Alex Van Helsing Voice of the Undead - By Jason Henderson Page 0,34
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.