Abraham Lincoln_ Vampire Hunter - Seth Grahame-Smith [116]
John Wilkes Booth would “make a bad end.”
Seven years later, the first part of her grim fortune came true.
Of the six young women Booth took back to his Richmond boardinghouse that night, only one remained by morning. He’d sent the others scurrying out the door before sunrise, their hair a mess, clothing bundled in their arms. After the fog of whiskey had lifted, he’d found them to be nothing more than the same silly, chatty, opportunistic girls who greeted him at every stage door in every city. He had no use for them beyond what had already transpired.
The girl in bed with him, however, was something entirely different. She was a small, dark-haired, ivory-skinned beauty of twenty or so, but carried herself with the calm confidence of a much older woman. There was a slyness to her, and though she seldom spoke, when she did it was with humor and wisdom. They made love for hours at a time. No woman—not Mary Surratt or his countless stage door conquests—had ever made Booth feel like this. He was drawn to her in a way he’d only been drawn to the theater.
Every woman before her has been a promise unfulfilled.
In moments of rest, Booth filled the silences with stories of his youth: the word “country” in the fire… the gypsy… the inescapable feeling that he was destined for greatness—something more than fame or money could provide. The ivory-skinned girl placed her lips against his ear and told him of a way that he could achieve that greatness. Perhaps he believed her; perhaps he was merely humoring his young lover—but at some point during that second night, John Wilkes Booth willingly drank her blood.
For the next two days, he suffered through the worst, and last, sickness of his life. He drenched his sheets in sweat; suffered horrific visions; convulsed so violently that the legs of his bed clattered against the floor.
Three days after he’d last been seen in public, Booth awoke. He rose and stood in the center of the room—alone. The ivory-skinned girl was gone. He would never learn her name; never see her again. He didn’t care. He’d never felt more alive than he did at this moment; never seen or heard with such clarity.
She spoke the truth.
Booth had craved immortality since he was a child. Now it was his. He’d always known that some special fate awaited him. Here it was. He would be the greatest actor of his generation… of every generation. His name would be renowned in ways that Edwin and Junius could only imagine. He would grace the theaters of the world; watch empires crumble to dust; commit every word of Shakespeare to memory. He was the master of time and space. Booth couldn’t help but smile as another thought crossed his mind. The old gypsy was right. He’d died young, just as she said he would. And now he would live forever.
I am a vampire, he thought. God be praised.
Immortality, however, proved somewhat disappointing at first. Like so many vampires, Booth had been left to learn the hard lessons of death on his own. There was no mentor to explain the thousand whispers that now filled his head when he faced an audience. No shopkeeper to suggest the right pair of dark glasses, or the proper means of removing blood from the sleeve of an overcoat. When his first cravings came, crashing against his mind in waves, he’d wandered the dark streets of Richmond for hours, following endless wobbling drunks down endless winding alleys, never quite working up the nerve to strike.
When the cravings became so severe that he felt himself slipping into madness, Booth found his nerve—but not in Richmond. Twenty days after being made immortal, he mounted his horse after dark and set off for a plantation in nearby Charles City. A wealthy tobacco farmer named Harrison had been to see his Hamlet and invited the actor to dine the following week. Booth meant to take him up on