“When I was young, I was strong as an ox,” Harry continued. “I was captain of the football team. And it wasn’t just any team. We were state champs, and that was something back then. This was prime football country, and our team—the Washington-Lee Generals—we were the best of ’em.
“But I wasn’t dumb like most of the other players. I knew that football was gonna end. Even if you got a couple more seasons of glory in college, it was gonna end. So I didn’t see no use in puttin’ it off. I had a hell of a good run with the Generals, so I figured I might as well start in on a career. I signed up for the Marines.”
We were back on Route 66, where the glow of the vapor lights along the freeway became the campfire around which Harry told his story.
“That turned out to be the right choice,” he said. “They told me I had the brains to be an officer, and that was good enough for me. They sent me to boot camp in South Carolina. For everyone else, that part was hard. For me, it was a piece of cake. I set records on some of the obstacle courses. Yeah—I did real good.”
I glanced in the rearview mirror and caught Harry looking down at his legs. I didn’t see regret on his face, but I thought I saw a flicker of determination. As for myself, I felt a pang of sorrow.
“I did so good in fact, that I got sent up to Quantico when I was done. That’s where the smart ones got sent—for more specialized training. If I had stayed in South Carolina, would it’ve made a difference? Maybe I would’ve been safe. Who knows?
“Anyway, at Quantico, I was getting trained in targeting. My days were jam-packed. Both classroom learnin’ and practice. No boozing for me. No women neither. Just didn’t have the time. But I felt good. Better than I ever had.
“Then one night Art Craig—he was my best buddy at Quantico—and me drove out to Dumfries for a bachelor party. It wasn’t a big deal kinda party like ya see nowadays. We’re talking a hotel room, a couple of strippers, and drinking. And even that wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been, because most of the fellas were married and had to work the next day. Art and me had to report at oh six hundred, so we headed back about one in the morning. Art was drunk, and I was pretty wired up too, but not as bad as him.
“Art was drivin’, and back then no one gave a rat’s ass about drivin’ drunk. But that ain’t what did us in. What did us in was Art’s clunker. That car wasn’t fit for the road. But it was never a big deal until that night. It wasn’t like we really needed cars. Like I said, our days were jam-packed, so there was no time to do nothing else or go anywhere. And everything was on base. Still, I guess you wanna have some freedom. Too bad.”
Harry paused, and I glanced at the rearview mirror again. This time we made eye contact, and he turned up the corners of his mouth in a what the hell can you do grimace of disgust at himself.
“Anyway, we were driving down Joplin Road through Prince William Forest Park,” he said. “It’s old land. They keep it wild. Untouched, they call it. They say it ain’t changed since the start of our country. It was Chopawamsic land back then.”
Lee looked over at me. As I said, the guy was smart. I knew he’d just made the same connection I had, even though it wasn’t a strong connection—at least not yet. Cold Falls was old land, prime Native American land, glorified land. Or so we’d believed as kids.
“The clunker started huffin’ and puffin’ like it was gonna conk out and die,” Harry said. “Then it did, right there on goddamn Joplin. And it didn’t wanna start up again. So we got out and pushed it over to the shoulder, then talked about hitching a ride back. But we decided against it. What if an officer from the base pulled over? He’d see we were drunk. There was no hidin’ that. He might do nothing, or he might report us, dependin’ on the officer and the mood he was in. So we decided to walk back instead.
“Now, that wasn’t such a bad idea. The bad idea was the next one. We decided to cut through Prince William Forest. That way there’d be no chance an officer would spot us. Yeah, that was a dumb move. So we started through the woods, and it was dark as hell. But we didn’t think about that until we were too far from the road. And by then it was too late. We were lost. All your training goes out the door when you’re drunk.
“But after wandering a little ways, the dark sobered us up—just enough that one part of our training came back. We found a patch where we could see up through the trees to the sky, and we picked out some constellations. Then we were able to figure out what direction the base was in.
“It was slow going at first, but we sobered up some more and got on track. And that was when we heard someone followin’ us. It could’ve been an animal. But if it was, it was a mighty big one. We could tell by the footfalls. So we figured it was a man, and we stopped to check it out—which ain’t easy in the dark, no matter what your training is. But we didn’t hear nothin’ and we didn’t see nothin’. The guy only moved when we did. He wasn’t stupid.
“So we kept going, and then it started to get a little foggy, which wasn’t helping none. So we sped up the best we could to get away. Now, don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t like we were scared, but something didn’t feel right, you know? Like this woods wasn’t our place. Like we were trespassing or something.
“Anyway, because of the noise we were making in the brush—louder now ’cause we were going faster—we couldn’t hear if he was still followin’ us or not. And we were good for a while. I was in the lead. I was better at navigating, checking the constellations and adjusting our direction. But it was gettin’ harder. The fog was gettin’ thicker so it was harder to see the sky. And then the woods started to stink, like there was a rotting animal around.
“A few seconds later, Art screamed out. I looked back, figuring he tripped or ran into something, but he must’ve been hurt bad for him to be yelling like that. Turns out Art was down on the ground and another man was standing over him. Art was floundering around, tryin’ to get up, but he just couldn’t do it. The fella standin’ over him had already taken him down. But the thing was, I could see the guy wasn’t beefy. He looked skinny and weak. Sure, he was tall all right—real tall—six ten, maybe seven foot. But I didn’t see where the strength was from. He’d put Art down, which wasn’t an easy thing to do. And the weirdest thing: he was wearing camo, like he was a marine. But no one on base was that tall.
“Course, that wasn’t going through my mind right then. The only thing I was thinking was to go help Art. And that’s what I did. But when I got close, close enough to see Art’s face—it wasn’t a pretty sight, crushed and bloody—the tall man swung his arm at me and sent me smashing into a tree. His arm was like a goddamn club.
“I picked myself back up, ready to jump him, but it was too late. I heard a nasty cracking sound—bones breaking—and Art wasn’t trying to get up no more. The tall man stood up from Art, and I saw that Art’s head was sideways. His neck was broke.
“Then I looked at the man, and caught sight of his face for a second. He’s as calm as the night. His face is kinda soft, and there ain’t no sign that he’s upset or angry or nothing. He’s as calm as an animal going about its life. A well-bred animal. And that calm tells me what I should do next.
“I ain’t never run from anything, but this guy’s got a look that’s tellin’ me to get the hell out of there. Besides, Art was already dead. No question about that. So I ran. Didn’t get but three yards away when I felt him grab my legs. I went down hard, face first. Didn’t know how he caught me so fast. He just wasn’t close enough. But I didn’t have time to worry about that.
“He was pressin’ down on the back of my legs, and I was sure he was gonna move up and snap my neck. I tried to twist around to fight him face to face, but he kept pressing on my legs. A raw sting—burning hot—shot through them, God-awful, and so bad that I screamed out, and then it got worse, shooting through all of me, like lightning made of pain. I heard a cracking sound before I even felt it. He was crushing my legs, and I was screaming so loud that I couldn’t think straight.
“I didn’t know ho
w long that lasted. But I stopped screaming because I felt like I was gonna pass out. I told myself not to pass out, and I tried to twist around, to look back, to see if he’d gone—but it was too hard to move. The pain was shooting through me and I was throbbing, like I was one big heartbeat. I wasn’t really thinking and I just started dragging myself. Maybe back to the road. I didn’t really know what I was doing or where I was going. It didn’t matter anyway, ’cause I didn’t get far.
“I was about to pass out for sure this time when I saw him again. He was standing over me. He said one word, not a word you usually hear, and then he was gone—or I passed out—it was hard to remember.
“The next thing I knew, I woke up in a hospital bed. The nurse ran out to get the doctor, and the doctor came in and told me I was lucky to be alive. Ha! Lucky! I mean, yeah, I was luckier than Art. But if you’re young and healthy, it ain’t lucky to become a cripple.
“Now I’m going to skip over the parts where I felt sorry for myself—no one needs to hear that crap—and get back to the part you all want to hear. I told the police what happened. And I told the MPs. They were all gung-ho to get the guy. And I made sure to tell them everything. I replayed the whole thing in my head over and over again, so I wouldn’t forget nothin’. It was the only way to catch that guy. I talked to the police a lot. Same with the MPs. But months go by and they don’t find a thing. Not even one damn lead.
“So when I got better, I got some buddies to take me into the woods, so I could look around. It didn’t do any good, except for one thing: I remembered that word. Bloodlines. And it don’t take a genius to figure out that bloodlines means family. So I dug into our family history. Ya see, my parents, your grandma and grandpa”—in the rearview mirror, I saw him nod over to Lee—“they didn’t raise your dad and me tellin’ us much about the curse. Sure, they told us we were descendants of the Mayflower colonists. They were proud of that, ’cause we were poor and it was all we had to separate us from the other poor kids. But when it came to the curse, they only talked about it ’cause they had to. ’Cause other relatives brought it up.
“So I looked at the family history myself, and I saw that pattern. You know those stories, Lee. From Jeremiah to Aunt Selma to your poor grandma losing her firstborn when he got hit by a car. But she never blamed it on the curse—”
“My dad did,” Lee said.
“Yeah, well, as soon as I told Macon there’s something to the Bellington curse, he grabbed on to it like a drowning man grabs on to a life preserver. It means bad luck for all of us, he said. Hell, I was now the prime example. But that’s not what I saw in our family history, Lee. What I saw was ancestors getting killed. Accidents, murders, disappearances. And not just Bellingtons, but some of their buddies. Of course, there was that criminal crap, too—the hoodlums and con men—but when you looked at it real close, that part was nothing. I saw a bigger pattern. The Hatfield and McCoys. Maybe I saw it ’cause I lived it. It wasn’t bad luck that crushed my legs. It was a goddamn person. What if someone drowned Selma or ran down your grandma’s firstborn?”
Harry stopped with that question, and I looked in the rearview mirror, waiting for more.
Lee provided more in the form of his own question. “If we’re the Hatfields, who are the McCoys?”
“The man who crushed my legs.”
That hung there, and I wondered if Harry meant it the way it had sounded. Was he saying there was only one McCoy? As the phrase goes, the real McCoy? He couldn’t possibly expect us to believe that. He had to mean the man who had attacked him was one of the McCoys and that other McCoys were responsible for the attacks down through the generations of Bellingtons.
At first, in the silence that followed, I thought Lee must’ve been thinking the same thing I was. Then I realized he was already predisposed to believe this outlandish idea. After all, he already believed that the man we were tracking was the same man he’d pushed off a cliff twenty-five years ago.
“Harry,” I said. “You’re not saying there’s just one guy responsible for everything that’s happened to the Bellingtons.” The guy would have to be hundreds of years old. “If it’s the Hatfield and McCoys”—I looked over to Lee for support, even though I knew it probably wasn’t coming—“then it’s generational. It’s not the same guy battling it out over hundreds of years.”
Lee didn’t offer his support, and Harry made his case. “You saw that thing come into my apartment and turn into a dog, didn’t ya?”
Harry’s theory seemed absurd, regardless of what I’d seen. Fact and fiction. A giant shake and bake. Sure, those words went through my mind, but it didn’t mean I believed them.
“Can we kill him?” Lee asked.
“I don’t know, but I know he’s got weaknesses.”
“Like what?” Lee had lasered in on what I should’ve been focused on if I wanted to protect Nate.
“Like power plants.”
I remembered Lee had said something about his uncle living next to a power substation where the rent had been low.
Lee turned to his uncle. “You think this guy doesn’t like power plants?”
“Well, I ain’t positive,” Harry said. “But I thought I saw him sixteen years ago. Remember Martha? She was my helper back then? Well, she was pushing me back from the drugstore. We shouldn’t have gone out at night in the first place, but I’d forgotten to ask her to pick up my blood pressure pills on her way over. The pharmacy had ’em ready. So after dinner, I said let’s go get ’em.
“On the way back, this fella started following us—real tall fella. I wanted Martha to slow down so I could get a closer look at him, but I told her just the opposite: speed up, because I got to go to the bathroom. I didn’t want her to end up like Art. So we get halfway down my block and the man stops followin’ us. He stops in front of Mrs. Barnwell’s oak tree, about a hundred yards from the power plant.”
“How do you know it was the same guy who attacked you?” I asked. It didn’t sound like a positive ID to me.
“I told ya already—I couldn’t be sure. I know you ain’t really buyin’ this, but you wanted my story, so I’m giving it to you.”
Lee shot me an annoyed look, then turned back to Harry. “There was more to it, right? There was something that made you think it was him.”
“Yeah. There was fog near the drugstore when we got there. Not heavy or nothing, but it was there, and so was that rotten smell. Martha rolled me through the fog and into the store. Inside, I remember thinking, why the hell didn’t I just wait on the pills? Skipping one dose ain’t gonna kill me, but going out tonight just might. And when I saw him, it confirmed what I’d been thinkin’.
“Then it happened again three years later—same thing. Only this time, I didn’t go out for any pills. This time, I went out ’cause I knew. I knew he was waitin’. But I had to see for myself. I had to know for sure. I told Martha that I wanted to get some air. Just a stroll around the block. So she pushed me outside, and we got halfway down the block, and there he was, waitin’ for me. In the same spot. Next to Mrs. Barnwell’s oak tree. Just waitin’ there. About a hundred yards away from the plant. That’s why I think he don’t like the plant.”
“Why didn’t he kill you?” I said.
“I’m telling you—because he don’t like the plant.”
“No—I mean why didn’t he kill you near the drugstore? Or why didn’t he kill you in Prince William Forest? Or why not before you even moved to the apartment by the power plant?” I found his eyes in the rearview mirror. “And what about Lee? Why didn’t he kill Lee when we were kids, back in Cold Falls?”
“It’s a game,” Harry said.
I shook my head at the absurdity of that answer. But if I’d been clear-headed, and if I’d remembered that we’d come to Harry because he was the next lead, and if I’d been able to break free of the chains that held me down facing the shadows on the wall, I would’ve made the connection that Lee made.
“That’s what she told us,” Lee said. “That�
�s what Otranto said.”
And the stakes are life and death. The only kind of game worth playing. It was exactly what she’d said.
Harry added, “If you live hundreds of years, I’m guessing everything becomes a game.”
I believed that. But don’t think I’d accepted that our enemy was hundreds of years old. No—that part I wasn’t buying. I was only buying the part about the game. It was the game which dictated who Dantès killed and when. And there was something else I was starting to buy into: the idea that there were unexplainable elements to this game, elements that appeared to be supernatural. But I knew these elements had to have an explanation—one far better than the notion that fact and fiction were one and the same.
Was this the first step in the process of believing it all? How could it not be? Yet I didn’t see it that way. Not then. Of course not. In the same way that I couldn’t accept that novel therapy was the way through this, I couldn’t accept what I was seeing or hearing. If I had, I might have been closer to understanding that Harry’s story, like all the stories so far, was leading me deeper into another story—one of the most famous stories of all time.
Chapter Eleven
Harry’s former neighborhood consisted of a dozen blocks of red brick, two-story apartment buildings. Decades ago, the area had been a low-income section of Arlington. I remembered it because my mother used to drive through it with me in tow on the way to Seven Corners, a shopping area that bordered Falls Church. The neighborhood had long since been gentrified, as denoted by the faux, old-fashioned streetlamps.
Amid the quaint buildings and landscaped ground, the electric substation stuck out like a sore thumb. It was an ugly island of massive cylinders, grids, and wiring, surrounded by tan, cinderblock walls that were topped with coils of barbed wire. A small parking lot ran alongside the substation, but a metal arm, chained shut, barred entry.
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