The Origin of Dracula (21 page)

“It ain’t him,” Harry said flatly.

“You don’t know that.”

“You still ain’t buying it.”

“I can’t buy it.” Nate stopped wheezing and quivering. His body went limp. I held him more tightly. My shirt was warm with his blood.

Harry wheeled forward. “Who do you think you’re fighting? We got no chance unless you open your goddamn eyes.”

“Who
are
we fighting?”

“Someone who fucks with your head.”

I clung to Nate’s body. My sweet son, fragile, all hope extinguished.

Harry waved the gun at Nate. “Look for yourself.”

I didn’t even have to look—I already felt that the small body in my arms was gone. In its place was cold, clammy air that clung to my arms. It had a weight of its own, pressing down on me. And when I did look, I saw it had a presence, too. Thick, white mist. Foul-smelling.

The mist suddenly dispersed in a rush, revealing a bat. An ugly creature. Scraggly dark gray fur and black, cold eyes—Nate’s eyes, at least the ones I’d just seen. It spread its bony, leathery wings and bolted up into the air, then flew over the bookshelves, leaving no sign of mist or Nate or our whole creepy and bloody encounter.

I couldn’t have asked for a more direct reference to
Dracula
. Yet it was still hard to accept, and harder still to decipher. The reality that fact and fiction were the same had been laid bare in front of me. I’d just lived it. This was what Harry wanted me to see.

But I was like Jonathan Harker in
Dracula
. To me, hallucinations and madness were far more acceptable explanations. Like Harker, who’d been trapped in Dracula’s castle, witnessing a gala of supernatural events, I, too, was trapped—and my reaction, like his, was to cling to the idea that I was slipping away from reality. I couldn’t accept that I’d been dragged into a new world that was just as real as my former world.

But Harker had eventually come around. He’d accepted that reality was a blend of fact and fiction. Was that the lesson here? Courtesy of novel therapy? The therapy I despised? And if I accepted that the threat looming over Nate was supernatural, did that get me any closer to stopping it?

Right then, another critical element of
Dracula
came back to me. Of course, it was my desperation for answers that made this element seem critical. The element had to do with how Bram Stoker had laid out his story. A large chunk of it wasn’t about Dracula at all. It was about Van Helsing, an expert on vampires, and his efforts to convince the other characters in the book that such a creature as Dracula existed.
I
needed to be convinced, too.

“Are you gettin’ closer to believing what you’re seeing?” Harry was eyeing the top of the bookshelves as if he was expecting the bat to return.

I was getting closer, but I didn’t say so. “Let’s look at that Virginia history display.”

Harry wheeled around and headed back toward it. As I followed, I noticed that my shirt was no longer drenched in Nate’s blood. It was drenched in the mist’s clammy waters, as if I’d been baptized in the waters of a netherworld. A netherworld where doubt turned into belief. Dantès had made his point, and the only thing left for us to do in the Cherrydale Public Library was to find that breadcrumb.

The Virginia history display featured a dozen books. While Harry clutched his gun and kept a lookout, wary of another attack, I quickly scoped them out. Each book focused on a different period of Virginia’s history—from colonial times, through the American Revolution, to just after the Civil War.

When my eyes landed on a slim volume titled
The Forest
, I considered the connection. Cold Falls and Prince William Forest—both forests, as was Windy Run, which ran all the way down to the Potomac, and we’d been only blocks from Windy Run when Dantès had emerged to kill Lee. But this was a stretch—wasn’t it?—and not enough to lead to any conclusion. And the author’s name, Edna Grayson, didn’t strike me as something to get excited about.

But when I got to the editor’s name, in small lettering, under the author’s name, my breath caught in my throat.
Jonathan Harker
. The character in
Dracula
who had to be convinced he wasn’t hallucinating. And my own namesake in this menacing nightmare.

I grabbed the book and flipped it open. From the preface, I learned that Jonathan Harker was a history professor at Virginia Tech. While he was working on a restoration project in Williamsburg, he’d come across an unfinished short story written by one of the original settlers of Jamestown. He discovered this previously unknown story among the items stored in the attic of a nineteenth-century plantation home, the centerpiece of the restoration project. The story had been hidden in a desktop Bible, slipped in between the Bible’s pages, one page of the story inserted every fifty pages or so. The Bible was old, but the parchment pages on which the story was written were far older.

Harker discovered that the parchment and ink were consistent with what had been used at the time of the Jamestown Colony. Also, the parchment had aged at the same rate as other documents from that period. But just to make sure he’d discovered something special, he had a sample from the parchment tested in a lab. The results confirmed his theory. This short story dated back to the Jamestown Colony and, therefore, it was the first story written on American soil.

Jonathan Harker had unearthed the first American short story.

Then he went on to explain that some of the parchment pages that made up
The Forest
were missing—so the story was incomplete, and this greatly disappointed him. At first, he published the incomplete version of
The Forest
in academic journals, but later, he decided he’d try and fill in the missing pieces.

His first task was to find out who’d written the story, and this ended up taking years of extensive research. The author turned out to be Edna Grayson—listed as Mrs. Horace Grayson in Jamestown’s official records. She’d arrived in Jamestown with her husband and four children, on the
Susan Constant
, one of the three ships that had transported the original colonists. Harker learned as much as he could about Edna Grayson and about the Jamestown Colony, and using that research as a guide, in addition to the story pages he had, he completed her story. The result was the book I now held in my hands.

“This is why we’re here,” I said. “A stripped-down version of U.S. history starts with three colonies. The Plymouth Colony—that’s where we get the Bellington connection. The Roanoke Colony—that’s where we get the connection to Quincy. Dantès killed him on Roanoke Island. And now we have the last of the trifecta—the Jamestown Colony.”
And
, I thought to myself,
we have
another story
: The Forest.

A rustling sound started to rise in the library, an expansive soft swooshing, seemingly from all around us. Both Harry and I scanned the room, but there was nothing to see. Yet the sound was becoming more distinct, a wing-like batting of the air.

“Let’s go,” Harry said, spinning his wheelchair around.

I handed him
The Forest
and started pushing him toward the foyer. We looked down each aisle we passed because it was now clear that the swooshing was radiating from the direction of the bookshelves, though the precise source of it still wasn’t evident. Harry had his gun ready.

We were just a few aisles away from the foyer when the books, en masse, began to rock back and forth ever so slightly, almost imperceptibly.

“Do you see that?” I said.

“Yep,” Harry said. “You’re catchin’ on.”

The books then began to pitch back and forth with greater force, as if they were reacting to an earthquake.

I picked up my pace, wheeling Harry faster.

The books, their covers various colors—blue, white, yellow, red—were all changing to one color: dark brown. And there was a new sound—a scratching, like claws clicking for purchase on a ledge.

Then the books morphed from their rectangular shapes to oval shapes.

And the ovals grew fur.

We were still about ten yards from the foyer when the books completely morphed into bats—thousands of them.

“Shit!” I took off, pushing Harry—but it was too late.

The bats flew off the shelves in a massive swarm, covering the room in a dark brown, undulating cloud. An instant later, a platoon of them swooped down on me, but not before I was able to give a final push to Harry’s wheelchair. Hopefully he’d find safety in the foyer.

Then I desperately swung at the bats, trying to knock them away. But I was outnumbered—they relentlessly charged at me in waves. I lurched my way forward, swatting at the horde, but the attack intensified. They were battering me. Some clung to me with their claws. I swiped at them, but I was met with an unremitting swell of wings and teeth. The blistering pain of dozens of bites and scratches seared through me—I felt like I’d been lit on fire.

For a fraction of a second, through the cloud of brown, I caught a glimpse of the foyer, which looked clear. I forced myself to stagger toward it, stumbling through the sea of rabid monsters. But the room was so thick with bats that I tripped over the ones swarming at my legs and tumbled to the floor.

A fresh horde swooped down on me then, going in for the kill. I swung at them wildly, but it was hopeless. They were clawing and biting me and were now so concentrated that I was having a hard time breathing in without sucking parts of them into my mouth. I spat out wing tips and claws and fur and who knew what else, and choked as I did.

Finally, I whipped my hands up and covered my eyes for fear the creatures would gouge them out. With my eyes shielded, I resorted to willing away the bats as if they were a hallucination. As if
I
were Jonathan Harker in
Dracula
, who’d spent many months after his visit to Count Dracula’s castle convincing himself he’d gone temporarily mad and that none of what he’d seen was real.

But the bats were clawing and biting my hands, ripping my skin raw, trying to force me to uncover my eyes and see just how real they were. They were as real as their thousand bites, each cutting me to my core, the agony so overwhelming that my brain was about to shut down.

Fact or fiction. It’s all the same.

I believed it—

And before I even opened my eyes, I felt that the bats were gone.

And when I did open my eyes, I saw that, indeed, every one of them had disappeared. The library was silent, and all the books were back on the shelves.

I sat up, bewildered. Not only was the pain gone, but my hands and arms were healed. Not one bite or scratch anywhere on me, and my clothes were completely intact. Not even one tiny rip.

Harry rolled up to me. His eyes were wide with surprise. “You stopped it, didn’t ya?”

“Beginner’s luck.”

“Nah—it ain’t luck. Like I said, you’re catchin’ on.”

I wheeled Harry toward the administrative offices, glancing down to make sure he still had the copy of
The Forest
. It was in his lap. He picked it up and waved it at me. “Mission accomplished, huh?” he said.

“You’re catching on, too,” I responded.

We parked in front of one of Arlington’s largest electrical substations, one near a shopping center and major roads. We didn’t have to worry about nosy neighbors here because there were none. The rising sun was starting to lighten the sky, so the main risk now, other than Dantès, came from the Arlington police. If someone had spotted our car driving away from Lee’s body, police cruisers would be on the lookout for us, and with dawn here, our car would be easy to spot.

As soon as I cut the engine, I dove into
The Forest
, picking up where I’d left off in the preface. Every few pages, I filled Harry in.

After making the case that Edna Grayson’s story was the first piece of fiction written by an English settler in the Americas, Jonathan Harker—the Virginia Tech history professor, not the fictional character from
Dracula
—launched into a lengthy description of the conditions under which Edna had written the story, explaining that this context would shed light on the story itself.

The original settlers of Jamestown—the Englishmen who’d arrived on the
Susan Constant
,
Discovery
, and
Godspeed
—had built their settlement in Tsenacommacah, a large swath of land which itself was part of a much larger territory known as the Powhatan Confederacy. The confederacy was made up of Native American tribes, all of Algonquin descent.

Unfortunately for the settlers, Tsenacommacah was inhabited by one of these tribes, the Paspahegh. Not that this was a problem at first. Far from it: the Paspahegh welcomed the settlers, and the tribe’s hospitality extended well beyond just a cordial embrace. The settlers were poorly prepared for their new environment, and the only reason they survived in this new world was because of the tribe’s help.

There were regular meetings, both formal and informal, between the Paspahegh leaders and the colony’s leaders. These were men-only affairs, and this is where Edna Grayson’s story really started. She befriended some of the Paspahegh on her own because she was interested in learning as much as she could about her new environment. She wanted her kids to thrive in the new world, and she understood that the Paspahegh could help with that.

But what she didn’t know was that the colony leaders, including her husband, Mr. Horace Grayson, were secretly plotting to drive the Paspahegh from their land. Mr. Grayson hid this from his wife.

As it turned out, driving the Paspahegh from Tsenacommacah would have been a far better fate for the tribe than what the settlers actually ended up doing: wiping out the entire Paspahegh population over the course of the next three years.

The confrontations were small at first—mostly skirmishes over right-of-way—so Edna was able to keep up her friendships with the tribe, even though the settlers who knew about these friendships frowned on them. Unlike the majority of her peers, Edna believed that the English and the Native Americans could share this land and live in peace.