The Last American Vampire

by Seth Grahame-Smith

  Daylight had broken by the time Crowley finished the dragging and digging. The arranging and covering over would have to wait. It had been a long night, and he was eager to sleep awhile before resuming his work. Before he returned to his bed, there were two more bodies to pick up. The ones he’d killed the farthest from the settlement, almost in sight of the coast.

  Crowley retraced his steps to where he’d left Henry and Edeva. The smell of death led him in the general direction, and when he was close enough, a tiny hummingbird heartbeat took him the rest of the way. A faint heartbeat, still there in its mother’s cold belly. You’re a strong one, thought Crowley as he neared the site. God bless you. Go now… go to your rest, little angel. There was the tree he’d hidden behind as they’d approached. There was Edeva’s body, frozen and quiet.

  But Henry was gone.

  Crowley followed a trail of red droplets all the way back to the fort. There he found Henry—broken and barely standing, able to lift only one of his arms—leaning awkwardly against a tree, using a knife to carve something into its bark:

  “CRO—”

  Now, that’s a clever boy. He was trying to identify his murderer with what little time he had left.6 Crowley was amazed. You had to hand it to him. He’s a tough one. Brave.

  “You look a mess.”

  Henry spun around, startled by the voice behind him. Even now, with his body shattered, he held the knife out and came at Crowley, staggering forward, on the verge of toppling over with each step. Crowley might’ve laughed at the pathetic sight, had it not been for the hatred in Henry’s eyes. The determination. Yes, there’s a killer in you, boy. I see it plainly upon your face. Oh, the joy of cultivating a killer. Raising him up like a son, teaching him the beauty, the artistry of it.

  Once again, the cell of an idea began to divide in Crowley’s mind:

  The others had panicked at the sight of him. Their hands shaking as he glared with his black marble eyes and hissed at them with those hollow razors. But Henry’s aim had been true. Yes, he’d killed the boy’s pregnant wife, and Henry would doubtless hold a grudge against him for that, but it would pass, as all things pass. Once Henry realized what a gift he’d been given, it would pass. No, he would spare the boy. Turn him. Teach him.

  And poor Virginia. How could he feed on her? This poor, orphaned child whose birth he’d attended with his own hands? The first English soul born in the New World?

  No, it would be too cruel. More than cruel—it would be treasonous. Crowley would take her. Yes, he would take the child, too. He would look after her. Care for her. And when she was old enough to bleed, he would lay with her.

  She would be his companion.

  His lover.

  Like all vampires before him, Henry was suffering through the worst, and last, sickness of his life.

  I dreamt of metal. Using tongs to hold a raw bar of iron in a forge, rolling it evenly in the flame until it began to glow red. Taking it out of the flame and placing it on the anvil. Bringing my hammer down hard—again, again, again—gradually flattening it out… taking it from a raw, useless piece of scrap, and turning it into something sharp and beautiful. A weapon. Heating it, cooling it, striking it into the perfect shape; the perfect balance. Sharpening it so that it would draw blood if a man merely tapped the pad of his finger against the blade. Polishing it until it shone brightly.

  He drifted in and out of consciousness, his nightmares indistinguishable from reality. There were periods of movement. The moonlit forest floor passing below as he (flew?) was carried over a (monster’s?) man’s shoulder. There were periods of rest and darkness. The cries of a child in the faraway nothing. There were lullabies that made Henry yearn for home. Yearn for his mother to cradle him and dry his brow and tell him it had all been a dream. Tell him that he was still in good old Putney, still just a lowborn boy with limited prospects. He became other people, the way you can only in a dream. Saw the world through their eyes.

  Suddenly he was his mother, mourning the death of her stillborn sons and her baby girl. And now, on top of all my sorrow, my only son leaves me and runs off to the New World. Why, Henry? Why have you done this to your poor mother? He was his father, ferrying passengers across the Thames, resigned to his meager lot in life. He was Charon, ferrying the damned across the Styx, in the hopeless and eternal darkness of hell. He was the simple boy with wild eyes, drawing blood with his teeth. Lashing out. He was Edeva, dying on the ground. He was the unborn child in his wife’s belly, shrouded in darkness… the faint, muffled vibrations of the great unknown growing ever fainter as the great nothingness came to reclaim it.

  Henry would never know if the child had been a boy or a girl. He would never see its face or hold it or sing it a lullaby. He wondered—and hated himself for wondering—how long it had lived inside its mother’s belly after she’d died. A minute? An hour? Was it still alive, even now, its tiny heart struggling to beat? Why did I drag her away? Why did I drag her from the safety and comfort of home to come here? She was reluctant, I could tell. She was afraid, but I urged her on. I told her it would be better for both of us.

  His heart and his hope were gone. Edeva’s was just another face flittering away from his grasp, as the darkness closed in around him and his mind was twisted into something else. His DNA forming new chromosomes inside his cells, those cells dividing and carrying out their new instructions—making calcium harden into new shapes in his mouth; making muscle fibers grow in new places and in new configurations. Making his bones grow denser; changing the physical characteristics of his inner eyes, his rods and cones and receptors hundreds of times more sensitive; and reconfiguring his neurons to handle his new heightened senses. Perhaps, even, to communicate without any of them.

  Three days had passed since the massacre. It was dark. Virginia had finally fallen asleep, and Henry had finally woken up. Crowley watched the new vampire—his vampire—begin to come around. The length of the transformation varied, but on average, it took three days. After that, the fever broke and the vampire emerged from the fog and into a clarity no living man could comprehend.

  It’s hard to describe. Imagine you’ve only ever seen the world through an old black-and-white television set. Eleven inches across, broadcast over the airwaves in two fuzzy dimensions. A slightly buzzy sound farting out of its little speaker. Add to this the fact that you’ve been nearsighted your whole life but haven’t realized it. So not only are you looking at a narrow, noisy image, but it’s out of focus. Everything you’ve ever experienced, every kiss or sunset or adventure, has come through that fuzzy little screen and speaker. To you, it’s as beautiful as the world can be. Nothing could ever be more magical or real, because you don’t know any better. That’s what it is to be human.

  Now imagine you wake up one day, and someone’s replaced that little black-and-white set with a 3-D IMAX screen, eighty feet high; replaced that little speaker with digital surround sound. Imagine experiencing color for the first time. Crystal clarity and three-dimensional sight and sound for the first time. Imagine having your senses expanded beyond what you ever considered possible. The curtains pulled back on a world you never could have imagined in the static of your little black-and-white mind. That’s what it is to be a vampire.

  Henry was amazed upon awakening, as nearly all vampires are. He staggered out of Crowley’s structure and lay on his back in the center of the fort, looking up at the Milky Way through the clean, crisp winter air, which carried distant perfumes of plant and animal life to his nostrils over impossible distances. He reached his hand out to run his fingers through the stars and nebulae above, which seemed so close… so real.

  It’s a birth in every sense. You’re an infant in those first moments… taking in light and sound when all you’ve ever known is darkness and silence. I was overwhelmed by the raw amount of information coming through my senses… that big, crisp, 3-D world, those sounds coming from every direction—the beating of a moth’s wings. It was all my brain could handle. It took a while—
I’m not sure how long, an hour… two maybe—before I began to remember little things about myself: my name, where I was… what had happened.

  Crowley sat in the dark, watching his creation emerge from its cocoon. What a gift he’d given him! How many men, after all, could say that they’d stood at heaven’s gates, only to return to earth with the strength of Samson and the longevity of God Himself? Henry sat up and looked at Crowley blankly. He doesn’t remember me, thought Crowley. Not yet.

  The anger came, of course. It took a few more hours of Henry wandering around the empty fort, marveling at the detail he could make out in the darkness, staring at his hands in wonder, as if he’d dropped a tab of sixteenth-century acid. Crowley sat on a stool just outside the door of his structure, smoking a pipe under the stars as Virginia slept inside. He saw the memories creep over Henry’s face. The little flashes of horror. Images of headless Englishmen and useless pistols. Of running. Of poor Edeva, God bless her and send her swiftly to the angels. And finally—here it comes—the image of the man responsible for all of it.

  “You…,” he said.

  Henry took his vampire form for the first time, fangs punching through his virgin gums, staining his teeth with the blood that still ran in his veins. He ran at Crowley, intent on tearing off his limbs. But Crowley didn’t so much as flinch.

  He just sat there on his stool, smoking that pipe as I came at him. And when I was an arm’s length away, up came his leg. He braced his back against the structure and kicked me in the chest, sending me flying backward, sliding across the dirt, and landing in a heap against one of the other buildings.

  Henry was still weak from the ordeal of his transformation. His senses still foggy. He won’t know his true strength until he feeds. No matter. Crowley would weather the anger, and when it subsided, the lessons would begin. The lessons he was never fortunate enough to have had, his maker having run off as if the whole thing had been a cruel joke. Surprise! I’ve made you a bloodthirsty demon; go and sort the rest out yourself! Crowley had always been quite fond of jokes, but there was nothing funny about that.

  “Why?” muttered Henry.

  The sun had risen outside. After walking for hours through the bitter night, Crowley had found a small recessed cave—barely more than an overhang—in a line of granite that cut through the frostbitten woods like a giant zipper, holding two halves of the earth together. As the stars had begun to fade, he’d torn branches off the larger trees and uprooted the trunks of smaller ones entirely, arranging them against the rock and then laying a pair of heavy blankets over them to construct a makeshift shelter that kept the light out and the warmth in. The cold didn’t bother Crowley or Henry much, but little Virginia was susceptible, so Crowley had made a small fire inside their temporary home. There the three of them sat, lit only by the glow of the flame. Crowley and Henry had given Virginia their coats. She slept on top of one and used the other as a blanket.

  The night after I came around, Crowley had marched us out of the fort to the shore. He loaded us into a canoe and paddled us across the sound to the mainland.7 From there we marched through the wilderness when it was dark and rested by day, in caves if we were lucky enough to find one, or in makeshift shelters that Crowley constructed. He was taking us inland. Searching for prey.

  “Why what? Why did I kill everyone? Why did I make you a vampire? Why didn’t I just leave you to die? Please, Henry. You’re being terribly vague.”

  “Virginia… why did you bring her?”

  “You’re weak, Henry. You must feed.”

  “I would forfeit my own rather than take the life of an innocent.”

  “Oh no, you wouldn’t. Stop that; you’re being absurd.”

  “I cannot kill as callously as you do.”

  “Of course you can. You’ve done it a thousand times.”

  Henry didn’t know what Crowley meant. “I’ve never killed anyone,” he said.

  “I take it you’re a laborer’s son? You’ll forgive the assumption; it’s simply—you don’t strike me as an educated man. Bright, certainly. Bright, yes, but not learned. Certainly not a yeoman or a gentleman. Your father had a trade, probably owned a muddy little parcel, is that it?”

  Henry didn’t respond.

  “Tell me, Henry Sturges, he of the labor class, he of the poor rabble—how many chickens’ necks have you broken with your bare hands? How many rabbits have you skinned without a second thought? Dozens? Hundreds? And did you weep for them? And on those blessed occasions when there was meat at your table, did you weep as you tore the warm flesh of cattle or goat between your teeth? As you bit into the strands of muscle, letting those juices—the juices of salty, roasted blood—run down your throat?”

  Again, Henry said nothing.

  “You fed,” said Crowley, “because it was in your nature to feed. Because it was your right as granted by the Heavenly Father.”

  “You dare evoke the name of God to excuse what you are?”

  “ ‘But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him, shall never be more athirst: but the water that I shall give him, shall be in him a well of water, springing up into everlasting life.’8 Have you not drunk the water, Henry? Has it not granted you eternal life? I’ve laid the gift at your feet. All that remains is the acceptance and the thanks.”

  “You would have me thank you… for making me this?”

  “Do you think suffering is exclusive to men? To be human is to be inhumane, dear boy. When you butcher a pig, does it not shriek? When you wrestle it to the ground and cut its throat, does it not bleed?”

  “That’s different.”

  “Ask the pig if it’s different.”

  Henry turned away. Enough of this. Why? Why waste his breath talking to this monster?

  “Did you have a trade in London?” asked Crowley.

  Henry said nothing. He was done talking. Angry with himself for engaging the monster in the first place. You should be ashamed of yourself, he thought. Conversing with the man who killed your wife… your unborn child. The monster inside is trying to make you forget. Trying to get ahold of you.

  “Oh, come now—you’re the one who started the conversation. Did you have a trade, or were you just a mud-caked lowborn boy, butchering pigs and breaking necks and cutting into bloody flesh while congratulating yourself for being a saint?”

  Henry turned back toward Crowley.

  “I was a blacksmith’s apprentice.”

  “Ah… hammering horseshoes and nails, cutting firewood and sweeping floors, while your master sat on his ass.” Crowley laughed at the thought of it.

  “It’s better than cannibalism,” said Henry.

  “It isn’t cannibalism, Henry, because we are no longer human. Tell me, young Apprentice Sturges—did you ever make a sword?”

  “Of course.”

  “Of course. Of course you made swords, because that’s what blacksmiths’ apprentices do. I would wager you made dozens of swords, and being a man who takes his labors seriously, I would wager that they were as sharp and true as any sword crafted by English hands. And did you ever wonder, Apprentice Sturges, what became of those swords after they left your anvil? Did you ever consider the possibility that your work would be used to butcher men on the fields of battle? To take the heads of women accused of witchcraft?”

  Again, Henry said nothing.

  “Tell me,” said Crowley, “who is the guilty party in this equation? The sword? Its maker?”

  “The one who wields it.”

  Crowley smiled. Exactly.

  “We are the swords, Henry. Shaped by our maker, with but one purpose—to kill men and feed upon their blood. And no less a swordsman than God wields us, for if He did not wish us to be, why would He have forged us in the first place?”

  “Who says God was the one who forged us?”

  “And if it was the devil? What then—have we any less right to exist? You have to free yourself, Henry. Free yourself by letting go of those old myths. Those human notions of right and
wrong. You are not a man anymore. You are something more.”

  After wandering in the wilderness for days and finding nothing but more wilderness, Henry, who’d been granted eternal life, was growing close to death.

  I refused to feed. It’s common for new vampires, especially those who were made against their will, as I was. Not to mention the fact that my maker had just killed my wife and unborn child and virtually every English soul in the New World. I wasn’t feeling cooperative.

  Night after night, Crowley tried to teach me how to be a vampire. Making me watch as he fed on the blood of animals. Demonstrating how he used his heightened senses of hearing and smell to track them and his speed and strength to chase them down. Wildcats, deer, rodents… they were poor substitutes for human blood, but then, there were no humans to be found. Not yet. For all we knew, ours were the only white faces on the continent.

  Virginia sat atop Henry’s shoulders, her chin resting on his head, her red hair intertwined with his black hair as they followed Crowley through the dark, untouched wilderness. The job of carrying her had fallen to Henry, simply because Virginia still recoiled at the very sight of Thomas Crowley and cried out when he so much as touched her arm or smiled cheerfully at her.