99 Coffins: A Historical Vampire Tale

by David Wellington

  She did as she was told. She reached down to open the bottom drawer of the cabinet, a metal tray long enough to hold a human body. The drawer pulls felt like ice in her hands. When the drawer slid out she found a long black vinyl bag inside with a zipper that ran its whole length.

  “It was Harold who wrote to me recently to say the Mütter had a certain specimen that would interest me. When he told me it was dated from 1863 I thought it might do more than just satisfy my curiosity.” He waved a folded piece of paper at her. “I did a little research before you arrived. Let me show you what I dug up. ‘Item 67-c, Lot 1863a. The remains, in part, of a male. Believed to be a vampire.’” Arkeley looked down from the paper and nodded for her to unzip the bag. “I think we can confirm that.”

  Caxton thought so too. She’d seen enough vampire skeletons—especially after the ninety-nine in the cavern in Gettysburg, she knew to look for that jaw. Rows of translucent teeth jagged outward from the mandible, some sticking so far out that they looked like they would have shredded the vampire’s lips every time he opened or closed his mouth.

  “It’s a vampire, alright.” A vampire collected the same year as the battle of Gettysburg. The same year, presumably, that the cavern under the battlefield was filled with coffins. “You think this vampire knew our suspect?”

  “It would be a surprising coincidence if he didn’t. Vampires are few in number at any given time. They seek each other out, when they can.” Arkeley read from his sheaf of papers. “‘Bones of a believed vampire. Remains of one Obediah Chess, of Virginia.’ You should recognize that name, I hope.”

  She searched her memory. “Shit,” she said. She had it—kind of. “Malvern first came to America when she was already too weak to get out of her coffin. She was sold like a fossil, sold to a guy named, um,” she worked for it, “Josiah. Josiah Caryl Chess.”

  Arkeley placed a finger alongside his nose. “She killed Josiah, I’m relatively certain of that. He was found without any blood in his body. Not, however, before he had brought a son into this world. Zachariah Chess, whose life seems to have been quite ordinary. Zachariah begat another son. Whose name was Obediah. Meanwhile Malvern rotted away quietly in the attic of the Chess plantation. I don’t know any details, but I will happily bet that it was Malvern who made Obediah what you see before you.”

  The cold that gripped Caxton then had nothing to do with air-conditioning.

  Arkeley continued to read from the paper he held. “‘Specimen obtained under unusual circumstances, donation of the War Department. Signed for by C. Benjamin, whom see for further particulars,’” Arkeley read. “Well, that would be tricky, since Dr. Benjamin died over a hundred years ago. But he was kind enough to leave us a few notes.” With his one useful hand Arkeley picked a sheet out of the packet and read it in silence, his head moving back and forth slowly for long minutes while Caxton could only wait. Occasionally she looked down at the bones in the drawer, but that just made her feel cold.

  “Can I see that when—”

  “Done,” he said. He handed the sheet to her. It was an old photocopy of a much older document, written out in a long sloping hand. Caxton read it twice:

  Specimen prepared by Captain Custis Benjamin, surgeon. At the request of a Colonel Pittenger with the War Department I have undertaken a preliminary examination. Results follow. Remains removed to the College of Physicians at Philadelphia for study on June 25, 1863. After dinner that night I took possession of two wooden boxes personally, and moved them immediately to the dissecting theater. There I performed an autopsy on the subject, assisted by my colleague, Doctor Andrew Gorman, a fellow Member of the College. Examination began at half past nine in the evening.

  Subject was delivered in a skeletal condition. Under separate cover heart arrived packed in excelsior. Heart examined first; found that it weighed twelve and one half oz. (slightly heavier than average human organ), had a blackish red coloration, and oozed a pale milky secretion when probed. Had no particular smell, nor showed any signs of corruption despite being separated from the body for several days.

  When returned to the remainder of the body, heart began action almost instantly. Production of milky secretion increased dramatically. Steam and palpable heat arose from the area of greatest activity and some reconstituted flesh visible after ten minutes time. This despite removal of heart from body cavity for extended period.

  As requested by Colonel Pittenger, then moved on to application of four oz. human blood, secured from Doctor Gorman’s left arm. Reconstitution accelerated considerably. Muscle tissue began to knit together following one hour, at which time full suite of organs already visible.

  Major Gorman expressed unwillingness to see body completely restored. I concurred. Heart removed at this time. Reconstituted flesh and structures collapsed rapidly, as an inflated bladder losing air through a puncture. Heart destroyed as per orders and male subject permanently deceased, as of one quarter past twelve, June 26, A.D. 1863.

  When she’d finished she looked up at Arkeley. He was smiling like a cat with a mouth full of fresh mouse. “Would you care to say it first?”

  She knew exactly what he was getting at. “No,” she said. “I think you’re jumping to a dumb conclusion. This vampire’s heart had been removed for a couple of days. When they put it back, he started regenerating, sure. After a couple of days! Geistdoerfer found my vampire’s heart lying on top of his coffin. He put it inside and the vampire came back to life. I see what you’re getting at, but it can’t be the same thing. Too much time passed for that.” Surely the heart would have rotted away after a hundred and forty years. To think anything else was absurd. Yet how else could she explain her vampire’s condition? He had cheated time.

  Still she wouldn’t believe it. She shook her head back and forth.

  “Tell me, Trooper,” Arkeley said, his face a patient mask. “If the doctors here had not destroyed the heart—if they had saved it in another one of these cabinets—would you be willing to reunite it with these bones, just to prove your point? Would you take that chance?”

  Caxton looked anywhere but his face. Then she pushed the drawer closed with her foot, shutting the bones away, out of sight.

  48.

  With the vampire below, our only path of egress was UP. We must find stairs to get away. Thinking he had found the way to the cupola, Storrow rushed for the locked door, and burst it open. My heart was in my mouth, and I could not speak, though I knew that was the wrong door, and something of what lay beyond.

  Eben Nudd was the first in. “Oh, Mercy,” he said. It was the harshest language I’d ever heard him use.

  It was not hard to find the seat of his discomfort. The room beyond the door was another boudoir, perhaps that of the lady of the house. The fittings might have been sumptuous once, but I had little time to study their decay. One feature of that room demanded all my attention. It was a coffin, a simple box of pinewood, tapered at the bottom, & it was open. Within lay a creature unlike any we’d seen before.

  She had the pale skin & the hairlessness of a vampire, & the pointed ears. She certainly had the fangs. Yet she looked to be some sixmonth-dead corpse, her body ravaged by the worm, her face a mass of sores & pustulent blisters. She had but one eye in her head; the other having collapsed long since, & rotten away perhaps. She made no movement, nor rose from her place, but only watched us with her remaining eye.

  “Another,” Storrow breathed. “There is another?”

  None of us had time to answer him. Bill, at that moment, slew German Pete with a single blow to the head. He had a massive truncheon made of the leg of a dressing table, and his hand did not stay a moment.

  Eben Nudd did not wait for the hexer’s body to fall before raising his musket rifle. It was too late, though, for Bill had run off, and I never did see him again. From the look of him & from the state he was in, he wasn’t going to last too long.

  —THE STATEMENT OF ALVA GRIEST

  49.

  “We know so little about the
m, really,” Arkeley said. “No scientist has ever written more than a partial description. They can’t be captured and put in zoos for schoolchildren to gawk at, and they’re thankfully rare enough that no one has ever tried. We don’t understand anything about their magic, their orisons, or even how their curse works. It defies everything we do know.”

  “But do you understand what you’re saying? They’re stronger than us and maybe smarter. We can barely destroy them when they do crop up. The one thing we can count on, the one real advantage we have over them, is that they get old even faster than we do. That they wither away.” Caxton thought of the old stories of vampires who remained forever young, their looks and their strength bolstered by regular access to copious amounts of blood. That was the myth, the dream every vampire tried to make come true. It was what Malvern was still living for, the hope that someday she would be fully restored, if only she could get enough blood.

  Now there was evidence—the bones in the drawer, the record of Custis Benjamin, Surgeon—that maybe it was possible. Maybe it wasn’t perfect, but there was a way for vampires to live for centuries and not lose their power.

  All they had to do was have somebody remove their heart from their bones and put it someplace safe. Days, years, centuries later the heart could be returned to the body and the vampire would reanimate, almost as strong as ever, weak and hungry perhaps, but ready to hunt again.

  It wasn’t quite eternal youth. But it was as close as they could get.

  She thought of the way the vampire of Gettysburg—her vampire, she had come to think of him—had looked when she’d first seen him. Stringy, bad skin, limbs like sticks. His rib cage had stuck out prominently from his white flesh and his face had been hollow and depleted. That had to be what came of being denied blood for so many decades. Yet as soon as he started drinking again he had plumped out with surprising quickness.

  “If you have a better answer, tell me,” Arkeley said.

  Caxton fumed in silence, unwilling to give up her denial. Knowing that he was right anyway. “Okay,” she said.

  “At the very least it’s a working hypothesis.”

  “Okay!” she said again. She handed him the photocopy and he tucked it in his pocket. Caxton ran her fingers through her hair, her elbows out. Slowly she turned away from him. Exhaustion and fear caught up with her as if she’d been running down a dark corridor and smacked right into a wall she couldn’t see. “I just—I can’t—they’re too strong already! They’re too good at what they do. Now they have this power too. I guess they had it all along, but we were so in the dark we didn’t even realize it. We can’t keep up with them. I can’t keep up with them.” She started walking out of the room. Away from him, from the bones. She didn’t want to see any more skeletons, didn’t want to be around them. Ever again. “I can’t do this,” she said.

  “Laura,” he called out.

  It felt like she’d been doused in cold water. She couldn’t remember the last time he’d spoken her first name. She had no doubt he used it calculatedly, to get her attention. She turned and stared at him from maybe twenty feet away. “I’m losing my shit,” she said.

  “Then find it again. Now.”

  She nodded. Swallowed, hard, her throat still bruised and thick. She fought her swimming head and got her focus back. “What’s our next step?” she said, finally.

  His eyes widened a fraction. “You tell me.”

  Fair enough. This was her investigation. “We go see what Malvern’s come up with, if anything. Then I’m going to go meet with the local cops. He’s probably not going to attack again tonight—not here or anywhere else. He’s already fed and he’s smart enough to get off the streets. Tomorrow night is another matter.”

  He nodded and walked with her up the stairs, back toward the museum. He was pretty slow going up—one of his knees just wouldn’t bend sufficiently, so he had to climb the steps one at a time. He took a rest at the first landing, just stood there looking down at his shoes. She wanted to hurry him along, but out of respect she waited for him to catch his breath.

  Upstairs Malvern had been busy. When they arrived at her coffin they found she’d written quite a bit on the laptop. Her hand still rested on the keyboard, but it was motionless, perhaps waiting for the next question, or maybe she’d just run out of energy.

  What she had written, though, got a reaction out of them both.

  the answers you seek i lack

  but there is one other who knows

  a dead man, in this house

  i can call him

  ye know my price

  Caxton read the words on the computer screen again. “She’s saying she can raise Geistdoerfer as a half-dead. She’s suggesting he knows something we could use. How could she know that?”

  “They can communicate without words, you know as much,” Arkeley said. “She sensed him coming. She must have sensed Geistdoerfer’s death as well. I think we should do this.”

  “No, no, no. No. Absolutely not,” Caxton said. “Never. Can’t be done. There is zero possibility here and you should just stop thinking about it right now.”

  She said it to herself. Arkeley was back by the coffin, patiently asking Malvern questions and then waiting while she tapped out the answers, one painful letter at a time.

  “No. We will never do that.” She stood in a corner muttering to herself. It made her feel crazy. But she wasn’t the crazy one. Arkeley was crazy for even considering this. He had changed. His wounds and his bitter regret had driven him insane.

  “This is a nonstarter.” She knew perfectly well that it was the only way. That she was going to do it, that she was going to help Malvern bring Geistdoerfer back from the dead just so she could question him, was almost a given.

  There remained, however, some residue of her former self, some resinous discoloration on her soul that still looked like Laura Caxton, soldier of the law. Some particle of her being that still believed in human dignity and compassion for the dead. There wasn’t much of it, just enough to make her feel extremely nauseous.

  “It’s not even possible,” she said, aloud this time. “Malvern didn’t drain his blood. My vampire did. Nobody can call back a half-dead except the vampire who killed him.”

  Arkeley tapped the laptop’s trackpad. “I already asked that one,” he said. Malvern’s answer scrolled down onto the screen:

  the curse is all of a part

  “Which means what, exactly?” Caxton asked.

  Arkeley shrugged. “It means it doesn’t matter. Any vampire can call a half-dead. As long as the corpse has had its blood sucked, the curse is in it. The same curse they all share. I believe her.”

  “That’s…scary,” Caxton said. Malvern was an inveterate liar. A master manipulator. Believing her—trusting her—was absolute foolishness. “Look, we know her. We know she’ll say or do anything if she thinks it gets her one step closer to getting out of that coffin on her own two feet. She said she needs blood to do this, more blood—”

  Arkeley scrolled up a little on the page:

  my strength has flown i require more

  “Exactly. She gets blood out of this. What happens if we feed her and then nothing happens and she says, ‘Oh gosh, guys, I guess that wasn’t enough blood. Maybe if you gave me a little more…’ I mean, how much are you willing to give her?”

  Malvern had an answer for that, too:

  one tenth part a woman’s measure

  it will suffice

  “Oh.” The average person had about six quarts of blood. So Malvern was asking for a little over a pint. That much would revivify her considerably, but it would hardly be enough to bring her back to full health.

  “If she demands more, she won’t get it. I was quite clear on that,” Arkeley said. “I’ve thought of all these things, Trooper.”

  Caxton shook her head. No matter what he thought he knew, there was a catch somewhere. There always had to be when Malvern was involved. “It’s a trick.”

  “Yes,” he said. “It
is. It’s a trick to get blood from us. That’s the only thing she ever wants. The only thing any vampire ever wants. In exchange we get information we truly need.”

  “This is worse than the worst thing I have ever done,” she said, talking mostly to herself.

  “Shall we get started?” Arkeley asked.

  She clamped her eyes shut and held her tongue. “Yes,” she managed to say, though that tiny part of her, that last shred of who she used to be, was screaming no.

  She went down to the basement, where Harold was waiting. The night watchman didn’t ask any questions. He helped her as he had before, taking Geistdoerfer’s body, getting his arms under the torso while she took the legs. The body felt dry and lighter than it had before. She was very conscious of the fact that at any moment, with no real warning, her vampire, the vampire of Gettysburg, could call to Geistdoerfer. Even while she was carrying him the vampire had the power to reanimate him.

  It didn’t happen in the time it took to carry the corpse up the stairs, nor while they tied his dead hands and feet together and laid him out on top of a wooden cabinet. From a display case nearby the shriveled head of a woman with a horn growing out of her forehead stared down at them, her mouth frozen in an eternal groan. Caxton turned away and saw a cat with two faces, one open and mewling, the other with its eyes and mouth permanently shut.

  None of the room’s skeletons pointed accusing fingers at her. No formless voice came out of nowhere to say “Thou shalt not.” The museum was as silent and lifeless as it had ever been. Caxton knew better than to expect divine retribution, of course. She knew what her real punishment would be: more guilt, to haunt her every quiet moment. More nightmares.