Abraham Lincoln_ Vampire Hunter - Seth Grahame-Smith [19]
They stood by the outhouse, lest their whispers wake anyone in the cabin. Barts asked him one more time: “Can you have my money in three days?” Thomas hung his head again. “I cannot.” Barts smiled and looked away. “Then…”
He turned back. His face was gone—a demon’s in its place. A window into hell. Black eyes and white skin and teeth as long and sharp as a wolf’s God strike me down if I lie.
“… I’ll take it in other ways.”
Abe stared at his father through the fire.
Dread. Dread filled my stomach. My arms and legs. I was faint. Sick. I wished to hear no more of this. Not tonight. Not ever. But father could not stop. Not when he was so close to the end. The one that I had already guessed, but dared not believe.
“It was a vampire that took my daddy from me…”
“Stop…”
“Who took the Sparr—”
“Enough!”
“And it was a vampire who took your—”
“Go to hell!”
Thomas wept.
The very sight of him awakened some heretofore unknown hatred. Hatred of my father. Of all things. He revolted me. I ran into the night for fear of what I might say; what I might do if I were in his presence a moment longer. My anger kept me away for three days and nights. I slept in the barns and outbuildings of neighbors. Stole eggs and ears of corn. Walked until my legs shook from exhaustion. Wept at the thought of my mother. They had taken her from me. Father and Jack Barts. I hated myself for being too small to protect her. I hated my father for telling me such impossible, unspeakable things. And yet I knew they were the truth. I cannot explain how I knew with such certainty, but I did. The way my father had hushed us when we spun vampire yarns. The screams that had carried on the wind at night. My mother’s fevered whispers about “looking the devil in the eyes.” Father was a drunk. An indolent, loveless drunk. But he was no liar. During those three days of anger and grief, I gave into madness and admitted something to myself: I believed in vampires. I believed in them, and I hated them to the last.
When he finally came home (to a frightened stepmother and silent father), Abe didn’t say a word. He made straight for his journal and wrote down a single sentence. One that would radically alter the course of his life, and bring a fledgling nation to the brink of collapse.
I hereby resolve to kill every vampire in America.
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
III
Sarah had hoped Abe would read to them after supper. It was getting late, but there was a good fire going, and more than enough time for a few pages of Jonah’s adventures or Joseph’s coat of many colors. She loved the way Abe read them. Such life. Such expression and clarity. He had a wisdom well beyond his years. Manners and sweetness seldom found in a child. He was, as she would tell William Herndon after her stepson’s assassination, “the best boy I ever saw or ever hope to see.”
But her Bible was nowhere to be found. Had she lent it to a neighbor and forgotten? Had she left it at Mr. Gregson’s? She looked everywhere. She looked in vain. Sarah would never see her Bible again.
Abe had burned it.
It was the rash act of an angry child, one that he would live to regret (though never enough, it seems, to tell his stepmother the truth). Years later he would attempt to explain himself:
How could I worship a God who would permit [vampires] to exist? A God that had allowed my mother to fall prey to their evil? * Either He was powerless to stop it, or He was complicit in it. In either case, He was undeserving of my praise. In either case, He was my enemy. Such is the mind of an angry eleven-year-old boy. One that sees the world as a choice between two disparate certainties. One that believes a thing “must” be this way or that. I am ashamed that it happened, yes. But I would not compound that shame by pretending that it did not.
With his faith in ruins, eleven-year-old Abe took his resolution a step further in this undated manifesto (c. August 1820):
Henceforth my life shall be one of rigerous [sic] study and devotion. I shall become learned in all things. I shall become a