Beyond that lay another exhibit, this one about the great epidemics of the last two centuries. The great influenza of 1918 was well represented—the signs on the walls described it as the greatest health crisis in history, responsible for more than fifty million deaths. She came up to a picture of a pile of bodies waiting for interment in a mass grave and she stopped.
No vampire could ever hope to match that kind of destruction. Yet if Malvern were revived she would certainly give it a try. She would need blood, whole oceans of it, to keep her going. The older a vampire got the more she needed every night. Arkeley had estimated once that it would take five or six murders a night just to keep her on her feet—and that even then she would still be hungry. Starved as she was, she was unable to hunt, unable to kill. Yet if this vampire found a way to revive her, where would she stop?
She would create new vampires to serve her, to protect her. She would slay indiscriminately, cutting a bloody swath through Pennsylvania. How many dead cops would it take before she was eventually brought down?
She couldn’t let this new vampire finish his task. So far fear for her own life had driven her, a desperate need to live just a little longer. But there were limits on even that terror.
“Not much farther, I think,” he said behind her.
Had Arkeley gotten her message? She truly hoped so. She walked away from the picture on the wall, walked farther into the building, and there it was. The Mütter Museum in all its awful glory.
It spanned two levels, a main floor below them and a broad gallery connected by a pair of carved wooden staircases. Every inch of wall space had been lined with cabinets, dark wood fronted in polished glass. Inside were bones, mostly—walls full of skulls showing variations in cranial anatomy, whole skeletons mounted on steel bars to show deformities of bone structure. On her left stood the casket of the saponified woman, a corpse the Mütter had bought to demonstrate how soil conditions could turn a human body into grave wax. On display around the room were a giant impacted colon, the brain of the assassin who killed President Garfield, the conjoined liver of Chang and Eng.
It was all very tastefully done.
Caxton walked out onto the gallery and looked down at the main floor below. There were a lot more skeletons down there, some in huge glass cases of their own. One held the bones of a giant, a man at least seven feet tall, standing next to the remains of a dwarf. They looked strangely like a parent walking with a child. Nearby stood a big wooden set of drawers which she remembered held thousands of objects that had been removed from human stomachs—coins, pins, broken pieces of lightbulbs.
Between those two displays stood a single wooden coffin on a pair of sawhorses. The lid was closed. It wasn’t part of the museum’s collection. “There,” she said, because she knew that Malvern was inside.
“Yes, thank you, I can see for myself.” The vampire grabbed her shoulder, not overly hard, and turned her to face him. “You’ll stay here,” he said, “and wait for me to finish.”
Her hands were in her pockets. She’d thought this might be coming. Despite what he thought, she still had her amulet. Because the ribbon was broken she couldn’t wear it around her neck—instead she’d put it in her pants pocket. Where she could reach it if she needed it. Out in the parking lot she hadn’t had a chance to grab it, but now she held it tightly. She could feel it getting warm.
His eyes blazed into hers. He was trying to hypnotize her—to freeze her in her tracks. Surely, she thought, he would feel something when it didn’t work. He would know she had some protection against him.
He said nothing, though. Maybe he hadn’t felt anything. Maybe he was just in a hurry. He brushed past her and then leaped over the side of the gallery, not bothering to take the stairs. He landed with a barely audible thump and moved immediately to the side of the coffin. For a second he stood motionless before it, then passed his white hands over its top, his head tilted back.
Someone walked up behind Caxton and she nearly screamed. A fingerless hand touched her shoulder and she turned to see Arkeley standing there. His face was a mask of torture in the gloom. His good hand held his old reliable Glock 23. It looked like he’d received her message, though clearly he hadn’t had time to really prepare.
He raised his ruined hand to his lips and she understood he wanted her to be quiet. What was he waiting for? She knew him well enough to believe he must have some plan, but she couldn’t imagine what it might be.
Below them the vampire lifted the lid of the coffin. It opened noiselessly. Inside lay Malvern. She was withered and her skin was covered in sores, but she looked far more healthy than the last time Caxton had seen her. That didn’t make sense—Arkeley had been starving her of blood for over a year, hoping she would eventually die of malnutrition. If anything it looked like she’d grown stronger. How was that even possible?
The vampire reached into the coffin and ran his fingertips across Malvern’s mottled cheek. He said something, so low she couldn’t make it out.
There was no more time—what was Arkeley waiting for? The Gettysburg vampire had found some way to cheat time. What if he knew some magical spell to bring Malvern back to her former self as well?
There was no time at all.
Her eyes wide, she stared at Arkeley, but he only shook his head. So she did the only thing she could think of. Grabbing the Glock out of his hand, she aimed down at the vampire and put three quick rounds into his back, into where his heart would be. One two three. The noise was immense in that hushed place—it sounded as if every glass case in the museum had shattered at once.
The vampire vanished into thin air. If she’d gotten him, if she had killed him, he would have just slumped to the floor. She must have missed the heart, or the blood that flowed in his veins, Geistdoerfer’s stolen blood, must have protected him.
“You idiot,” Arkeley said, his face congested with rage. “How could you screw everything up?” He didn’t wait for an answer but ran off, into the shadows.
38.
I was set to search the upstairs rooms, in case more fiends lay in wait for us. The task loomed large. Whatever soothing balm the excitement of battle may bring, it wears off powerfully fast.
Luckily the second floor was not so large, & the number of doors I faced small. Two were locked; a third led to a narrow stairs, by which one could access the cupola, which was ringed inside with a narrow iron gallery. I headed back, & tried the locked doors again. You can perhaps imagine my horrified surprise when I heard a muffled sound from behind one of them.
It might have been a pigeon, having found its way in through some broken window, I told myself.
But it was not. The sound I heard was high pitched, a keening whine that I had heard before. It was the voice of one of the fiends.
“I have a minié ball for you if you make another sound,” I said through the door, my voice just loud enough to carry through the wood. I knew I could dispatch the creature beyond that portal. I was worried more he would make some alarum that would rouse the cavalry outside.
“Alva?” the voice asked. “Alva, is it you?”
You will have already guessed the identity of my conversant, & you are correct. It was BILL. My horribly wounded & long-sought friend, found at last. So why then did my blood run cold to hear him?