But something about the photo struck him oddly, and in a moment he knew what it was: living children, but one dead one in the middle, propped up by his uncomfortable siblings on each side to give the boy a false appearance of life. It was given the lie by his blank stare and lolling head.
A mourning photograph. A Victorian tradition, when only one image might have existed of each person, and a way to immortalize the dead before it was too late. To modern eyes, it was horribly morbid, but for that family, in that time, it would have been a precious thing to memorialize a loved one.
He tried not to read anything into its presence in the album.
The next two pages held clippings of old, yellowed newspaper articles, complete with a not-very-expertly drawn illustration of the very farmhouse in which he now stood. This was, he realized, near the time of Morganville’s founding, and well before he’d become sane enough to venture far from his own walls in his new laboratory. The newspaper was the long-dead Morganville Crier, and it detailed a murder at the Vexen house. Micajah Vexen, his wife, Virtue, his brother Argus, and his children Trothe and Verily had all been killed. Missing from the home was the middle Vexen daughter, Clemencie. The gruesome scene had been discovered days later by a passing cowboy who’d stopped to water his horse. The Morganville sheriff of that time had been involved. No arrests had ever been made, according to the second clipped article.
The next turn of the page brought photos of the dead. Not in their living years . . . No, the house was not that kind. These were photos taken of them on the spot of their discovery—crime scene photos, they would have been called today. Faded sepia, but vivid enough to be chilling. Likely a profitable morbid sideline for the photographer.
Myrnin stared at them, trying to see what he was supposed to take from them. That it hadn’t been a vampire’s kill? That much was obvious; the scene was much too chaotic, too enraged, too . . . messy. It seemed to be a very human crime.
“Seems a bit obvious,” he said conversationally to the madhouse that was holding him prisoner. “Some family argument that boiled out of control, and the children were in the way of it. Am I right?” He turned the page. Nothing. He turned another, and received blank pages. “If that is your very subtle way of showing displeasure at my lack of comprehension . . .”
He looked up, because there was someone sitting across the table from him. A girl.
“Ah. That’s better. Clemencie?” The girl sitting across from him was bone white, eerily so, with hair bleached pale and eyes clouded over. In life, he doubted she’d been so colorless. From the shape of her, she would have been perhaps thirteen or fourteen . . . child more than woman. “Or is your name Trothe?”
The lips parted and shaped a word, but there was no sound.
“Clemencie, then,” he said. “If you’re meant to terrify me, I’ll have to warn you that you won’t cause me nightmares. I’m far worse than you. In other words, you’ll have to do better.”
She smiled. It was a sweet, unguarded kind of thing, and it made her . . . human. And it hurt, to think on this girl suffering. He’d been a predator a long time, but he’d rarely been a monster. Not in that way.
She reached out one pallid hand to him, and turned it palm up.
“You want something, yes. I know that much,” he said. “And I must compliment you on delivering a very creditable haunting, but you really must be more specific. I’m a vampire, not a mind reader.”
She just gazed at him with those blind eyes, and he finally sighed. He’d been raised believing in many things, ghosts chief among them, and he knew better than to touch one. Especially at the ghost’s invitation. In the small Welsh village where he’d been raised, touching a ghost was a direct portal to hell.
But he did want to get out of this place, and he sensed very strongly that Clemencie Vexen would be the only doorway through which he could pass.
So he touched her hand . . . and died.
It wasn’t actual death, physical death, but it certainly felt that way. Not pleasant. Not quick. It was the death of a confused, anguished child who could not understand how her life had gone so badly wrong, or why anyone, anyone, would want to wring such pain from her.
He sat back with a sigh, falling back into his own suddenly aching body, and put a trembling hand to his forehead. Where the ghost had gripped his fingers, they felt icy and frostbitten, and were almost as pale as the corpse-girl’s. As the feeling came back, they shot through with hot needles of pain, but he hardly even noted it.
He had died once, but by comparison his mortal ending had been much easier. He was not generally given to fits of emotion, but for a long moment he could not speak, nor could he look at Clemencie’s still, pale face, which was blankly tranquil, in death as it had not been in the last moments of her life.
“Oh, dear child,” he said. “What happened to you here? And where did you go?”