Chapter 22 Then Don’t
Then Don’t
Sascia and Danny are both fifteen, that strange liminal space between her birthday in April and his in June where he’ll jump a year ahead again.
Their parents and the restaurant staff have come down with a nasty flu.
Athena’s Yard has been closed for the week and the three kids have been shipped off to Sascia’s godmother’s place down the street.
Noná Beth is a single woman in her mid-forties with a lucrative banker salary; her house contains a pristine assortment of minimalist furniture and abstract paintings.
On the days Beth works from home, there is a strict no-noise rule.
Ksenya has taken to long history podcasts; Sascia and Danny have taken to sneaking out.
Beth is getting a pool installed in her backyard.
The earth has been carved open and the piping laid down.
Sascia and Danny like to climb into the hole and poke at the mounds of dark dirt, while gossiping about the kids at school.
One day, Danny kicks a canvas-covered object that rings hollow and metallic.
It’s a manhole of some kind. The builders must have discovered it while digging.
Sascia and Danny glance at each other, retreat into the house, and return with flashlights.
The bottom of the manhole opens up to a concrete tunnel about seven feet wide.
Soon, the metallic chime of their footfalls is replaced by soft susurrations.
Thick Darklichen covers the tunnel floor.
“Ooh,” Danny coos. “It’s so beautiful.”
It is, frankly, stunning. A microcosm of delicate tendrils sprouts from the moist earth, drawing a vivid mosaic of greens and pinks and oranges. The leaves seem to breathe, rising and falling like a single, shared lung.
Danny has always loved plants. Lately, with college applications looming on the horizon, he’s taken an interest in botany. He wants to come back with tweezers and a light-proof box to gather samples—Sascia is elated to oblige.
The next day, they venture a little farther. On the third, they find another manhole that comes out on Beth’s grumpy neighbor Joe’s backyard, behind his shed. By the seventh day, they have a tiny colony of lichen growing in two Nike shoeboxes.
By the end of the month, their parents are healthy again and the two shoeboxes have become a whole abandoned utility closet at the very back of their building’s basement.
The lichen has become a proper garden, blooming with what Danny believes to be Darkirises, Darkhydrangeas, and Darkfoxgloves and crawling with Darkants, Darkcentipedes, and little buzzing Darkbees.
(Sascia likes those best, the insects, their wings and antennae and too many legs, and the symbiotic relationship they develop with the plants they feed on.)
By midsummer, three months later, they discover a nest in the tunnel system.
At first, they can’t understand what they’re seeing.
It looks like a cocoon spun from moonlight itself, attached to the walls of the tunnel by a dozen silken webs.
But when they flash their light on it (turned extra low, to cause no damage), they can see tiny larvae holed into cocoons—pupas, as they’re called at this stage.
They don’t touch the nest, but they come back every day to check on it.
A few weeks later, they visit the manhole behind Joe’s to find it hammered closed. Disinfection in Process, the sign on top reads. Do Not Enter.
Danny starts panting with the same panic Sascia feels galloping through her chest. Disinfection means men with nova-blasters and flamethrowers razing everything in sight.
All those blooms and bushes, all those insects and rodents—gone.
It takes long, agonizing minutes for Sascia to wrench the cover off with a crowbar.
She and Danny run through the tunnels, flickering their flashlights on and off at full lumen.
It’s a trick they’ve learned from other Dark aficionados on the internet.
The quick bursts of nova-light don’t harm the Darkflora and fauna, but scare them enough to force them to retreat back into the Darkworld.
But the cocoon doesn’t react to their warning. The larvae inside are too young, too brainless to realize what the blaring alarm of Sascia’s flashlight means.
“They’re here,” Danny warns.
The furnace of the exterminators’ flamethrowers reflects on the walls at the end of the tunnel. Orange grooves into the concrete. The air distorts with waves of heat.
“We need to get out before they see us,” Danny warns. What they’re doing is not exactly legal.
“I can’t leave them here to die.”
His gaze holds on to hers, like a secret agreement. “Then don’t.”
Sascia takes off her coat, pulls the cocoon into it, and runs.
They hatch in early September.
Now that they’re busy with schoolwork again, Danny and Sascia take turns sneaking down to the basement and caring for their little garden.
On a random Tuesday, Sascia finds the cocoon split open.
Empty gray pupal cases are scattered everywhere.
Tiny bodies try to unfold their delicate, crumpled wings.
Those with expanded wings crawl on the sides of the closet, while others fluff about, trying to fly.
Moths, all of them, the prettiest creatures Sascia has ever seen.