The Ultimate Frankenstein

by Byron Preiss (ed)

  Johanna. How can I describe her grief? She raged. She brooded. She cried enough to irrigate the Sahara. She refused to let me comfort her, and she took to sleeping in Frankie Baby's room. She even neglected her law practice. "How can I deal with those kids?" she wailed. "At least they're alive." Nothing on earth, it seemed, would console her. Through all of this, there was no word from Dr. Frankie.

  Finally, after about six months during which Johanna flatly refused any kind of psychiatric help, I called the doctor. It was a desperate move, but I was afraid that Johanna was beginning to think about suicide. It was nothing she said—she barely spoke except about the most ordinary things —but she had developed a kind of morbid detachment, as if she were contemplating eternity. If anyone could shake Johanna out of it, the cranky Dr. Frankie probably could.

  "Yes," she said. "I'll come. Everything is ready."

  "What's ready?" I asked her.

  Dr. Frankie turned uncharacteristically coy. "You'll see when I get there," she said. "Expect me in two days. And don't tell Johanna."

  How could I not tell Johanna? We'd always told each other everything. At least, until Johanna had turned silent and withdrawn. But, I told myself, Dr. Frankie obviously had some kind of surprise in store. If it was a surprise that would restore Johanna to me and to herself, then it was worth keeping my mouth shut. Two days wasn't long to keep a secret.

  I started waiting for the doorbell to ring as soon as I got up on the second day. Johanna usually slept late, curled up in Frankie Baby's youth bed. I looked in on her, said good morning, asked her if she wanted a cup of coffee. As usual, there was no answer. As usual, I touched her arm, made sure she was breathing. Still sleeping, she flinched away from my touch. Sure, it hurt. But what could I do about it? Except that on that day, I could hope that Dr. Frankie would work some miracle.

  It was a long day. I tried to work, but the words on my computer screen didn't make much sense. Johanna got up around noon, picked at the breakfast I made for her, and then watched television. It didn't seem to matter to her what she watched. She just sat there, glassy-eyed. I switched channels a few times. She kept on watching. When I turned the set off, she moaned softly until I turned it back on. It was the worst she'd been in all these long months. If I hadn't been expecting Dr. Frankie any minute, I think I probably would have bundled her up and packed her off to a psych ranch.

  All through the afternoon of soap operas, reruns, and kid shows, she sat there, my beautiful, intelligent, sarcastic wife. I couldn't bear to watch her and I couldn't bear to leave her alone for more than five minutes. Three times, I tried to call Dr. Frankie to see if maybe her plans had changed and she'd forgotten to let me know. All I got was her voice on an answering machine telling me that she was not available. I left no messages. What could I say? "I'm waiting here for you to save my wife?"

  At last, when the six o'clock news came on, Johanna got up and turned the set off. "Tired," she murmured. "So tired." I followed her into the kitchen, where she peered into the refrigerator, opened and closed all the cupboards and drawers, and then stood by the back door with her face pressed up against its window.

  "What are you looking for?" I asked her.

  She ignored me. I might as well not have been there. I tried to put my arms around her. She shook me off impatiently. Then quite deliberately, she went to the knife drawer, took out the first knife that came to hand, a small paring knife, and held it to her throat. I leaped to stop her, but before I could, she threw the knife down and collapsed onto the floor, sobbing convulsively.

  At that moment, the doorbell rang.

  I picked Johanna up and carried her back into the living room. She was so light, so fragile, and her poor, sad face was streaked with tears. I laid her on the couch and covered her with an afghan. The doorbell rang again.

  "We have company," I told Johanna. She stared at me without comprehension.

  "I'm going to open the door now. Will you be all right?"

  She closed her eyes.

  I backed across the room and into the small foyer, watching her for any sign that she might try to repeat her knife trick. I jerked the front door open without looking to see who was there. And I didn't look until I heard a familiar voice cry, "Daddy!"

  She leaped into my arms just the way she used to, wrapping her legs around my waist and snuggling her face into my neck. I stared over her golden curls into Dr. Frankie's triumphant grin.

  "I've brought you your daughter," she announced. "Your genetically perfect daughter."

  The child, whoever she was, scrambled down from my arms and ran across the room to Johanna. "Mommy! Mommy!" she yelled. "Get up, Mommy! I'm hungry."

  And there was my miracle. Johanna, her face bright, her eyes shining, stood up and, as if nothing in the world had happened, took the child's hand and said, "Well, let's get you something to eat."

  I glared at Dr. Frankie. "What is it?" I demanded. And then, without waiting for an answer, I followed my wife and the child who was an exact replica of our dead daughter into the kitchen.

  Johanna was making a peanut butter sandwich. The girl was sitting at the kitchen table, in Frankie Baby's favorite chair, drinking a glass of milk.

  "Wait a minute," I said, grabbing Johanna's hand. "Who do you think that is?"

  "My baby's come back. Isn't it wonderful?" she replied. She wrenched her hand out of mine to go on with her sandwichmaking, and I wound up with peanut butter on my thumb. Thoughtfully, I licked it off. On the plus side, Johanna had snapped out of her funk. I'd been ready to mortgage my soul to achieve that. But there were too many minuses connected with this incredible recovery, no doubt some I didn't even know about. Yet.

  Confident that, in her present state of euphoria, I could leave her alone, I went back into the living room. Dr. Frankie was ready and waiting for me.

  "I know you have questions," she said. "I wish you didn't. I wish you could just accept this the way Johanna has."

  "Who is she? She's not my daughter. Where did you find her?"

  "She's as much your daughter as the one who died. Let's just say she's an improved version of the original."

  I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Yet the proof was sitting there in the kitchen, eating a peanut butter sandwich. "Improved? How?"

  Dr. Frankie grinned. "She has my intelligence. She's my daughter, as

  well as yours. Remember those gene samples? I took some from Frankie Baby, too. Weeded out the imperfections, added more of your better characteristics and Johanna's, and crowned the mix with my own mental capacity. You're going to be very proud of your daughter."

  "All that in six months?"

  "More than six years. I've been working on this project for a long time. But I needed to get it out of the lab and into a real world situation. Yours was the ideal case."

  "We're not a case and she's not my daughter," I insisted. "My daughter died."

  "And now she's alive again." Johanna had come into the living room. "Frankie, do you know what she said to me? She said, 'Mommy, I want to be just like Auntie Fran when I grow up. With lots and lots of babies.' How many babies do you have, Frankie?"

  "Quite a few. They're all part of the project. And they're all more or less perfect."

  "And do they all look like this one?"

  "No. Not all of them. This one is the best of the Francesca lot."

  Johanna absorbed that information, mulling it over and staring at her friend. 1 kept my peace, waiting to see what she would do.

  She moved closer to Dr. Frankie, her eyes intense, her shoulders squared. I'd seen her like that before, when she described the most horrendous of her cases, and I didn't envy Dr. Frankie one little bit. Johanna could be scathing.

  "Frankie, she's perfect. But there's something a little odd about her."

  "You'll get used to it," Dr. Frankie said complacently.

  "I don't know that I will," Johanna said. "Let me tell you why. She had to go to the bathroom, and, of course, I went with her. I didn't want t
o lose sight of her for a moment. And here's the funny thing, Frankie. She hasn't got a belly button. Have you ever seen a child without a belly button?"

  "I didn't think that mattered, Johanna. It would serve no useful purpose." Dr. Frankie was beginning to look a little nervous.

  "Oh, it matters, all right. But you wouldn't understand it. It's the connection. The physical evidence that the child and the mother were once connected. Its absence made me think straight for the first time in months. It was no coincidence that my baby died a week after you left, was it, Frankie? You killed her, didn't you? You injected her with some damned slow-acting virus, something the doctors couldn't cure. You killed her so you could replace her with this creation of yours. You may be a brilliant scientist, Frankie, but you know zilch about people. Do you deny any of this?"

  "No. Why should I? You should be grateful to me for bringing her back better than before. This one will never be sick. She's genetically immune to every known disease. She's going to live a long time and contribute enormously to mankind."

  "I'm afraid she won't," said Johanna. "She wasn't immune to this."

  There was the knife again, blood-stained and quivering in Johanna's hand. I lurched toward her, trying to grab her arm. But before I could reach her, Dr. Frankie had produced a gun and fired. Johanna fell to the floor. I bent to pick up the knife. The doctor fired again, barely missing my head. I let fly with the knife, that little paring knife. It caught the doctor in the throat. She gasped and dropped the gun.

  "I was ready," she whispered. "To protect my child. You don't understand." And then she toppled over.

  Johanna was dead, shot through the heart. In the bathroom, Dr. Frankie's creation was dead. And Dr. Frankie was bleeding to death on my living room rug. I called the police.

  There was nothing they could charge me with. Dr. Frankie lived to stand trial for murder. She got off on self-defense. Mercifully, no one seemed to know what to do about the dead child with no navel except give it a decent burial. It was not mentioned at the trial. Johanna went to her grave under the stigma of mental imbalance. Someday, I'll set that right.

  I still don't know if Johanna's final accusation was correct. Chances are I'll never know. But I do know that Dr. Francesca Stein killed my wife, and that she's back in her remote Rocky Mountain lab creating more perfect little pseudo-humans.

  And me?

  Well, I still churn out my columns. But I do it now from a lonely mountain cabin overlooking Dr. Frankie's place. And my favorite fantasy is blowing the lab and everything in it sky-high. Maybe someday, it'll be more than a fantasy. On that day, I'll write my final column. Watch your local newspaper.

  PITY THE MONSTERS

  Charles de Lint

  ▼▼▼

  We are standing in the storm Of our own being.

  —Michael Ventura

  "I WAS a beauty once," the old woman said. "The neighbourhood boys were forever standing outside my parents' home, hoping for a word, a smile, a kiss, as though somehow my unearned beauty gave me an intrinsic worth that far overshadowed Emma's cleverness with her schoolwork, or Betsy's gift for music. It always seemed unfair to me. My value was based on an accident of birth; theirs was earned."

  The monster made no reply.

  "I would have given anything to be clever or to have had some artistic ability," the old woman added. "Those are assets with which a body can grow old."

  She drew her tattery shawl closer, hunching her thin shoulders against the cold. Her gaze went to her companion. The monster was looking at the blank expanse of wall above her head, eyes unfocused, scars almost invisible in the dim light.

  "Yes, well," she said. "I suppose we all have our own cross to bear. At least I have good memories to go with the bad."

  ▼▼▼

  The snow was coming down so thickly that visibility had already become all but impossible. The fat wet flakes whirled and spun in dervishing clouds, clogging the sidewalks and streets, snarling traffic, making the simple act of walking an epic adventure. One could be anywhere, any- when. The familiar was suddenly strange; the city transformed. The wind and the snow made even the most common landmarks unrecognizable.

  If she hadn't already been so bloody late, Harriet Pierson would have simply walked her mountain bike through the storm. She only lived a mile or so from the library and the trip wouldn't have taken that long by foot. But she was late, desperately late, and being sensible had never been her forte, so there she was, pedaling like a madwoman in her highest gear, the wheels skidding and sliding for purchase on the slippery street as she biked along the narrow passageway between the curb and the crawling traffic.

  The so-called waterproof boots that she'd bought on sale last week were already soaked, as were the bottoms of her jeans. Her old camel-hair coat was standing up to the cold, however, and her earmuffs kept her ears warm. The same couldn't be said for her hands and face. The wind bit straight through her thin woolen mittens, her cheeks were red with the cold, while her long brown hair, bound up in a vague bun on the top of her head, was covered with an inch of snow that was already leaking its wet chill into her scalp.

  Why did I move to this bloody country? she thought. It's too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter. . . .

  England looked very good right at that moment, but it hadn't always been so. England hadn't had Brian whom she'd met while on holiday here in Newford three years ago, Brian who'd been just as eager for her to come as she had been to emigrate, Brian who walked out on her not two months after she'd arrived and they had gotten an apartment together. She'd refused to go back. Deciding to make the best of her new homeland, she had stuck it out surprisingly well, not so much because she led such an ordered existence, as that she'd refused to run back home and have her mother tell her, ever so patronizingly, "Well, I told you so, dear."

  She had a good job, if not a great one, a lovely little flat that was all her own, a fairly busy social life—that admittedly contained more friends than it did romantic interests—and liked everything about her new home. Except for the weather.

  She turned off Yoors Street onto Kelly, navigating more by instinct than vision, and was just starting to congratulate herself on having completed her journey all in one piece, with time to spare, when a tall shape loomed suddenly up out of the whirling snow in front of her. Trying to avoid a collision, she turned the handlebars too quickly—and the wrong way.

  Her front wheel hit the curb and she sailed over the handlebars, one more white airborne object defying gravity, except that unlike the lighter snowflakes with which she momentarily shared the sky, her weight brought her immediately down with a jarring impact against a heap of refuse that someone had set out in anticipation of tomorrow's garbage pickup.

  She rose spluttering snow and staggered back towards her bike, disoriented, the suddenness of her accident not yet having sunk in. She knelt beside the bike and stared with dismay at the bent wheel rim. Then she remembered what had caused her to veer in the first place.

  Her gaze went to the street, but then traveled up, and up, to the face of the tall shape that stood by the curb. The man was a giant. At five-one, Harriet wasn't tall, and perhaps it had something to do with her low perspective, but he seemed to be at least seven feet high. And yet it wasn't his size that brought the small gasp to her lips.

  That face . . .

  It was set in a squarish head which was itself perched on thick broad shoulders. The big nose was bent, the left eye was slightly higher than the right, the ears were like huge cauliflowers, the hairline high and square. Thick white scars criss-crossed his features, giving the impression that he'd been sewn together by some untalented seamstress who was too deep in her cups to do a proper job. An icon from an old horror movie flashed in Harriet's mind and she found herself looking for the bolts in the man's neck before she even knew what she was doing.

  Of course they weren't there, but the size of the man and the way he was just standing there, staring at her, made Harriet unaccountab
ly nervous as though this really was Victor Frankenstein's creation standing over her in the storm. She stood quickly, wanting to lessen the discrepancy of their heights. The sudden movement woke a wave of dizziness.

  "I'm dreadfully sorry," she meant to say, but the words slurred, turning to mush in her mouth and what came out was, "Redfolly shurry."

  Vertigo jellied her legs and made the street underfoot so wobbly that she couldn't keep her balance. The giant took a quick step towards her, huge hands outstretched, as a black wave swept over her and she pitched forward.

  Bloody hell, she had time to think. I'm going all faint. . . .

  ▼▼▼

  Water bubbled merrily in the tin can that sat on the Coleman stove's burner. The old woman leaned forward and dropped in a tea bag, then moved the can from the heat with a mittened hand.

  Only two more bags left, she thought.

  She held her hands out to the stove and savored the warmth.

  "I married for money, not love," she told her companion. "My Henry was not a handsome man."

  The monster gaze focused and tracked down to her face.

  "But I grew to love him. Not for his money, nor for the comfort of his home and the safety it offered to a young woman whose future, for all her beauty, looked to take her no further than the tenements in which she was born and bred."

  The monster made a querulous noise, no more than a grunt, but the old woman could hear the question in it. They'd been together for so long that she could read him easily, without his needing to speak.

  "It was for his kindness," she said.

  ▼▼▼

  Harriet woke to the cold. Shivering, she sat up to find herself in an unfamiliar room, enwrapped in a nest of blankets that carried a pungent, musty odor in their folds. The room itself appeared to be part of some abandoned building. The walls were unadorned except for their chipped paint and plaster and a cheerful bit of graffiti suggesting that the reader of it do something that Harriet didn't think was anatomically possible.