Blood of the Impaler (20 page)

"Okay, okay," she said, angry at his ingratitude. "I'll try to close the goddamn door." She turned back to the doorway and reached out to pull shut the iron gate. After she had done so, she pushed what was left of the wooden door shut from within. "There. Happy now?" she spat.

"Thrilled," he muttered, and resumed his efforts. He was able to force the crowbar into the narrow space easily, and then, taking the hammer, he pounded against the flat end of the crowbar and drove it deeper into the gap, thus lifting the lid slightly from the coffin. Malcolm took three more crowbars from the black bag and repeated his actions at the other end of the coffin and then on the other side as well. "Lid isn't as heavy as it looks," he said aloud to himself. "Of course not. Mina and Van Helsing were able to move it all by themselves while Stewart was waiting outside, holding on to Gramps."

"What?" Holly asked.

"Nothing, nothing. Just get out of the way." She stepped back toward the corner of the room and watched in nervous silence as he leaned his weight against the side of the coffin lid and pushed with all his might. The lid slipped with a screeching, crunching sound across the edges of the leaden box and then crashed loudly onto the floor.

Malcolm stepped back from the coffin and reached down for the flashlight. He picked it up and shined it into the sarcophagus. Holly waited for him to say something, and her
heart raced as he stood motionless, staring downward. She did not move forward and look herself. An endlessly long moment passed in total silence, and then she heard him whisper, "God damn it! God
damn
it!" His voice bespoke fear and fury.

She forced herself to walk forward, forced her eyes to remain open as she leaned over and looked down into the coffin, but she knew before looking what it was that he had seen.

It was all there, just as he had described it to her, just as he had imagined it must be, just as the book had told him it would be. The long strands of brittle yellow hair still clung to the decayed skull of what had once been a beautiful, vibrant young woman. The skeleton was in an advanced state of decomposition, but the bones of the hands still wore the rings and bracelets that had been placed upon them before burial a century before, and the hands still rested folded upon the faded, crumbling, yellowed linen that had been the woman's burial gown.

The skull and the vertebrae were not connected to each other, for the head had been severed from the body. That had not been the cause of death, of course. Holly and Malcolm both knew how she had died, they both knew who had killed her. The decapitation had occurred after death, was one of the precautions taken by those who loved her, who wished to make certain that her death would be both blessed and final, who had acted, not out of malice, but out of devotion.

The fresh garlic with which they had stuffed her dead mouth had long since rotted away to nothing, but not before it had imparted its pungent aroma to the interior of the coffin. The consecrated communion wafer that her friends had placed upon her stomach had likewise fallen victim to the passage of time. But Malcolm knew and Holly knew that both substances had once been there, both of them, the garlic and the wafer. They knew this as surely as they understood why her decayed skeletal rib cage still held, in the spot beneath which her young heart had once beat, a wooden stake.

"My God!" he said between clenched teeth. "My God, my God!"

Holly grabbed him firmly by the shoulder. "Malcolm, let's get out of here, right now, Malcolm, right now!"

"It's true," he said darkly. "It's all true."

"This doesn't prove a damn thing, Malcolm!"

"Doesn't it?" he asked, sarcastic through his misery.

"No!" she said emphatically. "All it proves is that she really lived and really died, and . . ."

"Yes, and what?" he asked angrily. "And what? That after her death someone opened her coffin and for no reason whatsoever cut off her head and pounded a wooden stake through her heart? Do you think that was customary funeral procedure in Victorian England?"

"Of course not," she replied. "But it doesn't prove anything about
her
,
either! All it proves is that people back then were very superstitious—"

"Oh, stop it, Holly!" he snapped. "We're talking about a suburb of London, not some primitive backwoods! Civilized, educated people did this, and they wouldn't have done it if there hadn't been a damn good reason." He paused. "And you know the reason for it as well as I do."

"Stop it!" she said harshly, shaking him by one shoulder. "You're letting this get to you, letting your imagination run away with your common sense. This doesn't prove anything! Think about it, for pity's sake! It doesn't actually prove anything!"

"It proves that the story is true."

"It does not!" she insisted. "Okay, it proves that somebody did a little research, stuff like that. But it doesn't prove anything about her, and it certainly doesn't prove anything about
you
!"

He seemed to calm down slightly, and she allowed herself a brief hope that her words had made sense to him. That hope died when he turned to her and said, "You know what I'm going to do now. I think you'd better go. I don't really know if you would be safe."

Her nervousness and fear and his obstinacy combined to make her angry. "Don't be ridiculous," she said. "I'm not going anywhere. I'm not going to stand outside in a graveyard all by myself in the middle of the night, for one thing, and I'm certainly not going to leave you in here all alone with your morbid fantasies getting out of control." She folded her arms imperiously across her chest, her gesture and tone conveying irritated and impatient condescension. "Go ahead, get on with it. Get this nonsense over with. Do what you think you have to do, and then when nothing happens and you feel like a jackass, we can get out of here and go back to
the hotel." She waited a moment and then repeated, "Well? Go ahead!"

He stared up at her for a moment and then whispered, "You have no idea how much I want to feel like a jackass about this. You have no idea."

The sorrowful honesty of his tone prompted in her an urge to embrace and comfort him, but she repressed it. She reasoned that she could help him best by maintaining an annoyed skepticism, so she said, "Stop wasting time. Get on with it!"

He turned from her and gazed back down at the moldy skeleton. Without taking his eyes from it, he reached into the bag and drew forth a whisk broom and a bottle of vinegar. He poured the vinegar freely over the teeth and jaws of the skull so as to wash away any vestigial remains of the garlic, and then he deftly flicked the whisk broom over the faded linen that still encumbered the pelvic bones, thus making certain that no tiny bits of the consecrated wafer remained upon the surface of the funeral gown.

He watched and waited for a few moments as the vinegar dripped down from the teeth and spread out over the bottom of the coffin. Then, slowly and almost reverently, he took the skull in his hands and moved it a few inches downward toward the body, aligning its base with the tip of the spinal column. He paused, breathing heavily. Then he grasped the wooden stake by its protruding end and withdrew it from between the ribs.

"Well?" Holly, yawning, said sarcastically. "Is she ready to go out dancing with us, or what?" Her yawn was improvised, for effect.

"Shut up," he muttered. He reached into the black bag once again and felt around for a few moments. Then he took out a small penknife and a small metal crucifix. He tossed the crucifix to her and said, "Stand by the door. Block it."

"Oh, for Pete's sake!"

"Don't argue with me!" he said, his voice strangely even and controlled. "Just do it!" As she complied, he opened the penknife and made a small incision in his forearm. The blood welled up from the cut, and when it began to flow freely, he leaned his arm into the coffin and allowed the blood to drip onto the teeth of the skull. In a few moments the bones were running with red streams.

He stepped back and wrapped a handkerchief around his small but stinging wound, and then he waited. And Holly waited. She felt as if she could hear her own heartbeat echoing from the walls of the crypt as the long minutes passed. Then she stepped forward and looked down into the coffin. "See?" She laughed harshly. "I told you. This is all nonsense, and your grandfather is nuts. Now let's go back to the hotel,"

He frowned as he gazed down at the motionless skull. "I don't understand this," he muttered. "I don't understand this at all. If what I was told is true, something should have happened."

"But nothing did!" she said cheerfully as she began to lead him by the arm back toward the door of the chamber. "I mean, of course nothing happened! You've just been acting silly, that's all." She poked him playfully in the ribs. "And you know it, don't you! I'll bet you feel like a grade-A jerk just about now."

He forced himself to smile at her. "Yeah, maybe so, sort of. I guess so." He placed his hands upon the cracked wooden door and began to pull it open, then froze in place. "What was that?"

"What was what?" she asked calmly.

"Listen!" Neither of them moved. Even their breathing was hushed.

Almost imperceptibly at first but then increasingly louder, a hissing sound was coming from the coffin.

Malcolm walked slowly and unsteadily toward the sound, his hands trembling so violently that he was scarcely able to keep a grip on the flashlight.

Holly remained at the door, willing her legs to move and follow him, failing in the attempt, clutching the crucifix to her breast. "W . . . wait . . .
"
she stammered. "Don't . . . don't look . . ."

He ignored her. He leaned over and gazed down into the coffin, muttering an unintelligible prayer when he saw the fine red mist seeping up and out from every bone fragment, drifting over the skeleton and seeming to draw together the bits and pieces of dust and bone. He watched with horrified fascination as the bones of the skeleton grew together, as the mist solidified into a yellowish liquid that itself began to form flesh, as full red lips grew downward from the skull and covered the grinning teeth, as the eyelids grew over the empty sockets and then filled out as the eyes formed beneath them, as the eyes opened and shined with a mad, red light, as the lips parted and a pink tongue drifted obscenely over the pointed fangs, as a low inhuman laugh reached his ears at the same moment that a hand reached up and grabbed him by the throat.

Holly fainted as the creature in the coffin crawled out, never releasing Malcolm from its dead grip. The aged, decaying linen of her burial gown clung to her voluptuous form, bizarrely accentuating the pallid flesh by draping it with faded yellow cloth. Her flesh was not white as might be the skin of a delicate and sheltered woman; rather, it was the cold, lifeless color of a corpse. Her teeth champed together horribly as she hissed and laughed and drew him closer.

There was the stench of death about her, and as her mouth drew nigh him, he could feel her breath upon his face, breath reeking of rot and disease, breath like unto the stagnant air of a slaughterhouse.

Malcolm was strangely calm. He thought himself at first to be in shock, or paralyzed with fear, but he rapidly realized that what he felt was merely resignation, despair, and a hint of morose confidence.
So now I know the truth
, he thought sadly.
Now I know
.

The thing which had just crawled out of the coffin brought her smiling lips closer to his throat, but something,
something
in his eyes distracted her, unnerved her, halted her, froze her in place despite her overwhelming hunger. "Who . . . ?" she rasped. "Who . . . ?"

"You know," he said quietly.

She continued to stare at him as she shook her head. "No," she said hoarsely.

"Yes," he whispered. "Look at my eyes. Taste the blood I have given you. Tell me who I am."

She backed away from him, fear and confusion suffusing her face. "But you . . . you are not . . . you are someone else."

She paused, staring at him. "And yet . . . and yet . . ." She heard a moan coming from behind Malcolm, and she looked to see Holly, as yet only semiconscious, struggling to awaken from her faint. The confused, fearful look shifted in an instant to one of lustful animal appetite and she crouched slightly, as if readying to spring upon the defenseless woman. Holly opened her eyes and looked groggily over toward Malcolm, and when she realized what she was seeing, she leaped to her feet, screaming, clutching the crucifix to her breast with trembling hands.

Malcolm stepped in front of the creature and said, "No!" She looked up at him furiously. "I must feed!" she hissed.

"Not from this woman," he said.

She backed away from him farther into the shadows of the rear of the crypt, well out of range of the flashlight beam that shined upon the wall nearest him. He had dropped the light when she grabbed him, and it remained where it had fallen. "Who are you?" she demanded, her tone mingling anger and dread, her red eyes glowing in the darkness. "Why have you come to me?"

"I have not merely come to you," he said sadly. "I removed the stake that had been driven through your heart."

"A stake!" she screamed. "Who dared to do such a thing!"