The Origin of Dracula (31 page)

This was a plan all right, but it didn’t fit into the complicated game of chess we’d been playing. On the other hand, it wasn’t like we were winning the game. The best you could say was that we hadn’t been checkmated yet.

I guess we’d have to see if I could uncover what Edna’s amber weapon actually was before ruling out Harry’s crazy idea. And that thought led to a question.

“Why does Buck have dynamite?” It had dawned on me that explosives didn’t seem like collectable memorabilia.

“Well, he might not, anymore,” Harry said, “but I remember him telling me he and his wife were gonna plant a garden in the back yard. He got dynamite to blast out two tree stumps. Then his wife got sick and they never did get to plantin’ that garden.”

It was evening when we got to Buck’s place. The afterglow from the setting sun was red, the kind of brilliant red that makes you stop and stare at the sky in wonder. But this evening, on this last night of Drakho’s game, the night before Nate’s life would either be won or lost, I saw this spectral red glow as a sign that Drakho’s land—his sacred land, from North Carolina to Massachusetts—had been colonized by settlers. For this spectacular sunset was the result of pollutants from the millions and millions of those settlers on his land.

Buck had made spaghetti and meatballs for dinner and had set the table for three—the same table on which he’d earlier displayed his knife collection. We didn’t have time for a meal break, but we were starving, so I scarfed down my food and then quickly excused myself; rude behavior, but I had more pressing concerns than whether or not Buck found me lacking in the social graces.

Harry was left at the table, entrusted with the task of coming up with an explanation—a lie—as to why I was in such a rush. Buck had already set up his laptop for me in the war room, and I got right down to it. I searched “amber,” and this time I took a closer look at the gem’s history. Amber had been widely admired as jewelry for thousands of years—archeologists had even found examples of prehistoric man using the gem as ornaments. So it stood to reason that Edna would have known of amber primarily in the context of jewelry. But what could she have meant by “amber weapon”?

Or more to the point: What had the Paspahegh prisoner meant when he’d used the term “amber weapon”? After all, the phrase had originated with the prisoner; he’d said it over and over to the settler who’d interrogated him. Edna had merely translated it.

Of course, it was possible that the interrogator had misremembered the phrase, or that Edna had mistranslated the Paspahegh language. Which meant perhaps the prisoner had never actually meant to refer to amber at all. But I wasn’t ready to concede that possibility yet, because if that was true, then there was nothing left to go on.

I moved on from the history of amber and instead turned to information about the qualities of the mineral itself. This led to the discovery that amber exhibited a special property. Thales, a Greek philosopher, who lived in the sixth century B.C., discovered it. When you rubbed a piece of “elektron,” which was the Greek name for amber, the mineral acquired a special property—what Thales called a unique force. This force was able to attract pieces of straw. People thought this force was some kind of trick, or even magic. It would take another two thousand years to discover that this force was what we now call static electricity. And it would take even longer to discover that static electricity was part of a greater force—electricity itself.

When I read this, I felt immediately vindicated: my latest foray into novel therapy seemed to have paid off big time. I’d just discovered the missing link, the missing connection—the one that tied the amber weapon to Drakho’s weakness. The same weakness that Harry had discovered many years ago.

Drakho feared electricity.

And that explained why Drakho stuck as much as he could to the wilderness in Northern Virginia. The wilderness was the land least contaminated by electricity. So with the connection between amber and electricity now clear—and it couldn’t get any clearer; even the word “electricity” was derived from the Greek word “elektron” meaning “amber”—it was time to go back to my bible.
The Forest
.

Edna hadn’t coated a knife in amber—or in tree resin. Her weapon had been
amber itself
. Harker had made the wrong choices when embellishing and completing her story. Of course, he’d had no reason to think his choices would ever affect anyone or anything; he’d simply been restoring a piece of fiction, and factual accuracy wasn’t how fiction was judged. He couldn’t have known that for me, fiction would be a matter of life and death.

Buck wheeled Harry into the war room, and Harry asked, “How’s it going?”

“Good,” I said, wanting to blurt out everything but stopping myself. I couldn’t fill Harry in with Buck in the room.

“What’d ya find?” Harry asked.

I glanced at Buck, who smiled curiously. The silence grew until it became awkward.

Finally I said, “I think we’ve got what we need. If you’re ready, we can hit the road.”

“First tell me what you got.” Harry wheeled himself closer to me.

Why was he putting me on the spot?

“Buck knows,” Harry added.

“What?” In one fell swoop, this explained why Buck hadn’t asked us any questions.

“They didn’t call him Drakho,” Buck said. “The Confederate soldiers called him the Nightman. It’s in some of their diaries. The Union soldiers also talked about him in their diaries, but they saw him differently. They thought he was the devil himself. The way they saw it, since God wasn’t going to help the South, the devil was doing it. But no matter what side you were fighting on, the soldiers agreed on one thing: Virginia was his homeland. That’s why it’s just the soldiers in these parts who saw him.”

“So you believe this Nightman is real?” I said.

“Hell if I know, but I’ll tell you this: when I visited Harry in the hospital all those years ago and he told me what went down in Prince William Forest—I believed
him
. And it reminded me of something I’d read in my great-grandfather’s diary when I was kid. My great-grandfather was a Confederate soldier, and he was one of the ones who wrote about this Nightman. I believed
him
, too.”

“Let’s hear what you dug up, John,” Harry said.

I wanted to hear more about the Nightman, but I knew it’d have to wait, so I told Harry what I’d found out about amber and then laid out my conclusion.

“We know Harker made up the ending of Edna’s story because those pages were missing. My bet is that Edna used amber against Drakho. Not a knife coated in amber or tree resin, but amber itself—the raw material, or maybe a piece of jewelry. She understood that the ‘weapon’ part of amber was this strange force—the static electricity—created when you rubbed it. The Paspahegh had figured it out. Just like you figured out that Drakho stays away from electric power stations, they figured out that he stays away from that strange force created with amber.”

“So Edna used amber to protect her son—to ward off Drakho,” Harry said.

“Yeah, and that part fits because we know for sure that Edna didn’t end up killing Drakho—he’s most definitely still around.”

“So it looks like Harker latched on to the wrong part of
Dracula
,” Harry said.

“What do you mean?”

“From what you’re sayin’, amber was jewelry, so don’t it stand to reason—if reason got anything to do with this—that Edna had her boy wear a necklace around his neck—”

I got where he was going and filled in the rest. “Like a garlic necklace wards off Dracula.”

“Yeah. But I still got a problem.”

“What?”

“Are you tellin’ me we’re gonna kill Drakho with static electricity?”

“No—not
static
electricity. The key thing here is that he’s susceptible to electricity, period.” I looked at the battle maps on the war room’s walls. “Let’s say that hundreds of years ago, it took only a small amount of electricity to ward him off, so static electricity did the job. But as we became more industrialized, Drakho gained more tolerance. He
had
to. Electricity is now everywhere, and to survive, to interact with his environment, to interact with us, he had to be able to tolerate stronger electrical fields.”

“We all adapt or die,” Buck said.

“I’m living proof of that,” Harry grunted.

“The bottom line is you’re right, Harry,” I said. “We’re going to need more than static electricity.”

“You’re gonna need a bigger boat,” Buck said, and chuckled.

“Especially if we’re gonna kill him,” Harry added. “And if I remember right, in
Jaws
, they never did get a bigger boat—they killed the shark with an explosion.”

“Yeah,” Buck said. “They stuck an oxygen tank in its mouth, shot the tank, and blew that fish to smithereens.”

Was warding Drakho off a better strategy?
Harker hadn’t been able to uncover whether Edna and her son had survived the Starvation Time or not. If she
had
survived—if she had withstood Drakho’s onslaught of Jamestown—then she had probably succeeded by using her amber weapon to keep Drakho at bay.

But could Nate and I spend the rest of our lives next to a strong electrical field? I supposed it was possible. We could move to a house or an apartment that abutted a substation. And then what? Would Nate only attend schools that were near substations? Would he only visit friends who lived near power plants? How would he travel from place to place? It was clear that no matter what, Nate would eventually find himself vulnerable to attack. It just wasn’t possible to make sure he’d spend every minute of the rest of his life in close proximity to a strong electric field.

“We’re going to have to use electricity to kill him,” I said.

Harry shook his head. “How are we gonna do that? We can’t just cut down a power line, hand it to the fella, and say hold on to this.”

“No, but there has to be a way to do this.”

Harry’s brow furrowed, and he leaned back in his chair. Buck nodded like he was thinking this through.

I got back online.

“What are you lookin’ up now?” Harry said.

“How strong the electrical fields are around those substations.” That information was easy to find. People didn’t want to live near substations, and the power companies wanted to show it was safe to do so, so there were plenty of studies that measured these electrical fields.

“Harry, when you lived off Columbia Pike, you said Drakho stopped following you when you were about a hundred yards from the power plant,” I said.

“Yeah.”

That turned out to be good news. The electrical field from a substation was relatively weak at that distance, which meant a portable generator might be powerful enough to inflict damage on Drakho—
if
we could get him close enough to it. I looked up generators and found a few models that could do the job.

I filled Harry and Buck in, and Harry said, “Just how are we going to draw him to a generator?”

“We meet him in his favorite place—a cave,” I said. “And this is the part you’re going to like: we trap him inside by dynamiting the cave shut.”

“You’re right,” he said. “I do like it.”

“Good—then maybe you can come up with a way to get a generator into a cave that Drakho considers sacred, then rig the cave with dynamite without him catching on.”

“Maybe I can,” Harry said.

“I’d like to come along and help,” Buck said. “Since I’m donating the dynamite.”

Harry glanced at me, and I could tell he didn’t like that idea. He took a beat, then turned to his friend. “We could use an extra pair of hands, Buck, but if you get into this, and we can’t kill the bastard, I guarantee you’ll become part of this. I know you don’t worry about yourself none, but your family becomes part of this guy’s game, too. The Nightman takes a liking to bloodlines. I know you got your daughter, Beth, and her family, and your son, Henry, and his family. If you come with us, you’re riskin’ their lives, too. And their kids’ lives. I mean, you’re lucky your great-grandpa only wrote about the fella and didn’t tangle with him.”

Buck took this in and then looked over the memorabilia in the war room.

Everything Harry had said applied to me, too. It reinforced that I was doing the right thing. Warding off Drakho wasn’t enough. The only way to save Nate, and the family Nate would someday have, was to kill Drakho.

“It ain’t worth the risk,” Harry said, adding a coda to his speech. “If you want to help, go ahead and add the Nightman to the war room. So when others come looking for what’s after them, they got someplace to go to find some answers. They’ll know they’re not crazy.”

Buck nodded, though he didn’t look happy with his decision.

I went back online for one last bit of information. Something we’d need to know if we wanted to trap Drakho: the area in Northern Virginia that was the least touched by man-made electromagnetic fields. Sacred land may once have meant land untouched by humans, but I was sure it now meant land untouched by these fields.

I tracked down an environmental watchdog site with a special set of maps. Each of the fifty states had an overlay of man-made electromagnetic fields. I magnified the Virginia map until Northern Virginia filled the computer screen. The areas with the most powerful electrical fields were covered in a red hue, a brilliant red like tonight’s sunset. These parcels of land featured power plants, factories, manufacturing parks, TV stations, arrays of satellite dishes, and medical complexes.

Next came areas covered with orange hues, where the electrical fields were strong but not overwhelming. These were the densely populated parts of suburban Virginia which included townhouses, apartment complexes, and all the business districts.

Then came areas covered with yellow hues. These were the wealthiest parts of the suburbs, where the homes were on huge lots and where there were plenty of parks, including a few lakes.

White hues indicated the weakest levels of electrical fields, and that was what interested me. These were the rural areas with few homes. It included the wilderness areas along the Potomac, Northern Virginia’s state and national parks, and a good chunk of the Shenandoah Valley. These were the places where Drakho felt the safest. They included Cold Falls, Prince William Forest, and Hadley Cave.