The Origin of Dracula

by Irving Belateche

  “Nah, take it from me. Lee’s wife counts as a Bellington. Dantès don’t discriminate. I saw what he done going way back, and marrying in counts.”

  So that left Lucy, Quincy, Art, and me—and I got it right then and there. The big picture suddenly came into focus. The light bulb moment was shining bright. My heart started racing and my chest tightened. I was elated, frightened, and even more baffled than before. Baffled because even though I had just now graduated from checkers to chess, moving forward with this clue meant I’d have to trust more in the very thing I was running from.

  Novel therapy. The one place I didn’t want to look for leads. The place that had failed me. But novel therapy now pointed to one book. One very specific book.

  Lucy, Quincy, Art, and me—John. Those were the names of the four main characters in one of the most famous books of supernatural fiction: Dracula. Lucy Westenra, Quincey Morris, Arthur Holmwoode, and Jonathan Harker.

  “I have a lead,” I said, though I had no idea how to interpret the lead, or what Dantès meant by it.

  I laid it out for Harry, explaining that Dantès’s primary way of playing his game with me was through books and stories. Stories were how I’d gotten to Harry in the first place, so it was hard to argue against following this new lead.

  As usual, Harry’s reaction was direct. “Are you tellin’ me that this thing is Dracula?”

  “I’m telling you that the next lead is in that book.”

  “What kinda lead is gonna be in that book?”

  “I don’t know.” I pulled the car over. It was time to find another substation and dive into this new lead. We were in one of Arlington’s densely populated corridors of condominiums, so I could park and not look suspicious.

  “You’re not telling me we’re gonna be running a stake through this guy’s heart, are you?” Harry said.

  “Listen, we’re not chasing down Dracula. We’re chasing down a lead.” I looked back at him. “Why is it so easy for you to believe that Dantès is hundreds of years old, but not so easy to go with a stake through the heart?”

  “So you are sayin’ he’s Dracula?”

  “Absolutely not. Besides, I’m not looking to kill Dantès.”

  “Oh yeah? Then why are we hunting him down?”

  I finally told him about the letter. “If I can find Dantès’s identity, he’ll spare Nate’s life.”

  “Well, I wanna kill him,” Harry said. “And that way you’ll be goddamn sure your son is safe.”

  It was hard to argue with that, so I didn’t. Instead, I moved on to the task at hand. I pulled out my cell phone, located a substation, which turned out to be fairly close, and headed in that direction.

  On the way, I thought about Dracula, trying to remember what I could about the book. It’d been a long time since I’d read it—my teenage years—but I’d read it quite a number of times. If I could remember the names of the characters, certainly I could remember more. And Dantès was counting on that, wasn’t he?

  He was forcing me to travel further into the world of fiction. But I was still fighting it—I was staring hard at the reality around me, looking for it to ground me. Yet the condominiums I passed looked fake, as if they were movie sets, empty of life inside, just mock-ups. The whole neighborhood was nothing but a shadow cast on a blank wall. It wasn’t real. Somewhere out there, beyond the stretch of condominiums, the real objects that cast those shadows were visible.

  But I couldn’t see those objects. Not just yet. Though Dantès had loosened my chains, forced me to consider that reality was a mix of fact and fiction, the fiction part wasn’t visible yet.

  “So what’s in that book?” Harry said.

  “I’m going to have to take a look at it,” I answered.

  “Are you kidding me? You’re gonna take time out to read.”

  “I don’t remember the book well enough.”

  “My bet is you do.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You just finished telling me that books have been helping you all night—even though you don’t want them to, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you ain’t been reading books all night, right? You been moving forward usin’ what you remember about them.”

  That shut me up. When something strikes you as right, you don’t have to analyze it. So what else did I remember about Dracula? A lot about its plot and a lot about the folklore that Bram Stoker, Dracula’s author, had created. Folklore that had spawned hundreds of vampire books, comics, TV shows, and films.

  And I remembered Jonathan Harker, the novel’s main character—the character who bore my name. During his stay in Dracula’s castle, he witnessed some bizarre occurrences: Dracula climbing out of a window and crawling down the wall like a lizard, Dracula turning into a bat, Dracula sleeping in a wooden box filled with dirt, and more. Harker dismissed these strange events as hallucinations. Or worse—he thought he was descending into madness.

  Was I following in his footsteps?

  Harry interrupted my train of thought. “The names made you think about the book, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What about Dracula? You ain’t said nothing about his name.”

  Names. Wasn’t this entire trip through hell about names? Searching for Dantès’s true identity. His name. Time to double down on names.

  I pulled over.

  “What are you doing?” Harry leaned forward in his seat. “We’re not at the power plant.”

  “Checking to see how Bram Stoker came up with the name Dracula.” Hopefully the web would dispense that information with ease.

  My search quickly yielded that Bram Stoker had gotten the name “Dracula” from a Romanian folk hero who’d lived in the Middle Ages. That was a start, but it didn’t help. Luckily it only took a bit more digging to find something that did help—something that applied to me directly.

  I found an article that had another detail about the origin of the name “Dracula,” and if I’d had more faith in my hunches, I wouldn’t have had to read the article at all. Our next move was right there in the title. But, as usual, I had doubts about anything that had do with novel therapy, so I read the article.

  It explained that Stoker had discovered the name “Dracula” in the Whitby library. Whitby was a small English town, and Stoker had set part of Dracula in Whitby as a tribute to its library. Then the article went on to list a dozen other examples of authors who’d also found major elements of their novels during visits to their local libraries.

  The point of the article was that libraries had once been holy places for writers, and that this was no longer the case. For centuries, any information writers needed for their stories was waiting for them in that vast reservoir of books known as their local library. But in this day and age, almost any information could be harvested from the web—just as I was doing right then. So writers had lost something when their local library had ceased to be their holy place.

  The title of the article was Libraries: Holy Reservoirs.

  *

  Twenty minutes later, we pulled into the employee parking lot of the Cherrydale Public Library—my local library and my workplace. Harry hadn’t totally bought into this lead, but he wasn’t dismissive either. “It was your idea to check out the name Dracula,” I’d told him, to help him see it my way.

  I got out of the car, pulled Harry’s wheelchair from the trunk, and helped him get in.

  “Gimme my rifle,” he said. “And you take this.” He tried to hand me his handgun.

  “I don’t need it.”

  “Yeah, you do. It’s just that you don’t want it, right?”

  I stared at the gun. My aversion to the weapon was visceral and powerful.

  “Listen,” he said. “You saw what he did to Lee. He don’t fuck around. If he decides to kill you, you’re gonna wanna defend yourself.”

  I still couldn’t do it. “If he decides to kill me, I don’t know if that’s going to help.”

  Harry shoo
k his head. “Suit yourself.” He shoved the gun back into his waistband. “Then forget the rifle—just get me some extra rounds. Pistol ammo’s in the blue box.”

  I did as I was told, then wheeled Harry to the employee entrance, punched in the access code, and headed inside. To say I was entering my workplace under bizarre circumstances would have been a great understatement. The person who’d walked out of this library less than twelve hours ago wasn’t the same person who was walking in now. My life had changed so much as to be completely unrecognizable.

  I wheeled Harry through the library’s administrative area, past desks piled high with files, and through the double doors into the library’s foyer. We rolled past the checkout counter and the bulletin boards advertising local events, then into the main room, where the books were shelved. Tens of thousands of stories, neatly arranged by author, as if organization could bring order to the chaos of fiction.

  “Now what?” Harry said.

  I had an answer, but it was just a placeholder until I could find out why Dantès wanted us here. “We’re checking out the library’s copies of Dracula.”

  “So you are going to take time out to read?”

  “I didn’t say that. But checking out those copies might lead to something: a clue scrawled inside a copy of the book, or maybe something down that aisle.” It could be anything, I thought, based on Dantès’s pattern.

  And that would turn out to be true. It would be something unexpected—but for once it would be easy to believe it was the right breadcrumb.

  On the way to the correct aisle, I scanned everything I passed, looking for the next lead. The displays—one highlighting bestselling mysteries, another graphic novels, another YA books about zombies—didn’t call out to me. It was only when my eyes fell on the last display that the trumpets sounded. The call to arms was loud and clear.

  I couldn’t connect the other breadcrumbs from tonight into a bigger picture yet. A homeless man giving directions to Dante’s Inferno; a bartender spouting Plato; a man in a wheelchair waiting in a dingy apartment for a dog to attack him. No, I couldn’t see the bigger picture. But on the other hand, I knew that what I saw in front of me fit perfectly:

  Barbara’s display on Virginia history.

  I pushed Harry up to the display. He eyed me suspiciously. “What are you doing?”

  “There’s something we need in one of these books.”

  “My eyes ain’t that good, but none of ’em say Dracula.”

  “No—think history,” I said. That was the recurring motif. That was the part of the big picture I could see. “We’re talking about the Bellington curse down through the ages. Your genealogy.”

  “You’re barking up the wrong tree. This here’s about Virginia history. John Bellington, the Mayflower, Plymouth Colony—that’s Massachusetts history.”

  “Yeah, but remember when you said I’m thinking small?”

  He nodded.

  “Now you’re the one who’s thinking small. Think of the country back then. It was all Native American land. Prince William Forest, Cold Falls, the Potomac, and everything up and down the coast. Massachusetts and Virginia were all glorified land if you go back far enough.”

  Harry shook his head. “What the hell is glorified land?”

  I was about to explain that it was a figure of speech, a magical figure of speech that had drawn many kids, including me, to Cold Falls to find that land, when I heard Nate’s voice—

  “You killed Mom.”

  I hurried from the display toward the voice. It was coming from the adjoining aisle. Of course, it couldn’t be Nate’s voice. Unless Jenna had brought him here? In the dead of night? Why? Dread bloomed in my chest. Whatever was going on, it had to be horrible.

  I peered down the aisle and saw Nate. He was walking toward me from the other end of the aisle. The blue in his eyes was overpowered by large black pupils, cold and hard and fixed on me.

  “Nate,” I said, racing to him. “Are you okay?”

  “Why’d you kill Mom?”

  I knelt down to him. “I didn’t.” I leaned forward to hug him.

  He backed away. “Then why didn’t you talk about her after she died?” His face was ghostly pale, infused with the agony of doubt—doubt about me. His black eyes bore into mine, searching for an answer.

  “I couldn’t talk about her—” I began.

  “Because you killed her.”

  “No!”

  He cowered away from me, like an animal who’d just been wounded. “You’re lying,” he said. His lips were quivering.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I was having a hard time, honey. A hard time letting go of her.”

  “You’re lying. ’Cause you still don’t want to talk about her.”

  “No, that’s not it. Once you stopped bringing her up, I just didn’t want to remind you about her. I thought it would make you sad.”

  “I stopped talking about her because you wanted me to stop! She doesn’t make me feel sad. I love her.”

  “So do I, honey.” Tears were forming in my eyes.

  “You took me to Aunt Jenna’s because the police know you killed her. You’re running away from them.”

  “No… no. I took you to Aunt Jenna’s because—” I couldn’t tell him why.

  “Because you don’t want to take me with you,” he said.

  “That’s not it at all. Please, Nate.” I reached for him, to bring him closer to me, to hug him and assure him, to let him know I loved him more than anything in the world. But just before I wrapped my arms around him—his head swung down, his jaws opened, and he bit my arm. A vicious, deep bite, like a ravenous pit bull clamping down on a piece of raw meat.

  He wasn’t letting go.

  I screamed out and instinctually tried to push his head off my arm, but his jaws were locked on to my flesh. This isn’t Nate, I thought, and I pushed his small body as hard as I could.

  He tumbled back with a piece of my flesh between his teeth. His eyes were wild, and his black pupils were tinged with a golden glow. He lunged right back at me and savagely chomped down into my shoulder. As a red-hot pain shot through my body, I grabbed at him and tried to shake him off.

  Out of nowhere, a gunshot rang out, unnaturally loud, like a wake-up call from another world.

  Nate tumbled off of me onto the floor. He was heaving and shuddering.

  “Oh my God!” I kneeled down over him.

  His neck was ripped open where the bullet had struck, and blood flowed unabated from the wound. I tried to stanch the flow with my hand, but Nate was already in his death throes, wheezing and quivering.

  I lifted his small body and held him to me, embracing him. I felt his shuddering and his harsh gasps for air vibrating through my own body as if I were dying with him.

  With his head cradled in the crook of my arm, I looked over my shoulder, at Harry. He was at the end of the aisle, gun in hand. His eyes weren’t on me. They were on Nate.

  “You killed him…” I managed to croak out.

  “It ain’t him,” Harry said flatly.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “You still ain’t buying it.”

  “I can’t buy it.” Nate stopped wheezing and quivering. His body went limp. I held him more tightly. My shirt was warm with his blood.

  Harry wheeled forward. “Who do you think you’re fighting? We got no chance unless you open your goddamn eyes.”

  “Who are we fighting?”

  “Someone who fucks with your head.”

  I clung to Nate’s body. My sweet son, fragile, all hope extinguished.

  Harry waved the gun at Nate. “Look for yourself.”

  I didn’t even have to look—I already felt that the small body in my arms was gone. In its place was cold, clammy air that clung to my arms. It had a weight of its own, pressing down on me. And when I did look, I saw it had a presence, too. Thick, white mist. Foul-smelling.

  The mist suddenly dispersed in a rush, revealing a bat. An ugly creature. Scr
aggly dark gray fur and black, cold eyes—Nate’s eyes, at least the ones I’d just seen. It spread its bony, leathery wings and bolted up into the air, then flew over the bookshelves, leaving no sign of mist or Nate or our whole creepy and bloody encounter.

  I couldn’t have asked for a more direct reference to Dracula. Yet it was still hard to accept, and harder still to decipher. The reality that fact and fiction were the same had been laid bare in front of me. I’d just lived it. This was what Harry wanted me to see.

  But I was like Jonathan Harker in Dracula. To me, hallucinations and madness were far more acceptable explanations. Like Harker, who’d been trapped in Dracula’s castle, witnessing a gala of supernatural events, I, too, was trapped—and my reaction, like his, was to cling to the idea that I was slipping away from reality. I couldn’t accept that I’d been dragged into a new world that was just as real as my former world.

  But Harker had eventually come around. He’d accepted that reality was a blend of fact and fiction. Was that the lesson here? Courtesy of novel therapy? The therapy I despised? And if I accepted that the threat looming over Nate was supernatural, did that get me any closer to stopping it?

  Right then, another critical element of Dracula came back to me. Of course, it was my desperation for answers that made this element seem critical. The element had to do with how Bram Stoker had laid out his story. A large chunk of it wasn’t about Dracula at all. It was about Van Helsing, an expert on vampires, and his efforts to convince the other characters in the book that such a creature as Dracula existed. I needed to be convinced, too.

  “Are you gettin’ closer to believing what you’re seeing?” Harry was eyeing the top of the bookshelves as if he was expecting the bat to return.

  I was getting closer, but I didn’t say so. “Let’s look at that Virginia history display.”

  Harry wheeled around and headed back toward it. As I followed, I noticed that my shirt was no longer drenched in Nate’s blood. It was drenched in the mist’s clammy waters, as if I’d been baptized in the waters of a netherworld. A netherworld where doubt turned into belief. Dantès had made his point, and the only thing left for us to do in the Cherrydale Public Library was to find that breadcrumb.