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