The Beautiful Dead (14 page)

“If we get out
of here,” I finally say, “we’re taking you home with us, and getting you a new
pair of legs.”

“I want my old
ones. I liked my old ones.”

I turn to
Helena. “We’re going to find the others. We can’t give up hope, not now. We’re
going to see Trenton again and everyone we’ve left behind.”

Helena, still
unruffled, asks, “Before or after our legs are taken too?”

“Think on it
this way,” the teenager offers, regaining his spirit instantly and losing the
sourness, somehow. “We are Undead. We don’t bleed, no matter if they take our
legs or our arms or gouge us with knives. But most importantly, we feel no
pain. The only anguish we experience is mental … psychological … and if you can
conquer that, you will always win—even if you lose.”

In a distant
aisle, I see a guard hauling a woman from her cage and, by only the hair,
dragging her away.

I tell the
teen, “You’re a wise one for your age.”

“I’m not as
young as I look,” he says back, and I hear the smile in his words.

Him saying
that makes me think it, so I bother to ask. “Have you had your Dream yet?”

“My what?”

“Your Waking
Dream … Death Dream or whatever. Have you recalled your Old Life?”

Closing his
eyes, he shakes his head no. “That’s the worst of it all. Dying here without
knowing who I was.”

“I share a
similar fear.”

“You seem so
together for a person who hasn’t yet learned their False Self.” He smiles
coyly. “You could be the next Mad Malory for all we know.”

“Oh, so you’ve
heard of her too?”

“Everyone
has.” He laughs, turns his face to me. “Or I could be the next … I’d only be so
lucky. I’m Benjamin.”

“Nice to meet
you.”

“You too, Mad
Winter. Wild Winter.”

“Bonkers
Benny.”

The two of us
laugh. Helena huffs, crawling to the opposite end of her cage and curling up as
if to sleep. I glance at her, still affected by her telling me the story of her
Old Life. Even through her sulkiness, I see a woman who wants—
needs
my
support and friendship more than anything. Even with all our quarrels
considered, I see someone I can, with no irony intended, trust.

“No matter
your moods,” I tell her backside, “or what you think of me, I’ll always admire
you for your strength. I’ll be forevermore your proudest Raise, I promise
that.”

She doesn’t
respond.

“Be ready,”
Benjamin tells me, drawing my attention back to him. “Next time they open my
cage, I’m going to make bones out of them. Legs or no. It’ll be time for us to
fight for our lives.”

And then I see
something that drops my gut through the ground. “Here comes your chance.”

For in the
distance, another prison guard approaches. As he draws near, it’s quite clear
this time which of us he’s come for. And it isn’t Benjamin.

And it isn’t
me either.

“Helena,” I
breathe. “Wake up. Helena!”

Helena groans:
“Wake up, she says … Wake up. Since when do the dead sleep?”

The guard
stops in front of her cage and begins examining his length of chain for the proper
key.

I can’t stand
for this, not at all. “Take me,” I bark at the guard. “Take me, not her! Take
me! She doesn’t deserve this—
I
do! I deserve this!”

“Save your
breath,” Helena grunts, pushing herself up to her feet. “I’m bored of this
scenery anyway.”

But I can’t
help myself. I face the guard, my voice turning nasty. “Need help with that?”
He doesn’t react, still patiently thumbing through his keys. “My eyes are Icecap
Blue. Good for finding keys. Take me instead!”

Helena’s gaze
meets mine, eyes cold and tired. At the sight, all the fight drops from my
body. I know there’s no use to my shouting.

The guard has
located the right key, twisting it into her lock and swinging open the cage.

“Care to tell
me where we’re off to?” Helena asks the guard, her stony gaze still on me.

“To … the …
Black Tower,” he manages, his every quivery word an effort. I’m surprised to
hear the thing talk for the first time. I wasn’t until now certain whether or
not it could.

“Is that where
I die?” she goes on. “The Black Tower? The Deathless chamber of torture? Where
you pull apart my body like a puzzle for your amusement? Where I meet my end,
stranded from everyone I know? Degraded and alone? Punished for all eternity?”

He responds in
a bored, languid drone: “It is … the throne of … the Deathless King. The King
wants … to speak … to you.”

All of us—Ben,
me, her—turn to the guard with bafflement in our eyes.

“Oh,” says
Helena.

C H A P T E R – E L E V E N

“This is our
chance,” Ben cheers on, excited, eager.

Hours have
gone by since Helena’s taking. Or days.

“I can’t begin
to imagine what they’re doing to her.” I’m sulking in the corner, back pressed
uncomfortably against the bars. Listen to me, talking like we Undead can feel
discomfort. What a fool.

“Imagine the
worst. And it’ll be even worse yet.”

“Thank you,” I
retort, annoyed as ever. “So helpful you are with your imagery.”

“Don’t you see
the tool in this?” He attempts to shift his field of view to include me, on his
back and bound and legless as he is. “Helena is with the King now. She … She
might be preparing an upper hand for us. Leverage. A means by which to get us
out of this hellhole!”

“Wishful
thinking.” I roll my eyes and look away. “But it does still pose the question …
What
does
this King person want with her? This is awfully strange.”

“The King only
speaks to persons of great interest. It’s unheard of to be summoned by the
King.”

“Great
interest? What ‘great interest’ does
she
possibly have?
I’m
the
one they bowed to, not her.”

“Bowed to? Who
bowed?—What do you mean?”

“Never mind.”
I poke at my fingernails. Another one pops off. “We really need a way to be
more durable.”

“Our existence
is the mere definition of being durable,” he says with half a chuckle. “The
very essence of what we are is enduring.”

“What
is
a Deathless anyway?”

Benjamin
convulses out of the blue, struggling and thrashing about madly against his
binds. In just as quick an instant, he gives up, sighs, then addresses my question.
“They are just like you, just like me. Undead. Not a speck different from us,
except in philosophy. We believe in masking our deathliness—pretty clothes,
nice skin, all four limbs. They believe in embracing it. Making themselves as
rotted, as disfigured, as embodying of death as they can.”

“So what’s
with the Humans?” I ask, thinking uneasily on the girl that not so long ago was
contained next to me. “My hometown Trenton demands we act as though they never
existed. Anything Living is outlawed.”

“The Deathless
eat them.”

I sigh, not
wanting to have heard it. Where once my stomach was filled with fear, I’m only
feeling a vile rage now. I’m so angry at the sudden turn my life—unlife,
whatever—has made in this short a time. I would give anything to be back home.

I wish Grimsky
were by my side, telling me how silly these people are, relieving me of all
this terror. I want to be lying next to him in a field of grass, tulips by our
ears. I want to ascend the creaky steps of my porch again, singing my little
tune for John to let me in.

Oh … John. I’d
nearly forgotten about the man with a heartbeat, still waiting for me at home.

Assuming he’s
still waiting. He could very well have lost his patience by now. I have no
understanding of how much time has actually passed … Hours, days, weeks. He
could’ve given up on me by now, taken off on his own. Or died there on the
floorboards of my house, starved and wasted away …

I’m completely
lost here. Body, soul and time.

“Will I ever
see Helena again?” I bother to ask.

“Come to think
of it,” he replies quietly, “I haven’t again seen anyone who’s come
back
from the King.”

“So she’s gone
then. Forever.”

“It’s a
possibility. Not yet a fact.”

“How do you
know so much about everything anyway?”

“I’ve been
held in many cages.” He smiles wanly at the grey and greyer sky. “I’ve been
here longer than most. At least I like to say I have … It will give greater
weight to my feat of having at last escaped this place.”

Maybe John’s
getting along perfectly. Maybe it was only for my own selfish desires that I
kept a Human around … Secretly enjoying his presence, his aliveness, his
warmth. Maybe it’s time I see that the people you think you can’t live without
can, in fact, live without you. That’s the lesson everyone learns whether alive
or not … Nothing lasts.

“Do you not
believe me?” the teenager asks.

“I don’t know
what I believe.”

He turns his
head slightly. “There is a hole in the city, a great big, unfathomably deep pit
in which the chopped-up body parts of Undead are thrown, including heads.
They’re all still animated, as you and I are now, only their parts are all
mixed up. No one knows who belongs to what. And when your head’s pulled from
your body—”

“I know,” I
say, shutting him up.

“Anyway. They
call it the Well.” He shudders, I hear his binds rattling. “And then there’s
the Mausoleum where, after being bound, disobedient Undead are buried deep.
Some of them in tombs, some of them in the ground outside. Think of it like the
cages we’re in now, only smaller. Much smaller.”

“Why are you
telling me this?”

“Because I’m
deciding which of them I’m going to trap the Deathless King in when I revolt.”
He laughs. “Do you think His Highness would prefer a coffin, a gravesite, or a
giant pit full of his own punished peasants?”

“I’d rather
just kill the bastard.” I clutch my knees.

“Nice ring,”
he says, lifting his brows. “Married?”

“Hardly.” I
spin the clunky thing around my finger … My one and only keepsake.

“If you
promise to keep me alive long enough to know my False Self,” he murmurs, his
voice gone soft and dreamy, “I’ll do the same for you.”

“Deal.”

And all too
soon, the shuffling of chains draws forth. I perk up, my eyes going wide. The
guard stumbles down the rows. Everyone recoils to the backs of their cages,
trembling, gasping, scuttling away like cockroaches in the light. He almost
seems to march, his every footfall a terrible effort. He turns onto our row,
then stops right in front of our cages, fumbling through his inventory of keys
one by one. No mistaking it … This thing is here for either me or Ben.

The guard
releases one key, and turns in my direction.

My lock
clicks. My door swings open.

I’m on my feet
in an instant, clutching my own hands to keep from panicking. The thing slumps
two feet into my cage and extends a hand, just as he did the little girl Megan.
I just stare, unable to accept his offering.

“Go with him,”
Ben grunts. “Take his hand and go.”

“Where are you
taking me?” I ask so quietly I can hardly hear myself over the howling winds.

“To … the
Black … Tower,” moans the guard.

“To see the
King?” I’ve almost lost my balance at the words. “I’m—I’m being summoned too?”

“The …
Deathless King … summons.”

Ben and I lock
eyes. We share a moment of shock.

“Go on then,”
he urges me. “This is our … our final moment.”

I think he
meant to say, “This is our chance,” but edited himself at the last second, I
guess to keep the guard from suspecting anything amiss.

“I will see
you soon,” I promise him, though my heart’s not in the words.

Benjamin can
tell. “You too,” he says anyway.

And so I at
long last leave with the guard.

It feels like
days since I was brought here, but I recall being dragged down some of these
streets. And if it wasn’t bad enough being dragged through them half-conscious,
I’m brought once again, this time fully awake.

As we walk
down the aisles of scared prisoners, I can’t tell if they’re all Undead like
me, or if there’s any Humans among them like the little girl Megan. Funny, no
matter who they are, they all look the same … Terrified, as if looking up means
staring into the eyes of death.

We pass
through a warehouse. There’s so many cages. There’s so many screams. I can
imagine a happy Human family that once ran this place centuries ago … Maybe it
was a toy factory. Or a candy factory.

We’re in the
streets again. We take a left here, a right there, another right.

I regret every
little gripe I had about my hometown Trenton. Every whiny remark and misgiving
shared. I’d so readily cast them away after my time here in this
stuff-of-phobias Deathless domicile.

The buildings
of the city give way to a small muddy field where, no doubt, lines of
vegetables once grew at the hand of some cheery farmer who died centuries ago
when the world was alive. I see mushrooms sprouting from the heaps of dirt,
only to realize upon seeing one of them twitch that they are actually fingers,
loose bones. Empty holes have been recently dug, no doubt awaiting fresh
corpses. I’m sure there are heads buried in this field too, heads of the
uncooperative Undead who will live out the rest of eternity in the earth,
buried alive, buried blind.

I wonder if
one of those holes is waiting for me.

After passing
a large open barn where Humans, male and female, are lined up on all fours like
horses in their stables patiently waiting their turn at some medieval torture device,
we arrive at the foot of a giant rice silo painted black.

“This … way,”
the guard grunts.

He presents me
to the tower door like I’m some guest at a ritzy hotel.

“Alright.” I
turn the handle and let myself in. A colossal iron staircase spirals up the
inside of the rice silo. After casting a doubtful glance at mister deadpan, I
slowly begin to ascend the creaky steps. Of course they’d creak.

Every step I
take is a negotiation.

After I’m
fairly certain the staircase may never end, it does. At the top is a brief
landing where a set of double-doors awaits me. I stay on that last step for a
good while, just staring at the doorway. I can’t enter it. I simply can’t. I
don’t want to spend the rest of eternity broken apart and buried in a farmyard.
I can’t face this alone.

I want Grimsky
with me. I want him to tell me I’ll be okay. I want his lips near my ears, his
arms around me.

It’s a strange
sensation, knowing full well that I am utterly stomach-churning nervous, but
having no racing pulse or throbbing heart to tell me so.

I push open
the doors and accept whatever awaits.

Inside the
dull room, the first thing that strikes me is the wide wall-to-wall
floor-to-ceiling balcony at the opposite end, welcoming in the breeze and the
silver sky and the peace of a dead world. In the center of the room is a table
with something on it, but I can’t tell what from this angle. At the far
precipice rests an overwhelmingly tall iron chair upon which is seated a
shrouded figure: the Deathless King, presumably. He wears a very tall crown
forged of black metal that stands half the height of him. His clothes are a
mess of frayed fabrics and dark robes, none of which scream royalty. A King
he’s called, but a King he doesn’t appear to be, save the crown he wears.

Just his silhouette
paralyzes me with fear.

Prompted by
nothing at all, he rises from the iron chair—which I take to be the throne—and
turns to meet me. His face is shadowed completely by a hood which the heavy
crown keeps in place.

“Welcome,” he
says in a clear, high tone.

I’m not sure
why I expected the Deathless King to sound like a throatless demon with six
hissing tongues, but his elevated, unblemished voice surprises me still.

I clear my
throat pointlessly. “Is—Is this when I die?”

The King tilts
his head. The effect that has on his enormous, tall crown is comical. “Why do
you ask?”

“Oh, I don’t
know,” I mumble. “Maybe the agonized screams of your other prisoners tipped me
off.”

“They are not
prisoners,” he explains simply.

Oh, okay,
sure, he says so.

“I have
brought you here,” he goes on, his voice lilting in an unexpectedly feminine
way, “because I admire your bravery. With just a little sword, you stood
against my army, downed as your friends were and all alone. I admire that kind
of unflinching mien. Have a seat, child.”

For some
reason, I do not argue. I reluctantly move to a nearby chair closer to the
table—and that’s when I see it. I stop, my entire body paralyzed at the sight
of her bound to the table.

Helena, bound
to the table.

“Please, have
a seat,” the King repeats.

Staring at my
helpless Reaper, how she just lies there spread-eagle without a care in the
world, I finally, slowly lower myself into the chair. Its texture is rough and
offputting, which I assume to be the point. I can’t imagine how offputting
lying on that table must feel.

In a poor
attempt to mask the reaction I just had at seeing Helena, I slouch into the
chair as though I enjoy its unwelcoming shape. My hands gripping the armrests,
I lift my head and say, “And what now?”

“You are so
beautiful in your sadness.”