Alex Van Helsing

Alex Van Helsing ran. He ran instantly and without a second thought in the direction of the scream, bursting from the side of the road into the trees as fast as his legs could move, rubber soles churning against soft earth and leaves slick with dew. The sun had barely risen, and in the woods it was still dark. He heard the shout again—someone screaming out hoarsely, a voice that sounded raspy and male.

Alex had been walking the tree-lined road that ran from the gate of his new school, shivering slightly in the predawn cold. He’d been at Glenarvon Academy for all of two miserable days, and already he could tell he was going to have to make a change. Unable to sleep, he’d
snuck from his bedroom and out, through the deserted hallways and then the grounds and the front gate, onto the road. Not far away, he could hear the distant sound of loons on Lake Geneva, the occasional croak of frogs. Other than that, all had been silent but his own soft, steady breath.

Then the scream from the woods split the air.

Alex picked up his pace as the sound grew more desperate and then cut out. Running, he wove his way under low-hanging branches, one of them smacking his ear.

He leapt over a log, reached a clearing, and froze, stumbling to a halt.

There in the woods, he saw a body.

It was male, probably in his forties, wearing a boat painter’s cap and overalls. The victim’s beard was drenched in blood, and there was steam rising off the body. Even without the scream Alex had followed, he knew—this death had just occurred.

Alex’s eyes darted around the clearing and back to the body. He was not afraid of the dead; at fourteen he had already trained in mountain rescue in Wyoming, had already participated in search operations. Some of those had ended badly. But nothing he had seen in Wyoming had ended like this.

Then came another sound:
static
, a jagged, dark whis
per in his brain that jolted his head for a moment. Alex blinked, staggered by the feeling, losing his balance for a second.
Set it aside. Pay attention.

A wisp of leaves curled and lifted, and Alex’s eyes flicked toward the movement. Then he saw something that raised the hairs on the back of his neck: A figure in white slid behind a nearby tree.

In that split second he saw that it was a she, and she started to run.

“Hey!” Alex shouted, taking off after her. She was insanely fast. “Hey!” he called again, leaping over underbrush, gauging the ground and the trees and the branches with every running step.

She might have been involved, might be a witness, might be a scared daughter or girlfriend. She must have seen something. Now and then Alex could glimpse, by trickling early light, a leg here, a flowing sleeve there, now nearly a hundred yards away.
Catch her. Catch her
.

They broke into another clearing and she was exposed in the dimness. This time she had nowhere to go—she had reached a rock formation that cut off her escape and now she spun around, slapping her hands back behind her against the rock, facing him.

As Alex slid to a stop he took her in: white boots, white tunic, white leggings, even a short, white hood.
She wore white gloves—no, not gloves, those were her hands, bone white as well.

“Hey,” Alex said a third time, less forcefully. His brain was buzzing more strongly now, whispering and pounding against the inside of his head and against his eyes and contact lenses, and he swallowed the feeling down.

She was leaning forward, mouth barely open, teeth clenched. Her eyes were so dilated that they shone. She stared wildly at him, and he thought for a moment that she had been severely traumatized and struck dumb.

He said gingerly, “Do you know what—”

And now she snarled, and as she opened her mouth, he saw that her teeth were enormous, white and sharp. Not quite teeth. They were fangs.

Alex felt his own mouth hang open, and he was already twisting, finding his footing as he spun around, and running as she leapt at his back.

It wasn’t a girl, it was an it,
he thought, still unwilling to believe.
It wasn’t a girl; it was a thing. That’s crazy. That’s crazy and it’s at your back!
He felt her close behind as he ran through the trees. Rapidly he tried to retrace his steps. He didn’t know these woods. He had just followed a scream because it was the right thing to do and he had no idea—

Feet churning,
Don’t look back, she’s still there, I turned
this way—the road is that way.

He could hear the road, a few hundred yards off. He could hear early morning traffic. Alex turned toward the sound, losing his footing for a second. He reached out to steady himself but overbalanced.

Slow motion. Falling, he began scanning. As he smashed into the forest floor, his face just missed a long, narrow tree limb lying on the ground. Alex grabbed the limb, lifting it as he rolled, bringing it around as the girl leapt for him.

He swung the limb around, catching her in the knee, and her momentum sent her sprawling past him.

As she hit the ground she tumbled and righted herself. He was still trying to rise when he saw her taut muscles bunch through the white leggings and she jumped at him—her sharp nails catching him in the shoulders.

Alex felt the air shoot from his lungs as she drove him back against the earth. His mind raced.
The world won’t slow down, but your mind can. What do you do?

She tried to pin him—close now, her face an arm’s length from his, his shoulders and shoes digging into the forest floor. But he wouldn’t be pinned. Not now. Alex swept his feet out and around her legs, then to the side, and she lost her balance and fell. He rolled, kicking her away, and now she did a wondrous thing, he had
to admit: While still in the air she spun like a cat,
like a freaking cat
, and she was coming again.

Sharply, Alex realized that she wasn’t just the random attacker or tweaker at the beach he’d prepared for in self-defense classes. She was something else. And there was something else in him clicking in on how to deal with her.

He felt himself reaching for the downed limb again, certainty driving his actions as surely as certainty had driven him off the road to pursue the scream.

In the fraction of a second as she leapt, Alex brought the limb in front of him and locked his arms. He felt it drive into her chest as she landed.

Her face registered shock and anger. She was snarling, white eyes blazing in the dimness, and then she was on
fire
.

A moment later, she burst into dust.

Alex kicked and crab-walked back as the cloud of dust settled over him, landing on his slacks and shirt. He got to his feet, shaking his head:
No, no, no. This doesn’t happen.

He ran for the road, staggering out of the woods and tripping, spinning onto the asphalt.

A flatbed delivery truck swerved around him, barely missing him. As Alex rose, still staring into the woods,
he realized the driver was yelling at him in French.

The driver stopped shouting when he took in the sight of Alex—torn and muddy pants, scrapes and cuts from the trees. Alex gestured mutely,
Can I have a ride?
even as he was grabbing the edge of the truck bed and jumping on.

“Where do you need to go?” the driver asked in French.

“My school—
école
,” Alex answered in his beginner’s French. “Um, Glenarvon. Glenarvon Academy.”

He watched the woods race by the half mile back to the gate, all the while thinking,
This doesn’t happen. This didn’t happen.

C
HAPTER
2

An hour and a half later. Alex was in the headmaster’s office, wearing fresh pants and a clean shirt. His mind was still swimming with the nightmare—no, the
thing
that happened—and that wasn’t even what had brought him here. He’d have to come to terms with what had transpired in the woods, and he didn’t have the time yet.

“I want a new room,” Alex said flatly.

There. He had said it, after working up the courage to walk the long corridors, hearing the clapping of his dress shoes against the marble floors. With every step he had gone over it in his head. He knew what he had to say. And then at the last second he changed it.

“I…I mean, I need, I—I think I need a new room.”

Alex squirmed as the woman behind the desk—draped in a shawl as if they didn’t keep the foyer of the headmaster’s office toasty and warm already—eyed him through her glasses. Mrs. Hostache, he reminded himself as he read the nameplate on her neatly arranged desk. Next to the nameplate was a bud vase, and in it a white flower he didn’t recognize.

Mrs. Hostache cleared her throat. Off to the right behind her stood the door to the headmaster’s office. Over her left shoulder Alex saw a massive window revealing a view that could have been a painting: the leafy grounds of Glenarvon Academy, and beyond, the waters of Lake Geneva, cold and gray with early autumn. He got lost in the view for a second, waiting for her to respond. He had started this badly.
Lemme go out and come in again,
he thought.

“What was your name?” Mrs. Hostache peered through wide, blue-rimmed glasses that threatened to hide her face.

“Alex. Alex Van Helsing.”

Mrs. Hostache leaned forward, chin on her fist, seeming almost amused. Her hair was brown, pulled back in a tight bun, wisps of gray streaking through it. She chewed her lip. “Didn’t you just get here?”

Alex nodded. “Yeah, I—I got here two days ago.” So she did remember, he thought with relief. It was already two weeks into the fall term when he had come in, all of a sudden sent here by Dad and Mom because after the incident at Frayling Prep they hadn’t known what to do. Now he was in a new school, new house. New room.

“What seems to be the problem, Alex?”

“I…” Alex thought for a second.

He had found a dead mouse in his bed. He wasn’t afraid of mice, but you had to admit that was pretty nasty. He was further unnerved because he hadn’t woken up with it, not that sleeping with a dead mouse would have been better. No, he had awoken around four
A.M.
and realized that his alarm clock had been unplugged. His roommates, the Merrill brothers, or Merrill & Merrill as they were called by the other students, were pretending to sleep.

Sick of being there with them, Alex had risen and washed his face. He dressed and nearly gave up trying to put in his contacts, the cursed things—he had to try three times to get the right one to go in—and quietly exited the school, out into the darkness to walk. He was done with them.

And then the nightmare in the woods. He could still feel the ferocity of the girl in white’s attack. He had
returned in a mild state of shock, only to find the mouse, tiny, fragile, and dead, on his pillow.

Coming off the trauma of the attack, he had wanted to throw up. He wanted to throw up now, thinking about the mouse, its tiny closed eyes, a tiny body someone had snuffed the life from just to make a point. He was more horrified by Merrill & Merrill than by the nightmare in the woods; he had just faced something that
did not happen
, in the words his father always used, and now he had returned to find that there were also monsters in his room: his roommates. After two days of penny-ante antics like busted alarm clocks, toothpaste in his shoes, and glue in his books, they now seemed to be turning sadistic.

“I found…”
Wait. Careful, Alex.
He thought down the chessboard a few moves as he stared into the giant, slightly amused eyes of Mrs. Hostache. If he told the story he might trigger some sort of investigation, or whatever it was they would do here. He pictured the Merrill brothers, Steven and Bill, with their kind eyes and cruel mouths, fessing up or not, and it wouldn’t matter, because within three days of his arrival Alex would have caused a major disciplinary event. He might even get swept up in it; the brothers might be able to turn it to their advantage. Everyone would hear, and watch.

“I found that I snore,” he said quickly. “And it disturbs Merrill and Merrill—I mean, the Merrill brothers. I think they would be happier if I…”

“What’s this?” came the voice of Headmaster Otranto, now standing in the open door of his office. Otranto was a wide-shouldered, older man, Italian with a finely trimmed mustache, wearing a topcoat. He was headed out.

“Oh, you have a message.” Mrs. Hostache rose, handing Otranto a slip of paper. She turned away from Alex, and he listened as she and Otranto lowered their heads. “In the woods…asking us to keep a watchful eye.” Alex took this in. Did they know about what had happened to him in the woods this morning? Was he walking into more than he had thought?

But no. Otranto frowned and nodded, then changed the subject. “Is there a problem with this one?” Otranto looked Alex up and down, as though he were leafing quickly through the files in his head.

“Young Master Van Helsing is thinking he would like a new set of roommates.”

Alex felt himself flush. Otranto had seen his file, had heard the whole story of what had happened at the old school. On Alex’s first day, Otranto had given him a long lecture. “What happened before is of no concern to me,
young man,” he had said. “But it bears a mark, a mark of character, shall we say. And that mark must be proven to be a smudge, and not a scar.” Which was a weirdly charming way of saying it was of
great
concern.

“What happened?” Otranto asked.

“Nothing, I just…we have differences.”

“And are you certain, sir, that you do not invite these differences?”

Alex stared, his eye twitching. What do you say to that?

His right contact was killing him; he now suspected he might have put it in inside out, which meant it would bother him until he had the chance to take it out and try again.

“I didn’t invite—” he said. “I just think that we made the assignment pretty fast, and I thought maybe I could be matched, somehow.”

“Matched?
We
made the assignment?” Otranto repeated the phrase, the temerity of it.

Alex looked down.

“I think we should…”

“I think you should be getting to class,” said Headmaster Otranto. “And
we
will look forward to more of your learned consultation in the future.”

Alex sighed heavily.

Out of the foyer and into the corridor he slunk. First period had already begun. The year was off to a fine start.

Feeling like a mouse himself, Alex entered his first-period classroom. First period was literature, and Mr. Sangster, a teacher in his early thirties with close-cropped, slightly curly hair, was at the board, scrawling on the chalkboard. Alex scanned the room and found his desk, not far from the back. Glenarvon was a school for boys, so it was a rather smarmy, sarcastic, hostile horde that looked back at him. They were a privileged assortment. Sons of diplomats, aristocrats, and oil barons mingled with the children of high-level corporate executives from around the globe.

And then there was Alex, who was far from under-privileged, but whose old-money background was boring and staid and on the very low side of rich. Unlike the others, he wasn’t here to make lifelong connections. He was here because he had been kicked out of his old school for something that still haunted him, and sent here by his father, who had covered up the whole incident and told Alex to forget it ever happened. But how could he? Alex was still grappling with the guilt.

He walked slowly past two boys he had met—Paul, a friendly, beefy British boy who seemed to have crammed
himself with great discomfort into his chair, and Sid, who was Paul’s roommate, a gangly Canadian with red, unkempt hair. Alex had already hit it off with these two at lunch on his first day, though the conversation had run little past their amusement over Alex’s “exotic”—it really wasn’t, he insisted—last name.

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 for
get—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.

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