chapter 20
The coffin is empty. Alex ran into the street, daylight already streaming back in, the nightmare of darkness lifted. He held out his hands toward traffic in vain hope that this would somehow keep cars from running over him. “Astrid, help me get the pieces!” he called into his wireless.
Get the pieces. He wouldn’t think about it until he recovered the pieces. Alex ran around, grabbing wood and tossing it to the side of the road. He ran after bits of straw and shredded paper that turned to dust in the damp air. Amazingly, at least one motorist hopped out of his car and helped him, and then Astrid was there, running, too.
At the side of the road Alex had a stack of ruined casket—lid and bottom, pieces of all six sides, and the stuffing, a few bits of which he shoved into his pack.
Something caught his eye, and Alex squinted, feeling his contacts swim as his eyelids squeezed his eyeballs, trying to drag a few extra feet of vision out of them. What looked to him like a paper flag was stuck in a corner of the casket, flitting in the wind against the opposite curb. Alex ran, dodging cars and delivery trucks, and when he reached the chunk of wood he saw that the paper was an envelope. There was a plug of wax on the back with a stamped indicia that looked to Alex like an early version of the one he saw every day: P, and below it: Talia sunt.
In the coffin of Allegra Byron, he had found a letter from Dr. John Polidori himself.
Alex picked it up and looked back across the street at Astrid, who stood with the other chunks of wood. He waved it.
“What’s that?” he heard her say.
“I think it’s a letter.” That was all there was. He turned it over in his hand—very thin and delicate, with a wax stamp on the back and a pressed, ornate letter P. He tapped his Bluetooth. “Sangster, we found—”
Alex suddenly heard sirens ringing out. “Sangster, where are you?”
A click finally responded in his ear. “Alex, are you hurt?” Sangster said with urgency.
Alex was running back to the churchyard, waving at Astrid to follow. He ran back around the street, huffing as he made his way down the sidewalk. An ambulance was pulling to the curb next to the Polidorium van.
Sangster was walking next to the gurney that two English paramedics were putting Armstrong on. Alex and Astrid met them as they were moving across the lawn.
“What is it? Is she—?”
“Don’t be so dramatic,” Armstrong screamed. She was lying on the gurney as the paramedics moved her quickly, trying to put an oxygen mask on her face. She tried to grab at her knee, which was bleeding profusely, and the paramedics were fighting with her. “This is not necessary; I have a van,” he heard her say.
Sangster was bleeding from a wound in his shoulder, and he spoke rapidly to Alex in short spurts. “I’m fine, leave it,” he said as he waved off a medic. “There were reinforcements among the skulls; they wanted to keep us away from the grave. One of them caught Anne’s leg as she kicked him and bit into her knee. Did they get the body?”
“What about Armstrong?” Alex asked as she was whisked into the ambulance. She was shouting muffled profanities at them as the ambulance doors closed.
“Just a cluster—it happens all the time. Someone must have called the EMS, and they’re not gonna take no for an answer. It’s fine; they’ll get her checked in, and we’ll have someone kidnap her tonight and bring her back to the farmhouse.” Again he said: “Alex, did they get the body?”
Alex made an open, helpless gesture with his hands. “There was no body. It was empty.”
“What?!” Sangster’s question sounded as angry as it did shocked.
“The Scholomance looked as surprised as we were. Elle screamed bloody murder. But I did get something…I don’t know; it’s a letter.”
Sangster shook his head and doubled over for a second, breathing as he put his hands on his knees. Sangster stood up, as if beating back his stress with a poker. He turned and started to jog toward the Polidorium van. “We gotta go.”
Alex and Astrid looked at each other and followed when Alex repeated, “I got a letter here!” The ambulance was pulling away, its siren wailing.
Sangster stopped at the door to the van and turned back. “What?”
“Well, like I said, the coffin was empty. But I got a letter here that fell out of it. No DNA, but we got the ribbons and stones that weighed it all down, and we got a letter.” He waved it idiotically, standing next to the open van door as the engine idled. “It’s from Polidori.”
“So open it,” Astrid said.
Alex looked at Sangster. “Maybe we should take it to the lab first.”
Sangster shook his head. “What does it say?”
Alex tore into the old paper, feeling it splinter in his hands.
There was a battered and stained sheet of paper within. He sighed at the few words written there. “The coarsest sensations of men.” Alex paused, then shook his head. “Everybody get that? No body, but we got ‘the coarsest sensations of men.’ Why? Because nothing can ever be easy.”
Sangster turned around and ran his hands along the roof of the van, as if answers would be found in the steel. “The coarsest sensations…?”
“The coarsest sensations of men.”
“Right,” Sangster said, pressing his forehead against the van.
“It sounds like a pirate thing.”
Sangster swore and smacked the van with his fist.
“What?” Alex said.
“It’s a line from Frankenstein.”