The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein (Mammoth Books) (57 page)

“He worshipped me, that was the trouble. He thought I was a goddess, that I wasn’t real. And he was so possessive. He wouldn’t let me talk to other men. He was always telephoning me to make sure where I was. In the end, I began to feel that I was trapped, that I was suffocating. I had too much whisky to drink and I went for a drive.

“I don’t remember the accident. All I remember is waking up in your father’s clinic. I was terribly crushed, the lorry had driven right over my pelvis. You were right, of course, I
was
dead. But your father took possession of my body, and took me to Pinner.

“You probably didn’t know very much about your father’s work with electrical galvanization. He had found a way of stimulating life into dead tissue by injecting it with negatively-charged minerals and then inducing a massive positive shock. He had perfected it in wartime
for the War Office . . . and of course they had been only too happy to supply him with dead soldiers to experiment on. The first man he brought back to life was a Naval petty officer who had drowned in the Atlantic. The man’s memory was badly impaired, but later your father found a way of preventing that from happening by using amino acids.

She paused, and then continued, “I was killed in that accident, all those years ago, and I should have stayed dead. But your father revived me. Not only that, he rebuilt me, so that I was almost as perfect as I had been when he first met me.

“My legs were crushed beyond repair . . . he gave me new legs. My body was pulped . . . he gave me a new body. New heart, lungs, liver, pelvis, pancreas . . . new arms, new ribs, new breasts.”

She dropped the shoulder of her dressing-gown. “There,” she said, “look at my back.”

David could barely see the scar that his father’s surgery had left on his mother’s back. The faintest of silvery lines, where Georgina’s arm had been sewn onto somebody else’s shoulder.

“How much of you is really you?” he asked her, hoarsely. “How much of you is Katya Ardonna?”

“Over the years,” his mother said, “your father used six different women, restoring me piece by piece to what I once was.”

“And you let him do it? You let him murder six women so that he could use their body-parts, just for you?”

“Your father was beyond my control. Your father was beyond anybody’s control. He was a great surgeon, but he was obsessed.”

“I still can’t believe you allowed him to do it.”

His mother lifted her dressing-gown again. “I suffered years of agony, David . . . years when I was scarcely conscious from one month to the next. It was like living in a dream, or a nightmare. Somethings I used to wonder if I was actually dead.”

“But how did he get away with it, killing all of those women? How did he get rid of the bodies?”

From around her neck, Katya Ardonna took a small silver key. “You’ve seen that black leather album in the attic? The one that’s locked? Well, this key will open it. This key will let you know everything that you’ll ever want to know, and more.”

They looked through the album in silence. It was a complete photographic record of his father’s surgical reconstruction of his mother’s shattered body as brightly-coloured as a sex magazine. Page by page, year after year, they could follow his progress as he painstakingly put her back together again. The surgical techniques were extraordinary – even
involving a rudimentary kind of micro-surgery, to reconnect nerve fibres and tiny blood capillaries.

First of all, they saw how David’s father had sewn new limbs onto his mother’s shattered body – then replaced her ribcage and her lungs and all of her internal organs.

After years of meticulous surgery, she had emerged as perfect as she was today. The same beautiful woman that his father had met in Poland in 1937 – almost flawless, finely proportioned, and scarcely scarred at all.

She smiled from the album like the Queen of Warsaw.

But the photographs told a darker story, too. Stage by horrifying stage, they showed what David’s father had done with the limbs and the organs that had been surplus to his needs. He hadn’t wrapped them up in newspaper, or burned them, or buried them, or dissolved them in acid. He had painstakingly sutured them together, muscle to muscle, nerve to nerve. Every photograph was a grisly landscape of veins and membranes and bloody flesh. Glutinous chasms opened up; glutinous chasms were closed. Blood welled scarlet over thin connective tissues; blood was drained away.

Neither of them had ever seen the human body opened up like this. It was a monstrous garden of grisly vegetables: livers shining like aubergines, intestines heaped like cauliflower curds, lungs as big as crumpled pumpkins.

Out of this riot of skin and bone and offal, out of all of these rejects, David’s scrupulous father had been able to create another woman. Of course, she wasn’t as beautiful as Katya Ardonna . . . he had pillaged the best parts from six women’s bodies to restore Katya Ardonna’s beauty, the way he had remembered it to be.

But this other woman had been presentable enough, under the circumstances. And she had given him the opportunity to practise his suturing skills, and some of his new ideas on connecting nerve-fibres.

And she had
lived
just as Katya Ardonna had lived – six murder victims tangled into one living woman.

The last few photographs in the album showed the woman’s toes being sewn on, and the skin being closed over her open leg-incisions.

The very last picture showed the day that the bandages had come off this new woman’s face. She was bruised and stunned, and her eyes were out of focus. But with a sickening, surging sensation of pity and disgust, they saw the desperate, lopsided face of David’s Aunt Rosemary.

Adrian Cole’s four-book series “The Omaran Saga” and “Star Requiem” have been published on both sides of the Atlantic, and his other novels include the heroic fantasy
Blood Red Angel
and the forthcoming
Armageddon Road.

“
My first memory of Frankenstein and his bizarre creation goes back to when I was a boy of seven,” recalls the author, “living at the time in Malaya, my father having been in the Army. Our house backed on to a rubber plantation, itself an ideal environment into which to let loose a fermenting imagination. The tropical afternoons were sweltering, a time to be in the shade, and my mother regularly took me to the local cinemas – not, I hasten to add, to see Frankenstein movies! – or we talked about books we had read or movies we had seen and loved
.

“
I do recall quite vividly her telling me the plot of the Boris Karloff movie, which had left a lasting impression on her, as her description of it then left on me. She had transposed the tremendous impact of Karloff’s performance, which had wowed the movie world, on to my inner eye: ironically it had not filled me with terror, but rather with fascination, certainly pity. Since then, Frankenstein’s creature has always been one of my favourites – at school I was notorious for doodling a kind of
Mad
magazine version of it in my jotters and other less acceptable places. And of course, I became an avid fan of the movies, which I still watch over and over again
.

“ ‘The Frankenstein Legacy’ posed a problem for me – how to explain Victor Frankenstein’s survival and that of his creation? In Mary Shelley’s novel, the scientist clearly dies, the Monster determined to self-destruct. But then it struck me that we only have Robert Walton’s word for that, don’t we? And he was a man with a quest, a desire for glory, blessed of remarkable determination and resiliance. Could he really have resisted an opportunity such as Victor Frankenstein presented? Was he such a fine chap as his letters to his sister imply? Those letters . . . I wonder
. . .”

A
FIERCE WIND
drove landward from the Atlantic, a predatory elemental force, almost sentient in its fury. In its screaming wake line upon line of breakers smashed on rocky shores, spume and rain mingling, lashing the cliffs. The cauldron of the skies mirrored the churning grey maelstrom, thick black clouds pulsing and fomenting, ripped through with bolts of light. Beyond the rim of the cliffs, a single cottage seemed to crouch down in a fold of moorland out of the storm’s anger, the rain clawing at it, tearing loose slates from the roof, dragging down a length of guttering that tumbled across the adjacent fields and was gone in the blink of an eye.

Inside the cottage, mind closed to the hysteria of the night, Staverton slumped in a high backed chair, reading through one of the numerous volumes that lined the wall of his small living room. A coal fire smouldered in the grate: he would retire to bed soon, though it was relatively early. Too wild a night to go out to the shed for more logs. When he had been a young man, he would have revelled in a night such as this, but now, at fifty, he felt the cold too easily, and his bones ached at the very thought of a stiff breeze. But it was the price he paid for isolation, for severance from the world he had once inhabited.

He jerked as the thought was given substance by a sudden pounding on the front door. Far too rhythmic to be the wind. And it demanded to be answered. His light was on; it would have been seen.

Cursing, he went to the door and slid back the long bolt, easing the door inward. A blast of freezing air cuffed at him and as he lifted his arm to protect himself, he saw figures beyond. Three dishevelled youths confronted him. Beyond them, on a knoll by the cliff edge, he caught a glimpse of another, hunched over against the tempest but positioned like a sentinel.

He had no time to study it: his visitors were inside, the door banged shut and bolted anew against the storm.

“Doctor Staverton?” said the first of them. He was in his early
twenties, his near-shaven head bare, his eyes sunken and dark-ringed. Clothes poor, jacket and faded trousers baggy and creased, shirt stained, buttons missing. The two other youths could have been his brothers, equally as shabby. Didn’t they call them travellers?

“Not doctor. I was a surgeon. And I’m retired,” said Staverton.

“We know,” said the youth, half smiling. His teeth were bad, his mouth cruel.

“I don’t have anything worth stealing – ”

“We’re not here to do the place over. It’s you we want. Better sit down.”

Staverton had no alternative. He dropped back into his chair. The spokesman sat awkwardly in the chair opposite him as if it were alien to him; the others stayed by the door, watching vacantly.

“I’m Turner. You don’t know me,” said the youth. His face gleamed with the rain and Staverton saw now that his jacket was sodden, though the youth didn’t seem bothered, hardly noticing the fire.

“Who sent you?” said Staverton uneasily.

“Not who you think. Not Walton.”

In spite of himself, Staverton gasped. “What do you know about him?”

“You worked for him, at the Institute. For years.” Turner’s eyes were tiny, but they fixed on Staverton’s face, the youth’s gaze irresistible, frightening.

“It was a long time ago – ”

“It’s taken my boss years to track you down. After you left the Institute, you really did go to earth, Doctor.”

“Look, I’ve nothing worth having, worth knowing.”

“My boss doesn’t think so.”

“Who is he? Not the police?”

Turner’s face creased in a semblance of a grin. “No chance. You’ll meet my boss soon enough. Then you’ll know him. He’ll make it worth your while. And you won’t get hurt. He needs you.”

“Has – Walton – got anything to do with this?”

Turner snorted. “Oh, yes. Indeed he has.”

“I won’t go back to him, not now – ”

“Sounds to me like you hate him.”

Staverton pulled his jacket tighter about him. “He’s despicable. Treats people like dirt. Uses them and discards them.”

“You should know, eh?” Turner leaned forward, a hellish gleam in those tiny eyes. “You don’t know half of it. Want to?”

Staverton shuddered. “No. I’m glad to be out of there now. I’d outlasted my usefulness. God, it’s such a relief to be free of him.”

“It’s time you knew the truth about him.”

Staverton shook his head. “No. All I want is to be left alone.”

“Tough. My boss needs your help. He said to tell you everything about Walton. Then you’d help.”

Staverton looked up, then across at the other two youths. They were slouched against the door, seeming to drowse. “I don’t have much choice.”

“Hear me out, then choose,” said Turner.

Staverton again felt the onset of coldness creeping in the air. It moulded ominous shapes from his past, but he nodded. There was an inevitability in all this that part of him had always dreaded.

“Did Robert Walton ever talk about his first partner, Victor Frankenstein?” Turner began.

Staverton pondered the name, but murmured a negative.

“Frankenstein was, among other things, a brilliant surgeon. He lived in the eighteenth century. We don’t know when he died.”

Staverton frowned. “But you said he was a partner of Walton’s. That’s not possible – ”

“Walton is not what he seems. You know he’s a surgeon, well, sort of. But Frankenstein was the master. His genius is what Walton wanted, what he stole.