Free The Origin of Dracula by Irving Belateche

that I was already feeling better, which was true. I was feeling better because I was leaving Cold Falls forever. Or so I hoped. But that would turn out not to be the case. In two decades, I’d return to the scene of the crime, and maybe in the back of my mind, or in my gut, where a dull ache had started to grow, I knew those woods and that night would draw me back in.
    In the days that followed, I could’ve told my dad the truth about Cold Falls and gotten his advice about going to the police and combating Lee’s version of the story. My dad and I had a close relationship, so confiding in him wouldn’t have been as hard for me as it might have been for some kids.
    But I didn’t confide in him. Instead, I watched the local news every night, flipping between stations, expecting to land on a story about a man who’d recently disappeared, or about a man who’d been fished out of the Potomac, or about a man who’d washed up on the riverbank with his head cracked open. In the mornings, I’d search the Washington Post looking for a headline about a man who’d drowned in the Potomac, or about a man who’d been found bruised and battered in Cold Falls State Park.
    Days turned into weeks, and I never saw or heard anything about any such man. And when weeks turned into months, not only did it seem foolish to confess, I also became more convinced that the incident hadn’t unfolded the way I’d originally thought. I replayed it over and over again, in great detail, to confirm that, indeed, it had been a nightmare of shadows, fog, and fear.
    But there was a huge kink in that interpretation. Lee had admitted to pushing the man over the cliff. And obsessively reliving that night didn’t wipe out that kink. More times than not, when I was caught up in that loop of creepy, unsettling images, it triggered a clawing guilt, accompanied by a physical reaction. My skin felt clammy and dank, as if the fog were touching it again, reaching out from Cold Falls to haunt me. It took me a long time to stop reliving that night. Only when months turned into years was I able to bury it in a hard-to-reach corner of my psyche.

Chapter Five
    “I remember it all,” I said. The dreadful images from that night may have been buried deep in my psyche, but they were perfectly preserved, ready to be recalled at a moment’s notice.
    Lee was looking at the mantelpiece as if he was studying the vases of dead flowers. “But you never believed me,” he said. “That that guy was hunting me down.”
    “It doesn’t matter now, does it?” There was no point in debating the past. And there was no time. This was all about saving Nate’s life.
    “If you really remember that night,” he said, “you’d remember it was fucked up.”
    That much we agreed on, but I still wasn’t sure if he was referring to the surreal elements. “So?”
    “No one reported the man missing,” he said. “It was like he disappeared.”
    “We got lucky.”
    “And now you think our luck finally ran out?” His question dripped with disdain, as if he was daring me to agree with something absurd.
    “Someone discovered what we did and is getting revenge.”
    “No one found out.”
    Anger suddenly boiled up inside me. “What are you talking about?”
    “It’s him.”
    “Him? You mean the guy you killed?”
    He didn’t answer my question, but he held my eyes, resolutely and confidently, meaning “yes” and also calling me out as a fool for not believing him.
    “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “You’re the one who doesn’t remember that night. He couldn’t have survived that fall. I heard his body hit the boulders.”
    “But what did you see ? Actually see ?”
    “Just because I didn’t see him hit the rocks and float on downriver, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”
    “That’s not what I’m talking about. I mean what did you actually see?”
    If he wanted me to talk about the dank, foul fog, or the wolf, or the castle, or the unearthly pallid shade of