Seward, Arthur, Quincey Morris, and Van Helsing climb into the churchyard before midnight, close around the tomb, and open Lucy's coffin to find it empty again. Morris demands plain truth from Van Helsing, and the Professor swears he has not touched the body while recounting how garlic sealed the door until he removed it to prove the pattern. They wait hidden among the yews while he seals the entrance with communion wafer and paste, a ritual that silences even the sceptics in the party. Arthur watches the empty coffin with the same white stillness he wore at Lucy's first funeral, and Seward notes how mystery can numb grief long enough to act.
Lucy returns as a white figure carrying a child, and moonlight shows the familiar face turned cruel and hungry. She drops the child without care, opens her arms to Arthur with a wife's voice, and nearly pulls him into embrace until Van Helsing thrusts a crucifix between them. Blocked from the tomb, she snarls with a face Seward calls death itself before slipping through a crack no blade should pass, which proves the rules of her existence are physical as well as moral. Seward holds Arthur's arm when the child moans on the grass, and even Van Helsing's iron nerve falters at the blood on Lucy's lawn shroud.
After the funeral crowd leaves, the four men enter again by daylight's absence. Van Helsing explains the curse of the Un-Dead and asks whose hand should free Lucy's soul. Arthur accepts the stake and hammer, strikes while prayers are read, and holds steady through screams and convulsions until the body lies still. When they look again, the monster is gone and Lucy rests with the sweetness they remember, a change so clear that grief and relief arrive together. Quincey chews tobacco he cannot smoke while the Professor prepares stake, hammer, and prayers with surgical calm.
Arthur forgives Van Helsing with a broken blessing, kisses Lucy's lips as a husband may when she is truly dead, and walks out into air that feels washed clean. Van Helsing names the work still ahead: find the author of their sorrow and stamp him out. Each man takes his hand and promises to follow to the bitter end, and the chapter closes with a dinner summons and the Professor leaving for Amsterdam while the great quest is about to begin. They leave the rescued child where police will find him, as before, and sleep briefly with the thin sleep of men who know tomorrow continues the hunt.
Coming Up in Chapter 17
Van Helsing races to meet Mina while Seward inherits boxes of typed diaries and phonograph cylinders at the asylum. Before the council can form, Mina will copy grief into evidence, Jonathan will trace earth freight from Whitby to Carfax next door, and Arthur will arrive grieving.
