9.

She followed him out to the parking lot. The clerk at the front desk gave them a cheery wave, which Arkeley completely ignored. The old Fed shoved himself into her little Mazda and in a minute they were off. It wasn’t a long drive to Gettysburg—it was the next town over from Hanover. Though they didn’t talk any more along the way, the atmosphere in the car never got too unbearable. She was just doing a favor for an old friend, she told herself. Well, friend was probably the wrong word.

He cleared his throat as they neared Gettysburg, but only to give her directions. “It’s on the far side of town,” he said.

She drove through the center of Gettysburg, a town given over almost entirely to history. She knew very little about the Civil War, but like most kids raised in central Pennsylvania she’d been dragged through Gettysburg on class trips as a child, so she knew it had been the location of a particularly important battle, the turning point of the war. Now it was a tourist destination.

Not necessarily a tourist trap, though. She had seen plenty of those: soulless little towns comprised entirely of T-shirt shops and gaudy ice cream parlors. Instead Gettysburg was a well-preserved Victorian town, full of brick buildings with slate roofs that hadn’t changed much in a hundred and forty years. It was almost tasteful—at least at its center. She drove through a traffic circle called Lincoln Square, past small museums and antiques shops, banks, and hotels. The town was crowded with tourists, families with herds of children carrying plastic replicas of Civil War–era rifles and felt forage caps with plastic brims. The real things were in evidence as well, in some profusion: it seemed every corner had at least one reenactor in blue or gray, clad in authentic but itchy-looking uniforms, most of them with beards and long sideburns.

She sighed as she stopped at a crosswalk to let a gaggle of schoolchildren pass. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll bite.”

“Hmm?” he asked.

“What’s here?” she asked. “What kind of horror could there possibly be in a place like this?”

He shifted painfully in his seat. “Something old. I got a call a couple days ago from a student at the college here. An archaeologist was digging up some old Civil War ruins and found some evidence of vampire activity.”

“No,” Caxton exhaled, “we got them all!”

He waved one impatient hand at her. “Old vampire activity,” he said. “More than a century old. They found the bones of a number of vampires, still in their coffins. It’s almost certainly nothing.”

“But you won’t rest easy until you check it out,” she said.

“I never rest easy,” he told her. It wasn’t what she wanted to hear. She didn’t want to have anything in common with him, not anymore.

Caxton stared straight ahead at the crosswalk, ready to get moving again. Eventually some adults herded up the children and moved them on. They drove in silence until she’d reached the far end of town. He had her turn off into the military park, up to the top of Seminary Ridge, a zone of quiet green hills studded everywhere by endless monuments—obelisks, arches, huge marble statues. There were fewer tourists out that way but a lot more reenactors, some of them having set up elaborate period-accurate tent camps. They drilled in formation or stood around polishing cannon and mortars that looked like they could actually be fired. Arkeley told her to turn off on a poorly marked gravel road, and the car rumbled along for about half a mile into a thick clump of trees. Three cars, late-model cheap Japanese sedans, sat in a crook of the road, and a foot trail led deeper into the woods. Caxton pulled up beside a red Nissan Sentra and switched off the ignition. She had no idea where she was or what Arkeley wanted there, and she told herself she didn’t care.

He cleared his throat again. “Aren’t you going to take off your seat belt?” he asked.

“No,” she told him. “I’m not staying.”

“Alright,” he told her. “If you’re determined to be unhelpful, so be it. Maybe you’ll do me one last favor, though.” He reached into his inside jacket pocket and drew out a long length of rumpled knit cloth. It was soon revealed as a necktie that was probably twenty-five years old. “There is a way to tie one of these with only one hand, but I haven’t mastered it yet.”

She squinted at him. Did he really want her to tie it on for him? Did he really want her to touch him? It would certainly be a first.

“I’ve never gone into an official interview in my life where I wasn’t properly dressed,” he explained. “I’m not allowed to wear my badge anymore, but I can at least look like a cop.”

She stared at him for a long time. Jameson Arkeley, vampire killer emeritus, needed somebody else to tie his tie. She fought back the wave of bitter sadness that gave her but she couldn’t quite swallow her pity.

“Alright,” she said. She unfastened her seat belt. It was easy enough to get the tie on him. She’d tied Clara’s tie plenty of times. When the knot was tight enough for him he grunted in satisfaction.

“Good. Now. Please help me get out of the car.”

She could hardly refuse him that. She got out of the car and gave him a hand climbing out of his seat and suddenly they were both standing there, just like they used to. Like partners.

“Tell me, honestly, that you aren’t even curious,” he said, looking at the trail.

She started to do just that. The words didn’t come easily, though.

“Tell me you don’t even want to take a look. What do you have to do today that is so much more important than this?” he asked.

She would have said no just on principle. She would have refused. But he was right—she was curious, even though her life wasn’t about vampires anymore. Especially not their moldering bones. He was right about another thing, too. She had nothing else to do.

Arkeley’s body might be ruined, but he still knew how to push her buttons. Then and there she knew she had to at least take a look.

She locked up the car and together they headed down the trail. It ran through a field of wildly profuse grass for about two hundred yards, then ended in a simple campsite with a cluster of nylon tents and a big fire ring. There were no reenactors around, but a man in a hooded sweatshirt and jeans was waiting for them. He shook Arkeley’s hand eagerly enough, then turned and smiled at Caxton as if he was waiting to be introduced.

“Trooper, meet Jeff Montrose. He’s from the archaeology department of Gettysburg College.”

Caxton raised an eyebrow, but held out a hand for Montrose to shake. He was of average height, and maybe a little pudgy. His brown hair was thinning on top and he had a long and elaborate goatee that he had dyed so blond it was almost white. There was something weird about his eyes, she thought, which worried her—but then she realized he was just wearing eyeliner. “Civil War Era Studies is what we’re calling it, but we get our hands dirty whenever we can.”

“Hi,” she said. His appearance didn’t bother her, but it wasn’t what she expected from an archaeologist. He didn’t recognize her or ask her for her autograph, which was one thing in his favor. “Are you a professor?” she asked. She’d never finished college, but she didn’t remember her professors wearing eye makeup.

“A grad student. Running Wolf ’s technically in charge here, but he had classes all day, so he asked me to help you out.”

“Who’s Running Wolf?” she asked, confused.

He laughed. “Sorry. That’s what we call Professor Geistdoerfer. He got the name because he jogs through campus every day. He’s a fixture around here—I forget sometimes that people in the real world might not know him. The whole college does.” Montrose could not mask the boyish enthusiasm on his face, though every time he looked over at Arkeley he stopped smiling, as if that scarred face had reminded him this was a police investigation. “I’ve sent all the diggers out for lunch, so we have the place to ourselves.” He turned and walked to the largest of the tents and lifted its flap. “This is so exciting. We’d really like to get back to work, so if you don’t mind, I think I’ll just show you what we’ve got.”

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.