The Last American Vampire

by Seth Grahame-Smith

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  This one goes out to the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) and all who sail on her.

  Tell you now children—you’re all gonna die. No hand stamp reentry, no refund, no lie.

  —Found written on a bathroom stall in Disneyland, June 6th, 1988

  FACTS

  1. Between 1860 and 1865, a Confederacy of Vampires attempted to conquer the United States, enlisting an army of men to fight on their behalf.

  2. They were defeated by Abraham Lincoln, a gifted vampire hunter, and a small brotherhood of immortals who were sworn to protect mankind. They called themselves “the Union.”

  3. In the aftermath of the Civil War, these defeated vampires were scattered throughout Europe, Asia, and elsewhere—their numbers smaller than ever before. Just when the vampires were faced with extinction, rumors of a new vampire leader, and a new plot to enslave mankind, began to surface.

  INTRODUCTION

  What a strange thing, to be a vampire. To break free of death’s gravity! To think that Henry has observed this earth with the same eyes, the same mind, uninterrupted, for two hundred and fifty years! To think that he has witnessed the fall of empires and the birth of nations! What stories he could tell! What volumes he could fill!

  —Abraham Lincoln, in a journal entry, December 15th, 1832

  I was dying, and I wasn’t afraid.

  After all, I’d asked for this. I’d asked him to bring me as close to death as a man could get. Close enough to see the stitching that holds existence and inexistence together, without actually tearing it. And here I was, perched on a high wire above Hades, nine toes in the grave and the tenth on its way, and all was well and right. I’d heard it said that a certain peace washes over us when we stray close enough to death. That our bodies release chemicals to calm us, to ease us into the inevitable nothing that drapes us all in its black cloak sooner or later. Perhaps that’s all it was—a biological calmness. Or perhaps I just trusted that Henry knew what he was doing.

  A thought rang through the dark, bright and pleasing, like a church bell on a cold, starry night. If I do die tonight, I thought, at least I’ll die in October. That most American of months, when the first wisps of chimney smoke kiss the crisp apple air, and the promise of a World Series looms large in the imaginations of the good and ever-hopeful people of New England. When children have finished mourning the long summer and grown re-accustomed to the buzzing fluorescents of their classrooms. When Christmas is beginning to take shape on the horizon, just beyond the cousins and food comas of Thanksgiving. Closer still are the masks and glow sticks and cotton spiderwebs of Halloween, the one night when we embrace the darkness from which all of America is descended. October is the gateway to the wonderful, mystical finale of the American year. A place where life ends and the celebration of life briefly begins.

  I began to taste blood in the back of my throat. Fear suddenly crept in, cold and unwelcome, tracking mud on the carpet of my cozy little death. I looked into Henry’s eyes just before my own began to roll back in my head. Those black vampire eyes that I’d seen only once before, years earlier. He’d shown them to me, those eyes, along with the hideous glass shards of his fangs and the calcified razors that were his claws. He’d shown me because he’d needed me to believe the impossible. His face had been wild then. Animal-like. But tonight it was careful and curious. The tips of his fangs were barely visible beneath his upper lip. His right hand was on my throat, squeezing off my jugular, cutting off the blood to my brain. My brain, in turn, was carrying out its final instructions, ticking boxes on the pre-death checklist that humans have evolved over eons. And all because I’d asked him to.

  Perhaps I’d misjudged Henry. Perhaps this ancient, powerful vampire—whom I’d come to think of as a friend—meant to kill me after all. I felt like a zookeeper who wanders into a tiger’s cage, unafraid, only to be mauled to death. Why? he thinks, as he’s torn apart by those massive claws and teeth. How can this be, when I raised you, fed you, loved you since you were a helpless cub? Only in the final, terrifying seconds does he understand that the love he gave was never returned. That he’d grown too close. Too familiar. I forgot that it was a tiger, he thinks as he slips away. It was always a tiger.

  The edges of my vision went fuzzy… darkness creeping closer to the center of my sight, like those ever-tightening black circles at the end of silent movies and cartoons. I tunneled away into the dark, but there was no light at the end. No feeling of floating above my body. There was only the inner. The quiet. I thought of all of the Halloweens and Thanksgivings and Christmases I would miss. I thought of my boys, when they were so small and helpless I could hardly stand it.

  And then there were no more thoughts.

  It had begun with a jingle, years earlier. A chime that had been affixed to the front door of the five-and-dime since the universe was in its infancy and time just a concept in God’s imagination. Its ring was as old and as quaint as the store itself—a store that had been a fixture in the little upstate town of Rhinebeck, New York, since 1946, selling damn near anything to damn near anybody: school supplies, knitting yarn, toilet brushes, toys, rain boots, electrical sockets, and whatever else customers were willing to plunk down their pocket change for. Packed onto shelves against wood-paneled walls, or in bins lined with contact paper.

  I’d worked there on and off since I was fifteen, earning extra money for college, brimming with big dreams and big ideas, dreams of published novels and Manhattan book signings, of tenured professorships and corduroy blazers with elbow patches. College had come and gone, novels begun and abandoned, vows exchanged, children born, struggles endured, and there I was, behind that same counter, fifteen years and twenty-five pounds later, and not an inch closer to Manhattan than I’d ever been. There I was, thirty years old, greeting customers by name, watching the Yankees on a small color TV under the counter, selling pink pencil erasers and sink stoppers for a penny’s worth of profit, from eight-thirty in the morning until five-thirty at night, six days a week. Every week. Wash, rinse, repeat. There I was, clinging to the idea that there was still a place for an old five-and-dime in a Walmart world—still a chance that all those scraps of paper with their half-begun stories would congeal into a dream realized.

  By 2006, I’d heard that door jingle a million times. But one summer day, it seemed to ring with a slightly darker sound as a new customer stepped in from the sunshine of East Market Street and onto the checkered linoleum of our floor. I looked up from the sports section of the New York Post and saw a young man of twenty-seven or so, with dark, fashionably messy hair. Expensive clothes designed to look tattered and cheap. Dark sunglasses, which he neglected to take off. I’d seen plenty of his kind before—the weekend visitors who drive up from the city to revel in the quaint and backward ways of us simple folk. The young urbanites who brave the Taconic Parkway to ironically spend their discretionary income. But this was no visitor, it turned out. He was a local boy. Not born and bred, but transplanted.

  “Hello,” I said, the way one does in a small town.

  “Hello,” said Henry, and went about his browsing. And that was that. I went back to my newspaper, not knowing that I had just been n
udged an inch closer to Manhattan.

  Henry came in from time to time, bought things, and left. This went on for a number of months, before we slowly evolved beyond the required pleasantries and started talking. Music, mostly. Henry was always eager to talk about music, and I was always happy to oblige. Other than writing, it was the closest thing to a passion that I had, as evidenced by the ever-evolving iPod mix that filled the store’s speakers from open to close, its tracks culled from the deepest recesses of “you haven’t heard of this band yet” blogs. We talked about what we were listening to, gave each other recommendations, and so on. Henry’s taste ran the gamut: the Beatles, Boards of Canada, Stockhausen, Count Basie, Sebadoh, Chick Corea, the Doors, Captain Beefheart, Stravinsky, Sunny Day Real Estate, Elvis, Alice Coltrane, My Bloody Valentine, Patsy Cline… he was a one-man “staff recommends” shelf at a failing record store. I liked him instantly.

  Months passed, seasons changed, and life went as it usually did—which is to say, nothing of much note happened, until one evening, in the winter of 2008, the bell jingled, and Henry hurried into the store carrying a package wrapped in brown paper. A package containing a bundle of ancient letters, a list of names and contact information, and ten ancient-looking leather-bound journals, each one filled with tightly packed handwriting.

  They were the personal journals of Abraham Lincoln, chronicling his lifelong battle against the vampires that had shaped his destiny and long haunted the American night.

  Right. Of course they were. I didn’t believe a word of it, just as I don’t believe in flying saucers or Santa Claus or happy endings. There were no such things as vampires, let alone ax-wielding vampire hunters who went on to become president of the United States. Henry, anticipating this, had seen fit to convince me that night in a shocking way that left me badly shaken. Once you’ve seen those glassy fangs, those pulsing blue veins, and the satiation of that bottomless hunger for blood, there’s little room left for doubt.

  So began nearly two years of research and writing, poring over the journals and letters, chasing down the names on the list he’d given me, and conducting interviews with reluctant subjects. I wrote day and night, much of it in notebooks at the store counter, stopping only when a customer needed help. I’d been given the gift of a story that had already been written. A story that just needed to be carefully stitched together, like the boundary between existence and inexistence. The scribbled notebooks became a typed manuscript, the manuscript became a book, and the book was given to the world to be judged. My dream had been realized in dramatic fashion. Or so I thought.

  Writing a book, it turned out, wasn’t all that big a deal in the Twitter age. Certainly not as big a deal as which pop star got arrested or which reality TV personality got her prebaby body back. For one brief, shining moment, I was the ringmaster, and then, just as quickly as it had arrived, the circus packed up its tents and steamed on to the next town, and there I was, back behind the counter. A few inches closer to Manhattan, but still miles away. Living a life that suddenly felt two sizes too small.

  The idea came in the winter of 2011.

  It was a Monday morning, slow and snowy, the sidewalks empty, only the occasional car passing on the unplowed street, hazards flashing. The store was as dead as the world outside. I flipped through the pages of the Post, ignoring the chants of Egyptian uprisings coming from the mono speaker of my small television. One of the national morning shows was on, and news gave way to chat, gave way to weather, which was all I was really interested in. The weatherman forecasted—more snow, snow forever, endless winter—then read out the names and showed the pictures of those lucky viewers who’d reached their hundredth birthday. The chosen few who’d seen a century pass before their eyes, gone from horses and buggies to Mars landers in the blink of a lifetime. One of today’s celebrants was a man who’d reached the ripe old age of 108.

  “My word,” said the weatherman. “Isn’t that wonderful? Imagine the things he’s seen.”

  Imagine the things he’s seen…

  I looked up from my paper. Something stirred in me—a vague memory of a passage from one of Abe’s journals. I couldn’t recall the words, not exactly, but I had the spirit of it. He’d written it as a young man, not long after training with Henry, wondering what it was like being a vampire, wondering what someone like Henry must have seen in his centuries. I went back through the transcripts of Abe’s journals on my computer (the originals were safely back in Henry’s possession) and found the passage I was looking for: “What a strange thing to be a vampire. To break free of death’s gravity!”

  Abe’s journals had covered only a fifty-year span of Henry’s life. But what about the other four hundred years? What of a twenty-first-century man, born before Galileo or Shakespeare? Imagine the things he’s seen. A man who, with the exception of a brief and turbulent period of being alive, had never had a cold—or a gray hair?

  That morning, I did something I hadn’t done in twenty years of working at the store: I closed early and braved the snowy roads to Henry’s house.

  “Not interested,” he said.

  His answer was immediate and unequivocal. For one, the last thing Henry wanted was more publicity. His fellow vampires had been upset enough when he’d shared the secret of Lincoln’s journals. Two, he saw no point in looking back. “Nothing kills a vampire as quickly as the past,” he said. To that end, he’d never kept a journal of his own. Never hung on to every letter the way Abe had. You have to keep moving, moving—make a point of staying engaged in the present. Otherwise you ended up like an old car, cautiously creeping along a snowy road with your hazards on. Still talking Beethoven when everyone else has moved on to Batman.

  I persisted. He resisted. This went on for months. I would e-mail, and Henry would take days to reply. And when he did, he wasn’t encouraging.

  Yes, I’m traveling. There’s nothing to discuss. I don’t see what good will come of me airing out my dirty laundry or further aggravating those of my kind who are already livid that I made certain details of our past public in the first place.

  HS

  From: @gmail.com>

  Date: March 2, 2012 at 2:01:03 EST

  To: @aol.com>

  Subject: Book

  Henry,

  Are you traveling? I haven’t heard back from you regarding my last e-mail. I understand your concerns about privacy, etc., but I think there’s a way to get around those issues. Can we discuss when you return?

  SGS

  Finally, in the spring of 2012, more than a year after I’d first broached the subject, Henry agreed to sit and hear me out. We sat in the study of the giant metaphor that was his mansion—old and Gothic on the outside but completely redone on the inside, all concrete, iron, and glass. Open spaces and clean, tech-friendly surfaces, as if the very décor was there to strengthen his hold on the present. Nothing kills a vampire as quickly as the past. There we were, I with my take-out cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee steaming beside me, he with his hands folded in the lap of his expensive jeans. An incredibly old, experienced mind behind his clear brown eyes.

  “So,” he said. “What did you have in mind—a rambling multicentury autobiography? A mopey treatise on the drawbacks of immortality?”

  “I want to know what happened in Springfield,” I said. “After Abe’s funeral.”

  I knew that being specific was the only shot I had. If I’d started with “Tell me everything,” or “Oh, whatever you feel like,” he would have disengaged. When you’re dealing with a man who has five centuries rattling around in his skull, you have to cast specialized bait or you’ll catch nothing. In the course of writing about the journals, I’d learned that Ford’s Theater hadn’t been the end of Abraham Lincoln. What I didn’t know was how he had escaped death… and what had become of him after he did. It seemed as good a place to start as any.

  “How?” I asked. “How did it happen? How did you do it?”

  Henry considered me with those old eyes. I could see his wheels tur
ning, see him debating his next move. For a second, I wondered if I’d stepped over some invisible line, wondered if he was going to leap out of his chair and crack me open, spilling my innards onto the floor of his museum-quality home.

  To my great relief, he started talking.

  He talked until the days stretched into weeks and the summer became Indian summer, then autumn. And when the leaves of the Hudson Valley had reached the peak of their crisp, fiery bloom, we weren’t even close to the middle of the story. But we were hooked, and the experience had infused Henry with an energy that he hadn’t felt since the fighting times. He was intoxicated by the distilled memories that had been fermenting for hundreds of years. He was, in the words of Norman Maclean, “haunted by waters.”

  I asked him questions. Sometimes I stopped him for clarification or elaboration. Mostly I just listened, taking notes and recording every word on my phone—both of us aware of, and amused by, the fact that we were living out a fictional scenario imagined by Anne Rice almost forty years earlier.

  I spent the better part of a year conducting these infrequent but intense interviews. When Henry felt he’d rambled as much as he could, I began the task of transcribing months’ worth of fragmented recollections (excerpts of these transcripts appear on virtually every page of this book, as indented text), writing the connective tissue between them, and arranging it all into a palatable shape that would fit fashionably between two covers. I wrote about iron and electricity; rippers, Russian mystics, and Indian chiefs; I wrote about world wars and robber barons; about Roosevelts and Kennedys. Blood and murder and lost loves.

  Henry gave me the freedom to change and “shine up” his description of certain things (he can be a very matter-of-fact speaker, even when describing the gory or fantastic). But I was strictly forbidden from changing a single word that might alter the truth of what was being told.