The Empty Coffins Page 7

No, that would never do. Besides, he still had the memory of Singh’s words. The mystic, for some reason best known to himself, was not entirely convinced by the happenings. It gave Peter the dim hope that somehow, somewhere, there might be an answer to all the frightful things that had happen­ed—an answer in which he, and others, could be­lieve.

  The day of the funeral came. Four pall­bearers entered the house. Peter watched from the hall. He was dressed in sombre black, his face white and serious. He saw them come downstairs, carrying the coffin—then they took it out to the hearse and slid it gently into position. After that there was some ten minutes of wreath-laying.

  Dr. Meadows arrived before the funeral cortege started off. He said but little. There was sor­row deep in his eyes, but it had not the naked hurt expressed in Peter’s features.... Mrs. Dawlish was present too, in sombre clothes. The remainder of the mourners were chiefly those few from the village who had ignored malicious gossip and liked Elsie for herself.

  So the forlorn journey to the cemetery began. The weather had turned unseasonable. There was a cutting wind and a light, saturating rain. The vicar seemed to mumble the burial service. At the back of the church sat Rawnee Singh, utterly unemotional, listening intently. He was also present at the graveside and watched Peter hurl a handful of earth down into the grave on top of the coffin. Then it was all over and Elsie had been laid to rest—at least so far as human endeavour could plan it. What might happen later nobody, except maybe Singh, knew.

  Peter, for his part, had come now to the task he had been fearing the most. He had to make arrangements for a watch to be kept over Elsie’s grave. He would probably have shirked it alto­gether, only Dr. Meadows did not allow him to.

  He insisted that a meeting should be held that evening in the main lounge of the village inn—and Peter had to be there whether he liked it or not.

  He found the room fairly crowded with villagers, both men and women, when he arrived towards eight o’clock. He waited until Dr. Meadows came, and then explained the situation.

  “This, for me, is the most difficult thing I have ever attempted,” he said, with a serious glance at the faces turned towards him. “I am having to ask for volunteers to strike down my wife—by driving a stake through her heart—­if she is seen to leave her grave. We all know that she died because of a vampire attack by her former husband, George Timperley, which makes it inevitable that she will become a vampire in turn. We have already experienced the horror of a vamp­ire in our midst: unless we can take prompt action we are liable to have yet another vampire…my wife.”

  “It does not follow that she will actually be seen leaving her grave,” Dr. Meadows pointed out. “She will have the power of any spirit to pass through solids and might also have the gift of invisibility until she is about to strike; then invisibility will be useless to her. By this I mean that she may appear anywhere, anytime, either in some part of the cemetery or outside it. It will be by night, not day. We shall have to be always on the alert.”

  “Otherwise there’ll be more murders?” somebody asked.

  “That is inevitable,” Meadows agreed. “Remember that Mrs. Malden had no reason during life to be friendly towards you villagers. You pilloried her because she married so soon after her first hus­band’s death. Since then you have heard, chiefly at the inquest, how brutally her first husband treated her. You also know how he avenged him­self: by destroying her—albeit slowly—and leaving the mark of the vampire upon her.”

  “George Timperley—the vampire, that is—hasn’t been seen for some time,” a woman remarked. “What do you suppose has happened to him, doctor?”

  For a moment or two Meadows considered this; then he replied:

  “It is possible that his only aim in rising from the grave as a vampire was to find his former wife and leave his mark upon her. With that acc­omplished his foul mission was, perhaps, completed. There is only one way to make sure.”

  “Open his grave?” Peter asked.

  “Exactly. I think we should do that—tonight if possible. Scotland Yard do not seem to be gett­ing anywhere, and since we in this village are the most likely potential victims for future attack we might as well see how we stand.”

  “We can do that when we’re in the cemetery to­night,” Peter said. “I want volunteers who’ll agree to keep watch in the cemetery—maybe every night for a month, or until such time as we are satisfied as to what is happening.”

  There was no lack of response to his request. Several hands went up, mostly from dour-looking farmers in whom superstition was deep-rooted.

  “A dozen,” Peter said, nodding as he counted the hands. “That’s fine. Say six each alternate night. That should be enough. I too will stay on watch alternate nights, commencing tonight.”

  “Might I join too?” asked a quiet voice, and Peter looked quickly towards the doorway where a man had just come in. He was wearing a mackintosh and a turban.

  “You still around this district, Singh?” Meadows asked him bluntly. “What do you hope to accomplish now the worst has happened?”

  “I have yet to be assured, my dear doctor, that the worst has happened....” The mystic came forward with his catlike tread and paused a few feet away from where Peter and Meadows were standing.

  “You don’t regard the death of my wife as the worst?” Peter demanded bitterly.

  “No.” Singh gave him a direct look from his dark eyes. “I shall consider the worst has happ­ened when your wife reappears as a vampire...as she will. I am anxious to see that happen.”

  “Why?” Meadows asked.

  “Chiefly to satisfy myself that I have read the future aright.”

  Singh turned as a burly farmer tapped him on the arm.

  “Look here, mister, I don’t quite understand where you fit into this business. D’you mean you actually read the future?”

  “It is my profession.” Singh agreed, with his inscrutable smile. “I am able to use my poor gifts to read destiny.... I knew Mrs. Malden would die. I also know she will reappear as a vampire.”

  “Oh, you do!” Grim suspicion crossed the farmer’s face. “You seem to know the hell of a lot! Maybe the police would like a word with you.”

  “They’ve already had one,” Peter said. “Mr. Singh is a mystic—so he says—and so far every­thing he has foreseen has come true. Some of you may remember him at the Christmas fair.”

  The farmer snapped his fingers. “That’s where I’ve seen you! You told Sam Jenkins that his haystack would catch fire on the night of January 10th, didn’t you?”

  “I hardly remember.... Naturally, it did catch fire?”

  “Yes. We never found out how. Come to think of it, you could have fired it yourself to make a prophecy come true—”

  Singh held up his hand. “Gentlemen, I beg of you not to anger the powers that be by discredit­ing them. That can only bring disaster on all of us.”

  “I think,” Meadows said deliberately, “you are going to cause a great deal of trouble amongst us, Singh, if you stay in this district.”

  “Perhaps I am not alone in that,” he responded. “In any case I intend to remain. I have a friend just outside the village with whom I’m staying. This business of Mrs. Malden interests me tremend­ously. Anything with an other-world flavour commands my attention.”

  Obviously he was not to be shaken off, so neither Meadows nor Peter took any further notice of him. He joined the party of six who went to the cemetery towards eleven o’clock to keep the first night’s vigil. The dismal dreariness of the day had been carried on into the night and drizzle was still descending from a black sky as the party, hurricane lamps swinging, made its way to the new grave where Elsie lay buried. For a moment or two, when the grave had been reached, Peter stood looking at the headstone and the still fresh wreaths: then he turned to Meadows.

  “I’ll stay here with three men, Doc,” he said. “You’d better take the opportunity to open up George’s grave and see how things are.”

  Meadows
nodded, signalled to the remaining three men who were carrying shovels and tools, then they went off into the murk. Peter watched them go, then he looked back at the villagers in their rain-soaked mackintoshes. Singh was there too, immobile in the light of the hurricane lamps.

  “You don’t want to satisfy yourself about George Timperley, then?” Peter asked him.

  “My interest is in your wife, Mr. Malden.”

  “You mean my late wife…”

  “As you wish. For myself I have still to be satisfied on that point.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Peter demanded. “Can’t you see that we’re all of us under strain enough—myself in particular—without you making all kinds of enigmatic remarks?”

  “I ask your forgiveness,” Singh murmured, with a slight obeisance. “I was merely thinking it would be more sensible to open your wife’s grave than George Timperley’s, since it is she with whom we’re concerned.”

  Peter hesitated and the men with him glanced at each other.

  “It is so obvious a course,” Singh added, spreading his hands. “If her coffin is empty we know that we have to be on the alert. If she still lies there, then—for the time being at least—we have nothing more to guard against.”

  “I’ll ask the Doc when he comes back,” Peter decided.

  “He may be a long time,” Singh remarked, with a glance at the distant spots of light where the hurricane lamps stood by George Timperley’s grave. “I would advise you to dig now. There are tools here—and shovels. I am not averse to doing my share.”

  “He may be right, Mr. Malden,” one of the men said. “It’s up to you, though. She’s your wife—or was.”

  Peter spent a further moment or two trying to make up his mind, then before he could do so a scream from the lane which ran past the cemetery made him glance up sharply. Singh, and the three other men, swung round and stared through the drizzle.

  The scream came again, choking off into a ghastly shriek.

  “Trouble!” Peter snapped. “Come on—!” He whipped up a shovel as a weapon and started racing along the shale pathway. Meadows and the men working with him had also heard the cries and were heading towards the gap in the cemetery railings when Peter and his party caught up.

  In a moment or two the entire group was in the lane, the hurricane lamps swinging, heading to­wards the lights of the doctor’s car from where the scream had seemed to emanate.

  They came upon the cause of the trouble abrupt­ly—too abruptly for the good of their nerves. Two men were lying face down in the lane, arms and legs sprawled as grotesquely as though they were rag dolls.

  “Sergeant Blair and Constable Hawkins!” Meadows gasped. “The pair of them!”

  He hurried forward, hurricane lamp in hand. Putting it down in the roadway he turned both men over, frowning as he felt how flaccid their bodies were. Peter and the rest of the men, Rawnee Singh in the background, looked down in silent horror on two bodies from which every scrap of blood had apparently been drained. The corpses were dehy­drated in some extraordinary way, leaving folds of flesh clinging to the bone structure. And on the throats of both men were deep, vividly stained punctures.

  “Well, do I have to explain this?” Meadows ask­ed, looking up at the grim faces in the lamplight. “Our two stalwart guardians of the law have ob­viously been attacked and slain by a vampire—either George Timperley, or….”

  “Go on, say it!” Peter snapped. “Or Elsie!”

  “I’d sooner you said it for me,” Meadows re­sponded. “Evidently these two poor devils were set upon as they patrolled the lane out here: They promised they would do, remember, when we told them of our plans for tonight. The point is, which vampire caused this ghastly business? Not a drop of blood is left in either man!”

  “Only thing for it is for some of you men to transport these terrible corpses back into the village for the Yard men to see tomorrow,” Peter instructed. “We’ll carry out our original idea of opening Elsie’s grave.”

  “You mean George’s,” Meadows corrected, stand­ing up.

  “And Elsie’s. Mr. Singh thought it would be a good idea; and I agree.”

  Peter turned to Singh for confirmation, but the mystic had disappeared.

  “Where’s he gone?” Peter demanded, looking about him in the dark and drizzle. “Singh! Where are you?”

  There was no response. Meadows gave a shrug.

  “Be damned to the man: he’s no use to us, any­way. Seems to spend all his time arguing for the wrong side…. You two men get these bodies back to the village,” he instructed. “Go and fetch a truck if you have to. The rest of us will go back into the cemetery. We’ll open both graves while we’re at it.”

  Turning, he led the way back down the lane, Peter at his side.

  “I’m getting a bit baffled by Singh, Peter,” Meadows said anxiously, after making sure the rest of the party was out of earshot. “He behaves in such a strange way and seems to know so much he’s got me wondering....”

  “About what?”

  Meadows did not answer until the main cemetery path had been regained. Then he said:

  “I am wondering if he possessed some strange influence over Elsie, which brought about her death. I am not one who believes in what is call­ed the ‘evil eye,’ even though I think vampires exist—but I am commencing to wonder if perhaps, when Elsie visited him that evening at the fair, he did not put some kind of psychic spell upon her. He was so convinced she would die, but he erred in the time, apparently. Doesn’t that suggest to you that perhaps he did not really know how long it would be before she succumbed? When he had really worked it out he came and made amendments to his calculations.”

  “But what on earth reason would he have for wanting to kill Elsie? There’s no sense in it! Besides, that doesn’t explain away George being a vampire.”

  “I suppose not—unless Singh is perhaps account­able for that also, in some way so complex the solution has not yet occurred to us.”

  Peter did not pursue the subject because the remainder of the party had caught up, barring the two men who had gone back to the village for transport for the two corpses in the lane.

  “I’ll join you later,” Meadows said, pausing beside George Timperley’s half dug-up grave. “You’d better see what kind of a tale Elsie’s coffin has to tell.”

  Peter nodded and went on ahead with three of the men. He did not need to give them instructions. They removed the wreaths reverently and set them on one side; then, Peter handling his shovel with as much vigour as his colleagues, the first moves in the exhumation of Elsie began.

  They had just got as far as the lid of her coff­in when Meadows appeared at the grave edge with the man who had been helping him.

  “It wasn’t George,” he said. “He’s returned to his coffin, lying there as if he’s never done a wrong thing.”

  Peter lowered his shovel and looked up incred­ulously in the glow of the hurricane lamp.

  “You mean—through the soil, the screwed lid, and everything?”

  “That isn’t remarkable, Peter. A spirit, evil or good, can pass through all solids. It satisfies me that his sole reason for becoming a vampire was to inflict Elsie with his own loathsomeness.”

  “Which means it was she who attacked and killed those two policemen tonight?” Peter whispered.

  “It looks horribly like it.” Meadows jumped down into the grave. “How far have you got towards opening her coffin—? Oh, just got to the lid, eh? All right—carry on.”

  Peter did not move. Now he had come to the task of removing the screws from the lid his nerve had failed him. Meadows gave him an understanding smile in the glow of the lamp and picked up a screw­driver, motioning the other men to get their tools from the bag.

  Swiftly the lid was unfastened—and raised. There was a long and deathly silence.

  “Gone!” Peter breathed, staring at the empti­ness. Just the plush, the headrest, the lead lining—that was all. The coffin still smelled of the aroma
tic ointments the undertakers had used.

  “Yes—gone.” Meadows took a deep breath. “She was only buried this morning. She would not leave her coffin during the daylight hours, and we enter­ed the cemetery at eleven. That means that she started to prowl as a vampire somewhere between darkness and eleven o clock. There were two hours of darkness there when she was unguarded. Fools that we’ve been! We should have come sooner!”

  “It would not have availed you anything if you had.”

  Meadows, Peter, and the rest of the men looked up sharply. At the edge of the grave, his queer, oblique eyes peering into the cavity, Rawnee Singh was waiting.With his turban and rain-glistened mack­intosh he cut a queer figure against the drizzling dark.

  “What the devil are you talking about?” Meadows snapped.

  “I mean, my dear doctor, that I was here tonight from sunset to the time when I joined your party.”

  “You were?” Peter looked surprised. “How did that come about?”

  “You wish to make a mystery of it? That would be rather pointless, would it not? We finished discussing in the inn at about half past eight. It was just commencing to grow dark then. We had arranged to meet at eleven. I had nothing with which to occupy myself in the intervening time—­so I came here.”

  “And saw what?” Meadows questioned.

  “Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I am prepared to swear by all the gods I hold sacred that this grave—and that of George Timperley—remained undisturbed throughout the time I was here. I stood in the chapel porch over there, where I could see both graves—”

  “In the dark?” Peter interrupted.

  “It is never entirely dark in an open space, my friend. The departure or entry of the occupant of either grave would have been visible because of the white shroud each would be wearing. There was no such manifestation.”

  “We’ve only your word for it,” Meadows said. “Personally I’m not at all satisfied with your be­haviour, Singh. That you came here by yourself is at least—suspicious.”

  “Is it?” Singh gave his slow smile. “Do you believe that that I perhaps arranged for Elsie Malden to leave her resting place?”