Abraham Lincoln_ Vampire Hunter - Seth Grahame-Smith [78]
The innocent were forced to barricade their doors as rival thugs stabbed, shot and bludgeoned one another to death in the streets. Merchants saw their shops destroyed; their wares brazenly stolen in the chaos. Eleven passersby—a woman and child among them—were mauled for no cause but their straying too close to the fight.
CURIOUS SIGHTINGS IN GANG BRAWL
The Tribune was inundated with testimonies of “strange” and “impossible” feats throughout Saturday evening and Sunday morning. Men were said to leap across rooftops “as if carried by the air” in pursuit of one another; climb the sides of buildings “as effortlessly as a cat climbs a tree.”
One witness, a merchant by the name of Jasper Rubes, claims to have seen a Dead Rabbit “lift a Bowery Boy above his head and throw him against the second story of [a Baxter Street factory] hard enough to leave a hole in the bricks.” Incredibly, the victim “landed on his feet,” said the witness, “and kept up the fight as if nothing had happened.”
“His eyes,” said Rubes, “were black as soot.”
Hunting vampires was the furthest thing from Abraham Lincoln’s mind in the early 1850s.
Ten months after burying their son, Abe and Mary welcomed another. They named him William “Willy” Wallace Lincoln in honor of the physician who’d stayed at Eddy’s side until the end. In 1853, they welcomed one more boy, Thomas “Tad” Lincoln, born April 4th. Along with ten-year-old Robert, the three formed a “boisterous brood.”
“Bob howls in the next room as I write this,” Abe said in an 1853 letter to Speed. “Mary has whopped him for running off and disappearing. I suspect that by the time I finish this letter he will have run off and disappeared again.”
Abe made very few journal entries in the wake of Eddy’s death. Those six and a half little leather-bound books had become a record of his life with vampires—a record of weapons and vengeance; of death and loss. But those days were behind him now. That life was over. After his entries had resumed in 1865, Abe looked back on that “last, peaceful, wonderful spell.”
They were good years, to be sure. Quiet years. I wanted nothing more of vampires or politics. To think of all that I had missed whiling away the hours in Washington! How much of Eddy’s brief, beautiful life had escaped my notice! No… never again. Simplicity! That was the oath I swore now. Family! That was my errand. When I could not be with my boys at home, I let them run about the office (much to Lamon’s * consternation, I suspect). Mary and I took lingering walks, regardless of the season or weather. We spoke of our dear boys… of our friends and futures… of the speed with which the whole of our lives had passed.
There were no letters from Henry. No visits or hints of his whereabouts. At times I wondered if he had finally come to accept that I would hunt no more—or if he himself had fallen prey to the ax. Whatever the reason behind his absence, I was glad for it. For while I had come to regard him with tremendous affection, I loathed every memory the mere mention of his name conjured up.
Abe’s long coat, riddled with the rips and scars of battle, was unceremoniously burned. His pistols and knives were locked in a trunk and forgotten in the cellar. The blade of his ax was allowed to rust. The specter of death, which had hung over the old vampire hunter since his ninth year, seemed at last to be lifting.
It returned briefly in 1854, when Abe received word from a friend in Clary’s Grove that Jack Armstrong was dead. From a letter to Joshua Speed:
The damned fool’s gotten himself killed by a horse, Speed.
Old Jack stood in an early winter