In the Shadow of Frankenstein: Tales of the Modern Prometheus

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  “I wandered those vast wastes with nothing but my memories for company. My bitterness, my disgust, my self-repugnance dogged me like wolves, always snapping at me, but never tearing me down. Year after year it went on, until they tired, those emotional scavengers, skulking away, toothless and contemptible. All faded but my hate.

  “And I came back.”

  “For him?”

  “Yes. Fate had tied us as surely as the birth cord ties a babe to its mother. I had had none, but I was secured to Frankenstein by his very act of creation.”

  “You found him—”

  “No. By the time I had unravelled the details of his life after he returned from the Arctic, a task of considerable years, he was no more. I assume he was a victim of Robert Walton’s perfidy. Certainly he is dead. But Robert Walton lives on. Like me, he cheats death, safe in his disguise, for who would believe the truth about him?”

  Staverton shook his head. “Medical science would mock such an idea, unless—” He gazed uneasily at the creature before him.

  “Unless I came forward? Yes, I could undo him with the truth. But I have lived in darkness since my return. I have made the graveyard my home, the secret places of your world, the crawling dark. And my companions are the denizens of that sub-world. The dregs of humanity, spurned by it as I have been: they understand me and serve me well. Time is meaningless to me, as it is to Robert Walton. But I am ready for him now, ready for the reckoning.”

  Staverton winced at the raw pain in the words, as though the creature had fashioned the agonies of its entire life into a weapon of retribution. “But what is my part in this? I have had nothing to do with Walton for years.”

  “You, too, have sought seclusion. You live alone, without relatives or friends, shut away in a barren land, forgotten by the world that knew you. You are a ghost, Daniel Staverton, a shadow person. No one notices what you do. But your arts are not lost to you.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “I need them. Do not deny me. How can you? You would see the fall of Robert Walton as I would.”

  Staverton could not deny it. His emotions had become dulled over the years. But Walton could rekindle hatred, anger.

  “Walton once wrote to his sister that I had gone to my funeral pyre, that I would exult in its agony. But I am not destroyed by words, any more than I am destroyed by actions. As he will learn.”

  VI

  It was only after Staverton had left the presence of the cadaverous being in the vault that the true horror of its nature struck him. Above in the mausoleum, he felt an onrush of dread, a need to get outside into the air. Night greeted him; he sagged against a headstone, watched by the ever-present Turner and his seedy trio of companions.

  “He’s real,” Turner said. “Hate made him, keeps him alive. Nothing stronger than hate, Doctor. Fear makes you weak. Hate makes you strong. You want to remember that.”

  Staverton nodded. He clung to his own hate now. Either that or terror would undo him.

  Later, deep into the night, they left the cemetery in the van and soon the forest enclosed them, the silence as intense as the darkness. Turner knew the way: everything from now on had been planned with the precision of a surgeon’s work.

  A high wall loomed up beside the road, the boundary of the Waltonian Institute, topped with barbed wire. Too many people had too much to gain from the Institute for the law of the land to be adhered to: the wire was electrified. Turner swerved off the narrow road to where another vehicle was parked under the wall. A huge figure clambered out of it, and Staverton realized just how enormous, how monstrous, this creature truly was.

  “You’ll find everything you need inside,” said the creature, handing Staverton a leather bag, which was oddly heavy. The creature turned and watched silently as Turner’s minions slid together two sections of ladder and propped it up against the wall. When they had secured it, the creature climbed woodenly up to the top of the wall.

  “The current—“ began Staverton, but Turner’s face was a mocking grimace.

  “Just get ready to move fast, Doctor.”

  Staverton’s trepidation turned to shock as the creature reached the barbed wire and gripped it with both hands. Electric current sizzled, the air snapping with brilliant light, smoke billowing in the glow. But the creature merely tore the wires apart, impervious to pain, the horrible scorching of its flesh. Using inexorable strength, it ripped away wire and stanchions alike, creating a sizeable gap through which it disappeared.

  “Move!” snarled Turner, and Staverton clambered upwards, barely able to hang on to the black bag. At the top, the smell of cooked flesh was nauseating, but he forced himself over the wall. The drop on the other side was eased by a tall mass of shrubbery and undergrowth which eased his fall. Turner and the others were beside him in moments, the ladder recovered and hidden away.

  “They’ll know we’re here,” said Turner. “But it don’t matter.”

  His master towered over them. “In the forest, there will be dogs, and worse things. Keep together, especially you, Staverton.”

  Staverton turned away from its charred hands and as he did so he felt another surge of horror: Turner and his men pulled from their jackets long machetes.

  The group had not moved far through the labyrinth of trees when the sound of baying came to them. There could be no escaping the hunt and within moments the first of the huge black beasts came crashing through the bracken. The creature met it with a blur of movement, its arm striking the neck of the hound before it could sink its teeth into flesh, and the sound of snapping bone was loud in the night. The hound catapulted sideways, dead before it thudded into the earth.

  Others tore into the men, but they used their wide-bladed weapons with devastating effect. Staverton crouched down, clutching the bag as if it could hide him, while around him the hounds snarled, blades gleamed, and blood ran. There must have been a dozen in the pack. A few minutes later none were left alive. One of the men had taken a bad wound on his arm where teeth had torn the flesh open, but his companions bound it up with a ripped section of jacket, stemming the flow of blood.

  They moved on through the forest, and for now it was again silent, though Staverton was certain that their movements were being watched. Closed-circuit television maybe.

  It was a two-mile hike to the buildings of the Institute, and although they heard more baying in the distance, there were as yet no more attacks by the hounds. In the shrubbery beside the gravel car park at the front of the Institute, they squatted down and watched.

  “You know this place,” said the creature to Staverton. “What is the least difficult way to enter it?”

  “We’ll never get in,” muttered Staverton. “The dogs are one thing, but they have armed guards, a small army of them. Look.” To illustrate his point, he indicated a group of men who had appeared from around a corner of the massive building: uniformed, carrying weapons of some kind, they fanned out. Lights above stabbed at the forest, search beams, and the party among the trees ducked down. The Institute was crawling with the guards.

  Staverton could see the creature’s ghoulish features twisting with frustration. “I was foolish to imagine that Walton would protect himself any less thoroughly.”

  “There’s one possible way in,” Staverton told him. “About a mile on the other side of the Institute, at the back of the gardens, there’s an old orangery. In the buildings around it there’s a way down to some cellars that were dug when part of the Institute was a monastery. They lead under it, though I’ve never been down there.”

  “Take us there,” the creature grunted.

  VII

  They goaded Staverton through the undergrowth, weaving like escaped criminals as the lights stabbed out into the forest. But the guards, scores of them now, remained on the gravel paths surrounding the house, not eager to be drawn out into the vast woodland, secure in the knowledge that no one could get past them. Gradually Staverton and his bizarre companions moved back into the forest’s thick shad
ows, the sounds of the hounds receding. Twice they were found by the hounds, but these were despatched as swiftly and as decisively as the others had been.

  The orangery was as Staverton had remembered it, the lawns before it immaculate, the shrubs neatly maintained. It took him a while to locate the outbuildings; Turner and the others felt it was safe enough now to use their flashlights. In one of the musty rooms a rotting door revealed stone steps.

  “I’m sure this is it,” said Staverton. At the foot of the steps there was another wooden door, heavily padlocked. The creature wrenched the lock off and shouldered the door inward. Beyond was a low corridor, cut from the naked rock. They all had to stoop down to follow the passageway. Staverton had been right: it wormed its way under the earth for about a mile, gradually sloping downwards as it went. At its far end yet another door barred the way.

  The creature put its ear to it and listened. “Do you know what is beyond?” it asked Staverton.

  “Either cellars or possibly laboratories. There were places we were not allowed to visit. We knew some of them were far below the Institute. God knows what Walton got up to.”

  “Guarded?”

  “Above, perhaps. But not down here. Hardly anyone would know this area exists.”

  The creature nodded, bent almost double by the confines of the tunnel. It used its damaged hands to tear at the door as though pain were totally unknown to it. The wood protested; dust trickled down from above. But the door began to splinter. A thick plank dragged loose and it was all the creature needed: in moments it had forced the door off its massive hinges, wrenching it aside in another dust cloud.

  It shone its torch inward and up a short corridor. At its end was a grille, rusting and ancient. Again the creature used its incalculable strength to rip it aside like a curtain. Beyond was a chamber, unexpectedly cavernous, a vaulted catacomb, its many pillars a stone forest in the bowels of the earth.

  The party emerged from the tunnel, Staverton’s nerves attuned to the slightest sound: there were a number of them and he stifled a moan of terror. An uneven slithering came from the right, a muted croaking from the left, and other uneasy sounds echoed softly from all around. Something stirred in Staverton’s memory, images of long buried myths about the Institute’s remote history, its forgotten, shameful past. Once they had been no more than stories, jokes among the staff. But here they were real, rising up to defend their grim domain.

  VIII

  In the crossbeams of the torches, the shapes reared abruptly and Staverton lurched back, appalled. The creature and its henchmen were prepared to defend themselves, unmoved by the nature of the things that loomed out of the shadows. These things were human, but there was something drastically wrong with all of them, as though they were unfinished, the victims of a defective genetic process. They moaned at the intrusive beams of light, which were far more effective than any weapon, cutting at them, substantial as razors. Scores of the creatures thronged the chamber, some chained, straining against the locks that impeded their movements.

  Again Staverton gasped as he realized they had not gathered to attack. They wanted something, reaching out with claws, talons, and in some cases snakelike arms.

  “Food,” said Turner, his own grim features twisted into a rictus of revulsion. “They want food.”

  In the eerie torch glow, Staverton saw the profile of the Monster, caught an almost frightening look of pity in those sunken eyes. It alone understood the suffering of the beastmen in this hellish dungeon. It turned to Staverton, pity turning to a vast anger.

  “Did you know of this?”

  Staverton shook his head as the torch beams dazzled him. But the light must have vindicated his own shock. “The experiments of a lifetime, of several lifetimes!” he murmured. “The by-products of Walton’s evil work. Why in God’s name has he preserved them!”

  The creature turned away and went amongst the throng, invulnerable. It began tearing at chains, ripping them out of the walls, tossing them aside, releasing as many of the monstrous creatures as it could. Turner urged Staverton to follow in his master’s wake. It was clear now that they would not be attacked.

  “What will happen to them?” Staverton called to the creature.

  “Let them find their way out into the forest.”

  “But they’ll—” die, Staverton thought, but did not say. Yes, better to die out there than be preserved here in this hole. That’s what the creature wants. Let them die avenging themselves, taking as many of their tormentors with them as they could.

  The creature had crossed the chamber. Several hunched figures dogged its footsteps, as if it had spoken silent commands to them. Like zombies, flesh-bloated, grey as putty, their dead eyes fixed on it, like hounds awaiting fresh commands.

  Again Turner prodded Staverton forward, the other henchmen close behind them. Already the mass of shapes was thinning: they had found the exit, choking it with their exodus as if they could smell the night air a mile beyond.

  The creature forced open another door; there was a modern stairway beyond. Turner killed the lights, using only a single torch to guide the party up into the Institute. There were no guards here: none had been thought necessary. The creature’s new followers remained deathly silent, and in a brief flicker of light, Staverton saw why: they had no mouths. It was too dark to see what alternative Walton’s warped science had given them.

  The creature motioned Staverton to the head of the party. “You should know your way from here. Find Robert Walton.”

  There was no point arguing. Staverton did as bidden, knowing that they were now inside the main block of the Institute. Walton was just as likely to be here as anywhere else. On a carpeted landing several flights up, they came across an armed guard.

  Turner despatched one of his henchmen to deal with him, and he blended with the wall, creeping forward until it was too late for the guard to prevent himself from being caught in a steely grip. Turner’s henchman dragged the guard back to the others.

  “Where’s Walton?” Staverton demanded nervously.

  The guard’s eyes bulged with terror as he saw Staverton’s ghastly companions. He had no choice but to furnish them with what they wanted. “He’s not far. In one of the main halls. But—”

  Staverton fought down his nausea as the creature choked the life from the guard in one brief, terrible squeeze of its charred hands, dropping the corpse like a rag doll.

  They wove along a few more corridors until Staverton recognized the doors to the hall that the guard had referred to. One was slightly ajar. Voices came from beyond, the sound of an argument.

  The creature’s massive head lifted, eyes filled with an icy hatred. “It’s him. Walton is in there.” It swung around to the zombies it had brought up from the bowels of the Institute and although it said nothing, its eyes must have conveyed something to them, some dread command. As one they plodded forward, knocking aside the twin doors and entering the hall beyond.

  Staverton heard the gasps, then the deafening blast of guns being discharged. He dropped to his knees, crawling to a wall and trying to melt into it, his terror sweeping over him in a wave. Someone came rushing out, only to be felled by the creature’s flailing fist. Other people, surgeons possibly, as well as guards, tried to get out of the room where all hell had broken loose, but the creature and its henchmen dealt with them with the deadly efficiency of commandos.

  Eventually Staverton felt himself dragged to his feet, still clutching his black bag, face streaked with tears. He was bundled into the tall room beyond. The mayhem was over, but the place was like a battlefield, bodies strewn among the shattered furniture. Four of the zombies had been cut down and lay twitching amongst their victims. The other two merely stood like robots that had been switched off.

  At the heart of the chaos, the creature confronted the only other survivor, gripping his shirt and swinging him round. Staverton found himself looking into the terror-stricken eyes of his former employer.

  “I know you,” Robert Walton
gasped. “You—”

  Anger welled up in Staverton. Anger at the loss of everything he had once wanted to be, anger at his rejection, and anger now at Walton’s ultimate cruelty. It sluiced away all other emotions. “I was one of the best you had, Walton.”

  The creature’s grip on Walton’s shoulder tightened. “If he did not know that then,” it said, “he soon will. Open your bag. It is time to begin the real work.”

  IX

  Robert Walton looked out of the tall window, studying the group of men below as they got into their black vehicles and began to leave the Institute. His eyes were cold, unemotional. Satisfied that the procession of cars would soon be swallowed by the forest, carrying back to Westminster its lackeys with their glib report, he turned. His movements were a little stiff, as if he were recovering from a minor accident. Those cold eyes met the uneasy gaze of Staverton.

  “It must be nearly time,” said Walton in his deep, cultured voice. “My dear fellow, you must be exhausted. Such a demanding operation. But you can have all the rest you want soon.”

  Staverton drew himself together with an effort. He looked as if he’d been without sleep for days, his face grey, his eyes shrunken.

  “Come along,” said Walton suddenly. “Let us have done with this wretched business.”

  Outside on the landing, two armed guards stiffened, but Walton spoke to them softly, reassuringly: order had been restored, chaos explained, glossed over. Then he motioned Staverton to follow him.