The Origin of Dracula (30 page)

“Hey,” I yelled, over the sound of the falls.

Harry swung himself around, took in my waterlogged, beaten-down appearance, then shouted, “What happened?”

I climbed over to him and told him about my encounter, which I could have summed up in four words: It was a bust.

“Well, you get a partial victory,” he said.

“How do you figure that?”

“It sounds like you got the sacred land part right.”

“We can’t be sure.”

“If he shows up in person, then you’re at the man’s house. Or at least, one of them.”

His logic was sound.

“And come to think of it,” he added, “you got another victory. The bastard let you go.”

“I told you, he didn’t let me go. I ran.”

“You think you got away ’cause you
outran
him?” Harry scoffed. “He let you go so he could play his game, just like he did with me. But he’s got a soft spot for you—he let you keep your legs.”

I’d been too panicked to realize that this was exactly what had happened. Of course I hadn’t escaped.

“He’s sticking to the rules of the game,” Harry said. “The game is for your son’s life, not yours.” He looked back down at the falls. “But give him time—and he’s got plenty of it—and he’ll get around to yours, too.”

“Meanwhile, we get another chance,” I said.

Harry smiled. “Yep—but we gotta get it right this time.”

The clock was ticking, so even though I would have preferred to have spent a few minutes recuperating, we began our trek back. Carrying Harry down should have been easier than hauling him up, but the punishment my body had taken from the falls made it harder. Every one of my muscles ached, and every time my foot hit the ground, it felt like the falls were punching me again. These new body blows made the going very slow.

During one of our frequent stops, I told Harry what I’d concluded earlier: that Harker had misinterpreted what Edna had meant by an amber weapon, or I had. “Or the weapon just don’t work no matter what,” he said. “And the story is just that—a goddamn story with nothing to it.”

“No—that’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” I shot back, defensive, as much out of exhaustion as stubbornness. “The story laid out his powers perfectly. It told us everything about him.”

“Okay then, here’s something I got from the story. Something you ain’t said nothin’ about. He’s been here for a hell of a long time. Way before those settlers came over, and way before the Indians made Virginia their home. Nothing’s beat him yet. The proof is in the puddin’.”

“So you think this is a lost cause? I thought you were all for this.”

“I’m sayin’ we need more than stories to kill him. If stories were all it took, I could kill him myself. I got a thousand stories.”

The ride back from Front Royal was somber. I weighed whether to give up. What if novel therapy was failing me again? It had guided me into a world where fact and fiction where the same, a world where supernatural events were part of life, but also a world where death wasn’t hidden—where it couldn’t be shunned or ignored but had to be accepted.

I’d seen Lucy, so fragile and sad, beckoning me to cross the river Acheron.

In that way, this world was the opposite of the world I’d left just a day and half ago: the world of American culture, mores, and tradition, which dictated that we should avoid dealing with death and should bury our grief as if it were unnatural.

So was novel therapy working or not?

The only way to come up with the answer to that question was to answer another question: Was it helping with my battle to save Nate’s life?

The answer to that was “no,” which meant that as soon as I got back to Arlington, I’d go and see Nate. I’d spend this evening with him and as much of tomorrow as possible; I’d give him some sort of birthday celebration after all. I’d spend every hour I could with him before Drakho took him from me.

He’d have a blast, unaware of his fate; but for me, it’d be hell on earth. A voyage deeper into Dante’s
Inferno
. The hell of knowing that my precious son was going to die. And when he did die—

“What am I not seeing about
The Forest—
about Drakho—about
Dracula
?” I blurted out, hoping to stem the feeling of dread welling up from my soul, the bitter agony of losing my child. A grief so great as to be unfathomable.

“Maybe he ain’t Dracula,” Harry said.

“Maybe,” I said, though I didn’t believe that for second. Drakho
was
Dracula, the original Dracula. That’s where the trail had led. Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
had led us to
The Forest.
It wasn’t possible that this had been just a coincidence. The connections were too great to ignore. And the more I’d dug, the stronger the connections had become.

And that took me deeper into novel therapy, where another connection started to crystallize. It required a bigger leap of faith than the ones I’d already taken—but what choice did I have? I either had to double down or give up.

This new connection meant believing and accepting a bigger picture, a canvas of fact and fiction that spanned centuries. A canvas that had been painted by three people: Edna Grayson, Bram Stoker, and Jonathan Harker. If I could accept this bigger picture, I’d be able to devise another strategy for playing Drakho’s game of chess.

When we got back to the sprawling suburbs of Northern Virginia, I told Harry that I might have a way forward, or at least a way to find out what our next move should be.

“So what are you waiting for?” he said. “Lay it on me.”

I did, but I was expecting resistance. “Edna wrote her story at the very start of the seventeenth century,” I began. “Then, almost three hundred years later, just before the turn of the twentieth century, Bram Stoker wrote
Dracula
. And then, a hundred and ten years after
Dracula
, Harker found Edna’s original story—”

“Thanks for the history lesson, but so what?”

“You wanted me to lay it on you, so hear me out. Harker finds this four-hundred-year-old story and fills in the missing pieces. But he’s basically from our generation, and he knows the same stories we know. So he’s filling in the missing pieces with what he knows.”

“So?”

“So he sees the resemblance between Drakho in
The Forest
and
Dracula
. I mean, anyone reading
The Forest
would see the connection. Even a twelve-year-old.”

“Okay, I’ll give you that—but I don’t see where you’re going with this.”

That worried me. Harry was smart, and I was hoping I’d get him to see where I was going before I got there. It would’ve validated that I was headed in the right direction, that the big picture I was seeing had merit.

But this wasn’t to be, so I made the connection for him. “What if Harker used
Dracula
, a book published hundreds of years after
The Forest
, to fill in the missing pieces of
The Forest
? Just think about it for a minute.
Dracula
didn’t exist when Edna wrote
The Forest
, so her story was based solely on whatever she knew back then. It was based on what the Paspahegh told her about Drakho. Her story wasn’t based on ideas that came three hundred years later.”

“I’m still not seeing what you’re getting at.”

That added more doubts to the ones I already had; I’d thought he’d definitely start connecting the dots by now. Still, I forged on. “What if Harker filled in the missing pieces of Edna’s story with things she couldn’t have possibly known? I mean, what if he used elements that came hundreds of years later to complete her story? After all, we’re talking about fiction; he was embellishing a
story
, make-believe. So it’s not like anyone would really care about these made-up details.”

“You do,” Harry said.

I had to laugh. “Ridiculous, huh?” He grinned and I went on. “Here’s the long and the short of it: What if Harker shaped Edna’s story so that it fit in neatly with the Dracula story he
already
knew. The Dracula story we
all
know. The detailed mythology we can’t help but absorb even if we have no interest in Dracula. You know, all that stuff we grew up on: biting necks, blood, capes, coffins, the whole bit. The Dracula legend that Edna would’ve had no idea about. Harker was writing about Dracula;
Edna
was writing about Drakho.”

Harry didn’t respond for a few seconds. Either he was trying to wrap his head around this or he was disgusted. “Okay… I get your point,” he finally volunteered. “But I still don’t see how that gets us our next move.”

“It might get us a different weapon,” I said. “The right weapon. If we’re lucky.”

“At least you’re talkin’ weapons.” He grinned again. “That I can buy.”

“Okay, good. So how about this? What if Harker based the amber weapon on
Dracula
—the rules laid down by Bram Stoker, and not by Edna? We need to see exactly what Edna wrote about the amber weapon and what Harker added.”

“No one’s stoppin’ ya.”

That was my cue. I pulled over, reached into the back seat, and scooped up
The Forest
. I dove back into it, determined to isolate exactly which sections of the story Edna had written and which sections Harker had written or embellished.

I already knew that Harker had written the very end of Edna’s tale, the section where Edna defeated Drakho, the section I’d used as my field guide, the section that had ended in triumph for Edna and failure for me. But now I focused on exactly what Edna had actually written about the amber weapon. What did the
original
text say—her words?

Harker’s detailed footnotes were meticulous on this front. And as it turned out, the only time Edna had written about the weapon herself was in the section where she described how she’d learned of it.

I reviewed that section once more. She’d learned about the weapon from the settler who’d tortured one of the Paspahegh, and not directly from the Paspahegh prisoner. I made a mental note of that, as well as noting that at this point in the story there was no doubt that Edna was looking for the same thing the rest of the settlers wanted: a way to stop the vicious warrior from slaughtering the residents of Jamestown.

The settler had relayed to Edna the words he’d heard from the Paspahegh, and Edna had translated those words as “amber weapon.” She hadn’t been ambiguous about those words. But she didn’t give any other details about the weapon. It was Harker who had written the rest of the information about the dagger—from Edna coating it in amber to her stabbing Drakho with it.

It took me less than five seconds to realize what this meant, and I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed it the first time around. But I understood why I hadn’t. The first time around, I hadn’t yet seen the bigger picture. But now I did, and this is what it told me:

Edna had never once called the weapon a dagger or a knife. That was all Harker.

Why would Harker have assumed the amber weapon was a knife? The answer seemed obvious. How would you go about killing a creature Harker believed was the basis for the myth of Dracula? Well, you’d kill him in the traditional way: by stabbing him in the heart. With a knife.

It was only natural that Harker would have come to that conclusion. I supposed he could’ve opted for a stake through the heart, which was also part of the myth of Dracula, but it wasn’t part of Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
. In Stoker’s book, knives had killed Dracula: one to the count’s throat and one through his heart.

But the point was that Edna wouldn’t have known about either stakes or knives. Stoker’s novel wouldn’t come along until three hundred years after her death.

So what
did
she actually know?

The answer to this question was lost in
The Forest’s
missing pages—which were now lost to history. The only clue Edna had left behind was the term
amber weapon
.

I needed to drop my assumptions—and Harker’s—about what those words could mean; I needed to start fresh. First, I couldn’t assume the weapon was a knife or dagger of some sort. And second, I couldn’t assume that Edna had used amber to coat her weapon. This “coating” idea had also come from Harker.

I had to start at the beginning again and research “amber.” But this time, I didn’t want to use my cell phone. I wanted to do a more thorough search. But I had no home in which to do it, and I couldn’t go to the Cherrydale Library.

“Does Buck have a computer and Internet access?” I asked.

“Why wouldn’t he? Just ’cause he’s into the Civil War don’t mean he’s living like a caveman.”

I explained that I wanted to go back to the drawing board with amber. So Harry called Buck.

On the call, once again, the knife didn’t come up. You’d think Buck would have wanted to know how we’d used it. And, once again, I didn’t ask Harry
why
Buck wasn’t curious. Maybe I just didn’t want to know that there was yet another layer to this nightmare.

On the way to Buck’s, Harry laid out
his
plan. “Buck’s got some explosives—dynamite. I say we load up, go back to Hadley’s Cave, and when Drakho shows up, we blow the shit out of him.”

“And why do you think that’d work?”

“Hell, I didn’t come up with the idea. The army did. And not just the U.S. Army: all armies, all military powers, no matter when or where—they all know that the bigger the bomb, the more you wipe out your enemy. It’s kinda like if you can’t kill your enemy with bullets, drop a goddamn megaton bomb on ’em and that’ll do the job. Hell, that’s why we kept building bigger and bigger bombs until we got the king of all bombs: an atomic bomb. You just blast an entire city.” Harry glanced at me. “I know what you’re thinking, so don’t get me wrong. I’m not sayin’ that blowing up entire cities is the right thing to do. I’m just talking about a tried-and-true tactic. Somethin’ we can use.”

“So we destroy the entire cave, huh?” He had a point.

“Yeah. And if he’s in it, or if he’s somehow part of the cave, like you were describin’, then he ain’t gonna survive.”

“We’d have to surprise him—ambush him.”

“Then that’s what we’ll do,” Harry said, folding his arms.