffling sound, a growling sound. The kind of sound a large animal might make. The absurd thought that it was Pest itself, somehow embodied, took hold of her. She was overcome with terror.
    The thing making the sound was big, that was certain. Very big.
    The sound was coming from the area of the garden where the cabbages were starting to go to seed. She started to relax. The stag , she thought. It’s a deer . Deer liked cabbages.
    That’s when she saw the dog—a dog big as a bear, steel blue, almost black, like the color of the gun her father had kept in his safe. For just a moment, they stared at each other across the wide expanse of green. Clare realized that, given the size of the dog, it made absolutely no difference that it was on the other side of the garden. She would never be able to outrun it.
    It never even occurred to her to placate the animal by saying something like, “Good doggie! Good doggie!” The animal’s face was running with pus or foam, and it looked like it had never had an owner’s care in its life. It didn’t have a collar.
    Clare knew the dog would kill her. She wondered, for a moment, how much it would hurt.
    Clare ran.
    She had once been on a nature hike with her cheerleading friends and a shy naturalist who explained with great seriousness that one should never run from a bear. Clare now strongly suspected the same thing applied to dogs, but it made absolutely no difference, and, besides, she almost made it to the cabin. But Clare made the mistake of slowing enough to turn and look over her shoulder. The dog was as enormous as she had thought and was coming for her with teeth bared.
    Clare kept running. She was almost to the door.
    Then she fell, heavily.
    The dog pulled itself up, as if in surprise. Then it came on. The animal was heavier and bigger than she was—there was no chance that she would be able to overpower it. Clare was just starting to put a hand up to defend herself when it leapt at her. Its breath was rank, as if it had fed on corpses, and she felt teeth closing on her arm.
    She stared up into the dog’s yellow eyes, eyes running with mucus, and at that moment she found herself thinking—strange as it was—about the stag she had seen in the honey light of a morning that now seemed long ago.
    Without thinking, she blew into the dog’s nostrils.
    “Bad dog,” she said.
    One of her arms was trapped under the dog while its teeth were buried in the flesh of the arm that covered her throat. She had blown all the air out of her lungs with those two words, and now she couldn’t breathe in.
    She felt the animal