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.
“James,” I whispered.
He opened his eyes. His skin was as pale as ashes, his blue eyes now the black color that the eyes of the newly dead often turn. He wore a white shirt and black pants and the big heavy emblem of the ducal house around his neck on a chain. He could have died an hour ago. His gaze fastened on me where I knelt over him with the drill in my hands.
He smiled.
“I knew you’d come for me, Adele,” he said.
We sat on the steps of the mausoleum and looked out over the town. There were lights down in the streets, and bright illumination in the center of town where they were setting up the stage for tomorrow’s Hanging Day.
“I woke up in the coffin,” he said. “It must have been days ago. I yanked and pulled at the manacles, but all that happened was this.” He showed me his ragged wrists. There were wounds braceleting them, torn but not bloody. The wounds of the dead never heal, but they never bleed, either. I had seared the metal of the manacles with the drill until they’d come apart and fallen away. I was wincing as I did it, terrified I would hurt him even as I knew I couldn’t.
“Your uncle did this,” I said. “He didn’t want you coming back to accuse him.”
“He must have planned this for a long time. Had the coffin made. The manacles put in. Paid the maker to be silent. Hired a man to run me down.” James was looking toward the town. Toward the brightly illuminated gallows. “They’re hanging him tomorrow, aren’t they?”
I nodded. “They’re calling him a drunk driver. Your death was an accident, but he still has to die for it.”
“It wasn’t his fault,” said James distantly. “No one says no to the Duke.” He turned to look at me. “If it weren’t for you, I’d still be in that coffin.”
I looked at him. He was still the same James, his beautiful face hardly changed at all. But something behind his eyes had gone away, something indefinable and strange. I said, “What’s it like?”
“What’s what like?”
“Being dead.”
He reached up and put his palm against my cheek. His hand was cold, so cold, but I leaned into it anyway, fitting the curve of my cheekbone to his palm as I had so many times before. “When I woke up, I could hear everything.” His black eyes reflected the lights of the town like mirrors. “I could hear you. I could hear your heart beating. But I couldn’t sleep in my grave without you.”
“James …” I swallowed. “In the morning they’ll know what happened. That I dug you up. We have to get out of town—run away. Maybe we can go to the city—”
“No one runs away from Lychgate.” He tilted his head to the side, slowly. “Where can we go? In any other town, when they look at me, they’ll see a walking corpse.
They’ll chase us away with pitchforks and torches.”
“Then what can we do?” I looked at him. I wondered when the black had eaten the blue in his eyes. Had it been gradual, or had it happened all at once?
“I want you to come with me,” he said. “To Hanging Day, tomorrow.”
“James—” I was horrified. “Your uncle will be there. If he sees you, he’ll know what I did. That I got you out. I’ll go to jail.”
“No, you won’t.” He sounded completely confident.
“You can’t be sure of that.”
“Adele.” He turned to me. “Do you trust me?”
I hesitated. He was James, still. I had always trusted him. Even if his skin was the papery color of an old book now, and his eyes were black instead of blue, and he smelled of cold stone and fresh dirt. “Yes.”
“I won’t let anything happen to you. Not while I—”
He hesitated. I knew he had been going to say while I’m alive. It was something he’d always said.
“Not while I’m here,” he finished. He reached to take my hands. He wrapped his fingers around mine. His were like twigs carved out of ice.
“After that we can run away?” I said. “Hide somewhere, where they’ll never find us?”
He leaned forward and touched his lips to mine. His were cold and tasted of salt.
“Whatever you want,” he said.
Hanging Day began early, with crowds gathering in the square by nine in the morning. I had brought James some of his old clothes that he’d left at my house—a battered shirt and jeans would be much less likely to stir up notice than his somber funeral gear.
We stood at the outskirts of the crowd, in the shadow of one of the taller buildings. James kept his head down, his hair hiding his face. The return of the Duke’s nephew from the dead would have been an event newsworthy enough to take the attention off Hanging Day, or even bring it to an end completely. He was totally silent, watching the stage, the scaffold, and the lectern where his uncle would stand. When he was alive, I could always read his face, but now I couldn’t imagine what he was thinking.
Slowly the town square filled up with people. Teenagers in laughing groups, parents with their children on their shoulders, young couples carrying picnic baskets. And as I stood there with James, I saw something I had never really noticed before. I had always been close in to the festivities in the center of the square. But now that I stood outside everything, I saw that there were zombies here, clinging to the shadows, folding themselves into the darkness at the edges of the crowd. They stood with their black eyes fixed on the scaffold, their hands hanging empty at their sides.
It would never have crossed my mind that zombies would enjoy a Hanging Day just like everyone else. But of course, we had been trained to ignore the undead.
Not to see them when they were there. They were like trash lying in the gutter; you looked up and away, trying to concentrate on more pleasant things.
A shout went up from the crowd, and I looked to see what they were shouting about. The Duke’s stretch limousine was sliding through the crowd like a shark through shallow water. The people in the crowd began shouting and waving. Behind the limo drove a police wagon with barred windows. I felt James, beside me, grow as stiff as a plank of wood.
The Duke’s car drew up to the stage, and he was helped from the black limousine by his attendants. The crowd was surging; I could see only bits and pieces of what was going on—the policemen opening the back of the wagon, yanking out a terrified-looking man who was handcuffed and gagged. He struggled and kicked as they dragged him up the steps to the scaffold, where the executioner stood, all in black.
The Duke took his place at the lectern. He looked out over the crowd, smiling, as a few feet away the murderer was forced to stand over the square trapdoor cut in the stage’s floor.
“Greetings, good folk of Lychgate,” the Duke said, and a roar went up from the crowd.
James’s hand tightened on mine. Suddenly he was moving, pulling me after him forward through the crowd. I tried to dig my heels in, but his grip was as hard as iron.
“Today we stand as one, united in our desire for justice,” the Duke went on. “A terrible crime has taken place. The murder of my beloved nephew—”
His voice was drowned out by the crowd yelling. They were shouting James’s name. None of them noticed that James was there among them, stepping on their toes and jostling their elbows as he dragged me closer to the stage. He was just some scruffy zombie pushing through the crowd.
“—The punishment for which, as I am sure you know, is death by hanging—”
We were nearly at the stage now. The Duke’s amplified voice was deafening in my ears.
“—and burning, the ashes to be scattered on Corpse Hill—”
There was a police line around the stage, blocking the crowd from getting too close to the steps. As we neared it, an officer threw out his arm as if to stop us.
James came to a halt, still holding my hand, and looked full in the officer’s face.
The policeman lowered his arm slowly, looking astonished. “Your Grace?”
“—And if any among the crowd has an objection, or evidence of this man’s innocence, bring them forth now!”
The Duke’s voice rang out like a bell. He was required to say these words; the crowd could always come forth and speak up for the prisoner; no one ever did.
Except now. James raised his head and in his slow, dead voice, said loudly:
“I speak for the prisoner.”
The Duke looked stunned. “Who was that? Who spoke?”
“It was me, Uncle.” James took a step forward, but the police officer blocked him.
James gave him a stern look. “Don’t you know who I am?”
“Y-yes,” the man stuttered. “But—” You’re dead. I could see he wanted to say it, but he didn’t. Instead he stood aside and let James ascend the lectern. The crowd was screaming, watching James as he made his slow and steady way to the stage.