Vampires Never Get Old - Zoraida Cordova Page 0,28
sounds more annoyed than terrified. The bell chimes again, and the pity dies in Will’s chest. For a moment, he considers leaving Maxwell Thaddeus Hawthorne to spend the rest of the night trying to dig his own way out. But the lion’s share of the work is already done. Why throw it away out of spite? Swallowing his pride—and reminding himself of the front row in the lecture hall—he presses his mouth to the tube and speaks, “This pipe looks rather narrow. Best to conserve air.”
“Beg pardon?” Maxwell Thaddeus Hawthorne replies, in the tone of a man who has never had to conserve in his life. “This coffin is the finest on the market.”
Will’s lip curls. Only the rich could be more concerned about public opinion of their burial than the burial itself. At least he has stopped ringing the damned bell. “Regardless,” Will grunts, returning to his shovel. “It’s built to support survival, not conversation.”
“How would you know?”
“I’m a doctor,” Will replies. The claim slips out—more hope than truth. “Or rather,” he adds, “I aim to be.”
“Do you?” The voice echoing up the pipe sounds delighted. “Is that how you found me? You were going to steal my corpse for anatomy class?”
Will falters at the accusation. Body snatching is not technically illegal—the politicians know it is a necessary side effect of the advancement of science, and there are plenty of wealthy doctors who can afford to pay them to look the other way. But the practice is wildly unpopular, especially with the poor, who are at the greatest risk of being anatomized. Will himself has carted plenty a pauper from the clay fields to the amphitheater—watched their flesh mutilated, their bodies made a spectacle, each of them robbed of the only rest they were ever guaranteed.
Of course, few resurrectionists are bold enough to take a rich man’s body. Is that why this particular rich man seemed to find the threat of anatomization so entertaining? Is it a scintillating brush with the reality of the commoners? Might he be game enough to play along further? “An account from a victim of live burial will be far more interesting to the students,” Will says as he resumes digging.
“An account?” The amusement in Maxwell’s voice falls away. “I’m not about to be paraded before a lecture hall or be plastered across the papers.”
“The papers will get wind of it anyway,” Will says—after the fanfare of a high society funeral, a miraculous resurrection will be hard to hide. But the voice that comes up through the pipe is flat.
“Not from you.”
Will’s shovel strikes the coffin lid with a hollow crunch—the prize at last. But he hesitates, stomach twisting. Maxwell’s reply sounded almost like a threat. The wind rushes by; an owl shrieks in the dark.
“Surely you understand the importance of discretion,” Maxwell adds then, his tone changing once again. Desperate now—and promising. “Can you imagine being made a spectacle? People pointing and staring when you pass? Having conversations where pleasantries can barely hide the prurient curiosity in their eyes?”
Will’s gut cramps again—not with his humors, but with a sympathetic fear. “I can.”
“I’ll make your silence worth your while,” the voice replies eagerly. But Maxwell’s pale fingers are already worming up through the split wood of the coffin lid. “Just get me out of here!”
Will tosses his shovel onto the grass and kneels in the hole to help pry apart the coffin lid. He is more careful than usual; still, Maxwell cringes away from the splintered edges of the boards—from the clumped earth falling in through the jagged opening.
With other night parcels, Will’s habit is to sling a rope under the corpse’s shoulders and haul the limp body through the hole. But Maxwell can clamber up on his own once the hole is large enough. Gingerly, he unfolds, brushing a speck of dirt from his lapel. “What took you so long?” the boy demands, with less gratitude than Will had hoped, though just about as much as he’d expected. In the tight space of the narrow hole, his closeness is unsettling—or perhaps it is the stark differences between them. Maxwell is taller, of course. And his grave suit alone is expensive enough to pay for a year at the college, while Will’s threadbare flannels had cost a dollar at the secondhand shop, and that was before they were covered head to toe in mud.
Will puts his palms flat on the lip of the grave and pushes himself upward till he can perch there. He