9. VIDEO CONFIRMATION
LEESA SAT HUNCHED over her desk, slogging through her physics book, struggling to understand Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Her room had grown dark while she was studying, but her desk lamp provided a small island of light. Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” was playing in the background. Leesa loved the young British singer’s voice, so powerful and full of raw emotion. It was hard to believe she wasn’t even twenty-five years old yet. Leesa let her mind drift for a moment, escaping into the lyrics. She particularly liked the part about a fire starting in her heart. That was definitely a good description of how Rave made her feel—in more ways than one!
As the song wound down, she turned back to her physics book. “Uncertainty” was a fitting word for her right now, she thought. Not only was she uncertain about this whole Heisenberg Principle, but she was uncertain about so many other things going on in her life as well. Just when things were finally becoming normal with her mom and her brother, all this other stuff kept cropping up. Rave losing control of his fire, the strange phone call, her difficulty sleeping and her weird dream—all that was way more than any one person should have to deal with.
There didn’t seem to be anything she could do about those things, though, so she forced her mind back to physics. Final exams were only two weeks away. They were something under her control, at least. She just had to concentrate.
Suddenly, something gripped her tightly by the shoulders. She almost jumped out of her skin as adrenaline shot through her system. She whipped her head around to see Cali grinning down at her.
“Sorry,” Cali said. “Your door was open and I just couldn’t resist. You were totally lost in that book. I didn’t know physics was so enthralling.”
“You almost gave me a heart attack,” Leesa said, her heart still racing.
Cali plopped down on the edge of Leesa’s bed. She was wearing ripped jeans with tiny red sequins outlining the front pockets and a dark brown T-shirt with a gold tic-tac-toe game etched on the front. Instead of O’s, the designer had used shiny gold hearts. Three hearts formed a diagonal row from the bottom left square to the top right, with an arrow drawn through them to show hearts had won the game.
“I really am sorry, Lees. Rule ninety-four: sneaking up on someone who hangs out with vampires is not a good idea.”
Leesa smiled, her body beginning to recover from the adrenaline jolt. “I don’t ‘hang out’ with them. I just happen to know one. And if I never see Stefan again, that will be just fine with me.”
“Speaking of things that go bump in the night, did you hear about that thing in the graveyard over in Higganum?”
Leesa’s heart rate spiked again as the images from her dream came rushing back to her. Higganum was a small rural community less than ten miles south of Weston College. She hoped Cali wasn’t going to say what she thought she was going to say.
“Graveyard?” she asked. “No, I didn’t hear anything.” She was almost afraid to ask about it, but she had to know. “What happened?”
“It’s really freaky. Someone dug up a bunch of bodies, and then left ‘em lying right there on the ground.”
Leesa closed her eyes for a moment. She could see the images from her dream as clearly as if she were dreaming it right now.
She opened her eyes. “How do they know someone dug them up?”
Cali’s brow knit in puzzlement as she stared at Leesa. “How else would they have gotten there, silly? They sure didn’t climb up out of the graves themselves.”
I hope not, Leesa thought. I really and truly hope not.
Cali saw the concern on Leesa’s face. “Oh, no…you’re not going to tell me zombies are real, too, are you?”
“No, of course not,” Leesa said. “At least not as far as I know, anyway. It’s just that I had this weird dream last night. Some bodies pushed themselves up out of the ground in an old cemetery.”
“Really? That’s definitely freaky, especially with this story today.”
It was much too freaky, Leesa thought. But if vampires existed, and volkaanes, why not zombies? She was definitely going to have to ask Rave about it.
“In your dream, what did they do?” Cali asked. “Once they got out of their graves, I mean?”
“Nothing, really. They stumbled around in circles for a few minutes, then fell to the ground. That’s when I woke up.”
“It’s six-thirty. Turn on the TV. Maybe we can catch something about it on the news.”
Leesa grabbed her remote and switched on the television. The local news was just coming on. They had to sit through a boring story about some possible corruption in the state house, but then a jumpy video of an old graveyard, probably taken from a helicopter, filled the screen. It was still light out in the video, so it had obviously been taken earlier in the day.
“There’s a strange story coming out of Higganum today,” the neatly coiffed, gray-haired anchorman began. “Police are investigating an unusual act of vandalism in one of the town’s old cemeteries.”
The picture switched to a live shot of a reporter on the scene. Bright klieg lights lit up the graveyard behind her. A green knit ski cap pulled down over her blond hair showed how cold it was outside. Her foggy breath was visible on the television as she spoke. Still, she looked remarkably fresh and perky.
“Here’s what we know so far,” she said. “Sometime last night, someone dug up six bodies here at the old cemetery. Police aren’t sure if this was simply a thoughtless act of vandalism, or perhaps the work of grave robbers searching for valuables. All the graves here are well over one hundred years old, so it’s doubtful thieves could have found much of value.”
The camera panned over her shoulder to the graveyard, focusing on several very old headstones. Leesa looked closely, but no bodies were visible from this angle. The news director had probably decided that a pile of rotting corpses was not proper dinnertime fare. Either that, or the authorities had already covered them up.
The reporter continued speaking. “Police are puzzled by several strange aspects to all this. Earlier, I spoke with Detective Dave Sanderson.”
The picture reverted to a daylight shot again, and the mustachioed face of a good-looking man in his late thirties or early forties filled the screen.
“We have no real leads at this time,” he said. “We’re asking for the public’s help. If you know anything about this brazen, disrespectful act, please call the number on the bottom of your screen. There are no signs of any heavy equipment having been in the cemetery, so we know the perpetrators had to be here a long time to dig up so many graves by hand. This is a pretty out of the way spot, but we’re hoping someone driving by saw something unusual here last night.”
A live shot of the reporter replaced the detective’s face. “There’s another troubling aspect about this incident that no one will talk about on camera,” the reporter said. “But I’ve been told by a member of the forensics crew that not only was there no evidence of heavy equipment, but they’ve been unable to find any sign of any digging equipment at all. ‘There aren’t even any shovel marks,’ he told me. ‘It doesn’t make any sense, but it looks like somebody dug the bodies up by hand.’”
“Holy crap!” Cali said, turning to Leesa. “Did you hear that?”
Leesa’s head was spinning. What the heck was going on here? Her fingers began twirling in her hair.
“Shhh. I want to hear the rest of this.”
The reporter flashed a cheerleader smile. “Now there’s a mystery wrapped up inside a puzzle,” she said. “Who or what would dig up a half-dozen dead bodies without even using a shovel? And why go to all that trouble, and then just leave the bodies lying there?”
The picture returned to the earlier helicopter shot. “That’s all we have for now,” the reporter said as the camera zoomed in on the graveyard. Leesa leaned closer to the television. A ragged circle of dark lumps was barely visible now. They had to be the unearthed bodies. From this distance, she couldn’t tell if they were covered by anything or not.
She shuddered. Even though the view was still too far to see clearly, she was struck by how similar the circle of bodies looked to the one she had seen in her dream. She switched off the television.
“Wow, that’s freakin’ crazy,” Cali said. “Do you think your vampire friends could have done it?”
“I keep telling you, they’re not my friends.” Leesa stood up and took a few aimless steps around the room. “But no, I doubt vampires had anything to do with it. What would they want with dead bodies? They only like live ones, filled with lots of warm blood.”
“Oh, yeah, I guess you’re right. I definitely need to take that Vampire Science class you’re always talking about next semester.”
Cali looked at Leesa more closely and saw the worry etched on her face. She reached over and gently pulled Leesa’s hand from her hair. “So, how close was that to what you dreamed?”
“I’m not sure. It was hard to see. I wish they’d zoomed in closer, but I guess it’s not the kind of thing they’re going to show on TV.” Leesa took a deep breath. “But from what I could see, it looked way too similar.”
“There were a bunch of people watching from outside the cemetery,” Cali said as an idea popped into her head. “I bet someone took pictures or video with their cell.” She grabbed Leesa’s laptop from the desk. “Let’s check YouTube.”
Cali sat back down on the edge of the bed and opened the computer on her lap. Leesa came over and sat beside her, unsure whether she wanted Cali to find anything or not.
Cali’s fingers pecked rapidly at the keyboard, opening the YouTube home page and then typing in her search.
“I knew it,” she said excitedly. “Look. Someone posted a clip from the cemetery. Gotta love all those smartphones out there.”
Leesa leaned in more closely as Cali started the video. At first, the picture was grainy and jumpy—barely recognizable as a graveyard. The phone’s owner was behind the police crime scene tape, well over one hundred feet from whatever was in the center of cemetery. As he or she zoomed in and found the proper focus, the image began to grow clearer.
Leesa found herself holding her breath. She forced herself to exhale, but kept her eyes glued to the screen. Finally, the details became sharp enough to recognize the bodies for what they were. And they were not covered, at least not when the video was taken. The low angle of the shot prevented her from being able to see all the corpses, but she could see most of the closest body and parts of two others. She looked more closely at one of the farther bodies, whose head and shoulders jutted out from behind the first one. She blinked, unable—or unwilling—to believe her eyes. She was pretty sure the corpse was wearing the remains of a tri-cornered hat….