99 Coffins: A Historical Vampire Tale

GRIEST

But how thankful should we be to amerciful Providence that that awful tomb was not disturbed by anyone not having the knowledge necessary to deal with its dreadful occupant!

F. G. Loring, The Tomb of Sarah

50.

“What of HER?” Eben Nudd asked, pointing at the thing in the coffin. No man made answer. We had not time for demons any more.

We made for the next doorway down, the one which led up into the cupola. Storrow nearly dragged me.

We made what speed we could. Chess was on his way up, through the house. We could hear him shrieking, though none could understand the words he spoke.

Our shoes rang on the iron gallery, which was suspended from the dome by rods. We pushed through the broken section of the cupola & out into the night air, & the light of one million stars.

Around us the dark trees sighed & cast their limbs about. Storrow & Eben Nudd lifted me through the opening & then set me down on the slope of the roof, to hold on as best I might.

“We’ll have to climb down. Try not to fall, is my best counsel,” Storrow said. But then he turned.

“Did you hear that?” he asked.

“Ayup,” Eben Nudd said. We all had. It was the sound of feet falling on the iron gallery. It could be naught but Chess the vampire, hot on our heels. “I think—” the downeaster began, but we never learned what he thought.

Chess jumped up through the broken dome as if he’d been shot out of a parrot gun. He grabbed Nudd by the collar & twisted his head clean around, snapping his neckbones with audible sounds.

He did not bother to suck the erstwhile lobsterman’s blood, but only threw him off the roof to crash to the ground below.

“I’m not sure we’ve been properly introduced,” Chess said. His eyes burned like coals.

—THE STATEMENT OFALVAGRIEST

51.

“What time is it?” Arkeley asked. He held his arm over a white enameled basin and rolled up his sleeve.

The gauze bandage around his wrist was brown with dried blood. When he removed it his arm was smeared red, the fine hairs turned dark and stuck to his skin. An ugly wound like a dried-up worm ran down the length of his wrist. “Trooper?”

Exhaustion passed through her like a cold wind. It had been a long time since she slept. “It’s, uh, four-thirty.” Clara would be asleep. “What—where is it? I put it down for a second.” Harold met her gaze with questioning eyes. She looked down at his hands and took a paper-wrapped lancet from him.

There were plenty of supplies in the museum basement for what they intended to do. On the table before her sat a graduated glass jar, a fresh roll of gauze, and a roll of surgical tape.

“We have to keep moving,” Arkeley told her. “If the sun comes up before she’s ready, we’ll waste an entire day. And more blood than I want to spare.”

Caxton nodded and bit her lower lip. Time to focus. She peeled the paper back from the lancet, a short rectangle of surgical steel with one sharp triangular end. She looked down at Arkeley’s arm. It was the one with no fingers. The palm was a flat square of flesh, so thick with scar tissue it didn’t even look human. It looked more like the paw of an animal. Caxton tried to drag the lancet across the wound but flinched away when Arkeley grunted and moaned in pain. A few dark drops of blood welled up out of the cut but nothing like the flow she’d expected.

“You can’t hesitate like that,” he said, gritting his teeth. “This isn’t like cutting open a bag of frozen peas.

You need to dig in. Deep.”

Caxton got dizzy for a second just listening to him. Holding the lancet very tight in her fingers, she leaned over and stabbed it deep into Arkeley’s arm. He shouted in pain but she ignored him and started reopening the wound with a resolute sawing motion. “Like this?” she asked.

“That’ll do,” Arkeley said. He moved his fingerless hand back and forth to work the muscles in his arm.

Blood seeped vigorously from the wound and rolled across his skin. “Now, the jar,” he said. Caxton brought it up underneath the wound to catch the blood. With his good hand Arkeley squeezed at his arm as if he were getting the last toothpaste out of a dried-up tube. Blood surged out of the wound, thick and dark, venous blood the color of red wine. It splashed and pattered on the sides of the jar, then started to fill it up. The meniscus of blood climbed up the white painted graduations on the side of the jar. Two ounces. Five ounces. Ten.

“Halfway there,” she said, in what she hoped was a reassuring tone.

“God fucking damn it,” Arkeley bellowed, pushing and squeezing at his arm.

Twelve ounces. fifteen. The wound wasn’t closing up, the flow wasn’t slowing down. Caxton gave silent thanks for that. She must have hit a big blood vessel. Would he need stitches? Seventeen ounces.

Twenty.

“Okay,” she said, and took the jar away. Blood splattered with a ringing noise in the white basin. Setting the jar aside, she wrapped Arkeley’s arm tightly with the gauze and then sealed the bandage with surgical tape. Red dots appeared on the white gauze almost instantly. “I might have gone too deep,” she said.

“Don’t worry about that now,” he told her. He put pressure on the bandage with the fingers of his good hand. “Feed her. It has to be warm to have any effect.”

It has to be warm, and fresh, and human, she thought. As much as vampires scared animals, they would never attack them. The blood had to be fresh, too—if it clotted they couldn’t digest it properly.

She moved quickly to the coffin. Malvern was straining to lift her head. Her hands were at the level of her throat, reaching up, unable to grasp the jar. Caxton didn’t want to get close enough to her toothy jaws to get bitten. There was no good way to do it otherwise, though. Hands shaking only a little, she tilted the jar over Malvern’s open mouth. The blood poured through the air and splashed on the vampire’s gray, shriveled tongue.

The effect was electric and immediate. Malvern’s body started to tremble, then white smoke lifted off her tattered nightdress, tongues of it licking up from her armpits, blowing back over her ragged head. The skin started to grow over her half-exposed skull instantly, the old dry leather there inching across the yellow bone. Malvern’s single eye grew wet and started to reinflate. Her hands reached up and grasped at the jar, tore it out of Caxton’s hands.

Caxton took a step back. She watched in disgust as Malvern licked out the contents of the jar with a probing tongue. The skeletal hands fleshed out visibly, the prominent knuckles and veins smoothing out as new muscle grew in under the skin.

A noise sagged out of Malvern, a long, whistling moan of pleasure. She dropped the jar, now spotlessly clean, and it rolled across her shoulder. Her hands lifted in the air as if she were giving thanks. Before she had looked like a pile of bones wrapped in a too-big pelt of leather. As Caxton watched the ravages of time reversed themselves until she looked like she’d only been dead a few months.

“Do it,” Arkeley commanded. “Call him.”

Slowly, creakingly, Malvern sat up in her coffin, hauling herself upright with her hands. She brought her knees up and hugged them to her chest, her gruesome head resting on protruding kneecaps. Luxuriously, almost dreamily, she turned her face to look on Geistdoerfer, who lay only a few feet away. She opened her mouth and a rattling sound came out, a noise like a metal rake dragging through a pile of leaves.

Malvern hadn’t spoken more than two words in over a century. And that was after she’d bathed in blood, her