Frankenstein Lives Again (The New Adventures of Frankenstein) (11 page)

“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
 
b
oom!
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 from 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!”

“That American – that Dr. Winslow!” shouted a woman. “He’s as bad as Frankenstein himself! He is bringing the Monster back to us! Let’s get him… and put an end to him!”

The crowd roared in agreement. But before anyone could move in the direction of the castle, Mayor Krag whipped out a revolver from beneath his robe and fired it several times into the sky. The sudden blasts of yellow fire brought the group to hushed attention.

“Wait!” Krag warned with all the official air he could muster. “Winslow has still not broken any law that we know of. He told us he would be experimenting in his castle. That does not mean he has brought back the — “

“What of the crate? The big crate that we saw him bring from the train?”

The Mayor waved his hands to stop the grumbling. “It could have contained anything!”

“Yes, like the Monster!”

The word monster instantly aroused another volley of shouts and complaints from the crowd. Again Krag fired into the air.

“All of you, listen to me! That crate probably contained laboratory materials and nothing more!”

“And if it did not?” someone exclaimed. “Bah! You were brave enough to drive away that horror show. What stops you now from doing the same with this Winslow?”

“Winslow has not yet shown us any monster,” he said defensively. “My intention is to keep peace in the streets of Ingolstadt. I will not abuse my office by harrassing the American until I have proof that he has broken the law. But this I promise you, fine people: If Winslow has, in fact, brought back the Monster, I shall deal with him personally and legally, with the police by my side.”

The crowd grumbled.

“As for now,” the Mayor went on, “we can’t invade a man’s personal property just because he flashes some lights in the dead of night. All of you, return to your homes and go to bed. Don’t invent demons that are not there. I’ve already ordered the police to patrol the streets and stop any mob action. Now go home!”

The townspeople were still complaining, but they dispersed, returning to their homes or, in the cases of businesses that remained open this late, their work.

Three of them stayed behind, concealing themselves in the shadows. After Krag had turned his back on them to return to his residence, the trio quietly moved through the dark umbrage of the street. Ahead of them was the forest, beyond that was Castle Frankenstein. Each man tightly clutched a rifle.

When the three men finally peered out from an entanglement of shadowed bushes less than a hundred yards from the near end of the castle’s drawbridge, their leader whispered, his breath reeking with the stench of beer, “There it is. If the Frankenstein demon is prowling about the castle grounds tonight, we’ll know about it.”

The second man, looking up at the flickering lights showing from one of the castle windows, said, “B-but what if the Monster sees us, Heinrich?”

“Don’t be such a coward, Ulrich,” replied Heinrich Franz with confidence. “It will never see us in this underbrush. Then we’ll return to town, organize the other villagers and bring torches back here. We’ll set fire to the Monster and then the castle, trapping this Winslow and his woman inside like the devils they are. And when the smoke clears, we three will be important men in Ingolstadt. Why, I may even be the next mayor, once the people see how I acted in the place of my old and ineffectual friend Krag.”

* * *

Lynn Powell gasped. “Now that it’s alive again, the Monster looks worse than ever.”

The giant’s head was turning, its heavy eyelids blinking beneath the sloping brow. The straight lips seemed as though they were trying to speak, though no words issued from that long speechless mouth. Then a scream, one which both Lynn and Winslow seemed to feel as much as hear, roared from the strapped-down creature.

Lynn’s feelings were rapidly changing. “Oh, Burt,” she pleaded, turning away and burying her face in her hands, “turn it off. He must be in terrible pain. Stop the experiment. Please.”

When he replied, Winslow’s attention was still on the giant figure. “I can’t stop now! Switching off the machines prematurely could prove disastrous. He’d be weak, maybe in pain forever. I’ve got to complete the experiment. Take it all the way!”

The Monster’s head was still moving about, the hooded eyes looking from Winslow to Lynn and then back to the scientist. The hulking body strained, fought with a loud groan to break free of the restraining straps. Then, surprisingly, its head dropped back against the platform, the electrodes at his temples still sparking and sizzling.

But the Frankenstein creation did not scream again, neither from pain or any defiance. 

“Burt, please —"

“Wait, Lynn,” he said, still twisting dials on the control board and maintaining the electrical show. “Something’s happening to him.”

Winslow, even at this distance, could see the strange excuse for a smile that was distorting the Monster’s features even more so than they already were. There seemed to be a look of resignation on that face, a look that told the scientist that the Monster was accepting the artificial life that had been given him, taken away, and was now restored to him.

“You see, Lynn? He is grateful that we’ve brought him back!”

“Maybe,” said Lynn somberly, “he realizes that even a life as miserable as his own is better than no life at all… maybe he might go to any lengths to keep that life.”

But again, Winslow was more concerned with increasing the power, augmenting the Monster’s strength, than listening. He flicked switches. An ear-shattering electrical crash resounded through the chamber.

The Monster’s body jerked spasmodically.

“A little more power....” said Winslow, turning dials.

Teeth clenched, the creature snarled, then trained his yellow orbs directly on Winslow. The scientist wondered for a moment if the giant were seeing him as his creator.

Then the yellow hands formed mammoth fists and the muscles beneath the black clothing flexed like twisted steel.