“Except for the janitor and the guy who ferries me back to Hokkaido, yes. It started out as a normal expedition — there were fourteen of us. But one by one, the others have died or left. I can’t even re-bury the specimens — the girls — we’ve excavated.”
“And the people who left or died from your expedition—”
“Well, at first people died. Then that and the other spooky stuff made the rest leave. They were frightened for their lives.”
Alaric frowned. “Who died first?”
“Out of our expedition? Ronald Argyll. Pottery specialist. He was examining two jars that were found — well, I’ll skip that story until later. He fell off a ladder and broke his neck.”
Alaric’s eyebrows went up. “That was spooky?”
“From a guy like him, who’s been in the business for almost twenty years — yes.”
“Twenty years? Maybe a heart attack? And then off the ladder — boom.” Alaric made a downward gesture.
“Maybe that’s the way it was. You may be able to explain all our little mysteries for us.” The chic woman with the short hair dimpled like a tomboy. She was dressed like one too, Elena realized: Levi’s and a blue and white shirt with the sleeves rolled up over a white camisole.
Alaric gave a little start, as if he’d realized he was guilty of staring. Bonnie and Elena looked at each other over his head.
“But what happened to all the people who lived on the island in the first place?
The ones who built the houses?”
“Well, there never were that many of them in the first place. I’m guessing the place may even have been named the Island of Doom before this disaster my team was investigating. But as far as I could find out it was a sort of war — a civil war.
Between the children and the adults.”
This time when Bonnie and Elena looked at each other, their eyes were both wide. Just like home — Bonnie began, but Elena said, Sh. Listen.
“A civil war between kids and their parents?” Alaric repeated slowly. “Now that is spooky.”
“Well, it’s a process of elimination. You see, I like graves, constructed or just holes in the ground. And here, the inhabitants don’t appear to have been invaded.
They didn’t die of famine or drought — there was still plenty of grain in the granary.
There were no signs of illness. I’ve come to believe that they all killed one another — parents killing children; children killing parents.”
“But how can you tell?”
“You see this square-ish area on the periphery of the village?” Celia pointed to an area on a larger map than Alaric’s. “That’s what we call The Field of Punished Virgins. It’s the only place that has carefully constructed actual graves, so it was made early in what became a war. Later, there was no time for coffins — or no one who cared. So far we’ve excavated twenty-two female children — the eldest in her late teens.”
“Twenty-two girls? All girls?”
“All girls in this area. Boys came later, when coffins were no longer being made.
They’re not as well preserved, because the houses all burned or fell in, and they were exposed to weathering. The girls were carefully, sometimes elaborately, buried; but the markings on their bodies indicate that they were subjected to harsh physical punishment at some time close to their deaths. And then — they had stakes driven through their hearts.”
Bonnie’s fingers flew to her eyes, as if to ward off a terrible vision. Elena watched Alaric and Celia grimly.
Alaric gulped. “They were staked?” he asked uneasily.
“Yes. Now I know what you’ll be thinking. But Japan doesn’t have any tradition of vampires. Kitsune — foxes — are probably the closest analog.”
Now Elena and Bonnie were hovering right over the map.
“And do kitsunes drink blood?”
“Just kitsune. The Japanese language has an interesting way of expressing plurals. But to answer your question: no. They are legendary tricksters, and one example of what they do is possess girls and women, and lead men to destruction — into bogs, and so on. But here — well, you can almost read it like a book.”
“You make it sound like one. But not one I’d pick up for pleasure,” Alaric said, and they both smiled bleakly.
“So, to go on with the book, it seems that this disease spread eventually to all the children in the town. There were deadly fights. The parents somehow couldn’t even get to the fishing boats in which they might have escaped the island.”
ElenaI know. At least Fell’s Church isn’t on an island.
“And then there’s what we found at the town shrine. I can show you that — it’s what Ronald Argyll died for.”
They both got up and went farther into the building until Celia stopped beside two large urns on pedestals with a hideous thing in between them. It looked like a dress, weathered until it was almost pure white, but sticking through holes in the clothing were bones. Most horribly, one bleached and fleshless bone hung down from the top of one of the urns.
“This is what Ronald was working on in the field before all this rain came,” Celia explained. “It was probably the last death of the original inhabitants and it was suicide.”
“How can you possibly know that?”
“Let’s see if I can get this right from Ronald’s notes. The priestess here doesn’t have any other damage than that which caused her death. The shrine was a stone building — once. When we got here we found only a floor, with all the stone steps tumbled apart every which way. Hence Ronald’s use of the ladder. It gets quite technical, but Ronald Argyll was a great forensic pathologist and I trust his reading of the story.”
“Which is?” Alaric was taking in the jars and the bones with his camcorder.
“Someone — we don’t know who — smashed a hole in each of the jars. This is before the chaos started. The town records make note of it as an act of vandalism, a prank done by a child. But long after that the hole was sealed and the jars made almost airtight again, except where the priestess had her hands plunged in the top up to the wrist.”
With infinite care, Celia lifted the top off the jar that did not have a bone hanging from it — to reveal another pair of longish bones, slightly less bleached, and with strips of what must have been clothing on it. Tiny finger bones lay inside the jar.
“What Ronald thought was that this poor woman died as she performed a last desperate act. Clever, too, if you see it from their perspective. She cut her wristsyou can see how the tendon is shriveled in the better-preserved arm — and then she let the entire contents of her bloodstream flow into the urns. We do know that the urns show a heavy precipitation of blood on the bottom. She was trying to lure something in — or perhaps something back in. And she died trying, and the clay that she had probably hoped to use in her last conscious moments held her bones to the jars.”
“Whew!” Alaric ran a hand over his forehead, but shivered at the same time.
Take pictures! Elena was mentally commanding him, using all her willpower to transmit the order. She could see that Bonnie was doing the same, eyes shut, fists clenched.
As if in obedience to their commands, Alaric was taking pictures as fast as he could.
Finally, he was done. But Elena knew that without some outside impetus there was no way that he was going to get those pictures to Fell’s Church until he himself came to town — and even Meredith didn’t know when that would be.
So what do we do? Bonnie asked Elena, looking anguished.
Well…my tears were real when Stefan was in prison.
You want us to cry on him?
No, Elena said, not quite patiently. But we look like ghosts — let’s act like them.
