Fraulein Frankenstein

by Stephen Woodworth

  Although the Fiend had commenced his parade of horrors in Bavaria, he had moved steadily north and west into Hesse with his subsequent crimes. Ingolstadt, Nuremberg, Schlüsselfeld, Hösbach, Babenhausen . . . the authorities could only guess where the killer might strike next.

  But I could tell exactly where the path led, as if a trail of breadcrumbs had been laid out for me. Raphael could have killed only one woman to obtain the body he desired, and Ernst and I might never have learned of his butchery. Instead, he picked the pieces one-by-one, town-by-town, so that we would recognize the signature of his crimes and his ultimate destination.

  He wanted us to follow him.

  I strode back into the coffeehouse and stood before Ernst’s chair, confronting him with the article. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  He sighed but did not seem surprised that I had discovered the story. “It’s nothing. Just some lunatic. Nothing to do with us.”

  I glared at him. “You know very well who it is.”

  “That’s impossible!” Ernst checked the roomful of chattering patrons to see who might be listening and hushed his voice to a whisper. “I gave him enough poison to kill ten men.”

  I laughed hollowly. “Too bad for you he’s the equal of twenty.”

  Ernst raised a hand to silence me. “He died in the fire.”

  “Did you see him die? Did you find a body in the ashes?”

  “There was no need.”

  “Then you can’t be certain.” I bent closer to him. “You know where he’s going. And you know what he’ll do when he gets there. Don’t deny it—I see it in your eyes.”

  “Enough!” Ernst turned his back to me. “No more of this insanity!”

  I moved around to kneel before him, took his hands in mine. “Please. If I’m wrong, then there’s no harm if we find nothing. But until I’m sure, I’ll never have a moment’s peace.”

  Ernst considered me with a sullen look. “Suppose you are right. What will you do if you find him?”

  I squeezed Ernst’s hand. “He was dead when I brought him into this world. He shall leave it the same way.”

  Ernst sighed. “Very well. Then I shall go with you.”

  CHAPTER 24

  HOMECOMING

  Ernst and I barely spoke during the weeklong trip by coach out of Austria and back through Bavaria. Although we maintained the pretense of being married, our fellow passengers must have taken us for strangers, for we sat opposite each other, staring out the window—he gazing back toward Vienna, I looking ahead to Darmstadt.

  Every day, I checked the newspapers for word of another murder. When no further killings occurred, it only intensified my anxiety. Raphael wasn’t done with his work. What was he waiting for?

  You, his voice replied inside my head.

  The weather turned as dismal as our mood. The sky pressed down in gray blankness, misting the air with a cold drizzle that saturated us in clammy misery every time we descended from the carriage to find an inn for the night. On the day we crossed the border into Hesse, the clouds clotted into a great gout of inky darkness. Deep within the thunderhead, the first shimmers of lightning pulsed—the palpitations of a black heart stuttering to life.

  Perhaps we were already too late.

  A thunderclap boomed louder than cannon fire, and the drizzle became a deluge. Water sheeted down around us until we could hardly see through the streaked curtains of rain. The coach rocked and splashed as the downpour flooded the road, turning the ruts and potholes into craters of mud. The conditions grew so treacherous that on the outskirts of Darmstadt, the carriage lurched so violently to the left that it nearly tipped over. The team of horses whinnied in terror, and I was thrown into the lap of the flustered clergyman seated beside me. A young novice of the Catholic church, he struggled to help me up without actually touching me.

  As Ernst and I and our fellow passengers all righted ourselves, we found that the coach itself still canted to the left. The driver’s whip cracked, the horses stamped and strained, but the shuddering carriage failed to roll forward. I heard the coachman curse.

  “Anna!” Ernst groaned as I leaned out the crooked coach door into the tempest.

  The stout coachman squatted beside the left front wheel, spitting oaths. His feet had sunk past the ankles in the same muck in which the wheel was lodged.

  “How long before we can move again?” I shouted to be heard over the storm.

  He looked up at me in exasperation, rain pelting his face so hard he could barely keep his eyes open. “We’re not going anywhere, pretty one.”

  I jumped down into the river of silt, soaking my skirts. “What if we push?”

  “Useless! The axle is cracked.”

  Already, I was as wet as if I’d been fished out of the ocean, and I clawed aside the sodden hair that ran into my eyes. “But we must get to Darmstadt tonight!”

  “Impossible.”

  Ernst leaped down beside me. “Then how much for one of your horses?”

  The coachman wrinkled his face in disbelief. “Are you mad?”

  “That one there.” Ernst pointed to a lean, muscular, brown gelding at the head of the team. “Name your price.”

  The coachman looked up at the worsening storm, down at the broken wheel. “Well, then, let’s see just how mad you are,” he said to Ernst, and demanded five times what the horse was worth.

  Ernst paid him at once from the purse in his coat pocket, on the condition that we could keep the bridle and cut the reins that joined the gelding to the rest of the team. “And since we can’t take them with us, you can sell our things as well,” he added.

  We jumped back up into the carriage compartment briefly, and Ernst wrested two items from our luggage: a cutlass in its scabbard that he’d wrapped in black felt and a small wooden box. Ernst strapped the cutlass to his side with his leather belt, and from the box drew a pair of flintlock pistols. I’d seen him load the guns as we’d prepared for our journey and knew what he planned to do with them. These he also stuck under his belt, then tried as best he could to cover them with the tails of his coat to keep the flints and powder dry.

  The clergyman still huddled inside the coach, shivering as a fusillade of raindrops bombarded the roof. “Y-you’re quite sure you want to go out in this frightful flood?” he worried aloud.

  “Want has nothing to do with it,” Ernst muttered. “We must.”

  “Then God be with you.” The young priest made the sign of the Cross.

  “I’m afraid God has nothing to do with it, either,” I said.

  Ernst and I abandoned the shelter of the disabled coach and went to claim our new horse. The carriage driver shook his head and climbed inside to sit with the priest, where it remained relatively dry. The road was now a river, and I had to lift my skirts to wade forward to the brown gelding. Torrents of rain soaked our clothes until they weighed on our shoulders like chain mail.

  Ernst grabbed the makeshift reins he’d cut from the team’s leather tack and pulled himself up onto the horse, settling himself so far forward that his legs were nearly astride the beast’s front shoulders. “No saddle, so we’ll have to ride bareback,” he shouted. “Hold on tight!”

  He held out his arm to help me climb on behind him. The horse was so slippery that I nearly slid off as I hitched up my dress and swung my leg over to straddle the beast.

  Before I’d had a chance to get my balance, the horse lurched ahead. Again, I nearly fell off, and I caught hold of Ernst around the waist with such force that he cried out in pain.

  “Ugh! Not that tight.”

  Thunder cracked like a riding crop, and the skittish horse trudged forward, plucking its hooves from the mud with every step. I clamped my legs on its flanks and clung to Ernst, glancing over his shoulder at the terrain ahead. Hair kept running in my eyes, but I didn’t dare let go of Ernst for a second to brush it aside.

  The trees at either side of the road were little more than dark blurs seen through the rippling curtains of water, and at tim
es we seemed to be swimming in place. With every clap of thunder, the gelding balked and attempted to bolt in the opposite direction, but Ernst reined in the horse and prodded it onward.

  Night fell, the starless dark so deep that we were grateful for every bolt of lightning that fitfully brightened our path. A crooked trident of quicksilver split the heavens, and we saw that the forest had given way to rolling hills of fields and vineyards. And there in the distance cowered a tiny cluster of buildings with the modest spire of the Stadtkirche at its center: Darmstadt.

  “Thank heaven!” Ernst said. “At least now we have someplace to stay the night—”

  “No,” I insisted. “No, we have to go on. That way.” I pointed to the left.

  He frowned but snapped the horse’s reins, veering it in the direction I indicated.

  Before long, the terrain sloped upward at a steeper angle, and the cleared croplands disappeared from view as we plunged into another dense thicket of forest. Clammy from the constant wet, I tingled with recognition at my surroundings.

  With a boom that sounded like mountains colliding, a bolt struck an elm barely a hundred yards ahead of us. The tree flared with blinding blue fire, its trunk splintering shards of bark. An enormous bough creaked, broke off, and crashed to the ground. Terrified, our horse reared and stamped, throwing both Ernst and me into the mud.

  Our clothing splattered and our faces smeared, we scrabbled up onto our feet, but the horse had already clopped off into the darkness, its loose reins whipping in the wind.

  “That does it!” Ernst despaired. “We’ll never get there now!”

  He yelled, but I could barely hear him over the ringing in my ears. “No!” I cried. “It’s not that far. We can make it on foot.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve done it before.”

  I grabbed his hand and yanked him with me as I darted through the forest, leaping over tree roots and stomping through puddles. It ought to have been impossible to find my way under those conditions, but the memory of my first night was fixed so clearly in my mind that I felt I could have retraced my steps blindfolded.

  Up and up we went, until we at last broke free from the forest into a wide clearing.

  “Look!” I indicated a tiny yellow light that appeared to hover in midair far above us. Only when the next stroke of lighting flashed could we see the stone facade of Castle Frankenstein before us. The solitary light shone from one of the rectangular windows near the top of the tower. Every other window in the structure was utterly black.

  With the shimmer of another thunderbolt, the heavy double doors of the entrance flickered into visibility. We approached, and I was about to pull the bell chain when Ernst grabbed my hand and put a finger to his lips. He gestured to the right-hand door, and I saw that it stood slightly ajar, as if someone anticipated our arrival.

  I eased the door open and crossed the threshold. Rain gusted through the archway behind me, the wind and spatter echoing in the marbled cavity of the foyer. It was dark as a crypt and we had no means of lighting a candle, so I inched forward with my arms extended, fingering the air like a blind woman.

  Ernst edged in beside me. As we advanced, our drenched clothes dripped trails of water on the floor. At least we had a roof over our heads.

  As I pawed my way toward the right, seeking the stairway to the tower, my foot struck a soft-yet-cumbersome object on the polished stone. It slid away as I inadvertently kicked it. Afraid of tripping over the thing, I moved to nudge it aside, but my toe hit a larger, heavier bulk that resisted my efforts to push it with my foot. I almost slipped, for the floor was slick with what I assumed was the rainwater I’d tracked inside. I would have stooped to feel what the obstruction was, but lightning flashed outside the open castle door, throwing cold light onto a face mere inches from my own.

  It was the old servant, Hans. He glared at me in wide-eyed affront, his shriveled mouth agape.

  I staggered back against Ernst, certain that Hans was about to raise the alarm and rouse the whole house against us.

  Lightning flashed again, showing me that I had nothing to fear from the servant. The truth was far, far worse. The old man’s severed head had been impaled on a pike held by the suit of armor that stood to one side of the castle’s entry.

  A scream caught in my throat like a bone, and I choked to release it. Ernst slapped a hand over my mouth to hold it in.

  The flicker of illumination playing over the floor revealed that the object I had kicked was Hans’s arm, twisted and ripped from the body as if it were the leg of a roast goose. Black blood coated the floor, smeared by shoeprints where I’d stepped in it.

  Beside the arm lay the corpse’s headless trunk, and beyond that other pieces of dismembered anatomy. Too many to belong to one old man. We’re expecting the master’s aunt Lenya and her family, Hans had said the last time I had come to the castle. My heart sank to think that what I saw before me might be them.

  A mosaic of human limbs extended into the darkness, laid out with horrid humor. The head of a little girl—a cherub-faced waif with blue ribbons still entwined in her auburn curls—had been stitched onto the neck of a fat, middle-aged man in a great coat and riding boots. The bodies of a blue-veined crone and a peach-skinned maiden had been stripped naked, cut in quarters, and reassembled as mismatched patchworks, mirror images, each with one full, supple bosom and one sagging, wrinkled breast.

  Was Raphael simply mocking the atrocities that Frankenstein and I had perpetrated? Or was he . . . practicing them?

  I tore Ernst’s hand from my mouth and stalked in the direction of the stairs. He rushed to take the lead, shushing me when I tried to protest. Without thunderbolts to light the cavernous stairwell, we had to feel our way upward a step at a time. Ernst drew his sword and sliced it through the darkness ahead of him in case anyone silently waited in the thick shadows to prey upon us.

  As we scuffled up the last flight of steps to the top floor of the tower, a wan yellow glow greeted us. The light offered no relief. No doubt it emanated from the single lamp we’d seen in the tower window. I’d expected that the door to Frankenstein’s laboratory would be shut and bolted against intruders, but instead it had been left wide open for us.

  Still brandishing the sword with his right hand, Ernst fumbled one of the two flintlock pistols out from under his coat before approaching the door. I took advantage of his momentary distraction to enter the room first. Ernst glowered and shoved in beside me, weapons raised.

  The air inside the laboratory was frigid, and my wet cheeks and hair stiffened as if rimed with frost. Chuffing out white vapor, I soon saw the cause of the cold: half-melted blocks of ice surrounded the wooden slab where I had been born. And on that plank lay a nude female form, its delicate arms and graceful legs sewn to a voluptuous torso with such fine stitches, that, once the wounds closed and the black thread had been removed, the scars would hardly be visible at all.

  Raphael had obviously honed his skill as a surgeon.

  He had not completed his creation, however. The neck remained a ragged red bundle of loose tendons, disconnected veins, severed windpipe, and spinal column. Yet the body lay ready to receive the final spark: manacles dangled from chains beside the delicate ankles and wrists, and another chain ran to a circlet of electrodes that rested in the vacant place where the head would be, awaiting the brow it would crown. Once the iron bonds had been fastened to the finished woman, the next thunderbolt that struck the tower’s lightning rod would surge down the chains and into the dormant beauty, rousing her in violent resurrection.

  Beyond the slab, at the far end of the room, burned the lamp in the window we’d seen from below. Its sickly halo outlined the silhouette of a hulking figure hunched on a wooden stool. The reflected light from the bald dome of its head gleamed slick and red, as if the skin had been peeled from the scalp.

  “I knew you’d come, Nana,” it said.

  The voice was Raphael’s, but the words had an odd, slobbering lisp to them.
Ernst needed no further proof of the speaker’s identity, however. He aimed the flintlock at the figure’s heart and pulled the trigger. The hammer snapped, but the pistol didn’t fire. The rain must have saturated the gun’s black powder too much for it to ignite.

  Raphael gave a gurgling chuckle as he rose from his seat. “And you’ve brought Herr Dr. Waldman. How fortunate! It saves me the trouble of finding him.”

  Ernst threw down the useless gun and switched the sword to his right hand, point extended. Raphael ignored the threat.

  “Your murders brought us here,” I said coldly. “What do you want?”

  “Why, to show you everything I’ve learned.” He lurched toward the slab with a limp that favored the left leg, his arms and hands held in an almost arthritic cramp. He passed a window just as lightning glimmered outside, frenetically illuminating his shadowed form.

  I gasped. My beautiful Raphael . . .

  I saw now why he gurgled and hissed—his right cheek had nearly burned away. A grotesque halfgrin permanently exposed his teeth and tongue, so that he had to slurp up spittle to keep from drooling. He rolled his eyes up until the irises nearly disappeared, and I realized that his eyelids had shriveled like parched rose petals, leaving him unable to blink. Not a hair remained on his entire body, and scabs and scars encrusted every inch of skin. He moved with pained, mincing deliberation, as if any reckless gesture might cause his wounds to crack and bleed anew.

  “You see? I saved it.” Raphael held aloft a large, leather-bound book, the edges of its vellum pages singed to feathery ash. Though its cover was blackened beyond recognition, I knew it was Frankenstein’s notebook. “The rest I learned from you.”