The Last American Vampire

by Seth Grahame-Smith

  It was an idea that would give rise to a new sect of vampires. A Union, founded on the belief that men and vampires were equal. That the living had a right to life and to dominion over the light, and vampires over the darkness. It was, in a way, an early form of democracy. Preached by a tutor to the immortal bastard of a king, passed on to living men who would perfect the idea of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and use it to break with another king hundreds of years later. The world was a strange place.

  More than five hundred years had passed since Adam Plantagenet had been made immortal. He’d outlived his royal siblings by hundreds of years, while acquiring more power and wealth than they could’ve dreamt of. And his father, King Edward II? The man Adam had been so desperate to impress? Just two years after refusing his dying bastard son an audience, Edward was deposed. Betrayed by his wife, the queen, who raised an army against him and had him imprisoned. He died at Berkeley Castle, held down by two men while a third forced a red-hot poker into his rectum, burning him alive from the inside out. The king who’d refused his dying son was dead, and the dying son was immortal. Karma was a bitch.

  Though the Union had no official leader, it was commonly understood that, as he was the oldest of them, the honor belonged to Adam if it belonged to anyone. And like all Union vampires, Henry felt a sense of patronage to the old man. When Adam called for him, he came, even if no specific reason was given.

  I struggled to banish all thoughts of Abraham Lincoln from my mind. He’ll know. The thought filled me with dread on the carriage ride to the Union, and it kept repeating itself: He’ll know what you did, Henry, and it will be the end of you.5

  As far as the Union and the rest of the world were concerned, Abraham Lincoln had gone to his eternal rest on April 15th, 1865, and stayed there. Henry had never shared the events of that week in Springfield with anyone and determined that he never would—for sharing them almost certainly would have meant his death.

  Vampires don’t do rules. It isn’t in our nature. Try getting a few dozen powerful, independent, and immortal killers together and see what you can get them to agree to.

  As such, the Union didn’t have many rules. In fact, it had only three:

  A vampire will respect and protect the dominion of humans over the earth.

  A vampire will not feed upon the innocent or the young.

  A vampire will make no other vampire.

  The punishment for breaking any of them was severe, but special severity was reserved for any Union member who broke the third. The world had quite enough vampires already, thank you very much. Too many, in fact. And when too many vampires settled in one place, bad things happened, as recent American history had proven. The slave trade that sparked the Civil War had been controlled by Southern vampires who had grown too rich and too comfortable. With slavery, they had finally found a sustainable method of feeding on human blood. Vampires possessed of such cruelty could never be allowed to concentrate such power again.

  “Our kind have all but abandoned America,” said Adam, his back pressed into the red velvet upholstery of a high-backed chair. His posture perfect. “They return to the lands of their birth, while the living flock here in droves. We get reports almost daily, you know. Dispatches from our Union brothers abroad and our living allies. They come from every corner of the civilized world—Europe, Asia, South America. Daily reports, right here, in this very building, traveling over a wire no thicker than my fist. Can you believe it?”

  “An age of miracles, indeed.”

  Henry looked around as Adam spoke. The last time he had been in this room, the Civil War had been raging. The ballroom had been alive with rows of telegraph operators, click-clicking away at their desks. There’d been maps on the walls, the comings and goings of sympathetic humans. But the war was long over. The enemy had been scattered to the four winds, and now the room was vast and empty, save for the two of them and a butler who hovered in the doorway at the opposite end. Every pop of the fire echoed off the hard, polished surfaces, adding to the feeling that they were ants in a canyon.

  “A wire, stretched across an ocean,” said Adam. “Words, thoughts, traveling across it in an instant. Did you ever think such a thing possible?”

  I was an old man myself, yet I felt like a child in his company, nodding politely as his grandfather prattled on about trivial nonsense, telling the same three stories, over and over. He reminded me of those living men, those warriors whose glory has long since faded. You’ve seen them—the ancient lords and admirals who get carted out for parades or memorial dedications in their dress uniforms, so weighed down with ribbons and medals they can barely stand. That was Adam, only he had the smooth, porcelain-white face of a seventeen-year-old boy. A shock of red hair. It’s a strange thing to hear ancient thoughts come out of such a young face.

  “My ambassadors in Europe have made great use of this new telegraph device. Communications are brisk, and because of that my views always have a seat at the table, even when that table is halfway around the world.”

  My dread—the fear that I’d been called to answer for my sin of making Abe—began to lift. Was Adam going to make me an ambassador?

  “Alas, my friend,” said Adam, guessing Henry’s thoughts. “That’s not the kind of job I have to offer you.”

  He rose and gestured for me to follow. We walked out of the grand ballroom, down a narrow, twisting flight of stone steps to a corridor below—still lit by torches in those days. My dread returned. I couldn’t help but feel like a mouse following a cat.

  Henry followed Adam through a heavy wooden door and into a small, candlelit library, its floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves and leather-bound volumes framed by cold stone walls. In the center of the room, neatly placed on a table, were five wooden boxes, each ornately hand carved, and each roughly the size of a large hat box.

  “Three months ago,” said Adam, “the telegraphs began to go silent, one by one, and the boxes you see before you began to arrive. One after the other. Each accompanied by a note, written in the same hand.”

  Adam took a white card from his pocket and handed it to Henry:

  With his eyes, Adam urged me to open the first box, and against my better judgment, I did. Inside was the severed head of Elias Corwyn, the Union’s emissary in Spain. The skin had been peeled from his face, leaving only muscle, and his fangs had been pried out and shoved into his eyes. My stomach clenched at the thought of what was in the next four boxes.

  “Spain, Germany, France, Italy, England,” said Adam. “All of our ambassadors murdered. Their heads severed and sent here, each one more horrific than the last.”

  Henry opened the next box. This second head was locked in an eternal scream. Its eyes were missing, the sockets around them blackened. But the rest of the face was otherwise pristine.

  “Michael Burakow,” said Adam. “Terrible. What could do such a thing?”

  I knew what could do such a thing. I’d seen such contraptions in the war. “Fire masks” they were called, black masks that covered the vampire’s face completely, except for the eyes, which were then exposed to the harsh sun. The light burned through the sockets and roasted the brain inside the skull. It was the apex of cruelty, but it showed imagination.

  “The man who did this is deranged,” said Adam, shaking his head.

  “Who is this Grander?” asked Henry. “I’ve never heard of him.”

  “That’s what I need you to find out. Such affront to the Union cannot stand. And a man capable of this”—he motioned toward the boxes—“is capable of much, much more.”

  Adam handed Henry an envelope containing the names of the murdered ambassadors, their addresses, and their known associates. There was also a ticket for passage aboard the RMS Umbria, departing the next evening.

  “Go to Europe, Henry. Find this ‘Grander’ and put an end to him.”

  THREE

  The Actor’s Assistant

  1563 / 1888

  We shall not cease from exploration


  And the end of all our exploring

  Will be to arrive where we started

  And know the place for the first time.

  —T.S. Eliot

  Henry Ogden Sturges was born on the second day of March, 1563, five years into the reign of Elizabeth I. Son of Edmund Sturges, a wherryman, and Abigail, who kept house and worked as a seamstress on occasion. He was christened Henry, not after the queen’s late father, Henry VIII, but after one of Edmund’s brothers, who had died at the age of five.

  Henry was the third of four children, but the only one to survive infancy. The first two boys had been stillborn. The fourth, a girl, died before the age of one month.

  I have no memory of her, or of my parents’ grief. In all likelihood, they shed a tear, built her a box, and buried her in the yard—thankful that it had only been a girl. Such were the times.

  They lived in the parish of Putney.1 It was an ancient place even then, having been settled by Saxons some five hundred years earlier. Like all things English, it had a damp, rugged charm.

  Edmund made his living ferrying passengers back and forth across the Thames in a skiff—a long, narrow rowboat that could hold up to eight paying customers at a time.

  It was a good trade, and a well-regulated one, unusual in those days. Unlike, say, blacksmiths or stable hands, watermen needed a license to operate skiffs on the river—sometimes in teams of two, or sometimes, as in my father’s case, alone, rowing with two small sculls.

  When Henry was ten, he joined his father as an apprentice, studying the ever-shifting currents of the Thames, keeping the skiff clean, and collecting fares from paying passengers.

  It was in Westminster, on the other side of the river, that young Henry Sturges caught his first glimpses of a larger world. On those rare days off, he and his father would row across, tie up the small boat, and walk the narrow streets of London, moving to the side to make way for the occasional well-appointed carriage or well-dressed aristocrat. On occasion, they might even see a lord or lady walking through town, all puff and garters and fur and capes. Women in their heavily embroidered Spanish farthingales, men in their high stockings and feathered hats, their torsos pulled tight by doublets and their necks encircled by ridiculous white lace collars.

  I suppose those collars had the effect of framing their faces in elegance, but to me it always looked as if their severed heads were being served up on white platters.

  The clothes were both elegant and uncomfortable, but then, so were the times. Books could be printed and bound in beautiful leather volumes, but few could afford or even read them. England had a new queen, but her ascension to the throne had come in the midst of much controversy and bloodshed, and there were some who believed her reign illegitimate. Many thought a woman unfit to lead.

  But for the Sturges family, those concerns seemed a world away, even if they were just across the river.

  We were the working class, adorned with dull burlap coats. We tied sashes around our waists to keep our itchy trousers from falling down.

  Henry had few memories of his living years. The images had become blotted after his vampire transformation, and when he tried to summon them, it was as if his nose was pressed against a canvas, looking at splotches of colored paint and trying to guess at the shape of the whole. But one incident still stood out sharply in his memory.

  There was a simple boy who lived in a house near ours. I say “simple,” because that’s what he would’ve been called back then. That is, if you felt like being polite. If you didn’t, you would’ve called him “mad,” or an “idiot.” He was still a boy, perhaps a year or two younger than I was. I’m not sure what he would’ve been called now. “Autistic,” perhaps. He didn’t say much. Rocked back and forth when he sat. He was prone to fits, I remember. Terrible, red-faced fits. Foaming at the mouth. Screaming and pulling out clumps of his own hair. But then, he was also a quiet, gentle child. Sitting out in front of his house for hours on end when the weather was warm enough. I’d pass him on my way to or from the river. “Henry, Henry, Henry,” he would say as I passed. Always like that. Always in threes. “Henry, Henry, Henry.” But never looking up. Never looking me in the eye. I took a liking to him and, insomuch as he was able to, he took a liking to me.

  Eventually, Henry began taking the boy for rides on the river, paddling his father’s skiff in the back while the boy sat silently near the bow, his hands folded in his lap, watching the water lap up against the sides of the hull. Feeling the gentle rocking from side to side.

  He found it peaceful, I suppose. I did, too, not having any brothers or sisters of my own to share such moments with. So much time has passed, so many things have happened since then, that I don’t even remember the boy’s name anymore. Christ, not even his name. But for a time, long ago, we were companions. He enjoyed my company, and I enjoyed his, even though he wasn’t much for conversation. I believe—I can’t be sure about this, since it was so long ago—but I believe that I loved him the way I would’ve loved a brother, if I’d had one.

  One day, after taking the boy on one of their gentle sojourns down the river, Henry pulled the skiff ashore, stepped onto the muddy bank of Putney Parish, and held the boat steady while the simple boy stepped out.

  The boat lurched and he slipped. I reached out, instinctively, and put a hand on his shoulder to steady him, and he changed, instantly, violently. It suddenly dawned on me—I’ve never touched him. Not once. Before I knew what was happening, he’d gone wild. He turned his head toward my arm and bit into it the way a lion bites an antelope. I remember feeling his teeth clamping down on my flesh and tearing it away. I remember the shock of looking down at my arm and seeing the perfect, bloody impression of his top and bottom teeth. I can still see that wild, absent look in his eyes. The red of my blood on his lips. It’s one of the few memories of my living years that has stayed with me over the centuries. My mother’s and father’s faces are lost to me. My own reflection as a boy, lost. But those wild eyes and blood-soaked lips… I’ve never forgotten them, and I never will.

  The crossing was uneventful. The Umbria reached Liverpool in seven days, three hours, and twenty-two minutes. From Liverpool it was straight on to London by carriage. And so it was that Henry Sturges returned to the city of his birth for the first time in nearly three hundred years.

  He may have carried an American passport, but Henry was an Englishman by birth, and he was returning to the seat of an empire at its height. This was the London of Dickens. Of naval conquests and African colonies. Queen Victoria was still in her forties, and only halfway through a reign of nearly sixty-four years—not yet the dour, matronly figure she would be remembered as, though she was a large woman, and not an inch over five feet tall. She wore only black—her beloved Albert having died in 1861—and she had survived no fewer than seven assassination attempts, the most recent occurring in 1882, just six years before Henry’s arrival. In each case, her would-be assassins either missed their target or had their pistols misfire. This unbelievable streak of good luck only added to Victoria’s already sizable legend and, in the eyes of the public, provided proof of God’s favor and Britain’s invincibility.

  London was a dense, soot-filled city of some six million souls in 1888, with its newly reconstructed Palace of Westminster and its Elizabeth Tower, which would become famous as Big Ben. Construction on Tower Bridge2 had been going on for only two years and wouldn’t be completed for another six. It was a city in which one could experience the marvels of the age. The Crystal Palace, then the largest collection of plate glass seen anywhere on earth. The Metropolitan Railway, the world’s first subway, which used steam engines pulling wooden carriages to ferry passengers in three classes of service. Incandescent lights, which had first begun to pop up as novelties at exhibitions and were now moving into the homes of the wealthy.

  Of the all the wonders, [electric light] excited me the most. There have been a few times—just a handful, really—when I’ve known, instantly, that the world would
never be the same. When I could almost see the long-assumed future disappear before my eyes. Seeing my first electric light was one of those moments. I’ll never forget it. New York, in the fall of 1880, in the Mercantile Safe Deposit Company. The whole interior had been redone with electric lights to demonstrate the new technology. People would stand in line to get into that bank and see the miracle of light without flame. I went night after night, marveling at this strange, constant light that didn’t flicker. But while it excited to me to think of a world where night could be vanquished by the flip of a switch, it also frightened me. The same way that the first DNA tests and surveillance cameras frightened me. I didn’t know what this new electric world would look like. I only knew it would be a more difficult place to be a vampire.

  There were all the usual hassles and lies. The hassles—living out of a hotel room while I looked for a home; presenting letters of credit to the bank to pay for it… The lies—“Yes, yes, I’m in the textile business.” “Oh, you’re very kind to offer, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to make it quite so early in the morning.” It’s always the same. The same hassles, the same lies.

  Grander’s trail was already cold, and Henry knew he couldn’t afford to waste any time. On his arrival in London, he hastened to the nearest of the addresses Adam had given him—the home of the Union’s ambassador in England, Tobias Forge. Of the five decapitated vampires, Forge had been the hardest to recognize. His head had been burned beyond recognition, like a cut of meat left roasting for days over a campfire, until all that remained was a blackened lump of carbon in the crude shape of a human head. But when Henry arrived, he found that, like Mr. Forge’s head, the entire building had burned to a charred husk some five months earlier. Inquiries about an “A. Grander VIII” were met with puzzled stares and more than a few mutterings of “bloody Yank.”