Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

SIX

Ann

I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming… I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost.

—Abraham Lincoln, in a letter to Mrs. Lydia Bixby,

mother of two sons killed in the Civil War

November 21st, 1864

I

New Salem hadn’t grown as quickly as Denton Offutt hoped; in fact, it may have lost a few residents in the months after he opened the store. The Sangamon was still a long way from being “the next Mississippi.” Navigation remained a treacherous affair, and all but a few steamboats remained trapped in the wider waters to the south, with all of their precious customers and cargo. It didn’t help matters that New Salem had a second general store closer to the center of the settlement, siphoning off customers before they’d even had a chance to reach his front door. By the time the ice began to break on the sluggish Sangamon in the spring of 1832, Offutt’s store had failed, and Abe was out of a job. His anger is evident in an entry dated March 27th.

Bade farewell to [Offutt] this morning, the last of the goods having been sold or traded; my belongings were moved to the Herndon place until such time as I am able to make other arrangements. I care not that he has gone. I feel no sadness at his leaving, and feel not tempted in the slightest to follow his listless example. I have never known idle hands, and shall not know them now. I resolve to remain. I shall prosper yet.

As always, Abe was true to his word. He did whatever it took to make money: Splitting rails. Clearing land. Building sheds. His relationship with the Clary’s Grove Boys paid its first dividends, too, in the form of the odd jobs they intimidated locals into giving him. He even found work as an “ax man” on one of the few steamboats making its way up the Sangamon, standing on its bow and chopping away any obstructions that slowed its struggle north. And through it all, he never stopped hunting.

I have given a great deal of thought to what the barkeep said. Have I ever wondered why Henry takes such an interest in hunting vampires? Have I ever wondered why he sends me in his stead? I admit that I have spent many an hour perplexed by these questions. Wondering if perhaps there is some deeper truth in them. That I am the sworn enemy of vampires doing the bidding of a vampire? There is no eluding this fact, nor the paradox inherent in it. That I am being used to further the unseen ends of one vampire in particular? I must admit the possibility. Yet after deliberating the whole, I have come to this conclusion:

It matters not.

If indeed I am nothing more than Henry’s servant, so be it. So long as the result is fewer vampires, I shall serve happily.

Henry’s letters began to arrive more frequently, and Abe ventured out when they did. But he didn’t venture alone.

I have found in Jack an able and eager hunting companion, and have endevored [sic] to share with him the whole of my knowledge with regard to destroying vampires (I needn’t teach him anything of quickness or bravery, for he enjoys a surplus of both). I am thankful for the help, for Henry’s letters have been coming so frequently that I find myself running from one end of the state to the other.

One night Abe found himself running through the streets of Decatur with a bloodied ax in his hands, Jack beside him with a crossbow. No more than ten paces ahead of them, a bald man made a beeline for the Sangamon River. The right side of his shirt was soaked with blood, and his right arm was dangling by his side, attached to his body by nothing more than a few bits of sinew and skin.

We ran past a pair of gentlemen on the street. They watched our little procession speed by, yelling after us: “You there! Stop at once!” What a sight we must have made! I could not help but laugh.

Abe and Jack chased the one-armed man to the water’s edge.

He dove in and disappeared beneath the black water. Jack would have gone in after him had I not grabbed him by the collar and yelled “no!” with what little voice I had left. Jack stood on the bank, gasping for breath and pointing his crossbow at every bubble that surfaced.

“I told you to wait for my signal!” yelled Abe.

“We would have been waiting all damned night!”

“Well, now we’ve lost him!”

“Shut up and keep a sharp eye! He has to come up for air sooner or later….”

Abe looked at Jack, his fury surrendering to a quizzical smile… then to laughter.

“Yes,” laughed Abe. “I expect he shall be coming up for air any day now.”

Abe put a hand on Jack’s shoulder and led him away from the riverbank, his laughter echoing through the sleeping streets.

If [Jack] is wanting in anything, it is patience. He is too quick to spring from hiding—and, I fear, too eager to share what he knows with his companions from Clary’s Grove. I am ever reminding him of the need for secrecy, and of the madness that would overtake all of Sangamon County if word of our errands were to spread beyond the two of us.

He’d been in the county all of a year, but in that short time Abe had become something of a local celebrity. A “young man whose hands are just as skilled with an ax as they are with a quill,” as his schoolteacher friend, Mentor Graham, put it. Abe had seen and heard enough from his customers to know what was on their minds.

Chief among their concerns is the river itself. What a state it is in! Barely more than a creek in some parts; choked by all manner of driftwood and obstructions. If we are to enjoy the bounty of the Mississippi, it shall need to be greatly improved, so that steamboats may navigate it freely. Such improvement, of course, will require a tremendous sum of money. I know of only one way (outside thievery) to procure it.

Abraham Lincoln decided to run for office. In announcing his candidacy for the Illinois State Legislature in a county newspaper, he struck a populist, if somewhat defeatist, chord:

I am young, and unknown to many of you. I was born, and have ever remained, in the most humble walks of life. I have no wealthy or popular relations or friends to recommend me. My case is thrown exclusively upon the independent voters of the county; and if elected, they will have conferred a favor upon me for which I shall be unremitting in my labors to compensate. But if the good people in their wisdom shall see fit to keep me in the background, I have been too familiar with disappointments to be very much chagrined.

Shortly after Abe’s announcement, word of a “war with the Indians” reached New Salem.

A Sauk war chief named Black Hawk has violated a treaty and crossed [the Mississippi] into the village of Saukenuk to the north. He and his British Band ^* mean to kill or drive out every white settler they encounter and reclaim land believed rightfully theirs. Governor Reynolds has put out a call for six hundred able-bodied men to take up arms against these savages and protect the gentle people of Illinois.

Despite his political ambitions (or because of them), Abe was among the first in Sangamon County to volunteer. He would recall his excitement years later.

I had lusted for war since I was a boy of twelve. Here, at last, was my chance to see it firsthand! I imagined the glory of charging into battle—firing my flintlock and swinging my ax! I imagined slaughtering scores of Indians with ease, for they could be no quicker or stronger than vampires.

The volunteers gathered in Beardstown, a growing settlement on the banks of the Illinois River. Here, the men were given a crash course in the barest essentials of warfare by a handful of experienced militiamen. Before journeying north, Abe’s unit—a ragtag group of volunteers that included men from New Salem and Clary’s Grove—elected him to serve as their captain.

Captain Lincoln! I will admit that tears filled my eyes. It was the first time I had felt such esteem. The first time that I had been elected to lead my fellow men, and their sacred trust gave me more satisfaction than any election I have won or any office I have held since.

Among those marching off to battle with Abe were fellow vampire hunter Jack Armstrong and a young major named John Todd Stuart. Stuart was a slender man with “a high forehead and neatly parted black hair.” He had a “prominent” nose and “unkind” eyes that “did his gentle nature an injustice.” Stuart would play a crucial role in Lincoln’s postwar life, as an encouraging lawyer in Springfield, as a friendly adversary in Congress, and most of all as the cousin of a raven-haired Kentucky belle named Mary Todd.

The realities of war proved far less exciting than Abe’s imagination had conjured. With thousands of Illinois militiamen engaging the rebellious Indians to the north, there was little for the volunteers to do but sit and swelter. From an entry dated May 30th, 1832—after weeks spent camped out miles from the fields of battle:

My men have suffered greatly (from boredom), much blood has been shed (by mosquitoes), and I have swung my ax mightily (chopping firewood). Surely we have earned our place in the annals of history—for never has there been so little war in a war.

In early July, Abe and his men were finally discharged and began the long journey home, not a single war story to tell among them. Abe reached New Salem (where he found two letters in need of his “urgent attention”) less than two weeks before the election for state legislature. He resumed his candidacy at once, shaking hands and knocking on doors day and night. Unfortunately the field had ballooned to thirteen candidates while he’d been away battling mosquitoes. With so much time lost and so many candidates splitting votes, he didn’t stand a chance.

Abe finished eighth. But there was a silver lining, one that even the depressed and defeated Lincoln couldn’t help but see: of all three hundred votes cast in New Salem, only twenty-three had been cast against him. Those who knew him overwhelmingly endorsed him. “It was merely a matter of shaking more hands.”

His political career had begun.

II

Lincoln needed a success in the wake of his first political defeat, and he knew just where to find it. From an entry dated March 6th, 1833:

I shall do what Offutt could not. By God, I shall run a profitable store in New Salem! Berry ^* and I have today purchased the whole on $300 of credit, which we have every expectation of paying back within two years’ time. In three years, we shall have saved enough to purchase our building!

Again, the realities proved far less exciting than Abe’s imagination. There were already two general stores in New Salem by the time Lincoln/Berry opened its doors, and barely enough demand to keep those open. Historians have puzzled over why a man with Abe’s intellect and his father’s “horse sense” didn’t foresee the problem of adding a third store to the mix. Or why he seems to have so thoroughly misjudged his partner, William Berry, who proved shiftless, unreliable, and “perpetually drunk.”

The answer seems to be something more than ambition. With the store on the verge of collapse less than a year later, Abe’s journal entries grow increasingly exhausted; desperate. One in particular stands out—not only for its abruptness, but for its closing reference to (we can only assume) his mother.

I must endure.

I must be more than I am.

I must not fail.

I must not fail her.

But fail he did—at least as far as the world of dry goods and ladies’ hats was concerned. The Lincoln/Berry store simply “winked out” in 1834, leaving each man with debts of more than $200. In the end, the unreliable Berry couldn’t even be counted on to stay alive. He died a few years later, leaving Abe saddled with the whole amount. It would take him seventeen years to pay it off.

Had the timing been different, Abe might have packed up and left New Salem forever. But as it happened, there was another election for the Illinois State Legislature just a few short months off. Having little else to do (“none of Henry’s letters having arrived of late”), and encouraged by his good showing the last time around, Abe resolved to run again—and this time, he was determined to run properly. He traveled the county on horseback and on foot, stopping to speak with anyone he encountered. He shook the hands of farmhands toiling in the scorched fields and won their respect with demonstrations of his own frontier-learned skills and God-given strength. He spoke at churches and taverns, horse races and picnics, peppering his stump speech (undoubtedly written on scraps of paper in his pocket as he traveled) with self-deprecating stories of flatboat mishaps and mosquito battles.

“I have never seen a man with a greater gift for speaking,” remembered Mentor Graham after Abe’s death. “He was an ungainly—some might say unpleasant-looking—fellow… tall as a tree, with pant legs that stopped a good six inches above his shoes. His hair was in a constant state of untidiness; his coat ever in need of pressing. When he took his place in front of the crowd, they studied him with furrowed brows and folded arms. But when he launched into his address, their doubts vanished, and they were inevitably moved to thunderous applause—even tears by its conclusion.”

This time he shook enough hands. Abraham Lincoln was elected to the Illinois State Legislature on August 4th, 1834.

A poor son of the frontier, with nary a dollar to his name and not a year of schooling to his credit, sent to Vandalia ^* to speak for his fellow man! A rail-splitter seated beside men of letters! I admit that I am intimidated at the prospect of meeting such men. Will they accept me as their collegue [sic], or shun me as the unlearned clodhopper with holes in his shoes? In either case, I suspect that my life is forever changed, and cannot help my excitement as December nears.

Abe’s feeling proved correct. His life would never be the same. He would soon count statesmen and scholars among his friends; trade the backwoods folksiness of Sangamon County for the burgeoning sophistication of Vandalia. He’d taken the first step on his way to being a lawyer. His first step on the road to the White House. But it was only one of two turning points that year.

For he had also fallen madly in love.

III

Jack was giving serious thought to turning his crossbow on Abe. They’d just made a miserable 200-mile trip north to the town of Chicago, sleeping under the freezing stars of late autumn, trudging through knee-high mud and waist-high water, “and the ganglin’ fool’d done nothin’ but talk ’bout a girl the whole damned way.”

Her name is Ann Rutledge. I believe her twenty or one-and-twenty years, though I dare not ask. It matters not. Never has a more perfect creature graced this earth! Never has a man been more in love than I! I shall write of nothing but her beauty in these pages for as long as I live.

Armstrong and Lincoln sat with their backs against the rear of a stable stall and their bottoms on a bed of loose hay, their breath visible in the cool night air coming off of Lake Michigan. A horse’s backside loomed over their heads, every twitch of its tail giving rise to the fear that something naturally foul was about to occur. They’d been waiting for their prey all night, one of them speaking in smiling whispers, the other contemplating murder.

“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 walks, where they carried on lively discussions of life and love; then on Ann’s favorite hilltop overlooking the Sangamon, where they hardly talked at all.

I am almost ashamed to record it here, for I fear it may somehow cheapen the thing itself, but I cannot resist. Our lips met this afternoon. It happened as we sat upon a blanket, watching the occasional flatboat drift silently by below. “Abraham,” said she. I turned, and was surprised to find her face so close to my own. “Abraham… do you believe what Byron says? That ‘love will find a way through paths where wolves fear to prey’?” I told her that I believed it with all my heart, and she pressed her mouth to mine without another word.

It is the moment that I wish to remember with my dying breath.

Three months remain before I am required in Vandalia, and I plan to fill every moment of them with Ann’s company. She is the most fetching… most tender… most brilliant star in the heavens! Her only fault is that she lacks sense enough to avoid falling in love with such a fool as I!

Abe would never write with such flowery flourish again. Not of his wife; not even of his children. It was the stomach-turning, obsessive, euphoric love of youth. A first love.

December came “too quickly.” He bade Ann a tearful farewell and rode to Vandalia to take his oath as a member of the legislature. The prospect of being a “rail-splitter seated beside men of letters” (which had previously given him fits of excitement) now hardly mattered at all. For two agonizing months, he sat in the Capitol thinking of Ann Rutledge and little else. When the session closed at the end of January, he was “out the door before the sound of the gavel ceased to echo,” and sped home for what would be the best spring of his life.

There is no music sweeter than the sound of her voice. No painting more beautiful than her smiling face. We sat in the shade of a tree this afternoon, Ann reading Macbeth as I lay my head across her lap. She held the book in one hand, and played with my hair with the fingers of the other—gently kissing my forehead with each turn of the page. Here, at last, is all that is right with the world. Here is life. She is the antidote to all the darkness that poisons this world. When she is near I care nothing of debts or vampires. There is only her.

I have resolved to ask her father’s permission to marry. There is but one insignificant obstacle in the way of my doing so, and I shall see to its removal at once.

That “insignificant obstacle” was named John MacNamar—and contrary to Abe’s flippant reference, he posed a serious threat to their happiness.

That’s because he and Ann were engaged to be married.

[MacNamar] is by all accounts a man of questionable character, who pledged his love to Ann when she was but eighteen, only to depart for New York before such time as they could marry. The few letters she received from him in Decatur were hardly those of a man in love, and it has been ages since she has received any word from him at all. Until he releases her, however, I shall not be satisfied. But I take heart (for the course of true love has never run smoothly ^* ) and expect that all shall be swiftly and happily resolved.

Abe did what he did best. He wrote John MacNamar a letter.

IV

On the morning of August 23rd, Abe jotted ten innocuous words in his journal:

Note from Ann—not feeling well today. Off to visit.

It had been a perfect summer. Abe and Ann met nearly every day, taking long, pointless walks along the river, stealing kisses when they were sure no one was looking. It didn’t matter—all of New Salem and Clary’s Grove knew the two were in love, thanks in part to Jack Armstrong’s constant griping on the subject.

Her mother met me at the door and told me that she wished no visitors, but on hearing our voices, Ann called me in. I found her lying in bed, an open copy of Don Juan on her chest. With Mrs. Rutledge’s permission, we sat alone. I took her hand in mine and remarked on its warmth. Ann smiled at my concern. “It is merely a fever,” she said. “It shall pass.” As we talked, I could not help the feeling that something else troubled her. Something more than a summer cold. I pressed her, and her tears confirmed my suspicions. I could scarcely believe what she next imparted.

Ann’s long-lost fiancé, John MacNamar, had returned.

“He came to see me night before last,” she said. “He was furious, Abe. He looked sickly; acted strangely. He told me of your letter, and demanded my answer in person. ‘Tell me now that you love this other man!’ he said. ‘Tell me that, and I shall leave this place tonight and never return!’ ”

Ann gave her answer: she loved no man but Abraham Lincoln. True to his word, MacNamar left that night. Ann would never see him again. Abe’s fury is evident in an entry made that evening.

I wrote this MacNamar of our love—asking him to do the gentlemanly thing and release her. Rather than reply, he crossed a thousand miles of wilderness to waylay a woman he had ignored these three long years! To claim her as his own after casting her aside! Scoundrel! Had I been there when the coward appeared, I would have broken his skull and cut strops ^* from his back! Yet I rejoice, for he is gone—and with him the only impediment to our happiness. I shall delay no longer! When Ann is recovered, I shall ask her father’s permission.

But Ann would not recover.

By the time Abe returned on the morning of the 24th, she was too sick to speak more than a few labored words at a time. Her fever grew worse; her breathing shallow. By midday, she couldn’t speak at all, and slipped in and out of consciousness. When she did wake, it was to nightmarish delusions—her body convulsing to the point that her bed rattled against the floor. The Rutledges joined Abe at her side, keeping her compresses cool, the candles burning. The doctor had been there with his sleeves rolled up since midday. At first, he’d been “certain” it was typhoid. Now he wasn’t so sure. Delusions, convulsions, coma—and all in such a short time? He’d never seen anything like it.

But Abe had.

A dread crept over me throughout the course of the day and evening. An old, familiar dread. I was a boy of nine again, watching my mother sweat and suffer through the same nightmares. Whispering the same futile prayers; feeling the same unbearable guilt. It was I who had brought this upon her. I who had written the letter demanding she be released. And who had I demanded this of? A man who left mysteriously and returned sickly and ashen… a man who had waited till nightfall to confront his betrothed… a man who would sooner see her suffer and die than see her in the arms of another.

A vampire.

This time there was no last embrace. No momentary reprieve. This time she merely slipped away. God’s finest work. Defiled.

Finished.

Ann Rutledge died on August 25th, 1835. She was twenty-two years old.

Abe didn’t take it well.

FIG. 1-3. - ABE WEEPS AS ANN RUTLEDGE WASTES AWAY IN AN ETCHING FROM TOM FREEMAN’S BOOK ‘LINCOLN’S FIRST LOVE’ (1890).

25th August, 1835

Mr. Henry Sturges

200 Lucas Place, St. Louis

By Express

Dear Henry,

I thank you for your kindness these several years, and beg a parting favor of you. Below is the name of one who deserves it sooner. The only blessing in this life is the end of it.

John MacNamar

New York

—A

For the next two days, Jack Armstrong and the Clary’s Grove Boys kept watch over him in round-the-clock shifts. They stripped him of his pocketknife and carpentry tools; took away his flintlock rifle. They even confiscated his belt for fear that he would hang himself with it. Jack saw to it that Abe’s hidden stash of hunting weapons was moved well beyond his reach.

For all their care, there was one weapon they missed. None of them thought to look beneath my pillow, where I kept a [pistol] hidden. Jack having briefly left my side that second night, I retrieved it and pressed the barrel to the side of my head—resolved to be done with it. I imagined the ball penetrating my skull. I wondered if I would hear the shot, or feel the pain of it tearing through me. I wondered if I would see my brains strike the opposite wall before I died, or if I would see nothing but darkness—a bedside candle blown out. I held it there, but I did not fire….

Live…

I could not….

I could not fail her. I threw the weapon on the floor and wept, damning myself for cowardice. Damning everything. Damning God.

Rather than kill himself that night, Abe did what he always did in times of immense grief or unbridled joy—he put pen to paper.

The Suicide’s Soliloquy ^*

Yes! I’ve resolved the deed to do,

And this the place to do it:

This heart I’ll rush a dagger through

Though I in hell should rue it!

Sweet steel! Come forth from out your sheath,

And glist’ning, speak your powers;

Rip up the organs of my breath,

And draw my blood in showers!

I strike! It quivers in that heart

Which drives me to this end;

I draw and kiss the bloody dart,

My last—my only friend!

Henry Sturges galloped into New Salem the next morning.

He sent the others away at once, claiming to be a “close cousin.” The two of us alone, I imparted the whole of Ann’s murder, making no attempt to hide my grief. Henry took me in his arms as I wept. I remember this distinctly, for I was doubly surprised—both that a vampire could show such warmth, and by the sensation of his cold skin.

“It is the fortunate man who does not lose one so loved in his lifetime,” said Henry, “and we are not fortunate men.”

“You have lost one as beautiful as she? As kind?”

“My dear Abraham… one could fill a cemetery with the women I have wept over.”

“I do not wish to live without her, Henry.”

“I know.”

“She is too beautiful too… too good….”

“I know…”

Abe could not help his tears.

“The more precious His gift,” said Henry, “the more anxious God for its return.”

“I must not be without her….”

Henry sat on the bed beside Abe, holding him in his arms… rocking him like a child… debating with himself.

“There is another way,” he said at last.

Abe sat up straight on the bed; ran a sleeve over his tears.

“The older of us, we… we can wake the deceased, provided the body is whole enough, and less than a few weeks dead.”

It took Abe a moment to comprehend what Henry had said.

“Swear to me you speak the truth….”

“She would live, Abraham… but I warn you—she would be cursed to live forever.”

Here was the answer to my grief! A way to see the smile of my beloved again—to feel her delicate fingers in mine! We would sit in the shade of our favorite tree, reading Shakespeare and Byron for all time, her finger carelessly twirling my hair as I lay in her lap. We would walk the years away on the banks of the Sangamon! The thought of it brought such relief. Such bliss…

But it was fleeting. For when I pictured her pale skin, her black eyes and hollow fangs, I felt nothing of the love we had shared. We would be united, yes—but it would be a cold finger gently twirling my hair. Not in the shade of our favorite tree, but in the darkness of our curtained house. We would walk the years away on the banks of the Sangamon—but it would be only I who grew old.

I was tempted to the point of madness, but I could not. I could not indulge the very darkness that had taken her from me. The very evil that had taken my mother.

Ann Rutledge was laid to rest at the Old Concord Burial Ground on Sunday, August 30th. Abe stood silently as her coffin was lowered into the earth. A coffin he’d insisted on making himself. He’d inscribed a single line on its lid:

In solitude, where we are least alone.

Henry was waiting outside my cabin upon my return from the funeral. It was not yet midday, and he held a parasol over his head to shield his skin, dark glasses over his eyes. He asked me to follow him. Not a word passed between us as we walked a half mile into the woods to a small clearing. There I saw a pale, blond-haired little man tied to a post by his arms and ankles, stripped naked and gagged. Firewood and kindling had been piled at his feet, and a large jug placed on the ground near him.

“Abraham,” said Henry, “allow me to introduce Mr. John MacNamar.”

He writhed at the sight of us—his skin covered in blisters and boils. “He is quite new,” said Henry. “Still sensitive to light.” I felt the pine torch as it was placed in my hand… felt the heat on my face as it was lit. But my eyes never left John MacNamar’s. “I expect he shall be even more sensitive to flame,” said Henry. I could think of nothing to say. I could only look at him as I approached. He shook as I did, trying to free himself. I could not help but pity him. His fear. His helplessness.

This is madness.

Still, I longed to see him burn. I dropped the torch on the woodpile. He struggled against his bonds to no avail. Screamed until his lungs bled with nary a sound. The flames grew waist-high almost at once, forcing me back as his feet and legs began to blacken and burn. So great was the heat that his blond hair blew continually upward, as if he stood in a gale. Henry remained close to the flames—nearer than I was able. With the jug in hand, he repeatedly poured water over MacNamar’s head, chest, and back, keeping him alive as his legs were burned to the bone. Prolonging his agony. I felt tears on my face.

I am dead.

This went on for ten, perhaps fifteen minutes until—at my insistence—he was finally allowed to die. Henry doused the flames and waited for the charred corpse to cool.

Henry placed a gentle hand on Abe’s shoulder. Abe brushed it away.

“Why do you kill your own, Henry? And do me the honor of the truth, for I deserve as much.”

“I have never given you otherwise.”

“Then say it now and be done with it. Why do you kill your own? And why do—”

“Why do I send you in my stead, yes, yes I know. My God, I forget how young you are.”

Henry ran a hand over his face. This was a conversation he had hoped to avoid.

“Why do I kill my own? I have given you my answer: because it is one thing to feed on the blood of the old and the sick and the treacherous, but quite another to take sleeping children from their beds; quite another to march men and women to their deaths in chains, as you have seen with your own eyes.”

“Then why me? Why not kill them yourself?”

Henry paused to collect his thoughts.

“When I rode here from St. Louis,” he said at last, “I knew that you would not be dead when I arrived. I knew it with all my heart… because I know your purpose.”

Abe lifted his eyes to meet Henry’s.

“Most men have no purpose but to exist, Abraham; to pass quietly through history as minor characters upon a stage they cannot even see. To be the playthings of tyrants. But you… you were born to fight tyranny. It is your purpose, Abraham. To free men from the tyranny of vampires. It has always been your purpose, since you first sprang from your mother’s womb. And I have seen it emanating from your every pore since the night we first met. Shining from you as brightly as the sun. Do you think that it was some accident that brought us together? Do you think it was mere chance that the first vampire I sought to kill in more than a hundred years was the one who led me to you?

“I can see a man’s purpose, Abraham. It is my gift. I can see it as clearly as I see you standing before me now. Your purpose is to fight tyranny…

“… and mine is to see that you win.”