Life Eternal
Page 2Eleanor Bell
18 rue Châtel
55100 Verdun, France
Below it was a mailing code.
1-11-1-33-7-13-58-1-8-2
I emptied the contents onto my bed. The seal was already broken, but I was so used to my grandfather reading my mail that I didn’t care. My best friend from Gottfried, Eleanor, had been traveling around Europe with her mother all summer, and had been sending me postcards sealed in envelopes for privacy, each from a different town: Ascona, Switzerland; Grasmere, England; Utrecht, Netherlands; Immenstaad, Germany; Frosses, Ireland. Waxy landscapes decorated the mirror over my dresser, a pathetic but welcome stand-in for Eleanor. This one was a picture of a shimmering lake, its blue water speckled with green islands. I flipped it over.
Renée,
Bonjour from Verdun! As in Verdun, France, which is where I am for the next few days. My mother has been dragging me to all of these remote lakes that are apparently famous in Monitoring history. She’s also been really paranoid, like we’re not safe. She’s worried about pickpockets and thieves, but the places we’ve visited are practically off the map and pretty much empty, so I don’t see who could steal our things. It’s weird how obsessed she is. To be honest, I think she’s actually worried about me. She still refuses to acknowledge what I am. It’s like she thinks that by taking me to all of these Monitoring places she can somehow reverse what happened. Anyway, it’s hardly fun without you here. Hope you have an amazing birthday.
Love,
Eleanor D. Bell
Placing the envelope next to the postcard, I picked up a pencil, and, following the mailing code, I began counting. I wrote down the first word of Eleanor’s note, then the eleventh word after that, then the first word after that, then the thirty-third, and so on, until I was left with the following message:
Renée,
I am safe but empty without you.
Love,
D
I lingered on the letter D, feeling an aching hollowness within me. Dante. As I said his name out loud, my insides stirred, as if something within me had just come alive. I hadn’t seen him since he’d kissed me in the field behind the chapel last spring and literally given me back my soul. I should have been alive after that. I should have gone back to the Renée I had been before the kiss, and Dante should have gone back to being Undead. But something wasn’t right. I could barely even recall what happened that day in the field; I must have left him there like he’d asked me to, because the next thing I knew, I was surrounded by professors, who carried me to the nurses’ wing. That was the last time I could remember the smell of flowers or the feel of the sun on my neck. Without Dante, everything was dull and colorless, a world made of cardboard. What did it feel like to drink a glass of cold water on a hot day? To taste the tartness of a summer peach? These days, I could barely recall what it felt like to enjoy even simple pleasures like that.
My only comfort was the memory of Dante, and the hope that once I saw him, I would be able to understand what had happened to me, and what had happened to him. Was he alive? Was he Undead? Or somewhere in between, like me? He had been sending me messages through Eleanor all summer, each brief and devoid of any information other than that he was safe. I knew he didn’t have a choice. He was in hiding; he had to be concise. But where did that leave me? Dante couldn’t return to Gottfried; the professors suspected him of killing the headmistress last spring, and even though he hadn’t, he could never tell them the truth—that he took my soul and gave it back—because it was still murder. If he went back to Gottfried the Monitors would sense him, find him, and bury him. So how would I see him? And what if I never heard from him again?
I read his message one last time, touching the D with the tip of my finger as I imagined his voice seeping in through the window screen with the rain. Placing the postcard next to the others on my bureau, I went to the bathroom and turned on the shower, a little less upset that it was my birthday. While the water was warming up, I glanced in the mirror, my reflection catching me off guard. Dustin was wrong; I didn’t just look older; I looked different, surreal—my eyes darker and deeper, my lips brilliant, my face angular and expressive and somehow sad. Had it happened overnight, or had I just not noticed until now? Steam wafted out of the shower, fogging the glass. Dante, I wrote on the mirror with one finger. I watched as the fog on the surface slowly thickened, until all I could see of my face was his name.
The mansion was unusually quiet as I made my way downstairs for breakfast. The rain pattered against the side of the house. “Hello?” I said, skimming my hands along the banister; but when I reached the dining room, it was empty. The chandelier was lit, but the table was bare. Water trickled down the windows. “Dustin?” I called out. I was wandering into the hall when I heard a muffled noise coming from the kitchen.
Huddled by the pantry were the entire kitchen and maintenance staffs, as well as Dustin, who had a particularly somber look on his face. In front of them sat a tiny television, set up on a stool. On the screen, a reporter dressed in a Windbreaker spoke into the camera.
“This morning, a fisherman found the body of a woman washed up on a small island in Lake Erie. The woman has been identified as Annette LaBarge, a native of Vermont, and a philosophy teacher at Gottfried Academy, a private high school located in Maine. According to a close friend, Annette LaBarge had been missing for over a week.”
I raised a hand to my mouth, accidentally knocking some pots and pans on the wall. The entire staff turned around at the clamor.
Stunned, I looked to Dustin, who was standing by the sink, too appalled to move.
“The victim was discovered on the beach, her mouth stuffed with some sort of white cloth, which authorities believe to be gauze. Although the cause of death is still unclear, initial police reports indicate that her body was severely bruised and scratched, possibly by fingernails. These reports have aroused strong suspicions of foul play.”
I stared at the screen, unable to believe what I was seeing. Behind the reporter was a familiar scene. A rocky beach, the coast guard, a thicket of trees in the background. A red rowboat was tipped on its side near an area blocked off with caution tape.
“It can’t be,” I murmured, but no one in the kitchen seemed to hear me.
“The boat left on the island had been rented from a company just a few miles away. The man who was working there attested that Annette LaBarge was alone when she rented it late last Friday. Authorities still do not know why the woman rowed to the island on her own. No suspects have been identified yet.”
Gauze in her mouth. My parents had died like that, too, their souls sucked out by the Undead they had been tracking. That was the danger with the Undead—some of them took souls at random to get a momentary burst of life. Miss LaBarge was a Monitor, just like my parents. Could she have died in a Monitoring accident? Is that what I had seen in my dream?
The camera panned away to a bumpy shot of the shoreline, where two uniformed men were carrying a heavy stretcher onto a patrol boat. “It can’t be her,” I whispered, my eyes darting across the screen, trying to wrap my mind around what I was seeing. How could I reconcile the body on the stretcher with Miss LaBarge, the woman who loved English breakfast tea and Nietzsche; who was the only voice of reason when nothing else made sense, and the only professor at Gottfried whom I considered a friend?
“There must have been a mistake,” I said, turning to Dustin. “I mean, are they even sure it’s her?” He didn’t answer, so I pressed. “Maybe they identified the wrong person. It doesn’t sound like her. Monitors always work in pairs. Miss LaBarge would never have gone out alone.”
“It’s possible,” he offered, but didn’t look me in the eye.
The camera swept back to the scene on the beach. I shuddered as it lingered for the briefest moment on the zigzag of footprints scrawled in the rocky sand like a message.
We stayed glued to the television, waiting for some kind of explanation, but it repeated the same story before moving on to a commercial break and the daily programs, which were almost offensive in their normality. Had what I dreamed actually happened? Had I somehow foreseen Miss LaBarge’s last moments?
“Turn it off,” I said, but my voice was so small that no one heard me. “Turn it off,” I repeated. “Please.”
When no one moved, I lunged forward and hit the power button. Stunned, the staff stared at me. Dustin reached for my arm, but I pulled away.
I can only remember snippets of what happened after that. Dustin rattling the knob on the library door after I locked myself inside; the feeling of dust on my palms as I pulled out all the philosophy books on dreams and death from my grandfather’s collection and piled them around me; the roughness of the rug as I collapsed on the floor among them, too exhausted to do anything but feel them surrounding me like the scraps of people I had once known.
I stayed there until the hallway went quiet. All I could think about was my dream: the look on my teacher’s face as she turned to me with her flashlight and said, “You,” the water lapping against my face as I swam after her boat, the slick creatures that climbed onto the beach in front of me. If I hadn’t woken up, what would I have done? What would I have seen? “Nothing,” I said out loud. I was a Monitor; I could sense death, but I couldn’t predict it. No one could. “It was just a bad dream.” But still, I wasn’t sure I believed it.