Stay With Me in the Dark

The Guard

Though it was gaping and painful, Mother was powerful in healing the great tear across my body. She needed to use a patch for some of it, but I was almost myself again in time. At least in body. It was hard to accept that the child could no longer hear me or see me as I am, but we were still together. I made the best of it and worked to find the cure, as well as I knew how.

From that point on, Pup spent most of her time outside. At first, this alarmed me. Just after dusk when the child was asleep, I would usually risk cracking open her window, so that I might lean down and speak with Pup for a time each night.

"Do not worry for me," she said. Already, her voice was becoming older. She was also growing larger. Fighting evil hardened her quickly. "I was alone in the darkness when the child found me. I was little and tender then. Being here in the darkness, now, is no greater danger - For now, I am not so little and tender. And I am not alone. Nor is the path so dark."

"But Pup...what if they return in the night?" I argued. "You must not be outside of our walls. It would be like being alone again. If they come again, sound the alarm so that I might come out with you."

"No Flop. You are my elder and I will listen to what you say, but you know very well that this cannot be. You are not as swift as you once were. And though your care for me blinds you at times, you are still wiser than I am. What if they come again through the closet, as they have before? What if they find a hole in the earth underneath the floorboards, and squeeze through the cracks? What if they enter another way, of which we have not yet known?

"You remember the sacred trust," she reminded me, "the same as that which you taught to me: When the darkness turns, at whatever the cost, one of us must always be with her. Always. Sick with the blindness or not, she is the shining light in this world of shadows. However the darkness may seem to prevail now and in the days to come, she will one day arise and put it down. I know it. I don't need anyone to teach me this; I can see it in her every day.

"What if they do come tonight, my kin?" she continued, with fire in her eyes. "What if we are both fools and have believed in her for nothing? What if everything that the shade said was true?" Pup heaved and spat at that as if the words themselves were poison. "I would still run at them. I would still sound the alarm, not to bring you out, but to wake Mother and Father and the child herself. 

"Who knows? One night their eyes may be opened on their own accord. And if they are not, if Mother and Father punish me again in their own sickness, if they turn me away so that I never know their love again, I will still fight the evil for what it has done to them. It is the blindness, the plague sent by the evil, which makes them do it. I will always love our family, and I will always hate the darkness. 

"Even if the darkness comes again as they did that night, if the shades rip me apart as they did to Ted, I will die with my teeth at their throats. I am finished with running, Flop. In happiness or sorrow, my end will be here, with the child and with you."

We shed a part of our innocence, Pup and I. But with that resolve, Pup and I became closer by being further apart. We had an understanding that no longer required words. It was in a look, in a passing nod, as I stood guard over the child and as Pup patrolled the world outside.

But we could still see each other. In the day, we and the child would at times go to the meadow for tea. This, one might think, was dangerously close to the thicket where the old gate was, but Pup and I believed that going there in the light of day was not a great risk. The child seemed to be drawn to that place as if part of her - the part which was still seeing - was looking for Ted. 

It allowed us to inspect the place where the gate was, to ensure that it was still closed. The trees had twisted together into a great wooden knot, with ash all around it in a black ring. Little of Ted was found - occasionally we came upon a puff of cotton, tangled in the grass. The grass was stained black as if it had been soaked with the same substance to which the shade had decayed that night.

Tea was not the same without Ted. Because of what had happened in the kitchen, Pup and I also never wrestled again. It was also not the same as it was before the blindness robbed the child of her sight and her hearing. 

But it was at tea that Pup and I could see it: the remnant. She would speak to us, still, when we sat at tea. Sometimes it was only in the motions, as she worked through a dim memory of days when we would speak back to her. But there were other times when she seemed to listen to us. 

In those moments, the child would give us soft whispers. Clues, which helped us search for the cure. The part of her which could still see was in there, somewhere, and that part of her was becoming wiser to the ways of the blindness. Strands of the hope. The hope, which was still alive.