The Last American Vampire

by Seth Grahame-Smith

  He led Doyle over to see the boots he was making for Henry. And that’s when Doyle saw them. A pair of brogans, nearly finished… the biggest pair of brogans he’d ever seen.

  “What size are those, if I may?” asked Doyle.

  “Fourteens, those are, sir. I’ve only made one bigger pair in all my life.”

  Doyle didn’t know why the man with size-fourteen feet had taken Henry’s card, but he knew in that moment that he had.

  “And who, if I may, are those shoes for?”

  Henry told the coachman to hurry. But it was a weekday morning, and the streets were packed with pedestrians. If the coachman went any faster, he was liable to kill someone.

  Henry got out and ran, taking care not to run faster than a human could, lest he draw attention. A cheetah moving at a snail’s pace, so as not to offend the snails.

  He ran, his body not tiring, his breath not quickening, his heartbeat nonexistent, until he reached the address Doyle had looked up. Doyle, who had insisted they go straight to the police. But Henry knew that if Doyle was right—if the Ripper was who he thought he was—they would be sending those policemen to their deaths.

  Henry could smell another creature on the other side of the door. He could sense the presence of another vampire, reaching into his mind as he reached back. He knows me, thought Henry. Whoever this vampire is, he knows me. There was something so familiar about that mind… flashes of shared experiences.

  Henry reached the door and found it ajar. He pushed it open, slowly. Doyle was right.

  It was him.

  It was impossible, but there he was, sitting on the edge of a bed against the opposite wall, facing the door. Expecting me. There he was… one leg crossed over the other. He sat there, looking at me, as if this were just another other social call. It was an absurd sight. I’ll never forget it.

  “Hello, Henry,” said the Tall Man.

  He hadn’t changed a bit. He was tall and balding. His face pockmarked; his eyes kind. He looked exactly as he had in Roanoke, all those centuries ago.

  It was the man who had taken his love. The man who had taken his life.

  The man who had made him a vampire.

  FIVE

  Good Devil

  He that falls into sin is a man; that grieves at it, is a saint; that boasteth of it, is a devil.

  —Thomas Fuller

  God had delivered them to a virgin shore.

  Henry Sturges stepped out of the rowboat and stood on the sand of the New World, young and alive. A blacksmith’s apprentice. A runaway. A young man of solid build and handsome features, with long, dark hair that ran to the middle of his back and which he almost always wore in a ponytail.

  It was July 22nd, 1587. A Wednesday afternoon, in the humid height of a North American summer. A storm was approaching, kicking up onshore winds that only heightened the drama of their already dramatic arrival. The ship that had borne Henry and 116 other English souls across the ocean, the Lyon, was anchored just off the coast. They’d landed on the northernmost tip of Roanoke Island, part of a two-hundred-mile string of barrier islands that make up the Outer Banks of present-day North Carolina, just a few miles south of Kitty Hawk, where the Wright Brothers would fly the world’s first motorized airplane 316 years later. The Mayflower wouldn’t land at Plymouth Rock for another thirty-five years.

  Henry fell to his knees, letting the ocean wash over his legs, his long hair whipping beneath gray skies. He kissed the rocky beach—its stones in shades of black and gray, like the gathering storm clouds above, polished smooth over the eons by the motion of the sea they’d just crossed. He kissed the stones a second time, then, with sand and salt water still on his face, he rose and kissed his bride, Edeva.

  She was a beautiful girl—let me start there. Blond hair. Brown eyes speckled with amber. Tall and delicate with a lightly freckled nose and perfect teeth, which in those days was nothing short of a miracle. She was—and I say this with all respect to the other women I’ve loved—the most beautiful, the most physically beautiful woman I’ve ever known. But it was more than that. It was… she was also my first love. The only innocent love I suppose I ever had. We were only a day apart in age. That’s true, by the way. Absolutely true.

  She was, as Henry had said to her on their wedding day, his “heart” and his “hope.”

  Henry and Edeva had known each other for less than a year by the time they first set foot in America. They had met the previous August, around the time John White, an artist and adventurer, was mounting an expedition to the New World. It was to be financed by his patron, Sir Walter Raleigh, and White needed not just a crew, but the seeds of a new society as well. He’d put out a call for “sturdy, married English men and their wives, to establish a colony, for the glory of Her Majesty, the Queen, and the kingdom.”

  Edeva’s father hadn’t approved of his daughter marrying a man of my stature. He wasn’t rich by any means—not an aristocrat or anything of the sort—but he was a well-respected merchant, and she was his only daughter, and a stunning one at that. You can’t blame the poor man for having high hopes. Higher than seeing her run off with a wherryman’s son, anyway.

  I don’t remember exactly how we heard of the expedition. Word of mouth, most likely. Looking back, it seems a little extreme. Why not run away to Scotland or France? Why risk everything to go off into the unknown? But we were madly in love and young. And big decisions come easily when you’re young.

  To the young lovers, here was an answer to their prayers. A way for them to be together. To have a life together, on their own terms.

  We got married right away. A small ceremony, at home. My parents served as witnesses. Edeva’s parents weren’t able to attend the wedding, mainly due to the fact that they didn’t know it was taking place. If they had, I’m sure they would’ve done everything in their power to stop it.

  On May 1st, 1587, Henry bid his parents farewell, not knowing if he would ever see them again. A week later, he and Edeva boarded the Lyon at Plymouth and embarked on a ten-week voyage across the Atlantic.

  Hers were the warm fingers entwined in his on the cold and uncertain nights, both of them shivering beneath the sheets during their treacherous crossing. Both of them young, and in wretched, undying love that would assuredly last until the end of time, because all love was eternal and theirs above all.

  It was a miserable crossing; that much I remember. [Captain and colonial governor John] White and [ship’s navigator Simon] Fernandez didn’t agree on anything. Fernandez resented having an aristocrat for a captain, and White resented having a degenerate sailor questioning his every command. It didn’t help that the voyage was an especially difficult one, marred by a pair of strange deaths.1

  The first days at Roanoke passed with excitement and uncertainty. A search party was sent to look for the fifteen English soldiers who’d been left behind on the previous expedition, charged with keeping watch over the fort, but no sign of them was found, other than a single skeleton that may or may not have been one of the men in question. Abandoned buildings were rebuilt; relations with the local Algonquin2 tribes—most notably the Croatans—reestablished; a perimeter fence made of logs with sharpened points at the top was put up, turning their encampment into a fort, just in case relations with the natives soured.

  A week after the colonists arrived, that’s exactly what happened. An Englishman named George Howe was found facedown in the shallow waters of Albemarle Sound, some two miles from the fort. He’d been fishing for crabs with a small forked stick, alone. There were sixteen small puncture wounds in his body—presumably from Indian arrows, though none were found at the scene. His head had been crushed by forceful blows. When the search party found him, there were crows perched around him, eating pieces of his brain.

  Indian attacks were a constant concern, but nothing frightened the Roanoke settlers more than sickness. It was a New World in every sense: new people carrying new diseases; new foods and vegetation testing their tender English constitution
s. Their lodgings were damp and cold, and their diet supplemented by fish, crab, and vegetation gathered from the surrounding wilderness. Something as simple as a bout of food poisoning or influenza could wipe out the whole colony in a matter of days, if left unchecked.

  On August 18th, Henry and the others were in good spirits, rejoicing at the arrival of the colony’s first baby, Virginia Dare—Captain John White’s granddaughter. She was the first English child born in the New World and, like her mother, possessed a shock of red hair.

  The Roanoke colonists gather to celebrate the baptism of Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the New World. The highlighted figure is the only rendering of a pre-vampire Henry Sturges, then twenty-five years old, to ever exist.

  It was all too perfect. “Virginia Dare.” “Virginia,” for our “Virgin Queen,” and “Dare,” which is exactly what we were there to do. To dare and tame this vast wilderness. To dare! To conquer, for England!

  Only two weeks after his granddaughter’s birth, and one month after making landfall, Governor John White set sail for England, to arrange for the delivery of supplies and reinforcements. He would return within six months, it was promised, with ships stuffed to bursting with salted beef, grain, and, most important, more able-bodied men to aide in building and defending the new settlement.

  In fact, it would be three years before John White set foot on Roanoke Island again.

  Thomas Crowley loved to laugh.

  “A good laugh,” he often said, “is a powerful tonic.” And as a doctor, he knew what he was talking about. Over the years, he’d observed that those patients who were possessed of a “cheerful disposition” often recovered more quickly than those of a “dour character.” Laughter, he believed, could even mean the difference between life and death.

  He was a tall and kindly man of fifty-six, bald headed, with a curtain of graying hair that fell over his neck. His face was kind, and his cheeks bore the scars of a childhood bout with acne. Thomas Crowley was a skilled physician, to be sure, but unlike the humorless, bloodletting butchers of the day, he possessed what would today be called a “pleasing bedside manner.” Nothing made him happier than helping a patient lift his or her spirits with a good laugh.

  Crowley had, naturally, attended the birth of the New World’s first English child, Virginia Dare. Unlike other physicians of his stature, who would have had a nurse or midwife assist him with the menial details, Crowley insisted on doing everything himself—including the collection and disposal of the large quantities of blood and afterbirth. However, unlike other physicians of any stature, he’d consumed the blood while no one was looking.

  Like his fellow colonists, Crowley had risked everything to come to the New World. But it wasn’t the glory of England that had compelled him to cross an ocean or, like the pilgrims who would follow decades later, religious freedom. It was food. London may have been home to millions of humans, but it was also home to thousands of vampires, all of them competing for victims in the same seedy alleys, it seemed. The New World, while dangerous, represented an opportunity for an enterprising vampire. A hundred colonists would soon become a thousand. Then ten thousand.

  There had been some tense moments during the crossing. He’d managed to subsist on rats (always plentiful aboard a ship) for two weeks before the hunger had compelled him to kill the poor lookout and throw him from the crow’s nest. With a fresh supply of human blood, Crowley had been able to go another three weeks, topping himself off with the occasional rat, before the hunger had come again, and he’d taken the dear girl during a storm.

  Two strange deaths on a single crossing wasn’t unheard of, but if a third member of the passengers or crew was to go missing or meet with a freak accident, well, who could say? And what would he do if the finger of suspicion was cast at him? Kill the lot of them? Crowley was a fine doctor, but he knew nothing of sailing a ship. He imagined himself alone in the middle of the Atlantic. Adrift. Bored. Hungry. If a storm didn’t sink him, he would surely starve to death.

  So it had filled him with joy when the cries of “Land!” had gone up. And it had been with thanks to God that he’d set foot on the shores of the New World. With the exception of George Howe—a slipup early on in his stay—Crowley had managed to get by on an all-animal-blood diet at first. He found that if he fed twice as often (every week, instead of twice a month), and if he avoided rodents, fish, and reptiles in favor of deer and wild game, he could mitigate the ill effects that usually accompanied such a diet—namely, lethargy and mild aches.

  But three months, though nothing in the face of eternity, was a long time to feel run down, and Crowley had begun to crave human blood again. But how to acquire it? That was the issue. There were barely more than a hundred of them in colony, packed tightly together behind the walls of their little fort. If people began disappearing every two weeks, the suspicion would be intolerable. Crowley supposed he could sneak off and snare a native every so often—a woman or child walking in the woods. But relations with the Indians were fragile as it was. Even if no bodies were found, the disappearances would undoubtedly raise suspicion, possibly even lead to war.

  It was Ambrose Viccars, the portly carpenter, who’d given Dr. Crowley the idea. He’d come in with a stubborn fever, nothing out of the ordinary. After examining him, Crowley recommend bloodletting, by the far the most common—and as most physicians of the time believed, the most effective—means of battling ailments.3 The cause of the fever was undoubtedly some contaminant in the patient’s blood, and how better to remove the contaminants than by removing a volume of blood and letting the patient’s body replenish it with a fresh, untainted supply? It also happened to be a wonderful way for a vampire physician to get his hands on a meal, without having to go through the trouble of killing. But there were challenges. The blood had to be consumed quickly after leaving the patient’s body, or it lost its replenishing properties. If left sitting too long, this “old blood” could even make the vampire sick.

  Crowley had been supplementing his animal-blood diet with the occasional bowl of patients’ blood, but unlike in London, where he might see upward of a hundred patients a week and bleed fifty, in Roanoke he had occasion to open the veins of only one or two adults a week, at best. Hardly enough to get by on.

  “We’ll have to breathe a vein,” said Crowley, reaching for his lancet.4 Viccars knew the drill and rolled up his right sleeve as Crowley brought a white measuring bowl over and sat beside him. Crowley tied off Viccars’s arm with a tourniquet, then, holding the lancet’s blade between his thumb and forefinger, carefully dragged the pointed blade down the length of a protruding vein. The blood began to pour forth immediately, and Crowley turned the arm over so that it flowed directly into the white bowl. Some physicians liked to bleed their patients to the point of fainting, but Crowley took a more scientific approach. He took the patient’s height and weight into consideration, for one. He also considered what kind of ailment he was bleeding them for. For a man of Viccars’s size, with a fever, he would remove about four gills5 of blood every four hours until he saw an improvement. If he didn’t see any improvement, he might supplement the treatment by inducing vomiting or urination to further cleanse the body of poisons.

  It would have been another routine bloodletting, had Viccars not asked:

  “How much new blood doth the body produce in, say, a day’s time?”

  “More than enough to replenish that which I take now, I assure you.”

  “It excites the mind,” said Viccars, the blood flowing from his arm, “to think that, were a man bled slowly enough, and he be otherwise in good health, that he could bleed forever.”

  Crowley nearly spilled the bowl resting on his lap. Could it be that simple? After years—decades—spent treating patients, opening their veins, stealing sips of their lukewarm blood, how had it never occurred to him? Bleed a man until he loses consciousness. Then feed on him in intervals, draining him near the point of death, but not too close. No, let him recover. Let his
body make more blood. Keep him warm and fed until he’s near the point of waking. Then feed again. Keep him balanced atop the fence that divides the living world from the dead.

  “Yes,” said Crowley, looking at the blood coming in rivulets from Viccars’s arm. “I suppose… if one could devise a way of bleeding a man more slowly than his blood replenished itself.”

  It was just a seed of an idea. A single cell, you could say. But it divided quickly, growing in Crowley’s mind until he could think of little else.

  Ananias Dare was fighting for his life, the poor soul.

  “I’m sorry,” said Crowley to Dare’s wife, Eleanor. “But there is little we can do but wait and beg God for His divine mercies.”

  Eleanor Dare sat by her unconscious husband’s side, the infant Virginia on her lap. In addition to her shock of wavy red hair, the little girl possessed, as was written at the time, a fair complexion and “angelic features.” She passed the time by playing with one of Crowley’s tools, a pestle for grinding herbs—far too young to understand the severity of the situation.

  “I believe the disease a native one,” Crowley said. “I must admit—and it shames me to do so—that it is beyond my skill.”

  “You’re a good man,” said Eleanor. “God will grant you the wisdom to help my husband. I know it.”

  No, he won’t, madam. I’m afraid the devil’s beaten Him to it.

  It had been a dreadful six months for the colony. In all, twenty-two of them—sixteen men, four women, and two children, ages thirteen and nine—had succumbed to the strange illness. Crowley’s little ruse had proved trickier than he’d anticipated. Keeping men alive for weeks on end, slowly draining and sucking their blood, was harder than it sounded. For one, the wounds had to be small enough to remain hidden, lest any of the colonists ask where they came from. Then there was infection—an inevitable result of opening and reopening the same wounds over and over. And once an infection took hold, they were as good as dead, whether Crowley liked it or not.