Fraulein Frankenstein

by Stephen Woodworth

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Kindle Press, Seattle, 2016

  A Kindle Scout selection

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, Kindle Scout, and Kindle Press are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  This book is dedicated to

  PETER ATKINS and WENDY RATHBONE,

  my fearless laboratory assistants;

  to KELLY DUNN,

  my monster mate;

  and most especially to my

  favorite mad scientist,

  my father,

  HARRY WOODWORTH

  (1929–2016).

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1 BIRTH PAINS

  CHAPTER 2 SANCTUARY

  CHAPTER 3 FIRST WORD

  CHAPTER 4 FRANKENSTEIN’S BRIDE

  CHAPTER 5 WEDDING NIGHT

  CHAPTER 6 GRAVEDIGGER’S DELIGHT

  CHAPTER 7 BECOMING KATARINA

  CHAPTER 8 THE ONCE AND FUTURE HUSBAND

  CHAPTER 9 THE RIVAL

  CHAPTER 10 AN ASSIGNATION

  CHAPTER 11 ELOPEMENT

  CHAPTER 12 UNEARTHING THE TRUTH

  CHAPTER 13 ECLIPSED HONEYMOON

  CHAPTER 14 THE WIDOW

  CHAPTER 15 FAMILY REUNION

  CHAPTER 16 THE PROFESSOR’S SON

  CHAPTER 17 ASSEMBLING AN ANGEL

  CHAPTER 18 THE CREATION

  CHAPTER 19 THE NEWBORN

  CHAPTER 20 THE EDUCATION OF RAPHAEL

  CHAPTER 21 BROKEN COMMANDMENTS

  CHAPTER 22 ANGEL’S FALL

  CHAPTER 23 VIENNA

  CHAPTER 24 HOMECOMING

  CHAPTER 25 ANNA AT LAST

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER 1

  BIRTH PAINS

  I was born in horror, my first speech a scream.

  Consciousness came as I convulsed upon a slab, thick leather straps binding me to a plank of wood as iron manacles funneled lightning into my body and brain. I shrieked in birth agony, as if mother and child in one, and the strangeness of my own voice frightened me. Through a thin veil of gauze over my eyes, I could see the blue fire of electricity flare around me.

  Then everything went dark. My fingers and feet tingled, either from the residue of static or from the blood that began to course through my extremities.

  My throat raw, I gasped and hiccoughed, unused to the chore of breathing. I heard the scuffing of footsteps and felt brusque hands tear open the rough smock that covered my chest. A circle of polished wood—the bell of an ear trumpet—pressed down upon the cleft between my breasts.

  “The heart beats.” A voice, clipped and frigid, dripping with disappointment and disgust. “Your mate lives.”

  “Let me see her!” another voice demanded, deeper and cruder than the first. I thrashed to free myself from my bonds as heavy, thudding steps approached.

  “She’s not ready,” the first voice protested.

  “Show her now!”

  I heard a scuffling, and the first voice cried out, “Very well, very well! Now unhand me . . .”

  He panted with panic. I strained to hear what they might do next.

  Then the cool blade of a pair of shears slid underneath the gauze at my neck and snipped away the bandages that wrapped my face like funereal cerements. As the strips of cloth fell away and my eyelids flicked open, the terrible new wonder of vision assaulted my unformed mind.

  Beside me stood a man, though I did not yet understand that his sex differed from mine. All I knew was that he was a being like myself. His thoughts were inscrutable to me, yet he clearly had me at his mercy. Attired in a fine—if somewhat severe—black frock coat, he possessed a high, cerebral forehead made more prominent by a receding shock of reddish-brown hair. The gravity of his expression etched deep lines in his youthful face, and he peered down at me with eyes that each contained a smaller, screaming face. Those tiny faces were actually my own, reflected in the oval lenses of his spectacles.

  “There,” he said, and I recognized at once the brusque, clinical tone. “I trust you are satisfied—”

  “Release her.” I strained to see the source of that other, harsher voice, but it remained just outside the periphery of my vision, as if deliberately shying away from me.

  The man clenched the fist that held his shears, as if tempted to use them as a weapon. “I tell you, she’s not ready yet.”

  “I want her to come to me.”

  The man’s frown deepened, and he cast aside the shears. “As you wish.”

  He took a metal ring from a peg on the adjacent wall. An odd, square metal key dangled from the ring, and he used this key to unscrew the manacles at my ankles and wrists. When I wriggled to worm my limbs from the leather straps that still held them, he flinched away.

  “Be still now,” he murmured, as if calming a captive animal.

  He unfastened the circlet of iron that encompassed my forehead and pried it off. Charred skin clung to the metal points that had fired sparks into my temples.

  I watched, chest heaving, as he undid the leather bindings on my upper legs and midriff. My fear had no patience, so before he could free my right arm I yanked it loose, ripping the thick animal hide in two as easily as if tearing fine lace. The man staggered back in fright.

  Sensing I now had the advantage, I sprang forward, snarling. But I had no mastery over my body, and when I levered my feet off the wooden plank my legs folded beneath me and I fell to my knees on the hard stone floor. I yelped in pain and grabbed the edge of the slab to pull myself back up, the strip of torn leather still hanging from my right wrist.

  The man shot a panicked glance into the darkness that lay at the far end of the room. There, outside the circle of yellow light cast by the oil lamp above us, I saw a hulking form hunched in the shadows. It appeared to be almost as tall as the man and twice as broad.

  Then it stood up.

  Its head nearly brushed the ceiling timbers. Its face was blotted by darkness, but I could see the figure possessed a misshapen, distorted quality, a fearful asymmetry. Lightning from the ongoing storm outside flashed through one of the chamber’s narrow windows, so that the silhouette appeared to emanate a flickering aura of unearthly silver-white energy. The stone floor seemed to quake under the giant’s tread, amplified by the reverberation of thunder. It reached for me with arms that were too long and too large for its frayed peasant’s coat, its splayed hands the size of a bear’s claws.

  As the creature stooped down into the lamplight, its head emerged from eclipse like a baleful moon. Lank black hair drooped in unctuous tangles around an unfinished face. Yellow skin stretched like a distended lamb’s bladder over sharp bone, its translucence revealing a web of gangrenous purple veins. It leered at me, black pupils in jaundiced eyes, and bared tarnished teeth in the crooked semblance of a smile.

  Yet it was not the creature’s hideous aspect that repulsed me. Innocent as an infant, I had no aesthetic prejudice by which to judge it ugly. Rather, I instinctively feared the desperate desire that trembled through every fiber of the monster’s massive frame—an all-consuming possessiveness gathered into the single word it spoke as it came for me.

  “Mine.”

  Shrieking, I dropped on all fours and scuttled away from its grasping hands. To my surprise, the thing did not attempt to seiz
e me but instead retreated into the dark end of the chamber as though I had frightened it. It wrapped its arms over its head in abject shame and wailed.

  “Damn you, Frankenstein! You made her pretty.”

  The well-dressed man regarded me with scorn. “That is easily fixed.”

  The man called Frankenstein snatched a scalpel from a tray of surgical implements beside the slab and stalked toward me, raising the blade. I barely dodged the knife as he slashed it in an arc toward my cheek.

  Scrabbling away across the floor, I realized I could never escape him by crawling. I clutched at the corner of a dissection table opposite the slab where I had lain and hauled myself up to a standing position, willing myself to walk as my pursuer did. As I gripped the table’s edge, my fingers slipped through a slick, viscous liquid, and my nose filled with a heavy iron odor. I raised myself above the level of the tabletop and saw the nude form of a woman in repose upon the marble, her figure statuesque, her skin as pale and unblemished as alabaster. A ragged gash punctured her chest just below the breastbone, and her swanlike neck ended in a stump of sawn meat and bone. Dark burgundy fluid drained into a gutter chiseled into the table’s stone surface.

  I recoiled from the headless corpse and nearly collided with Frankenstein, whose knife I suddenly dreaded more than ever. He grabbed a fold of my loose smock and dragged me toward him, the blade scything toward my face.

  “No!”

  The creature seized Frankenstein’s arm in its enormous fist. The man cried out in pain and dropped the knife, and I tugged my smock free of his other hand.

  “Are you mad?” Frankenstein shouted at the monster. “Do you want her or not?”

  Indecision rippled the beast’s expression. He released his grip on the man, who surged toward me.

  Tottering like a newborn calf, I lunged for the first weapon I could lay hands upon. Wooden shelves laden with glass containers lined the walls of the room, and in each jar gelatinous organs floated in a murk of alcohol and blood. I hurled these flasks at my pursuer, and a stink like pickled pig’s feet erupted as the jars burst and splashed entrails on the floor. The lid of one container came off in midair, showering Frankenstein with plasma solution as two raw kidneys stained his waistcoat.

  While he wiped the scum from his spectacles and spat dripping blood, I frantically pawed the perimeter of the square chamber, seeking an exit. Reaching a gap between two sets of shelves, I beat at the heavy oaken door I found there but succeeded only in rattling its cast-iron hinges.

  A shadow engulfed me, and I gasped. The creature had come up behind me. I trembled in terror, certain it would crush me in its embrace. When I gazed up into its yellowed eyes, though, I saw such an aching sadness there that my fear dissolved into pity for the monster. Rather than seizing me, it slid back the door’s iron bolt, lifted the latch, and pulled the portal open.

  I had neither time to wonder why the giant had shown me such mercy nor words to express my gratitude to it, for I heard the blood-drenched man behind me give an angry yell. I leaped through the door’s open archway and nearly tumbled down a flight of stone steps. Clinging to the side of the unlit stairwell, I felt my way blindly down its incline, bare toes feeling for each step. As I came to the first corner in the descent, the dim amber rays of a lantern fell on the stairs behind me, but I shrank from its searching beams as it approached.

  Spurred by the rapid patter of leather-soled footsteps behind me, I hurried down the stairs and around the next right-angle turn. My pace quickened as I learned to use my legs, and two more flights of steps brought me to the bottom of the staircase. Feeling my way forward, I touched the rough grain of another heavy wooden door. I battered it with my fists, threw my entire weight against it. The door shuddered, but it would not open.

  Lantern light bloomed in the stairwell behind me, the footfalls growing louder. Frantic, I remembered how the creature had opened the previous door. I pawed the wood until my fingertips brushed cold iron fittings. I shot back the bolt and rattled the latch until it clattered open, falling through the archway as the door swung open into the room beyond.

  I slumped onto the smooth marble floor of this new chamber. A faint, guttering glow illuminated furnishings of richly carved mahogany and walnut and gilt-framed portraits of glowering ancestors. I shrieked when I saw what appeared to be a silver man with a spear standing over me, then realized it was merely a hollow suit of armor with a pike held in its empty gauntlet.

  I was not alone, however. The light in the room emanated from three tapers in a candelabrum held by an old man in a nightshirt who gaped down at me in wide-eyed astonishment.

  I sprang to my feet again and skittered away from him. As I did so, Frankenstein burst through the open doorway from the stairwell. “Hans, you fool!” he shouted at the old man. “Stop her!”

  Seeing both men come toward me, I darted glances around the room, seeking escape. Lightning flashed in a window to my left, and I understood that the storm raged outside this place where I was trapped.

  The incandescent flicker also revealed a pair of doors beside the window. Unlike the other doors, these were smooth and polished, with handles and hinges of fine brass instead of rough iron. I charged toward them, but Frankenstein caught me around the waist. Without thinking, I roughly shoved him away, and to my surprise, the force of the blow sent him reeling back against his elderly manservant.

  I tore one of the double doors open, hesitating only an instant as another thunderbolt cracked the darkness ahead of me. Then I dashed out into the night, preferring to take my chances with the storm and the unknown world beyond.

  CHAPTER 2

  SANCTUARY

  Raindrops pelted me as I raced down a dozen stone steps and barreled into the black wilderness beyond. A crack of thunder startled me, and, panicked, I looked back over my shoulder. A blindingly bright lightning bolt struck a rod atop one of the two square towers that rose from the castle I’d fled. As thunder rent the air, an enormous silhouette filled the tower’s narrow upper window.

  I knew the strange figure could not be Frankenstein. I could see my well-dressed pursuer in the lightning’s silver glare as he burst forth from the castle’s entrance. Wearing a tall, broad-brimmed hat to shield his eyes from the rain, Frankenstein still carried the lantern in his left hand but now cradled what appeared to be a long metal tube in the crook of his right arm.

  Although I could not begin to understand the danger I was in, I ran as if I did, colliding with the cragged trunks of trees that seemed to materialize in front of me with every flicker of lightning. Every time I glanced over my shoulder, I saw the lantern’s amber glow bobbing after me like a relentless revenant.

  Rainwater matted my hair until the locks dripped right into my eyes. My bare feet sank to the ankle in an ooze of mud and sodden leaves with every stride. The ground sloped downward unexpectedly, and I slipped in the muck, water sluicing around me as I slid along the incline. I scratched at the hillside, sinking my fingers into the silt to halt my descent. As I lifted myself, drenched and shivering, from the slime, I saw Frankenstein stop only a short distance behind me. He set the lantern on the ground beside him and lifted the metal tube to shoulder-level, sighting along its length as he pointed it at me.

  I mistook the loud report that followed for another thunderclap. But I could see the puff of smoke from the barrel and the flare of sparks from the gunpowder, which he had kept dry by bracing the gun’s stock under the sleeve of his frockcoat. A musket ball whistled past my ear and chipped bark from a tree behind me.

  I wheezed with fright, and Frankenstein cursed when he saw he’d missed. With no time to muzzle-load the weapon, he threw down the musket, reached beneath his coat, and drew a dueling pistol from the waist of his breeches.

  I scampered off, darting and weaving among the trees as he tried to aim. He must have snatched up the lantern again, for a shaft of sickly yellow light glinted through the branches around me as I ran. Another crack, then a pistol ball nipped off the bristle of
a pine right above my head.

  The slope leveled off and the woods thinned. I panicked as the fringe of the forest gave way to an open clearing, for without the protection of the trees, I would have no place to hide. I turned back toward the woods but found the lantern hovering mere steps behind me, the hunter at my heels.

  Another flicker of the storm revealed a rutted dirt road to my left, the canals of its wagon tracks flooded with rainwater. The road curved toward a cluster of slant-roofed buildings, dark and sleeping in the depths of the night. With no other shelter available to me, I sprinted toward the town.

  I reached the largest of the structures—a large, drafty stable. Its doors were closed to me, however, and I did not see the sort of bolts and latches I knew how to open. Frenzied with frustration, I pounded at the entrance with such force that the whole stable rattled and the thick oaken beam that barred the doors groaned and nearly buckled. Startled by my assault, the horses within bucked and whinnied, ready to bolt.

  Lantern light bathed the right side of my face, and I looked over to see Frankenstein standing near the corner of the stable, panting with exertion. Lightning illumined the dark face beneath the brim of his hat, revealing the cold determination of his expression. He pulled a second dueling pistol from beneath his coat—the twin of the one he’d already fired—and cocked the hammer, leveling the barrel at the circle of light he had centered on my gaping eyes.

  At that moment a second lantern swung into view, emerging from a cottage of timber and brick adjacent to the barn. “Settle down, you stupid beasts!” an uncouth voice yelled as the horses continued to stamp and neigh. “Great God, but it’s only a bit of thunder.”

  My pursuer lowered his weapon, cloaked his own lantern with the tail of his coat, and hastily retreated around the stable’s corner, out of sight. Since I did not know what I might have to fear from this unexpected stranger, I, too, shied away, flattening myself in the shadows far to the left of the stable’s entrance.

  A bow-legged peasant waddled up to the doors, his shirttail only half-tucked into his breeches. “Keep whining like that,” he muttered to the unsettled animals, “and I’ll give you something to whine about.”