—THE STATEMENT OFALVAGRIEST
37.
The vampire stared at Caxton’s coat as her cell phone rattled out the opening bars of a Pat Benatar song. She closed her eyes as the phone buzzed against her side. Would this be the thing that finally got her killed?
The vampire didn’t stop her as she slowly reached into her pocket and took out the phone. It had stopped ringing. A moment later it chirped to tell her she had new voice mail. “It’s,” she said, about to tell him it was her phone. Then she stopped.
Geistdoerfer had frisked her back in Gettysburg. He had felt the cell phone in her pocket, had actually squeezed it. He hadn’t taken it away from her, though. Why not? At the time she had just assumed he didn’t consider it a threat. She had decided he was right—what use was it to her while he was watching her every move?
Maybe, though—maybe he had been trying to help her. He had seemed to want to aid the vampire in his plan, had in fact acted like he was part of it all. He must have known on some level, however, that it would end in his own death. Unless somebody stopped the vampire first. He couldn’t have helped her directly, not with the vampire right there. Had he been trying to give her a chance without giving himself away?
She would never know, now. But maybe she had gained a momentary advantage. Maybe she could use this.
“It’s a music box,” she said. “Like the one in the car.” She showed the phone to the vampire but he just shook his head. He wouldn’t even know what he was looking at. They hadn’t had LCD screens or keypads in his time.
“It plays music for you? Whenever you like?”
She had to think. She had to think what she could do. She couldn’t very well call the police. He would realize what was happening before she’d gotten more than a few words out. She couldn’t even listen to the message she’d just received—that would look too suspicious.
“I can make it play another tune,” she said, after a second. “Can I show you?”
He shrugged. He had plenty of time—the night was still young.
Caxton bit her lip and worked the keypad with her thumb. As quickly as she could she texted a short message to Arkeley:
at mm w vamp no gun
It was all she could think of. Looking up at the vampire, she hit send. The phone burbled in her hand, a happy little crescendo telling her the message was sent.
“Delightful,” the vampire said, actually smiling. “Perhaps later you’ll play me some more. Now, alas, I have much to do. Ladies first, if you please.”
She nodded and walked ahead of him. She could feel him behind her, his icy presence making her skin crawl. She walked around the corner to the museum entrance. The door was locked but the vampire just tugged at the handle until the lock mechanism groaned and snapped. A small torn piece of metal flew out and tapped Caxton’s hand. She walked through the opened door and into a broad lobby lit only by the orange glow of the streetlights outside.
Caxton had been to the Mutter Museum before, years past on a school trip. Long before her life had been about vampires. The place had spooked her out even back then. That was when it was well-lit and full of teenagers and college kids looking for a nasty thrill.
In the dark, in utter silence, the place was like a haunted mausoleum. A whole new kind of fear gripped her. It helped a little that there were no skeletons in the lobby, no two-headed babies floating in alcohol, just a broad staircase leading up, closed off with a velvet rope, and doors leading to a gift shop, some offices, and finally the museum. The building actually housed the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, a meeting place for doctors and a sizable medical library. The museum was only a small part of the college tucked away in a corner of the building. Caxton headed through a doorway to her left, then walked through a maze of plasterboard walls housing a display of medical instruments used by Lewis and Clark.
Beyond that lay another exhibit, this one about the great epidemics of the last two centuries. The great influenza of 1918 was well represented—the signs on the walls described it as the greatest health crisis in history, responsible for more than fifty million deaths. She came up to a picture of a pile of bodies waiting for interment in a mass grave and she stopped.
No vampire could ever hope to match that kind of destruction. Yet if Malvern were revived she would certainly give it a try. She would need blood, whole oceans of it, to keep her going. The older a vampire got the more she needed every night. Arkeley had estimated once that it would take five or six murders a night just to keep her on her feet—and that even then she would still be hungry. Starved as she was, she was unable to hunt, unable to kill. Yet if this vampire found a way to revive her, where would she stop?
She would create new vampires to serve her, to protect her. She would slay indiscriminately, cutting a bloody swath through Pennsylvania. How many dead cops would it take before she was eventually brought down?
She couldn’t let this new vampire finish his task. So far fear for her own life had driven her, a desperate need to live just a little longer. But there were limits on even that terror.
“Not much farther, I think,” he said behind her.
Had Arkeley gotten her message? She truly hoped so. She walked away from the picture on the wall, walked farther into the building, and there it was. The Mutter Museum in all its awful glory.
It spanned two levels, a main floor below them and a broad gallery connected by a pair of carved wooden staircases. Every inch of wall space had been lined with cabinets, dark wood fronted in polished glass. Inside were bones, mostly—walls full of skulls showing variations in cranial anatomy, whole skeletons mounted on steel bars to show deformities of bone structure. On her left stood the casket of the saponified woman, a corpse the Mutter had bought to demonstrate how soil conditions could turn a human body into grave wax. On display around the room were a giant impacted colon, the brain of the assassin who killed President Garfield, the conjoined liver of Chang and Eng.
It was all very tastefully done.
Caxton walked out onto the gallery and looked down at the main floor below. There were a lot more skeletons down there, some in huge glass cases of their own. One held the bones of a giant, a man at least seven feet tall, standing next to the remains of a dwarf. They looked strangely like a parent walking with a child. Nearby stood a big wooden set of drawers which she remembered held thousands of objects that had been removed from human stomachs—coins, pins, broken pieces of lightbulbs.
Between those two displays stood a single wooden coffin on a pair of sawhorses. The lid was closed. It wasn’t part of the museum’s collection. “There,” she said, because she knew that Malvern was inside.
“Yes, thank you, I can see for myself.” The vampire grabbed her shoulder, not overly hard, and turned her to
