“I imagine I stayed with him in that room for several days. I checked to see if life had returned to him so many times, but it never came back. Eventually, I came to accept that if I were to really see Peter again, he would be afflicted just like me. But even this was in doubt; hours would go by when nothing would happen. However, every time I was just on the edge of giving up, of contacting the school to confess what I’d done and to see what I should do, he would stir once more. After the second or third day, he even muttered a word: my name. I was so deprived of sleep and still so all at sea that I almost convinced myself that I’d just imagined it, but after a few further hours, he said it again.
“I knew of course from the beginning what it all meant. As I’d killed him, I’d have to be banished to one of the terrible hidden underground lairs that had been dug out to store the unwanted; either that or something worse that I had not heard about during my short stay here. So I started to think about what I could do, what we could do so that we could stay together. As it was obvious that no one could ever find out about what I’d done, this also meant that they could not find out about Peter: we had to find a way to hide Peter.
“Luckily for us, there was an old coal cellar under the house. So that’s what we’d use, I thought. Back then, the thing wasn’t hidden; but we could change that over time. The only problem was how to get blood. It was clear to me then, obviously, how important it was to get the stuff to ensure that neither of us would ever attack anyone again. We tried our best. I worked as hard as I could to get the money we needed to buy the blood for the both of us. But, as I’m sure many of you know, that’s not always enough. Whenever we were short, it had to be Peter who went hungry.
“The deputy asked me not to discuss the other attacks as he said that we should hear about them first from Peter. Because of this, I suppose I only have one more thing to say: I understand what I did was wrong and that I accept that I deserve, in your eyes, to go down to those tunnels. Nevertheless, in many ways I’m glad that I did what I did back then; I’m happy with how I acted after the attack. Indeed, if I were presented with the same situation again tomorrow, I’d probably do it all the same way.”
A few members of the gathered crowd gasped at this last statement, shocked that Mary could be so unrepentant of her actions, particularly in the face of being sentenced. Mary responded to the surprise of the audience by just turning away and returning to her chair. In many ways, she felt that she had nothing to lose and no reason to have any real interest in the people before her: she had never integrated herself into the undead community and she knew almost no one else in the hall. Now that she was sure she would be banished to the Tunnels, it seemed likely to her that she would never really have to deal with them again, meaning their opinions of her were of no consequence.
With a little push from the deputy on his arm, Peter was urged to leave his seat to give his own confession. It felt so odd for him to be in such a place, in a room where there were more people than he had seen in the forty or so years that had passed between Mary’s attack and the discovery of his hiding place by Amanda. Furthermore, apart from Mary, he had barely talked to anyone in the whole of this time – barely, as he had answered the phone on a number occasions when Mary, who was fervently against Peter speaking to anyone, was not in – and now he was expected to address a couple of hundred people in one go.
Unlike Mary, Peter was glad that they would never again return to their house in Radcliff, a place he regarded as much a prison as a home. Indeed, while he did not know what would result from whatever sentence was given to him, he was fairly convinced that it would be something better than his life hidden away on Balfour Lane; a life during which his only forays into the outside world had led to the deaths of two innocent people. So while it was odd for him to walk up to the lectern, it was not in his opinion a bad thing. Rather, it was an exciting new experience the likes of which, with the multitude of undead and the strange environment of the school, he had only ever seen on television.
Nevertheless, all of this was something he knew he could not admit to Mary. She had made her feelings clear that their situation was one of
