I think you should also note how many of the zombie stories are love stories and how few of the unicorn ones are. Very telling, that.
Holly: Another story where I can just pretend that we’re talking about an undead type that I like. There’s not even any brain eating! Excellent for me!
Justine: Yet another story where Holly’s secret zombie adoration is revealed.
You know, Holly, you could just cut to the chase and admit that Team Zombie has won.
Cold Hands
By Cassandra Clare
James was the boy I was going to marry. I loved him like I’d never loved anything else. We were seven when we met. He was seventeen when he died. You might think that was the end of our story, but it wasn’t. Death is never the end of anything, not in Zombietown.
Zombietown is what other people call it, of course. Those who live here call it by its name, Lychgate. In Old English, “lych” means “corpse.” James says that means we’re a town that’s always been touched by death, but it wasn’t always like it is now.
Lychgate used to be a nice place to live. Orderly houses set out in neat arrangements, pretty rows of streets decked in flowers, and the Duke’s palace at the north end of town, with Corpse Hill rising up behind it. Then, one day, in the early morning, when people were just getting up and starting to get the morning paper, and putting the coffee on, and turning on the radio to hear the Duke’s daily address, Corpse Hill came to life. The dirt sloughed off the graves like old skin. The earth peeled back and the dead came out, blinking in the sun like newborn kittens.
They limped and shuffled and crawled. They turned their eye sockets toward the path that leads down to the town. And then they began to walk.
It was Saint John’s Eve—one of the town’s four big festival nights. All the streets were strung with colored lights. James and I were down in the old part of the city, and James was buying flowers from a dead woman.
Her name was Annie. She ran the flower stall down the street from the main square, and she sold the best flowers in town. I know what you’re thinking—it’s weird that a dead person could own a flower stall. Well, of course she couldn’t own it. The dead don’t have property rights. But ever since the morning the Curse struck, ever since the dead started coming back to the town, the town council has been struggling to figure out what to do with all the zombies. They’re pretty quiet— they don’t say much—but if you can’t get a zombie to go back to its grave in the first week or so after it comes back, it’ll just stay forever. So they hang around the town, sitting and staring, cluttering up the streets. Much better to give them menial jobs like road sweeping, and trash collection. And flower selling.
James handed me a bunch of blue roses, which are my favorite—the same color as his eyes. I watched him as he took out a handful of coins, each stamped with his uncle’s face, to pay Annie. The bones of her fingers clacked together as she took the money.
He turned back to me, his eyes searching. “You like the flowers?”
That was one of the things I loved about James. No matter how long we had been together, no matter how many times he’d given me gifts, or I’d given them to him—though I could never match what he could afford—he always worried about whether I would like something or not. He always wanted to please me.
I nodded, and he relaxed, starting to smile, starting to slide his wallet back into his pocket. That was when the car came screeching around the corner. James saw it; his eyes widened and he shoved me back, toward the sidewalk; I fell, and scrambled around just in time to see the car knock him down, then speed away with its tires screeching.
Annie, the zombie, was going crazy, making those weird noises they do, and shuffling around in a frenzy, knocking flowers off her cart by the handful until torn petals littered the street. People had started to come running, but I hardly noticed them. I was crawling toward James, who was lying partly in the road, partly out of it, his legs bent at strange angles. I still thought he might be all right—broken legs are survivable—until I got to him and pulled him into my lap. When he looked at me, blood bubbled up out of his mouth, so I never knew what his last words were.
Annie screamed and screamed when he died. It was like she’d never seen anyone die before.
It was James who told me the truth about the Curse. Everyone knows that it started about a hundred years ago, the dead coming back. We all know it had something to do with a sorcerer in Lychgate, someone who summoned up the dead and then couldn’t put them back. What James told me was that the sorcerer was a member of the Duke’s—of James’s—family and that the dead man he summoned up cursed him and cursed his town, too, for good measure.
That’s why the Curse sticks to the inhabitants of Lychgate like glue. Even if we move away from the town, our dead will follow us. They belong to us. They come after the ones they knew when they were alive—their living friends and family. They want to be with them. That’s why no other town will have us. That’s why we can’t ever leave.
I don’t really remember what happened after James died. I know there were the flashing lights of the police cars, and the EMTs who arrived in the ambulance and tried to pry him out of my arms. I wouldn’t let him go. What was the point? He was dead anyway. There was nothing they could do for him. They were trying to convince me to let go of him when the Duke’s limousine pulled up. I’d ridden in that limousine plenty of times, to events at the Duke’s palace, sometimes just home with James after school, watching the town go by through the tinted windows.
The door opened and the Duke got out. James’s uncle, who’d married his mother after James’s father had died. He’d known me since I was nine. Been at my sixteenth birthday party. He’d given me a teddy bear—a weird thing to give a sixteen-year-old, like he thought I was still a little girl. He’d smiled at me. He had blue eyes like James, but they were weirdly lifeless, like doll eyes. James said it was because the responsibilities of being Duke tired him out, but I’d never liked him. I looked forward to the time when James turned eighteen and became Duke and we never had to see his uncle again.
Now Duke Grayson looked through me like I wasn’t even there. “Take the boy from her,” he said to the EMTs, who were standing around looking miserable.
“We’ve tried. She won’t let him go,” I heard them murmur.
“Take him,” said the Duke. “Break her arms if you have to.”
He walked back toward his limo without looking at me again.
It was my parents who finally came to get me, to put me in the back of their car and drive me home. My mother sat next to me, murmuring soothing words; my father sat up front, looking shattered. I could see all his dreams of his daughter marrying the next Duke leaking away like James’s blood had leaked into the gutter at the side of the road.
“It was just an accident,” my mother said, stroking my hair. Blue petals clung to her fingers. “Just an accident. At least it was fast, and he didn’t suffer.”
“It wasn’t an accident,” I said coldly. I could tell my mother was upset that I wasn’t crying. “He was murdered. Duke Grayson had him murdered so he’d never turn eighteen.”
My father jerked the wheel so hard that we ran off the road and bumped up over the curb, the wheels grinding. He whirled around in his seat, his face as white as paper. “Never say that again. Do you hear me, Adele? Never say that again, to anyone. If you do …”
He left the sentence hanging in the air, but we all knew what he meant.
Murders don’t happen in Lychgate often. The punishment is always death, and they carry out the hanging or shooting in the town square. Everyone comes to watch.
They bring picnic lunches—egg salad sandwiches in brown paper bags, warm bottles of soda pop, bars of chocolate. They cheer when the Duke gives the order for the execution to begin. After that the priests bring the bodies of the guilty up to Corpse Hill for burning, and the air turns black with smoke, and for a few days people walk around with surgical masks on to keep out the ash and grit. The other towns don’t like it—they can see the smoke at a distance—but they know what happens in Lychgate if you don’t burn the vengeful dead. They’ve heard the stories —doors ripped off their hinges, whole families slaughtered, judges and jury members dragged out into the street by walking corpses whose eyes burn like angry fire.
Murder isn’t the only crime that can get you hung. Stealing from the Duke will do it. Vandalizing ducal property. Or slandering a member of the Duke’s family. All are crimes punishable by death.
The Duke came to my parents’ house the next day. The doctor had come that morning and given me a shot that made me feel as if my head had separated from my body and was floating away somewhere. I couldn’t move from where I was lying on the bed. Everywhere around me were the big silver-framed photographs of me with James that I had been collecting since we had met in first grade. James and I at the playground as children, at the beach when we were older, holding our All Hallows’ Day soul candles as we painted our faces to go out, hand in hand on Hanging Day. James with his sandy hair and his blue eyes and his big grin, looking down at me from everywhere and all around as my parents sat downstairs with the Duke and his wife, James’s mother, listening to their sad words.
I knew they were stunned by the honor. Even though I had been with James for so long that everyone knew it was inevitable that we would marry—even though the Duke, by law, had to marry a commoner—my mother and father were still struck speechless at the idea of actually welcoming Duke Grayson into their home. They just agreed when he told them that I couldn’t come to the funeral. “It’s just for family,” he said, “unfortunately, and the ceremony is elaborate. We’re concerned it will be too much for Adele to handle.”
I heard my father make soothing noises, telling them it would be all right, while I lay on the bed and wished that I could die too.
Not everyone who dies comes back. Sometimes they come back to right a wrong.
Sometimes to reveal a secret no one else knows, or to tell family members where a treasure was buried. Sometimes they just can’t bear to be dead. Or, like the girl in the song whose bones were made into a harp, they return to sing a song of the one who killed them. It was always my favorite of the songs the Christmas carolers would sing door-to-door in the winter—especially the part where the bone-harp speaks and accuses the one who murdered her.
The very first song that the harp did play “Hang my sister,” it did say.
“For she drowned me in yonder sea, God, never let her rest till she shall die.”
There was more to the song too, about how the older sister was sentenced to death, but came crawling back out of her grave because her guilt would not let her rest. She spent her long unlife sitting on the cliffs near her old home, cradling her dead sister’s singing bones. So you see, there are lots of reasons the dead come back. Sometimes they even come back for love.
If you love someone, you’re not supposed to want them to come back. Better a peaceful sleep in the earth than the life of a zombie—not really dead but not really alive, either. You’re supposed to pray for a quiet death for your loved ones, for dark oblivion in the earth. But I couldn’t bring myself to pray for that for James. I wanted him back—no matter what.
The funeral was the next day, and true to the Duke’s word, I wasn’t allowed to attend. Instead I watched from my bedroom window. Even at a distance I could see the mourners like black ants wending their way up Corpse Hill. It was raining and the path was slick with mud. I saw some of them slip and fall as they went up, and I was glad. They deserved it, for being allowed to attend the funeral while I was shut out.
Though the Duke had refused to televise the event, they had set up loudspeakers on every street corner in town, and were blasting the funeral service for everyone to hear. I suppose it’s not every day that the Prince of the town dies. I could see people gathering in damp huddles, their faces upturned as they listened to the voice of the priest booming down the streets.
“‘For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, nor suffer thy Holy One to see corruption.
Behold, I show you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed:
for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. But your dead will live; their bodies will rise. You who dwell in the dust, wake up and shout for joy. Your dew is like the dew of the morning; the earth will give birth to her dead.’”
The loudspeaker crackled then, and I heard Duke Grayson telling the priest to lower the coffin. I shut the window, hard, before I could hear the sound of the dirt clods hitting the lid.
James didn’t come back the next day. Or the next. I waited patiently for the shuffle of his feet on the paving stones outside my house. The cold knock of his dead hand on my front door. The graveyard whisper of his voice.
But he didn’t come.
It can take the dead some time to return, I reminded myself. They wake up inside the coffin, disoriented and confused. They don’t remember dying, most of them.
They don’t know where they are. In the old days they used to bury people with a rope inside the coffin that was connected to a bell aboveground. When the dead rose, they could ring the bell, and the graveyard keepers would come and dig them up and pour salt into the coffin and rebury them. That was before they started burying the dead in mausoleums, the way they do now, stacked one on top of the other with the most recently dead keeping the others down. I think of them sometimes, one on top of the other, whispering down to each other through the dirt and the bones.