99 Coffins: A Historical Vampire Tale

face him. “You’ll stay here,” he said, “and wait for me to finish.”

Her hands were in her pockets. She’d thought this might be coming. Despite what he thought, she still had her amulet. Because the ribbon was broken she couldn’t wear it around her neck—instead she’d put it in her pants pocket. Where she could reach it if she needed it. Out in the parking lot she hadn’t had a chance to grab it, but now she held it tightly. She could feel it getting warm.

His eyes blazed into hers. He was trying to hypnotize her—to freeze her in her tracks. Surely, she thought, he would feel something when it didn’t work. He would know she had some protection against him.

He said nothing, though. Maybe he hadn’t felt anything. Maybe he was just in a hurry. He brushed past her and then leaped over the side of the gallery, not bothering to take the stairs. He landed with a barely audible thump and moved immediately to the side of the coffin. For a second he stood motionless before it, then passed his white hands over its top, his head tilted back.

Someone walked up behind Caxton and she nearly screamed. A fingerless hand touched her shoulder and she turned to see Arkeley standing there. His face was a mask of torture in the gloom. His good hand held his old reliable Glock 23. It looked like he’d received her message, though clearly he hadn’t had time to really prepare.

He raised his ruined hand to his lips and she understood he wanted her to be quiet. What was he waiting for? She knew him well enough to believe he must have some plan, but she couldn’t imagine what it might be.

Below them the vampire lifted the lid of the coffin. It opened noiselessly. Inside lay Malvern. She was withered and her skin was covered in sores, but she looked far more healthy than the last time Caxton had seen her. That didn’t make sense—Arkeley had been starving her of blood for over a year, hoping she would eventually die of malnutrition. If anything it looked like she’d grown stronger. How was that even possible?

The vampire reached into the coffin and ran his fingertips across Malvern’s mottled cheek. He said something, so low she couldn’t make it out.

There was no more time—what was Arkeley waiting for? The Gettysburg vampire had found some way to cheat time. What if he knew some magical spell to bring Malvern back to her former self as well?

There was no time at all.

Her eyes wide, she stared at Arkeley, but he only shook his head. So she did the only thing she could think of. Grabbing the Glock out of his hand, she aimed down at the vampire and put three quick rounds into his back, into where his heart would be. One two three. The noise was immense in that hushed place—it sounded as if every glass case in the museum had shattered at once.

The vampire vanished into thin air. If she’d gotten him, if she had killed him, he would have just slumped to the floor. She must have missed the heart, or the blood that flowed in his veins, Geistdoerfer’s stolen blood, must have protected him.

“You idiot,” Arkeley said, his face congested with rage. “How could you screw everything up?” He didn’t wait for an answer but ran off, into the shadows.

38.

I was set to search the upstairs rooms, in case more fiends lay in wait for us. The task loomed large. Whatever soothing balm the excitement of battle may bring, it wears off powerfully fast.

Luckily the second floor was not so large, & the number of doors I faced small. Two were locked; a third led to a narrow stairs, by which one could access the cupola, which was ringed inside with a narrow iron gallery. I headed back, & tried the locked doors again. You can perhaps imagine my horrified surprise when I heard a muffled sound from behind one of them.

It might have been a pigeon, having found its way in through some broken window, I told myself.

But it was not. The sound I heard was high pitched, a keening whine that I had heard before. It was the voice of one of the fiends.

“I have a minie ball for you if you make another sound,” I said through the door, my voice just loud enough to carry through the wood. I knew I could dispatch the creature beyond that portal. I was worried more he would make some alarum that would rouse the cavalry outside.

“Alva?” the voice asked. “Alva, is it you?”

You will have already guessed the identity of my conversant, & you are correct. It was BILL. My horribly wounded & long-sought friend, found at last. So why then did my blood run cold to hear him?

—THE STATEMENT OFALVAGRIEST

39.

Caxton thundered down the stairs, her feet blurring on the steps, her weapon held high and ready, pointed at the ceiling. The vampire could be waiting for her at the bottom, in the shadows there. She could feel his teeth tearing into her flesh, ripping through her skin. He could be lying in ambush and she could be running right into his maw.

At the bottom of the stairs she turned and extended her arms, weapon in firing position. She looked around for pale humanoid shapes—and suddenly realized there were far too many of them. The skeletons in their cases all looked like vampires in the dark. The vampire she was chasing, while he no longer looked like a famine victim, was still rail thin, and would pass for a skeleton if he stood very still in a corner of the room.

Caxton pivoted slowly, trying to cover the entire room. This was madness. The vampire could see her just fine. Their night vision wasn’t supernatural by any means, but they could see blood—her blood—as if it glowed with its own red light. She was a walking neon sign as far as the vampire was concerned. At any moment he could spring on her, and he was fast, so fast she wouldn’t have time to get her gun around to fire at him.

The only sensible thing to do in her situation was run. Get out, get to a safe distance. Try to seal off the museum’s exits, then wait for dawn. Arkeley had taught her a long time ago, however, that whenever you tried to fight vampires in a sensible fashion they would just slip through your net. In the time it took her to lock the museum’s doors the vampire would be long gone—or he would already have killed her.

The only effective way to hunt vampires, Arkeley had shown her, was to walk right into their traps. To give them exactly what they wanted. It confused them, made them think you had more up your sleeve than you actually did.

There—she rushed forward, thinking she’d seen something move. She jabbed her handgun out, lined up its sights on center mass, started to squeeze the trigger.

Then she stopped. The shape she’d almost shot was the skeleton of a man who had suffered from crippling spina bifida. His bones looked as twisted and worn as driftwood.

The vampire laughed at her. Then she heard a chuckling, echoing sound that made her skin crawl. The sound seemed to come from all around her, from nowhere in particular. Had it come from directly above? She looked up with a fright, but saw nothing over her except for the ceiling. She didn’t feel much relieved, though. That laugh had crawled right in her ear and laid eggs in her brain. A dry, nasty, grating laugh that spun off into distorted echoes had chased off into the shadows.

She had no time to decide what that meant, if anything. She had a subject to collar. Caxton pressed backward, up against a display of pickled fetuses, some with heads, some without, some with more than the requisite number. Slowly, inching her way, covering the whole room before her, she headed back for the stairs. She was pretty sure the vampire wasn’t on the lower level.

She was wrong.

A white blur leaped over the top of Malvern’s coffin and barreled right at her. She brought her weapon around just fast enough to blast a hole in his face before he collided with her bodily, knocking her to the floor. He reared up, clutching his eyes, and she rolled to the side before he could strike downward with his fists. They connected with the floor hard enough to crack the wooden parquet.

“Shit,” she said, the word just leaping out of her mouth. He turned to follow her voice and she saw she’d ruined the bridge of his nose. Most of the middle of his face was hanging down by a flap of skin and she saw splintered bone in the wound. Even as she watched, however, white vapor filled in the hole with snaky tendrils that knitted together. In the time it took him to stand upright again, his face was completely restored.

He glanced at the coffin in the middle of the room, his face dropping in regret, and then he was moving again.