Otranto’s proposal sounded reasonable. She had delivered it in a voice buoyed with hope.
I strained to see Lucy more clearly, and for a second her face came into focus. It looked soft and fragile. Her eyes glistened with tears, and her mouth was slightly upturned in the saddest of smiles. She whispered something to me, words that went with her sad smile. But I couldn’t make out those words. Not yet. It would take a minute or two for them to reach my ears.
Was she waiting for me?
“There’s a place where the dead are alive,” Otranto said.
“She’s not real,” I said, my rational side attempting to fight back.
“She is. You just can’t imagine it from this side of the river. You have to cross over.”
I understood what Otranto was telling me. She was asking me to take my own life in the hope that Lucy was still alive, waiting for me, just out of reach. That would be the biggest leap of faith yet. Far bigger than believing in and following the trail that had led me to The Forest. By comparison, my plan to rely on an amber weapon to end this nightmare was the most logical plan ever conceived.
Then Otranto upped her offer. “If you sail away with Lucy, Dantès will accept that as the end of the game. He won’t take Nate’s life tomorrow.” She looked up at her torch and let out a soft breath. The flame flickered and fluttered and died, plunging us into absolute darkness. “Your son lives, and you join Lucy,” she said, her voice the only living thing.
Then light slowly returned as if it were coming from an unseen sunrise. It was a dark, rich, orange-yellow light—an amber light.
And in this light, I saw I was no longer standing at the river’s edge.
I was now standing in front of a large tree. Its trunk was charred black and its branches were barren of leaves. And where the river had once been, there was now a landscape of dead trees, surrounded by bronzed, dry dirt, untouched by even a hint of vegetation. It was the bleakest landscape I had ever seen.
I looked behind me, checking for the tomb’s passageway—my way into this place of death—hoping it would be my way out. But it was gone, replaced by more of the somber, lifeless vista. Endless. And the dark amber light bathed it all in gloom.
Was this the amber weapon from the story? This oppressive light from which there was no escape?
I turned back to the large tree. A noose hung down from one of its branches, and a series of boards were nailed to its black trunk: rungs of a ladder leading to the noose. The orange-yellow light, which hung heavy over the rest of the landscape, played a different role here. It highlighted the noose, foregrounding it in blazing amber.
The noose beckoned me.
This was the amber weapon that would save Nate.
Right then, I understood that Harker had been completely mistaken about the ending for The Forest. His analysis had led him to write the wrong ending. But I knew the right ending: Edna had sacrificed herself for her son. She had taken her own life; Drakho had accepted it and let her son live. That was the ending she’d written. The true ending. The ending lost to history.
Didn’t it make sense that a mother would sacrifice her own life to save the life of her child?
I’d do the same. I was going to do the same. I would give up my life, and Nate would be spared. That had to be way this game ended. That was why Lucy had appeared on the river Acheron. Sure, I’d be reunited with her, but that wasn’t why she’d come. She’d told me her purpose, for those were the words she had whispered to me across the dark water:
Give up your life for Nate.
Those words were the reason for her sad, fragile smile. She knew I had no choice.
I climbed up the rungs of the tree and crawled out along the branch. I grabbed the rope and pulled the noose up from below.
Nate would live.
I put the noose around my neck and was submerged in amber light. It chilled my skin and bones. I would join the barren landscape—the dead trees and the dead earth. They were waiting for me. They were waiting to receive the only living man in this world—
Or was I already dead?
Was life and death a blend of fact and fiction, too?
The noose felt tight around my neck.
No—Life was where the line was drawn.
There was a clear line between life and death. That was why Drakho played games of life and death. Those were the real stakes, the only stakes. Life was where the line was drawn.
I grabbed the noose from around my neck, slipped it off, and let it fall. It snapped to a stop ten feet from the ground. The sharp sound echoed through the dead world. I crawled along the branch and climbed back down the rungs.
My thoughts were thick and hard to process, and I was glad for it. I didn’t want to think right then. I just wanted to leave. To get as far away as possible from this dead world.
Though I couldn’t see the tomb’s passageway, I moved in that direction as if it was still there. It had to be the way out, just as it had been the way in.
At first, I trudged along the dry soil, passing barren trees. But after a while—I couldn’t be sure how long—the amber light began to darken, and then it disappeared. I found myself walking through the tomb once more. The hieroglyphs hadn’t changed. The men, women, and children were still crossing the river Acheron. I walked on, and the tomb widened and warmed until I stepped back into the Home Depot.
Chapter Seventeen
The store was no longer empty. A few yards from where I stood, a couple was checking out floor tiles, and farther down the aisle, other customers did the same. Bewildered, I didn’t move. I stood there like a statue lit by the fluorescent lights above—lights whose glare I normally disliked, but which I now welcomed.
Finally, I looked over my shoulder. The tomb was gone. I tried to reorient myself to what was now a normal Home Depot. The river Acheron no longer flowed through it and the dead world was gone. I turned back. The nearby couple was now staring at me as if my confused state might pose a threat to them. I quickly walked down the aisle, leaving them to get on with their shopping.
Then, amid the other customers, I got on with my own shopping. The thickness which had slowed my thoughts had worn off, so I forced myself not to think about what had just happened in order to concentrate instead on getting what I needed: fast-drying varnish and a brush with which to apply it. I also picked up a couple of flashlights in case we ended up meeting Drakho in one of the Shenandoah Valley caves.
In line, at the cashier, I found myself glancing around the store, still bewildered by the normalcy of the place. Laborers, housewives, couples, and contractors walked the aisles and examined items. There was no sign of Otranto or the bleak landscape.
Or Lucy.
*
In the car, Harry and I ran through our “sacred land” options one more time and concluded that the Shenandoah Valley was the best option in Northern Virginia. And there was another benefit to heading toward those limestone caves. The Shenandoah Valley was more or less heading south, so we’d be one hour closer to Wassamoah Bay.
So I pulled out and started toward Front Royal, the town that was the gateway to the Blue Ridge Mountains, Skyline Drive, and the Shenandoah Valley. Once we were on Route 66, I convinced Harry to start coating the D-Guard knife with the varnish, so it’d be dry by the time we got there.
As he applied the first coat, I told him what had happened in the store. He listened without saying much. Maybe that was because he was doing an excellent job of coating the knife. Even though he wasn’t convinced that varnish was the equivalent of Edna’s amber weapon, he was applying it with the confident, even brushstrokes of a craftsman.
When I finished my tale, I tried to explain how taking my own life had seemed like a perfectly reasonable way to save Nate.
Harry said he understood, but I didn’t believe him, and he must have been able to tell, because he then told me a story that explained why he understood. A story he’d never told anyone else. There’d been no reason to—until now.
; “It happened after the attack in Prince William Forest,” he said. “I was still in the hospital. My legs had been amputated and I’d been all drugged up for a while. A long while. But they were finally startin’ to take me off the drugs. I was feelin’ pretty bad. You know, it ain’t easy to get used to not walkin’ no more. You gotta learn to take care of yourself all over again. Hell, I didn’t like it. Not one damn bit.
“Anyway, they started teachin’ me how to help myself. How to get in and outta the wheelchair—hard as hell when you start—and all sorts of other things. And every night I’d lie there in the hospital room, scared, like a little baby who’d lost his mommy. I didn’t think I could make it on my own. And the more they took me off the drugs, the more I really believed that. My life was shit.”
I glanced over at him. He was applying a second coat of varnish, using the same even brushstrokes he’d used for the first.
“So one night, this nurse comes in,” he said. “A new nurse, blond and pretty, with the greenest eyes I’ve ever seen.”
Otranto, I thought.
“I was awake,” Harry said, “feeling bad for myself. Not wanting to go back to Quantico. And in the back of my mind, I thought I wasn’t ever gonna go back to Quantico—that they were gonna warehouse me somewhere. I knew life was gonna be shit no matter what. But the nurse says to me, like she knew what I’d been thinking, ‘I’m taking you to see a place where things are good.’ And she don’t even make me get in the wheelchair by myself. I should’ve known something was wrong right there. They’d all been forcing me to do things on my own. But not her. She helps me slide right into the wheelchair.
“Then she wheels me to the elevator, and we head down to a floor lower than the basement. I didn’t remember a floor down there, but it was right there on the panel of buttons—as plain as the nose on your face. The elevator door opens, and she pushes me into an alleyway. I’m thinking, Where the hell are we? and I look back at her to ask—but she’s still in the elevator and the door is closing.
“So I try to wheel my chair around, but I wasn’t so good at steering the damn thing yet, and by the time I got it right, the door was closed and there wasn’t no button to call the elevator back. So I wheel back around and check out the alleyway. I see nothin’ but dumpsters and trash.
“I’m thinking to myself: I just been dumped from the hospital. I’d heard about that kinda thing on the news. Maybe the VA stopped paying my bills or something. The buildings in the alley, well, their walls were black, like they’d been through a pretty bad fire, and their windows were all busted out. I start to wheel myself forward to get outta there, and from what I can see through the windows, the buildings are all burned up on the inside, too.”
He continued to apply the varnish, meticulously, without missing a beat in his story.
“I kept goin’ until I made it out of the alley. It turns out I was in a city. I hate cities, and this one was bad. It was all rundown. The buildings were cracked and falling apart, like they’d all been abandoned. And some of ’em were burned out.”
“But in front of me, across the street, there was a river—a wide one—and on the other side of it, I saw my favorite place, my favorite town: Culpeper—where I grew up. It’s not like the streets in Culpeper are paved with gold or nothin’, but it’s nice. Small and friendly. I could see the town square, and people were goin’ about their business, headin’ to their offices, or lunch, or eatin’ ice cream cones, shootin’ the breeze.”
Harry finished the coat of varnish, picked up the knife, and examined his handiwork.
“I’m thinking I got to get over to the other side. I’m askin’ myself, Can I swim? I got no legs, but I got arms. And I’m trying to decide if my arms are strong enough. Staying in the hospital made them weak. I look down at the river, and it’s moving pretty fast. I don’t know if I can make it across.
“When I look back up from the river, I see Art Craig on the other side. My best buddy is lookin’ at me from the shore, standing there, smiling, like Drakho never killed him. I’m thinking, Art wants me to swim over there. Why else would he be here? And I wanted to go over there, you know? I wanted to see my buddy and go back to my hometown. Who wouldn’t?
“So I decide that’s exactly what I’m gonna do. And I knew how to do it. There was only one way to swim over there. And as soon as I decided I was gonna do it—boom, I’m back in my hospital bed.
“It’s the middle of the night now. I knew, ’cause they dimmed the room lights when it got real late, and there was less hustle and bustle—no doctors, no visitors, and hardly any nurses around.
“This was the perfect time to do it. The perfect time to swim across that river. So I pull out my IVs and I do what they been teaching me to do. I get into my wheelchair by myself. But this time I want to do it. I use my arms and shimmy to the side of the bed. I push myself up, holding on to the bed, and get myself into my chair.”
Harry was turning the knife over in his hand. The fresh coat of varnish flared in the sunlight.
“Then I roll myself into the bathroom and up to the sink. I use the sink for leverage and pull myself up so I can reach the cabinet. I pull out my shaving razor and fall back into my chair, snug as a bug in a rug. And then I get right to it. No use wastin’ time. I open the razor, pull out the blade, and slide it across my wrist. The bleedin’ starts right up.
“I know that this is the way to swim across the river and get to Culpeper and see Art, so I push the blade down harder to make it go faster. And it’s workin’. I’m bleeding pretty good, and I’m swimming across. I feel the river water on my skin. It’s thick like blood.
“Then I hear someone calling me: ‘Harry!’ And I look back and see Macon. He snatches the blade out of my hand. Then he grabs a towel and wraps it around my wrist, and all the while, he’s yelling at me, ‘What the fuck are you doing, man?’ over and over again. Then he tells me to hold on to the towel, and he wheels me out of the bathroom and down to the nurses’ station. He’s got tears rolling down his face. He tells the nurse what I was doing, and she tells the other nurse to grab some supplies. Then she wheels me back to my room, telling me I got plenty to live for, it’s just a bad time now.
“Macon isn’t saying anything, just following us. We get back to my room, and the nurses put me back in bed. Then they hook me up to the IVs and start to patch up my wrist. They’re tellin’ me they’ll get someone to talk to me—someone who knows what I’m going through—and it’ll all work out.
“The whole time, Macon’s just standing back, staring out the window, or staring at the bathroom, or staring at some ‘get well soon’ cards I got. The only place he isn’t looking is at me.
“The nurses finally leave, and he stays quiet. Me too. I’m ashamed of what I done. It takes him another couple of minutes, but he finally looks me, and he says, ‘Why?’
“‘I’m sorry…’ I said, and I was. He said, ‘I looked up to you. You’re the good one…’
“I told him I’d been having a hard time. I told him it had been really bad. But he didn’t answer me. He’s got tears in his eyes and he just leaves. He took off.” Harry took a breath and looked over at me. “You know that saying: ‘hero to zero’?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, that’s what happened. I wasn’t no hero no more to him. I was a lowlife cripple. Just a sad sack of shit.”
Harry started applying a third coat of varnish to the knife, and he didn’t say anything more for a few seconds. Then he said, “This last coat should do it.”
His story hung with a physical weight, pressing down on me, the same awful sensation I’d felt right after Lucy died. The same weight Harry must’ve felt in the hospital—a star football player, a strong and smart soldier, cut down, adjusting to a life where he could no longer walk.
I drove for a while in the warm, clear light of the Virginia afternoon. A light with no hint of heavy amber. A light colored by a powder blue sky and a radiant yellow sun. A light that melted away that heavy weight so I c
ould ask the question I had to ask.
“… Did you think it was Drakho trying to get you to do it?” I said.
“You mean trying to get me to kill myself?” Harry shot back.
I nodded.
“Not till today. Not until you told me your story. I thought it was withdrawal from the drugs. But who the hell really knows, right? Ain’t that the whole point of this not knowin’ what’s real and what ain’t? I was feeling pretty down back then. Hell, the only reason I didn’t try again was because of Macon.”
“Macon? Why?” From what Lee had said about his dad and from what I’d seen in Dan T.’s Firegrill, there was nothing about the guy that would inspire anyone to do anything good.
“I know it don’t make sense,” Harry said. “Back then, he was no different than he is now—a lazy drunk, just scraping by. But I got to thinking, if I offed myself, he’d sink even lower. Just getting my shit together again would help him keep his together. If I stuck around—hero or no hero—he’d be all right. Don’t fool yourself—a man can go pretty bad even if he’s bad already, and I didn’t want that for my brother. And it worked. I mean, he didn’t sink no lower, and you know why that was good?”
I shook my head.
Harry turned toward the window. “Because of Lee,” he said. “Macon wasn’t a great dad. He wasn’t even a good one. But somehow he was good enough for Lee to turn out okay. Lee got it together in the end, and that’s the truth.”
The queasy helplessness of loss welled up in my stomach, but I pushed it away before it turned into melancholy. I thought instead of The Forest, reviewing passages I’d read, as a pastor might review verses in the Bible looking for a lesson. Neither of us spoke for while.
*
As we got closer to Front Royal, the suburbs thinned out, and when we entered the edge of the Shenandoah Valley proper, there were far fewer housing developments and far more forested patches of land. Thirty minutes later, we were driving through rolling hills and farmland, bearing down on Front Royal. It was time to talk business again.
The Origin of Dracula Page 21