Alex Van Helsing Read online

  Alex stopped at his desk and felt the eyes of Bill Merrill on him, in the seat right next to his. Bill’s brother, Steven, was on the other side of Bill. Alex glanced over; Bill was smirking, a smirk that Alex had seen could charm teachers into missing the cruelty that hid there. Alex laid his backpack on the desk.

  Sid looked back as Alex pulled out his chair. “Where have you been?” he whispered.

  Alex shrugged. “Otranto’s.” He started to sit down.

  There was no longer any chair, he realized. In a split instant he was falling, his arms flailing—and out of nowhere Alex felt a strong hand grab his collar and catch him.

  He looked up, bewildered. There, with one arm holding Alex’s entire weight aloft, was Mr. Sangster.

  How fast had the teacher moved? Had he already slid around to the side of the class as Sid had been whispering to Alex?

  “You should be more careful.” Mr. Sangster had crinkles around his eyes, which looked almost merry and angry at the same time. Alex found his footing as Mr. Sangster let go.

  The whole class was watching as Alex grabbed his chair and sat, staring at his desk. Why was this happening to him? What had he done? But then he remembered, and the flush of shame came again, and again was stifled.

  With the stifling came a rush of hot anger as Alex looked at Merrill & Merrill. Bill had pulled out his chair. Alex was sure of it.

  Mr. Sangster was moving again, toward the front. Like Alex, and unlike most of the students, who tended to be from Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, Mr. Sangster was an American. “I think, before the acrobatics of young Master Van Helsing, we were discussing Frankenstein.”

  Alex pulled a notebook and a thumbed copy of Frankenstein from his pack. Mr. Sangster had told them he was a Romantic and Victorian connoisseur, and that he intended the study of Frankenstein to take several weeks.

  “So,” said Mr. Sangster, “what sort of stories did the Villa Diodati group tell?”

  “Vampire stories,” Alex heard Sid mutter.

  Alex looked at Sid. “Say it,” he whispered. Sid shook his head. Apparently Sid was into vampires. He had been thrilled to hear Alex’s name was Van Helsing, even though the name meant nothing, really.

  Bill overheard Sid and spoke up: “Vampire stories.”

  “Eh,” Mr. Sangster said. “Not really. But close. What were they writing?”

  Bill threw Sid a punishing look. “You moron, you gave me the wrong answer,” he said under his breath.

  Sid reacted as if he’d been hit. He whispered, “Honestly—two of them were writing vampire stories.”

  Mr. Sangster looked in the back. “Do you guys have something you want to add? Sid?”

  Sid was dumbfounded for a second in the spotlight and trailed his fingers over his desk. After a moment he managed to drag forth, “Polidori and Byron were writing vampire stories.” Sid had named two of the people at the house party the teacher was going on about.

  Mr. Sangster shrugged. “Well, that’s not what Mary Shelley says.”

  They were talking about the introduction to the book. Not even the book. The introduction, where Mary Shelley talked about getting the idea for the book. Alex scanned the length of Shelley’s Frankenstein and calculated that at this rate they would still be reading it when he left for college.

  “Ghost stories,” offered Bill. “Scary stories.”

  “Right,” said Mr. Sangster. He pointed out the window, out to the trees on the grounds. “In 1816, just across this very lake, in a charming villa rented by the famous poet Lord Byron, a small party decided to pass the time telling ghost stories—or so reports Mary Shelley.”

  Sangster looked up at the board, where he had written a number of key words and names. “The party at the Villa Diodati that summer—the Haunted Summer—consisted of five writers: Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who were already quite famous; two young women writers, Mary Godwin (soon to be Shelley) and her half sister Claire—whom Mary disliked so much that she doesn’t even mention Claire was there; and Byron’s doctor friend, Polidori, who wrote short stories. And they’re bored out of their skulls, because although it’s summer, a massive volcanic eruption in Asia has clouded the sky and made the weather everywhere cold and rainy. So Lord Byron issues each of them a challenge: Write the scariest, most terrifying story you can.

  “Mary says the famous guys each wrote some minor pieces, and that Dr. Polidori had, and this is fun, ‘some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady, who was so punished for peeping through a keyhole—to see what I forget—something very shocking and wrong of course.’”

  Mr. Sangster looked back at the names. “And then they—gave up.”

  “Maybe it was the skull-lady story,” said Bill. “Polidori sounds like a loser.”

  The class laughed. Bill was a crowd-pleaser.

  “Yes,” Mr. Sangster said softly. “He does sound that way.” Then Mr. Sangster turned back to the class. “But out of Byron’s challenge, a seed grew—and that seed would germinate in the wild imagination of nineteen-year-old Mary into one of the most resilient books in the history of the language. This one. Frankenstein.” He smiled.

  Alex dared to raise a hand. “Not one of the best?”

  “We’ll see. But it happened here. Right over there at the Villa Diodati. You all enjoy quite an honor, reading it next to its germination.”

  The bell rang. “Tomorrow we begin,” said Mr. Sangster, and the class started to file out.

  Alex wanted to turn back to apologize for being late but Mr. Sangster had already turned to a notebook and was scrawling in it. At the door Sid was asking, “What was that about with Bill?”

  Alex looked at Paul and Sid as he adjusted his backpack on one shoulder. He didn’t know the pair that well but he felt himself desperately clawing for friends. “You won’t believe what happened,” Alex said.

  A hand clamped down on his shoulder and Alex thought for a second that Mr. Sangster was yanking him up again, but it was Bill. “You should be more careful,” the smiling boy said, his brother sneering next to him. “So, Van Helsing. Kill any monsters lately?” Bill hissed the syllables out with disgust.

  So Alex’s name was Van Helsing. Yes, we all get it. Like that Van Helsing, the vampire hunter from Dracula. But Alex’s father was a professor and his mother was an artist. The only great meaning to his name in all his years was carried in the ornate lettering on annual reports from the Van Helsing Foundation his father controlled. It was a name of some renown in philanthropic circles and turned up occasionally as a sponsor of public radio programs he never listened to. There was no brandishing of wooden stakes, no demons or vampires.

  Not a one, not ever. “That is not how things are,” his father had told him once. “Those were things that just didn’t happen,” and they never touched on it again. But of course now Alex was sure that his father had been wrong. Or else that he himself was going insane.

  Which might be the case. He had felt entirely, blissfully normal until recently, back at Frayling Prep in the United States. Short bursts of fuzzy pain behind his eyes, a feeling he could only describe as static, had started intermittently and then grown, jagged and buzzing. Alex had gotten a little paranoid. Then the incident that had gotten him expelled. Now he was here. None of this was stuff he would say to Bill Merrill.

  Alex turned to Bill. He couldn’t let the mouse incident go whether he was getting a new room or not. Alex spoke softly because the door was still ajar, Sangster just beyond. “I know what you did.”

  “Oh?” said Bill. His brother listened silently. Alex had slept in the same room with them for two nights and he hadn’t heard Steven Merrill say ten words. The two of them clearly didn’t want him in their room, but they couldn’t come out and say it; they had to make his life miserable. “And what did you do, eh?”

  Alex noticed that Sid and Paul were watching intently, and so were some other boys passing by. Bill came closer: “What did you do that got you kicked out of your last school? You set somet
hing on fire? Steal something? I’ll bet that’s it.”

  Paul moved his own massive form into the space. “Come on,” the British boy said to Alex. “Let’s go.”

  Alex surveyed the scene, his eyes twitching again. Bill had his backpack hanging casually over his shoulder, an expensive model with countless cords and loops hanging down. Alex shook his head. “We don’t have to do this,” he said.

  “We don’t have to do this here,” said Bill. “How about later?”

  “Secheron,” whispered Steven.

  “Yeah,” said Bill. “Good one, Steve.”

  “Wow,” Alex referred to Steven. “He speaks.”

  “Secheron,” Bill repeated, by which he meant a small village nearby. Alex had heard there were cafés, curio shops, and ice cream there. It all sounded charming. “After school.”

  Steven raised an eyebrow. For the first time Alex got the impression that still waters ran deep. “Football.”

  “Oh, right.” Bill consulted his brother, casual and businesslike. “Practice. You think…”

  As they were discussing when to beat Alex mercilessly, and whether their weekday soccer schedule could accommodate the beating, they now really did resemble Merrill & Merrill, a law firm. There was nodding and finally Bill turned back. “Friday. Day after tomorrow. Secheron.”

  Paul said, “Oh, you’re going to fight in Secheron? Where, at the ice-cream parlor?” Paul turned back to Alex. “Come on,” he repeated.

  “Fine,” Alex said, feeling exhausted. “Secheron.” He rubbed his right eye, feeling some release when he pressed on it. As his vision cleared he rested his eyes on the cords dangling from Bill’s pack.

  The boys all started to leave.

  Suddenly, Bill Merrill was mysteriously yanked back and smacked his head on the doorjamb. He yelped sharply. “Hey!”

  As they continued briskly down the hall, Alex smiled. Sid said, “What the—?”

  Alex shrugged. In the moment before they moved, he had taken just a few seconds to loop one of the cords of Bill’s pack to the hinge of the door.

  “I am more than just a mouse,” muttered Alex.

  CHAPTER 3

  From the moment Alex had walked in the first evening, he had understood the situation by the way Merrill & Merrill arranged themselves, Bill standing like an unhappy guard, Steven leaning against a bookshelf and staring at the floor. They wanted a three-man room to themselves. For the first blissful weeks of the term, the brothers had been lucky; whatever curious fate had failed to fill their room, they had grown used to the luxury, stacking the third bed with DVDs and magazines and books. And then Alex had arrived to disrupt their paradise.

  By now he had already learned to stay out of the room as long as possible. Let the Merrills have it. Let them study or not study, watch movies on Bill’s portable player or not, but for the love of all that was holy, don’t go back there until it’s time for everyone to go to sleep.

  Tonight he hit the library. The school was quiet in the evening, and the largest group he saw as he passed through the halls was gathered in the student lounge, watching local news on a large TV. Alex lingered at the entrance for a second, catching some of what apparently Mrs. Hostache had been whispering to the headmaster. A boat painter had been murdered in the woods, the third seemingly random attack in the past month.

  That was the dead painter he had seen himself. He felt a pang of remorse over not reporting it, and yet for the life of him he had no idea how he would describe what he had seen—and what he had done. How can I explain that I impaled someone with a tree branch—but don’t bother looking for her? He blinked it away. Now the incident was drifting into the past, into what he had to admit was denial that had taken him through the day without thinking about the girl with the eyes and the fangs, and oh yes, the cloud of dust. Come on. Maybe that had been an illusion—some sort of hoax. It simply, absolutely could not be what he feared it was. Like Dad said, “Those things don’t happen.”

  The painter’s murder itself was far from unique. Alex had heard that people disappeared around here, not constantly, but a steady trickle. He had felt sure this was probably true but no more true than around any large lake. Now he was lost in too much knowing with no explanation.

  Great place to send me, Dad. Sure can pick ’em.

  The going wisdom on TV seemed to be that everyone should be extra careful at night. That advice sounded wise.

  Alex found a table off to the side of the dark-paneled, shelf-lined library and hauled out his books. He cracked into Frankenstein first, reading the introduction and then moving into the novel, trying to drop into Mary Shelley’s prose.

  His eyes were bleary. After a moment he stopped reading and reached into his pack, pulling out his contact lens case, a bottle of cleaner, and his glasses. Delicately he began the process he had only recently learned, prying each eye open with his fingers and pinching the contact off his eyeball. “That’s just weird,” his younger sister had said when she first saw him doing this over the summer when he got them. “Nothing about touching your own eye is normal.”

  This was true. Putting the contacts in was agony, taking them out defied all instinct to not touch your own eye. He had to grab at the left one, the one that felt comfortable, three or four times before his thumb and forefinger found traction, and finally he felt the contact slip off his eye, now red with irritation.

  Alex closed the contacts into their tiny case and donned his glasses, feeling much younger. Wasn’t that what the contacts were really about, after all? He was just a boy with glasses, and then his mom had offered to get him these things. He looked older with them, strangely, and for the first time in memory he had peripheral vision. But was seeing a door before you bonked into it worth the punishing ritual of poking your own eye?

  “I didn’t know you wore contacts.” Sid plopped down in the seat across from him. He had with him an enormous black-and-red paperback book, An Encyclopedia of Vampires, and a small stack of magazines and source books that Alex saw ran the gamut from horror to the supernatural to mythology, and segued as if in some geekish solidarity into science fiction and fantasy. He had no apparent school-related material at all.

  “Well, I’ve only been here three days,” said Alex.

  “Does it hurt, touching your eye like that?”

  “Yes,” Alex said ruefully.

  “Why do you do it?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “What are you lot talking about?” said Paul, joining them. He had his copy of Frankenstein with him as well but dropped it as he sat, and started thumbing through Sid’s magazines. “You got any Cinescape?”

  “Do they even make Cinescape anymore?” Sid smirked. He was flopping open his massive encyclopedia and Alex saw that he had several sheets of graph paper inside. Each graph page had been divided into four sections, presenting a complete history on a person, and Alex looked closer: a picture, a name, and various descriptors like age, height, weight, and paragraphs on history, powers, and abilities. Sid selected a couple and said, “I was asking Alex why he wears contact lenses, if he hates poking himself in the eye.”

  “For the girls, mate, for the girls,” Paul said. He looked around. “Oh, wait…”

  “I don’t wear them to get girls.”

  “Well, then you shall not be disappointed.” Paul looked at Sid’s graph paper and picked up a sheet, waving it at Alex. “Do you believe this? Look at this paper.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a character.” Sid took the graph paper back.

  “He spends hours—bloody hours, every day—designing characters. And not just characters, but vampire characters. For the Red World.”

  “The Scarlet World,” Sid corrected, irritated. “It’s an RPG.” Alex vaguely knew what he meant: a role-playing game, the old paper-and-dice kind.

  “Scarlet World,” Paul acknowledged. “Now, no one else here plays this game, so he doesn’t actually play the characters, he just makes more of them up. Each on
e has a race—”

  “Class,” Sid said.

  “Sorry, a class. Smart vampires, dumb vampires, zombie vampires. This one is a rat vampire, I think.” He held up a character.

  “That would be a Nosferatu,” said Sid, “you know, like in the silent movie Nosferatu. And he does attract vermin, so Paul has apparently learned more than he lets on.”

  “What’s that one?” Alex pointed at the one Sid was drawing, a tall vampire with Asian eyes.

  “It’s a dhampyr,” Sid said, excited. “A half vampire, you know, with a human mom and vampire dad. Like in Vampire Hunter D.”

  “What’s that?” Alex asked.

  “It’s an anime. It’s awesome.”

  Alex was amazed at the breadth of Sid’s hobby. “You really got into today’s class,” he said.

  Paul beamed at his roommate with something like pride. “He could teach the class.”

  Sid seemed to fold this over before him and then he sighed. “Mr. Sangster’s wrong, by the way,” he said finally.

  “About what?” Alex said curiously.

  “Byron and Polidori did write about vampires,” Sid said. “Mary just lies. That whole thing about Polidori writing a story nobody liked, about a skull-headed lady looking through a keyhole? That’s stupid. You can look that up and you won’t find it. Mary just put that into her introduction—sixteen years after the Haunted Summer—to make Polidori look like an idiot.”

  “See?” Paul said. “Listen to that. Like they’re friends of his.”

  Sid was looking down, laughing, small and wiry and sheepish. For a moment Alex wondered if Sid minded being teased.

  Paul concluded, “How I ever wound up hanging with such a nerd is a mystery.”

  “You’re the one who’s reading his space magazines,” Alex said, smiling.