The Origin of Dracula (25 page)

I knew that some southerners used that term for the Civil War—and that those who did usually had an unnatural obsession with that war. I had no problem with that, but some of them were also virulent racists, and that sickened me. My bet was that Buck fit right into that category, and it was just a matter of time before he showed his stripes.

“I bought that D-Guard knife from a fellow in Manassas about thirty years ago,” he said. “It was passed down to him by his great-granddaddy, who defended Virginia in a battle not more than twenty miles from here.” He picked up the knife and turned it over in his hand. “It’s a beaut. The fellow had to sell it ’cause he needed the dough. Sometimes money’s more valuable than memorabilia. But I gave him a fair price ’cause I didn’t want bad luck coming along with the knife.”

Even after giving that disclaimer, Buck averted his eyes and lost a little of his cheer, again, as if he did feel a little guilty for taking advantage of someone else’s misfortune.

After a couple of seconds, he looked back at us. “So you wanna borrow this one?” he said, his cheeriness restored. “It’s a fine choice.”

I got the impression that putting the D-Guard knife to good use would assuage his guilt. And it appeared, from the clue in
Dracula
, that the game called for this knife.

“That’s the one,” I said.

Buck smiled. “I don’t got an original sheath for it, but I got a reproduction off eBay.”

“Then wrap ’er up and we’ll be on our way,” Harry said, rolling himself out of the alcove. Buck and I followed.

In the living room, Buck motioned toward the hallway. “Why don’t you stick around a bit longer and check out the war room?”

“Since when do you got a war room?” Harry said.

“Since I got nothing but time on my hands.”

“We really have to go,” I said.

But Harry glanced at me and mouthed,
He’s lonely
, then began to wheel himself toward the hallway. “We can spare another couple of minutes, Buck,” he said.

I reluctantly fell in line, perturbed by this waste of time, and that’s when I realized there’d been something weird about Buck and Harry’s interaction over the knife: Buck hadn’t asked Harry what we were planning to do with it. You’d think that would’ve been a wake-up call for me—that things weren’t exactly as they seemed. But it wasn’t even close to a wake-up call. Instead, I rationalized it this way: Buck trusted Harry’s judgment completely.

But I was way off the mark.

The war room was decorated with Civil War memorabilia, which validated my hunch: Buck was obsessed with the War Between the States. I was now fully expecting his next lecture to include his ugly beliefs about race relations. The room was like a mini-museum, curated with attention to detail. On the wall hung framed Confederate uniforms under glass, battlefield photographs, detailed maps of battles, Confederate money, sabers, guns, and the front pages of yellowed newspapers.

“Ain’t this something?” Harry said.

“Everything you see has got to do with battles that took place right here in these parts.” Buck walked over to one of the uniforms. “All the uniforms are from soldiers who defended this part of Northern Virginia.” He motioned over to one of the framed newspapers. “See that? It’s the original reporting on the Battle of Arlington Mills, one of the first battles in the war. That stand kept the Union army from getting too deep into Northern Virginia.”

Then Buck stepped over to one of the maps. “This here’s a map of a more famous battle that took place on that very same day. The Battle of Fairfax Courthouse.”

That map caught my attention. In addition to methodically illustrated troop movements, it also boasted meticulously drawn topographical details. Hillsides, cliffs, valleys, streams, and even copses of trees.

“Do you have any other maps of Northern Virginia like this one?” I asked. “I mean ones where the geography is so detailed.”

“You bet.” Buck moved over to a cabinet and opened it, revealing more than a dozen long cardboard tubes. “Any particular area you’re interested in?”

“Yeah—land that’s still undeveloped today.”

“Not much of that left. But you’re still going to have to narrow it down for me. I got lots of maps.”

I looked at Harry, not sure where to start. He shrugged.

“What is it exactly you’re looking for?” Buck said.

I couldn’t say sacred land or untouched land, so I went with, “A place that hasn’t changed… at all.”

Buck rifled through the tubes, grabbed one, opened it, and pulled out the map inside. He knelt down on the floor and unrolled the map. “This land here runs along the Potomac in Loudon County. Goose Creek cuts through it.”

I knelt down and checked out the map, searching for some hint that this land was sacred land. The map was as meticulously drawn as the other one, but there were no troop movements or battle lines.

“Why doesn’t this map have troop movements on it? ” I said.

“General Ewell—a Lieutenant General in the Army of Northern Virginia—wanted to gain an advantage over the Union Army. He thought he could do that by learning the lay of the land down to every anthill. So he had maps drawn for the entire area. This is a copy of one of those original maps.”

Buck opened another tube and pulled out another map. “This one shows land near Mount Vernon. Some of it is still parkland.” He unrolled the map. “Ewell was a mighty fine man. You know what he wanted to do with the slaves?”

Okay, here it comes,
I thought. Buck was about to unleash his racism.

“He told Jefferson Davis to free them,” Buck said, “and let them fight for the Confederacy. I know it don’t sound like much to modern ears, but he also put his money where his mouth was. He said he’d lead a brigade of freed slaves. Jefferson and the rest of ’em thought the man was crazy.
And
they thought it was a terrible strategy.”

He stopped there, but as I looked over the Mount Vernon map, I kept expecting him to say what was really on his mind. He didn’t.

As for the map, nothing jumped out at me, so I switched my line of thought from Edna’s untouched land to
Dracula
. The book had yielded up which knife to choose, so maybe it would yield up the sacred land’s location. But my only lead along those lines, without actually searching through the book, was that the count had brought soil from Transylvania with him when he’d moved to London. The casket in which he slept was packed with dirt from the old country. That was
his
sacred land.

I stared at the map, trying to make a connection between soil from the old country and what I was seeing in front of me: beautifully rendered line drawings of hillsides, valleys, and caves. And it was when I saw the caves that I made the connection. Not to Stoker’s novel, but to our own bible,
The Forest
. Edna had mentioned a specific characteristic about Drakho’s sacred land. Of course, it could’ve been Harker who’d embellished that part of the story, but it was all I had.

I brought it up with Buck. “Are any of the lands you’re thinking of known for their caves?” For Edna had said that Wassamoah Bay was a land of ancient caves.

“Yep,” Buck said. “And sometimes Confederate soldiers hid in those caves to ambush Union soldiers.”

Bingo
, I thought, and then made another connection, one I should have made earlier. Drakho had led me to caves once already: through Dan T.’s account of Plato’s famous cave. Why hadn’t I always been on the lookout for caves—fact or fiction?

Buck pulled out a third map and unrolled it on the floor. “This is where the Battle of Front Royal took place. The land is tricky here. Lots of peaks and valleys and streams and caves. Jackson drew the Union Army into the area, and the army got divided up, confused, and lost. They were forced to retreat. Anyway, there are lots of caves there. Old limestone caves going way back. Soldiers hid in them, and some even signed their names on the walls.”

I took pictures of the map with my cell phone. There was no way to know if this was sacred land, but it met the only requirement I had at the moment: caves. And Buck said
going way back
, which to my ears sounded like another way of saying
ancient
caves.

“Front Royal is part of the Shenandoah Valley,” Buck continued. “You know Skyline Drive and the Blue Ridge Mountains?”

I nodded. Skyline Drive was a big Northern Virginia tourist attraction. But wasn’t that problematic? “I don’t know if you could consider that land unchanged,” I said. “There must be trails all over it.”

Buck countered easily. “Parts of the Shenandoah Valley have hardly been touched at all.”

I wasn’t convinced that this was sacred land, but I took more pictures of the map, hoping I was on the right track. Then Harry and I thanked Buck for the D-Guard Bowie knife and the tour of the war room, and we all made our way out to his rickety front porch.

That’s where the final verdict on Buck’s racism was rendered. I shook hands with him, then wheeled Harry carefully down the three steps, and as I started toward the car, Harry said, “Hang on a minute. Swing me back around.”

I did, and Harry looked up at Buck, who was standing on the top step. “Listen, I’m sorry I didn’t say anything,” Harry said.

Buck’s cheery demeanor fell away; it was replaced with a somberness that made him look every bit his age. “That’s okay,” he said. His voice was soft.

“I meant to,” Harry said, “but I just kept putting it off. Then…” Harry took a breath and gathered his thoughts.

Buck’s eyes watered, and he rubbed them.

“I was gonna say something today,” Harry said, “but I didn’t see any pictures of her in there. So I thought, well, maybe you guys went your separate ways or something before…”

Buck shook his head. “Never.” He looked back at his house. “I took her pictures down because I couldn’t look at them all the time. They reminded me of how sick she was at the end.”

“Jenny was my favorite of all the wives,” Harry said. “Smart as a whip, the best sense of humor, and gorgeous, too. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. I was a hell of a lucky man to have roped her in.” Buck walked down the steps and pulled out his wallet. “When I feel up to it, this is the picture I look at. And I’ve been looking at it a lot lately. You know, it’s like the good times are coming back, and I’m forgetting how she was when she was dying. I might even put some of her pictures back up.”

Buck opened his wallet and showed Harry the photo. I looked over Harry’s shoulder and took a peek. The picture was one of pure happiness: Buck, smiling wide, in a red and yellow Hawaiian shirt, with his arm around a pretty African-American woman, caught in the middle of a joyous laugh. She was wearing a white dress that highlighted the pink and green lei around her neck. Sunlight sparkled gloriously on the blue Pacific Ocean in the background.

“That was the last vacation we had,” Buck said, a hint of melancholy in his voice. “I’m glad we splurged.”

“She was a keeper,” Harry said.

Buck looked at the photo for a long beat—lost in the past—then quickly closed his wallet and stuffed it back in his pocket. “I’m glad you said something, Harry. I appreciate it.”

As I helped Harry into the car and loaded his wheelchair into the trunk, Plato’s cave came back to me in a new light. This time it told me how badly I’d misjudged Buck. My assumption that he was a racist was another example of focusing on the shadows on the cave wall, rather than looking at the reality behind them. I hadn’t wanted to consider that there was more to the man than met the eye. And what made it worse was that he’d basically told me so right up front.

If I’d paid attention to exactly what Buck had been saying during his history lecture—
You couldn’t whitewash war back then. For the most part, you had to look your enemy in the eye… We wouldn’t be so quick to get into all these damn wars if we went back to that
—I wouldn’t have seen him as a pro-war collector of weapon memorabilia. His stance against the perpetual war our country was waging would have been obvious.

All this was another sharp reminder that my life was changing. I had to let go of my old beliefs.

As we pulled away from Buck’s house, Harry immediately asked me how I knew which knife to choose, so I filled him in on Bram Stoker’s account of Dracula’s death. Then I moved on to the next task at hand: tracking down amber.

“We’re headed to Home Depot,” I said.

“They talk about Home Depot in
Dracula
?” Harry laughed at his own joke.

I let him enjoy himself for a few seconds, then told him what I was thinking. “Melting amber would’ve been impossible for Edna.”

“I got that part,” he said. “I figured, just like us, she didn’t have access to high-tech lab equipment.”

“And it doesn’t really make sense that she’d have tree resin just lying around.”

“She probably got it from a tree, just like we’re fixing to do.”

“Well, I can’t rule that out,” I said. “But there’s a better alternative. Something that would’ve been easy for her to get. And considering Jamestown was a colony, with building going on all the time, I’d say she had easy access to this.”

“Okay—cut to the chase.” Harry frowned at me impatiently.

“Varnish.”

He cocked his head, then grinned. “Made from tree resin.”

“Exactly. And that’s what we’re going to pick up at Home Depot.”

Harry leaned back in his seat, seeming to accept my conclusion. But only for a second. “I don’t know,” he said.

“How else could she have coated her dagger in amber?”

“Tree resin—from a tree.”

“So you’re telling me you prefer tapping a tree over picking up a can of varnish?”

“I’m not tellin’ you nothin’. It’s just that we’re getting farther and farther from the story. And if stories tell ya all you need to know… well…”

Harry had a point, but I didn’t know how good a point it was at the time. Just as it was true that you had to interpret the Bible to understand its lessons, you had to interpret
The Forest
. And that was proving to be a major challenge. Centuries had passed since
The Forest
had been written, so the real context would always elude me. Plus, I had to be content with the missing pages as well as Harker’s edits and embellishments.