Into the Pit

by Scott Cawthon

  The Dracula’s Daughter thing had started because she’d been carrying around a paperback copy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and one of the jocky popular guys had said, “Oh, look, how sweet. She’s reading a book about her dad.”

  From then on, she’d been Dracula’s Daughter.

  Of course everybody knew she was really Jeff and Audrey Fitzsimmons’s daughter, which made her almost as much of a misfit as she would have been if Dracula were her real dad. The Fitzsimmonses were kind of a joke in the town, famous for their tendency to start projects with great enthusiasm and then abandon them. They had bought a run-down but once-beautiful colonial house when Millie was ten and had thrown themselves into refurbishing it. They had kept it up for about three months until they ran out of time, money, and energy. As a result, the house had a weird patchwork quality—the living room and the kitchen were repainted and had new fixtures, but the bedrooms still had old, peeling wallpaper, and floors with squeaky boards. The bathroom pipes screamed when you turned on the water and the ancient tub, sink, and toilet never looked clean no matter how much they were scrubbed.

  The most talked-about thing, though, was the exterior of the house. Millie’s dad had repainted the front and one side a nice, soft blue with cream trim, but paint was expensive, painting was exhausting, and he really didn’t like getting up on ladders. As a result, the front of the house was painted beautifully, but the back and other side were still covered with old, flaking white paint. Millie’s mom said nobody would notice. It was like when people arranged the Christmas tree so the ugly side faced the wall.

  People noticed.

  People also noticed the Fitzsimmonses’ inability to keep a steady job. Millie’s parents were always coming up with some new scheme that finally was going to bring them the success of their dreams. One year her mom was making candles and selling them at the farmers market, while her dad started a nutritional supplement store that closed its doors after six months. After that, her mom and dad started a store that sold yarn and knitting supplies, and they might have made a go of it if either of her parents had known more about yarn and knitting. And then they bought a food truck, even though they were both terrible cooks.

  Millie couldn’t understand how her parents could remain so optimistic with failure after failure, but they did. They attacked each new project with huge enthusiasm, and then after a few months, both the project and the enthusiasm fizzled out. They weren’t poor, exactly—there was always food to eat, even if, toward the end of the month, it tended to dwindle to pancake mix and boxed macaroni and cheese—but there was always worry about how the bills would get paid.

  Millie knew that her grandpa helped them out some months. Her grandpa was also considered weird in town but was cut some slack because he was old and a widower and had been an excellent high school math teacher for many years. As a result, he earned the title of “eccentric” instead of “weird.”

  Some people said that maybe by taking this teaching job in Saudi Arabia, Jeff was finally getting it together and following in his dad’s footsteps. Millie knew, though, that her dad would fritter away this opportunity like he had so many others.

  So Dracula’s Daughter or Jeff and Audrey Fitzsimmons’s daughter? Either one was a one-way ticket to being a social outcast.

  In the cafeteria, Millie took a second to adjust to the deafening din of hundreds of teenagers talking and laughing. She walked past a table full of popular girls and saw her best friend from elementary school, Hannah, sitting with them, laughing at something all the other girls were laughing about. Millie and Hannah had been inseparable from kindergarten through fifth grade, playing on the swings or jumping rope together at every recess and playing dolls or board games at each other’s houses after school.

  But in middle school, popularity started to be more and more important to Hannah, and she drifted away from Millie and toward the crowd who was always giggling about clothes and boys. What Millie understood but Hannah did not was that those girls never accepted Hannah as more than a hanger-on. Hannah lived in a plain little house in a plain little neighborhood and didn’t have the money or social status to make the cut. The popular girls didn’t push her away, but they never let her into their inner circle, either. It made Millie sad that Hannah preferred to accept crumbs from the popular girls rather than real friendship from her.

  But then, a lot of things made Millie sad.

  Millie sat alone, nibbling on the egg salad sandwich and apple slices her grandpa had packed for her and reading Tales of Mystery and Imagination. She was managing to drown out all the cafeteria noise and focus on the story she was reading, “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Roderick Usher, the main character in the story, couldn’t bear noise of any kind.

  But then she felt herself being watched.

  She looked up from her work to see a lanky boy with horn-rimmed glasses and frizzy hair that had been dyed fire-engine red. Both his ears were studded with silver earrings. Millie coveted his black leather jacket.

  “Hi, um, I was wondering,”—he nodded at the chair across from Millie—“is anybody sitting there?”

  Was this guy asking to sit with her? Nobody ever asked to sit with her.

  “My imaginary friend,” Millie said. Wait … was that a joke? She never joked with people.

  The boy grinned, revealing a mouthful of braces. “Well, would your imaginary friend mind if I sat in her lap?”

  Millie looked at the empty chair for a second. “She says, ‘Suit yourself.’ ”

  “Okay,” he said, setting his tray down. “Thanks. To both of you. I don’t really know anybody yet. I’m new.”

  “Nice to meet you, New. I’m Millie.” What, was she a comedian now?

  “My name’s Dylan, actually. I just moved here from Toledo.” He gestured toward her book. His fingernails were short but polished black. “A Poe fan, huh?”

  Millie nodded.

  “Me too,” Dylan said. “And H. P. Lovecraft. I love all the old scary writers.”

  “I’ve never read Lovecraft,” Millie said. Better to be honest than to try to fake knowledge and talk herself into a corner. “I’ve heard of him, though.”

  “Oh, you’d love him,” Dylan said, dunking a cafeteria-issued chicken nugget into a puddle of ketchup. “Super dark and twisty.” He looked around the cafeteria, his face a mask of disdain. “So is this school as lame as it seems?”

  “Lamer,” Millie said, marking her place in her book and shutting it. The House of Usher wasn’t going anywhere, and she couldn’t remember when she’d last had an interesting conversation.

  “Well, I’ll tell you what,” Dylan said, gesturing with a french fry. “So far you’re the only person I’ve seen here who seems cool.”

  Millie felt her face heating up. She hoped a blush wouldn’t pinken her pallor. “Thanks,” she said. “I, uh … like your jacket.”

  “And I like your earrings.”

  She reached up to touch one of the black teardrops that dangled from her earlobes. “Thanks. They’re jet. Victorian mourning jewelry.”

  “I know,” Dylan said.

  He knew? What kind of high school guy knew about Victorian mourning jewelry? “I have a few pieces of it,” Millie said. “I mostly find them on eBay. I can’t afford my favorite kind, though, which is—”

  Dylan put up his hand. “Wait, don’t tell me. It’s the kind where they weave the hair of the dead person into the jewelry, right?”

  “Yes!” Millie said, shocked and amazed. “Those pieces show up sometimes on eBay, but they always cost a fortune.”

  The bell rang, signaling that lunch period was about to end. Dylan leaned toward Millie and half whispered, “Do not ask for whom the bell tolls.”

  “It tolls for thee,” Millie finished. Where had this guy come from? Toledo, sure, but how was he so sophisticated and knowledgeable? She had never met anyone like him.

  Dylan stood up. “Millie, it’s been a rare pleasure. Would you and your imaginary friend mind very much
if I joined you two at lunch tomorrow?”

  Millie felt the corners of her mouth twitch in an unfamiliar way. “We wouldn’t mind at all,” she said.

  * * *

  “See, I had thought about freezing you to death, too,” the voice said. “I thought I could short out the power in here so the space heater turns off, and my metal body can get pretty cold. But I figured your grandpa would come in and notice the power was out in his precious workshop and would fix it right away. So freezing to death is a no-go. Sorry if you had your heart set on that one, sweet pea.”

  Millie was shivering not from the cold, but from fear. “I don’t understand. Why do you want to kill me?”

  “Interesting you should ask,” the voice said. “There are a couple of reasons, actually. The first is quite simply that it’s something to do. I sat in a salvage yard for ages before your grandpa found me and brought me here, where I’ve just been sitting, too. I’m bored out of my skull. Not that I have a literal skull, but you know what I mean.”

  “Aren’t there other things you could find to do besides killing people?” Millie asked. Whatever this being was, it was obviously intelligent. Maybe she could reason with it.

  “None so interesting. And plus, there’s my second reason, which is that death is what you want. You’ve been mooning around since you moved here, talking about how you want to die. Well, I like to kill people, and you want to die. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship. Like those little birds that pick the parasites off rhinoceroses. The bird gets to eat, and the rhinoceros gets rid of the itchy little bugs. We both get what we want. Win-win.”

  Millie suddently realized that she had spoken of death, written about it, but it had always been just an interesting idea to play around with. She never intended to take any action to make it a reality. “But I don’t want to die. Not really.”

  A horrible rumbling sound surrounded Millie and shook the body of the machine that trapped her. It took her a few seconds to recognize the sound as laughter.

  * * *

  For dinner, Grandpa made spaghetti with marinara sauce, garlic bread, and Caesar salad. It was much better than the meals he usually slung together.

  “You’re actually eating tonight,” Grandpa said.

  “Because this is actually good,” Millie said, twirling spaghetti on her fork.

  “All right, I’ve finally found something you like to eat,” Grandpa said. “I’ll add it to my limited repertoire. I kept the sauce meatless for you and added meatballs to mine, so everybody’s happy, herbivores and carnivores alike.”

  “Well, ‘happy’ may be stretching it,” Millie said, unwilling to admit that she actually had kind of a good day. “But the spaghetti is good, and my day at school didn’t totally stink.”

  “And what made the day less stinky than usual?” Grandpa asked, spearing a meatball.

  “I met someone who seems kind of cool.”

  “Really? A girl someone or a boy someone?”

  Millie didn’t like Grandpa’s insinuating tone. “Well, not that it matters, but it happens to be a boy. Don’t try to turn it into some kind of love story, though. We just had a decent conversation, is all.”

  “A decent conversation is something, especially these days. Most people your age won’t look up from their phones long enough to say as much as ‘how do you do,’ ” Grandpa said. “Not to put the cart before the horse, but I met your grandma when I was just a little older than you are now.”

  “So what, now you have me engaged to this guy I just met? Grandpa, I’m fourteen!”

  Grandpa laughed. “You’re right that you’re much too young to be engaged. And your grandma and I didn’t get engaged when we were teenagers, either. But we were high school sweethearts, and then we went to the same college. We got engaged our senior year of college and married in June right after we graduated.” He smiled. “And it all started with a good conversation at lunch, like you had today, so you never know.”

  “Slow down, old man,” Millie said, fighting off a smile.

  Grandpa’s eyes went soft and misty. “I’m just reminiscing. I wish you could’ve known your grandma, Millie. She was really something special. And to lose her when she wasn’t even forty—”

  “It’s like ‘Annabel Lee,’ ” Millie said.

  “The Poe poem?” Grandpa asked. “ ‘It was many and many a year ago, in a kingdom by the sea …’ Yes, I guess it was something like that.”

  “You know Poe?” Millie asked. It was weird to hear him recite one of her favorite poems. Grandpa was a math person; she didn’t expect him to know anything about poetry.

  “Believe it or not, I’m a pretty literate old dude. I like Poe and a lot of other writers, too. I know you like Poe because he’s dark and spooky, and it’s easy to romanticize death when you’re young and it’s so far away. But Poe didn’t write about death because he thought it was romantic. He wrote about it because he lost so many of the people he loved. You’ve never experienced that kind of loss, Millie. It … changes you.” He blinked hard. “You know, for years after she died, friends were always trying to fix me up with other women, but it never worked. She was the only one for me.”

  Millie had never really thought about Grandpa’s feelings before. How he must have felt when Grandma got sick and died. How lonely he must have been after she was gone. How he might still be lonely now. “That must’ve been hard,” she said. “Losing Grandma.”

  Grandpa nodded. “It was. I still miss her every day.”

  “Well, thanks for dinner,” Millie said. “I guess I’d better get started on my homework.”

  “Without being asked?” Grandpa said, smiling. “This is certainly a special day.”

  In her room, Millie didn’t think of death. She thought of Dylan, and she thought about what Grandpa had said about Grandma. When she recited “Annabel Lee” in her head this time, it seemed like a poem about love instead of a poem about death.

  * * *

  “Silly Millie, for someone who doesn’t want to die you sure spent a lot of time talking about it,” the voice surrounding her said. “But that’s the way of things, isn’t it? Talk is always easier than action.”

  “I think,” Millie said, sniffling, “that when I said I wanted to die, what I really wanted was to escape. I didn’t want death. I just wanted my life to be different.”

  “Oh, but that really takes action, doesn’t it?” the voice said. “Changing a life for the better, especially when the world is such a mean, rotten place? It’s much easier—and ultimately much more satisfying—just to snuff it out. Which brings me to my second set of options. Much more interesting ones. These are quick and easy for you for the most part, but they require a little more effort from me. I’m not complaining, though. There’s nothing I like more than a good challenge to relieve my boredom. Say, you like Dracula, don’t you?”

  Millie could barely find her voice to answer. “Why? Are you going to bite my neck?”

  “Now how would I do that with you in my belly, silly girl? I know that you’re a Dracula fan. The kids at school call you Dracula’s Daughter, don’t they? Well, what you might not know is that the character of Dracula was inspired by a real person, a prince named Vlad Dracula. But he’s better known by his nickname, Vlad the Impaler.”

  Millie’s insides seemed to turn to jelly.

  “Vlad killed thousands of his enemies, but his crowning achievement was creating a ‘forest of the impaled’ where thousands of his victims—men, women, and children—were skewered through stakes driven into the ground. Now I’m no prince and I can’t aspire to that level of achievement, but one little old impaling can’t be that hard, can it? I can just take one of my metal rods and drive it through my body cavity, and it’ll go straight through you and out the other side. If the spike goes through your vital organs, death comes quickly. If it doesn’t, there can be some hours of bleeding and suffering. The people who walked through the forest of the impaled talked about the moaning and gasping of the victims.
So … impaling! One might say other deaths im-pale in comparison!” The voice’s tone was cheery. “It can work quickly or slowly, but the result is the same in the end. Like I said, win-win.”

  “No,” Millie whispered. She wanted her mom and dad. She wanted her grandpa. They would help her if they only knew. She’d even settle for goofy Uncle Rob and Aunt Sheri as long as they would come to her rescue. She would even put on a Christmas sweater if it made them happy.

  * * *

  Millie sat at her table in the cafeteria expectantly. She had taken special care with her appearance this morning, choosing a lacy black top and a jet Victorian mourning necklace from her small collection. Her face powder enhanced her pallor, and her black eyeliner had the perfect catlike effect.

  As minutes passed, she started to worry. What if Dylan didn’t show up? What if she had gotten all dressed up for nothing? What if, as she’d always suspected, life offered no possibility of pleasure or happiness?

  But then there he was, with his leather jacket and fire-engine red hair and shiny silver earrings.

  “Hey,” Millie said, trying not to sound like she was too happy to see him.

  “Hey,” he said, setting his tray on the table and sitting across from her. “I brought you something.”

  Millie’s heart pounded in excitement. She hoped she didn’t show it.

  He reached into the pocket of his leather jacket and pulled out a worn paperback book. “H. P. Lovecraft,” he said. “I was telling you about him yesterday.”

  “I remember,” Millie said, taking the book. “The Call of Cthulhu and Other Stories. Did I say that right—Cthulhu?”

  “Who knows?” Dylan said. “H. P. Lovecraft made it up, and he’s dead so we can’t ask him. You can keep the book. I got a copy in hardcover for my birthday.” He grinned. “My parents are cool. They don’t mind that I like weird stuff.”

  “Thanks.” She felt a little smile creeping up on her. She slipped the book into her bag.