99 Coffins: A Historical Vampire Tale v-2 Read online

  “What the fuck happened?” a trooper asked, pressing his shoulder against the side of a car. He leaned out a little, into the open, then jumped back as rifle fire chewed up the gravel ahead of him. “They were supposed to all be asleep!”

  Captain Horace tore off his gas mask and scowled at the barn. “I guess they use their own shit. Meth freaks get up earlier than normal people.”

  Hands reached down and helped her sit up against the side of a car. She couldn’t see anything through her mask. She couldn’t breathe. “Let me up,” she shouted. “I can still shoot!”

  “Stay down, ” Horace shouted, pushing down hard on her shoulder. “I don’t have time for this. I’m giving you an order. You disobeyed the last one. You don’t get to do that twice. You stay here, stay down, and stay out of the goddamned way.”

  Caxton wanted to protest, but she knew he wasn’t interested in her opinion. “Yes, sir,” she said. He nodded and jumped up to run to the back of another car. She struggled to take off her gas mask and drop it on the gravel beside her, then settled in to get comfortable.

  It was hours before the shooting was done and they’d carted off the last suspect. After that she could only watch as the other troopers came parading out of the house carrying pieces of the meth lab wrapped in plastic and plastered with biohazard stickers. Ambulances carried away the wounded and almost as an afterthought a paramedic was sent to take a look at her bruised chest. He took off her vest, opened up her shirt, and took one look at her before handing her an ice pack and telling her she was fine. While she was being discharged Corporal Painter came by to check up on her. “You missed all the fun,” he said, grinning. He leaned down and gave her a hand to help get her back on her feet. Her rib cage creaked a little as she rose, but she knew she was fine. “Not quite what you signed on for, was it?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I’m going home,” she told him. She dug her notepad out of her pants pocket and threw it to him. “Here, you can write up the report.”

  4.

  They asked I tell my tale. I should like it not, save the War Department demands it of me, & no man, no living man can call me SHIRKER, so I will write down on these pages what happened to me & to the men of my charge, & what horrors I have seen & what tragedies did occur. Also, of those trespasses we committed. So be it.

  Let me begin after the battle of Chancellorsville, for what happened there is of no matter to my present narrative. Suffice to say the Third Maine Volunteer Infantry was the last to flee that hell of cannon fire and muddy death. When at last the order came to retreat, we made all due speed away. On June 21st, 1863, after some marching, we made camp in a place called Gum Spring, Virginia. Before we were allowed to rest, however, the sergeant came down the line with a candle in his hand and beating on a small drum with new orders. We were to stand Picket Duty, which is no soldier’s desire. The six of us, which were one quarter of the remains of Company H, marched out about one mile from the lines, there to look for & make contact with the enemy, should he present himself. Hiram Morse, who I have called a malingerer & worse, liked it least. “This is dog’s duty,” he muttered, & often. “To send us into the heart of the Confederacy in the middle of the night! Do they want us dead, truly?”

  I should, as my duty as corporal requires, have struck him & made him silent but it was good old Bill who saved me from such an unwelcome task. “Maybe you’d like to ride back to camp & ask our Colonel that question,” he whispered. “I’m sure he’d love to hear your thoughts.”

  —THE STATEMENT OFALVAGRIEST

  5.

  The next morning Caxton was finally getting some sleep when sunlight flooded into the room and burned her cheek. She tried to roll away from it but the heat and light followed her. She clenched her eyes tight and grabbed hard at her pillow.

  Something soft and feathery brushed across her mouth. Caxton nearly screamed as she bolted upright, her eyelids flashing open.

  “Time to get up, beautiful,” Clara said. She had a white rose in her small hand and she’d been running its delicate petals across Laura’s lips.

  Caxton took a deep breath and forced a smile. After a tense moment Clara’s face turned up with a wry grin. Clara had already showered, and her wet hair hung in spiky bangs across her forehead. She was wearing her uniform shirt and not much else.

  “Too much, so early?” Clara asked. Her eyes were bright. She held out the rose and Laura took it. Then she picked up a glass of orange juice from the bedside table and held that out, too.

  Caxton forced herself to calm down, to push away the darkness of the night. There had been bad dreams, as always. She was, over time, learning ways to forget them when she woke up. Clara had learned ways to help.

  “Just perfect,” Caxton said. She drained half the glass of juice. “What time is it?”

  “Almost eight. I have to go.” Clara was a police photographer for the sheriff ’s department in Lancaster County. It was nearly an hour’s commute from the house they shared near Harrisburg. Caxton had been trying to convince Clara for months to join the state police so they could work out of the same building, but so far she had resisted.

  Caxton drank her juice while Clara finished getting dressed. “I have to get moving, too,” she said.

  Clara kissed her on the cheek. “Call me if you want to meet for lunch, okay?”

  And with that she left. Caxton padded into the kitchen, the floor freezing cold against her bare feet, and watched through the window as Clara drove away in her unmarked Crown Victoria. She craned her neck, leaning hard on the sink, to catch an extra little moment. Then Clara was really gone, and Caxton was all alone.

  She didn’t waste much time getting ready. She had come to not like her own house when there was no one else in it. Some very bad things had happened there, and she was a little surprised it wasn’t actually haunted.

  Deanna, Caxton’s lover before Clara, had died there. Not right away. It had been ugly, and Caxton herself had been involved in a very bad way. She had inherited the house and her car from Deanna, but the dead woman’s legacy went a lot deeper than that. It threatened to destroy her mind every night. After moving in, Clara had redecorated the place completely, but the velvet curtains and the hanging strands of lights shaped to look like chili peppers only went so far.

  She took a long shower, which felt very good. She ran a comb through her short hair and brushed her teeth. She ran a wet washcloth over her face and smeared on deodorant. Back in the bedroom she pulled on black dress slacks, a white button-down man’s shirt, and her best knit tie. Standard dress for criminal investigations and not too aggressively butch. It looked cold outside, appropriately cold for the season, so she grabbed a knee-length black coat and rushed outside to feed the dogs.

  Her greyhounds were excited to see her, as usual, and started singing as soon as she pulled open the door of their heated kennel. Fifi, her newest acquisition, had to lick her hand for a long time before she would allow Caxton to change her water. The dog had been abused at her former home and she still didn’t trust anyone, even if they were carrying treats.

  The dogs all wanted to play, to get out and run, but she didn’t have time. Food and water supplied, a little love spread around the three dogs in the kennel, she moved on. In the driveway she popped open the door of her Mazda and climbed inside.

  She took out her BlackBerry and scrolled through her email. After yesterday’s shooting she was on medical leave from work, but there was still something she had to do. She’d been putting it off—frankly, she’d been avoiding it in hopes that it would just go away. It wasn’t exactly something she would enjoy, but it was important. She could go and visit a crippled old man to whom she owed her life several times over.

  Jameson Arkeley had been her mentor, once, or at least she had wanted him to play that role. She’d been useful to him in his crusade to drive vampires to extinction. She’d worked with him closely and as a result terrible, truly horrible things had happened to her life. A year later she
was just starting to recover from them.

  He’d been badly injured back then, so much so that he had been forced to retire from the U.S. Marshals Service. He’d been in the hospital for months having his battered body put back together. Caxton had tried to visit him once, only to be told he didn’t want to see her. That seemed harsh, but not surprising.

  He was a tough old bastard and he didn’t waste a lot of time on sentimentality. Since then she hadn’t seen him or heard from him. Then out of nowhere he had emailed her, asking her to come and see him at a hotel in Hanover. There was no other information in the email, just a request for her presence.

  Now seemed like the perfect opportunity. She took the car out onto the highway and headed south, down toward the border with Maryland. It was a good hour’s drive, but felt longer. Back when she’d worked on the highway patrol she had thought nothing of being in a car for eight hours a day, driving endless distances up and down the Turnpike. In one short year she’d lost that, and now an hour’s drive seemed to take forever.

  In Hanover she pulled into the lot of a Hampton Inn and walked into the lobby. A blue-vested clerk at the reception desk smiled broadly as she walked up and leaned on his counter. “Hi,” she said, “I’m—”

  “Officer Caxton, you don’t need to introduce yourself,” he said. “I’m a huge fan.”

  Caxton smiled but couldn’t contain a little sigh. Another fan of the TV movie. They all seemed to think that she’d personally had something to do with the production. She hadn’t even seen any money out of it, much less worked on the set. She could barely watch it, herself, because it brought back too many memories.

  “Mr. Arkeley is expecting you, of course,” the clerk told her. “Isn’t he great?”

  “Are we talking about Jameson Arkeley?” She couldn’t imagine anyone calling the grizzled old vampire killer “great.” It just didn’t fit.

  The clerk nodded, though. “Just exactly like they showed him. I remember thinking when I watched the movie that nobody could be that big a jerk, that they must have broadened his character, but—well. I suppose I don’t need to tell you. He’s in room 112. Could you just sign this?”

  “Sure,” she said, and looked down, expecting to see a guest registry. Instead the clerk held out a copy of the DVD release of Teeth: The Pennsylvania Vampire Killings . Underneath the title was a picture of the actress who had played Caxton. Nearly a perfect match, except the woman on the cover had blue eyes and bright red lipstick. It looked ridiculous, since she was also wearing a state trooper’s uniform and shooting a giant pistol from the hip.

  Caxton shook her head a little but took the pen the clerk offered and scribbled her name across the picture. Another name was already inscribed near the bottom. It was Arkeley’s signature, an almost angry-looking letter A followed by a simple dash. She wondered how many times the clerk had been forced to ask before Arkeley had consented to that.

  “You,” the clerk said, “have just made my day. If you guys need anything, complimentary room service, free cable, whatever, just call this desk and ask for Frank, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said, and handed him the DVD. Then she turned and headed down a short hallway to the guest rooms. Room 112 was near the end, across from the laundry room. She knocked lightly on the door and then stood back, her hands in her pockets. She would stay an hour, she told herself. No more than that.

  The door opened and Arkeley looked out at her. She almost gasped, but covered her shock in time. He had changed considerably since the last time she’d seen him. Back then he was in his early sixties but looked eighty. Killing vampires had left him wizened and with a face so full of wrinkles that his eyes seemed to get lost in the folds.

  Now he looked ghastly. The undead servants of the teenaged vampire Kevin Scapegrace had left their mark on him, and even a year later silvery scars covered most of the left half of his face. His left eyelid drooped low over the eye and the left half of his mouth was a J-shaped mass of scar tissue. His buzzed hair was missing in a big swath across the top of his head, where a reddish fissure dug through his scalp.

  She looked down, away from his face, but that was almost worse. His left hand was a club of flesh with no fingers. Scapegrace himself had bitten them off, she remembered. Just grabbed them with his teeth and tore them right off. She’d always imagined that they could have been reattached. Apparently she’d been wrong.

  The worst change to his appearance, though, didn’t stem from his injuries or his scars. It came from time, and distance. She remembered him, whenever she did think of him, as a giant of a man. He’d been considerably taller than her and much broader through the shoulders. Or at least she remembered him that way. The man standing before her was a little old man, a badly, horribly injured little old man who couldn’t have fought off a teenaged delinquent, much less a rapacious vampire. It seemed impossible that this was the same man she’d once known. Then he opened his mouth and proved her wrong.

  “Too long, Trooper,” he said. “You took too damned long getting here. It might already be too late.”

  “I was busy,” she said, almost reflexively. She softened a little and tried greeting him again. “Nice to see you, too, Jameson,” she said, and followed him into the hotel room.

  6.

  It was uneasy work to cross those fields. There was but little moon, & yet starlight was enough to see by. All of us had the fear, for this was the land of partisans and rangers, who would shoot a man’s back should he step away from his fellows & only long enough to heed the call of nature. At the least we could see something. Away from the line & the endless dust of marching the air was almost preternaturally clear. Perhaps that is how Eben Nudd spotted the white demon so easily, though it took pains to hide itself.

  Nudd grabbed my arm, without warning, & I nearly jumped. In the darkness every motion was an enemy, & every sound the hoofbeats of a regiment of Reb cavalry. Nudd did not call out, though, or make any sign. He lifted one finger & pointed toward a stand of trees at perhaps twenty-five yards.

  For myself I saw but a certain pallor in those woods, at least at first, like a snake of mist coiled up. I squatted down & squinted & thought maybe I saw a pair of eyes there, like the last embers of a campfire. I did not care for their expression. “Is that man watching us?” I asked Eben Nudd, my voice a barest exhalation of air.

  “Ayup,” he said, which I sometimes think is half of his vocabulary. Eben Nudd is the very type of a downeaster, formerly a lobsterman, with a craggy face like leather & eyes as pale & clear as morning dew, & he was born, it sometimes seems, with no passion in his breast at all. Many times on many battlefields his coldness had served us well & I trusted him now, even when I liked not what he had to say. “Longer than we seen him, I figger.”

  —THE STATEMENT OFALVAGRIEST

  7.

  Arkeley moved slowly, one leg dragging behind the other. Caxton shuffled along behind him as respectfully as she could. Once he turned to glare back at her, but he said nothing. With a deep grunt he dropped to sit on the edge of a single bed and then ran his good hand over his face as if he were wiping away sweat.

  “How have you been?” she asked. “How’s your family? Have you seen them much lately?” He had a wife and two children, she knew, though she’d never met them. She believed he was estranged from his family, though not in any kind of dramatic way. He had just become so obsessed with his work that they had fallen by the wayside, immaterial to what he considered important.

  “Everyone’s fine.” She expected him to say something more but he didn’t.

  She glanced around the room. She’d been trained to always make a note of her surroundings when she entered a new place, and though she didn’t expect to find any criminals lurking in the corners, she did get a big surprise. The room was nice enough, a small double furnished tastefully though cheaply. There was a big television in a cabinet on one wall, an open closet with a pair of suits hanging from its rack. A door at the far end of the room led to a darkened bat
hroom. A thin muslin curtain had been drawn across the windows, leaving the room in semidarkness. Arkeley’s suitcase stood open and mostly packed on the other bed. Beyond that bed, near the windows, two metal luggage stands had been erected. Balanced on top of them stood a simple wooden coffin.

  Caxton’s guts clenched at the sight of it. She had no doubt that it was occupied.

  The coffin could belong only to one creature, the vampire who had destroyed Caxton’s life and turned every one of her nights into a parade of nightmares. Justinia Malvern, a three-hundred-year-old monster with a pedigree of cunning and deceit.

  Even a year later Caxton felt the urge to go over to the coffin, throw back the lid, and tear out Malvern’s heart. It was daytime, and she knew that if she did open the casket she would find little but bones and maggots in there. Even by night the vampire was a decrepit wreck, a rotten body with one eye and little else but a diabolical will to continue her blighted existence. Like all vampires she was immortal, but she required blood to maintain her bodily health. The older a vampire got the more blood they needed every night just to be able to walk. A long, long time ago Malvern had passed the point where she could hunt for herself, and now she was doomed to an eternity in her coffin, barely able to move at all. If she could get enough blood—and she would need gallons of it every night—she could have revivified, but Arkeley had made sure that never happened.

  Caxton walked over and set her hand on the coffin. The wood was cold as ice, and her skin prickled when it got too close. Malvern, like all vampires, was an unnatural freak, something that shouldn’t exist.

  She warped reality around herself, and every living thing recognized the wrongness, the unclean nature of her. Maggots didn’t seem to mind, but dogs and horses would go crazy if she came close to them.