Abraham Lincoln_ Vampire Hunter - Seth Grahame-Smith [43]
He was correct. Satisfied that the other slaves were out of earshot, the gray-bearded host gave a whistle. Upon this, nine pairs of eyes turned black, nine sets of fangs descended, and nine vampires tore into their helpless prey from behind.
The first vampire grabbed the sides of the thickset woman’s head and twisted it backward so that her chin and spine met—his wretched face her dying sight. Another screamed and writhed when she felt the sting of two fangs in her shoulder. But the greater her struggle, the deeper the wound became, and the more freely her precious blood poured into the creature’s mouth. I saw the head of a boy beaten until his brains poured from a hole in his skull, and another man’s head taken entirely. I could do nothing to help them. Not when there were so many. Not without a weapon. The slave master calmly pulled the barn doors closed to stifle the noises of death, and I ran into the night, my face wet with tears. Disgusted with myself for being so helpless. Sickened by what I had seen. But more than anything—sickened by the truth taking shape in my mind. A truth that I had been too blind to see before.
Abe purchased a black leather-bound journal on Dauphine Street the next day. His first entry, while a scant seventeen words, was a powerful statement of that truth, and one of the most important sentences he would ever write.
June 25th, 1828
So long as this country is cursed with slavery, so too will it be cursed with vampires.
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
PART II
VAMPIRE HUNTER
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
FIVE
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
New Salem
The way for a young man to rise, is to improve himself every way he can, never suspecting that any body wishes to hinder him.
—Abraham Lincoln, in a letter to William Herndon
July 10th, 1848
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
I
Abe was shaking.
It was a bitter cold February night, and he’d been waiting for a man to put his clothes on for the better part of two hours. Abe paced back and forth… back and forth in the hard-packed snow, throwing the occasional glance toward the unfinished courthouse on the other side of the square, and at the second floor of the saloon across the street—where a light still burned behind the curtained window of a whore. He passed the time with thoughts of his weeks spent floating shirtless down the Mississippi in unbearable heat. “Heat a man could drown in.” He thought of mornings spent splitting rails in the shade; afternoons cooling off with a swim in the creek. But those memories were all more than three years and two hundred miles away. Tonight, on his twenty-second birthday, he was freezing on the empty streets of Calhoun, Illinois. *
Thomas Lincoln had finally given up on Indiana. He’d been receiving regular reports from John Hanks, a cousin of Abe’s mother, regarding the untapped wonders of Illinois.
John wrote of the “plentiful and fertile” prairies of that state. Of “flat land that needed no clearing. Free of rocks, and to be had cheap.” It was all the incentive Thomas needed to leave Indiana and its bitter memories behind.
In March of 1830, the Lincolns packed their belongings into three wagons, each hitched to a team of oxen, and left Little Pigeon Creek forever. For fifteen exhausting days they navigated mud-covered roads and forded icy rivers, “until at last we reached Macon County and settled just west of Decatur,” smack-dab in the center of Illinois. Abe was twenty-one then. It’d been two years since he’d witnessed the slave massacre in New Orleans. Two years of handing hard-earned wages over to his father. Now he was finally free to strike out on his own. Despite being desperate to