DRACULAS (A Novel of Terror)

Mick the Mick didn’t answer. He’d noticed something engraved near the end of the far tip. He leaned closer, squinting until it came into focus.

Sears.

What the—?

He stepped back for a another look at the scepter of power and—

“A curtain rod …it’s a freakin’ curtain rod!”

Willie looked at him like he was crazy. “Curtain rod? Didn’t you hear the man? It’s, like, a magic wand, and— hey, what’s that over there?”

Mick the Mick slapped at Willie’s kidney as he passed but missed because he couldn’t take his eyes off the Sears scepter of power. Maybe they could steal it, return it to Sears, and get a brand new one. That wouldn’t help much with Nate the Nose, but Mick the Mick did need a new curtain rod. His old one had broken, and his drapes were attached to the wall with forks. That made Thursdays—spaghetti night—particularly messy.

“WELCOME!” boomed the same voice as Willie stopped before another display. “What you see before you is a rare artifact that once belonged to an ancient lost race that dwelled in the Arkham area during prehistoric times. This, like every other ancient artifact in this room, was excavated from a site near the Arkham landfill.”

“Hey, Mick y’gotta see this.”

After some biblical thinking, Mick the Mick spared the rod and moved along.

“We know little about this ancient lost race but, after careful examination by the eminent archeologists and anthropologists here at the Arkham Pennsylvania Museum of Natural History and Baseball Cards, they arrived at an irrefutable conclusion: The artifact before you was used by an ancient shaman of this lost race to perform surrogate sacrifices. (For those of you unfamiliar with the term ‘shaman,’ please return to the previous display.)”

“I know what a shaman is, ‘cause you just told me,” Willie said. “But what’s a surrogate—?”

“A surrogate sacrifice was an image that was sacrificed instead of a real person. Before you is a statuette of a woman carved by the ancient lost race from a yet-to-be-identified flesh-colored substance. Note the head is missing. This is because the statuette was beheaded instead of the human it represented.”

Mick the Mick stepped up to the display and immediately recognized the naked pink figure. He’d used to swipe his sister Suzy’s and make it straddle his rocket and go for a ride. Only Suzy’s had a blonde head.

“That’s a freakin’ Barbie doll!” He grabbed Willie’s shoulder and yanked him away.

“Jesus, Mick! You know I got a dislocating shoulder!”

Willie stumbled, knocking Mick the Mick into another display case, which toppled over with a crash.

“WELCOME! What you see before you is a rare tome of lost wisdom that once belonged —”

Screaming, Mick the Mick kicked the speaker until the voice stopped.

“Look, Mick,” Willie said, squatting and poking through the broken glass, “it’s not a tome, it’s a book. It’s supposed to contain lost wisdom. Maybe it can tell us how to keep Nate the Nose off our backs.” He rose and squinted at the cover. “The Really, Really, Really Old Ones.”

“It’s a paperback, you moron. How much wisdom you gonna find in there?”

“Yeah, you’re right. It says, ‘Do Not Try This at Home. Use Only Under Expert Supervision or You’ll Be Really, Really, Really Sorry.’ Better not mess with that.”

“Oh, yeah?” Mick the Mick had had it—really had it. Up. To. Here. He opened to a random page and read. “‘Random Dislocation Spell.’ “

Willie winced. “Not my shoulder!”

“ ‘Use only under expert supervision.’ Yeah, right. Look, it’s got a bunch of gobbledygook to read.”

“You mean like ‘Mekka-lekka hi—?”

“Shaddap and I’ll show you what bullshit this is.”

Mick the Mick started reading, pronouncing the gobbledygook as best he could, going slow and easy so he didn’t screw up the words like he normally did when he read.

When he finished he looked at Willie and grinned. “See? No random dislocation.”

Willie rolled his shoulder. “Yeah. Feels pretty good. I wonder—”

The smell hit Mick the Mick first, hot and overpowering, reminding him of that time he stuck his head in the toilet because his older brother told him that’s where brownies came from. It was followed by the very real sensation of being squeezed. But not squeezed by a person. Squeezed all over by some sort of full-body force like being pushed through a too-small opening. The air suddenly became squishy and solid and pressed into every crack and pore on Mick the Mick’s body, and then it undulated, moving him, pushing him, through the solid marble floor of the Arkham Pennsylvania Museum of Natural History and Baseball Cards.

The very fabric of reality, or something like that, seemed to vibrate with a deep resonance, and the timbre rose to become an overpowering, guttural groan. The floor began to dissolve, or maybe he began to dissolve, and then came a horrible yet compelling farting sound and Mick the Mick was suddenly plopped into the middle of a jungle.

Willie landed next to him.

“I feel like shit,” Willie said.

Mick the Mick squinted in the sunlight and looked around. They were surrounded by strange, tropical trees and weird looking flowers with big fat pink petals that made him feel sort of horny. A dragonfly the size of a bratwurst hovered over their heads, gave them a passing glance, then buzzed over to one of the pink flowers, which snapped open and bit the bug in half.

“Where are we, Mick?”

Mick the Mick scratched his head. “I’m not sure. But I think when I read that book I opened a portal in the space-time continuum and we were squeezed through one of the eleven imploded dimensions into the late Cretaceous Period.”

“Wow. That sucks.”

“No, Willie. It doesn’t suck at all.”

“Yeah it does. The season finale of MacGyver: The Next Generation is on tonight. It’s a really cool episode where he builds a time machine out of some pocket lint and a broken meat thermometer. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a time machine, Mick?”

Mick the Mick slapped Willie on the side of his head.

“Jesus, Mick! You know I got swimmer’s ear!”

“Don’t you get it, Willie? This book is a time machine. We can go back in time!”

Willie got wide-eyed. “I get it! We can get back to the present a few minutes early so I won’t miss MacGyver!”

Mick the Mick considered hitting him again, but his hand was getting sore.

“Think bigger than MacGyver, Willie. We’re going to be rich. Rich and famous and powerful. Once I figure out how this book works we’ll be able to go to any point in history.”

“You mean like we go back to summer camp in nineteen seventy-five? Then we could steal the candy from those counselors so they couldn’t lure us into the woods and touch us in the bad place.”

“Even better, Willie. We can bet on sports and always win. Like that movie.”

“Which one?”

“The one where he went to the past and bet on sports so he could always win.”

“The Godfather?”

“No, Willie. The Godfather was the one with the fat guy who slept with horse heads.”

“Oh yeah. Hey Mick, don’t you think those big pink flowers look like…

“Shut your stupid hole, Willie. I gotta think.”

Mick the Mick racked his brain, but he was never into sports, and he couldn’t think of a single team that won anything. Plus, he didn’t have any money on him. It would take a long time to parlay the eighty-one cents in his pocket into sixty grand. But there had to be other ways to make money with a time