“Then wrap ’er up and we’ll be on our way,” Harry said, rolling himself out of the alcove. Buck and I followed.
In the living room, Buck motioned toward the hallway. “Why don’t you stick around a bit longer and check out the war room?”
“Since when do you got a war room?” Harry said.
“Since I got nothing but time on my hands.”
“We really have to go,” I said.
But Harry glanced at me and mouthed, He’s lonely, then began to wheel himself toward the hallway. “We can spare another couple of minutes, Buck,” he said.
I reluctantly fell in line, perturbed by this waste of time, and that’s when I realized there’d been something weird about Buck and Harry’s interaction over the knife: Buck hadn’t asked Harry what we were planning to do with it. You’d think that would’ve been a wake-up call for me—that things weren’t exactly as they seemed. But it wasn’t even close to a wake-up call. Instead, I rationalized it this way: Buck trusted Harry’s judgment completely.
But I was way off the mark.
The war room was decorated with Civil War memorabilia, which validated my hunch: Buck was obsessed with the War Between the States. I was now fully expecting his next lecture to include his ugly beliefs about race relations. The room was like a mini-museum, curated with attention to detail. On the wall hung framed Confederate uniforms under glass, battlefield photographs, detailed maps of battles, Confederate money, sabers, guns, and the front pages of yellowed newspapers.
“Ain’t this something?” Harry said.
“Everything you see has got to do with battles that took place right here in these parts.” Buck walked over to one of the uniforms. “All the uniforms are from soldiers who defended this part of Northern Virginia.” He motioned over to one of the framed newspapers. “See that? It’s the original reporting on the Battle of Arlington Mills, one of the first battles in the war. That stand kept the Union army from getting too deep into Northern Virginia.”
Then Buck stepped over to one of the maps. “This here’s a map of a more famous battle that took place on that very same day. The Battle of Fairfax Courthouse.”
That map caught my attention. In addition to methodically illustrated troop movements, it also boasted meticulously drawn topographical details. Hillsides, cliffs, valleys, streams, and even copses of trees.
“Do you have any other maps of Northern Virginia like this one?” I asked. “I mean ones where the geography is so detailed.”
“You bet.” Buck moved over to a cabinet and opened it, revealing more than a dozen long cardboard tubes. “Any particular area you’re interested in?”
“Yeah—land that’s still undeveloped today.”
“Not much of that left. But you’re still going to have to narrow it down for me. I got lots of maps.”
I looked at Harry, not sure where to start. He shrugged.
“What is it exactly you’re looking for?” Buck said.
I couldn’t say sacred land or untouched land, so I went with, “A place that hasn’t changed… at all.”
Buck rifled through the tubes, grabbed one, opened it, and pulled out the map inside. He knelt down on the floor and unrolled the map. “This land here runs along the Potomac in Loudon County. Goose Creek cuts through it.”
I knelt down and checked out the map, searching for some hint that this land was sacred land. The map was as meticulously drawn as the other one, but there were no troop movements or battle lines.
“Why doesn’t this map have troop movements on it? ” I said.
“General Ewell—a Lieutenant General in the Army of Northern Virginia—wanted to gain an advantage over the Union Army. He thought he could do that by learning the lay of the land down to every anthill. So he had maps drawn for the entire area. This is a copy of one of those original maps.”
Buck opened another tube and pulled out another map. “This one shows land near Mount Vernon. Some of it is still parkland.” He unrolled the map. “Ewell was a mighty fine man. You know what he wanted to do with the slaves?”
Okay, here it comes, I thought. Buck was about to unleash his racism.
“He told Jefferson Davis to free them,” Buck said, “and let them fight for the Confederacy. I know it don’t sound like much to modern ears, but he also put his money where his mouth was. He said he’d lead a brigade of freed slaves. Jefferson and the rest of ’em thought the man was crazy. And they thought it was a terrible strategy.”
He stopped there, but as I looked over the Mount Vernon map, I kept expecting him to say what was really on his mind. He didn’t.
As for the map, nothing jumped out at me, so I switched my line of thought from Edna’s untouched land to Dracula. The book had yielded up which knife to choose, so maybe it would yield up the sacred land’s location. But my only lead along those lines, without actually searching through the book, was that the count had brought soil from Transylvania with him when he’d moved to London. The casket in which he slept was packed with dirt from the old country. That was his sacred land.
I stared at the map, trying to make a connection between soil from the old country and what I was seeing in front of me: beautifully rendered line drawings of hillsides, valleys, and caves. And it was when I saw the caves that I made the connection. Not to Stoker’s novel, but to our own bible, The Forest. Edna had mentioned a specific characteristic about Drakho’s sacred land. Of course, it could’ve been Harker who’d embellished that part of the story, but it was all I had.
I brought it up with Buck. “Are any of the lands you’re thinking of known for their caves?” For Edna had said that Wassamoah Bay was a land of ancient caves.
“Yep,” Buck said. “And sometimes Confederate soldiers hid in those caves to ambush Union soldiers.”
Bingo, I thought, and then made another connection, one I should have made earlier. Drakho had led me to caves once already: through Dan T.’s account of Plato’s famous cave. Why hadn’t I always been on the lookout for caves—fact or fiction?
Buck pulled out a third map and unrolled it on the floor. “This is where the Battle of Front Royal took place. The land is tricky here. Lots of peaks and valleys and streams and caves. Jackson drew the Union Army into the area, and the army got divided up, confused, and lost. They were forced to retreat. Anyway, there are lots of caves there. Old limestone caves going way back. Soldiers hid in them, and some even signed their names on the walls.”
I took pictures of the map with my cell phone. There was no way to know if this was sacred land, but it met the only requirement I had at the moment: caves. And Buck said going way back, which to my ears sounded like another way of saying ancient caves.
“Front Royal is part of the Shenandoah Valley,” Buck continued. “You know Skyline Drive and the Blue Ridge Mountains?”
I nodded. Skyline Drive was a big Northern Virginia tourist attraction. But wasn’t that problematic? “I don’t know if you could consider that land unchanged,” I said. “There must be trails all over it.”
Buck countered easily. “Parts of the Shenandoah Valley have hardly been touched at all.”
I wasn’t convinced that this was sacred land, but I took more pictures of the map, hoping I was on the right track. Then Harry and I thanked Buck for the D-Guard Bowie knife and the tour of the war room, and we all made our way out to his rickety front porch.
That’s where the final verdict on Buck’s racism was rendered. I shook hands with him, then wheeled Harry carefully down the three steps, and as I started toward the car, Harry said, “Hang on a minute. Swing me back around.”
I did, and Harry looked up at Buck, who was standing on the top step. “Listen, I’m sorry I didn’t say anything,” Harry said.
Buck’s cheery demeanor fell away; it was replaced with a somberness that made him look every bit his age. “That’s okay,” he said. His voice was soft.
“I meant to,” Harry said, “but I just kept putting it off. Then…” Harry took a breath and gathe
red his thoughts.
Buck’s eyes watered, and he rubbed them.
“I was gonna say something today,” Harry said, “but I didn’t see any pictures of her in there. So I thought, well, maybe you guys went your separate ways or something before…”
Buck shook his head. “Never.” He looked back at his house. “I took her pictures down because I couldn’t look at them all the time. They reminded me of how sick she was at the end.”
“Jenny was my favorite of all the wives,” Harry said. “Smart as a whip, the best sense of humor, and gorgeous, too. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. I was a hell of a lucky man to have roped her in.” Buck walked down the steps and pulled out his wallet. “When I feel up to it, this is the picture I look at. And I’ve been looking at it a lot lately. You know, it’s like the good times are coming back, and I’m forgetting how she was when she was dying. I might even put some of her pictures back up.”
Buck opened his wallet and showed Harry the photo. I looked over Harry’s shoulder and took a peek. The picture was one of pure happiness: Buck, smiling wide, in a red and yellow Hawaiian shirt, with his arm around a pretty African-American woman, caught in the middle of a joyous laugh. She was wearing a white dress that highlighted the pink and green lei around her neck. Sunlight sparkled gloriously on the blue Pacific Ocean in the background.
“That was the last vacation we had,” Buck said, a hint of melancholy in his voice. “I’m glad we splurged.”
“She was a keeper,” Harry said.
Buck looked at the photo for a long beat—lost in the past—then quickly closed his wallet and stuffed it back in his pocket. “I’m glad you said something, Harry. I appreciate it.”
As I helped Harry into the car and loaded his wheelchair into the trunk, Plato’s cave came back to me in a new light. This time it told me how badly I’d misjudged Buck. My assumption that he was a racist was another example of focusing on the shadows on the cave wall, rather than looking at the reality behind them. I hadn’t wanted to consider that there was more to the man than met the eye. And what made it worse was that he’d basically told me so right up front.
If I’d paid attention to exactly what Buck had been saying during his history lecture—You couldn’t whitewash war back then. For the most part, you had to look your enemy in the eye… We wouldn’t be so quick to get into all these damn wars if we went back to that—I wouldn’t have seen him as a pro-war collector of weapon memorabilia. His stance against the perpetual war our country was waging would have been obvious.
All this was another sharp reminder that my life was changing. I had to let go of my old beliefs.
*
As we pulled away from Buck’s house, Harry immediately asked me how I knew which knife to choose, so I filled him in on Bram Stoker’s account of Dracula’s death. Then I moved on to the next task at hand: tracking down amber.
“We’re headed to Home Depot,” I said.
“They talk about Home Depot in Dracula?” Harry laughed at his own joke.
I let him enjoy himself for a few seconds, then told him what I was thinking. “Melting amber would’ve been impossible for Edna.”
“I got that part,” he said. “I figured, just like us, she didn’t have access to high-tech lab equipment.”
“And it doesn’t really make sense that she’d have tree resin just lying around.”
“She probably got it from a tree, just like we’re fixing to do.”
“Well, I can’t rule that out,” I said. “But there’s a better alternative. Something that would’ve been easy for her to get. And considering Jamestown was a colony, with building going on all the time, I’d say she had easy access to this.”
“Okay—cut to the chase.” Harry frowned at me impatiently.
“Varnish.”
He cocked his head, then grinned. “Made from tree resin.”
“Exactly. And that’s what we’re going to pick up at Home Depot.”
Harry leaned back in his seat, seeming to accept my conclusion. But only for a second. “I don’t know,” he said.
“How else could she have coated her dagger in amber?”
“Tree resin—from a tree.”
“So you’re telling me you prefer tapping a tree over picking up a can of varnish?”
“I’m not tellin’ you nothin’. It’s just that we’re getting farther and farther from the story. And if stories tell ya all you need to know… well…”
Harry had a point, but I didn’t know how good a point it was at the time. Just as it was true that you had to interpret the Bible to understand its lessons, you had to interpret The Forest. And that was proving to be a major challenge. Centuries had passed since The Forest had been written, so the real context would always elude me. Plus, I had to be content with the missing pages as well as Harker’s edits and embellishments.
When we got to Home Depot, I parked, googled which types of varnish were made purely from tree resin, and headed into the store. Harry waited in the car because I expected a quick trip—I knew exactly what I needed to pick up.
But that expectation died as soon as I stepped inside.
There was not one other person in the store. There had been plenty of cars in the parking lot, so this didn’t make any sense. I told myself to ignore what I was seeing and just head to the aisle with varnishes. Drakho was clouding my mind—and doing a damn good job of it.
Though there weren’t any people around, the store itself looked normal. I passed aisles for light fixtures, paints, tools. The lack of customers exaggerated the store’s cavernous size—all these goods and no one to purchase them.
I picked up my pace, and then suddenly the overhead lights started turning off—from the back of the store to the front. That prompted me to hurry even more, but the darkness was sweeping through the store quickly, like a tsunami of gloom. Unless the varnish was in the next aisle or two, I’d be searching in the dark. It wasn’t—and then the last set of lights went out.
There were a few seconds of total darkness—during which I stood there, indecisive, debating whether to leave or continue—before I saw her.
She was standing halfway down an aisle, holding a lit torch that bathed her in fiery light. Her lush blond hair and luminous ivory skin shone in a radiant aura, as if she were a goddess. As if I’d entered her world and left mine.
Otranto’s emerald green eyes stabbed at me. “There’s another way to end the game,” she said. “You don’t have to tell Dantès his real name.”
Was she making me this offer because she knew that I’d found his real name? Or did she know I’d discovered Drakho’s Achilles’ heel?
“I can show you the way out,” she continued, “so you don’t have to play this game at all.” Her torch flared up and the flames momentarily lit the aisle behind her—but it was no longer an aisle. It was a stone passageway, like the entrance to a tomb, stretching out into the distance. Strange hieroglyphs were carved into its walls.
She turned and started walking into the tomb. “Let’s go.”
I didn’t move.
“I’ll give you what you want most,” she said.
“I want to save Nate’s life.”
“That’s not what you want most.”
“It is.”
She turned back, her green eyes wider now, beautifully malicious. “That’s a lie.”
Of course she’d know there was something I wanted more. Something I could never have. It was what we all wanted after losing someone we loved.
“You can have what you want,” she said, then walked farther into the tomb.
I followed, tempted to see if she could deliver. Could she bring forth a miracle? One straight from the Bible? The real Bible.
I told myself I should be thinking more rationally, but I couldn’t convince myself to actually do so. There was no difference between fact and fiction, and here was the living proof: I was walking through a tomb in the middle of a Home Depot.
The deeper I
moved into the tomb, the more the temperature dropped. But my attention quickly turned from the cold to the hieroglyphs on the wall. I was close enough to Otranto now that they were visible in her torch’s light—pictograms of men, women, and children trekking through a lush forest toward the banks of a wide river. Then, after a few yards, the hieroglyphs changed. The men, women, and children had now reached the banks of the river. They seemed to be waiting at the water’s edge for something or someone to appear.
The temperature dropped even more, and the tomb walls started to close in on us as if the passageway was narrowing. The pictograms were larger here, and the story they told had progressed. Boats appeared at the river’s edge, and the people were boarding them, children first. Farther down the wall, the boats were crossing the river, and that was when I made the connection.
The hieroglyphs fit in perfectly with what I wanted most. These men, women, and children were crossing the river Acheron, the river that separated the living from the dead. Drakho was once again using Dante’s Inferno, for in that work of fiction, Dante crossed the river Acheron into the world of the dead.
Up ahead, past Otranto, I saw that our narrow passageway opened up. I assumed we were headed into a large mausoleum and was shocked when instead I found myself stepping outside, as in outdoors—
I was on the banks of a rippling, dark body of water that stretched out to the horizon. Up above me was a black sky without stars. The water rhythmically lapped at the shore, maintaining a steady, eerie cadence—it was the only sign of life in this dead place.
Otranto approached the river, her torch held high. Across the water, about thirty yards away, a boat appeared from the darkness—and in its bow stood the woman around whom my every thought revolved. The woman I loved. The woman with whom I wanted to spend the rest of my life.
My sweet Lucy.
I strained to see her face, wanting to read her expression. Was she joyful or sad? She was too far away to tell. I hurried up to the river’s edge.
“If you take your own life,” Otranto said, “you can join her. She’ll come to shore and take you with her—to the other side.”
The Origin of Dracula Page 20