The Last American Vampire

by Seth Grahame-Smith

He wasn’t the only veteran who wanted to start fresh. Abraham Lincoln had also returned home eager to forget the concussive blasts of artillery shells and the hasty field burials of too many friends.

  I saw him briefly in ’45, in the American Sector [of occupied Berlin]. He’d come in with the Russians in April or May; I’d come in with the Eighty-Second [Airborne] in June. We only had an afternoon to catch up, and like most soldiers, we weren’t interested in sharing war stories, so we filled the time with small talk. (Come to think of it, that was the last time I saw him in person, until ’63.) Abe told me he’d read a book—it was a popular book at the time, I forget what it was called6—but it had to do with getting back to the land and all that. Anyway, he’d read this book and gotten it in his head that he should become a farmer. And that’s exactly what he did. As soon as he got back to the States, he bought himself a little farm near Springfield and started raising cattle. Some of them he sold to slaughterhouses; some he kept for himself and fed off in increments. He’d had his fill of killing men, and now that he was back in the U.S., he wanted no part of it—even if it meant feeling a little run down.7

  In all his centuries in America, Henry had never made it as far west as California. Now, as the world took a breath between a hot war and a cold one, he made a pilgrimage to America’s second shore, some four hundred years after landing on its first one.

  Everything alive and modern. All neon and glamour. I remember how strange it was, seeing palm trees on American soil. How different the light seemed; how different the air smelled. There was a still a Western feel to [Los Angeles] in those days. Orange groves and farmland still mingled with concrete at the edges of Hollywood. And as many people as there were, it never felt the least bit crowded. There was plenty of room, plenty of air, everything flat and vast, like the world’s biggest small town.

  Howard Hughes was many things—genius, pilot, engineer. He was a film director and producer and the sole owner of RKO Pictures. He was a famous womanizer, having worked his way through a long line of Hollywood starlets, from Katharine Hepburn to Ava Gardner. He was prone to wild mood swings and a notorious obsessive compulsive.

  He was also, much to his dismay, a vampire.

  Hughes had been killed in a plane crash on July 7th, 1946, while testing his company’s experimental XF-11—designed as an army reconnaissance aircraft. An engine failure had sent him careening into a Beverly Hills neighborhood, destroying several houses but miraculously sparing the people inside them. Hughes’s badly burned and broken body had been pulled from the wreckage and taken to a hospital, where surgeons had been unable to save him. With a cold war looming, the army had decided that a man of Hughes’s engineering genius was too valuable an asset to lose, so they’d made arrangements to have his death reversed.8

  When Hughes woke from his transformation and realized what had happened, he fell into a deep depression. Not long after being resurrected, he’d famously spent four months in a dark screening room, watching movies around the clock, refusing to bathe or shave, and writing extensive memos on legal pads, instructing his employees to avoid looking at him or speaking to him. Once the initial shock wore off, however, his vampirism became just another problem for the genius to solve.

  A lifelong germophobe, Hughes abhorred the idea of biting into another being’s flesh and sucking out its “dirty, unfiltered blood.” To this end, he employed an ever-changing stable of some fifty donors (they were told they were part of a clinical research trial). Each of the donors was given an extensive background check, screened for diseases, and forbidden from smoking, drinking, or taking drugs for the term of their employment. Even so, Hughes demanded that all the collected blood be run through a dialysis machine9 before he used it. Hughes even designed a machine that injected the blood directly into his fangs at high pressure, filling his body in a third of the time of a conventional feeding.

  Henry’s Porsche pulled up to the guard gate of RKO’s backlot in Culver City. Affectionately known as Forty Acres, the lot had been in use since the silent era, home to productions like King Kong and Gone with the Wind. And in 1953, it was the sole property of the reclusive Howard Hughes.

  I’d arrived early, so I parked and walked around a bit, this being my first time on a movie backlot. Here, ancient Greece. There, a bombed-out European square. Tarzan’s jungle next to a plantation from the antebellum South. It was a journey through time, ancient places, previously existing only in the imaginations of readers, rendered real with exquisite detail. I wandered down a street where they were building a full replica of a small 1860s town—dirt streets, horse-drawn carts, everything exactly as it would have been. I stood in the middle of this imaginary town, nearly a century removed from the real thing, and was awash in the strange feeling of having been transported back in time.

  Henry was ushered into Hughes’s office at precisely twelve o’clock noon. Not a second before or after. It was a perfect, sparse square of a room, everything pristine and white, from the walls to the carpet to the furniture. So white that the tiniest speck of dust would stand out like tar on a wedding dress and be mercilessly annihilated by the attentive and retentive staff. The only nonwhite features in the room were the large windows that dominated two walls of the corner office. Their panes had been painted black, barring even a single photon of sunlight from slipping through. A pair of frosted spherical overhead light fixtures provided dim, even illumination.

  The frail, lanky figure of Hughes stood up behind his white lacquer desk. He had a thin mustache, his graying black hair parted in the middle and draped over both sides of his face. He wore black trousers that looked two sizes too big and a crisp white shirt, completely unbuttoned, revealing his pale, almost skeletal chest beneath. Henry was shocked at Hughes’s appearance but gave no outward sign of it.

  Vampirism hadn’t made him more youthful. In fact, Hughes looked worse than ever. Maybe it was a side effect of having the blood filtered before drinking it. Maybe he was protecting himself from germs but also stripping the blood of some mysterious yet essential property.

  “Mr. Hughes,” said Henry, reaching out his hand. Hughes didn’t take it.

  “You’ll forgive me,” said Hughes, looking at Henry’s outstretched hand like there was a gun in it. “Filthy things, hands. Disgusting repositories of germs. Did you know that the average hand has hundreds of thousands of fecal particles on it?”

  “I can’t say that I did.”

  “When I see a pair of shaking hands, all I see is two people politely smearing their shit together. It’s an abhorrent practice, abhorrent, abhorrent, ab—”

  Hughes swallowed hard, choking back the word. He gestured for Henry to take a seat on one of two firm white sofas that faced each other in the center of the room. Henry obliged, while Hughes pulled four tissues from a dispenser on an end table, unfolded them, and placed them gently on the cushion, ensuring that no part of his trousers made contact with the couch, before he sat.

  I’d heard the stories, and I’d been prepared for the idiosyncrasies. Still, he must’ve caught me looking at the tissues, because he felt compelled to say—

  “Disease is everywhere, Mr. Sturges.”

  “Disease can’t harm you anymore, Mr. Hughes.”

  “Just because I no longer feel the effects of a disease doesn’t mean it’s not there… growing under the surface of my fingernails. Festering in the pores of my skin. Festering, Mr. Sturges, festering, festering, festering—”

  Hughes kept repeating the word, squinting his eyes and screwing up his face, caught in a feedback loop from which he was powerless to free himself:

  “Festering, festering, festering…”

  I’m sitting across from a madman.

  “With all due respect, Mr. Hughes,” said Henry, cutting him off, “did you invite me to come all this way to talk about disease?”

  Hughes paused, his eyes opening again. He swallowed, then continued as if nothing strange had happened:

  “As a matter of fact, Mr. Sturges
, I did.”

  Hughes gave a nod to one of his assistants. The lights dimmed, and a projection screen lowered out of the ceiling behind Hughes’s desk. A beam flickered out of a small glass square embedded in the wall, filling the screen with black-and-white footage. First, a title card—I don’t recall exactly what it said, but it was something along the lines of THE FOOTAGE YOU’RE ABOUT TO SEE HAS BEEN CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET. Then, images of a laboratory. Medical researchers, microscopes, and test tubes. Men in white lab coats, some of them smoking pipes, discussing things, looking at charts. Real doctors and researchers, awkwardly re-creating their daily routines for the cameras.

  “A thousand years from now,” said Hughes, “humanity will look back on 1953 as the year the future was born. For this year, there have been not one, but two landmark announcements in the field of medicine.”

  The footage changed to a pair of young scientists giving a demonstration with a large metal model that reminded me of an overgrown Erector Set.

  “James Watson and Francis Crick,” said Hughes, “who recently published a groundbreaking paper in which they described, for the first time, the double-helix structure of DNA.”

  The footage changed to a smiling man wearing a lab coat and horn-rimmed glasses, holding up two large glass bottles of dark liquid. Without missing a beat, Hughes continued:

  “Dr. Jonas Salk, who this very year announced his successful vaccine for polio, eradicating a disease that has plagued mankind since Moses led his people through the desert.”

  Every word was perfectly timed to match the film. I imagined [Hughes] sitting there, alone in the dark, obsessively watching the reel hundreds of times, practicing his narration before I arrived. Why not just record it in advance? I’m sure he had his own bizarre reasons.

  The scene changed again, this time to an overhead shot of a man lying on a table, wearing a surgical gown and scrub cap.

  Title Card: PHYSICAL EXAMINATION

  [The man was] a vampire—one I didn’t recognize. His fangs were being examined by a team of masked human doctors. They took measurements, tested his reflexes, drew his blood. I was intrigued. I’d never seen a real vampire captured on film. Not with its fangs out, anyway. And certainly not interacting with humans in such a clinical, cooperative manner. Being poked and prodded for all to see, captured on film for all time.

  Title Card: ASSESSMENT OF ABILITIES

  [The vampire subject] ran across the screen in slow motion, from left to right, the wall behind him painted with black-and-white distance markers—the same you would see in a car crash test. Next came a close-up of his claws extending, then a wider shot—again, all of this was in slow motion—of him taking a swipe at a pig carcass that had been hung from the ceiling. His claws opened four deep gashes in the pig’s skin and sent slow-motion ripples through its body. Next came the eyes. A close-up of the whites clouding over black as he took his vampire form. Then a split screen. On the left, nothing but darkness, with a tiny flickering dot of light in the center. The words “HUMAN SUBJECT—20/20” superimposed at the bottom. On the right, a brightly lit office—probably one of the researchers’—with a desk, chairs, and piles of papers all clearly visible. A man in a white lab coat standing in the center, with a lit candle in his hand, its flame in exactly the same position as the flickering dot of light on the left. The words “VAMPIRE SUBJECT—20/5” superimposed.

  Title Card: FEEDING MECHANISM

  The vampire stood against a black background, staring into the camera, a mannequin beside him. On cue, he extended his fangs and bit into the mannequin’s neck. In a close-up, the fangs were shown entering the rubber skin in slow motion. As weird as it was, sitting there, watching this with Hughes, it was also fascinating. As many necks as I’d sunk my fangs into, I’d never seen the mechanics of the process revealed as clearly as they were here—slowed down to a fraction of real time. The fangs punching through tiny holes in the gums, the hollow tips tearing into the flesh.

  Title Card: METABOLISM

  This dissolved into an animation of blood being drawn out of the neck and into the hollow fangs. The animation zoomed out, becoming a cross section of the vampire’s entire body. It showed the blood running though a pair of veins from the fangs into the aorta, where the heart slowly pumped it through the rest of the vascular system. A hand-drawn clock appeared in the upper right-hand corner, the hour hand spinning wildly to show the passage of time, as the blood was slowly absorbed into the tissue over a period of days, nourishing it like water in a flowerpot.

  A final title card appeared on-screen: PRODUCED BY RKO PICTURES FOR THE HOWARD HUGHES MEDICAL INSTITUTE. COPYRIGHT MCMLIII.

  The light of the projector went dark. The screen retracted into the ceiling, and the room slowly brightened.

  “You’re looking for a cure,” said Henry.

  Hughes smiled. It was all the confirmation Henry needed.

  It was a question that had occupied me, occupied virtually every other vampire since the beginning of history: Is there a way out? A way back? Is death the only cure for our curse? Is “curse” even the right word? I’d heard of vampires traveling to Asia and Africa in search of shamans and witch doctors. Concocting herbal remedies or sitting in steam baths, trying to sweat the impurities out. I’d seen vampires sitting in churches with their rosary beads in hand, humbling themselves before God in a vain effort to gain His forgiveness. I’d seen all of the fad “cures,” and I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t tried a few of them myself.

  “Others have tried,” said Henry.

  “Yes,” said Hughes. “But they lived in simpler times. They thought of vampirism in religious terms, and they shunned the affected. Feared them, just as lepers and hunchbacks were shunned and feared. But never, in the thousands of years that vampires have roamed this earth, has anyone bothered to study them.”

  He was wrong, actually. Plenty of people had studied vampires over the centuries—most of them vampires themselves. Hell, Tesla took X-rays of my fangs fifty years before I ever met Howard Hughes.

  “It’s a dream,” said Henry. “One that vampires have been dreaming for a thousand—”

  “No one dreams as big as Howard Hughes!” he yelled.

  Silence. The rage had come from nowhere, like a bolt of lightning on a cloudless night.

  “Mr. Hughes, I didn’t mean to—”

  “After the shock of my transformation wore off,” said Hughes, all traces of his anger gone, “I thought—what if this isn’t some old black magic? What if it isn’t a ‘curse’? After all, a man gets cancer, we cut it out. He gets polio, which changes the shape of his body, alters the makeup of his muscles and density of his bones. And what do we do? Do we call him a demon? In the Dark Ages, maybe. But nowadays we look for a cure.”

  “Vampirism is different. The changes are more radic—”

  “Is it? It’s passed from host to host, through the blood. It alters the makeup of our bodies, changes our muscles and our bones, affects our hearing and sight. But we’re so conditioned to think of sickness making our bodies worse, we almost can’t conceive of one that would make us better. It’s a disease… and for every disease, there’s a cure.”

  “Let’s suppose you’re right. That it’s no different than cancer. Finding a cure will be every bit as hard—if not impossible.”

  Hughes smiled again and gave another nod to one of his hovering assistants, who carried an easel to the end of Henry’s sofa and set on it a full-color rendering of a large building surrounded by palm trees.

  “The Howard Hughes Medical Institute,”10 said Hughes. “Already under construction in Miami. When it’s complete, it will house the finest scientific minds in the world, all of them looking for the secrets to life itself. I’m raising a $100 million endowment, $50 million of which comes from my own pocket.”

  Henry looked at the rendering—its vibrant colors and sun-soaked palm trees a stark contrast to the darkened, grayscale lunatic sitting across from him.

  “Mr. Hughes,” he s
aid at last, “I admire your passion. But it seems like an awful lot of money to spend on a relatively small problem. I’d venture there are fewer than a hundred vampires in the United States.”

  “Ninety-three, including you and me.”

  The way Hughes said it left no room for doubt. I imagined a small army of well-paid emissaries conducting an exhaustive vampire census with the obsessive attention to detail their boss would have demanded.

  “Point is,” Henry continued, “the breed is dying out, all by itself. Besides, I’d think a man like you would jump at the chance to live forever. Think of the things you could accomplish.”

  “Oh, I intend to live forever. But I’d like the option of doing it as a man and not a monster. Think about it—freedom from aging, freedom from death. Perfect eyesight and hearing. Perfect health. Now imagine being able to grant those gifts to everyone, in the form of a pill. Eternity in a bottle, Mr. Sturges. A world without hospitals or graveyards.”

  Hughes spoke as if it was some kind of utopia. But there was something about his vision that unnerved me.

  “You’re talking about creating a race of superhumans,” said Henry.

  “I’m talking about a revolution in what it means to be human. What it means to be alive. I’m talking about erasing the boundaries between vampire and man—taking the best qualities of each and cutting the rest out like a cancer. For vampires, an end to darkness and murder. For humans, an end to fear and suffering.”

  “And a beginning to overpopulation, religious turmoil, unwinnable wars…”

  “We already live in that world.”

  Crazy or not, he has a point…