The Hammer Horror Omnibus (12 page)

“I have had some correspondence with the Baron, and he seemed quite satisfied with my qualifications.”

“That’s right.” I was deriving some amusement from this. “He did, didn’t he?”

Paul Krempe gave me a swift sidelong glance. He was trying to assess just how difficult a charge I was likely to be.

He said: “Will you tell your father that I’m here.”

“My father is dead.”

This took him aback. “But that’s ridiculous. I had a letter from him . . .”

“He has been dead for many years. It was I who advertised for a tutor. It was I who wrote to you.”

“You are the Baron?”

“And have been since I was five years old.” I smiled.

“Yet you wrote to me saying that you wanted a tutor for your son.”

I had thought it would save a lot of explanation if I made the man come for a personal interview. In a letter he might have read things awry and been dubious about dealing direct with one as young as myself. He might have decided that the long journey was not worth while merely to satisfy what might be a rich young idler’s whim. Now that he was here we could talk frankly.

We did talk, and at great length. I admired the way in which he reacted to what must at first have been a somewhat disturbing situation. He had a wry sense of humor and a keen appreciation of most of the points I made about my education so far and my requirements for the future. We talked as equals, yet he paid just the appropriate respect to my position, while I found it easy to defer to the wider range of his knowledge.

I had no intention of leaving this house and the estate in the hands of any of my relatives. I had no intention of completing my studies in Geneva, since I was convinced that under such conditions they never would be completed. What I wanted was a man like Krempe, a scientist and a scholar, who would live here and fill in the lamentable gaps in my knowledge. A general education was not what I sought: I was happy enough with my general background, and wished to concentrate now on the specialized work for which I felt I was destined.

“You were engaged as my tutor,” I said at the end of our long discussion, “subject to the Baron’s approval.” We both smiled: it had now become an agreeable joke between us. “I may tell you that the Baron approves. Do you still want the position?”

“I shall be honored, Herr Baron,” said Paul with a trace of respectful mockery which I found most refreshing after the hypocrisies and servility of my relatives.

And so we began.

There were times when I grew impatient. Paul turned out to be an admirable tutor, and in two years I had learned all he had to teach. But those two years dragged abominably. Of course, the groundwork was essential; but I wanted to move on to the subjects which really obsessed me.

It was Paul who taught me patience. Now, when he has forsaken me and repudiated all that we worked on together, I wonder if he realizes just how much of my doggedness and unwearying application can be attributed to his personal example? We spent the days, the weeks, the months together, probing into the unknown, investigating, recording, searching . . . always searching, until gradually the great sweep of our research began to narrow down to a single direction.

To this we finally turned all our energies. We had explored biological byways, had even studied alchemy in the hope of finding grains of truth in the dross; but now we saw how recent discoveries in the field of magnetism opened up possibilities of a stimulus which might provoke the reaction we sought. It took us years of unrelenting work to approach even the fringe of what we longed to find.

During those years Paul lived in the house and rarely went out. We needed no outside distractions. He paid a few visits to some ageing uncle many miles away, but was always eager to return. Sometimes he went down to the village and I refrained from asking what entertainment he found there. For myself, I observed with a by no means dispassionate interest the development of the young serving girl on my staff, and when I fancied some frivolous relaxation I coaxed her into my bed. She required little coaxing. For all the splendid firmness of her body and the burning promise of those restless eyes, there were few in the neighborhood who could satisfy her, and we spent some rewarding hours together. Justine was her name, and I will confess that there were many times when I murmured the syllables lovingly into her ear in such a way as to persuade her that she meant everything to me. There is little point in pursuing any pleasure, however fleeting it may be and however easily discarded it may later be, unless one is wholehearted about it at the moment of its consummation. There would come a time when I regretted the romantic glibness of my tongue.

Justine, after all, was merely a diversion. I summoned her when I was in the mood for her, and if she had understood the responsibilities and limitations of her employment in my household there would never have been any trouble. I was Baron Frankenstein, and my life was consecrated to life itself.

Of the activities of Paul and myself she knew nothing. Or so we believed. Our efforts were applied out of sight and sound of the rest of the house. Nobody was allowed into the laboratory. When the place required cleaning we cleaned it ourselves. When there were things to be disposed of—things better concealed from the prying eyes of ignorant servants—we destroyed them in various ways.

And at last, after years of application, we were rewarded.

We had been experimenting on a dog which Paul had lured away from the village. There had been a small outcry about its disappearance as it was a great pet with the family to which it belonged, but nobody suspected that it had found a resting place in the Frankenstein home. They ought to have been honored. Possibly one day, when the whole story is told, they will indulge themselves in some petty pride: their dog made history, though the history is still to be written for the world to see.

I had killed the animal painlessly and then lowered it into the tank. It floated for two days in the viscous fluid with which we had already dosed or injected some hundreds of rats, mice, and birds. At the end of two days we began to apply the magnetic charges which jolted through the system and beat out an imperious rhythm in the animal’s heart. A hundred minor adjustments were necessary. The frequency of the heartbeats and the intensity with which these could be simulated were delicate matters.

We reached the crucial stage late one night. There had been so many failures that I was not unduly optimistic. The most I allowed myself to hope was that we should learn something, some tiny additional piece of knowledge, that would make the next step clearer. I opened the tank and drained it. Paul, as engrossed in the task as myself, was impatient to reach in and take out the dog but I waved him away. The body needed thoroughly washing before we could allow ourselves to touch it. I drew on my gloves and sluiced the dog down until I was sure it was safe to approach the final investigation.

The dog lay as it had lain the day I killed it. Its eyes were open but glazed and unseeing. The paws lay flat and lifeless. There was no sign of breathing.

Paul stood beside me as I applied the stethoscope. He, too, might well have been lifeless: he was afraid to breathe or make a move. I listened, and he watched me.

The throb might be in my own head. I wanted so much to hear it that I could be cheating myself.

But no—there could be no mistake. I stood upright and tried to control my trembling exultation.

“Paul . . . it’s alive!” I scooped the dog up in my arms. It was a limp weight, but I laughed madly over it and felt a wild desire to give it a pet name because it had behaved so well. Good dog . . . good dog! I said: “We’ve done it.”

2

T
here was a considerable lag between the cardiac reaction and the first visible signs of life. Paul took the dog from me, wanting to share in my jubilation just as he had so devotedly shared in my work, and carried it downstairs to the sitting room. He laid the dog on the floor, and we drank a glass of brandy while waiting for it to get up on its feet. I was alarmed by its continuing stillness, but Paul pointed out that some time would be necessary for the first heartbeats to circulate life through the body once more.

“In itself,” he said eagerly, “this opens up magnificent possibilities. Suppose that we could delay or prolong that period in which the body presumably remains dead while the heart is alive—then we’d have a living body with only the barest life spark present. Think what that would mean when it came to performing major surgery! It would save hundreds of lives, reduce shock to a minimum . . . no loss of blood . . .” He was beside himself with joy. “Victor, the medical federation meets in Berne next month. Can we have our paper ready by then?”

At our feet the dog stirred. It shuddered along its whole length and then lazily lifted its head. As we watched, it thumped its tail twice. Then it began to stagger to its feet.

“Do you think we can?” Paul persisted.

“We could,” I said, “but we’re not going to.”

“But why not? There isn’t another meeting of this scale for another year. Why wait that long?”

I was conscious of a twinge of disappointment. He had been a faithful ally and had shirked nothing, but now that success was within our grasp he showed himself too naïve in his enthusiasm. What we had done so far was nothing to what we could yet do. We had only just started. The door was open: now was the time to go through and find what lay beyond. I had had my own moments of impatience, but these were now conquered. I knew what came next and I knew that it required care and concentration. We had discovered the source of life itself and had used it to restore a creature that was dead. It was a tremendous discovery which was not ready to be shared. We must move on to the next stage.

“It’s not enough just to bring a dead animal back to life,” I said. The dog sniffed at me and then went to Paul, who patted it affectionately as though he had owned it for years. “We must create from the beginning. We must build up our own creature—build it up from nothing, if necessary. Otherwise we have accomplished only half the task we set ourselves.”

“Build?” He was baffled. “Build what?”

“The most complex thing known to man,” I said. “Man himself. Let’s not concern ourselves with side issues such as operational techniques. We must create a human being.”

“Victor, this has gone to your head. Let’s talk tomorrow and—”

“A man with perfect physique,” I said. “With the mature brain of a genius. Everything planned and perfect. We can do it. Don’t you see?”

In all these years I had seen no indication that he was anything but a devoted man of science. Now he revealed unsuspected doubts—the doubts of an ordinary superstitious mortal.

“What you’re saying is madness—a revolt against nature. Such a thing can end only in evil.”

“Come now, Paul.” I forced myself to be patient with him. “You haven’t shown any scruples up to now. As for revolting against nature, haven’t we done so already and succeeded? Isn’t a thing that’s dead supposed to be dead for all time? Yet we brought it back to life.”

The dog confirmed this by licking his hand. Paul looked down. The rasp of that rough tongue seemed to convince him more than my words did. He nodded to himself.

I went on: “We hold in the palms of our hands such secrets as have never been dreamed of. Nature puts up her own barriers to confine the scope of man, but over and over again these barriers have been surmounted or thrust farther back. We have pushed them back. We are in a great tradition, Paul. There’s nothing to stop us now.”

With that wry smile I knew so well, admitting rueful defeat, he asked: “What do you want to do?”

“First,” I said, “we need the framework—the body. Whatever adaptations may be necessary, that basic material is our starting point. Last week they hanged a man in Inglestadt. He was a highwayman who’d been terrorizing the countryside for months. As a warning to others his body has been left on a gibbet just outside the town. It’ll stay there until it rots . . . or until it’s stolen.”

For a moment I thought Paul was about to protest again. Then he raised his glass. We were partners again in our splendid enterprise.

It would have suited me very well to ride out at once and claim the body of the robber, but we had worked deep into the night and were both exhausted. Paul made up a comfortable bed for the dog from an old blanket in the corner of the laboratory, and then we made our own way to bed. I lay awake for a long time, too tired and, at the same time, too ecstatic to sleep.

The following day my thoughts were occupied entirely by the next crucial step. Rising late, I checked that the dog was still alive and healthy, and decided that in a day or two it must be turned loose. Let it go back to its startled owners if it wished! Having a dead dog concealed in my house was no great problem; having a live one padding about the place would certainly arouse some conjecture. I wondered, with excitement rather than apprehension, how we would cope with the problem of a newly created man when that arose.

Justine tried to fondle me as I passed along the first-floor landing during the course of the afternoon. I brushed her off. She was growing much too forward for my liking. She belonged to the darkness and to the hours of my choice: I was disturbed to see signs of a brash familiarity and even arrogance in her manner.

The rebuff brought a dark frown to that usually pert, provocative face. Then she laughed none too agreeably.

“You’ll be more friendly tonight, I’ll be bound.”

“Tonight I’m busy,” I said.

“Busy?” She was alert at once. “You and your friend are bringing village girls into the house—is that it?”

“No, Justine,” I said. “No. We shall be working. And now go and do the same.”

The sulky pout of her lower lip, so entrancing at the right moment, now had the sinister quality of a threat. But she still knew the sound of an order when she heard it in my voice. She flounced away.

She was beautiful—yet not, deplorable as it may seem to some, as beautiful in my eyes as the corpse that swung from the gibbet by the roadside that night.