The Origin of Dracula (23 page)

Edna calmed herself and rose to her feet. Her robe was clawed and tattered, and her body was covered in bruises, welts, and hundreds of cuts. But she braced herself and waited for an answer.

She scanned the woods, hoping to see Drakho. But the first thing she saw was that her horse had abandoned her—the stallion was nowhere to be seen. Did Drakho now expect her to run as the horse had? Or was he considering her offer of the game?

“The game is a good one,” she said. “The prize is the life of my son, Benjamin.” She scanned the forest once more, glad she’d chosen a night when the moon lit up some of the darkness. But it was an odd light—a pale, unsettling light. The light of an unnatural world.

Then something else appeared in this unnatural world. A mist began to enshroud the forest. She recognized it from the attacks on the settlement. It thickened quickly and took on a foul odor.

She had no doubt that she’d gotten Drakho’s attention.

In the distance, through the mist, she saw a shadow darker than the night itself. It was shaped like a man. A very tall man.

“I did not support my people’s decision,” Edna said, believing she was speaking to Drakho. “Killing the Paspahegh was not a Godly choice. It was evil. Born of the very devil himself.” She was telling the truth, for she was a good Christian. She believed in the New Testament God. A God of love and mercy and peace.

“I loved the Paspahegh as my own brothers and sisters. They were Christians even though they hadn’t read the words of Jesus. They led their lives as the New Testament asks.” The shadow, still quite far away, turned more opaque, more substantial. “My people were wrong to slaughter the Paspahegh. And you are not wrong to seek vengeance on those who harmed them. In the Old Testament, God approved of vengeance on those who had harmed his people. Me—I don’t know what to think about vengeance. But I do know what to think about my son Benjamin. He is innocent. He had nothing to do with killing the Paspahegh.”

Drakho appeared suddenly in front of her. How he’d moved through the forest so quickly, or changed from shadow to substance so fully, she didn’t understand. But he stood before her now—a tall man with dark hair, a narrow face, and deathly pale skin. His black eyes were large and shone with intelligence, cunning, and ancient knowledge. He wore black vestments. He appeared to her like a fallen angel—from the underworld?—in human form.

Edna got on her knees. “Will you consider my proposal?”

“I must take the lives of
all
the Englishmen,” he said. His voice was full, stern, and dominating.

“Some of my people are good,” she said.

“Letting your people live is like letting disease flourish. In the end, disease kills every living thing it touches.”

“That may be true, but I know my son’s heart. He is not part of that disease. He doesn’t look to war as an answer. He won’t grow up to kill the people you choose as yours. He won’t destroy your land.”

Drakho was silent. Edna looked up from her supplicating pose. From the neutral expression on Drakho’s face—no lines on his brow and no curl to his lips—she couldn’t tell if he was considering her proposal. The thought crossed her mind:
If he
is
considering it, should I go through with my plan to kill this ancient being, or should I play the game for Ben’s life instead?

“Please grant me the opportunity to play the game,” she said. “If I win, you do not lose. If Ben lives, he will not be your enemy.” Edna made her voice small and kneeled even closer to the ground. “You will find that playing this game is more worthwhile than simply taking another life.”

“Your people are mindless,” Drakho said. “I have tried to play my games with them, but they fail at every one. They don’t give a thought to anything. The Paspahegh seek answers to puzzles and look for clues in the words and pictures I leave. Your people cannot see past what is in front of them. They are too easy to trick.”

Edna took that as a sign.
She
wasn’t so easy to trick.
She
had tricked Drakho. She grabbed the dagger from its sheath, leapt up, and drove it into Drakho’s chest, deep into his heart.

He staggered back, his face twisted in shock. His black eyes narrowed and his pale skin took on a pinkish hue. He reached up, clutched at the dagger in his chest, and struggled to pull it out. His body began to weaken and wilt. It shrank inside his black vestments, which began to billow, no longer secured by the weight of his body inside.

Edna watched, slack-jawed and wide-eyed.

Drakho was dwindling to nothingness. She’d driven him from the rank of fallen angel—of eternal being—to that of fallen warrior. He didn’t go from dust to dust, but from eternal to nothing.

The vestments fell to the ground in a heap. Drakho was dead. The amber weapon had done its job.
She
had done her job.

Edna returned to the settlement by foot. It took her more than half a day, but she was propelled by triumph, by the joy of knowing she’d saved her son.

No one in the settlement knew about her adventure. But from that day on, the settlers’ luck changed. The Starving Time came to an end, and Jamestown began to grow and thrive.

And that was how
The Forest
ended.

Harker then wrote an epilogue. He explained that he hadn’t been able to uncover any records that revealed Edna’s true fate. He was referring to the author, the real Edna—Mrs. Horace Grayson—and not the fictitious Edna in the story.

He
did
discover evidence that fact and fiction had intersected on one front: the real Edna, like the fictitious Edna, had lost her husband and all her children, save one son, during the Starving Time. But Harker couldn’t find any evidence that she and her son had survived the third year of the Starving Time. They could easily have been part of the eighty percent who’d perished. Or it was possible that they had moved to another settlement in the Americas, or even back to England. Harker said there just wasn’t enough evidence to come to a definitive conclusion.

He also wrote that what happened to the fictional Edna at the very end of
The Forest
wasn’t clear. When the story wound to a close, as was true for other parts of the tale, pages were missing. So Harker had had to shape the very end of the narrative. He was the one who’d chosen a victorious ending, and he went on to explain his decision.

He saw Edna’s story as an attempt to make sense of the unbearable hardships in the new colony. The settlers who’d arrived on the
Susan Constant
,
Discovery
, and
Godspeed
were so ill-prepared for the new world that Harker compared it to the trials and tribulations that the first settlers on Mars might have to face. The unexpected adversities far outweighed those few for which they had prepared.

So he believed Edna had intended for her story to be a tale of courage and perseverance against almost insurmountable odds. It was her way of convincing herself that the settlers could, and would, overcome a harsh environment, an environment that showed no mercy. She wanted to believe they would eventually win the battle.

Therefore, Harker’s interpretation of the story was that she’d translated that harsh environment into human form by creating the character of Drakho—based on the Paspahegh legend. He was the one destroying the colony, and it was up to the story’s heroine to defeat him, save her son, and save the settlement.

So that’s what Harker had her do at the end of
The Forest
.

“There you have it,” Harry said.

“There’s more,” I said.

Harker had also written an afterword to
The Forest
. Reading it made the connections between the story and our present day descent into hell even more clear. In it, Harker postulated a connection between
Dracula
and
The Forest
, laying out the case that Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
was based on the Paspahegh’s Drakho.

First, he noted his own connection to the material—a strange coincidence that had no practical value as factual evidence, but which had to be addressed nonetheless. How could it be that he, Jonathan Harker, who bore the same name as one of the main characters in
Dracula
, should be the one to discover the origin of the Dracula myth? There was no answer to that question, except that it was a coincidence, one of those strange, grand ones we’ve all experienced in our own lives. He made it clear that he didn’t believe some mystical force had brought him to the parchment pages hidden in the Bible. Then he went on to make his case about the origin of Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
.

Harker’s research—confirmed by other scholars and academicians—revealed that Stoker had never visited Eastern Europe, the region he’d chosen as Dracula’s birthplace and homeland. The accepted wisdom was that Stoker had picked this region because he’d based the character of Count Dracula on Vlad the Impaler.

Vlad the Impaler, whose real name was Vlad Tepes, was a historical figure from the mid-fifteenth century. He was heir to the House of Draculesti, a powerful family whose lineage went back centuries, and he was prince of Wallachia, a region in Romania. He was also known as Count Dracula, derived from his family name, Draculesti. Count Dracula became a folk hero for defending the Romanians against the Ottomans, and he became infamous for his extreme cruelty, which included impaling his enemies.

No historian or professor of literature had challenged this theory. It was accepted dogma: the inspiration for the fictitious character of Dracula was Vlad the Impaler. Of course, there was no reason to challenge this. First of all,
Dracula
was a work of fiction. Digging up new information about this novel wasn’t going to change the world. Second, the novel wasn’t considered highbrow fiction, so over the decades, scholars hadn’t been falling all over themselves actively chasing down new leads about the book’s genesis. Such efforts were reserved for the established literary canon, not the likes of
Dracula
.

But Harker couldn’t shake the parallels between
Dracula
and
The Forest
—there were so many. Broad ones like Dracula’s and Drakho’s lifespans, both apparently spanning centuries, and specific ones like their supernatural abilities, from morphing into animals to traveling in the form of mist. Not to mention the most obvious similarity, their names: Dracula and Drakho.

Here, I couldn’t help but think of my own journey—the one which had led me to
The Forest
. Names had been critical every step of the way.

So Harker set out to determine whether Stoker could have heard about the legend of the Native American Drakho. And for that, he needed to uncover the missing link: either Bram Stoker had heard and/or read about
The Forest
, or he’d heard and/or read about the Paspahegh legend of Drakho. Harker would also have to prove that one of these two things had occurred
before
Stoker wrote his masterpiece of horror fiction.

After many dead ends in which he’d tried to prove that Stoker had run across the legend of Drakho in England, Harker moved on to investigating whether Stoker had visited the United States before writing
Dracula
. That turned out to be the better trail.

Stoker wasn’t primarily an author. His full-time job was managing the stage tours for one of England’s most famous actors: Henry Irving. Henry Irving traveled the world, and as Harker discovered, Stoker was right there with him on almost all of those trips—including many to the United States, where Irving was a favorite.

Irving was so popular in the States that he was invited to the White House and met the president on more than one occasion. This information inspired Harker to do extensive research into those visits to Washington, D.C. He was focused on D.C. because the nation’s capital was across the Potomac from Virginia—Tsenacommacah land, Drakho’s homeland, and the Paspaheghs’ homeland. He eventually found that both Irving and Stoker had taken a trip to Williamsburg, a stone’s throw away from the original Jamestown colony.

Harker was getting closer to finding a direct link.

But it turned out the record of Stoker and Irving’s visit to Williamsburg was thin. Though both men occasionally wrote personal notes about their trips—letters, diary entries, calendar entries—neither of them had written anything about this particular excursion. So Harker looked for other paper trails: newspaper accounts, hotel records, travel receipts, et cetera.

Through those, he was able to determine that their visit had lasted three days—plenty of time for Stoker to come across the Drakho legend. Of course, except for placing Stoker in the right location, there was no definitive proof that Stoker
had
come across that legend. His visit had come almost three hundred years after the English had slaughtered the Paspahegh and Edna had written her story. And there was also the fact that, as far as Harker could tell, Edna’s short story hadn’t surfaced during those three hundred years.
And
it wouldn’t surface for another hundred years
after
Stoker’s visit, when Harker, himself, would discover it in that old Bible.

Still, he thought he’d discovered a strong link, a link far stronger than the accepted wisdom—that Stoker had stumbled across the folk hero, Vlad the Impaler, in the Whitby library, a small library in the English countryside. That explanation didn’t account for the entirety of Dracula folklore.

Harker’s link
did
. He’d placed Stoker in the heart of Drakho country, in the heart of the Drakho legend. A legend that paralleled Stoker’s
Dracula
almost perfectly, including the similar names.

In the first edition of
The Forest
, Harker’s afterword ended there, without the evidence of a direct link between Stoker and Drakho. But Harker spent many more years looking for harder evidence.

And he found it.

In the second edition of the book—the one I held in my hands—Harker laid out that harder evidence. He’d discovered Henry Irving’s name on a guest list for a lecture given during the actor’s visit to Williamsburg. The topic of the lecture was “The Peculiar Myths of the James City Indians.” If Stoker had accompanied Irving to that lecture—and from the records of their travels together, it appeared that Stoker was part of Irving’s close-knit entourage—then this placed him right where Harker needed him: listening to a lecture on Native American legends that were specific to this region of the country. The county of James City included Williamsburg and Jamestown, home to the Paspahegh—and the clincher was that the James City Indians were what the locals from that time period called the Paspahegh.