“Cover me,” she said, “then come down ten seconds after I get to the bottom.”
Glauer nodded. His eyes were very wide.
There will be nobody down there, she thought. There will be nobody down there except ninety-nine skeletons. We can spend the rest of the day grinding them down to powder and then burning the powder in a blast furnace. My vampire has the hearts, but without the bones that’s nothing.
It could be that easy. It really could. She knew better, though.
She put one foot on the ladder. Nothing grabbed her ankle. The rung held her weight. She put her other foot down and waited a second, then hurried down as fast as she could go. At the bottom she panned her Beretta back and forth at eye height, ready to shoot anyone who appeared. Nobody did. She scanned the cavern with her flashlight beam.
Behind her Glauer scampered down the ladder too fast. He missed one of the rungs and nearly fell.
She should have told him not to bother coming down.
“Remember the conversation we had that one time, about the worst things we’d ever seen?” Caxton asked him. “I think I have a new contender.”
Her flashlight lit up stalactites and stalagmites, old dusty broken furniture, mineral deposits. The cavern was otherwise empty—no bones, no coffins.
Somebody had moved them while she wasn’t looking. There could be only one reason why.
Back up top, she gathered the locals together and told them to start calling every name on their emergency phone tree, to get every available man out of bed or work or wherever he was and get them down to the police station. She asked Glauer to find Vicente for her, to start liaising there.
Her job had just become a lot more difficult. They would need to find the coffins, the bones, the hearts.
All of them. They would need to find her vampire, wherever he was sleeping the day away. They might need to do a lot more than that. She glanced at her watch. It was nine-fifteen. She had less than ten hours and no leads whatsoever.
No—there was one person she could call who might know what had happened in the cavern. One person who was responsible for the coffins. Deep in the stored phonebook of her cell she found an entry for Jeff Montrose, the graduate student from the department of Civil War Era Studies. She called him and after four rings got his message:
“Welcome…to the dark lair of Jeff, Mary, Fisher, and Madison. We can’t take your call right now, most likely because we’re hanging by our feet someplace quiet and gloomy. If you’d like to leave a message, a prayer for salvation, or your darkest desire, we’re just dying to hear from you!”
The phone beeped in her ear and she snapped it shut. She needed to talk to Montrose as soon as possible.
“Glauer,” she shouted, “call your dispatcher. I need a street address right now.”
58.
I looked to the side, which was all I could do, & caught sight of Chess rolling on his own ground, his hands clutching his sides. He, I knew, would not be slain by such a fall. He would be merely inconvenienced.
Storrow fired direct into the body of Chess, & then he loosed his second shell. The vampire curled like a moth that has touched flame, & shook, & screamed in anger & in pain. Not dead yet, & surely he would recover in a moment.
When he did Storrow fired again. Then he reloaded his weapon & when the vampire stirred he shot once more. Neither of us knew any way to permanently steal the vampire’s strange life, but Storrow understood the creature could be kept stunned, at least for a while.
Storrow did not speak to me as he carried out this ugly work. I did not know how many shells he possessed. It could have still ended in both our deaths, & perhaps it should have. Yet before too long we both looked up for we had heard some great noise in the woods around us, as of many men approaching. Had I seen then dead Simonon’s ghost riding a skeletal horse I would have not been so surprised as to see who led that host. For instead it was Hiram Morse, our cowardly deserter.
—THE STATEMENT OFALVAGRIEST
59.
She spent the morning doing police work—real police work. Following up leads and examining crime scenes. There was plenty to find. The vampire had been busy.
By ten-thirty it started raining, a faint drizzle that felt more like mist. Water shook down from the trees and soaked the leaves on the sidewalks. Where Caxton’s shoes brushed away the oak leaves they left brown spiky stains on the concrete, shadows cut loose in the silvery light.
The chief arrived in a car with a gold badge on its hood and just a single blue light on top. He stepped out and glared at her, not even trying to hide his annoyance. He wore a heavy yellow raincoat with reflective tape across the back. He rushed toward her while opening an umbrella.
“You told me you had this under control,” he said.
“I told you to stay on your toes,” she replied.
It wasn’t what she’d wanted to say. It was a game she was playing, though, and she’d never been very good at games. This time she needed a solid win.
“I’d hoped we’d seen the last of you,” he said. He had a tight smile on his face that was probably the closest he could manage to a look of patient concern. “That’s why we brought you in. You’re supposed to know how to handle these things.”
The chief would have been briefed at least once by his officers. He had to know what was going on. Still he wanted to put the blame on her. To make her say it was all her fault. That wouldn’t help anybody.
Carefully she laid out their shared problem. “There were ninety-nine more skeletons in that cavern. Our vampire has managed to remove them all to an unknown location. He has also come into possession of the hearts that used to belong to those ninety-nine vampires. If he puts the hearts together with the bones he can wake them up. All of them. Tonight, just before seven, they’ll rise from their coffins and they’ll be very, very hungry.” She had to play this just right, she knew. Not step on his toes, but not kowtow to him either. “This is your show. You have some pretty tough decisions to make. I’ll be happy to advise you if I can.”
“You’re saying he came back here.” The chief just didn’t seem to get it. She needed to fix that. “You’re saying there are going to be more of them?”
Caxton nodded. “I’m sorry to drag you all the way out here. I just thought you should see this for yourself.”
Arkeley would not have played this game, she knew. He wouldn’t have had to. He would have bulled into town and demanded his due share of respect and power and he would have run things his way from the start. She’d already blown any chance of doing that—already squandered what goodwill the chief might once have felt toward her.
Glauer had filled her in on what had happened while she’d been in Philadelphia. Already Vicente had tried to undermine her. He’d made a big show of inviting her down to Gettysburg originally because he thought she could kill the vampire in one night and make all the bad things go away without putting any of his men at risk. She had been the famous vampire killer, the one they made that movie about—surely one vampire would be no problem for her to dispatch. It hadn’t worked out that way. Instead she had scared off all the tourists—the town’s lifeblood—and cost the local businesses untold amounts of money.
Everybody in this world has a boss, and the chief of police’s boss was the mayor. There had been an emergency meeting of the chamber of commerce. The National Park Service, which was its own little fiefdom in a town with more history than people, had weighed in as well. They weren’t happy at all. The mayor, who knew nothing about vampires, had come down hard on Vicente. Ripped him a new asshole, as Glauer put it (and this from a man who had trained himself never to curse in polite conversation).