The Den of Souls

The Den of Souls - Chapter Six

The seven of us huddled together in front of the metal door and peered down at the black notebook in my hands. With one last glance behind me at the graveyard slowly coming to life, I opened the thin black cover to the first yellow-stained page. There was nothing written there. I turned the page. Still nothing. I continued to turn the pages one by one and panic set low in my chest when, still, there was nothing written on the pages I had turned.

"Nothing," Lily said. "There's nothing." I could hear an edge in her voice that mirrored the panic I was feeling as I continued to turn the pages.

Everyone else was silent. Whether their silence was from intrigue or fear, I didn't know. Either way, I didn't want to disappoint everyone after telling them the notebook was a clue, so I kept turning pages.

Almost halfway through the notebook, a word appeared written on a page in inky red letters.

"'Find,'" I read. "Find what?"

Remembering we didn't have much time left before the zombies ripped their way completely out of their graves, I stopped turning the pages individually and instead, hooked my thumb on the remaining half of the notebook and flicked the pages over. On the third to last page, another word was scrawled down: 'me.'

"'Find me,'" I whispered. I looked up and found my blue eyes staring into mine. "We have to find the owner of this book. That's where the next clue will be. Look!" I closed the notebook and turned it to the cover. "The owner's initials must be F.G. Their grave must be somewhere in here."

Damien nodded and began to look around, Lily following behind him.

"You want us to find a dead guy's grave when there are zombies crawling out of the rest of them?! You have got to be kidding me!" Tricia exclaimed. She glared at me and bit the bottom of her trembling lip.

"Yes," was all I said before I left her, Anna, and the twins standing by the door to join Damien and Lily in the search for Mr. or Mrs. F.G.

I took one step towards the graveyard and immediately regretted it when I saw that many of the zombies had dug themselves partially out of their graves. The guy closest to us was the dead guy with no eyes. He had dug himself out past his hips and was trying to crawl vigorously towards us. I swallowed hard and shook my head and looked for Damien and Lily.

The two of them were walking cautiously back down the graveyard, taking careful steps around the zombies and any raised soil they came across. I started walking towards them, mimicking their steps and wariness.

I had just dodged a zombie's arm reaching out to grab me when my grandmother's voice filled my mind. It had happened when I was about 10 years old and right after I had watched Night of the Living Dead with my father. I was cowering in the corner of the living room behind the maroon loveseat. My grandmother had come around to find me there hugging my knees to my chest and tears welling in my eyes.

"Oh my sweet Evelyn. I don't know why you're so afraid. It was just a movie. Real zombies are very difficult to raise from the dead, so you don't have to worry about them."

I didn't understand anything she meant back then. But right now, although this place was supposed to be fake, the churning in my gut was telling me that zombies could very well be raised from the dead.

"Eve!" Lily called, bringing me back to reality. "We found it! F.G!"

Lily and Damien were bending down next to a small grey headstone placed snuggly in the ground. The name on the stone read Frederick Geralts. Placed beside the headstone was a nameless black leather-bound book. Lily picked up the book and opened it.

"What does it say?" I whispered to her.

"It says, 'Poor people have it. Rich people need it. If you eat it you die.'"

"It's a riddle," Damien said. "Does it mean money?"

"No, I don't think so," I said. "Poor people don't have money and rich people already have money."

"And you can't eat money," Lily added. "Then what does it mean?" She flipped through the pages of the book to see if there was more, but to no avail. All the other pages were blank.

A shudder rippled through the room, shaking the ground and jolting fear right back into my gut. A quick look around the graveyard and I noticed some zombies were shakily pulling themselves out of the dirt. I heard Tricia, or was it Anna, screaming in the distance as Leon yelled for us to hurry it up.

"Think!" Lily cried. "We have to think!" Her fingers shook and turned white where she gripped the nameless book. Beside them, Damien had closed his eyes, presumably trying to focus on thinking about what the riddle meant instead of looking at the doom around us.

Think, Eve, think! I was never one for riddles. Solving problems, especially riddles, was never something I was good at in school either. Even my grandmother would suck her teeth at me when I couldn't decipher her odd sayings about the floating baby down the street or the dark man in our neighbor's basement.

What did poor people have that rich people didn't? Copying Damien and to forget about the dead people crawling out of their graves around us, I closed my eyes.

Poor people had . . . what did they have? Poor people had no money. Some poor people had no homes and no food. They didn't have anything. Poor people have nothing. Well, maybe they had pets, but that was it. What could they have that rich people need? They had nothing. They –

" – have nothing," I muttered.

"What?" Damien asked. He had opened his blue eyes and stared right at me.

"Poor people have nothing," I repeated. "They don't have anything."

Damien looked at me, confused. He repeated what I said, his lips mouthing the word "nothing". I could practically see the gears in his mind turning as he lost himself in thought for a moment. After a few seconds, a light entered his eyes and he reach out to me, gently gripping my shoulders as his lips turned up into a knowing grin. Despite the situation, I felt my cheeks flush as I looked into his eyes.

Speaking loud enough to echo across the room over the rumbling of the ground, he said, "Poor people have nothing. Rich people need nothing because they have it all. And if we eat nothing, we die."

As soon as the words left Damien's mouth, the rumbling in the room ceased, leaving zombies motionless both in their graves and on the surface of the earth mid-crawl. The dark lights in the room turned bright again and the wind returned to a gentle breeze. There was a creaking near the back of the room where the rest of our group waited and we turned to see that the metal door behind Ian had opened.