Montrose went down first without any ceremony. Caxton followed and then Arkeley struggled his way down. He had trouble on the ladder, but he didn’t complain and he brushed her hands away whenever she tried to help him.
Montrose gestured at the pit around them. It was about six feet deep and Caxton couldn’t really see out.
A weird earthy smell made her eyes water. “We found this magazine site years ago but just now got the approval to open it up. The Park Service doesn’t care much for relic hunting, even when it’s done the right way. Too many people came through here with metal detectors over the years, digging up sacred soil.” He shrugged. “I figure that the best way to honor history is to learn about it, but I guess not everybody agrees with me. This was a Confederate powder magazine originally, a place where they stored barrels of gunpowder for the cannon. They kept them underground where it was cool and where if they blew up accidentally nobody would get hurt. There are magazines like this all over Gettysburg, most of them constructed very quickly and then filled in with earth after they were no longer needed.
Sometimes you find pieces of barrels or maybe some broken hardware from a winch or a pulley, but that’s about it. This wasn’t supposed to be a particularly interesting dig, but you always look, just in case.”
He headed over to the far end of the pit and Caxton saw another ladder there, leading farther down into the earth. Electric light streamed up from a hole cut in the floorboards.
“After the Battle of Gettysburg they intentionally blew it up. That’s not too surprising—the Confederates tore out of here in a real hurry when they realized they’d lost the battle, and they didn’t want the Union to get the powder they left behind. Except now we think they might have had another reason, as well.” He moved to the second ladder and crouched down as if to peer inside. “We were almost done here. We found some artifacts and maybe we could have gotten a paper out of this place in one of the lesser journals. I think we were all glad to be done so we could move on to more interesting stuff. Then one of my fellow students—Marcy Jackson is her name,” he said, waiting for Caxton to write it down, “told Professor Geistdoerfer that she thought the floor here sounded hollow. You’re not supposed to ruin the integrity of a site by digging just because somebody had a hunch but like I said, this place wasn’t very important. So Marcy took a chance.”
He headed down the ladder. Caxton started to follow but stopped when she saw Arkeley leaning on a support beam and looking bored. “Aren’t you coming?” she asked.
“In this condition I’ll never get down there,” he told her, grimacing as he looked down at his stiff legs.
She nodded and turned to head down the ladder. This, then, was the real reason he’d talked her into coming with him. How much had it cost him to admit that he couldn’t do this alone?
The ladder went down about fifteen feet. At the bottom Caxton found herself in a large natural cavern, maybe a hundred feet from end to end and twenty-five feet wide. There were caves like it all over the Commonwealth, but this one was unlike the tourist caves Caxton had visited. Electric lights hung from the ceiling on thick cables, though they were clearly put there recently by the archaeologists. The cavern’s walls were rough and the ceiling was thick with stalactites. The floor was almost invisible. Almost every square inch of the space had been filled with coffins.
10.
It is with some abruptness I break the flow of my narrative, but it cannot match the speed with which things happened then. There was some shooting, even as John Tyler’s neck was torn open by invisible claws. Eben Nudd dropped to a crouch, & dug inside his pack, while Hiram Morse pushed past me, running for the hills like the Yellow Dog we’d always thought him to be.
John Tyler had been an undistinguished soldier but he hardly deserved to lose his life in such a way. The pale phantom I’d seen in the woods was at his throat, his, or rather its, mouth incarnadine & buried in the wound. I raised my own weapon, & knowing I’d never have time to load a shot, I charged with my bayonet, & stabbed the demon ruthlessly again & again, but to no effect. Eben Nudd came up behind me with something in his hand, some small piece of wood, & I saw it was a crucifix of the kind some Roman Catholics carry. He thrust this holy symbol forward as if it were a firebrand, chanting a simple prayer the whole time, his eyes blazing as if he would turn back the total Host of Hell.
The beast dropped John Tyler on the ground, & stepped forward, & grabbed the cross from Eben Nudd’s hand. The downeaster looked surprised, & that alone shocked me. With one hand the demon crushed the whittled Christ into pieces, & cast them over his shoulder. I raised my weapon again but before I could strike the demon had dissolved, once more, into shadows & was gone.
—THE STATEMENT OFALVAGRIEST
11.
Caxton tried to breathe calmly. The electric bulbs overhead only dimly lit the cavern, but it was still daytime. There was no immediate danger of the coffins opening, lid after lid, and death climbing out.
“Isn’t this awesome?” Montrose asked her.
She shook her head in incomprehension.
“I love this stuff,” he said. “Ghosts and vampires and things that go bump in the night. It’s why I wanted to study this era in the first place—the nineteenth century was just so morbid. I pay for my tuition by giving ghost tours of the town. I have this velvet cape I wear, you know? And I tell people scary stories for tips. I never in a million years thought I’d see the real thing.”
“Ghost tours,” she said, distractedly. She was not a big fan of ghosts, but at least they couldn’t hurt you physically. Vampires were another story. “Jesus.”
She moved down the ranks of coffins. She knelt down and drifted her hand over the top of one. A lumpy stalagmite had grown on its lid where water dripping from above had left mineral deposits over the years. Her hand felt cold and clammy as it passed over the weathered wood of the lid, and she felt her stomach churn as she stepped closer. It wasn’t like when she’d approached Malvern’s coffin back in the hotel room, however. The feeling wasn’t as strong. This felt more like an echo of evil that had passed by long ago.
“You must know the history of this town pretty well,” she said. “You ever hear any stories about vampires at the Battle of Gettysburg?”
He shook his head. “No, nothing like that.”
“I take it this is the first time anyone’s found a vampire crypt here, then.”
He laughed at the idea. “Yes, and we never expected to. Most of the battlefield’s been played out for decades. You don’t expect to find anything anymore except the occasional bullet or maybe the tin badge off some dead guy’s hat. There aren’t a lot of mysteries left here, which is what makes this so incredible.”
She had to open the coffin. She had to see what was inside. She didn’t want to—she had to. There were so many of them. If there were vampires in all of the coffins, what could they possibly do? How could they possibly fight back? She did a quick count. The coffins were laid out in long, neat rows, five of them across and ten…fifteen…twenty deep. That made an even hundred. A hundred vampires wouldn’t just be a problem. They would be an army. An army of blood-fueled killing machines.
A year earlier Caxton had helped Arkeley destroy four vampires and it had cost both of them dearly. It had destroyed his body and nearly taken her sanity. She had done things—horrible things—that she tried to never think about, but that she relived endlessly in her dreams. She had been infected with the vampiric curse. She had nearly become one of them herself. The four vampires had done so much evil in just a few short days while Arkeley had played a deadly game of catch-up, following them from one bloodbath to another, walking right into the fiendish traps they left for him, with Caxton held out like squirming bait for them the whole time.