And what I was told, it turns out, is something of a caper. A manhunt spanning four centuries. A hunt for the greatest enemy America has ever faced, a shadowy puppeteer who seemed to confound Henry at every turn. Because of that, perhaps, there are some parts of Henry’s remarkable life that are simply not relevant to the larger tale and haven’t been documented in these pages. Another time, perhaps.
Between running the store and raising two resentful growing boys from a distance, it took me nearly a year to put together the manuscript in its rough form. When I was done, Henry set about making his own alterations—pulling back where he thought I’d gotten too colorful, pushing me when he sensed I was trying to be flattering or respectful. He insisted on naked judgment, warts and all.
One thing Henry found especially lacking were my descriptions of death. “They read like a eunuch writing about an orgy” is how he put it.
I asked him to describe it for me as best he could. I wanted to know what dying felt like in exquisite detail, so that I could convey that experience with my words.
“It’s impossible to explain,” he said. “You have to experience it.”
And so I asked him to kill me. And he obliged.
I shuffled down East Market Street, crisp leaves underfoot, the taste of blood clinging to my teeth like copper fillings. I had no memory of how I’d gotten there. One moment I was dead, the next I was in the center of town, the sun rising in a cold and cloudless sky, my feet guiding themselves down a well-worn path. In that rote, distant manner, they brought me back to the store, to the counter, to my notebook. In my fog, as the first customers began to trickle in, I wrote down everything I could remember, determined to capture the words before the high of being alive wore off.
Just as the towering myth of Abraham Lincoln—honest backwoods lawyer, spinner of yarns, righter of wrongs—tells only part of the truth, so, too, is the myth of America woefully incomplete. The country that Ronald Reagan once called “a shining city upon a hill” has, in fact, been tangled up in darkness since before she was born. Millions of souls have graced the American stage over the centuries, played parts both great and small, and made their final exits. But of all the souls who witnessed America’s birth and growth, who fought in her finest hours, and who had a hand in her hidden history, only one soul remains to tell the whole truth.
What follows is the story of Henry Sturges.
What follows is the story of an American life.
Seth Grahame-Smith
Rhinebeck, NY
October 2014
ONE
May 8th, 1865
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.
—William Shakespeare, Richard II, act 3, scene 2
Abraham Lincoln wasn’t happy to be alive.
He’d been roused against his will, pulled from his well-deserved eternal rest with explosive force. One moment, he’d been floating gently through a borderless sea of warm, black nothingness. No more aware or burdened than a man is in the centuries before he’s born. And then some lesser god had yanked the plug out of the Great Drain of the Universe, and the consciousness that had once been Abraham Lincoln had been sucked down into it. He was born again. But not into the world outside.
The world of the inner welcomed him first. His brain remoistening with blood, one drop, one vessel at a time. One cell, two cell, red cell, blue cell. Synapses beginning to fire slowly, randomly, like the hammers of a typewriter striking a blank sheet of paper but spelling nonsense. Thoughts—what a strange concept, “thoughts”—being pieced together, the images and feelings primitive cave paintings on the inside of his skull. Then a filmstrip of disjointed frames flashing before him—what a strange concept, “him”—his mind gathering steam now, the fog of death lifting. Here, a dandelion in his six-year-old hand, his feet running across lush green grass. Here, the dirt hearth of a Kentucky cabin. Here, a candlelit book and the smell of bread cooling in the next room. A fleeting feeling of disconnected joy, then grief, then rage, coming and going at random as his brain emerged from its tomb. Each reanimated cell a speck of dirt being brushed off a long-buried fossil. The voices came next. Far-off words in some as yet foreign language. The cries of a child, echoing down a hallway. The moans of lovemaking.
Then, suddenly and unrelentingly, the nightmares. Horrific visions: the faces of his beloved children crying out as they burned away to ash. That ash swirling in a disembodied shaft of light as winged demons flew overhead, their skin so black that only their eyes and teeth showed. His son—the name… why can’t I remember his name?—reaching out for him, crying out as the impossible hands of the devil himself dragged him away to burn forever. The boy’s face streaked with tears, Abe helpless to save him. And then the nightmares broke like a fever, and Abe could breathe again. It was as if God had tired of watching him gasp and flop and had dropped him back in the cool waters of the now.
On the third day, Abe rose again. He heard a different voice beyond the darkness of his closed eyelids. Unlike the screams that had accompanied his nightmares, this voice came to Abe by way of his ears. It was a familiar voice, speaking words that were also familiar, though Abe wasn’t sure why. Nor was he certain what language the man was speaking, as those parts of the fossil had yet to be uncovered.
“Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it,” said the voice. “He died as one that had been studied in his death, to throw away the dearest thing he owed, as ’twere a careless trifle…”1
Abe’s eyes opened, though there was no life behind them. He looked around the room—that’s what it’s called… a room—as spare as a room could be. White walls. A fireplace at the foot of his large bed. A single, framed painting of a rosy-cheeked young boy hanging on the opposite wall. Yet as spare as the room was, there was also something vaguely familiar about it. A feeling of being home.
Abe noticed a shape to his right. A dark shape, hovering over him. A man, sitting in a chair beside his bed. There was something familiar about him, too. That face. That ghostly face framed by dark, shoulder-length hair.
The tiniest sliver of sunlight squeezed between the drawn curtains and fell on the wall above his head. Abe feared the light. He hated it. It blinded him. It burned him. He wanted it to go away, and it did. As if hearing his thoughts, the curtains were drawn shut, and the burning and blindness were gone.
Now, in the black pitch, Abe saw as never before. Every detail of the room revealed itself, as sharp as day, though drained of nearly all color. Every creak of the house was magnified by his ears. A mouse scurrying behind the walls became a horse galloping over cobblestones. The bristles of a broom sweeping a neighborhood sidewalk sounded like sheets of paper being torn an inch from his ear. And voices. Voices crashing ashore a hundred at a time, the result sounding quite like the jumbled din of an audience milling about in a theater lobby during intermis—
A theater. I was in a theater.
There were other voices—strange voices that didn’t pass his ears but were somehow heard just as clearly. Abe looked back to the man in the chair. With the sliver of sunlight gone, he was able to make out the features on the man’s face. It was the same face that had greeted him in his twelfth year—the first time he had been spared from the comforting embrace of death. He knew because it was exactly the same face. The face belonged to a man. The man who had steadied him when his body convulsed. Dried his skin when it ran with sweat. Who, now that Abe thought about it, had been right there, every time his fevered eyes had chanced to flitter open for a moment over the last days and nights. There was something so familiar about it all. Lying here in bed, with this man—this familiar man—by his side. Waking from a dream without end. They’d been here before, the two of them. What is your name?
And suddenly, like a ship enshrouded in fog catching the first faint sweep of the lighthouse beam, it came to him.
“Henry,” said Abe. “What have you done?”
Lincoln’s coffin is draped in bla
ck during a funeral procession in Columbus, Ohio—one of many stops made by the late president’s train on its journey to Springfield, Illinois. Henry would steal Abe’s body from the same coffin a few nights later.
Abe’s mortal body had died in the early morning hours of April 15th, but it was nearly a week before the late president’s funeral train departed Washington, D.C., on its way to Springfield, Illinois. The trip had taken thirteen days. Millions had turned out to mourn their fallen leader along the way, some waiting hours to shuffle past his coffin as he lay in state in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, some lining the railroad tracks before dawn, hoping to get a glimpse of history as it sped by, to give a last salute to the savior of their Union as he journeyed home. By the time he was laid to rest on May 4th, Abe’s body had been an empty vessel for three weeks.
On that warm, sunny afternoon, Henry had stood among the thousands in Oak Ridge Cemetery, waiting through the speeches and the prayers in the shade of his black parasol. And long after the mournful masses had marched back to Springfield on foot and by carriage, Henry remained. He stood alone as hot day became warm night, keeping watch over the padlocked iron door of a receiving vault—the temporary home of Abe’s coffin, which he shared with the casket of his son Willie, whose body had been brought on the train from Washington so that it could be interred beside his father. Henry stood there, mourning his fallen compatriot, wading through the memories of their tumultuous forty-year friendship. He’d read some of the scraps of paper that had been left by passing mourners at the foot of the iron gates that surrounded the vault, along with flowers and keepsakes. One of the notes had stirred him like no other. A single scribbled line, taken from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:
I am a foe to tyrants, and my country’s friend.
Henry had stared at those ten little words for the better part of an hour, his resolve deepening. Moments coming back to him as if rendered by the dreamy brushstrokes of Manet or Degas… Standing over Abe as a boy, pulling him from the clutches of death after his first ill-fated hunt. Standing in the woods outside New Salem, Illinois, trying to convince a young man who’d just lost his first love that the future held great things for him. Most men have no purpose but to exist, Abraham; to pass quietly through history as minor characters upon a stage they cannot even see. To be the playthings of tyrants. In the White House, the last time Henry had seen his friend, when the two of them had been at each other’s throats.
I couldn’t let it end that way. I imagined all the good that was left to be done. I imagined having the chance to finish what we’d begun. Even then, in death, I believed that it was his purpose to fight tyranny. And there was plenty of it left to fight, by God. To come so far—to bear the weight of a war on his shoulders, to pull a nation back together with his bare hands, only to be cut down at the hour of its splendid reunion. A hero who so often defied death in battle, only to have it ambush him in repose. This was a tragic ending worthy of Shakespeare. Yet unlike Shakespeare, I couldn’t find the moral in his death. Only senselessness. Waste. Looking back, I wonder what part my own guilt played in my decision. The fact that we’d parted on terrible terms. Perhaps all I wanted was a chance to make things right.
Whatever his reasons, Henry had broken into the tomb just before sunrise, and with no small effort, he’d spirited the body to a waiting carriage and then to a house on the corner of Eighth and Jackson Streets. Like many buildings and private homes in Springfield, it had been draped with black bunting as the city mourned its favorite son. But this house was different. A plaque beside the front door still read A. Lincoln.
I wanted it to be somewhere familiar, to ease the inevitable shock that comes with being pulled from eternal rest. It also had the added benefit of being sealed off for a period of official mourning—its shutters closed and heavy black drapes drawn inside. Darkness, privacy, and a sturdy bed were important when becoming a vampire.
Henry looked down at his old friend, his face caked with heavy makeup, which had begun to dry and crack. His lips had been set in a smile, one that, Henry noted, “Abe never would’ve made on his own.” Three weeks was by far the longest death that Henry—or any vampire, to his knowledge—had yet attempted to reverse. But there was reason to hope. Like anyone who read the papers, Henry knew that Abe had been arterially embalmed in Washington—his blood drained through his jugular, and his arteries filled with a mix of chemicals through a small incision in his thigh. This kept the walls of his arteries and veins moist and staved off the rot of death. Ironically, it was a practice that had only recently come into widespread use in the Civil War, and at Abe’s request—so that the bodies of fallen Union soldiers wouldn’t rot before their families had a chance to look upon them back home.
I left the body and ventured into town, where the streets were still crowded with travelers who’d come for the funeral—some of them having spent the night packed together on the floors of overbooked boardinghouses; others on the straw in stables. I made my way to Thomas Owen’s drugstore in Statehouse Square, where I sought the item I needed. But Mr. Owen didn’t carry it, and so I was forced to seek out a mortuary, where I convinced the undertaker to sell me a hollow needle and plunger.
Henry returned to the house, taking care not to be seen as he entered through a back door, and began what amounted to a re-embalming of the late president—opening Abe’s jugular and draining the embalming fluid into a pan, then drawing blood from his own veins and injecting it, one plunger-full at a time, into Abe’s.
Twice during this process, my own supply of blood became dangerously low, and I was forced to venture out and feed. Knowing that Abe would be unable to bear the thought of his resurrection coming at the expense of another’s man’s life, I fed on the blood of a horse in a nearby corral instead.
When Abe’s body would hold no more, Henry began to massage his heart, circulating the blood.
Hours passed. Nothing. It had been too long, I thought. My friend had ventured too far down the river Styx to turn back. I began to mourn him again. To contemplate a world without him in it. And then I saw his fingers—those long, weather-beaten fingers, which the embalmers had rendered perfectly straight—begin to slacken. Then twitch. Slowly, the rigor began to ease its grip on Abe’s gray, cold body. Breath, barely a whisper at first, moved in and out of his lungs. And then the sickness came, as it always did. The last, violent throes of living flesh giving way to dead. I sat by his side day and night, cleaning the black vomit from his face and the sheets when it came. Wiping his sweat-soaked brow. Holding him down by the shoulders when his shaking grew too intense, fearing that he might break his own neck. In the quieter moments, I read to him from a copy of Shakespeare’s Complete Works that I’d found in the downstairs parlor. For two days, I watched him. And then the fever broke. His eyelids fluttered, then opened. I watched him take in the room, unsure if he recognized it or not.
“Henry,” said Abe. “What have you done?”
Henry smiled down on him, relieved that his old friend’s mind had survived intact—at least intact enough to recognize a face and speak its name.
“Welcome back, Abraham.”
“What have you done?”
I took a hand mirror from the bedside table and handed it to him. The changes that I’d witnessed over three days now revealed themselves in a reflected instant. Age had retreated from his face. Gone were the deep lines that a life of heartache and worry had carved over the years, like glaciers across a plain. Gone was the hunch his tall frame had taken on in its later days, and the gray of his beard. His body was lean and strong again. His shoulders square, his skin smooth, and his eyes bright and sharp. Decades of hardship and wear, erased in a relative instant. Yet I knew, even then, that the real hardships lay ahead. The grief of his first kill. The loneliness of his first century of darkness. But I would ease his burden. I would be his companion in grief. His mentor in killing. His light in the dark.
Abe stared at himself for a time. From his expression, it was clear to He
nry that he was crying, though his eyes remained dry.
“One of the cosmic ironies of immortality,” said Henry. “We cannot cry, no matter how deep our sorrow. Though I suppose the same can be said of living men. Those who cause the most tears often shed the fewest.”
“We…”
Abe threw the mirror against the wall, shattering it. Henry remained seated, unflinching. The book in his lap.
“It is normal to grieve one’s own death,” he said.
Abe threw off his covers and rose to his bare feet—still wearing the shirt and trousers he’d been buried in.
He went for the drapes, flung them open, and was instantly repelled by the explosion of harsh sunlight. He cried out in pain and retreated to the corner of the room—shielding his eyes with his forearm. Where the sun had briefly fallen on his skin, there were now red, blistered burns. And even in the relative darkness of his corner, the light reflected off the walls continued to irritate his skin. I rose and closed the drapes. With the return of darkness, he lowered his arm, and the redness retreated at once—the blisters disappearing before his eyes. In moments, he was whole again.
“You’ll grow tolerant of the light in time,” said Henry.
Abe collapsed in the corner, his back to the wall, head in his hands. It had been a little over three years since they’d been in each other’s company, and they hadn’t parted friends.
“Henry… what have you done?”
I returned to my chair and took considerable time before answering. When I did, it was with a calm, clear voice. There was no need to agitate him any more than he already was. It was a shock, to be sure. The changes to one’s body. To the way one perceives the world. The untrained mind, filled with disconnected whispers that can’t yet be shut out. And the hunger. The threat of a great hunger, merely a suggestion at first. A dark cloud rolling over a distant hilltop. Speaking from experience, it’s no easy thing to wake from one’s own death, especially when one wakes in poor company.