The Origin of Dracula Read online

  “Will the magician show me some tricks?”

  “Of course. I already talked to him about it.”

  “What kinds of tricks?”

  “A card trick, a disappearing coin trick, and a couple of tricks that are going to be surprises.”

  “Four tricks?”

  “Yeah. And maybe more, if there’s time.”

  “Good. I’m going to do them for my afterschool class. Ms. Johnson said I could do them next week.”

  “That sounds like a good plan.” I checked the rearview mirror. Nate was beaming with pride.

  “Can I pick up the cake with you?” he said.

  “Sure.”

  He had insisted on being involved in all facets of planning the party. Lucy had usually planned his birthday parties, so this might’ve been his way of staying close to her. But it had also crossed my mind that he thought I wasn’t up to planning the party, or worse: he could tell I wasn’t totally there for him and wasn’t capable of planning anything.

  He didn’t talk much about Lucy anymore. We had talked about her death a lot during the first couple of months. Mostly about how random it had been. She’d been murdered in a carjacking and it was hard for him to understand why the thief had picked her out. The irony was that his instincts would turn out to be better than the police’s, but who would’ve guessed that then?

  Over the next seven months, there had been a healthy geometric decline in these conversations about Lucy’s death. There were a lot of studies about how young kids dealt with the death of a parent. Many concluded that a good number of kids had a hard time accepting that a dead parent was gone forever. These kids believed their dead parents would come back and walk right through their front doors as if death weren’t permanent.

  But Nate seemed to grasp that his mom wasn’t coming back. In those first couple of months, many of his questions were in one way or another attempts to confirm that her death was irreversible. He wasn’t expecting her grand return. Instead, he was getting used to the idea of no return. And as it stood now, he’d done a hell of lot better at accepting the tragic loss of his mom than I had.

  I turned onto Fillmore Street, pulled up to our house—a small, white craftsman that Lucy had always described as warm and cozy—and parked. Nate grabbed his backpack and popsicle-stick house and scrambled out of the back seat. As we walked toward the front door, he turned the popsicle-stick house over in his hand, examining it.

  “I like the afterschool class, Dad,” he said.

  Warmth bloomed in my chest, and my thoughts suddenly lost their bitter edge. Nate was happy with the afterschool program. He didn’t see it as a bad turn in his life, which made it a good turn in my life.

  I leaned down and kissed him on his forehead. “Good for you, sweetheart. I’m glad you like it.”

  “Yeah. The extra stuff we do is good. You don’t have to change your work to pick me up. ”

  That warm sensation bloomed again. He wanted me to know that it was okay that he had to stay late. He was a good kid, doing his part to make our new life work. Of course, there was another interpretation. He didn’t want to hang out with his shell of a dad.

  I unlocked the door and we walked into the house. “Do you have any homework for the weekend?”

  “No—I mean yes, but I did it already.”

  “Great.”

  He plopped his backpack down on the couch. “Can I watch TV?”

  “Sure—until dinner is ready.”

  He headed toward the den, toting his popsicle-stick house. I grabbed his backpack and headed into the kitchen. I’d taken over Lucy’s job of going through his backpack to check and see if he’d been assigned homework or if the school had sent home any notices. He was pretty good about telling me if he’d been given homework, but it was a different story when it came to those notices. If I didn’t dig them out, sometimes they’d remained buried in the bottom of his backpack for weeks.

  At the kitchen table, I unzipped the backpack and pulled out his workbooks. While flipping through them, my thoughts drifted to the long night ahead, the part that came after cooking dinner and washing the dishes and getting Nate ready for bed, all of which was the “normal” part of the night. What came after all of that was my transformation into a nocturnal creature. Reading one newspaper after another on my iPad. Sitting zombie-like in the den watching movies. Camping on the edge of my bed, going through photos of Lucy. Wandering from room to room, tidying up an already tidy house. Standing in the back yard, staring up at the stars in the dark night sky, wondering why Lucy had been taken from me.

  I closed Nate’s math workbook, pulled out his vocabulary workbook, and noticed a white, letter-sized envelope peeking out from under another workbook. My first thought was that it was a notice from school, another one that without my intervention would’ve sunk to the bottom of the backpack and stayed buried there for a while.

  As I pulled it out, it dawned on me that the school rarely sent notices home in an envelope. Usually they arrived in the form of a brightly colored flyer. Turning the envelope over revealed that there were no markings on either side. If it was a notice from school, surely it would’ve said, “To the parents of Nathan Grant.” Maybe it was a note from the afterschool program or an invitation for a play date. But this was wishful thinking on my part—I’d already concluded that it was neither of those.

  From the second I spotted the envelope, a queasy, sickly feeling started to grow in the pit of my stomach. Holding the envelope in my hand made the queasiness worse. The envelope’s texture felt unnatural. It was smooth, as it should be, but it also felt cold and clammy, almost wet, even though it was completely dry.

  If I hadn’t opened the envelope—if I had just thrown it away—would my life have remained undisturbed by the horrors that followed? I’d never know. Because I did open it, and I pulled out the folded sheet of paper inside.

  I unfolded the paper—it was a letter, clean and neat, printed on a laser printer. The letter started with my name, John, with no salutation before it. No formal Dear or informal Hi. Then came the first paragraph, made up of one simple and powerful line:

  The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.

  I recognized the quote immediately—William Faulkner—and the words hit me like a punch to the gut. I couldn’t breathe. I knew exactly what these words referred to, and I didn’t want to keep reading.

  But I did.

  The body washed away and disappeared. The river took it downstream and out of your life.

  Until today. Now it’s washed up onto your doorstep.

  My heart was thumping heavily, pumping fear throughout my body. My awful transgression had come back to haunt me. The past wasn’t dead.

  The time for revenge has come, the letter continued. I will kill your precious son on his seventh birthday.

  I fought to breathe and tried to will my heart to stop its manic thumping. The queasiness in my stomach had turned into painful nausea.

  If you have any doubt about the veracity of my threat, I suggest you check in with your partners in crime. You’ll find a connection that will serve as proof of the devastating damage I can wreak.

  There was almost no doubt in my mind that this threat was real. The past had been waiting patiently, more patiently than was humanly possible, to spring forth and attack. This wasn’t revenge as much as it was justice. Over the protests of my thumping heart and overwhelming fear, I forced myself to read the rest of the letter and tried to convince myself that it was a hoax.

  This is a game, and in a game each player has a chance to win. You will have one chance to save your son. If you can find me and tell me my name, tell me my true identity, I will spare your son.

  A tiny ray of hope.

  The letter wasn’t signed, but it did end with a name:

  Dantès.

  I immediately understood that since this wasn’t his real name, it was part of the game, just as the Faulkner quote had been. The person who’d written this letter had chosen Dant�
�s as his pen name for one reason. Anyone who’d finished the required reading in his or her high school English class would know the reason: Edmond Dantès was the main character in the most famous tale of revenge, The Conte of Monte Cristo.

  The game had already started, whether I wanted it to or not. I put the letter down and slowly inhaled, then exhaled, forcing myself to breathe more calmly. Again, I tried to will my heart to stop its violent thumping, but it wouldn’t. My painful nausea grew more acute.

  My physical reaction to the letter, along with the questions spinning wildly in my head, made it hard to think straight. I continued to breathe in and out slowly, hoping this would help me regain at least enough composure to gather my thoughts. It was urgent to prioritize what needed to be done. Then, from my scattered, rambling thoughts, one imperative emerged:

  I have to stop Dantès before he kills Nate.

  That was all. Nothing else mattered.

  But how?

  By heading over to the closest police precinct. Right now. Playing Dantès’s game was the wrong move. Trying to discover his real name, his identity, was the wrong move.

  But going to the police meant telling them what had happened twenty years ago. So what? If it would save Nate, I’d do it.

  I focused on my surroundings, searching for a foothold on reality. But there was a creepy, ghostly veneer over everything—the kitchen walls, the stove, the cabinets. They didn’t look real; they appeared to be projections from some place beyond this world. This veneer was familiar. It was how the world had looked right after Lucy’s death. Everything outside of me had appeared ethereal and eerily phony. The only reality had been that I’d lost the love of my life.

  This time, the only reality was the threat to my son’s life. But unlike after Lucy’s death, now there was something I could do about it. Death hadn’t come yet, and I had a chance to combat it before it did. To hell with the veneer. I’d ignore it. This wasn’t like last time. Death hadn’t won this round yet.

  I needed to get to the nearest police precinct, present the letter, and confess to the secret I’d been keeping for twenty years. But I’d have to bring Nate with me.

  A second later, I found myself walking into the living room, letter in hand, debating what to tell him. That debate was interrupted when a frightening image came to me: Dantès placing the letter in Nate’s backpack at school. My skin was damp with sweat, and the few clear thoughts I’d managed to string together started to unravel.

  In the hallway to the den, I stopped and once again started breathing in and out slowly, hoping to abate my rush of panic. Dantès hadn’t harmed Nate. Not yet. And that led me to another rational thought: it was possible that a parent or a kid or a teacher at Nate’s school might’ve seen Dantès slipping the letter into Nate’s backpack. If so, the police would have a witness to question.

  Before stepping into the den, I glanced down at the letter, and for the first time saw it as the police would: a piece of paper that didn’t come with proof that the threat was valid. The police would have to investigate before proceeding, and that would take time. Time I didn’t have. I had less than two days to save Nate: Friday, which was almost over, and Saturday.

  And the clock was already ticking.

  Getting the proof that the threat was real meant taking one trip before talking to the police. The trip Dantès had suggested in his letter. The trip he knew I’d have to take, as if he was one step ahead of me. Check in with your partners in crime. You’ll find a connection that will serve as proof of the devastating damage I can wreak.

  That meant visiting either Lee or Quincy or both—the only two people in the world I never wanted to see again. And what if Dantès’s proof was another unfathomable horror? What if he’d already extracted revenge by murdering one of their kids? But who knew if they even had kids? The fact was, I knew nothing about them.

  After that fateful night at Cold Falls, the site of our transgression, we’d sworn never to see each other again. It was our way of forgetting. In retrospect, we’d have drifted apart anyway, but it wouldn’t have been as abrupt. Our decision to go our separate ways and not so much as even talk to each other had lasted to this day. It was one of the reasons why that night had become less real to me over the years, and more like a nightmare I couldn’t totally shake.

  I stepped into the den, went over to my desk, and fired up my laptop. Tracking down Lee and Quincy seemed like an easy task, since every time I’d tried to find out what had become of a childhood friend, the Internet had lassoed them in fairly quickly.

  Nate was glued to an animated Nickelodeon show and wasn’t paying attention to me at all. A few months ago, I’d started working in the den as a way of remaining physically close to him, so by now my presence had become part of the background for him.

  He let out a deep belly laugh, full of delight. For me, those laughs were always a quick snapshot of what happiness sounded like, and I longed to be part of it. They were a reminder that our life could get back to some kind of normalcy.

  But now Dantès had changed that.

  It didn’t take me long to find out that Lee and Quincy had one thing in common. They didn’t have Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, LinkedIn profiles, or any other kind of Internet presence that Google could immediately find.

  If I’d had the patience and focus to dig a little deeper, Google would’ve returned a hit on Quincy. A hit that would’ve verified that Dantès was playing a vicious game. But my focus was too scattered, so as soon as it became obvious that tracking down my partners in crime using Google searches was going to be tough, I pulled out my credit card and paid $14.99 to one of those despicable websites that sells personal information.

  One minute later, I had both Lee’s and Quincy’s phone numbers and addresses.

  Quincy lived in North Carolina, and Lee was local. Very local. Like me, he lived in Arlington. Both of us had settled down close to where we’d grown up. Still, based on the kind of kid Lee had been, I figured that talking to Quincy was the far wiser choice. But that reasoning lasted no longer than a second. Under the circumstances, it was critical to talk face to face, and there was no time to drive down to North Carolina. So Lee was my only option. Hopefully he’d changed over the years.

  “Nate, we’re going out to dinner,” I said, keeping my voice calm. I’d pick something up for him on the way to Lee’s place.

  “Great! Can I watch the rest of this before we go?”

  I glanced at the clock on my computer screen. His show would be over in less than ten minutes, but every minute was critical. “If you want to go out, we have to go now.”

  “Please.”

  I stood up. “I don’t mind making dinner instead.”

  “No—I want to go out!”

  After Lucy’s death, I’d spoiled him by taking him out to dinner three or four times a week. That had stopped when the reality of our financial situation had come home to roost. But by that time, eating out had become one of his favorite activities. He had a list of preferred places: Paglia’s Pizza, Subway, Granny’s, Chipotle, and Le Petit Café.

  “Then let’s go.” I grabbed the letter. “How about Subway?”

  “Really?” He was now beaming. “Can I get chips?”

  “Sure.”

  He grabbed the remote and clicked off the TV.

  In the foyer, I grabbed jackets for both of us. As I slid the letter into my jacket pocket, I glanced back at the living room. Everything was still coated with that ghostly veneer.

  Chapter Three

  We picked up Subway sandwiches—an activity now ridiculously mundane compared to the real business at hand—and ten minutes later we were driving through one of the older neighborhoods in Arlington. Here, “bash and build” hadn’t totally taken over yet, so among the splashy new McMansions were a good mix of small houses, including Lee’s—a modest, red brick rambler.

  I parked out front, then stared at his front door. Though he lived just a few miles away from me, it felt like I’d travel
ed halfway across the world. Or twenty years back in time.

  I turned to Nate. “I’ll be right back. I’m going to talk to an old friend for a minute or two.” My plan was to stay on Lee’s doorstep so I could keep an eye on Nate. “You can eat in the car.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah—just this one time.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s an early birthday present.”

  Nate’s eyes widened as he unwrapped his sandwich. I never let him eat in the car, so this was another treat.

  I climbed out, feeling for the letter in my pocket, and for the first time I realized my stupid mistake: the letter could have Dantès’s fingerprints on it, and I’d been handling it willy-nilly. Well, too late now, but I’d be more careful from here on in.

  I hurried up Lee’s walkway, braced myself at the door, and pressed the doorbell. As three chimes rang inside, a new scenario hit me. What if Lee was behind the letter? What if he was Dantès? After all, only he, Quincy, and I knew about our secret, and if one of them was behind the letter, it had to be Lee. But why would he threaten Nate? Money was the only answer that came to mind. But if this was a shakedown, wouldn’t he have asked for money?

  The front door swung open, revealing an unshaven man with pasty, lifeless skin, uncombed, wild hair, and bags under dead eyes. He was wearing a dirty white terry-cloth bathrobe, cinched around his waist. Though his disheveled appearance took me by surprise, there wasn’t any doubt that the man standing in front of me was Lee. The wiry teen was now as thick as a linebacker.

  “Long time, no see,” I said, not sure how else to start.

  “Get the hell out.” He started to swing the door closed.

  My hand automatically whipped out and stopped the door. “Please, I need to talk to you for a minute. It’s important.”

  “Whatever you’re selling, I don’t want it.” He pushed on the door, but I held firm.

  “Just give me a few seconds.”

  “Don’t you remember the deal?” His tone was harsh. “We never see or talk to each other again. We didn’t say except for a few seconds.”