Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

the vampire’s table.
Having picked two of these, the vampire followed them up the staircase, and the barkeep rang out his last call.
Abe’s mind, half pickled with whiskey, churned until it received “the blessings of another idea.” Knowing that his brother would never leave him to wander the streets alone, he told John that he’d changed his mind and made “arrangements” to spend the night with a woman.
John had hoped (fervently, I suspect) that this would be the case, and promptly made his own arrangements. We bade each other good night as the barkeep snuffed out the lanterns and locked the bottles away. Having given my brother and his friend ample time to reach their room, I followed up the stairs, alone. Here was a single, narrow hallway lit dimly by oil light and papered with an elaborate pattern of reds and pinks. A number of doors ran down both sides, all of them closed. At the end, another closed door faced me which, judging by the shape of the building, led outside to a back staircase. I walked slowly down the center, listening for clues as to which room held my vampire. Laughter from my left. Profanity from my right. Sounds which I have not the words to describe. Having reached the end of the hallway with no success, I at last heard what I had been waiting for on my right side—the voices of two women coming from the same room. Leaving John to enjoy the warm embrace of a stranger, I turned back, headed out into the cold, and donned my long coat. I knew the vampire would likely finish his business and leave before sunrise. And when he did, I would be waiting for him.
But by the second hour of pacing in the street, he’d grown tired, cold, and bored.
The slaughter of sixteen vampires had left me rather audacious, I admit. Not content to wait any longer in the cold, I resolved to be done with it. I walked up the snow-covered staircase at the rear of the building, taking care to step lightly, and preparing the martyr in my hand.
“Martyr” was the name Abe had given to a new weapon of his own creation. From an earlier entry in his journal:
I have recently read of the successes of an English chemist by the name of Walker who has developed a method of creating flame using nothing more than friction. Having procured the necessary chemicals to reproduce his “congreves,” * I set about dipping a number of small sticks in this mixture. The chemicals having dried, I bundled twenty of the little sticks tightly together (the whole being roughly twice the thickness of a fountain pen) and soaked all but the tip of one end in glue. When the exposed end is struck against a rough surface, the resulting flame is brief, violent, and brighter than the sun. This has the effect of rendering my black-eyed adversaries temporarily blind, allowing me to chop them to pieces with greater ease. I have used them twice with tremendous success (though the burns on my fingers bear witness to earlier failures).
I stood before the door in question with the martyr in one hand and my ax in the other, light from beneath the door illuminating my snow-covered shoes. There were no voices coming from the other side, and I was presently struck by the thought of seeing the two girls slaughtered on the bed, their blood staining the sheets to match the patterned walls. Using the head of the ax, I knocked three times.
Nothing.
Having given them ample time to answer, I knocked again. Another moment passed with no noise from the other side. Just as I was weighing whether to knock again or not, I heard the creaking of the bed, followed by the creaking of someone walking across the wooden floor. I prepared to strike. The door opened.
It was him. Curly hair, the color of weathered wood. Nothing but a long shirt between his skin and the cold.
“What in the hell is it?” he asked.
Abe struck the tip of the martyr against the wall.
Nothing.
The damned thing failed to light, it having been left in the damp pocket of my coat for so long. The vampire looked at me quizzically. His fangs did not descend, nor his eyes blacken. But on seeing the ax in my other hand, they doubled in width, and he shut the door with such force as to rattle the whole building. I stood there, looking at the door like a dog looks at a book, all the while allowing the vampire time to escape on the other side. This having occurred to me at last, I took a step back and let the door have the full force of my heel. It sailed open with a tremendous noise—a noise I mistakenley