The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein (Mammoth Books) (31 page)

Something scraped harshly, and light splashed over him. The light was orange; it flickered, plucking at his eyelids. He felt as though the torch, whose sputtering he could hear, were thrust close to his eyes; he could almost feel its heat snatching eagerly at him. He shrank within himself, bathed in fear. He tried to hold his eyes still amid the flickering. At last the light withdrew a little, and metal scraped the dark into place again. The watcher shuffled away, dwindling.

Blinded once more, he lay in his cell. From the echoing stone, and the scrape of the spy-hole, he knew that was where he was. How could he have been imprisoned for trying to save a girl from drowning? Or had the authorities taken the chance to arrest him for his unchristian beliefs, which the University’s theologians and his old parish priest
had condemned? He tried to outshout his thoughts: no, his situation here had nothing to do with his beliefs, nothing at all.

His mind wasn’t hushed so easily. It was as though fragments of thought that had remained from before his ordeal were settling together, clarifying themselves. Soon he would remember everything: far too much. Because he could almost remember it now, he realized that he didn’t know his name. His panic seemed to sweep him deeper into darkness, where there was no sound, and no time. It felt like the beginning of eternity.

Perhaps it was. Before he could understand that thought, and give way entirely to terror, he made himself try to move. He must at least escape his helplessness. It might be possible to overpower the watcher. Surely it might be.

He strained. His limbs felt too large, and separate from him – as though bloated and stiffened by drowning. Of course that wasn’t why they felt unfamiliar. The reason was – He struggled to reach his body with his mind, more to distract himself than in any real hope. His thoughts waited patiently for recognition.

At last, with a sigh that shuddered out of him as though he were relinquishing his life, he slumped helpless. At once his thoughts rushed forward. His body was beyond his control because he was dead.

The thought was terrible because it explained so much. It crushed him, as though the darkness had become stone. His blindness had robbed his mind of all defenses. If he tried to think, his philosophy led him straight to his fears. He was a child alone in the dark.

The image of the river was too vivid to be false. He’d been walking by the Danube when the girl had fallen in. He and another man had plunged in, to rescue her. The other man had reached her. But nobody had saved him; a hidden current had dragged him away and down, down, far too deep to have survived. The memory dragged him down now, into the relentless darkness.

As he walked, he’d been preparing the next day’s lecture. Pythagoras, Plato, Kant. Could that have anything to do with his plight? No, he told himself. Of course not. Nothing. But he dreaded finding out where he was.

That was contemptible. He would know sooner or later, he couldn’t change that; he must resign himself. If only he didn’t feel so helpless! Perhaps, if he began very gradually, he could gain control of his body; if he could move just one limb –

He made himself aware of his limbs. They felt swollen, but not painful. A chill had gathered on them, from the surrounding stone. His back felt like a slab; his mind must be confusing it with the stone on which he lay.

He concentrated on his right arm. It felt distant, cut off from him by enormous darkness. He grew aware of the fingers. He tried to feel their separateness, but they were pressed together like a single lump of flesh, in a kind of mitten. They were bound, as was his entire body. Panicking, he strained to raise his hand. But it lay inert as meat on a butcher’s slab.

Again he was a child in the dark, but more alone: even time had deserted him. He remembered lying in the darkness of his childhood, praying never to lose his beliefs, because if you died unbelieving you were doomed to eternal torment. His worst and vaguest terror had always been that the torment would be appropriate to the victim.

He fought against the current of his terror. How could he give up without trying all his limbs? His mind groped about, as though in a cluttered dark room; he was surrounded by jumbled dead flesh, his own. At last his awareness grasped his left arm.

It lay parcelled in its bindings, resting lifeless on the stone. That was how a mummy’s arm must feel. Somewhere in there were nerves and muscles, buried in the meat: dead and unresponsive. He forced his mind to reach out. He was panting. His teeth scraped together, with a creak of bone that filled his skull.

He must reach out, just a little further. He could do it. Just one finger. But his mind was diffused by the darkness; it felt as though it were floating shapelessly in the meat. His thought of ancient history had stimulated it into babbling Pythagoras, Plato, Kant, von Herder, Goethe. All of them had believed – His mind writhed, trying to dislodge the thoughts. His violent frustration clenched his fist within its bindings.

For a moment he thought he’d imagined it. But his fingers were still moving, eager to be free of their mitten. He managed to subdue his gasp of triumph before it could reach the walls. He rested, then he raised his arm. It groped upward in the dark, brushing the chill wall beside him. Soon he would unwrap himself, and then – His arm rose a few inches, then shuddered and fell, jarring all its nerves.

He was still weak, he mustn’t expect too much, must give it time. It took several tries to convince him that he couldn’t raise his arm higher, nor move any other part of his body. His arm refused to bend, to reach his bindings; it refused to recognize him. His mind was a stagnant pool in a lump of unrecognizable flesh. He could no longer doubt that he knew where he was.

They had devised their torments well: allowing him the illusion of triumph, the better to destroy all hope. Now came the torment of waiting helplessly, like a condemned man – except that the sufferings to which he was condemned would be eternal.

His childhood fears had told the truth. He should never have
thought beyond them. For questioning his childhood faith, for believing that he would be reincarnated – the belief to which he had clung at the moment of his death, in the river – he had been condemned appropriately. To be reborn in an unfamiliar body, for unending torture: this was his hell.

They might keep him waiting for an eternity: that would be only a fraction of the time he had to suffer. They wanted his mind to fill with the tortures they were preparing, so that he could suffer them more fully. It did so. His helpless flesh could not even writhe. But he was sure they would make it feel.

His head throbbed with his pulse, as though all its flesh were pumping. Blood deafened his ears, like a close sea. Again it was a while before he could be sure that there were other sounds. The shuffling had returned, together with another set of footsteps, lighter and more purposeful. They were coming for him.

He sucked in his breath. He must stay absolutely still; they were waiting for him to betray himself. His teeth clenched, his lips trembled. Beyond the door, blurred sounds muttered. Though they resembled human voices, he was sure not all the distortions could be caused by the door. They must be discussing him. He tried to calm his face.

Metal slid, scraping. The torch peered in. Light danced on his eyelids, challenging him not to twitch. His breath swelled, harsh as stone in his lungs. At last a voice muttered, and the metal cut off the light. At once his breath roared out, appallingly loud.

Surely they couldn’t have heard him, surely the sound of the spy-hole had muffled – But keys were scrabbling at the lock. His eyelids shook, his face worked uncontrollably; his treacherous mouth drooled. The door squealed open, and figures were standing silently close to him.

He must keep still. Eventually they would go away. He’d rest then, and try to free himself. But his face felt like a huge unfamiliar mask. It grimaced independent of his will. As it did so, one of the watchers hissed in triumph.

He had betrayed himself. There was no longer any reason to pretend, and his imaginings were worse than anything he might see. But when his eyes twitched open he groaned in terror. Beside the flames a stooped figure was peering down at him. One of its heads was covered with cloth.

The second figure must be a demon too, although it looked human: a thin young man with troubled eyes. His face stooped close, relentlessly staring. Then he stood up, shaking his head sadly.

That was surely not a demon’s reaction. As the young man gestured the light closer, the man on the slab saw that the torch-bearer
had only one head after all, and a hunched back. The light showed that the bindings of his limbs were bandages.

They had rescued him, after all! His fears and his paralysis were only symptoms of his sickness! He raised his arm, until it fell back feebly. The young man glanced at it, but continued to test the other limbs, shaking his head. The man on the slab tried to speak to him. But the sound that poured from his lips contained no syllables, no shape at all.

“Useless. Stupid. A failure,” the young man muttered, almost to himself. “To think that I had that mind in my hands. How could I have reduced it to this?”

The shuffling man asked him what should be done. The young man told him indifferently, dismally, not even glancing at the victim he condemned. They went out, locking the darkness behind them.

Long after their footsteps had faded the man lay on the slab, straining to move his arm an extra inch, trying to pronounce three syllables, to prove his intelligence when someone returned. Just three syllables, the name he had heard the hunched man call his master: Frank-en-stein.

In a career spanning nearly four decades, Ronald Chetwynd-Hayes has had more than sixty books published – novels, novelizations, short story collections and anthologies
.

His recent novel
The Psychic Detective
has attracted the interest of Hammer Films and Warner Bros., and his short story “The Thing” has been optioned as an animated film for television. His latest book is entitled
Hell Is What You Make It,
and recent short story appearances have included
Dark Voices: The Pan Book of Horror, Weird Tales, After Dark
and
The Mammoth Book of Werewolves,
while the magazines
Phenix
(France) and
Scarlet Street
(USA) are devoting special issues to his work
.

About the story that follows, the self-effacing author reveals: “Honestly – I can do no more than gaze upon this early work with unstinted admiration (quoting Noel Coward). It slid out from my fingers and typewriter with oiled ease. And how right it is that Charles Brownlow received his monster-making training in the butcher shop and petrol station. I have a very strong suspicion that many surgeons learn their business in the same source and possibly know little more, even less, than my later-day Frankenstein
.

“
It may interest readers to know that at the age of sixteen – having seen
Son of Frankenstein
at the local cinema – I got as far as pickling a sheep’s heart in my grandfather’s work shop and distilled pure alcohol from methylated spirit. But I never got around to actually making a monster . . .”

C
HARLIE
B
ROWNLOW
had decided to create a monster.

Nothing elaborate you understand. Nothing that required an expensive laboratory and masses of flashing lights and buzzing machinery. Neither was he all that keen to open graves at midnight, pinch madmen’s brains, murder unsuspecting peasants for their hearts, or employ any other of the tricks that had eventually led to Baron Frankenstein’s downfall.

In fact after an intensive course of study – to wit: watching all the midnight horror movies on television – he came to the conclusion that the misguided baron had been too ambitious by far. His creation was much too big. A hulking great brute that no one could control. No, he would make a nice little monster, that could be taken for a run at night and given a clip round the ear whenever it got obstreperous.

Now, unless you have ever set out to create a monster yourself, you can have no idea of the problems involved. Gathering the materials – without reverting to the Baron’s unethical line of conduct – was in itself a sleep-murdering prospect, and might never have been achieved if Charlie’s grandad had not decided to float into eternity on a sea of undiluted whisky. The old boy had been ailing for some time, his liver and kidneys having thrown in the sponge after a long lifetime of abuse, and the entire family agreed that it was a happy release for all concerned.

Everyone filed into the front room to pay their final respects before the coffin lid was screwed down and stared at the shrivelled old face with varying degrees of regret. Aunt Matilda, for example, regretted that the old man had not seen his way clear to pass over years ago, so that she could have enjoyed her share of whatever was going before galloping inflation had set in. Uncle George regretted that the mean old basket hadn’t repaid the fiver he borrowed three weeks before his death. Cousin Marion regretted not allowing the dirty old devil to pinch her bottom, which might have resulted in a substantial mention in the yet to be opened will. In fact everyone regretted some lapse or lost opportunity – except Charlie.