She got up and started toward me. I noticed that her fingernails were sharp and painted a bright hue of red. They reached for my face.

"Bitch!" she snapped.

I dodged backward just in time to avoid the first swipe of her nails. She was right in my face, though, and I got a strong smell of something a bit rancid.

"Cheryl," growled a stern voice.

Cheryl snapped back.

She choked a bit, and gasped. Emory Clarke had extended a long arm, hooked her with long fingers and had dragged her back away from me.

"Enough, Cheryl," said the voice.

That voice, still soft-spoken, was now edged with something more, something deeper. Cheryl Ames was no lightweight, and she'd had quite a bit of momentum in her lunge toward me, yet Emory had stopped her as though she'd been some Raggedy Ann doll. I looked at him. There was strength there.

And some kind of power.

Cheryl immediately lost her fire. She collapsed into herself, nodded, and lowered her hands.

I wish I could say that the aborted altercation ended at that, but before I could do a thing to further dampen the fire and lighten the situation with apologies, a joke, whatever, a sonorous voice swept down upon us all.

"What seems to be going on here?"

We all looked up.

I could almost feel Harold cringe.

Maybe I would have, but for my own cringing.

Standing there in his usual garb of office suit, dark narrow tie and big face was none other than the Principal of Crossland High School.

Croydon Canthorpe, Ph.D.

Dr. Canthorpe, as he had everyone call him, was a burly man in his late thirties with a big face and a great deal of hair. In fact his hairy brow almost touched his hair line. His eyes were sharp and steely, and though he wasn't the Vice Principal in charge of discipline in the school, he's been one once at a junior high in a tough neighborhood, and hadn't lost his lust for a good confrontation.

"Nothing!" I said. "Nothing at all. Uhm... Cheryl was just showing us something she saw on a TV show last night. Right, Cheryl?"

"Oh, yes - right," said Cheryl.

"Doctor Canthorpe," said Emory. "I quite assure you, we are civilized beings here."

The Principal looked down at the stooped figure of Emory Clarke. He looked angry. Dr. Canthorpe usually looked angry, but it was a cool, controlled anger. As he looked at Emory, though, his nostrils flared. I could almost hear his teeth grinding. Something about Emory truly bothered him.

"I thought I smelled a fight," he said.

"Doctor!" piped Harold, finally. "C'mon, do we look like wrestlers!"

"Doctor Canthorpe," another voice said.

The Principal turned and there was Peter Harrigan. He stood there, looking for all the world like Peter O'Toole as Lawrence of Arabia, easing a confrontation with the force of his mile.

Dr. Canthorpe straightened. With his broad shoulders unhunched, you could see that he was over six feet tall and big. He smelled of authority. His features lightened though as he noticed Peter.

"Well, top of the morning to you there, Mr. Harrigan," growled the principal.

"Doctor Canthorpe! You're looking so wonderful today! Doctor, as it happens, I've been here the whole time, and there's nothing here to concern you. These are top scholars, Doctor! I believe if there is any altercation, they'll take it to the Debate Club!"

The Principal's big mouth was suddenly full of teeth. He was grinning.

He barked a laugh.

"So I believe they would." He turned to Cheryl and then to me. "You two were having a problem, though, and as good students you're expected to set an example to the other students. Is that understood?"

"Yes sir," said Cheryl.

"I know you, Cheryl," said the Principal. "And I, of course, know you, Emory. But I don't know you."

His voice was like a gentle growl. His dark eyes looked into mine and I felt frightened. His big nostrils quivered, as though he was sniffing out my character through scent alone.

"Rebecca. My...my name is.... Rebecca Williams....sir.. I mean, Dr. Canthorpe."

A smile glimmered in his eyes. He sensed my fear, and I could feel some kind of excitement at it. This was a man who enjoyed his job.

"Rebecca, on your way to home room, please stop by the office. My schedule is fairly full today, but I think I have some time tomorrow. I think an introductory talk might be in order."

"Okay, Doctor Canthorpe."

He spun around and stalked off, shoulders hunched again.

We all were quiet, waiting for the blessing of distance from the disciplinarian.

Emory turned to Peter.

"That was quite remarkable," he said, his voice, with its Southern accent, suddenly rather beautiful. "All I can say is thank you. I loathe that kind of ugliness."

Peter laughed. "What can I say? I love to perform. And seeing as I was the cause of the problem."

"Cause?"

"Well, sort of. I believe there was some upset about my attention being lost."

I reddened, fear replaced by embarrassment.

"Oh, I see," said Emory "No problem. I'll get mine soon. I'm going to get my share of performing tonight at the tryouts."

"Tryouts?" said Emory.

"Yes," said Peter. "For the big Winter Crossland Players production. And oh my is it a doozy! It's none other than the play version of Bram Stoker's Dracula."

He feigned swinging a cape around. His eyes opened wide.

"Listen! The children of the Night!"

I shivered with awe and anticipation.

"Oh right, Peter," I gushed. "You know, I'll be there too!"

CHAPTER FIVE.

THE BIG BLACK heavy curtains on the stage opened.

A figure in a long cape stepped out of the shadows. With great gravitas, he stared down at us all. His red eyes glared. He drew himself up to his full height regally.

"Good evening," he said. "I am.... your Count."

The students clustered around the stage laughed and applauded.

The man bowed graciously, sweeping his hand slowly and languorously down, almost touching the top of the stage. He stood back up and then opened his mouth.

Two long sharp fangs hung from the top of his mouth, like ivory icicles.

The small crowd hushed for a moment, there were a few nervous giggles, and then a spattering of applause.

William Crawley, the English teacher director, dug his hands into his mouth and pulled out the fangs. He had longish black hair that swept back in a rough wave, oddly suspended behind his head. His expressive eyebrows lifted, and he surveyed his audience for a moment, allowing silence to seep into a room once thumping and clattering with lunch trays and milk boxes.

"Fun, huh?"

His audience laughed.

I laughed too, a giddy laugh, a release from tension. Harold, sitting beside me, guardian of my bag, sitting beside me, laughed as well.

"My faithful thespians!" he said. "As the Beach Boys immortally proclaimed. "Fun, Fun, Fun." Let that be our motto as we forge onward into this less than immortal production of Dracula." Mr. Crawley had on his best enunciation for his speech, getting all plummy and rich with his vowels. "I speak of fun, however, not in a campy way.. We do not wish to make sport of the Victorians or ridicule them. No. This is rich material. It can be fun to simply leave this troubled, complex world of 1968. To forget method acting for a bit, and use good old fashioned tricks of the trade....but in an immersive, joyous fashion.

"This is not drama. It is melodrama. But it is a play of a novel and a tradition of the supernatural that drives deep into our psyche.

No number of silver ships of science going to a cold lump of rock that orbits in the sky will ever erase the power of the full moon in a dark forest with the howl of wolves in the wind."

He let this pronouncement hang in the air. Then he clapped his hands together.

"Very well, my friends! Fun! Let's have some fun as we do some readings and pick out the players who will bring Dracula to Crossland Senior High School, Prince Georges County a and, perhaps, if we do it right, a far larger and perhaps more important audience."

I'm pretty sure that went over the heads of most of the students, including me. What was he talking about? Statewide play competitions? Or was some nearby statesman or dignitary a possible guest?

It didn't matter much to me. I wasn't here to try out to show off, or to start off a stint in the Drama Club, many of whose members comprised this gathering. No, I had far less noble and far more pressing needs...

When I'd told Harold about my plan, he wasn't too surprised, considering my love for Victorian literature. Novels of the gothic persuasion to be precise.

However, Harold was surprised at the real reason I wanted to try out for a role.

And what role I wanted to try out for.

He did know the book Dracula as well as I did. But he had not heard about the play version.

It took me a while to get to Dracula. I'd already consumed Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, of course, not long after discovering the Bronte Sisters and then George Eliot's Middlemarch. (I read Dickens and Poe, of course - how can you avoid them on a Victorian and pre-Victorian binge?) But Dracula? A little too shabby and corny, I told myself.

One summer's vacation, though, aged fifteen, I'd picked it up and started reading.

Reader, I stayed up all night reading that book! I assure you, it is a gripping novel. In any case, something about it kept me turning the pages. Was it just that the first part, the story of Jonathan Harker's visit to Castle Dracula in the Carpathian Mountains and his encounter with the mysterious and sinister Count was so arresting? Or was it simply the suspense of the actual story of Count Dracula's journey to England, his mixing with Victorian society, his deadly hold over Lucy, his fly-eating servant Renfield, and his deadly battle with the vampire-hunter Van Helsing? I had thought it was just a creepy story for guys. Nothing prepared me for how it caught me up, despite the fact that even at fifteen I knew that I wasn't exactly reading Jane Austen.

When I closed the covers of that mildewed copy at four in the morning, and looked out at the lights and quiet fields of the town near Oxford in England where Dad was stationed, I trembled. Somehow the damp cold of the summer night had seeped in. There was ground fog collecting near a creek, and tendrils of it drifted up, translucent beneath a gibbous moon peeking out of the clouds.

Something is out there, I thought. Something dark and needy...and lonely.

From that moment on, I was fascinated with the legend of the vampire. Films I'd seen didn't really actually capture the core essence of what I'd felt reading the book.

The book itself was not as popular in England as it was in America. But because of copyright problems, Bram Stoker received none of the American royalites. He died with no idea of how popular his book a and character a would become.

I wasn't aware that a play version of Dracula even existed until I heard about Crossland's intended production last December. But it absolutely made sense.

The version we were using was the one that was performed on Broadway in New York in the 1920's. In 1924, the actor Hamilton Deane had adapted it from the novel, after buying the rights from Stoker's widow. Deane had had a success with his adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. He'd intended to play Count Dracula himself, but then decided to take the meatier role of Van Helsing, casting Raymond Huntley as Dracula. (Huntley, I was happy to hear, was now an actor in Hammer Horror films.) The play toured England for years and then had a successful run in London. In 1927, Horace Liveright brought the play to Broadway. He hired John L. Balderston to adapt it for American audiences. This is the version that starred Bela Lugosi, and the version Tod Browning's film was based on. This was the version that we were using for the play script.

I'd read it, of course.

It was kind of creaky.

I was naturally curious of course as to what kind of interpretation Mr. Crawley would give it. A melodrama about an evil blood sucking aristocrat, coming to England to spread the undead disease of vampirism from foul pockets of the Balkans through the world and presumably to take charge of it all?

Hmm. Fun, but not campy, sounded good.

But then, it didn't really make any difference, because that's not why I was trying out today.

Mr. Crawley clapped his hands together.

"All right, then, folks. Let's get started. If you haven't got copies of the play, they're a pile of them right over there, in that coffin." He smiled gently and extravagantly swept down to take his place in a chair at the side of the stage to observe the proceedings. He hauled up a large spiral bound book to take notes.

I craned my neck around.

"He's not here," I whispered. "Peter's not here."

"Maybe he's already got the part," said Harold.

"But this morning he said he'd be here," I countered.