“It smells like a sewer,” I said, pinching my nose.
“We do visit all the best places,” Frankie said.
At the bottom of the stairs was an old, ruined cellar. Pale yellow moonlight streaked in through a cracked window and allowed us to look around.
“This must be a sort of chapel,” said Harker.
The cellar’s ceiling was low and partially caved in. Tumbled stones lay everywhere, amid mounds of dirt piled across the floor. But the strangest thing was the boxes. Dozens and dozens of long wooden boxes.
They looked like coffins, only the lids were off of some of them and we saw that they weren’t filled with bodies. They were filled with dirt.
“Whoever heard of putting dirt in a box?” I asked.
“Flower boxes have dirt in them,” said Harker.
I laughed. “Somehow I don’t think Dracula is into gardening.”
Being good with numbers, Frankie did a quick count of the boxes. “Fifty boxes,” she said, dusting her hands.
“But why are they here?” asked Harker. “What are they for? It’s all so strange and mysterious—”
“I’ll find out,” said Frankie. She plopped down on a box that stood in a patch of yellow moonlight, cracked open the book, and stuck her nose deep into it.
“Wow, Frankie,” I said. “First you count, then you read? Someone here’s going to get a major headache.”
“Probably,” she admitted. “But it makes me not so scared if I know what’s going on.”
“I can dig it.” And I could. It’s like watching a scary movie a second time. You know what’s going to happen and you aren’t as scared as you were the first time.
While Frankie was straining her eyesight, and Harker poked around the chapel for a way out, I found something interesting. On the side of each dirt box was a label, and all of them said the same thing.
from Dracula’s Castle
To Whitby, England
Handle with Care
For some reason, it made me mad that the evil vampire was asking people to handle him with care.
“Ha!” I snorted. “I’ll handle with no care! None! You big vampire creep face—”
Next to me was a box with its lid on. I gave it a hard kick and the lid just happened to slide aside.
What I saw made my heart stop.
He was inside the box. Yes, him! The Count, in the box. He was lying on a bed of dirt. His eyes were closed, but his face was even plumper than before. Blood trickled from the corners of his mouth. And he was smiling.
“G-G-G-Grosssss!” I finally managed to say. Harker ran over and, seeing who was napping in the box, grabbed a nearby shovel and whacked Dracula on the head. It didn’t seem to hurt him at all. He hardly budged an inch. In fact, all that happened was that the vampire’s face turned to us, and his eyes popped open.
“Yahhh!” I cried. I kicked the lid back over his face, and we jumped back, expecting Drac to bounce out. But he didn’t. I guess he was just so tired after his snacking that he didn’t want to get up.
Scared and shivering, Harker and I edged back to Frankie, who was reading so deeply she hadn’t heard us yelling and batting vampires with shovels. I was about to tell her what we’d seen when I realized something.
We were suddenly not alone.
It’s not as if there were a noise. I didn’t actually hear anything. It was more of a feeling running up my neck.
At least I hoped it was a feeling running up my neck and not fingers running up my neck. I turned slowly.
Standing there, in the yellow moonlight, were three women. At least they had been women … once. Now they were three thin, pale, probably dead, ex-women.
My heart nearly stopped beating.
The women stood in the shadows staring at us. They wore long, dirty gowns. Their skin was colorless, but their eyes were bright and hard, their teeth white, and their lips red and gleaming.
They might have passed for supermodels on a photoshoot in a castle, except that they cast no shadows on the floor, they smelled really bad, those nice white teeth were actually fangs, and like their vampire boss, their eyes were flashing red.
“Um … Harker?” I said.
But Harker was even more scared than I was. He stood there, silent, staring, and frozen to the spot as the three vampires took a single step toward us.
“F … F … Frankie?” I mumbled.
“Shhh,” she said, her back to us, her nose deep in the book, not seeing anything of what was going on. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m reading here. Plus, I found the part where we’re in this basement.”
“Frankie, I have to tell you something.…”
“Shhh,” she repeated. “Harker’s telling how he finds the dirt and the boxes. And there’s the yellow moonlight. It’s all here on page fifty-four. This is so cool!”
“Skim ahead, will you? I need to know what happens on, say, page fifty-five.”
“Skimming isn’t reading!” she said sharply, still glued to the page. “Mr. Wexler told us to read every word. Besides, there are lots of strange words in this book.…”
“There are also lots of strange people here and I think they want us dead!”
“You really know how to break somebody’s concentration, Devin,” Frankie said with a sigh, shutting her book and turning to Harker and me. “Now what strange people are you talking about—”
The three women stood staring at Frankie, their fangs glistening in the moonlight.
Frankie paused a moment, then said, “Oh.”
Then she said, “OH!”
“Now do you see what I mean?” I said. “Strange people. Strange ladies. Although I’m pretty sure the technical term is lady vampires. Three lady vampires. One for each of us. And I figure if we don’t want to get to know them a lot better, we need to get out of here.”
Frankie nodded slowly. “You just read my mind.”
“Oh, great! I learn to read just before—I die!”
At that moment, the three vampires ground their sharp teeth together and—with a very creepy, wet, rushing sound—they attacked us.
Chapter 10
Luckily, my legs turned to jelly, and I crumpled to the floor. The first lady vampire couldn’t stop in time, and she fell over me and into a box.
“Get them!” she howled to the others, spitting dirt from her mouth. “They belong to us!”
Well, that was pretty much the creepiest thing I’d ever heard! But there was no time to think about it.
“I’ll take the dumb one!” the second vampire said.
“Which dumb one?” the third asked.
“Hey!” said Frankie. “Now it’s personal!”
As I wobbled to my feet, Frankie hurled a shovel at the charging vamps.
Wump-wump-wump!
They crashed into a wall and let out a wild hissing sound that made my skin crawl. In the second that they were all down, Frankie grabbed me and Harker, and all three of us tore straight up the stairs we had come down.
My heart was racing like a motor. My head was pounding like a drum. We kept running and didn’t stop to catch our breath until we were back in Dracula’s room. We rushed in and bolted the door behind us.
“Close shave,” said Frankie.
“Close shave!” I cried. “We nearly died! We’ve got to get out of this book—”
Suddenly we heard the sound of cracking whips and the pounding and scraping of horses’ hooves from outside.
“What new evil is happening now?” said Harker.
We jumped over to the window and flung it open in time to see five large wagons roll into the black-stoned courtyard below.
The lead driver shouted in a strange language to the others, and the wagons slowed to a stop. Men hopped out and entered the castle far below. A moment later, they began loading the big long boxes into the wagons.
“Those are Gypsies,” said Harker. “What sort of game is Dracula playing here?”
“My guess is he’s taking his boxes to England,
” I replied. “They were all filled with dirt, labeled, and ready to go.”
“Right,” added Frankie. “It’s not like he can just bop around whenever and wherever he wants. Vamps have to work the night shift.”
Harker’s eyes were wild. “But … but … if they are taking Dracula’s boxes to England, he will go with them. And that means … we will be left here prisoners in this castle … with them. With those horrible—”
Blam! Blam!
The vampire ladies began pounding on the door, wailing loudly, “We want you! And we’ll get you!”
“Oh!” Harker suddenly blurted out. “We are trapped! Trapped like rats! Could any dream be more terrible than this horrible gloom and mystery that closes around me! Oh, dear! Dear, dear!”
I guessed he was talking lines from the book, but I had to admit it did look fairly grim for us. I turned to my friend. “Frankie, there’s only one thing to do,” I said. “We need to end this chapter. End it right now.”
“What? You’re not thinking of …”
“Exactly. Jump ahead in the book. We need to get out of here. If we flip ahead a couple of pages things could be better. I mean, how much worse could they get?”
Womp! Womp! The vamps were hurtling themselves against the door now.
Frankie looked scared. “But what about the big ripping sound and the darkness coming at us and everything going nutty-nutty?”
Poing! One of the hinges popped off the door and flew across the room. The door sagged toward us.
“One for each of us!” the lady vampires wailed.
“Flip the pages, Frankie!” I cried. “Get us out of here!”
Harker’s eyes grew huge. His skin was as white as a pillowcase. “We’re going to die! Die, die, die! Oh, good-bye, everyone! Mina, my love, I shall try to escape home to you. Until then—good-bye! Goodbye!”
“Frankie!” I cried. “Flip the pages! Flip them— now!”
She gave me one last look, then flipped the pages.
The room cracked from top to bottom with an enormous ripping sound. Darkness poured out of the rip, and we were all thrown to the floor.
The walls, the ceiling, the furniture around us … everything went black and swirly.
Everything in my head went black and swirly, too.
Then—kawooooom!—there was nothing.
Chapter 11
The next thing I remember was that I was on my back and water was splashing my face. Correction, I was on my back, then my front, then my back. I was rolling.
“Help!” I screamed.
Suddenly a hand grabbed me. I hoped that the hand wasn’t all hairy with its fingernails cut to sharp points.
It wasn’t. The fingernails were painted pearly white.
“Frankie!” I cried.
“One and the same!” Frankie dragged me to my feet.
I wiped the water from my eyes. “Where are we?”
“On some kind of ship,” she said, struggling to keep her balance. “And there’s a major storm going on.”
It seemed true. We were on a flat wooden deck crammed with wet stuff. Waves were sloshing up really high, then crashing down again.
“The ship is called the Demeter,” Frankie went on, bending over the book to keep the old pages dry. “It says so right here. Actually, it’s not Harker’s diary anymore. It’s a clipping from a newspaper.”
Icy rain pelted us like heavy fists. To make it worse, thick fog poured over everything and choked the air.
“I don’t want to be on a ship,” I said, trying to keep from falling overboard. “I don’t like ships. They roll from side to side, and pretty soon my lunch starts thinking about reappearing.”
“You won’t like this ship for another reason,” said Frankie. “It’s full of boxes—”
“Boxes!” I shrieked at the top of my lungs. “Boxes! Boxes from Dracula’s castle? Boxes of dirt?”
“The baddest, evilest dirt ever,” said Frankie, pointing to the deck behind me where the long wooden coffins were tied down with thick ropes.
I staggered, then clung to Frankie for support. “So, like, how many pages did you actually flip?”
Using her finger and thumb to mark the places, Frankie said, “About thirty pages.”
“No wonder we blew a fuse!”
“At least I don’t see Pastyface Neckbiter around anywhere,” Frankie mumbled. “Those spooky vampire sisters, either. Which, let me tell you, is good news. The bad news is that when we changed the setting, I think we left our old pal Jonathan Harker behind—”
There was a sudden crashing jolt, and we were thrown to the deck. Staggering to our feet, we noticed that the boat didn’t rock back and forth anymore.
“We must have run aground,” said Frankie. “That means we’ve landed!”
“The best part of being on a boat,” I said.
We scrambled to the railing and, looking over, found that the storm had driven the ship up onto a beach. There were cliffs surrounding us on all sides, with a small town nestled between them and a harbor below.
“Cute little town, no castles in sight, I like it!” I said.
Grrrr. Something growled.
I turned to Frankie. “Did you just growl at me? Please say ‘yes.’”
“No.”
Grrrr!
We whirled around to see a big black dog spring onto deck from inside the ship. It clacked its jaws at us and bared its enormous teeth as if it were going to charge, but a giant wave washed over Frankie and me and sent us sliding across the deck. That wave saved us.
Growling once more, the dog leaped twenty feet off the deck to the harbor below and hightailed it across the sand.
“Not that I want to follow that creepy thing,” I said, “but we should probably get off the ship, too.”
“Aye-aye, Captain Dev!”
We spotted a big gray hulk of a building standing in the fog nearby. When a blast of wind came up over the water I could see that the building was a church. It looked fairly safe.
We climbed off the ship and ran across the beach, taking cover from the storm under the peaked front roof of the church. While Frankie read the book to see what she could find out, I took a look around.
In the flashes of lightning, I saw that the church stood nearby a small graveyard of old, tilted stones. They made me shiver, as just about everything had since we had dropped into this book. The shivers convinced me that, even though the setting had changed, we were definitely in the same story.
“I found it,” said Frankie, pointing to the page. “The storm, the church. There should be a woman—”
“You there! You!” a woman’s voice shouted.
“Right on schedule,” I said.
We turned to see a woman running toward the church. She was dressed in a long cloak, but her head was bare, and her long brown hair was tossed by the wind. She looked very scared about something. Probably about being in a horror book.
“My goodness!” she cried, rushing under the roof to us. “Are you all right? What are you doing here?”
Frankie and I glanced at each other. We knew the truth wouldn’t help much. “We’re new in town,” I said. “By the way, what town is this?”
“Why, it’s Whitby, of course—”
“Of course, of course!” Frankie whispered. “The labels on the dirt boxes were addressed to Whitby. So, we’re in England now.”
“Cool,” I said. “Lady, we’re Frankie and Devin.”
“My name is Mina,” she said. “Mina Murray. But soon my name will change to Mina Harker.”
Frankie jumped. “Hey, we know you! Your boyfriend Jonathan told us about you—”
Mina nearly hit the church roof. “My goodness! Jonathan is in Europe even now! How do you know him?”
“We just left him in Dracula’s castle,” I said.
“Which is pretty much a lair of evil,” said Frankie.
“Dracula was the man Jonathan was going to see!” Mina said. “Please—tell me everything you know.”
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“Why, sure,” I said. Then I took a deep breath.
“It all started with me turning to chat with Frankie in Mr. Wexler’s English class this morning.…”
Ten minutes later I finished with, “So I told Frankie to flip the pages. And she flipped the pages! Everything went all kkkk! and here we are.”
When I finally stopped, Mina was staring at me as if I were some kind of idiot. It’s a look I am familiar with.
“But what does that mean?” she asked.
“Which part?” I asked. “I said a lot of stuff.”
“Everything you said was nothing more than a confused mumble of noises!”
I was stunned. She hadn’t gotten a word of my long and detailed summary. I was bummed. All that effort!
Then Frankie pulled me aside.
“Devin,” she whispered. “I think we just discovered another wrinkle to this book thing. Even though all the Harker stuff at the castle happened before, Mina doesn’t know it happened before. The author must be playing around with his characters. The reader knows what happened at Dracula’s castle, but some characters don’t.”
I tried to take it all in. “Does this mean we have to convince everybody all over again?”
Frankie chewed her lip. “Maybe we’d better just push the story along.” She turned to Mina. “So, what brings you out on such a dark and stormy night?”
“I came looking for a dear friend of mine,” Mina said. “Her name is Lucy Westenra. We’ve known each other for years.”
Frankie shot me a quick grin. Yeah. Lifelong friends. We knew a little something about that. “Go on,” I said.
“Lucy was staying with me but she disappeared from my house tonight.”
There was fear in Mina’s eyes when she said this. She was obviously really into her character. She made me believe she really cared for this Lucy person.
“So, Lucy is sort of special, huh?” asked Frankie.
“She is a wonderful friend to me,” Mina said, her eyes getting moist. “Everyone loves her. In fact, before she became engaged, three gentlemen had asked for her hand in marriage—”
“Three!” I said. “Wow, this Lucy character must be some kind of babe—”
Whack! Frankie smacked the back of my head lightly with the book. “One more crack like that, Devin, and I’m flipping back to the boat!”