In the Shadow of Frankenstein: Tales of the Modern Prometheus

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  “Why didn’t you stop it earlier? You could have.”

  “I’ve thought of that. Considered how different we are. I knew about your past—that you loved men. Made myself take time off, fought the feelings. But there is something that happens when our skins meet. It’s like our electricity runs at the same wattage and we create a current that runs all through us. As if we make something bigger together, than we do on our own. It’s definitely not something in my mind. I’ve always had a stubbornness there that could put an end to something, if I chose to. Not this. No way.”

  I chuckle. “I understand completely. Whatever this is, it’s at a level I can’t impose my control over. So, you see? You have no reason to fear.”

  Her voice is not as strong as her words. “You’re right.”

  That night, I am lying awake, still bandaged, as Sonia reads in her whisper. I hear her get up and go into the hall. There she meets with someone whose voice is not familiar to me. They speak softly to avoid being heard, but my hearing is still acute. I listen hard.

  “Well, he’s almost done it.” Sonia speaks conspiratorially.

  “Talk about a total cure. It took a dying heterosexual scholar’s brain to do it, but there’s nothing left of Carol. All he has to do is train that voice.”

  “She’ll need months of physical therapy for her legs. God, Reed, what if he’s actually remade her? Her body, anyway. He got rid of the arms that pushed him away, the legs that were going to walk her distant from him, and replaced them. To his taste, I might add. He’s always admired dancers. Something about the musculature. But he wanted Carol’s head and torso. Where was he ever going to find anything better? That kind of beauty is too rare. She did have beautiful breasts. And that’s the irony. This Craig person was dying of breast cancer. Had them both lopped off before Kenny saved her.”

  “Ironic, but divine providence. If Carol hadn’t died like that … shit, he’s been so much calmer, saner, since then. He just couldn’t handle finding out she was just using him to get pregnant. And then she was going to leave him for her female lover? I thought he’d lose it permanently.”

  “Oh, come on Reed. How would you handle it if your wife left you for another woman?”

  “It would never happen.”

  “Kenneth thought the same thing. Male vanity.” She snorts. “It wasn’t him, though. He doesn’t understand that. And now he has to let it go.”

  “If he’s ever going to make it with the new Carol.”

  “Allison. Her name is Allison. You’d better remember.”

  The rest of the conversation blurs. Every suspicion is confirmed. When Sonia returns, I roll over, as if asleep.

  The bandages come off today. Each time the doctor removes the bandages to change them, I see a little. Only light really. I am happy for that. I’ve managed to keep my new voice to myself, except from Greta. I want to speak to Kenneth when I can see. There’s so much I need to tell him, and I want to see his reaction.

  Kenneth comes to unveil my eyes. I hear other nurses and the voice of Reed. Greta squeezes my hand quickly, then lets go, as Kenneth speaks to the assembled group.

  “My Allison sits, she eats and writes and soon she will dance. Today, she sees. I wanted you all here to witness my first complete woman. Some of you know my brother, Reed, the neuro-surgeon. He’s in town especially for the occasion.” Then he turns to me. “Allison, my brother, Reed. Reed, Allison.”

  “I’m happy to finally meet you.” His hand touches mine.

  I nod. Kenneth removes the bandages without drama. I look about. There are jellyfish in vaseline with pale haloes around them. I blink until I think I see the doorway beyond the shapes.

  “What do you see?” Kenneth plucks adhesive residue from my forehead. I know he expects me to reach for my pad and scrawl my blind scrawl.

  I speak. “Shapes. Blurred shapes.” My voice is uncannily like my own. It’s not Carol’s any longer.

  A giddy laugh escapes from Kenneth. “You can talk. Ah. This is more than I’d hoped. Everyone, Allison can talk!” There is uncomfortable applause. They can see the look of shock on his face.

  Reed takes an eye examination tool and shines a light in my eyes. “Retinal response is fine. Pupils dilate. You did a great job, little brother. I applaud you once again. Allison, you are a miracle.” He lifts my hand limply, then drops it.

  “I’m tired. I’m sorry I don’t have the energy for a party.”

  Kenneth shoos everyone out, including Greta. I see her vaguely, small, dark.

  “Can you see me?” Kenneth waves his hand before my face.

  “You are the great Dr. Chernofsky, I presume?”

  “Oh, Allison.” His mouth falls on mine. Our kiss is nothing compared to mine with Greta. I wonder, as his tongue finds mine, if my attraction to Greta is a product of Carol’s cells, the matter of her being, or if I’ve never acknowledged my feelings for my own sex. It doesn’t make any difference. I can’t be Kenneth’s fantasy any longer. Mine, for him, is gone.

  “I want to take you on a cruise. The Greek Isles. That would be perfect. What do you think?”

  “Kenneth, I want to get back to my writing. One step at a time.”

  He looks mildly disappointed. “Listen to you. So impatient when you first arrived, and now you’re the picture of calm.” He pats my hand. “Whenever, Allison. We have a long life ahead.”

  I try to smile, but it comes off feigned. He frowns slightly, though I can’t really see, yet. “Am I being too pushy?”

  “It’s that, and I need to find myself. My new self. You’ve given me this new body. And a new life. I want to learn what that means.”

  Desperation creeps into his voice. “I have a feeling I’m losing you. I can’t lose you.” He turns away, then back. “I won’t.” That tone again. The one he’d used with Sonia. “I’ll kill you if …”

  I try to sound steady, but I am frightened. “Kenneth. You’re moving too fast, again.”

  He nods, mollified slightly. “I’ll let you rest.”

  “Thank you.” I squeeze his hand. He seems grateful for that. As he leaves, I close my eyes. I feel deeply sad.

  Greta shuts the door behind her and rushes to me. I still can’t see her clearly, but her lips are real on mine and her arms around me are sanctuary.

  “I love you.” I say the words that have been lying in wait all these months.

  She holds me at arm’s length, studying my face, waiting. Slowly, my eyes clear, but only for a moment. She’s familiar in a way. A face I’ve known. Older, lined. Like my own a year ago. I’ve fallen in love with someone old. When I learn to use my hands as she uses hers, and have the delicate sense of touch I’ve yet to develop, I won’t be feeling youthful skin beneath them. And I won’t have a lifetime with her. Not my lifetime.

  I pray my disappointment doesn’t show. I think myself shallow and the sadness returns. If I had known, I don’t know if I would have loved differently. If I could have. How little control we have over nature, even if, like Kenneth, we play God.

  I open my arms to her. Her face nestles in my neck. I feel her tears, and too, for the first time, my own.

  DAVID J. SCHOW

  Last Call for the Sons of Shock

  David J. Schow’s short stories have been regularly selected for more than twenty-five volumes of Year’s Best anthologies across three decades and have been awarded the World Fantasy Award and the ultra-rare Dimension Award from Twilight Zone magazine, plus he won a 2002 International Horror Guild Award for his collection of Fangoria columns, Wild Hairs.

  His novels include The Kill Riff, The Shaft, Rock Breaks Scissors Cut, Bullets of Rain, Gun Work, Hunt Among the Killers of Men (part of Hard Case Crime’s Gabriel Hunt series), Internecine, Upgunned and The Big Crush. His short stories are collected in Seeing Red, Lost Angels, Black Leather Required, Crypt Orchids, Eye, Zombie Jam and Havoc Swims Jaded.

  He is the author of the exhaustively detailed Outer Limits Companion and has written extensively for mov
ies (Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, The Crow) and television (Tales from the Crypt, Perversions of Science, The Hunger, Masters of Horror). When a legendary movie poster artist asked him to write text for his next book of images, the result was The Art of Drew Struzan.

  You can see him talking and moving around on documentaries and DVDs for everything from Creature from the Black Lagoon, Incubus and The Shawshank Redemption to Scream and Scream Again (a BBC4 special about the horror film boom of the 1980s available on YouTube), Never Sleep Again, Beast Wishes and The Psycho Legacy.

  “John Betancourt dared me to write a Frankenstein story for his anthology The Ultimate Frankenstein,” explains the author. “I told him it was a dopey idea. Twenty-four hours later I had the bare bones of ‘Last Call for the Sons of Shock,’ my smartass attempt to confuse John as to which of his three Ultimate anthologies (Frankenstein, Dracula, Werewolf) was the most suitable, thinking he’d give up and put the story in all three volumes.

  “Ultimately (pun intended), the story emerged as a thematic bookend to a previous story of mine, ‘Monster Movies.’ Craig Spector, John Skipp and I read it during a lecture gig at Vassar, among other places, with Craig reading the Dracula lines and John doing the Wolf Man. You had to be there …”

  Blank Frank notches down the Cramps, keeping an eye on the blue LED bars of the equalizer. He likes the light. “Creature from the Black Leather Lagoon” calms.

  The club is called Un/Dead. The sound system is from the guts of the old Tropicana, LA’s altar of mud wrestling, foxy boxing and the cock-tease unto physical pain. Its specs are for metal, loud, lots of it. The punch of the subwoofers is a lot like getting jabbed in the sternum by a big velvet piston.

  Blank Frank likes the power. Whenever he thinks of getting physical, he thinks of the Vise Grip.

  He perches a case of Stoli on one big shoulder and tucks another of Beam under his arm. After this he is done replenishing the bar. To survive the weekend crush, you’ve gotta arm. Blank Frank can lug a five-case stack without using a dolly. He has to duck to clear the lintel. The passage back to the phones and bathroom is tricked out to resemble a bank vault door, with tumblers and cranks. It is up past six-six. Not enough for Blank Frank, who still has to stoop.

  Two hours till doors open.

  Blank Frank enjoys his quiet time. He has not forgotten the date. He grins at the movie poster framed next to the backbar register. He scored it at a Hollywood memorabilia shop for an obscene price even though he got a professional discount. He had it mounted on foamcore to flatten the creases. He does not permit dust to accrete on the glass. The poster is duotone, with lurid lettering. His first feature film. Every so often some Un/Dead patron with cash to burn will make an exorbitant offer to buy it. Blank Frank always says no with a smile … and usually spots a drink on the house for those who ask.

  He nudges the volume back up for Bauhaus, doing “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” extended mix.

  The staff sticks to coffee and iced tea. Blank Frank prefers a non-alcoholic concoction of his own devising, which he has christened a Blind Hermit. He rustles up one, now, in a chromium blender, one hand idly on his plasma globe. Michelle gave it to him about four years back, when they first became affordably popular. Touch the exterior and the purple veins of electricity follow your fingertips. Knobs permit you to fiddle with density and amplitude, letting you master the power, feel like Tesla showing off.

  Blank Frank likes the writhing electricity.

  By now he carries many tattoos. But the one on the back of his left hand—the hand toying with the globe—is his favorite: a stylized planet Earth, with a tiny propellored aircraft circling it. It is old enough that the cobalt-colored dermal ink has begun to blur.

  Blank Frank has been utterly bald for three decades. A tiny wisp of hair issues from his occipital. He keeps it in a neat braid, clipped to six inches. It is dead white. Sometimes, when he drinks, the braid darkens briefly. He doesn’t know why.

  Michelle used to be a stripper, before management got busted, the club got sold and Un/Dead was born of the ashes. She likes being a waitress and she likes Blank Frank. She calls him “big guy.” Half the regulars think Blank Frank and Michelle have something steamy going. They don’t. But the fantasy detours them around a lot of potential problems, especially on weekend nights. Blank Frank has learned that people often need fantasies to seem superficially true, whether they really are or not.

  Blank Frank dusts. If only the bikers could see him now, being dainty and attentive. Puttering.

  Blank Frank rarely has to play bouncer whenever some booze-fueled trouble sets to brewing inside Un/Dead. Mostly, he just strolls up behind the perp and waits for him or her to turn around and apologize. Blank Frank’s muscle duties generally consist of just looming.

  If not, he thinks with a smile, there’s always the Vise Grip.

  The video monitor shows a Red Top taxicab parking outside the employee entrance. Blank Frank is pleased. This arrival coincides exactly with his finish-up on the bartop, which now gleams like onyx. He taps up the slide pot controlling the mike volume on the door’s security system. There will come three knocks.

  Blank Frank likes all this gadgetry. Cameras and shotgun mikes, amps and strobes and strong, clean alternating current to web it all in concert with maestro surety. Blank Frank loves the switches and toggles and running lights. But most of all, he loves the power.

  Tap-tap-tap. Precisely. Always three knocks.

  “Good,” he says to himself, drawing out the vowel. As he hastens to the door, the song ends and the club fills with the empowered hiss of electrified dead air.

  Out by limo. In by cab. One of those eternally bedamned scheduling glitches.

  The Count overtips the cabbie because his habit is to deal only in round sums. He never takes … change. The Count has never paid taxes. He has cleared forty-three million large in the past year, most of it safely banked in bullion, out-of-country, after overhead and laundering.

  The Count raps smartly with his umbrella on the service door of Un/Dead. Blank Frank never makes him knock twice.

  It is a pleasure to see Blank Frank’s face overloading the tiny security window; his huge form filling the threshold. The Count enjoys Blank Frank despite his limitations when it comes to social intercourse. It is relaxing to appreciate Blank Frank’s conditionless loyalty, the innate tidal pull of honor and raw justice that seems programmed into the big fellow. Soothing, it is, to sit and drink and chat lightweight chat with him, in the autopilot way normals told their normal acquaintances where they’d gone and what they’d done since their last visit. Venomless niceties.

  None of the buildings in Los Angeles has been standing as long as the Count and Blank Frank have been alive.

  Alive. Now there’s a word that begs a few new comprehensive, enumerated definitions in the dictionary. Scholars could quibble, but the Count and Blank Frank and Larry were definitely alive. As in “living”—especially Larry. Robots, zombies and the walking dead in general could never get misty about such traditions as this threesome’s annual conclaves at Un/Dead.

  The Count’s face is mappy, the wrinkles in his flesh ricepaper fine. Not creases of age, but tributaries of usage, like the creeks and streams of palmistry. His pallor, as always, tends toward blue. He wears dark shades with faceted, lozenge-shaped lenses of apache tear; mineral crystal stained bloody-black. Behind them, his eyes, bright blue like a husky’s. He forever maintains his hair wet and backswept, what Larry has called his “renegade opera conductor coif.” Dramatic threads of pure cobalt-black streak backward from the snowwhite crown and temples. His lips are as thin and bloodless as two slices of smoked liver. His diet does not render him robustly sanguine; it merely sustains him, these days. It bores him.

  Before Blank Frank can get the door open, the Count fires up a hand-rolled cigarette of coca paste and drags the milky smoke deep. It mingles with the dope already loitering in his metabolism and perks him up.

  The cab hisses aw
ay into the wet night. Rain on the way.

  Blank Frank is holding the door for him, grandly, playing butler.

  The Count’s brow is overcast. “Have you forgotten so soon, my friend?” Only a ghost of his old, marble-mouthed, middle-Euro accent lingers. It is a trait that the Count has fought for long years to master, and he is justly proud that he is intelligible. Occasionally, someone asks if he is from Canada.

  Blank Frank pulls the exaggerated face of a child committing a big boo-boo. “Oops, sorry.” He clears his throat. “Will you come in?”

  Equally theatrically, the Count nods and walks several thousand worth of Armani double-breasted into the cool, dim retreat of the bar. It is nicer when you’re invited, anyway.

  “Larry?” says the Count.

  “Not yet,” says Blank Frank. “You know Larry—tardy is his twin. There’s real time and Larry time. Celebrities expect you to expect them to be late.” He points toward the backbar clock, as if that explains everything.

  The Count can see perfectly in the dark, even with his murky glasses. As he strips them, Blank Frank notices the silver crucifix dangling from his left earlobe upside-down.

  “You into metal?”

  “I like the ornamentation,” says the Count. “I was never too big on jewelry; greedy people try to dig you up and steal it if they know you’re wearing it; just ask Larry. The sort of people who would come to thieve from the dead in the middle of the night are not the class one would choose for friendly diversion.”

  Blank Frank conducts the Count to three highback Victorian chairs he has dragged in from the lounge and positioned around a cocktail table. The grouping is directly beneath a pinlight spot, intentionally theatrical.

  “Impressive.” The Count’s gaze flickers toward the bar. Blank Frank is way ahead of him.

  The Count sits, continuing: “I once knew a woman who was beleaguered by a devastating allergy to cats. And this was a person who felt some deep emotional communion with that species. Then one day, poof! She no longer sneezed; her eyes no longer watered. She could stop taking medications that made her drowsy. She had forced herself to be around cats so much that her body chemistry adapted. The allergy receded.” He fingers the silver cross hanging from his ear, a double threat, once upon a time. “I wear this as a reminder of how the body can triumph. Better living through chemistry.”