99 Coffins: A Historical Vampire Tale

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She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave.

Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance

1.

Fifty thousand men had died or been wounded on this broad valley, Montrose told himself. It must have been a scene out of hell—the injured lying sprawled across the corpses, the cannon still firing from the top of one hill at the top of another. The horses screaming, the smoke, the utter desperation. This was where the country could have fallen apart—instead, this place had saved it from utter ruin.

Of course, that had been a century and a half ago. Now as he stared out over the dewy Gettysburg battlefield all he saw were the trees shimmering in the wind that swept down between two ridges and stirred the long green grass. The blood had dried up long ago and the bodies all had been taken away to be buried. Off in one corner of the field he could just make out the scrupulously period-authentic tents of a band of reenactors, but it looked like even they were sleeping in.

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