“Renée, you have all of the traits that are characteristic of a Monitor.”
“But I can’t be. I mean, I’m just me. Renée. I don’t have any special sixth sense.”
“You found your parents, dead, in the redwood forest.”
“That was luck. I saw their car on the side of the road. It was coincidental.”
“When you first came to this house, you played croquet with Dustin and found a dead bird on the edge of the lawn.”
“The ball rolled to it. It wasn’t me. I’m just bad at croquet....” My voice trailed off as I remembered my first Horticulture class, when I found the dead fawn. Or how I’d found the dead mouse in the library. Or how I always seemed to find myself in the crevices of my room, staring at a dead spider or insect.
“You’ve always been drawn to death. It’s as if you can sense it. There were hints early on. Your mother told me about how, as a child, you would wander around the yard, always returning with some sort of dead insect crushed in your tiny fist. During one of my visits when you were six, you found a mouse caught in a trap behind the refrigerator. It smelled wretched; it must have been decaying for days, but it didn’t seem to bother you. You picked it up with your bare hands and presented it to us just before dinner. Your father wanted to throw it out, but you insisted on giving it a proper burial. Sepultura, as we call it. You did the same with all of your pets.”
“Sepultura?” I repeated. The second cause of death in Cassandra’s file.
“Interment. The preferred method of putting the Undead to rest, at least in these parts. That’s another reason for many of the rules at Gottfried—to protect the Monitors while they do their work. The no lights after curfew rule, for example, was designed for this specific purpose.”
I no longer cared about the meaning behind the school rules. “But I didn’t know. If I were a Monitor, shouldn’t I have known, instinctively?”
“Underclass Monitors, such as yourself, take one training class per year, through which the faculty is able to assess their skill sets. For you, that class is Horticulture.”
“Horticulture?” I repeated, going over all of our class exercises. The burials, the soil, the graveyard, the medicinal plants, the snow topography.
“And like yourself, they are not told of the existence of the Undead, but are left to discover it on their own. The process of discovery is incredibly important, as it distinguishes a truly excellent Monitor from a capable one. Information as shocking and disturbing as the existence of the Undead is not something one can merely be told; it has to be felt thoroughly and utterly. This is why I resisted telling you about it, as much as I wanted to.”
“So you think that I’m some sort of...killer?”
“Not a killer, a Monitor.”
“Monitors still kill people.”
“Monitors only kill things that are already dead. The instinct is genetic. It runs in families. It was your great-great-great-grandfather, Headmaster Theodore Winters, who created the Board of Monitors. He was also the man who planted the great oak. In essence, it’s literally our family tree. Every generation of our family has been connected to Gottfried since then; most have served as Monitors, even after graduating from Gottfried. Your mother and father included.”
“My parents? But they were teachers.”
“How do you think they died? They didn’t just happen to stumble across a few Undead children. It’s a mystery to others, but it’s no mystery to our kind. The cloth. The coins. They’re tools—tools to put the Undead to rest. Putting two coins on the eyes of the dead is a burial ritual devised by the Greeks. According to them, the dead would use the coins to pay the boatman to cross the River Styx into Hades. The cloth was used for mummification.”
“Are you saying that my parents were Undead?”
“No, no; that is impossible. Remember, only those under the age of twenty-one can become Undead. What I’ve concluded is that they were on the trail of a feral Undead, seeking to put it to rest. They were unsuccessful, and their target took their souls.”
“But why was the cloth in their mouths?”
“To prevent their souls from leaving their bodies just before the Undead performed Basium Mortis. Just as mummification keeps the dead body from rising, it can also keep the soul of the living from leaving the body. Your parents put the gauze in their mouths themselves, though perhaps they did not act fast enough.”
The information was overwhelming. My parents were killed by an Undead? That alone was difficult to accept, but what was even more troubling was that I thought I’d known everything about them, when really, I knew nothing.
“Why didn’t they tell me?”
“Your parents wanted to give you a chance at a normal life. That’s why we had a falling out. I disagreed. Not about your having a normal life, but about them hiding your talents from you. You can’t run away from who you really are, and you can’t change it. And why would you want to? You have an extraordinary gift. That doesn’t mean you have to use it, but the choice should be yours, not your parents’.”
I considered everything he had told me. Was that why I felt so strange around Dante? Because I was a Monitor, designed to kill him? “So I’m... I’m supposed to kill the Undead?”
“Not all of them. But some.”
“But I don’t want to kill anyone.” I said, thinking of Dante.
“They are killers. Some of them, at least. They often don’t understand the situation that they’re in, and depending on their age and how bright they are, many don’t even realize they’re dead. All they know is that something is different. Food doesn’t taste good anymore. They can’t sense changes in the weather. There’s an emptiness that wasn’t there before—an emptiness that they’re constantly trying to fill. It’s instinct. Like an animal looking for food.”
“But if it’s instinct, then why should we interfere? If it’s a part of the cycle of nature, then why can’t we just let it run its course?”
“Nature also created us. And first and foremost, nature values life. Without life there would be nothing. What’s worth more? A child’s life, or the life of the Undead, who already had the chance to live?”
I thought about Dante and the person who had his soul. Who’s to say that that person’s life was more valuable than his? How could anyone compare the value of two lives?