At about ten thirty on the black night of April 14, 1865, a man signalled with a lighted candle from the stoop of Petersen’s boardinghouse in Washington, D.C., and shouted four ordinary words, “Bring him in here!” Opposite, across the street, something far out of the ordinary began to move. Monstrous and many-legged like a centipede, it had just squeezed itself out through the doorway of Ford’s Theatre and now began to crawl in agonizingly slow motion toward the candle’s flame, its many feet moving in weirdly unrelated, out-of-time steps, all struggling for stances in the wheel-rutted and hoof-chopped dirt.

Viewed close up, its true nature became apparent and even more horrifying, for it represented twentyfive soldiers and doctors and bystanders carrying the body of Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth President of the United States and the first ever to be struck down by an assassin, to the nearest bed. An officer’s sword had opened a path in (he crowd that stood transfixed with shock, eyes straining beyond the short flare of three gas jets to glimpse the familiar face. They saw it, wax pale. The President was naked to the waist, but flung lopsidedly over his chest was his overcoat, its collar sticky with new blood.

Full Story >>