Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

extended his hand. “You shall do that, and it shall cost you nothing.”

IV

Booth arrived in Lewis Powell’s rented room at seven o’clock sharp, accompanied by a short, nervous twenty-two-year-old pharmacist named David Herold, whom he’d met through Mary Surratt. Atzerodt was already there. Booth wasted no time.

In a few hours, the four of them would bring the Union to its knees.

At precisely ten o’clock, Lewis Powell was to kill Secretary of State William Seward, who was currently bedridden after falling from a carriage. Powell, who was unfamiliar with Washington, would be led to Seward’s house by the nervous pharmacist. After the secretary was dead, the two conspirators would ride across the Navy Yard Bridge and into Maryland, where they would meet up with Booth. At the same time, Atzerodt was to shoot Vice President Andrew Johnson in his room at the Kirkwood House, before joining the others in Maryland. As for Booth, he would return to Ford’s Theater. There, he would kill the president with a single-shot derringer pistol before plunging a knife into General Grant’s heart.

With the Union government decapitated, Jefferson Davis and his Cabinet would have time to reorganize. Confederate generals like Joseph E. Johnston, Meriwether Thompson, and Stand Watie, whose armies were fighting valiantly against the Yankee devils even now, would be able to rearm. From Maryland, Booth and his three companions would continue south, relying on the kindness of their fellow sympathizers for food and shelter while the Union pursued them. As news of their deeds spread, a chorus of joyful voices would ring from Texas to the Carolinas. The tide would turn. They would all be hailed as heroes, and John Wilkes Booth would be called “the Savior of the South.”

Atzerodt protested, insisting that he’d agreed to a kidnapping, not a murder. Booth launched into a stirring speech. There is no record of what he said—only that it was soaring and thoroughly convincing. Probably it contained references to Shakespeare. Certainly it had been rehearsed for this very occasion. Whatever Booth’s words, they worked. Atzerodt reluctantly agreed to go forward. But what the apprehensive German didn’t know— what none of the living conspirators would ever know, even as they climbed the thirteen steps to their deaths—was the truth behind the young actor’s hatred of Lincoln.

On the surface, it made no sense. John Wilkes Booth had been called the “handsomest man in America.” Audiences packed theaters all over the country to watch him perform. Women trampled one another to catch a glimpse of him. He’d been born into the nation’s preeminent acting family, and made his professional debut as a teenager. Unlike his famous older brothers Edwin and Junius, who were actors in the classic sense, John was raw and instinctive—leaping about the stage, screaming at the top of his lungs. “Every word, no matter how innocuous, seems spoken in anger,” wrote a reviewer for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, “and yet one cannot help but be captivated by it. There is an almost ethereal quality to the gentleman.”

One night, following a performance of Macbeth at the Richmond Theater, Booth reportedly took six young ladies back to his boardinghouse and wasn’t seen for three days. He was rich. He was adored. He was doing what he loved. John Wilkes Booth should have been the happiest man alive.

But he wasn’t alive.

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing. ^*

When he was thirteen years old, Johnny Booth paid an old gypsy woman to read his palm. He’d always been obsessed with fate, particularly his own—due in large part to a story often told by his eccentric mother. “On the night you were born,” she’d say, “I asked God for a sign of what awaited my newborn son. And God saw fit to answer.” For the rest of her life, Mary Ann Booth would swear that flames had suddenly leapt from the hearth of their fireplace and formed the word “country.” Johnny spent countless hours pondering the meaning of it. He knew that something special awaited him. He could feel it.

“Oh… a bad hand,” the gypsy said at once, recoiling slightly. “Sorrow and trouble… sorrow and trouble, wherever I look.” Booth had come expecting a glimpse of his future greatness. What he got were forecasts of doom. “You’ll die young,” said the gypsy, “but not before amassing a thundering crowd of enemies.” Booth protested. She was wrong! She had to be wrong! The gypsy shook her head. Nothing could prevent it….

John Wilkes Booth would “make a bad end.”

Seven years later, the first part of her grim fortune came true.

Of the six young women Booth took back to his Richmond boardinghouse that night, only one remained by morning. He’d sent the others scurrying out the door before sunrise, their hair a mess, clothing bundled in their arms. After the fog of whiskey had lifted, he’d found them to be nothing more than the same silly, chatty, opportunistic girls who greeted him at every stage door in every city. He had no use for them beyond what had already transpired.

The girl in bed with him, however, was something entirely different. She was a small, dark-haired, ivory- skinned beauty of twenty or so, but carried herself with the calm confidence of a much older woman. There was a slyness to her, and though she seldom spoke, when she did it was with humor and wisdom. They made love for hours at a time. No woman—not Mary Surratt or his countless stage door conquests—had ever made Booth feel like this. He was drawn to her in a way he’d only been drawn to the theater.

Every woman before her has been a promise unfulfilled.

In moments of rest, Booth filled the silences with stories of his youth: the word “country” in the fire… the gypsy… the inescapable feeling that he was destined for greatness—something more than fame or money could provide. The ivory-skinned girl placed her lips against his ear and told him of a way that he could achieve that greatness. Perhaps he believed her; perhaps he was merely humoring his young lover—but at some point during that second night, John Wilkes Booth willingly drank her blood.

For the next two days, he suffered through the worst, and last, sickness of his life. He drenched his sheets in sweat; suffered horrific visions; convulsed so violently that the legs of his bed clattered against the floor.

Three days after he’d last been seen in public, Booth awoke. He rose and stood in the center of the room— alone. The ivory-skinned girl was gone. He would never learn her name; never see her again. He didn’t care. He’d never felt more alive than he did at this moment; never seen or heard with such clarity.

She spoke the truth.

Booth had craved immortality since he was a child. Now it was his. He’d always known that some special fate awaited him. Here it was. He would be the greatest actor of his generation… of every generation. His name would be renowned in ways that Edwin and Junius could only imagine. He would grace the theaters of the world; watch empires crumble to dust; commit every word of Shakespeare to memory. He was the master of time and space. Booth couldn’t help but smile as another thought crossed his mind. The old gypsy was right. He’d died young, just as she said he would. And now he would live forever.

I am a vampire, he thought. God be praised.

Immortality, however, proved somewhat disappointing at first. Like so many vampires, Booth had been left to learn the hard lessons of death on his own. There was no mentor to explain the thousand whispers that now filled his head when he faced an audience. No shopkeeper to suggest the right pair of dark glasses, or the proper means of removing blood from the sleeve of an overcoat. When his first cravings came, crashing against his mind in waves, he’d wandered the dark streets of Richmond for hours, following endless wobbling drunks down endless winding alleys, never quite working up the nerve to strike.

When the cravings became so severe that he felt himself slipping into madness, Booth found his nerve—but not in Richmond. Twenty days after being made immortal, he mounted his horse after dark and set off for a