Edna did.
And that paid off when she talked to one of the settlers who’d conducted the torture. He told her that the prisoner kept repeating the same words—words she was able to translate.
Amber weapon.
She didn’t tell her fellow colonists that she’d been able to translate the words. Instead, she put her own plan together. She’d kill Drakho with an amber weapon and save her only remaining son, Benjamin.
Here, Harker interrupted the narrative, again, with another footnote. He wrote that some of the following pages were missing, so he’d shaped this part of the tale himself.
Based on the word the Paspahegh prisoner had used for “weapon,” Edna determined she’d need some kind of knife or dagger. It would form the core of the amber weapon. But she didn’t want to steal a dagger from another settler. If she was caught, she’d face severe punishment, and her fellow citizens already distrusted her. Her past friendships with the Paspahegh made her suspect.
So she decided on a morbid course of action. She’d sneak into the cemetery on the edge of Jamestown and dig up the grave of a settler. On his deathbed, this settler had insisted his family bury him with his weapons.
Edna felt sick as she dug up the dirt and peeled the shroud away from the decaying body. She kept her composure during the gruesome task by clinging desperately to one thought: this was the only way to save her son. She retrieved the dagger holstered around the dead man’s waist, then quickly re-buried his body.
At this point in the narrative, I took another of the many breaks I’d been taking to fill Harry in. As I was summarizing this section for him, I connected Edna’s amber weapon, her dagger, to the knives used to kill Dracula. In the book Dracula, Jonathan Harker and Quincey Morris had killed the count using two knives. Harker had slashed Dracula’s throat with one, and Quincey Morris had stabbed him in the heart with another.
I dove back into the story, and a few pages later, Edna revealed exactly what the amber weapon was. She was preparing the dagger by coating it with amber. She didn’t go into detail about the process, but why would she? How could she have ever foretold that I’d be sitting here in the dawn’s early light, four hundred years later, in front of a electric substation, using The Forest as a field guide?
After Edna had readied the dagger, she had to figure out a way to get close enough to Drakho to stab him with it. She considered confronting him when he entered Jamestown to wreak his vengeance. He’d been ambushing settlers for months. She’d seen him descend on the colony disguised as a wolf, a dog, a cold, lingering mist, and even as a blanket of darkness from which he unfolded himself in the night. In the end though, Edna decided that Drakho’s stealth was so great—he came and went as he pleased—that confronting him in the settlement left too much to chance. Instead her plan was to draw Drakho to her.
Years ago the Paspahegh had told her that Wassamoah Bay, a land of ancient caves and untouched soil, was sacred land for Drakho. Her plan was to ride out to this sacred land and make Drakho an offer. She’d play one of his games for the life of her son. She’d plead for him to give her one chance at saving Benjamin. She’d get on her knees and beg for that chance.
But this would be a ruse. As soon as Drakho was within striking distance, she’d stab him with her amber weapon. She knew this wouldn’t be easy. Drakho had the ability to cloud her mind, which meant she’d have to be wary of everything she saw. Her own eyes might deceive her in the moment she needed them most.
When I filled Harry in on this part of the story, he said, “That game she wants to play—for the life of her son—it’s the game you’re playin’.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t ask for it,” I said.
“She didn’t neither, right? She’s got no choice.”
He was right. The parallel to my story rang true, which made me even more anxious to get to the end of her story to find out if she’d been able to save her son.
Edna waited three nights, for a night with a waxing crescent moon, bright enough to light her way. Her mission had to be carried out at night. The Paspahegh had told her many times that Drakho showed himself in the calm of night or in the darkness of caves, rather than in the frenzy of daylight.
Edna placed her weapon in a sheath that she’d sewn into the inside of her robe, then she saddled up her husband’s horse, a noble beast who’d turned despondent after her husband’s death. She wished she could explain her mission to the horse, tell him that his former owner would approve of this nighttime trek. If she could explain this to the noble beast, she was sure he’d help her during her confrontation with Drakho.
After riding for two hours, Edna entered the forest that surrounded Wassamoah Bay. Once there, she didn’t know where to go—was it all sacred land?—so she rode through the primeval forest toward the bay.
It wasn’t long before she heard rustling in the trees. And the rustling got louder the farther she rode into the woods. She thought these were restless nightingales or owls—dozens of them, judging by the denseness of the rustling.
Then suddenly her horse stopped and neighed—and a swarm of bats swept down from the treetops above, bony gray creatures with scaly wings. They sent her horse into a frenzy. The noble beast bucked and whinnied, terrified, as the bats flung themselves at the horse and rider. Edna fought to keep control of the animal while swinging at the mad swarm.
But the horse threw her. She hit the ground hard, and the bats hurled themselves at her like pelting hail. Claws and teeth ripped her robe and gnawed at her skin. The stinging pain was continuous, but each individual blow, each cut, racked her body with new torment.
She tried to swat the bats away, but this only made them fiercer, battering her with more force. She began to reach for the dagger, but then stopped herself. If she pulled it out now, the game was over. Drakho would see the amber weapon. Then she had the frightening thought: Does he already know I have it? No, she told herself. Drakho didn’t know who she was, so he couldn’t know her thoughts.
She didn’t pull out her hidden weapon. Instead she cried out, “I’ve come to play your game! I can play as well as the Paspahegh! Better!” The bats didn’t relent. “Please, I beg you! I offer you what you value most: a game!” She felt the onslaught of bats slow. “The Paspahegh told me you are fair, and I believe them.”
The swarm of bats thinned out, then flew back up into the trees.
Edna calmed herself and rose to her feet. Her robe was clawed and tattered, and her body was covered in bruises, welts, and hundreds of cuts. But she braced herself and waited for an answer.
She scanned the woods, hoping to see Drakho. But the first thing she saw was that her horse had abandoned her—the stallion was nowhere to be seen. Did Drakho now expect her to run as the horse had? Or was he considering her offer of the game?
“The game is a good one,” she said. “The prize is the life of my son, Benjamin.” She scanned the forest once more, glad she’d chosen a night when the moon lit up some of the darkness. But it was an odd light—a pale, unsettling light. The light of an unnatural world.
Then something else appeared in this unnatural world. A mist began to enshroud the forest. She recognized it from the attacks on the settlement. It thickened quickly and took on a foul odor.
She had no doubt that she’d gotten Drakho’s attention.
In the distance, through the mist, she saw a shadow darker than the night itself. It was shaped like a man. A very tall man.
“I did not support my people’s decision,” Edna said, believing she was speaking to Drakho. “Killing the Paspahegh was not a Godly choice. It was evil. Born of the very devil himself.” She was telling the truth, for she was a good Christian. She believed in the New Testament God. A God of love and mercy and peace.
“I loved the Paspahegh as my own brothers and sisters. They were Christians even though they hadn’t read the words of Jesus. They led their lives as the New Testament asks.” The shadow, still quite far away, turned more opaque, more substantial. “My peop
le were wrong to slaughter the Paspahegh. And you are not wrong to seek vengeance on those who harmed them. In the Old Testament, God approved of vengeance on those who had harmed his people. Me—I don’t know what to think about vengeance. But I do know what to think about my son Benjamin. He is innocent. He had nothing to do with killing the Paspahegh.”
Drakho appeared suddenly in front of her. How he’d moved through the forest so quickly, or changed from shadow to substance so fully, she didn’t understand. But he stood before her now—a tall man with dark hair, a narrow face, and deathly pale skin. His black eyes were large and shone with intelligence, cunning, and ancient knowledge. He wore black vestments. He appeared to her like a fallen angel—from the underworld?—in human form.
Edna got on her knees. “Will you consider my proposal?”
“I must take the lives of all the Englishmen,” he said. His voice was full, stern, and dominating.
“Some of my people are good,” she said.
“Letting your people live is like letting disease flourish. In the end, disease kills every living thing it touches.”
“That may be true, but I know my son’s heart. He is not part of that disease. He doesn’t look to war as an answer. He won’t grow up to kill the people you choose as yours. He won’t destroy your land.”
Drakho was silent. Edna looked up from her supplicating pose. From the neutral expression on Drakho’s face—no lines on his brow and no curl to his lips—she couldn’t tell if he was considering her proposal. The thought crossed her mind: If he is considering it, should I go through with my plan to kill this ancient being, or should I play the game for Ben’s life instead?
“Please grant me the opportunity to play the game,” she said. “If I win, you do not lose. If Ben lives, he will not be your enemy.” Edna made her voice small and kneeled even closer to the ground. “You will find that playing this game is more worthwhile than simply taking another life.”
“Your people are mindless,” Drakho said. “I have tried to play my games with them, but they fail at every one. They don’t give a thought to anything. The Paspahegh seek answers to puzzles and look for clues in the words and pictures I leave. Your people cannot see past what is in front of them. They are too easy to trick.”
Edna took that as a sign. She wasn’t so easy to trick. She had tricked Drakho. She grabbed the dagger from its sheath, leapt up, and drove it into Drakho’s chest, deep into his heart.
He staggered back, his face twisted in shock. His black eyes narrowed and his pale skin took on a pinkish hue. He reached up, clutched at the dagger in his chest, and struggled to pull it out. His body began to weaken and wilt. It shrank inside his black vestments, which began to billow, no longer secured by the weight of his body inside.
Edna watched, slack-jawed and wide-eyed.
Drakho was dwindling to nothingness. She’d driven him from the rank of fallen angel—of eternal being—to that of fallen warrior. He didn’t go from dust to dust, but from eternal to nothing.
The vestments fell to the ground in a heap. Drakho was dead. The amber weapon had done its job. She had done her job.
Edna returned to the settlement by foot. It took her more than half a day, but she was propelled by triumph, by the joy of knowing she’d saved her son.
No one in the settlement knew about her adventure. But from that day on, the settlers’ luck changed. The Starving Time came to an end, and Jamestown began to grow and thrive.
And that was how The Forest ended.
Harker then wrote an epilogue. He explained that he hadn’t been able to uncover any records that revealed Edna’s true fate. He was referring to the author, the real Edna—Mrs. Horace Grayson—and not the fictitious Edna in the story.
He did discover evidence that fact and fiction had intersected on one front: the real Edna, like the fictitious Edna, had lost her husband and all her children, save one son, during the Starving Time. But Harker couldn’t find any evidence that she and her son had survived the third year of the Starving Time. They could easily have been part of the eighty percent who’d perished. Or it was possible that they had moved to another settlement in the Americas, or even back to England. Harker said there just wasn’t enough evidence to come to a definitive conclusion.
He also wrote that what happened to the fictional Edna at the very end of The Forest wasn’t clear. When the story wound to a close, as was true for other parts of the tale, pages were missing. So Harker had had to shape the very end of the narrative. He was the one who’d chosen a victorious ending, and he went on to explain his decision.
He saw Edna’s story as an attempt to make sense of the unbearable hardships in the new colony. The settlers who’d arrived on the Susan Constant, Discovery, and Godspeed were so ill-prepared for the new world that Harker compared it to the trials and tribulations that the first settlers on Mars might have to face. The unexpected adversities far outweighed those few for which they had prepared.
So he believed Edna had intended for her story to be a tale of courage and perseverance against almost insurmountable odds. It was her way of convincing herself that the settlers could, and would, overcome a harsh environment, an environment that showed no mercy. She wanted to believe they would eventually win the battle.
Therefore, Harker’s interpretation of the story was that she’d translated that harsh environment into human form by creating the character of Drakho—based on the Paspahegh legend. He was the one destroying the colony, and it was up to the story’s heroine to defeat him, save her son, and save the settlement.
So that’s what Harker had her do at the end of The Forest.
Chapter Fifteen
“There you have it,” Harry said.
“There’s more,” I said.
Harker had also written an afterword to The Forest. Reading it made the connections between the story and our present day descent into hell even more clear. In it, Harker postulated a connection between Dracula and The Forest, laying out the case that Bram Stoker’s Dracula was based on the Paspahegh’s Drakho.
First, he noted his own connection to the material—a strange coincidence that had no practical value as factual evidence, but which had to be addressed nonetheless. How could it be that he, Jonathan Harker, who bore the same name as one of the main characters in Dracula, should be the one to discover the origin of the Dracula myth? There was no answer to that question, except that it was a coincidence, one of those strange, grand ones we’ve all experienced in our own lives. He made it clear that he didn’t believe some mystical force had brought him to the parchment pages hidden in the Bible. Then he went on to make his case about the origin of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Harker’s research—confirmed by other scholars and academicians—revealed that Stoker had never visited Eastern Europe, the region he’d chosen as Dracula’s birthplace and homeland. The accepted wisdom was that Stoker had picked this region because he’d based the character of Count Dracula on Vlad the Impaler.
Vlad the Impaler, whose real name was Vlad Tepes, was a historical figure from the mid-fifteenth century. He was heir to the House of Draculesti, a powerful family whose lineage went back centuries, and he was prince of Wallachia, a region in Romania. He was also known as Count Dracula, derived from his family name, Draculesti. Count Dracula became a folk hero for defending the Romanians against the Ottomans, and he became infamous for his extreme cruelty, which included impaling his enemies.
No historian or professor of literature had challenged this theory. It was accepted dogma: the inspiration for the fictitious character of Dracula was Vlad the Impaler. Of course, there was no reason to challenge this. First of all, Dracula was a work of fiction. Digging up new information about this novel wasn’t going to change the world. Second, the novel wasn’t considered highbrow fiction, so over the decades, scholars hadn’t been falling all over themselves actively chasing down new leads about the book’s genesis. Such efforts were reserved for the established literary canon, not the likes of Dra
cula.
But Harker couldn’t shake the parallels between Dracula and The Forest—there were so many. Broad ones like Dracula’s and Drakho’s lifespans, both apparently spanning centuries, and specific ones like their supernatural abilities, from morphing into animals to traveling in the form of mist. Not to mention the most obvious similarity, their names: Dracula and Drakho.
Here, I couldn’t help but think of my own journey—the one which had led me to The Forest. Names had been critical every step of the way.
So Harker set out to determine whether Stoker could have heard about the legend of the Native American Drakho. And for that, he needed to uncover the missing link: either Bram Stoker had heard and/or read about The Forest, or he’d heard and/or read about the Paspahegh legend of Drakho. Harker would also have to prove that one of these two things had occurred before Stoker wrote his masterpiece of horror fiction.
After many dead ends in which he’d tried to prove that Stoker had run across the legend of Drakho in England, Harker moved on to investigating whether Stoker had visited the United States before writing Dracula. That turned out to be the better trail.
Stoker wasn’t primarily an author. His full-time job was managing the stage tours for one of England’s most famous actors: Henry Irving. Henry Irving traveled the world, and as Harker discovered, Stoker was right there with him on almost all of those trips—including many to the United States, where Irving was a favorite.
Irving was so popular in the States that he was invited to the White House and met the president on more than one occasion. This information inspired Harker to do extensive research into those visits to Washington, D.C. He was focused on D.C. because the nation’s capital was across the Potomac from Virginia—Tsenacommacah land, Drakho’s homeland, and the Paspaheghs’ homeland. He eventually found that both Irving and Stoker had taken a trip to Williamsburg, a stone’s throw away from the original Jamestown colony.
The Origin of Dracula Page 18