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An Excerpt from Mercy: The Last New England Vampire by Sarah L. Thomson:
That’s where they burned her heart.” Haley pointed toward a low stone wall that ran along the edge of the Chestnut Hill Cemetery. “Right there.”
Melanie twisted her mouth and made a noise that sounded like yurghch. “Burned her heart? Why?”
“Because that’s what you do with vampires.”
“I thought you drove a stake though their hearts,” Mel objected. “That’s what they always do on Buffy.”
Haley shrugged, getting out her camera. “Maybe vampires in Rhode Island are different. Anyway, that’s what they did.” She crouched down, holding the digital camera out, tilting it to try different angles. The pale slab of marble, leaning a little, centered itself in the screen and she took the photo – dirty white stone, faded grass shaggy at its feet, the late autumn sky, a chilly blue, distant behind it. The simple letters on the stone were sharp, in crisp focus. Mercy L. Brown. Daughter of George T. & Mary E. Brown. Died Jan. 18, 1892. Aged 19 years.
Haley switched the camera over to black and white. Now the image in the viewscreen looked eerie. She stopped the exposure down to darken it a little. A scene from an old horror movie. All it needed was a werewolf to come around the corner.
“So why did they think she was a vampire? And dig her up and everything?” Mel had perched on another headstone to wait.
Haley took the second photo and then backed up to get a wider shot, including the stone wall, the old graves surrounding Mercy’s, a willow, bare of leaves, leaning as if it were cold, turning away from the wind.
“They didn’t dig her up. She wasn’t buried yet. She was in that crypt over there.” The crypt was against the far wall of the cemetery, a low stone building with brush hanging over the sloping roof. It looked as if it had been dug into a hill rather than built up from the ground. “And they did it because people were dying.” Haley clicked the shutter, took a step, clicked again. “Tuberculosis. Consumption, that’s what they called it.”
“Consumption. That sounds so romantic.” Mel laid the back of her hand across her forehead and sighed. “Beautiful ladies, wasting away, leaving their heartbroken lovers behind… “
“Coughing up little bits of their lungs,” Haley said without looking up from the camera. She switched it back to color. She wanted a wide-angle shot. All those gravestones.
She heard the toughness in her own voice as she answered Mel. Like it didn’t bother her at all, the thought of somebody dying like that.
Nineteen. Mercy had only been five years older than Haley. Four years younger than…
All those gravestones. The picture in her viewscreen wobbled a little.
