The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein (Mammoth Books)

by Stephen Jones

  Heart jack-hammering, she pushed the door open.

  It was like staring into night space. The room stank of wet rot. The air felt dry electric. She touched the brass knob and got a shock.

  In seconds her eyes adjusted. Two black candles had been wedged between the wall and the makeup mirror like torches. Ahead, shuffling in his seat, a dim shape. Remember, nowhere to step back to, she reminded herself. Candy picked up her Doc Martens and moved into the dressing room.

  Silence pierced as bad as the music that had so recently punched her eardrums.

  “Sit.” A raspy voice. No mistaking it. Creature.

  Nervous, excited, she looked around. It was hard to see. A kind of cot in the corner, and the chair he sat on. She perched on the edge of the hard cot, facing him.

  She’d never been this close to Creature. He sat at the makeup table with the candles behind him, the back of his head reflected in the glass, his front in shadow. Even sitting, he was bigger than she’d realized.

  “I, uh . . .” she began, afraid to keep up the lie, but too scared to rely on the truth. “I know you don’t do many interviews, but . . . You guys are great. You’re great.”

  A kind of wheeze came out of him. He held up the press pass. “You are Elizabeth.” His English accent was sexy.

  “Candy.” That sounded inane. “I mean, my real name’s Elizabeth. Everybody calls me Candy.”

  Another sound. Maybe the word, “Appropriate”?

  More nervous than ever, she fumbled with the pencil and notebook she’d brought with her, trying to look official, hoping to hell he wouldn’t ask about the magazine she supposedly wrote for.

  She tried to cover it by taking the initiative. “So, how long have you played music?”

  “I began with the flute. Nearly two centuries ago.”

  “Right!” Candy giggled, but she was the only one laughing, so she stopped. “So, you’re like, the real Frankenstein or something?” She’d heard this, the rumour in the clubs. What he’d said on MTV recently. His first interview. Great promo.

  “No!”

  The volume of his voice sliced down her backbone as if it were a scalpel cutting her open. Instinctively, she jumped to her feet.

  “Sit. Elizabeth, please.” His voice had dimmed to that fine rasp she found so appealing.

  She sat, but glanced at the door.

  “Victor Frankenstein was the man. I am his creation. Do you not recall his confession, as relayed to Robert Walton and recorded by Mary Shelley?”

  What the hell was he talking about? “You mean the book? Frankenstein?”

  Another snort.

  “Well, we read it in school,” she said hesitantly. Half true. The class read it. She’d skimmed the abridged version. “I saw the movie,” she said hopefully.

  “He created me, and yet his account was a lie! I am not driven by malice! Oh, of one thing, yes, he quoted me true. Immortal though it has been my misfortune to be, am I not as sensitive as any human being? Do I not feel cold and heat, pain and pleasure? Does not the sun blind my eyes, and the darkness of night stir fear in my heart? Am I not like you, beautiful Elizabeth?”

  Wow! Was Creature coming on to her? She couldn’t believe her luck. Alone in his dressing room, with the sexiest guy in the world! Fran will die, she thought.

  His pause made her remember why she was supposed to be here. She jotted down the last thing he’d said, about her being beautiful. She looked up. “So, uh, what’s the real story?”

  Creature stood. She was startled by his height. On stage he was enormous, but here, two feet away, he was a giant. He must be eight feet tall! His head skimmed the ceiling as he paced, his hands scraped his knees, although his body seemed to be in proportion. He moved in that lanky, jerky way of his, as though his joints ached, or his legs had been badly broken. The candle glow created shadows in the valleys of the scars that lined his face, chest and arms. Her mother caught Creature on that TV interview and labelled him ugly, but Candy saw the beauty of being wounded.

  “He did it for her,” he finally said.

  “Her? Who?”

  He paused to look down at Candy, candlelight making his black hair shimmer, and the stitch marks on his face resemble war paint. He was so big! It was as though a warrior god peered down at her. “Elizabeth, of course. He made me for Elizabeth.”

  She wasn’t sure what he was getting at. Then it clicked. He was like these guys who talk as if they’re Lestat. Creature was trying to tell her about himself, and “Frankenstein” worked for him. It was a symbol. Of course. All the lyrics of all of Monster’s songs had to do with being treated like a non-human. An outsider. They talked about being misunderstood and rejected.

  Desperately she tried to remember details from the book. Even the different versions of the movie were vague. She couldn’t recall anybody named Elizabeth. There was that other film, where the doctor made a female creature, with that great lightning bolt streaking up the sides of her hair. Maybe she was Elizabeth. Maybe not. Candy decided she’d better keep her mouth shut as much as possible.

  “Say some more about it, okay?”

  He had resumed pacing the small room, his steps heavy on the raw wood floor. His arms swung in a strange way, but it just made him more attractive to her eyes. He was different, not one of those pathetic clones on TV, pretty boys who spend all day flossing. Creature was flesh and blood. Human.

  “He claimed to love her. Yet, can a man truly love a woman he cannot satisfy?” he said. “You see, Victor was impotent. The crude anatomical examinations of the day produced no physical cause. I would expect a diagnosis today would be the same. His problems lay in the realm of the mind. As you might put it, Victor Frankenstein felt inadequate. Inferior. Perhaps he feared women, or even despised them. Perhaps he despised all of humanity. In any event, he built a creature, me, one who would be what he was not.”

  “So, he wanted you to, like, be his stand-in with his girlfriend?”

  “More. The lover of his soon-to-be bride.”

  Bits of the story of Frankenstein were catching up to her, but not enough that she could piece all this together. She started jotting down a few sentences, but then realized he wasn’t really paying attention, so what was the point. She lay the notebook and pencil on the cot. “Look, that’s crazy. I mean, she’d have to be crazy not to know it was somebody else in bed with her, right?”

  Creature stopped. With one step he was at the cot, sitting next to her. His towering body was cool. Charged. He took her hand and Candy’s heart thumped so hard she almost fainted. His nails were long and black, his scarred hand so large it engulfed hers. He was not just big, but strong. He made her feel protected. She looked into his moist eyes, taking in the gashes surrounding them, and breathed in intimacy.

  “You so resemble her. More than in name. The same innocent blonde hair and blue eyes. The identical soft demeanour.” His finger touched her cheek. A shock ran through her skin, all the way to her crotch. Suddenly, in the candlelight, a glint flashed through his eyes which she interpreted as torment. The moment she felt pity for him, he dropped his head and stared down at the floor.

  Her heart reached out to him. She rubbed her palm over the chain mail vest covering his back. “Look, sometimes it helps to get it all out. I mean, this guy, Victor, he sounds like major corruption material. He used you. He was no friend.”

  Creature turned to her. His black lips twitched, as if they were struggling to smile but just couldn’t cut it. “You are understanding, as was my Elizabeth. If only I had not loved her . . .”

  Candy didn’t like hearing about this old girlfriend, but maybe if he talked about it, he’d get over her. “So, how did she find out she was screwing the wrong guy?”

  “On her wedding night. I am, as you have surely noticed, large even for this day. Then I was as another species, although my entire body is in proportion. Even in the darkness of the boudoir, she could not fail to detect a difference between the man with whom she had made her vows that morn
ing, and the one who possessed her body and soul that warm Victorian night. And yet she was too sweet, too gentle to voice her concerns.”

  She didn’t really want to hear the detail of their sex life. “Well, you must look different, too, right?”

  “Alas, but no. Victor, as with all architects of abominations, had fashioned his creation in his own image. In my case, in every respect but stature. And, of course, these remnants of his inept hand.”

  Candy stared at the large scar running the length of his cheek. She wanted so much to touch it. To kiss it. To run her tongue along the red groove. Embarrassed, she looked away and said, “Wow! So she really didn’t know for sure you weren’t Victor until you two made it. ’Cause you were in the dark and all. Man, that’s truly weird.”

  “Indeed.”

  “So what happened when she found out you weren’t him?”

  “At the moment our love was consummated, Elizabeth screamed. Frankenstein abandoned his voyeuristic pursuits and came upon us in a fit of jealous rage.”

  “He attacked you?”

  “With all his might. In my haste to protect myself from his fatal blows, I fear that in the darkness and confusion the unthinkable occurred. Elizabeth was dead.”

  The silence was like dead air. Finally, Candy asked, “How?”

  He raised his hands to his face and sobbed.

  Candy jumped to her feet. She stood before him, her legs straddling his, cradling him to her breasts. He didn’t have to go on. She remembered now, everything. How Elizabeth had been murdered on her wedding night. And the book said Creature strangled her! And it was really that sick bastard Frankenstein! Something just like that story had happened to Creature and he’d been suffering all alone ever since. Not only was his girlfriend dead, but he was blamed. And he was innocent! Maybe that’s why the band moved to North America! He must be so lonely.

  While he sobbed, while she held him, stroking the flaky skin down the back of his neck, his arms circled her hips and he clung to her as if she were a life raft. He cried “Elizabeth!” over and over, pulling Candy down onto his lap, and she hugged him tighter.

  Candy felt her body locked in his firm grip, as if he could not get enough of her. As if he would never let her go. He needed her. She could be his new Elizabeth, the one who wouldn’t die on him.

  His hands slid up under her velvet skirt while hers automatically slipped down inside the chain mail vest and found the scars on his back, on his arms, his chest. The hot gouges in his skin seemed to pump and throb beneath her fingers, calling for her to cool and comfort them. To offer them release. Her flesh fit the wounds as though she had been made to heal him.

  She traced the scars that lined his forehead, his cheeks, sliding into the connecting grooves, links in his flesh that now joined the two of them together. Their lips met.

  As he entered her, she felt pain and tried to shift into a new position to ease it. “You’re hurting me. Let up, huh?”

  He gripped her tighter. Her hands tried to pry his from her waist. She shoved at his chest, and struggled to twist out of his embrace, but Creature was too strong, his need too great. She yelled as her fists pounded his shoulders. The pain became excruciating, but he had locked onto her as if they were chained together.

  All the while his face hovered before her own, so large, so forlornly sexy, so hopelessly scarred. She reached out a quivering finger to stroke the gash running up his cheek, searching for connection. But if she reached him, it was not in the way she intended; he jammed her body down onto his.

  Sharp, like a knife blade inside. He seemed to cut her in two. Candy screamed. Lightning exploded in her head.

  One of his massive hands crawled up her body and encircled her throat in a stifling caress. She clawed at the steely grip, but it only made him squeeze harder. All the while tears seeped from his pale eyes. The scars in his cheeks and forehead rippled, and his face contorted. His black lips twisted; she did not want to believe he was smiling.

  Candy gasped for air. For some reason it was important for her to choke out one final word. Saying it made it real. “Monster!” But it wasn’t the band she had in mind.

  Robert Bloch

  Mannikins of Horror

  In 1993 Tor Books published Once Around the Bloch, which the author – true to his renowned sense of humour – subtitled An Unauthorized Autobiography! More recently, Fedogan & Bremer has issued The Early Fears, a hefty omnibus of Robert Bloch’s first two short story collections, The Opener of the Way and Pleasant Dreams, plus some newer stories.

  Still best known as the author of Psycho (the basis for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 movie) and its various (literary) sequels, in recent years the writer has also turned editor with such anthologies as Psycho-Paths and Monsters in Our Midst.

  At the suggestion of producer Milton Subotsky, “Mannikins of Horror” formed the basis for the linking episode of the 1972 movie Asylum (aka House of Crazies), which Bloch scripted from his own short stories. Patrick Magee starred as the insane Dr Rutherford who experimented with creating life in miniature. Unfortunately, because of the low budget, the author’s perfectly-formed homunculi were transformed on the screen into unconvincing mechanical toys!

  “I can only claim credit – or blame – for those portions of the film which were shot in accordance with my script,” explains the writer. “Considering the handicaps and limitations under which they worked, the producers, director, cast and production people deserve full marks and I can only be grateful for their efforts.”

  Here’s your opportunity to read the original story, with the author’s imagination unrestricted by budget limitations . . .

  I

  COLIN HAD BEEN MAKING the little clay figures for a long time before he noticed that they moved. He had been making them for years there in his room, using hundreds of pounds of clay, a little at a time.

  The doctors thought he was crazy; Doctor Starr in particular, but then Doctor Starr was a quack and a fool. He couldn’t understand why Colin didn’t go into the workshop with the other men and weave baskets, or make rattan chairs. That was useful “occupational therapy,” not foolishness like sitting around and modeling little clay figures year in and year out. Doctor Starr always talked like that, and sometimes Colin longed to smash his smug, fat face. “Doctor” indeed!

  Colin knew what he was doing. He had been a doctor once: Doctor Edgar Colin, surgeon – and brain surgeon at that. He had been a renowned specialist, an authority, in the days when young Starr was a bungling, nervous interne. What irony! Now Colin was shut up in a madhouse, and Doctor Starr was his keeper. It was a grim joke. But mad though he was, Colin knew more about psychopathology than Starr would ever learn.

  Colin had gone up with the Red Cross base at Ypres; he had come down miraculously unmangled, but his nerves were shot. For months after that final blinding flash of shells Colin had lain in a coma at the hospital, and when he had recovered they said he had dementia praecox. So they sent him here, to Starr.

  Colin asked for clay the moment he was up and around. He wanted to work. The long, lean hands, skilled in delicate cranial surgery, had not lost their cunning – their cunning that was like a hunger for still more difficult tasks. Colin knew he would never operate again; he wasn’t Doctor Colin any more, but a psychotic patient. Still he had to work. Knowing what he did about mental disorders, his mind was tortured by introspection unless he kept busy. Modeling was the way out.

  As a surgeon he had often made casts, busts, anatomical figures copied from life to aid his work. It had been an engrossing hobby, and he knew the organs, even the complicated structure of the nervous system, quite perfectly. Now he worked in clay. He started out making ordinary little figures in his room. Tiny mannikins, five or six inches high, were molded accurately from memory. He discovered an immediate knack for sculpture, a natural talent to which his delicate fingers responded.

  Starr had encouraged him at first. His coma ended, his stupor over, he had been revivified by this new-found int
erest. His early clay figures gained a great deal of attention and praise. His family sent him funds: he bought instruments for modeling. On the table in his room he soon placed all the tools of a sculptor. It was good to handle instruments again; not knives and scalpels, but things equally wonderful: things that cut and carved and reformed bodies. Bodies of clay, bodies of flesh – what did it matter?

  It hadn’t mattered at first, but then it did. Colin, after months of painstaking effort, grew dissatisfied. He toiled eight, ten, twelve hours a day, but he was not pleased – he threw away his finished figures, crumpled them into brown balls which he hurled to the floor with disgust. His work wasn’t good enough.

  The men and women looked like men and women in miniature. They had muscles, tendons, features, even epidermal layers and tiny hairs Colin placed on their small bodies. But what good was it? A fraud, a sham. Inside they were solid clay, nothing more – and that was wrong. Colin wanted to make complete miniature mortals, and for that he must study.

  It was then that he had his first clash with Doctor Starr, when he asked for anatomy books. Starr laughed at him, but he managed to get permission.

  So Colin learned to duplicate the bony structure of man, the organs, the quite intricate mass of arteries and veins. Finally, the terrific triumph of learning glands, nerve structure, nerve endings. It took years, during which Colin made and destroyed a thousand clay figures. He made clay skeletons, placed clay organs in tiny bodies. Delicate, precise work. Mad work, but it kept him from thinking. He got so he could duplicate the forms with his eyes closed. At last he assembled his knowledge, made clay skeletons and put the organs in them, then allowed for pinpricked nervous system, blood vessels, glandular organization, dermic structure, muscular tissue – everything.

  And at last he started making brains. He learned every convolution of the cerebrum and cerebellum; every nerve ending, every wrinkle in the gray matter of the cortex. Study, study, disregard the laughter, disregard the thoughts, disregard the monotony of long years imprisoned; study, study make the perfect figures, be the greatest sculptor in the world, be the greatest surgeon in the world, be a creator.