The Last American Vampire

by Seth Grahame-Smith

  “What?” said Twain. “You mean become a bloodsucking heathen like you? No, thank you, sir. I’ll be sweating plenty as it is when I get my turn in front of Saint Peter, but if I play my cards right and don’t allow myself to become too corrupted by your pleasurable company, I may still have a fighting chance of getting past him.”

  “Think of the stories you could write.”

  “Who says they’d be any good?”

  “Think of the wonders you would live to see.”

  Twain indicated the laboratory around them. “My grandfather couldn’t have imagined a world of locomotives and steamships. This, right here? This is the electric future my father never could have imagined. What happens after I kick off, well… that’ll be a future I couldn’t have imagined, and rightly so. It’s none of my business. No matter how long you live, there’ll always be a future just beyond your reach. It’s as true for me as it was for my brother. Always has been, always will be, until God strikes the tent and takes the circus to the next town. Hell, I wish we could all be born at the age of eighty and work our way back to eighteen, too. But that’s not the way the plans were drawn up.

  “A fear of death,” Twain continued, “follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”

  Henry was thunderstruck.

  In one sentence, this man—this mortal—had diagnosed the disease that had been ailing me for nearly forty years.

  What had I done with myself since Abe died? Pushed expensive food around my plate… bought expensive homes… dressed in expensive clothes. Would I have become involved [in the Jack the Ripper case] if my calling card hadn’t been found on the first victim? Would I have cared if Thomas Crowley hadn’t forced me into caring? I doubted it.

  How had I lived? What had I felt? Those words—“A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time”—rang in my head like few words ever had. They shamed me. They shamed me, and, in time, they changed me.

  In many ways, they also changed the course of the next century.

  The idea had come to Henry in a dream.

  It was night. I was walking through a vast, empty church. Walking down the center aisle, pews on either side of me. There was a terrible storm raging outside. Thunderclaps every few seconds, right on top of the roof. Flashes of lightning making the stained-glass windows glow as bright as day for a second or two at a time. A pair of candles burned on the altar ahead of me, the only light, except for those intermittent flashes. Between the two candles, in the center of the altar, sat a gold crucifix—huge and heavy and ornate. The figure of Christ upon it, flickering in the warm light, his arms outstretched, head hung low, eyes closed. I climbed the four steps to the altar and stood there, admiring the beauty of the crucifix. Not the beauty of the craftsmanship, you understand, but the beauty of the meaning. A man suffering for his convictions. Giving his blood so others might live.

  Something said, Go on, Henry. Touch it. The way that voice always does in a dream. So I did. I reached out and touched the crucifix, and the instant my finger made contact, there was a flash of lightning, a crack of thunder outside. A terrible shock went through me, every muscle in my body tensing. The pain was… incredible. Like having your fingernails ripped off, only over every square inch of your body. The flash of lightning passed; the stained glass went dark again. So did the candles—the flames blown out by the rush of displaced air. I brought my finger close to my eyes, expecting to find it charred beyond recognition, but it was fine. As if nothing had happened. Another thunderclap and flash of lightning. I looked back up at the crucifix as the light flickered through the stained-glass windows. The eyes of the little Christ were open and looking at me. When I woke up, I had it. The whole thing, fully formed.

  It took some convincing, but Henry got the Union elders to let a famous human inventor—and an even more famous human author—into the heart of American vampiredom.

  Tesla had designed an electrified gate, which would be placed in the tunnel between Trinity Church and the Union building. He’d also built a system of electric locks for the heavy iron doors that had been installed on the first floor and in the lobby, which could be controlled from a central console. No door could be opened without the console’s input. And if one of the doors was forced, it would trigger an alarm bell. The Union Headquarters was receiving, in essence, the world’s first electronic security system. To power it, Tesla would have to install a generator, which would have to be kept fueled and running twenty-four hours a day. It was a huge, expensive undertaking—

  But as I explained to some of those who resisted the idea, no more expensive than building a factory and importing craftsmen for the sole purpose of making a pair of gigantic mirrors.

  The installation took nearly three weeks of almost round-the-clock work. Tesla, as was his custom, barely slept or ate. The sounds of hammering and of his frequent cursing could be heard echoing through the building at all hours. Just as Henry had been, the vampires were enamored of Twain and excited to have a celebrity of his caliber around. Where the Union Headquarters were usually a place to be avoided unless official business called, suddenly every vampire within a fifty-mile radius of New York City had a reason to drop by.

  Twain didn’t mind the attention—in fact, I think he loved it. He held court in the grand ballroom, telling stories of his life as only he could. How he’d first learned of vampires as a young man on the Mississippi; how they’d had been something of an open secret in the South in those days. He offered his perspective on the relationship between vampire and man, joking that “any good Christian ought to love vampires, for who needs prayer more desperately than a sinner?” He even joked that he was, in fact, a “union man” himself, having joined the Printer’s Union as a teenager. The Union vampires ate up every word of it. It was a bizarre sight, the old man with his shock of gray hair and push-broom mustache, sitting at the head of a semicircle of immortals, who hung on his every word like children being read a story at bedtime. And yet it seemed perfectly natural. He also listened in rapt fascination as the others told him firsthand accounts of figures and events he’d read about only in books.

  When Tesla’s work was complete, the Union Headquarters, at 100 Broadway, officially (but secretly) became the most secure building in the United States.

  With the new system in place, and with no attacks having occurred in the past nine months, the elders relaxed their security measures. High-value targets such as Henry would no longer be required to be under guard, which meant that William Duell could finally sail back to England and his life of killing and fucking.

  I’d always thought I’d be happy to be rid of [Duell]. But it was a bittersweet parting. I wasn’t going to miss his nasally voice or having him around at all hours, but I’d come to appreciate his unique perspective on being a vampire, and even his wit, as it were. Time had taught me to treat every parting as a final parting. So when he offered me a hand, I pulled him in for a hug instead. He went along with it, not really embracing me in return, but not pushing me away, either. I released him. He stood there and looked at me like I’d asked him to marry me.

  “Fuck off,” said Duell, and walked away.

  Henry smiled. He couldn’t have said it better.

  SEVEN

  Diplomacy

  No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country.

  You won it by making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his country.

  —General George S. Patton

  The anarchist was nervous, of course, this being the first time he’d ever done such a thing. But he would do it because the cause was important. Because he’d heard the rallying cries of Goldman1 and others. He was an American, and he was proud of being an American. So proud that it gave him great pain to see his beloved country in such a state. A vast gulf separating the immensely wealthy from the desperately poor. Children working their fingers to the bone in soot-covered factories. Working endless hours for meager wages, sacrificing their innocence, and often the
ir lives, to make the rich even richer.

  Leon Czolgosz knew their pain firsthand. When he was just ten years old, he’d taken a job at the American Steel and Wire Company in Detroit, working sixteen hours a day in the noise and heat and coal smoke of the factory floor, eating a crust of bread for his dinner, and sleeping in the crowded bunkhouses on factory grounds.

  And that son of a bitch McKinley. Friend to the rich. Friend to the factory. But enemy of the common man.2 The fact that he’d been elected to a second term showed just how blind the voters were. How corrupt this so-called democracy really was.

  Leon Czolgosz in 1900, a year before dying in the electric chair for the assassination of President William McKinley.

  But the beautiful woman had shown him a way.

  He’d met her in Cleveland, earlier that year. She’d come to him after one of the meetings. Leon had risen to speak for the first time that night. He’d told the assembled anarchists his story. How he’d lost his job in the Panic of ’93. How his family had turned its back on him after he rejected their poisonous Catholic dogma. Most of all, he’d told them about the anger. The anger that had been building in him for years now. He felt like a boiler, he’d said. Growing hotter by the minute. Ready to explode.

  “It took bravery to speak tonight,” the beautiful woman had said. “My friends and I are looking for brave men like you.”

  She’d shown Leon and the others how beautiful the future could be, if only there were men brave enough to claim it. The future didn’t belong to governments or companies or even the church—it belonged to the people. It was high time that men like Leon Czolgosz took their lives into their own hands. High time they overthrew the greedy, corrupt governments of the world. Abolished the banks and dragged the tycoons from their temples of wealth. It was time the common man put that wealth back in his own pocket and shared it with his brothers. The beautiful woman had shown them a vision of a world without nations. A world of peace and prosperity for all.

  Leon was no fool. He knew that the enemy wouldn’t let go of his power without a fight. He knew that peace was attainable only through violence, and that there had to be sacrifices to achieve the world the beautiful woman had described. And he was prepared to make that sacrifice.

  Leon shuffled forward in line. An organ was playing Bach, the bright notes of its pipes blending into chords that echoed through the Temple of Music at the Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo, New York. It was an especially hot early September day, and many of those in line carried fans or handkerchiefs to dab their brows and wipe their hands. One couldn’t well shake the hand of the president of the United States with sweaty palms. Leon carried a white handkerchief in his right hand, a .32-caliber revolver hidden beneath it. He’d bought the gun a few days earlier for $4.50, using the money that the beautiful woman and her friends had sent.

  They’d sent money to others, too. The man who’d stabbed French president Sadi Carnot to death in 1894. The bomber who’d struck Chicago’s Haymarket Square in 1886. The gunman who shot and killed Umberto I, king of Italy, in 1900. Nameless individuals who had toppled kings. Pennies that had altered the course of history. The meek inheriting the earth, Leon thought.

  There were only a few more greeters in line ahead of him. He watched McKinley take a red carnation3 off of his lapel and hand it to a little girl. It would be his turn soon. His turn to alter the course of history.

  Perhaps his would be the first shot fired in a war.

  Henry arrived in Washington, D.C., on October 29th, 1901. The day Leon Czolgosz was executed by electric chair for assassinating President William McKinley. The telegram had arrived the previous morning:

  WASHDC 617A 28OCT 1901

  MR H STURGES 603 PARK AVE NEW YORK NY

  SEC STATE JOHN HAY URGENTLY REQUESTS MEETING. TOMORROW IF POSSIBLE. DISCRETION CRUCIAL. CABLE REPLY TO CONFIRM.

  Henry had first met Secretary of State John Hay decades earlier, when he was Abraham Lincoln’s baby-faced twenty-two-year-old personal secretary. Now in his sixties, his baby face obscured by a graying beard, Hay was his nation’s highest-ranking diplomat and the man charged with advising the president on all vampire-related matters.

  The two had last seen each other four years earlier, in London, shortly after Hay’s appointment as ambassador to Great Britain. They’d corresponded semifrequently over the years, beginning not long after Lincoln’s assassination, when Hay and his fellow presidential secretary, John Nicolay, began an exhaustive, decade-long process of writing the first major biography of their late beloved boss. Henry had filled in some of the missing details of Abe’s childhood and clarified a few of Nicolay’s and Hay’s questions, but he wasn’t much use, as most of the stories he had to tell had to be left out of any “official” biography of the late president. Still, he and Hay had always been bonded by a shared love of “the Ancient,” as Lincoln’s secretaries used to call him.

  It was a crisp, clear Tuesday afternoon as Henry and Hay walked from the State, War, and Navy Building4 across the street to the White House, accompanied by one of Hay’s aides and a Washington, D.C., policeman—a precaution that had been ordered for all cabinet members by the new president, Theodore Roosevelt.

  Hay had warned me to say nothing of vampires in front of our companions. Few on his staff—only his closest aides—were aware of that part of his job.

  It was a policy that had begun while Hay was still a young man, under William Seward—Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state and a vampire hunter in his own right. In the wake of the Civil War, with stories of “vampire soldiers” running rampant among the returning Union soldiers, a concerted effort was made to discredit the growing notion that vampires were more than myth, mostly to prevent panic. With the shooting war over, Seward waged a propaganda war, meant to reassure the public that this talk of “vampires” was nothing more than wild stories. Chief among his tools were the newspapers, in which Seward planted front-page stories and editorials, such as the one that ran in the Boston Post in early 1866:

  RAVEN-WINGED LIES

  In my duties as pastor I am often called upon to comfort those who have suffered some torment, whether it be of mind, body or soul. Of late, those members of my congregation who have sought my private counsel have come with fear in their hearts and rumors on their tongues. Rumors of “devils” and “demons” fighting for the South during the War. They ask me what the Bible says about such creatures. Whether they be fallen angels, or a sign of End Times. They worry that the South will gather itself and attack anew. I have addressed my flock, and now I feel it is my duty to address the good readers of this newspaper.

  These stories, first whispered on the city streets, and now in my parish, are outright lies, dripping from the tongue of no less a sinner than the father of lies himself. They have infected even the most reasoned lips. I have sat with learned men, who repeat these stories of “savage men, whom bullets nor bayonets could fell.” How such creatures were so roundly defeated by a force of merely ordinary men, it would especially please me to hear. It would further please me to know why such whimsy persists in the mind of the public, when it has been labeled as such by no less a Union soldier than Gen. [Ulysses S.] Grant himself. These lies, designed to terrorize the rightful victors, and chase them from the conquered South, have spread their raven wings on every northern street corner. There is not a threshold they have not crossed, nor a family apartment they have not entered.

  I call on every good Christian to condemn them, and to cast out the darkness by lighting a candle of reason in his brother. If my prayers be heard, I shall not be called upon to chronicle so wide and profound a lie again.

  Rev. Daniel Tobin

  Walpole, MA

  At the same time that he was planting stories, Seward organized a reporting structure within the American government, specifying who would be privy to the truth about vampires: the president and his cabinet, the vice president, and the speaker of the house.5 Within the State Department, only the secretary, the dep
uty secretary, and their top aides would have access to those presidential briefs that related to vampire activity “foreign and domestic.”

  “If I’d known I was being summoned to meet with the president,” said Henry as he walked with Hay, “I would have worn a nicer suit.”

  “The president would prefer there be no record of this meeting. You understand, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “And if memory serves, Henry, I don’t recall you ever dressing formally to meet another president.”

  “Yes, well… I had a somewhat different relationship with that one.”

  “We all did,” said Hay.

  Hay’s eyes began to tear up. He rubbed a gloved hand across his face, wiping them dry, and excused himself for becoming emotional. His old friend, Nicolay, had gone to his eternal rest just a month earlier, and he’d found himself “somewhat haunted” by Washington of late.

  “Everywhere I turn, I see a street we ran down bearing urgent messages in the dead of night. Every time I have occasion to visit the White House, I picture the two of us sitting at those desks, working ourselves half to death, and I’m certain—sometimes, Henry, I’m certain that I hear him speaking in the next room. Certain that I catch a glimpse of him passing a doorway, hurrying with that long, strange stride of his.”

  They walked silently for a while, approaching the South Lawn. Henry hadn’t been to the White House in nearly fifty years, and the one before him, though familiar in many ways, seemed foreign. The grounds, once open to the public, were now surrounded by a fence6 and protected by guards.