In this episode we discussed The Garden of Darkness by Gillian Murray Kendall from 2014.

If you want to follow us on twitter we are @stillscaredpod, and our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com. Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her work at makiyamazaki.com. Outro music is by Joe Kelly, and their band Etao Shin are at etaoshin.co.uk Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find her work at behance.net/lettydraws

Transcript

Ren: Welcome to Still Scared: Talking Children’s Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children’s books, films and TV. I’m Ren Wednesday, my co-host is Adam Whybray and this time we’re chatting about The Garden of Darkness by Gillian Murray Kendall from 2014.

Ren: Good evening, Adam! Welcome to our podcast about The Garden of Darkness by Gillian Murray Kendall, which is our first outing into post-apocalyptic fiction on this podcast. With the exception of The Crysallids but that’s more post-post-apocalypse. This is immediately post-apocalypse, nearly everyone’s dead, small band of survivors, that sort of thing.

Adam: So survivalist fiction, I’d almost call it?

Ren: It’s like The Walking Dead with kids!

Adam: I think that’s pretty dead-on actually!

Ren: It’s like The Road, without the product placement.

Adam: What was the product placement again?

Ren: A refreshing can of Coca-Cola.

Adam: Ah, of course. Well you can imagine that if anything were to survive the apocalypse it would be a sturdy can of Coca-Cola.

So how did you come across this book?

Ren: There’s not much of a story to it —

Adam: Invent some details!

Ren: Uh, I was on a long deserted dusty road, backpack on my back, flask of water nearly empty, the crows were circling over head, I saw what looked like a patch of grass, I thought maybe I could suck some dew from the leaves. But when I looked down it was a paperback book instead, and it was this book! And that’s how I found it.

Adam: Oh great! And presumably you made it back to civilisation.

Ren: I did, yeah.

Adam: All’s well that ends well!

Ren: Yup.

Adam: It’s not a terribly old book, right?

Ren: No, it came out in 2014, and it’s not very well-known either. I think it’s quite a small press.

Adam: Which is surprising perhaps, given the popularity of post-apocalyptic films and video games over the last decade? You referred to The Road earlier, and also think of the Fallout games. And also, I guess the similarity of series like The Hunger Games or The Maze Runner to the post-apocalyptic genre. Which are survivalist, and have elements of the post-apocalyptic.

Ren: Yeah. It definitely feels quite timely that there would be a Young Adult — well, I’m sure there’s a few Young Adult survivalist post-apocalyptic novels.

Adam: I guess especially with the increased youth concern around climate change. I’ve been a bit involved with Extinction Rebellion in the past year, but certainly you see with the school strikes on Fridays that the real push towards climate change activism is coming from the young.

Ren: Not that this directly deals with climate change.

Adam: No, post-apocalyptic novels don’t, and I don’t know if that’s a hang-up of the nuclear age or not wanting to think too much about the impending horrors of climate change.

Ren: So what the threat is in this book is a disease called Sitka AZ-13 but known as ‘Pest’.

Adam: Which I think somewhat undersells it — Oh, its just a pest. Call pest control in, it’s fine.

Ren: It kills all adults, and most children, but a few children have delayed-onset Pest, which means they have a few years of reprieve before succumbing to the full disease in their late teens.

Adam: Across the first few chapters I thought that bam, as soon as a kid hits 18 they’re an adult and they get pest, or the symptoms kick in.

And I think that’s sort of how it’s written early on, that there is this hard line in the sand but actually later we discover there are 16 and 17 year-olds who find that the disease sets in fully before they turn 18, and indeed some kids who turn 18, become legal adults and still survive for a year or two afterwards.

And I thought that was interesting because it seems to dramatise this split, when a child becomes an adult, is somewhere out there in the material world. It’s an immutable law of nature. But if it is something more constructed, what does it mean for a child to become an adult? And particularly in a society where there are no longer laws?

Ren: Our protagonist Clare is 15, and she was a cheerleader in the pre-Pest world. And she watches her father and stepmother die of Pest, and tries to survive on her own in a holiday home outside of the city. An unnamed city, but I’m assuming North American somewhere.

Adam: It’s definitely not in Britain, because there are dogs with rabies. And I always rest secure in the knowledge that British dogs don’t have rabies. Which helps me leave the house in the morning.

Ren: That’s good.

Adam: I will note that there is a friendly companion dog in this book, who is perhaps the most terrifying aspect of it, frankly. I know it’s meant to be a good dog, it’s a loyal dog, but still.

Ren: Maybe a gigantic and easily provoked dog is a good companion in the post-apocalyptic world, but I don’t find him very reassuring.

**Adam: ** Probably more useful than a cat, in terms of scavenging and fending off attackers?

Ren: I mean, I don’t know, have you ever brought a cat to the vets? I’d like to have a gigantic cat, I think that would be quite effective.

Adam: Like a panther?

Ren: Or just a really big housecoat. That would be my ideal post-apocalyptic companion.

Adam: My default is toucan, because I like toucans a lot, but apart from being able to swallow grapes in one go…

Ren: It would keep the morale up, wouldn’t it.

Adam: That is what you’ve got to watch out for, really, is the morale. Because you might find you have enough water, but there are rivers, and what’s the natural source of morale?

Ren: Toucans.

Adam: Toucans, yeah.

Ren: So Clare and her alarmingly big dog go scavenging in the nearby town where they meet 13 year-old Jem who was at the same school as Clare, and two younger girls, Mirri and Sarai, who Jem is looking after.

And the four of them band together and essentially look for a cure for Pest, before Clare gets it.

Adam: Before she’s bested by Pest. Pested.

Ren: And they face hazards as well as finding sufficient food and water and shelter, in the shape of the Cured, who are people who took up a supposed cure for Pest, but which changed their personalities and made them violent and unpredictable.

Adam: They’re kind of zany zombies. Zombies but a bit kookier, I guess?

Ren: They talk.

Adam: To varying degrees of comprehensibility.

Ren: There does seem to be quite a wide spectrum of normal-seemingness among the cured.

Adam: Like there are some who you’ll approach and they’ll just be like ‘Oh fiddle-dee-fo, I’ll eat your face in one go!’ And there’s others who will be like ’Nah, I’m not a pest, I’m just looking out for myself’ and then you’ll find that they’re chewing on your elbow. And it turns out they were doing a very good job at pretending, and you go ‘Ohh, you pest! You darn pests!’

Ren: And the gangs one clue in the search for a cure is a looping radio message on the one radio signal that isn’t static, and it’s looping this message:

(Radio static noise) ‘I am the Master of the Situation, if you are alive you are a child, and when you come of age you will die of Pest. This is what the Pest rash means. But I can cure you. Come to me. North of Herne Wood near Route 1-80; North of Herne Wood near Route 1-80. I am the only adult left’

And probably because all he’s known as is ‘Master’ or ‘Master of the Situation’, self-proclaimed, I pictured him as The Demon Headmaster. The ur-text of this podcast.

Adam: Or John Major.

Ren: Or alternatively John Major, yes. As we started with The Demon Headmaster, everything must return to The Demon Headmaster.

Adam: Everything returns to the source.

Ren: And so the Master is the other… the other part of the novel, and we’re split between the group of children and their journeys and trials, and —

Adam: I noticed you were careful not to call him ‘the other protagonist’

Ren: Yeah, I tried that and then I thought ‘no, that’s too wrong’.

Adam: ‘Other relatable human guy’

Ren: Spoiler: he’s not a relatable human guy.

Adam: As people who call themselves ‘The Master’ so rarely are.

Ren: But we see his perspective as he enacts his plan to collect the surviving children for his own unsavoury desires. Which are pretty unsavoury, let me tell you.

Adam: Yeah, pretty unsavoury.

Ren: So you were saying that you don’t think this is horror?

Adam: I don’t generally see the survivalist or post-apocalyptic genre as horror. If we think about famous post-apocalyptic films, like the Mad Max films we’d consider action, A Boy and his Dog we might call darkly comic misogynist sci-fi?

But not really horror, and I think the reason for that is that the protagonists of survivalists films and stories are usually too equipped and capable. Because if you’re not equipped and capable, you’d probably have died off in the early stages, like I would do.

Ren: I quite firmly believe that I would be miscellaneous corpse littering the road while the capable people made bandages out of elastic bands, or whatever they do.

Adam: Ferns.

Ren: Ferns and elastic bands.

Adam: Bracken.

Ren: They’d kick my corpse aside and be like, ‘oh dear, they didn’t know how to do this. They had a podcast, bet that’s all they knew how to do’. Anyway.

Adam: But I think maybe, not so much The Box of Delights, but most of the children’s texts we’ve looked at so far, the protagonists while plucky, are often beset by anxiety and worry. I just don’t think the kids in this struggle enough, really. And maybe that makes me an awful sadist, but generally things go well for them, and when things seem to go wrong it usually picks up pretty fast.

I guess it’s also because the survivalist genre necessitates mission-based plotting. So yes, there’s the encroachment of chaos, being the pest, or whatever nasty apocalyptic deus ex machina you need, but generally the characters are very focussed on how you’re going to solve this situation, and what they’re going to do about it.

They have strategies and action plans in place, and sometimes they’ll be hiccups along the road, but they generally know where they’re going and what they’re aiming for.

Whereas for me, I think in horror, the chaos needs to seep into the psychology of the characters more, and there needs to be a sense of things spiralling out of control.

Whereas I guess with a post-apocalyptic text the spiralling out of control has already happened, that’s been and gone.

Like I remember watching Dawn of the Dead with my old housemate, Stu, which I was quite fond of as a teenager, and he said it was good but it’s not a horror film. And at the time I was confused, and was like ‘well, there’s zombies’, but he said it’s more of an action film, because the characters are always talking about how they’re getting from a-b, from this holdout to this gun cache, and what they’re going to do when they’re there. And it tends to be very much based around their actions and what they’re going to do, rather than the psychology so much.

So that’s my case, for it not being horror.

Ren: I mean, yeah, these are remarkably capable children. They know how to do basic medical things, and dig toilets, make weapons.

Adam: All the things that our parents generation, or maybe the generation before them did. But we don’t really know how to do those things.

Ren: You do feel like they will probably be okay.

Adam: There is peril, but you feel like they’re going to deal with it.

Ren: That is a good case, but on the other hand, it does hit a lot of horror tropes over the course of the novel. This is alphabetically:

• Blood-drinking
• Body horror
• Cannibalism
• Child Murder
• Cults
• Disfigurement
• Decaying Corpses*
• Eugenics?
• Feral children
• Mass sucicde
• Pedophilia
• Psychopathy
• Serial Killers

And teenage pregnancy. Maybe other people aren’t as scared of pregnancy as I am. But still. That’s quite a list.

Adam: Yeah, that’s a fair point! I suppose the mis-en-scene of… sorry, I’ve been lecturing all afternoon, is pretty creepy and horror-themed. I guess maybe if you had different characters thrown into this environment I’d feel like it was more of a horror?

Sometimes you do encounter children who have met worse fares, and spoiler warning, not all the kids survive, but the kids who are our protagonists are a pretty hardy bunch.

It also moves into some slightly supernatural areas. And I don’t think you need something to be supernatural to be a horror, slasher films are regarded as horror and they often don’t have a supernatural element, but that said… and this is personal preference and I can see why you wouldn’t include this in a post-apocalyptic genre piece, but I would have wanted a few more supernatural flourishes.

Like, there was a bit where Clare talks about seeing the Pest in its embodied form, and I was very up for seeing that! I wanted a good conversation with the pest. Even in a dream sequence. This might be partly because I’ve been playing the Alpha Pathologic 2, the plague simulator by Russian studio Icepick Lodge. And in that, this Russian steppe-town is beset by the sand plague and you do talk with an embodied form of the sand plague, which looks a bit like a cross between a plague doctor and a carrion crow.

Ren: That’s what I imagined it would look like!

Adam: And I guess I wanted more of that kind of thing, perhaps. I guess also I didn’t fundamentally find it scary, did you?

Ren: I found the character of the Master pretty creepy. He’s a creepy guy. And I thought there was quite a good sense of built-up dread surrounding him. In that we see the various horrible things he’s up to, but we know that our plucky band of survivors are making their way to him.

Adam: Yes, did you want to read — you mentioned the blood-drinking?

Ren: Yeah, I’ll just explain a little more about the Master. We’re very thoroughly in the devious adult authority figures area of children’s horror. For one thing he claims that he’s the only adult left, although it’s up for debate whether he is any more sane than any of the cured.

But by positioning himself in this way, the children are in the book are uniquely at his mercy. Both in the short-term that they are traumatised and hungry and frightened, but also in the long term that he’s promising a cure for pest, that they will die of if they don’t find him.

But this is where we come to my Bold Claim of the Week.

Adam: What you mean? (Echoey sound effect) Claim of the Week!

Ren: The master claims that drinking the blood of blue-eyed children will keep him alive because of the recessive gene.

Hmmm.

It’s unclear how much he himself believes this, but at times he does seem to. But as one one of the characters says ‘the blue-eyed-blood-is-a-cure stuff is nonsense. He just likes killing blue-eyed children’.

Adam: He’s basically coded as being unsavoury in all the various ways that an adult might be unsavoury towards children, I suppose.

Ren: Yes, and it doesn’t explicitly…

Adam: It doesn’t move into sexual abuse, but this is always lingering unpleasantly in the background, I’d say.

Ren: Yes. So I’ll read the extract where he drinks the child’s blood. Ahhh.

Adam: Good for you!

Ren: Because that’s what we like here on this podcast.

Somewhere behind the mansion the Master could hear the chugging of the generator. The oven was at just the right temperature, and Britta put in the cake.

Eliza cut vegetables. A child named Dante was helping her. The Master was watching her handle the knife when it skittered off the potato she was holding and embedded itself deep in her hand.

Eliza made no sound. She pulled the knife out and the blood began to flow freely down her arm in a spiral of red against milk white. “Put cold water on it,” said Britta. She moved quickly, a dishcloth in her hand, but the Master got to Eliza first.

What he felt was not an irresistible urge but the workings of cold calculation. The blood streaming out of Eliza’s hand was enough to keep Pest at bay for six months—maybe more.

The Master was free of SitkaAZ13, oh yes, but as long as the disease was in the world, he needed—what to call it?—boosters. Britta was the only one that the Master trusted with knowledge about the boosters. Boosters meant ingesting some blood from the right little girl.

Boosters were Part One of the process that left him happy and healthy. Part Two was purely recreational. Britta didn’t know about that. He cherished her ignorance. Eliza bled. The Master caught Britta’s eye. He suddenly turned away and pinned Eliza to the wall.

Britta and Doug looked on as he bent down and licked the blood off her arm, moving his tongue right up into the wound. Dante had stopped chopping vegetables, and he looked horrified, but Doug, without saying a word, went and stood against the door so none of the others could come in. Eliza was crying, but she did not scream."

Urghgghhgh. For clarification, we do not like this on our podcast.

Adam: I don’t like the taste of blood anyway. Very iron-y.

Ren: So in that extract he seems to be persuading himself that this is a genuine cure…

Adam: It’s tricky, right. Because obviously his beliefs seem founded on batshit magic race science, basically. Yet the world seemingly is not totally immune to magic, perhaps, in the early modern sense. One thing I found interesting to discover is that the author is a Shakespeare academic.

And there seems to be a sense in the book that the pest has kind of returned civilisation to the early modern period, and that things that made sense or worked for people then, start to work again now.

So one instance of this is dreams. Dreams in the book tend to take the form of prophecy, and there’s actually some discussion with the dialogue that now that pest has happened, dreams mean something again. I thought this was really interesting, the idea that early modern belief systems were perhaps suited to certain kind of hard-knock agrarian survivalism and this belief in them made them true, in a sense.

Shall we give a spoiler warning for what eventually does cure Pest?

It’s leeches! Leeches drain the bad blood and cure the affected kids of pest, and I thought that was really interesting because it reflects an early modern belief that suddenly makes sense, and it works!

I did wonder if there was a certain… my brother, for instance, irritatingly claims that he’s quite glad about climate change and the coming apocalypse because he’s like ‘It’ll be good! Returning to the hard graft and survival where men where men’ I guess.

Which is ridiculous, because he’s a lazy person, my brother! Realistically he doesn’t want to hunt his own food and skin animals, he wants to be playing on his Xbox!

But I find it interesting that there does often seem to be a perverse strain of wish-fulfilment at the heart of post-apocalyptic stories. People really enjoy playing Fallout. And I don’t know if this is a return to a less mediated world, where you have a very direct relationship to your surroundings and the objects you use.

Everything is purposeful, everything is in its right place. You know where you are with a bit of flint in your hand, and some fire and some twigs. Whereas who knows how computer works?

But I do think people tend to assume that they will be the one who survives.

Ren: Well, yeah. I don’t know, it sounds awful. I’d hate to be a post-apocalyptic survivor.

Adam: Same here! And I think this perverse fetishisation of it does really come from a place of privilege, because the fact is that climate change is already affecting the poorest regions of the globe and causing mass-migration.

I’m not saying that’s necessarily in play in the book, but there is a hint of the world returning to a prelapsarian state, basically. Jem has a line of dialogue which I thought was quite nice, where he mentions you see a lot of deer around, and he’s like maybe this is our chance to start over, and this time we’ll actually respect the natural world.

But part of me feels that this kind of narrative is quite dangerous because I think there’s an increasing awareness that the apocalypse isn’t just going to happen overnight. We’re not going to have this moment where everything’s awful, but we can start again. Rather, it’s a very slow process by which lots of different factors slowly get worse, and humans slowly try to adapt.

Ren: If you want a more realistic and consequently horrific take on post-apocalyptic fiction, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, which are devastatingly brutal, although amazing.

Adam: Are they for kids?*

Ren: The protagonist starts as a teenager. But they do try and make a new religious self-sufficient community in the chaos of what’s happened, but it doesn’t go smoothly, let’s say.

Adam: It’s like those Bucky Ball communes in the ‘60s in the deserts of California. They sound great, but there was an Adam Curtis documentary, (and he is pretty libertarian, so I try and take him with a pinch of salt) but the people interviewed suggested that it didn’t go that well, and actually you got lots of power abuses and other unpleasantness, and despite the utopian desires of those involved, it was pretty crappy.

Ren: Yeah, and I think what goes a little unrealistically smoothly in this novel, is how immediately harmoniously the children get along.

Adam: Yeah, because teenagers are awful. Sorry teens, if you’re listening, I’m sure you’re lovely, teenage listeners. But a lot of teens aren’t great, as I’m sure you know.

And these are all thoroughly good kids, basically. And not just good but they’re having to put up with pooing in a ditch, and they’re still generally pretty decent to one another.

And I think this was for me something of an issue, that the horror that I tend to like, and again this is personal taste, there’s always the threat of the protagonist, I don’t want to say succumbing to evil, but maybe recognising certain weaknesses in themselves, or that good and evil aren’t so easily demarcated.

It’s less about evil that it is about chaos, perhaps. Whereas one thing that frustrates me about this book is that when we have a character who seemingly is a human, and not one of the Cured, who does something evil, it’s revealed that they are actually Cured. And thus are other to human. The reason for their evil behaviour is because of the side effects of this ineffective cure.

So I was thinking of the character of Darian —

Ren: — Who they invite into their shelter, thinking he’s just another child like them, but he makes off in the morning with their pig and Mirri, the youngest girl, and who they find later around a campfire with the butchered pig and Mirri tied up. It’s really quite disturbing.

Adam: It’s the part of the book that I find most disturbing. It doesn’t say what his intent is but various bad things are insinuated. He’s positioned as a corrupted child figure, he may have turned 18 so there’s this anxiety about the innocent childhood having fallen away to reveal a corrupted adulthood.

Ren: But then they find the patch behind his neck that reveals he was a Cured all along. Which means we don’t have the thing where, in The Walking Dead, at first the threat are the undead and after a while, the other humans become more dangerous. They work out how to deal with the zombies, but other humans are dangerous to them in ways that are more unpredictable and threatening to them.

Adam: To be fair, that does go back to Night of the Living Dead from the 1960s, so you could say that that is a bit of a cliche, and you could say that the author is deliberately resisting that by not having that ‘ah, it was the humans who were evil all along!’

I think I just wish that the evil hadn’t been quite so clearly demarcated. Sometimes there are people who do throughly evil things, which is not to say that we’re all the same: (guardian columnist voice) ‘we’re all fallible, we’re all as bad as the master really!!’

I don’t believe that, but I did find the kids a little bit too perfect. But again, personal taste. And just because I like my morally conflicted characters, doesn’t meant that every teenage reader necessarily does.

Ren: Do you have a Texture of the Week?

Adam: Do I have any objects to make appropriate Texture of the Week sounds, is the question? I’ll make slurping, moaning, post-apocalyptic sounds.

(Horrible cacophony)

Ren: and Adam: (moaning) Textureee… off… the… week

Adam: I do actually have one, and it’s quite a nice little texture, it’s just one image in the book I really liked. There’s a description of butterflies in a display case, and it’s described as looking like drops of mercury that have fallen onto the butterflies, and obviously the texture of mercury is endlessly fascinating, and that’s a vivid image, I thought.

Ren: I similarly have quite a nice texture. Well, I have a nice one and a nasty one. My nice texture is that at the beginning Clare has a little birdie called Chupi, and it says:

‘She had taken Jane Eyre, and she also took Chupi, who liked to peck at the margins of the book, leaving behind holes that seemed full of meaning’

Adam: That is rather lovely.

Ren: The thing I really like about this book is that there are lots of nice images and turns of phrase.

Adam: That’s true. And sometimes the kids don’t quite talk like kids, perhaps, but I do like some of the little phrases they come up with. There’s a few moments where the kids use slightly the wrong word, or invent a word, and there’s little misunderstandings that are quite charming.

Ren: Do you want to hear my ‘orrible texture?

Adam: I suppose I do.

Ren: Since we haven’t actually talked about any of the body horror surrounding Pest. It’s not very nice, you get blisters that turn into pustules that spread all over the face. We have a description of one of the Cured, which says: ‘the woman’s face looked like someone had put a thumb down and smeared it’.

Adam: It reminded me a bit of the Charles Burns graphic novel Black Hole. Have you read that?

Ren: Yes, we read it together in Borders in York.

Adam: Ah yes, one of the many books we read in Borders before it closed down because people were reading books in Borders rather than buying them. That’s how you fight the capitalist machine! Use your local bookshop as a library.

But yes, I remembered that the disease in Black Hole creates facial mutations. You could argue that this borders onto creating horror out of disfigurement. Somehow I think it manages to skirt that, but I’m not quite sure how? I guess the people never seem dehumanised by these changes, I suppose?

Ren: I’m not sure, I think there is a moment where they come across a Cured whose face is swollen and one of the little girls says ‘Urgh, it’s a thing’. It’s not a massive part of the book, though.

Adam: It’s tricky though, does body horror always risk being ableist? Because it tends to play into anxieties around the body, and maybe these are anxieties that able-bodied people have, and maybe it’s about bodies changing in such a way that it’s deemed undesirable. I don’t know if it’s inherently…

Ren: Not Tetsuo Iron Man.

Adam: Not Tetsuo Iron Man, which is obviously very progressive and joyously queer. And if you’re a kid you probably can’t watch Tetsuo Iron Man, but if you’re not and you haven’t, you should. It’s frickin’ glorious!

Ren: Do you have anything else to add?

Adam: No, I’m aware that I might have sounded a bit down on the book overall, but that’s just because it’s not quite my thing. It certainly has stretches of effective and evocative writing, and I kept turning the pages, so I was interested in how it turned out, I think I’m just not very keen on the post-apocalyptic genre.

Or I prefer it in the medium of video games. I want to be the one trying not very well to survive, and collecting resources. But I think if you’re into that genre and it’s something you enjoy, then I recommend it.

How about you?

Ren: I did enjoy it, I think this is actually the second time I’ve read it. And I think on a re-read I was reading more carefully, so I noticed a few things I went ‘hmm’ about. But I think it’s really well-written and interesting. I like the writing a lot, and the details and the images she comes up with.

Adam: It certainly has a very memorable villain in the figure of the Master. Who’s very unambiguously evil.

Ren: We sort of touched on the eugenics aspect but didn’t really discuss that.

Adam: To be fair, I think the book somewhat sketches over it. It’s certainly referred to. In a sense the Master is kind of in the archetype of evil Nazi scientist.

Ren: It’s not explicitly referred to, but it refers to him wanting to find blue-eyed children and… mate them? Sorry, that sounds horrible. Breed them? And make more blue-eyed children. Which is a fairly unambiguously Nazi thing to do. But it’s not developed very far.

Adam: Which I don’t think it could be, really, this is a Young Adult book. So understandably, it circles those issues.

I’m going to try to think of a sign-off.

Adam: Sleep well, creepy kids, neither Pest nor Master be! That’s a kind of early modern old English.

Ren: Bye!

Adam: Bye!

• The alphabet is hard.
• Definitely not!!