Life Eternal Part 22

After a moment of focusing on him, the film cut out. A hand held up a sign that read: SUBJECT 005.

Back in the same cla.s.sroom sat a small boy. He was younger than the previous subject, no more than six years old. He was cross-legged on the floor, his hair a mop, his face covered in freckles. His eyes were growing hazy around the edges, just like Dante's.

"How old are you?" Dr. Newhaus asked.

The boy thought about it, sucking on his finger. "Twenty," he said finally, his voice boisterous.

"I see. That's quite old for such a small person."

The boy didn't answer.

"How many years have you been in school?"

The boy thought. "Ten."

"Can you tell me why it's bad to kiss people on the mouth?"

The boy looked at him as if he were confused.

"Is it bad to take someone else's soul?"

The boy didn't seem to register the question. "I'm hungry," he said instead.

"I don't think I have any food here except for a few b.u.t.ter biscuits. Would you like one of those?"

The boy hesitated. Without warning, he sprang up toward the camera, his limbs thras.h.i.+ng as he leapt toward Dr. Newhaus. Someone screamed. The camera trembled and then fell to the ground, focusing on the legs of a chair. Loud voices. A chair scuffing against the floor, and then an abrupt crash.

Two pairs of legs swathed in stockings crossed the frame. And then someone-presumably Dr. Newhaus-picked up the camera and steadied it, focusing on two nurses who were restraining the boy in the chair, while he kicked at them. They held him until he calmed, and remained by his side when silence resumed.

After a long pause, Dr. Newhaus said, "Why did you do that?"

The boy remained still.

"Why did you do that?"

His eyes darted quickly to the left.

"Look at me," Dr. Newhaus said, his voice sharp.

Before Dr. Newhaus could ask him another question, the boy kicked out of his seat, pus.h.i.+ng the chair over as he lashed out at the nurse to the left. Setting the camera down, Dr. Newhaus jumped into the screen and pinned the boy to the floor.

"Okay, that's enough," Dr. Newhaus said, only his legs visible as he threw his suit coat on the floor and bent over the boy. "Let's get him back to his room."

The clip ended, and a hand held up another sign: subject 067. A girl sat in front of us. She was prim and obedient-looking, like an elder sister. She sat on the edge of her seat with her knees together.

She gazed out the window, focusing on something far in the distance. "I still can't believe that I did it."

"What did you do?" asked Dr. Newhaus.

"I did what they asked me to do."

"Which is what?"

"I killed someone."

There was a long pause.

"Whom did you kill?"

"I killed a boy, a small boy."

"How did you do it?"

"I followed him, and then I captured him, and then I buried him." She blinked.

"Does what you did bother you?"

"Monitoring is my job," she said.

"But does it bother you?"

"I've been training to be a Monitor for my entire life. This is what I'm supposed to do."

"What are you looking at?" Dr. Newhaus asked, his voice gentle.

She looked at her knees, where her hands were clasped in a tight knot. "I'm not looking at anything."

"Could I ask you to look at the camera?"

"I'd rather not."

The film cut out again. We watched several more, the change of light in between each new subject making me wince. In the shadows I could see the whites of Noah's eyes as they traveled over me. I met his gaze. For the briefest moment, he held it, and then looked away, the projector humming behind us until the film turned white. Dr. Newhaus's voice boomed out from the darkness as if he were still offscreen. "I showed you this because you have to understand what you're being asked to do. You have to understand who you are.

"What can we glean from these interviews?" he asked, turning on the lights.

"Why were their eyes like that?" Brett asked. "I've met Undead before and they weren't like that."

Dr. Newhaus rewound the projector to the second Undead boy, paused it, and approached the screen. "You mean this?" he said, pointing to his irises, which had just begun to blur into the whites of his eyes. Just like Dante's. "As the Undead age, they decay and lose their senses. In other words, he is going blind."

"What?" I murmured, though only Anya could hear me. Dante was going blind? He hadn't told me.

Dr. Newhaus motioned to the image of the Undead boy. "As you'll remember, he had been in school for ten years at that point. But still, he had no idea what I was talking about when I asked him why it was bad to take someone's soul. This is why the very young Undead are so dangerous. When a child dies and reanimates before he reaches the maturity level to fully understand right and wrong, he will never be capable of learning the difference. This boy was six years old when he died. He will always remain six mentally, regardless of how many years he remains on earth. These Undead children are wild, unteachable, amoral. They take what they want without shame or guilt. And as you witnessed, they're agile."

The conversation wandered from the boy to the Monitor girl who had just completed her first burial. "She's just like us," everyone kept saying. But I wasn't interested in her.

Quietly, I raised my hand. Through everyone's voices, Dr. Newhaus called on me.

"Yes, Renee?"

The cla.s.s grew still.

"In the first interview, the Undead boy said that he took his brother's soul because he wanted to know where his toy truck was," I said slowly, parsing it out in my mind. "He said his brother wouldn't tell him, so he had to find it himself."

Clementine was about to interrupt me, but Dr. Newhaus held out his hand, letting me finish.

"What did he mean?" I asked.

Dr. Newhaus clasped his hands together. "All of us know that when an Undead takes a human's soul, the Undead also gains a temporary spurt of life."

Everyone nodded.

"However, there is a controversial theory that a.s.serts that more gets exchanged in an Undead kiss than life. A handful of Monitor researchers believe that when the Undead absorbs a person's soul, some of the memories of that person become lodged in the Undead. In other words, the Undead boy in the interview took his brother's soul in order to absorb the information he needed."

I gripped the armrest of my chair. Absorb memories? It sounded sickeningly familiar. Beside me, Anya whispered, "Are you okay? You look a little red."

I took a breath, and then another, my chest feeling suddenly constricted. "I'm fine," I said quickly; though, the more I thought about the memories and absorption, the stranger I felt. I began to sweat, and pressed my lips together. It felt as though a secret were about to burst out of me. My throat grew dry, as if stuffed with gauze. I swallowed.

"This phenomenon is called-"

"Wanderl.u.s.t," someone blurted out, finis.h.i.+ng Dr. Newhaus's sentence.

I looked around to see who had answered, when I realized that I was the one who had said it.

"Yes," the doctor said, studying me with surprise. "Would you care to explain to the cla.s.s what it is?"

A wave of nausea crept over me as I shook my head. I couldn't explain because I didn't know what the word even meant. It had come from nowhere.

"It's originally a German word, which translates literally into a l.u.s.t for travel. However, in the Monitoring world it refers to the soul's desire to wander from body to body. Which is exactly what it does if given the opportunity. There are two kinds of Wanderl.u.s.t. What you saw in the first interview with the boy and the truck was the most common kind, where trivial or isolated snippets of information are transferred." He held up a finger. "Though it doesn't always work properly, because the information that wanders is random. The Undead boy in the interview never actually found his truck. He took a chance, and now that piece of information is lost forever."

"What's-" I said, my voice cracking. "What's the second kind of-of-"

"Wanderl.u.s.t?" the doctor said.

I nodded miserably.

A glimmer of excitement pa.s.sed over his face. "I'll show you."

He fast-forwarded the film and a hand appeared on the screen, holding up a sign: SUBJECT 043.

A girl sat in the same cla.s.sroom as before. She was wearing an oversized sweater, and hugging her knees. After a moment she looked up at the camera. My cla.s.smates s.h.i.+fted in their seats as they studied her. She looked about my age, though her hair was dull and brittle like straw. Clouds obscured her irises, making her pupils appear gray; her eyes were out of focus, as if she were staring at nothing.

"How old are you?" Dr. Newhaus asked offscreen.

"Seventeen," she said, biting her nails.

"And how long have you been dead?"

She moved her fingers, counting, and then started over again, as if she had lost track. "Nineteen years."

"How do you feel?"

"Parched. Dull. Empty."

"And how did you feel after you killed your last doctor?" He said it gently, but the question seemed to agitate her. She squirmed in her chair, looking from the camera to Dr. Newhaus, to the floor.

"I didn't mean to kill him. I just wanted to talk to him. We were good friends. He was the only one who understood me. I just couldn't stop...."

"Why did you put gauze in his mouth?" Dr. Newhaus said softly.

"It was right there," she said. "It was in his office. I didn't bring it myself."

"I know," he said. "But why did you put it in his mouth?"

The girl wrung her hands together. "Because I didn't want to kill him; I just wanted to be close to him. I heard a rumor that gauze stops the soul from being completely transferred if you do it right. But I didn't."

"Who told you that?" Dr. Newhaus said, his voice noticeably firmer.

"People say that the Brothers use it to take information from people."

There was a long pause.

"Were you trying to take information from your doctor?"

"No," she said flatly.

Dr. Newhaus waited, and eventually the girl corrected herself. "I just wanted to know if he felt the same way about me as I did about him. That's all."

"What happened next?"

"I kissed him and he-he collapsed, and I realized what I'd done. But then I felt...full."

"Can you elaborate?"

"I felt like I had absorbed him. I could remember things in his past. When he embarra.s.sed himself in primary school, or when he had his first kiss. The first time he fell in love. The anger he felt when his father died."

"Could you remember other things? For example, what he had for dinner the previous night?"

The girl shook her head, looking like she wanted to cry, but couldn't.

Dr. Newhaus turned off the switch, and the screen went dark.

"The transferring of more detailed memories," he said as he turned on the overhead lights. "After taking her doctor's soul, she absorbed experiences a.s.sociated with high emotion-embarra.s.sment, fear, love, happiness....This is a rarer form of Wanderl.u.s.t; one that tends to occur in teenage Undead, rather than young children."

"And the gauze?" Anya said from beside me. She was thinking of the Nine Sisters, though all I could think about was my parents and Miss LaBarge.

"I believe," he said slowly, "and mind you, none of this has been scientifically proven yet, that the act of inserting gauze in the mouth of a victim before taking a soul may be a method that the Undead use to take information or memories from their victims without killing them immediately. Or, in other words, when done correctly, inserting gauze in the mouth prevents the entire soul from being taken in one kiss."

My breath grew shallow as I turned Dr. Newhaus's words around in my head. Gauze? Was that why the Sisters died with gauze in their mouths, why my parents and Miss LaBarge died the same way-because the Undead had tried to get information from them?