Excerpt: Lucky Angels

Chris slowly pulled back the cover on the object, and I think everyone was glad that Irina wasn’t home. Perhaps Freesia and Hattie shouldn’t be home either; it was very grotesque, and they both turned away, covering their mouths. What Chris found was more than an artifact. It was a mummy. Well, half of it, anyways, from the pelvis up. The skin was dried out, tugging onto the bones. The eyelids were sunken in; there were clearly no lifeless orbs behind them. Muscles were gone, having long since deteriorated away. There were small holes where hair follicles used to be, having long since died off. Despite me having a fairly strong stomach, seeing things in horror films as a reality made me a little nauseous.

“It looks like something from ancient Egyptian embalming,” Elena said. She seems unaffected, lucky girl.

“That’s the strange thing. It appears to be like this, but where I found it is not in a sarcophagus. I was walking down by the old graveyard, and it was pulled up out of the ground. I really wanted to preserve it a little better than just the hips up, but I think I found something interesting.”

“…what do you think you found, Chris?” Gar asked cautiously. The ever folklorist-in-training, Garrett asks a lot of questions. It’s a good thing for a folklorist to do such a thing.

“Look carefully at his neck.”

“His?” Hattie asked.

“Look at the shape of the pelvis, Hattie. It’s narrower, so it’s a male. If it was wider, then it’d be a female,” I told her.

“Yeah. Now look at his neck.”

I could see that Elena’s finger was hitting the zoom button on the camera. She let out a soft gasp. I leaned in a little closer to see what she saw, and I was a bit surprised myself.

On his neck were four holes: one set of two was closer to the nape of the neck, and the other two were closer to the jawbone. It seemed like a vampire bite, but that would be impossible! Everyone knows that vampires don’t exist.

“You could say that again,” Bethany said. It seems that I said that last line out loud.

“Drake, if you remember, one of the other versions of the legend is that a monster attacked the town. Vampires are mythical monsters, but this bite could easily belong to a rabid dog or something.”

“No…dogs don’t leave bites like this,” Freesia commented, her eyes wide as she remembered her accident three years ago.

“The key word here is ‘rabid’, Freesia. Your dog bite from a few years ago wasn’t from a sick animal. It was just warning you from the dangers that was coming your way, and that was on your hand. It would look different on a neck.” Chris placed a reassuring hand on the oldest triplet’s back.

“The strangest part,” Elena started, “is the embalming. If this male was bitten by some kind of animal and the part with the teen girl burying the bodies, why would our John Doe look like this now?”