Lee suddenly stopped, and for a second I thought he was giving up, but he opened a dumpster and jumped in. I wasn’t looking over my shoulder long enough to see it, but I heard him slam the lid down over himself, then noticed that the paws were no longer clicking on the asphalt.
When I looked back again, the dog was growling menacingly at the dumpster. It stood on its hind legs and attacked the lid’s metal lip, savagely snapping at it. But watching this unfold slowed me down, and the dog quickly caught on and bolted toward me. Instead of picking up my pace, I followed Lee’s lead, lunged for a dumpster, opened it, scrambled inside, and pulled the lid closed.
I gagged from the stench of putrid food and dog feces. The plastic trash bags surrounding me were leaking, and their juices were already seeping into my clothes, coating my skin with stench. The rancid stink was unbearable. My stomach clenched, and I willed myself not to puke.
A heavy thud landed above me, followed by clawing and snarling. The rabid dog’s scraping was so powerful that I actually thought he might be able to claw through the metal. Anything was possible in hell.
Then there was another heavy thud—and another—and another. The dog was throwing himself against the metal lid. I could hear him growling every time he righted himself. With each blow, he became stronger and more fierce, until he was rocking the entire dumpster.
My nausea worsened, and just as I thought I was going to vomit, the impossible happened: the lid started to warp under the dog’s relentless assault. The metal was somehow buckling. And if that wasn’t enough to make me believe I was no longer in a world where reality mattered, I suddenly remembered one of the rings of hell in Dante’s Inferno—a river of feces—and I realized that that was exactly where I was now trapped.
I vomited. The retching was deep and painful. The contents of my stomach added to the already unbearable stench. My retching ended with a couple of dry, agonizing heaves, which left me sweaty, aching, and sore.
I was so dazed that it took me a minute or more to notice that the dog’s assault had stopped. Maybe he’d retreated, pleased that he’d driven me so deep into hell, or maybe he was waiting me out.
I debated whether to make a run for it or stay put, but soon the decision was made for me. The dumpster lid whipped open—revealing Lee, breathing heavily. His eyes looked dead, as they had when I had first seen them. His cheeks were pale. The life had been chased out of him. He didn’t say a word as I climbed out, and I figured he was too shell-shocked to talk and left it at that.
I was in bad shape, too, in pain from retching, and shaken by the damage the dog had inflicted on the dumpster’s lid, which was even more apparent from the outside; the metal was dented as if someone had repeatedly smashed it with a sledgehammer. But I still should’ve realized that Lee’s demeanor wasn’t quite right—that his zombie-like state didn’t stem from shock and fear.
When we stepped up to the back of the apartment building, I finally spoke. “Do you think that Dantès sicced that dog on us?”
Lee was wearing a hollow, blank expression, as if he wasn’t all there yet. He shook his head—that was his only response.
Inside the building, we walked down a cinderblock hallway, past apartment doors, distressed and scratched, and into a dingy lobby. The lobby had no furniture, and there weren’t even any cheap paintings hanging on the walls, the usual go-to adornment when attempting to add some cheer to an otherwise dreary environment.
Lee pressed the elevator call button, then stared at the numbers above the door. The elevator motor started up, grinding loudly, straining to do its job. Along with the motor’s mechanical squawking, I heard what sounded like growling.
I glanced around the lobby, but it was empty. I glanced at Lee to see his reaction, but he was just staring up at the numbers, lost in his own world. Maybe I’d imagined the growling.
Then I heard it again, this time more guttural and raw, and my heart skipped a beat, because it was close. Real close. But there was no one and nothing else in the lobby except for Lee and me. Lee still hadn’t reacted, nor said anything, and I found myself suddenly taking a step back from him as if he was the source of the growling. But he just continued to stare up at the numbers, which now indicated that the elevator had arrived.
The door slid open, squealing as it did, and as Lee finally looked down, I heard the guttural growl again, this time mixed in with the door’s squealing. It sounded like it was coming from Lee, but he stepped into the elevator before I could be sure. I followed, telling myself that I was still unnerved by my stay in the dumpster.
The elevator was spare and sad, its steel walls buffed to a flat dullness by repeated attempts to remove graffiti. Of course, the delinquents had battled back by engraving their markings right into the steel—sharp cuts forming curse words and threats.
We creaked to a stop on the fourth floor. Lee led the way down a hallway more ugly than the one downstairs and stopped in front of apartment 4E, where I expected him to pull some keys from his pocket—but he didn’t. Instead he stood there for a beat, as if he couldn’t remember where he was, and then he did something weird. The motion was so slight, I couldn’t swear I’d actually seen it. He appeared to crinkle his nose as if he was sniffing the air. A second later, he bent down, lifted the corner of the plastic doormat, and picked up a key from underneath it.
He unlocked the door, and we entered the apartment. The odor of the place hit me first: a mixture of body odor, dirty clothes, mildew, and rotting food. It wasn’t as bad as the stench in the dumpster, but if left to ripen for a few more days, it would be.
I unintentionally winced, then glanced at Lee, hoping he hadn’t seen my reaction. He already felt guilty enough about his uncle’s living conditions, and I didn’t want to pile on. Still, I had to wonder why the caretaker wasn’t doing a better job. But then I realized she must have quit, as Lee had feared she might.
Lee didn’t notice my reaction. He’d already made it across the living room and was walking down a narrow hallway toward the back of the apartment. Rather than follow him, I took in the furnishings of the shabby room: a well-worn plaid couch, either salvaged or really old, and covered with dark stains; an easy chair; and a plastic coffee table.
“Get the hell outta here!” A voice—rich, deep, and southern—thundered from down the hallway. I scooted over to check it out and saw Lee stepping back out of a room at the end of the hall.
“I ain’t gonna tell ya again!” the voice said.
Lee continued to back away, and Harry came following after him in a wheelchair.
Even though he was seated, I could see that Harry was a big man, bigger than Lee, with a barrel chest and broad shoulders. If Lee had the build of a linebacker, Harry had the build of an All-Pro linebacker. And if that didn’t make him intimidating enough already, the rifle lying across the armrests of his wheelchair would have.
Harry took his hands off the wheels, grabbed the rifle, and tucked the butt firmly into his shoulder, like he knew exactly how to wield the weapon. He trained the rifle on Lee. “I knew you’d be comin’,” he said.
Maybe that was why instead of wearing pajamas, he was dressed in street clothes—a gray sweatshirt and a pair of jeans. The jeans were cut off at the knees and sewn up to encase his thighs, which were all that remained of his legs.
Lee wasn’t responding to his uncle, and I weighed whether to chime in and tell Harry that Lee was in shock.
“You ain’t gonna get me,” Harry said, then skillfully and quickly placed the gun back on the armrests, grabbed the wheels, rolled the wheelchair forward, and snatched the gun back up. He trained it on Lee once again.
Lee was now backed up into the living room.
Harry’s wheelchair rolled to a stop at the mouth of the hallway, and now he aimed the gun at me. “If you’re helpin’ him, I’d just as soon put a bullet in you, too. I can get off two shots before you know what hit ya.”
He aimed the gun back at Lee. “I been waiting for you. I knew he’d send some
thing my way. I been on the lookout.”
I looked at Lee. Why wasn’t he responding?
His response came just then. It took the form of a step toward Harry. One step.
A shot rang out, quick, sharp, and with no fanfare.
Lee’s head snapped back and his body crumpled to the floor. Part of his forehead had been blown off, leaving a gruesome cavity of flayed flesh and bone over his right eye. Dark, crimson blood was oozing from the cavity and pooling around his head.
Stunned, I sucked in air and looked away from the disturbing sight. Unfortunately, my eyes fell on the bits of skull and gray matter littering the plaid couch. My throat went dry and my stomach clenched. The nausea was returning.
“Go on, get out,” Harry said.
I looked over at him. His rifle was trained on me.
“Go on,” he said.
“You killed him…” I couldn’t accept that this had actually happened. Fact and fiction. Please let this be fiction.
Harry drew the rifle butt more firmly into his shoulder and aimed the barrel at my head. He was ready to squeeze off another round.
I wasn’t going to challenge him, so I headed toward the door. But when I glanced down at Lee, I stopped in my tracks. I was staring down at a huge black dog lying dead in a pool of blood. The very same dog that had been hunting us down in the alley. It was his head that was missing a chunk of flesh and bone. Not Lee’s.
Confused, I turned back to Harry and stared at him. What the hell was going on? Harry had somehow seen that Lee had been a shadow. And he’d somehow seen the rabid dog behind the shadow. But how?
Though Harry hadn’t lowered the rifle, I wasn’t going to run. I was standing in front of the only person who might be able to help me. Harry wasn’t chained down in Plato’s cave. He wasn’t a prisoner facing a wall of shadows.
“How did you know it wasn’t Lee?” I said, and I stopped there even though I wanted to unload a barrage of questions.
“You just got to look,” he said. A straightforward answer that echoed the homeless man, but was still of no help.
“I’ve been with him all night and I didn’t know.”
“Then you’re a dumbass.” He finally lowered his gun, as if he’d concluded that this dumbass was too stupid to pose a threat.
“What do you mean, ‘You just got to look’?”
With his rifle, he motioned to the dog. “If you’ve got something to do with that, then you gotta be on the lookout.”
“And what exactly am I supposed to be on the lookout for?”
“Why’d you come here?” he demanded.
“Lee and I were looking for the person who murdered our wives. We thought you might have a lead.”
“You’re a lying son of a bitch.” Immediately he aimed the gun at my head again. “Grace died in an accident. She wasn’t murdered.”
“Lee found out tonight that it wasn’t an accident.”
“And where is Lee?”
“I don’t know.” But I did know this: the dead-eyed thing who’d opened my dumpster wasn’t Lee. Lee was still out there somewhere—in a dumpster, or worse. “Listen, Harry,” I said. “When Lee—I mean whatever that thing is—walked in here—”
“It’s a goddamn dog—plain and simple.”
“Okay, but you said you knew something would be coming. You knew someone would send it. Who? Who would send it?” I wanted him to say Dantès, but I knew the answer wouldn’t be that simple.
Just then the front door lock rattled. Harry instantly swung his gun around.
The door swung open and Lee stepped inside. His eyes immediately fell on the dog. “Holy shit!” he said. “How the hell did it get in here?”
“It morphed into you and walked in,” I said, accepting as fact something I would’ve dismissed as fiction just hours ago.
Lee cocked his head. “What are you talking about?”
“I don’t get it either,” I said.
Lee approached his uncle. “Harry—what’s going on?”
“We gotta get out of here. Right now. That’s what’s going on.”
“What’s the rush? It looks like you took care of business.”
“Business ain’t over.”
“Okay, then fill me in.”
“We gotta get outta here first.”
“What the fuck is going on, Harry?” This time I was happy that Lee’s anger was calling the shots. I wanted answers too.
“It’s a long story,” Harry said.
And that was my cue to chime in. “My bet is that it’s the exact story we came here to hear.”
“Well, you ain’t gonna hear it now, boys.” Harry rolled his wheelchair across the room. “We’re sitting ducks.” He stopped in front of a closet and opened it. “Now get over here, Lee, and grab the guns.” He pointed to a metal box at the back of the closet. “And the ammo.”
“We need to hear that story now,” Lee said.
“I told ya—we don’t got time.”
Lee didn’t push it. He walked over to the closet and dragged the box out.
“Harry,” I said, impatient and starving for information, “you were waiting for something to show up. How did you know it would?”
“I got lucky—I don’t wait every night. Maybe ten times a year. Tonight was one of those nights. I guessed pretty good, huh?”
Lee opened the box and grabbed a rifle and pistol from inside. He tried to hand me the pistol, but I wouldn’t take it. I just shook my head. You’d think by now I’d be ready to dish out some vigilante justice, or, at a minimum, use lethal force to protect Nate, but I had been bred to have an aversion to guns, and it was going to be hard to overcome it.
Lee grabbed two boxes of ammo, then went into Harry’s bedroom and returned with an army duffel bag. He stuck the rifle, pistol, and ammo inside.
Harry thrust his own rifle toward Lee. “Stick this in there too. Can’t be wheeling through the hallways with it. And gimme the pistol.”
Lee loaded the pistol, then handed it to Harry, who stuffed it between his thigh and the wheelchair. “Okay—let’s go,” Harry said.
“Where to?” Lee stuck the duffel bag on Harry’s lap and pushed the wheelchair toward the door.
“There’s a place that’s kinda safe.”
“Kind of?” I didn’t think that sounded too promising.
“It kept me safe,” Harry said. “But you boys are in all sorts of trouble, aren’t ya?”
On the way downstairs, and in the elevator, Lee gave Harry a CliffsNotes version of our fateful night at Cold Falls. He told it as a tale of self-defense, explaining that the strange man had hunted him down through the foggy night.
“I had to push him over or he would’ve killed me,” Lee said.
“Don’t make no difference,” Harry said.
“What are you talking about?” Lee voiced my exact thought.
Harry didn’t bother to answer. We were now in the parking lot, and he was focused on our surroundings with keen concentration—every muscle in his body was taut. Lee helped him into the back seat of my car, then folded his wheelchair, which I put in the trunk along with the duffel bag.
As I backed out of my parking space, Lee asked Harry where the place was that he wanted to go, the place that was safe. Kind of.
“My old place—on Glebe,” Harry said.
Lee shook his head. “We can’t. Someone’s living there.”
“Nah, that’s not what I mean. Just go to that block. He don’t like it there.”
“Who’s he?’” I said.
“He’s what my story’s about.”
“Let’s hear it, Uncle Harry,” Lee said, then gave me my marching orders. “Head to Glebe and Columbia Pike.”
“What happened to the third boy you said was camping with ya at Cold Falls?” Harry asked.
“Quincy’s dead,” Lee answered. “Drowned.”
I looked at Harry in the rearview mirror. “Do you know who killed him? Who killed our wives?” My patience was running thin. P
robably because my belief system was cracking. After all, it was hard to admit to myself that a rabid dog had fooled me into thinking it was Lee.
“Let him tell the story,” Lee said. “Stories tell you all you need to know.”
“Damn right,” Harry said.
I took a deep a breath and let it out. Apparently Lee was now the patient one. At least, patient enough to sit through one of Uncle Harry’s stories rather than get right to the point.
“Lee, first I gotta fess up,” Harry said. “I didn’t lose my legs in combat. I told you that ’cause there was no reason to tell you any different. You were a kid and you didn’t need to know the truth. But I told your daddy the truth. He didn’t believe me, but I can’t really blame him. He thinks the curse is just some kind of bad luck. He don’t understand the curse, because it’s got nothing to do with him.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in the Bellington curse?” Lee said.
“Not in the way your daddy does.”
“But you always told me it was bullshit.”
“It’s bullshit when it comes to thinking of it like bad luck.”
“You’re saying you believe it?”
“Listen, I didn’t tell you nothing before because I was hoping you’d get off scot-free. Your daddy did.”
“But his life is a mess.”
“That’s just it. His life is a mess because he made it that way. The curse ain’t about that. It’s more like the Hatfields and McCoys. But one side, one family, is always on the run. We’re that side. And it’s not all Bellingtons that get messed with. Like I said, your daddy got off scot-free. His problems ain’t nothing but his own fault. For me—well, that ain’t the case. And from what I’m hearing tonight, it ain’t the case for you either.”
And why am I involved? I thought. I wasn’t a Bellington. I wasn’t a Hatfield or McCoy. Was it just because I’d become friends with the wrong kid in middle school? Had my parents been right when they’d warned me, “Don’t hang out with the wrong kids”?
The Origin of Dracula Page 13
