“Let me guess,” sighed Frankenstein Monster. “Dracula invited you to the castle tonight to hear his networking pitch, right?”
“How did you...?” Ergo asked.
The monster rolled his eyes. “He’s always yammering on about that stuff. In fact, it’s pretty sick, actually, how he’ll steer any conversation about anything to a discussion about his vampire networking business. The other day I was in the kitchen, cleaning the yogurt maker, and Dracula stops by and starts telling me about how absorbing the life blood of the living is four billion times stronger for the body than the probiotic content of homemade yogurt. I mean, can you believe this guy? It’s like, give it a rest already, I’m making friggin’ homemade yogurt...”
Ergo’s eyes widened, but he kept quiet.
“Oh, and perish the thought that you’re holding an office job. Oh, man, he’s relentless about how you’re stuck in a dead-end job when you could be immortal and absorbing souls and never die and blah blah,” piped in Sea Monster from the other room.
But Frankenstein Monster simply laughed and smirked. “Oh, and when have YOU ever held an office job, Fishman? Undersea CPA agency?” He laughed.
Sea Monster wasn't amused. “As a matter of fact, before my… lab accident… I was well occupied with a number of light office and clerical work positions and…”
Frankenstein Monster held up a disproportionately sized hand and silenced Sea Monster, re-entering the room with plates of sliced pizza in each hand.
“Hey, the red kid here is just another victim of Dracula’s kooky multi-level vampire scheme, and we need to help him get out of here. Look, there’s a door around the corner that leads to a secret passage into the castle pantry. We use that from time to time for more snack food. Head that way and you can work your way through the kitchen to the back door of the castle. Then just make your way down the hill, and you should reach a small village.”
“Thanks, friend.” Ergo smiled, happy to find an ally in this dark place. Frankenstein Monster nodded.
Sea Monster merely rolled his eyes. “They’ll catch him regardless…”
As Ergo made his way from the room through the hidden passage, he heard the two monsters continue to squabble behind him. He nimbly dodged through various obstacles in the kitchen and finally plowed through a large oaken door on the other side of the castle, opposite the one that had admitted him earlier.
Much to Ergo’s alarm, the castle yard made a steep, mountainous descent along a craggy, rocky slope scattered with tall pines. He studied the descent for a fraction of time before hearing the claxon behind him growing louder. His unholy pursuers were drawing closer.
He scrambled down the mountain, the gravelly path beneath him causing his trek to be more sliding than running, and he fought desperately to maintain his balance. From behind him came louder screams and yells and pleading. From far away wolves howled and Ergo, hearing these horrific noises, the shrieks of the creatures behind him, and the sound of his own labored breathing, felt an overwhelming sense of doom. His foot tripped on a pine branch. He stumbled and slid farther down the mountain, slamming at an awkward angle into a tree. The ordeal left him winded.
Before he could get his bearings, the first of the vampire marketers reached him, this one being a freakishly slender vampire woman with long curly black hair and inky, soulless eyes. With supernatural might she grasped poor Ergo’s neck and, keeping him pinned to the tree, slid him upward to face her eye to eye. In a voice ripe with unrighteous malignancy, she whispered snake-like to the boy.
“I don’t care if you’ve had a change of heart… I’m going to bring you into my organization right now!”
Ergo, trapped and unable to escape the icy choke hold, could only stare in wide-eyed horror as the inhuman woman bared her needle-like vampiric teeth and eased closer…
Author’s Note
Gentle readers, the following page is perhaps the most shocking, gruesome, and disturbing of this entire narrative, and for the sake of sensitive readers who might be friends of public television and radio, I present the following options for your discriminating reading enjoyment… choose your own life path…
If you wish to read all of the grisly, troubling vampiric events that immediately follow, click here.
If you would prefer to skip this completely, and instead refresh yourself with something mild and pleasant, click here instead.
If you’ve had enough of reading this stupid book and just want to get it over with, click here.
Or you can just keep reading, of course…