The Origin of Dracula Read online

  Though Quincy convinced his parents with that argument, it didn’t quite work when I used the same argument on my parents. They wouldn’t agree to let me go. So as that weekend approached, I resorted to temper tantrums, which was unusual for me because I was an easygoing kid. I yelled at my parents, over and over again, You don’t think I’m brave enough! You don’t think I can handle it! You don’t think I can take care of myself for one night!

  After a couple of days of that, my dad started to see it my way: this camping trip was an important test of my independence. Letting me go would prove that he had faith and confidence in me. Keeping me home meant he thought I was a baby and a loser. So basically, I was able to guilt him into taking my side.

  Then he tried to convince my mom that the trip would be good for me. After all, wasn’t Cold Falls the perfect place for such an important life lesson? The Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and other youth groups often camped there for that exact reason. In addition to the trails and picnic areas, Cold Falls had two small campgrounds near the Potomac River. Those campgrounds offered a good introduction to the wilderness without the risk of being stranded in the middle of nowhere should something go wrong. Hospitals, police, et cetera, were all close by.

  By Friday, my dad had talked my mom into it.

  To this day, I wish he hadn’t.

  We spent Saturday morning getting ready. I packed a change of clothes, a flashlight, and a radio. My dad went out and bought me a sleeping bag while my mom made sandwiches. In the early afternoon, my dad drove me out to Cold Falls.

  When we pulled into the parking lot, Lee was already there, with a backpack, sleeping bag, and grocery bag by his side. He said he’d ended up taking local buses to the park and that he’d shopped for his own food. Even though his dad had promised to swing by Uncle Harry’s and pick him up, he’d never showed, and Uncle Harry didn’t have a car.

  Quincy and his dad arrived a few minutes later, and Lee and I were happy to see that Quincy had remembered to bring a tent. Then the five of us checked out a glass-enclosed map next to the ranger station—a large wooden cabin. After that, we started hiking the Gray Owl Trail. It would take us to the Clear River campground.

  The day was gorgeous—blue sky and warm sunshine—so there were quite a few other people on the trail: a mixture of families, couples, and serious hikers. After we’d hiked about an hour, the trail narrowed and the forest thickened, adding shadows and mystery to the woods around us. It felt like our adventure had started.

  We arrived at the Clear River campground a few minutes later and took measure of it. It consisted of seven campsites where the undergrowth had been cleared and the dirt packed down. Each site was separated by twenty yards of trees and brush. Nowadays, you won’t find many campgrounds like this, where the campsites are so isolated from each other. We thought this was fantastic—exactly as we’d imagined it.

  None of the sites were occupied, so Lee, Quincy, and I proceeded to carefully examine each one as if we were making a critical decision. Quincy’s dad and my dad begrudgingly went along, but it was clear that they thought all the sites were the same: large, irregularly shaped patches of dirt, each equipped with a metal barbecue set into concrete.

  We managed to find differences though. Some sites were more shaded. Some were a bit smaller. Some featured rocks laid out in a circle, where previous campers had built fires. But the biggest difference, at least to us, was the proximity to the Potomac River.

  Lee liked the site closest to the river, which was also the site farthest from the trail. Quincy and I agreed with his choice. And it was the campsite most surrounded by the wilderness.

  “Are you sure you want that be that far from the trail?” my dad said, concern on his face.

  “This is good,” I said, embarrassed that he was worried about us.

  My dad glanced at Quincy’s dad, looking for support, but didn’t get any. “Well, if anything goes wrong,” Quincy’s dad mused, “I don’t suppose being a little closer to the trail is going to help. You’ll still have to hike back to the ranger station.”

  My dad stood up tall, an indication that he didn’t like that response. Quincy’s dad must have understood my dad’s body language because he followed up with: “You all know how to get back to the ranger station, right?”

  “Yeah, we’re not stupid,” Quincy said, also embarrassed by his dad’s concern. He grabbed the tent. “Help me set this up, Dad.”

  While Quincy and his dad were setting up the tent, Lee, my dad, and I hiked through the woods to the Potomac, about fifty yards away. There was no trail here, and we ended up at the top of a steep embankment, where huge gray boulders sloped almost vertically down to the river below.

  “You guys need to be careful out here,” my dad said. “Stick to the campsite once it gets dark. And use your flashlights.” He looked down at the Potomac. “And don’t climb down these rocks. If you want to get a closer look at the river, hike down that way.” He motioned downriver to where the edge of the forest stood even with the bank.

  But Lee was staring down the cliff in front of us as if he was already planning to ignore my dad’s warning. After all, climbing down these boulders was the very kind of adventure that had drawn us here.

  My dad headed back to the campsite and I followed. Lee spent another few seconds staring down from the precipice, then pulled himself away.

  Back at the campsite, my dad reminded us that if we got hurt or ran into any problems, we should immediately go to the ranger station. A ranger was on duty twenty-four hours a day. My feeling back then, which stuck with me to this day, was that regardless of his reminder, my dad knew in his heart that if something terrible happened to us, we were in trouble.

  As it turned out, he was right on the money.

  We said our goodbyes, and our solo camping trip officially began. The first thing we decided to do was hike the rest of the Gray Owl Trail. The round trip would take about three hours, which gave us plenty of time to get back before nightfall. We took our canteens—bottled water was not yet de rigueur—and shipped out.

  It wasn’t long before we were disappointed. The hike was fairly crowded, so it wasn’t much of a wilderness adventure. The large number of hikers stripped the forest of any mystery or danger. Lee was so pissed that he marched straight off the trail and into the woods.

  We followed him, leaving the day hikers behind, and entered a more intimidating forest, where trees came at us from every angle, where bushes stood unyielding in our path, and where ground creepers grabbed at our sneakers. As the challenge of this hike grew more difficult, our mood improved.

  But that didn’t last long. We were about to get a taste of the horror that awaited us in the night to come. After about twenty minutes of roughing it off-trail, and enjoying every minute of it, Lee stopped in his tracks and put his finger to his lips, shushing us. We stopped talking, and he pointed to a bush thick with green leaves and red berries. A raccoon was at the foot of the bush, pawing at a cluster of low-hanging berries.

  Lee slid a pocketknife from his pocket and flicked the blade open. I glanced at Quincy to see if he had the same reaction I did—I wasn’t into killing the raccoon—but Quincy didn’t make eye contact with me. He was staring at the raccoon.

  I knew that if Lee was going to be stopped, it was up to Quincy to do it. Lee didn’t let any kid challenge him except for Quincy. It was like he instinctually knew that his impulses had to be kept in check, but he only let Quincy play that role. Quincy kept him out of the worst kind of trouble—the kind that involved fights with seriously dangerous kids and/or the police.

  Lee liked me for a different reason, a reason I didn’t figure out until years later. Though Lee was a rough-and-tumble kid, a delinquent in the making, he was also smart, and I validated that part of him. I was his only smart friend, as in a friend who got good grades and was quick to understand anything thrown at him. Our friendship made Lee superior to the other kids who were troublemakers.

  Lee raised his arm,
the knife poised in his hand. He aimed, then whipped his arm forward. The knife rocketed through the air, its blade spinning so smoothly it was obvious that Lee had been practicing. Still, I was shocked when the blade found its mark and stuck the raccoon right in the back. The wounded creature immediately scurried off.

  “Bull’s-eye,” Lee said, with cold confidence, then raced after his prey.

  We followed. “Why’d you do that?” I said.

  “That’s what we’re here for.” Lee was pulling away from us. “But I want that goddamn knife back!”

  Up ahead, in the underbrush, I caught a fleeting glimpse of the raccoon’s gray coat. Crimson blood glistened around the blade, which was still embedded in the poor animal. We zigged and zagged around trees and bushes, trying to keep up with him, but we lost him.

  “Do you see him anywhere?” Lee asked.

  “Nope,” Quincy said.

  Lee was scouring the underbrush ahead. “I want that goddamn knife back.”

  You should’ve thought of that before you threw it, I thought.

  We spent the next hour or so looking for the raccoon, and just before we were about to give up, we found him.

  He’d been gutted.

  The raccoon lay on his back, and his stomach had been slit open lengthwise. His gray fur was matted with blood, thick and gooey, and his wet entrails, pink, white, and black, glistened in his open stomach. Just above his head, Lee’s pocketknife was stuck in the ground, upright, like a grave marker. It, too, was covered in blood.

  “What the fuck?” Quincy said, turning away from the gruesome sight.

  Feeling nauseated, I also turned away, but Lee’s eyes were filled with morbid fascination as he stared at the display.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Quincy said.

  “Let’s see if we can find the guy who did this,” Lee said, scanning the woods around us, trying to spot the culprit.

  “Who cares who did it?” Quincy said, and he started back toward the trail.

  Lee approached the raccoon, knelt down next to it, and grabbed some leaves off the ground. He wrapped the leaves around the knife, then pulled it out of the ground.

  I took off, following Quincy’s lead.

  “We should explore a little more,” Lee shouted at us from behind.

  “We can explore more later,” Quincy said without even bothering to turn around. “Let’s see if we can find the trail.”

  I caught up to Quincy. “Can you believe someone did that?”

  “Someone put it out of its misery,” Quincy said.

  “They went overboard.”

  And the only explanation I could come up with was that it was a warning. Maybe if I’d taken it as such I would’ve never gotten Dantès’s letter twenty years later, because I would’ve left Cold Falls right then.

  I glanced back and saw that Lee had caved in and was following us. When he got closer, I blurted out, “Why’d you stab it in the first place?”

  “It’s called hunting, not stabbing,” he said, and he was right. But he didn’t get who was really being hunted. None of us did.

  By the time we made it back to the campsite, it was early evening, and we were hungry. But when I unwrapped my sandwich, the image of the gutted, bloody raccoon flashed through my mind, and nausea coursed through me again. I ended up taking just a few bites of my sandwich before wrapping it back up. Quincy ate half his sandwich before stopping. Lee, on the other hand, was ravenous, as if the raccoon had whetted his appetite. He made himself three bologna sandwiches, and he devoured them one right after the other. Then he pulled his knife from his pocket—it was still wrapped in leaves—and washed off the blood using water from his canteen.

  When he was done, he announced, “Time to check out the Potomac.”

  “Cool,” Quincy said, eager for a new, and hopefully better, adventure.

  I looked up and saw the orange glow of the setting sun beyond the treetop canopy. Nightfall was on its way.

  “We should take our flashlights,” I said.

  Lee shook his head in disgust, as if I’d proposed surrendering to a weak-kneed enemy. “We don’t need flashlights.” He got up and started through the woods. Quincy and I fell in line behind him.

  We hiked to the edge of the precipice, where we all stared down at the long stretch of boulders and the Potomac below.

  “Let’s do this,” Lee said.

  My dad’s warning was still fresh in my mind, and I weighed whether to say anything. I decided not to—I didn’t want Lee getting on my case so early in the trip, calling me a “wimpy pussy,” his preferred term for kids who didn’t join him on his reckless excursions.

  Lee started down the steep decline of boulders, but Quincy hung back. I hoped Quincy would say something, and the longer he stood there, the more that hope grew. But he didn’t say a word. Instead he clenched his jaw, braced himself, and started down after Lee.

  I looked to the south of where we stood, to the area my dad had pointed out, where the edge of the forest met the banks of the Potomac. No cliff, no precipice. Just a muddy, rocky shoreline. But that option wasn’t on the table, so I reluctantly followed Quincy.

  It was a steep climb down, and we had to use the ledges formed between the boulders to find our footing. The problem was that some of those ledges—and they were too shallow to deserve that appellation—were barely wide enough for the tips of our sneakers to grasp. We also grasped onto whatever crevices we could find on the boulders’ surfaces, then hugged the rocks with our bodies so as not to tumble down into the river below.

  Halfway down, we got a reprieve. Lee found a perch, about forty feet above the Potomac, where a massive boulder jutted out and provided a surface wide enough for all three of us to stand on safely—more or less. We congregated there, and I saw why Lee had stopped. The rest of the climb down was even steeper than the one we’d taken so far. Again I thought about saying something, and again fear of being labeled a wimpy pussy stopped me.

  “You guys ready for round two?” Lee said, motioning down toward the river.

  Quincy glanced up at the sky; the orange glow had turned to a purplish blue. Evening had arrived, and darkness would soon follow. “We should head back before it gets dark,” he said.

  Lee’s lips curled into his trademark smirk. “Chicken, huh?”

  “Nope.” Quincy glared at him. “And we should’ve brought our flashlights.”

  I was ready for Lee to anoint Quincy a wimpy pussy, but instead he pointed across the river. “Check that out! A fucking wolf!”

  On the opposite bank of the river, above us, stood a husky and powerfully built gray wolf. He was staring down at us, and I saw menace glinting in his large black eyes. Just before he turned and started trotting downstream, his eyes flashed gold for a split second.

  “It has to be a dog,” I said as I watched the animal trot downriver. “There aren’t any wolves around here.”

  “Says who?” Lee demanded.

  “My dad checked it out.” My dad had called the Park Service to find out if dangerous animals roamed Cold Falls. None did.

  “Let’s go downriver and get a better look at him,” Lee said, and he started climbing back up the cliff.

  I was relieved that he’d abandoned this particular expedition, and I took another look at the animal who’d rescued us. The animal glanced back, and this time his large black eyes looked like human eyes—smart, cunning human eyes. I glanced at Quincy to see if he’d caught this, but he’d already started climbing back up.

  “Hurry up,” Lee shouted from above. “We’re gonna lose him.”

  By the time we reached the top of the cliff—which took much longer than the climb down—evening had turned to early night, and though the real darkness hadn’t settled in yet, it suddenly felt like we were far from home, alone.

  “Let’s get the flashlights before going downriver,” Quincy said—a reasonable suggestion.

  “We don’t have time for that.” Lee was angry.

  Quincy didn’t
argue, and neither did I. We both understood that even though flashlights were a good idea, going back to the campsite would put an end to tracking the wolf, our new adventure.

  We moved downriver, but there was no trail here, so we had to pay close attention to our footing. And that was why we lost sight of the wolf.

  “He’s still out there,” Lee said. “When we can see straight across the Potomac we’ll find him.”

  Maybe, maybe not, I thought, but at least the farther south we moved, the narrower the river became and the easier it was to see the riverbank on the other side.

  When we made it to the flatlands and got a clear line of sight across the river, Quincy concluded, “I think we lost him.”

  “We got plenty of time to find him.” Lee marched forward, following the shoreline but skirting the muddy, rocky bank.

  “Maybe he went back into the woods,” I said.

  “Then we gotta cross the river.”

  That was absurd. One of his classic, crazy exploits. “This isn’t a creek,” I said. “We’re not going to find some rocks to walk across.”

  “You think I’m an idiot? Maybe there’s a boat pulled up on the shore.”

  “I don’t think there’s gonna be a boat around here,” I said.

  “Why not?” He was determined to track down the wolf.

  “There aren’t any boat rental places in Cold Falls.”

  “What if a camper brought one?”

  He had a point, and Quincy laughed. “He got ya.”

  “So the plan is to steal a boat?” I said.

  Lee didn’t answer, but marched on. Quincy shrugged his shoulders and shot me a smile, as if to say Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.

  We hiked in silence, concentrating on avoiding the mud while also checking the other riverbank, hoping to catch a glimpse of the elusive wolf.

  No such luck.

  It wasn’t long before a waxing crescent moon brightened the night sky, painting the forest and river with a pale halo. But the halo didn’t illuminate the woods. Instead it bathed them in this unsettling, otherworldly hue. I still remember that abnormal tint, and thinking, Shouldn’t the light of the moon make the forest brighter, not creepier? Not only did I feel like I had traveled far from home, I now felt like I’d crossed over into another world.