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CHAPTER 12: Lucy Changes Again

It was just fifteen minutes before midnight when the gorup, consisting Van Helsing, Quincey Morris, Seward, and Arthur, climbed over a low wall and reached the tomb. The professor unlocked the door, lit the lantern, and pointed to Lucy's coffin. It was empty.

Arthur winced, as if in pain. The professor, however, sprang into motiion. First he closed the coffin, took a piece of communion wafer into his hands, crumbled it up and wet it, and make a sort of paste. He pressed this paste into the coffin's seals.

"What are you doing?" Morris asked.

"I am sealing the tomb with the communion wafer, that blessed holy bread. It repels evil. Now let's go wait outside."

The men arranged themselves in the bushes. "Shhh," Van Helsing warned. "Someone is coming."

The men crouched and watched as a white figure moved toward them. Instantly they recognized the figure as Lucy, but all were shocked by how altered a Lucy she was. Her old sweetness had turned somehow to cruelty, and her old purity to a new evil. Arthur gasped.

Van Helsing raised his lantern and shined the light on Lucy. In its glow the men could see that her lips were crimson with fresh blood.

When Lucy saw the men, she snarled and hissed angrily, like a cat taken by surprise. Her eyes blazed with evil. But then she changed course. "Arthur," she said, sweetly stretching her arms out to him. "Come to me." Arthur moved toward her as if under a spell, and Lucy lunged for him. Van Helsing was ready for her, however, and leaped between the couple, holding a gold crucifix. Lucy jumped back, her face contorted, and moved as if to rush back into the tomb.

When she got within a foot or two of it, however, she stopped, sensing the wafer Van Helsing had placed within. She turned, confused and enraged. Sparks seemed to be flying from her. If looks could kill, hers would have. She was a monster.

"May I go on?" Van Helsing asked Arthur.

Arthur fell to his knees. "Do what you need to," he said, weakly. He closed his eyes, thinking Van Helsing was going to kill Lucy now. Instead Van Helsing walked passed Lucy, removed the bread from the coffin's crevices, open the container, and stood back. With something that could only be described as relief, Lucy glided in, and the professor close the lid.

"Tonight is not the time," he said.

The next day they went back and found Lucy asleep in the coffin. The men took one last look at the beautisul woman's still-bloodstained mouth. The smile that lay on her lips as she slept was a devilish mockery of her life's sweetness.

Quickly Van Helsing removed his tools from his doctor's bag, including a round wooden stake that had been sharpened to a fine point.

"When the victims of the bite become officially undead," Van Helsing explained, "they keep adding new victims and multiplying their evil. Unless stopped, the circle is ever widening, like ripples from a stone thrown into the water." He spoke gently to his friend. "Arthur, if I had let Lucy kiss you on that day when I first stopped her, or last night when you wanted to hold her again, you would have become a vampire, too."

"If we kill her now, however, the wounds of all of the people she has bitten so far will heal right away, as her power over them will stop. And we will free Lucy as well.

"Instead of growing more and more wicked each day, our angel will take her rightful place where she belongs, with the other angles. We are doing her a kindness, if you think about it."

"Then let me do it," Arthur said firmly. "Just tell me what to do."

Van Helsing explained that Arthur must drive a stake directly through Lucy's heart. "You must not hesitate," Van Helsing said.

And Arthur didn't. Within a second the terrible task was over, and in the coffin was no longer an evil monster but theier old Lucy, in a normal body. The look of calm on her face comforted all of the men as they looked upon her. Finally Lucy was at peace.

"Now you can kiss her," Van Helsing said. And, leanig down, Arthur kissed her on th forehead.

"Our work has only just begun," Van Helsing annouced. "Next, we must find the author of all this sorrow and stamp him out. Will you all help me? Shall we work as a team?"

The men agreed that they would meet two nights later at the asylum where Dr. Seward worked and lived. Van Helsing would bring two other men. Jonathan Harker, Van Helsing said, had kept a careful journal of his encounter with the beast, which was going to come in handy in their hunt.

Shaking hands, the men vowed  to keep pushing, together, until the evil was eliminated.