Chapter Nine
The Dead
The stench of rotting corpse rolled out of the church in an eye-searing wave.
Oliver clamped his lips shut and tried not to breathe more than he had to.
He had expected Gwen to scramble away, but in an instant, her shawl unfurled from her shoulders and wrapped itself tightly around her face to muffle the stench of putrefaction.
As Felipe blenched, looking as green as the corpses probably did, a wave of stomach-clenching revulsion shot through Oliver.
For a moment, Oliver feared his partner might vomit into the grass, but instead, he closed his eyes and held the handkerchief closer to his mouth.
“I’m fine,” Felipe croaked. “Go ahead without me.”
Oliver wasn’t sure he wanted to. Cautiously stepping into the darkened church, the half-rotten boards squeaked in protest beneath his feet.
Under the ever present stench of decaying flesh was mold and mildew.
Oliver quickly donned a cotton surgical mask from his bag.
“Gwen, can you please open the windows for me?”
Plumes of dust erupted from the tall pairs of windows on either side of the church as they ground open inch by inch.
At the first rush of clean air, Oliver’s throat unclenched, and he motioned for Gwen to follow him inside.
The meager sunlight filtering through the open windows revealed the sources of the smell immediately.
Laid out in front of the altar were five bodies.
The shrouds covering them had once been white, but between the moisture coming in through the roof and out of the bodies, they had turned several shades of sickly brown.
Setting his gladstone on the nearest pew, Oliver donned a pair of cotton gloves and handed Gwen his autopsy notebook.
He was about to get started when he thought better of it and grabbed his longest pair of forceps.
With only a water pump, he wasn’t touching anything he didn’t have to.
“We’re going to need to burn our clothes after this,” Gwen grumbled as she swept the dust off the altar with an invisible hand.
“I tried to warn you,” Oliver said, giving her a pointed look before turning back to the open door. “Mr. Allen, before I get started with my examinations, can you tell Miss Jones who the deceased are and in what order they died.”
“The ones on the left have been there the longest,” he called as he walked a third of the way down the aisle with the crook of his arm pressed into his face.
“Mrs. Sarah Linstrom was the first. The next was Mr. John Fleming. He died in a mill accident; you’ll notice his arm is missing.
Then, there was Mr. Roger Ekland. He went after Mr. Hogarth and killed him, but Hogarth’s buried elsewhere.
Miss Annabelle Harrison was the last one I mentioned in my letter. ”
Oliver stared at the closest sheet-covered body. Cold dread clawed up his throat at the realization that there was another victim. “And the fifth person?”
“We had another attack between when the second investigators left and you arrived. Even though it was only two weeks ago and it’s been cold, he isn’t in the best of shape. His name was Horace Ridder.”
Oliver locked eyes with Gwen as she wrote down the last of the information. “Thank you, sir. Inspector Galvan will want to collect more detailed information about the... risings. If we have a question, we’ll call you.”
Mr. Allen nodded, looking as relieved as Oliver felt as he slipped into the fresh air.
Staring down at the five bodies, Oliver tried to ground himself with the weight of the tether hanging beneath his heart and Gwen’s comforting, familiar presence near the altar.
He had dealt with plenty of bodies that were thoroughly decomposed, but he had never dealt with so many all at once.
He didn’t like these cases. On one hand, it was easier to forget they were once people as he worked.
On the other, it reminded him far too much of his own mortality, and no amount of scrubbing could wash away the thoughts after.
“Gwen, are you sure you want to see this?” Oliver paused, trying to put into words the shock of seeing a person who was not only dead but breaking down to reveal that humans are but flesh and bone.
They all knew it, yet seeing it was different.
“Some of these people are going to be in bad shape. I just wanted to warn you since every dead person you’ve seen and smelled in my lab has been far more whole.
While I know you can handle it, I don’t want you going in unprepared, and if you have to take a break or step outside if it’s too much, only say the word and we’ll stop. ”
Tapping the pencil against her lips, Gwen stared at the first shroud with her head cocked. “I think I can handle it, but let’s go on a corpse-by-corpse basis.”
Nodding, Oliver was about to reach for Mrs. Lindstrom’s shroud when Gwen swept it away with her powers.
Relief washed over him at the sight of a thoroughly desiccated corpse.
As the chapel’s oldest resident, what tissue remained beneath her burial clothes was bone or dry to the point of being mummified.
Her flesh had tightened and pulled back to reveal a set of even, white teeth.
The fabric of her gown was half-rotted and speckled with dust, but there were no signs of purge by her mouth or the ruddy, lifelike complexion one might expect in a suspected vampire.
“Any bite marks?” Gwen asked as Oliver carefully turned her over.
“No, but there appears to be a little blood in her hair.” Gently probing the back of her head, Oliver felt her skull crunch beneath his fingertips.
“I think she has a skull fracture that might be pre- or perimortem. Make a note of that, Gwen, and that I need to ask Mr. Allen about her cause of death. Besides that, there’s no obvious signs of vampirism or consumption. ”
“Are you going to do a full autopsy on each of them?”
“Not if I don’t have to.”
Mr. Fleming and Mr. Ekland were in far rougher shape.
The man who had been killed in the mill accident was missing the majority of his right forearm and had what looked like a shotgun blast in the middle of his ribcage, but his corpse was otherwise unremarkable apart from the lack of blood around the bullet hole.
Mr. Ekland, the third risen deceased, was so decomposed that Gwen had to turn away, and Oliver couldn’t blame her.
His skull was peeking through his face, and when Oliver tried to examine him, his skin sloughed off in a slimy pulp beneath Oliver’s forceps.
If there was anything to glean from his body, Oliver wasn’t seeing it in the low light or without a full autopsy.
Annabelle Harrison was the closest any of them came to resembling a vampire.
She couldn’t have been more than seventeen with a head of light blonde curls, a thin frame, and a mouth painted with blood.
He rattled off his findings to Gwen, pointing out the ways one could have mistaken her for a vampire: the rosy complexion, the purge around her mouth, the amount of preservation despite how long she had been dead.
Oliver assumed she had died during the colder months, and the ground had acted as a natural refrigerator.
The only thing he couldn’t explain was the blood on her hands.
“She reminds me of the Mercy Brown case,” Gwen remarked as she leaned closer to get a look at the dead girl.
“Consumption swept through the family, and the poor dead girl got blamed for everyone else dying. They burnt her heart, I think, but her brother still died. I wonder who this girl went after.”
“Hopefully her doctor,” Oliver murmured as he replaced her shroud. “If it was consumption, living in this damp, dreary place certainly didn’t help her. Brace yourself for the last one. I can already smell him.”
Gwen pressed her makeshift mask closer as Oliver carefully peeled back Horace Ridder’s shroud. For a moment, Oliver stared down at the dead man, unsure of what he was seeing until a scream ripped from Gwen’s throat.
***
WAITING OUTSIDE THE church doors, Felipe stood with his hand on his gun and his ears on Oliver and Gwen.
When he was certain they were safe and some hidden danger wasn’t going to burst out from beneath a pew, he relaxed and walked far enough away that he could no longer smell the bodies.
Saliva pooled in Felipe’s throat and his stomach roiled, despite the handkerchief.
Where was the man who could deal with the bloodiest crime scenes without blinking?
Dead, Felipe answered as he pulled the cloth down and stared at the town spread out before him.
In the distance, the smoke from the ironworks drifted up and dissolved into the storm-grey sky.
From where he stood at the top of Cemetery Hill, he could make out the steeple of the new church, a row of storefronts that looked as tired as the inn, and streets of houses in the distance, but what kept drawing his eye were the pitch pines and black oaks.
The sensation of being watched wasn’t as intense as it had been when they arrived, but Felipe felt a fleeting glance at his back as if whatever it was still searched for them.
Felipe straightened at the thump of Mr. Allen’s cane against the floor of the church and the grassy flagstones at the front door.
He winced, his limp becoming more pronounced with each step.
“Pull up a grave, inspector,” Mr. Allen said as he perched on the nearest headstone. When Felipe hesitated, he let out a hoarse laugh and nodded toward the grave beside him. “I don’t think they’ll mind.”