Savannah, Georgia 2005 a.d.
Letter from William, a Vampire
My name is William Cuyler Thorne. I have been a soldier, a scholar, a wastrel, and a womanizer. But most important, I suppose, is the fact that among the many things I have been, I remain an unwavering killer of men. A predator.
Oh, I’ve taken my share of women as well, in temper and in pity, in hunger or merely in petulance. I have kissed the lips of some of the most beautiful courtesans on the planet before turning to baser needs. But always the blue blood of my savage ancestry, which runs so coolly through my veins, calls out for heat and for life. For sustenance.
I am a blood drinker.
I have walked the earth for five hundred years, plus or minus a decade. For two hundred of those years I was bound by kinship to hunt with my sire—a degenerate savage who deserved a righteous staking.
I remember what it was to be human, a time so long ago that I feel the vibration of mortal pain like the desperate tug of a rope falling into a bottomless grave. The tug no longer gives me pause. I am immortal, blessed, and cursed.
In the beginning of my undeath I fed as a soldier and since have watched men uncounted meet their doom. In my bloodlust I am a nightwalker, armed with flesh-tearing teeth like the Roman war dogs and with the sharp talons of the carrion crows who circle the battlefield. I kill the weakest and find life among the dying, feeding on the wreck of man’s foolish predilection for conquest.
The English and French fed me for nearly two centuries with their petty bickering; but then I set my sights on America and a bloody revolution of men wresting a country from other men. Being part Scots and part English in my parentage I should have preferred the “Redcoats,” as my rebellious New World neighbors called them. But I found the blood of the revolutionaries a wilder vintage, more vital and sustaining. No, I am not an avenger or a bringer of justice. Nor am I the sadistic killer I was created to be. I am merely the last spectral face dying soldiers see on the darkened battlefield before facing oblivion.
In the winter of 1778 I arrived in Savannah, a fading flower of a city. I carried with me a welcome supply of gold and the implied support of my newly chosen British surname—Thorne. The Brits had captured the city earlier that year and I had no reason to dispute them. There was plenty of bloodshed to go around. I have remained in the vicinity of Savannah for many reasons, including other murderous wars, but I see no need to broadcast my motives. Let’s just say that the city and its darker hugger-muggery suit me. As winter suits me.
Summer in these southern climes arrives with a glorious pressing heat that breeds bloodlust even in the mortal heart. Human nature being what it is, I find a steady, gourmand source in their casual bloodshed. Passions rise and humans die. There is something to be said for the term “red-blooded Americans,”and I sense their fury like a shark tracks a drop of blood in the outgoing tide.
And so I’ve given up the wandering life of a war dog, and now I reside in this city near the sea. The sharks and I are brothers. They fear nothing and cruise the watery darkness like silent sentinels waiting for the scent of the abandoned and dying, the flashing shock of hopelessness to draw them in for the kill. I live a gentleman’s life, attending evening social events, smoking cigars and drinking port in private gambling dens or exclusive bordellos, and walking the dark streets to feed my destiny.
I own all I wish to own of my adopted city. My “ancestral” home—since I am in effect my own ancestor—is centered on one city block on Houghton Square. The entire block belongs to me, along with a row of businesses bordered by the river. I find enterprise a mostly pleasant diversion to occupy my mind, while the riverfront assures private access to a dock near the port of Savannah.
Even monsters take vacations on occasion.
You might wish to know of my other pastimes and the small number of humans I trust. I am in no mood to speak of such things here. And I certainly do not divulge my true name or where I sleep when the sun is high and hot. My secrets are my own, as is the bounty on my traitorous, dark heart. These few scrawled lines were written only to warn that other beings walk beside you betimes. Beings you cannot fathom or interpret. Be wary of taking in strangers unawares.
Savannah, Georgia 2005 a.d.
Letter from Jack, a Vampire
My name is Jack McShane and I’ve been asked what I remember of being human. Of the days before William and I met.
I remember the hunger. And the fighting.
I remember a kid whose empty gut gnawed at him night and day. I dreamed of food—bread and meat piled to the sky, fruit from endless orchards, cabbage and potatoes from fields that stretched for miles. I had visions of butter and eggs to say grace over, of fat brothers and sisters and a rosy-cheeked mother. I don’t even remember their faces now. Hell, I barely remember my own. All I remember is hollow cheeks, listless eyes, and dull complexions. And my mother’s thin wails for those of us who didn’t survive.
I didn’t spend my days shooting marbles or playing tag like young boys are meant to do. My father, an immigrant dirt farmer, didn’t seem to know any way to raise his children other than to treat them like the slaves he couldn’t afford. Before his passage to America, he’d foraged and fought for food in the sooty, dank, urban hell of Belfast, darting up and down cobblestone alleys, dodging lines full of dingy laundry and heaps of garbage while trying to stay out of sight of bigger boys as desperate and hungry as himself.
In this new land of promised plenty, my brothers and sisters and I, the ones of us who survived, were raised on a diet of cornmeal mush and merciless beatings. All the time being told how lucky we were. My daddy beat me for not getting the milking done fast enough, for stealing an apple that could’ve been sold, for helping my sisters meet their measure of picked cotton. My mother was little more than a shell of a woman, without the will or the strength to challenge my father’s iron hand. When I got big enough to fight back, I did. By the time I was seventeen, I figured I’d better leave home before one of us killed the other, so I ran away to the grand city of Savannah where I worked the docks as a stevedore.
No sooner had I gotten a full belly and a dollar in my pocket than a war came along to damn me to a life of hunger and fighting again. A cruel blockade dried up the work and left poor laborers like me with no other choice than to join up with the Confederacy. By 1864, we were down to bug-infested hardtack and hot water that had only a passing acquaintance with coffee grounds.
After the demon Sherman torched Atlanta, his army headed east toward the sea on the Georgia Central railroad. They ordered three brigades of us in the Georgia militia from Macon to cut off the Federals on their way to Augusta to seize its arsenal and foundry. That was when we ran smack dab into U.S. General Charles Walcott and his men, part of Sherman’s right flank, not headed for Augusta, but for Savannah.
Confederate Brigadier General Pleasant J. Phillips, as poorly named a bastard as I ever came across, ordered us to charge—across an open field and up a hill—the Union troops entrenched behind a railroad embankment. Shaking as much from fury as fear, I looked around at what was left of the Georgia militia—a handful of able-bodied men like me and hundreds of old men and boys. I wanted to turn my rifle on that idiot Phillips, but when I heard the bugle call I started across the field with my comrades. I remember looking into the barrels of the Yankees’ Spencer repeating rifles and thinking that I didn’t survive hunger and merciless beatings just to wind up with a bullet in my brain.
Then I saw a blinding flash and felt a blow to my stomach that knocked me to the soggy earth.
The next thing I knew it was night, and I could feel that old familiar gnawing in my gut again. Only this time, it wasn’t hunger but a sucking wound setting free my life’s blood with every beat of my dying heart. This was it, then. All the fighting to stay alive had come down to my spilling out my life in a swampy field surrounded by the dregs of the slaughtered Confederacy. Nearing my last breath I cursed heaven as I had in my youth, not caring if it damned me to hell as it surely would.
The very next moment I sensed something near me, something both hot and cold, alive and yet not. Something evil . . . with a craving. And then it was looming over me, its eyes glowing like a hellhound’s, face and fangs dripping with blood.
It was William.
“You cannot save them now,” he said, gesturing to the corpses of my comrades around me. “Do you want to live?” he asked.
I did.
“Do you swear to serve me as long as you exist on the earth?” he asked.
