—THE STATEMENT OFALVAGRIEST
43.
Arkeley led her back to the museum, back to the lower level, where Malvern still lay in her coffin. As they approached Caxton looked down at the old vampire, trying to piece things together.
There wasn’t much left of Malvern. Her skin had turned to paper, still snowy white but riddled with dark sores. It had pulled away in places, hanging in tatters. Most of her scalp was missing, revealing yellow bone underneath. Her triangular ears hung down ragged and limp. One of her eyes was missing—it always had been—and the other was just a milky blob of flesh that wobbled back and forth in its socket.
Caxton doubted she could see anything with that eye.
That didn’t mean she was gone, though. When Caxton leaned down over the coffin, Malvern’s head craned forward on its spindly neck, her jaws opening in slow motion. She could sense Caxton’s presence somehow, and was trying to bite her, to tear into her flesh and suck her blood.
When Caxton pulled back the jaws closed, just as slowly as they’d opened.
The vampire from Gettysburg, her vampire, should have looked like that. Any vampire over a hundred years old should be that decayed and weak. Though he had fed on Geistdoerfer’s blood, that should not have been enough. They still had no idea how he was able to walk, even to stand up. Much less how he could outrun a police cruiser or throw her around like a rag doll.
Arkeley cleared his throat. Caxton turned and saw him standing next to a display case. Inside stood the head and shoulders of a man with his skin and part of his musculature removed. His blood vessels had been painstakingly exposed and plasticized, painted different colors to differentiate between the veins and arteries. On top of the case stood a cheap black laptop computer. Arkeley popped it open and raised the screen so she could see it.
“You’ll remember that she warned us,” he said. “She told us that he would come for her.” He tapped the space bar and the computer woke from its sleep mode. On the screen a white window appeared, the text field of a word processing program. Malvern’s original message was displayed there in large italic type, completed and therefore a little more legible now:
“Come for me he shall. Right,” Caxton said. “She was gloating. Laughing at us because she knew that soon enough he would come and take her away from all this. Bring her blood or—something. I thought maybe he knew some spell. She calls them orisons, right? Some orison to restore her.”
“Yes, I thought that too. Then I realized that she wasn’t that stupid.” Arkeley stepped in front of the screen and scrolled down the page. “Why give us even a cryptic warning? We wouldn’t have expected him to even know who she was. By telling us that he was coming for her she gave us plenty of time to prepare. I knew I needed more information so earlier this evening I set her up and let her type some more.”
He stepped away so she could see the screen. The next message read:
“Protect—” Caxton put a hand over her mouth.
“Ah. I think you’ve begun to get the point,” Arkeley said.
Caxton nodded. Yeah, she was getting it. The vampire of Gettysburg hadn’t dragged her all this way so he could revive Malvern. He’d come to destroy her. “But—they don’t fight among themselves. They cooperate.”
“Don’t ever assume that what you know about one vampire must be true of them all,” Arkeley told her.
“That’s a sure way to get yourself killed.” She knew that tone. She’d heard him use it a hundred times before. The tone of a schoolteacher correcting a student who could never seem to learn the most basic lesson.
“I couldn’t know this,” she said.
“I called you as soon as she was done typing. Didn’t you get the message?”
Her cell phone—she had received a message while standing out in the parking lot. Right before they’d come inside. “I wasn’t in a position to receive it,” she said. “He was standing there watching everything I did. It was the best I could do to send you that text message.”
He nodded but he didn’t look like he’d forgiven her. “Goddamn it,” he muttered. “I’ve been looking for a way to kill her for more than twenty years. I’ve devoted my whole career to it. The courts always stayed my hand. This would have ended so much misery and torment, so easily. If you had just been patient.”
Caxton’s cheeks burned, but she wasn’t going to take the guilt. “Your misery. Your torment.” It was true that he had been trying tirelessly to find some way to end Malvern’s scheming. To put an end to her existence. It was also true what Malvern had said. “This message,” she said, pointing to the screen,
“wasn’t for you. It was for me.” It was addressed to her directly, by name.
Arkeley snorted. “She knows better than to appeal to my kinder nature.” He picked up the laptop and moved it closer to the coffin, placing it on a display case just within Malvern’s reach.
The skeletal arm lifted slowly, very slowly, from the coffin, and the decayed fingers rested almost lifelessly on the keyboard. With painful slowness Malvern’s index finger tapped spastically at the
The hand fell back for a full minute, the fingers opening and closing slowly as if they were too weak to even lie still. Then the hand moved on, skittering across the keys like a dried-up leaf blown by an autumn breeze, moving up and to the left to touch the
Something about the way the hand moved bothered Caxton. As slowly as Malvern moved from letter to letter, she was actually making pretty good time. “She’s speeding up,” Caxton said, frowning. She looked at the message already on the screen, the one begging for her assistance. “And she seems to have remembered how to use the space bar.” The first message, “
“It took her days to type that last message. She averaged about a keystroke every four hours. I didn’t have that kind of time.” Arkeley kept his eyes on the screen.
“So you sped things up.” She was terrified that she knew how he’d done it, too. “Show me your arms,”
Caxton demanded.
Arkeley snorted again. She wasn’t kidding around, though. She needed to know. She grabbed his arm, his left arm. The one with no fingers. He didn’t fight her as she pushed up his sleeve. There was a thick bandage of clean white gauze around his wrist.
“You fed her,” Caxton breathed, not believing it, not knowing what it meant. It was a bad thing, she knew that. “You bastard. You fed her!” When Malvern had first become a ward of the court there had been doctors who took care of her. There had been two of them and she had been responsible for both of their deaths. They had fed her this same way—with their own blood. Arkeley had worked for years to get a court order forbidding them from doing just that. And now he was doing it himself.
Caxton could only shake her head in disbelief.
44.
