UNINTERLINGUA 2015

U N I N T E R L I N G U A 10 pped shadow from inside a flask in a remote room at Cravenmoore. The shadow attac- ks Hannah, and she flees in terror, but the inhuman shape pursues her into the forest nearby and brutally murders her. Readers of the novel soon learn that the shadow has a violent past. Ismael gives Irene a diary he discovered in the wreckage of a boat from 20 years earlier. The diary belonged to Alma Maltisse, Lazarus’ wife, and in it she des- cribes her encounters with the shadow: “Su ira es cada día mayor. Desde el momento en que liberé a esa bestia de su confina- miento, ha ido ganando fuerza sin cesar. [Mi esposo] Él hace guardia al pie de mi lecho todas las noches. Sé que teme que si me deja sola una noche, la sombra vendrá por mí” (123). Ismael discovers signs of struggle in the forest that indicate Hannah was followed from Cravenmoore, so the next night he and Irene decide to sneak in and investigate du- ring Jann’s ritual evening walk. Inside the mansion, the two look for Hannah’s room, but the shadow has taken over the metallic body of one of Jann’s automatons and at- tacks them before they are able to discover anything. The teens are forced to smash a window, tiptoe along the ledge, and slide down a drainpipe to escape the mansion. As they run desperately through the forest, the creature pursues them into a cave that has access into a sea cavern below. They jump through the hole, the creature follows, and with the shadow still inside it, the automaton plunges to the bottom of the water. The sha- dow abandons its metallic puppet and de- parts through the hole by which they came, expecting that the rising tide will soon fill the cave and kill the meddling teens. As Irene and Ismael struggle to stay alive, the shadow breaks into the Sea view house and kidnaps Simone, despite Dorian’s courageous efforts to stop it. After impriso- ning Simone in a room at Cravenmoore, the shadow seeks its next victim, quickly finding and knocking out Lazarus. When Simone regains consciousness, the shadow, preten- ding to be a masked Lazarus, tells her the story of his life. As a boy, he was abused, neglected, im- prisoned in darkness, and finally abandoned by his mentally unstable mother. He was saved by Daniel Hoffmann, the world’s grea- test toymaker, who promised Lazarus that he would inherit the man’s empire in exchan- ge for two things: his shadow in a bottle, ne- ver to be opened, and a promise to give his heart fully to Hoffmann and never to anyo- ne else. The desperately lonely boy quickly agreed, years passed, and all was well until Lazarus fell in love with Alma Maltisse and broke his promise by giving her his heart. In a show of defiance, Lazarus threw the bottle containing his shadow into the sea just befo- re his marriage to Alma. However, one of the wedding presents to Alma was an exquisite small chest from Daniel Hoffmann that con- tained the bottle, with instructions that she was to open this special bottle of “perfume” Pierina Beckman