Seth Grahame-Smith - Abraham Lincoln - Vampire Hunter

“Why haven’t you killed me?”

It sickened me to look at him. I cared not for his kindness. I cared not that he had saved my life. Treated my wounds and fed me. I cared not who he was. Only what he was.

“And pray, what reason have I to kill you?”

“You are a vampire.”

“And so the rest of me is written? Have I not the mind of a man? Have I not the same needs? To be fed and clothed and comforted? Judge us not equally, Abraham.”

Now it was I who could not help but laugh.

“You speak as one who does not murder to be ‘fed’! Whose ‘needs’ do not take mothers from their children!”

“Ah,” said Henry. “And it was one of my kind who took her from you?”

All traces of reason left me. There was something about the ease with which he spoke of it. The callousness. The madman returned. I struck at him, knocking the soup bowl to the stone floor in the process. Shattering it. I would have torn his face off but for the bindings around my wrists.

“Never speak of her! NEVER!”

Henry waited until my outburst had passed, then knelt on the floor and collected the pieces of the shattered bowl.

“You must forgive me,” said Henry. “It has been quite a long time since I was your age. I forget the passions of youth. I shall endeavor to choose my words more carefully.”

The last of the pieces in his hands, he stood and made to leave, but paused in the doorway.

“Ask yourself… are we so unalike, you and I? Are we not both unwilling servants of my condition? Did we not both lose something significant to it? You a mother? I a life?”

With this he disappeared, leaving me to my anger. I shouted after him: “Why haven’t you killed me!” His answer came calmly from the next room. “Some people, Abraham, are just too interesting to kill.”

IV

Abe healed with each passing day. He took food willingly, and listened to Henry read Shakespeare with increasing interest.

Though the sight of him still held the power to incite anger or apprehension, this power grew weaker as my body grew stronger. He loosened my bindings so that I could feed myself. Left books by my bed so that I could read alone. The more I came to know of his mind, the more I began to consider the possibility that he had no murderous designs on me. We spoke of books. Of the great cities of the world. We even spoke of my mother. Mostly, we spoke of vampires. On this subject I had more questions than words to ask them with. I wanted to know everything. For four long years, I had stumbled in the dark—relying on assumptions, and hoping that Providence alone would bring me face-to-face with a vampire. Here, at last, was my chance to learn everything: How they could live on blood alone. Whether they had a soul. How they came to exist at all.

Unfortunately, Henry didn’t have the answers to any of these questions. Like most vampires, he had spent a good deal of time obsessing over his “lineage” in an attempt to uncover “the first vampire,” hoping the discovery would lead to some deeper truth, perhaps even a cure. And like all before him, he had failed. Even the most resourceful vampires are only able to go back two or three generations. “This,” explained Henry, “is a product of our solitary nature.”

In truth, vampires rarely socialize—and almost never with their own kind. The scarcity of easy blood breeds vicious competition, and their nomadic lifestyle makes it difficult to form lasting bonds. In rare cases, vampires might work in pairs or packs—but these alliances are usually born of desperation, and almost always temporary.

“As to our ancestry,” said Henry, “I am afraid that it shall forever remain shrouded in darkness. There are some who believe that we began as a wicked spirit or demon, passed from one unfortunate soul to the next. A curse propagated through the blood. Others believe that we owe our parentage to the devil himself. And there are more still, myself among them, who have come to believe that our ‘curse’ never began at all—that vampires and man are merely different animals. Two species that have existed side by side since Adam and Eve were expelled from paradise. One race gifted with superior ability and length of life; the other more fragile and fleeting, but gifted with superior numbers. The only certainty is that we shall never be certain.”

When it came to the experience of being a vampire, however, Henry was endlessly knowledgeable. He had a gift for explaining his condition in a way that I could grasp at such a young age. A gift for humanizing the notion of immortality.

“Living men are bound by time,” he said. “Thus, their lives have an urgency. This gives them ambition. Makes them choose those things that are most important; cling more tightly to that which they hold dear. Their lives have seasons, and rites of passage, and consequences. And ultimately, an end. But what of a life with no urgency? What then of ambition? What then of love?

“The first hundred years are exciting ones, yes. The world is one of infinite indulgence. We master the art of feeding—learning where to cast our net and how best to enjoy our catch. We travel the world, beholding the moonlit wonders of civilization; amassing small fortunes by stealing valuables from our countless victims. We fulfill every imaginable desire of the flesh… oh, it’s all great fun.

“After a hundred years of conquest, our bodies are full to the point of bursting—but our minds have been left to starve. By now, most of us have built a resistance to the ill effects of sunlight. The world of the living, therefore, is no longer beyond our reach—and we are free to experience all that darkness had kept from us in our first century. We pore through libraries, dissecting the classics; see the world’s great works of art with our own eyes. We take up music and painting, write poetry. We return to our most beloved cities to experience them anew. Our fortunes grow vaster. Our powers greater.

“By the third century, however, the intoxication of eternity has worn rather thin. Every imaginable desire has been fulfilled. The thrill of taking a life experienced again and again and again. And though we have all the comforts of the world, we find no comfort in them. It is in this century, Abraham, that most of us turn to suicide—either by starving ourselves, staking ourselves through the heart, devising some method of taking our own heads, or, in the most desperate cases, by burning ourselves alive. Only the very strongest of us—those possessing exceptional will, and driven by a timeless purpose—survive into our fourth or fifth centuries and beyond.”

That a man who had been freed from the inescapable fate of death would choose it for himself—this I did not understand, and I told Henry as much.

“Without death,” he answered, “life is meaningless. It is a story that can never be told. A song that can never be sung. For how would one finish it?”

Soon Abe was well enough to sit up in bed, and Henry was comfortable enough to do away with his restraints altogether. Having failed to get answers to his more general vampire questions, Abe turned to a bottomless well of specifics. On sunlight:

“When we are newly made, the slightest sunlight blisters our skin and renders us ill, much the same way an excess of sunlight can sicken a man. Over time we become resistant to these effects, and are able to walk freely during the day—so long as we stray from harsh light. Our eyes, however, never adjust.”

On garlic:

“I’m afraid it merely makes you easier to perceive from a distance.”

On sleeping in coffins:

“I cannot speak for others, but I am quite comfortable in a bed.”