Veins of Ice

by Melissa Kellogg

  Inside of the mausoleum, they peered down the stairs into the dimly lit interior of the crypts. Water reflected at them like a murky mirror. The water was two feet deep. The afternoon team had made more progress than they had the day before. Amarine and Tristan climbed down the steps into the dank underground chamber to continue pumping out the water.

  “We’re going to head into the deepest part of the crypt. There’s another staircase at the back of the crypts, which isn’t normally used, but we’ll take advantage of it to throw the water out from there to the outside,” Amarine informed them.

  Amarine and Tristan vanished, and Karena went with Hadrian to take care of the coffins outside. They untied a dark, mahogany one that they had tethered to a nearby tree the previous day, and lifted it. She strained on her side. Her knees wobbled from the weight of it.

  “Damn, these are heavy. I thought dead bodies were supposed to get lighter, not heavier,” Hadrian growled.

  Karena tightened her grip around the thin, clammy, metal handle of the coffin. They frequently had to stop, set the coffin down, and rest. The stairs proved to be even more difficult to navigate. They took one step at a time, but each step was uncertain, slippery, and weight-laden by the coffin.

  “It has to be the water,” Karena said. Ice particles flecked off of her. Her body was counteracting her overheated condition.

  “Water weight, how lovely. Water weight is the easiest to lose you know.”

  Karena looked down at him carrying the lower end of the coffin. Sweat trickled down his face. He took a step downwards, and she followed with one of her own. It took a lot of effort to not lose her grip on the coffin. Five steps to go before they reached the bottom, Hadrian teetered. The coffin began to shift to the side. Due to the displacement of weight, he struggled to regain it, but his balance was thrown off and the coffin was too heavy. Knowing all was lost, he let go. Karena had no choice but to do the same. Hadrian pressed his back against the wall to let the coffin tumble down the stairs past him. It smashed into the ground with a resounding crack.

  “I heard that. Nice one,” Tristan voiced floated to them from wherever he was in there.

  They ignored Tristan.

  “At least it didn’t have far to go,” Hadrian said.

  “Yeah, but……Hadrian, look.”

  Karena stared at the overturned coffin. The coffin’s lid had popped from its lock.

  “Ewwwww. Just great, when we turn it over, the body is going to fall out in the process,” Hadrian said.

  They reluctantly descended the last steps of the stairs. Hadrian went to the head of the coffin, and Karena at the foot of it.

  “One, two, three,” Karena said, and they rolled the coffin backwards and righted it.

  The lid swung open, and rested against its hinges. The coffin’s interior was fully exposed. Karena’s mouth gaped in shock.

  Confused, Karena looked around and waved her arms. “Where’s the body?” she asked.

  They had been expecting a decomposed body to roll out. They stepped back in disbelief. Instead of a clothed, dried out, or possibly gooey skeleton, was a vacant casket. There were stains from where the corpse had laid on the white, cushioned liner, but other than that, there was nothing.

  “Did it just walk off?” Hadrian said. His hands flew to his horrified face and clasped around his mouth. She wished he hadn’t said that too.

  She gulped hard, and rubbed her hands on her pants. Claustrophobia and fear of the underground burial chambers threatened to send her running up the stairs to where there was light and space. They scanned their surroundings. Darkness stretched in the empty stone recesses where the coffins were supposed to be. The magical, burning torches in their holders on the walls licked upwards and caused the shadows to shiver. The hushed silence between them strained their ears, and was marred only by Tristan and Amarine working at the other end of the crypt.

  With a shakiness to her voice, Karena said, “Captain Valmar talked to the caretaker. All of the coffins were checked to make sure none of them had been tampered with, or had accidentally flipped when they had floated out of the crypts.”

  “Did he check the insides?”

  “No. I can’t blame him for not wanting to. There probably wasn’t any reason to.”

  “This has to be the doing of a necromancer. There’s no other explanation. Maybe a necromancer snatched the body to use for whatever sick ritual he was planning to perform. Those coffins out there were easy pickings.”

  “If so, then they would’ve taken the other bodies from the escaped coffins,” Karena said, her eyes scanning the crypts for the slightest of movements. “They never just take one. Necromancers are opportunists.”

  They sprinted up the stairs and outside, where the other coffins were that they had yet to carry down into the crypts. They went to a redwood coffin that was barely keeping afloat in the receding water of the cemetery.

  Hadrian pushed her to the side. “We don’t know what could be in there if these were messed with. I’ll open it, and if anything moves in there, ice it,” Hadrian said, giving her a worried look.

  “I will. Make sure to jump back.”

  Hadrian crouched down, and turned the lock. He flipped up the lid, and leapt back. The smell assaulted them. They gagged. It was a smell unlike any other. Encapsulated in a small space and left to fester for months, the rotting remains had become a stink bomb. Her stomach heaved, and her face went numb.

  “This one is as dead as it gets,” he said, and threw the lid back over it.

  They went to another one, and prepared themselves again. Hadrian opened it, and discovered it was likewise occupied by a corpse.

  Hadrian said, “Dead, and ewwww, yeah, dead.”

  A noxious wave of decay that smelled like garbage that had been sitting out in the sun for several weeks hit them.

  “Recently dead,” she said.

  “Yup.”

  And he closed the lid, and moved to the next one. Hadrian tried to open it, but couldn’t.

  “It won’t open,” he said. He tugged on it, fumbled back and forth with the lock, and even hit it to try to get it to open.

  Karena motioned for him to step aside, and he did. She looked at the locking mechanism for damage.

  “This lock is strange. It isn’t like the others,” she said. She frowned, and tilted her head to the side as she examined it.

  It wasn’t a simple lock where there was a tiny latch to lift and a knob to turn in order to open the coffin. This one had finger holes in its face, like a rotary dial, with crisscrossing lines around the side, which formed a pentagon.

  “Tristan!” she shouted.

  He came running from the back of the crypts.

  “Yes? What can I do for you, Karena?” Tristan said. He came to stand a few inches too close to her.

  “What type of lock is this?”

  He crouched down to study it. “It’s a hex lock,” he said.

  Karena raised her eyebrows. “Explain,” she said.

  “I don’t know how to open it, or where it comes from, or who makes them.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know anything about it? You’re a walking encyclopedia.”

  “I’ll take that as a very sincere compliment. I don’t have any knowledge about hex locks. I’ve seen a brief picture of one before and a little caption stating what it was, and that it unlocks if a certain combination is made by putting your fingers inside those slots and twisting the dial in a specific pattern. If you get the combination wrong, your fingers will be sucked in and then severed off.”

  “That’s brutal. Who would put it on a coffin?” Hadrian said. His eyebrows squished together and he crossed his arms.

  Tristan shrugged his narrow shoulders. “It’s beyond me,” Tristan said. “Black magic maybe? A necromancer?”

  “There’s a coffin that’s missing a corpse too,” Karena said.

  “Necromancers like skeletal remains and bodies, no matter how decomposed. I would suggest you check th
e other coffins, and see how many have missing occupants and a similar lock on them. But this has to be a fluke, and nothing more than from someone messing around.”

  Tristan hastily left to return to Amarine and continue helping with pumping out the last of the water.

  “Let’s carry the last of the coffins down into the crypts, and then we’ll check them,” Karena said.

  After they safely carried all of the escaped coffins into the crypts and shelved them in the stone recesses, they began their search. They went from coffin to coffin, from gated section to gated section in the crypts, opening them and keeping tally of what they found.

  In the end, they found five empty coffins and ten that were sealed shut with a hex lock. Karena puzzled over one of the coffins that was sealed with a hex lock. They couldn’t open it, not without the right combination. Its gold plating gleamed in the low lighting. What secret lay inside?

  “We should tell the other teams to check the coffins in their crypts,” Karena said, putting her hands on her hips. Her whole body felt traumatized from the stench in there. She had already lost feeling in her face.

  Hadrian glanced at her, and then back at the coffin she was studying. “They’re not going to be too keen on doing that,” he said.

  “I’ll do it if I have to.”

  A voice startled them with its booming quality. “I see that you have finished your assignment. Amarine and Tristan are outside,” Captain Valmar’s voice said.

  They turned around to see Captain Valmar standing there. They hadn’t heard him approach. Light illuminated the thick, jagged scar that ran across his neck.

  Karena told him what they had discovered and expressed her worries.

  “I’ll look it into, Karena. I’m sure the groundskeeper has records of anything odd that might’ve gone on, and there’s always the possibility that necromancers paid the cemetery a visit. Some of the corpses could’ve washed down the river, and for all we know, are now in the swamps.”

  She persisted by saying, “But look at this lock. Tristan doesn’t even know much about hex locks, and he knows everything.”

  “You could put in a request to visit the Ancient Library in order to conduct research about them. Otherwise, just let it go. I’ll look into it myself. If it’s related to dark magic, then it’s something I will need a sorceress or sorcerer to handle and dismantle.”

  His unblinking eyes bore into her. Hadrian nudged her foot with his boot. It wasn’t wise to argue with Captain Valmar.

  “I had best get to the next assignment then,” Karena said.

  “I’ll finish up here, and lock the gates in the crypt as an extra precautionary measure,” Captain Valmar said. He placed a hand on one of the coffins. She couldn’t decipher the expression on his face. The tense press of his lips, and yet the soft look to his eyes conflicted with each other.

  Karena and Hadrian skirted past him. They turned to look back. Captain Valmar was now tracing the design of the hex lock on the coffin. She frowned, shot a look at Hadrian, but kept walking to the stairs. They padded up them and stepped out into the weak, morning sunlight outside. They deeply breathed in the fresh air, flushing out the crypt’s rankness from their lungs.

  “There go his fingers,” Hadrian said as he squinted up at the sky where an eagle circled.

  “With their size, I doubt they would fit,” Karena said, to which Hadrian laughed.

  Despite leaving the Oaksvale Cemetery behind them to head to their next cryptid assignment, the sight and thought of those hex locks never left Karena. There was something profoundly dark about them. In society, benevolent behaviors were taught and reinforced; so to find something that was even more sinister than the feud was rare. It concerned her.

  After work, she went to City Hall. It was a stately building with rows of pearly-white pillars supporting its tented roof. Statues resided at each of the four entrances. At the entrance she walked up to, a stag stood on one side of the stairs, and on the other side, an Earth elemental gazed into the distance with a panpipe and Lokh horn next to her feet, the musical instruments of the Earths. A crown of leaves and flowers wreathed her head. Robed in clingy fabric, one of her hands was extended forward, as though to touch something before her. Colorful birds alighted on her arm and hand to sing a few notes before flitting away. The other entrances displayed different statues of animals, figures, and musical instruments in representation of the other three elements.

  In the library section of City Hall, she thumbed through the various books and consulted librarians about books pertaining to locks. But after hours of searching, she found nothing amongst the dusty, thick texts. She walked to the Request Center, filled out a form to gain access for a couple hours to the Ancient Library for information about locks, put it in the slot on the side of the wall, and left for the grocery store.

  Chapter 5

  Another storm rolled through Archelm City, bringing with it more rain and dreariness, but on the day of Karena’s birthday, sunshine glimmered through the clouds in the late afternoon sky. In her room, Karena sat with her back to her vanity desk’s mirror. Her mom fussed around her as she dotted her face with makeup powder. Her sister, Isabel, stood next to her, holding Karena’s tiara for the evening.

  After another sweep across her face with the powder brush, her mom had her turn around. She braided Karena’s hair, and pinned her artwork at the back of her neck. Karena had dyed her hair a taffy-pink color with cream-colored streaks underneath it. It would go well with her dress.

  Her mom took the sapphire speckled, silver tiara from Isabel, and settled it on Karena’s head. Karena straightened her back a bit more from seeing herself in the mirror with it on. Her mother opened the jewelry box on top of her desk. Inside was a short necklace. Clear crystals dangled from a short chain. While her mom placed it around her neck, Karena donned on her fingerless, lace gloves. Little jewels and flowers were sewn into the white lace.

  “Time for the dress. Isabel, give your sister some privacy,” her mom said, going to her bed where the dress lay.

  Isabel bounced out of the room, and closed the door behind her. Her mom put her arms under the dress and carried it to her. Karena stood up, slipped off her robe, and stepped into the dress. She lifted it up, and waited as her mom clenched the waist behind her. The strapless dress was a romantic masterpiece of color and fabric. A wide, magenta-colored ribbon spiraled down from the top of the dress. A creamy-white layer of fabric mimicked its flight pattern next to it, which was decorated with roses and beading. Below the waist, the two, colored ribbons separated, and between their gap, a sheer slip of pink fabric that was embroidered with a violet trim joined their lazy vortex to the dress’s hem.

  When she was finished lacing up the dress, her mom stepped back to gaze at Karena through the mirror.

  “You look stunning. You had better catch someone’s eye, or else I might have to conclude that they’re all blind,” her mom said with a smile.

  “I hope I do,” Karena replied. She didn’t have high hopes.

  Karena examined herself in the mirror. A beautiful dress such as that one was reserved for the most formal and special of occasions, and her birthday counted as special. Her eyes went from the jeweled tiara, to her makeup and blue eyes, to the necklace, and down her dress. She felt kind of silly, as though she was pretending to be royalty, but brushed it off. Today was her birthday, and she was the star of her birthday party.

  “How are you going to feel about everyone wearing a mask?” her mom asked, giving her an uneasy glance.

  “Most of them won’t be wearing full masks. I’ll probably be able to guess who everyone is in there, despite everyone wearing one,” Karena said. She did a twirl in front of the mirror. The bottom of her dress fanned out around her.

  From what Rachel had said, the masks would range from partial masks that covered the area around the eyes to full masks that concealed everything but the eyes and mouth. Because she was the birthday girl, she wouldn’t wear one. Everyone would know who
she was, but she wouldn’t necessarily know at first who they were.

  A knock sounded on the door.

  “The limo is here,” her dad’s voice said.

  “Time for you to go. We’ll be there in a short while,” her mom said, and helped usher her out and into the limo.

  As the driver drove her to the Blue Ballroom, Karena looked out the window at the familiar scenery. It was her twenty-second birthday. Not much had changed in her life. Was it a bad thing or a good thing? There hadn’t been any real romantic interests in her life to enrich it since her last birthday, no real hardships to speak of, except for the occasional illness or drama that the feud vomited up. Her birthday party would be like any other, the same people would attend, there would be dancing, long chats with friends, eating delicious food, the usual. No matter how much she and her life sparkled, there was a lackluster quality to her life that she had yet to remedy. Perhaps love was that missing piece.

  The driver pulled up to the Blue Ballroom. Balloons were strung in clusters around the entrance. Clad in an oak-green suit and wearing a mask that barely concealed his good looking features, Hadrian was waiting for her by the curb. His shoulder-length hair had been set free and formed a tousled mane of dirty blonde lust. He opened her door. Like the gentleman that he was, he offered his hand, which she took, and he helped her out of the limo.

  After thanking the driver, Hadrian led her inside. Earthly and pine scented, he smelled like a forest after a night of rain.

  “You look gorgeous. If only I was attracted to you,” he murmured.

  Karena felt the same wistfulness. “I know, right? It would make things so much easier. We both wouldn’t be single,” she said.