Dead Beautiful

by Yvonne Woon

  Before the founding of Rome, knowledge of the existence of the Undead was not prevalent.

  Romulus and Remus gained followers by displaying their incredible abilities in large public gatherings. People were awed at their inhuman healing powers, their inability to be killed by normal means, and their advanced rhetoric and linguistic skills, and believed the children to be sent from the gods to found their city.

  However, they quarreled over who would be king. Romulus slew Remus by burying him alive. As the first king of Rome, Romulus instituted Latin as the primary language, teaching it not only to children, but to adults of the upper class who were involved in governmental matters.

  Eventually the clergy adopted Latin. Since Latin came so naturally to the Undead, they believed it had to be a language sent from the gods. Meanwhile, Romulus was trying to find his lost soul, and worried that the other Undead in Rome would accidentally take it. He thus instituted burial rituals and funeral pyres to rid the city of the Undead.

  Skimming through the history of Latin through the ages, I skipped ahead to the part on its decline.

  With the spread of Protestantism and the reform of the Catholic Church, Latin slowly died out, replaced by the Romance languages. Many people forgot about the Undead and, consequently, the origins of Latin. Thus, it came as a surprise when an entire language ceased to exist. Of course, one realizes that a language can only become extinct when the people who speak it have been exterminated.

  Romulus and Remus. The first things that came to mind when I heard those names weren’t children, but cats. Siamese cats. The ones roaming about the headmistress’s office. It couldn’t be a coincidence. The rest sounded vaguely familiar from Latin class, but I hadn’t paid enough attention to fully comprehend what Professor Lumbar had meant. Still, Latin wasn’t my concern. Cassandra was Undead. Benjamin’s soul was taken. Then Cassandra was somehow killed again. Buried. And the school’s administration knew about it and was covering it up. Why?

  And then there was Dante. My Dante. Undead Dante. Slowly, everything began to make sense. I went over everything, every subtle turn of phrase, every unexplainable moment—the séance, the paper cut, the way I felt when he touched me.

  He had been on the green the night of the séance because I had accidentally conjured him. He couldn’t go in the tunnel with me. His Latin was perfect, but he told me he hadn’t studied it before coming here. I thought about what Professor Lumbar had written on the board on the first day of class. Latin: The Language of the Dead. “I just woke up one morning and it clicked,” Dante had explained that night in the classroom. By that logic, the rest of the Latin club—Gideon, Vivian, Yago, and Cassandra—must have all been Undead too.

  His skin was always freezing. He didn’t use a blanket and he rarely wore a jacket unless he knew I might need it. He kept his windows open even in the winter and seemed impervious to the weather.

  And he never slept. He rarely came to the dining hall. He wouldn’t kiss me on the lips. And when he touched me, the world blurred, sounds and smells and tastes collided into an unrecognizable dissonance. Maybe that was why I always felt weak when I was around him: because he was somehow draining the sensation from my body into his.

  But if I accepted the fact that my boyfriend was dead, what did that mean? Did these sensations happen to everyone who was around him? Suddenly I felt weak. I crawled into bed, where I stared at the ceiling and thought about death and life and everything in between, until the sun cracked open its eye.

  On Christmas morning, Dustin knocked on my door. “Miss Winters,” he said cheerfully. “Breakfast.”

  I didn’t move. My parents were dead. My boyfriend was dead. My grandfather had a mysterious hidden room that had books about the walking dead—which is what I knew I would feel like if I attempted to stand up.

  “I don’t feel well,” I said meekly, and rolled over.

  “Miss Winters,” Dustin said, knocking again. “Are you quite all right?”

  “No. Please go away.”

  He lingered a few seconds longer before I heard the muffled sounds of his footsteps disappearing down the stairs. Not long after, there was another knock. This time, no one waited for me to reply. My grandfather ducked into the room.

  “Dustin told me you weren’t feeling well,” he said, cautiously stepping close to my bed. He set a glass of orange juice on my bedside table. “I’ve brought you some juice.”

  “Please go away,” I said, my voice trembling.

  There was a long silence. I heard my grandfather bend over and pick up Seventh Meditation, which I had stupidly left on my bedside table.

  He sat on the edge of my bed and placed his hand on the outline of my ankle beneath the blankets. He smelled of cigars and leather. “Death is nothing to be afraid of.”

  “It’s not death I’m afraid of.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “Life,” I said, my voice small. The thought of living without my parents was practically unbearable, and Dante was the only person who gave me something to live for. Now that I knew he was dead, it seemed like there was nothing left.

  “I haven’t been honest with you, Renée. I know this,” he said gently. “But if you’ll get dressed and come downstairs, I’ll explain everything over breakfast.”

  I blinked back tears. He waited a few seconds longer, but I made no effort to respond. Finally he stood up. I heard the door click shut behind him.

  Slowly, I willed myself out of bed and got dressed. I rinsed my face and pulled my hair back into a ponytail. When I glanced at my reflection in the mirror, it was frightening: my eyes swollen, the circles beneath them making my face look hollow.

  “Is it true?” I asked, sitting down at the breakfast table.

  My grandfather looked up from his coffee and newspaper. Outside it was sunny and snowing, the entire world white and happy, as if the day were mocking me. Beneath the Christmas tree were stacks of presents.

  “Is it true that my parents were killed by the Undead?”

  My grandfather shuffled around his newspaper and glanced at Dustin, who left for the kitchen. “Yes.”

  A portrait of Charlemagne standing valiantly over a slaughtered boar hung on the opposite wall. I stared at it in silence as I imagined my parents’ last moments. The gauze and coins, which I still couldn’t make sense of. And then a faceless child, wild and bestial, sucking the life from their bodies. I closed my eyes as the face transformed into Dante’s. Had he killed people? Had he taken innocent lives?

  “Who was it?” I demanded, suddenly angry.

  My grandfather clasped his hands together and shook his head. “I have spent every day since their deaths trying to figure that out. But sadly, I do not have an answer for you. The Undead are hard to track, especially when they perform random acts of violence, which I suspect was the case with your parents.”

  A random act of violence? It couldn’t be. There had to be a better reason than that. “But what about Benjamin Gallow? He’d died under almost exactly the same conditions.”

  “Exactly. They were all killed by Non Mortuus. It isn’t as rare as you think. Why do you think Gottfried exists?”

  “So...so everything in the book is true?”

  “Most of it. The rest is based on myth and assumption.”

  “The Undead,” I said, trying to get used to the idea. “What exactly are they?”

  “Children who died and were not buried.”

  “So they’re like zombies?”

  “The common depiction of the zombie does not do them full justice. They have functioning minds, they have thoughts. The only difference is that they don’t have souls, which leaves them unable to feel sensation. They can see and hear, but they cannot perceive beauty or sadness or wonder associated with the things they see or the sounds they hear.”

  “Are you sure?” Dante definitely felt sensation when he was around me. Hadn’t he told me that in his room the night after Grub Day?

  “Quite positive. It’s one of t
he primary characteristics of the Undead.”

  “Even when they’re around a living person?”

  “Yes, even when they’re around a living person.”

  I hesitated. “So anyone can become Undead?”

  “Only people who die before the age of twenty-one. You, for example, could become Undead if you died and were not buried or cremated or mummified.”

  “And then someone else would have my soul?”

  “Yes. A child born on the same day that you died.”

  “And then I would be soulless for twenty-one more years, before I died again?”

  “If you weren’t buried, yes. Though the myth is that if you somehow found the person with your soul, you could take it back by Basium Mortis, or sucking the soul back into the body. Then you would be human again, and live a natural life span.”

  I imagined Dante taking his soul back from a child, but quickly shook the thought from my head. “Why is it a myth?”

  “Because finding one’s soul is an almost impossible task. Think of the odds—how many people are born and die each day, all over the world. There hasn’t been a single recorded episode of an Undead finding and taking its soul back. It is the great myth of history. That one can cheat death.”

  I couldn’t ignore my grandfather’s use of the word its. “So why do people think it’s possible?”

  “Because it is possible for the Undead to take souls that aren’t theirs. It delays the decaying process, giving them a few more years of ‘life’ before they begin to decline.”

  “And the human who loses his soul dies?”

  My grandfather nodded. “Or, if he isn’t discovered and is under the age of twenty-one, he could also become Undead.”

  “But then couldn’t he just take his soul back from the Undead who took it?”

  “No, because a taken soul will not occupy the Undead who performs Basium Mortis unless it is the original soul of the Undead. Otherwise, it will soon leave the Undead and be reborn anew.”

  Dustin brought out a plate of poached eggs and Canadian bacon.

  “So Gottfried Academy is...is a school for zombies?”

  “The Undead,” my grandfather corrected. “And no, it isn’t. Not exclusively, at least. Though at one point it was.”

  I waited for my grandfather to continue. He cleared his throat. “It was originally founded to educate the Undead about who they were. As you probably know, Bertrand Gottfried was a doctor who built the school as an infirmary for children. What many do not know is that it was an infirmary for dead children.

  “He had learned about the existence of the Undead years before founding the infirmary. His idea was to create a hospital that housed Undead children, so he could study them. He was trying to figure out how the bodies of children differed from adults, for only children can reanimate. The seclusion of Attica Falls was one reason why the location was ideal, as was the altitude and climate. At the age of twenty-one ‘Undead years,’ as some call them, the children begin to rapidly decay. Cool temperatures help prevent that process, much like the effect of a refrigerator. The last reason was the lake. Salt is a preservative; each patient was required to take a bath in the lake every morning.

  “Now, as you may know, soon after the infirmary was founded there was a reported outbreak of the measles and mumps, which killed over a hundred children. Of course, disease wasn’t the real cause of death. Many of Bertrand’s patients were due to expire around the same two-year period. Although Bertrand had devised many ways to help prolong the ‘life’ of the Undead, he had not discovered a way to stop their decay. They all perished. Most of the children didn’t have parents or families, so there were no further inquiries.” My grandfather held out his coffee cup, and Dustin stepped up to the table and spooned sugar into it.

  “When all the children died, Bertrand didn’t know what to do with the bodies. Instead of burying them in plots, he dug a vast underground tomb. Yet these catacombs also served another purpose: if Bertrand encountered an Undead that he wished to put to rest, he could bury them there.

  “Unfortunately, Bertrand died not long after the infirmary opened. He was found in the lake. Of course, it wasn’t a natural death. One of his patients took his soul.

  “After he died, the three founding nurses shut down the infirmary, keeping only the current patients inside. During that time, they went through his office and discovered hundreds of pages of notes and a journal, in which he had documented his findings. His notes have been integral in shaping our understanding of the Undead and how they function. He had also developed plans to turn the infirmary into a school for the Undead. The nurses carried out his wishes and reopened the school as Gottfried Academy. The purpose of the school was to teach the Undead how to live out their ‘lives’ without searching for their soul or taking the souls of others.

  “At first it was only a school for the Undead. The nurses sought to educate them not only in worldly matters, but in matters concerning their situation. Many Undead children were unaware that they were dead. As a result, they suffered from existential crises.”

  “What do you mean existential crises?”

  “Imagine waking up one morning and everything is the same, except different. You don’t like food anymore. You never sleep. You can’t hear or see or smell things the way you used to. You feel a constant emptiness within you.”

  “That’s the way I felt when my parents died,” I said softly.

  My grandfather nodded. “Existential crises happen to everyone. With humans it’s emotional rather than biological. This is the real Gottfried curse—the fate the Undead are faced with—and when they are unaware of what is happening to them, they can be very dangerous. Imagine an Undead girl trying to kiss a boy. She would accidentally take his soul and kill him.”

  Which was why Dante wouldn’t kiss me, I thought.

  “With the medical and technological advances over time, the Undead became rare, as fewer children died and more of those who did were buried. Slowly, the school began to integrate living children into its student body. Gottfried needed money, and accepting normal students, or what we refer to as ‘Plebeians,’ was a secure way to keep the school running.”

  Plebeians. I had seen that word before, in Benjamin Gallow’s file. “But wasn’t it unsafe for them?”

  “At first, yes. There were a slew of ‘accidents,’ all caused by the Undead. The school opened and closed, and was soiled by scandals that were artfully covered up by the faculty as natural disasters or epidemics. They only stopped when a new headmaster took over and revolutionized the school, training faculty in defense and burial rituals, designing more proactive course work, and instituting a stricter code of rules and regulations, which has now become the Gottfried Academy Code of Discipline. All of the rules have practical safety applications. For example, the banning of romantic relationships was designed to prevent accidental Basium Mortis.”

  “But it’s still unsafe.”

  “Although the Undead are rather rare these days, there’s still a chance of encountering the Undead at any school in the country. Plebeians are far better off encountering them at Gottfried, where there are trained professors and rules. Moreover, the only way to truly teach the Undead not to kill is to expose them to the living, so that they learn to value others not only in theory, but through their friendships. An Undead is far less likely to take the life of a friend than a stranger.”

  I stared at the food growing cold on my plate and considered Dante. I still couldn’t wrap my mind around the idea that he was dead.

  “One of the last safety precautions the school took was to dig tunnels that ran through Bertrand Gottfried’s original catacombs. As you recall, the Undead cannot go underground. In the chance of an attack, professors could direct the Plebeians to the tunnels, where they could seek refuge.”

  “So all of the professors know about the … the … Undead?” I still had trouble saying the word, as if speaking it out loud made it more real.

  “Yes.”


  “And the... Pleb—”

  “Plebeians.”

  “Right, the Plebeians know about the Undead?”

  “No. It has long been Gottfried’s policy not to explicitly tell Plebeian students about the existence of the Undead. It was feared that teaching living students about the Undead would create natural segregation and discrimination. The classes at Gottfried address issues that are pertinent to all students, not just the Undead.”

  “But the Undead can tell the difference between the Undead and the living?” I asked, thinking about Cassandra and Benjamin. Had she known that Benjamin was a Plebeian?

  “Of course. They were once living themselves; they can recognize the changes one goes through after reanimating because they experienced them firsthand. They also have special classes, in which they are taught about what they are and what it means for them.”

  Advanced Latin, I thought.

  “But more important, they are drawn to life. That is perhaps their only ‘sensation,’ if you could call it that. So it is a safe assumption that they know the living from the Undead.”

  “And Gottfried is the only organization in the world that knows about the Undead? No one else knows?”

  “There are others. Gottfried is one of three sister schools, each founded by one of the three original nurses who worked with Bertrand. Most of the Undead were listed as disappearances rather than deaths, because the bodies were never found. So when they reanimate and wander home, their loved ones aren’t usually aware that they’re dead. If they are still in contact with their parents, they might inform them; though more often they prefer to keep their condition to themselves.”

  “But why? I mean, why is it such a big secret? Why not tell someone? Like the police. Or the government.”

  My grandfather laughed. “And what would you tell them? Imagine trying to explain the theory of the Undead to someone else. They would think you were insane.”

  He had a point.

  “And even if they believed you, it’s difficult to tell the Undead from those who are alive. Can you imagine the kind of damage the police could do if they started blindly arresting children? If the outside world found out, it would be the start of the biggest witch hunt in history.”