The Origin of Dracula

by Irving Belateche

  Harker was getting closer to finding a direct link.

  But it turned out the record of Stoker and Irving’s visit to Williamsburg was thin. Though both men occasionally wrote personal notes about their trips—letters, diary entries, calendar entries—neither of them had written anything about this particular excursion. So Harker looked for other paper trails: newspaper accounts, hotel records, travel receipts, et cetera.

  Through those, he was able to determine that their visit had lasted three days—plenty of time for Stoker to come across the Drakho legend. Of course, except for placing Stoker in the right location, there was no definitive proof that Stoker had come across that legend. His visit had come almost three hundred years after the English had slaughtered the Paspahegh and Edna had written her story. And there was also the fact that, as far as Harker could tell, Edna’s short story hadn’t surfaced during those three hundred years. And it wouldn’t surface for another hundred years after Stoker’s visit, when Harker, himself, would discover it in that old Bible.

  Still, he thought he’d discovered a strong link, a link far stronger than the accepted wisdom—that Stoker had stumbled across the folk hero, Vlad the Impaler, in the Whitby library, a small library in the English countryside. That explanation didn’t account for the entirety of Dracula folklore.

  Harker’s link did. He’d placed Stoker in the heart of Drakho country, in the heart of the Drakho legend. A legend that paralleled Stoker’s Dracula almost perfectly, including the similar names.

  In the first edition of The Forest, Harker’s afterword ended there, without the evidence of a direct link between Stoker and Drakho. But Harker spent many more years looking for harder evidence.

  And he found it.

  In the second edition of the book—the one I held in my hands—Harker laid out that harder evidence. He’d discovered Henry Irving’s name on a guest list for a lecture given during the actor’s visit to Williamsburg. The topic of the lecture was “The Peculiar Myths of the James City Indians.” If Stoker had accompanied Irving to that lecture—and from the records of their travels together, it appeared that Stoker was part of Irving’s close-knit entourage—then this placed him right where Harker needed him: listening to a lecture on Native American legends that were specific to this region of the country. The county of James City included Williamsburg and Jamestown, home to the Paspahegh—and the clincher was that the James City Indians were what the locals from that time period called the Paspahegh.

  So had the lecture that night included the legend of Drakho? Harker couldn’t find the agenda for the night, but he did find a mention of the lecture in The Virginia Gazette. An article about Henry Irving’s visit to Williamsburg—apparently the news media had always been focused on celebrities instead of news—reported on the highlights of his stay and mentioned that he’d sat in on the lecture. It also gave one-line descriptions of two of the James City Indians’ myths. One was about “a mystical warrior who once roamed these lands.”

  Harker was convinced that this warrior was Drakho. How could it not be? Stoker had attended this lecture—there was almost no doubt about that—and then gone on to write Dracula, a novel that used every detail about this warrior, including his name. The “mystical warrior who once roamed these lands” must have been Drakho.

  I, too, was convinced of this. Of course, I was biased. I had experienced Drakho firsthand, so there was no doubt in my mind that the person or creature described in The Forest was the same person or creature hunting me down and threatening to kill Nate.

  “Drakho,” I said. “That’s Dantès’s real name.”

  “I guess that means you just tell the fella his real name and you win the game,” Harry said.

  “I guess so.”

  “You don’t sound so sure.”

  I wasn’t. Regardless of whether Drakho was his true identity—and couldn’t there be another layer still?—hadn’t I discovered a treasure trove of information about my enemy? Didn’t this story tell me all I needed to know?

  It told me that even if I delivered up the name Drakho, and Drakho then gave Nate a reprieve and spared his life, that wouldn’t be the end of it. He’d come after Nate again. Edna had reached through the centuries to confirm Harry’s hypothesis: Drakho stuck to the same bloodlines for his games. Once he chose a bloodline, he forever came back to it, generation after generation. Which meant Drakho would never let Nate go. Eventually he’d kill Nate, or his kids, or his grandkids. There was only one real McCoy—Drakho—but there were many Hatfields, and that now included my son and me.

  “We tell him the name, but that’s not all we do,” I said. It was time to fight back. To attack. It was time to stop playing checkers and start playing chess. “We’re going to kill him.”

  “It ain’t like we got a choice,” Harry said.

  And that had been Harry’s point from the start. We didn’t have a choice. For not only were we Hatfields, we were also a deadly disease flourishing on Drakho’s homeland.

  “We need the amber weapon,” I said.

  “Yeah, but there’s a hitch in that plan,” Harry fired back.

  I had a good idea what that hitch was. Harry was on the ball—he wasn’t going to let it slide. “Harker made up the end of the story,” I said.

  “Yep. And what if he got it wrong? I mean, Drakho’s still around. So we damn well know Edna didn’t kill him back then. That part of the story ain’t true. Drakho probably killed her. And her son.”

  “I won’t argue with that.” I flipped through the pages of the book. “But the part about the amber weapon—that came from the Paspahegh. They’re the ones who told Edna about it. The amber weapon wasn’t something Harker made up and added to the story.”

  “I don’t know.” He was shaking his head, doubt on his face. “What the hell is an amber weapon anyway? When you get right down to it, it’s just a goddamn knife.”

  “That’s like saying that when you get right down to it, Drakho is just a goddamn human.”

  Harry chuckled, and I knew I could close this deal. “When you were firing at him from the car, do you think you hit with one of your shots?” I asked.

  “I know I did. Even though I don’t see so good, I aim just fine.”

  “So if bullets can’t slow him down, maybe it’s going to take a special kind of weapon—and now we know what that weapon is.”

  Harry glanced down at the book, then looked up at the dawn, now purple and gold. A few beats later, he said, “I know where to get a dagger for the job. You’re gonna have to come up with the amber.”

  I pulled out my cell phone and started googling amber. I skimmed through the mineral’s history, then searched for how to acquire some, which turned out to be relatively easy. We could buy an amber gemstone at a local jewelry store. But after a little more digging, I found that coating a knife with amber wasn’t going to be so easy. The problem was melting the gemstone. It was nearly impossible to melt without professional equipment.

  But there did turn out to be workaround, the same one Edna must’ve found. Amber had been a precious gemstone since the days of the caveman. Every culture had known about it, and they’d also known that it was fossilized tree resin. So I was fairly sure Edna would have known this. She would have concluded that the best way to get amber in the form she needed—liquefied—was to go right to the source: tree resin. She must have coated her knife with tree resin, which was viscous.

  “So we’re gonna tap a tree?” Harry said after I filled him in.

  “Unless you know a professional scientist who’s going to lend us his lab to melt a little amber,” I said. But I should have taken his question more seriously—for there was an alternative, a far better one than tapping a tree.

  “We gotta draw Drakho out, too,” Harry said. “And that means drivin’ to Wassamoah Bay. Sacred land.”

  “Maybe there’s some sacred land up here, too. Edna called it ‘untouched’ soil.”

  “From the story, I’m thinkin’ untouched land mean
s land that people ain’t been on—or hardly been on, right? And up in these parts, no land’s untouched. Even preserved land ain’t really been preserved.”

  Considering Northern Virginia had become one big sprawling suburb, à la Southern California or northern New Jersey, that was a good assumption. Still, driving to Wassamoah Bay would eat up the rapidly dwindling hours left to save Nate. Tomorrow was less than seventeen hours away.

  So I pulled up a couple of Northern Virginia maps on my cell phone, looking for the least exploited areas. Harry was right—there wasn’t much “sacred” land. But I did notice some possibilities much farther out in Northern Virginia. Unfortunately, I would need a more detailed topographical map to determine which of those possibilities were actually in the running. And even if one piece of land appeared to be “untouched,” how could I be sure it was sacred land?

  I also looked up Wassamoah Bay and found that it was now part of the York River State Park. Though it had survived as wilderness, it was probably no longer untouched. Like Cold Falls and Prince William Forest, both also state parks, there were probably trails, picnic areas, and campsites littering the land.

  “If Drakho’s up here messing with us—and he damn well is,” Harry said, “he ain’t down there in Wassamoah Bay.”

  I smiled and shook my head at the clarity of this insight. “That’s right.”

  So we tabled the “sacred land” part of our plan and decided to move on to securing the knife and the amber. Clint “Buck” Gibson, one of Harry’s army buddies, was going to provide us with the knife. Buck collected daggers from America’s past wars.

  We pulled away from the electric substation and headed to Buck’s house in Falls Church. The purple dawn had turned into a bright blue morning, and its light invigorated me even though I’d had no sleep. It was refreshing to lose the veil of darkness. Night was gone and the world looked normal, which was reassuring. But I’d already moved out of this normal world and into a world where fact and fiction were interchangeable. In my heart I knew this, but we’re always in denial when change first comes a-calling.

  Maybe if I hadn’t been in denial, I would’ve expected that Buck was going to play an integral part in this game. But as it stood, I thought he would just provide us with a knife. I had to get more acclimated to playing chess, and the game was getting more complicated. But after Edna’s story, which had served as a kind of training ground, my skill at playing Drakho’s game was rapidly improving. And that would become more apparent at Buck’s.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Buck Gibson lived in a tiny brick house in one of the only neighborhoods in Falls Church that hadn’t been completely gentrified. Judging from his rickety front porch and the ancient, beat-up Ford Taurus in his driveway, Buck, like Harry, wasn’t in the best financial shape.

  The interior of his house backed that up: worn carpets and tattered furniture. But Buck, an older man who appeared to be in great shape, had a disposition that was diametrically opposed to the state of his house. He was cheerful and extremely happy to see Harry. They hadn’t seen each other in years.

  Harry had called ahead, so Buck was ready for our visit. He led us into his dining room, which was really nothing more than an alcove off of his living room. Here, on a small dining table, he had laid out his dagger collection. There were a dozen knives, each with its own history, which Buck proceeded to fill us in on.

  I didn’t interrupt Buck’s lecture, though if Harry and I were going to move on to the task of collecting amber, I’d soon have to. The mini-history lessons about each dagger included the type—trench knife, knuckle knife, push dagger, and more—and how each type was used in warfare. It all brought home the nature of what we were attempting to do: murder Drakho.

  As Buck spoke, I studied the daggers, looking for a sign that one was better than another. Even though I was in denial, I was almost expecting one knife to radiate some kind of supernatural quality. And considering what I was planning to use it for, that didn’t seem so unreasonable. In addition to studying the daggers, I listened carefully to Buck in case the history of one of the daggers revealed that it was the one. I was looking for any sign whatsoever, based on fact or fiction.

  The knives on the table were from the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War. Buck had told us he had no interest in the wars that followed, but it wasn’t clear if this was because he didn’t care for the knives used in those wars or because of political objections to the wars themselves. After about fifteen minutes or so, during which Buck had covered the history of six of the daggers, I was getting anxious about the time we were wasting. We had to make a decision and move on to getting the amber. So before Buck started telling us about the seventh dagger, I interrupted.

  “What do you think, Harry? Is there one you like?” I asked.

  “They all seem mighty fine to me,” Harry answered.

  That wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I looked them over again, hoping a mystical quality would leap out at me from one of them. It didn’t. Maybe that was because Drakho wasn’t messing with us right now. In Buck’s house, maybe there was no other world beyond the ordinary world. Maybe fact and fiction weren’t blended together.

  Buck began telling us about the next dagger, a World War I dagger, and painted a vivid picture of the young soldier who’d once owned it. He described the brutal trench warfare—the signature horror of that conflict—so well that I couldn’t help but see it: the young soldier in a muddy channel, fighting hand to hand with another soldier, both of them confused and scared, both fearing they’d never go home, both fearing they’d end up rotting in this open grave—and neither of them ever having imagined that war would mean fighting face to face with someone who looked exactly like you.

  “No drones back then,” Buck said, “and no launching missiles from a naval ship parked in the middle of the ocean hundreds of miles from the battlefield. You couldn’t whitewash war back then. For the most part, you had to look your enemy in the eye if you wanted to kill him. If you ask me, not that anybody does, we wouldn’t be so quick to get into all these damn wars if we went back to that.”

  “I hear ya,” Harry said, and I heard him, too, but his political leanings didn’t really register, as I was still focused on the job at hand: staring at the knives, willing myself to see if any of them was the shadow of another knife, a knife on the other side of reality—the knife that would aid us in our battle with Drakho.

  But still none of the knives called out to me. So I figured it was time to pick a dagger at random and hope that any dagger, as long as it was coated in amber, would do the job. The only other option was to come right out and ask Buck the most ridiculous question he’d ever hear: If you were going to kill Dracula, which knife would you use?

  I didn’t ask him that, but the thought of asking him led me to another question: What if there was a specific kind of knife that would kill Dracula?

  Edna hadn’t mentioned the type of knife she’d used in The Forest, but maybe Bram Stoker had mentioned the types of knives Harker and Quincey had used to kill the count in Dracula. I couldn’t remember.

  “I’ve got to make a phone call,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

  Buck eyed me suspiciously, like he wasn’t buying my excuse to walk away from his lecture. His good cheer dropped a notch or two.

  I hurried from the alcove, through the living room, and stepped out onto the front porch. I pulled out my cell, and it didn’t take me more than a minute to find an online copy of Dracula. Using the word-search function, I immediately went to the passages where Stoker mentioned knives. Sure enough, he’d stated exactly what kinds of daggers Harker and Quincey had used. Harker had used a Kukri knife, and Quincey had used a Bowie knife.

  I hurried back through the living room and heard Buck and Harry speaking in hushed tones in the alcove. They stopped as soon as they heard me approaching, as if they were hiding something from me. At the time, I dismissed that impression, chalking it up to my own growing paranoi
a, not to mention my lack of sleep; that burst of energy from the morning’s bright light was fading fast. But I’d soon find out that my impression had been right on the money. Everyone who was sucked into this nightmare had secrets.

  “Buck,” I said, getting on with it, “is one those daggers a Kukri knife or a Bowie knife?”

  “Yep,” he said, and pointed to a large knife. “That one there is an original D-Guard Bowie knife from the War Between the States.”

  I knew that some southerners used that term for the Civil War—and that those who did usually had an unnatural obsession with that war. I had no problem with that, but some of them were also virulent racists, and that sickened me. My bet was that Buck fit right into that category, and it was just a matter of time before he showed his stripes.

  “I bought that D-Guard knife from a fellow in Manassas about thirty years ago,” he said. “It was passed down to him by his great-granddaddy, who defended Virginia in a battle not more than twenty miles from here.” He picked up the knife and turned it over in his hand. “It’s a beaut. The fellow had to sell it ’cause he needed the dough. Sometimes money’s more valuable than memorabilia. But I gave him a fair price ’cause I didn’t want bad luck coming along with the knife.”

  Even after giving that disclaimer, Buck averted his eyes and lost a little of his cheer, again, as if he did feel a little guilty for taking advantage of someone else’s misfortune.

  After a couple of seconds, he looked back at us. “So you wanna borrow this one?” he said, his cheeriness restored. “It’s a fine choice.”

  I got the impression that putting the D-Guard knife to good use would assuage his guilt. And it appeared, from the clue in Dracula, that the game called for this knife.

  “That’s the one,” I said.

  Buck smiled. “I don’t got an original sheath for it, but I got a reproduction off eBay.”