99 Coffins: A Historical Vampire Tale

animals breaking in and gnawing at the bones, or at the very least you’d think groundwater would have gotten in at some point and flooded the chamber. We think that’s probably what happened to this one.”

“If animals had come for the bones, wouldn’t you have found chewed-up fragments of them, or something?” she asked.

He shrugged once more. “This is an inexact science a lot of the time. If you have a better explanation I’d love to hear it.”

Caxton thought she might have another explanation. Certainly not a better one. But no, it was impossible. Even if one of the vampires had been buried with his heart intact he wouldn’t have had the strength left after so much time to break his way out of the coffin. He wouldn’t have had the strength to sit up.

There was another possibility, but it didn’t merit thinking about. That someone else might have come down into the cavern and removed one of the skeletons. But why on earth would anyone do that?

She didn’t like thinking about the possibilities. She didn’t like that a skeleton was missing. Still, she had work to do—she had to check the intact coffins. Worrying could wait until that was done.

12.

Hiram Morse had run off in the scuffle, & John Tyler was dead. Worst of all, my Bill was gone missing. I sought him everywhere to no avail. I could hardly fit this fact into my head. We had been so close all our lives, & it was rare a day would go by that I had not spoken with him. Much more rare since the war began & we signed on together. My father had forbidden it of me, but Bill had chosen a man’s path, & I could do naught but follow. Through battle & cannon & smoke & war we had been together. In but a moment the white demon had changed that.

“Corporal Griest,” someone spoke, & I turned to see who it might be. Had it been our enemy returned I would not have flinched. Yet instead it was German Pete who was tugging at my pant leg. His hands were smeared with blood & his face was hard. “John Tyler’s dead, Corporal,” he told me. “Do we bury him, now?”

I shook my body as if some ghost had possessed me.

“Supposed to head back to the line,” Eben Nudd said, reminding me of my duty, & he was right.

We were standing picket, my handful of men & I. Our duty was not to engage the enemy, nor to put ourselves in greater danger, but only to return & report.

Yet my Bill was gone! Two years he & I had slept in the same tent, shared the same maggoty meat in camp. Since I was a child he had been the only friend I counted in the wide world.

“Did any man see what happened to Bill?” I asked.

“He’s not here,” Eben Nudd said, in his fashion. “Might expect him to be dead, too.”

“No one saw him get hurt, though.” I stared at German Pete, who shook his head in negation.

“Then he still lives. We don’t leave him here, not with that demon running loose.”

“Weren’t no demon,” Eben Nudd said. I scowled at him but he showed me the broken pieces of his wooden cross. “No demon can stand the sight of Our Lord.”

“That thing was a VAMPIRE,” German Pete insisted, “& ye all know it.” He spat on the ground, too close, I thought, to where John Tyler lay. “Bill’s food for it now as well. A vampire! A Reb vampire, at that.”

“We should report,” Eben Nudd told me, his face very still.

—THE STATEMENT OFALVAGRIEST

13.

It took Caxton hours to check all the intact coffins. Her legs grew cramped from squatting down all the time and her arms ached with stirring up the bones, but she didn’t want to go back and face Arkeley until the job was complete. As she worked her fear was slowly replaced by boredom. To help pass the time she quizzed Montrose. “How old is this place?” she asked.

Montrose shrugged. “There’s no good way to tell without a lot of lab work, but the powder magazine was chemically dated back to 1863. The coffins can’t be any later than that. This place definitely hasn’t been opened since then.”

Caxton nodded. Even if the vampires had still had their hearts intact, there was no way they could have gotten out of their coffins. Vampires theoretically lived forever, but like Justinia Malvern, the older they got the more blood they required just to stand upright, much less to maraud and pillage. Any vampire old enough to have been buried in the cavern would have been far too old to be a danger in the twenty-first century.

“Do you have any idea who put them down here?”

“None. There’s no evidence down here that would tell us something like that and I can’t find anything in the archives to explain it, either. We opened the cavern three days ago and since then I’ve been hitting the Internet pretty hard, searching databases of Civil War–era documents. That’s just good fieldwork. If you find something like this you want to know everything you can before you start opening things up.” He shrugged. “There’s no record of this place, though that’s hardly surprising.”

“Why?”

Montrose shrugged. “This was the nineteenth century we’re talking about. People didn’t save every email and scrap of correspondence the way we do now. A lot of records from the war were destroyed, either when libraries and archives burned down or when somebody was just cleaning house and threw out tons of old paper.”

She finished her search shortly thereafter. Of the ninety-nine skeletons in the tomb not a single one still had its heart. That was something. “Okay,” she said. “I don’t see any reason why we need to delay your work any further. Give me your phone number in case we have any more questions.”

He gave her his info and started up the ladder ahead of her. Before she followed she took one last look back at the cavern. The silence of the place and its long shadows were enough to make it eerie. The perfect stillness of the air inside and the sporadic dripping of water from the ceiling didn’t help. It was the skeletons themselves, though, that made the place so creepy. Their combined chill was enough to set her hair on end.

The place was a mystery. How had the skeletons gotten there? Why were they buried in an open space, in individual coffins? Someone had been careful enough to kill the vampires properly. Somebody had been scared enough to seal the place off by detonating a gunpowder magazine on top of it. Why, though, hadn’t they gone farther? Why not crush the bones to powder and dump the powder in the sea?

Perhaps some long-dead predecessor of Arkeley, some nineteenth-century vampire hunter, had filled the cavern. Perhaps he had thought the dead deserved a proper burial. Perhaps the hundredth coffin had been placed there as she’d found it, empty and broken. Perhaps there had never been a hundredth vampire.

She knew it wouldn’t be that simple.

As she climbed up the ladder Montrose cut the power to the lights below. Caxton froze in place on the rungs and felt the darkness beneath her swell as if the cavern had been holding its breath, waiting for her to leave it in peace.

She wasted no further time getting back up top.

Arkeley waited for her there. “Now are you interested?” he asked.

“I suppose you could say my curiosity is piqued,” she admitted, “but I don’t think we have anything to worry about. That tomb has been untouched for over a century. How did you even find out about this?”

she asked. “Ancient crypts aren’t exactly your style.”

“One of Geistdoerfer’s students wants to be a police officer,” he told her. She looked over at the archaeologist, who just shrugged. “That’s what she’s studying toward, anyway.”

Caxton checked her notebook. “Is her name Marcy Jackson?”

Arkeley nodded. “When they opened the first coffin and found a vampire inside she called the Marshals Service and asked to talk to me. I’m officially retired but they still had my number. I’ve left explicit instructions that