Mr Frankenstein

by Richard Freeborn

  Martha interrupted with a hissing sound. She ceased her hand movement and raised her wide-open luminous eyes to him in real fondness. Her voice twanged out:

  ‘A mighty clever man! He left a legacy of his own! Did you know that?’

  ‘Well, no, I…’

  ‘Don’t haver, young man! He did! He did leave a legacy!’ He was about to ask what it was when Martha suddenly raised both hands with a lively clicking of bangles. ‘Em-balm-ing,’ she whispered. ‘Clever, clever man! He taught himself, you know. I remember Robert saying he was expert.’

  Who the hell, he wondered, was Robert? Then he remembered. ‘Your late husband, he…’

  Martha again interrupted, this time without the histrionics of raised hands but instead by lifting her chin in a defiantly insistent challenge to anything she might hear him say. Total silence followed, so potent with meaning that Joe found himself holding his breath.

  ‘My late husband,’ she announced slowly, ‘was probably the most gifted man who ever lived. He literally raised up the dead.’ Her face assumed a look of bright-eyed warmth, as though consumed by some delightful reminiscence. ‘He often used to say how much he owed to his stepfather because, you see, if his stepfather – his stepfather, you see, was the Dr Hazell you mentioned – if his stepfather hadn’t been so expert in embalming he would never have been able to revitalize – that’s what he used to call it: revitalize – revitalize his own father. Now that is something we can be justly proud of! It is what all human science wants to achieve!’

  ‘His own father?’ Joe asked, drawn as he was into this mad dialogue as into a patch of quicksand. ‘Dr Hazell was his father, wasn’t he?’

  ‘No-o-o!’ Martha’s head sprang back against the wheelchair’s headrest. She stared at Joe. ‘No-o-o,’ she repeated, ‘his father was named Richter. I don’t know why and Robert never knew why, but Robert’s father was given the name Joseph Richter. He was born way, way back, right after his mother first came here and he was always a bit sickly, a poor sickly boy, so Robert always said, and though he was looked after and given every attention and married – yeah, married – he married real young, ’bout twenty years of age, I reckon, and Robert, his son, was born – why, when was he born? Oh, yes, he was born in 1924, that’s right, 1924 – and then it all ended, it all ended…’

  ‘It all ended?’

  Martha slapped her hands together in a loud clash of bangles. ‘Gone!’ she cried. ‘Both of them gone in an automobile accident! Mother and father both gone!’

  Joe felt the exclamations strike his face like sharp gusts of an icy wind, but the shock was dissipated by his own reluctance to accept what she said as gospel. She again studied him carefully.

  ‘But the baby, Robert, he had been left with his grandma and stepfather,’ she went on, ‘and they became like real parents to him. They nursed him, reared him, and it was only many years later when he was a grown man, a real clever young man, he kinda conceived the idea of being what you might call another Frankenstein.’ She reflected on this pronouncement for several moments, her lips pursed and her head of carefully coiffured hair shaking slightly. ‘And he sure was!’ she declared. ‘He was a Frankenstein! He decided, you see, to give part of his life to re-vitaliz-ing his own father, to raising him from his long embalmed sleep. Which is why he built this great house, this domain of San Jorge right here. And this is what I want to keep. And this, young man, is why you’re here. You’re here to preserve what Robert, my late husband, wanted preserved more’n anything else in the entire world.’

  This left Joe so nonplussed he simply sat back in sheer bewilderment. What the hell it all meant he had no idea. ‘I was told,’ he stammered, ‘it was… it was…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It was all going to be sold, that’s what I was told.’

  ‘Told, sold!’ she scoffed. ‘Ain’t no one ever going to buy San Jorge! Not so long as I have a breath in my body!’

  ‘Surely, the Russian oligarch…’

  ‘No one!’

  He accepted that she was not prepared to say another word on the subject. For a few seconds she appeared once again to have become lost in her own thoughts, so much so that Joe felt sure she suffered from incipient dementia as well as the evident self-delusion of all her high-flown talk. Then she astonished him by resuming her defiant look.

  ‘Show me!’ she demanded.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Show me what’s round your neck!’

  ‘You mean…?’

  ‘I want the proof!’

  A little reluctantly but obediently he looped the cord holding the locket over his head. Gloria Billington had told him during their long early-morning talk that Martha would want ‘proof’. He supposed it was in this mysterious locket. He held it out to this strange old woman in her silver wheelchair and she purred her way a little closer. She did the obvious thing and the lid sprang open at her first touch. Then she peered forward and studied the image of Dolly smiling up at her out of the locket’s little round porthole

  ‘My!’

  There was silence. She held the locket up close to her left eye and the slit of her lips slowly formed into the modest curve of a smile.

  ‘Mighty pretty little thing. She is?’

  ‘Gloria Billington’s daughter Dolly.’

  He was about to explain that he called her his niece when she pressed a button on the arm of her wheelchair and it moved backwards and to the right, leaving her at right angles to him. He could only tell that she was shaking her head. He had no idea what her expression might be, as she spoke in a sharp quavering voice away from him:

  ‘My husband was a suspicious man. I suppose like his own father and grandfather. He was also unfaithful to me, that is true. Towards the end of his life he preferred to live in your country, in England. I was left in charge here. I am in charge here. I remain in charge here. I created all this, it is what I wanted.’ She waved a wrist full of bangles in a slow, regal gesture towards the expanses of red carpet and other extravagances of the large room. ‘So don’t mention that woman to me! I don’t wish to be reminded.’

  He contemplated her. She had asked a question and he had answered it. He recognised her hurt and felt sympathetic, but he was equally certain he had a pin that would puncture her delusion.

  ‘The proof is there.’

  ‘Where?’

  He asked her to hand him the locket. She did so ungraciously. With a flick of the back of the locket as the courier had shown him, it opened to reveal a small disc. ‘DNA,’ he said. ‘Deoxyribonucleic acid.’

  ‘Please, young man, do not use such language! As for that woman, I do not wish to be continually reminded of my husband’s indiscretions!’

  ‘DNA,’ he repeated.

  ‘So what?’

  ‘Proof.’

  In what appeared to be annoyance but was more likely sheer puzzlement, she drove her wheelchair over to the consol similar to the one in Gloria Billington’s Tudor room and pressed a button. The slit of her mouth concentrated itself into a puckered, girlishly disagreeable pout. She blinked her eyes rapidly. ‘This fellow’ll know what to do with this. If it is what you say it is. Where were the tests done?’

  ‘In England. Gloria Billington asked me to bring them to you. They prove my identity and the identity of, well…’

  He paused because all certainty seemed to evaporate in the silence of the room. He could scarcely bring himself to raise his eyes to confront her. Once he let the silence intervene, he felt paralysed by his own doubts. She remained rigid, lips parted, in silhouette in her wheelchair, as apparently consumed by thought and old age as Whistler’s mother.

  ‘Oh, the staff I’ve got to put up with nowadays!’ The cry burst from her. ‘I never know who they are! It’s maddening!’

  Then, as if this outburst had merely been an aside of no consequence, she slowly moved her head to encompass him with the unblinking gaze of her ultra-bright eyes.

  ‘Whose identity?’

  ‘
Well, er…’

  ‘Whose?… Oh, here he is!’

  A middle-aged man had emerged from the silently opening doors of the elevator. Dressed immaculately in a pale grey waistcoat and long morning tail-coat, he approached with a slightly deferential, forward-leaning pose. All obsequiousness, though, was stricken from his features the moment he had the locket thrust at him.

  ‘Ma’am?’

  ‘Here, check it out! In this little thing here.’

  She held out the locket for the little disc to be extracted and, showing greater expertise than Joe had expected, deftly released it from its setting. She snapped the locket shut with a proprietary firmness that defied any attempt to claim it back. ‘I reckon I know now what to do. Go check it!’

  ‘Ma’am.’

  The man withdrew with the same deference he had shown on entering. When he vanished ghost-like through a door beside the consol, Joe’s uncertainty was redoubled, since he could not rid himself of a sense of déjà vu. But encompassed once more by Martha’s stare, her eyes skewering him with their strangely mad lustre, he had a sense that the very fact of his presence tested her delusions so greatly she was finding it hard to make up her mind. Sitting quite still in front of her, he recognised that she had to commune with whatever personal deity might come to her aid. If he moved, he might interrupt the contemplative, almost prayerful quiet growing between them.

  ‘Regular as clockwork,’ she began saying in a voice so low it was hardly more than a whisper, ‘regular as clockwork, that’s how often my husband would come back here. He had to do it because… oh, not because of me, he didn’t want to know me!’ The words were cast dismissively on the air like so much dust. ‘No, he wanted to make sure what he had created, his own father, his own flesh and blood stayed… er, stayed alive… That’s why! Every six months, regular as clockwork, he’d come here. To re-vital-ize, that’s why. As for you,’ she suddenly announced, her head shaking again, ‘I think I know what to do… Identity, indeed! Why, you don’t know the first thing!’

  17

  The middle-aged man had returned. He leant and whispered something in Martha’s ear. Some signal had apparently been received. She let him replace the disc in the locket and then she clutched it to her.

  ‘Right. So we can go.’

  She purred her way over to the sections of panelling that drew apart to reveal the interior of the elevator cabin. The wheelchair carried her smoothly into it and she directed Joe to join her.

  ‘My legs gave out on me two years ago. But now I have this contraption and that contraption… Reckon I’m better off than I was. Reckon my life’s a lot better. Except this darned new staff they have here! That fellow calls himself a gentleman’s gentleman! Wonder of wonders! But he’s reliable and he knows a lot. Can’t rightly complain. You, though, you must zip your lip, as they used to say. So don’t you tell a livin’ soul about this! It’s one thing my husband didn’t want known. It was his secret, you see. I must respect his secret, which is really my secret.’

  He had no idea what she was talking about. She seemed to be talking as much to herself as to him, but so long as she clutched the locket he felt in duty bound to accompany her. The elevator began its descent. It was silent and seemed motionless save for a faint quivering. There was no telling how deeply they descended. They went past several floors and he was beginning to wonder whether she had forgotten to press whatever button needed pressing on her wheelchair, since no doubt this was one of the contraptions she referred to, when their downward progress was brought to a slow and soundless halt. She pressed the locket into the equivalent of a small mailbox. Soundlessly the elevator doors opened onto total blackness that was gradually revealed as a long straight vista of corridor. Lights sprang into life one after another at infrequent intervals down its entire length. She retrieved the locket and purred her way out into this vista.

  ‘It’s a little ways along here. But it sure ain’t as far as Moscow.’

  ‘Moscow?’

  He walked beside her at an easy strolling pace. The purring of the electric motor grew into a soft whine.

  ‘I never been there. But that’s where he is. In what they call it? A mauso-something…’

  ‘Mausoleum?’

  ‘Right. It’s where my husband always said his granddaddy was. You know who I mean. Have you seen him there?’

  ‘Have I seen who?’

  ‘Right. They say there ain’t much of him left.’

  ‘No, well…’

  ‘He sure ain’t like what I got.’

  Was she really mad? He felt his only choice was to humour her. Whatever she was talking about made not a scrap of sense. In any case, the air in the long corridor was uncannily chilly. It suggested the air of a tomb. He began to have serious doubts about going any farther.

  ‘Say,’ her voice twanged as sharply as ever. ‘What’s the secret of life? Do you know what it is?’

  She was mad, he told himself. Quite mad.

  ‘You don’t know, do you? But my husband, he knew!’

  ‘So he knew!’ He felt like laughing.

  ‘Sure he knew! My husband was a wizard, as I said. He knew more than Luigi Galvani. Not just electrical impulses. He knew the real secret.’

  He stared ahead of him. ‘I thought only God knew that.’

  ‘That’s true, young man.’

  ‘Well, then…’

  ‘God knew the secret of life on this planet, but the Son of Man, didn’t he know about resurrection, about immortality?’

  He must turn round, he told himself, escape from this satanic, imbecile old woman with her horrid opulence, her contraptions, her San Jorge, her secret. He must free himself from the feeling that he was falling under her spell and being entombed in what seemed an increasingly hostile, white-tiled mineshaft. Suddenly, almost anticipating his thought, she stopped.

  ‘Young man, I’m getting out of breath.’

  She had been sitting all the while in her wheelchair, but, despite that, he noticed she had grown paler and now she clutched at her chest. She’s having a heart attack, he thought.

  ‘Can’t I get you help? Perhaps there’s a doctor…’

  ‘A doctor!’ Apparently this was the worst thing he could have said. She gazed up at him with pitying contempt, shaking her head dumbly. The bangles made dry clicking sounds like suddenly active grasshoppers on a hot day. ‘I don’t see doctors, young man! I’ve no use for doctors!’

  ‘Why on earth not?’

  ‘I know the secret of life, that’s why not!’

  Their voices, exchanging these exclamatory remarks in the emptiness of this long corridor, had begun to echo. It was eerie and distracting. In recognition of the noise they had been making, she lowered her voice and now spoke once again almost in a whisper.

  ‘We never had no doctors. Not so long as we’ve been here in San Jorge. They don’t know the half of it, doctors don’t.’

  Then she heaved her chest twice, took in long breaths and waited. The silence and the coldness came down the corridor like engulfing water. What the hell if she dies? he asked himself. How do I get in touch with anyone down here? His anxious thoughts were interrupted by a faint murmuring from her:

  ‘We’ll go on slowly.’

  The wheelchair started slowly forward with a resurgence of the purring and he walked beside it. They went on for a short while without speaking.

  ‘The granddaddy, the man they call Lenin in his mauso-something, he doesn’t move, does he?’

  ‘Of course he doesn’t! He’s dead!’

  The purring came to an abrupt halt. He stared at her. She was looking up at him with total incredulity.

  ‘What was that word you just used, young man?’

  ‘Dead. I said Lenin’s dead.’

  ‘O-o-o-o, I don’t know that word! I don’t wanna hear it!’

  She pressed the buttons on the wheelchair and it sped forward at its fastest speed. He kept up with it, but it was no stroll now. They covered the remaining length of the
corridor in a couple of minutes and swung round a corner to enter a small chamber. It was faced with marble. Low concealed lighting came from above. Lilies had been placed in a tall vase in one corner of the chamber and they scented the air. But the first thing that attracted the eye was a large glass screen or window occupying almost the whole of one side of the chamber. Through this glass could be seen a further dimly lit area. In the centre of this area, raised on a small dais and surrounded by banks of flowers, was an upright armchair. Seated in it, legs crossed, in a dark suit, was a human figure. The astonishing resemblance was undeniable. More remarkable still, the figure gave the distinct impression of being about to move, as if the approach of the two people on the other side of the glass had been noticed by it.

  Joe gaped.

  The high, domed forehead of the small, oval cranium, the expressively etched eyebrows, grey and slightly bushy, the glittering, unblinking, crystal sheen of the shaded eyes, the grey moustache and the small grey beard on the tapering, rather foxy face, and, most of all, the sense of contained power emanating from the features, all combined to replicate with astonishing vitality the appearance of Lenin grown exceedingly old, still mentally active, it would seem, if stiff and awkwardly upright as he sat there in the chair among the flowers. As Joe looked more closely he realized that the resemblance became less specific. His own ignorance seemed to cause a wavering in the glass screen itself, as if his uncertainty misted it very slightly and made the features vaguer, rounder, more generous than the way they were depicted in conventional images of the revolutionary Bolshevik leader. It was also obviously no triumph of the embalming art, no remarkably lifelike waxwork; it was graphically real in its supposed vitality, but that very vitality had a spectral intensity to it, a manufactured, phantom realism. The eyes were the only feature that contradicted this impression. They appeared to be watching, and it was their scrutiny that held Joe’s attention from first to last and made him gape.