Seth Grahame-Smith: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

At three minutes before four o’clock, the man entered the building and gave his name to one of the butlers.

“Joshua Speed, to see the president.”

A lifetime of war had finally taken its toll on Abe. He’d felt increasingly weak since Willie’s death. Clouded and unsure. The lines in his face were deeper, and the skin beneath his eyes sagged so as to make him appear forever exhausted. Mary was nearly always depressed, and her rare moments of levity were spent on frenzied fits of decorating and redecorating, or on séances to “commune” with her beloved Eddy and Willie. She and Abe hardly spoke beyond simple civilities. Sometime between April 3rd and April 5th, during his journey downriver to inspect the fallen city of Richmond, the president scribbled the following poem in the margins of his journal.

Melancholy,

my old friend,

visits frequent,

once again.

Desperate for distraction and companionship, Abe invited his old friend and fellow vampire hunter to spend a night at the White House. Upon being notified of Speed’s arrival, Abe politely excused himself from a meeting and hurried into the reception room. Speed recalled Abe’s entrance in a letter to fellow hunter William Seward after the president’s death.

Placing his right hand upon my shoulder, the president paused momentarily as our faces met. I daresay he found mine surprised and saddened, for when I studied him, I saw a frailty that I had never encountered before. Gone was the broad-shouldered giant who could drive an ax clean through a vampire’s middle. Gone were the smiling eyes and confident air. In their place was a hunched, gaunt gentleman whose skin had taken on a sickly pallor, and whose features belonged to a man twenty years his senior. “My dear Speed,” he said, and took me into his arms.

The two hunters dined alone, Mary having confined herself to bed with a headache. After dinner, they retired to Abe’s office, where they remained well into the early morning hours, laughing and reminiscing as if they were above the store in Springfield again. They spoke of their hunting days; of the war; of the rumors that vampires were fleeing America in droves. But most of all, they talked of nothing: their families; their businesses; the miracle of photography.

It was precisely as I had hoped. My troubles were distant, my thoughts quieted, and I felt something like my old self again—if only for those ephemeral hours.

Sometime well after midnight, after Abe had kept his friend laughing with his bottomless well of anecdotes, he told him about a dream. A dream that had been troubling him for days. In one of his final journal entries, Lincoln recorded it for posterity.

There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along… I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. “Who is dead in the White House?” I demanded of one of the soldiers, “The president,” was his answer; “he was killed by an assassin.” Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which woke me from my dream. I slept no more that night.

II

John Wilkes Booth loathed sunlight. It irritated his skin; overwhelmed his eyes. It made the fat, pink faces of boastful Northerners blinding as they passed him on the street, crowing about Union victories, celebrating the end of the “rebellion.” You have no idea what this war is about . The twenty-six-year-old had always preferred the darkness—even before he became its servant. His home had always been the stage. Its braided ropes and velvet curtains. Its warm, gaslight glow. Theater had been the center of his life, and it was a theater he entered just before noon to collect his mail. There would no doubt be letters from admiring fans—perhaps someone who had witnessed his legendary Marc Antony in New York, or thrilled to his more recent Pescara in The Apostate , performed on the very boards now beneath his boots.

The backstage loading door had been opened to allow daylight in, as had the exits in the rear of the house, but Ford’s Theater remained mostly dark. The first and second balconies were draped in shadow, and every time Booth’s heel landed on the stage, the resulting echoes filled the emptiness. There was no place more pleasing—more natural to him than this. Booth would often pass the daylight hours in darkened theaters, sleeping on a catwalk, reading in an upper balcony by candlelight, or rehearsing for an audience of ghosts. An empty theater is a promise . Isn’t that what they said? An empty theater is a promise unfulfilled . In a few hours, everything around him would be light and noise. Laughter and applause. Colorful people packed together in their colorful finery. Tonight, the promise would be fulfilled. And then, after the curtain came down and the gaslights were snuffed out, there would be darkness again. That was the beauty of it. That was theater.

Booth noticed a pair of men working in the stage left boxes, about ten feet above his head. They were removing the partition between two smaller boxes in order to make a single large one, no doubt for a person of some import. He recognized one of the stagehands as Edmund Spangler, a callused, red-faced old acquaintance and frequent employee. “And who are to be your honored guests, Spangler?” Booth asked. “The president and first lady, sir—accompanied by General and Mrs. Grant.”

Booth hurried out of the theater without another word. He never collected his mail.

There were friends to be contacted, plans to be drawn up, weapons to be readied—and so little time to do it all. So little time, but such an opportunity! He made straight for Mary Surratt’s boardinghouse.

Mary, a plain, plump, dark-haired widow, was Booth’s former lover and an ardent Southern sympathizer. She’d met him years before, when he’d been a guest at her family’s tavern in Maryland. Though fourteen years his senior, she’d fallen passionately in love with the young actor, and the two had carried on an affair. After her husband died, Mary sold the tavern and moved to Washington, where she opened a small boardinghouse on H Street. Booth was a frequent guest—but in recent years, he’d seemed less interested in “matters of the flesh.” Mary’s feelings for him, however, remained unchanged. So when Booth asked her to ride out to the old tavern and tell its current owner, John Lloyd, to “make ready the shooting irons,” she didn’t hesitate. Booth had left a cache of weapons with Lloyd weeks before, in preparation for a failed plot to kidnap Lincoln and exchange him for Confederate prisoners. Now he would use the same weapons to take a more direct approach.

Mary’s love for Booth would prove her undoing. For delivering his message, she would hang three months later.

While Mary was on her fatal errand, Booth visited the homes of Lewis Powell and George Atzerodt in quick succession. Both had been involved in his failed kidnapping plot, and both would be needed to carry out the audacious plan that was still taking shape in his head. Atzerodt, an older, rough-looking German immigrant and carriage repairman, was an old acquaintance of Booth’s. The boyishly handsome Powell, not yet twenty-two years old, was a former rebel soldier, member of the Confederate Secret Service, and friend of the Surratts. A meeting was arranged for seven that evening. Booth gave no reason for it.