When I awoke it was eleven o’clock at night and Gretchen was gone. I dragged myself out of bed and donned my black jeans, black T-shirt, leather jacket and porkpie hat. It was time to go to work. I made my way down the hill to the Stony Brook T station. There was still enough time to catch a train to the North End, but I had no idea how I’d get back. The T would have stopped running by the time I was through with my grisly business. Oh well, I’d cross that bridge when I came to it.
Late night on the MBTA on Tuesday was pretty grim. Instead of attractive young people on their way to and from parties and nightclubs, the crowd consisted mainly of sad-eyed middle-aged bachelors on their way home from the bar. But who am I to judge? At least they weren’t on their way to sneak into a graveyard hunting for depraved cannibals.
It wasn’t far from North Station to Copp’s Hill Burying Ground. Just a hop, skip and a jump. But there was no Rampant Hare to guide me this time. The cemetery gate was chained shut for the night, but that was no obstacle to me. Jack be nimble, Jack be quick. I hopped that fence like a candlestick.
The hushed antiquity of the venerable gravesite was amplified by the still of night. As always, I felt somewhat in awe of names and dates lovingly carved in grey slate. 1824...1791...1745... 1692...1664... There was one gravestone on the far end of the cemetery pockmarked with holes. Apparently, it belonged to an early rebel against the Crown, whose burial marker was used for target practice by scornful redcoats.
But the thing in the burying ground I gravitated to most was an obelisk-topped tomb that two vampires and I had once desecrated. There was a flight of stairs inside the tomb that had led to a dream gate deep beneath the hill. But that is another story. The tomb was sealed tonight, and I couldn’t find the mechanism that opened it. If it had ever been open. That experience seemed like a dream and I wondered if it had ever happened at all. My musings were cut short by the sound of moaning, somewhere in the shadows.
I crouched down instinctively, and hid behind the tomb. Oh shit. What had I gotten into? What if the corpse-eaters were here in the cemetery with me? What would I do? I didn’t have any weapons, not even a pocketknife. But I was Jack. I had a hat with a goose feather stuck in the ribbon. Somehow I’d be all right. I just had to do go for it. Tantivy!
Mustering my resolve, I crept towards the moaning sounds. There was more than one voice doing it. There were several. A real cacophony of “unnnnnnnnhhhhh.” I concealed myself as best I could behind a gravestone (thanks INCREASE MATHER) and peered over the top.
Oh my fucking god! There were five, six, seven...things... walking corpses...I don’t know...wearing nothing but tatters, bent over an open grave munching on a dead body like an all-you-can-eat buffet. One of them sniffed the air and looked in my direction. I ducked down beneath the gravestone, but it was too late. He had seen me. The zombie...ghoul...whatever he was started walking towards me. His friends dropped the hunks of rotting flesh they were munching and followed him.
There was no point in hiding anymore, so I started to back away. Then I turned and booked it for the fence. But the creature in the lead—the one who had spotted me first—was too fast. It pounced on me like a lion and knocked me to the ground. To my horror, the thing bit a chunk out of my shin. I saw his grinning emaciated face, a huge gobbet of my bloody flesh between his teeth. Was I going to die in a scene from a cheap horror movie? How cliché. At least I could take comfort from the fact that this wasn’t just any old cemetery. This was Copp’s Fucking Hill Burial Ground, one of the oldest Colonial graveyards in Boston.
“Begone! Scat!”
The thing eating my flesh abruptly dropped my leg and fled into the shadows like a scared cat. A deathly pale girl wearing a black hoodie stood over me. She had dyed-purple dreadlocks and held a sword in one hand, its silver blade glinting in the moonlight.
“Harriet?” I croaked. “You’re looking very goth.”
“Oh, Jack,” she said. “What am I going to do with you?”
Then I passed out.
I awoke naked in my own bed. My leg screamed with pain. Forcing myself to look, I saw a sickening chunk missing from my calf. Strangely, it wasn’t bleeding. The edges of the wound were a sickly greenish color, which seemed to spread slowly before my very eyes.
“Don’t worry, this won’t hurt a bit.” Harriet’s fangs sank into my neck with familiar needle pricks. A rush of ecstasy spread through my body, quelling even the pain from my leg. Then, unexpectedly, Harriet pulled her fangs out of my neck. She had never done that before, not so soon. She bit the inside of her own arm and a crimson rivulet of blood trickled from the puncture. Harriet pressed her arm to my lips and instinctively I began to drink. It was like the finest, most complicated wine. Her blood was ambrosia, the food of the gods. I dreamt.
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