Chapter 125
JUSTINE WALKED WITH Jack toward the entrance to the dark cemetery with the armed kids walking behind them. For reasons she wasn’t quite sure she could identify, she felt none of the terror she’d endured during the attack inside the jail. Indeed, she felt strangely calm as they passed through an arched wrought-iron gate and she smelled the faint odors of incense and Jack.
What do you usually find in cemeteries?
Roberto clicked on a flashlight and aimed it ahead of them. There were gravestones, monuments, and tombs everywhere. Many were coated in red wax, which Justine guessed came from candles that had burned in the cemetery during the two Days of the Dead.
“This cemetery is haunted,” the boy said.
“By who?” Justine asked.
“Vampire,” Roberto replied. “He hunted the citizens of Guadalajara two hundred years ago. It started with small animals, dogs and cats, found all over the city drained completely of their blood. Later, human babies were found dead and exsanguinated as well.”
“Exsanguinated?” Jack said.
“That’s what I said,” the boy replied.
“Where’d you learn to speak English so well?” Justine asked.
“Arizona,” Roberto said. “Lived there until my parents died two years ago. Then I came back here. Take a right there onto that path.”
Very smart kid, Justine thought. How did he come to this?
Roberto, meanwhile, was going on with his story about the vampire. “Everyone lived in fear. They stayed indoors after dark and prayed for their lives. A group of citizens who were tired of living in constant terror decided to end the daily nightmare and track down the vampire. They eventually found him and when they did, they drove a wooden stake through his heart.”
“I like it when that happens,” Jack said. “Reassuring.”
“But this was not over,” the boy replied. “The morning after they kill the vampire, the townspeople bring his body here. They bring many rocks too and bury the body beneath them, hoping he will never return from the dead.
“You see this big tree here?” Roberto asked, shining his light through a wrought-iron fence that surrounded a massive live oak tree. “They say the vampire is buried under this tree. They say that if the tree is ever cut down, he will rise from the dead and hunt again.”