I’d seen Lucy, so fragile and sad, beckoning me to cross the river Acheron.
In that way, this world was the opposite of the world I’d left just a day and half ago: the world of American culture, mores, and tradition, which dictated that we should avoid dealing with death and should bury our grief as if it were unnatural.
So was novel therapy working or not?
The only way to come up with the answer to that question was to answer another question: Was it helping with my battle to save Nate’s life?
The answer to that was “no,” which meant that as soon as I got back to Arlington, I’d go and see Nate. I’d spend this evening with him and as much of tomorrow as possible; I’d give him some sort of birthday celebration after all. I’d spend every hour I could with him before Drakho took him from me.
He’d have a blast, unaware of his fate; but for me, it’d be hell on earth. A voyage deeper into Dante’s Inferno. The hell of knowing that my precious son was going to die. And when he did die—
“What am I not seeing about The Forest—about Drakho—about Dracula?” I blurted out, hoping to stem the feeling of dread welling up from my soul, the bitter agony of losing my child. A grief so great as to be unfathomable.
“Maybe he ain’t Dracula,” Harry said.
“Maybe,” I said, though I didn’t believe that for second. Drakho was Dracula, the original Dracula. That’s where the trail had led. Bram Stoker’s Dracula had led us to The Forest. It wasn’t possible that this had been just a coincidence. The connections were too great to ignore. And the more I’d dug, the stronger the connections had become.
And that took me deeper into novel therapy, where another connection started to crystallize. It required a bigger leap of faith than the ones I’d already taken—but what choice did I have? I either had to double down or give up.
This new connection meant believing and accepting a bigger picture, a canvas of fact and fiction that spanned centuries. A canvas that had been painted by three people: Edna Grayson, Bram Stoker, and Jonathan Harker. If I could accept this bigger picture, I’d be able to devise another strategy for playing Drakho’s game of chess.
When we got back to the sprawling suburbs of Northern Virginia, I told Harry that I might have a way forward, or at least a way to find out what our next move should be.
“So what are you waiting for?” he said. “Lay it on me.”
I did, but I was expecting resistance. “Edna wrote her story at the very start of the seventeenth century,” I began. “Then, almost three hundred years later, just before the turn of the twentieth century, Bram Stoker wrote Dracula. And then, a hundred and ten years after Dracula, Harker found Edna’s original story—”
“Thanks for the history lesson, but so what?”
“You wanted me to lay it on you, so hear me out. Harker finds this four-hundred-year-old story and fills in the missing pieces. But he’s basically from our generation, and he knows the same stories we know. So he’s filling in the missing pieces with what he knows.”
“So?”
“So he sees the resemblance between Drakho in The Forest and Dracula. I mean, anyone reading The Forest would see the connection. Even a twelve-year-old.”
“Okay, I’ll give you that—but I don’t see where you’re going with this.”
That worried me. Harry was smart, and I was hoping I’d get him to see where I was going before I got there. It would’ve validated that I was headed in the right direction, that the big picture I was seeing had merit.
But this wasn’t to be, so I made the connection for him. “What if Harker used Dracula, a book published hundreds of years after The Forest, to fill in the missing pieces of The Forest? Just think about it for a minute. Dracula didn’t exist when Edna wrote The Forest, so her story was based solely on whatever she knew back then. It was based on what the Paspahegh told her about Drakho. Her story wasn’t based on ideas that came three hundred years later.”
“I’m still not seeing what you’re getting at.”
That added more doubts to the ones I already had; I’d thought he’d definitely start connecting the dots by now. Still, I forged on. “What if Harker filled in the missing pieces of Edna’s story with things she couldn’t have possibly known? I mean, what if he used elements that came hundreds of years later to complete her story? After all, we’re talking about fiction; he was embellishing a story, make-believe. So it’s not like anyone would really care about these made-up details.”
“You do,” Harry said.
I had to laugh. “Ridiculous, huh?” He grinned and I went on. “Here’s the long and the short of it: What if Harker shaped Edna’s story so that it fit in neatly with the Dracula story he already knew. The Dracula story we all know. The detailed mythology we can’t help but absorb even if we have no interest in Dracula. You know, all that stuff we grew up on: biting necks, blood, capes, coffins, the whole bit. The Dracula legend that Edna would’ve had no idea about. Harker was writing about Dracula; Edna was writing about Drakho.”
Harry didn’t respond for a few seconds. Either he was trying to wrap his head around this or he was disgusted. “Okay… I get your point,” he finally volunteered. “But I still don’t see how that gets us our next move.”
“It might get us a different weapon,” I said. “The right weapon. If we’re lucky.”
“At least you’re talkin’ weapons.” He grinned again. “That I can buy.”
“Okay, good. So how about this? What if Harker based the amber weapon on Dracula—the rules laid down by Bram Stoker, and not by Edna? We need to see exactly what Edna wrote about the amber weapon and what Harker added.”
“No one’s stoppin’ ya.”
That was my cue. I pulled over, reached into the back seat, and scooped up The Forest. I dove back into it, determined to isolate exactly which sections of the story Edna had written and which sections Harker had written or embellished.
I already knew that Harker had written the very end of Edna’s tale, the section where Edna defeated Drakho, the section I’d used as my field guide, the section that had ended in triumph for Edna and failure for me. But now I focused on exactly what Edna had actually written about the amber weapon. What did the original text say—her words?
Harker’s detailed footnotes were meticulous on this front. And as it turned out, the only time Edna had written about the weapon herself was in the section where she described how she’d learned of it.
I reviewed that section once more. She’d learned about the weapon from the settler who’d tortured one of the Paspahegh, and not directly from the Paspahegh prisoner. I made a mental note of that, as well as noting that at this point in the story there was no doubt that Edna was looking for the same thing the rest of the settlers wanted: a way to stop the vicious warrior from slaughtering the residents of Jamestown.
The settler had relayed to Edna the words he’d heard from the Paspahegh, and Edna had translated those words as “amber weapon.” She hadn’t been ambiguous about those words. But she didn’t give any other details about the weapon. It was Harker who had written the rest of the information about the dagger—from Edna coating it in amber to her stabbing Drakho with it.
It took me less than five seconds to realize what this meant, and I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed it the first time around. But I understood why I hadn’t. The first time around, I hadn’t yet seen the bigger picture. But now I did, and this is what it told me:
Edna had never once called the weapon a dagger or a knife. That was all Harker.
Why would Harker have assumed the amber weapon was a knife? The answer seemed obvious. How would you go about killing a creature Harker believed was the basis for the myth of Dracula? Well, you’d kill him in the traditional way: by stabbing him in the heart. With a knife.
It was only natural that Harker would have come to that conclusion. I supposed he could’ve opted for a stake through the heart, which was also part of the myth of Dracula, but it wasn’t part of Br
am Stoker’s Dracula. In Stoker’s book, knives had killed Dracula: one to the count’s throat and one through his heart.
But the point was that Edna wouldn’t have known about either stakes or knives. Stoker’s novel wouldn’t come along until three hundred years after her death.
So what did she actually know?
The answer to this question was lost in The Forest’s missing pages—which were now lost to history. The only clue Edna had left behind was the term amber weapon.
I needed to drop my assumptions—and Harker’s—about what those words could mean; I needed to start fresh. First, I couldn’t assume the weapon was a knife or dagger of some sort. And second, I couldn’t assume that Edna had used amber to coat her weapon. This “coating” idea had also come from Harker.
I had to start at the beginning again and research “amber.” But this time, I didn’t want to use my cell phone. I wanted to do a more thorough search. But I had no home in which to do it, and I couldn’t go to the Cherrydale Library.
“Does Buck have a computer and Internet access?” I asked.
“Why wouldn’t he? Just ’cause he’s into the Civil War don’t mean he’s living like a caveman.”
I explained that I wanted to go back to the drawing board with amber. So Harry called Buck.
On the call, once again, the knife didn’t come up. You’d think Buck would have wanted to know how we’d used it. And, once again, I didn’t ask Harry why Buck wasn’t curious. Maybe I just didn’t want to know that there was yet another layer to this nightmare.
On the way to Buck’s, Harry laid out his plan. “Buck’s got some explosives—dynamite. I say we load up, go back to Hadley’s Cave, and when Drakho shows up, we blow the shit out of him.”
“And why do you think that’d work?”
“Hell, I didn’t come up with the idea. The army did. And not just the U.S. Army: all armies, all military powers, no matter when or where—they all know that the bigger the bomb, the more you wipe out your enemy. It’s kinda like if you can’t kill your enemy with bullets, drop a goddamn megaton bomb on ’em and that’ll do the job. Hell, that’s why we kept building bigger and bigger bombs until we got the king of all bombs: an atomic bomb. You just blast an entire city.” Harry glanced at me. “I know what you’re thinking, so don’t get me wrong. I’m not sayin’ that blowing up entire cities is the right thing to do. I’m just talking about a tried-and-true tactic. Somethin’ we can use.”
“So we destroy the entire cave, huh?” He had a point.
“Yeah. And if he’s in it, or if he’s somehow part of the cave, like you were describin’, then he ain’t gonna survive.”
“We’d have to surprise him—ambush him.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do,” Harry said, folding his arms.
This was a plan all right, but it didn’t fit into the complicated game of chess we’d been playing. On the other hand, it wasn’t like we were winning the game. The best you could say was that we hadn’t been checkmated yet.
I guess we’d have to see if I could uncover what Edna’s amber weapon actually was before ruling out Harry’s crazy idea. And that thought led to a question.
“Why does Buck have dynamite?” It had dawned on me that explosives didn’t seem like collectable memorabilia.
“Well, he might not, anymore,” Harry said, “but I remember him telling me he and his wife were gonna plant a garden in the back yard. He got dynamite to blast out two tree stumps. Then his wife got sick and they never did get to plantin’ that garden.”
*
It was evening when we got to Buck’s place. The afterglow from the setting sun was red, the kind of brilliant red that makes you stop and stare at the sky in wonder. But this evening, on this last night of Drakho’s game, the night before Nate’s life would either be won or lost, I saw this spectral red glow as a sign that Drakho’s land—his sacred land, from North Carolina to Massachusetts—had been colonized by settlers. For this spectacular sunset was the result of pollutants from the millions and millions of those settlers on his land.
Buck had made spaghetti and meatballs for dinner and had set the table for three—the same table on which he’d earlier displayed his knife collection. We didn’t have time for a meal break, but we were starving, so I scarfed down my food and then quickly excused myself; rude behavior, but I had more pressing concerns than whether or not Buck found me lacking in the social graces.
Harry was left at the table, entrusted with the task of coming up with an explanation—a lie—as to why I was in such a rush. Buck had already set up his laptop for me in the war room, and I got right down to it. I searched “amber,” and this time I took a closer look at the gem’s history. Amber had been widely admired as jewelry for thousands of years—archeologists had even found examples of prehistoric man using the gem as ornaments. So it stood to reason that Edna would have known of amber primarily in the context of jewelry. But what could she have meant by “amber weapon”?
Or more to the point: What had the Paspahegh prisoner meant when he’d used the term “amber weapon”? After all, the phrase had originated with the prisoner; he’d said it over and over to the settler who’d interrogated him. Edna had merely translated it.
Of course, it was possible that the interrogator had misremembered the phrase, or that Edna had mistranslated the Paspahegh language. Which meant perhaps the prisoner had never actually meant to refer to amber at all. But I wasn’t ready to concede that possibility yet, because if that was true, then there was nothing left to go on.
I moved on from the history of amber and instead turned to information about the qualities of the mineral itself. This led to the discovery that amber exhibited a special property. Thales, a Greek philosopher, who lived in the sixth century B.C., discovered it. When you rubbed a piece of “elektron,” which was the Greek name for amber, the mineral acquired a special property—what Thales called a unique force. This force was able to attract pieces of straw. People thought this force was some kind of trick, or even magic. It would take another two thousand years to discover that this force was what we now call static electricity. And it would take even longer to discover that static electricity was part of a greater force—electricity itself.
When I read this, I felt immediately vindicated: my latest foray into novel therapy seemed to have paid off big time. I’d just discovered the missing link, the missing connection—the one that tied the amber weapon to Drakho’s weakness. The same weakness that Harry had discovered many years ago.
Drakho feared electricity.
And that explained why Drakho stuck as much as he could to the wilderness in Northern Virginia. The wilderness was the land least contaminated by electricity. So with the connection between amber and electricity now clear—and it couldn’t get any clearer; even the word “electricity” was derived from the Greek word “elektron” meaning “amber”—it was time to go back to my bible. The Forest.
Edna hadn’t coated a knife in amber—or in tree resin. Her weapon had been amber itself. Harker had made the wrong choices when embellishing and completing her story. Of course, he’d had no reason to think his choices would ever affect anyone or anything; he’d simply been restoring a piece of fiction, and factual accuracy wasn’t how fiction was judged. He couldn’t have known that for me, fiction would be a matter of life and death.
Buck wheeled Harry into the war room, and Harry asked, “How’s it going?”
“Good,” I said, wanting to blurt out everything but stopping myself. I couldn’t fill Harry in with Buck in the room.
“What’d ya find?” Harry asked.
I glanced at Buck, who smiled curiously. The silence grew until it became awkward.
Finally I said, “I think we’ve got what we need. If you’re ready, we can hit the road.”
“First tell me what you got.” Harry wheeled himself closer to me.
Why was he putting me on the spot?
“Buck knows,” Harry added.
“
What?” In one fell swoop, this explained why Buck hadn’t asked us any questions.
“They didn’t call him Drakho,” Buck said. “The Confederate soldiers called him the Nightman. It’s in some of their diaries. The Union soldiers also talked about him in their diaries, but they saw him differently. They thought he was the devil himself. The way they saw it, since God wasn’t going to help the South, the devil was doing it. But no matter what side you were fighting on, the soldiers agreed on one thing: Virginia was his homeland. That’s why it’s just the soldiers in these parts who saw him.”
“So you believe this Nightman is real?” I said.
“Hell if I know, but I’ll tell you this: when I visited Harry in the hospital all those years ago and he told me what went down in Prince William Forest—I believed him. And it reminded me of something I’d read in my great-grandfather’s diary when I was kid. My great-grandfather was a Confederate soldier, and he was one of the ones who wrote about this Nightman. I believed him, too.”
“Let’s hear what you dug up, John,” Harry said.
I wanted to hear more about the Nightman, but I knew it’d have to wait, so I told Harry what I’d found out about amber and then laid out my conclusion.
“We know Harker made up the ending of Edna’s story because those pages were missing. My bet is that Edna used amber against Drakho. Not a knife coated in amber or tree resin, but amber itself—the raw material, or maybe a piece of jewelry. She understood that the ‘weapon’ part of amber was this strange force—the static electricity—created when you rubbed it. The Paspahegh had figured it out. Just like you figured out that Drakho stays away from electric power stations, they figured out that he stays away from that strange force created with amber.”
“So Edna used amber to protect her son—to ward off Drakho,” Harry said.
“Yeah, and that part fits because we know for sure that Edna didn’t end up killing Drakho—he’s most definitely still around.”
“So it looks like Harker latched on to the wrong part of Dracula,” Harry said.
The Origin of Dracula Page 24