The Last American Vampire

  The firelight drew Abe and Henry in like moths. It cut through the night woods like a lighthouse through fog, guiding them home. They’d been small fires at first—fifteen or twenty flickering dots in the dark. Stars that had fallen to the ground, twinkling between the gaps in the trees. A chorus of voices had accompanied these little stars as they danced, chanting in unison, drawing the two vampires closer. As they crept nearer, the small fires had joined together, giving life to one towering flame that made the silhouette of every branch, and the white robes of every man they were about to kill, visible.

  They were on the edge of the clearing now, close enough to see those faces that weren’t obscured by hoods. There were forty of them, give or take. Men and boys, each of them holding a torch, their sheets rendered ghostlike in the glow of the flames. And the good ol’ cross. That Old Rugged Cross, the emblem of suffering and shame.5

  They stood in a circle around the cross, pointing their flaming torches at it, lifting and lowering them in unison. All of them wore white, save one. A portly one in a red sheet, his face uncovered, a red hood rising from his head like a dunce cap. He wore glasses, using the light of the torch in his right hand to read from a small book in his left.

  “For God…,” said the man in red.

  “For God!” repeated the others.

  Klansmen burn a cross during a rally similar to the one Abe and Henry attacked in 1937. Though lynching was on the decline by the 1930s, there were still incidents in America as late as 1968.

  “For country…”

  “For country!”

  “For race…”

  “For race!”

  “For Klan…”

  “For Klan!”

  With that, the other men threw their torches at the base of the cross, and up the flames went, climbing the kerosene-soaked wood with a whoosh of air.

  [The cross] was forty feet high, with the flames jumping another twenty feet above its top. The fire would’ve been visible for miles. Clearly, they weren’t worried about attracting attention or drawing the suspicion of the law. Half of them were the law.

  Abe and Henry waited for the moment to strike. Once they revealed themselves, the rest had to be quick and vicious. It was dangerous, taking on so many men at once, even for a pair of vampires.

  “In Jesus Christ’s name!” said the man in red.

  “In Jesus Christ’s name,” repeated the others, beginning a chant: “In Jesus Christ’s name! In Jesus Christ’s name!”

  As they chanted, one of the Klansmen, who happened to be looking toward the woods beyond the circle of his white brethren, saw a shape come streaking out of the tree line. Or was it two shapes? It was hard to see much in the darkness that lay beyond the flames. He saw the shapes—it’s two shapes, I’m sure of it—racing toward the other side of the circle with inhuman speed, coming into focus as they neared the light of the cross. Are they animals? But why would animals come toward—

  One of his brother Klansmen—from the size of him, I think it’s Big Ray, but I can’t tell with that damned hood on—suddenly arched his back and dropped his torch. He fell to his knees; his hands came up to his throat.

  The chanting stopped. All eyes on their kneeling brother.

  “Ray?” said the man in red. “That you under there?”

  Ray didn’t answer. He couldn’t, on account of his throat having been cut from ear to ear. None of the other Klansmen could see the color drain completely from Ray’s face, tuning his skin the same pale shade as the hood that covered it, or see his eyes bulge as he strained for breath. But they saw his blood. Spreading from his collar out to his chest as the fibers of his white sheet soaked it up like the roots of a thirsty tree. Gravity making the blood empty out of his brain, his heart pumping the rest upward, out of the gaping wound, pouring out of him by the glassful, darkening his chest. Big Ray fell onto his stomach, his hands at his sides. Prostrating himself before the burning cross, his soul fresh on its way to what he prayed would be a segregated heaven.

  Two men fell from the sky. They’d jumped clear over the Klansmen’s heads, landing inside the circle with animal grace. They were wearing masks, these men. At least they looked like masks. Their eyes were black from lid to lid—windows into the surrounding dark. Their mouths were open to jaw-breaking widths, with fangs that looked like glass shards in the firelight. The tall one snatched a torch from the nearest Klansman’s grip, drew his arm back, and drove the burning end clean through the man’s chest and out his back. It had gone through so fast that it was still burning when it broke through his spine, making the back of his robe pop out like the center of a circus tent and setting him alight.

  The Klansmen ran for their lives. The circle broke apart, white sheets fluttering in every direction. Henry made a beeline for the one in red.

  It was important to make an example of the leader. (I assumed he was the leader—he was the only one wearing red, and he didn’t exactly have the worker-bee physique.) I ran him down, which took all of a few steps, and tackled him. Pinned him. I rolled him onto his back and made sure he got a good look at my face. The eyes, the teeth. In most cases, I take victims unaware. It’s over before they know it. Quick and relatively painless, even for the wicked ones. But when someone is especially evil, when they’ve taken pleasure in striking fear into others before death, [then] I don’t mind them dying afraid.

  Henry lifted the man in red up by his throat and threw him into the air—no small feat, considering he weighed in at better than three hundred pounds. Up he went, into the burning cross, his crimson robes waving like the red flags Henry had seen used to signal imminent danger during the Great War. You’re in imminent danger, all right. The back of the man in red’s skull cracked as it struck the cross, knocking him unconscious. He fell back to earth, his robes consumed by the flames.

  He was [unconscious] for only a second or two. His eyes opened, and after a moment in the fog—you know, Where the hell am I? What’s that smell?—I saw it register on his face. The pain of his broken bones and burning flesh. The gravity of his situation. He panicked, of course. Got up on his hands and knees and crawled away from the burning cross. But it didn’t matter. His robes were burning like the fabric on those torches. All that fatty flesh was starting to sizzle beneath them. I considered feeding on him, showing him a little mercy. But then I thought of that boy, dragged from his bed and tortured, hanged. I decided to watch him burn.

  One thing I distinctly remember—his hat was still on top of his head as he crawled. Even after I’d thrown him up in the air, even after he’d landed in a heap, that pointy red hat was still stuck on there. And so help me, the very tip of its pointy top was the only part of it that was on fire. I watched the poor fat slug drag himself along the ground, screaming, and I was suddenly hit with the image of a red candle. A big Disney cartoon of a red candle, screaming in pain. Its wick burning, making the red wax (in this case his skin) melt. I started to laugh. I couldn’t help myself. Even with him squealing like a stuck pig, “Oh, Jesus, help me,” and all that.

  Henry began to sing as the man in red cried out for his savior:

  “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you…”

  Henry waved his arms back and forth as if conducting a symphony.

  I should’ve been off helping Abe run more [Klansmen] down, but I was transfixed. What’s that quote? The one from the Hitchcock film?6 “We all go a little mad sometimes.” I suppose I did. Having a fit of laughter and song at the sight of a suffering man. What else can you call it but madness? And the truth is, to this day, I can’t see a red candle without breaking out in a smile.

  Abe, meanwhile, chased down another of the fleeing Klansmen and caught hold of his sheet, yanking it backward—and bringing the man inside to an abrupt halt. He tore the hood from the man’s head and let him look upon his eyes, his pale, wild face and fangs. Abe knew the Klansman was terrified from the foul smell that wafted up from the seat of his pants—an all-too-common occurrence that never failed to tur
n Abe’s stomach and put him off feeding. His appetite gone, Abe had to settle for grabbing the sides of the Klansman’s head and turning it 180 degrees, so that his chin rested atop his spine.

  Most of the other Klansmen took off into the woods, ditching their robes in hopes that they would be harder to see. Some scooped up their children in their arms as they fled. A few ran to the cars and trucks parked nearby, fishing inside for pistols and rifles, intent on standing their ground. These defiant few took aim as the two figures approached from the middle of the clearing, silhouetted against the burning cross. They leveled their guns and shot. They shot straight and true. They saw the figures recoil as they were struck by the bullets. But they kept coming.

  Typically, we killed a few of them and let the rest run off to tell their friends. We always let them see our faces—that was key. Otherwise, they might run off thinking it was a group of local blacks that’d attacked them. There might be retributions. You might ask—where were the black vampires in all of this? It’s a fair question. We never intended, as two white vampires, to act like the saviors of an oppressed people. But the truth is, I didn’t know any [black vampires] in those days. Even if I had, it would have been a bad idea for them to join our raids, for the reasons I just mentioned.

  The gunshots died, along with the remaining men. Abe and Henry stood in the silence of the clearing, listening to the snapping twigs and branches of men fleeing in the dark woods and watching taillights disappearing down country roads in clouds of dust.

  At first light, the local sheriff, the mayor, and a handful of deputies (most of whom had been at the rally beneath sheets) stood in the clearing. The charred cross still stood, though its flames were long dead and the ashes damp with morning dew. The men held handkerchiefs over their noses and mouths.

  There were three of them. Three white men, stripped naked, their bodies flayed open and cleaned out like gutted fish. Each with a rope around his neck, each hanging from a high, sturdy tree branch at the perimeter of the clearing—their entrails dangling from their bellies, all the way down to the dew-covered ground, like umbilical cords attaching their corpses to mother earth. And each of the three was completely bereft of skin, their red flesh and muscle exposed. Skinned like grapes, save for a thin strip of pale white left on each of their chests in the shape of the letter “K.” In the center of the clearing lay the fat, charred body of their leader. His arms outstretched, his hands nailed to the beam of the burned cross in a Christ pose.

  The number of cross burnings dropped dramatically throughout the South in the 1930s.

  Abraham Lincoln entered the White House wearing his dress-green Class A army uniform, which bore the gold leaf insignia of a major. The military identification card he presented at the security desk bore a different name than the one he’d been born with. The signature on his card was checked against the one he entered in the visitors log, and he was ordered to surrender any weapons at the desk. He wasn’t carrying any. Nor was Henry, who, although also an officer in the army, was wearing civilian attire.

  The two vampires had been summoned back to Washington in April of 1937. They’d never reached South Dakota, which was just fine with Abe, who’d dreaded seeing his old, awkward self carved into the side of a mountain. The memorial on the mall was bad enough, and Abe avoided it like the plague whenever he was in town. But no structure in Washington gave him greater fits of anxiety than the White House.

  It was hard for him, going back. It was a house filled with ghosts. The ghosts of his cabinet, his wife, his children. They were all dead. Except in the White House. There, their voices, their faces were all very much alive to him.

  The West Wing and its Oval Office had become the epicenter of the presidency by then, but Abe and Henry had been ushered to the residence on their arrival, into one of its bedrooms—a more discreet place for FDR to meet with his two vampires. They sat, waiting for the president to wrap up other meetings. It was an uncommonly warm spring day, and the windows had been opened to let in the fresh, fragrant air. The curtains softening the sunlight, gently waving in the breeze. Abe and Henry sat opposite the room’s dominant feature—a rosewood bed, elegantly carved in Victorian style, with an arching, oversize headboard.

  I noticed Abe looking at the bed. Fixated on it. Whether by coincidence or design, we’d been asked to wait in what was then called the Lincoln Bedroom.7 Abe had been brought face-to-face with the bed his son Willie had died in seventy-five years earlier.

  “You think you’re the only one who’s sacrificed for this office?” said a voice.

  Franklin Roosevelt stood in the doorway, his weight resting on a cane. Under his trouser legs, metal braces had been fastened to his legs with leather straps, to help keep him upright. Abe and Henry stood out of respect as Roosevelt hobbled in with tremendous effort. Though paralyzed from the waist down after suffering a bout of polio in his late thirties, he still insisted on walking whenever possible, using a method of shifting his weight that he’d taught himself.

  Every president I’ve ever known has had the weight of the world on his shoulders, but none looked more worn down or ill suited to carry the burden than FDR. Ironic, since he was one of the more resolute and robust presidents we’ve had.

  “It takes everything from us, this goddamned job,” said Roosevelt, sitting on a chair opposite Abe and Henry. “Look at me. Barely five years on and I look like death warmed over—no offense.”

  “None taken,” said Henry.

  “You’ve sacrificed, I’ve sacrificed,” said Roosevelt. “Does any man achieve anything worth a damn without sacrifice? Hell, I’m held together by leather straps and nervous doctors.”

  “I died,” said Abe.

  “Ha!” cried Roosevelt. “Watching a play. Don’t act like you charged headlong into battle dodging cannon fire and waving the flag!”

  I’m not sure where [Abe and FDR’s] relationship went sour, exactly. They’d been cordial at first. Roosevelt had been elected in ’32. According to custom, he’d started receiving intelligence briefings before his inauguration, including a meeting with Abe and me. He’d been shocked to learn that Abraham Lincoln, one of his predecessors, was not only alive but a vampire, and on the War Department’s payroll, no less. I’d witnessed that same moment of presidential awe twice before, when Abe had been introduced to Coolidge in ’22 and Hoover in ’28. Both had revered Abe and frequently turned to him for advice on a number of matters during their own presidencies. And why not? He was still as wise a politician as ever, vampire or not.

  But FDR had never sought Abraham Lincoln’s advice. On the contrary, they’d bumped heads almost from the start. While Lincoln admired Roosevelt’s political savvy and largely supported his policies, he just didn’t care for the man.

  To [Abe], FDR was an elitist. A man who’d been born with a silver spoon in his mouth and a bug up his ass. He’d grown up American royalty, educated at Groton, Harvard, and Columbia. He’d worked on Wall Street, where he’d earned himself a reputation as a serial philanderer. He also saw Roosevelt’s “noninterventionist” stance in Europe as a cop-out. More than that, he saw it as downright un-American. “If only his cousin8 were still in the White House,” he’d say.

  Personally, I thought Abe a little too hard on FDR. Abe’s own son had been raised in the lap of luxury and attended Harvard, hadn’t he? Never mind the fact that Roosevelt could have chosen a life of idle leisure but entered public service instead. He’d spent most of his life sick, and he’d been crippled by disease, yet he hadn’t retreated from service. That counted for something, in my book, but Abe couldn’t have cared less. Maybe he was jealous of Roosevelt. Maybe he was insulted that Roosevelt hadn’t revered him as much as the others had. Maybe they were just oil and water. You never know with exceptional people.

  “The world is in peril,” Roosevelt continued. “We stand at the brink of a war unlike any history has ever seen. If we act quickly, we may be able to save untold millions of lives.”

  Throughout his fi
rst term, Roosevelt had taken a noninterventionist approach to foreign policy, choosing to fight the Axis powers with embargos rather than guns. America had no business meddling in other nations’ affairs until its own financial house was in order, he thought. But now, with the Chinese and Japanese at war in Asia, and Hitler poised to launch attacks on his European neighbors, “the ostrich was running out of sand to stick its head in,” as he told his advisers.

  FDR had seen the newsreels, as we all had. Crowds a million strong, all hailing their chancellor. There was something undeniably enchanting about Hitler. He had an almost… supernatural draw. Something about his obsession with “the purity of blood” and “superiority of race.” His vision of a world dominated by a chosen few. It all sounded eerily familiar.

  “He’s gearing up for war,” said Roosevelt. “The only question is with whom, and when he’s going to strike.”

  “So what is it,” asked Henry. “You’d like us to gather some intelligence on what Hitler’s up to? See if he’s working with any of our kind?”

  “No,” said Roosevelt. “I want you to kill the son of a bitch.”

  To many Germans, the feeling of being driven out, of being humiliated, went all the way back to 1 AD, when Rome invaded Germania and drove its tribes back to the Rhine and the Danube. The bitterness of that defeat was passed down, generation to generation, evolving into the nationalism that exploded when Napoléon invaded German territory in the late eighteenth century. That nationalism gave rise to the concept of Lebensraum (living room)—the idea that Germans, being culturally and genetically superior to their neighbors, had the right to claim new territory and expand. Those expansion plans failed during World War I, and defeat led to its borders being squeezed even tighter. By the early 1930s, there was barely enough farmland to feed the country’s booming population. And there was a widely held belief among Germans that they would have won the war, but for the “Jews and Marxists,” who’d undermined them on the home front.