Iain's brain was ringing.
Through the window, he stared at the figures still moving slowly in the back yard. Aunt Mary. Granny Clara. Old Mr. Lewis. And more besides, people he did not even recognize, bones and corpses buried under this patch of land for who knew how many years, rising one after another from the churning soil.
Supreme Lord of the Silent Dead!
Iain suddenly remembered that title from the coffin in the dream world. If that title was real, then it probably represented one of the many powers contained in the runes in that room.
At that point, he did not even need his super-brain. A regular pig brain would have been enough for him to realize that this had to be connected to him.
"Resurrection of the dead..."
In his mind, the activated section of runes was still shining.
He frowned and tried to extinguish it inside his consciousness. It remained there, quietly turning, like an oil lamp that had been lit all the way.
It would not go out.
"No!" Iain forced the word out through gritted teeth, in a tone full of utter disbelief. "My first magic is Dark Magic? Is that seriously how this is going?"
No matter how hard he tried to sever the dark current feeding that rune with his thoughts, it refused to budge. The rune seemed to have formed a connection with him that he did not understand at all.
It was stable in a way that felt hopeless.
Outside in the yard, the revived bodies were still standing there.
That was perhaps the only good news. At the very least, they had not immediately launched into a full riot and gifted the Harry Potter universe an actual undead apocalypse.
Still, thanks to the shrieks of the two little banshees, everyone in the building had already been woken up.
Downstairs, all hell broke loose.
"What's going on?"
Keisha and Lena's screams were like stones dropped into water, and within minutes the ripples had spread through the entire building. Mrs. Hawke came charging out of her room in a dressing gown, having lost one slipper somewhere on the way, her hair looking like a bird's nest after a tornado.
Right behind her came Mrs. Millie the cook, brandishing a frying pan with the expression of a medieval peasant woman marching off to fight a dragon. Then came Old Tom the groundskeeper, carrying a shovel and swearing under his breath, though no one caught exactly what he was saying.
From the tone of it, however, it was clearly not a cheerful good morning.
They rushed to the end of the corridor, threw open the back door, and then stopped dead.
There were more than a dozen people standing in the yard.
At least, they looked like people.
Aunt Mary stood at the front. Her shriveled, grey-white face was especially stark in the weak light, and bits of grass root and a tiny daisy torn up with the soil still clung to her tattered clothes. Her mouth hung slightly open, revealing nothing but a dark hollow.
No tongue. No teeth. Nothing.
Granny Clara stood beneath the plane tree, her empty eye sockets turned toward the back door. The way she stood was odd, as though something had fixed her in place.
Or as though she were waiting for a command.
Old Mr. Lewis appeared to be trying to take a step. His movements were agonizingly slow. One foot lifted, wobbled in midair, then sank back down again.
Wanting to walk, yet not walking.
"Damn it, it's demons!" Mrs. Millie shrieked, raising her frying pan as if preparing to throw it. "The devil's driving the dead to attack the orphanage!"
"The devil wants the purest souls in this place!" Being a Christian, her imagination had naturally gone into overdrive.
"No!" a voice suddenly piped up from among the children. It was eleven-year-old Galen, one of the seventy-two children in the orphanage who had been named by Iain.
At that moment, he was hiding behind the doorframe with only half his head showing, eyes round as saucers.
"It's zombies! Iain told us about this! If a zombie scratches you, you'll get infected, and then make baby zombies, and in the end the whole world turns into zombie land!"
"Yes, yes, exactly!" eight-year-old George chimed in, his voice carrying a bizarre excitement, as if this were not terrifying at all but an eagerly anticipated game. "Iain told us this part too. The zombie outbreak starts because some underground bio-lab goes out of control!"
"That's right! And even super science can't save the world! Iain's a prophet!" another child yelled.
Iain could not even tell whose voice that was, but right now all he wanted was to sew every last one of his younger siblings' mouths shut. The very last thing guilty little him wanted to hear at a moment like this was anyone bringing him up.
"This has nothing to do with me!"
Iain yelled down from the second floor.
Which only made him sound guiltier.
Unfortunately for him, no one noticed. It was far too noisy below.
Mrs. Hawke had already started herding all the children back into the building. Several of the adults worked together to barricade the door, each of them unable to believe what they had just seen.
"What do we do?"
"Find weapons! Find guns!"
"We're children, we don't have guns!"
"Then find frying pans! Iain says frying pans are overpowered!"
The children all started talking over one another, voices growing louder and the content growing more ridiculous by the second. Some had already begun assigning roles. Tommy had appointed himself captain, George wanted to be the sniper, and one four-year-old girl was crying and asking whether, if she turned into a zombie, she would still be allowed to eat pudding.
Children truly were fearless.
The adults, on the other hand, were terrified.
"Call the police! We have to call the police!"
Mrs. Hawke stood in the middle of the crowd, her face having shifted from shock into sheer exhaustion. She clutched the telephone receiver in one hand, her fingers trembling as she turned the dial.
"What?! Call the police?!"
Iain had already been dragged downstairs by a group of children trying to recruit him as the leader of the resistance, and the moment he saw what Mrs. Hawke was doing, his vision nearly went black.
A college student who had crossed over was not built for this kind of pressure.
Fortunately, perhaps Lady Luck had no desire to see Iain's Redemption performed inside a British prison.
Beep! Beep! Beep!
The line was busy.
Mrs. Hawke failed to get through.
Seeing that, Iain let out a breath of relief and secretly continued trying to cancel the spell, except the rune in his mind seemed to have no off switch at all once it lit up.
"I've got it!" At that moment, fifteen-year-old Michael, the oldest child in the orphanage, put on an expression so grave he looked like a news anchor announcing the end of the world.
"The whole city has fallen!"
Michael spoke in a low voice, full of the sort of certainty he personally found impressive. "There must be some secret genetics lab under London. A bioweapon leaked out, and artificial intelligence couldn't stop the spread."
"Maybe every dead person in the city has gotten back up. The police definitely can't handle this. The army probably couldn't either."
Who said older kids did not enjoy stories from the Iain Tells Tales program?
Smack!
Hiding in the crowd, Iain slapped himself across the face, deeply regretting how thoroughly he had fed the children's imaginations over the years.
God was his witness.
Back then, he had only been trying to test whether he had the makings of a great novelist.
"So are we going to die?" someone asked.
"No," Michael continued confidently. "Iain said that in the first seventy-two hours of a zombie outbreak, if we can find the twelve magic talismans, we can stop it."
He had now moved on to copying third-hand stories too.
"Michael! Stop talking! Your real talent should be dancing!"
Iain's voice came from the middle of the children.
His mouth hung slightly open, and outwardly he looked no different from any of the terrified adults around him, just another child stunned by the sight outside the window.
"There is no zombie apocalypse! None!"
Iain fervently denied being any sort of prophet.
"But what about those things out there..."
Tommy pointed out the window.
"What things out there?"
Iain walked to the window and looked outside. His pupils shrank in an instant, then widened again almost violently.
"My God... what in the world... who did this?!"
Through the iron fence of the orphanage, he could see figures swaying slowly under the streetlamp across the road. One of them was a male skeleton in Victorian clothing, his jaw opening and closing as if speaking words no one could hear.
"Damn it!"
Ignoring the attempts to stop him, Iain scrambled out through the window and ran outside, under the astonished cries of the children shouting, "Iain really is going off to transform into a superhero!"
Once he reached the street, he could see them everywhere.
Walking corpses.
Skeletons.
Now he understood why the police line had been busy. Many of the people awakened by the noise had just experienced the worst fright of their lives.
"Hss..."
Iain swallowed hard.
The range of this magic was far bigger than he had imagined.
He shut his eyes and frantically searched for that section of rune in his consciousness, trying to snuff it out with sheer force of will. He strained so hard that veins stood out on his forehead, so hard that his temples throbbed, so hard that his brain felt like an overheating engine on the verge of burning out.
And yet,
the rune did not move in the slightest.
It remained there, turning quietly and steadily, ignoring Iain's will completely. Worse, all his frantic fumbling only seemed to provoke a different response.
The rune flashed.
In the yard,
Aunt Mary's mouth opened.
Granny Clara's mouth moved too.
All the resurrected dead, whether they could truly speak or not, seemed to receive some kind of command. Their mouths moved in unison, and across the nighttime city their voices began to rise.
They were singing.
A Christmas carol.
"God rest ye merry, gentlemen,"
"Let nothing you dismay,"
"Remember Christ our Savior"
"Was born on Christmas Day..."
The dead across several whole blocks had started singing.
A song that ought to have sounded cheerful became, in such a scene, almost as horrifying as using a machine on the battlefield to broadcast the voices of fallen comrades.
"Shut up!"
Iain's face had gone as white as paper.
Panicked beyond measure,
he shouted.
And instantly, as though some invisible law had taken hold of the world, several whole blocks fell silent. Even the ordinary people frozen in terror seemed to have had their throats seized by unseen hands, unable to produce the slightest sound.
"Hm?"
Just as Iain felt that flood within him surge once more,
"What monstrous evil! What terrifying Dark Magic!"
A voice rang out from a street corner not far away, full of alarm, horror, and the trained vigilance of someone used to danger.
"Who's there?" Iain whipped around.
The air rippled like the surface of water, and then four people appeared on the street out of nowhere.
They wore dark robes, each holding a wand. The man at the front was tall and powerfully built, with dark skin and a striking shaved head.
"Aurors!!"
Iain recognized that manner of arrival at once.
Apparition.
Under the night sky,
the cold wind cut like a knife.
And so a small wizard and a group of fully grown wizards found themselves staring directly at one another.
"Well then..."
Perhaps truly gifted young wizards did not need the Sorting Hat at all.
Perhaps they simply found their own road to Azkaban.