Abraham Lincoln_ Vampire Hunter - Seth Grahame-Smith [56]
“Have you ever been in love, Jack?”
Jack gave no answer.
“It is a strange feeling indeed. One finds oneself intoxicated with happiness for no reason at all. One’s thoughts turn to the most peculiar things….”
Jack pictured a steaming pile of manure falling into Abe’s mouth.
“I long for the smell of her. Do you think me strange for saying so? I long for the smell of her, and for the feeling of her delicate fingers in mine. I long to look at—”
The stable doors opened outside. Boot heels against wooden planks. Abe and Jack readied their weapons.
The vampire could not smell us over the animal stench, nor hear us trampling hay. His footsteps ceased; the stall door opened. Before he had time enough to blink, my ax was thrown in his chest, and Jack’s arrow shot through his eye and into his brain. He fell backward, shrieking and grabbing at his face as blood ran around the sides of the arrow. Upset by the noise, his horse reared up—I grabbed it by the bridle for fear that it would trample us both. As I did so, Jack pulled the ax from the vampire’s chest, raised it above his head, and brought it down on the creature’s face, splitting it clean in two. The vampire was still. Jack raised the ax above his head a second time, and brought it down with even greater force. He did this a third, a fourth time, striking the creature’s head with the blunt side of the blade again and again until nothing more than a flattened bag of skin and hair and blood remained.
“My God, Armstrong… what’s come over you?”
Jack pulled the ax blade—crunch—from what had formerly been the vampire’s face. He looked up at Abe, out of breath.
“I pretended he was you.”
Abe held his tongue on the journey home.
Ann Mayes Rutledge was the third of ten children—daughter of New Salem’s cofounder, James, and his wife, Mary. She was four years Abe’s junior, but every bit his equal when it came to her appetite for books. She’d been away during most of Abe’s first year and a half in New Salem, tending to a sickly aunt in Decatur and reading everything she could get her hands on to pass the time. There is no record of what happened to her aunt (either she died, got better, or Ann simply grew tired of caring for her), but we know that Ann returned to New Salem before or during the summer of 1834. We know this because she and Abe first met on July 29th at the home of Mentor Graham, whose library both borrowed from, and whose tutelage both sought from time to time. Graham remembered her as a twenty-something with “large, expressive blue eyes,” a “fair complexion,” and auburn hair—“not flaxen as some have said.” She had “a good mouth and good teeth in it. Sweet as honey and nervous as a butterfly.” He also remembered the moment when Abe first made her acquaintance. “I have never seen a man’s jaw hang quite so low before or since. He looked up from his book and was hit square in the heart by that ancient arrow. The two exchanged pleasantries, but I recall the conversation being one-sided, for Lincoln could hardly keep his wits about him—so struck was he by this lovely vision. So amazed was he by her love and knowledge of books.”
Abe wrote about Ann that very day.
Never has there been such a girl! Never has a creature so beautiful and so bright existed in one body! She is a good foot shorter than I, with blue eyes and auburn hair and a shining, perfect smile. She is a bit slender, though it cannot be held against her, for it suits her kind, delicate nature. How shall I ever sleep again knowing she is out there in the night? How shall I ever keep another thought in my head when she is all I care to think about?
Abe and Ann saw more of each other, first at Mentor Graham’s, where they carried on lively discussions of Shakespeare and Byron; then on long, late summer