Poe didn’t let sleep try and court him by the time he’d finally been able to wiggle Cassie off of Winston and drive the two of them back home. In fact he made no mention of what he had tucked underneath his jacket to Cassie or to his elderly parents, who’d stayed up late to wish him off considering Poe was going to leaving early tomorrow for Harvard again.

  There was a few half haphazardly spoken goodbyes until Winter break, and then Poe locked himself up for good in his room until the dawn broke. He would not waste anytime he’d left, he wanted to unravel the words and the patterns that the scroll had before he returned to Harvard.

  It was in his good fortune then, that most of the hard work had already been done for him. Hieroglyphics were the first, and the easiest to unravel considering it had been the first language he’d learnt after English. Once his passions for space exploration and otherworldly creatures had cooled down, he soon found himself becoming obsessed with pharaohs, pyramids and all the treasures that were be seen in King Tut’s tomb. His childhood bookshelves held so many scribes and notes and fringe theories about Ancient Egypt that his parents had believed he would soon spend his future lost in the great plains of the Sahara, excavating and digging up the remnants of what was left in the Valley of the Kings. And he had been on that path once, until a crisis of faith in his late teens pushed him to search for and take an evening course in philosophy.

  Next came Hebrew, another language he’d grown versatile in when he was bored and had little else to do over long, hot summer months when the rest of his friends were on holidays elsewhere. There was always a collection of Hebrew texts in the house, his father always bringing them back when he when on pilgrimage in Israel, and soon Poe had enough Hebrew under his belt to charm an Israeli girl who’d moved only a few blocks down from where his family lived. They’d danced together once, at their high school ball, but they both knew it was not to be once she left for the land of milk and honey to do her compulsory military service.

  Sanskrit was peculiar, and not at all something he’d ever had much interest in. Growing up, Poe’s interest in the ancient world started in Carthage and ended at Persia, and so

  Winston’s grandfather, however, had once been a British officer stationed in India during the course of WW1, and it seemed Winston had already completed the Sanskrit translations using the dictionaries and textbooks that were on own his shelf. Blessed it be for Winston and his sudden Sanskrit learning.

  All that left was Aramaic, something which Poe hadn’t the faintest clue where it had begun, or when it had been lost spoken. Was is Sumerian, Akkadian or Assyrian in origin? He knew it wasn’t Persian, because that’s when it disappeared once Cyrus the Great conquered the Babylonian empire. His only clue was an old textbook he picked up from an thrift shop downtown. It was paper thin, dog eared and had been scribbled on by several budding scholars to be before Poe, but it would do it’s job in a Herculean effort like this. Poe could only hope there was enough meat on it’s slim bones to unravel a scroll several centuries old.

  One after another, he picked a little here or there from each of the four languages as he slowly began to decipher the words away. The Black Scrolls Book he won had already much of the pages deciphered already, their transliteration printed besides in the page next to the original text. He felt the Soviet narrative of a singular corporal genius in Afghanistan was starting to fall apart as he pressed on - perhaps the text had been passed on the government long before Kabul had morphed into a zombie haven. What were the chances really a singular Soviet corporal would be fluent in all those dead, archaic languages?

  Why 4? He thought, Like the four seasons? It was the only guess Poe had until he went back to the Elkins Library and pried open the archives that had been released to the public. He’d already seen some of the artwork that was inside before on posters at Harvard, depicting a singular glob of white soul stuff conversing and guided along by a dark figure with the teeth of a wild dog. Poe had overheard from scholars studying it that was probably an earlier attempt at fleshing out Anubis and the weighing of the scroll from Egyptian mythology, but he did not believe it. The figures seemed too universal to being linked to a singular mythology, like a child’s interpretation of a a psychopomp carrying her soul away into the Nether.

  Beneath the English transliterations, he could still see some of the faint Cyrillic text that had preceded. Espionage it was, and a copy of the Black Magic Scrolls had probably been snatched by a secret agent posing as a diplomat while on a mission to Moscow. Poe let his fingers trail further the pages, and the Cyrillic text grew fainter and fainter until it had completely vanished with 20 pages to go. Perhaps that was as much as that sly agent could bit off before he vanished back to Washington, the rest of it that hadn’t been decoded into Russian was only known to a select few back in the US.

  Poe chewed on his felt tip pen, and started to wonder if he could really go through wit something like this? He was not sure why, but it seemed so much scrutiny would come under him once the secrets had been studied and unlocked. True, zombies were not officially outlawed in certain states, like Massachusetts where he was heading, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be a stigma attached if someone saw a shuffling corpse moving up and down Gabriel Avenue.

  And even if he did unravel the whole text and decided to whisper his first few words of black magic on a dark night like this, what would he do with it? His grandparents were still alive, and he’d never had any pets that were that dear to him worth digging up for a ritual that may or may not even work. The families members of his own who’d died had always been rather distant to him, and didn’t have a close enough connection to drive across the country to resurrect them.

  Bella, the name of his first love, kept ringing in his ear as he moved through the last few pages of Aramaic and Hebrew that were still left to be chipped away. He didn’t like that, especially when it seemed to conjure up images of her shuffling, skeletal corpse rising up from beyond the grave.

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  At Harvard, the zombies he'd met were somewhat fresh, but that was only because they'd been well preserved beforehand, or had been dead for only a handful of days when it was time for life to breathed into them again.

  What would remain of Bella after spending 10 lonely years underneath a deep pit of rocks and soil? Would her eye sockets be empty, her long red hair whittled down from falling out in clumps as time marched on?

  Poe had seen the Soviet soldier from WW2 near the borders of Berlin, and they would not be winning any veteran beauty pageants anytime soon. He tried to lie to himself, to befuddle and confuse his mind that it was because they'd suffered such violent deaths in a conflict that happened 35 years ago, but it was no use.

  Bringing back Bella as a 22 year old dishevelled corpse was completely out of the question. Nada. Nilch. Zip. Not possible Not going to happen. Never.

  Perhaps he could find himself instead bringing comfort to a friend who’d been sold a pup, only to learn it had been the runt of the litter and had passed away tragically in it’s dog shed the first night it had him.

  Or that fat tabby orange cat, a stray who constantly butted heads with Poe growing up, who's demise came near the end of his summer break and was lost in some nearby garbage can after his father decided to do the lord's work and clean up the mess when no else would.

  Whatever choice he made, he was sure it was not going to involve his decomposing first love.

  It’s crazy I’m even considering this, Poe thought, but I should give it a go before I return to Harvard. 'twas a night as dark and stormy as any Hammer Horror serial would be when he entered the Cameron Church graveyard. He didn’t even need to toggle on his flashlight, for he’d come to know the path off by heart from the many times he’d came and went here over the years.

  It was about 5AM-ish, and Poe had cracked the code to the Black Magic Scrolls just under an hour ago. Aramaic, as he’d expected proved the most difficult to unravel by the end, but his persistence had paid off and now he’d the complete text of black magic within his backpocket, fidgeting and snarling to get out.

  If there is a just God out there, then this is the place where I’ll wind up being dragged to Hell as punishment.

  He lowered his head in meekness once he caught a view of his father’s dishevelled chapel in the distance. With the discovery of the scrolls, atheism had suffered a massive blow in popularity both inside and outside of Academics, but so did belief in the existence of an omnipotent God who was the only one capable of resurrecting the dead.

  Even as the world teetered with zombies running amok, Poe couldn’t help but give that religious spectre he’d worshipped as a child the respect it deserves. He did not like he was predisposed to such behaviours, but, as he reminded himself, he was a preacher’s son after all.

  For his years of choir singing service, instead of letting him be ravaged viciously by demons, God might feel merciful and explode into a burst of flames instead.

  Bella’s grave was, at it always was, near the top left corner of the Cameron graveyard. She was the first person to be buried in that part, in fact it had not been apart of the graveyard at first at all. Her untimely death caused such a wide wave of grief that a farmer nearby decided he would give the plot to her parents to bury her there.

  Poe still remembered the widespread funeral proceedings, which further agonised him as he went along with it, which were the largest he’d ever seen in Cameron. Mourners cradled around her coffin like the old phalanx formations of the Roman army. Outpouring of grief extended from her graveside to her classroom chair, which was kept empty and adorned with flowers by her peers who missed her deeply.

  Her own grave was still shrouded with the bouquet of Roses Poe had left a few weeks back. Her own parents had left Cameron not long after Bella’s death, so Poe had become the sole tender to it when he was growing up. Away at Harvard, baring her parents stopping by to visit it on their travels, no one would do the upkeep until Poe came back on his Winter, Spring or Summer breaks.

  He reached for the black notebook in his pocket, and began to flip through the list of translated sentences he’d written out. He had not spoken one word of the four languages until he was sure he’d finished transcribing the whole thing, and even thing, as the thought of bringing Bella back lingered, he decided he would not speak it until he was at her graveside again.

  The rationalistic side to him, his doubts, were beginning to break in to his troubled mind now that he was on the cusp of whispering his first few words of Sanskrit. There was a billion ways for this to go horribly wrong, and only way for it to go a 100% right. One misspoken vowel, one mistranslated word, and his own life might just be plain over already.

  He started to stammer, a deep lump coalescing in his throat. He tried to reason with himself, reasoning was the only way he could come to terms with the madness he was about to find himself lost in.

  I’m not doing this for myself, I’m doing this for Bella.

  His first words of Aramaic came out of him with more proficiency that he’d expected. It was the one he was most inexperienced with, but he spoke it’s sharp guttural growls and tender verbs with the trained etiquette of an Oxford scholar. He did not expect that, that he might get lost in those words as quickly as he’d started, that Aramaic might’ve been the work he was heralded a prodigy in had Ancient Egypt and the king Tut craze not swept him like it had the rest of the world.

  Sanskrit and Hebrew followed suit, and whatever confidence he held in his levels of mastery was soon followed by crippling second guessing, and long painful stretches of pauses where he made sure he had not mistaken a verb for an adjective.

  Hieroglyphics, his second love after Bella, was last. Ironic the one he found a breeze to translate was the only one he grew fearful of speaking about. He did not like that, to be fearful, especially a subject in which he should have more

  In all four languages, which preceded one after another, Poe recited the calling for someone who was dear to him and who’d been so deeply lost. There was a gravitas to the words, a calling that they might be brought back, a plead to whatever deity inhabited and overlooked this world that they might let the rules of nature be cast aside for this one small favour, and let the mourner’s beloved come back into their arms.

  He waited for the ground under him to come apart, to find, not Bella, but tendrils wrapping up to drag him down into the darkest pits of the Underworld for forsaken the Christian God and all that was holy. Poe didn’t even let his eyes peek out, for he was so frightened of what may come to get him that when he heard the first words of gravelling beginning to be pull apart he wondered if the faint outline of a demon was already about to reach for him.

  He grimaced. Bit heavily down on his tongue and waited to find himself submerged in hellfire.

  “Poe?”

  Shakily, his eyes came apart, and Poe first came across the dishevelled coffin which had been torn apart by his former inhabitant, with scatterings of plywood marked all over nearby graves and tombstones. Ripped apart, just like what became of his own heart after she perished a decade ago.

  He turned around, and behind him, green skinned, remarkably intact eyeballs and red hair that was cluttered with clumps of dirt, was her.

  It was Bella.