The Frankenstein Factory

by Edward D. Hoch

  She nodded. “You know, it just might work!”

  FIFTEEN

  WHILE VERA WENT ON to the underground laboratory to see what she could make up in the way of colorful skyrockets, Earl enlisted Armstrong’s aid in checking the capsules in the subbasement vault.

  “It’s a ticklish job,” the doctor observed. “For all we know there’s a body in every one of these tubes. By opening one we could ruin any possibility of reanimation.”

  “You’re sounding like Hobbes himself now. Look, most of these people were already dead for hours or days before they reached here anyway. If there is a body in the capsule we open, we could seal it up again before there’s any chance of thawing. Certainly a few more minutes in the open air won’t do any more damage than has been done already.”

  Armstrong agreed with some reluctance. “All right, which one?”

  Earl looked over the rows of tubes. “He produced five real bodies from somewhere, so we have to assume that some of the capsules are occupied. But look here—the track for his automatic elevator thing doesn’t even quite reach to the end of the aisle! Let’s try this last one and see what happens.”

  They went to work on the seal of capsule #563-A. It broke easily enough, and the screw top yielded to their tools. “According to the records, this capsule should contain the remains of a wealthy Midwestern banker,” Earl said, consulting the list he’d found among the banded papers in the upstairs safe. “Let’s see if it really does.”

  The top came off easily and Armstrong looked inside. “Empty,” he reported. “You were right!”

  Earl shined a light inside, studying the smooth interior. “No sign that it was ever used. All that money for upkeep, changing the nitrogen gas, storage—all for nothing.”

  “What do you think he did with the bodies?”

  “The sea is quite deep out there.”

  “But if that’s true,” Armstrong argued, his face pale as death, “why go through all this claptrap with the operation?”

  “I can only guess at that. Maybe someone was getting suspicious. Certainly my bureau was suspicious when they arranged for me to come out here. If Hobbes could bring one person back to life, it wouldn’t matter if there were no others to be brought back.”

  “No, no, no!” Armstrong insisted. “It would matter all the more! Don’t you see—if he can bring back Larry, son or not, he can bring back the ex-president! And people would want him to!”

  “I haven’t found any ex-president’s name on the list,” Earl pointed out.

  “Of course he’d be under a pseudonym.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that. The ultimate class—to have your body frozen under a pseudonym!”

  “Hey, you two!” Vera called down from the top of the spiral stairs. “Finished down there yet?”

  “Just about! How’re you coming with the fireworks?”

  “No good, but I think I’ve got something even better. Come on up and see.”

  Satisfied that they’d done all they could in checking out the vaults, Earl and Armstrong climbed back up. Vera met them at the top, holding a slender metal tube that was plugged with cork at both ends. “A magnesium flare!” she announced proudly. “When it goes off it’ll light up the sky like high noon! They’ll see it fifty miles away!”

  “Great! How do we get it up there?”

  “A nitro propellant, as you suggested. But we’ll need some sort of launch ramp to get it off to a straight start.”

  “That should be easy enough.”

  As they hurried along the brightly lit corridor toward the stairs to the main floor Armstrong suddenly grabbed Earl. “What’s that?”

  There was the sound of breaking glass from above. “My God, he’s getting in!” Vera gasped.

  Earl broke into a run. “Come on! We can’t hide from him this time!”

  He was the first one onto the main floor, and he saw the broken front window at once. Then his eyes went to the hallway just inside the locked front door. Old Hobbes’s body was still sprawled in its circle of blood, but now he’d been joined by a visitor.

  Frank was kneeling by the body, reaching out a tentative hand to stroke the cold, wrinkled skin of the corpse.

  “Easy,” Earl whispered, warning the others back. “Let’s not alarm him.”

  “Should I shoot him?” Armstrong whispered back.

  “What do you think?”

  “He’s still my patient. I’d hate to do it unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

  “It could become just that at any moment,” Earl cautioned. “Keep that gun handy!”

  He moved a step nearer, tensed to jump back at the first sign of aggression. But when Frank suddenly lurched forward from his kneeling position neither he nor Armstrong was ready for it. Vera gave a sudden scream and then Frank grabbed Armstrong’s pants, pulling the man forward and knocking the gun from his hand. Earl was on him in an instant, feeling the unreal flesh beneath his fingers. The three rolled over, tussling, and then Frank retreated, realizing that he was outnumbered. He grabbed up the fallen pistol and tried to aim it at the two men.

  That was when Vera hurled the lamp.

  It missed him, but he retreated into the living room.

  Vera followed, grabbing up the lightweight plastic grid for the laser game. She hurled that too, before he could aim the gun. It hit the side of his head, stunning him, and he shook himself with a sort of shudder. Then, as Armstrong and Earl rushed to capture him, he dived headlong through the shattered window by which he’d entered, then scampered to his feet and ran off into the night.

  “He’s got the gun,” Armstrong said. “Now we’re without a weapon. He can wait out there and shoot us down. He may not know how to operate a laser pistol, but he sure knows how to fire a revolver!”

  Earl put a gentle arm about Vera’s shoulders. “Thanks—you probably saved our lives.”

  “I think he was only defending himself,” she said. “When we found him he really seemed upset at the sight of Hobbes’s body.”

  “He’s not awfully strong,” Armstrong said. “Without the gun, I think we could take him easily enough.”

  Earl agreed. “That left arm of his still doesn’t work very well. And it seems he can’t speak. There wasn’t a sound out of him while we were struggling.”

  Armstrong nodded. “Probably that partial brain damage that was bothering O’Connor before he died.”

  “Could brain damage turn him into a killer?” Earl asked.

  “Anything’s possible.”

  He turned to Vera. “Let’s get that flare launched.”

  “We still need a launching platform.”

  “A couple of lengths of wood should do it.” Earl remembered the cabinet where the sharksticks had been stored. He walked over to it, wishing that he still had the laser pistols. “Get me that ax, will you, Armstrong? The one that was used to kill Whalen. I left it in the kitchen when we brought the body in.”

  It wasn’t much of a tool, but it did the job. He split the cabinet door in two lengthwise, then nailed the halves together at right angles to each other. The result was a ramp some seven feet long which could aim and support the flare as it was launched. In cross-section it was exactly like the portable V-ramps developed in the 1980s to fire cloud-seeding rockets.

  “Where’ll we do it?” Vera asked.

  “Upstairs,” Earl decided. “As close to heaven as we can get.”

  With Armstrong and Vera looking on, he clambered out his bedroom window to stand unsteadily on the sloping roof over the back porch. He lit the makeshift fuse with a table coil, then covered his eyes just in case the magnesium ignited too soon.

  But the rocket took off with a great whoosh, as if designed by an expert. The rear cork popped out on schedule and they watched its fiery trail rise in a gentle arc across the night sky.

  “Why doesn’t it burst?” Earl asked as it started to dip toward the sea.

  “Don’t be impatient. It will.”

  The words were hardly out
of her mouth when the sky was flooded with a blaze of white light. For an instant it almost blinded them with its brilliance. Then the shreds of burning magnesium drifted slowly down toward the water, steaming as they hit and died.

  “Fantastic!” Earl breathed.

  “It didn’t last long enough. We should have rigged a parachute so it would fall more slowly.”

  “Could you make another?”

  Vera bit her lower lip. “It took half the magnesium in the lab to make that one. I could do one more, but that would be it.”

  “Go to it!”

  “Do you think they saw it?”

  “They couldn’t miss it unless they were blind.”

  “Or looking the other way.”

  “The eternal pessimist! Go on—back to the lab!”

  It was past midnight when the next homemade magnesium flare was ready. Vera carefully explained its workings, including the deployment of a spandex parachute made from her old bodysuit.

  “Such a waste of a good bodysuit,” Earl observed.

  Vera ignored him. “It’ll work unless the flaming magnesium hits it and melts the spandex. But that’s a chance we have to take. In any event, it should stay up longer than last time.”

  “That’s good enough for me.”

  He climbed out onto the roof, as he’d done the first time, propping the V-ramp in place with its bottom resting against the drainpipe. This time he placed another board beneath it, increasing the angle until it was pointed almost straight up.

  “Here goes!”

  It blasted high into the night, singeing his hand as it took off. “Are you all right?” Vera asked.

  “I’ll live. Just a little burn.”

  “This one’s going higher.”

  “I hope so.”

  It burst with a blinding flash that lit the entire island. Suddenly below them they could see Frank, standing near the beach, gun hanging limply at his side, watching the flaming magnesium.

  “Get inside before he sees you,” Armstrong cautioned. “He could take a shot at you!”

  It seemed like good advice and Earl obeyed it. Above them in the sky the little spandex parachute was slowing the flare’s fall toward the water.

  “Perfect!” Earl decided a moment later, when the flare finally reached the waves and died in a fizz of steam. “It was lit well over a minute. Certainly someone from shore must have seen it.”

  Armstrong glanced at his watch. “If anyone’s still awake over there now.”

  “Don’t be a wet blanket,” Vera said. “Of course someone’s still awake!”

  Armstrong shrugged. “Go on and live with your dreams, you two. If you weren’t so busy looking at each other you’d have noticed there’s a fog rolling in. It could be thicker over toward Baja, if it’s coming in from the ocean. On the peninsula your wonderful magnesium flare might have been nothing more than a dull glow in the eastern sky at twelve-thirty in the morning. Heat lightning, maybe.”

  “Stop that!” Vera shouted, “I don’t think you want us to be rescued!”

  “Sure, I do. But I’m not blind to the truth.”

  “What do you suggest we do?”

  Dr. Armstrong shrugged. “Wait till morning. And pray.”

  They spent the rest of the night huddled together in the big living room, Earl and Vera on the couch and Armstrong across the room in a large foam chair. Outside, the moon had disappeared, and Earl had the feeling that Armstrong might be right about a fog rolling in.

  “What are you thinking about?” Vera asked him.

  He shifted position in the dark, caressing her firm breasts. It was something he hadn’t done with a girl since high school. “Just wondering what’s going to happen. Whether there’s going to be another murder.”

  “I thought you were probably dreaming of New York City.”

  “That too, I suppose.”

  “Is your office there?”

  He nodded, then realized that she probably couldn’t see him in the dark. “On top of the old World Trade Center. The Federal Government rents space there now, and we have the whole upper floor of the north tower. The flat roof is perfect for rocketcopters.”

  “What sort of crimes do you investigate?”

  “Nothing like this, believe me! Mostly computer frauds of one kind or another. Stock-market rigging, insurance swindles, even some gimmicking of the race-track computers. I’m fairly new with them, so I can’t tell you too much about it.”

  “Will they come looking for you if you don’t report?”

  “Sure—but not for another week or so. I’m on an undercover assignment here, posing as a medical photographer and records technician. If they came in too soon they’d be fearful of blowing my cover. Besides, it was supposed to be a fairly routine assignment, as these things go.”

  “It didn’t turn out that way.”

  “No.” He gazed into the darkness. “But then life rarely does. Even death hasn’t been routine for Frank.”

  Toward morning he dozed a bit, his head resting on Vera’s lap. He woke with a start at some noise from outside, but she calmed him with a warm palm to his forehead. “It’s only a bird. One of those high in the trees, seeing the first rays of the rising sun.”

  He ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, trying to moisten it. “Nearly morning,” he mumbled.

  “Yes.”

  “Have you slept?”

  “Not really.”

  He raised his voice a bit. “Armstrong—you all right?”

  From across the room they heard a stir. “Yes. All right.”

  Earl reached out a hand to pull himself up and felt a button that pressed inward under the pressure of his finger. He remembered that it was the signal Hobbes had used on a number of occasions to summon Hilda. “You know …” he began.

  “Yes? What is it, Earl?”

  “I’m not quite certain.”

  He had to think about it for a moment, to put it all together in his mind. He stood up, trying to shake the cobwebs from his brain. “Would you please tell me what’s going on? It’s too early in the morning for games!”

  “I’m going out to the kitchen. When I call you, press this button.”

  “What for?”

  “Just do it. I want to make sure my memory isn’t playing tricks on me.”

  He went into the kitchen, holding the door open a bit, and called out, “Press it now.”

  The buzzer sounded as he remembered it. He came back to the living room. “What’s all this business?”

  Armstrong complained. “It’s still the middle of the night!”

  “It’s dawn,” Earl corrected, walking to the window. “But there’s a mist over the island. It’ll take the sun a while to burn it off.”

  “Any sign of Frank?” Vera asked.

  “No.”

  “The help never came,” Armstrong grumbled. “I was right about that!”

  “Maybe they were waiting till daylight.”

  “Maybe shit!”

  Earl smiled. The doctor was not his usual calm self this early in the morning. “Come on—let’s have breakfast and I’ll tell you a story.”

  Vera mixed some frozen juice and made bacon and eggs on the microwave stove. It tasted good to Earl, and he tried to remember the last time he’d eaten. It seemed like days ago, though certainly it was only yesterday.

  “Now the story,” Vera prompted.

  Earl leaned back and took a sip of coffee. “It all revolves around the character of Lawrence Hobbes. And, indirectly, the character of the International Cryogenics Institute. When I think back to all the stories Hobbes told me—told all of us—I realize that ninety percent of them were lies. Consider for a moment—he said the trees here were the result of the unusual climate generated by his freezing equipment. Untrue and scientifically impossible, as was explained earlier. He said there were a limited number of bodies stored in the vaults. Then he said there were over a hundred, including an ex-president. We discovered that at least some of the tubes down
there are empty, and have been empty for years. He said Emily Watson gave him large sums of money to carry on the work, but the secret ledger we found shows that the money really came from swindling his dead clients’ estates. He said he wanted Frank brought back to life because it was really his long-dead son Larry, whose mother was Emily Watson. But since the story of Emily Watson’s donations has been proven untrue, we have no reason to accept the story of her motherhood.”

  “I’ll agree with that,” Vera said. “But where does that leave us?”

  “With the buzzer up there on the wall. I remembered that it was buzzing when I found Hilda stabbed to death in the kitchen. In fact, I’d gone looking for her because she hadn’t answered Hobbes’s summons. But we know she did on other occasions.”

  “So what? She didn’t answer it because she was dead.”

  “You’re missing the point,” Earl told her. “How could Hilda ever have answered it if she was deaf and dumb?”

  Vera and Armstrong looked at each other. “An interesting point,” the doctor admitted.

  “We know that Hobbes equipped the house with light signals, because one went off in the conference room, on my first day here, to signal Freddy’s arrival. But there’s no light signal here in the kitchen—only the buzzer.”

  “So that was one more of Hobbes’s lies.”

  “Exactly. The cook, Hilda, was not deaf, and probably not dumb either.”

  “But why lie about something like that? So she could spy on us?”

  “Doubtful. With all his electronic gear, he could certainly have the rooms bugged if he wanted. It would be much more effective. No, I think we have to look elsewhere for the explanation of Hilda’s pretended ailment.”

  “Maybe she was spying on Hobbes,” Vera suggested, “like Whalen was.”

  “No, because Hobbes was the one using the buzzer to summon her. Hobbes certainly knew that she could hear. And the fact that he didn’t change the buzzer to a light system implies that Hilda’s role was only a temporary one.”

  “I can’t see what you’re getting at,” Armstrong admitted.

  “Remember Hobbes’s dying words? If Emily Watson had been his killer he’d have said, ‘Emily killed me,’ or something like that. If Emily was still alive on the island he might have said, ‘Emily Watson isn’t dead.’ But what he actually said was, ‘Emily Watson didn’t die’! Meaning, I believe, that Emily Watson didn’t die when we thought she died.”