The Origin of Dracula (26 page)

When we got to Home Depot, I parked, googled which types of varnish were made purely from tree resin, and headed into the store. Harry waited in the car because I expected a quick trip—I knew exactly what I needed to pick up.

But that expectation died as soon as I stepped inside.

There was not one other person in the store. There had been plenty of cars in the parking lot, so this didn’t make any sense. I told myself to ignore what I was seeing and just head to the aisle with varnishes. Drakho was clouding my mind—and doing a damn good job of it.

Though there weren’t any people around, the store itself looked normal. I passed aisles for light fixtures, paints, tools. The lack of customers exaggerated the store’s cavernous size—all these goods and no one to purchase them.

I picked up my pace, and then suddenly the overhead lights started turning off—from the back of the store to the front. That prompted me to hurry even more, but the darkness was sweeping through the store quickly, like a tsunami of gloom. Unless the varnish was in the next aisle or two, I’d be searching in the dark. It wasn’t—and then the last set of lights went out.

There were a few seconds of total darkness—during which I stood there, indecisive, debating whether to leave or continue—before I saw her.

She was standing halfway down an aisle, holding a lit torch that bathed her in fiery light. Her lush blond hair and luminous ivory skin shone in a radiant aura, as if she were a goddess. As if I’d entered her world and left mine.

Otranto’s emerald green eyes stabbed at me. “There’s another way to end the game,” she said. “You don’t have to tell Dantès his real name.”

Was she making me this offer because she knew that I’d found his real name? Or did she know I’d discovered Drakho’s Achilles’ heel?

“I can show you the way out,” she continued, “so you don’t have to play this game at all.” Her torch flared up and the flames momentarily lit the aisle behind her—but it was no longer an aisle. It was a stone passageway, like the entrance to a tomb, stretching out into the distance. Strange hieroglyphs were carved into its walls.

She turned and started walking into the tomb. “Let’s go.”

I didn’t move.

“I’ll give you what you want most,” she said.

“I want to save Nate’s life.”

“That’s not what you want most.”

“It is.”

She turned back, her green eyes wider now, beautifully malicious. “That’s a lie.”

Of course she’d know there was something I wanted more. Something I could never have. It was what we all wanted after losing someone we loved.

“You
can
have what you want,” she said, then walked farther into the tomb.

I followed, tempted to see if she could deliver. Could she bring forth a miracle? One straight from the Bible? The
real
Bible.

I told myself I should be thinking more rationally, but I couldn’t convince myself to actually do so. There was no difference between fact and fiction, and here was the living proof: I was walking through a tomb in the middle of a Home Depot.

The deeper I moved into the tomb, the more the temperature dropped. But my attention quickly turned from the cold to the hieroglyphs on the wall. I was close enough to Otranto now that they were visible in her torch’s light—pictograms of men, women, and children trekking through a lush forest toward the banks of a wide river. Then, after a few yards, the hieroglyphs changed. The men, women, and children had now reached the banks of the river. They seemed to be waiting at the water’s edge for something or someone to appear.

The temperature dropped even more, and the tomb walls started to close in on us as if the passageway was narrowing. The pictograms were larger here, and the story they told had progressed. Boats appeared at the river’s edge, and the people were boarding them, children first. Farther down the wall, the boats were crossing the river, and that was when I made the connection.

The hieroglyphs fit in perfectly with what I wanted most. These men, women, and children were crossing the river Acheron, the river that separated the living from the dead. Drakho was once again using Dante’s
Inferno
, for in that work of fiction, Dante crossed the river Acheron into the world of the dead.

Up ahead, past Otranto, I saw that our narrow passageway opened up. I assumed we were headed into a large mausoleum and was shocked when instead I found myself stepping outside, as in outdoors—

I was on the banks of a rippling, dark body of water that stretched out to the horizon. Up above me was a black sky without stars. The water rhythmically lapped at the shore, maintaining a steady, eerie cadence—it was the only sign of life in this dead place.

Otranto approached the river, her torch held high. Across the water, about thirty yards away, a boat appeared from the darkness—and in its bow stood the woman around whom my every thought revolved. The woman I loved. The woman with whom I wanted to spend the rest of my life.

My sweet Lucy.

I strained to see her face, wanting to read her expression. Was she joyful or sad? She was too far away to tell. I hurried up to the river’s edge.

“If you take your own life,” Otranto said, “you can join her. She’ll come to shore and take you with her—to the other side.”

Otranto’s proposal sounded reasonable. She had delivered it in a voice buoyed with hope.

I strained to see Lucy more clearly, and for a second her face came into focus. It looked soft and fragile. Her eyes glistened with tears, and her mouth was slightly upturned in the saddest of smiles. She whispered something to me, words that went with her sad smile. But I couldn’t make out those words. Not yet. It would take a minute or two for them to reach my ears.

Was she waiting for me?

“There’s a place where the dead are alive,” Otranto said.

“She’s not real,” I said, my rational side attempting to fight back.

“She is. You just can’t imagine it from this side of the river. You have to cross over.”

I understood what Otranto was telling me. She was asking me to take my own life in the hope that Lucy was still alive, waiting for me, just out of reach. That would be the biggest leap of faith yet. Far bigger than believing in and following the trail that had led me to
The Forest
. By comparison, my plan to rely on an amber weapon to end this nightmare was the most logical plan ever conceived.

Then Otranto upped her offer. “If you sail away with Lucy, Dantès will accept that as the end of the game. He won’t take Nate’s life tomorrow.” She looked up at her torch and let out a soft breath. The flame flickered and fluttered and died, plunging us into absolute darkness. “Your son lives, and you join Lucy,” she said, her voice the only living thing.

Then light slowly returned as if it were coming from an unseen sunrise. It was a dark, rich, orange-yellow light—an
amber
light.

And in this light, I saw I was no longer standing at the river’s edge.

I was now standing in front of a large tree. Its trunk was charred black and its branches were barren of leaves. And where the river had once been, there was now a landscape of dead trees, surrounded by bronzed, dry dirt, untouched by even a hint of vegetation. It was the bleakest landscape I had ever seen.

I looked behind me, checking for the tomb’s passageway—my way into this place of death—hoping it would be my way out. But it was gone, replaced by more of the somber, lifeless vista.
Endless.
And the dark amber light bathed it all in gloom.

Was
this
the amber weapon from the story? This oppressive light from which there was no escape?

I turned back to the large tree. A noose hung down from one of its branches, and a series of boards were nailed to its black trunk: rungs of a ladder leading to the noose. The orange-yellow light, which hung heavy over the rest of the landscape, played a different role here. It highlighted the noose, foregrounding it in blazing amber.

The noose beckoned me.

This was the amber weapon that would save Nate
.

Right then, I understood that Harker had been completely mistaken about the ending for
The For
e
st
. His analysis had led him to write the wrong ending. But I knew the right ending: Edna had sacrificed herself for her son. She had taken her own life; Drakho had accepted it and let her son live. That was the ending she’d written. The true ending. The ending lost to history.

Didn’t it make sense that a mother would sacrifice her own life to save the life of her child?

I’d do the same. I
was going
to do the same. I would give up my life, and Nate would be spared. That had to be way this game ended. That was why Lucy had appeared on the river Acheron. Sure, I’d be reunited with her, but that wasn’t why she’d come. She’d told me her purpose, for those were the words she had whispered to me across the dark water:

Give up your life for Nate
.

Those words were the reason for her sad, fragile smile. She knew I had no choice.

I climbed up the rungs of the tree and crawled out along the branch. I grabbed the rope and pulled the noose up from below.

Nate would live.

I put the noose around my neck and was submerged in amber light. It chilled my skin and bones. I would join the barren landscape—the dead trees and the dead earth. They were waiting for me. They were waiting to receive the only living man in this world—

Or was I already dead?

Was life and death a blend of fact and fiction, too?

The noose felt tight around my neck.

No—
Life was where the line was drawn.

There was a clear line between life and death. That was why Drakho played games of life and death. Those were the real stakes, the only stakes. Life was where the line was drawn
.

I grabbed the noose from around my neck, slipped it off, and let it fall. It snapped to a stop ten feet from the ground. The sharp sound echoed through the dead world. I crawled along the branch and climbed back down the rungs.

My thoughts were thick and hard to process, and I was glad for it. I didn’t want to think right then. I just wanted to leave. To get as far away as possible from this dead world.

Though I couldn’t see the tomb’s passageway, I moved in that direction as if it was still there. It had to be the way out, just as it had been the way in.

At first, I trudged along the dry soil, passing barren trees. But after a while—I couldn’t be sure how long—the amber light began to darken, and then it disappeared. I found myself walking through the tomb once more. The hieroglyphs hadn’t changed. The men, women, and children were still crossing the river Acheron. I walked on, and the tomb widened and warmed until I stepped back into the Home Depot.

The store was no longer empty. A few yards from where I stood, a couple was checking out floor tiles, and farther down the aisle, other customers did the same. Bewildered, I didn’t move. I stood there like a statue lit by the fluorescent lights above—lights whose glare I normally disliked, but which I now welcomed.

Finally, I looked over my shoulder. The tomb was gone. I tried to reorient myself to what was now a normal Home Depot. The river Acheron no longer flowed through it and the dead world was gone. I turned back. The nearby couple was now staring at me as if my confused state might pose a threat to them. I quickly walked down the aisle, leaving them to get on with their shopping.

Then, amid the other customers, I got on with my own shopping. The thickness which had slowed my thoughts had worn off, so I forced myself not to think about what had just happened in order to concentrate instead on getting what I needed: fast-drying varnish and a brush with which to apply it. I also picked up a couple of flashlights in case we ended up meeting Drakho in one of the Shenandoah Valley caves.

In line, at the cashier, I found myself glancing around the store, still bewildered by the normalcy of the place. Laborers, housewives, couples, and contractors walked the aisles and examined items. There was no sign of Otranto or the bleak landscape.

Or Lucy.

In the car, Harry and I ran through our “sacred land” options one more time and concluded that the Shenandoah Valley was the best option in Northern Virginia. And there was another benefit to heading toward those limestone caves. The Shenandoah Valley was more or less heading south, so we’d be one hour closer to Wassamoah Bay.

So I pulled out and started toward Front Royal, the town that was the gateway to the Blue Ridge Mountains, Skyline Drive, and the Shenandoah Valley. Once we were on Route 66, I convinced Harry to start coating the D-Guard knife with the varnish, so it’d be dry by the time we got there.

As he applied the first coat, I told him what had happened in the store. He listened without saying much. Maybe that was because he was doing an excellent job of coating the knife. Even though he wasn’t convinced that varnish was the equivalent of Edna’s amber weapon, he was applying it with the confident, even brushstrokes of a craftsman.

When I finished my tale, I tried to explain how taking my own life had seemed like a perfectly reasonable way to save Nate.

Harry said he understood, but I didn’t believe him, and he must have been able to tell, because he then told me a story that explained
why
he understood. A story he’d never told anyone else. There’d been no reason to—until now.

“It happened after the attack in Prince William Forest,” he said. “I was still in the hospital. My legs had been amputated and I’d been all drugged up for a while. A long while. But they were finally startin’ to take me off the drugs. I was feelin’ pretty bad. You know, it ain’t easy to get used to not walkin’ no more. You gotta learn to take care of yourself all over again. Hell, I didn’t like it. Not one damn bit.

“Anyway, they started teachin’ me how to help myself. How to get in and outta the wheelchair—hard as hell when you start—and all sorts of other things. And every night I’d lie there in the hospital room, scared, like a little baby who’d lost his mommy. I didn’t think I could make it on my own. And the more they took me off the drugs, the more I really believed that. My life was shit.”