As dawn broke, a restless city roused itself from a drunken, angry stupor, and like horrible, furious human bees they began to swarm in the first bleak light of morning. The rain had stopped, mist lay as thick as fog on the ground and screaming bloody murder came to New York City.
Railroad yards, machine shops, shipyards and foundries were all quiet. The sun began to rise over the ragged rooftops of Five Points and the other poor wards of the giant metropolis; the fog began to shred and tear and the people marched. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands armed with the righteous indignation of a mob. Gathering in swirls were men, women and children armed with torches, clubs, sticks, knives and broken bottles, fueled by gin and the boiling anger of an entire race maligned since Cromwell crossed the Irish Sea and made his slaughter at the Black Castle of the Byrnes.
The signs said NO DRAFT and KILL THE NIGGERS, but in their savage hearts the mob knew that neither thing was at the root of their fury. Wealth and privilege were the enemies, the black man was the scapegoat and their greatest weapon was their stubborn, angry stupidity, for a mob is only as smart as its dullest wit, and if ever there was a mob of sodden dullards, this was it.
There had been fifty thousand casualties at Gettysburg two weeks before, and these people were not about to go peacefully into that kind of hell for the sake of Abe Lincoln’s proclamation of the nigger’s emancipation while the Irish had yet to see their own. The next draft draw was set for ten thirty in the morning at the provost marshall’s office at Third Avenue and Forty-sixth Street, and the mob, first a trickle, then a flood, was drawn to it like flies to fresh-killed meat.
A dozen Metropolitans were there to guard the office, but by eleven a call went out across the police telegraph for fifty more. Violence began to spread, fires began to burn and people began to die. William Seward, the governor, forewarned by his friends at the Assassin’s Club, was conveniently vacationing in New Jersey.
The mob split into a dozen branches, some concentrating on the plunder of stores such as Brooks Brothers and Tiffany’s, others rioting in front of the pro-Lincoln offices of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. Still others sought out the homes of policemen and known Republicans, while a separate throng moved up Fifth Avenue, looting, pillaging and destroying property as they went.
By noon whole sections of Broadway were in flames, tram cars overturned by main force, women with huge flensing knives slaughtering the horses and butchering them into likely cuts before they fled back to their verminous warrens, clutching the dripping roasts and haunches in blood-sodden aprons.
One furious harridan, stinking of rum, was arrested by a lone constable, an Irishman named Ryan Howard, late of the Coombe in Dublin. Screeching at him, she turned and in one stroke of her butcher’s blade she slit his throat from ear to ear. The crowd around her cheered, then tore the dead man’s body into pieces. A cry went up throughout the mob—“Kill the niggers!”—and they did.
By late afternoon the surges from the lower wards turned on the Colored Orphan Asylum at Fifth Avenue and Forty-third Street, burning it to the ground although by then the children had been evacuated. At five o’clock, the city wreathed in clouds of smoke from dozens of fires, a black coachman named Abe Franklin met the mob at the corner of Twenty-seventh Street and Seventh Avenue while trying to escort his elderly mother to the safety of a friend’s home.
Running into the house, he and his mother were chased by a group of thugs who crushed his skull with a brick, then dragged his body outside, stringing him up from a lamppost with a length of rope, then beating his unconscious form with clubs and fists. Interrupted briefly by a patrol of soldiers, they returned to the dangling body, hacking at it with knives and finally slashing out his eyes and slicing off his genitalia, carrying the severed flesh away on the tines of a pitchfork like a prize.
At seven that evening, the fires on Broadway now out of control, a roving host of almost five thousand rioters found their way into the streets of Greenwich Village, seeking out plunder in the warehouses along the waterfront, burning everything in their way and giving chase to fleeing residents of the area like baying hounds after a hare.
By nine o’clock, the police telegraph lines cut in most sections of the city and the troops quartered in City Hall Park spread out across the island so thinly as to barely make any headway against the seething hordes, they turned their attention back toward Broadway.
A young father, William Jones, desperate to feed his children, had purchased a loaf of bread and was returning to his tenement home of Clarkson Street when a small band of rioters trapped him, half of them women who worked together at a laundry on Elizabeth Street. They set upon him instantly, beating him with makeshift weapons made from clubs of wood studded with roofing nails as well as claw hammers they’d looted from a hardware store on Leonard Street.
Bleeding from a dozen wounds, the man was stripped of his clothes and strung up head down from a lamppost in the same fashion as the unfortunate Abe Franklin. When he showed no signs of life they piled up broken crates beneath his dangling body, doused them with kerosene and lit a fire underneath him, roasting him alive, listening to his horrible screams of agony while they danced around the lamppost, singing.
At ten, with full darkness fallen on a city lit like daylight by the towering flames of a hundred blazing fires, the writhing mob that roamed the streets of Greenwich Village sought out new worlds to conquer. Crossing Sixth Avenue, the smell of bloody, battered flesh hot in their nostrils, they turned into the narrow reaches of Minetta Lane.
Echo Van Helsing and Kate Warne stayed in the catacomb beneath the cathedral cemetery through the night and listened, sometimes unbelieving, to the Vampyr’s strange tale, all the while under the watchful eye of the Chinaman, Fu Sheng. The Vampyr told them of the approaching sickness that would soon overwhelm him, told them of the Nine and the ancient Order of the Dragon, the near mythic Drachenorden; the secret alliance of the Vampyr kind, dedicated to protecting the rights of the weak, mortal and unfortunate preyed upon by their half-breed cousins the unholy Damphyr, the blood lusters, the killers-for-joy who had roamed the earth almost since time began.
He also told them of the Tenth, the Other and the Fallen, who was the Damphyr’s leader and was the creature who’d really murdered Echo’s father, the renowned metaphysician and naturalist Abraham Van Helsing. Known variously through the ages as Memnoch, Gaheris, the mysterious Gwalchmai ap Gwyar, or Adamo Selva the Astrologer, the Other had craved the bloody mortal power of the Damphyr and chafed at the strict discipline and sacrifice practiced by his fellow Vampyrn.
He told them of his ancient home, of Budapest and Prague and of the dark secrets of Berlin. He told them of the strange, elusive, eellike Acqua Damphyr in Venice and the ghostly Damphyr Blanche beneath the streets of Paris. He told them of London and his escape, of the wreck of the Anglo-Saxon, the death of one Enoch Bale and the rebirth of another. He told them everything and they listened, transfixed.
Through the ages, the Nine became eight, then seven and now six. The Other, calling himself Adam Worth in this war-torn world, had battled with the Vampyr Draculiya more than once, never defeating him, never being defeated, always withdrawing to fight again in some other place and era. The time had come to do battle once again.
The Vampyr told them of Gould’s plot to raise the price of gold by bringing riot and fire to the city, aided by Adam Worth’s regiments of Damphyr, spread throughout the city’s poorest districts, their job to fan the flames of violence and hatred, taking their own grotesque pleasures unseen within the greater horror.
At dawn Fu Sheng slipped away through the secret exit from the crypt, returning an hour later to report that the riot had begun. He went out again at noon and did not return for several hours. When he did return, his shirt and his dark suit coat were drenched with blood, though not his own.
“The rioters are everywhere, my lord. The city is in flames. I had to fight my way back here. The telegraph has been cut and the roads out of the city are blocked. The police are having little effect. The army, what there is of it, is fighting in the streets. It is chaos.”
Kate, slumped against the wall of the dingy chamber, shook herself, like someone waking from a dream. Echo’s eyes were still firmly fixed on the figure of Enoch Bale as he stood, fully dressed now, leaning on the huge sarcophagus of the long-dead Haitian, Toussaint.
“We must…” Kate began. She shook her head again, then spoke a second time. “We must get help.”
“What help could there possibly be?” Echo said, her voice barely above a whisper. “We are beyond God now. We are in a world of darkness.” She sobbed once, a small ragged cry. “Matthew!” she moaned. “What have I done?”
“We’ll find your brother and deliver him from my old enemy,” said Draculiya. “I make that vow.” He turned to Kate. “What were you thinking, Mrs. Warne?”
“That this is madness, but that something must be done, and quickly. If New York is lost to the mob, then the war is lost.”
“I agree, but what can you do?”
“My friend Barnabus is working as a longshoreman on the Hudson piers until his new ship is ready. If I can get to him he can take me across to the Jersey shore. There’s a colonel attached to the provost general’s command at Gettysburg. His name is Alan Sharp.”
“And what can he do?”
“Send men. The Seventh New York was stationed here. A forced march could bring them to the city by Wednesday night, the following morning at the latest.”
“Would they come?”
“If Lincoln knew about Gould’s plot? Yes, I think so.”
“You can reach the president?” the Vampyr asked a little skeptically.
“I did him a favor once. Honest Abe owes me.”
“Which pier?”
“Twenty-four, at the foot of Vesey by the Barclay Street Ferry.”
“Fu Sheng!” commanded the Vampyr. “Accompany Mrs. Warne to the foot of Vesey Street. See that she finds her friend, and see that no harm comes to her.”
“Yes, my lord.” The Chinaman nodded with a small bow.
“I can make it on my own, thank you very much,” said Kate stiffly.
“Fu Sheng will accompany you,” said the Vampyr in his odd, insistent voice. There was no room for argument. Kate still had her small pistol in her lap, and she raised it experimentally. Her limbs were heavy, almost as though she’d smoked opium from the den on Doyers Street. She knew that with his strange hypnotic powers the Vampyr could have taken the gun from her at any time he wished, but he hadn’t. She looked at the Chinaman in his blood-stiff clothes. Better to have him as an ally than an enemy.
“Agreed,” she said finally. “But not without Echo.”
The Vampyr seemed to shimmer across the room, his feet barely touching the earthen floor of the crypt. In an instant he was looming over her, his long jet hair hanging around his face like a cowl. He reached out his hand to Echo and she rose to meet him, her eyes never leaving his.
The Vampyr spoke quietly to Kate. “Miss Van Helsing will stay in my care. She has an appointment on Minetta Lane, and so do I.” The dark figure’s voice seemed to deepen and fill the room, his eyes burning into Kate’s very heart. “Now, go.”
And she did just that.