Alex Van Helsing The Triumph of Death - By Jason Henderson Page 0,70

then Astrid started to walk toward the ribbon as it tumbled in the grass, finally catching in the crook of a stone.

The ribbon flitted against a long gray slab with a stone marker rising out of it. Alex walked swiftly toward it and dropped to the ground, staring at the carvings. Etched into the slab he saw a tall figure leading his followers. It was Pictish.

He was aware of Astrid dropping to her knees next to him, her hands in the grass. She wiped her cheeks. “Here,” she said. “There were so many of them here. Pictish captives. They knew they were going to die.”

“You can tell all that?”

“Only the feelings.”

He put his hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry you had to feel that.”

“It’s worth doing, Alex.”

He nodded and pointed directly at the base of the slab. “Then we dig here.”

He rose and scraped at the earth with his heel. “Let’s churn up the earth around this wall.”

Luckily the earth was soft, even a little muddy. For several minutes they scraped, kicking a few inches of earth.

Alex used the stock of his Polibow to rip away at the ground at the base of the stone. After a moment he saw a sliver of blue—another ribbon, rotten and disintegrating.

“Yes,” he said. He began to dig around the ribbon, tearing away chunks of dirt at least a foot down, exposing the ribbon as he went and widening the hole.

He looked back, studying the space between the slab and the strips of stone in the earth nearby. Was there room for a casket, even a child’s casket?

Finally the ribbon ended in a knot, and Alex felt past it, swiping earth aside to reveal an iron ring. He brushed more dirt aside, exposing old, mottled metal. Breathing harder now, he began to dig and run his fingers along the metal, finding edges that he desperately tried to clear. “It’s a box,” he said. “Help me with this.”

They tugged at the iron ring and wrestled with the box in the earth, watching the dirt slide away. It wasn’t a casket at all. It was a box about a foot long and seven inches wide.

With a great heave they wrenched it free, and Alex fell back, sprawling on the grass before catching himself and setting the old metal box on the grass. Then he rose and kneeled next to it, Astrid joining him.

“I don’t know. You think we should take it back to the lighthouse and inspect it there?” Astrid asked.

“No way; I want in this thing.” Alex clawed at a rusty clasp on the front of the box. It was not locked. “Okay, this could be…I don’t know. It could be awful.”

He breathed, flipped the clasp slowly, and pried the metal box open, forcing the ancient, rusted hinges. For a moment he hesitated, then looked at the contents. He saw a slim leather-bound booklet, held closed with a strand of leather, and a glass jar with a wide cork.

Alex picked up the jar first, holding it up. It was impossible to see through a layer of dust that had caked around it. Alex swiped at the dust and held it up again, and watched as strands of sunlight glinted off a swirling lock of human hair.

“That,” said Alex, “is DNA.”

“What about the rest?” Astrid said. She picked up the book, which seemed to be only a few pages long. She undid the string and opened it. Alex could see the writing was a dramatic, clear longhand, in English.

“‘On my greatest failure, a testament of John William Polidori. In 1822…,’” she read aloud, and then fell silent. “This isn’t right,” she said, handing him the book. “He’s your founder. You be the first to read it.”

Alex’s eyes shot across the page. He did not speak again until he had read it through.

CHAPTER 25

“All that is left of Allegra is this.” Alex gestured at the jar with the book in his hands. The cold, damp wind lifted Astrid’s hair as she listened, and he handed the book to her.

“Go ahead, read it,” Alex said. “But the gist is this: In 1822, John Polidori, the doctor who had worked for Lord Byron and broken off with him after Byron began to show signs of vampirism, was supposed to be dead. By this time he had already gone underground and formed the first team that would be known as the Polidorium. But he moved much of his work here, because he was determined to save Byron’s littlest victim, a