Vampires Never Get Old - Zoraida Cordova Page 0,26
grits his teeth. He shifts his shovel on his shoulder. At last, the bell stops ringing. As the sound fades, Mrs. Esther’s voice fades as well, and Will can breathe again.
The wind has torn the tattered shroud from the sickle moon, silvering the graveyard, tarnishing the shadows. In the light, the source of the sound is immediately apparent. A little brass chime shines like a tiny beacon atop a wooden scaffold erected above the fresh mound of earth. There is a string attached to the bell that loops through a pulley and disappears down a tube leading to the coffin below.
A strange contraption, but Will recognizes it. One of those new devices—an “improved burial case”—meant to alert the living in case the unfortunate occupant of the coffin has been mistakenly buried alive. Will has only seen them in pictures before, drawn on chalkboards at the university where he trades his midnight cargo for a spot standing in the back of the amphitheater where the dissections take place. For the last few months, the medical college has been aflame with talk of live burial after a string of tragedies across Pennsylvania.
The first reported case was a young girl who fell to a new strain of consumption—wasting away in a lethargic swoon, growing paler and paler until the blush of fever on her cheeks resembled blood on snow. When even that faded and her body grew cold, her parents entombed her in the family mausoleum. Their grief was still fresh when her younger brother fell into the same stupor. Weeks later, when they opened the mausoleum to inter him beside his sister, she flew out in a wild rage, red-eyed and cringing from the sunlight.
Some called her survival a miracle, but it was quickly apparent that her vivisepulture had driven her insane. At least the family was able to afford placement at Kirkbride’s Asylum in Philadelphia, where all the rich send their mad. And of course her brother was spared the same fate. But rumor has it he was still affected—either by his illness or by his sister’s entombment. He woke from his swoon, but in the weeks since, he suffered a loss of appetite and a habitual insomnia—at least, according to the doctor that treats him, who lectures twice a month at the college.
Other rumors of live burial had cropped up in the intervening time, some of them so wild they were clearly fiction. A body dissolving into smoke, a wolf wrapped in a burial shroud fleeing an open tomb. Dozens of coffins reported empty when they’d been dug up to check—but Will knows the reason for that.
Still, students and teachers alike bandied about the stories of live burial over beer or breakfast. The more enterprising among them dreamed up solutions and drafted patents, from glass lids to shovels stored at the foot of the coffin, to personal bell towers, like this one. There was even a design with a pantry containing marzipan, tinned fruit, sausage, and brandy, as well as a full set of serving ware. But only the rich can afford such expensive precautions. Much less costly to ask a friend to cut off your head before nailing shut the coffin.
Of course, with the rest of the country wild for that novel by Stoker, that request, too, might raise more than a few eyebrows. Discussions of the fanciful book—and the idea of the vampire—swept through the university as well, though the students took it much less seriously than the problem of live burial.
Will understands why. The century is ending, and with it, old ways of thinking. Of being. In the clear and steady gleam of electric lights, superstition turns to foolishness; in the crucible of the combustion engine, false beliefs are burned away. And under the scalpel and the microscope, the human form is revealed to be much closer to animals’ than to angels’. In the secret spaces, man has discovered cells, not souls. Death has become final; there is no such thing as eternal life. As a metaphor, live burial is much more relatable than the story of the vampire.
Ting a ling, ting a ling. The summons comes again, bringing Will back to the present. He narrows his eyes. The ringing is too insistent to be the wind: There is someone moving in that coffin. Someone desperate to get out. But despite Will’s growing fascinating, everything in him rebels against responding. His old life was dead and buried, and he’d scraped too hard, spent too much, gone too