Fraulein Frankenstein Read online

  “Oh. I see you got my note.” I indicated his immaculate black suit and tall, brimmed hat, which lent him the appearance of a well-heeled mortician.

  He tipped his hat. “I always believe in dressing for the occasion. And in being prepared.”

  Waldman took his left hand from behind his back long enough to show that it held a shovel.

  “How many are we disinterring today?” he asked. “Six, was it?”

  “Seven.”

  “Well! How . . . fortunate for you.”

  “For us,” I said, mimicking his arch tone. “The procession will pass along there.” I pointed up the rise toward the end of the ravine where the road led to the graveyard. “We’ll wait here until after dark, when all the mourners have left, but no longer. I want the specimens as fresh as we can get them.”

  Waldman gave a mordant nod. “You show tremendous promise as a ghoul, Fräulein Frankenstein.”

  His sarcasm nettled me, and I didn’t reply.

  Before long, we saw a parade of solemn figures marching across the horizon in the direction of the cemetery. I realized then that Waldman and I were overdressed. These poor laborers and their families could not afford to buy special black mourning attire, so they had come to bury their dead in the same dingy linen clothing they wore to mine their coal or clean their houses. The men carried the rough, unvarnished, oblong boxes of the coffins on their shoulders, their faces still grimed with coal dust and sweat from digging their friends’ bodies out of the rubble of a collapsed tunnel. The women carried their fatherless children, and even at a distance I could hear the wails of widows and babies.

  Waldman eyed me severely several times as the procession went by, perhaps to see if I suffered any pangs of conscience about what we intended to do. I didn’t. Those men were dead regardless of our actions, and they would no longer miss the bits of flesh and bone we would take from them.

  The mourners filed on up the road and out of view. We waited. After about two hours they returned, headed back toward town, their formal ranks scattered into small groups of family members that clung together in grief. Still, we made no move to leave.

  The sun went down. As darkness deepened around us, the crack in Brennender Berg glowed with unquenchable fire. Perhaps sensing I was not going to break the ponderous silence, Waldman finally spoke up.

  “Did you ever consider getting a man in a more conventional fashion?” he asked in a tone of idle curiosity.

  I growled and turned my back on him, hoping he couldn’t see my face flush with embarrassment.

  He shrugged with insufferable nonchalance. “I only ask because, if you doubt your ability to attract a suitable match, you needn’t worry. I can think of at least a dozen of my former classmates from the university who’d fall to their knees with marriage proposals the moment they laid eyes on you.”

  “You wouldn’t understand.” I sighed, picturing Stefan’s head on my lap, his blood running down between my bare thighs. “I’m not fit for ordinary men. I need one of my own kind.”

  I almost laughed then. My brother must have said exactly the same thing when he demanded that Frankenstein create me.

  “Well, I admit you’ll probably find a better husband in a graveyard than you will in the taverns of Munich.” Waldman shouldered his shovel. “Shall we get on with it?”

  #

  We rode together in the butcher’s wagon to the cemetery. Watching for any laggards who might have remained behind, we discreetly ventured forth onto the grounds, Waldman with his spade, I with my hooded lantern.

  It wasn’t hard to find the graves we sought—heaps of freshly turned earth marked with humble crosses of wood, the perishable monuments of those who could not afford chiseled granite cherubs. Waldman shed his coat and rolled up his sleeves for the work ahead.

  “Can’t say I’ve really missed this part of the job,” he commented as he stabbed the shovel’s blade into the first mound.

  “So why are you here?” I asked when he’d dug himself waist-deep in the pit.

  He cast a look of mild annoyance up at me. “You said it yourself. I want to know whether or not my father was a lunatic. This will prove it, one way or the other.”

  “Is that the only reason?”

  He turned more clods of soil up onto the grass beside the hole and smirked. “Oh, I don’t know. If it works for you, maybe I’ll make myself a woman. Haven’t had much luck getting one the old-fashioned way.”

  I let out a dry laugh. “I was sewn together from corpses less than a year ago. What’s your excuse?”

  He paused to consider. “I think I’ve been spending too much time with cadavers rather than people. Present company excepted, of course.”

  He tipped his hat, then jabbed the shovel back into the floor of the grave. It made a hollow thump.

  I crouched on the edge of the pit and raised the lantern. Waldman scraped the rest of the dirt from the coffin and jammed the shovel’s blade under the lid to pry it open. The coffin nails tore free with a groan, and Waldman bent the board up to allow the lantern light to fall into the box.

  “Ugh!” The jaded surgeon recoiled against the wall of the pit, hand over his mouth, face rumpled with revulsion.

  The body in the coffin would have been beyond the cosmetic repair of even the most talented mortician. The head and the left half of the torso were simply gone, most likely crushed beneath rock and timbers in the mine’s collapse. Only a sickening red cavity remained in the cage of ribs that had once housed the man’s heart and lungs.

  Yet the man’s right side remained eerily intact, the beefy pectoral still smooth and unscathed where exposed by his ripped and bloodied shirt. And that arm—its bulging musculature tapered down to fingers of surprising delicacy. Was it only fancy that made me certain I’d seen that hand before, had felt those fingers stroke my skin and hair?

  Waldman shook his head. “I don’t think this one will be of any use . . .”

  I grabbed the cloth sheaf of surgical implements he’d brought with him and tossed it into the grave. “Get that arm,” I said. “I need it.”

  CHAPTER 18

  THE CREATION

  With seven graves to plunder that night, we were able to cull many of the parts we needed to piece together our Osiris. I immediately packed the prospective limbs and organs in a wooden tub filled with ice chunks I’d chipped off the blocks in the back of the butcher’s wagon. I covered the tub with a tarp and heaped sides of beef and ham hocks on top to hide our ghastly cache.

  Several of the wounded survivors of the mine disaster passed away within days, and a few more nocturnal visits to the graveyard gave us the rest of the body I’d envisioned. But the proper head eluded me. All the dead miners were either baby-faced boys, like Stefan, or careworn family men, old before their time.

  That face—the captivating face I’d glimpsed in my dream. I could almost see it whenever I closed my eyes. I had to find it.

  My pickiness vexed Waldman. “Isn’t it enough for your lover to look like a man?” he griped as we stood beside yet another grave I’d had him open only to reject its contents. He lifted his spade toward the wagon loaded with human flesh. The ice in the compartment was already melting into puddles. “Every hour we spend searching for a pretty face,” Waldman said, “the rest of your demigod begins to rot.”

  He was right, of course. Too much delay could spoil all the body parts we’d gathered so far. But without a suitable face, the rest would be worthless anyway. How could I make Waldman understand? He’d never known my brother.

  “It’s not enough for him to be normal,” I insisted. “He must be beautiful. He must have every advantage that Victor’s creature never had. Please . . . let us search just a little more.”

  “Very well.” Waldman threw the shovel at my feet. “But you do the digging.”

  So I did.

  The next grave yielded nothing; neither did the one after that. I was on the verge of giving up and taking whatever homely head I could lay my hands on. There
was but one new grave left to raid, and I exhumed the coffin with the lethargy of hopelessness.

  When I opened the casket, it seemed all my effort had been a waste. The dead man inside had been mashed to such a pulp that the undertakers had merely scraped what remnants of bone and bits of meat they could recover into the box without even attempting to reconstruct the whole. Nothing but an unidentifiable red mass lay at the coffin’s head.

  I was about to slap the lid shut when I happened to glance toward the other end of the casket, about where the deceased’s knees should have been. There, as if carelessly tossed in at the last moment, lay the head, miraculously intact and unscathed. A mane of thick, sandy-brown hair surrounded the most beguiling countenance I had ever seen, frozen in age at masculinity’s peak of ripeness, just when the vigor of youth acquires the character of maturity. This was the face of a man, not a boy—a man who had enough worldly experience to know about life and love but not so much that he had become embittered by them. The features firm with strength and ardor, yet gentled by a soulful, empathetic nature. Half artist, half angel, just as I had dreamed.

  The eyes were open, and revealed clouded gray irises. Nevertheless, the head appeared to gaze up at me expectantly, its lips parted in soundless invitation. I cupped it in both hands and lifted it from the swamp of entrails in the coffin.

  “Here you are at last,” I whispered, finally speaking the name I had secretly chosen for him. “My Raphael.”

  #

  With our wagon of blood and body parts brimful and the ice inside dissolving by the hour, Waldman and I sped back to Ingolstadt. We drove the horses for as long as they would go, even traveling at night whenever there was enough moonlight to illuminate the road.

  Waldman’s father had bequeathed him an extensive estate outside the town proper, and we chose to perform our necromancy there rather than at the university so we might be secluded from the local citizenry. A narrow dirt road took us through verdant pastures in which a few cows grazed and past a copse of walnut trees before we came to the manor house. Not quite grand enough to be called a schloss, it featured the plain yet elegant architecture common in Ingolstadt, with a stark white facade, smallish windows, and red shingles and trim. With its steep, peaked roof, the house was three stories high—and as long as a city block. It seemed too large a home for one man.

  “Where is the rest of your family?” I inquired as we climbed out of the wagon and walked to the front door.

  “I have none,” Waldman said with stoic bluntness. “My mother died giving birth to my sister, who was stillborn. I was only two at the time, so I don’t even remember them. After that, reviving the dead became my father’s obsession.”

  “Would you have wanted him to bring them back if he could?” I asked. “Your mother and sister, I mean.”

  Waldman rapped the brass knocker of the home’s front door. “As a physician, I’ve devoted my life to the living. I wish my father had done the same.”

  His tone bespoke the resentment of a son neglected in favor of his dead relations. If the emotion pained him, he brushed it aside, for he greeted the matron who answered the door with a winning smile. “Ah, Wilhelmina! May I present our guest, Fräulein Anna Frankenstein.”

  Distracted and out of breath, the woman gave a hasty curtsy. “It’s an honor, fräulein.”

  “Thank you, Wilhelmina—”

  “Minna, if you please, fräulein.” She must have been only about forty, but perpetual worry had creased her brow and mouth prematurely. She shifted her feet and wrung her hands as if late for an appointment. “I do apologize, sir. I was so busy readying your rooms that cook and I have only just started dinner—”

  “That’s quite all right, Minna,” Waldman soothed. “I need some time to show Fräulein Frankenstein around the house, so we’ll dine late. And tell Oskar and Gert not to unload the wagon—we’ll take care of that ourselves this evening.”

  He issued the order in such an offhand way that Minna didn’t think it unusual. Only I understood why he did not want his servants to see the cargo we’d brought.

  A gracious host, Waldman collected my satchel and valise and showed me to the bedchamber where I was to stay. We then toured the house—all but the attic—and chatted idly until dinner. Even as we ate, our conversation lolled over bland trivialities, neither of us daring to speak of the dreadful project that preoccupied our thoughts. The hours lagged until I wanted to scream with impatience.

  Finally, the household staff went to bed, leaving Waldman and me alone. He led me upstairs to the attic and opened its door with a flourish.

  “Here it is, as you requested. I only hope it’s fit for a Frankenstein.”

  I smiled at the laboratory he’d cobbled together. In addition to the requisite chemical vats and dissection slab, Waldman had obtained fresh ice. The frigid blocks lay stacked around us like bricks in the walls of some frost giant’s prison.

  “Splendid!” I declared. “Let’s get the pieces of our angel.”

  Waldman looked as if he’d swallowed something he’d rather spit out, but he said nothing. We returned many times to the butcher’s wagon, retrieving the body parts one at a time and carrying them upstairs to the attic. In case any of the servants happened to see us, we wrapped each piece in loose linen to hide the horror of our endeavor.

  “Enough for one night!” Waldman grunted as we swung the hammocked torso onto the dissection slab. “I’m so tired, I’ll sleep as soundly as this poor fellow.”

  “No. We must start now.”

  He massaged his brow in exasperation. “Are you mad? This will take days. Weeks, even.”

  “And the longer we wait, the more we risk failure. Do you want that, after all we’ve gone through?”

  Waldman shook his head and grabbed one of the cloth-wrapped legs from the floor. “Christ!”

  Together, we laid out the scraps of men we’d collected on the marble slab and set to work.

  At first there was little I could do but watch as Waldman, the trained surgeon, painstakingly hemmed up every tiny blood vessel and muscle fiber that strung together our marionette of flesh and bone. He toiled in the attic’s freezing confines in order to prevent the body’s decomposition. Waldman wore fingerless gloves to keep his hands nimble for sewing, but had to stop repeatedly to warm his numb digits on the glass flute of an oil lamp.

  For three nights he labored that way, operating only in the wee hours so that we would have complete privacy. The slow progress made me frantic. Even amid the clean coolness of the ice, I fancied I could detect the first fetid whiff of putrescence—the stink of failure. Finally, I could take it no longer.

  “Birgit taught me to stitch as well as anyone,” I said. “Skin can’t be that much harder to mend than cloth. If you show me what to do, I’m sure I can help.”

  Waldman was engrossed in wrapping muscle about the ball-and-socket joint of bone on the body’s right shoulder, but he abruptly threw down his needle and thread with a sigh. He’d slept at most an hour or two during the days, and the fatigue had aged him so much he resembled the portrait of his father that hung in the second-floor library. He evaluated me for a moment, then nodded. “Very well. You can’t make any more of a mess of it than I have.”

  He beckoned me to where he stood beside the operating table and demonstrated how he was stitching a deltoid muscle on the torso’s back to the nub end of a severed tendon on the arm. “Like this. See?”

  He offered me the needle. As he had done, I pinched together the muscle fibers to be joined and looped the needle in and out of the meat to bind it with thread. I flinched a bit at the stickiness and gooey pliability of the tissue but ultimately found it no worse than trussing up a goose.

  I could feel Waldman staring at me as I toiled, and his scrutiny made me wonder if I was doing everything wrong. But his gaze was on my face, not my hands.

  I finished repairing the tendon and anxiously presented it for his approval. “Well?”

  At last, he smiled. “You woul
d have made an excellent surgeon, Anna. Provided, of course, that the university had ever accepted women, which it didn’t.”

  He clapped me on the back like one of his fraternal classmates.

  I gaped at him. “What did you call me?”

  This time, his cheeks reddened. “Forgive me, Fräulein Frankenstein.”

  I smiled coyly. “There is nothing to forgive . . . Ernst. Now tell me what to do so you can get some rest.”

  #

  After that, the work went much faster. It was not only that I could assist Ernst and relieve him when necessary. We had suddenly turned from strangers into colleagues, with a new rapport and mutual respect. Ernst continued my education in medicine as we labored for as long as fourteen hours at a stretch, pausing only to drink the hot coffee the servants left at the door of our icebound laboratory.

  When we finally needed to rest, he had a private meal served to us in the parlor, after which he charmed me by playing whimsical tunes on his pianoforte or reading to me from the poetry of Schiller and Byron. Lulled by his mellifluous voice, I leaned back in my chair and shut my eyes, resisting the urge to nap. I only wished that I had something—some skill or pleasure of my own—to give him in exchange for all he gave me.

  Yet as we neared completion of the body and my excitement began to grow, Ernst became distracted and withdrawn again. Attaching the head made him especially agitated. He sat on a stool and brooded as I closed the seam around the creation’s neck. It took a long time, for I used the tiniest stitches I could to minimize the scarring. I was determined to spare Raphael the humiliation my brother and I had endured.

  “What if he won’t have you?” Ernst asked. The man seemed to have the most vexing ability to read my mind.

  “I beg your pardon?” I glanced up, pretending I hadn’t heard what he’d said.

  “You’ve told me how you spurned Frankenstein’s beast,” he said. “Suppose your homemade groom rejects you in the same way?”

  I didn’t have a ready riposte. I won’t say the possibility he raised hadn’t occurred to me, but I’d refused to entertain the idea.