The Origin of Dracula (27 page)

I glanced over at him. He was applying a second coat of varnish, using the same even brushstrokes he’d used for the first.

“So one night, this nurse comes in,” he said. “A new nurse, blond and pretty, with the greenest eyes I’ve ever seen.”

Otranto
, I thought.

“I was awake,” Harry said, “feeling bad for myself. Not wanting to go back to Quantico. And in the back of my mind, I thought I wasn’t ever gonna go back to Quantico—that they were gonna warehouse me somewhere. I knew life was gonna be shit no matter what. But the nurse says to me, like she knew what I’d been thinking, ‘I’m taking you to see a place where things are good.’ And she don’t even make me get in the wheelchair by myself. I should’ve known something was wrong right there. They’d all been forcing me to do things on my own. But not her. She helps me slide right into the wheelchair.

“Then she wheels me to the elevator, and we head down to a floor lower than the basement. I didn’t remember a floor down there, but it was right there on the panel of buttons—as plain as the nose on your face. The elevator door opens, and she pushes me into an alleyway. I’m thinking,
Where the hell are we?
and I look back at her to ask—but she’s still in the elevator and the door is closing.

“So I try to wheel my chair around, but I wasn’t so good at steering the damn thing yet, and by the time I got it right, the door was closed and there wasn’t no button to call the elevator back. So I wheel back around and check out the alleyway. I see nothin’ but dumpsters and trash.

“I’m thinking to myself:
I just been dumped from the hospital
. I’d heard about that kinda thing on the news. Maybe the VA stopped paying my bills or something. The buildings in the alley, well, their walls were black, like they’d been through a pretty bad fire, and their windows were all busted out. I start to wheel myself forward to get outta there, and from what I can see through the windows, the buildings are all burned up on the inside, too.”

He continued to apply the varnish, meticulously, without missing a beat in his story.

“I kept goin’ until I made it out of the alley. It turns out I was in a city. I hate cities, and this one was bad. It was all rundown. The buildings were cracked and falling apart, like they’d all been abandoned. And some of ’em were burned out.”

“But in front of me, across the street, there was a river—a wide one—and on the
other
side of it, I saw my favorite place, my favorite town: Culpeper—where I grew up. It’s not like the streets in Culpeper are paved with gold or nothin’, but it’s nice. Small and friendly. I could see the town square, and people were goin’ about their business, headin’ to their offices, or lunch, or eatin’ ice cream cones, shootin’ the breeze.”

Harry finished the coat of varnish, picked up the knife, and examined his handiwork.

“I’m thinking I got to get over to the other side. I’m askin’ myself,
Can I swim?
I got no legs, but I got arms. And I’m trying to decide if my arms are strong enough. Staying in the hospital made them weak. I look down at the river, and it’s moving pretty fast. I don’t know if I can make it across.

“When I look back up from the river, I see Art Craig on the other side. My best buddy is lookin’ at me from the shore, standing there, smiling, like Drakho never killed him. I’m thinking,
Art wants me to swim over there
. Why else would he be here? And I
wanted
to go over there, you know? I wanted to see my buddy and go back to my hometown. Who wouldn’t?

“So I decide that’s exactly what I’m gonna do. And I knew how to do it. There was only one way to swim over there. And as soon as I decided I was gonna do it—boom, I’m back in my hospital bed.

“It’s the middle of the night now. I knew, ’cause they dimmed the room lights when it got real late, and there was less hustle and bustle—no doctors, no visitors, and hardly any nurses around.

“This was the perfect time to do it. The perfect time to swim across that river. So I pull out my IVs and I do what they been teaching me to do. I get into my wheelchair by myself. But this time I
want
to do it. I use my arms and shimmy to the side of the bed. I push myself up, holding on to the bed, and get myself into my chair.”

Harry was turning the knife over in his hand. The fresh coat of varnish flared in the sunlight.

“Then I roll myself into the bathroom and up to the sink. I use the sink for leverage and pull myself up so I can reach the cabinet. I pull out my shaving razor and fall back into my chair, snug as a bug in a rug. And then I get right to it. No use wastin’ time. I open the razor, pull out the blade, and slide it across my wrist. The bleedin’ starts right up.

“I know that this is the way to swim across the river and get to Culpeper and see Art, so I push the blade down harder to make it go faster. And it’s workin’. I’m bleeding pretty good, and I’m swimming across. I feel the river water on my skin. It’s thick like blood.

“Then I hear someone calling me: ‘Harry!’ And I look back and see Macon. He snatches the blade out of my hand. Then he grabs a towel and wraps it around my wrist, and all the while, he’s yelling at me, ‘What the fuck are you doing, man?’ over and over again. Then he tells me to hold on to the towel, and he wheels me out of the bathroom and down to the nurses’ station. He’s got tears rolling down his face. He tells the nurse what I was doing, and she tells the other nurse to grab some supplies. Then she wheels me back to my room, telling me I got plenty to live for, it’s just a bad time now.

“Macon isn’t saying anything, just following us. We get back to my room, and the nurses put me back in bed. Then they hook me up to the IVs and start to patch up my wrist. They’re tellin’ me they’ll get someone to talk to me—someone who knows what I’m going through—and it’ll all work out.

“The whole time, Macon’s just standing back, staring out the window, or staring at the bathroom, or staring at some ‘get well soon’ cards I got. The only place he isn’t looking is at me.

“The nurses finally leave, and he stays quiet. Me too. I’m ashamed of what I done. It takes him another couple of minutes, but he finally looks me, and he says, ‘Why?’

“‘I’m sorry…’ I said, and I was. He said, ‘I looked up to you. You’re the good one…’

“I told him I’d been having a hard time. I told him it had been really bad. But he didn’t answer me. He’s got tears in his eyes and he just leaves. He took off.” Harry took a breath and looked over at me. “You know that saying: ‘hero to zero’?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, that’s what happened. I wasn’t no hero no more to him. I was a lowlife cripple. Just a sad sack of shit.”

Harry started applying a third coat of varnish to the knife, and he didn’t say anything more for a few seconds. Then he said, “This last coat should do it.”

His story hung with a physical weight, pressing down on me, the same awful sensation I’d felt right after Lucy died. The same weight Harry must’ve felt in the hospital—a star football player, a strong and smart soldier, cut down, adjusting to a life where he could no longer walk.

I drove for a while in the warm, clear light of the Virginia afternoon. A light with no hint of heavy amber. A light colored by a powder blue sky and a radiant yellow sun. A light that melted away that heavy weight so I could ask the question I had to ask.

“… Did you think it was Drakho trying to get you to do it?” I said.

“You mean trying to get me to kill myself?” Harry shot back.

I nodded.

“Not till today. Not until you told me your story. I thought it was withdrawal from the drugs. But who the hell really knows, right? Ain’t that the whole point of this not knowin’ what’s real and what ain’t? I was feeling pretty down back then. Hell, the only reason I didn’t try again was because of Macon.”

“Macon? Why?” From what Lee had said about his dad and from what I’d seen in Dan T.’s Firegrill, there was nothing about the guy that would inspire anyone to do anything good.

“I know it don’t make sense,” Harry said. “Back then, he was no different than he is now—a lazy drunk, just scraping by. But I got to thinking, if I offed myself, he’d sink even lower. Just getting my shit together again would help him keep
his
together. If I stuck around—hero or no hero—he’d be all right. Don’t fool yourself—a man can go pretty bad even if he’s bad already, and I didn’t want that for my brother. And it worked. I mean, he didn’t sink no lower, and you know why that was good?”

I shook my head.

Harry turned toward the window. “Because of Lee,” he said. “Macon wasn’t a great dad. He wasn’t even a good one. But somehow he was good enough for Lee to turn out okay. Lee got it together in the end, and that’s the truth.”

The queasy helplessness of loss welled up in my stomach, but I pushed it away before it turned into melancholy. I thought instead of
The Forest
, reviewing passages I’d read, as a pastor might review verses in the Bible looking for a lesson. Neither of us spoke for while.

As we got closer to Front Royal, the suburbs thinned out, and when we entered the edge of the Shenandoah Valley proper, there were far fewer housing developments and far more forested patches of land. Thirty minutes later, we were driving through rolling hills and farmland, bearing down on Front Royal. It was time to talk business again.

“I don’t think Drakho is just going to show up like he did in
The Forest
,” I said. Actually, I couldn’t be sure if he’d ever showed up for Edna either, since that part of the story had been Harker’s addition.

“If you tell him that you got his real name,” Harry said, “then he’s got to show up to collect it, right?”

“Maybe.”

Harry touched the D-Guard’s blade. “The varnish is dry,” he said, then sheathed the knife. “So there you go: he shows up, you stab him, and everything’s hunky-dory.”

“Too easy?”

“Not that it’s got to be hard, but it still seems like we’re getting too far away from
The Forest
.”

I didn’t have a response for that, because I hadn’t been able to latch on to anything else in the story. To take the pastor analogy one step further, my Bible verses weren’t offering up any new lessons.

As soon as I drove past the Front Royal city limits sign, housing developments once again reared their ugly heads. But at least they were small, and few in number. We entered the town, where many blocks had been redeveloped, another indication of just how far south the D.C. suburbs had sprawled into Virginia. We were seventy miles from the nation’s capital, but based on some of the boutiques we passed, we could just as easily have been driving through Georgetown or Old Town Alexandria. There were still a few country stores with rundown wooden facades and hand-painted logos, but they were overwhelmed by the far more numerous faux-quaint shops and retail chains.

On the other side of Front Royal, we hit Skyline Drive, the gateway to the Blue Ridge Mountains. After a dozen more miles or so, I pulled in at a state visitors center, where I hoped to get more information on the ancient limestone caves—the landmarks that connected Edna’s story to whatever sacred land might be in these parts.

Harry stayed in the car and skimmed
The Forest
while I headed inside. The center was empty of tourists except for an elderly couple checking out a giant map of hiking trails that covered an entire wall.

A gray-haired docent sat behind an information counter. She flashed a grandmotherly smile at me, which I returned before walking over to a rack of pamphlets. The pamphlets advertised the various attractions along Skyline Drive, and it was clear at a glance that Skyline Caverns was the main attraction.

I plucked a few pamphlets from the rack and started to peruse them, looking for a clue. A clue about the caves. Maybe a Native American name, or a reference to colonial times, or a description of a supernatural monster—a local legend—that haunted the Shenandoah Valley, or something that hinted at
Dracula
or
The Forest
or Dante’s
Inferno
.

But nothing jumped out at me except the ancient caves themselves. The pamphlets went into the history of the limestone caves—the caverns—and the highlight was the discovery of a rare geological formation there, a six-sided crystal called an anthodite. But since the pamphlets weren’t giving up any clues, I walked over to the giant map and located Skyline Caverns. I wanted to see if the map revealed anything about the caverns that indicated they were sacred land. Although if tourists were going in and out of the caverns all day long, I doubted Drakho considered them untouched.

As I looked over other parts of the map, checking more remote areas in the Blue Ridge Mountains, out of the corner of my eye I saw the docent get up from her chair and walk out from behind the counter. She made her way over to me and said, “Is there anything I can help you with?”

“Sure,” I said.

Her face lit up with enthusiasm. “Fantastic. Nowadays we don’t get much traffic in here because of the Internet. Everybody just goes online.”

“I know what you mean—I’m a librarian.” But my life had changed so much in the last twenty-four hours that claiming I was a librarian seemed like a lie. It was fiction, and my quest to kill Drakho was fact.

She motioned to the map. “What are you looking to do today?”

“I was thinking of exploring the caverns.”

“A great choice! I’ve been working here for forty years and it’s still my favorite part of the Shenandoah.”

“Which cavern is the oldest?” I hoped that would make it sacred land.

“Even though it’s called Skyline Caverns, it’s really just one big cavern with multiple sections.” She motioned to it on the map. “The entire site is fifty to sixty million years old. And that’s even more amazing when you consider it was untouched until 1937.”

“Untouched?” She’d used the right word.

“Yes—it wasn’t discovered until then. When the state of Virginia was building Skyline Drive, they hired a retired geologist to look for caves along the route. They wanted to find tourist attractions to get people out this way. Well, boy did that work out. The geologist came across a sinkhole and decided to dig it out. Next thing he knew, he’d made one of the greatest geological discoveries of all time.”