The day following the visit to the B elzoni exhibit, April 14 (a day on which, forty seven years later, the world’s greatest ship would be fatally struck on her maiden voyage) Mary Todd Lincoln and her husband were escorted into the presidential booth at Ford’s Theatre for the new play’s presentation. Mary Todd was pleased at how the booth was suitably decorated with flags, and she was further pleased to see the effect her new gown was having, drawing every eye in the theatre as they entered their booth to sit down. After they seated themselves, the whole assembly took their seats and the play began.

Weary with the cares of his presidency and the effects of the past war, his sunken eyes and loose, sagging skin of his face showing the world how very tired he was, the President attempted to turn his attention on the play, which everyone was raving about in Washington City. He had a good view of it, since the box overlooked the stage, but his utter exhaustion could not be denied. The President was soon nodding in his chair, unable to keep his attention on the comedy. He loved good-hearted humor, but his exhaustion made it impossible for him to sit very long before he became drowsy. Mary Todd, used to his ways, did not care to prod him, as she was so taken with the play she hardly noticed how her husband was faring.

After five minutes the bodyguard slipped away from outside their door and went across the street for some more refreshment since his bottle had run dry. He had been in that saloon once before that day, and he thought a few more drinks wouldn’t hurt. It was a dull job for an active, young body standing duty outside a door for hours on end. Nobody would be the wiser if he took a little break, he reasoned. While the bodyguard was at the saloon the assassin, the actor and revenge-minded, Southern sympathizer John Wilkes Booth, saw his golden opportunity to strike a last blow for the defeated South. At seventeen minutes after ten, he went up to the second floor to the door of the president’s booth. He tried the door, it was unlocked, and he entered with a loaded, cocked pistol.

He observed Lincoln and his wife, their backs turned, oblivious to his quiet entrance. Standing behind the president, he saw there would be nothing to prevent him, and at precisely twenty minutes after ten he shot the president at close range, firing directly into the back of Lincoln’s massive head.

Mary Todd jerked around at the explosion of sound struck her, saw the assassin and the smoking gun, and still had the presence of mind to scream, “He has murdered the president!”

How many times had the chronically fearful woman rehearsed this line? A dozen times? A hundred? Her practice, in the wee hours of the night when everyone else could sleep but she lay nearly breathless with anxiety, now paid off in a flawless performance of the Aggrieved Wife of the Mortally Striken President.

The whole theatre erupted in chaos as the sound of the gun, the high, feminine scream, with the words of Mary Todd Lincoln crying murder. It immediately stopped everything on stage as the actors and actresses stook transfixed in their places. The assassin, realizing his escape back out the door would be the first to be cut off, dashed past Mary Todd Lincoln to the rail, seized it, and threw himself over. He meant to leap to the stage from the box, which was a short distance away, and he would have made it safely except that his boot spur caught in a flag and he fell, breaking his leg and tearing the flag as he struggled to get free. Falling onto the stage, he staggered free of the tattered flag and broken leg and all escaped out the back of the theater and somehow mounted his horse and got away, heading for the house of another Southern sympathizer.

The presidential box was almost immediately filled with men, who carried Lincoln out to a house across the street where he was laid in a bed in the master bedroom. Doctors were summoned, and White House officials also came to the room where the president lay unconscious and clearly dying.

The doctors observed the wound and agreed the bullet could not be touched.—it was too deeply embedded and he would expire at the first attempt There was no saving the president, yet they did not wish to hasten his end by unnecessary surgery. Rather, it was best to make him comfortable as possible and await the inevitable. Mary Todd was so distraught by this time, she was impossible to have in the room, and by orders of the physicians she was removed from the room. Her throwing herself on the president and crying uncontrollably could not possibly help him, they reasoned.

Part III

Lincoln lay motionless in the borrowed bed, his bandaged head propped on a big pillow, wholly unconscious to the world, but he was dimly aware of a great pain in his head. He had no idea that he had been shot, having seen nothing of John Wilkes Booth. Unknown to him, the American people were already grieving, hearing of his mortal wound.

He drifted in and out of dreams, which were very strange even to his fading mind. He saw a colossus (was it Belzoni’s?) being removed from a tall-pillared, white edifice as huge flaring lights were directed on the work that made the night brighter than day. Somehow he got closer and was surprised to see, being borne by giant machines instead of gangs of hundreds of sweating slaves as Pharaoh’s colossus would have been borne, his own image. How could that be? he wondered. The very idea of anybody making such an image of him was appalling. What had he done to deserve such a fate?

“Where are you taking the Colossus, my good fellow?” he asked a man standing there. “To Manhattan, the Big Apple,” the man replied, before squirting some chewed Copenhagen from the side of his mouth. “Why?” “This old town is done for! Don’t you know?” the man cried, dumbfounded. “Look for yourself!”

The rail-splitter and lawyer looked, and though, he saw smoke and soot on some of the buildings, the fires had evidently been extinguished and there was no general destruction in the strange, vast and beautiful metropolis spread before him. With flares of working crews everywhere as they removed artifacts from the most important structures, it was marvelous in construction to his eye, with many noble buildings all standing in flooded with light before him. The only truly odd and disturbing thing was the ring of flashing blue and red lights and searchlights he could see in the distance and the constant wails of high-pitched horns.

“What city is this?” he marveled, for he had never seen anything so grand, not even in New York. “Are you crazy?” the man cried. “Don’t you know it’s Washington, the capital—or was, I should say? Are you—?“ He peered at Lincoln. “Say, you must have been hit by the death rays-—that explains it, your brain is affected!” “I don’t see what you mean!” he said to the man, though he did feel rather hurt in his head. He put a hand up, but could feel nothing, only a strange numbness. The man looked exasperated. “The people—they’re all stone dead, man! Here on the surface they’re all blasted, nothing but bones and some skin here and there where the rays didn’t hit! Somebody let off a neutron bomb on the Beltway—and they say there’s another set to go off any time to take care of any survivors and medical teams! The whole subway system is shut down and blocked, of course!”

“’Neutron bomb’?” Lincoln repeated. What could that be? he wondered, but he didn’t get an answer, as the man was very busy directing the operation. The man moved away, but saw Lincoln still standing by the side. “You need to get moving, if you are to get out of here before they wall it all up permanently. The UN is taking over, and this is a no-man’s land, off-limits to the public from now on! From now on Chocolate City is in New York—an apple covered with tax payers’ chocolate instead of Coney Island caramel-—hahaha!!“

The supervisor squinted in the bright lights as he peered closer at Lincoln. “Are you sure you aren’t related to old Abe? You sure are a dead ringer for him! Hey guys--” The supervisor turned to call a few of his workers over to see what he meant by comparing him with the statue, but already the whole scene before the dying Lincoln was fading away, and darkness closed in as the workers gathered round to stare at him where he sat in a big white sheet.