Seth Grahame-Smith - Abraham Lincoln - Vampire Hunter

This is the Journal of Abraham Lincoln.

9 February 1820—I have been given this book as a gift for my elevnth [sic] birthday by my father and stepmother, who is named Mrs. Sarah Bush Lincoln. I will endevor [sic] to use it daily for the purpose of improving my letters.

—Abraham Lincoln

II

One early spring night, not long after those words were carefully composed, Thomas called his son outside to sit by the fire. He was drunk. Abe knew this, even before being summoned to sit on a stump and warm himself. His father only made a fire outside when he felt like getting particularly plastered.

“I ever tell you about your granddaddy?”

It was one of his favorite stories to tell when he was drunk: the story of witnessing his father’s brutal murder as a boy, an event that left him deeply scarred. Unfortunately the comforts of Sigmund Freud’s couch were still decades away. In its absence, Thomas did what any self-respecting, emotionally crippled frontiersman did to deal with his troubles: he got blind, stinking drunk and hung them out to dry. If there was any consolation for Abe, it was this: his father was a gifted storyteller, with a knack for making every detail come alive. He would mimic accents, mime actions. Change the tenor of his voice and the rhythm of his delivery. He was a natural performer.

Unfortunately, Abe had seen this particular performance many, many times. He could recite the story word for word: how his grandfather (also named Abraham) had been plowing a field near his Kentucky home. How eight-year-old Thomas and his brothers had watched him toil in the heat of that May afternoon, turning over the soil. How they’d been startled by the yells of a Shawnee war party as it sprang out of hiding and attacked. How little Thomas took cover behind a tree and watched them beat his father’s brains in with a stone hammer. Cut his throat with a tomahawk. He could describe it all—even his grandmother’s face as young Thomas relayed the news after running home.

But that wasn’t the version Thomas told him now.

The story began as it always had, in the heat wave of May 1786. Thomas was eight years old. He and two of his older brothers, Josiah and Mordecai, had accompanied their father to a four-acre clearing in the woods, not far from the farmhouse they’d helped him build some years before. Thomas watched his father guide the small plow as it scraped along behind Ben, an aging draft horse that had been with the family since before the war. The blistering sun had finally dipped below the horizon, leaving the Ohio River Valley in soft, blue-leaning light, but it was still “hotter than a woodstove in hell,” and humid to boot. Abraham Sr. worked without his shirt, letting the air cool his long, sinewy torso. Young Thomas rode on Ben’s back, working the reins while his brothers followed behind, broadcasting seed. Waiting for the welcome clang of the supper bell.

So far Abe knew every word. Next would come the part where they’d been startled by the war cries of the Shawnee. The part where the old draft horse reared up and threw Thomas to the ground. Where he ran into the woods and watched them gore his father to death. But the Shawnee never came. Not this time. This was a new story. One that Abe paraphrased in a letter to Joshua Speed more than twenty years later.

“The truth,” father told me in a half whisper, “is that your granddaddy wasn’t killed by any man.”

The shirtless Abraham had been working the outer edge of his clearing, right up against the tree line, when there was “a great rustling and cracking of branches” from the nearby woods, no more than twenty yards from where he and his boys worked.

“Daddy told me to pull up on the reins while he gave a listen. It was probably nothing but a few deer making their way, but we’d seen our share of black bears, too.”

They’d also heard the stories. Reports of Shawnee war parties preying on unsuspecting settlers—killing white women and children without shame. Burning homes. Scalping men alive. This was still contested land. Indians were everywhere. There was no such thing as an excess of caution.

“The rustling came from a different part of the woods now. Whatever it was, it wasn’t any deer, and it wasn’t alone. Daddy cussed himself for leaving his flintlock at home and started unhitching Ben. He wasn’t about to let the devils have his horse. He sent my brothers off—Mordecai to fetch his gun, Josiah to get help from Hughes’s Station.” *

The rustling changed now. The treetops began to bend, like something was jumping across them, one to the other.

“Daddy hurried with the straps. ‘Shawnee,’ he whispered. My heart just about thumped a hole in my chest at the sound of it. I followed those treetops with my eyes, waiting for a pack of wild savages to run out of the woods, whooping and hollering and waving their hatchets. I could see their red faces staring at me. I could feel my hair being pulled tight… my scalp being clipped off.”

Abraham was still struggling with the hitch when Thomas saw something white leap from a treetop “some fifty feet up.” Something the size and shape of a man.

“It was a ghost. The way it flew above the earth. The way its white body rippled as it moved through the air. A Shawnee ghost, come to take our souls for trespassing.”

Thomas watched it soar toward them, too frightened to yell. Too frightened to warn his father that it was coming. Right above him. Right now.

“I saw a glint of white and heard a shriek that would’ve woke the dead a mile off. Old Ben spooked, threw me in the dirt, and took off running wild, the plow hanging on by one strap, bouncing around behind him. I looked up where Daddy’d been standing. He was gone.”

Thomas struggled to his feet with a head full of stars and (though he wouldn’t realize it for hours) a broken wrist. The ghost stood fifteen or twenty feet away with its back to him. Standing over his father, patient and calm. Glaring at him like a God. Reveling in his helplessness.

“He wasn’t no ghost. No Shawnee, either. Even from the back, I could tell this stranger wasn’t much more than a boy—no bigger than my brothers. His shirt looked like it’d been made for somebody twice his size. White as ivory. Half tucked into his striped gray trousers. His skin was damn near the same shade, and the back of his neck was crisscrossed with little blue lines. There he stood, with not a twitch or breath to set him apart from a statue.”

Abraham Sr. was barely forty-two years old. Good genes had made him tall and broad shouldered. Honest work had made him lean and muscular. He’d never seen the losing end of a fight, and he sure as hell wouldn’t see it now. He got to his feet (“slow, like his ribs were broke”), squared his body, and clenched his fists. He was hurt, but that could wait. First, he was going to knock this little son of a—

“Daddy’s jaw went slack when he got a look at the boy’s face. Whatever he saw scared the hell out of him.”

“What in the name of Chr—?”

The boy swung at Abraham’s head. It missed me. Abraham took a step back and lifted his fists, but stopped short of throwing a punch. It missed. He felt a stinging on the left side of his face. Didn’t it? A tingling under his eye. He lifted the tip of his index finger to his face… the slightest touch. Blood began to run down in sheets, pouring out of the razor-thin slice that ran from his ear to his mouth.

It didn’t miss.

These are the last seconds of my life.

Abraham felt his head snap backward. Felt his eye socket shatter. Light everywhere. He felt the blood running from his nostrils. Another blow. Another. His son screaming somewhere. Why doesn’t he run? His jaw broken. His teeth knocked loose. The fists and the screaming growing farther away. To sleep now… never to wake.