Specimen prepared by Captain Custis Benjamin, surgeon. At the request of a Colonel Pittenger with the War Department I have undertaken a preliminary examination. Results follow. Remains removed to the College of Physicians at Philadelphia for study on June 25, 1863. After dinner that night I took possession of two wooden boxes personally, and moved them immediately to the dissecting theater. There I performed an autopsy on the subject, assisted by my colleague, Doctor Andrew Gorman, a fellow Member of the College. Examination began at half past nine in the evening.
Subject was delivered in a skeletal condition. Under separate cover heart arrived packed in excelsior. Heart examined first; found that it weighed twelve and one half oz. (slightly heavier than average human organ), had a blackish red coloration, and oozed a pale milky secretion when probed. Had no particular smell, nor showed any signs of corruption despite being separated from the body for several days.
When returned to the remainder of the body, heart began action almost instantly. Production of milky secretion increased dramatically. Steam and palpable heat arose from the area of greatest activity and some reconstituted flesh visible after ten minutes time. This despite removal of heart from body cavity for extended period.
As requested by Colonel Pittenger, then moved on to application of four oz. human blood, secured from Doctor Gorman’s left arm. Reconstitution accelerated considerably. Muscle tissue began to knit together following one hour, at which time full suite of organs already visible.
Major Gorman expressed unwillingness to see body completely restored. I concurred. Heart removed at this time. Reconstituted flesh and structures collapsed rapidly, as an inflated bladder losing air through a puncture. Heart destroyed as per orders and male subject permanently deceased, as of one quarter past twelve, June 26, A.D. 1863.
When she’d finished she looked up at Arkeley. He was smiling like a cat with a mouth full of fresh mouse. “Would you care to say it first?”
She knew exactly what he was getting at. “No,” she said. “I think you’re jumping to a dumb conclusion.
This vampire’s heart had been removed for a couple of days. When they put it back, he started regenerating, sure. After a couple of days! Geistdoerfer found my vampire’s heart lying on top of his coffin. He put it inside and the vampire came back to life. I see what you’re getting at, but it can’t be the same thing. Too much time passed for that.” Surely the heart would have rotted away after a hundred and forty years. To think anything else was absurd. Yet how else could she explain her vampire’s condition? He had cheated time.
Still she wouldn’t believe it. She shook her head back and forth.
“Tell me, Trooper,” Arkeley said, his face a patient mask. “If the doctors here had not destroyed the heart—if they had saved it in another one of these cabinets—would you be willing to reunite it with these bones, just to prove your point? Would you take that chance?”
Caxton looked anywhere but his face. Then she pushed the drawer closed with her foot, shutting the bones away, out of sight.
48.
With the vampire below, our only path of egress was UP. We must find stairs to get away.
Thinking he had found the way to the cupola, Storrow rushed for the locked door, and burst it open. My heart was in my mouth, and I could not speak, though I knew that was the wrong door, and something of what lay beyond.
Eben Nudd was the first in. “Oh, Mercy,” he said. It was the harshest language I’d ever heard him use.
It was not hard to find the seat of his discomfort. The room beyond the door was another boudoir, perhaps that of the lady of the house. The fittings might have been sumptuous once, but I had little time to study their decay. One feature of that room demanded all my attention. It was a coffin, a simple box of pinewood, tapered at the bottom, & it was open. Within lay a creature unlike any we’d seen before.
She had the pale skin & the hairlessness of a vampire, & the pointed ears. She certainly had the fangs. Yet she looked to be some sixmonth-dead corpse, her body ravaged by the worm, her face a mass of sores & pustulent blisters. She had but one eye in her head; the other having collapsed long since, & rotten away perhaps. She made no movement, nor rose from her place, but only watched us with her remaining eye.
“Another,” Storrow breathed. “There is another?”
None of us had time to answer him. Bill, at that moment, slew German Pete with a single blow to the head. He had a massive truncheon made of the leg of a dressing table, and his hand did not stay a moment.
Eben Nudd did not wait for the hexer’s body to fall before raising his musket rifle. It was too late, though, for Bill had run off, and I never did see him again. From the look of him & from the state he was in, he wasn’t going to last too long.
—THE STATEMENT OFALVAGRIEST
49.
“We know so little about them, really,” Arkeley said. “No scientist has ever written more than a partial description. They can’t be captured and put in zoos for schoolchildren to gawk at, and they’re thankfully rare enough that no one has ever tried. We don’t understand anything about their magic, their orisons, or even how their curse works. It defies everything we do know.”
“But do you understand what you’re saying? They’re stronger than us and maybe smarter. We can barely destroy them when they do crop up. The one thing we can count on, the one real advantage we have over them, is that they get old even faster than we do. That they wither away.” Caxton thought of the old stories of vampires who remained forever young, their looks and their strength bolstered by regular access to copious amounts of blood. That was the myth, the dream every vampire tried to make come true. It was what Malvern was still living for, the hope that someday she would be fully restored, if only she could get enough blood.
Now there was evidence—the bones in the drawer, the record of Custis Benjamin, Surgeon—that maybe it was possible. Maybe it wasn’t perfect, but there was a way for vampires to live for centuries and not lose their power.
All they had to do was have somebody remove their heart from their bones and put it someplace safe.
Days, years, centuries later the heart could be returned to the body and the vampire would reanimate, almost as strong as ever, weak and hungry perhaps, but ready to hunt again.
It wasn’t quite eternal youth. But it was as close as they could get.
She thought of the way the vampire of Gettysburg— her vampire, she had come to think of him—had looked when she’d first seen him. Stringy, bad skin, limbs like sticks. His rib cage had stuck out prominently from his white flesh and his face had been hollow and depleted. That had to be what came of being denied blood for so many decades. Yet as soon as he started drinking again he had plumped out with surprising quickness.
“If you have a better answer, tell me,” Arkeley said.
Caxton fumed in silence, unwilling to give up her denial. Knowing that he was right anyway. “Okay,” she said.
“At the very least it’s a working hypothesis.”
“Okay!” she said again. She handed him the photocopy and he tucked it in his pocket. Caxton ran her fingers through her hair, her elbows out. Slowly she turned away from him. Exhaustion and fear caught up with her as if she’d been running down a dark corridor and smacked right into a wall she couldn’t see. “I just—I can’t—they’re too strong already! They’re too good at what they do. Now they have this power too. I guess they had it all along, but we were so in the dark we didn’t even realize it. We can’t keep up with them. I can’t keep up with them.” She started walking out of the room. Away from him, from the bones. She didn’t want to see any more skeletons, didn’t want to be around them. Ever again. “I can’t do this,” she said.
