99 Coffins: A Historical Vampire Tale

by David Wellington

  He dragged the two of them over to a Dumpster in the alley and threw Geistdoerfer’s body inside without further ceremony. Caxton wasn’t surprised. Vampires and their minions held no reverence for human death. When the body was disposed of he dragged her to her feet and finally let go of her. She didn’t even think to run. With the blood in him the vampire would be even faster than before. Stronger. Much harder to kill.

  “She’s here,” he said. “Miss Malvern.” He wasn’t looking at her for confirmation. He had his head up as if he could smell the other vampire on the air. “She’s quite close. You did well, my friend, to bring me here.”

  It was then, of all times, that Caxton’s cell phone chose to ring.

  36.

  In back of the pantry, we found the servants’ stairs, & thought we might be better hid on an upper floor. Every one of those steps creaked, and might have given us away. With time, however, we found ourselves at the top, and in front of a row of wide windows. The marksman & I peeked out through said apertures & watched Simonon playing cards with a sergeant who wore no shoes at all. We could speak up there, if we were soft about it. “I could get off a shot from here,” Storrow said, running one hand along the massive barrel of his target rifle, “that would do the Union much good.”

  “& get us all killed, in the bargain,” Eben Nudd pointed out.

  Storrow nodded in agreement, but added nothing. I truly think he would have given his life, & been glad to do it, if he could remove the Ranger from play.

  Through gritted teeth I asked my next question. “Why is he here, though? What does he want with this Obediah he keeps calling to?”

  “You haven’t yet guessed it?” Storrow asked. He favored me with a grim smile. “Obediah Chess, he’s the master of this place, or else, he was.” He pointed at the oversized finial at the bottom of the stairs. It was in the shape of a pawn, as I have recounted earlier. “Don’t ask me how he came to his change of estate, but now he’s yer vampire. Simonon’s come to draft ’im.”

  “The Confederacy is recruiting vampires now?” I could scarcely credit it, even from such villains.

  —THE STATEMENT OF ALVA GRIEST

  37.

  The vampire stared at Caxton’s coat as her cell phone rattled out the opening bars of a Pat Benatar song. She closed her eyes as the phone buzzed against her side. Would this be the thing that finally got her killed?

  The vampire didn’t stop her as she slowly reached into her pocket and took out the phone. It had stopped ringing. A moment later it chirped to tell her she had new voice mail. “It’s,” she said, about to tell him it was her phone. Then she stopped.

  Geistdoerfer had frisked her back in Gettysburg. He had felt the cell phone in her pocket, had actually squeezed it. He hadn’t taken it away from her, though. Why not? At the time she had just assumed he didn’t consider it a threat. She had decided he was right—what use was it to her while he was watching her every move?

  Maybe, though—maybe he had been trying to help her. He had seemed to want to aid the vampire in his plan, had in fact acted like he was part of it all. He must have known on some level, however, that it would end in his own death. Unless somebody stopped the vampire first. He couldn’t have helped her directly, not with the vampire right there. Had he been trying to give her a chance without giving himself away?

  She would never know, now. But maybe she had gained a momentary advantage. Maybe she could use this.

  “It’s a music box,” she said. “Like the one in the car.” She showed the phone to the vampire but he just shook his head. He wouldn’t even know what he was looking at. They hadn’t had LCD screens or keypads in his time.

  “It plays music for you? Whenever you like?”

  She had to think. She had to think what she could do. She couldn’t very well call the police. He would realize what was happening before she’d gotten more than a few words out. She couldn’t even listen to the message she’d just received—that would look too suspicious.

  “I can make it play another tune,” she said, after a second. “Can I show you?”

  He shrugged. He had plenty of time—the night was still young.

  Caxton bit her lip and worked the keypad with her thumb. As quickly as she could she texted a short message to Arkeley:

  at mm w vamp no gun

  It was all she could think of. Looking up at the vampire, she hit send. The phone burbled in her hand, a happy little crescendo telling her the message was sent.

  “Delightful,” the vampire said, actually smiling. “Perhaps later you’ll play me some more. Now, alas, I have much to do. Ladies first, if you please.”

  She nodded and walked ahead of him. She could feel him behind her, his icy presence making her skin crawl. She walked around the corner to the museum entrance. The door was locked but the vampire just tugged at the handle until the lock mechanism groaned and snapped. A small torn piece of metal flew out and tapped Caxton’s hand. She walked through the opened door and into a broad lobby lit only by the orange glow of the streetlights outside.

  Caxton had been to the Mütter Museum before, years past on a school trip. Long before her life had been about vampires. The place had spooked her out even back then. That was when it was well-lit and full of teenagers and college kids looking for a nasty thrill.

  In the dark, in utter silence, the place was like a haunted mausoleum. A whole new kind of fear gripped her. It helped a little that there were no skeletons in the lobby, no two-headed babies floating in alcohol, just a broad staircase leading up, closed off with a velvet rope, and doors leading to a gift shop, some offices, and finally the museum. The building actually housed the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, a meeting place for doctors and a sizable medical library. The museum was only a small part of the college tucked away in a corner of the building. Caxton headed through a doorway to her left, then walked through a maze of plasterboard walls housing a display of medical instruments used by Lewis and Clark. Beyond that lay another exhibit, this one about the great epidemics of the last two centuries. The great influenza of 1918 was well represented—the signs on the walls described it as the greatest health crisis in history, responsible for more than fifty million deaths. She came up to a picture of a pile of bodies waiting for interment in a mass grave and she stopped.

  No vampire could ever hope to match that kind of destruction. Yet if Malvern were revived she would certainly give it a try. She would need blood, whole oceans of it, to keep her going. The older a vampire got the more she needed every night. Arkeley had estimated once that it would take five or six murders a night just to keep her on her feet—and that even then she would still be hungry. Starved as she was, she was unable to hunt, unable to kill. Yet if this vampire found a way to revive her, where would she stop? She would create new vampires to serve her, to protect her. She would slay indiscriminately, cutting a bloody swath through Pennsylvania. How many dead cops would it take before she was eventually brought down?

  She couldn’t let this new vampire finish his task. So far fear for her own life had driven her, a desperate need to live just a little longer. But there were limits on even that terror.

  “Not much farther, I think,” he said behind her.

  Had Arkeley gotten her message? She truly hoped so. She walked away from the picture on the wall, walked farther into the building, and there it was. The Mütter Museum in all its awful glory.

  It spanned two levels, a main floor below them and a broad gallery connected by a pair of carved wooden staircases. Every inch of wall space had been lined with cabinets, dark wood fronted in polished glass. Inside were bones, mostly—walls full of skulls showing variations in cranial anatomy, whole skeletons mounted on steel bars to show deformities of bone structure. On her left stood the casket of the saponified woman, a corpse the Mütter had bought to demonstrate how soil conditions could turn a human body into grave wax. On display around the room were a giant impacted colon, the brain of the assassin who killed President Garfield,
the conjoined liver of Chang and Eng.

  It was all very tastefully done.

  Caxton walked out onto the gallery and looked down at the main floor below. There were a lot more skeletons down there, some in huge glass cases of their own. One held the bones of a giant, a man at least seven feet tall, standing next to the remains of a dwarf. They looked strangely like a parent walking with a child. Nearby stood a big wooden set of drawers which she remembered held thousands of objects that had been removed from human stomachs—coins, pins, broken pieces of lightbulbs.

  Between those two displays stood a single wooden coffin on a pair of sawhorses. The lid was closed. It wasn’t part of the museum’s collection. “There,” she said, because she knew that Malvern was inside.

  “Yes, thank you, I can see for myself.” The vampire grabbed her shoulder, not overly hard, and turned her to face him. “You’ll stay here,” he said, “and wait for me to finish.”

  Her hands were in her pockets. She’d thought this might be coming. Despite what he thought, she still had her amulet. Because the ribbon was broken she couldn’t wear it around her neck—instead she’d put it in her pants pocket. Where she could reach it if she needed it. Out in the parking lot she hadn’t had a chance to grab it, but now she held it tightly. She could feel it getting warm.

  His eyes blazed into hers. He was trying to hypnotize her—to freeze her in her tracks. Surely, she thought, he would feel something when it didn’t work. He would know she had some protection against him.

  He said nothing, though. Maybe he hadn’t felt anything. Maybe he was just in a hurry. He brushed past her and then leaped over the side of the gallery, not bothering to take the stairs. He landed with a barely audible thump and moved immediately to the side of the coffin. For a second he stood motionless before it, then passed his white hands over its top, his head tilted back.

  Someone walked up behind Caxton and she nearly screamed. A fingerless hand touched her shoulder and she turned to see Arkeley standing there. His face was a mask of torture in the gloom. His good hand held his old reliable Glock 23. It looked like he’d received her message, though clearly he hadn’t had time to really prepare.

  He raised his ruined hand to his lips and she understood he wanted her to be quiet. What was he waiting for? She knew him well enough to believe he must have some plan, but she couldn’t imagine what it might be.

  Below them the vampire lifted the lid of the coffin. It opened noiselessly. Inside lay Malvern. She was withered and her skin was covered in sores, but she looked far more healthy than the last time Caxton had seen her. That didn’t make sense—Arkeley had been starving her of blood for over a year, hoping she would eventually die of malnutrition. If anything it looked like she’d grown stronger. How was that even possible?

  The vampire reached into the coffin and ran his fingertips across Malvern’s mottled cheek. He said something, so low she couldn’t make it out.

  There was no more time—what was Arkeley waiting for? The Gettysburg vampire had found some way to cheat time. What if he knew some magical spell to bring Malvern back to her former self as well? There was no time at all.

  Her eyes wide, she stared at Arkeley, but he only shook his head. So she did the only thing she could think of. Grabbing the Glock out of his hand, she aimed down at the vampire and put three quick rounds into his back, into where his heart would be. One two three. The noise was immense in that hushed place—it sounded as if every glass case in the museum had shattered at once.

  The vampire vanished into thin air. If she’d gotten him, if she had killed him, he would have just slumped to the floor. She must have missed the heart, or the blood that flowed in his veins, Geistdoerfer’s stolen blood, must have protected him.

  “You idiot,” Arkeley said, his face congested with rage. “How could you screw everything up?” He didn’t wait for an answer but ran off, into the shadows.

  38.

  I was set to search the upstairs rooms, in case more fiends lay in wait for us. The task loomed large. Whatever soothing balm the excitement of battle may bring, it wears off powerfully fast. Luckily the second floor was not so large, & the number of doors I faced small. Two were locked; a third led to a narrow stairs, by which one could access the cupola, which was ringed inside with a narrow iron gallery. I headed back, & tried the locked doors again. You can perhaps imagine my horrified surprise when I heard a muffled sound from behind one of them.

  It might have been a pigeon, having found its way in through some broken window, I told myself. But it was not. The sound I heard was high pitched, a keening whine that I had heard before. It was the voice of one of the fiends.

  “I have a minié ball for you if you make another sound,” I said through the door, my voice just loud enough to carry through the wood. I knew I could dispatch the creature beyond that portal. I was worried more he would make some alarum that would rouse the cavalry outside.

  “Alva?” the voice asked. “Alva, is it you?”

  You will have already guessed the identity of my conversant, & you are correct. It was BILL. My horribly wounded & long-sought friend, found at last. So why then did my blood run cold to hear him?

  —THE STATEMENT OF ALVA GRIEST

  39.

  Caxton thundered down the stairs, her feet blurring on the steps, her weapon held high and ready, pointed at the ceiling. The vampire could be waiting for her at the bottom, in the shadows there. She could feel his teeth tearing into her flesh, ripping through her skin. He could be lying in ambush and she could be running right into his maw.

  At the bottom of the stairs she turned and extended her arms, weapon in firing position. She looked around for pale humanoid shapes—and suddenly realized there were far too many of them. The skeletons in their cases all looked like vampires in the dark. The vampire she was chasing, while he no longer looked like a famine victim, was still rail thin, and would pass for a skeleton if he stood very still in a corner of the room.

  Caxton pivoted slowly, trying to cover the entire room. This was madness. The vampire could see her just fine. Their night vision wasn’t supernatural by any means, but they could see blood—her blood—as if it glowed with its own red light. She was a walking neon sign as far as the vampire was concerned. At any moment he could spring on her, and he was fast, so fast she wouldn’t have time to get her gun around to fire at him.

  The only sensible thing to do in her situation was run. Get out, get to a safe distance. Try to seal off the museum’s exits, then wait for dawn. Arkeley had taught her a long time ago, however, that whenever you tried to fight vampires in a sensible fashion they would just slip through your net. In the time it took her to lock the museum’s doors the vampire would be long gone—or he would already have killed her.

  The only effective way to hunt vampires, Arkeley had shown her, was to walk right into their traps. To give them exactly what they wanted. It confused them, made them think you had more up your sleeve than you actually did.

  There—she rushed forward, thinking she’d seen something move. She jabbed her handgun out, lined up its sights on center mass, started to squeeze the trigger.

  Then she stopped. The shape she’d almost shot was the skeleton of a man who had suffered from crippling spina bifida. His bones looked as twisted and worn as driftwood.

  The vampire laughed at her. Then she heard a chuckling, echoing sound that made her skin crawl. The sound seemed to come from all around her, from nowhere in particular. Had it come from directly above? She looked up with a fright, but saw nothing over her except for the ceiling. She didn’t feel much relieved, though. That laugh had crawled right in her ear and laid eggs in her brain. A dry, nasty, grating laugh that spun off into distorted echoes had chased off into the shadows.

  She had no time to decide what that meant, if anything. She had a subject to collar. Caxton pressed backward, up against a display of pickled fetuses, some with heads, some without, some with more than the requisite number. Slowly, inching her way, coverin
g the whole room before her, she headed back for the stairs. She was pretty sure the vampire wasn’t on the lower level.

  She was wrong.

  A white blur leaped over the top of Malvern’s coffin and barreled right at her. She brought her weapon around just fast enough to blast a hole in his face before he collided with her bodily, knocking her to the floor. He reared up, clutching his eyes, and she rolled to the side before he could strike downward with his fists. They connected with the floor hard enough to crack the wooden parquet.

  “Shit,” she said, the word just leaping out of her mouth. He turned to follow her voice and she saw she’d ruined the bridge of his nose. Most of the middle of his face was hanging down by a flap of skin and she saw splintered bone in the wound. Even as she watched, however, white vapor filled in the hole with snaky tendrils that knitted together. In the time it took him to stand upright again, his face was completely restored.

  He glanced at the coffin in the middle of the room, his face dropping in regret, and then he was moving again.

  Caxton barely had time to dodge before the vampire swept past and up the stairs. Cursing—silently this time—she lifted her weapon again and dashed up after him, though he had already disappeared into the gallery. At the top of the stairs she swung around, covering the corners of the room. She didn’t see him. There were two exits from the gallery—back through the maze of pasteboard walls and the exhibits, or out through a clearly marked exit door that returned visitors to the lobby. She dashed through the latter, knowing she was falling behind, that he was getting away. The velvet rope across the staircase had been torn from its mountings and she knew he had gone up.

  Where was Arkeley, she wondered? Hopefully he’d run for safety. As far as she knew he didn’t have another weapon, and she didn’t think he’d be stupid enough to try to stop the vampire with his bare hands. It was up to her.