Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

by starving ourselves, staking ourselves through the heart, devising some method of taking our own heads, or, in the most desperate cases, by burning ourselves alive. Only the very strongest of us—those possessing exceptional will, and driven by a timeless purpose—survive into our fourth or fifth centuries and beyond.”
That a man who had been freed from the inescapable fate of death would choose it for himself—this I did not understand, and I told Henry as much.
“Without death,” he answered, “life is meaningless. It is a story that can never be told. A song that can never be sung. For how would one finish it?”
Soon Abe was well enough to sit up in bed, and Henry was comfortable enough to do away with his restraints altogether. Having failed to get answers to his more general vampire questions, Abe turned to a bottomless well of specifics. On sunlight:
“When we are newly made, the slightest sunlight blisters our skin and renders us ill, much the same way an excess of sunlight can sicken a man. Over time we become resistant to these effects, and are able to walk freely during the day—so long as we stray from harsh light. Our eyes, however, never adjust.”
On garlic:
“I’m afraid it merely makes you easier to perceive from a distance.”
On sleeping in coffins:
“I cannot speak for others, but I am quite comfortable in a bed.”
When Abe reached the question of how one becomes a vampire, Henry paused.
“I shall tell you how I came to be one.”

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
V
Abe committed the following to his journal on August 30th, 1825, shortly after his return to Little Pigeon Creek.
What follows is the story exactly as Henry related it to me. I have neither embellished, nor withheld, nor verified any part of it. I merely duplicate it here so that some record of it exists. “On 22nd July, in the year 1587,” Henry began, “three ships carrying 117 English souls landed on northern Roanoke Island, in what is today called North Carolina.”
Among this teeming mass of men, women, and children was a twenty-three-year-old blacksmith’s apprentice named Henry O. Sturges, average in height and build, with long, dark hair to the middle of his back. He was joined by his new wife, Edeva.
“She was but a day younger and an inch shorter than I, with hair of the finest flaxen and eyes a strange shade of brown. There has never been a more delicate, a more fetching creature in all the annals of time.”
They had just experienced a harrowing voyage, one plagued by unseasonably bad weather and uncommonly bad luck. While there was nothing unusual about sickness and death on an Atlantic crossing (sixteenth-century ships were typically moldy, rat-infested breeding grounds for any number of air- or food-borne illnesses), the accidental demise of two people on two separate occasions was ominous enough to raise alarm.
Both deaths occurred aboard the Lyon, the largest of the three-vessel caravan, and the one personally captained by John White. White, a forty-seven-year-old artist, was handpicked by Sir Walter Raleigh for the job of establishing a permanent English presence in the New World. He’d been part of the first attempt to colonize Roanoke two years earlier—an attempt that failed when the colonists, all men, ran desperately short of supplies and hitched a ride back to England with Sir Francis Drake, who, as fate would have it, had decided to anchor nearby during a break from raiding Spanish ships.
“This time ’round,” Henry said, “Raleigh’s plan was more ambitious. Instead of brusque sailors, he sent young families. Families that would put down roots. Produce children. Build churches and schoolhouses. It was his opportunity to build ‘a new England in the New World.’ For Edeva and me, it was an opportunity to leave a home that held little in the way of happiness. All told we were ninety men, nine children, and seventeen women, including John White’s own daughter, Eleanor Dare.”
Eleanor, who was eight months pregnant, was joined by her husband, Ananias, aboard the Lyon. She was an “uncommonly pretty” twenty-four-year-old, with a shock of red hair and freckled face. One can only imagine the discomfort she felt as the 120-ton ship pitched about in the oppressive July heat—heat that turned the innards of the ships into giant steam ovens.
“Even some of the surest-footed sailors found themselves green-faced and bent over the railings when the seas kicked up and the sun beat down