Vampire Dreams (Bloodscreams #1) (6 page)

“They're old, Abe, but not ancient.”

“It could be an Indian burial site, couldn't it?”

“None around here according to records.”

“But records've been known to be wrong.”

Magaffey nodded thoughtfully.

“If they are old bones, couldn't the marrow have just disintegrated years ago?”

“I guess Banaker'll see it that way.”

“But you don't?”

“You've studied the bones of ancient cavemen, son, and they all retain microcosmic trace elements of marrow--or should.”

“Well, what the hell explains the absence of marrow then, Doc? And what do you mean, buried twice?”

“Son, you know we're a small place, Andover ... you know, you don't have to believe everything you hear, but do me a favor--”

“What's that?”

“Next time you go by the 
Sentinel
 offices?”

“Yeah?”

“Stop in, have a look-see at their back issues, particularly any stories about graveyard vandalism.”

“I've heard rumors, stories.”

“Bull. Rumors don't unearth bodies.”

“Are you saying we've got a modern-day body snatcher on our hands? Grave robbers?” Stroud could hide his impatience no longer.

“Two cases unquestionably,” replied Magaffey. His features assumed a frown of remembrance. In the old days, Martin Magaffey was the only man in all of southern Illinois in the field of forensic medicine. He actually had an m.e. degree, a rare piece of paper for any doctor. But he enjoyed a poor reputation, and seemingly made it poorer each chance he got. Stroud didn't know him well enough yet to form a complete judgment.

“Dirt was freshly dug, found that way by the family.... Both cases the graves of children.”

“You order an exhumation?”

“No ... tried to ... wanted to ... but nobody'd have it, not Banaker, not the families--”

“But you're the coroner.”

“Small town, even the coroner's got to worry about re-election.”

“Was Banaker here at the time?”

“The old man and the kid both. Father was mayor for a time. Didn't you know?”

“No, no, I didn't know.”

“Anyway, nobody believed it possible. It was written off as graveyard vandalism, along with a few headstones that'd been turned over, and some chinked good with heavy tools, spray-painted with obscenities, that sort of thing. Nobody believed kids around here were industrious enough to make it the six feet under; said maybe they got a few feet and then decided it weren't worth it, and then just tried to cover it back over. I said--”

“Why would vandals make a show of covering it back over?”

“Exactly, but no one wanted to hear it. Families didn't want to believe it. One old-timer wanted an exhumation on his grandchild, but ahhhh, he wasn't the parents, and the parents wanted it left alone.”

“This was all in the papers?”

“Nah, I mean, sure, but not half as much as ought to have come out did.”

Dr. Oliver Banaker was coming toward them. But before getting to them, Banaker stopped to say a word to everyone he passed. It seemed that he exuded some magical force like an invisible aura about him that people wished to touch, either physically, through eye contact, or a shake of the hand. He seemed more politician than medical man, and in a sense, running the Banaker Institute in the city of Andover made him a politician. He looked polished and in charge even in his stylish casual wear selected randomly from his closet as he rushed to the scene of the discovery. Behind him, the backhoe churned up more bones and clayey southern Illinois soil. The sight outraged Stroud as the killing of whales would outrage a Greenpeace man.

Banaker was waving a map that was yellowed with age in his hand as he approached. Stroud studied Banaker's features in more detail than before. Certain physical characteristics seemed somehow more prominent now than before, such as the arching brow and confident, loping stride. He had a thick-boned frame and skull, the forehead protruding yet sloping back at the same time, wolflike in this aspect. His bushy eyebrows met over the nose, forming a long, dark line. The man's hair was tufted, crispy from too many applications of hairspray, perhaps? Banaker's triangular ears were large, as were the man's lips. His nose was not flat and large, but sleek and long like a bird of prey. He seemed an exaggeration of the species, but the eyes were luminous, lovely even, like the life-filled eyes of a pregnant woman. Stroud found himself fascinated with the man's gaze as Banaker spoke to them.

“Appears we've got an answer to our mystery, gentlemen.”

“Is that right?” asked Magaffey.

“What we've stumbled onto here is a long-forgotten graveyard, Stroud.”

“Taken over by the weeds,” said Briggs, joining them. “How were we supposed to know? Have my badge for this.”

Banaker held up a thigh bone and several times slapped it into his open palm as if he were a teacher and it was a ruler. The gesture was meant to bring home his point. “I wouldn't worry unduly, Briggs. It was, after all, unmarked. How could you know?”

“If you knew this, Banaker, why did you allow the damned machine in?” asked Stroud.

“I just received information.”

A lame reply, but Stroud sensed Banaker was taking some macabre pleasure in all of this, despite the fact a graveyard had been razed and Timmy Meyers remained missing. Banaker said, “Besides, the way the bones were discovered, it appeared to be a dumping site! A potter's field for the poor and indigent. This explains the absence of coffins, headstones, and any semblance of a normal pattern as in other grave--”

“Ahhhhh,
 I see,” said Magaffey thoughtfully.

Banaker took Stroud aside for a moment and said in his ear, “Been listening to our town octogenarian, I see. Take care, Doctor Stroud, and remember to take ample salt along with whatever the old coot tells you.”

Stroud's dislike for Banaker had its roots in ancient history. Stroud recalled that his grandfather had had difficulties with a man named Melvin Banaker years ago.

“You've cleared up the confusion for us all, Doctor Banaker. The mixed bones, the fact they weren't properly interred.”

“If the site is as old as I assume, no coffins of the era would have survived to date,” added Banaker before stepping away again to speak with Chief Briggs.

“The old settlers' boneyard is four or five miles from here,” countered Magaffey when Stroud turned to him.

“Perhaps there were two old graveyards.”

“Not by my recollection.”

“Potter's field, maybe ... you know, for those who couldn't pay for a place in the usual way. How far does the other yard date to?”

“Early 1800s, maybe late 1700s.”

Muttering to himself now, agitated, Magaffey stormed off. He'd taken some of the bones in hand for later analysis. For a moment Stroud stared after the old man whose frame was racked with arthritis, and whose legs were bowed. He looked the picture of an old eccentric, but deep inside the gnarled form and bedeviled brain there seemed, at least in Stroud's mind, a great deal to admire. When he turned to Banaker, he had the opposite reaction, and yet Banaker seemed to have made the only sense in the bizarre set of circumstances: an old grave site long forgotten and fallen into disuse. Take it a step further and you go the route of a group of people practicing a cult form of burial rites which requires the bones to be pitched one upon another, scattered about the earth in order for what? To keep them from reassembling and rising on dark and stormy nights? The bones of the young were intertwined here with those of the aged. Why? And what significance was there in Magaffey's observation about the missing marrow? And what of the old man's statement that had the bones buried not once, but twice?

Stroud was familiar with the literature of burial customs and rites in such places as Burma, Cambodia, Vietnam, Bulgaria, and even Transylvania and he knew there were still people in the world who observed the dead bodies of their loved ones for upwards of six months to ward off a takeover of the body by evil forces. He had studied and read of people who buried their dead twice, people whose custom it was to exhume the bodies of their beloved to check on their progress toward decay. If there was little or no sign of decay, then it was feared the soul had been trapped there by evil spirits, the body reanimated. It was the kind of superstition that begot ghouls and vampires.

Was Magaffey playing games with his twice-buried bones? Daylight and Banaker would sort it all out. His potter's field theory was good. It certainly explained away a lot in one fell swoop. But how did Banaker explain shallow graves in which the bones of the elders were mixed with the bones of the young after bleaching out the marrow?

Banaker returned to him the instant Magaffey disappeared. “You must be exhausted, Stroud. Sorry we must be meeting for the first time under such conditions, the missing boy ... this business ... sad. Of course, you may be assured that my team will be making determinations soon.”

Stroud saw Banaker's 
team,
 a group of white-clad men and women so well trained they never spoke a word to the press, or anyone else. The only spokesperson for Banaker's operation was Banaker himself.

“Thank you,” Stroud said.

“About Magaffey. It's time this town let the old man rest.”

“What?”

“Magaffey's finished. Next city council meeting and he's history, like these bones.” He slapped the thigh bone into his palm again.

Stroud saw before him a man who had sprayed and dried his hair before arriving at the scene, a man who was always playing to the cameras and said half a dozen indispensable words to the television cameras before and after he picked over a crime scene, and each indispensable word was vague enough to have no apparent meaning. While Magaffey's meaning was preposterous.

“May I?” asked Stroud, extending a hand out for the bone.

Banaker frowned but turned it over to the archeologist. Stroud searched for the break, or cut, at the ends where Magaffey had said the red marrow should have been. There were no breaks, however, and the bone didn't look quite the same as Magaffey's femur. Something about it looked different. Stroud wondered if he didn't need sleep, wondered if his mind was not trying to shut down on him. “Where'd you find this one? Same site as the original find? Or over there?”

“I pulled it from a patch of earth brought up by the backhoe. See the sheen of it? It was impacted in clay, a lot deeper than the others, much better preserved.”

“I see.”

“Lot of the others were broken, scarred, wearing down.”

“Wearing down?” asked Stroud. “Decaying?”

“Happens in the mineral-rich earth we have around here.”

“Does that mean, sir, that the bone marrow, too, could rapidly break down?”

“Sure, as I said, given the right minerals surrounding the bone, sure, but why do you ask?”

From what Stroud knew of soil properties, the bone appeared remarkably well preserved and so too then should the marrow. But he said nothing more to Banaker who began chatting with another neighbor.

Stroud stroked his stubble noisily and rubbed the throbbing back of his neck. He stared at Magaffey's beat up old Ford as the man drove off with a gunnysack of the bones. Nearby, some of Banaker's people were filling their own sacks--polyurethane bags of various sizes. These got labels and numbers to correspond to a grid of the site which they had worked out. They appeared to be scientifically expert; they looked like a team of archeologists at work, except for the white lab coats and white-to-transparent rubber gloves. One of them was a young woman Stroud had noticed earlier: name tag, Pamela Carr. She glanced in Stroud's direction several times as she worked. She seemed, next to the others, animated, although she did next to nothing in any truly animated way. It was just that the company she kept, Stroud thought, made her look like a jumping jack.

She was Stroud's height, but hardly his age. What, twenty-three, twenty-four? With him in his early forties any liaison between them in Andover would be considered scandalous. Stroud had always wanted to be considered scandalous. Might be a refreshing change from being simply thought of as dangerous. Perhaps danger was what prompted her curiosity; perhaps she had been warned about him and that'd served as a red flag. Who'd tell her such things? Her momma and pappa? Her minister? Maybe even Banaker? Something both odd and fascinating about her, even to the pallor of her skin. It might be what they called alabaster--it had a translucent blue tint to it. She must have been cultivating her long-flowing hair since 1979, he decided on the spur of the moment. Large, oval eyes, near Oriental in their dimension and those full black centers; enticing eyes, eyes that said more than most women said with their entire bodies.... Not that the rest of her wasn't gorgeous also, because it was.

In the predawn setting, in her tight lab outfit, the blue tinge to her skin was not noticeable to Stroud. She was either the best makeup artist in the world, or she wore no makeup whatsoever. Her naturally red lips were hers. The dark, mysterious eyes and lashes and brows were hers. Nothing artificial about this young Woman. And the way she looked at him, making him feel alone with her. Or was he imagining it? Was he so beat that at the moment he might believe anything put to him, as he had believed for a moment that old Magaffey's missing marrow meant something? Something interesting and chilling about Magaffey. But for the moment, her eyes riveting him, he couldn't remember what Magaffey looked like, much less what the old fart had had to say.

She ran her tongue across her lips in a sensual show for him. Banaker must have seen this and he marched directly to her and set her straight, sending her back to work with a reprimand.

Briggs further broke the spell when he ambled up to Stroud, saying, “We ain't yet found the Meyers boy, but it's getting light now and we've got more volunteers coming in. Thinking now is, we're looking in the wrong place. Somebody sighted a boy back of the houses near Combs Hill Crossing, out past that old shack of a church they use over that way for black revivals. Taking some men over there to have a look-see. You've been here all night, Professor. Best get some ham and eggs over at the Starlite Diner, put it on APD tab, get some rest. Or ... come along if you like. Suit yourself.”