99 Coffins: A Historical Vampire Tale

The chief wheeled around to stare at her. “Don’t tell me there’s more bodies.”

Caxton looked over at Glauer. Glauer just shrugged and failed to make eye contact with anybody. He’d never worked a homicide case before. Neither had the chief. Hell of a way to start, Caxton thought.

60.

I lit out at once for Gum Spring. My orders were quite vague, which was hardly unusual, yet there was enough in them to chill me. A creature had been discovered there, a vampire. I thought such evils were banished from the earth. Yet this war had dug up so many ancient wrongs—fratricide, treason and espionage among the more mild.

At a field morgue in Maryland, I once saw teamsters fitting bodies for pinewood coffins. If the dead man in question proved too tall they would jump in with him, and trample on his feet and legs, until he became a shorter being and would fit better. Then there were the amputated limbs, stacked like cordwood, ripe with decay. When they found some man missing an arm or a leg they would place one from the proper pile in with his remains, taking no pains whatsoever to ensure the right man was matched with the right appendage.

I chastised such men when I saw their work, but only the first time. I learned quickly what every soldier knows. A man is counted lucky, who is buried by his mother back at home. For most a shallow grave on foreign soil is their only recompense for service, a grave dug deep as possible by the decedent’s friends, so that hogs and other animals may not root it up.

Should dumb animals, should nature herself have turned against us, what surprise is there in a risen corpse come to prey upon the living? None. Yet a vampire—what the deuce could this have to do with me?

—THE PAPERS OFWILLIAMPITTENGER

61.

Bright yellow police tape wrapped around the house on Railroad Street leased to Jeff Montrose and three roommates. The house was a gray-painted clapboard affair with plenty of gables and a porch with white gingerbread details. Some of the carved wood had come loose and hung on rusty nails. Around the foundation clumps of ailanthus and hydrangea hung wilted and sodden. A basement window on the side of the house flashed with the trapped light of the police cruisers that filled the street.

Caxton shook out the collar of her jacket, spraying water everywhere, and hurried toward the house, gesturing at the white wooden porch with its loose gingerbread. “This house is rented in part to a graduate student at the college, one Jeff Montrose. I tried to contact him to ask him about the coffins but he didn’t answer his phone. Officer Glauer and I came here to see if we could find him, or at least figure out where he might have gone.”

Vicente went in first and then she followed. Glauer stayed outside. He didn’t explain why, but she supposed he didn’t have to. He’d already seen what was inside.

Vicente stamped his feet on a mat inside the front door. It was warm and mostly dry in the front room, a big living space with a pair of mismatched couches and a television on top of a plastic milk crate.

Beyond, through a high archway, stood the kitchen—dishes in the sink, a refrigerator full of leftover Chinese food.

In any normal crime scene the room would be full of forensics cops taking samples, lifting prints, cutting fibers from the stained shag carpet. There was no need this time. Caxton had already learned what she needed to know from the house from her previous visit.

She led Vicente up a wooden staircase that creaked at every other step. The old woven runner that draped across the risers was faded and worn through in places. Silvery light from an exterior window brightened the wall ahead of them and dazzled their eyes. At the top a hallway split off toward four different bedrooms. Three of the doors were closed. Mary Klein, Fisher Hawkins, and Madison Chou Zhang owned those rooms. All three were accounted for, safe at the homes of parents or friends far away from Gettysburg. They had left town after hearing Caxton’s press conference the day before, even though it meant skipping classes. Montrose had the fourth room, the farthest one from the top of the stairs.

Vicente paused with his hand still on the banister. He looked slightly out of breath. Caxton wondered if he’d ever seen a dead body before.

Together they stepped into the room where Jeff Montrose’s life had ended at approximately five-fifteen that morning, several hours before Caxton arrived back in town.

The walls of the room were lined with posters from various concerts, black ink on vibrantly colored paper. Clothes and books littered the floor, were heaped up by the cot that had served as Montrose’s bed. Videos and DVDs were stacked neatly on shelves, prominent among them a copy of Teeth .

Caxton hoped Vicente didn’t see it. A desk sat beneath the room’s single window, mostly covered in a big beige computer setup and thick sheaves of printer paper. In a chair before the computer Montrose remained just as Caxton had found him. He wore a white shirt open at the neck and wrists and a black cape lined with red velvet. He’d told her about that cape when she’d met him—he wore it when he did ghost tours in town. His eye makeup was impeccable, but the dark mascara and kohl stood in high contrast to the near-perfect whiteness of his face. Most of his neck had been torn away, but there was not a drop of blood anywhere in the room.

Vicente took one look at the body and started to vomit. He turned around in a circle until he found a trash can and hugged it to him as his chest and shoulders heaved.

Caxton waited patiently until he was done.

“The killer was our vampire, the original one. There’s no real question. He must have come here directly from the crime scene in the alleyway. He would have been told where to look for Montrose by Professor Geistdoerfer from the college.”

“The Running Wolf?” Vicente stared at her with wild eyes.

“Professor Geistdoerfer was the one who woke our vampire in the first place. I don’t think he understood what the consequences would be, at the time. Afterward the vampire controlled him through threats and intimidation. He’s…dead now.” Presumably dead again, and for the last time, she thought, but didn’t say.

“And this kid.” Vicente stepped a little closer to the body in the chair. He reached out and touched the cloth of Montrose’s cape. “Was he some kind of—Satanist?”

“No. A student of dark history.” Caxton frowned. “He was fascinated with ghosts and vampires and other unnatural things. That’s why he came to school here, to study the darkest period of American history. The people of the nineteenth century shared some of his more ghoulish interests.”

“So when a vampire came along he just jumped at the chance to help.”

Caxton shook her head. “Just because he was interested in vampires, that didn’t make him evil. My girlfriend was a goth, back in high school, and she read nothing but books on vampires. I can promise you she’s not evil. Lots of kids play vampires and victims.”

“Sure, we did that at my school, too. We’d tie black towels around our necks and run around pretending to bite each other, just like in the movies. Then we discovered girls and it all seemed kind of silly. This guy didn’t grow out of it, right?”

Caxton shrugged.

“And now he’s paid for it. Just a dumb kid.”

She pushed some papers aside on the desk and showed him what lay there. A simple wooden stake, a piece of wood about a foot long, sharpened at one end. “He was a lot of things, but he wasn’t an idiot,”

she said. “He knew something was up. I think he must have known all along, at least as soon as he heard on the news about how Officer Garrity had died. He must have known he was an accomplice, that he had helped bring the vampire back to life. He knew what was happening in this town.” She touched the pointy end of the stake. Montrose had probably known it was useless against a vampire that had already fed on blood that night. He’d studied vampires enough, had watched Teeth probably more than once.

The stake must have been the best thing he could get his hands on. “I don’t think he was a bad person, at heart. He just couldn’t seem to make up his mind which side he was on.”

Vicente shook his head. “I don’t understand, Trooper. Why did you want me to see this?”

Caxton leaned over the computer on the desk. “We found this when we discovered the body. He made no