Seth Grahame-Smith: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

If you cannot meet any of these conditions for any reason, please stop and wait to be contacted by me. However, if you agree, then you may proceed.

I believe it is your purpose to do so.

—H

Well, shit… there was no way I wasn’t opening it now .

I tore the paper off, uncovering a bundle of letters held tightly by a red rubber band, and ten leather-bound books. I opened the book at the top of the pile. As I did, a lock of blonde hair fell onto the desk. I picked it up, studied it, and twirled it in my fingers as I read a random sliver from the pages it’d been pressed between:

… wish I could but vanish from this earth, for there is no love left in it. She has been taken from me, and with her, all hope of a…

I skimmed through the rest of the first book, spellbound. Somewhere upstairs, a woman was listing off the names of counties. Pages and pages—every inch filled with tightly packed handwriting. With dates like November 6th, 1835; June 3rd, 1841. With drawings and lists. With names like Speed, Berry, and Salem. With a word that kept showing up, over and over:

Vampire.

The other books were the same. Only the dates and penmanship changed. I skimmed them all.

… there that I saw, for the first time, men and children sold as… precautions, for we knew that Baltimore was teeming with… was a sin I could not forgive. I was forced to demote the…

Two things were obvious: they were all written by the same person, and they were all very, very old. Beyond that, I had no idea what they were, or what would’ve compelled Henry to lend them to me. And then I came across the first page of the first book, and those seven absurd words: This is the Journal of Abraham Lincoln . I laughed out loud.

It all made sense. I was amazed. Completely, kicked-in-the-teeth amazed. Not because I was holding the Great Emancipator’s long-lost journal in my hands, but because I had so thoroughly misjudged a man. I’d taken Henry’s quietness to mean he was reclusive. I’d taken his fleeting interest in my life to mean he was outgoing. But now it was obvious. The dude was clearly out of his mind. Either that, or messing with mine. Playing some kind of hoax—the kind that rich guys with too much time on their hands play. But then, it couldn’t be a hoax, could it? Who would go through this much trouble? Or was it—was this Henry’s own abandoned novel? An elaborately packaged writing project? Now I felt terrible. Yes. Yes, of course that’s what it was. I looked through the books again, expecting to see little hints of the twenty-first century. Little cracks in the armor. There weren’t any—at least as far as I could tell on first glance. Besides, something kept nagging at me: if this was a pet writing project, why the eleven names and addresses? Why had Henry asked me to write about the books, instead of asking me to rewrite them? The needle began to lean toward “crazy” again. Was it possible? Did he really believe that these ten little books were the—no, he couldn’t possibly believe that. Right?

I couldn’t wait to tell my wife. Couldn’t wait to share the sheer insanity of this with someone else. In a long line of small town psychos, this guy took the cake. I stood, gathered the books and letters, crushed the cigarette under my heel, and turned to—

Something was standing six inches from me.

I staggered backward and tripped over the folding chair, falling and banging the back of my head against the corner of the old tanker desk. My eyes were thrown out of focus. I could already feel the warmth of the blood running through my hair. Something leaned over me. Its eyes were a pair of black marbles. Its skin a translucent collage of pulsing blue veins. And its mouth—its mouth could barely contain its wet, glassy fangs.

It was Henry.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. “I just need you to understand.”

He lifted me off the ground by my collar. I could feel the blood running down the back of my neck.

I fainted.

Have a good one. See you next time .

III

I’ve been instructed not to get into the specifics of where Henry took me that night, or what he showed me. Suffice it to say it made me physically ill. Not from any horrors I may have witnessed, but from the guilt that I’d been a party to them, willing or not.

I was with him for less than an hour. In that short time, my understanding of the world was torn down to its foundation. The way I thought about death, and space, and God… all irrevocably changed. In that short time, I came to believe—in no uncertain terms—something that would’ve sounded insane only an hour before:

Vampires exist.

I didn’t sleep for a week—first from terror, then excitement. I stayed late at the store every night, poring over Abraham Lincoln’s books and letters. Checking their incredible claims against the hard “facts” of heralded Lincoln biographies. I papered the basement walls with printouts of old photographs. Time lines. Family trees. I wrote into the early morning hours.

For the first two months, my wife was concerned. For the second two she was suspicious. By the sixth month we’d separated. I feared for my safety. My children’s safety. My sanity. I had so many questions, but Henry was nowhere to be found. Eventually I worked up the courage to interview the eleven “individuals” on his list. Some were merely reluctant. Others hostile. But with their help (begrudging as it was), I slowly began to stitch together the hidden history of vampires in America. Their role in the birth, growth, and near death of our nation. And the one man who saved that nation from their tyranny.

For some seventeen months, I sacrificed everything for those ten leather-bound books. That bundle of letters held tightly by a red rubber band. In some ways they were the best months of my life. Every morning, I woke up on that inflatable mattress in the store basement with a purpose. With the knowledge that I was doing something truly important, even if I was doing it completely, desperately alone. Even if I’d lost my mind.

Vampires exist. And Abraham Lincoln was one of the greatest vampire hunters of his age. His journal—beginning in his twelfth year and continuing to the day of his assassination—is an altogether astonishing, heartbreaking, and revolutionary document. One that casts new light on many of the seminal events in American history and adds immeasurable complexity to a man already thought to be unusually complex.

There are more than 15,000 books about Lincoln. His childhood. His mental health. His sexuality. His views on race, religion, and litigation. Most of them contain a great deal of truth. Some have even hinted at the existence of a “secret diary” and an “obsession with the occult.” Yet not one of them contains a single word concerning the central struggle of his life. A struggle that eventually spilled onto the battlefields of the Civil War.

It turns out that the towering myth of Honest Abe, the one ingrained in our earliest grade school memories, is inherently dishonest. Nothing more than a patchwork of half-truths and omissions.

What follows nearly ruined my life.

What follows, at last, is the truth.

—Seth Grahame-Smith

Rhinebeck, New York

January 2010

PART I

BOY

ONE

Exceptional Child

In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares.

—Abraham Lincoln, in a letter to Fanny McCullogh

December 23rd, 1862