Four—just four—had destroyed both their lives. A hundred vampires would have torn them to pieces without blinking.
A wave of unreality passed through her, a feeling of sheer impossibility. This couldn’t be happening. It might be a dream or some kind of hallucination. She counted the coffins again and got the same number.
“Isn’t it just gorgeous? Professor Geistdoerfer made sure he was the first one down here,” Montrose said, looking at her sheepishly. “He wanted to make sure it was his name at the top of the paper when he wrote this place up. I’m just glad to be part of this—I love a good juicy mystery.”
She stared at him. What was he babbling about? Did he even know what a real living vampire was capable of? Most people didn’t. Most people seemed to think they were like paler versions of Romantic poets. That they dressed in lace shirts and sipped red wine. That they would deign, from time to time, to nibble at somebody’s neck with delicate little fangs.
She grasped the edge of the nearest coffin lid. It felt like ice in her hands. She lifted and heaved and the battered old wood started to give way.
“Hey! You can’t do that! That has to be fully cataloged before we open it up.”
She grunted and threw the lid back on its rusted hinges. The lid shrieked and the metal hardware snapped. With a clatter that echoed around the cavern the lid smashed to the floor. Caxton leaned over the open coffin and stared down at its contents.
A skull looked back at her, its mouth open in a dreadful grin. The eye sockets and cheekbones looked mostly human, but the mouth was filled with sharp triangular teeth lined up in deep rows. Much like the teeth of a shark. Caxton had seen such teeth before, seen what they were capable of. A vampire could tear a man’s arm off at the socket with one bite. With another it could take his head. Vampires, real vampires, didn’t nibble on the necks of nubile young virgins. They tore people to pieces and sucked blood out of the chunks.
The lower jaw had fallen away from the rest of the skull and dropped to one side. Caxton glanced down and saw the rest of the bones lying jumbled in the bottom of the coffin, only approximately in the positions they’d once held. She grabbed at the intact rib cage and lifted it up even as Montrose grabbed at her arms and tried to pull her away.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing? That’s College property!”
She glared at him. She was trained in hand-to-hand combat and could easily have broken his wrists to get free of his grasp, but it didn’t come to that. When he saw the look in her eyes he took an involuntary step back. She didn’t have to work hard to summon up real, blistering anger. She had only to think about Malvern and her brood.
He tried to match her withering gaze, but didn’t have it in him. Eventually he looked away, his eyes darting to the left, and she knew he wouldn’t interfere again. She reached back into the coffin and lifted the rib cage once more. She reached between the cold bones, her fingers tracing the lines of the sternum and the xiphoid process, tapping on the knobby vertebrae. She didn’t find what she was looking for.
Oh, thank God, she thought, and let out a long relieved sigh.
The heart was missing.
Vampires possessed many gifts the living could not match. They were stronger, much faster, and they were nearly invulnerable to physical damage. If you cut a vampire’s arm off he could grow a new one while you watched. If you fired an entire clip of bullets into his face he would just laugh and hold you down while his teeth and eyes grew back. The heart of a vampire was its only weak spot. It took blood, the stolen blood of humans, to regrow damaged tissues and heal those injuries, and without a heart a vampire could not regenerate. When the heart was destroyed the vampire was dead.
Whoever had buried so many vampires under Gettysburg had been smart enough to make sure they stayed buried.
In the cold cavern her relief felt like warmth spreading through her numb fingers and toes. It felt like coming back to life, to reality, like waking up from a nightmare. She would need to check every coffin, of course, defile every piece of College property in the cavern, because she had to make sure. But it looked like the world was safe again.
Thank God.
She rubbed at her face with her hands. Her whole body tingled with adrenaline. Slowly she stood up straight and looked at Montrose again.
“Listen,” he said, “I’ve tried to be helpful here. But I really do need to bring my people back and start the real work of cataloging this place and—”
Caxton held up one hand. “We won’t keep you much longer. I just have to make sure these bodies are truly dead. That means looking at all of them.” She walked down one of the rows, holding out her hand over each of the coffins she passed. Each of them gave her the same cold feeling she’d gotten from the first. It seemed vampire bones were unnatural even in true death. She wondered if Montrose could feel it or if it was something only she could perceive. “I’ll try to be gentler with the other ones.”
Something occurred to her then. She looked back and counted coffins, then looked to either side. Four of the rows had twenty coffins each. The row she was looking at was short a coffin. It had only nineteen.
“There are ninety-nine coffins here,” she said. It irked her, but just a little. Why weren’t there an even hundred? Of course she had no idea why the coffins were there in the first place, or how many vampires there had once been. It just seemed a little odd. “I count ninety-nine.”
“Ninety-nine intact, yeah,” Montrose said. He waved her over to the other side of the cavern. She stepped over a coffin to reach him and couldn’t help but feel a little jolt of fear that it would open as she passed overhead and that the skeleton inside would rear up to grab her. She walked over to meet him and looked down at the end of the row. There had been another coffin there at some time, for an even hundred. Now there was just a pile of broken wood. The lid was reduced nearly to splinters, while the sides of the coffin looked as if they’d been smashed apart with a sledgehammer. There were no bones inside, nor any sign of occupation. The wood did not register cold when she ran her hand over it.
“Did you find it like this?” she asked.
He nodded. “We were surprised we didn’t find more of them like it. If this place really is a hundred and forty-one years old, you’d expect a lot more damage over time. Normally with a big tomb like this you find signs of 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?