Лиза Смит - The Return - Midnight

They didn’t die of famine or drought — there was still plenty of grain in the granary.

There were no signs of illness. I’ve come to believe that they all killed one another — parents killing children; children killing parents.”

“But how can you tell?”

“You see this square-ish area on the periphery of the village?” Celia pointed to an area on a larger map than Alaric’s. “That’s what we call The Field of Punished Virgins. It’s the only place that has carefully constructed actual graves, so it was made early in what became a war. Later, there was no time for coffins — or no one who cared. So far we’ve excavated twenty-two female children — the eldest in her late teens.”

“Twenty-two girls? All girls?”

“All girls in this area. Boys came later, when coffins were no longer being made.

They’re not as well preserved, because the houses all burned or fell in, and they were exposed to weathering. The girls were carefully, sometimes elaborately, buried; but the markings on their bodies indicate that they were subjected to harsh physical punishment at some time close to their deaths. And then — they had stakes driven through their hearts.”

Bonnie’s fingers flew to her eyes, as if to ward off a terrible vision. Elena watched Alaric and Celia grimly.

Alaric gulped. “They were staked?” he asked uneasily.

“Yes. Now I know what you’ll be thinking. But Japan doesn’t have any tradition of vampires. Kitsune — foxes — are probably the closest analog.”

Now Elena and Bonnie were hovering right over the map.

“And do kitsunes drink blood?”

“Just kitsune. The Japanese language has an interesting way of expressing plurals. But to answer your question: no. They are legendary tricksters, and one example of what they do is possess girls and women, and lead men to destruction — into bogs, and so on. But here — well, you can almost read it like a book.”

“You make it sound like one. But not one I’d pick up for pleasure,” Alaric said, and they both smiled bleakly.

“So, to go on with the book, it seems that this disease spread eventually to all the children in the town. There were deadly fights. The parents somehow couldn’t even get to the fishing boats in which they might have escaped the island.”

ElenaI know. At least Fell’s Church isn’t on an island.

“And then there’s what we found at the town shrine. I can show you that — it’s what Ronald Argyll died for.”

They both got up and went farther into the building until Celia stopped beside two large urns on pedestals with a hideous thing in between them. It looked like a dress, weathered until it was almost pure white, but sticking through holes in the clothing were bones. Most horribly, one bleached and fleshless bone hung down from the top of one of the urns.

“This is what Ronald was working on in the field before all this rain came,” Celia explained. “It was probably the last death of the original inhabitants and it was suicide.”

“How can you possibly know that?”

“Let’s see if I can get this right from Ronald’s notes. The priestess here doesn’t have any other damage than that which caused her death. The shrine was a stone building — once. When we got here we found only a floor, with all the stone steps tumbled apart every which way. Hence Ronald’s use of the ladder. It gets quite technical, but Ronald Argyll was a great forensic pathologist and I trust his reading of the story.”

“Which is?” Alaric was taking in the jars and the bones with his camcorder.

“Someone — we don’t know who — smashed a hole in each of the jars. This is before the chaos started. The town records make note of it as an act of vandalism, a prank done by a child. But long after that the hole was sealed and the jars made almost airtight again, except where the priestess had her hands plunged in the top up to the wrist.”

With infinite care, Celia lifted the top off the jar that did not have a bone hanging from it — to reveal another pair of longish bones, slightly less bleached, and with strips of what must have been clothing on it. Tiny finger bones lay inside the jar.

“What Ronald thought was that this poor woman died as she performed a last desperate act. Clever, too, if you see it from their perspective. She cut her wristsyou can see how the tendon is shriveled in the better-preserved arm — and then she let the entire contents of her bloodstream flow into the urns. We do know that the urns show a heavy precipitation of blood on the bottom. She was trying to lure something in — or perhaps something back in. And she died trying, and the clay that she had probably hoped to use in her last conscious moments held her bones to the jars.”

“Whew!” Alaric ran a hand over his forehead, but shivered at the same time.

Take pictures! Elena was mentally commanding him, using all her willpower to transmit the order. She could see that Bonnie was doing the same, eyes shut, fists clenched.

As if in obedience to their commands, Alaric was taking pictures as fast as he could.

Finally, he was done. But Elena knew that without some outside impetus there was no way that he was going to get those pictures to Fell’s Church until he himself came to town — and even Meredith didn’t know when that would be.

So what do we do? Bonnie asked Elena, looking anguished.

Well…my tears were real when Stefan was in prison.

You want us to cry on him?

No, Elena said, not quite patiently. But we look like ghosts — let’s act like them.

Try blowing on the back of his neck.

Bonnie did, and they both watched Alaric shiver, look around him, draw his windbreaker closer.

“And what about the other deaths in your own expedition?” he asked, huddling, looking around apparently aimlessly.

Celia began speaking but neither Elena nor Bonnie was listening. Bonnie kept blowing on Alaric from different directions, herding him to the single window in the building that wasn’t shattered. There Elena had written with her finger on the darkened cold glass. Once she knew that Alaric was looking that way she blew her breath across the sentence: send all pix of jars 2 meredith now! Every time Alaric approached the window she breathed on it to refresh the words.

And at last he saw it.

He jumped backward nearly two feet. Then he slowly crept back to the window.

Elena refreshed the writing for him. This time, instead of jumping, he simply ran a hand over his eyes and then slowly peeked out again.

“Hey, Mr. Spook-chaser,” said Celia. “Are you all right?”

“I don’t know,” Alaric admitted. He passed his hand over his eyes again, but Celia was coming and Elena didn’t breathe on the window.

“I thought I saw a — a message to send copies of the pictures of these jars to Meredith.”

Celia raised an eyebrow. “Who is Meredith?”

“Oh. She — she’s one of my former students. I suppose this would interest her.”

He looked down at the camcorder.

“Bones and urns?”

“Well, you were interested in them quite young, if your reputation is correct.”

“Oh, yes. I loved to watch a dead bird decay, or find bones and try to figure out what animal they were from,” Celia said, dimpling again. “From the age of six. But I wasn’t like most girls.”

“Well — neither is Meredith,” Alaric said.

Elena and Bonnie were eyeing each other seriously now. Alaric had implied that Meredith was special, but he hadn’t said it, and he hadn’t mentioned their engagement to be engaged.

Celia came closer. “Are you going to send her the pictures?”

Alaric laughed. “Well, all this atmosphere and everything — I don’t know. It might just have been my imagination.”