Trapped in Transylvania

  “Frankie!” I cried out.

  “Devin!” she yelled back.

  But the darkness overcame everything. I fell hard to the floor. Then the room, the table, and all the furnishings were suddenly gone.

  I was lying on the rough ground.

  The cold rough black ground.

  Mountains loomed all around me. A cold and icy wind whipped down from the frost-covered treetops.

  And I saw it, perched on a nearby summit, a dark hulk against the gathering darkness.

  “The castle!” I said, nearly choking. “The castle of Count Dracula!”

  Chapter 18

  A hand grasped mine. It was old, but strong.

  “Up with you,” said the familiar voice of Professor Van Helsing. He stood with Mina, staring at the castle.

  “Where are the others?” I said, gazing around the dark landscape. “Where’s Frankie?”

  “We had to split up to better track the evil vampire’s movements,” Mina said. “Frankie is with Lord Godalming and my Jonathan, chasing the fiend by boat.”

  The professor nodded. “Quincey the Morris and Dr. Seward are by land coming, on horses with many rifles. We three have pushed ahead, with Mina helping, to where Dracula must come, if he fool our friends.”

  I stared up at the castle, that awful place of everything creepy and grisly. I shivered. It was then I realized that not only was Frankie not there, neither was the book.

  I gulped. I hoped Frankie was all right and that she had the book safe and sound. I wasn’t looking forward to staying in this story forever.

  “So what happens now?” I asked.

  “We wait for the Count,” said Van Helsing. “I have just come from the castle where the three vampire sisters have found true death from me. Also with the holy water, Dracula’s tomb is made too holy for him.”

  Gazing up at the castle and rubbing her forehead, Mina said, “He is coming. I can feel it.”

  Mina was pale and thin and worn down by what must have been a long journey. There was a strange look in her eyes and I remembered again what Dracula had said about her. She would be one of his vampires, a special one. A glance from Van Helsing told me that he was worried about that, too.

  As if on cue, the mountain wolves began to howl.

  Then, just like the first time I was here, snow began to fall, sweeping cold white flakes into the darkening air.

  “Soon he is come,” said the professor. “So let us find a waiting place. When he be come, we be ready!”

  As we made our way down from the castle, I felt something wild and frightening about the whole place. Night was falling. Soon it would be dark. Dracula was coming. All the old fears came rushing back. I didn’t like it. But what I liked even less was what was right there in front of us.

  “Look, look!” cried Mina. “Coming up the road!”

  Straight before us and not far off came a group of Gypsies on horses galloping wildly toward the castle. In the middle of the gang was a long wagon.

  On the wagon was a great big box.

  I nearly swallowed my head when I saw it.

  “It’s him! Mr. Floss-a-lot! Fangmouth! Dr. Dental!”

  “Dracula,” said Van Helsing grimly. “King of Vampires!”

  “Yeah, him.”

  As if we were all thinking the same thing, the three of us jumped behind a large rock and crouched there, waiting. The wagon driver lashed his horses violently and they sprang with greater speed toward the castle.

  “They come quickly,” Van Helsing whispered. “Racing for the sunset. If Dracula rise from his box, and our friends come not soon, we may be too late!”

  Closer and closer the Gypsies came, hurtling over the road toward us. The sky was growing darker, streaking us with shadows from the setting sun. Our wooden stakes ready, we watched the wagon lurching closer.

  I was so scared, I wanted Frankie to be right there. And I wanted her to have the book. I wanted to read it and read it and read it until this scene was finally over.

  “There are too many of them!” I said. “We need help!”

  Suddenly, there was a loud crackling sound. Everything seemed to light up and get dark at exactly the same time. We were all thrown up in the air and bounced back down again. Smoke whooshed in from nowhere. We all started coughing.

  Then a voice pierced the fog.

  “Stop that wagon!”

  I knew that voice! It was Frankie!

  “Frankie!” I cried. “You’re here! You’re here!”

  And she was—charging out of the smoke with Harker and Godalming by her side. Not far away were Dr. Seward and Quincey Morris galloping at top speed on a pair of raging horses.

  “Man alive, we’re here just in the nick of time!” Morris shouted. “That old sun’s nearly down!”

  But the Gypsies drove even more wildly to the castle.

  Seeing our friends, Van Helsing, Mina, and I felt bold. We jumped up from behind our rock and stood in the road.

  The Gypsies were going to drive straight over us, but before they knew what was happening Harker and Quincey forced their way to the wagon.

  “We must finish this before the sun sets!” Harker shouted. With strength that seemed incredible, he leaped onto the wagon and pulled on the heavy box. In one move, he flung it over the side of the wagon.

  “Man alive!” Morris cried. “I mean, vampire alive. I mean undead. I mean … get him!”

  We formed a wall around the box, but the Gypsies swarmed us, weapons drawn. One of them wounded Morris with a knife, but Godalming and Seward pulled out their rifles and the Gypsies shrank back.

  That left only us … and him.

  All this time, Harker was kicking at the box and pounding on it. “Dracula! Dracula! You evil fiend! I’ll get you for what you did to my Mina!”

  Suddenly—kkkkrrrrk!—there was the terrible sound of splintering wood.

  As the last rays of sunlight faded below the horizon, the lid of the box burst open and Dracula bounced out, hissing like a leaky balloon.

  “Sooooo! You think you can stop the great Dracula? What can a boy, a girl, a woman, and a few weak old men do against the king of vampires? Why are you even here? Don’t you see my enormous fangs?”

  His mouth shot open and his teeth, as long as a bunch of bananas, sparkled in the fading light.

  “He ask too much question!” Van Helsing said.

  But I raised my hand. “The answers are: yes, lots, the book brought us here, and is that broccoli between your fangs? Because if it is, you really need to floss—”

  Dracula narrowed his red eyes at me, then glanced at the sun as it finally sank below the horizon.

  Sunset. Breakfast time for vampires.

  Dracula’s look of hate turned to triumph.

  And my legs turned to jelly.

  Growling like a panther, Dracula swished his cape and opened his mouth as wide as possible. “Prepare to die!” he snarled.

  “Think again, Dracu—loser!” yelled Frankie.

  Without warning, the Count leaped away from his box of dirt and thrust himself in my direction, leading with his teeth. But he didn’t get far.

  Harker and Morris leaped on him, their knives drawn. There was a sweep and a flash of silver in the moonlight.

  “No! No! I—must—bite—you!” Dracula cried.

  “Bite the dust instead, Fangboy!” said Frankie.

  Trying to jump out of the way, Dracula slipped on his cape, and Harker and Morris made their final attack.

  “Ugh!” groaned the vampire, as their knives pierced his evil heart.

  KKK-POOOOOOOOF!

  The vampire burst into a million tiny little chunks. They sprayed everywhere in a large cloud of foul-smelling dust. Dark flecks exploded over us, across the road, and into the distant trees.

  Finally, there was nothing left. Just flakes of fluffy white snow whirling swiftly through the night air.

  “Rest in pieces, Count Dracula,” I said. “Your part in this story is over.”

>   “Ya,” said the professor. “The undead king is now just plain dead!”

  Thinking we had something to do with the sudden vanishing of the man in the box, the Gypsy horsemen and the wagon driver finally fled out of there at top speed.

  It was peaceful.

  It was calm.

  It was over.

  Almost.

  Chapter 19

  Quincey Morris made a sudden strange noise and sank to the ground, clutching his chest where he had been wounded by the Gypsies.

  We all jumped to him, but it was clear that he wasn’t going to make it to the end of the chapter.

  The strange thing was that even in his pain he was smiling. “Look,” he said, pointing to Mina. “The curse is lifted. You are healthy again!”

  Mina’s face, so pale and thin before, was full of life, and normal, and her neck holes were healed. The evil that Dracula had done was gone.

  Then Morris coughed. “Man alive …” he said. Then he rested his head on the ground. “I mean … dead.”

  He breathed a long breath, and it was over for him.

  Quincey Morris was gone. It was definitely a bummer, but I figured that he had made it through most of the book and was a fairly cool character, so it wasn’t too bad for him. Plus, he was one of the two guys who actually killed Dracula. Not bad for a Texan from Texas.

  For a long time after he died no one made a sound. Then all of us—Harker, Mina, Dr. Seward, Lord Godalming, Van Helsing, Frankie, and I—looked over at the place where Dracula had been.

  Finally, the professor breathed deeply and spoke.

  “No one will have belief of what happened here.”

  “It’s sort of very impossible,” I said.

  “But we know it did happen,” Frankie added, tapping the brown book she clutched so tightly.

  At that moment, we spied something blue and flickery in the trees just beyond where we stood.

  I blinked. “Frankie, is that—”

  “The zapper gates!” she said. “I guess our story really is over. I can hardly believe it.…”

  We turned to our friends.

  “Thanks for the great book, you guys,” I said. “But it looks as if Frankie and I need to leave now.”

  Mina gave us a hug. “Be watchful, always,” she said.

  Harker nodded. “You’ve been a great help.”

  Dr. Seward shook our hands. “There are strange things in the world. May you both travel safely.”

  “Thanks,” said Frankie.

  “No, thank you, for everything,” Lord Godalming said. “You proved yourselves good friends to us.”

  Finally, Van Helsing stomped over. “Well, my youngsters two. Today a great thing you have done. Always you shall remember what happened here between us.”

  “I’ll say!” I said. “We read a whole book!”

  “Not quite,” said Frankie.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  She held up the book. Between her thumb and forefinger was a single page. “We are here.”

  “Not …”

  She nodded. “The last page.”

  “Holy cow, I want to read it!” I said, reaching for the book.

  She pulled it back. “Me first! I earned it.”

  “No, me!”

  “It’s mine!”

  “No, mine!”

  The book flew out of our hands. We jumped after it.

  KKKKKK! The whole world went blue when the book fell between the gates. Then everything went dark for a split second, and we found ourselves tumbling over and over industrial carpeting until we hit the leg of a table.

  We unrolled ourselves and looked around.

  “The library workroom!” Frankie shouted.

  My eyes sought out the clock on the wall. “At the end of second period! And the wall’s not cracked anymore. We’re home! We did it! This is excellent!”

  We got to our feet, stretched, breathed, and then stared at each other.

  “This is so weird,” said Frankie. “I feel as if we’ve been away forever.”

  “And now we’re back to reality?” I said.

  “Yeah.” Then she shook her head. “Actually, no. Because the book seemed so real while we were in it.”

  I thought about that. “Maybe that’s the thing with books. If you really read them, they do become real.”

  Just then, we heard the rapid patter of feet as they approached the workroom door.

  “Mrs. Figglehopper!” I said. “Quick, back to work!”

  We bounded up to the table and sat down.

  The second we plunked down into our seats, Mrs. Figglehopper flung open the door and barged in.

  “Well!” she boomed, as we taped up the last page and closed the back cover of Dracula, finished at last. “Having fun?”

  It wasn’t a question I had an answer to, so I gave her a look that probably made her think I was an idiot.

  Frankie answered for me. “Pretty much, yeah.”

  “Splendid!” The librarian picked up the book and examined it. “You seem to have finished the entire book. All the pages are nicely taped. Good work.”

  “It wasn’t as boring as we thought,” I said.

  “Oh, I know!” Mrs. Figglehopper said.

  Now, I won’t say her eyes exactly twinkled when she said that, but they were very bright.

  When she left a moment later, Frankie nudged me. “Do you think she knows? I mean, about the zapper gates, and the crack in the wall, and getting into the book and all? I mean, they’re her gates and her wall.”

  I gave a shrug of the shoulders. “Not sure,” I said. “But just in case, we’d better not say anything, you know. We should probably just keep it a secret.”

  Frankie agreed. “It’s not like anyone would believe us.”

  The next day in English class Frankie and I asked Mr. Wexler if we could give an oral report on Dracula.

  “Dazzle me,” he said, narrowing his eyes.

  We did dazzle him. For forty minutes we talked all about our detailed knowledge of the original classic vampire saga.

  We discussed theme (the awesome victory of good stuff over bad-evil stuff), setting (Transylvania, Whitby, London, then Transylvania again), and character (good husband Harker, extremely bad-evil creep-head yucky doofus vampire Dracula, poor babe Lucy, language-twisting vamp expert Van Helsing, pretty almost-vampire Mina, regular guy Dr. Seward, noble Texan Quincey Morris, fancy Lord Godalming, and garlic-snitching Mrs. Westenra). Then, while the plot mostly took place in winter, we summarized it anyway.

  “It all comes down to this,” I said, finally. “There are bad things in the world.”

  “And bad people,” said Frankie, “who mostly have very long teeth, red eyes, and a big cape.”

  “But if you have friends helping you out, you can take on any challenge.”

  “Including a very fat chubby book!”

  Frankie and I looked at each other. We shrugged.

  “Mr. Wexler, can we sit down now?” I asked.

  Our teacher gave us both the eye. It was clear he didn’t understand how we could actually know so much about Dracula. But he couldn’t prove anything.

  “Oh … just take your seats!” he said.

  But we didn’t take them anywhere.

  We just sat down.

  FROM THE DESK OF

  IRENE M. FIGGLEHOPPER, LIBRARIAN

  Dear Reader:

  Like Mr. Wexler, I, too, heard Frankie and Devin’s class report about Bram Stoker’s classic book, Dracula.

  While their report shows that they must have read the book (their story is strangely close to Stoker’s actual tale), I can’t think how in the world they did it, can you? There simply wasn’t time to read five hundred pages!

  Oh, well. Never mind. Classics are classics for a reason. Once readers get “into” a good book, I find they just have to keep reading until they’re done!

  Still, a few words about the real author and his book might be helpful here.

  Abraham “
Bram” Stoker was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1847. Listening to his mother retell the old Irish legends, little Bram’s ears were filled with tales of banshees, water goblins, and child-stealing demons. No doubt these old legends fueled Bram’s lifelong fascination with fantasy and terror. How nice! After graduating from Dublin’s Trinity College, Bram spent his days managing a theater and his nights writing stories and novels. None of his books was successful until, in 1890, he began work on his masterpiece.

  The most famous of all vampire tales, Dracula is a novel told in letters, journal entries, diary excerpts, even a newspaper clipping, Bram did much research in the famous British Museum. There he learned about vampire legends, folk beliefs, and the terrain of Transylvania (now part of Romania). He must have done a good job, for he clearly scared the wits out of Frankie and Devin!

  When Bram’s book was published in 1897, it was instantly hailed as the finest vampire tale ever written. Over a century later, Dracula remains unequaled in its ability to scare the cookies out of you.

  While the book is mainly about the terrible effects of evil on ordinary lives—Dracula left many victims scattered across Europe—Devin and Frankie also discovered that the book shows how friendship and love can knock the stuffing out of evil (or the dust out of a vampire!). For even though Quincey Morris dies, the novel ends with the birth of a son to Jonathan and Mina. In memory of their friend, they name the child Quincey.

  By the time Bram Stoker died in 1912, he had written nineteen books. But none has been read with such fascination and fright as his classic, Dracula.

  If you ask me, readers should wait until they are Devin and Frankie’s age to read the original. You need a good vocabulary and a cheery disposition—not to mention a strong stomach. One more thing: never read a horror book at night! I found that out the hard way.

  Note to self: those security gates have started buzzing again. Check it out before someone gets suspicious.

  Check it out? Look at me, I’ve made a library joke!

  Well, that’s all for now. See you where the books are!

  I. M. Figglehopper