Alex Van Helsing

by Jason Henderson

  He raced down the stairs, past bleary-eyed students on their way to breakfast. Headmaster Otranto was coming in from outside and Alex nearly bumped into him, eliciting a short, disapproving look.

  Out the door, onto the path, through the gate, a steady pace to the road. He had forgotten Sid’s bike, left it in the woods halfway to Secheron. He was glad for the mistake—he wanted to go back into the woods. Unlike school, the woods were a clearer world, of hooded monsters and agents on motorcycles. Every inch of the area crawled with the kind of energy that he barely felt in his everyday school life. Out here there was energy with purpose. Heroes on a mission. Alex found himself thinking hard as he ran.

  The trees looked unfamiliar in the daylight, but after a while he felt he was reaching the bend where he had left the road, where the caravan had started to pass. Finally he saw the glint of the reflector on Sid’s bike as it lay in the leaves.

  Alex froze. There, leaning against a tree, arms folded, was Sangster, wearing a navy blue jogging suit. “We need to talk,” he said.

  Alex went to the bike and lifted it. “I want in,” he said.

  “What do you mean, ‘in’?” Sangster asked.

  “You showed me pictures of my father. I can do it. I want in.”

  “Are you sure that’s what you need to be doing right now?” Sangster asked. “You’re skilled and you’re lucky, but I gotta admit, I’m worried that you shouldn’t even stay in the area.”

  “What else am I supposed to do?” Alex asked, and he meant the question sincerely. “Even if I wanted to be normal, to lead a normal life—I’ve got these vibrations in my head when I see these—oh, wait, right—monsters.”

  “And they know you have that,” Sangster said. “I’m willing to bet that the Scholomance got wind that a Van Helsing was in Geneva.”

  “Last night when you guys were checking out my glasses, you were acting like you thought maybe I was spying on you,” said Alex. “Spying for my dad, I guess.”

  “Right.”

  “Why would he want me to do that?”

  “The relationship is complicated,” Sangster said.

  “You gotta understand that’s just not part of what I know of my father. I want to learn about that. I want to learn to do what he did.”

  “Alex,” Sangster said soothingly, “this stuff takes years to learn. And you have years.”

  “Oh, give me a break,” Alex said. Sangster was calling him a kid basically. That was what this was about. Alex was furious. Last night Sangster had sounded ready to hand him a machine gun. “First, I’ve already killed one of those things without any of your training. And second, I can learn to do what you do. You think I can’t ride through trees?”

  Sangster tilted his head. “I didn’t say I don’t think it will happen. I already told you that. Someday.”

  Alex started rolling the bike. “I have to go. Paul and Sid are waiting.”

  “Be careful on these roads,” Sangster called, adding to Alex’s irritation.

  Alex returned the bike and made it to the refectory just as Paul and Sid were getting up from breakfast. Sure enough, there was a crowd of admirers gathered around, who indeed regarded Paul’s scratches and wounds as badges of honor. Alex’s bruises ran up and down his body but were generally invisible, and he felt a twinge of jealousy.

  “How was your walk?” Sid asked. Alex shrugged.

  A hand clapped down on his shoulder from behind. Alex spun, anticipating a fanged demon that would bite his head in half. Close enough. It was Bill Merrill.

  “You didn’t come in last night,” Bill said.

  Behind Alex, Paul and Sid grew serious. Steven Merrill, nursing his own wounds, lingered nearby.

  “I was there,” Alex said evenly. “Don’t you remember?”

  This answer caught Bill by surprise—he was about to respond, then stopped and seemed to chew on it. Get there faster, Bill, thought Alex. Bill looked back at Steven, who pursed his lips.

  “Yeah,” Bill said finally. “Maybe so. But don’t think for a minute we’re done.”

  “Okay,” Alex said.

  Paul made a time-out gesture with his hands. “It’s Saturday, mates. Saturday. For the love of God. Let’s all do something else.”

  Bill and Steven consulted each other and reached an agreement. “See you tonight, roomie,” said Bill.

  “Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Alex said, knowing they were glad to be rid of him. He hoped that would be the end of it.

  Alex, Paul, and Sid spent the rest of the day wandering aimlessly about the grounds. After lunch they spent some time on the battlements, sprawled out and reading stacks of Sid’s comics and magazines.

  Alex was reading a vampire comic called Tomb of Dracula and despite the events of the past week his first feeling was guilty thrill. His father had always forbidden books on the supernatural—for the first time, Alex thought, he had a clue as to why. But still he couldn’t help trying to compare the pale figures of the comic with those he had seen, even if he could not discuss them aloud.

  “What was the first vampire book?” Alex asked.

  Sid leaned back against the wall. “Modern vampire?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I mean there were always stories about family ghosts that came back to haunt sons who’d embarrassed them,” Sid said. “A modern vampire, that’s the Dracula kind, a revived human who, you know, sucks blood and chases women.”

  “Okay.”

  “You have two important works in 1816—Christabel by Coleridge, but that’s a poem and you want books,” Sid went on, “so that brings us back to The Vampyre by John Polidori. Of course that one was really about Lord Byron.”

  “Lord Byron, the poet?” Paul asked. Alex remained quiet.

  Sid nodded. “He was called Ruthven in the book, but it’s about how he would seduce and destroy everyone he met. It was clear to everyone that Polidori was writing about Byron. Byron was cruel, man. That girl Claire, Mary Shelley’s half sister? She was obsessed with Byron and followed him everywhere, but when they had a child, Byron insisted on taking it and not letting Claire anywhere near it. Then he got tired of raising the baby and stuck her in a convent, where she died before she was six. He was a narcissist and a sadist. This guy was so bad, some people believe Polidori’s vampire metaphor wasn’t a metaphor at all.”

  Alex shook his head, impressed. “I’ll take your word for it.”

  Sid stood up and looked over the battlements at the woods and the lake. “We have vampires here.”

  “Come on,” Paul said, snorting. “There are no such things. Not in real life.”

  “What do you think happened to that woman in the square?” asked Sid insistently. “Just don’t go in those woods at night, is all I’m saying.”

  Paul started snickering and Alex tried to join him. After a moment Paul said, “Do you ever look anything but sad?”

  Alex smiled awkwardly. “Is that how I look?”

  Paul rested his great forearms on his knees and said, “When I got here—this is three years ago—I spent all my time thinking about Ealing. That was my neighborhood. I thought about it all the time. The parks where I rode my bike, my friends. It got where if I wasn’t thinking about it I felt guilty for not thinking about it.”

  Sid nodded to Alex, indicating this was true.

  Paul said, “So Count Dracula here started bugging me about London. Had I been to where they filmed those Hummer movies.”

  “Hammer,” said Sid. “That’s a vampire series.”

  “Hammer movies. Whatever. And there’s classes, and there’s answering all these bloody questions. And sooner or later, I realized that my life was here, at least for now.”

  “Your life was talking about your home instead of thinking about it?”

  “My life was whatever was going on,” Paul said. “What do you miss?”

  “I don’t know,” said Alex, trying to think. “We watch a lot of old movies, that’s my mom’s thing. And I miss ski
ing with my sister.” That wasn’t quite accurate, unless one understood skiing to mean rescue skiing. His little sister Ronnie, although twelve, was already an enthusiastic search-and-rescue aficionado, and when they had lived in Wyoming she and Alex had both thrown themselves into the training they were lucky enough to receive. Ronnie was the most daring of his four siblings.

  “So I have news for you, mate,” Paul said. “You can keep that. But everybody back home would probably want you to make the best of your life here.”

  They cracked into the shojo that Sid had borrowed from Minhi.

  When Alex looked at the first shojo, emblazoned with a great, black-winged angel holding a guitar, he saw her name scrawled on the back cover. “Minhi with an h,” he said. He opened up the book and a slip of paper fell out, jagged and torn from Minhi’s pink notebook. He picked it up. After reading it for a second, Alex asked, “Did you guys see this?”

  Paul and Sid shook their heads. “What?” Paul asked.

  Below the phone number and email address, the note said: FALL RECITAL AND MIXER. SATURDAY AT 8. LALAURIE SCHOOL.

  “It’s an invitation,” Alex said, as he stood up. For a moment he leaned on the battlements, watching the lake, feeling a bit like a knight.

  CHAPTER 10

  At seven o’clock the boys gathered at the front gate on their bikes. They figured it would take forty-five minutes to make it around the lower horn of the lake to LaLaurie.

  “You look quite posh,” Paul said to Alex, who was wearing a school jacket he had borrowed from Sid—he hadn’t received his own yet—and a pair of dress pants he had managed to lug back with a bag full of his other clothes from his old room.

  Sid’s jacket was a little small at the shoulders for Alex, but Paul’s only extra had surrounded Alex like a shroud when he put it on, so he had decided to go with too tight.

  They benefited from another thing that Paul explained. On Saturday, the ten o’clock curfew check was notoriously lax for the simple reason that the older boys tasked with enforcing it tended to be out themselves.

  Around the weaving road they pedaled, moving at a steady clip as the sun went down, talking all the way. Paul and Sid filled Alex in on classes, teachers, school traditions. Everyone agreed that the librarian was hot but could probably rip you in half, and that Sangster was easily the most demanding teacher they had. Sid said that Mr. Otranto was known to have powers beyond those of mortal men when it came to anything he needed for the school or its students; he had once procured Russian visitor visas for the Glenarvon mathlete team in less than forty-eight hours. The guy was connected, but had no social life—or none anyone had observed. This was no accident: Teachers and staff all lived in a garden-style apartment complex on the far side of the campus, and students were not welcome to roam there. Alex took all of this in, deliriously happy to be rid of the colossal strangeness of the past several days.

  Finally, they reached a well-manicured drive under an archway that read LALAURIE SCHOOL. The boys fell silent as they passed by brilliant topiaries and into an enormous parking area. They locked their bikes at a rack along a berm near the entrance. The lot was crowded with racing-green Jaguars and gray Rolls-Royces, Mercedes upon Mercedes.

  Visitors were milling about the lawn as Alex, Paul, and Sid approached the front entrance. They reached the top of the wide, rounded staircase and hung to the side for a moment. “Let me do the talking,” Paul said under his breath.

  “Guys,” came a voice.

  They turned to see Sangster jogging up the steps in a dinner jacket and black pants. He was carrying an old, leather-bound book tied with a silver ribbon and bow.

  “Mr. Sangster!” Sid gasped.

  Alex was already trying to figure out how he’d followed them, but he realized that especially where Sangster was concerned, there were a thousand easy ways. “This is a surprise,” Alex said.

  “Yeah, I wish I’d known you guys were coming!” Sangster smiled. It occurred to Alex that Sangster the teacher was a different person from Sangster the…whatever that other Sangster was. The differences were subtle but there. He wondered if Sangster even noticed himself. The teacher added, “So does anyone know you were coming?”

  Paul looked at the others, and then tried, “What really do you mean by know?”

  Sangster waved him off. “Stop while you’re ahead.”

  “Are you here on…business?” Alex asked darkly.

  “Not really. So do you have an invitation?” Sangster looked up at the front gate, where a woman in a silk blouse held a clipboard and was checking names.

  “Alex, the note is in your pack, mate—”

  “Kind of. Actually,” Alex said, “we were sort of winging it.”

  Sangster nodded. “All right then.”

  As they climbed the front steps, Alex quietly asked Sangster, “Did you really not know we’d be here?”

  Sangster gave him a look that suggested Alex must think he had just fallen off a turnip truck. Then he pulled away and went up to the woman at the door. As Sangster approached, she showed a moment of confusion and then lit up with surprise. They hugged briefly and then Sangster indicated the book he’d brought. She registered more surprise, and then genuine appreciation.

  Alex followed this few seconds of pantomime—they had met but didn’t seem to know each other that well.

  Now Sangster gestured back at the boys, squirming in their dress shoes, and Alex did make out the words, “Little fans.”

  Alex watched the woman wave her head from side to side, Oh, all right. She touched Sangster on the elbow.

  And they were in.

  The performance hall of LaLaurie School was off to the right. All in all it looked much like Glenarvon except with more flowers. The entryway to the performance hall spilled into a foyer where several of the students were rushing back and forth. There was excitement everywhere, and Alex felt a strange jealousy as he saw girls in uniforms introducing friends to friends and friends to parents and parents to teachers.

  “I feel like an intruder,” said Alex to Paul, who was reading a program. Sid was turning pale.

  Suddenly a figure was waving from near the entrance of the auditorium. It was Minhi. She gestured with long, skinny arms for them all to come, and Sangster led them through the throngs, smiling faintly to Alex as they went.

  “Look at you gentlemen with the jackets,” she was saying.

  “Yeah, I had to borrow mine, which is why it’s so small,” Alex volunteered idiotically. He sighed inwardly. Moving along. “You know Paul and Sid. This is our lit instructor, Mr. Sangster.” Minhi made a slight curtsy.

  “What are you performing?” Sangster asked.

  “It says here…” Paul held up a program he’d been handed. “Well, I see ‘ballet’ and ‘poetry’ and ‘singing,’ and then there’s you.”

  “Then there’s me,” she said, smiling wryly.

  “You’re not reading poetry, are you?” Alex asked.

  “I’m not sure I’d invite you here for that,” she said with a smile. She looked at her watch and said, “There are some seats down right. See you after the show.”

  Sangster, Alex, Paul, and Sid filed into the auditorium, found some seats, and settled in for a nightmare of several ballet pieces, three different solo vocal renditions of “Ave Maria,” and lots…and lots…of poetry.

  And then came Minhi.

  She bounded upon the stage in a black tunic, black leggings, and bare feet, and began to demonstrate her own art. She moved fluidly, muscles tight, sliding through a routine that looked like a performance of karate but brought all its force driven inward, intense and contained. Minhi drew imaginary bows, brought her fists in and out with a power that seemed to bend on itself. Above all it was slow, so slow that her muscles seemed ready to spring and pop, always controlled, every punch hypnotically glacial in its movement.

  “Kung fu?” whispered Alex.

  “Hung Gar,” whispered Sangster back. “Don’t be fooled by the speed. She could kno
ck your head off.”

  There were other performances, but Alex would recall none of them.

  After the recital, Paul, Sid, Minhi, Alex, and Sangster abandoned the crowds and headed out a pair of French doors onto the enormous lawn, which ended at the lake. The sun had mostly set, but lanterns were lit around the perimeter of the lawn, which itself was studded with classical statues.

  Alex competed with Paul and Sid in sheer enthusiasm. “That was—that was fantastic.”

  “You were like an action hero,” said Sid.

  “Again!” Alex said. “That’s like the second time you’ve been an action hero. Hey, he said you could take someone’s head off.” Alex thumbed back at Sangster. Sangster raised an eyebrow, his hands in his pockets as he walked.

  Minhi was leading them down to a floating pier at the edge of the water, smiling as she went. This had been her idea, to get away from all the families and alumni.

  “Why isn’t your family here?” Paul asked Minhi.

  “It’s a long way,” Minhi said. “Still, I’ll see them at the winter break.”

  Alex dropped back next to Sangster and changed his tone as his thoughts returned to the hunt for the Scholomance. He asked quietly, “How are your friends?”

  “They’re impatient,” Sangster said, watching the lake. “How does an entire fortress hide in plain sight?”

  “Were you going to find out last night?”

  Sangster glanced at Alex. “Maybe. Never can tell. But we went one way and the caravan went the other. We missed the entrance this time.”

  “Could they be underground?”

  “We’ve scanned,” said Sangster. “All around the lake.”

  “What about”—Alex searched for the words—“extra-dimensional pockets?”

  Sangster smiled. “You’ve seen too many movies.”

  As they reached the shore and the start of the narrow pier that led to the larger floating platform, which had railings and iron loops into which to place fishing poles, Alex heard someone call, “Mr. Sangster!” They all looked back.