Alex Van Helsing Read Free Page A

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 wellbut 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 theUnited 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