Life Eternal
Page 27
But I couldn’t leave. Clementine had sensed him. I could tell by the way her eyes darted toward the edge of the trees, as if she were searching for him. If I left, she might follow and find him. So I stayed, and as soil flung past me, and the hole got wider, deeper, I took a surreptitious survey of the cemetery, and let out a sigh of relief. I couldn’t feel Dante anywhere.
Chapter 8
WINTER CAME TO MONTREAL TWO MONTHS early. Or I should say, two months early to me. By the end of October I had only just gotten ready to take out my autumn coat, when the school started delivering a bundle of wood outside each of our doors in the morning for the potbellied stove. But no matter how close I sat to the fire, I couldn’t get rid of the cold vacancy within me.
So instead I embraced it, and ventured out into the chilly Canadian air until I found my way to the edge of city. There, I wandered along the waterfront, where I could almost feel Dante watching me from the other side of the river. I spent most of my evenings there, pacing around the perimeter of Montreal, waiting for him to come to me.
Abandoned grain silos lined the opposite shore; lonely brown cylinders that rose behind the water. If you stood on a particular spot on the wharf and spoke over the river, your voice would bounce off the silos and echo back. At nightfall, when everyone had left, I approached the edge of the water and leaned on the railing.
It was scratched with graffiti: initials of lovers, etched in hearts. When the wind died down, I spoke.
“Did you lie?” I said, the words wobbly.
When they bounced back, my voice was low and round, repeating itself over and over: lie lie lie lie.
“No,” I said into it again, and imagined it was Dante when it came back: No. No. No. No. No.
After that, I kept going back to the waterfront, speaking to myself through the silos. I was so intent on finding Dante that I barely thought about the riddle on the headstone. And to my surprise, Clementine didn’t remind me, even though I knew she’d been just as disappointed as I’d been after our run-in at the cemetery.
On that night, the girls had dug and dug, but there’d been nothing in the anonymous grave, not even a casket. Clementine had said nothing as we walked back to the dormitory, our face and hands streaked with dirt. She was quieter after that; she never stopped me in the halls or tried to embarrass me in front of her friends. At first I thought we had reached some sort of truce, but then I realized she was waiting, watching me closer than she ever had before, trying to figure out what I knew and who I had been with that night.
At first I didn’t tell Anya what happened, partly because that night confused me, too. That was why I went to the silos—with the hope that I would find Dante. But after a week of nothing, I gave up and told her everything.
“You went to the cemetery without me?” Anya said. We were sitting in Latin class, waiting for everyone else to show up.
“I was in a rush,” I said. “Everything happened quickly.”
She rotated the cuff in her ear. “What do you think it means?”
“What?”
“The riddle, obviously,” she said in disbelief.
“Oh, I don’t know.”
She sat back, staring at me.
“What?” I said. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“You’ve barely eaten anything for days,” she said. “You’re not interested in the riddle even though just a few weeks ago you were dragging me to the hospital with you. What’s going on?”
The door opened and Clementine and her friends walked in, followed by Monsieur Orneaux. I lowered my voice. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I can’t talk about it.”
Anya bit her fingernail. “It’s about a boy,” she said, studying me. “I’ve felt like this too. That’s why I pierce my ears whenever I’m upset. It takes my mind off of things I don’t want to think about.”
“I don’t think I want to do that.”
“Of course you don’t,” she teased, pinching my virgin earlobe as the professor sat at the head of the table and took out his lecture notes. “But maybe figuring out the riddle will distract you from your boy problems?”
“There was nothing buried beneath the headstone,” I whispered as Monsieur Orneaux cleared his throat. “And I already checked the cemetery map—there’s no body of salt water anywhere near there, and if there is a bear on one of the headstones, it could take years to find it. The cemetery is huge.”
“Okay,” Anya whispered. “You don’t have to get testy about it.”
That’s when Clementine raised her hand. Monsieur Orneaux tried to ignore it while he recited Homeric phrases. But after a few minutes had passed, she decided to just speak up.
“Who killed the Nine Sisters?”
That woke everyone up.
Monsieur Orneaux narrowed his eyes, making his face look even more hollow. “I don’t know anything about that. I teach Latin.”
“Then why did Madame Goût say the murder of the sisters was your area of expertise?” Clementine said.
I put down my pencil, appreciating Clementine’s pushiness for the first time.
Monsieur Orneaux’s face darkened as he leaned back in his chair, pressing his fingers together. “Madame Goût. I should have known.” And without saying anything more, he stood up and wrote a word on the blackboard.
Liberum
“The group widely believed to have murdered the Nine Sisters call themselves the Liberum.” He tapped his chalk to the blackboard, just over the letter i. “What do the roots of this word signify?”
Without giving us any time to respond, he underlined the beginning of the word. “Liber means child.” He gazed at us. “As you know, only people under the age of twenty-one can potentially become Undead, which is clearly why the Liberum chose this word.”
“It also means freedom,” I said, my voice cutting through the classroom. I felt a pair of eyes on me, and I lifted my chin to see Noah gazing at me, a pencil tucked behind his ear. He gave me a half smile, and then looked away when Clementine leaned over and whispered something in his ear.
Monsieur Orneaux met my gaze for a split second, barely acknowledging me. He repeated, “It also means freedom.”
“Who are they?” Noah asked.
“They are a brotherhood of Undead,” the professor said, sitting down. “A secret brotherhood. Although we know they exist—for we’ve found their name scrawled in their abandoned abodes—no Monitor has ever captured one.”
A brotherhood, I thought. A brotherhood to oppose a sisterhood.
“How come?” Clementine asked.
“They’re nameless. Faceless. Dangerous,” Monsieur Orneaux said, his face solemn. “Desperate. More so than you could ever imagine.”
A few people shifted in their seats. “What?” I heard someone murmur.
“All Undead can take souls at random to gain a bit of life,” the professor explained. “But the Brothers have pushed it to the extreme. We believe they have taken enough souls to live far past their natural span of twenty-one years, and may have even survived for centuries, killing for life. As a result, they’re shells—barely human except in form.”
“How many are there?” Clementine asked.
“We believe there are nine of them.”
Just like the Sisters, I thought.
“But they’re vagrant,” Monsieur Orneaux said. “We don’t know where they are. We don’t know who they are. All we know is what they want.”
“Which is what?” Noah asked.
When he answered, Monsieur Orneaux looked at me. “Freedom. They want to be human again. They want their souls back. Not just temporarily, but forever. They want immortality, and they will stop at nothing to find it. That’s why they killed Les Neuf Soeurs. To find their secret.”
“What?” I said. “But why would they kill people if they wanted information?”
“All eight of the Nine Sisters who were found dead had gauze stuffed in their mouths.”
A murmur rose over the class. “Gauze?” I heard someone say. “Why gauze?”
“I don’t understand,” I said, remembering how my parents had died, how Miss LaBarge had died. “Isn’t putting gauze in the mouth a normal way for Monitors to protect themselves from the kiss of an Undead?”
The class went silent as everyone stared at me.
“No,” Monsieur Orneaux said. “It’s known as a method of torture that a select few Undead use on their victims.”
“Torture?” I breathed. “What do you mean?”
“It’s a simple gag, made cruel because it uses the victim’s own weapon. The Liberum didn’t kill the Sisters immediately; they systematically tortured them. The autopsy reports, along with many accounts of the crime scenes, indicate that each of the Sisters endured prolonged suffering before they finally met death.”
“What?” I whispered, my voice so small I barely recognized it. “But my grandfather said—”
Monsieur Orneaux’s eye began to pulse with irritation. “He was mistaken.” Picking up his notes, he resumed his lecture.
Outside on the window ledge, a pair of pigeons ruffled their feathers and then swooped down to the fountain below. I watched them bathe in the water. Both my parents and Miss LaBarge were found with gauze in their mouths. Did that mean they weren’t killed in a normal Monitoring accident, but that they were tortured and then killed?
The bell sounded, signaling the end of the class.
I lingered, lost in my thoughts, as everyone filtered out of the room. In the letter from Miss LaBarge’s cottage, my mother had said that she’d found a clue that would lead them to the lost girl. Lost girl. My grandfather thought that had been a code word for an Undead, but the more I thought about it, the more I started to believe that she had meant the ninth sister. And Miss LaBarge had clearly been looking for something, too, judging from the clippings and the maps in her cottage.
Chapter 8
WINTER CAME TO MONTREAL TWO MONTHS early. Or I should say, two months early to me. By the end of October I had only just gotten ready to take out my autumn coat, when the school started delivering a bundle of wood outside each of our doors in the morning for the potbellied stove. But no matter how close I sat to the fire, I couldn’t get rid of the cold vacancy within me.
So instead I embraced it, and ventured out into the chilly Canadian air until I found my way to the edge of city. There, I wandered along the waterfront, where I could almost feel Dante watching me from the other side of the river. I spent most of my evenings there, pacing around the perimeter of Montreal, waiting for him to come to me.
Abandoned grain silos lined the opposite shore; lonely brown cylinders that rose behind the water. If you stood on a particular spot on the wharf and spoke over the river, your voice would bounce off the silos and echo back. At nightfall, when everyone had left, I approached the edge of the water and leaned on the railing.
It was scratched with graffiti: initials of lovers, etched in hearts. When the wind died down, I spoke.
“Did you lie?” I said, the words wobbly.
When they bounced back, my voice was low and round, repeating itself over and over: lie lie lie lie.
“No,” I said into it again, and imagined it was Dante when it came back: No. No. No. No. No.
After that, I kept going back to the waterfront, speaking to myself through the silos. I was so intent on finding Dante that I barely thought about the riddle on the headstone. And to my surprise, Clementine didn’t remind me, even though I knew she’d been just as disappointed as I’d been after our run-in at the cemetery.
On that night, the girls had dug and dug, but there’d been nothing in the anonymous grave, not even a casket. Clementine had said nothing as we walked back to the dormitory, our face and hands streaked with dirt. She was quieter after that; she never stopped me in the halls or tried to embarrass me in front of her friends. At first I thought we had reached some sort of truce, but then I realized she was waiting, watching me closer than she ever had before, trying to figure out what I knew and who I had been with that night.
At first I didn’t tell Anya what happened, partly because that night confused me, too. That was why I went to the silos—with the hope that I would find Dante. But after a week of nothing, I gave up and told her everything.
“You went to the cemetery without me?” Anya said. We were sitting in Latin class, waiting for everyone else to show up.
“I was in a rush,” I said. “Everything happened quickly.”
She rotated the cuff in her ear. “What do you think it means?”
“What?”
“The riddle, obviously,” she said in disbelief.
“Oh, I don’t know.”
She sat back, staring at me.
“What?” I said. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“You’ve barely eaten anything for days,” she said. “You’re not interested in the riddle even though just a few weeks ago you were dragging me to the hospital with you. What’s going on?”
The door opened and Clementine and her friends walked in, followed by Monsieur Orneaux. I lowered my voice. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I can’t talk about it.”
Anya bit her fingernail. “It’s about a boy,” she said, studying me. “I’ve felt like this too. That’s why I pierce my ears whenever I’m upset. It takes my mind off of things I don’t want to think about.”
“I don’t think I want to do that.”
“Of course you don’t,” she teased, pinching my virgin earlobe as the professor sat at the head of the table and took out his lecture notes. “But maybe figuring out the riddle will distract you from your boy problems?”
“There was nothing buried beneath the headstone,” I whispered as Monsieur Orneaux cleared his throat. “And I already checked the cemetery map—there’s no body of salt water anywhere near there, and if there is a bear on one of the headstones, it could take years to find it. The cemetery is huge.”
“Okay,” Anya whispered. “You don’t have to get testy about it.”
That’s when Clementine raised her hand. Monsieur Orneaux tried to ignore it while he recited Homeric phrases. But after a few minutes had passed, she decided to just speak up.
“Who killed the Nine Sisters?”
That woke everyone up.
Monsieur Orneaux narrowed his eyes, making his face look even more hollow. “I don’t know anything about that. I teach Latin.”
“Then why did Madame Goût say the murder of the sisters was your area of expertise?” Clementine said.
I put down my pencil, appreciating Clementine’s pushiness for the first time.
Monsieur Orneaux’s face darkened as he leaned back in his chair, pressing his fingers together. “Madame Goût. I should have known.” And without saying anything more, he stood up and wrote a word on the blackboard.
Liberum
“The group widely believed to have murdered the Nine Sisters call themselves the Liberum.” He tapped his chalk to the blackboard, just over the letter i. “What do the roots of this word signify?”
Without giving us any time to respond, he underlined the beginning of the word. “Liber means child.” He gazed at us. “As you know, only people under the age of twenty-one can potentially become Undead, which is clearly why the Liberum chose this word.”
“It also means freedom,” I said, my voice cutting through the classroom. I felt a pair of eyes on me, and I lifted my chin to see Noah gazing at me, a pencil tucked behind his ear. He gave me a half smile, and then looked away when Clementine leaned over and whispered something in his ear.
Monsieur Orneaux met my gaze for a split second, barely acknowledging me. He repeated, “It also means freedom.”
“Who are they?” Noah asked.
“They are a brotherhood of Undead,” the professor said, sitting down. “A secret brotherhood. Although we know they exist—for we’ve found their name scrawled in their abandoned abodes—no Monitor has ever captured one.”
A brotherhood, I thought. A brotherhood to oppose a sisterhood.
“How come?” Clementine asked.
“They’re nameless. Faceless. Dangerous,” Monsieur Orneaux said, his face solemn. “Desperate. More so than you could ever imagine.”
A few people shifted in their seats. “What?” I heard someone murmur.
“All Undead can take souls at random to gain a bit of life,” the professor explained. “But the Brothers have pushed it to the extreme. We believe they have taken enough souls to live far past their natural span of twenty-one years, and may have even survived for centuries, killing for life. As a result, they’re shells—barely human except in form.”
“How many are there?” Clementine asked.
“We believe there are nine of them.”
Just like the Sisters, I thought.
“But they’re vagrant,” Monsieur Orneaux said. “We don’t know where they are. We don’t know who they are. All we know is what they want.”
“Which is what?” Noah asked.
When he answered, Monsieur Orneaux looked at me. “Freedom. They want to be human again. They want their souls back. Not just temporarily, but forever. They want immortality, and they will stop at nothing to find it. That’s why they killed Les Neuf Soeurs. To find their secret.”
“What?” I said. “But why would they kill people if they wanted information?”
“All eight of the Nine Sisters who were found dead had gauze stuffed in their mouths.”
A murmur rose over the class. “Gauze?” I heard someone say. “Why gauze?”
“I don’t understand,” I said, remembering how my parents had died, how Miss LaBarge had died. “Isn’t putting gauze in the mouth a normal way for Monitors to protect themselves from the kiss of an Undead?”
The class went silent as everyone stared at me.
“No,” Monsieur Orneaux said. “It’s known as a method of torture that a select few Undead use on their victims.”
“Torture?” I breathed. “What do you mean?”
“It’s a simple gag, made cruel because it uses the victim’s own weapon. The Liberum didn’t kill the Sisters immediately; they systematically tortured them. The autopsy reports, along with many accounts of the crime scenes, indicate that each of the Sisters endured prolonged suffering before they finally met death.”
“What?” I whispered, my voice so small I barely recognized it. “But my grandfather said—”
Monsieur Orneaux’s eye began to pulse with irritation. “He was mistaken.” Picking up his notes, he resumed his lecture.
Outside on the window ledge, a pair of pigeons ruffled their feathers and then swooped down to the fountain below. I watched them bathe in the water. Both my parents and Miss LaBarge were found with gauze in their mouths. Did that mean they weren’t killed in a normal Monitoring accident, but that they were tortured and then killed?
The bell sounded, signaling the end of the class.
I lingered, lost in my thoughts, as everyone filtered out of the room. In the letter from Miss LaBarge’s cottage, my mother had said that she’d found a clue that would lead them to the lost girl. Lost girl. My grandfather thought that had been a code word for an Undead, but the more I thought about it, the more I started to believe that she had meant the ninth sister. And Miss LaBarge had clearly been looking for something, too, judging from the clippings and the maps in her cottage.
