He lingered long through the night & up until the dawn, when the light of day touched him like the finger of God. Then his flesh melted away like candle wax, & his naked bones fell from the noose.
They made me a stretcher, for I could walk no longer, and carried me hence.
—THE STATEMENT OFALVAGRIEST
63.
Vicente read the message over a couple of times, just as Caxton had before him. While she waited she wondered about Montrose. The day and night before, the student had taken on a truly gruesome task.
Alone, unaided, he had moved ninety-nine coffins to a new location. She supposed that if you were studying to be an archaeologist you learned how to handle bones and not be creeped out by them. Still. It must have taken him all day. It must have left him exhausted.
Then he’d come home after all that hard and dirty work and put on his cape, the one he wore when he led his ghost tours. He had prepared his stake and sat down to wait and see what happened. He must have been so confused—wanting, desperately, to actually meet a real vampire in the flesh. Terrified because he knew he probably wouldn’t survive the encounter. She wondered what the two of them had talked about. She wondered if Montrose had, in the end, learned what he so badly wanted to know.
When the chief finished reading he looked down at the body again. He seemed to have recovered from his squeamishness. “I don’t get this. He helped the vampire. Why did it kill him?”
“Because Montrose could have told us where the coffins are. You’ll notice Geistdoerfer was careful enough not to give the location away in his email. Montrose here would be the only living person who knew it.”
“We need to find those coffins,” Vicente said. “We need to find them before dark.”
Caxton nodded. That was about half of what she’d wanted him to say. About half of what she’d wanted to get by bringing him down here and making him look at Montrose’s corpse. The other half would take some more finesse.
She lead Vicente out of the murder scene, down the stairs again and out onto the sidewalk. While they’d been inside the rain had turned serious. Glauer stood at attention by the chief ’s car, the brim of his hat completely soaked.
“Officer, I want you to organize a house-by-house search,” Vicente said, his face perfectly impassive. “I want you to bring in every man and woman we can get, have them check every possible place someone might hide all those coffins.”
“Yes, sir,” Glauer said, but he didn’t move at once. Caxton had already rehearsed him in his part of the drama that came next. “I think we can get about thirty people together, each of them with a vehicle. We’ll get right to it. There are hundreds of places like that in and around the borough. We’ll do what we can.”
“I sincerely hope so,” Vicente spluttered. “Do you know what’s at risk here?”
Glauer stood stock-still and said nothing. After a long, tense silence, he turned and looked across at Caxton.
Vicente broke the silence. “What is this? What aren’t you telling me?”
“This scene is considerably more violent than others we’ve seen from this vampire,” she said. She had thought, once, that this vampire was different. That he had some sense of honor or decency. Arkeley had known better—she should have listened to him. She should have known it herself all along. “I’m willing to call it a pattern. He started by wounding Geistdoerfer. He could have killed him then and there, but he had enough restraint to hold back. He moved up to provoked homicide with Officer Garrity, who tried to kill him. He then killed Geistdoerfer because he was hungry. The family from New Jersey,” she said, pointing in the direction of the alley and the death car, “he did because he was in a hurry. From there he went directly to this house. Montrose was actively helping him. He spent his whole life wanting to be a vampire’s best friend. The vampire killed him just because he knew where the coffins were—just to tie up one simple loose end. Human life has lost all meaning to this vampire, Chief. He’s become a real sociopath now, capable of acting in cold blood. He’s getting nastier and he’s not done yet.”
Vicente’s face was already pale. He turned to look away, up the rainy street. He wasn’t looking at her.
She moved around him, got right in his face. This was the dangerous part of the game, the part where she had to rely on him being a reasonable man. “Originally, he didn’t want to wake the others. He wanted to let them rest in peace. That was before he started to change. I think he’s more than capable now of bringing them all back. He won’t just wake up one or two of them—he’ll wake them all.”
“Pure conjecture,” Vicente said in a weak voice.
“Maybe so, but that’s what we have to go on.” Time to drive her point home. “Chief,” Caxton said, “I’d like to make a recommendation, if you’ll listen to it.”
Vicente scowled, but when he’d stared at her for a while he eventually nodded.
“You should completely evacuate the town.”
She stood her ground, waited for Vicente to start shouting. She didn’t have to wait for long. While he told her just what he thought of her idea she waited patiently for the verbal storm to blow over. She barely even registered what he was saying.
“We’ll search this town from top to bottom for those coffins,” she said. “I will do everything in my power to find them before nightfall. But if the search fails—”
“—You have a recommendation for when that happens, too?”
Caxton stared into his eyes. Directly into his eyes—like a vampire hypnotizing a victim. She lacked the magical powers, but she hoped her sincerity and her fear would have a similar effect. “If we can’t find the coffins before nightfall, we need to be ready. Ready for an army of vampires. Because that’s what we’re talking about. They’ll wake up hungry and they will kill everyone they see. Chief, I need you to authorize me to start planning for tonight.”
“Tonight? Tonight, when you’re going to single-handedly take on a hundred vampires with your sidearm?”
“No. I need you to help me gather my own army. I need officers, I need guns, and I need you to stay out of my way. I need you to stop thinking in terms of jurisdictions. I need you to stop thinking of this as an investigation and start thinking about this as a war.”
64.
I arrived in time to see Chess hang, and to watch his mansion burn. It should have ended there, with the vampire’s second and final death. Yet like this war the tale has no conclusion yet; and like the unquiet grave, it seems, any finality it offers is temporary at best.
If the War Department wants my final assessment of what happened at Gum Spring, then let it have this: Private Hiram Morse should get a medal. Then he should be horsewhipped. The cur was good enough to search the burnt ruins of the Chess plantation and find the decrepit female still partially alive; or undead, or whatever the mot juste may be; and then to bring her down to where the Army Investigators waited, where they were already examining what remained of Obediah Chess. I would guess he was drunk with the praise he’d already received for giving them one vampire on the end of a rope. He must have thought his rewards would be doubled when he returned a second, and this one still capable of interrogation. Surely he cannot have known what vital knot he was unraveling. By recovering her body he may have changed the course of this war; yes, and of history. But he has also given me the most profane duty I ever hope to receive, and robbed all my future nights of sleep, however many they may be.