Alex Van Helsing Voice of the Undead - By Jason Henderson Page 0,48

to play. “Freedom through sacrifice, freedom through sacrifice.”

“Gotta admit, that is one mellifluous voice,” Monty said. He started bringing up other windows.

Armstrong picked up a file off the desk area of Monty’s station and flipped it open, showing Alex a pencil sketch based on the person he had seen on the train. “This is the person you saw. This is Ultravox.”

“Have you matched him with anyone?” Alex asked.

“Not yet. So far this is just a guy in a peasant shirt.”

Sangster looked at the picture. “If I didn’t know better I’d think we were fighting Ernest Hemingway.”

Alex thought of the Icemaker adventure. “Do you think we might be?”

Sangster said, “It’s tempting, but no, Hemingway was not a vampire. Did some work for us, once, but that’s a whole other thing.”

“I’m running this through the database,” said Monty. “Should just be a moment.”

Alex was surprised. “You have a database of all the vampires’ voices?”

“No,” Monty said, “but there are a lot of elements out there that work their mojo through sound. There’s a Malaysian vampire that sings, a whole clan of Benedictine monk/sorcerers in Germany that use chants, and on and on. As in life, there are people who deal in sound.”

Alex turned back to Sangster and Armstrong. “Here’s what I don’t get. The voice told them to kill the guy, okay? And Elle brought a box of knives and laid them out for them. But why were the girls even there?”

Armstrong folded her arms. Her freckles showed in the dim light. “Could it have been back-masked or something, into a public announcement?”

“They don’t do PAs that way at LaLaurie,” Sangster said, shaking his head. “But I see where you’re going.”

“I don’t,” said Alex. “Clue me in.”

“There could have been a posthypnotic suggestion sent to these girls,” Sangster explained. “A message telling them to get up in the middle of the night and meet in the woods.”

Alex was looking at the file in the folder. The voice of Ultravox still haunted him, and in his mind he could hear it turned on him as opposed to the message on the iPod, which was meant for the pajama horde. It will never get better than this, Ultravox had said.

“Only girls were there,” Alex said, trying to focus on the task at hand, despite his distaste for the sound of the vampire’s voice. “There are boys at LaLaurie now, but only girls went into the woods. Why would it be just girls?”

Sangster shrugged. “I don’t think we have an answer for that yet.”

“Would this message have to be explicit?” Alex continued his questions. “I mean, as explicit as ‘get up at one and go a mile into the woods?’”

“Maybe. Could be a virus,” said Monty, who had put on a pair of headphones but could still hear them. He was sorting through several long lists of files, each bearing incomprehensible names.

Sangster had never heard of this. “A virus?”

Monty looked back, tapping a button to pause whatever he was listening to. He rubbed his forehead, clearly trying to dumb down his explanation as much as he could. “Like a computer virus. A whole set of instructions enclosed in a string of words, a magic spell, if you will. It could be in any language; if someone good—and we gotta assume Ultravox is good—he could create a posthypnotic virus that would include the instructions. All that would be left would be to inject it into the targets.”

“It could be a teacher,” Alex said. “A plant at LaLaurie. Or Glenarvon.”

Monty held up a finger, shushing them, and unplugged his headphones.

They heard a voice on an old, crackling recording. “You are going to do something now, not for me, but because you want to.”

“That’s him,” Alex said.

Monty played the two recordings simultaneously, and the two droning recordings swirled over each other on the screen. “This recording was made in 1937 in Washington, D.C. It is the only known recording of Jonathan Frene.”

“Frene,” Sangster whispered, staring at the name that Monty brought up on the screen. A dossier followed, but there was no picture. Alex saw time lines running back hundreds of years. “Frene was a voice man?”

“You’ve heard of him?” Alex asked.

Sangster held up two fingers. “Two ways. One, Jonathan Frene is a name that pops up in vampire events a lot in the past couple hundred years. Assassinations, mainly. And second, he was seeded into a story by Algernon Blackwood, a writer and one of our agents in the first half of the twentieth century. He suggested