Zombies vs. Unicorns (37 page)

The door opened and the Duke got out. James’s uncle, who’d married his mother after James’s father had died. He’d known me since I was nine. Been at my sixteenth birthday party. He’d given me a teddy bear—a weird thing to give a sixteen-year-old, like he thought I was still a little girl. He’d smiled at me. He had blue eyes like James, but they were weirdly lifeless, like doll eyes. James said it was because the responsibilities of being Duke tired him out, but I’d never liked him. I looked forward to the time when James turned eighteen and became Duke and we never had to see his uncle again.

Now Duke Grayson looked through me like I wasn’t even there. “Take the boy from her,” he said to the EMTs, who were standing around looking miserable.

“We’ve tried. She won’t let him go,” I heard them murmur.

“Take him,” said the Duke. “Break her arms if you have to.”

He walked back toward his limo without looking at me again.

It was my parents who finally came to get me, to put me in the back of their car and drive me home. My mother sat next to me, murmuring soothing words; my father sat up front, looking shattered. I could see all his dreams of his daughter marrying the next Duke leaking away like James’s blood had leaked into the gutter at the side of the road.

“It was just an accident,” my mother said, stroking my hair. Blue petals clung to her fingers. “Just an accident. At least it was fast, and he didn’t suffer.”

“It wasn’t an accident,” I said coldly. I could tell my mother was upset that I wasn’t crying. “He was murdered. Duke Grayson had him murdered so he’d never turn eighteen.”

My father jerked the wheel so hard that we ran off the road and bumped up over the curb, the wheels grinding. He whirled around in his seat, his face as white as paper. “Never say that again. Do you hear me, Adele? Never say that again, to anyone. If you do …”

He left the sentence hanging in the air, but we all knew what he meant.

Murders don’t happen in Lychgate often. The punishment is always death, and they carry out the hanging or shooting in the town square. Everyone comes to watch. They bring picnic
lunches—egg salad sandwiches in brown paper bags, warm bottles of soda pop, bars of chocolate. They cheer when the Duke gives the order for the execution to begin. After that the priests bring the bodies of the guilty up to Corpse Hill for burning, and the air turns black with smoke, and for a few days people walk around with surgical masks on to keep out the ash and grit. The other towns don’t like it—they can see the smoke at a distance—but they know what happens in Lychgate if you don’t burn the vengeful dead. They’ve heard the stories—doors ripped off their hinges, whole families slaughtered, judges and jury members dragged out into the street by walking corpses whose eyes burn like angry fire.

Murder isn’t the only crime that can get you hung. Stealing from the Duke will do it. Vandalizing ducal property. Or slandering a member of the Duke’s family. All are crimes punishable by death.

The Duke came to my parents’ house the next day. The doctor had come that morning and given me a shot that made me feel as if my head had separated from my body and was floating away somewhere. I couldn’t move from where I was lying on the bed. Everywhere around me were the big silver-framed photographs of me with James that I had been collecting since we had met in first grade. James and I at the playground as children, at the beach when we were older, holding our All Hallows’ Day soul candles as we painted our faces to go out, hand in hand on Hanging Day. James with his sandy hair and his blue eyes and his big grin, looking down at me from everywhere and
all around as my parents sat downstairs with the Duke and his wife, James’s mother, listening to their sad words.

I knew they were stunned by the honor. Even though I had been with James for so long that everyone knew it was inevitable that we would marry—even though the Duke, by law,
had
to marry a commoner—my mother and father were still struck speechless at the idea of actually welcoming Duke Grayson into their home. They just agreed when he told them that I couldn’t come to the funeral. “It’s just for family,” he said, “unfortunately, and the ceremony is elaborate. We’re concerned it will be too much for Adele to handle.”

I heard my father make soothing noises, telling them it would be all right, while I lay on the bed and wished that I could die too.

Not everyone who dies comes back. Sometimes they come back to right a wrong. Sometimes to reveal a secret no one else knows, or to tell family members where a treasure was buried. Sometimes they just can’t bear to be dead. Or, like the girl in the song whose bones were made into a harp, they return to sing a song of the one who killed them. It was always my favorite of the songs the Christmas carolers would sing door-to-door in the winter—especially the part where the bone-harp speaks and accuses the one who murdered her.

There was more to the song too, about how the older sister was sentenced to death, but came crawling back out of her grave because her guilt would not let her rest. She spent her long unlife sitting on the cliffs near her old home, cradling her dead sister’s singing bones. So you see, there are lots of reasons the dead come back. Sometimes they even come back for love.

If you love someone, you’re not supposed to want them to come back. Better a peaceful sleep in the earth than the life of a zombie—not really dead but not really alive, either. You’re supposed to pray for a quiet death for your loved ones, for dark oblivion in the earth. But I couldn’t bring myself to pray for that for James. I wanted him back—no matter what.

The funeral was the next day, and true to the Duke’s word, I wasn’t allowed to attend. Instead I watched from my bedroom window. Even at a distance I could see the mourners like black ants wending their way up Corpse Hill. It was raining and the path was slick with mud. I saw some of them slip and fall as they went up, and I was glad. They deserved it, for being allowed to attend the funeral while I was shut out.

Though the Duke had refused to televise the event, they had set up loudspeakers on every street corner in town, and were blasting the funeral service for everyone to hear. I suppose it’s not every day that the Prince of the town dies. I could see people gathering in damp huddles, their faces upturned as they listened to the voice of the priest booming down the streets.

“‘For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, nor suffer thy Holy One to see corruption. Behold, I show you a mystery; We
shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. But your dead will live; their bodies will rise. You who dwell in the dust, wake up and shout for joy. Your dew is like the dew of the morning; the earth will give birth to her dead.’”

The loudspeaker crackled then, and I heard Duke Grayson telling the priest to lower the coffin. I shut the window, hard, before I could hear the sound of the dirt clods hitting the lid.

James didn’t come back the next day. Or the next. I waited patiently for the shuffle of his feet on the paving stones outside my house. The cold knock of his dead hand on my front door. The graveyard whisper of his voice.

But he didn’t come.

It can take the dead some time to return, I reminded myself. They wake up inside the coffin, disoriented and confused. They don’t remember dying, most of them. They don’t know where they are. In the old days they used to bury people with a rope inside the coffin that was connected to a bell aboveground. When the dead rose, they could ring the bell, and the graveyard keepers would come and dig them up and pour salt into the coffin and rebury them. That was before they started burying the dead in mausoleums, the way they do now, stacked one on top of the other with the most recently dead keeping the others down. I think of them sometimes, one on top of the other, whispering down to each other through the dirt and the bones.

For a week after James died, my parents kept me home from school. They were afraid I wouldn’t be able to handle the whispers and the stares. It had been one thing when I’d been the Prince’s girlfriend, when they’d all known I’d be the Duchess of Lychgate someday. Then I’d had power, power enough to hold the stares back, to wave away prying questions. But now I was nothing. Just another commoner who’d known the Duke once. A commoner who was never going to be anyone special. I heard my father whispering to my mother in the kitchen, so quiet he thought I couldn’t hear him. “We can’t let her go back,” he said. “They’ll tear her apart.”

Finally I convinced my parents to let me leave the house. I wore a hat and dark glasses to keep people from recognizing me, though it didn’t really work. I could feel their eyes on me as I walked down the street. I saw a news van slow down next to me, the antenna on its roof spinning lazily, as if whoever was inside was trying to decide whether it was worth bothering to get out and start talking to me. Eventually it sped away.

Even the zombies seemed to be staring. Normally I barely noticed them as they shuffled silently along the sidewalks, or moaned to themselves as they sat hunched on benches or crouched with their begging bowls by the side of the road. But they seemed unusually alert today, turning their heads to watch me go by like weird, dead sunflowers following the passage of the sun.

But that wasn’t what was making me cringe as I walked,
making me wish I’d never left the house. I kept seeing James everywhere, like a ghost, though I knew ghosts didn’t exist. When I was buying CDs in the music store, I went to the listening stand and put on headphones and heard his voice. When I went to the supermarket, the Muzak on the speakers was James, saying my name. When I passed the window of the electronics store, the flickering images on the televisions inside were images of his face. I heard him in the crackle of the fire, the sputtering static of a dead telephone, the breath of the wind.

As I hurried home, the street corner speakers flared into crackling life, saying that the murderer of the Duke’s nephew had been found, and would be put to the death on the next Hanging Day. I froze for a moment, staring up at Corpse Hill, still in the twilight.

I knew what I had to do.

I got up at midnight that night and put on black. Black pants and a shirt, my hair tied back, black shoes that wouldn’t make a sound as I walked up the path to the cemetery. I stole my father’s power drill, a shovel, and a pair of gardening gloves. The moon was the only light as I walked between the graves, which were clothed with winding sheets of mist. First I went past the graves of the poor, marked only by concrete slabs. Those lanes gave way to the wide, paved roads of the area where the richer families were buried. Here each family had a mausoleum, marked over the door with the family name and with stone cemetery angels kneeling at either side.

The Duke’s mausoleum was by far the biggest. It towered
over the rest in white marble and wrought iron, with the names of all the members of the royal family carved down the sides. There were still visible remnants of the funeral that had been held that week—flower petals strewn all up and down the path leading to the mausoleum’s front door, and glittering grains of salt from the burial ceremony, scattered like mica in the dirt.

I put my hand to the latch of the iron door, and it swung open. Inside, the crypt was silent but not dark: There was an electric light in the ceiling that gave enough light for me to see that there was a small chapel inside, with marble benches, and either wall was lined with vaults, like the inside of a bank’s safe-deposit room. There were marble slabs on the floor too.

I stood by the slab that had James’s name on it and wedged the narrow end of the shovel into the space between the slab and the next stone. I pushed down on it with all my strength, until the slab began to move, with a grating sound so harsh that my ears sang with pain. My shoulders were aching as the slab slowly inched up. I shoved, hard, and it slid to the side, revealing the dark square hole beneath.

In the hole was the coffin. I dropped the shovel and knelt. The coffin was bound in brass, heavy and elegant-looking. I took my father’s power drill and turned it on.

The screws came out of the coffin hinges easily, as if they had never been tightened. Once I had them all out, and had pushed the lid back, I realized why.

I set the power drill down and stared. Tears burned my eyes.

The inside walls of the coffin were made of brass, etched all
over with prayer words meant to seal the bonds of death. The coffin itself was full of salt; James lay amid the salt like a body washed up on a beach, surrounded by sand. There were huge brass circles sunk into the sides of the coffin at his hands and feet. They were connected by thick chains to manacles around James’s wrists and ankles. I imagined him waking in his coffin, struggling against the manacles that held him, choking on the salt in his mouth. I had never seen anything so cruel.