Fraulein Frankenstein Read online

  A hatred far more revolting than disfigurement contorted his features. “I thought as much.”

  He moved to leave, crouching to duck beneath the doorframe. I rushed to stop him, to beg for another chance to show I had not rejected him like the rest of the world had. As I caught hold of his elbow, though, I heard Walton outside, yelling, “Search the ship!”

  “You’ve got to get away from here,” I whispered.

  He shook off my grasp. “It doesn’t matter.”

  It mattered to me, though. As long as my brother lived, I might someday reconcile with him.

  The moment we emerged from the cabin, four angry sailors surrounded us, some of them only half-dressed. They brandished boathooks and skinning knives—whatever weapons they could lay hands on.

  I stepped in front of my brother, attempting to shield him, like an ant trying to defend an elephant. “Leave him be!”

  An unshaven man to our right swore in Russian and stabbed a harpoon at the monster beside me. With the barbed point an inch from piercing his heart, my brother grabbed hold of the harpoon’s shaft. He wrenched it from the sailor’s grasp and clubbed the attacker in the stomach, batting the man into his comrades, who fell together like tumbling ninepins.

  The commotion brought other crewmen running. With his way clear for only a moment, my brother thundered aft-ward, where he’d anchored his ice raft. He spared me only one backward glance—part sorrow, part scorn—before vaulting over the railing.

  I dashed forward to see whether he’d landed safely, but Captain Walton got to the rail before I did. He lifted a musket to his shoulder and sighted along the barrel at a downward angle.

  I didn’t need to see his target. Lunging forward, I shoved the gun’s stock just as the flintlock’s hammer fell.

  The musket ball flew wide of its mark, and Walton cursed. In a lather, he took the horn of black powder from his side and began the laborious process of loading and tamping the muzzle for another shot. He soon gave up, for when he glanced out over the water, he saw that my brother had already freed the ice raft from the sea anchor and had pushed adrift from the ship with his makeshift oar.

  “Are you mad?” the captain shouted at me. “Don’t you know what that beast is? Don’t you know what it’s done?”

  “Yes. I know.” I watched the black blot on the ice raft paddle away until it dwindled to a tiny speck on the pristine whiteness of the Arctic wastes.

  I never saw my brother again.

  CHAPTER 16

  THE PROFESSOR’S SON

  I waited more than a month after the Michael made port before I returned to the abandoned university in Ingolstadt. A month I spent poring over Victor Frankenstein’s research papers as a profane vision took shape in my mind.

  To realize my awful fantasy, however, I would need skilled assistance. And that is when I recalled the forlorn figure of Ernst Waldman the younger, crumpled in grief where his father had been thrown to his death.

  Autumn had brought early darkness and drenching rains to Ingolstadt by the time I arrived at the university’s former Anatomy Building. Drops spattered the fabric of my sodden umbrella and sluiced off around me in thick rivulets. I gazed up at the lightning fracturing the sky overhead, its thunder reverberating in my bones, and I inhaled the charged air as if I could taste its divine power.

  Soon, I thought.

  I had no reason to expect that anyone would be at the Anatomy Building on that night, at that hour. Yet I was not surprised to see that the shattered window of the hexagonal cupola had been restored and that a solitary lamp glowed within.

  I knew why Ernst Waldman still haunted the place. Like me, he had lost a father and now sought in vain for answers to unasked questions. I intended to offer him those answers in trade for his help, and so I carried Victor Frankenstein’s notebook beneath my cloak.

  Folding my rather useless umbrella, I approached the structure’s main entrance and knocked on the door, though I thought there was little chance Waldman would hear me over the thunderclaps. I rapped, waited, then pounded and waited again.

  Soaked to the marrow and shivering, I tested the door’s latch. Locked, of course. I glanced at the deserted avenue behind me. All the townspeople had sought shelter for the night. Surely no one would see if I broke the door open.

  I drew my hand back, ready to ram it against the lock with all my unnatural strength. But just then the door pulled away from my palm, and I had to catch myself to keep from stumbling over the threshold.

  “What do you want?” Ernst Waldman glared at me through the narrow opening. The lamp he held gave his handsome face a sallow complexion, and he looked as if he hadn’t slept or eaten for days. Perhaps it was only the coarse shading of stubble on his cheeks that made them appear sunken and malnourished.

  “I must speak with you,” I said.

  “I can’t be bothered. Good-bye.”

  He thrust forward, intending to slam the door. I braced it open with one arm, unnerving him.

  “Who are you?” he demanded.

  “Someone who shares your sense of loss. You may have heard about the recent death of my cousin Victor.”

  His green eyes, quivering from fatigue and distraction, suddenly fixed on me with dagger-keen intensity. “I have nothing to say to a Frankenstein. And the only regret I have to offer you is that I was not there to watch him die.”

  “My cousin did not kill your father,” I vowed. “But I know who did. And I can prove it if you’ll let me.”

  I took Victor Frankenstein’s notebook from beneath my cloak.

  Waldman frowned with mistrust but opened the door and brusquely motioned for me to enter. “If you know who committed this slaughter, why haven’t you gone to the police?” he asked as he led me up a wooden staircase. “Unless you’re protecting the villain . . .”

  “I haven’t gone to the police because they would never believe me, for the murderer is no ordinary cutthroat. Only a man of science will comprehend the truth. Victor tried to tell your father. Now I hope you will listen to me.”

  Waldman paused at an upstairs door, held the oil lamp close to my face as if to read in my expression whether I was lying. I gazed steadily at him.

  He opened the door and we passed through into a large chamber with six angled windows overlooking the courtyard. It appeared to be a dissection room for educating medical students. The tables topped with white marble, each carved with gutters to channel drained blood, chilled me as if I could feel the cold, polished stone pressing against my bare back.

  How many corpses, I wondered, have been carved up to create me?

  Waldman set the lamp on a desk cluttered with papers that were crammed with arcane diagrams and notations. This was obviously the place where he kept his lonely vigil—the very spot where my brother must have slain his father.

  “You’ve been studying his work,” I observed.

  “Only to find out why anyone would brutalize a harmless old man. It’s all a load of nonsense anyway.”

  I idly skimmed the sheets of foolscap. “Victor didn’t think it was nonsense. Your father was his mentor.”

  “Frankenstein was mad. He probably flew into a murderous rage when my father told him his insane designs were impossible.”

  “They weren’t impossible.” I threw Frankenstein’s notebook on the desk, flattened the pages open at the drawing of the creature that had become my brother.

  Fascination flickered in Waldman’s expression as he compared how Frankenstein had refined and extrapolated his father’s concepts. Then he shook his head as if to dislodge such ideas from his brain. “Revivifying dead tissue? Doomed to failure!”

  “Victor succeeded. Twice.”

  I loosened my scarf, let Waldman see the unbroken chain of scar tissue that encircled my throat. He trembled, eyes wide, and I couldn’t tell whether he was thrilled or repulsed. As a physician, he knew no human could have survived such a cut.

  I leaned forward, flaunting the gash. “Look at it! I am a living vind
ication of all your father’s theories. Don’t you want to see his reputation redeemed?”

  Waldman recoiled. “It . . . it’s madness. More mad if true than if not.”

  “You think your father mad?” I gestured to the drowsing city outside the window. “Is that how you want the world to remember him? Or do you want history to recognize him for what he really was—the man who discovered the key to life itself?”

  Waldman’s expression wavered, twisted by some internal debate. “You said you could identify my father’s killer. Who was it?”

  I put a hand on the drawing in Frankenstein’s book. “This creature that Victor created—his first—became crazed by its own hideousness. For the misery of its existence, it sought revenge on everyone Frankenstein held dear.”

  Waldman nodded with grim satisfaction. “As I thought. Only evil can come of this blasphemy.”

  “I have not become a raging beast.” Guilty thoughts of Stefan billowed in my mind, but I stuffed them back into the dank hole whence they came. “The process of creation itself does not make the creature mad. It is how it’s treated after it’s born.”

  Waldman spat breath dismissively. “What is the point of making such a monster? Aren’t the masses already rutting and reproducing enough to breed more wretches than the world can abide?”

  “But we—you and I—could make a being who would never be poisoned by the wickedness of this world, who would remain untainted by sorrow, bitterness, or fear,” I countered. “A being fashioned from such beauty, raised with such purity and nobility, fostered with such love, that it would embody all the good of humanity and none of the bad. A being that could shine as a paragon of the godly perfection to which every mortal aspires. Wasn’t that your father’s dream?”

  Waldman rubbed his haggard face in an agony of indecision. His gaze fell upon the illustration in Frankenstein’s journal. Unlike my brother, the creature in the sketch exemplified a celestial grace unknown to mortal flesh. A seraph incarnate.

  His choice made, the physician hung his head. “God forgive me,” he whispered.

  CHAPTER 17

  ASSEMBLING AN ANGEL

  Even after I convinced him to help me build my demigod, Waldman and I argued over how best to procure the raw materials for our creation.

  To my surprise, he had no moral objection to graverobbing. “The practice of medicine would not exist without ghouls,” he said dryly, referring to the acquisition of the cadavers from which doctors learned their art. For the sake of expediency, though, he thought we should simply raid the churchyard there in Ingolstadt, as he and his fellow medical students had done for decades.

  I objected. Like Darmstadt, Ingolstadt was a small, sleepy, peaceful town. The infrequent deaths there tended to be of the old and decrepit, the fat and the frail. I needed the flesh of the young and virile, limbs and organs in superlative physical condition.

  Waldman threw up his hands in exasperation. “So you want to wait until a dozen young people in perfect health suddenly drop dead? That could take years!”

  “Not if we get them from here.” I unfolded a map on which I’d circled the town of Dutweiler in the Saar region of western Prussia. The surrounding land was one of the principal coal-mining areas of the country. Strenuous and dangerous work, coal mining built men into muscular drudge animals, then slaughtered them at their prime in vast numbers. Tunnel collapses, poison gas leaks, black lung disease, spontaneous explosions—barely half the miners survived to the age of forty, yet dire poverty ensured there were always enough desperate souls to take the places of the deceased.

  Waldman shook his head again. “Why go to so much trouble just for a pretty face? Isn’t it enough that the beast look human?”

  “No,” I said. “People only embrace beauty. He must be beautiful.”

  The young physician gave me a penetrating look. “So the creature must be a male, eh?”

  For the first time, I couldn’t meet his gaze. “We already have a female specimen,” I reminded him, laying a hand on my bosom. “Another female would be . . . redundant.”

  Waldman grinned with maddening cheekiness. “I see. When you put it like that, your plan makes perfect sense.”

  I think I blushed.

  #

  We both had numerous preparations to make for our charnel theft, so we parted company and agreed to rendezvous in Dutweiler in five weeks. I used the time to set aside as much fresh blood as I could donate. Every three or four days, I drew another pint from my veins with a catheter, collecting the plasma in empty wine bottles I stoppered with a cork. On the days in between, I gorged myself on calf’s liver and red meat, washing them down with pitchers of water and heavy French clarets to replenish my body. My creation would be bonded to me from birth, for his blood would be my own.

  To preserve the vital fluid, I loaded the bottles of blood into a butcher’s wagon filled with ice—huge, sweating chunks of glacier I paid to have imported all the way from the Alps. Adopting the guise of a butcher’s wife, I kept slabs of beef and pork in the wagon’s rear compartment to allay the suspicions of anyone who might look inside. But I intended to load the wagon with meat of a far more precious sort.

  With morbid eagerness, I sought out reports of untimely deaths in Dutweiler and felt a shameful aggravation when weeks passed with no fatalities. Fretting my plan was a failure, I set out for the Saarland in my butcher’s wagon anyway. I was half a day’s travel away from Dutweiler when I received news of a terrible cave-in at one of the local mines, with many lives feared lost. Sickened by the excitement with which I welcomed such a tragedy, I drove the wagon’s horses hard to get to the town before the bodies had been recovered from the rubble.

  Once I secured lodging at the best inn the village had to offer, I intended to send a letter to Waldman, asking him to come to Dutweiler immediately. I soon found the correspondence unnecessary, however.

  “Herr Dr. Waldman has been expecting you,” the concierge informed me upon my arrival. When she told me he was not in his room that afternoon, I dashed off a brief note that I sealed in an envelope and left for him at reception. “Meet me at the Burning Mountain tomorrow at dusk, and wear black,” it read. “Until then, I think it’s best if we are not seen together.”

  I ordered some cold meats and cheeses to sup on in my room but could hardly eat. Although I went to bed early, I lay wide-eyed in the dark for hours, thinking, scheming, imagining. At some point I must have dozed off, for I had a dream. At first, I feared it would be the nightmare I’d had all too many times in the past: I was nude, and a great looming creature reached toward me out of the darkness with consuming lust.

  As it emerged into the light, however, I saw that it was not the same as my brother at all. The figure was that of a man, but a man unlike any I’d seen before. He, too, was naked, and had fine seams of scar tissue where his head and limbs had been sewn to his body. Other than these superficial flaws, the figure possessed sculpted sinew of such perfect heft and proportion as to be almost divine. Stefan would have seemed a boy in knee breeches beside such a Samson.

  When his massive arms enfolded me, I shuddered not with fright but with desire. I lapped hungrily at the salty sheen of the polished breastplate that was his bare chest. His face drew close to mine, shedding its husk of shadow. His face . . . his glorious face . . .

  I awoke with a scream of climactic ecstasy that degraded into a growl of frustration when I found myself alone in my bed at the inn. I lay there all morning in a lassitude of dejection, vainly trying to recapture the fantasy the dull daylight denied me.

  By that afternoon, when I went to meet Waldman, my inflamed passion had calmed to cold resolve. I would make that unfulfilled dream a reality.

  #

  The bank of sulfurous rock known as Brennender Berg, or the Burning Mountain, resides at the bottom of a deep gorge outside Dutweiler, not far from the city’s cemetery. As I brought the butcher’s wagon to a halt beside a nearby oak and descended to put feedbags on the horses, I could
feel the heat emanating from the gravelly earth. It warmed my feet even through the thick leather of my boots. Eddies of rising heat made the barren branches of the surrounding trees appear to ripple and waver.

  I approached a large block of stone wedged into the hillside, its face the colors of fire: yellow and orange and infernal red. A cleft in the wall exhaled a hot gust of brimstone that smelled like the forge in Stefan’s blacksmith shop. Feathers of black smoke occasionally wafted from the crack, and deep within the fissure an orange glow pulsed like a demonic heart.

  A vein of coal beneath this ground had caught fire more than a century before and had resisted all attempts to extinguish it. For all anyone knew, it might smolder forever. Goethe had once visited the place, and it was easy to imagine that the spot had inspired his visions of Hell in Faust.

  I was grateful for the warmth, however, for the dolor of late autumn frosted the air. Having spent the entire summer in the Arctic, I could hardly remember the last time I hadn’t been cold. The repeated bloodlettings had also left me vulnerable to chill. I leaned back against the flat plane of rock and shut my eyes, basking like a lizard in the sun.

  “I take it you are here for the funeral, fräulein.” The male voice jarred me alert. “My condolences on your loss.”

  I glanced at my widow’s gown, the one I’d purchased to disguise myself after killing Stefan. I’d worn it to blend in as a mourner and decided I’d better play the part. “Thank you, Herr . . .”

  “Doktor,” the man corrected as I turned to him. “Doktor Waldman.”

  Little wonder I hadn’t recognized him at first! He hardly resembled the gaunt and haggard physician I’d seen in Ingolstadt. His strong jaw was clean-shaven, the muttonchops neatly trimmed, his thick, dark hair combed and coiffed. His face had filled in and regained its color, as if he’d resumed eating properly, and his eyes glittered with the animation of an incisive-yet-playful intellect. He was more handsome than I remembered.