The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein (Mammoth Books) (39 page)

Jerris ripped the monstrous mannikin off and crushed it; crushed it to a brown pulp between his fingers before others arrived in the room.

Then he stooped down to the floor and picked up the torn head with the mangled face, the miniature, carefully-modeled face that grinned in triumph, grinned in death.

Jerris shrugged himself into a shiver as he crushed into bits the little clay face of Colin, the creator.

Daniel Fox made his first appearance as a horror writer in 1992, since when he has become a regular contributor to
Dark Voices: The Pan Book of Horror.
As Chaz Brenchley, he has published four psycho-thrillers
– The Samaritan, The Refuge, The Garden
and
Mall Time,
while his most recent novel is
Paradise,
which is described as “an inner city epic of good and evil”
.

He is the author of three fantasy books for children and has published more than four hundred short stories in various genres. He has recently completed a year as crimewriter-in-residence at St Peter’s Riverside Sculpture Project in Sunderland
.

“I’ve always read
Frankenstein
as a tragedy rather than a horror story,” observes the author, “more sad than terrible. The keystone of all tragedy, of course, is inevitability: it’s the inherent necessity of disaster that appals. Making a man is easy, compared to the challenge of making a place for such a man in a world peopled by the rest of us; and we know that, and we nod wisely and shake our heads in sorrow more than anger, and murmur that saviours should always be sought, never achieved
.

“
And as ever, the more we know, the more we seek to know. That’s inevitable. Only bring us fire and the blast-furnace must follow. Time’s coming when making a man or woman to prescription will be comparatively easy; and what can be done will be done. That’s inherent. And by definition, what follows will simply be necessary . . .”

R
EASON IS SLEEPING
, in the village and the castle both
.

Reason is sleeping: and up in the castle the doctor sharpens his bone-saw and tests the edge on his scalpels, polishes them brightly on the sleeve of his white coat. In the village below there are crutches and eye-patches, empty sleeves and absent organs; every torso has its scars. And the villagers watch the sky hopefully for signs of an incipient, a beneficent storm: and they bless the good and fruitful doctor, bless him and bless him
. . .

Reason is sleeping
: and in a world with too many children, here’s a child that all the world can welcome.

Planned even to genetic level, every building-block examined and found good, he has Nobel prizes and Olympic golds in his near ancestry, beauty and vigour and health. His immaculate conception occurs under a microscope, under the eyes of the foremost specialists; his host-mother has passed every selection test they could devise, physical and psychological both. She spends all the months of her pregnancy in an exclusive nursing-home, constantly monitored, her exercise and diet rigorously controlled.

Brought forth by Caesarean at the optimum time, he is named – after long argument – Nathaniel; but that’s disingenuous. No gift from any God, he. They made him themselves, nor do they intend to share the praise. His host-mother is sewn up and sent away, much the richer and legally bound.

His foster-parents have been similarly chosen. Nothing overlooked, nothing left to chance: here are two people well paid to be perfect, nor will they fail in that. Conceived in glass vessels, Nathaniel will be raised also under glass, the epitomic hothouse child, encyclopaedias in his cot and the total concentration of two adults through all his crucial years.

It’ll be the best and most challenging life that money can buy, for the best lad that humankind can create . . .

Reason is sleeping
: five hours a night were enough. Even here, even in this wretched company his discipline held good. He had come to bed with the others, he’d slept his regular time, and now he was awake again.

And had hours to fill before the six o’clock reveille; and while he wasn’t bored, while he’d never understood how that was possible, still it wasn’t easy to find a use for dead time in the darkness, too far from his books and computers, his TV and his radio.

All he had with him was his pocket chess, running on a program he’d written himself.
Start stupid, learn fast
: every game the computer played it got better, it learned from his victories and its own mistakes. So that’s what he was doing now, he was
tutoring his chess-set, playing it game after game and letting it learn.

But he could still do that on auto-pilot, it wasn’t smart enough yet to give him any kind of contest. As his fingers played, his mind moved on other pathways, considering the values of things. As of the softly-glowing symbols in his lap, the knight and the bishop and the rook, each ascribed a value according to what it could achieve. And the queen, of course, strong and beautiful and by far the best of them, head and shoulders above the rest. Power and responsibility, the far-sighted strategist with a fist of iron . . .

He teased White’s queen into what seemed to him a ludicrously obvious trap, and took it with a pawn.

Not good enough
, he thought sadly; and in honesty, he thought, she never would be. The fault lay with the piece, not the player. The most powerful piece on the board, yes – but still it wasn’t enough if a pawn could bring her down, if stupidity could undo her.
Not good enough
was the doom of most things, was certainly his own.

Six o’clock, and a whistle blew; and Nathaniel was instantly out of his bunk and pulling on his tracksuit, neat and efficient and fast. Feet into running-shoes, velcro fasteners and he was off. Five compulsory laps of the camp, about four miles in all: and if he was first out, he could run alone all the way so long as he remembered to hold himself back after the first mile, not to catch up with the stragglers. Alone was easier, alone was always easier.

So he ran, and he came in from running breathing easy, running down. Into the shower and a fast shampoo and he was finished, he was coming out as the others started to arrive.

Even amid their hot jostling bodies, he avoided their eyes. He was good at that, too. Programmed for it, by now.
Start stupid, learn fast
.

Not possible at breakfast, though, at communal tables with plates and dishes and jugs constantly passing, the day’s teams to be selected and projects to be announced. Best he could manage here was to be quiet, amiable, inoffensive.

Not easy sitting next to Raoul, who had been frightened on the mast of the training ship at the weekend, who had needed Nathaniel’s cool strength to help him down, who had refused to swim underneath the hull and cost their team points all along the line.

Or sitting opposite Charlotte who was national chess champion at fifteen, who was acclaimed the best player the nation had so far produced, who had lost three times to Nathaniel in one afternoon and wouldn’t play him any more, saying that she couldn’t understand his game, it was too deep for her, too different.

Or sitting at the same table or the next table or simply in the same
hall as Peter and Annie and Josephine, Tarian and Michaela. Three weeks he’d been here, and in that time he’d upset or embarrassed or offended almost everyone he’d come into contact with. None of that was of his making, except that he couldn’t lie and wouldn’t dissemble. If a thing was so, he would say so; if not, again he would say. If a game was to be played, he would play it as best he could within the rules. If he was better or faster or stronger than the others, then he would win.

And he was better, faster, stronger, as he always had been: that was simply the way the world was. And the others resented it, some of them hated him for it; and that too was the way the world was, and always had been.

And it didn’t matter how good he was, he still wasn’t good enough. That was inherent in the piece. He’d been trained to command and trained to follow orders, but something was missing in him, something he lacked to make them love him.

And he only knew one way to find it, as he only knew one way to live: to be better, to try harder, to learn more and win by a greater margin. It was the constant theme of his childhood, playing on in his adolescence.
Not good enough, you must shine more brightly. So much potential, it must not be wasted; but only you can drive yourself to your limits. We can’t reach that far. What you achieve is in your own hands now, all we can do is make opportunities
.

Drive he had in abundance, and motive too. The race is to the swift, and the battle to the strong; only winners got the glittering prizes. If he outreached even the ambitions held for him, if he could shine blazingly bright, surely then he’d earn more than a nod of satisfaction and a harder challenge next time round . . .

The camp leader was generally held to be a bastard. A soft-spoken, smiling man, he was softly and smilingly unbending even to his favourites, and pitiless on defaulters.

Today at breakfast he left them eating longer than usual, until appetites were sated; then a single stroke of his little bell, and those few who weren’t already watching him turned as he rose to his feet, interest and apprehension mixing on their faces.

“Well,” he said, “I think we’ve mollycoddled you long enough.” And smiled, spread his hands disarmingly, paused a moment. Didn’t seem at all perturbed that his little joke raised not a smile, broke no one’s concentration. “You’re all fit,” he went on, “you’re all intelligent and adaptable; you were demonstrably self-reliant and you already understood something of teamwork, or you would never have been accepted here. These last weeks, I hope we’ve underlined what you knew before, honed your bodies
to a sharper edge and taught you a little more about yourselves and each other.

“Today, we really start to test you.

“From now on, it’s for real. Special risks, special opportunities. You’ll be divided into teams, and given various targets to achieve. For the next fortnight those teams will eat together, work together, sweat and suffer and weep together. Sleep together if you want to, but only if your leader thinks it’s good for the team.

“Each team will have a leader, chosen by me: this is not a democracy. But here on in, there will be no supervision. You’re on your own out there. Your safety will be entirely in your own hands; there will be no staff looking out for you, no one to step in and rescue if you’re stupid.

“So don’t be. We’ve had accidents every year, you must expect emergencies and disaster; and while we’ve never lost a camper yet, it’s statistically certain to happen sometime. Every year that passes, the odds get worse. Remember this. The odds are
not
in your favour out there; so take every precaution you can think of, take care, don’t be stupid.

“But don’t fail, either. Don’t be weak.”

The team selection might not have been deliberately malicious, but Nathaniel thought that quite probably it was. The staff liked him no more than the other campers; they envied his future, he thought, his bright and burning future, and so sought to make his present as difficult as they were able.

Nothing new there. Sometimes he wondered when this supposed future would finally begin. Ten years ago, he’d been sure to have achieved it by sixteen; from here it seemed as far away as ever, a golden dream blocked off by a wall of days, dark days heaped one upon another.

But be it accident or design, Nathaniel found himself teamed with Raoul and with Charlotte, with Peter and Josephine, Tarian and Michaela. Almost his entire roll-call of the ill-disposed; and no, surely this couldn’t be accidental. The staff watched them too closely to get it so very wrong.

Nor was Nathaniel appointed leader, though his record at the camp must have required that.
Best at everything but still not good enough, huh
? he thought ruefully, as the job went to Josephine.

Perhaps he maligned them, though. On his way back to the dormitory to pack – “just one bag, and bare essentials only. Remember, you’ve got to carry it; but remember, you can’t come back for what you’ve forgotten or thought you wouldn’t need” – he
was taken aside by one of the climbing instructors, a man he liked better than most.

“Here,” the man said, “I want you to carry this, in case of an emergency. Every team gets one; but don’t tell your team leader, or anyone else.”

“What is it?” The question was instinctive, but actually, taking the device and turning it over in his hands, Nathaniel knew already what it was. A small black sealed unit on a stiff cord, a light amulet of rubberized plastic, no marks on it, no distinguishing features – in the circumstances, there was really only one thing it could be.

“Panic button,” the man said, a beat behind Nathaniel’s mind. “We do have responsibilities. There’ll be a helicopter standing by, never more than half an hour’s flight away. Better if the team doesn’t know that, though. A promise of rescue makes people careless.”