Dead Beautiful

  “How are you so sure? I mean, a long time ago people did know about the Undead, didn’t they? That’s how they created all the burial rituals. And then over time we just forgot what they were for.”

  “Discrimination has always existed, which is exhibited in the fact that they created the rituals in the first place. Romulus killed most of the Undead children in Rome, including his own brother, out of fear.”

  “So … why did you send me to Gottfried? I’m just a Plebeian, right? What does this have to do with me?”

  My grandfather studied me pensively. “Because it is an excellent school. And a safe school. The Undead exist everywhere; at least at Gottfried the professors are aware of their existence and are trained to deal with them. That, and I wished you to know the truth about the world. Aren’t you glad you know?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. I mean, yes. And no.” Of course I wanted to know the truth. The question was, could I accept it?

  That afternoon I went downstairs and knocked on the door to Dustin’s quarters. The door opened suddenly. “Miss Winters,” he said warmly. “You should have rang the service bell instead of coming all the way down here.”

  I shrugged. “It’s no problem. I don’t like using bells anyway.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “I was wondering if there’s a video-rental store around here that’s open?”

  “There is one but twenty minutes away. Would you like me to take you there?”

  “Please.”

  We drove through the back roads of Massachusetts until we reached a dingy strip mall with a liquor store, a convenience store, a barber shop, an ice-cream parlor, and a place that read king’s videos.

  A gawky teenage boy behind the counter eyed us as we came in. I went straight to the horror section in the back.

  Without much discrimination, I started pulling movies from the shelves, all about the Undead. Dawn of the Dead, The Walking Dead, White Zombie, Night of the Living Dead, and about two dozen others. When I was finished, I brought them to the register. Dustin trailed behind me, carrying the rest.

  The boy behind the counter smiled, his teeth crooked and covered with braces. “A zombie freak,” he said, giving me a wide grin. “I love this one,” he said, holding up a movie with a ghoulish creature on the cover. “It’s a classic.”

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  “These are due back in seven days,” he said, ringing us up.

  “That’s fine,” Dustin said from behind me. We took the bags and left.

  Dustin set up the DVD player in the Red Room, and I arbitrarily picked a movie from the pile and put it in. Images of the Undead flashed in front of my eyes—people rising from the grave, cemeteries overrun by staggering corpses, women screaming as they ran to their houses, chased by zombies; men trapped in their cars, swarmed by the Undead. Over each zombie face I mentally superimposed Dante’s, trying to come to terms with what he was.

  I didn’t leave the Red Room for days. I went from one movie to the next, falling in and out of sleep to the blue light of the screen. Dustin left plates of food outside the door, but I barely touched them. A few times a day my grandfather came in to check on me, hovering awkwardly over the couch before giving up. Every so often I would venture down the hall to get a glass of water from the bathroom. Otherwise, I stayed put. The mansion creaked and groaned as the days grew darker. Gusts of wind rattled the windows. I couldn’t eat or sleep. Dante continued to call every night, but I wasn’t ready to talk to him. “Tell him I’m busy,” I told Dustin when he appeared at the door holding a silver platter with a call note. I couldn’t talk to him. Why hadn’t he told me? And what was I going to say to him? Hi, Dante, I know you’re the walking dead and that you have a secret desire to kill me. How was your day?

  Nighttime was the hardest. I called Annie, but I couldn’t tell her about Dante because, where would I begin? So I told her about the mansion and about Eleanor, and she told me about my old friends, who seemed more and more alien to me now. With my parents gone, friends far away, and Dante Undead, I felt so lonely that sometimes I thought I couldn’t bear it. I felt betrayed and used and alone—completely and utterly alone. Now that I knew what Dante was, I couldn’t fathom how I hadn’t seen it before. I wanted to believe that Dante was the kind of boy I’d always dreamed of, the kind of boy who was too perfect to actually exist. And he didn’t. Or at least not exactly. Every night I stayed up until the early hours of the morning, curled up on the couch, staring into the darkness until I cried myself into a fitful, haunted sleep.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Dead Forest

  ON THE FIFTH DAY I WOKE UP TO TWO KNOCKS on the door. Wearily, I opened my eyes. In front of me the screen had turned to a scrambled static. Before I could answer, Dustin opened the door, holding a shotgun. I winced at the sudden stream of sunlight. “Miss Winters,” he said. “I was wondering if you might accompany me while I hunt for wild game?”

  Rubbing my eyes, I gazed from the screen to the gun. It was a bizarre sight, though after watching almost forty hours of horror movies, it didn’t seem that weird. I pulled myself off the couch. “Okay.”

  “Renée,” my grandfather said, delighted to see me at breakfast. “How are you feeling?”

  “I could be better.”

  “I hear there’s a boy calling for you,” he said over his newspaper.

  I shrugged, patting down my hair, which at this point felt like a bird’s nest.

  “Tell me about him.”

  “He’s no one.”

  My grandfather gave me a knowing look. “No one indeed. I once heard that from your mother. Two weeks later she had eloped and moved to California, with nothing but your father and the clothes on her back.”

  I stopped chewing. My parents had eloped? They’d never told me that. “Well, I don’t want to talk to him. I’ve already told Dustin.”

  “I see,” he said, frowning. “Might this have something do with the films you’ve been watching, and our chat the other night?”

  I narrowed my eyes. “No.”

  Just in time, Dustin walked into the room, armed with the long-barreled gun, a goose whistle, a bag marked Shells, and two brown paper bags.

  “Whenever you’re ready, Miss Winters.”

  “I’m ready now,” I said, eager to leave the questioning eyes of my grandfather, who was definitely not going to let Dante go unnoticed.

  He clasped his hands over one knee. “What is it today, Dustin?”

  “Wild snow geese, sir.”

  “Excellent. Excellent. Well, have a good time. Try not to shoot any people, now. And if you do, bury them.” He winked at me, but I didn’t appreciate his humor.

  Donning a pair of high rubber boots, a fur-lined parka, and earmuffs, I set out with Dustin to the grounds behind the estate. The sky was a cloudless blue, the branches of the evergreens around us heavy with snow. Dustin showed me how to blow the goose whistle, and we followed the sounds of their response calls until we reached a frozen pond.

  “Be very still,” Dustin said, crouching low while looking through his binoculars at a flock of geese pecking at the snow by the edge of the water. Slowly, he took the duck gun from his shoulder and handed it to me. “Now, all you have to do is aim in their general direction and pull the trigger.”

  I stared at the gun as if it were a foreign object, not realizing that I was supposed to do the shooting. “I...um... I don’t think I can... I mean, I don’t really want to kill anything.”

  “As you wish,” he said, handing me his lunch bag. Putting on his goggles, he squinted along the barrel of the gun and aimed it at the pond. And fired.

  The birds scattered into the air, flying frantically toward the trees above us. Without flinching, Dustin aimed again, this time almost directly up. There was a squawk, followed by a cloud of feathers. Dustin ripped off his goggles and searched the sky.

  “Call!” he shouted.

  I looked up. Suddenly I heard something descend through the
air. My arms moved without me, and before I knew it, the dead goose dropped into my arms, a flurry of blood and down.

  Dustin turned to me, a smile spreading across his face. I screamed and dropped it, shaking the feathers off my hands in a panic.

  “An excellent catch, Miss Winters! Excellent!”

  “Just Renée,” I said, correcting him as I wiped my hands on my jacket. “And nice shot.”

  “Why, thank you,” he said, slinging the bird over his shoulder. “In my time, I was a great skeet proficient.”

  I nodded, having no clue what he was talking about.

  We ate lunch by the pond. Since I didn’t want to shoot anything, we ended up sitting by the water, feeding the remaining geese bits of our sandwiches instead.

  “Thanks for taking me out here,” I said. “It’s a nice change of scenery.”

  “It’s my pleasure. I thought you might need a bit of fresh air after all of those films.”

  I let out a laugh. “Yeah. They were pretty bad.” I threw a piece of bread onto the snow.

  “Miss Winters—”

  “Just Renée,” I interjected.

  “Very well, then... Renée. I feel compelled to tell you that movies often do not depict reality. The people in your life are still the same people you knew before.”

  “Except they’re not people.”

  Dustin gazed out over the lake.

  “This Mr. Berlin. Has he offended you in some way?”

  “He lied to me about who he was. He made me think I was losing my mind and seeing things, when he knew I wasn’t.”

  Dustin frowned and hoisted himself up. “I see. Well, I suppose it’s settled, then. Shall we pack up and head back?”

  I let my eyes wander over the geese still grazing by my feet, realizing that I didn’t want it to be settled. “Yeah, I guess so.” And in the dwindling afternoon light we made our way back to the mansion.

  “Dustin, did you know about...?” I asked him before we went inside.

  “About what?”

  “I know you were listening at breakfast. You were there, in the corner. You must know.”

  “I have been aware of the existence of the Undead since ...since I was your age,” he said, opening the door for me. “And yet I still trust your grandfather with your safety.”

  Wiping my boots on the mat, I stepped inside, peeling off my outerwear piece by piece. Normally, my grandfather worked with talk radio on, but now the house was strangely silent. “Hello?” I called out as Dustin unloaded our gear and brought the goose to the kitchen to be defeathered.

  As I took my hat off, my hair wild with static, I noticed a note on the foyer side table. It was on my grandfather’s stationery.

  R,

  Left on business. Dustin will see you back to school.

  —BW

  January was blustery and bleak. Dustin drove me back to school, where, against his protests, I dragged my suitcase up to my room. The snow moved like sand dunes in the wind, and icicles hung tenuously from the roof, thick and irregular. Everything was white, even the sky, the clouds blurring the horizon into an endless barren landscape.

  Even though the investigation about Eleanor was technically still going on, with no leads, no suspects, and no evidence, it had degenerated into guesswork and speculation. A few students didn’t come back to school because their parents thought it was too dangerous. In response, Gottfried tightened its security by increasing the number of guards both on campus and around the wall, and by enforcing stricter rules for day students entering and exiting the campus.

  Although I had no decent theories, my discovery of the Undead made everything more logical. Gideon and the rest of the Latin club had to be Undead. It fit with their behavior—and their files. And if Benjamin had died of Basium Mortis, that could mean that Cassandra had taken her boyfriend’s soul. But who killed Cassandra? And was the same person behind Eleanor’s disappearance?

  After spending winter break recovering at her mother’s house, Eleanor returned to Gottfried. She burst into the room and was about to give me a hug when she stopped as if she had changed her mind, and pulled away before we touched. “Is everything all right?” I asked, giving her a weird look. It wasn’t like Eleanor to be standoffish.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I just have a cold. I don’t want you to catch it.”

  “We’re living in the same room,” I said with a laugh. “I’ll probably catch it anyway.”

  For a moment we stood in silence, Eleanor looking uncharacteristically humorless. I didn’t know what to say, and small talk had never been my forte. So I just asked her what was on my mind.

  “Eleanor, what happened?”

  She took off her beret.

  “You have to tell me,” I said. “I know that look. You’re hiding something.”

  She sighed and sat on her bed. “Okay, so don’t get mad at me, but this past semester, I was secretly dating...” She closed her eyes and bit her lip, bracing herself for my reaction, “Brett.”

  “What?” I said, too loudly. It was so far from what I was expecting that I couldn’t help but stare, waiting for her to confirm that I had heard correctly. “Brett Steyers? You and Brett Steyers?”

  Eleanor nodded.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I don’t know. I liked the idea of a secret fling. It was so exciting and romantic to think we could get caught. And then when they found me, I didn’t want to tell anyone what really happened because they might suspect him, and it wasn’t his fault.”

  “What do you mean ‘what really happened’?”

  “On Grub Day I went to the library to study. Later, I snuck out to meet Brett, then tried to sneak back into the dorm through the basement. But just after I stepped inside, someone locked the door behind me. I tried to climb into the chimney to get back to our room, but the flue was closed. I heard four loud bangs, like a hammer on metal, and water came rushing in from somewhere in the ceiling. I tried going to the furnace room to find another way out, but the basement was already filling with water. I screamed and screamed, but the water was too loud for anyone to hear me.”

  “How did you get out?”

  She shrugged. “One day I just woke up and the flue was open, so I climbed out.”

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

  “I didn’t want them to know about the chimney. It’s our only way out. And I didn’t want anyone to suspect Brett.”

  “But what if it was Brett?”

  Eleanor shook her head. “It wasn’t. Because I was coming back from meeting him when it happened. He would have had to be in two places at once to have broken the pipes while I was in there. Besides, why would he want to kill me?”

  “So are you guys still...you know?”

  Eleanor sighed. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him yet,” she said, and unzipped her bag.

  Sitting on the bed while she unpacked and told me about her winter vacation, I wanted to believe that nothing had changed, that we were back to the first day of school, before the flood, before Dante, before everything got complicated. But it wasn’t true. She avoided talking about the flood any further, and remembering what it felt like after my parents died, I didn’t ask. Whatever happened in the basement had changed her. It was something about the way she carried herself, the way she now slouched and dragged her feet, the way her smile seemed thinner and crooked. They were subtle differences, barely noticeable to anyone except me. It was as if she had been replaced by a twin, identical, yet essentially different. So instead of talking about what happened, we went to lunch.

  “So how was your break?” she asked as we sat in the dining hall. Groups of students gathered in clusters at the tables around us.

  More than anything, I wanted to tell her about what I had learned at my grandfather’s house. “I was at home and I found this book,” I said, trying to figure out how to best explain everything. Where to begin? Should I start with the Seventh Meditation, or just skip ahead to what the Undead were and how ev
erything in the book described Dante? “So you know how Dante has all of these unexplainable things about him—like his cold skin and the fact that he never...he never...” My voice trailed off as Eleanor’s plate caught my eyes.

  “Renée?” she said to me. “Hello? You were saying something?”

  “Ate anything,” I said blankly. Eleanor’s plate was virtually empty. Putting my cup down, I studied her again. Could it be?

  “You’re not eating anything,” I said quietly as I tried to remember how many days Eleanor had been in the basement. Ten?

  Eleanor looked at her plate. “I sort of lost my appetite since the flood.”

  “And you didn’t wear a coat when we walked over here.”

  Eleanor didn’t notice until I pointed it out to her. “I guess you’re right,” she said, looking at the thin sweater covering her arms with surprise. “I didn’t even realize. Anyway, what were you saying about Dante and something about a book?”

  Should I tell her about it? I wasn’t sure that Eleanor even knew what she was yet, and I definitely wasn’t the right person to tell her. But I also didn’t want to get accidentally killed. “Oh, um, nothing. Nothing.”

  That night she didn’t sleep. She tossed around in bed, tangling herself in the sheets, while I had nightmares of zombies running toward me from every direction, their faces blank and emotionless. Every so often I would wake up in the middle of the night, my pajamas drenched in sweat. I’d kick off the covers and sit up, unable to stop thinking about all the things my grandfather had told me about Gottfried. And then I would stare at Eleanor and wonder if she was feeling the impulse to take my soul.

  Suddenly she stood up and started pacing around the room.

  “Are you feeling okay?” I asked, my voice trembling.

  Startled, she turned to me. “I don’t know. I have to think about it,” she murmured as if she were talking in her sleep, the hem of her nightgown fluttering around her legs in the moonlight.