Frankenstein Lives Again (The New Adventures of Frankenstein) Read online

  Dartani nodded slowly, then his eyes snapped wide open like lights. “The impudent, pompous fool! To think that he thought he could tell me where I can and cannot show my exhibits! To think that he presumed to tell me anything! But the overstuffed ass shall pay for what he has done.”

  “Pay?” A sadistic grin moved Gort’s lips. He rubbed his massive hands together in anticipation of some act that only he could envision.

  “And he shall pay in the most terrible way that I can devise,” hissed Dartani.

  Gort’s enthusiasm was growing. “Do you want me to sneak back into town?” he asked with wide eyes. “I could slit the creep’s throat, maybe shoot him, or — “

  “And have attention drawn immediately to us?” replied the Professor, his bones creaking as he twisted his body around to face his servant. “Remember, everyone saw our little conflict in the streets.”

  “We could take the body with us and dispose of it someplace else.”

  Dartani shook his head. “Even if Krag were suddenly missing, we would be suspected. And these old wagons could never outrun the horses of the gendarmes. Besides, Krag’s death must not be by ordinary means. He must be made to suffer for his disparaging attitude toward me. Krag’s death must be terrible and unique and not traceable to us.”

  “But,” said Gort, slamming a fist into his other hand, “I am getting impatient.”

  “I can understand that,” said the Professor, gently tapping Gort’s mountainlike shoulder with his bony hand. “I can imagine how torturous it can be for someone of your own special talents to remain idle. But please, be patient. I promise that you will have your pleasure before much longer, as will I.”

  As he spoke of pleasure, Dartani again imagined the young beauty who had so narrowly escaped him by the pond. He yet longed for her sun-bronzed nakedness. But for the present, the old man’s desire for revenge superseded his other longings. In another instant his thoughts had drifted to what he had heard in the street about the horror that had once been so great in Ingolstadt that the mayor would not allow Dartani’s exhibits in his town.

  The brute servant returned to the campfire to spoon out two plates of hot beans. He was about to hand one steaming plate to Dartani when the Professor, ignoring him, slid off the boulder and got down on the ground. Then he knelt and dug his fingers into the damp earth.

  “What are you doing, boss?” asked Gort, still holding the plates.

  Dartani did not look up at him, but stared straight ahead in the direction of the castle.

  “It has finally occurred to me,” the Professor responded after a long silence, “just what the significance of Krag’s remarks might be. I am finally remembering why the name of Ingolstadt is familiar to me. And just what that castle might be. And if I am correct, perhaps Krag’s death will be more delightful than I had ever hoped.”

  The old man dug his fingers deeper into the ground.

  “What are you getting your hands all covered with dirt for, Professor?”

  “Undoubtedly you’ve never heard the term psychometry,” answered Dartani, his face still looking ahead. “In short, it is a means by which a psychic can grasp an object belonging to someone and, by means of reading the radiation given off by that object, know something about its owner. I am going to use the very earth in this area and try to read what message it has for me. Now, be quiet. I must have total silence, complete concentration.”

  Gort watched as his master’s eyelids closed and the vulturelike head lifted, facing the castle. His body remained rigid for a while until a slight vibration could be detected in those corpselike limbs. At last the wrinkled lips twitched into a ghastly smile, as though the Professor had seen something to his delight through his sightless eyes.

  Dartani was still smiling when he opened his eyes again and looked up at Gort.

  “I have seen him and he is wondrous!” rasped the Professor. “And when he comes to us, he shall be ours.”

  “Huh? What are you talking about, Professor? Who?”

  The old man finally accepted one of the plates of beans and began to nibble at them, while Gort devoured his own portion like a ravenous animal of prey.

  “You will know everything,” said Dartani, “soon enough. But for the present, we both wait.”

  * * *

  The laboratory that now existed inside Castle Frankenstein barely resembled the old ruins first discovered by Burt Winslow when he purchased the building and its surrounding land.

  The rusted, archaic equipment used by Victor Frankenstein had been replaced by the best new apparatus that the Winslow fortune could buy. The expensive modern generator, connected to the river-turned paddle wheel outside the castle, occupied a prominent place in one corner of the room. Pieces of bizarre-shaped electrical apparatus filled every cranny of the laboratory, with great terminals and coils and rheostats just waiting to be sparked into operation.

  In the center of the laboratory was the replacement for Victor Frankenstein’s wooden table. Winslow had substituted for it a gleaming metal platform, some ten feet in length, equipped with five buckle-down leather straps and tilted to a forty-five degree angle with the floor. At the base of the platform was a metallic footrest.

  But it was not the platform that Burt Winslow was now concerned with, as he brought a hypodermic needle filled with a strangely colored liquid up to his eye level. Winslow, clad in a white laboratory smock, felt his heart pound with excitement as he beheld again the awesome hulk of the Frankenstein monster, lying motionless and silent against the platform. The assemblage of transplanted organs, mostly human parts, was securely strapped to the platform, the raised black boots firmly in place against the footrest.

  The gas mask had been removed hours ago and the creature’s ghastly countenance was now in full view. The heavy, waxlike eyelids were still closed over the dun white sockets. The straight black lips were relaxed now and closed.

  The dormant Monster was no longer wearing the tattered rags that Winslow had first seen through the ice block. Now he wore a new set of clothes, all a nightly black, including the turtle-neck sweater and coat, none of the attire large enough to accommodate his large size. The sewn arms extended for several inches beyond the sleeves and the massive chest seemed about to burst through the ebon sweater. But Winslow, when he bought the clothes, had not expected the Monster to be this large.

  “What are you doing now?” came a softly feminine voice.

  Still holding the needle, Winslow turned to see Lynn walking across the laboratory floor. She was dressed in a plain white nurse uniform, appealing only in the way it hugged her curvaceous body and showed the gentle hills of cleavage where the two top buttons were left open.

  “Just going to give him one more injection,” he told her, “using one of the formulae Frankenstein discovered while at the University of Ingolstadt. Then we’ll begin.”

  He found a spot in the Monster’s cold arm and gave the injection.

  “I still think it’s ugly,” said Lynn, watching Winslow withdraw the needle. “I’ll be glad when we’re finished and you’ve proven whatever it is you so desperately want to prove. Then maybe the two of us can go back to living like normal human beings.”

  “It won’t be long now, darling,” he said, putting aside the empty syringe and then making some last minute adjustments in one of his machines. “And once we’ve revived the Monster, bringing him back at full strength, and proving that both Victor Frankenstein and Mary Shelley were right, we – and the world – will learn much from our giant friend.”

  “I only hope,” she said, barely loud enough to be heard, “that the Monster doesn’t resent being brought back to life.”

  “Huh? What was that you said?”

  “Oh, nothing I haven’t already said before.” Lynn completed her own adjustments in another section of equipment.

  Winslow grasped two lengths of cable, each of which terminated in a small, socketlike device. The cables had already been connected to the laboratory machinery. With the
free ends in his hands, the scientist climbed a ladder which had been placed beside the metal platform. Reaching the top, Winslow connected a socket to each electrode imbedded in the Monster’s temples.

  “All fastened,” he said, looking down at his lovely assistant.

  “Fine,” she said, turning to look up at him. “And ol’ ‘Igor’ here is ready when you are.”

  Smiling, Winslow rechecked the electrode connections, then hastened down the ladder to take his place beside Lynn. Both of them gazed up at the apparently lifeless form strapped to the platform.

  “He frightens me, Burt,” she said, shivering and grabbing his arm. “Even lying there dormant, he scares me. That face, those stitches and everything. In a way, I feel sorry for him. To think, he’ll be brought back into this world as a Monster, a hideous freak, never to know love or companionship.”

  “That’s all about to change now, Lynn,” said Winslow in all honesty. “He’ll be my responsibility and I will treat him like the human being he was intended to be. We may call him ‘Monster,’ but we’ll let him know that he’s really a man. That he is different from you and me only in his origin. No longer will he be hated, scoffed at by an uncaring world. Never again will he find the need to act like... a monster. When he sees how things have changed since he last walked the Earth, he will be grateful for his revival.”

  “I… hope you’re right, Burt. God, but I hope you’re right! But I still don’t like looking at it. I wonder if I ever will.”

  “Maybe not,” said Winslow. “But for now, let’s not worry about how the Monster looks, not only making him live again.”

  Recalling the instructions he had memorized from The Journal of Victor Frankenstein and knowing full well the operation of his own new equipment, Winslow picked up two pairs of dark-lensed goggles, donned one pair and handed the other over to his assistant. Then he took her hand, feeling her tremble slightly, and led her to the control panel. Standing behind the panel, Winslow looked up over the mass of buttons and switches and glanced again at the Monster.

  “Are you ready?” asked Winslow, his fingers settling down over two imposing dials.

  Nodding, Lynn grasped a pair of switches on the panel. “Let’s get this over with,” she said, gulping.

  “All right, here we go, just the way we rehearsed it.”

  Taking a deep breath, Winslow twisted the first dial. Then he turned the second dial, after which he began to flick in his previously rehearsed sequence the first series of switches. Lynn was working the set of controls entrusted to her in concert with what Burt was doing. Thus far everything was going according to Winslow’s schedule.

  Suddenly the laboratory was alive with electrical splendor. Lights of varying colors flashed, bringing eerie glows to the ancient chamber, and great jagged arcs of energy jumped from one terminal to the next. The dark goggles helped shield the scientist and his assistant from the ever increasing display of pyrotechnics. Soon the laboratory was buzzing and whining, erupting with the forces of unorthodox science, with the stench of ozone permeating the air.

  Winslow shouted something, but his voice was drowned by the noises of power exploding all about him and Lynn.

  On the platform, the Frankenstein monster’s composite body remained still, the eyes stayed shut.

  Winslow increased the power.

  His and Lynn’s ears ached from the noises of screeching machines.

  Crackling blue-white sparks leaped unbelievable lengths about the terminals. Wheels spun and shot off sparks. Noises crashed above other noises. Gauge needles seemed to be fighting to burst free of the glass confining them.

  Ribbons of electricity shot about the Monster’s smoking electrodes, while the long connecting cables continued to pump electrical energy into the giant’s reclining body.

  All the while, Winslow and Lynn watched the Monster for the slightest movement, while their hands continued to manipulate the controls.

  Then Winslow leaned forward. He knew that it wasn’t simply his imagination. His heart pounded furiously as, oblivious to the blinding light, he lifted his goggles a bit for a better look.

  There was no mistaking the fact that the Monster’s face was twitching!

  Winslow yanked down the goggles once more. Now he could see, even through the dimness, that the massive body on the platform was stirring, moving and jerking beneath the restraining straps in convulsive spasms.

  “Look, Lynn! Look!” he shouted at top voice, which proved barely audible over the pandemonium of sounds in the laboratory.

  Winslow sprang from behind the control panel to get a closer look. He saw the Monster’s black lips quiver, then part to drink in a long draught of the electrically charged air. The pearly teeth shown as those lips drew back into a snarl.

  A deafening boom! reverberated throughout the room.

  And Winslow’s heart nearly burst, for the heavy eyelids of the giant were beginning to open.

  * * *

  Sensations!

  Sounds too loud to bear. Familiar sounds, somewhat like those heard long ago before the darkness came, yet somehow different.

  Smells unknown since those earliest memories.

  And the pain. Hot, searing, like intangible daggers ripping through his skull and along his spine, but not causing death.

  The sensations came all at once. He had known them before and remembered them well, for they were his first sensations, those which were with him at the moment of his birth. He had come to despise those sensations.

  And now there was also the visual assault, the light that had invaded his period of peaceful darkness. He had almost begun to believe that he had died or returned to the lifeless matter from which he sprang. Cursed fate! he thought, for he knew that his horror was beginning anew.

  He felt his body twitch, experienced the sensation of energies flowing through limbs stiff from inactivity, felt the unseen things that held him rigidly and kept him unable to stand erect.

  In a few moments, his brain was thinking... remembering... hating. He saw that first human face ever to appear before his eyes — a man. A young face, and the expression upon that first of all faces was one of utter revulsion. He recalled how that being, from whom he had wanted but acceptance and love, had fled from him. He remembered the scorn heaped upon him by others of that one’s species, the resulting pain, the deaths inflicted for revenge with his own hands…

  Again! It was happening once more to him.

  Desperately, he tried crying out to any deity or demon that might hear, to pray that this was but a nightmare, that it was not, in fact, happening again. But, though he tried to speak, there came no words — only a sharp pain in his throat. Some cruel Fate had rendered him mute, incapable even of cursing his own wretched lot.

  The light was stronger now. He could not shut the illumination out of his dark existence anymore. At last he resigned himself to the radiance, letting his eyes open and focus upon —

  No! he thought. The place. It was the same. His birthplace, the most damnable of any place in this accursed world. What had brought him here, so many miles away from the place of cold and ice where the darkness overcame him?

  There was a human figure in this, his birthplace. A vague figure, rapidly coming into focus. Behind the figure there was another, of incomparable beauty with hair like spun gold, but it was not that figure with which he was concerned.

  It was the man. Could it be he, that most hated of all men?

  No. With his own eyes he had seen Frankenstein’s corpse, lying aboard the ship, shortly before the darkness swept him into oblivion. Not he. But at first this one might well be mistaken for the creator. Perhaps this one was slightly older. Yet his eyes were the same, possessed of that same wild enthusiasm, that madness, as he who had bestowed upon him the unwanted gift of life.

  Surely this one would follow Frankenstein’s example. Rejection, hatred, all the other negatives would follow. It would always be the same.

  But this time he would be prepared – right fro
m the beginning!

  * * *

  The Monster’s eyes were staring wide like balls of sulphur.

  Winslow felt the sensation of power surge through him, the same feeling that he knew had destroyed other men.

  He rushed to Lynn and hugged her. “It’s alive! Do you see it, Lynn? Alive! Do you realize what we’ve done? We have revived the Frankenstein monster!”

  When he finally let her go, Lynn shrugged, not so much from the contorting face of the figure on the platform, but from Winslow himself. Something had changed about him, certainly not for the better. There seemed to be a difference in the man’s eyes.

  Cautiously, she took a step away from him, then looked back at the writhing form on the platform, seeing the black-haired head of the Monster slowly turning in her direction.

  The laboratory lights continued to flash.

  * * *

  The residents of Ingolstadt could not help but notice the activity. They could hear the noises emanating from the open windows of Castle Frankenstein and see, even at this distance, the great flashes and flares of unholy light. Soon much of the population was huddled in the dark streets, either making the Sign of the Cross or raising the two fingers that indicated the presence of the Devil.

  The black shape on the hilltop seemed to move amid all of the noises and lights.

  Someone in the crowd finally shouted, “There, you see! See what is happening at the Devil’s castle!”

  Mayor Krag was already rushing out into the street, still wearing his bathrobe as the shouts of his people had jarred him from his sleep. He could see them raising their fists, hear them crying out in agreement with the man who spoke first.

  “The lights in the castle!” yelled another man. “My great-grandfather told me stories of what happened when the lights of Castle Frankenstein first flashed in the night. That was the night the Monster from hell came to us!”

  “Now we know it is no legend!” hollered another. “We no longer have any doubts! Our ancestors did not lie to us!”