“You were murdered,” said Henry. “Assassinated, in Ford’s Theater.”
Abe sat in silence for a time.
“By whom?”
“A vampire named Booth.”
“Mary?”
Mary… poor Mary, standing over another body.
“Unharmed. Though quite stricken with grief, as you would imagine. The whole nation is in mourning, Abraham. Even the South.”
The South… the war…
“Where is she?”
“In Washington, with your sons.”
My sons… Eddie… Willie…
“Willie,” said Abe. “The last time I saw you… we fought about Willie.”
“Yes.”
“They took him… they killed my boy.”
“Yes.”
Here was the book of Abe’s life, its pages filled with a jumble of random letters. Only minutes ago, it had been a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. But with every passing second, the letters arranged themselves into words, the words into memories: the mother he’d buried. The sister, the two sons, and the lover he mourned. The vampires. The hunts. The nation. The end. The memories began to overwhelm him. Sorrows coming not as single spies, but in battalions—for all of it, every goddamned word of it, was darkness. Loss.
Abe sat in the corner, staring at nothing in particular. Piecing it together.
“I heard a noise,” he said after a long silence. “I felt a pain… a hot pain, radiating out from the back of my skull.”
“You were shot.”
“There was a struggle. Screaming. I heard Mary… heard her shouting. I tried to tell her not to worry, but my mouth wouldn’t heed the command to speak, nor my eyelids the command to open. I felt myself floating through the darkness, being carried through some god-awful ruckus. And then it was quiet again. The pain was still there, somewhere in the dark. But it was distant. I felt the cold prodding of instruments on my skin. Heard voices. Hushed voices. People coming and going; crying… but even these noises began to drift farther away, as if I was floating down a lazy river, and all the world was on the banks behind me. Drifting away, until there was only the beating of my own heart as it slowed, like a watch in need of winding. And after a time…”
Abe struggled to find the right words. There weren’t any.
“After a time?” asked Henry.
“After a time, there was no time.”
Abe looked up and met Henry’s eyes.
“Henry,” he said, “what have you done?”
He’d asked and asked, but now the question struck me with its full weight.
“I’ve broken a sacred vow,” said Henry. “I’ve borrowed you back. Returned you to a nation that still needs your wisdom and your strength.”
Abe shook his head.
“You’ve undone everything. Whatever good I accomplished, whatever grief I suffered—all that I lost. It means nothing now.”
“Abraham—”
“You’ve made me the very evil I devoted my life to fighting.”
“I’ve made you immortal, so that you and I might continue what we began.”
“This isn’t what I wanted…”
“You have your youth! Your strength! Think of the good you can do. You’ll be able to see your family again. You’ll be able to watch Robert and Tad gro—”
“And what kind of father would I be? What kind of husband? A murderer, confined to darkness? You would have me bestow upon those boys and that woman an impossible burden! Just as you have bestowed one upon me!”
“Yes, it’s a burden. But I can help you master the bearing of it.”
“To what end? Henry, what becomes of me now? You would have me undo all that I devoted myself to. You would have me be the very thing that took my mother! My boy! How can I look upon myself when I am all that I despise? A life! A good death!”
“Think of what you can do with limitless time. Think of the wonders you’ll see. The lives you’ll—”
“Spare me, Henry. For forty years you’ve done nothing but blather about the miseries of eternity. Now you sell it as snake oil.”
“I can teach you how to make it tolerable. If you’ll just listen to me—”
“Listen to you? And then what? Do you expect me to follow you into darkness?”
“That’s the only place for you now, Abraham.”
Abe rose to his full height, his back strong and straight. His limbs lean and muscular. The last time Abe and Henry had laid eyes on each other, they’d been locked in a fight. A fight between an aging mortal and a vampire. Now they were equals.
For the first time, I saw the hallmarks of his curse. His fangs, which had yet to draw blood—virgin and pristine. His eyes, suddenly as black and lifeless as a shark’s. When I’d last faced him, he’d been a living man. Powerful, yes. Trained, yes. But a living man nonetheless, and therefore at a disadvantage. Now we were equals—if not in experience, then at least in strength. Furthermore, I was weak, having given so much of my blood to bring him back, and having replenished my own with that of animals and all their attendant filth. I was sure he was going to lunge at me, attack.
Henry looked up at him.
“The hunger will come, Abraham. And when it does, you’ll be as powerless to stop it as I am.”
“By then,” said Abe, “I’ll be in hell.”
Abe stared at Henry a moment longer, then turned and ran across the room.
I realized what he meant to do and screamed his name. He leveled his broad shoulders and met the drapes head-on, shattering the window behind them and crashing through into the harsh light. And I saw, in that unmistakable way only vampires see. Saw his new skin redden and blister the instant the sun fell upon it. I heard him cry out with the agony of it, even as he fell through the air, all of it happening in an instant—too fast for the living to perceive. But to me, helpless and all seeing, he seemed to hang there, in the air, forever. I meant to get up. To jump down after him and shield him from the light. To save him. But it was already too late. All I could do was listen. Listen to my friend burning alive…
Abraham Lincoln was gone.
TWO
Five Heads
1888
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
—Aeschylus
America was at Henry’s back.
A thousand miles astern of the RMS Umbria—the steel-hulled steamship that bore him back to the place of his birth, along with fifteen hundred other passengers and crew. He stood against the railing of her promenade deck, a full moon above reflected in the flat calm of the ageless sea. Marveling at the speed and steadiness with which it passed. The entire crossing, from New York to Liverpool, was scheduled to take seven days. Seven days. Henry’s first, centuries earlier, had taken months. Packed aboard a cramped and rat-infested hell, pitching and rolling, grown men puking over the side, sickened by the motion of the sea and the stench of the rotting rations.
He’d been a mortal then, in 1586. Twenty-three years old. A veritable infant. An Englishman of average height and slender build, with black hair to the middle of his back, and his love by his side, the two of them off to make a life together in the wild. To build a colony and raise a family in the name of the king.
Here he was, on the same sea. An American. Alone. His long hair now sensibly cropped. The swells of that first crossing distant and calm. The virgin shores of that first landing now covered with concrete and glittering with glass. The sweltering, putrid hull of that old pitching hell replaced by a stateroom, appointed with such luxuries as to make royalty blush at its excess. So still, it may as well have been on land.
Henry stared at the sea. Halfway between the continents. Halfway between the Old World and the New. He could hear music from the first-class dining room. Strings softly playing Schubert and Brahms. The clinking of silver on china. The murmurs of the women gossiping over tea, their sleeveless silk evening gowns in shades of coral and sea-foam green, accented with diamond choker necklaces and white kid-
leather gloves. The men gossiping over brandy, stuffed into their tailcoats and crisp white bow ties. Henry had no care to join them. Nor did he have any need. Though he’d become adept at giving the appearance of eating—pushing food around his plate, dabbing his lips with a napkin at regular intervals—he found the practice deeply annoying and tried to avoid it at all costs. Better to pass the time alone. Sleeping by day, reading by night. Dressing only to wander the deck in darkness, taking in the unseasonable warmth of the salt air.
Fortunately, the rich had endless reserves of tolerance for strange behavior, at least among their own kind. While a recluse of lesser means might have drawn suspicion, this fellow first-class stranger was merely an “eccentric” who preferred to take his meals in his quarters. An artist, no doubt. A man who needed privacy to summon his muses. Or perhaps he was a wealthy young lord who didn’t care to mingle with the merely rich. And, just as fortunate for the well-heeled passengers, I could endure the seven-day passage without feeding. There would be no clumsy ladies slipping on the wet sundeck and breaking their necks on this voyage. No poor, drunken gentlemen getting too close to the railing and falling overboard in the dead of night.
For years I had hungered to see England again. Not the familiar need for a change of pace or scenery that comes every two or three decades, but something else. Something—and forgive me for saying this—something deeper. I missed England like a man misses his first love, with an intensity tempered by melancholy. And I might never have acted on that longing to see my homeland if an urgent errand had not been thrust upon me in New York. I had no way of knowing at the time, but that errand would consume the next century of my life.
Henry had wandered America in the years after Abe’s fatal leap, watching with a sort of detached fascination as the young country rose from the ashes, brushed itself off, and began to move west by way of iron and ink. The purchase of Alaska in 1867; the golden spike of the first transcontinental railroad two years later. America had looked inward. It had gone to war with itself to decide what kind of nation it was going to be. And with that decision firmly and finally made, it pulled itself together and soldiered on, emerging from its near-death experience with a new vitality. A new spirit of progress.
Henry had marked his three hundredth year during America’s Civil War. Three hundred years of motion. Of taking new names, making new homes, adapting to the world as it changed around him. In 1888, with the war long over and the greatest man he’d ever known twenty-three years in the grave, he moved again. This time he swam against the westward tide of progress, leaving the Midwest and settling in New York City.
I’d heard it said that “when a man is tired of moving, he moves to New York, and the movement comes to him.” I supposed it was partially this. The need to relax in the anonymity of large numbers. To let the movement of the world come to me for a change. And I suppose I also liked the thought of being closer to the headquarters of the Union.1 But looking back, more than anything, I think I wanted to be farther away from America. It had been a long relationship, fraught with discovery and upheaval and loss. To me, it was a nation of ghosts, you understand. In every corner of the country, whether it be Richmond or St. Louis or New Orleans, there were a hundred faded memories. The faces of a hundred friends lost to time.
Henry’s home in St. Louis was put up for sale and a new one procured in New York. Arrangements were made via letter and cable. Furnishings were bought. A staff hired, sight unseen, based on recommendations from other well-to-do New Yorkers, human and vampire alike. Clothing, keepsakes, books, and artwork were packed up and shipped from St. Louis in advance.
Henry heard the horse first. Then he saw his dinner.
A few hours earlier, upon arriving at his apartment on Park Avenue, Henry had realized that his hands were shaking with hunger. It occurred to him that he hadn’t eaten since St. Louis. Fortunately, his new city was practically made of scoundrels and bottom-feeders, their character wanting and their veins bulging.
The Gilded Age was in full swing, and the world was racing to New York’s shores by the millions, driven from their homelands by poverty or war or simple ambition. The bricks of new buildings could hardly be laid fast enough, and the bricks of the old were bursting at the mortar as immigrant families crammed three, sometimes four generations into two-room apartments.
Walking the crowded sidewalks at night, or hurrying over cobblestone streets, dodging carriages and trolley cars, one could hear German, Italian, Mandarin; the brogues of Scots and Irishmen joining with the steady hiss of the gas lamps. Streets both paved and unpaved, filled with exotic, overwhelmed faces. The loftiest gentlemen and ladies and the lowest wretches, sharing the same sidewalks. As a brother of the Union, I was sworn to respect the living. To feed only upon the “sick and the wicked.” God knows there were plenty of them. They arrived daily by steamship and train. By horse and by foot. Millions of them, lost in this New World. Struggling with a new language. Most of them were decent, but in a city of such size, with such a varied population, there were bound to be scoundrels. Whoremongers and rapists. Men who worked children to death in sweltering factories. Dying drunks sleeping under the stars in Central Park. Extortionists who threatened to break the arms or burn the businesses of those who refused to pay protection money. Men like these existed in every corner of America, but nowhere were they so deliciously packed as in New York. And remember, lightbulbs were still a novelty. Forensic science and surveillance cameras were a lifetime away. It was a wonderful place to be a vampire.
It was a city on the verge of being sleepless, soon to be called the Capital of the World, brimming with electric light, but already brimming with its own brand of electricity. It was a city of contradictions. Noisy and crowded in places, deathly dark and silent in others. Its buildings could be Gothic and grand, yet connected by unpaved streets teeming with horse-drawn coaches, the stench of manure and uncollected garbage thick and unbearable in the summer months. Construction was just beginning on what was, at the time, a massive apartment building on the corner of Seventy-Second and Central Park West.
A horse lies dead on the streets of New York after being found with two large puncture wounds in its neck. Animals were often meals of last resort for vampires.
It was a beautiful building, all dormers and spandrels. Gothic. Elegant. But it was also considered an act of lunacy on the part of its backer, Edward Clark.2 It wasn’t the building that was the problem—it was where he’d chosen to build it. You have to understand, the area bordering Central Park was completely undeveloped at the time. There were no neighboring buildings of any note. And here was a towering monument standing in the middle of it all. Apartments only the wealthy could afford, farther uptown than any rich people had need to go. When it was finished, four or five years later, they gave it a name befitting the virtual wilderness that surrounded it: the Dakota.
Henry hadn’t been walking long when he heard the familiar groan of a horse in pain. A cart had stopped in the middle of the street farther down the block, so loaded down with scrap iron that its wheels visibly bowed. It was being pulled—in theory, at least—by a lone white shire horse and driven by a stocky, bearded man in a bowler hat. A cigar hanging from one side of his mouth. Even a healthy horse would’ve had trouble pulling so much weight on its own. This one was clearly exhausted. Malnourished. But that didn’t stop the driver from yelling, cussing, and whipping the poor beast to no end. The horse cried out, but it didn’t budge, so the driver jumped down from his seat and yanked on its reins, trying to get the beast to move. It didn’t. So the driver took a pull off his cigar, until the ashes at its tip glowed red, and thrust it into the animal’s left flank beside a grouping of similarly shaped round scars—searing its flesh and eliciting a horrible cry. The driver climbed into his seat and gave the reins a snap. The horse began to move.
It’s interesting. If you’re willing to listen, every so often, life—or God or the Universe or whatever you prefer to call it—lets us know that it’s pay
ing attention. Here was a man, if you could call him that, whose cruelty would’ve gone unnoticed and unpunished, if not for the fact that a vampire had wandered onto that very block, at that very hour, on that very night, to witness it. And not just any vampire. A vampire who’d once owned a similar white shire horse as a boy. A horse he’d been quite fond of, named “Alistair.”
Henry followed the cart, taking care to keep his distance. North on Broadway. West on Canal Street. North again on Sullivan, the excitement building in him with every block. The anticipation of the kill. The warmth of the giving blood. The night sky was clouded over, the stars obscured, and the moon just a soft suggestion. It was a dark night, and the darkness would do.
Finding a victim is, in a way, like finding a mate. We venture into the night, hoping to find the right one. That one in a thousand that makes our eyes light up and our breath quicken, for whatever subconscious or chemical reason. Some nights we get lucky; other nights we settle. Some nights we simply go home hungry. But it isn’t a cold, calculated thing. That’s the biggest misconception, really. That we simply grab the first warm-blooded human we stumble across and sink our fangs into its neck. No. There has to be some kind of connection between vampire and victim. Something more than the transaction itself. An emotional component, whether it’s as simple as physical attraction, repulsion, or rage. And just as when looking for a mate, we have types. Some vampires kill only men. Others women. Some won’t touch blondes, or the elderly, or the obese.
The Last American Vampire Page 3