The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein (Mammoth Books) (78 page)

Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster: The Director’s Cut
. The three-hour extended version, with additional beach party numbers.

My bladder is uncomfortably full but I can’t get up to pee lest I miss anything irreplaceable. Channel 1818 is a treasure trove. If I keep watching, I’ll be able to note down credits. I’ll be the true source of information. Weldon, Glut and Jones will have to beg me for credits. My interpretations will be definitive. Hardy’s
Aurum Encyclopedia: Horror
will have to be junked entirely. The history of horror is written on shifting sands.

Then come trailers: Peter Cushing sewing new legs onto disco
queen Caroline Munro in Hammer’s
Frankenstein AD 1971
; an hour-long print of the 1910 Edison
Frankenstein
; Baron Rossano Brazzi singing “Some Lightning-Blasted Evening” in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s
Frankenstein!
; Peter Cushing and Boris Karloff in the same laboratory; W.C. Fields as the Blind Hermit, sneering “never work with children or hunchbacked assistants”; James Whale’s 1931
Frankenstein
, with Leslie Howard as the doctor, Bette Davis as Elizabeth and a still-living Lon Chaney, all staring eyes and glittering teeth, as the monster; John Wayne and a cavalry troop tracking the Monster through Monument Valley in John Ford’s
Fort Frankenstein
; a restored 1915
Life Without Soul
, with Percy Darrell Standing;
Frankenstein 1980
in 3-D, with a better script; James Dean and Whit Bissell in
I Was a Teenage Frankenstein
.

1818 was the year in which Mary Shelley published
Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus
. This is the Frankenstein Channel.

My bladder lets go, but I don’t mind. I can’t make it to the kitchen without looking away from the screen, so I’ll have to improvise food. As always, I have enough munchies to keep me going. Sleep, I can do without. I have my vocation.

My wrist aches from writing down titles and credits. I have responsibilities.

David Cronenberg’s
Frankenstein
. Dario Argento’s
Frankenstein
. Ingmar Bergman’s
Frankenstein
. Woody Allen’s
Frankenstein
. Martin Scorsese’s
Frankenstein
. Walerian Borowczyk’s
Frankenstein
. Jerry Warren’s
Frankenstine
. Akira Kurosawa’s
Furankenshutain
. Ernest Hemingway’s
Frank Stein
. Troma’s
Frankenslime
. William Castle’s
Shankenstein
. Jim Wynorski’s
Wankenstein
. Wayne Newton’s
Dankenshane
. Odorama’s
Rankenstein
.

I watch, reference books strewn around the floor, all useless, all outdated. On and on, monsters and mad doctors, hunchbacks and mobs, blind men and murdered girls, ice floes and laboratories.

Channel ident 1818 flickers. I fight pangs in my stomach and eat the crummy paper which was wrapped around my last pack of digestive biscuits. Sammy Davis Jr slicks hair across his flat-head in a Rat Packenstein picture, as Dino and Frank Sinatra fix up the electrodes.

I recognize the strange smell as my own. There are enough crumbs behind the cushions of the sofa to sustain life. I pick them out like a grooming gorilla and crack them between my teeth.

Badly-dressed black musicians rob the graves of blues singers in the endless
Funkenstein
series. Ridley Scott directs a run of
Bankenstein
ads for Barclays, with Sting applying for a small business loan to get his monster wired. Jane Fonda works the scars out of her thighs in the
Flankenstein
video.

I am transfixed. I would look away, but there is a chance I might miss something. I’m dreaming the electronic dream, consuming imaginary images made celluloid.

Brides, sons, ghosts, curses, revenges, evils, horrors, brains, dogs, bloods, castles, daughters, houses, ladies, brothers, ledgers, lodgers, hands, returns, tales, torments, infernos, worlds, experiments, horror chambers . . . of Frankenstein.

I hit the exhaustion wall and burn through it. My life functions are at such a low level that I can continue indefinitely. I’m plugged into Channel 1818. It’s my duty to stay the course.

Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis, Redford and Newman, Astaire and Rogers, Mickey and Donald, Tango and Cash, Rowan and Martin, Bonnie and Clyde, Frankie and Annette, Hinge and Brackett, Batman and Robin, Salt and Pepa, Titch and Quackers, Amos and Andy, Gladstone and Disraeli, Morecambe and Wise, Block and Tackle . . . Meet Frankenstein.

I can barely move, but my eyes are open.

Credits roll, too fast to jot down. These films exist for one showing and are lost. Each frame is unique, impossible to recreate. I daren’t even leave the room to get a pack of blank videotapes. It is down to me. I must watch and I must remember. My mind is the screen on which these Frankensteins perform.

The Frankenstein Monster is played by . . . Bela Lugosi (in 1931), Christopher Lee (in 1964), Lane Chandler, Harvey Keitel, Sonny Bono, Bernard Bresslaw, Meryl Streep, Bruce Lee, Neville Brand, John Gielgud, Ice-T, Rock Hudson, Traci Lords.

The experience is priceless. A red sun rises outside, and I draw the curtains.

“Now I know what it feels like to be a God,” croaks Edward G. Robinson.

I will stay with the channel.

“We belong dead,” intones Don Knotts.

I will watch.

“To a new world of Gods and monsters,” toasts Daffy Duck.

Paul J. McAuley is a research biologist who lives in Scotland. His first novel
, Four Hundred Billion Stars
(1988) won the Philip K. Dick Award and was followed by
Secret Harmonies, Eternal Light
(shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award) and
Red Dust.
He has also published a collection of short stories
, The King of the Hill,
and with Kim Newman he co-edited
In Dreams,
an anthology of stories about the culture and myths surrounding the 7-inch single
.

“
The Temptation of Dr Stein” was written especially for this volume and is set in the same alternate history as his latest novel
, Pasquale’s Angel,
in which the inventions of the Great Engineer, Leonardo da Vinci, have made Florence into a world power. The novel features a cameo by a certain Dr Pretorious (a character played by the great English eccentric Ernest Thesiger in the 1935 movie
Bride of Frankenstein),
and this story concerns his activities in Venice, some ten years earlier
. . .

D
R
S
TEIN PRIDED
himself on being a rational man. When, in the months following his arrival in Venice, it became his habit to spend his free time wandering the city, he could not admit that it was because he believed that his daughter might still live, and that he might see her amongst the cosmopolitan throng. For he harboured the small, secret hope that when
Landsknechts
had pillaged the houses
of the Jews of Lodz, perhaps his daughter had not been carried off to be despoiled and murdered, but had been forced to become a servant of some Prussian family. It was no more impossible that she had been brought here, for the Council of Ten had hired many
Landsknechts
to defend the city and the
terraferma
hinterlands of its empire.

Dr Stein’s wife would no longer talk to him about it. Indeed, they hardly talked about anything these days. She had pleaded that the memory of their daughter should be laid to rest in a week of mourning, just as if they had interred her body. They were living in rooms rented from the cousin of Dr Stein’s wife, a banker called Abraham Soncino, and Dr Stein was convinced that she had been put up to this by the women of Soncino’s family. Who knew what the women talked about, when locked in the bathhouse overnight after they had been purified of their menses? No good, Dr Stein was certain. Even Soncino, a genial, uxorious man, had urged that Dr Stein mourn his daughter. Soncino had said that his family would bring the requisite food to begin the mourning; after a week all the community would commiserate with Dr Stein and his wife before the main Sabbath service, and with God’s help this terrible wound would be healed. It had taken all of Dr Stein’s powers to refuse this generous offer courteously. Soncino was a good man, but this was none of his business.

As winter came on, driven out by his wife’s silent recriminations, or so he told himself, Dr Stein walked the crowded streets almost every afternoon. Sometimes he was accompanied by an English captain of the Night Guard, Henry Gorrall, to whom Dr Stein had become an unofficial assistant, helping identify the cause of death of one or another of the bodies found floating in the backwaters of the city.

There had been more murders than usual that summer, and several well-bred young women had disappeared. Dr Stein had been urged to help Gorrall by the Elders of the
Beth Din
; already there were rumours that the Jews were murdering Christian virgins and using their blood to animate a Golem. It was good that a Jew – moreover, a Jew who worked at the city hospital, and taught new surgical techniques at the school of medicine – was involved in attempting to solve this mystery.

Besides, Dr Stein enjoyed Gorrall’s company. He was sympathetic to Gorrall’s belief that everything, no matter how unlikely, had at base a rational explanation. Gorrall was a humanist, and did not mind being seen in the company of a man who must wear a yellow star on his coat. On their walks through the city, they often talked on the new philosophies of nature compounded in the university of
Florence’s Great Engineer, Leonardo da Vinci, quite oblivious to the brawling bustle all around them.

Ships from twenty nations crowded the quay in the long shadow of the Campanile, and their sailors washed through the streets. Hawkers cried their wares from flotillas of small boats that rocked on the wakes of barges or galleys. Gondoliers shouted vivid curses as skiffs crossing from one side of the Grand Canal to the other got in the way of their long, swift craft. Sometimes a screw-driven Florentine ship made its way up the Grand Canal, its Hero’s engine laying a trail of black smoke, and everyone stopped to watch this marvel. Bankers in fur coats and tall felt hats conducted the business of the world in the piazza before San Giacometto, amid the rattle of the new clockwork abacuses and the subdued murmur of transactions.

Gorrall, a bluff muscular man with a bristling black beard and a habit of spitting sideways and often, because of the taw of tobacco he habitually chewed, seemed to know most of the bankers by name, and most of the merchants, too – the silk and cloth-of-gold mercers and sellers of fustian and velvet along the Mercerie, the druggists, goldsmiths and silversmiths, the makers of white wax, the ironmongers, coopers and perfumers who had stalls and shops in the crowded little streets off the Rialto. He knew the names of many of the yellow-scarfed prostitutes, too, although Dr Stein wasn’t surprised at this, since he had first met Gorrall when the captain had come to the hospital for mercury treatment of his syphilis. Gorrall even knew, or pretended to know, the names of the cats which stalked between the feet of the crowds or lazed on cold stone in the brittle winter sunshine, the true rulers of Venice.

It was outside the cabinet of one of the perfumers of the Mercerie that Dr Stein for a moment thought he saw his daughter. A grey-haired man was standing in the doorway of the shop, shouting at a younger man who was backing away and shouting that there was no blame that could be fixed to his name.

“You are his friend!”

“Sir, I did not know what it was he wrote, and I do not know and I do not care why your daughter cries so!”

The young man had his hand on his long knife, and Gorrall pushed through the gathering crowd and told both men to calm down. The wronged father dashed inside and came out again, dragging a girl of about fourteen, with the same long black hair, the same white, high forehead, as Dr Stein’s daughter.

“Hannah,” Dr Stein said helplessly, but then she turned, and it was not her. Not his daughter. The girl was crying, and clasped a sheet of paper to her bosom – wronged by a suitor, Dr Stein supposed, and Gorrall said that it was precisely that. The young man had run
off to sea, something so common these days that the Council of Ten had decreed that convicted criminals might be used on the galleys of the navy because of the shortage of free oarsman. Soon the whole city might be scattered between Corfu and Crete, or even further, now that Florence had destroyed the fleet of Cortés, and opened the American shore.

Dr Stein did not tell his wife what he had seen. He sat in the kitchen long into the evening, and was still there, warmed by the embers of the fire and reading in Leonardo’s
Treatise on the Replication of Motion
by the poor light of a tallow candle, when the knock at the door came. It was just after midnight. Dr Stein picked up the candle and went out, and saw his wife standing in the door to the bedroom.

“Don’t answer it,” she said. With one hand she clutched her shift to her throat; with the other she held a candle. Her long black hair was down to her shoulders.