Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

TWO

Two Stories

And having thus chosen our course, without guile, and with pure purpose, let us renew our trust in God, and go forward without fear, and with manly hearts.

—Abraham Lincoln, in an address to Congress

July 4th, 1861

I

If Thomas Lincoln ever tried to comfort his children in the wake of their mother’s death—if he ever asked them how they felt, or shared his own grief—there is no record of it. He seems to have spent the months after her burial in near-total silence. Waking before dawn. Boiling his coffee. Picking at his breakfast. Working till nightfall, and (more often than not) drinking himself into a stupor. A short grace at supper was often the only time Abe and Sarah heard his voice.

Be present at our table, Lord—

Be here and everywhere adored.

Thy mercies bless and grant that we—

May strengthened for thy service be.

But for all his faults, Thomas Lincoln had what the old-timers called “horse sense.” He knew that his situation was untenable. He knew that he couldn’t keep his family going alone.

In the winter of 1819, just over a year after Nancy’s death, Thomas abruptly announced that he would be leaving for “two weeks or three”—and that when he returned, the children would have a new mother.

This took us quite by surprise, for we had scarcely heard him utter a word for the better of a year, and were unaware that he had any such designs. Whether he had any particular woman in mind, he did not say. I wondered if he meant to take an advertisement in the Gazette, or simply wander the streets of Louisville proposing to any unaccompanied lady who walked his way. Neither, I admit, would have surprised me much.

Unbeknownst to Abe and Sarah, Thomas did have someone particular in mind, a recently widowed acquaintance in Elizabethtown (the very place he’d first laid eyes on his Nancy some thirteen years before). He meant to show up on her doorstep unannounced, propose marriage, and bring her back to Little Pigeon Creek. That was it. That was the extent of his plan.

For Thomas, the trip marked an end to his silent grieving. For nine-year-old Abe and eleven-year-old Sarah, it marked the first time they’d ever been left alone.

At night we left a candle burning in the center of the room, hid beneath our covers, and barricaded the door with father’s bed. I know not what we meant to protect ourselves from, only that we felt better for having done it. We remained this way well into the night, listening to the noises that came from all around us. Animal noises. Far-off voices carried on the wind. The cracking of twigs as something walked around the cabin. We shivered in our beds until the candle finally died, then fought in whispers over who would leave the safety of their covers and light the next. When father returned, we were each given a good thrashing for having burned through so many candles in such a short time.

Thomas was true to his word. When he returned, he was accompanied by a wagon. In it were all the earthly possessions (or at least, the ones that would fit) of the newly minted Sarah Bush Lincoln and her three children: Elizabeth, thirteen; Matilda, ten; and John, nine. For Abe and his sister, the sight of a wagon brimming with furniture, clocks, and tableware was akin to beholding “the treasures of the maharaja.” For the new Mrs. Lincoln, the sight of these barefoot, dirt-covered frontier children was equally shocking. They were stripped down and scrubbed thoroughly that very night.

There were no two ways about it—Sarah Bush Lincoln was a plain woman. She had sunken eyes and a narrow face, which conspired to make her look perpetually starved. She had a high forehead made larger by the fact that her wiry brown hair was forever pulled back in a tight bun. She was skinny, knock-kneed, and missing two of her bottom teeth. But a widower with few prospects and nary a dollar to his name couldn’t be picky. Nor could a woman with three children and debts to pay. Theirs was a union born of good old-fashioned horse sense.

Abe had been quite prepared to hate his stepmother. From the moment Thomas announced his intentions to marry, he’d busied his head with schemes to undermine her. Imagined faults to hold against her.

It was inconvenient, therefore, that she was kind, encouraging, and endlessly sensitive. Sensitive in particular to the fact that my sister and I would always hold a tender place in our hearts for our sweet mother.

Like Nancy before her, the new Mrs. Lincoln recognized Abe’s passion for books and resolved to nurture it. Among the possessions she’d carted in from Kentucky was a Webster’s Speller, which proved a gold mine to the unschooled boy. Sarah (who, like her new husband, was illiterate) often asked Abe to read from her Bible after supper. He delighted in regaling his new family with passages from Corinthians and Kings; with the wisdom of Solomon and the folly of Nabal. His faith had grown since his mother’s passing. He liked to imagine her looking down from heaven, running her angel fingers through his soft brown hair as he read. Protecting him from harm. Comforting him in times of need.

Abe also took a liking to his new stepsiblings, particularly John, whom he dubbed “the General” for his love of playing at war.

Where I was reluctant to stand, John was reluctant to stand still, always concocting this imagined battle or that and rounding up the required number of boys to fight it. Always urging me to leave my books and join his fun. I would refuse, and he would harass, promising to make me a captain or colonel. Promising to do my chores if I joined in. Badgering me until I had no choice but to leave the comfort of my reading tree and run wild. At the time, I considered him something of a simpleton. I now realize how wise he was. For a boy needs more than books to be a boy.

On his eleventh birthday, Sarah presented Abe with a small, leather-bound journal (against Thomas’s wishes). She’d bought it with money earned by cleaning and mending clothes for Mr. Gregson, an elderly neighbor whose wife had passed away years before. Books were hard enough to come by on the frontier, but journals were truly a luxury—particularly for little boys in poor families. One can only imagine Abe’s joy at receiving such a gift. He wasted no time making his first entry, dutifully recorded in his unpolished hand on the very day he received it.

This is the Journal of Abraham Lincoln.

9 February 1820—I have been given this book as a gift for my elevnth [sic] birthday by my father and stepmother, who is named Mrs. Sarah Bush Lincoln. I will endevor [sic] to use it daily for the purpose of improving my letters.

—Abraham Lincoln

II

One early spring night, not long after those words were carefully composed, Thomas called his son outside to sit by the fire. He was drunk. Abe knew this, even before being summoned to sit on a stump and warm himself. His father only made a fire outside when he felt like getting particularly plastered.

“I ever tell you about your granddaddy?”

It was one of his favorite stories to tell when he was drunk: the story of witnessing his father’s brutal murder as a boy, an event that left him deeply scarred. Unfortunately the comforts of Sigmund Freud’s couch were still decades away. In its absence, Thomas did what any self-respecting, emotionally crippled frontiersman did to deal with his troubles: he got blind, stinking drunk and hung them out to dry. If there was any consolation for Abe, it was this: his father was a gifted storyteller, with a knack for making every detail come alive. He would mimic accents, mime actions. Change the tenor of his voice and the rhythm of his delivery. He was a natural performer.

Unfortunately, Abe had seen this particular performance many, many times. He could recite the story word for word: how his grandfather (also named Abraham) had been plowing a field near his Kentucky home. How eight-year-old Thomas and his brothers had watched him toil in the heat of that May afternoon, turning over the soil. How they’d been startled by the yells of a Shawnee war party as it sprang out of hiding and attacked. How little Thomas took cover behind a tree and watched them beat his father’s brains in with a stone hammer. Cut his throat with a tomahawk. He could describe it all—even his grandmother’s face as young Thomas relayed the news after running home.

But that wasn’t the version Thomas told him now.

The story began as it always had, in the heat wave of May 1786. Thomas was eight years old. He and two of his older brothers, Josiah and Mordecai, had accompanied their father to a four-acre clearing in the woods, not far from the farmhouse they’d helped him build some years before. Thomas watched his father guide the small plow as it scraped along behind Ben, an aging draft horse that had been with the family since before the war. The blistering sun had finally dipped below the horizon, leaving the Ohio River Valley in soft, blue-leaning light, but it was still “hotter than a woodstove in hell,” and humid to boot. Abraham Sr. worked without his shirt, letting the air cool his long, sinewy torso. Young Thomas rode on Ben’s back, working the reins while his brothers followed behind, broadcasting seed. Waiting for the welcome clang of the supper bell.

So far Abe knew every word. Next would come the part where they’d been startled by the war cries of the Shawnee. The part where the old draft horse reared up and threw Thomas to the ground. Where he ran into the woods and watched them gore his father to death. But the Shawnee never came. Not this time. This was a new story. One that Abe paraphrased in a letter to Joshua Speed more than twenty years later.

“The truth,” father told me in a half whisper, “is that your granddaddy wasn’t killed by any man.”

The shirtless Abraham had been working the outer edge of his clearing, right up against the tree line, when there was “a great rustling and cracking of branches” from the nearby woods, no more than twenty yards from where he and his boys worked.

“Daddy told me to pull up on the reins while he gave a listen. It was probably nothing but a few deer making their way, but we’d seen our share of black bears, too.”

They’d also heard the stories. Reports of Shawnee war parties preying on unsuspecting settlers—killing white women and children without shame. Burning homes. Scalping men alive. This was still contested land. Indians were everywhere. There was no such thing as an excess of caution.

“The rustling came from a different part of the woods now. Whatever it was, it wasn’t any deer, and it wasn’t alone. Daddy cussed himself for leaving his flintlock at home and started unhitching Ben. He wasn’t about to let the devils have his horse. He sent my brothers off—Mordecai to fetch his gun, Josiah to get help from Hughes’s Station.” ^*

The rustling changed now. The treetops began to bend, like something was jumping across them, one to the other.

“Daddy hurried with the straps. ‘Shawnee,’ he whispered. My heart just about thumped a hole in my chest at the sound of it. I followed those treetops with my eyes, waiting for a pack of wild savages to run out of the woods, whooping and hollering and waving their hatchets. I could see their red faces staring at me. I could feel my hair being pulled tight… my scalp being clipped off.”

Abraham was still struggling with the hitch when Thomas saw something white leap from a treetop “some fifty feet up.” Something the size and shape of a man.

“It was a ghost. The way it flew above the earth. The way its white body rippled as it moved through the air. A Shawnee ghost, come to take our souls for trespassing.”

Thomas watched it soar toward them, too frightened to yell. Too frightened to warn his father that it was coming. Right above him. Right now.

“I saw a glint of white and heard a shriek that would’ve woke the dead a mile off. Old Ben spooked, threw me in the dirt, and took off running wild, the plow hanging on by one strap, bouncing around behind him. I looked up where Daddy’d been standing. He was gone.”

Thomas struggled to his feet with a head full of stars and (though he wouldn’t realize it for hours) a broken wrist. The ghost stood fifteen or twenty feet away with its back to him. Standing over his father, patient and calm. Glaring at him like a God. Reveling in his helplessness.

“He wasn’t no ghost. No Shawnee, either. Even from the back, I could tell this stranger wasn’t much more than a boy—no bigger than my brothers. His shirt looked like it’d been made for somebody twice his size. White as ivory. Half tucked into his striped gray trousers. His skin was damn near the same shade, and the back of his neck was crisscrossed with little blue lines. There he stood, with not a twitch or breath to set him apart from a statue.”

Abraham Sr. was barely forty-two years old. Good genes had made him tall and broad shouldered. Honest work had made him lean and muscular. He’d never seen the losing end of a fight, and he sure as hell wouldn’t see it now. He got to his feet (“slow, like his ribs were broke”), squared his body, and clenched his fists. He was hurt, but that could wait. First, he was going to knock this little son of a—

“Daddy’s jaw went slack when he got a look at the boy’s face. Whatever he saw scared the hell out of him.”

“What in the name of Chr—?”

The boy swung at Abraham’s head. It missed me. Abraham took a step back and lifted his fists, but stopped short of throwing a punch. It missed. He felt a stinging on the left side of his face. Didn’t it? A tingling under his eye. He lifted the tip of his index finger to his face… the slightest touch. Blood began to run down in sheets, pouring out of the razor-thin slice that ran from his ear to his mouth.

It didn’t miss.

These are the last seconds of my life.

Abraham felt his head snap backward. Felt his eye socket shatter. Light everywhere. He felt the blood running from his nostrils. Another blow. Another. His son screaming somewhere. Why doesn’t he run? His jaw broken. His teeth knocked loose. The fists and the screaming growing farther away. To sleep now… never to wake.

It held Abraham’s body by the hair, striking and striking until his forehead finally “caved in like an eggshell.”

“The stranger wrapped his hands around Daddy’s neck and lifted him in the air. I cried out again—sure he meant to strangle the last of him away. Instead he pushed those long thumbnails, those knives, through Daddy’s Adam’s apple and—pop—tore his neck open from the middle. He held his mouth underneath the hole, guzzling like a drunk with a whiskey bottle. Swallowing mouthfuls of blood. When it didn’t come quick enough, he wrapped an arm around Daddy’s chest and hugged him tight. Squeezed his heart till the last ounce was gone—then dropped him in the dirt and turned around. Looked dead at me. Now I understood. Now I knew why Daddy’d been so scared. It had eyes black as coal. Teeth as long and sharp as a wolf’s. The white face of a demon, God strike me down if I lie. My heart thumped away. My breath abandoned me. It stood there with its face covered in Daddy’s blood and it… I swear to you it clutched its hands to its chest and… sang to me.”

It had the earnest, pitch-perfect voice of a young man. An unmistakable English accent.

When griping grief the heart doth wound,

And doleful dumps the mind oppress—

Then music, with her silver sound,

With speedy help doth lend redress. ^*

That such a sound could come from something so hideous—that its white face could wear such a warm smile—it was all a cruel joke. Its song concluded, the demon gave a long, low bow and ran into the woods. “Ran off till I couldn’t see a trace of white between the trees no more.” Eight-year-old Thomas knelt over his father’s crooked, empty corpse. Every inch of him shook.

“I knew I had to lie. I knew I could never tell a soul what I’d seen, lest they think me a fool, or a liar or worse. What had I seen, anyway? I might have dreamed it for all I knew. When Mordecai came running with the flintlock—when he demanded to know what happened—I broke down crying and told him the only thing I could. The only thing he’d have believed—that it was a Shawnee war party that killed our daddy. I couldn’t tell him the truth. I couldn’t tell him it was a vampire.”

Abe couldn’t speak. He sat across from his drunken father, letting the occasional cracks of burning wood fill the void.

I had listened to hundreds of his stories, some collected from the lives of others, some recounted from his own. But I had never known him to invent one, even in his present state. Frankly I did not think his mind capable. Nor could I think of a sensible reason to lie about such a thing. That left only one unsettling possibility.

“You think I’ve gone round the bend,” said Thomas.

It was precisely what I thought, but I gave no answer. I had learned to keep my mouth closed on such occasions, rather than risk the angry misinterpretation of some innocent remark. I resolved to sit in silence until he sent me away or fell asleep.

“Hell, you’ve got every reason to.”

He took a swallow of last week’s work ^* and looked at me with a softness I had never seen in him before. Putting everything else aside for the moment and seeing the two of us, not as we were, but as we might have been in some better life. Father and son. That his eyes presently filled with tears both astonished and frightened me. I felt him pleading with me to believe. Yet I could not believe something so foolish. He was a drunk telling a story. That was all.

“I’m telling you because you ought to know. Because you… deserve the truth. I’m telling you that I’ve seen two vampires in my life. The first was in that field. The second…”

Thomas looked away, fighting back tears again.

“The second was named Jack Barts… and I saw him just before your mama died….”

Father had spent the summer of 1817 committing the sin of envy. He’d grown tired of watching his neighbors reap kingly profits by planting wheat and corn on their land. He’d grown tired of breaking his back to build the barns they used to get rich, while sharing in none of the spoils. He felt, for the first time in his life, something like ambition. What he lacked was capital.

Jack Barts was a squat, one-armed man with a taste for expensive clothes and a thriving shipping business in Louisville. He was also one of the few Kentuckians in the business of giving private loans. Thomas had done some work for him as a young man, loading and unloading flatboats on the Ohio River for twenty cents a day. Barts had always treated him kindly and paid him promptly, and when they’d parted company, it had been with a handshake and an open invitation to return. More than twenty years later, in the spring of 1818, Thomas Lincoln took him up on that offer. With his hat in his hands and his head hung low, Thomas sat in Jack Barts’s office and asked for a loan of $75—precisely the amount he needed to buy a plow, a draft horse, seeds, and “everything else one needed to grow wheat, short of sunshine and rain.”

Barts, who looked “hale and hearty as ever in his one-sleeved violet coat,” agreed at once. His conditions were simple: Thomas would return with $90 (the principal plus 20 percent interest) no later than September 1st. Any profits earned above that were his to keep. Twenty percent was more than twice what any respectable bank would’ve charged. But seeing as Thomas didn’t technically own anything (having merely helped himself to his plot at Little Pigeon Creek), he had no collateral—and nowhere else to turn.

Father accepted the terms and went to work felling trees, pulling stumps, plowing sod, and broadcasting seeds. It was grueling labor. In all, he planted seven acres of wheat by hand. If he yielded thirty bushels an acre (a reasonable estimate), he would have enough to pay Barts back, plus a little to get us through winter. Next year he would plant more. The year after that, he would hire a hand to share the work. In five years’ time, we would own the largest farm in the county. In ten years, the state. His last seed sown, father rested and waited for his future to spring from the earth.

But the summer of 1818 proved the hottest and driest in anyone’s memory. When July arrived, there was nary a healthy stalk to be harvested anywhere in Indiana.

Thomas was ruined.

He had no choice but to sell the plow and horse for what little money he could. With no crops to harvest, they weren’t worth much. Too ashamed to face Barts in person, Thomas sent him $28, along with a letter dated September 1st (which he’d dictated to Nancy) promising to send the rest as soon as he could. It was the best he could do. It wasn’t good enough for Jack Barts.

Two weeks later, Thomas Lincoln found himself pleading in whispers, each one visible in the biting night air. He’d been roused from sleep only minutes before. Roused by something brushing against his cheek. The sleeve of a blue silk coat. A handful of bank-notes, $28 in all. The shape of Jack Barts standing over his bed.

Barts hadn’t come all this way to argue, merely to warn. He liked father. He had always liked him. Therefore, he would give him three more days to find the rest of his money. It was business, you see. If word got around that Jack Barts granted special favors to delinquent borrowers, then others might think twice about paying him on time. And where would that leave him? In the poorhouse? No, no. There was nothing remotely personal about it. It was merely a matter of solvency.

They stood by the outhouse, lest their whispers wake anyone in the cabin. Barts asked him one more time: “Can you have my money in three days?” Thomas hung his head again. “I cannot.” Barts smiled and looked away. “Then…”

He turned back. His face was gone—a demon’s in its place. A window into hell. Black eyes and white skin and teeth as long and sharp as a wolf’s God strike me down if I lie.

“… I’ll take it in other ways.”

Abe stared at his father through the fire.

Dread. Dread filled my stomach. My arms and legs. I was faint. Sick. I wished to hear no more of this. Not tonight. Not ever. But father could not stop. Not when he was so close to the end. The one that I had already guessed, but dared not believe.

“It was a vampire that took my daddy from me…”

“Stop…”

“Who took the Sparr—”

“Enough!”

“And it was a vampire who took your—”

“Go to hell!”

Thomas wept.

The very sight of him awakened some heretofore unknown hatred. Hatred of my father. Of all things. He revolted me. I ran into the night for fear of what I might say; what I might do if I were in his presence a moment longer. My anger kept me away for three days and nights. I slept in the barns and outbuildings of neighbors. Stole eggs and ears of corn. Walked until my legs shook from exhaustion. Wept at the thought of my mother. They had taken her from me. Father and Jack Barts. I hated myself for being too small to protect her. I hated my father for telling me such impossible, unspeakable things. And yet I knew they were the truth. I cannot explain how I knew with such certainty, but I did. The way my father had hushed us when we spun vampire yarns. The screams that had carried on the wind at night. My mother’s fevered whispers about “looking the devil in the eyes.” Father was a drunk. An indolent, loveless drunk. But he was no liar. During those three days of anger and grief, I gave into madness and admitted something to myself: I believed in vampires. I believed in them, and I hated them to the last.

When he finally came home (to a frightened stepmother and silent father), Abe didn’t say a word. He made straight for his journal and wrote down a single sentence. One that would radically alter the course of his life, and bring a fledgling nation to the brink of collapse.

I hereby resolve to kill every vampire in America.

III

Sarah had hoped Abe would read to them after supper. It was getting late, but there was a good fire going, and more than enough time for a few pages of Jonah’s adventures or Joseph’s coat of many colors. She loved the way Abe read them. Such life. Such expression and clarity. He had a wisdom well beyond his years. Manners and sweetness seldom found in a child. He was, as she would tell William Herndon after her stepson’s assassination, “the best boy I ever saw or ever hope to see.”

But her Bible was nowhere to be found. Had she lent it to a neighbor and forgotten? Had she left it at Mr. Gregson’s? She looked everywhere. She looked in vain. Sarah would never see her Bible again.

Abe had burned it.

It was the rash act of an angry child, one that he would live to regret (though never enough, it seems, to tell his stepmother the truth). Years later he would attempt to explain himself:

How could I worship a God who would permit [vampires] to exist? A God that had allowed my mother to fall prey to their evil? ^* Either He was powerless to stop it, or He was complicit in it. In either case, He was undeserving of my praise. In either case, He was my enemy. Such is the mind of an angry eleven-year-old boy. One that sees the world as a choice between two disparate certainties. One that believes a thing “must” be this way or that. I am ashamed that it happened, yes. But I would not compound that shame by pretending that it did not.

With his faith in ruins, eleven-year-old Abe took his resolution a step further in this undated manifesto (c. August 1820):

Henceforth my life shall be one of rigerous [sic] study and devotion. I shall become learned in all things. I shall become a greater warrior then [sic] Alexander. My life shall have but one purpose. That purpose is to kill ^* as many vampires as I can. This journal shall be where I write about killing vampires. No one other then [sic] me shall read it.

His interest in books, which to date had merely been ravenous, became obsessive. He walked more than an hour to the home of Aaron Stibel, a shoemaker who boasted a personal library of some 150 volumes, twice a week to return an armful of books and borrow another armful. He accompanied his stepmother to Elizabethtown whenever she visited a relative, sequestering himself in the Village Street home of Samuel Haycraft Sr., one of the town’s founders, and the proud owner of nearly five hundred books. Abe read about the occult; found mentions of vampires in European folklore. He compiled a list of their rumored weaknesses, markings, and habits. It became common for stepmother Sarah to find him asleep at the table in the morning, his head resting on an open page.

When he wasn’t improving his mind, Abe was hard at work improving his body. He doubled his daily wood chopping. He built long, winding stone walls. He practiced throwing his ax into a tree. First from ten yards. Then twenty. When stepbrother John invited him to play at war, he jumped at the chance, and fought with a new intensity that left more than one neighbor boy’s lip bloodied. Based on the information he’d gathered in books, Abe whittled a dozen stakes and made a quiver to carry them in. He fashioned a small crucifix (although he had declared God his “enemy,” it appears that Abe wasn’t opposed to his help). He took to carrying small pouches of garlic and mustard seed. He sharpened his ax until the blade “blinded all who looked upon it.” At night, he dreamed of death. Of hunting down his enemies and driving stakes through their hearts. Of taking their heads. Of glorious battle. Years later, as the clouds of Civil War loomed on the horizon, Abe looked back at his youthful bloodlust.

There are but two types of men who desire war: those who haven’t the slightest intention of fighting it themselves, and those who haven’t the slightest idea what it is. Of my youth I can decidedly say that the latter was true. I ached for this “war” with vampires, knowing nothing of its consequences. Knowing nothing of holding a dying friend in my arms or burying a child. Any man who has seen the face of death knows better than to seek him out a second time.

But in the summer of 1821, these lessons were still years off. Abe wanted his war with vampires, and after months of vigorous study and exercise, he was ready to launch the opening salvo.

He wrote a letter.

IV

Abe was uncommonly tall for a boy of twelve. He already stood shoulder to shoulder with his father, who was himself considered tall at five-foot nine. Like his ill-fated grandfather, good genes and years of toil had made him exceptionally strong.

It was a Monday, “the kind of summer day one finds only in Kentucky—shining and verdant; the breeze carrying warmth and dandelion seeds.” Abe and Thomas sat atop one of their smaller outbuildings, making repairs to its winter-beaten roof. They worked in silence. Though Abe’s hatred had cooled, he still found it difficult to be in his father’s presence. A journal entry dated December 2nd, 1843 (not long after the birth of Abe’s own son, Robert), sheds some light on the nature of his contempt.

Age has made me temperate in many things, but on this point I remain steadfast. His weakness! His ineptness! He failed to protect his family. Thought only of his own needs, and left others to their cost. Had he simply gathered us and fled to some far-off territory. Had he merely asked our neighbors for some small advance against future work. But he did nothing. Nothing but sit idly. Silently. Secretly hoping that somehow, by some miracle, his troubles would simply disappear. No, it needs no further elaboration than this: had he been any other man, she would be with me still. This I cannot forgive.

Thomas, to his credit, seemed to understand and accept his condemnation. He hadn’t mentioned the word “vampire” since that night. Nor had he pressed Abe to talk.

Sarah had taken the girls to help her clean Mr. Gregson’s house that Monday afternoon, and John was off fighting some imaginary war. The two Lincolns were at work on the roof when a horse approached carrying a child on its back. A plump child in a green coat. Either that or a very short man. A short man with dark glasses and… one arm.

It was Jack Barts.

Thomas put his hammer down, his heart just about thumping a hole in his chest at the thought of what Barts could want now. By the time he climbed down and began walking to meet their unexpected guest, Abe was already halfway to the cabin. Barts handed Thomas his reins and dismounted with some difficulty, hanging on to the saddle horn with one arm while his stout legs struggled to find the ground. Having done so, he found the fan in his coat pocket and put it to use, cooling his face. Thomas couldn’t help but notice that there wasn’t a bead of sweat on him.

“Simply dreadful… dreadfully, miserably hot.”

“Mr. Barts, I—”

“I must admit, your letter surprised me, Mr. Lincoln. A happy surprise, to be certain. But a surprise nonetheless.”

“My letter, Mr. Ba—?”

“Had you written it earlier, perhaps the unpleasantness which transpired between us might have been avoided. Terrible… terrible thing…”

Thomas was too confounded to notice Abe walking toward them with a long wooden object in his arms.

“You’ll forgive my haste,” said Barts, “but I should like to be off at once. I have business in Louisville which must be attended to this evening.”

Thomas couldn’t think of a thing to say. Not a damned thing.

“Well? Do you have it, Mr. Lincoln?”

Abe joined them, cradling a long, hand-carved chest with a hinged lid. A tiny coffin for a slender corpse. He stood beside his father, facing Barts. Towering over him. Leering at him.

“Strange,” said Abe, breaking the silence. “I hadn’t expected you during the day.”

Now it was Barts who found his brain tied in knots.

“Who is this child?”

“My son,” said Thomas, petrified.

“It’s here,” said Abe, raising the chest. “All of it. All one hundred dollars, just like the letter said.”

Thomas was sure he’d misheard. Sure this was a dream. Barts looked at Abe, suspicious. Bewildered. A smile spread over his face.

“My God!” said Barts. “For a moment I thought us all mad!”

Barts began to laugh. Abe opened the lid—just enough to slip his hand inside.

“Good boy,” said Barts, laughing heartily now. “Let us have it then.”

He reached his hand up and ran his thick fingers through my hair. I could think of nothing but the way my mother had done the same when she read to me. I could think of nothing but her sweet face. I glared down at this man. This creature. I joined him in laughter as my father stood helpless—a fire spreading through my chest. I felt the wooden stake in my fingers. I could do anything. I was a god.

These are the last seconds of your life.

I have no memory of driving it in—I only remember that I did. His laughter ceased and he took an awkward step. His eyes turned black in the space of a single blink, as if the inkwells in his pupils had suddenly shattered—the spill contained behind glass. His fangs descended, and I could presently make out a faint blue web beneath his skin. It was true. Until that moment there had been room for doubt. But now I saw it with my own eyes. Now I knew.

Vampires were real.

His arm rose, and his stout little hand instinctively grabbed the stake. There was no fear in his face yet. Merely a puzzlement, as if he was attempting to sort out just how such an object could be attached to his body. He presently lost his footing and collapsed into a seated position, where he remained for a moment before falling the rest of the way onto his back. His hand lost its grip on the stake, and the arm fell to his side.

I walked around him, wondering when he would strike. Wondering when he would laugh at the futility of what I had done and cut me down. As I did, his eyes followed me. They were the only things that moved now. There was fear in them. He was dying… and he was afraid. What little color he had left him now—and rich, dark blood began to run from his nostrils; out the sides of his mouth. A trickle at first… then a flood—running over his cheeks and pooling over his eyes. More blood than I ever thought possible. I could see his soul (if indeed he had such a thing) departing. Bidding an unexpected, frightening farewell to such a long, long life—one undoubtedly filled with happiness, and agony, and struggle, and success. Filled with moments too beautiful to share. Too painful to recall. It was all ending now, and he was so afraid. Afraid of what nothingness awaited him. Or worse, what punishment.

And then he was gone. I expected my eyes to fill with tears. To feel remorse at the sight of what I had done. I admit that I felt nothing. I only wished he had suffered more.

Thomas stood aghast. “Look what you’ve done,” he said after a sickened silence. “You’ve killed us.”

“On the contrary… I’ve killed him.”

“More will come.”

Abe had already begun to walk away.

“Then I shall need more stakes.”