99 Coffins: A Historical Vampire Tale

by David Wellington

  The three of them entered the tent, an enclosed space maybe twenty feet by ten. Long tables had been set up inside and covered with white paper. Muddy-looking bits of metal and deformed white bullets were laid out for inspection, with handwritten notes penciled around them. They didn’t interest her as much as the hole in the ground in the middle of the tent. A wide pit had been carved out of the earth there with a bright yellow ladder leading down into the ground. The walls of the pit had been shored up with timbers. In some places the pit had been excavated down to the level of wooden floorboards. Had it been the cellar of a house long since demolished?

  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 OF ALVA GRIEST

  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.

  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?

  She didn’t like thinking about the possibilities. She didn’t like that a skeleton was missing. Still, she had work to do—she had to check the intact coffins. Worrying could wait until that was done.

  12.

  Hiram Morse had run off in the scuffle, & John Tyler was dead. Worst of all, my Bill was gone missing. I sought him everywhere to no avail. I could hardly
fit this fact into my head. We had been so close all our lives, & it was rare a day would go by that I had not spoken with him. Much more rare since the war began & we signed on together. My father had forbidden it of me, but Bill had chosen a man’s path, & I could do naught but follow. Through battle & cannon & smoke & war we had been together. In but a moment the white demon had changed that.

  “Corporal Griest,” someone spoke, & I turned to see who it might be. Had it been our enemy returned I would not have flinched. Yet instead it was German Pete who was tugging at my pant leg. His hands were smeared with blood & his face was hard. “John Tyler’s dead, Corporal,” he told me. “Do we bury him, now?”

  I shook my body as if some ghost had possessed me.

  “Supposed to head back to the line,” Eben Nudd said, reminding me of my duty, & he was right. We were standing picket, my handful of men & I. Our duty was not to engage the enemy, nor to put ourselves in greater danger, but only to return & report.

  Yet my Bill was gone! Two years he & I had slept in the same tent, shared the same maggoty meat in camp. Since I was a child he had been the only friend I counted in the wide world.

  “Did any man see what happened to Bill?” I asked.

  “He’s not here,” Eben Nudd said, in his fashion. “Might expect him to be dead, too.”

  “No one saw him get hurt, though.” I stared at German Pete, who shook his head in negation. “Then he still lives. We don’t leave him here, not with that demon running loose.”