Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. “Who is dead in the White House?” I demanded of one of the soldiers, “The president,” was his answer; “he was killed by an assassin.” Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which woke me from my dream. I slept no more that night.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
II
John Wilkes Booth loathed sunlight. It irritated his skin; overwhelmed his eyes. It made the fat, pink faces of boastful Northerners blinding as they passed him on the street, crowing about Union victories, celebrating the end of the “rebellion.” You have no idea what this war is about. The twenty-six-year-old had always preferred the darkness—even before he became its servant. His home had always been the stage. Its braided ropes and velvet curtains. Its warm, gaslight glow. Theater had been the center of his life, and it was a theater he entered just before noon to collect his mail. There would no doubt be letters from admiring fans—perhaps someone who had witnessed his legendary Marc Antony in New York, or thrilled to his more recent Pescara in The Apostate, performed on the very boards now beneath his boots.
The backstage loading door had been opened to allow daylight in, as had the exits in the rear of the house, but Ford’s Theater remained mostly dark. The first and second balconies were draped in shadow, and every time Booth’s heel landed on the stage, the resulting echoes filled the emptiness. There was no place more pleasing—more natural to him than this. Booth would often pass the daylight hours in darkened theaters, sleeping on a catwalk, reading in an upper balcony by candlelight, or rehearsing for an audience of ghosts. An empty theater is a promise. Isn’t that what they said? An empty theater is a promise unfulfilled. In a few hours, everything around him would be light and noise. Laughter and applause. Colorful people packed together in their colorful finery. Tonight, the promise would be fulfilled. And then, after the curtain came down and the gaslights were snuffed out, there would be darkness again. That was the beauty of it. That was theater.
Booth noticed a pair of men working in the stage left boxes, about ten feet above his head. They were removing the partition between two smaller boxes in order to make a single large one, no doubt for a person of some import. He recognized one of the stagehands as Edmund Spangler, a callused, red-faced old acquaintance and frequent employee. “And who are to be your honored guests, Spangler?” Booth asked. “The president and first lady, sir—accompanied by General and Mrs. Grant.”
Booth hurried out of the theater without another word. He never collected his mail.
There were friends to be contacted, plans to be drawn up, weapons to be readied—and so little time to do it all. So little time, but such an opportunity! He made straight for Mary Surratt’s boardinghouse.
Mary, a plain, plump, dark-haired widow, was Booth’s former lover and an ardent Southern sympathizer. She’d met him years before, when he’d been a guest at her family’s tavern in Maryland. Though fourteen years his senior, she’d fallen passionately in love with the young actor, and the two had carried on an affair. After her husband died, Mary sold the tavern and moved to Washington, where she opened a small boardinghouse on H Street. Booth was a frequent guest—but in recent years, he’d seemed less interested in “matters of the flesh.” Mary’s feelings for him, however, remained unchanged. So when Booth asked her to ride out to the old tavern and tell its current owner, John Lloyd, to “make ready the shooting irons,” she didn’t hesitate. Booth had left a cache of weapons with Lloyd weeks before, in preparation for a failed plot to kidnap Lincoln and exchange him for Confederate prisoners. Now he would use the same weapons to take a more direct approach.
Mary’s love for Booth would prove her undoing. For delivering his message, she would hang three months later.
While Mary was on her fatal errand, Booth visited the homes of Lewis Powell and George Atzerodt in quick succession. Both had been involved in his failed kidnapping plot, and both would be needed to carry out the audacious plan