Later civilizations found that there were three things the Undead could not withstand without decaying: fire, geometric golden ratios, and the underground. Since then, each society has discovered new ways of preventing the Undead from rising: by fire—funeral pyres and cremation; by golden ratio—coffins and pyramids; and by the underground—burials and catacombs. Each of these rituals was created for one sole purpose—to let our children rest.
Over time and transgression, the rituals became so ingrained in society that people forgot why they were performed. Soon, everyone—including adults—was buried or cremated, and no one remembered that children could rise from the dead.
The words blurred as tears filled my eyes. Raising a trembling hand, I wiped them away with the back of my fist. Images of Dante lying dead in a field flooded my mind as I gazed at the pictures, unable to look away. To illustrate the burial rituals, Descartes had drawn diagrams of each tradition, with steps next to it. One was a six-sided coffin, around which Descartes noted how it had to be made of a hard wood, nailed shut, and buried no less than six feet beneath the earth. This was why Dante didn’t go underground. It wasn’t a childhood trauma, per se, although dying was traumatizing. He didn’t go underground because he couldn’t; otherwise he would die for good.
I skimmed through the next few pages, examining the diagrams and rules of the pyramids, of mummification and embalmment. In the margins were all kinds of notes about the kind of gauze that had to be used, the number of layers the mummy had to be wrapped in, and the design of the maze within the pyramids and their geometric orientation.
They were all familiar to me from History class, as mummies were of particular interest to Professor Bliss, though I had never considered their purpose.
The next drawing was of a body with coins on its eyes, resting on a funeral pyre. The use of coins, Descartes explained, was a discovery of the Greeks, and were given to the dead so they could pay the boatman on the river Styx to take them to Hades. Below it was a picture of a child with cloth stuffed in his mouth. I stared at it, unable to believe what I was seeing. My parents couldn’t have been Undead; they were adults. So why would they have died that way? And what did their deaths have to do with any of this?
V. OF LATIN AND ITS EXTINCTION
Latin is the language the Undead speak. In ancient times, before the founding of the Roman Empire, before people discovered burial rituals, Latin was only spoken by children. It was the one way to tell who was Undead and who was alive.
In Roman mythology, two children were the original founders of Rome. Their names were Romulus and Remus, and they were brothers. While this is a commonly accepted myth among educated society, what most are not aware of is that Romulus and Remus were Undead, having both drowned in the River Tiber before rising again.
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.