Life Eternal

Dustin, apparently still hovering outside the library, responded through the door. “Renée? Are you all right? Will you let me in?”

I didn’t answer.

“Everything is going to be all right, Renée,” Dustin said, his voice gentle. “It was an accident. A Monitoring accident. She was probably killed by the Undead she was hunting. These things happen sometimes.”

I stared at the light peeking in beneath the door, but didn’t move.

Dustin sighed. “Well, I’m here.”

I was still here too, I thought, but last night I had drifted somewhere else. Was it an accident? In my dream, it didn’t seem like she was hunting anyone. It seemed like I was hunting her.

I didn’t open the door. Instead, I sat against the wall beneath the window, listening to the rain trickle down the side of the house until I fell asleep.

When I woke up, the rain had stopped and the house was quiet. I rubbed my eyes and stood up, unlocking the door and nearly tripping over Dustin, who was sitting on the floor outside, dozing off next to a tray with a teapot, two cups, and a plate of butter cookies.

“Renée,” he said, shaking himself awake. Hoisting himself up, he reached for the tray. “I thought you might need something to warm you up,” he said, and carried it into the library.

He folded his legs into the small space beside me and sat down between the piles of books. There he adjusted his jacket and gave me a sad smile. “This is a cozy spot you’ve made. A nice reading selection,” he said, gesturing to a pile of books by Aristotle. He used them as a table while he poured me a cup of tea, which was now cold. “You know, Annette LaBarge came to the house with your mother every summer when they were at Gottfried together,” he said, gazing out the window at the wet, green lawn. “She was a lovely girl.”

“It feels like everyone around me is dying,” I murmured.

“That’s what happens when you get older.”

“But I’m not old.”

“You’re a Monitor. I used to be one too, you know, and look at me.” Wincing, he adjusted his knees. “Time passes differently with us. Life, death—sometimes it all seems like a dream.”

His words made me shudder. “A dream?”

Dustin nodded.

I wanted to tell him what I had seen in my sleep, and to ask him what it meant. I wanted him to tell me that it wasn’t my fault, that it was a coincidence. But I couldn’t. What if he told my grandfather? That would only add to my problems.

I studied his fleshy hands, the skin covered with age spots. “You were a Monitor?”

“I was.” He leaned over and took two cookies from the plate, offering me one. “Go on.”

I turned away, unable to look at it. “What if I don’t know how to?”

Dustin furrowed his brow. “Don’t know how to what?”

“Just go on.”

“It will happen whether you know how to or not,” he said. “After all, what else can we do?”

Chapter 2

I WOKE UP IN THE LIBRARY, MY FACE PLANTED IN the middle of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, to the sound of a horn honking. After my conversation with Dustin, time had seemed stretched out, as though the forty-eight hours had been one unbearably long moment. I had wandered in and out of the library in a daze, hoping the news of Miss LaBarge’s death had been a nightmare, but it wasn’t. The seventeen-item breakfast that Dustin had prepared for me had sat on the kitchen counter until one of the cooks scraped it into the garbage. Even though the staff was going about their normal work, knowing that Miss LaBarge was dead made the mansion feel drafty and deserted, as if everyone else had died along with her.

Miss LaBarge had an accident while hunting an Undead. That’s what Dustin kept telling me. But the more I thought about it, the less sense it made. Why had she been there alone, when I knew that Monitors always worked in pairs? Or more importantly, why had she been hunting at all? The little I’d gleaned from my mother’s Monitoring books had taught me that all Monitors eventually specialized—burying, researching, judging, teaching, coffin building.…There was an order to tracking and hunting the Undead; we didn’t just go out and bury them. Especially not professors, like Miss LaBarge, who had dedicated their lives to teaching the Undead and Monitors how to coexist. So why would she have traveled across several states to hunt one?

“Why?” I’d begged Dustin, when he couldn’t give me an explanation. As if finding out the answer would somehow erase her mistakes.

Leaning over, I pushed the curtains aside and peered out the window. It was a crisp, blue day, so bright it made me wince. My grandfather’s car was parked at the end of the crescent driveway, the doors open as Dustin struggled to carry in two stacks of papers, a briefcase, and a traveling bag.

I went into the hall just as my grandfather thrust himself into the foyer, his coattails swooping in behind him. His wrinkled face was tanned, like his old leather briefcase.

“Did you hear that Miss LaBarge—” I started to say, but my grandfather waved his hand to quiet me.

“I’m aware of what happened.” He took off his coat and draped it over the pile of things Dustin was balancing in his arms.

“Do they know who—”

“I don’t know, Renée,” he said, his face softening while he studied me. “I’m sorry.” He took off his hat and dropped it on top of his coat. Dustin gave him a perfunctory nod before whisking everything away.

“Where were you?” I persisted, walking behind him.

“I’ll explain later,” he said, without turning around. “There are things I need to attend to now.”

I stood in the doorway of his study while he sifted through the papers on his desk until he found the one he was looking for. Ignoring me, he picked up the phone and dialed a number written on the page.

“Yes, hello. Is this the LaBarge residence?” With one hand he loosened his tie.

“Who is that?” I mouthed.

“Yes, thank you,” my grandfather continued, and, leaning over the desk, he shooed me out into the hall. As his office door closed, I could hear him say, “Jeffrey, hello. This is Brownell Winters speaking. I’m so sorry for your loss….”

With nothing else to do, I slid to the floor and waited. I tried to listen in, but all I could hear were occasional phrases. “I see.” “How odd.” “Yes, I would very much like to see it, if it’s not too much of an imposition.”

His muffled voice faded in and out until the door opened.

“Oh, Renée,” my grandfather said, bumping into me. “You’re still here.”

“Of course I’m still here. What was that about?”

Instead of answering my question, he rolled down his shirtsleeves and fastened them at the wrists with cuff links. “Get dressed,” he said. “We’re going on a trip.”

Vermont was green and rolling. I spent half the drive dozing in and out of sleep, my dreams permeated by dairy farms and grain silos, garage sales and lawn ornaments. The car sagged in the back with my grandfather’s shovels and Monitoring supplies, which made a loud thumping sound every time we drove over a bump. He had brought them along just in case we encountered any Undead; though it seemed pretty unlikely that the Undead who killed Miss LaBarge would come to her childhood home. I had been trying not to think about where we were going, but everything around us reminded me of Miss LaBarge: the yarn stores and bakeries, where I could almost see her in a window, wearing an oversized sweater as she nibbled on a scone.

Her house was off of a pastoral road riddled with potholes. It was a weathered wood cottage burrowed into a hillside, the roof almost completely overgrown with grass. There was one car in the driveway; otherwise, it looked deserted. Two of the front windows were broken.

We pulled up next to the house, in front of a small vegetable garden. “After we give our condolences to her family, I’ll have to spend a few minutes examining her house to search for any information on the Undead she was hunting, per Monitor protocol,” my grandfather said as we made our way up the stone path to the front door. “I’d like for you to join me.”

“Monitor protocol?” I asked. “You do this for every Monitor that’s killed?”

“I don’t, but someone from the High Monitor Court does. I used to be a member, and now that I’m retired I only take cases that are especially close to me. Annette LaBarge was one of your mother’s best friends. It’s the least I can do to honor her memory.”

Climbing roses curled their tendrils around the railing as if trying to pull the house into the ground. Swallowing, I gave my grandfather a brief nod and smoothed out my skirt, feeling unsure about what I was supposed to say or do once we went inside. “Just be yourself,” my grandfather said, as though reading my mind.

Just before he swung the knocker, the door opened, and a stout man wearing a baggy sweater greeted us. “You must be Brownell,” he said with a smile. He had the smooth face of a baby, but had to be at least forty years old.

My grandfather took off his sunglasses.

“I’m Jeffrey,” the man said, holding out his hand first to my grandfather, then to me. “Annette’s mother’s nurse. She was too ill to make the journey, so I’m here in her stead. Please, come in,” he said, and showed us into the front of the cottage. In the living room, a couch was positioned oddly next to a few overturned stools; a bland print of a landscape leaned on the floor in the hallway, as if it had been knocked off the wall; and a pile of broken dishes had been swept into the corner of the kitchen.

“The front of the house was ravaged when the police got here,” Jeffrey said. “The windows were broken, the furniture was all over the place….They think it happened after her death; someone trying to steal her things. Thankfully there wasn’t much here, and whoever it was didn’t touch the back rooms.”

“Where is everyone?” I asked, realizing we were the only ones there. “Her family? Friends?”