The Ultimate Frankenstein

by Byron Preiss (ed)

  I know not how many bleak days I wandered through the eternal twilight, tormented by the certainty that I could not end my torment. I gave no thought to food, nor to the hell-cold that lay like a gun barrel along my spine and made flatirons of my feet; until the very deadness of my extremities revealed to me in a flash—oh, ecstatic bolt!—that I need take no action whatsoever, that by doing nothing, nothing at all, I would invite the elements and my own poor clay to render me extinct.

  I walked.

  Walked as the cold clawed at my flesh, walked as hunger shredded my stomach like blind worms. I fancied I headed north, away from the cities of men and the treacherous warmth and sustenance that only pretended to nurture as they preserved this wretch for fresh cruelties, greater injustices, world without end; but in truth I had no instruments to point the way, and at least once in my delirium I was convinced that each step drew me nearer to that nightmare country, my own instincts having forsaken me as surely as had my creator. My ears and nose lost sensation, my lips cracked and bled, the blood crystallizing the instant it touched the air—contributing, no doubt, to my fearsome configuration. And yet I walked still.

  Whether I plunged in actuality through a sheet of ice imperfectly formed into the numbing black waters, or whether it was a wishful hallucination, I shall never know. I do not remember the precise moment when tortured beingness became kind oblivion. My last clear memory was the sight, scores of leagues away on a great floe, of a solitary white bear standing on its hind legs to defend itself from a ring of huge shaggy wolves, and of a deep emotion, so alien to my tragic uniqueness, of pride of kinship when the besieged brute lashed out with one enormous paw and slapped a pouncing wolf to the ground. Blood sprayed, the would-be attacker's agonized yelp echoed off the ice peaks, a pretty fugue. Then darkness, utter and profound. (I have since come to discount the vision of the siege, for the polar bear's range is not shared by wolves; but the pleasure-memory is no less great for that.)

  My next emotion was rage.

  That I should live to experience the emotion at all, that was its cause.

  Alive still! How many more brief slumbers must I endure before the endless sleep?

  You must understand that I had no way of determining at the time that I had slumbered for two hundred years.

  ▼▼▼

  I heard before I saw.

  The steady whine of a great engine, like Frankenstein's dynamoes at my first awakening.

  My confusion was complete. Was this, then, Hell for a synthetic man? Was it my fate, alone among all others, to relive again and again my awful span, with the additional refinement of foreknowledge? For is not the ability to know what is to come any man's—and certainly any monster's— definition of Hades? The rage came then, with the scarlet blinding purity of the one I had known when my depraved God slashed to pieces the mate he had created for me before my very eyes. Had I a legion of Lucifer's faithful before me at that moment I would have slaughtered them all, and laughed at the demonic blood staining me from neck to heels. But I could not move.

  Something held me pinioned in the supine position. I sensed without investigating that it was stronger than I. Not organic then, for no mere creature was a match for this thing pieced together from gigantic cadavers and imbued with alchemy. A mechanical device, encasing my body and leaving only my head free to turn so I could observe—

  Nothing.

  Hollow sky beyond a small thick window level with my eyes, above and below. What I assumed at first to be Arctic floes were in fact clouds viewed from above. I was no longer chained to the earth I despised.

  Heaven, then! And all the blather I had read in both Testaments and dusty theological tracts about the immortality only of God and the Soul of Man was but ignorant fustian. Whatever Life Force Frankenstein had harnessed was worthy of the Eternal. What a supreme joke! But what was its point? Would I not be as much an outsider among angels as I had been among men? If thus, by what right was this called Paradise?

  I had little time to ponder, for a stirring of the air told me that I was no longer in solitude. The angle of my repose did not allow me to observe my new company, but I heard two distinct voices in conversation. As to their subject I remained unaware, for although they spoke English it was in a strange, flat accent that I knew instinctively was not Continental, and many of their words were foreign: okay, software, head honcho, megabucks—it may as well have been the language of Cathay for all I comprehended. A match was struck, I smelled tobacco burning, and the exchange that followed was as much as I understood from that first encounter with my captors:

  "Jesus, Hal! You know what the old man said about smoking in here."

  "Relax, the old man's snoozing. I'll put it out the minute Godzilla there complains."

  Several minutes of indecipherables ensued, then a door opened and shut and I was again alone. Sometime later someone entered who I sensed had not been in the earlier party, walked directly up to where I lay, and placed his fingers on my neck, the first time since my brief and poignant acquaintance with the saintly Dr. Lacey, so very long ago—just how long I did not then know—that a human being had touched me willingly. Through my veiling lashes I observed the surprise on his spare old clean-shaven features.

  "A pulse!" he whispered, in an intonation which I recognized at once as German. "Du lieber Gott! It lives!"

  "I live," I then affirmed, in a voice that creaked as if dust were flaking off the cords. "Who so exclaims?"

  Whereupon his ancient jaw dropped, revealing to me that the craft of making dentures had advanced far since my time; he clutched his breast beneath the white smock he wore and fell out of my line of vision. That, I was to learn, would be my sole meeting before death claimed him at age seventy-six of Dwight Laemmle, Professor of Anthropology and the senior academician with the famed 1988 Arctic expedition sponsored by the University of Michigan College of Arts and Sciences.

  ▼▼▼

  I had placed myself in jeopardy through foolhardiness. Fortune had spared me.

  When at length the professor's corpse was discovered, I resolved not to give myself away twice, at least until such time as 1 was free of restraint; for although I craved immolation as much as ever, my hatred of man, surpassing my loathing of life itself, would not allow me to surrender my fate to my age-old tormentors. Happily, excitement and consternation over the eminent researcher's death (apoplexy was the cause) diverted attention from the inert thing sharing his quarter, so that I was able to feign dissolution for the remainder of the flight.

  For flight it was. By now I had divined that this was no celestial chariot, but an earthly craft, and that somehow during my time in the North, that accursed Science that was Frankenstein's only altar had mastered the art that Nature had intended for birds as thoroughly as he himself had usurped the Power of Life. I knew then the first feeble stirrings of the Great Truth whose full disclosure was yet to come, along with its horror.

  Much time would pass before I would learn of the discovery Professor Laemmle had made in a glacier: of a man, physically gargantuan and Neanderthal in appearance but wearing clothing associated with early polar explorers in the eighteenth century, preserved exactly as he was in life; of his removal under a blanket of secrecy to the team's "airbase," where the outer jacket of ice was thawed slowly away and its prisoner transferred to a portable climate-controlled chamber of the professor's own devising, intended for the preservation of specimens as large as a saber-toothed cat, whose acquisition in pristine state was his great dream.

  I know now that following the removal on terra firma of the professor's remains, the "specimen"—myself—still in its shining cylinder, was unloaded with considerably less ceremony into the rear of a four-wheeled contrivance called a van and whisked northward from a thing termed an airport in a place called Detroit in a region known as Michigan in the United States of America, that former British colony of which I had heard much in times past, though its celebrated status as an egalitarian haven was but a mockery to me, fo
r it was populated by men. Our destination was the city of Flint and research facilities maintained there by the university. At the time, of course, it was all a dazzling jumble of lights and noise and that distressingly coded English, and I reverted to my first conclusion that I had awakened in Hell. It was as if Frankenstein had only counterfeited death and lived to breed a community of students of the forbidden arts. By then I was beginning to realize that I had done more than nod off after the episode of the bear.

  A detour was taken, whether because of an accident or the ubiquitous construction by which this bizarre culture was constantly uprooting itself and rebuilding, I cannot say even now. Abruptly my view through the windows shifted from directional markers and broad colored placards bearing cryptic legends—MORE TASTE/LESS FILLING, SID'S REPTILE CITY, FOOD FOLKS AND FUN—to evergreens, and the surface over which we traveled became rough. The cigar-shaped chamber in which I was confined, unsecured, and rocked from side to side. I aided it. Left, right, left, right, gaining momentum with each roll, until one violent lurch brought it up against the side of the vehicle with a bang that shook my entrails. When I recovered I could move my left arm.

  Although I had gained but an inch, it was evident something had been jarred loose, some clamp or latch. With my new leverage I flexed and strained, and it seemed to me that something was yielding. For the next half hour, possibly longer, I struggled, resting only when my heartbeat and respiration grew so loud I really feared they would be overheard. A last, desperate, frustrated heave, and the cylinder popped open in two halves like an egg. Needles pricked my extremities as circulation returned. Then like the ambulatory corpse I was I stepped from my coffin.

  At that moment the van braked. Either we had reached our terminus or my movements had been felt in the front seat. Footsteps crunched in gravel, someone passed between a window and the light, heading for the doors in back. I waited until the latch clicked, then hurled myself at both doors with all my strength.

  They flew apart with no resistance, one of them striking my visitor and laying him horizontal. I nearly landed on him, caught my balance on the roadbed, and was looking around for bearings when a second man appeared from the other side of the van.

  "Clive, what's—"

  A pudgy, balding young man wearing an odd quilted coat, he broke off when he saw me standing over the limp form of his companion. I recognized his voice immediately as one of those I had overheard in the air. I raised my arm to club him, but at the sight of me he made a choking noise, wheeled, and ran up the road, pumping his arms and legs awkwardly. I made a contemptuous gesture in his direction and plunged off into the thick wood.

  It was, I found out later, state-owned land and largely undeveloped, reminding me no little of the Swiss countryside where I had been brought to life. A thin sheet of snow covered the ground, but I was accustomed to far worse cold, and in fact abandoned the heavy fleece-lined oilskin I had

  worn at the pole. I have since decided that the time was late November. I was approaching a birthday.

  For two days I wandered that sylvan country, avoiding roads and marveling at the constant hum of motor traffic that penetrated the deepest forest. The first time a jet-powered aircraft shrieked overhead I dove in terror for cover, but as this became a regular occurrence with no apparent threat to me, I recorded it in my mental roster of the complexities of this strange new land.

  Early on the second day I encountered my first human being since the incident at the van. This one was armed.

  We entered a clearing at the same time from opposite sides. He was clad entirely in luminescent orange from cap to boots, a sight to startle the ages. When he saw me he stiffened, paused, then raised a rifle to his shoulder. But I had anticipated the maneuver, and in the flick of an eyelash I crossed the acre that separated us, tore the weapon from his grip just as knee. I flung away the pieces and was prepared to do the same to his pathetic body when he fainted.

  Bewildered by what I had seen of the principles of self-preservation in this place, I left him where he lay. Many weeks later I would see his likeness on the front page of a garish periodical under the declaration:

  TERRIFIED HUNTER REPORTS: I ESCAPED BIGFOOT!

  I was ravenously hungry. Forgetting in my confusion my vow to starve, I slew and ate a deer, leaving only the hooves, hide, and antlers. It failed to satisfy me after two centuries of total abstinence.

  At length I came upon a dwelling on a wooded hill, which I at first took for a church: a three-story triangle of wood and glass, its shingled roof extending almost to the ground, it suggested nothing so much as a steeple fashioned after the letter A. Although the front door was locked, the knob twisted free with ridiculous ease and I entered, ready to throttle whatever occupants I found, for where there was civilization there was sustenance.

  No one accosted me. I was alone in a house whose stale air informed me that it had not been inhabited for some time. Empty of heart, I ignored the sitting-room furniture and strange contrivances that surrounded me and made my way to what seemed to be a pantry, furnished with a table and chairs, a waist-high bench with a basin built into it, more odd devices, and an upright chest made of enameled metal. I opened the chest. The frigid air that came out startled me. When I recovered, I examined the packages I found inside and identified them as frozen meat, although by what witchcraft its owner had managed to harness the Arctic air and bring it back for preservation in this moderate climate, I could not fathom. I pulled out all the packages and left them on the floor to thaw while I looked elsewhere for immediate gratification.

  In a cupboard I found scores of airtight metal containers with labels bearing likenesses of fruits and vegetables. The seams opened with little effort and I gorged myself until I realized that with judicious rationing, I could survive on the stores of the house indefinitely while I contemplated my next maneuver. I thereupon returned the meat to the chest lest it spoil.

  I shall not tax the reader's patience with my reaction to the miracles that revealed themselves to me in those early days. Electric light, appliances large and small, an instrument on a wall which when manipulated brought forth a rumble from below and filled the house with heat, a vessel that was clearly a chamber pot, but which emptied and cleansed itself with water at a flick of a lever—how my creator would have reveled in it! But the box in the ground-floor sitting-room was the greatest of all. The first time a small man appeared in its illuminated window and fired a tiny pistol at me through the glass, I very nearly destroyed the box in self- defense. Imagine, then, my dumbfoundment when, days after I switched it on—it had been operating continuously, for my fascination with it was inexhaustible—the name Frankenstein issued from the speaker.

  It was a cable hook-up, of course, and I had happened upon a channel that played old movies twenty-four hours a day. During the classic horror- film retrospective that ran all that week I saw Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Son of Frankenstein, The Ghost of Frankenstein, and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, some of them several times as the features were repeated. I learned from the parade of unctuous hosts who introduced the films that the tale of the scientist and his creation had been told by Mary Shelley from Robert Walton's letters and brought to the screen by Hollywood a century later, becoming a part of the popular culture, which little suspected its truth.

  The motion pictures were remarkable. Jack Pierce, Universal's make-up genius, had added to the synthetic man a pair of electrodes protruding from the neck and a curious flattening of the top of the skull; in every other particular, save clothing and scars that seemed never to heal, he had transformed actor Boris Karloff into an eerie replica of my own tragic self. Further, Karloff (and, to a lesser extent, the other performers who assayed the role in the final two films), endeavored to portray the creature sympathetically, with an understanding of his plight. This was vindication; and more than once, having fallen asleep in front of my magic window, I awakened with the grim certainty that I had dreamt it all, and expected to find myse
lf still awaiting death on the roof of the world.

  However, my education did not stop there. Through the news channels I learned of test-tube babies, cloning, genetic engineering, and other incidents of science's quest for the Secret of Life, no longer a blasphemy but a revered pursuit funded by government and carried out not in dreary farmhouses and deserted watchtowers but in fully-equipped laboratories under the glare of public scrutiny. And like those primitive organisms assuming shape and symmetry in petri dishes and on glass slides, an awareness stirred and began to grow deep in my borrowed brain that I was no longer Alone.

  Such was my state, shaken by these astounding conclusions, that I was more curious than wary when the door to my private sanctuary opened unexpectedly and I found myself face to face with my landlord.

  I knew by the key in his hand, which he had found unnecessary because of the forced lock, that he was the owner. A thickset, solidly built man in his middle years, he wore a hat with a soft brim and a dark coat with a fur collar over a gray suit of clothes, odd attire for the country. Seeing me towering there he hesitated, but the look in his eyes was more caution than fear.

  Said I finally, "Do not be alarmed. When I came here I sought merely food and shelter."

  "Uh-huh," he grunted. "And now?"

  "I know not. But I shall leave if you will stand aside."

  His eyes evaluated me. "Are you as strong as you look?"

  For no reason that I can ascertain I stooped and lifted the twelve-foot leather sofa by one leg, holding it level with my shoulder. Then I replaced it. He nodded, as if he had expected nothing less. "I think we can work something out." He opened his coat.