The Mammoth Book Of Vampire Stories Written By Women

Danielle watched in horror as the woman stumbled past her into the kitchen and fell through the door and down the stairs to the landing. Alexandre, enraged, followed, and planted a solid blow to her head. The woman on the landing stopped moving.

Every flat door seemed to open at the same moment. Screams and curses followed, with fingers pointing at Alexandre and Danielle. "Murderer!" a man cried. "Killer!" screamed a child.

Danielle, dumbfounded, retreated to the apartment and escaped through the window into the mist of the night.

William Kemmler confessed to the murder of his common-law wife, Matilda Ziegler, and was sentenced to death by the state of New York. He was transferred to the prison in Auburn, where in August of 1890 he awaited his execution.

But the execution was to be a civil and humane one, the first one in which electricity would be used to snuff out the life of the convicted. A chair had been built of oak and electrical circuits, and tested on animals to make sure the death would be humane. Though there had been arguments between the two leading moguls of electric power, Thomas Edison and George Westing-house, as to which of the currents — Edison's "Direct Current" and Westinghouse's "Alternating Current" — it came to be through some underhanded manipulation that Edison assured that AC current would be used for the electric chair. Although Westinghouse refused to sell his equipment to the prison for the death machine, Edison arranged for some used equipment to be purchased without his competitor's knowledge and made into the chair. This, Edison knew, would seal in the minds of Americans that AC was deadly, and so DC should be used in homes. Men at Auburn prison as well as reporters in their daily and weekly newspapers began joking that a man put to death in the electric chair would be said to have been "Westinghoused", a term that horrified the developer of the alternating current.

None of this mattered to William Kemmler, however, nor to Danielle Boquet. With her charm and grace she had been able to gain welcome into the prison's main building, but had yet to be invited to enter the cold portion of the death house where her Alexandre awaited his execution. She had the power to kill the guards but did not have the power to force them to offer her entrance.

And so she waited. And she fretted. And Marie and Clarice tried to console her. She went back time and again to the tenement flat in hopes she might find a way to help her love escape yet another death by the great and humane society, but there was nothing. She took the black Bible and kept it close in her skirt's pocket, but reading it did nothing. Explained nothing.

Danielle clung to the exterior wall of the death chamber at night, and during the day slept in a closet of the prison's gasworks. Marie and Clarice stayed with her, assuring her that it was not Alexandre and once he was dead she would come to her senses.

Witnesses arrived at the prison the evening of 6 August, twenty-five men, fourteen of them doctors, anxious and excited to see this new death which would not cause undue suffering. The death chamber itself was in the cellar, and Danielle lay in the steamy, bug-infested grass at one of the windows, staring through the steel bars and glass at the horrific scene playing out below. The witnesses walked in, clutching top hats and gloves, and most of them settled themselves on seats that had been arranged to face the electric chair. Other men stood. And then the warden and several guards entered, with Alexandre between them. A priest, looking bored and disinterested, followed behind in his robe, holding his Scriptures to his chest.

Alexandre glanced about the damp, stark room. His eyes were red-rimmed with lack of sleep and the terror of the impending. The guards nodded at the chair. He walked to it, but could not seem to sit down. A guard said, "You'll like this a lot better than the gallows, boy."

"I must get in," whispered Danielle to her Sisters behind her.

Marie and Clarice, standing a few yards back, said, "You cannot."

Alexandre turned and lowered himself into the chair. Then he sprang up again. "I remember!" he shouted.

"Shut up and sit down," said the warden. "We'll break your arms to do it if we have to."

"No, no, hear me, I remember!" Alexandre's face twisted with dreadful knowledge. "Oh, God, I remember!"

The warden shoved Alexandre into the chair. Guards began securing the leather straps at his legs and arms. But Alexandre continued. "I remember the blade on my throat, the quick slash of the merciful Africans who said I was the first to die a civil death! I remember the blade of the guillotine, and the assurance that the execution would be painless. I remember now! Why again?"

"He's crazed with fear," said one nervous doctor. "Let's have it done!"