The Origin of Dracula (16 page)

The gauntlet opened onto a dimly lit parking area filled to capacity. Lee told me to head down to the third row. As I did, a distant barking filled the air. It sounded vicious, and that brought with it an image of skinheads in some nearby apartment, training their pit bull for mayhem.

Lee pointed to an empty space halfway down the third row. “Looks like we’re in luck. That’s Harry’s spot. Sometimes his dirtball neighbors snag the spot since he doesn’t have a car, and that leaves Marta, the gal who helps him, with no parking. The poor woman has to drive the streets until she finds one. That’s why I bet she quits on me soon.”

I pulled into the tight spot, cut the engine, and opened the door. There was barely enough room to climb out, and when I did, the first thing to hit me was the barking—louder and more malicious. The second thing was the pungent scent of roasting sweet peppers, which conjured up the image of a South American woman preparing a late dinner for her family—a contrast to the disturbing image of the skinheads with their menacing dog.

Lee must’ve been thinking along the same lines because he said, “You know, the Hispanics never take Harry’s parking spot. Not once. It’s always the goddamn white-trash lowlifes.” He chuckled, the first laugh from either of us since the start of our warped journey. “Makes me ashamed of my own kind.”

“Every kind has bad apples.”

And what kind was Dantès? It didn’t matter, did it? He was the bad apple, rotten to the core.

As we approached the building, the vicious barking got even louder. So much so that Lee and I both scanned the windows to see where it was coming from.

If we’d been looking down instead of up at the apartments, we might’ve seen the person who sicced the nasty creature on us. But we didn’t.

The huge black dog vaulted toward us from between a couple of cars. It was snapping and snarling—spittle flew from its mouth.

Lee and I immediately took off, heading to the back of the lot, scrambling between parked cars. I followed Lee’s lead, figuring he knew the area a hell of a lot better than I did. After running through a couple rows of cars, we hit an alleyway. We began to race down it, and I took the lead, but neither of us was going to win any sprinting contests. The dog was hurtling toward us, barking madly, its paws clicking on the asphalt.

The alleyway was lined with dumpsters and discarded furniture. There was no place to hide. I glanced back. Lee was ten yards behind me, closely trailed by the dog, a massive animal that looked as much like a wolf as it did a dog—no surprise there. Its canine teeth were white and spiked, and its black snout was pronounced.

Lee suddenly stopped, and for a second I thought he was giving up, but he opened a dumpster and jumped in. I wasn’t looking over my shoulder long enough to see it, but I heard him slam the lid down over himself, then noticed that the paws were no longer clicking on the asphalt.

When I looked back again, the dog was growling menacingly at the dumpster. It stood on its hind legs and attacked the lid’s metal lip, savagely snapping at it. But watching this unfold slowed me down, and the dog quickly caught on and bolted toward me. Instead of picking up my pace, I followed Lee’s lead, lunged for a dumpster, opened it, scrambled inside, and pulled the lid closed.

I gagged from the stench of putrid food and dog feces. The plastic trash bags surrounding me were leaking, and their juices were already seeping into my clothes, coating my skin with stench. The rancid stink was unbearable. My stomach clenched, and I willed myself not to puke.

A heavy thud landed above me, followed by clawing and snarling. The rabid dog’s scraping was so powerful that I actually thought he might be able to claw through the metal. Anything was possible in hell.

Then there was another heavy thud—and another—and another. The dog was throwing himself against the metal lid. I could hear him growling every time he righted himself. With each blow, he became stronger and more fierce, until he was rocking the entire dumpster.

My nausea worsened, and just as I thought I was going to vomit, the impossible happened: the lid started to warp under the dog’s relentless assault. The metal was somehow
buckling
. And if that wasn’t enough to make me believe I was no longer in a world where reality mattered, I suddenly remembered one of the rings of hell in Dante’s
Inferno
—a river of feces—and I realized that that was exactly where I was now trapped.

I vomited. The retching was deep and painful. The contents of my stomach added to the already unbearable stench. My retching ended with a couple of dry, agonizing heaves, which left me sweaty, aching, and sore.

I was so dazed that it took me a minute or more to notice that the dog’s assault had stopped. Maybe he’d retreated, pleased that he’d driven me so deep into hell, or maybe he was waiting me out.

I debated whether to make a run for it or stay put, but soon the decision was made for me. The dumpster lid whipped open—revealing Lee, breathing heavily. His eyes looked dead, as they had when I had first seen them. His cheeks were pale. The life had been chased out of him. He didn’t say a word as I climbed out, and I figured he was too shell-shocked to talk and left it at that.

I was in bad shape, too, in pain from retching, and shaken by the damage the dog had inflicted on the dumpster’s lid, which was even more apparent from the outside; the metal was dented as if someone had repeatedly smashed it with a sledgehammer. But I still should’ve realized that Lee’s demeanor wasn’t quite right—that his zombie-like state didn’t stem from shock and fear.

When we stepped up to the back of the apartment building, I finally spoke. “Do you think that Dantès sicced that dog on us?”

Lee was wearing a hollow, blank expression, as if he wasn’t all there yet. He shook his head—that was his only response.

Inside the building, we walked down a cinderblock hallway, past apartment doors, distressed and scratched, and into a dingy lobby. The lobby had no furniture, and there weren’t even any cheap paintings hanging on the walls, the usual go-to adornment when attempting to add some cheer to an otherwise dreary environment.

Lee pressed the elevator call button, then stared at the numbers above the door. The elevator motor started up, grinding loudly, straining to do its job. Along with the motor’s mechanical squawking, I heard what sounded like growling.

I glanced around the lobby, but it was empty. I glanced at Lee to see his reaction, but he was just staring up at the numbers, lost in his own world. Maybe I’d imagined the growling.

Then I heard it again, this time more guttural and raw, and my heart skipped a beat, because it was close.
Real
close. But there was no one and nothing else in the lobby except for Lee and me. Lee still hadn’t reacted, nor said anything, and I found myself suddenly taking a step back from him as if he was the source of the growling. But he just continued to stare up at the numbers, which now indicated that the elevator had arrived.

The door slid open, squealing as it did, and as Lee finally looked down, I heard the guttural growl again, this time mixed in with the door’s squealing. It sounded like it was coming from Lee, but he stepped into the elevator before I could be sure. I followed, telling myself that I was still unnerved by my stay in the dumpster.

The elevator was spare and sad, its steel walls buffed to a flat dullness by repeated attempts to remove graffiti. Of course, the delinquents had battled back by engraving their markings right into the steel—sharp cuts forming curse words and threats.

We creaked to a stop on the fourth floor. Lee led the way down a hallway more ugly than the one downstairs and stopped in front of apartment 4E, where I expected him to pull some keys from his pocket—but he didn’t. Instead he stood there for a beat, as if he couldn’t remember where he was, and then he did something weird. The motion was so slight, I couldn’t swear I’d actually seen it. He appeared to crinkle his nose as if he was sniffing the air. A second later, he bent down, lifted the corner of the plastic doormat, and picked up a key from underneath it.

He unlocked the door, and we entered the apartment. The odor of the place hit me first: a mixture of body odor, dirty clothes, mildew, and rotting food. It wasn’t as bad as the stench in the dumpster, but if left to ripen for a few more days, it would be.

I unintentionally winced, then glanced at Lee, hoping he hadn’t seen my reaction. He already felt guilty enough about his uncle’s living conditions, and I didn’t want to pile on. Still, I had to wonder why the caretaker wasn’t doing a better job. But then I realized she must have quit, as Lee had feared she might.

Lee didn’t notice my reaction. He’d already made it across the living room and was walking down a narrow hallway toward the back of the apartment. Rather than follow him, I took in the furnishings of the shabby room: a well-worn plaid couch, either salvaged or really old, and covered with dark stains; an easy chair; and a plastic coffee table.

“Get the hell outta here!” A voice—rich, deep, and southern—thundered from down the hallway. I scooted over to check it out and saw Lee stepping back out of a room at the end of the hall.

“I ain’t gonna tell ya again!” the voice said.

Lee continued to back away, and Harry came following after him in a wheelchair.

Even though he was seated, I could see that Harry was a big man, bigger than Lee, with a barrel chest and broad shoulders. If Lee had the build of a linebacker, Harry had the build of an All-Pro linebacker. And if that didn’t make him intimidating enough already, the rifle lying across the armrests of his wheelchair would have.

Harry took his hands off the wheels, grabbed the rifle, and tucked the butt firmly into his shoulder, like he knew exactly how to wield the weapon. He trained the rifle on Lee. “I knew you’d be comin’,” he said.

Maybe that was why instead of wearing pajamas, he was dressed in street clothes—a gray sweatshirt and a pair of jeans. The jeans were cut off at the knees and sewn up to encase his thighs, which were all that remained of his legs.

Lee wasn’t responding to his uncle, and I weighed whether to chime in and tell Harry that Lee was in shock.

“You ain’t gonna get me,” Harry said, then skillfully and quickly placed the gun back on the armrests, grabbed the wheels, rolled the wheelchair forward, and snatched the gun back up. He trained it on Lee once again.

Lee was now backed up into the living room.

Harry’s wheelchair rolled to a stop at the mouth of the hallway, and now he aimed the gun at me. “If you’re helpin’ him, I’d just as soon put a bullet in you, too. I can get off two shots before you know what hit ya.”

He aimed the gun back at Lee. “I been waiting for you. I knew he’d send something my way. I been on the lookout.”

I looked at Lee. Why wasn’t he responding?

His response came just then. It took the form of a step toward Harry. One step.

A shot rang out, quick, sharp, and with no fanfare.

Lee’s head snapped back and his body crumpled to the floor. Part of his forehead had been blown off, leaving a gruesome cavity of flayed flesh and bone over his right eye. Dark, crimson blood was oozing from the cavity and pooling around his head.

Stunned, I sucked in air and looked away from the disturbing sight. Unfortunately, my eyes fell on the bits of skull and gray matter littering the plaid couch. My throat went dry and my stomach clenched. The nausea was returning.

“Go on, get out,” Harry said.

I looked over at him. His rifle was trained on me.

“Go on,” he said.

“You killed him…” I couldn’t accept that this had actually happened.
Fact and fiction. Please let this be fiction.

Harry drew the rifle butt more firmly into his shoulder and aimed the barrel at my head. He was ready to squeeze off another round.

I wasn’t going to challenge him, so I headed toward the door. But when I glanced down at Lee, I stopped in my tracks. I was staring down at a huge black dog lying dead in a pool of blood. The very same dog that had been hunting us down in the alley. It was
his
head that was missing a chunk of flesh and bone. Not Lee’s.

Confused, I turned back to Harry and stared at him. What the hell was going on? Harry had somehow seen that Lee had been a shadow. And he’d somehow seen the rabid dog
behind
the shadow.
But how?

Though Harry hadn’t lowered the rifle, I wasn’t going to run. I was standing in front of the only person who might be able to help me. Harry wasn’t chained down in Plato’s cave. He wasn’t a prisoner facing a wall of shadows.

“How did you know it wasn’t Lee?” I said, and I stopped there even though I wanted to unload a barrage of questions.

“You just got to look,” he said. A straightforward answer that echoed the homeless man, but was still of no help.

“I’ve been with him all night and I didn’t know.”

“Then you’re a dumbass.” He finally lowered his gun, as if he’d concluded that this dumbass was too stupid to pose a threat.

“What do you mean, ‘You just got to look’?”

With his rifle, he motioned to the dog. “If you’ve got something to do with that, then you gotta be on the lookout.”

“And what exactly am I supposed to be on the lookout for?”

“Why’d you come here?” he demanded.

“Lee and I were looking for the person who murdered our wives. We thought you might have a lead.”

“You’re a lying son of a bitch.” Immediately he aimed the gun at my head again. “Grace died in an accident. She wasn’t murdered.”

“Lee found out tonight that it wasn’t an accident.”

“And where
is
Lee?”

“I don’t know.” But I did know this: the dead-eyed thing who’d opened my dumpster wasn’t Lee. Lee was still out there somewhere—in a dumpster, or worse. “Listen, Harry,” I said. “When Lee—I mean whatever that thing is—walked in here—”

“It’s a goddamn dog—plain and simple.”

“Okay, but you said you knew something would be coming. You knew someone would send it. Who? Who would send it?” I wanted him to say Dantès, but I knew the answer wouldn’t be that simple.

Just then the front door lock rattled. Harry instantly swung his gun around.