The Last American Vampire

by Seth Grahame-Smith

  I’d lost [my accent]. It’s funny—I was an Englishman, or at least I thought I was, but the centuries had coarsened the queen out of my speech. I sounded like an American now. I’ll admit… part of me mourned the loss of that last piece of my old identity.

  Henry’s investigation, scarcely begun, had already reached a dead end. Left without a lead in a city he no longer knew, he decided to reacquaint himself with London and her culture. If nothing else, perhaps it would hasten the return of his accent.

  He attended the opening of a production of his favorite of all Shakespeare’s works, Macbeth, at the Lyceum Theatre, starring the crown jewel of the English theater, Henry Irving.

  You have to understand, Irving was as big a celebrity as a man could be in the nineteenth century. He was, by far, the most famous actor in the world at the time, and had been for years. He could play anything, but he really excelled at villains. In those days, most actors played villains as cackling and cartoonish. Big, over-the-top movements, stroking their glued-on beards, shaking their fists in the air as they shouted soliloquies to the back row. But Irving… Irving could knock you over with a feather. He was all about subtlety. All about playing the truth, not the exaggeration. And keep in mind, this is almost a century before Strasberg.3 Stanislavsky4 was still in his twenties. People give them all the credit, but Irving was already doing it.

  When the curtain rose on Irving that night, the audience applauded at the mere sight of him, as was customary. But Henry was too astonished to clap. Irving had already knocked him over with a feather. Just not in the way Henry had expected.

  He was a vampire. Henry Irving, the world’s greatest actor, was a goddamned vampire. I knew it immediately, before he’d even said a word. It’s a skill you develop. A million tiny, almost molecular subtleties you learn to recognize over time. The same way a human might catch a glimpse of a man on the street and know—somehow instinctively know—that he’s troubled or dangerous.

  He had an ageless quality about him, his eyes slightly sunken, his face narrow and dour, and his frame slender. It was impossible to know his true skin color, as he was caked in makeup, but I didn’t need to see. I knew. His mannerisms were subtle. Elegant. I recall him seeming to glide across the stage, the audience breathless in anticipation of his every word.

  Here was an answer to the mystery of his greatness. The mystery of how he seemed to perform Shakespeare so well, as if he understood every word on an instinctive level. As if he was speaking in his own words and not reciting those of a man who’d died more than 250 years before. Here’s why he was so much better than his contemporaries: he’d simply had more time to rehearse.

  Vampire actors were nothing new. Another one famously murdered my friend in Ford’s Theater. Show business has always been littered with them and remains littered with them even today. The profession seems to draw them in. It appeals to their vanity. It’s another one of those little jokes, I guess. A creature that’s supposed to shrink into the shadows, flaunting itself in the bright lights.

  In a way, every vampire becomes an actor. It’s necessary to our survival. If we don’t possess a natural charisma, we learn to do a serviceable imitation of being charismatic. We learn to improvise our way through awkward conversations: “What’s the matter? You haven’t touched your food.” Or, “Why can’t a man like you find a nice girl and settle down?” We play a variety of roles throughout our long careers. Changing our names, our settings, our costumes. Changing our appearance to blend in with the times and places we find ourselves in. Learning new phrases and languages the way professional actors learn lines.

  The play hadn’t even ended before Henry made up his mind. He had to meet Irving. Not only to confirm his suspicions, for they hardly needed confirmation, but also to pick his brain.

  Here was the world’s greatest Shakespearean, and here I was, not ten yards from him, watching him perform my favorite of all Shakespeare’s plays. But as he performed that night, all I could think about was the role his immortality had played in it all. Had he known Shakespeare? My God… was he Shakespeare? Was the Bard a bloodsucker? Was that why I was so infatuated with his works? Had they been speaking to me on a deeper level than I’d ever realized? My mind sifted though the collected works, looking for clues to support the theory: Richard III, the twisted, conniving, and powerful villain, haunted by the ghosts of his victims… Lear, the old and outdated king, whose legacy turns to dust before his eyes… The treacherous Iago, doomed to live out the rest of his days in pain and silence. And everywhere, ghosts and magic, talk of “blood” and “curses.”

  Henry shuffled out of his seat before the final curtain (“an unforgivable breach of etiquette, I know”) and made his way to an alley beside the theater. He tapped the head of his cane on the stage door. Moments later, a young stagehand opened it.

  “Who’re you?”

  Henry reached a leather-gloved hand into his coat, pulled out a card, and presented it to the stagehand.

  “I should like to pay my respects to Mr. Irving.”

  The stagehand looked at the card. It was black with raised white type:

  H. Sturges

  Importer of Fine Textiles

  No. 2 Chester Square5

  Belgravia, London

  “But…,” said the stagehand, “he’s doin’ a show right now.”

  “So I noticed, whilst sitting in your theater these past three hours. Tell me, when I said I should like to pay my respects, did you take my meaning as ‘this very moment’?”

  The stagehand looked at Henry blankly.

  “Wait here,” he said at last, and closed the door. When it opened again, less than a minute later, Henry was met by a tall, forty-year-old Irishman. Smartly dressed. Barrel-chested, with a reddish brown beard and suspicious eyes. He looked like the sort of man who routinely punched holes in walls when he didn’t get his way. He also looked like the kind of man who would run into a burning building to save a kitten. Henry liked him immediately.

  “Mr. Irving doesn’t receive callers after a show,” said the Irishman.

  Ah, thought Henry. You’re his Renfield, then.

  Vampires often employ humans to act as fronts. Professional secret keepers who double as their direct link to the present. In the community, as it were, they’re known as “Renfields.” Who knows why. Perhaps the first human to serve a vampire was named Renfield or was from a place called Renfield. But that’s what they’re called. The practice is tolerated but frowned upon by some, the conventional wisdom being that the fewer humans who know the fact of our existence, the better. These human employees are called many things: “personal assistants,” “associates,” “confidants.” I’ve never hired one, personally. Not that I fault those who do. But in my opinion, Renfields create a barrier between the vampire and the world. Another shadow to hide in. If anyone’s going to act as my direct link to the present, shouldn’t it be me?

  “Very well,” said Henry. “Then I’ll call on him tomorrow, before the show.”

  “Mr. Irving doesn’t receive callers before the show, either.”

  “Well, when does Mr. Irving receive callers?”

  “Mr. Irving isn’t in the habit of receiving callers.”

  “Ah, I see. Well… you might’ve mentioned that straightaway and saved us both the time.”

  “Look, Mr.—”

  “Sturges. It’s right there on the card.”

  “I have a theater to run. Now, if you’ll excuse me…”

  The Irishman began to close the stage door in Henry’s face. Henry stuck the end of his cane out and stopped it from closing all the way.

  “I’ll be happy to,” said Henry, “if you’ll answer just one question.”

  “What is it?”

  “How long have you been his Renfield?”

  The Irishman’s face flushed bright red.

  I thought so.

  “Let’s try this again, shall we? Now, I’m a great admirer of Mr. Irving’s, and I should very much like a few mo
ments with him… if, of course, it wouldn’t be too much of an inconvenience. I realize what a busy creature he is.”

  He extended a hand. “Henry Sturges.”

  The actor’s assistant looked at Henry’s hand a moment, then shook it.

  “Bram Stoker.”

  Stoker first met the great Henry Irving a decade earlier, when he’d been toiling away as a theater critic in Dublin and working, with little success, on his own short stories.

  In 1876, he wrote a rave review of Irving’s Hamlet for the Dublin Evening Mail. Irving, who always read his reviews, had been flattered by its effusive praise—but more important, he’d been impressed by the quality of its prose. He sent for the young critic, and the two met in Dublin. Irving needed someone to run his Lyceum back in London. Someone smart, energetic, and ambitious to write the adverts, keep the staff in line, and—most of all—keep the house full.

  Stoker later told me how nervous he’d been at that first meeting and how Irving attempted to put him at ease by doing the one thing he did best: performing. He asked Stoker to name his favorite poet. Any poet would suffice.

  Bram Stoker follows his boss, famed actor and vampire Henry Irving, to a waiting carriage outside the Lyceum Theatre in London. This is the only known photograph of Irving wearing dark glasses.

  Stoker, so nervous that all the moisture had left his mouth and moved to his palms, grasped at names in his mind like a drowning man grasping for a rope. The words “Thomas Hood” finally escaped his lips.

  The way Stoker tells it, no sooner had he said the name than Irving proceeded to recite Hood’s “The Dream of Eugene Aram” from memory. And not just recite it, but perform it with an intensity and elegance that sent chills through Stoker’s body.

  “The Dream of Eugene Aram” offers fictional insight into a factual murder. The real Eugene Aram (1704–1759) was an English schoolmaster who gained notoriety after the disappearance of his friend Daniel Clark in North Yorkshire. It was widely thought that Aram, whose wife had been having an affair with Clark, had had something to do with the disappearance. But with no evidence to support their suspicion, the authorities did nothing. Aram moved to London, where, as the poem explores, he lived with the guilt of his crime for the next fifteen years.6 An excerpt:

  And how the sprites of injur’d men

  Shriek upward from the sod,—

  Aye, how the ghostly hand will point

  To shew the burial clod:

  And unknown facts of guilty acts

  Are seen in dreams from God!

  He told how murderers walk the earth

  Beneath the curse of Cain,—

  With crimson clouds before their eyes,

  And flames about their brain:

  For blood has left upon their souls

  Its everlasting stain!

  When Irving was done, Stoker had been “mesmerized,” he said. He accepted the job on the spot, partly because it would afford him time to work on his stories during the day, and partly because his association with Irving would afford him access to levels of London society that were otherwise off limits to a theater critic. But mostly, he took the job because, after that meeting, he’d been too frightened not to.

  Stoker hurriedly married his sweetheart, Florence, an Irish beauty who’d once been courted (halfheartedly, one presumes) by Oscar Wilde. Together the young couple moved from Dublin to London, Stoker working on his stories till midday and attending to the Lyceum and Irving’s affairs till midnight and beyond.

  I’m not sure when he first began to suspect that there was something strange about his boss, or if Irving just revealed it from the start. But by the time we met, Bram Stoker knew that Henry Irving was a vampire. That much I’m sure of. Part of his job in managing the Lyceum was keeping the secret—politely declining dinner invitations on Irving’s behalf, protecting his privacy above all. Whether he ever procured victims for Irving, I don’t know. I remember trying to broach the subject with him once and seeing that big Irish head flush bright red. “What sort of damned-fool question is that?” he asked. I suppose that was as good an answer as any.

  Henry got his audience with the jewel of England’s stage. He and Irving sat in the actor’s parlor one Sunday evening, Stoker waiting in an adjacent room.

  I found him dull, to be honest. He didn’t want to talk about Shakespeare. His interpretations of the text. Whether he’d personally known Shakespeare, whether Shakespeare had been one of us—not even the characters he’d played. Basically, all the good stuff was off limits. He didn’t want to talk about being a vampire, either. How he’d become one, what insights the condition gave him into his craft, how he felt about killing or world affairs or anything. I raised subject after subject. I gave him every opening, and he refused to engage.

  I’ve had this experience with other actors. Some of them are perfectly charming and engaging in person, but many of them are self-serious or withdrawn or insufferably dull. They’re often lost without a role to play. When they’re unable to escape the existential terror of who they really are, or squeeze snugly into someone else’s skin. I asked [Irving] if he’d heard of anyone named “Grander.” He hadn’t, so I promptly offered my thanks and left. It’s quite possible that I left that meeting knowing less about Henry Irving than I had before it.

  His encounter with Irving had been brief and unmemorable. But Henry’s relationship with the actor’s assistant would prove far more lasting and rewarding. Bram and Florence soon became part of Henry’s exceedingly small social circle. They passed most of that summer of 1888 together. Florence didn’t mind the company. It was nice to see Bram spending time away from the theater and with someone other than Mr. Irving (whom, though she wouldn’t dare say so to her husband or anyone else, she found strangely unnerving and didn’t much care for). Henry was charming and well mannered, though she worried about how skinny he was and wished he’d eat more. She was determined to fix him up with a nice girl.

  We passed many a night at the Stokers’ kitchen table. I remember laughter. Lots of it. And those accents. [Henry laughs.] Those Irish accents. Bram’s big, booming voice. And Florence… so sharp. What a lively, beautiful woman. Very unlike the picture you probably have in your mind of women in those days. She’d been an actress herself, and she still had an actress’s grace. We would talk and laugh, the three of us. Eventually Florence would turn in, and Bram and I would lower our voices and tell each other stories into the early morning hours, most of them about vampires. He was especially fascinated by stories of Abe and the war. I told him everything—our first meeting, training Abe as a vampire hunter, Jeff Davis and his cabal of vampires, tracking John Wilkes Booth to a tobacco barn in Virginia and exacting vengeance for my fallen friend. Of course Stoker wanted the bloody details, and reluctantly I obliged. I told him that I’d held Booth across my knees, like a father whipping a child, as the farm burned all around us. I told him that I’d removed Booth’s vertebrae, one by one. I told him that they’d popped like the corks off champagne bottles. Blood and spinal fluid splashed onto my face, but I did not drink a drop of John Wilkes Booth. The thought of his vileness coursing through me was anathema. The only thing I left out was Springfield. That was the one secret I would take to my grave.

  August 30th, 1888, was just another Thursday night. Henry and Bram sat at the small kitchen table, sharing stories, laughing, and talking about the troubles of the world well into the night.…

  Neither man with any inkling of what horrors sunrise would bring.

  FOUR

  The Tall Man

  1888

  Do not all passions require victims?

  —Marquis de Sade

  Polly Nichols had five mouths to feed, by God.

  She was forty-three years old but was told she looked at least ten years younger—though a few strands of gray had begun to appear in her chestnut-brown hair, and five babies had changed the shape of her bosom and left lines in the loose flesh around her middle. None of the men seemed to mind, though. I
t was all the same to them when the lights went out. Something warm and different. That’s all they wanted.

  Polly knew what she was. But she didn’t like being called that word. It was an ugly word, it was, and she’d been born better. The pretty, petite daughter of a London locksmith, christened “Mary Ann” but called “Polly” since she could well remember. It had been a rough home, what with her father’s drinking, but whose home wasn’t rough? Besides, there’d been love there, and as angry as he got, Father never laid a hand on a one of them. Not on her mother, her sisters, or Polly—which was more than she could say for Nasty Will.

  She’d known William Nichols from the neighborhood since both of them were little children. “Nasty Will,” they’d called him. And he was a naughty, nasty boy. Spitting and fighting and saying things that had no business coming out of a Christian’s mouth. But where the other girls had kept their distance, Polly had been strangely attracted by it all. When she was twelve, she’d let Will take a peek under her dress. When she was fifteen, she’d let him put a hand on one of her breasts and keep it there a full ten seconds. When she was nineteen, she’d borne him a son—seven months to the day after their wedding, a fact that the neighborhood gossips didn’t miss. But Polly and Will hadn’t cared about all the talk. They had a son. They named him Edward, because it seemed a proper name for a boy, and he was their joy. The children kept coming, one every couple of years. Those were the good times, when the babies were small and Polly’s skin was radiant and Will still looked at her that certain way on certain nights. The days before he discovered the comforts of other women, and she the comfort of drink.