The Origin of Dracula (22 page)

After about a year of these skirmishes, Edna discovered that the colony’s leaders were purposely provoking the Paspahegh as an excuse to wage an all-out war on the tribe. She tried to convince her husband and some of the colony’s leaders that this was a bad strategy. She told them they were only making life harder for themselves. But because she was a woman, and because many of the leaders believed they had a God-given right to this land, her pleas fell on deaf ears.

At this point, the colonists escalated the confrontations with the tribe into larger battles. Those battles always ended with the colonists annihilating entire Paspahegh villages. But still, during this period, Edna secretly maintained her friendships with the Paspahegh.

It was also during this period that she started writing her story. It was based on a Paspahegh legend, one told to her by a couple of her closest Paspahegh friends—friends who were murdered by the colonists when the colonists ambushed their Paspahegh village and slaughtered every last man, woman, and child who lived there. Edna had feared this day would come, prayed to God it wouldn’t—and was devastated when it did.

Harker concluded his preface by explaining that in addition to applying what he’d learned about Edna and Jamestown, he’d bridged the missing pages as best he could using Edna’s style, language, and voice. He had tried to stay true to what he believed was her intent.

After finishing the preface, I dove right in to Edna’s story. It quickly became clear that this slim volume was the bible of what was happening to us. The story it told, four hundred years old, would end up bringing order to the chaos and supernatural phenomena that had engulfed us. But just like the real Bible, this bible was going to require some interpretation.

The Forest
started with an introduction to “Drakho,” a powerful warrior who lived on Tsenacommacah land. The Paspahegh were already sharing their land with him when the settlers arrived. An agreement between Drakho and the Paspahegh had been in place for hundreds, possibly even thousands, of years; many of the Paspahegh believed that Drakho was far older than their own race. And because he was so much older, he had learned and perfected special skills. He had powers no Native Americans possessed.

Harry and I both recognized these powers.

Edna wrote that Drakho had the ability to cloud the Paspahegh’s minds. He triggered strange and sometimes terrifying visions that were as real as anything the Paspahegh could see or hear or touch when they weren’t under his spell. He could cloud their minds even if he was at a great distance from them. At times he also had the ability to read their thoughts. He knew the most intimate details of their personal lives.

And Drakho could transform himself into an animal—a wolf, a dog, or a bat. He’d traverse inhospitable territory in those forms, and he also traveled in the form of mist. Using these forms, he moved with such stealth that he was impossible to track.

Then Edna noted one of Drakho’s character traits, a trait that was important to the Paspahegh, because it offered them a way to appease the great warrior. Drakho loved to play games. Complicated games—games based on riddles, quests, and challenges. He’d engage the Paspahegh, as well as other tribes, in elaborate competitions that would last days, weeks, months, years, and even decades. Then he’d award a prize to the winning individual or village. Drakho also liked to stick to the same bloodlines for his games; once he’d chosen a bloodline, he’d forever come back to it, generation after generation.

After introducing Drakho and the Paspahegh, Edna launched into the meat of her story: Drakho’s response to the arrival of the settlers.

First, she explained that it wasn’t as if Drakho approved of the Paspahegh—her Paspahegh friends had told her it wasn’t like that at all. They couldn’t read Drakho’s mind, but over the centuries, the tribes had come to understand that above all else Drakho loved the land.
His
land, which they said stretched across a great swath of the Atlantic coast—a swath that I knew went from North Carolina to Massachusetts.

The Paspahegh told Edna that Drakho understood that the Native American population would increase, and he understood that with that increase, so would their exploitation of his land. But a crisis point would take centuries, if not millennia, to arrive, and Drakho was patient. He was biding his time until that crisis arrived.

Edna wrote that Drakho’s reaction to the English colonization of his land was very different. While he’d accepted the Native Americans, at least temporarily, he wasn’t so keen on these new settlers. He’d already had some encounters with the Europeans arriving on his shores, and they had left a negative impression. That impression was reinforced when he saw the settlers betraying the Paspahegh.

Still, he didn’t get involved until the English began to massacre the Paspahegh. When they did, he intervened on the tribe’s side. But the settlers were relentless in their war against the Paspahegh. They were fiercer and more violent than Drakho had foreseen. So he made a decision. He swore he’d never allow the settlers to get a foothold on his land. To that end, he began an offensive against them.

Here, Harker had a rather long footnote about the historical context of Edna’s story. A few years after the settlers annihilated the Paspahegh, their own population was also decimated. Eighty percent of the settlers died. Modern historians called this period “the Starving Time” because famine caused the vast majority of the deaths.

But Edna’s story laid out a different explanation: Drakho killed the settlers. He was defending his land.

Also in this footnote, Harker explained that up to this point in her story, Edna had based her tale on an obscure Native American legend—the legend of Drakho. But now she was weaving her own life into
The Forest
, including the calamity. She also brought in the tragedy that struck her own family during these dark days. She lost her husband and three of her children to starvation and disease.

But in Edna’s account, Drakho was the culprit. He had destroyed her family, leaving her with only one son, Benjamin. And here, the drama in her story escalated. Edna knew that Drakho was determined to kill all of the settlers. He was going to clear Tsenacommacah—meaning Jamestown—of every last colonist. But she wasn’t going to let him kill Benjamin, her only remaining child. And the only way to stop Drakho was to kill him.

But how?

He appeared unstoppable. The revenge he was meting out on behalf of the Paspahegh proved that he was immune to the settlers’ every weapon. And his unique abilities made him an even more formidable enemy.

Edna wanted to turn to the Paspahegh for help. Unfortunately, by this time it appeared that the settlers had murdered them all. And if by chance there
were
any left—and she prayed to God that some had survived—she was sure they’d fled.

In the end, she clung to one hope. She’d heard that some of the settlers had tortured a Paspahegh, hoping to extract information from him before executing him. The settlers wanted to know how to stop the vicious warrior who was fighting on the side of the tribe. These settlers didn’t have the inside information Edna had about the warrior—that he was an ancient being defending his homeland—but they did have one thing in common with her: they wanted to know how to kill him.

As it turned out, the settlers
had
extracted information from their prisoner. Some of which they understood. You
could
kill the warrior. He had an Achilles’ heel—a weak spot. But they couldn’t understand the most important part of this information because they didn’t understand the Paspahegh language well enough.

Edna did.

And that paid off when she talked to one of the settlers who’d conducted the torture. He told her that the prisoner kept repeating the same words—words she was able to translate.

Amber weapon.

She didn’t tell her fellow colonists that she’d been able to translate the words. Instead, she put her own plan together. She’d kill Drakho with an amber weapon and save her only remaining son, Benjamin.

Here, Harker interrupted the narrative, again, with another footnote. He wrote that some of the following pages were missing, so he’d shaped this part of the tale himself.

Based on the word the Paspahegh prisoner had used for “weapon,” Edna determined she’d need some kind of knife or dagger. It would form the core of the amber weapon. But she didn’t want to steal a dagger from another settler. If she was caught, she’d face severe punishment, and her fellow citizens already distrusted her. Her past friendships with the Paspahegh made her suspect.

So she decided on a morbid course of action. She’d sneak into the cemetery on the edge of Jamestown and dig up the grave of a settler. On his deathbed, this settler had insisted his family bury him with his weapons.

Edna felt sick as she dug up the dirt and peeled the shroud away from the decaying body. She kept her composure during the gruesome task by clinging desperately to one thought: this was the only way to save her son. She retrieved the dagger holstered around the dead man’s waist, then quickly re-buried his body.

At this point in the narrative, I took another of the many breaks I’d been taking to fill Harry in. As I was summarizing this section for him, I connected Edna’s amber weapon, her dagger, to the knives used to kill Dracula. In the book
Dracula
, Jonathan Harker and Quincey Morris had killed the count using two knives. Harker had slashed Dracula’s throat with one, and Quincey Morris had stabbed him in the heart with another.

I dove back into the story, and a few pages later, Edna revealed exactly what the amber weapon was. She was preparing the dagger by coating it with amber. She didn’t go into detail about the process, but why would she? How could she have ever foretold that I’d be sitting here in the dawn’s early light, four hundred years later, in front of a electric substation, using
The Forest
as a field guide?

After Edna had readied the dagger, she had to figure out a way to get close enough to Drakho to stab him with it. She considered confronting him when he entered Jamestown to wreak his vengeance. He’d been ambushing settlers for months. She’d seen him descend on the colony disguised as a wolf, a dog, a cold, lingering mist, and even as a blanket of darkness from which he unfolded himself in the night. In the end though, Edna decided that Drakho’s stealth was so great—he came and went as he pleased—that confronting him in the settlement left too much to chance. Instead her plan was to draw Drakho to her.

Years ago the Paspahegh had told her that Wassamoah Bay, a land of ancient caves and untouched soil, was sacred land for Drakho. Her plan was to ride out to this sacred land and make Drakho an offer. She’d play one of his games for the life of her son. She’d plead for him to give her one chance at saving Benjamin. She’d get on her knees and beg for that chance.

But this would be a ruse. As soon as Drakho was within striking distance, she’d stab him with her amber weapon. She knew this wouldn’t be easy. Drakho had the ability to cloud her mind, which meant she’d have to be wary of everything she saw. Her own eyes might deceive her in the moment she needed them most.

When I filled Harry in on this part of the story, he said, “That game she wants to play—for the life of her son—it’s the game you’re playin’.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t ask for it,” I said.

“She didn’t neither, right? She’s got no choice.”

He was right. The parallel to my story rang true, which made me even more anxious to get to the end of her story to find out if she’d been able to save her son.

Edna waited three nights, for a night with a waxing crescent moon, bright enough to light her way. Her mission had to be carried out at night. The Paspahegh had told her many times that Drakho showed himself in the calm of night or in the darkness of caves, rather than in the frenzy of daylight.

Edna placed her weapon in a sheath that she’d sewn into the inside of her robe, then she saddled up her husband’s horse, a noble beast who’d turned despondent after her husband’s death. She wished she could explain her mission to the horse, tell him that his former owner would approve of this nighttime trek. If she could explain this to the noble beast, she was sure he’d help her during her confrontation with Drakho.

After riding for two hours, Edna entered the forest that surrounded Wassamoah Bay. Once there, she didn’t know where to go—was it all sacred land?—so she rode through the primeval forest toward the bay.

It wasn’t long before she heard rustling in the trees. And the rustling got louder the farther she rode into the woods. She thought these were restless nightingales or owls—dozens of them, judging by the denseness of the rustling.

Then suddenly her horse stopped and neighed—and a swarm of bats swept down from the treetops above, bony gray creatures with scaly wings. They sent her horse into a frenzy. The noble beast bucked and whinnied, terrified, as the bats flung themselves at the horse and rider. Edna fought to keep control of the animal while swinging at the mad swarm.

But the horse threw her. She hit the ground hard, and the bats hurled themselves at her like pelting hail. Claws and teeth ripped her robe and gnawed at her skin. The stinging pain was continuous, but each individual blow, each cut, racked her body with new torment.

She tried to swat the bats away, but this only made them fiercer, battering her with more force. She began to reach for the dagger, but then stopped herself. If she pulled it out now, the game was over. Drakho would see the amber weapon. Then she had the frightening thought: Does he already know I have it?
No
, she told herself. Drakho didn’t know who she was, so he couldn’t know her thoughts.

She didn’t pull out her hidden weapon. Instead she cried out, “I’ve come to play your game! I can play as well as the Paspahegh! Better!” The bats didn’t relent. “Please, I beg you! I offer you what you value most: a game!” She felt the onslaught of bats slow. “The Paspahegh told me you are fair, and I believe them.”

The swarm of bats thinned out, then flew back up into the trees.