Voice of the Undead

by Jason Henderson

  “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 bu
nch, 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.

  Chapter 13

  Visiting Steven at Secheron Hospital on Wednesday was a nuisance that none of them had time for, but they did it anyway. The second Pumpkin Show was that night and the ball—just two days away—was occupying the girls’ every thought. (Alex had yet to ask Sid how the first rehearsal went.) Alex had almost begged off from the hospital visit except that Minhi had insisted that it would mean a lot to Vienna and somehow that was that. Alex felt overwhelmed by demand.

  Everything not destroyed in the fire had been moved to LaLaurie, and Alex rode the spare bicycle he habitually borrowed from Sid—he kept forgetting that he needed to ask his parents to ship him one. They pedaled all the way into town.

  Going into town required a bike or a bus. It was nicer by bike, Paul had told him, and this was still true even now that they had about twice as far to go, around the lake and into Secheron Village. As they rode, Alex was watching the trees, half expecting Elle to appear.

  They clustered near one another on the road, and Minhi asked something that Alex had a hard time keeping straight himself. “Sid, how does someone become a vampire, anyway?”

  “There are a lot of different stories,” said Sid. “But the one that seems to be true is that it’s a curse and a poison both. You get the poison and it can kill you. If you die from it and you haven’t been embalmed or cremated already, you rise again. But there are lots of halfway points. You can be a thrall.”

  “A what?”

  “A thrall, you know, a servant. Sometimes those are just people who really love vampires,” Sid explained. “And sometimes they’re people who have been bitten, who already are poisoned, who are on the way themselves.”

  “I’m glad you’re finally finding a use for all this info,” Minhi said.

  “Tell you what I wish,” Alex said. “Sometimes I wish I could just download your brain into mine.”

  Alex was relieved to put away thoughts of vampires when they locked their bikes at the hospital and headed in to visit Steven Merrill.

  Unlike the tony, new feel of the village library and marina, the hospital was bland and utilitarian and looked as though it had been built in the mid-sixties, with sweeping, ugly arcs and thin modern columns. Awful architecture was a mainstay the world over.

  As Vienna signed the papers at the front desk Alex looked at Paul and Sid.

  “Can you believe we’re doing this?” he muttered.

  Paul shrugged. “Seems like the right thing to do.”

  Minhi had been asking directions from the nurse behind the desk and now returned to them. “Elevator’s out,” she said. “Third floor.”

  They were used to stairs. Alex shivered at the colossal dreariness of the place. A flash of color caught his eye as they neared the stairs, reflections of gold paper. He peered in the trash can with curiosity as he passed. It was a box of chocolates, crushed and dumped, next to the plainer paper it had been shipped in. The label said MERRILL. Alex filed it away—Bill was in a bad mood, so trashing a care package was within the realm of irrational things he might do.

  As they walked up the white plaster
stairwell—Alex could never understand why anyone painted stairs white when it made them look dingier than they could possibly actually be—Alex turned to Sid and Vienna. “I didn’t even ask how rehearsal went Monday night.”

  Sid shook his head. “I think I’m no Steven Merrill.”

  “Sid did very well,” Vienna said. They reached the third floor. “I think after a few more times he would be perfect.”

  Alex was cursing himself slightly. Rehearsing for the ball certainly would have been better than the train ordeal. Plus he was now well on the way to putting Sid next to Vienna for the rest of the week. Because this clever strategy of putting his friends close to any girl he found remotely interesting was working out so well already.

  Vienna pushed through the door and Sid turned to him. “Dude, you gotta take my place.”

  “Really?” Alex said.

  “Yes, really,” Paul whispered. “Sid nearly fell down the stairs.”

  “I thought the debutantes come down the stairs—”

  “Seriously, you gotta take my place,” Sid said, his face crinkled.

  Vienna held the door open and said, “You know I’m standing right here, right?” She looked at Minhi as they all stepped into the third-floor hall.

  Alex paused for a beat. Okay, sure. “So . . . would you mind terribly if I took Sid’s place?”

  “I think we can make that work,” Vienna said, with only a Mona Lisa smile in evidence.

  Abruptly Vienna stopped, and Alex felt the smile drain from his own face as he looked down the hallway. This was not a huge hospital—one central hallway traveled down the floor—and on a weekday afternoon there should have been a flurry of activity. But all was silent. The only visible soul was Bill Merrill, who was leaning with his hands thrust into his sport coat against the wall next to a hospital room door.

  Vienna spoke first. “Bill?”

  Bill seemed to come awake, heaving himself off the wall as he looked up toward them. Alex saw what seemed to be wistfulness dry up and dissolve into something angrier. “What are you doing here?” Bill demanded. As he came closer, he pointed at Alex. “What is he doing here?”