Abraham Lincoln_ Vampire Hunter - Seth Grahame-Smith [28]
“Living men are bound by time,” he said. “Thus, their lives have an urgency. This gives them ambition. Makes them choose those things that are most important; cling more tightly to that which they hold dear. Their lives have seasons, and rites of passage, and consequences. And ultimately, an end. But what of a life with no urgency? What then of ambition? What then of love?
“The first hundred years are exciting ones, yes. The world is one of infinite indulgence. We master the art of feeding—learning where to cast our net and how best to enjoy our catch. We travel the world, beholding the moonlit wonders of civilization; amassing small fortunes by stealing valuables from our countless victims. We fulfill every imaginable desire of the flesh… oh, it’s all great fun.
“After a hundred years of conquest, our bodies are full to the point of bursting—but our minds have been left to starve. By now, most of us have built a resistance to the ill effects of sunlight. The world of the living, therefore, is no longer beyond our reach—and we are free to experience all that darkness had kept from us in our first century. We pore through libraries, dissecting the classics; see the world’s great works of art with our own eyes. We take up music and painting, write poetry. We return to our most beloved cities to experience them anew. Our fortunes grow vaster. Our powers greater.
“By the third century, however, the intoxication of eternity has worn rather thin. Every imaginable desire has been fulfilled. The thrill of taking a life experienced again and again and again. And though we have all the comforts of the world, we find no comfort in them. It is in this century, Abraham, that most of us turn to suicide—either by starving ourselves, staking ourselves through the heart, devising some method of taking our own heads, or, in the most desperate cases, by burning ourselves alive. Only the very strongest of us—those possessing exceptional will, and driven by a timeless purpose—survive into our fourth or fifth centuries and beyond.”
That a man who had been freed from the inescapable fate of death would choose it for himself—this I did not understand, and I told Henry as much.
“Without death,” he answered, “life is meaningless. It is a story that can never be told. A song that can never be sung. For how would one finish it?”
Soon Abe was well enough to sit up in bed, and Henry was comfortable enough to do away with his restraints altogether. Having failed to get answers to his more general vampire questions, Abe turned to a bottomless well of specifics. On sunlight:
“When we are newly made, the slightest sunlight blisters our skin and renders us ill, much the same way an excess of sunlight can sicken a man. Over time we become resistant to these effects, and are able to walk freely during the day—so long as we stray from harsh light. Our eyes, however, never adjust.”
On garlic:
“I’m afraid it merely makes you easier to perceive from a distance.”
On sleeping in coffins:
“I cannot speak for others, but I am quite comfortable in a bed.”
When Abe reached the question of how one becomes a vampire, Henry paused.
“I shall tell you how I came to be one.”
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
V
Abe committed the following to his journal on August 30th, 1825, shortly after his return to Little Pigeon Creek.
What follows is the story exactly as Henry related it to me. I have neither embellished, nor withheld, nor verified any part of it. I merely duplicate it here so that some record of it exists. “On 22nd July, in the year 1587,” Henry began, “three ships carrying 117 English souls landed on northern Roanoke Island, in what is today called North Carolina.”
Among this teeming mass of men, women, and children was a twenty-three-year-old blacksmith’s apprentice named Henry O. Sturges, average in height and build, with long, dark hair to the middle of his back. He was joined by his new wife, Edeva.
“She was but a day younger and an inch