In the Shadow of Frankenstein: Tales of the Modern Prometheus

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  She appeared fairly consistently until September 1951. She was standing at the end of Sea View pier on the Isle of Wight (a pier that was later blown down in a storm). She was wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a calf-length floral dress, and white strappy shoes. Her face was hardly visible in the shadow of her hat, but she seemed to be laughing.

  Then again, his mother seemed to disappear. There were no photographs of her until November 1952, when she had attended Lolly Bassett’s wedding at Caxton Hall, in London. She wore a grey suit with a pleated skirt. She looked extremely thin, almost emaciated. Her face was still beautiful but slightly lumpy in a way, as if she were recovering from a beating, or hadn’t slept well.

  Throughout the first five photograph albums that he looked at, David discovered seven material gaps in his mother’s appearance … almost as if she had taken seven extended vacations throughout his early childhood. When he came to think about it, she had been away now and again, but he had always been so well looked after by Iris, his nanny (his father’s maiden sister), and then by Aunt Rosemary, that it had never really occurred to him until now how extended those absences must have been. He remembered that his mother had been ill a great deal, in those days, and that she had been obliged to stay in her bedroom for weeks on end, with the curtains tightly drawn. He remembered tiptoeing into her bedroom to kiss her goodnight, and scarcely being able to find her in the darkness. He remembered touching her soft, soft face, and feeling her soft, soft hair; and smelling her perfume and something else, some strong, penetrating smell, like antiseptic.

  But then, in 1957, she had reappeared, as strong and as beautiful as ever before, and the sun had shone in every room, and his father had laughed, and he had thought sometimes that he must have the best parents that any boy could wish for.

  There was a sixth album, bound in black leather, but it was fastened with a lock, and he couldn’t find the key. He made a mental note to himself to look through his father’s desk.

  He turned back to the photograph of his mother in 1948, and laid the flat of his hand on it, as if he could somehow absorb some understanding of what had happened through the nitrates on the paper.

  All through his early life, it seemed as if his mother had come and gone, come and gone, like the sunlight on a cloudy afternoon.

  He parked outside Northwood Nursing Home and spent some time wrestling the MG’s waterproof cover into place, because it looked like rain.

  Inside, he found the registrar’s office down at the end of a long linoleum-floored corridor, which echoed and smelled of wax polish. The registrar was a tired-looking woman in a lilac cardigan who noisily clicked extra strong mints around her teeth, making little sucking noises. She made it more than obvious that David’s request was extremely tiresome, and that she could have been doing something much more important instead (such as making Nescafe).

  David waited while she leafed through the record book, making a performance of turning each page.

  “Yes … here we are. July 3, 1947. Mrs. Katerina Geoffries. Blood group O. Medical history, measles, chicken pox, mild scarlatina. Live male birth—I presume that’s you?—weighing 7lbs 4ozs.”

  David peered over the desk. “There’s another note there, in red ink.”

  “That’s because somebody has checked her medical record at a later date.”

  “I see. Why would anybody want to do that?”

  “Well, in this case, because of her accident.”

  “Accident? What accident?”

  The registrar stared at him very oddly, her eyes magnified by her spectacles. “You are who you say you are?” she asked him.

  “Of course. Why shouldn’t I be?”

  The registrar closed the book with an emphatic slap. “It just strikes me as rather peculiar that you don’t know about your mother’s accident.”

  David pulled out his wallet, and showed the registrar his driving license and a letter from the Borough Council. “I’m David Geoffries. Mrs. Katya Geoffries is my mother. Look … here’s a photograph of us together. I don’t know why she never told me about her accident. Perhaps she didn’t think that it was very important.”

  “I would say that it was extremely important—at least as far as your mother was concerned.”

  “But why?”

  The registrar opened the book again, and turned it around so that David could read what was written in red ink. “Senior med. reg. from Middlesex Hosp. inquired blood grp & med. history urgent 2 a.m. 14/09/48 (unable contact GP). Mrs. G. seriously crushed in car accident.”

  Underneath, in black ink, in another hand: “Mrs. Geoffries deceased 15/09/48.”

  David looked up. He felt as if he had been breathing in nitrous oxide at the dentist—light-headed and echoey and detached from everything around him. “This must be a mistake,” he heard himself saying. “She’s still alive, and perfectly well, and living at The Limes. I saw her only yesterday.”

  “Well, if that’s the case, I’m very pleased,” said the registrar, making a loud rattle with her mint. “Now, if you can excuse me—“

  David nodded, and stood up. He left the Nursing Home and stood on the steps outside, while the rain began to spot the red-asphalt driveway, and the wind began to rise.

  He found a copy of the death certificate at Somerset House. Mrs. Katerina Ardonna Geoffries had died on September 15, 1948, in the Middlesex Hospital, cause of death multiple internal injuries. His mother had been killed and here was the proof.

  He visited the offices of the Uxbridge Gazette and leafed through amber-colored back-issues in the morgue. There it was: in the issue dated September 18, complete with a photograph. A few minutes after midnight, a Triumph Roadster had run through a red traffic light at Greenford, and collided with a lorry carrying railway lines. David recognized the car at once. He had seen it in several photographs at home. It hadn’t occurred to him that it had failed to reappear after September 1948.

  His mother was dead. His mother had died when he was only a year old. He had never known her, never talked to her, never played with her.

  So who was the woman in The Limes? And why had she pretended for all of these years that she was his mother?

  He went back home. Bonny had made him a devastatingly hot chili-con-carne, one of his favorites, but he found that he could only pick at it.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked him. “You’re so pale! You look as if you need a blood transfusion.”

  “My mother’s dead,” he said; and then he told her whole story.

  They left their supper and sat on the sofa with glasses of wine and talked about it. Bonny said, “What I can’t understand is why your father never told you. I mean, it wouldn’t have upset you, would it? You wouldn’t have remembered her.”

  “It wasn’t just me he didn’t tell. He didn’t tell anybody. He called her Katya and he told everybody how they had met in Poland before the war … he used to call her the Queen of Warsaw. Why would he have done that, if it wasn’t her at all?”

  They pored over the photograph albums again. “These later pictures,” said Bonny, “they certainly look like your mother. She’s got the same hair, the same eyes, the same profile.”

  “No … here’s a difference,” said David. “Look … in this picture of her holding me when I was eleven months old, look at her earlobes. They’re very small. But look at this picture taken in 1951. There’s no doubt about it, she’s got different ears.”

  Bonny went to her easel and came back with her magnifying glass. They scrutinized the woman’s hands, her feet, her shoulders. “There … she has three moles on her shoulder in this picture, but not in this one.”

  At last, with the bottle of wine almost empty, they sat back and looked at each other in bewilderment.

  “It’s the same woman, yet it isn’t the same woman. She keeps changing, very subtly, from year to year.”

  “My father was a brilliant surgeon. Maybe he was giving her cosmetic surgery.”

  “To make her earlobes big
ger? To give her moles where she didn’t have moles before?”

  David shook his head. “I don’t know … I can’t understand it at all.”

  “Then perhaps we’d better ask the only person who really knows … your mother, or whoever she is.”

  She sat with her face half in shadow. “I am Katya Ardonna,” she said. “I always have been Katya Ardonna, and I will remain Katya Ardonna until the day I die.”

  “But what about the accident?” David insisted. “I’ve seen my mother’s death certificate.”

  “I am your mother.”

  He went through the photograph albums again and again, searching for clues. He had almost given up when he found a photograph of his mother at Kempton Park racecourse in 1953, arm in arm with a smiling brunette. The caption read, Katya & Georgina, lucky day at the races!!

  Clearly visible on her friend Georgina’s shoulder were three moles.

  Georgina’s father sat by the window, staring sightlessly out at the traffic on the Kingston Bypass through his grimy net curtains. He wore a frayed grey cardigan. A resentful tortoiseshell cat sat in his lap and gave David an unblinking death stare.

  “Georgina went out on New Year’s Eve, 1953, and that was the last anybody ever saw of her. The police were very good about it, they did their best, but there were no clues to go on, not one. I can see her face like it was yesterday. She turned around and said, ‘Happy New Year, Dad!’ I can hear it now. But after that night, I never had one happy new year, not one.”

  David said to his mother, “Tell me about Georgina.”

  “Georgina?”

  “Georgina Philips, she was a friend of yours. One of your best friends.”

  “Why on earth do you want to know about her? She went missing, disappeared.”

  David said, “I think I’ve found out where she is. Or at least, I think I know where part of her is. Her arm?”

  His mother stared at him. “My God,” she said. “After all these years … I never thought that anybody would ever find out.”

  She stood in the center of her room, wearing nothing but her pale peach dressing gown. Bonny stood in the corner, right in the corner, fearful but fascinated. David stood close to his mother.

  “He worshipped me, that was the trouble. He thought I was a goddess, that I wasn’t real. And he was so possessive. He wouldn’t let me talk to other men. He was always telephoning me to make sure where I was. In the end, I began to feel that I was trapped, that I was suffocating. I had too much whisky to drink and I went for a drive.

  “I don’t remember the accident. All I remember is waking up in your father’s clinic. I was terribly crushed, the lorry had driven right over my pelvis. You were right, of course, I was dead. But your father took possession of my body, and took me to Pinner.

  “You probably didn’t know very much about your father’s work with electrical galvanization. He had found a way of stimulating life into dead tissue by injecting it with negatively charged minerals and then inducing a massive positive shock. He had perfected it in wartime for the War Office … and of course they had been only too happy to supply him with dead soldiers to experiment on. The first man he brought back to life was a Naval petty officer who had drowned in the Atlantic. The man’s memory was badly impaired, but later your father found a way of preventing that from happening by using amino acids.”

  She paused, and then continued, “I was killed in that accident, all those years ago, and I should have stayed dead. But your father revived me. Not only that, he rebuilt me, so that I was almost as perfect as I had been when he first met me.

  “My legs were crushed beyond repair … he gave me new legs. My body was pulped … he gave me a new body. New heart, lungs, liver, pelvis, pancreas … new arms, new ribs, new breasts.’’

  She dropped the shoulder of her dressing gown. “There,” she said, “look at my back.”

  David could barely see the scar that his father’s surgery had left on his mother’s back. The faintest of silvery lines, where Georgina’s arm had been sewn onto somebody else’s shoulder.

  “How much of you is really you?” he asked her, hoarsely. “How much of you is Katya Ardonna?”

  “Over the years,” his mother said, “your father used six different women, restoring me piece by piece to what I once was.”

  “And you let him do it? You let him murder six women so that he could use their body parts, just for you?”

  “Your father was beyond my control. Your father was beyond anybody’s control. He was a great surgeon, but he was obsessed.”

  “I still can’t believe you allowed him to do it.”

  His mother lifted her dressing gown again. “I suffered years of agony, David … years when I was scarcely conscious from one month to the next. It was like living in a dream, or a nightmare. Somethings I used to wonder if I was actually dead.”

  “But how did he get away with it, killing all of those women? How did he get rid of the bodies?”

  From around her neck, Katya Ardonna took a small silver key. “You’ve seen that black leather album in the attic? The one that’s locked? Well, this key will open it. This key will let you know everything that you’ll ever want to know, and more.”

  They looked through the album in silence. It was a complete photographic record of his father’s surgical reconstruction of his mother’s shattered body as brightly-colored as a sex magazine. Page by page, year after year, they could follow his progress as he painstakingly put her back together again. The surgical techniques were extraordinary—even involving a rudimentary kind of micro-surgery, to reconnect nerve fibers and tiny blood capillaries.

  First of all, they saw how David’s father had sewn new limbs onto his mother’s shattered body—then replaced her ribcage and her lungs and all of her internal organs.

  After years of meticulous surgery, she had emerged as perfect as she was today. The same beautiful woman that his father had met in Poland in 1937—almost flawless, finely proportioned, and scarcely scarred at all.

  She smiled from the album like the Queen of Warsaw.

  But the photographs told a darker story, too. Stage by horrifying stage, they showed what David’s father had done with the limbs and the organs that had been surplus to his needs. He hadn’t wrapped them up in newspaper, or burned them, or buried them, or dissolved them in acid. He had painstakingly sutured them together, muscle to muscle, nerve to nerve. Every photograph was a grisly landscape of veins and membranes and bloody flesh. Glutinous chasms opened up; glutinous chasms were closed. Blood welled scarlet over thin connective tissues; blood was drained away.

  Neither of them had ever seen the human body opened up like this. It was a monstrous garden of grisly vegetables: livers shining like aubergines, intestines heaped like cauliflower curds, lungs as big as crumpled pumpkins.

  Out of this riot of skin and bone and offal, out of all of these rejects, David’s scrupulous father had been able to create another woman. Of course, she wasn’t as beautiful as Katya Ardonna … he had pillaged the best parts from six women’s bodies to restore Katya Ardonna’s beauty, the way he had remembered it to be.

  But this other woman had been presentable enough, under the circumstances. And she had given him the opportunity to practice his suturing skills, and some of his new ideas on connecting nerve-fibers.

  And she had lived just as Katya Ardonna had lived—six murder victims tangled into one living woman.

  The last few photographs in the album showed the woman’s toes being sewn on, and the skin being closed over her open leg incisions.

  The very last picture showed the day that the bandages had come off this new woman’s face. She was bruised and stunned, and her eyes were out of focus. But with a sickening, surging sensation of pity and disgust, they saw the desperate, lopsided face of David’s Aunt Rosemary.

  ADRIAN COLE

  The Frankenstein Legacy

  Adrian Cole was born in Devon, where he still lives. He is the author of more than twenty-five no
vels and numerous short stories, writing in several genres, including science fiction, fantasy, sword and sorcery and horror.

  His first books were published in the 1970s—The Dream Lords trilogy—and he went on to write, among others, the Omaran Saga and the Star Requiem series, as well as writing two young adult novels, Moorstones and The Sleep of Giants.

  More recent books have included the Voidal trilogy, which collects all the original short stories from the 1970s and ’80s and adds new material to complete the saga; the novels Night of the Heroes and The Shadow Academy, and the Lovecraftian short story collection Nick Nightmare Investigates, featuring the occult detective of the title.

  “My first memory of Frankenstein and his bizarre creation goes back to when I was a boy of seven,” recalls the author, “living at the time in Malaya, my father having been in the Army. Our house backed on to a rubber plantation, itself an ideal environment into which to let loose a fermenting imagination. The tropical afternoons were sweltering, a time to be in the shade, and my mother regularly took me to the local cinemas—not, I hasten to add, to see Frankenstein movies!—or we talked about books we had read or movies we had seen and loved.

  “I do recall quite vividly her telling me the plot of the Boris Karloff movie, which had left a lasting impression on her, as her description of it then left on me. She had transposed the tremendous impact of Karloff’s performance, which had wowed the movie world, on to my inner eye: ironically it had not filled me with terror, but rather with fascination, certainly pity. Since then, Frankenstein’s creature has always been one of my favorites—at school I was notorious for doodling a kind of Mad magazine version of it in my jotters and other less acceptable places. And of course, I became an avid fan of the movies, which I still watch over and over again.

  “‘The Frankenstein Legacy’ posed a problem for me—how to explain Victor Frankenstein’s survival and that of his creation? In Mary Shelley’s novel, the scientist clearly dies, the Monster determined to self-destruct. But then it struck me that we only have Robert Walton’s word for that, don’t we? And he was a man with a quest, a desire for glory, blessed of remarkable determination and resiliance. Could he really have resisted an opportunity such as Victor Frankenstein presented? Was he such a fine chap as his letters to his sister imply? Those letters … I wonder …”