The Origin of Dracula (32 page)

But I was hoping to narrow it down much more. I wanted to find Drakho’s sweet spot. An electromagnetic-free zone.
If
it existed. Drakho hadn’t been able to keep mankind from touching every inch of his homeland, but was it possible that mankind hadn’t yet infected every inch with an electrical field?

I magnified the map as much as the website would allow, then scrolled through the regions overlaid with white—through national and state parks, through wilderness preserves, and through the Shenandoah Valley. I was ready to give up, to settle for another trip to Front Royal and Hadley’s Cave, when it appeared—a small patch of land untouched by an electrical field. An area in the middle of the Bull Run Mountains, not far from Paspahegh Falls. It wasn’t covered in red, orange, yellow, or even white hues. This was the last untouched part of Drakho’s homeland.

I was reminded of
Dracula
. At the end of Bram Stoker’s tale, Dracula retreated to his homeland in the Carpathian Mountains. But in Drakho’s story, Drakho wasn’t retreating—it was his homeland that was retreating.

I googled maps of the Bull Run Mountains, trying to scope out more topographical features about this specific patch of land. It turned out to be a valley between two shallow peaks, but it still wasn’t clear exactly what was there—caves, woods, marshes? From one map, it appeared there was a col—a small pass—between the peaks, so I plotted out the best way to access this col: Route 66 to Fauquier County, then a series of small rural roads.

The last of these roads led to a trail that would take us close to this spot. But to get to the col, it looked like we’d have to go off-trail. I downloaded a GPS app to my phone, since getting lost in that remote area was a real possibility.

While I called Home Depot and placed an order to rent a generator, Buck retrieved the dynamite from his garage. Then we loaded the sticks of dynamite, along with blasting caps, into the trunk of my car. Buck gave me a crash course in explosives, from how to prepare the blasting caps using a mechanical match, to where to place the dynamite so the explosion would dislodge enough stone to seal the cave.

As we all said our goodbyes, I again considered my other option: warding Drakho off for the rest of my life, then passing that burden on to Nate. And again I couldn’t see that as a viable option. Maybe it had worked for Edna and her son.

And maybe not.

At Home Depot, I picked up the generator, a couple of empty gas cans, and a cart for hauling the generator through the wilderness. It was a quick trip this time. The river Acheron wasn’t flowing through the store.

After filling up the cans at a gas station, Harry and I headed to Fauquier County.

“Why doesn’t Drakho just leave this area—get the hell out of Dodge?” I said. “Why doesn’t he go to a place that’s totally free of electrical fields? There must be a few of those spots left somewhere on Earth.”

“The same reason any man wouldn’t leave,” Harry said. “This is his homeland.”

Of course
, I thought.
Some things aren’t that complicated
.

Harry glanced at me and said, “I never got to ask you something.”

“Better go ahead then—this might be your last chance.”

“How did you and Lee get to be friends? I know you were just kids, but it still don’t seem like you two would be hangin’ out on the same side of the tracks.”

That was an easy question to answer. “He made me cool. I was a nerd and got picked on a lot. Lee, on the other hand, was a mean kid—but not the kind of mean kid who was a bully. He didn’t need to pick on kids, because all of us were already scared of him. We saw that if you crossed him, he’d get angry.”

“Yeah, that boy had a temper.”

“I guess it came in handy sometimes, because that’s how we became friends. I was waiting my turn to play four square, and Lee was in line, too, ahead of me. His turn came up and he went in. And when the next kid fouled out, I went in, too.

“But no one liked to play with me, the nerd, and I didn’t really want to play, either, but Mrs. Baxter, our teacher, forced us to do group activities during recess. She said it built character. So for me it worked like this: to get rid of me, the kids made sure I fouled out as soon as I got in. You know, for carrying the ball or double bouncing or whatever, even if I didn’t actually do it. And I never argued.

“And that’s how it went down this time, too. At least that’s the way it started to go down. I hit the ball, and one of the kids called it out and told me to take a hike. Of course, it wasn’t out. It hit inside the line, but like I said, I never argued. Well, Lee argued. He said it wasn’t out. And for some reason the other kid insisted that it
was
out. Maybe the kids were all used to getting rid of me, so it was a habit, or maybe he hated me so much he thought it was worth the risk of crossing Lee.

“Anyway, it was a big mistake. Lee got in his face and yelled,
Are
you saying I’m blind? Or a dumbass? Is that what you’re saying?
And he punched the kid. Just like that. The kid started crying and Lee told him to shut up. If Mrs. Baxter came over, he’d punch him a hundred times. So I stayed in the game and we all kept playing. Lee didn’t say anything to me. And I didn’t foul out until I really did hit the ball out.

“Later, after school, I went up to him, to thank him, but before I said anything, he asked me to explain a math problem to him. He didn’t say anything about defending me and neither did I. But that was it. We were friends from that day on.”

“You know what?” Harry said, “You’re pretty good at telling stories yourself.”

I laughed.

After that we didn’t talk much. There wasn’t much left to say. We both believed Drakho would show up. He’d damn well know humans were in his pristine lair.

I saw this trip to the Shenandoah Valley with different eyes this time. It wasn’t just a journey from the densely populated suburbs—beleaguered by housing developments, shopping malls, and office parks—to the rural areas of Northern Virginia. It was a journey through electrical fields. Angry red fields, then buzzing orange fields, then mellow yellow, and finally calm white.

When I reached the Bull Run Mountains—a lush expanse of peaks and valleys, thick forests, and rocky cliffs—I pulled off Route 66 and headed down the rural roads that would carry us to the most sacred of lands.

The first few roads were paved. We passed picnic areas, trailheads, and turnouts with scenic views. Then we hit a series of dirt roads, each narrower and more desolate than the last.

A metal cross bar blocked the last road. The cross bar was locked in place with a padlock and chain; both were covered in a thick coat of rust, as if they hadn’t been touched in many decades.

We were way too far from our destination to start hiking, so I grabbed a rock and started pounding on the padlock. On about the twentieth blow it broke open. I unraveled the chain and began pushing the cross bar. It creaked and groaned, trying to resist, but eventually it gave way.

After driving a couple more miles, it became obvious that not only had the padlock not been touched in many decades, neither had the road. The forest was encroaching on it from both sides, threatening to take it over; saplings were even growing from the road itself. I had to stop the car several times to get out and yank the saplings from the dirt in order to clear a path farther into the wilderness.

Then we reached a point where the forest had almost completely taken over. Vestiges of the dirt road were still there, but instead of saplings springing from it, larger trees had taken root, and the underbrush here was as thick as in the bordering woods.

The only way forward was on foot, and that meant roughly a four-mile hike to the col.

“You ain’t gonna be able to haul the generator and carry me on your back,” Harry said.

“What about trying to use the wheelchair?” There was still the hint of the dirt road.

“You gotta be kidding me.”

“I’ll alternate between the generator and pushing you.”

“And when you get to the trail?”

“The hike to the col is short.” But what I didn’t say was that we’d have to go off trail to get to the col.

“Listen, I wanna help, but I don’t see how I can,” Harry said. “Last time I’m guessing I was good for moral support—kinda.” He grinned, then turned serious again. “You had doubts then. But you ain’t got doubts now, right?”

I did have doubts. I didn’t doubt Drakho would be at the end of the trail, but I doubted we’d be able to trap him. He might even have been tracking us already, and was busy preparing for our next move.

“You go alone and you go faster,” Harry said. “
And
you’re in better shape when you get there.”

It was in that moment that I realized why Harry had to come with me. Or maybe I’d known it all along, but it wasn’t until now that it finally crystallized into the right words.

“Someone has to tell the story,” I said.

“What?”

“You’re Edna Grayson. You’re Bram Stoker. You’re Jonathan Harker.”

“And you’re off your rocker.”

“Stories tell you all you need to know, and
you
have to tell
this
story, Harry. Without stories, the Hatfields never have a chance. The McCoys—the real McCoy always wins. It was your story that gave me a chance.”

Harry leaned back and stared at the peaks in the distance. His face looked resolute. This was about as serious as I’d seen him, as if he was weighing my words carefully and considering the journey ahead.

“Your story will fill in those missing pages,” I said.

Harry looked from the peaks to me. “If you don’t make it and I do,” he said, “I’d have to crawl back on my own. Now
that
would be a story worth tellin’.”

“One you’d want to tell?”

“Hell yes.” He smiled. “But I’ll settle for the one where we both make it back.”

After filling the generator with gas, then strapping it to the cart along with the dynamite, blasting caps, and flashlights, I pulled the cart about a quarter mile down the road, navigating through the underbrush. Then I went back for Harry and the wheelchair. The path wasn’t smooth, but pushing him was better than carrying him.

Still, after a mile or so, the forest had done such a good job of reclaiming the land that it became tougher to drag the cart, and pushing the wheelchair forward was altogether impossible. So from that point on, I alternated between carrying Harry on my back and dragging the cart—two trips every fifty yards or so.

The closer we got to the trail, the lusher and more wild the terrain became. It was possible that hikers had trekked out this way, but this land was so isolated—nestled and lost between the shallow mountains—that it was more likely that Harry and I were the first to come this way in a long, long time.

It took about four hours to make it to the trail, which was so overgrown it was barely visible. Here, I tried to use my GPS app, but it wouldn’t work—no reception. I knew that our final destination, the col, was about a half mile away, so I left Harry and the generator behind as I went on to scout.

I followed the traces of the trail, or what I thought to be the traces, and I must have done a good job of it, because when I continued past the trail, into the woods, I soon hit the col—the electromagnetic-free zone I’d pinpointed at Buck’s. There was no doubt this was the place—a low pass between two peaks.

I scanned the hillsides up to those peaks, searching for a cave entrance or some geological formation Drakho might favor, paying particular attention to the ridges and rock outcroppings. Nothing stood out except one particularly large ridge on the east side. The land here was so thick with trees that it was hard to know for sure if I’d missed something, but as far as I could tell, there were no caves. Which meant no place to trap Drakho.

After studying the terrain for another fifteen minutes, I was seriously regretting the decision to come here. Maybe we should have gone to Hadley Falls again—or to another area with a weak electric field. An area that we were sure had caves.

But we didn’t
, I thought.
And there’s no turning back now.
If I was going to have any chance of saving Nate by tomorrow, I had to work with the cards I’d been dealt—even if I’d dealt those cards to myself. And right now, it looked like I had dealt myself a bad hand.

But as I hiked back, I didn’t focus on my awful cards. Instead I racked my brain, trying to come up with a new battle plan. Unfortunately, when I got back to Harry, I still hadn’t come up with anything.

I filled him in on what I’d seen, and he summed up what should have been obvious from the start.

“He don’t need a cave here because there ain’t no electrical fields,” he said. “He feels pretty safe in these parts.”

“So how are we going to trap him?”

“We should’ve brought a bear trap instead of dynamite,” Harry said.

“He’d probably just gnaw his leg off and regrow it,” I countered.

“Nah. Dracula didn’t regrow limbs.”

I could go along with that—I’d built my entire theory on the legends of Dracula and Drakho, and there was nothing in those myths about regenerating limbs. A bear trap might actually have worked out just fine. We could have snared him and then dragged the generator over to him. Didn’t that parallel trapping Dracula in sunlight? For Drakho, electricity
was
sunlight.

“Can we build our own bear trap out here?” I said.

“Even if we could, how we gonna draw him in?” Harry cocked his head. “With animals, you draw them in with food. But Dracula?”

“With Dracula—I guess you’d do it with blood. With Drakho… who knows? Edna didn’t give us any help there.”

My eyes fell on the weapons we’d brought: the dynamite and the generator. Regardless of what we did or didn’t know, we had to make do with these. Edna had used her amber weapon to ward Drakho off, to keep him at bay. I wondered: could we use the generator to do the opposite? We had brought it here to kill Drakho—but could we first use it to draw him in?

And then it suddenly hit me: “If you can’t
draw
an animal into your trap, you
herd
it into your trap,” I said.