The Origin of Dracula (18 page)

“I didn’t know how long that lasted. But I stopped screaming because I felt like I was gonna pass out. I told myself not to pass out, and I tried to twist around, to look back, to see if he’d gone—but it was too hard to move. The pain was shooting through me and I was throbbing, like I was one big heartbeat. I wasn’t really thinking and I just started dragging myself. Maybe back to the road. I didn’t really know what I was doing or where I was going. It didn’t matter anyway, ’cause I didn’t get far.

“I was about to pass out for sure this time when I saw him again. He was standing over me. He said one word, not a word you usually hear, and then he was gone—or I passed out—it was hard to remember.

“The next thing I knew, I woke up in a hospital bed. The nurse ran out to get the doctor, and the doctor came in and told me I was lucky to be alive. Ha! Lucky! I mean, yeah, I was luckier than Art. But if you’re young and healthy, it ain’t lucky to become a cripple.

“Now I’m going to skip over the parts where I felt sorry for myself—no one needs to hear that crap—and get back to the part you all want to hear. I told the police what happened. And I told the MPs. They were all gung-ho to get the guy. And I made sure to tell them everything. I replayed the whole thing in my head over and over again, so I wouldn’t forget nothin’. It was the only way to catch that guy. I talked to the police a lot. Same with the MPs. But months go by and they don’t find a thing. Not even one damn lead.

“So when I got better, I got some buddies to take me into the woods, so I could look around. It didn’t do any good, except for one thing: I remembered that word.
Bloodlines
. And it don’t take a genius to figure out that bloodlines means family. So I dug into our family history. Ya see, my parents, your grandma and grandpa”—in the rearview mirror, I saw him nod over to Lee—“they didn’t raise your dad and me tellin’ us much about the curse. Sure, they told us we were descendants of the Mayflower colonists. They were proud of that, ’cause we were poor and it was all we had to separate us from the other poor kids. But when it came to the curse, they only talked about it ’cause they had to. ’Cause other relatives brought it up.

“So I looked at the family history myself, and I saw that pattern. You know those stories, Lee. From Jeremiah to Aunt Selma to your poor grandma losing her firstborn when he got hit by a car. But she never blamed it on the curse—”

“My dad did,” Lee said.

“Yeah, well, as soon as I told Macon there’s something to the Bellington curse, he grabbed on to it like a drowning man grabs on to a life preserver. It means bad luck for all of us, he said. Hell, I was now the prime example. But that’s not what I saw in our family history, Lee. What I saw was ancestors getting killed. Accidents, murders, disappearances. And not just Bellingtons, but some of their buddies. Of course, there was that criminal crap, too—the hoodlums and con men—but when you looked at it real close, that part was nothing. I saw a bigger pattern. The Hatfield and McCoys. Maybe I saw it ’cause I lived it. It wasn’t bad luck that crushed my legs. It was a goddamn
person
. What if someone drowned Selma or ran down your grandma’s firstborn?”

Harry stopped with that question, and I looked in the rearview mirror, waiting for more.

Lee provided more in the form of his own question. “If we’re the Hatfields, who are the McCoys?”

“The man who crushed my legs.”

That hung there, and I wondered if Harry meant it the way it had sounded. Was he saying there was only
one
McCoy? As the phrase goes, the
real
McCoy? He couldn’t possibly expect us to believe that. He had to mean the man who had attacked him was
one
of the McCoys and that other McCoys were responsible for the attacks down through the generations of Bellingtons.

At first, in the silence that followed, I thought Lee must’ve been thinking the same thing I was. Then I realized he was already predisposed to believe this outlandish idea. After all, he already believed that the man we were tracking was the same man he’d pushed off a cliff twenty-five years ago.

“Harry,” I said. “You’re not saying there’s just one guy responsible for everything that’s happened to the Bellingtons.”
The guy would have to be hundreds of years old
. “If it’s the Hatfield and McCoys”—I looked over to Lee for support, even though I knew it probably wasn’t coming—“then it’s generational. It’s not the same guy battling it out over hundreds of years.”

Lee didn’t offer his support, and Harry made his case. “You saw that thing come into my apartment and turn into a dog, didn’t ya?”

Harry’s theory seemed absurd, regardless of what I’d seen.
Fact and fiction. A giant shake and bake
. Sure, those words went through my mind, but it didn’t mean I believed them.

“Can we kill him?” Lee asked.

“I don’t know, but I know he’s got weaknesses.”

“Like what?” Lee had lasered in on what I should’ve been focused on if I wanted to protect Nate.

“Like power plants.”

I remembered Lee had said something about his uncle living next to a power substation where the rent had been low.

Lee turned to his uncle. “You think this guy doesn’t like power plants?”

“Well, I ain’t positive,” Harry said. “But I thought I saw him sixteen years ago. Remember Martha? She was my helper back then? Well, she was pushing me back from the drugstore. We shouldn’t have gone out at night in the first place, but I’d forgotten to ask her to pick up my blood pressure pills on her way over. The pharmacy had ’em ready. So after dinner, I said let’s go get ’em.

“On the way back, this fella started following us—real tall fella. I wanted Martha to slow down so I could get a closer look at him, but I told her just the opposite: speed up, because I got to go to the bathroom. I didn’t want her to end up like Art. So we get halfway down my block and the man stops followin’ us. He stops in front of Mrs. Barnwell’s oak tree, about a hundred yards from the power plant.”

“How do you know it was the same guy who attacked you?” I asked. It didn’t sound like a positive ID to me.

“I told ya already—I couldn’t be sure. I know you ain’t really buyin’ this, but you wanted my story, so I’m giving it to you.”

Lee shot me an annoyed look, then turned back to Harry. “There was more to it, right? There was something that made you think it was him.”

“Yeah. There was fog near the drugstore when we got there. Not heavy or nothing, but it was there, and so was that rotten smell. Martha rolled me through the fog and into the store. Inside, I remember thinking, why the hell didn’t I just wait on the pills? Skipping one dose ain’t gonna kill me, but going out tonight just might. And when I saw him, it confirmed what I’d been thinkin’.

“Then it happened again three years later—same thing. Only this time, I didn’t go out for any pills. This time, I went out ’cause I knew. I knew he was waitin’. But I had to see for myself. I had to know for sure. I told Martha that I wanted to get some air. Just a stroll around the block. So she pushed me outside, and we got halfway down the block, and there he was, waitin’ for me. In the same spot. Next to Mrs. Barnwell’s oak tree. Just waitin’ there. About a hundred yards away from the plant. That’s why I think he don’t like the plant.”

“Why didn’t he kill you?” I said.

“I’m telling you—because he don’t like the plant.”

“No—I mean why didn’t he kill you near the drugstore? Or why didn’t he kill you in Prince William Forest? Or why not before you even moved to the apartment by the power plant?” I found his eyes in the rearview mirror. “And what about Lee? Why didn’t he kill Lee when we were kids, back in Cold Falls?”

“It’s a game,” Harry said.

I shook my head at the absurdity of that answer. But if I’d been clear-headed, and if I’d remembered that we’d come to Harry because he was the next lead, and if I’d been able to break free of the chains that held me down facing the shadows on the wall, I would’ve made the connection that Lee made.

“That’s what she told us,” Lee said. “That’s what Otranto said.”

And the stakes are life and death. The only kind of game worth playing
. It was exactly what she’d said.

Harry added, “If you live hundreds of years, I’m guessing
everything
becomes a game.”

I believed that. But don’t think I’d accepted that our enemy was hundreds of years old. No—that part I wasn’t buying. I was only buying the part about the game. It was the game which dictated who Dantès killed and when. And there was something else I was starting to buy into: the idea that there were unexplainable elements to this game, elements that appeared to be supernatural. But I knew these elements had to have an explanation—one far better than the notion that fact and fiction were one and the same.

Was this the first step in the process of believing it all? How could it not be? Yet I didn’t see it that way. Not then. Of course not. In the same way that I couldn’t accept that novel therapy was the way through this, I couldn’t accept what I was seeing or hearing. If I had, I might have been closer to understanding that Harry’s story, like all the stories so far, was leading me deeper into another story—one of the most famous stories of all time.

Harry’s former neighborhood consisted of a dozen blocks of red brick, two-story apartment buildings. Decades ago, the area had been a low-income section of Arlington. I remembered it because my mother used to drive through it with me in tow on the way to Seven Corners, a shopping area that bordered Falls Church. The neighborhood had long since been gentrified, as denoted by the faux, old-fashioned streetlamps.

Amid the quaint buildings and landscaped ground, the electric substation stuck out like a sore thumb. It was an ugly island of massive cylinders, grids, and wiring, surrounded by tan, cinderblock walls that were topped with coils of barbed wire. A small parking lot ran alongside the substation, but a metal arm, chained shut, barred entry.

So I couldn’t park there, nor could I park in the neighborhood; street parking was restricted to permits, another mark of a gentrified neighborhood. But the drugstore from Harry’s story was close by, so we parked there and hoped we wouldn’t get towed.

The neighborhood was then treated to a strange sight: three disheveled men, one being pushed in a wheelchair, moving rather quickly at this late hour, well past midnight, a most unlikely time for a stroll. And if someone in the neighborhood decided to call the police, which in this neighborhood was a real possibility, and if the police were to make a timely appearance, which was also a real possibility, the officers would discover that the man in the wheelchair had a handgun tucked into his waistband.

“So what’s the plan?” Harry asked as we approached the substation.

“Your story is supposed to give us the plan,” I said. “It’s supposed to tell us where to go next.”

“So what does it tell you?”

“I don’t know yet. I have to figure it out.”

“That’s kind of tough, ain’t it, since you’re having a hard time believing me?”

“It doesn’t matter whether I believe it or not,” I said. “I’m sure the next lead is buried in your story.”

“Because that woman told you so.”

“That’s right,” I said. Lee had filled him on Otranto.

Harry was warily eyeing everything we passed, from the apartment buildings, their windows dark, to the hedges, trees, and parked cars. He was on the lookout for the real McCoy. But as we got closer to the substation, he relaxed a bit. He truly believed we had entered some kind of safe zone. A Dantès-free zone.

I began to hope that his unwavering belief in his story would inspire me to uncover the clue buried in his tale—or that somehow the clue would just come to me in one of those light bulb moments. But as it stood, finding such a lead felt like a task of Sisyphean proportions.
Was
there a breadcrumb hidden in Harry’s story? I didn’t know. What I
did
know was that the most distinctive, and most disturbing, element of his story was this:

Dantès was immortal.

And if Dantès truly had the gift of immortality, then this game of life and death turned on another reality. The shadows on the cave wall, the ones that were
my
reality, might not be of much help, because those shadows didn’t allow for immortality. Nor did they allow for a dog to appear as a man, or for a man to have no reflection. For any of that to be real, fiction would have to be exactly like fact.
Wouldn’t it?

But I wasn’t ready to accept that. Just because Dantès was a ruthless predator playing an elaborate game didn’t mean that he was some kind of immortal being who had lived for centuries. It didn’t mean that there wasn’t some logical, reasonable explanation for everything I’d seen. For me, the real McCoy was someone who knew about that night in Cold Falls. The real McCoy was the person getting revenge for Lee’s crime. The real McCoy was a flesh-and-blood man seeking retribution on all of us. Not some immortal bogeyman.

I focused on my surroundings—the manicured lawns, the golden glow of the streetlamps, the quaint, red brick buildings—to get a handhold on reality, the reality I saw around me, rather than the reality in Harry’s story.
This
was my world, and I told myself that I needed do my best to stay firmly in it.

We made it to the substation, where we picked Harry up and lifted him over the parking lot’s metal bar, followed by the wheelchair. Then we all headed to the back of the parking lot, hoping no one would notice the three strange men loitering at the substation. The place was lit by vapor lights, and though one side of the lot was nothing but the concrete wall that penned in the station, the other side and the back were lined with privacy hedges.

“There were no hedges when I lived here,” Harry said, then motioned to the apartment building next to the substation. The building’s second story was visible above the hedges, and every window facing us was dark. “The back apartment there—that was my place. A damn fine place, too—”

Harry suddenly stopped in mid-sentence, and peered anxiously at the building.

I looked in that direction but didn’t see anything suspicious. As I was trying to figure out what Harry had latched on to, I realized that I was hyperaware of the sounds around me. The buzzing of the vapor lights wasn’t just one solid drone—I could hear each light sizzling and crackling as if they were individual campfires. And the chirps of the crickets were more than a blanket of undifferentiated noise—I could hear distinct groups chirruping as if I were listening to individual sections of an orchestra. Even the distant sounds were coming in loud and clear: cars whooshing down Glebe Road a few blocks away, an owl hooting—and another, farther away, hooting back—and a dog baying glumly, as if pining for his owner to come home.