by Ron Miller
It had been sitting on a wooden chair and when the screen was pulled away, it stood up— slowly and painfully, which only made it seem worse. I keep saying It, but I didn’t know what else to call it at the time. It must’ve been well over six feet tall, maybe six and half, but standing there on the raised platform it was hard to tell. As for what it looked like . . . you ever see that Hollywood version of The Picture of Dorian Gray? The one with the painting that Chicago artist did, Ivan Albright, if I got his name right? The one that made Dorian Gray look like he was made of rotting cottage cheese and earthworms? Well, this thing was something like that. A pair of fishy eyes stared gelatinously from the moldy face and a livery tongue lolled over the pendulous blue-grey lips, like a huge, glistening slug crawling over the toppled gravestones of the creature’s crumbling, mossy teeth. It was more than obvious now where the odd smell had been coming from.
“Jesus Christ,” I told the barker. “You sure live up to your advertising.”
“Pretty impressive, ain’t he?”
“No kidding. What is it? Some sort of skin disease or something?”
“Hell, no! He’s the real thing all right.”
“Look, just between you and me, let’s not be kidding each other here. I know there’s no such thing as a real Frankenstein. That was just a story whatsername wrote. They made a couple a movies from it. That’s all. There ain’t no such thing as a real Frankenstein.”
“Ah, well, that’s just where most people go wrong. There sure was a real Frankenstein and there he is, in the flesh, what’s left of it at any rate.”
“Say, pal, I’m not one of your ignorant rubes. I work for a paper. I been around. Come on, lemme have the real story. It’s good enough, I’ll pay you for it.”
“I told you the truth mister,” the barker said, unfolding the screen and placing it back in front of his exhibit, “and there ain’t much more I can tell you than that.”
“Who is he, really? What’s wrong with him?”
“Say, I’ll tell you what. You stand me to a beer and I’ll tell you. Deal?”
“Sure. There’s a tavern right down the block, got a good lunch there, too.”
“That’s just what I was hoping you’d say.”
We were heading back out into the sunlight when I thought of something. “Say, what about ...?”
“Frankie? He’ll keep, have no fear!” For some reason the kid thought this was really funny.
I found a booth for us in a quiet corner of the tavern, ordered some beer and sandwiches and when the waiter left the table I leaned toward my friend and said, “All right. Let’s have it.”
“Well...I suppose you’ve read the book or seen the movie—Frankenstein, I mean?”
“Who ain’t seen the movie? But, yeah, I read the book when I was in high school. Pretty tough going, I can tell you, and not half so creepy as the movie.”
“Yeah, well, I always wanted to sue Mary Shelley for libel, the way she described what he was trying to do—and especially the way she described the creature he made. ‘Hideous monster’, phooey! It was no more hideous than you are!”
Well, thinking back to the abomination I’d seen in the tent, I sure didn’t take that as any sort of compliment. But, I figured, maybe he’d lived with the awful thing so long he’d gotten used to it. Saw it’s better side, as it were. Maybe it had a nice personality. So I didn’t say anything and let him keep on talking, which he did.
“All I can say is that you at least got the basic idea of what Frankenstein was after. Sure, he was trying to create life. But he was after more than that. He not only wanted to create life, he wanted his own life to go on forever. Immortality. Eternal life. And you know what? He did it. He figured it out.”
“Figured what out?”
“Figured out how to live forever. He figured if his formula would give eternal life to his creation, it would work just as well on himself. So he mixed himself up a big batch of his formula and he drank it.”
“He did, huh? I suppose Frankenstein is still with us, then?”
“He sure is!”
Our beers arrived just then. The kid took a long suck on his, wiped his lips and leaned toward me conspiratorially. “Guess how old I am. Go ahead. Give it a shot.”
“I dunno. Twenty, twenty-five?”
“That’s what I figured you say. What would you think if I told you I was more’n a hundred and sixty years old?”
“What d’you think I’d say?”
“I can prove it!”
“If you can do that, then I’d say you earned yourself your free lunch. So what you’re trying to tell me is that you’re...?”
“You bet I am! That’s just exactly who I am!”
If he was a hundred and sixty year-old mad scientist I was Primo Carnera, so I just smiled and bit into my sandwich, which had meanwhile arrived and was very tasty.
“Yeah, well, you’ll see. Tell you the truth, I’ve been wanting to get the whole thing off my chest for a long time. Why not? I’m getting pretty sick and tired, I can tell you, of sneaking around like this, reduced to playing these two-bit carnivals. God—you know how long it’s been since I had a girl? I don’t mean that way, I mean a regular girlfriend? I don’t want to tell you!”
That was too bad, too, because he was a pretty good-looking kid, like I been saying.
When we got back to the carnival, the kid took me behind the tent where he’d shown me the monster. There was a pre-war Buick parked there and a trailer. As we entered the latter, I asked, “Your pal Frankenstein live in here, too?”
“Hell, no. He couldn’t get through the door even if he wanted to, and, besides, he leaks all the time and stuff comes off him. And, Jesus, if you knew what he smells like. Naw. I got him fixed up with a cot behind the stage with a rubber sheet and all and a couple a buckets.”
“Nice little set-up you got here,” I said, looking around. And he did, too. Kind of like a serious college student’s den. There were books everywhere, on shelves, in stacks, piled on the furniture. Really old books, too. Big things with crumbling leather covers and brass clasps and everything. Besides the books, there were rolls of parchment and sheets of manuscripts, all of which looked really old, too.
“Take a look back here,” he said, leading me into the rear of the trailer.
“Say, this is pretty impressive,” I said and meant it. If he was a student, he must’ve been a conscientious one, lugging a whole chemical laboratory around with him like that. God knows what all the stuff was ‘cause I didn’t. To me it was just a complicated maze of test tubes and beakers and flasks and bottles and curly glass tubes. There were alcohol burners under some of the flasks in which gruesome-looking liquids were bubbling and fizzing. It all looked exactly like the mad scientist’s laboratories you see in the serials.
“What’s all this in aid of?” I asked. “Prohibition was repealed twenty years ago.”
“Naw...I gotta make the stuff that keeps my friend going. It’s pretty complicated.”
“Looked to me like the only thing that’d keep him would be about ten gallons of embalming fluid.”
“It wouldn’t do any good,” he said as he pulled a heavy book from under a stack of papers and handed it to me. I opened it and looked at the first page. The paper was soft and linen-like. While it was still white, it felt old. I knew that paper like this hadn’t been made in a long time. The words “Das Tagebuch und die Aufzeichnung der Versuche von Victor Frankenstein, 1810-1816” were handwritten in ink that’d turned rusty with age. I flipped through the pages. They were filled with a crabbed, spiky-looking script, page after page of it, broken up with scientific formulas, drawings and sketches, mostly anatomical and some of them pretty nasty-looking, I can tell you.
“You see,” he said, taking the book away from me, “once the secret of creating life had been discovered, the secret of immortality soon followed. Unfortunately, the results were, well, pretty appalling.”
“You mean that thing...?”
; “Yes. Unfortunate...but now you can see why I must care for the poor fellow? I feel as though he’s my responsibility. After all, if it hadn’t been for that terrible experiment...”
If he’d been telling me all this back in the tavern, I would’ve been insulted that anyone’d consider me such a low-grade moron as to think that I’d swallow even a word of such a tall tale... but here, in the gloomy recesses of the trailer, that looked like the cell of some medieval monk, surrounded by bubbling flasks and antique books... and with the memory of that inhuman horror in the tent...well, I have to admit I was getting kind of caught up in the con. I mean, if he was pulling some kind of scam, it was well worth the price of admission, whatever it was going to be. There was something about the whole thing...I mean, it was one thing to tell a tall tale over a beer in a tavern, but to go to all this trouble? Just to get me to believe that he was really the mad scientist from that old book? I believed him when he told me that he hadn’t ever before let anyone into the trailer, or told them the things he was telling me. I don’t know for sure exactly why I believed that. Reporters just develop a kind of internal lie detector, I guess. Whatever the reason, I was starting to believe him.
“You’re telling me that thing out there is the real honest-to-God Frankenstein?”
“Yup”.
“And that you’re immortal? That you’re more than a hundred and sixty years old?”
“You got it.”
“Well, Jesus, if that’s true I don’t see why you’d spend your life hauling that monster around. Maybe you do feel responsible for it, but for Christ’s sake, I’d think that after the first hundred years you’d’ve paid your debt to it. I mean, you’re a—well, you look like a young man. You could be going places, doing things. I mean, you could be doing a lot better for yourself than working a two-bit carnival.”
“Tell me about it. It isn’t as easy as you think. I’ve tried to dump him more than once, believe me, but he follows me everywhere. I’d thought I’d lost him once about, I dunno, twenty-thirty years ago, but he managed to track me down. I had a good job by that time, too. Friends, even a girl. Busted in on me in the middle of a cocktail party. You can imagine the fuss that made! Well, what with one thing and another, it just seemed easier to do what I’m doing now.”
“You ever think about, well...ah, getting rid of him? You know what I mean...”
“Don’t think for a minute I haven’t thought about that! Many times! You would too if you’d been saddled with an albatross like that for more’n a hundred years. Shoot, people kill wives and husband’s who’ve only been tormenting them for a tenth that long. But you see my problem, don’t you? The thing can’t be killed. It’s immortal.”
“How do you know...”
“All right, all right...I’ve tried, I admit it. I’ve tried, for all the good it did me. Why do you think he looks as bad as he does? I can tell you right now that nothing works, as I knew all along it wouldn’t. Poison darts, axes, bullets, acid, steam rollers, ball peen hammers, drowning, electrocution, speeding Buicks, garrottes, gas, fire, rabid bats, locomotives, broken light bulbs in his tapioca, tapeworms, botulism, snakes, embalming fluid, hungry cats, influenza...you name it, nothing works. Already I’d had trouble getting him just to keep...trying to kill him just made things worse.”
“I can see where it would.”
“Well, there you go, then. The whole sad, sordid story. I’m glad I told you. Nothing’s going to change, I guess, but I’m glad I got it out. Thanks for listening, buddy, I appreciate it.”
“Yeah, well, everything you said, it’s all well and good, but I got you on one little detail.”
“What’s that?”
“You keep calling the monster ‘Frankenstein’. That’s where most people go wrong, you know, calling the monster Frankenstein, because it’s not the monster the book is named for, but Victor Frankenstein, the mad scientist who created it. I don’t think the monster itself ever really had a name and I sure don’t think you’re Dr. Frankenstein.”
“That’s right!” he said, laughing and holding out his hand. “Good God, man, is that what you’ve been thinking? Well, then, let me introduce myself. My name is Hans. I was a hunchback with a club foot, a withered arm and a cast in one eye who was hung for stealing pigs a hundred and thirty years ago. See?” He pulled open the collar of his shirt and there, by God, was a deep scar running clear around his neck. “The doctor saved my life, mister. He pieced me together a brand new body and brought me back to life—an immortal life, as it turned out. It’s really too bad it didn’t work for the doctor himself. His treatment was just all wrong for living flesh, you see.”
“Hold on...”
“Say, this is really funny!” he laughed, slapping his knee with the palm of his hand. “I had no idea! You don’t tell me...Oh, this is really rich! You didn’t really think all along that that thing out there was the monster and I was the doctor?”
DEUX EX MACHINA
1. Then
Lynn, Massachusetts was an ideal location for the birth of the Physical Savior, the New Motive Power, Heaven’s Last Gift to Man. There had always been a toleration of unusual religious beliefs peculiar to New England and the town had long been a hotbed of Spiritualism, social reformers and utopianists. Small wonder, then, that John Murray Spear, a little-known Unitarian minister and newly converted Spiritualist, found himself attracted to the bustling little town, whose busy shoe factories seemed to epitomize the success of the Industrial Revolution, a herald of the new age of the Machine.
One momentous night, after months of making a tenuous living through mediumship (even though he advertised direct communication with such popular spirits as Emmanuel Swedenborg and Benjamin Franklin), Spear was conducting what he thought was to be yet one more ill-paying seance. A short, broad man with the long, curling hair of the dreamer or philosopher, and a wide, open, not very intelligent face, Spear had never been a terribly convincing medium. Showmanship was certainly not in his blood—not as it had so copiously flowed in the veins of the fabulously successful Fox Sisters—possibly because he took his calling too seriously and possibly because the messages he delivered from the Other Side were both banal and boring. But that night in 1853 something came to him that transformed not only his life and the life of everyone in Lynn, but the human population of the earth itself.
Instead of the words of Emmanuel Swedenborg coming from Spear’s lips in a nasal Yankee drawl that did not seem much like what most people expected from the great Swedish philosopher, Spear began writing. As he stared blankly ahead, his eyes half-rolled into their sockets, his hand flew over sheets of paper like a bird frantically pecking out worms. Words, hundreds of words, flowed onto the paper in a tidy, workmanlike penmanship that most witnesses agreed was most unlike Spears’ usual illegible scrawl.
It was, it turned out, a message from the great American patriot and scientist, Benjamin Franklin. John Murray Spear, Franklin declared, had been selected as the earthly representative of the Band of Electricizers—an ethereal academy of departed scientists who were dedicated to raising the status of the human race through the application of technology.
Franklin explained that his organization was composed of several sub-committees with such names as the Healthfulizers, the Educationalizers, the Agriculturalizers and so forth, each of whom was to be assigned an earthly representative. The Electricizers were the most important, however, and Spear, to his astonishment, had been made its official liaison with Earth.
No one had ever heard anything like this, not even from the Fox Sisters or Andrew Jackson Davis, and word began to get around that maybe this fellow was really onto something.
The sole interest of the Electricizers, Spear said, was the promotion of “man-culture and integral reform with a view to the ultimate establishment of a divine social state on earth.” They had some pretty definite plans on just how this was to be carried out, too. There would be great cities built, of course, laid out in a sensible, circular plan just as
the Utopianists had been urging all along. And people would travel between these cities in electrically powered vehicles and flying machines. And they would no longer curl the hair on the backs of their heads because this interfered with the proper functioning of the brain.
But before any of this could happen, Spear declared—or Franklin declared through him, as the case may have been—the New Messiah had to be constructed.
By this time, the Reverend Spear had accumulated a sizable following of devoted acolytes or apostles. Among these were Mr. and Mrs. Hutchinson of Lynn, dedicated Spiritualists, devout Unitarians and rabid reformers the both of them; and the Reverend J.C. Hewitt, editor of the New Age, and Alonzo Newton, editor of the New England Spiritualist; and a mysterious woman who would only allow herself to be called “the Mary of the New Dispensation.” No one knew what her real name was, though everyone doubted it was actually Mary.
The Hutchinsons donated a shed that was located near their tidy little hilltop cottage—High Rock by name—and Spear immediately launched into his last, great work.
It took nine months (by accident or intent is not known) to build the New Messiah. It might have taken less time but for the necessity of Spear to enter into a trance in order to receive and transmit the next step in the Electricizer’s plans. No one, not even Spear—or so he claimed—had any idea about what the finished machine would look like, how it would operate or even exactly what it was meant to do.
Fortunately, Lynn, being the New England industrial town that it was, was not lacking in skilled machinists and high-quality materials. Fortunate in that even though neither Spear nor his cohorts had any idea what the parts were, the specifications had high tolerances and needed to be constructed with extreme care and precision. Copper, zinc, steel and brass all went into the machine, and so did ebony and ivory and glass. And as each part was completed and delivered it was added to the ever-growing device that loomed, ominous, oily and glittering, in the parlor of High Rock.
