Alex Van Helsing The Triumph of Death - By Jason Henderson Page 0,62
tablet as his mind raced through what he had learned about the book just a month or so before. “Both editions, 1818 and 1831.”
“What are you looking for?”
Alex removed his wireless and clicked it off, and gestured for Astrid to do the same. “John Polidori had Mary Shelley put clues about Claire and Byron in Frankenstein. I’m hoping there’s more.”
“What are you doing, Alex?” Astrid shook her head. “They said you can go home. They’ve given up on this. In fact, I think you said you were out, that you didn’t want to do this anymore.”
“Go home to what? Everlasting night because they don’t want to read? No, no. Just…get the books; we quit later.”
She shrugged. “I never wanted to quit anything.”
Alex pointed, not looking up as he scribbled notes. “Books.”
By the time she returned with the books, Alex had opened an internet chat and in a separate window entered the phrase the coarsest sensations of men into Google. The search brought up the notation instantly. “Sangster was right: It is a phrase from Frankenstein.” For a moment Alex wondered at someone’s ability to hear a few words and place the book from which they came. He had internet tools to do this, but only careful reading over time could allow you to do it by memory. He had the suspicion that he could pick any five words out of any book Sangster had read and the teacher would be able to nail it. He could use him now.
A voice spoke from the tablet, young and female. “Are you sure you need this?”
Alex whispered near a microphone grating at the corner of the tablet. “Yes. Do you still have access to the forms?”
There was the sound of typing. The voice on the other end was looking something up. “Yes.”
Astrid looked at the chat window and read the name of Alex’s chat partner. “Who are you talking to? Who is ‘RVH’?”
“That would be Ronnie Van Helsing,” Alex said. “Short for Veronica. My little sister.”
“Where is she?”
“In the States, but she’s the only one who can do what I need her to do in the time we have.” Alex scribbled some notes on a sheet of paper.
“New girlfriend, Al?” the voice taunted.
“Not the time, Ron,” Alex answered. “Just set me up and come back when you do.” He took the book Astrid handed him and flipped through the 1818 edition of Frankenstein, to the place where his Google search had led him, chapter 11. He looked at Astrid. “Polidori had Shelley put her hints in the 1831 edition, but here this phrase is in the 1818 version. That means it wasn’t a plant by Polidori; it was just a reference. Still, see if there’s a difference in the 1831 book.”
Astrid flipped to chapter 11 and frowned. “It’s not here.”
“The chapters are different.” Alex glanced back at the internet version. “Try chapter…nineteen in yours.”
“Okay.” Astrid searched the pages. “Paragraph?”
“A few pages in, starts ‘On the whole island, there were but three miserable huts.’”
Astrid found it and they pushed the books together and confirmed that the paragraphs were the same in both, just in different chapters. Alex made a decision that the difference meant nothing. He had to move quickly and rely on snap decisions.
“What’s going on in this section?” Astrid asked.
Alex scanned, relying as much on having read the book recently as on what he was seeing. “Uh, Dr. Frankenstein has been threatened, and he has to build a bride for the monster. He has to go off by himself to do it. And he chooses an island.” He paused and looked up. “Is it possible that Polidori hid Allegra’s body away on this island, wherever it is—this is somewhere in Scotland, by the way—and used a reference to Frankenstein to lead us there?”
“Why would Polidori do that?”
“I guess to keep the body safe.”
“But why not just leave instructions?”
“If I had to guess? Because he didn’t want random grave robbers to know, and because from my limited experience, that’s kind of the way he worked.”
“It’s a lot of assumptions, Alex.”
“Yes,” Alex hissed, “but look: Every clue we’ve followed so far has been right. The vampires caught up to us at Harrow. We were right. So this has a good shot at being right, too.”
Astrid sighed and looked at the paragraph. “This island is in Scotland?”
Alex read some. “They don’t name it. Ugh. So it’s just ‘an island.’ In the Orkneys,” he read, jumping around paragraphs. He went back to the computer and brought