Abraham Lincoln_ Vampire Hunter - Seth Grahame-Smith [39]
III
Abraham Lincoln and Edgar Allan Poe were born within weeks of each other. Both lost their mothers as children. Otherwise, their upbringings couldn’t have been more different.
After his mother’s death, Poe had been taken in by a wealthy merchant, John Allan (who dealt in slaves, among other commodities). Whisked away from his native Boston, he’d been thoroughly educated in some of England’s finest schools. He’d seen the wonders of Europe that Abe could only read about in books. Around the time Abe swore his vengeance against vampires and staked Jack Barts through the heart, Edgar Allan Poe returned to America, settling with his adoptive father in Virginia and enjoying all the luxuries associated with belonging to one of its wealthiest families. Poe had everything Abe could ever want: The finest education. The finest homes. More books than he could count. A father with no want of ambition.
But he and Abe were equally miserable creatures.
As a first-year student at the University of Virginia, Poe drank and gambled away every penny his foster father sent him, until John Allan finally cut him off. Enraged and abandoned, he fled Virginia for Boston and enlisted in the army under the name Edgar A. Perry, loading artillery shells by day, and writing ever-darker stories and poems by candlelight. It was here, while stationed in the city of his birth, that Edgar Allan Poe met his first vampire.
Using his own money, Poe published a short collection of poems, identifying himself only as “A Bostonian” on its cover (for fear of being mocked by his fellow enlisted men). Of the fifty he paid to have printed, fewer than twenty sold. Notwithstanding this poor reception, one reader saw a particular genius in Poe’s collection, and bribed its printer to learn the author’s true identity. “It was shortly [after this] that I was visited upon by a Mr. Guy de Vere—a widower of considerable means. He explained how he had come to learn my name, and that he had been much affected by my work. He then demanded to know what a vampire was doing serving in the army.”
Guy de Vere was convinced that only a vampire could have written poems with such an outlook on death and grief. Poems of such darkness and beauty.
“He was surprised, then, to find a living man their creator. I was likewise surprised to find myself speaking to a man who was no longer living.”
Poe was endlessly fascinated by the stately, bloodsucking de Vere, and de Vere by the gloomy, brilliant Poe. The two struck up a tenuous friendship, much as Henry and Abe had done. But Poe wasn’t interested in learning about vampires to better hunt them—he wanted to know about the experience of living in darkness, of moving beyond death, so that he could better write about it. De Vere was all too happy to oblige (with the understanding that Poe would never reveal his identity in print). *
Several months after making de Vere’s acquaintance, Poe’s regiment was assigned to Fort Moultrie in South Carolina. With no city to satisfy his appetite for culture, and no means of satisfying his thirst for further vampire knowledge, the army suddenly seemed a prison.
Therefore he had decided to grant himself an “unofficial leave” and come to New Orleans for the stated purpose of “studying vampires”—for de Vere had insisted there was “not a better place in America to do so.” Judging by the number of times he filled and emptied his whiskey glass, he had also come to drink himself to death. We sat that evening in the saloon near Mrs. Laveau’s. Allen Gentry had gone off to “consort with ladies of a certain character,” leaving us free to talk on that subject we enjoyed most, but dared not discuss freely. We spoke well into the night, sharing everything we had read, and heard, and witnessed firsthand regarding vampires.
“How then do they learn to feed?” asked Abe as the barkeep swept the empty tavern around them. “How do they know to shy away from the su—”
“How does a calf know to stand? A honeybee to… to build a hive?”
Poe took another drink.
“It is their nature, beautiful and simple.