Voice of the Undead (9 page)

His voice was smooth, low enough to reverberate in Alex's chest, but with a strange high tenor hidden in it.

Alex found himself saying, “Yes.”

“We're going to walk now, Alex. And you're going to do something for me.”

Alex felt the guard completely relax his grasp and move away, and Alex sat forward. He needed to kill this man now. He needed to reach for his stake and try.

“We're going to walk,” the man said again, “and you're going to do something for me.”

Alex was rising and thinking he needed to reach for—something, there was something, or maybe not. Maybe not. Maybe what he was going to do now was walk.

“Let's walk.”

They began to move down the car, toward the back, past the man's card table. Alex was trying to think of what it was he was going to do, just now, and in the distance he heard the vampire in the peasant shirt say to the others, “One of us will be right back.”

Chapter 10

The train track spewed from the back of the train, red-brown and blurred, as Alex and the gray-bearded vampire stood outside in the cold and the wind. They were up against an iron railing and Alex was listening to the man talk and watching the long line of iron, watching the white gravel of the train track that melted with speed into a milky gray railroad, the dark, gray-blue evening sky stretching all around them, blanketing behind trees and ugly buildings, the view behind the view, the view no one looks at on a train.

“The truth, Alex, and we both know it, is that this is as good as it gets,” said the man. His voice was audible over the wind, close behind Alex, mixing with the wind. He didn't need to shout; Alex was listening. “Relax.”

Alex put his hands on the rails, watching the liquid stream of iron and gravel, listening to the liquid words.

“Your father is very proud of you, Alex, because of what you have become. Everyone who has ever known you, all those people who secretly doubted you would amount to anything, because we all know that secretly they doubted you, whatever they may have said, now even they have heard of your skills and are proud of you. Everyone is satisfied. Your mother—whose talents were so great that she could move your father to turn his back on his life—even she is amazed. All of us on the brighter side, we too are amazed. You have surprised us all. This truly is as good as it's ever going to get.”

Alex nodded. All of this made sense. He understood that people generally lied when they pretended to be proud of you, but he had been doing amazing things lately. “But I thought they didn't know—”

“Of course they know,” the man said. “Of course your father knows. Do you think the greatest enemy of the brighter side is stupid? We don't think that, even though it would be of great comfort to us. And, Alex, it takes
extraordinary
effort not to believe that which is of great comfort.”

The man leaned closer, and Alex could hear all the crosscurrents of high and low in his voice. “Let me tell you what comforts you must not believe, Alex. You're not going to get much farther. Your friends, whatever friends you have made, will not survive being close to you. Your family will not remain proud, because of the damage you will cause. And in the end you will not be able to overcome the inherent flaws; your intellect will sadly not reach above the rather rudimentary heights it has attained now. You also, despite what you believe, will not be very tall.”

Alex felt a stab of sadness at that last one, but it was just one more thing. All of this truth was exactly as he had expected.

The vampire clicked his tongue. “But look—you were able to stop a great clan lord and command the respect of a very stubborn organization. You have attained achievements most men your age could only dream of. It truly does not get any better than this.”

He pointed. “The iron there is extremely spiky and hard. If you were to leap upon it, in all likelihood you would, almost instantly, be able to seal your life, seal it, here, at its best point, when you have all those things that, really, you know you only barely deserve—friends, respect, and accomplishment. And it's so easy—to step. Isn't it?”

Alex was watching the iron line and listening, and all of this made sense. There was something in the back of his mind that he had intended to do, but what the man had said made sense.

The man was talking again, like a refrain in a song, and it was true. Alex lifted his foot and hung it over the side, how easy it was. Like being in the snow, letting it close in and envelop you.

This feeling had happened once before.

Alex had been in the snow for too long the last time he had felt it, after rescuing a man on the mountain who had taken a wrong turn; Alex was a hero and then suddenly he himself had gotten lost when the rescue helicopter set off half the mountain in an avalanche. Alex had hunkered against a tree as the snow came down around him like a wave. And for what seemed like hours he had waited, so easy to go to sleep, to let the snow overtake him; he was a hero and it would never—

Alex.

He could sleep, he could step, and it would never—

Alex!

It would never be better, never to disappoint, never to overlook or outgrow, let go, step—

Beyond the droning of the voice, beyond the flowing of the rails, there was a rattling sound, a whooping sound. Something deep within him reached out for this new sound, just as he had when he had been lost in the snow. He had seen hands furiously digging toward him, digging like the coming noise, moving snow out of the way, a voice calling to him—

Alex!!

And now there was a helicopter swooping into view from over the trees, coming into view the way a pair of hands had come into view, hands reaching through the snow for him, his sister's gloves—

Take my hand!

Rattling, whooping sound of a helicopter, diving closer, thirty yards above, and Alex was reaching into his pocket. His foot still hung over the edge, and he wrapped his fingers around the handle of the palm-size grappling gun in his jacket and raised it—

Take my hand, Alex!

And fired it.

The hook looped around the skids of the chopper and Alex felt himself yank free, his shoulder twisting and screaming in pain, yes,
Wake up, take my hand, come on.

He was swinging wildly in the air and then there were people dragging him up into the chopper, and he could barely hear Sangster and Armstrong. Alex lay on the floor of the chopper and watched the train disappear into a tunnel, as the vampire in the peasant shirt turned slowly and stepped inside.

Chapter 11

“I would have done anything he told me,” said Alex, putting down his pen and bringing everyone's work to a halt. It was the next day, Tuesday. The first Pumpkin Show was that evening, and the ball in three days' time. He, Paul, Minhi, and Sid sat at an enormous round table in the New Aubrey House study, working on homework and stories for the Pumpkin Show.

Sid was writing furiously, a stack of books in front of him, opened and laid across one another as he consulted each and scribbled away on long yellow legal pads. “
The Skein
says you should use recurrent phrases to drive the reader along,” he said as he wrote. “
The Skein
says if you introduce a gun on the first page you have to use it before the end.”

Paul asked, “Does
The Skein
recommend you measure twice and cut once?”

Minhi offered, “Does
The Skein
recommend you not let anyone else get any work done?”

But for Sid, the ideas were flowing. Alex himself hadn't managed to get anything down. He turned instead to studying, and finally he had spoken up, haunted by the events of the night before.

Minhi laid down her own book and sighed, as though relieved that he wanted to talk about it. Alex had given them a brief run-down and then asked them to drop it. But now he found he just couldn't not talk. That was unusual for him. It was true, though: He would have done anything the vampire—Ultravox, of course—had suggested.

“You say that now,” Minhi observed, “but you didn't, did you?”

Ultravox and his retinue had disappeared, either in the tunnel or somewhere along the track. The only positive side to Alex's excursion had been that Alex had seen him, and even now his description was being studied by the guys with the computers. But it was a good bet that Ultravox was at this point safely inside the protective walls of the Scholomance.

“Do you think it's true?” Paul asked, getting back to something that was bugging Alex even more than the fact that he had been about to throw himself off a moving train. “That your dad knows everything you've been up to?”

“Obviously it's not a perfect secret,” Alex said. “It's hardly a secret at all. There are Polidorium people who know, there're all of you—”

“Like we're gonna be calling your mom and dad,” Sid said, and snorted.

“There's my sister, and of course there's the fact that my dad isn't an idiot. He was a part of the organization.”

“May I . . . ,” Vienna spoke, as if unsure whether to go on.

“What's that?” Alex said.

“This is none of my business,” she demurred.

“Seriously, that never stops these guys.” Alex smiled. “Hey, you're the one who got sideswiped by Punk Elle. Go ahead, tell me what you're thinking.”

“This man, Ultravox, he told you things in order to get you to do what he wanted,” Vienna said. “My father is a negotiator and I know what such a man is like. That treaty he's working on? I've seen him talk people into supporting it even though they were dead set against it. Changing people's minds is not about bending them to your will. It's about getting them to bend their own will. What I mean is, the fact that what Ultravox said made you want to do things does not make what he said true. It just makes it something you could believe. In fact, the best lies always sound like truth. So—you really can't count on
any
of it being true.”

Alex looked at Sid and Paul with a pursed frown.
Not bad.

“Mate,” said Paul, “you would do well to talk to your parents.”

“
Really
talk to them,” emphasized Minhi.

“I will,” Alex said.

“Really?” she said, laughing.

“I think so.”

“Hang on,” Sid said, thinking of something else. Alex watched the boy seem to scan invisible letters hanging before him in the air. As if possessed, Sid opened up
The Skein
, ran a finger down a page, and then shut it again. Sid wrote down a few words and said, “Okay.”

Paul asked, “Okay, so you're with us again?”

“Yeah,” Sid said. “I think I'm good to go with the first story.”

“Already?” Alex asked. “That's amazing.”

“I wouldn't say amazing.” Sid sat back, looking pleased. “For years I've been doing character descriptions. Now that I've learned to put a story around them, it's—well, I think I followed the advice pretty well.”

“I'm not surprised—he could tell a vampire story in his sleep,” Minhi said.

“Oh, my story isn't about vampires,” said Sid, shaking his head. “Sorry to disappoint.”

Minhi looked shocked. “Why not? That's like your subject.”

“I think maybe it's too close,” Sid said. “Anyway . . . I'm not sure I'm looking forward to the reading part.”

“When's the first Pumpkin Show again?” Alex asked.

“Tonight,” Minhi said. “It's not too late to sign up.”

Chapter 12

On the way to the first Pumpkin Show, the gang passed Sangster in the lobby. He was standing near a ladder chatting with a couple of other teachers who were watching a pair of older boys hang a chandelier. They were surrounded by wires and cables and for a moment Alex had the vision of the boys on the ladder being eaten alive by the wiring, sucked up through the ceiling. He needed to stop listening to Sid.

Alex dropped back from his friends as Sangster glanced at Alex and excused himself. It was obvious to Alex that Sangster had been waiting for him. “Let's walk,” Sangster said.

They went down the hall, past rooms that were still full of cobwebs and sheets and even, strangely, a pair of genuine giant-wheeled bicycles like the one that Alex and his mom had seen Paul Newman ride in
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
They exited out the side, and as they began to walk the long way, hugging the mossy wall of the grounds, he could see that Sangster had something serious to tell him.

“What?” Alex asked.

“Armstrong passed along some more Chatterbox intel on Scholomance,” Sangster answered. “A reprimand went through for your friend Elle. She's angry as hell, because a project she was working on is being canceled. Project Claire, it's called.”

“Claire,” Alex said. In his mind he instantly saw a skeleton, female, long hair barely visible underneath a white veil. The skeleton was alive, but barely, and had been drinking the blood of the Clan Lord Icemaker. Icemaker had nearly gotten
Alex's
blood in order to revive her completely, so that Icemaker and Claire could rule together. But, thanks to Alex, it hadn't worked out.

Sangster said, “We did wonder what happened to Claire. Now we know; Claire the skeleton has been sitting at the Scholomance, and Elle has been leading the project to finish bringing her to life, and the bosses just pulled the plug.”

Alex shrugged. “I guess I don't get why this is a big deal.”

“It's just information you might be able to use against a vampire who seems very interested in taking you apart,” Sangster said. “Anyway, their chief frustration with Elle is that she failed to kill you. She was supposed to tear out your throat or something and instead she got all clever with the Glimmerhook worm. But look, they're calling you by
name
. They wanted
you
out of the way before Ultravox got here.” Sangster looked around.

Alex thought of the train. “But if I was supposed to be out of the way for Ultravox—Sangster, that guy could have just pushed me off that train himself.”

“I have a theory about that,” Sangster whispered. “Ultravox likes to do things his way. Before we lost the chatter lines we were following, you know what the vampires were saying? That as upset as the Scholomance was, Ultravox was simply
amused.
But, Alex, I think he wants to know whether in fact you are a threat. I think he's testing you.”

“Testing me how?”

“There's something special about you, and it has them worried.” Sangster tapped his head. “We don't really know much about this thing you have up here. Your ancestor Abraham may have had it, and we think his first son did, too. But not everyone has it. Your father didn't.”

“But he managed,” Alex said.

Sangster said, “Oh, yeah, he managed. But you do have it. First in a couple generations as far as we can tell. So far
you
use it to sense them. Maybe there's more to it. But—that might be beyond the Polidorium's ability to help with. I have to say it's getting dangerous,” Sangster said. “Not one of us would think any less of you if you decided to leave.”

Alex sighed.
Getting
dangerous? For a moment he shot through the whole scenario—leaving the Polidorium, leaving Glenarvon, going home, and then what? School in the U.S.? Take up woodworking? “I'm not leaving unless you kick me out,” he said.

“Okay, partner,” Sangster said. Alex had absolutely no idea if Sangster was relieved or not, and he didn't trust the casual language to be any indication of Sangster's feelings at all. He was the most unreadable person Alex had ever met. “So that's it. Ultravox is in Geneva; he's here to do something, and we don't know what it is. We have a lot of work to do.”

But first, the opening Pumpkin Show.

The LaLaurie library was dimly lit, and Alex realized with some regret that this was his first time seeing it. It spilled out before him with high stacks and catwalks going up three stories, and he could make out the green reading lamps you expected to find at an Ivy League university rather than a high school. “This is cool,” Alex said to himself, pushing past a crowd of students to stand inside the entrance.

There Alex found Sid, who looked as pale as a ghost, surrounded by Paul, Minhi, and Vienna. Sid had drawn the third slot and was flipping through his papers nervously.

“When do they begin?” Alex asked Minhi. He looked at the place of honor that had been set: a large chair that almost qualified as a throne, surrounded by candles, with a reading table placed in front of it.

“Ms. Daughtry will start us off,” Minhi said.

“Everybody, welcome,” came the voice of Ms. Daughtry, emerging from the back of the library as if on cue. She went straight to the candles, talking as she went. “I don't know how many of you are familiar with our ritual, so I'll set the stage, and then we'll be off. Please, by all means, take a seat.”

After the gathered students found chairs and tables to lean on or stand against, Daughtry continued.

“The Pumpkin Show is a LaLaurie tradition that dates back to our founding. For decades it was exclusively for reading original stories, though in recent years we've expanded the competition to include artistic works of any kind. We take as our inspiration the salons of antiquity, before the age of the Xbox and the internet, when our only defense against the cold and damp was one another. The most famous model comes from just up the lake,” she said.

“At the Villa Diodati,” whispered Alex as Daughtry said the words aloud. He knew the place well.

“It was here on Lake Geneva in 1816 that Europe's greatest living writer, Lord Byron, gathered with a small retinue of friends, including Percy and Mary Shelley, and shared stories—and not just any stories, but ghost stories and other tales of the supernatural. It was not without its success. The results of that story circle include some of English literature's most enduring works: Shelley's
Frankenstein
, Byron's
Fragment
, and John Polidori's
Vampyre.
”

Alex's head swam with rivers of meaning behind each of these little markers of Geneva history. The lake was alive with connections to the Diodati circle.
Frankenstein
had held coded warnings about the return of Byron in the guise of a powerful vampire clan lord. Polidori, the minor name in the bunch, had been the master of a clue hidden in Shelley's book, and had founded the organization that had so taken over Alex's life. And yet here that cast of characters was, back in their place as the backdrop to a story contest. Which seemed just.

“So. The first reader will take his or her place at the seat of honor and, as we say,
declaim
.” There was a chuckle. “And you'll want to shout that, by the way. Our young authors often like to start their readings by giving us a lot of apologies about whether their story is any good. ‘I've just started on this,' ‘This is a first draft,' ‘I don't know what I was thinking.'” She smiled. “That's when to shout. So, without further ado—Minhi Krishnaswami?”

Paul squeezed Minhi's shoulder and she headed up to the seat. Minhi took a moment to adjust herself in the large, reddish chair, and shuffled her papers a bit. “Mine is called ‘The Ice,'” she said. “And I'm really sorry, but it's still in the—”

“
Declaim!
” came a bunch of female voices, and Minhi began.

“The Ice.” Alex expected, when he heard that title, that Minhi was going to raid her own experience at the hands of the Icemaker, of being dragged across a frozen lake and down to the Scholomance underneath. He had been surprised that she would be so daring, to tell a story of her own horror. But he was relieved to be wrong. “The Ice” was a tale of a ship trapped in a glacier. Thoroughly horrifying—there were deaths by freezing and heroic attempts to get away, and a final surrender to cold death—but it was a horror of imagination and not of confession. People listened, rapt, as she read in that elegant voice of hers, the slight Indian accent and American phrasings. This was the second time Alex had watched her perform, and it was clear she loved and commanded the spotlight. Previously he had seen her performing
Hung Gar
kung fu, and that, too, was entrancing.

When she was done she received her applause with a mix of pleasure and slight, charmingly perfect humility, and then the seat was taken by another student Alex didn't know.

Sid was third of the evening, and Alex watched his friend slowly move to the front and take his seat. The thin boy with ginger hair squirmed a bit as he gathered his papers. He opened his mouth, looking like he was about to pass out. Alex wanted to shout in support but let it go.

“‘The Box.'”

Sid began to read, his voice quavering at first and then slowly building into a confident sound that never gave out for all fifteen pages of his manuscript. As Sid read, Alex heard all the things Sid had learned. He heard cadence and rhythm and repeating mantralike phrases. Sid even pulled out what sounded to Alex like a high-wire act of words, in which he managed to end every short scene with sentences that echoed one another without repeating. Alex had the suspicion that he was even missing half the tricks. Somehow, Sid had become a master of composition. The difference between what Sid was doing with words and what Alex himself could do—based on what he churned out in English assignments, anyway—was like the difference between an Olympic ice dancer and a Sunday ice-skater. The tools were the same but the result was orbiting on a higher plane.

The story was of ghosts in a tower, of hidden messages in a silver box, all right, but beyond that it was a presentation of foreboding. It built on itself, tightening the screws of suspense and then releasing, tightening and releasing, and at the end snapping in a crescendo of shock and tragedy.

Alex watched the crowd. The students, especially the girls, were not merely engaged; they were held tight to their seats and transfixed.

There was a chestnut-haired Asian girl, tall enough that Alex guessed she was a senior, standing along the wall. Alex watched her sway slightly as she listened. Another girl, blond and wearing a lavender sweater, had gone glassy at the eyes, her mouth slightly parted.

Alex was awed by the power of Sid's reading. In his years of making characters, Sid had become a master of story, and his audience was held in his hypnotic sway. When he was done, there was an electric silence. It took Ms. Daughtry, who began clapping, to rip the silence open into a shock of applause.

Alex had no idea a story could do that to its listeners. In that instant he was insanely proud of his friend. For one person at least, the move to LaLaurie had netted a clear triumph.

There were other stories in the evening, but Minhi and Sid had put themselves in the minority by choosing prose: Alex and Paul endured a litany of pop songs, monologues from
The Crucible
,
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
, and
The Children's Hour
, an authentic yodeling demonstration from a German girl, and one poem by Maya Angelou. Alex found himself wishing Minhi had done her
Hung Gar
, or at least used it on the yodeling girl.

After the readings were over, Ms. Daughtry made a few announcements about the next heats: This was Round One. There were two more to go. Ten contestants would make it, no telling who, but one of them was in no doubt. Sid had been the master, and that had ended the evening well before its actual finale.