The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein (Mammoth Books) (73 page)

“Shit man, we could make our own comeback sequel, with all the talent in this room,” Larry says. “Maybe hook up with some of those new guys. Do a monster rally.”

It could happen. They all look significantly at each other. A brief stink of guilt, of culpability, like a sneaky fart in a dimly lit chamber.

Make that dimly-lit
torture dungeon
, thinks Blank Frank, who never forgets the importance of staying in character.

Blank Frank thinks about sequels. About how studios had once jerked their marionette strings, compelling them to come lurching back for more, again and again, adding monsters when the brew ran weak, until they had all been bled dry of revenue potential and dumped at a bus stop to commence the long deathwatch that had made them nostalgia.

It was like living death, in its way.

And these gatherings, year upon year, had become sequels in their own right.

The realization is depressing. It sort of breaks the back of the evening for Blank Frank. He stands friendly and remains as chatty as he ever gets. But the emotion has soured.

Larry chugs so much that he has grown a touch bombed. The Count’s chemicals intermix and buzz; he seems to sink into the depths of his coat, his chin ever-closer to the butt of the gun he carries. Larry drinks deep, then howls. The Count plugs one ear with a finger on his free hand. “I wish he wouldn’t
do
that,” he says in a proscenium-arch
sotto voce
that indicates his annoyance is mostly token.

When Larry tries to hurdle the bar again, moving exaggeratedly as he almost always does, he manages to plant his big wrestler’s elbow right into the glass on Blank Frank’s framed movie poster. It dents inward with a sharp crack, cobwebbing into a snap puzzle of fracture curves. Larry swears, instantly chagrined. Then, lamely, he offers to pay for the damage.

The Count, not unexpectedly, counter-offers to buy the poster, now that it’s damaged.

Blank Frank shakes his massive square head at both of his friends. So many years, among them. “It’s just glass. I can replace it. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

The thought that he has done this before depresses him further.
He sees the reflection of his face, divided into staggered components in the broken glass, and past that, the lurid illustration. Him then. Him now.

Blank Frank touches his face as though it is someone else’s.

His fingernails have always been black. Now they are merely fashionable.

Larry remains embarrassed about the accidental damage and the Count begins spot-checking his Rolex every five minutes or so, as though he is pressing the envelope on an urgent appointment. Something has spoiled the whole mood of their reunion, and Blank Frank is angry that he can’t quite pinpoint the cause. When he is angry, his temper froths quickly.

The Count is the first to rise. Decorum is all. Larry tries one more time to apologize. Blank Frank stays cordial, but is overpowered by the sudden strong need to get them the hell out of Un/Dead.

The Count bows stiffly. His limo manifests precisely on schedule. Larry gives Blank Frank a hug. His arms can reach all the way round.

“
Au revoir
,” says the Count.

“Stay dangerous,” says Larry.

Blank Frank closes and locks the service door. He monitors, via the tiny security window, the silent, gliding departure of the Count’s limousine, the fading of Larry’s spangles into the night.

Still half an hour till opening. The action at Un/Dead doesn’t really crank until midnight anyway, so there’s very little chance that some bystander will get hurt.

Blank Frank bumps up the volume and taps his club foot. A eulogy with a beat. He loves Larry and the Count in his massive, broad, uncompromisingly loyal way, and hopes they will understand his actions. He hopes that his two closest friends are perceptive enough, in the years to come, to know that he is not crazy.

Not crazy, and certainly not a monster.

While the music plays, he fetches two economy-sized plastic bottles of lantern kerosene, which he ploshes liberally around the bar, saturating the old wood trim. Arsonists call such flammable liquids “accelerator.”

In the scripts, it was always an overturned lantern, or a flung torch from a mob of villagers, that touched off the conclusive inferno. Mansions, mad labs, even stone fortresses burned and blew up, eliminating monster menaces until they were needed again.

Dark threads snake through the tiny warrior braid at the back of Blank Frank’s skull. All those Blind Hermits.

The purple electricity arcs toward his finger and trails it loyally. He unplugs the plasma globe and cradles it beneath one
giant forearm. The movie poster, he leaves hanging in its smashed frame.

He snaps the sulphur match with one black thumbnail. Ignition craters and blackens the head, eating it with a sharp hiss. Un/Dead’s PA throbs with the bass line of “D.O.A.” Phosphorus tangs the unmoving air. The match fires orange to yellow to a steady blue. The flamepoint reflects from Blank Frank’s large black pupils. He can see himself, as if by candlelight, fragmented by broken picture glass. The past. In his grasp is the plasma globe, unblemished, pristine, awaiting a new charge. The future.

He recalls all of his past experiences with fire. He drops the match into the thin pool of accelerator glistening on the bartop. The flame grows quietly.

Good
.

Light springs up, hard white, behind him as he exits and locks the door. The night is cool, near foggy. Condensation mists the plasma globe as he strolls away, pausing beneath a streetlamp to appreciate the ring on his little finger. He doesn’t need to eat or sleep. He’ll miss Michelle and the rest of the Un/Dead folks. But he is not like them; he has all the time he’ll ever need, and friends who will be around forever.

Blank Frank likes the power.

Although not a prolific writer, Brian Mooney has been building a solid body of work since the publication of his first short story, “The Arabian Bottle”, in the
London Mystery Selection
in 1971. Since then his fiction has appeared in such anthologies and magazines as
The 21st Pan Book of Horror Stories, Dark Voices 5, The Anthology of Fantasy & the Supernatural, The Mammoth Book of Werewolves, Shadows Over Innsmouth, Fantasy Tales, Final Shadows, Kadath, Dark Horizons
and
Fiesta.

“ ‘Chandira’ was another of those lucky tales which appeared to me almost as written,” reveals the author. “My thinking on the tale started backwards with the two points that most Frankenstein-type creations are things of pathos rather than horror, and so many horror films I’ve seen end with fire
.

“
I then got the idea of suttee, which may be acceptable to Hindu thought but which is anathema to the Western mind. Next I saw the circumstance in which suttee might be acceptable to a Westerner. My narrator had to be a European to see suttee as alien, he had to be in a position of power, and he had to be young and independent enough not to be bound by inflexibility or the imposed rule of a senior. Hence a young District Officer in the days of the Raj, born in India so that he had a better understanding of the culture
. . .”

I
AM AN OLD MAN
now and daily I think more and more about death.
I think about death and then I recall certain events towards the end of the last century and I start to become frightened.

I am an old man, winter’s damp chills gnaw at my bones and rack my joints and I curse the miserable climate of my supposed home land. Most evenings, even during the more clement months, I sit by a roaring fire and sip from a glass of fine malt whisky which helps to ease the aches. And sometimes the fire and the whisky evaporate my terror of death.

But I wasn’t always so cold. Most of my life, save for when I was sent away to school, was spent under the torrid Indian sun which leathered my skin and thinned my blood. Nor did I always have a fear of dying. That didn’t start until I was all of twenty years of age.

I was born near Poona, where my father was a district officer, and I grew up speaking Marati and Gujarati, dialects to which I was to add in later years. It therefore seemed the proper thing for me to enter the service when I became a man. Certainly India was more home to me than the bleak moors of my ancestors, and my return to the sub-continent as a very junior official was a great joy.

It was much the done thing in those long-ago days of the Raj to send young men like myself to remote stations. It was a way of testing our mettle, to see if we were fit for India and for eventual promotion to the higher grades. I often smirked when I heard the subalterns of the British Army complain of their hard lot. Most of them had only to worry about a suitable mount for the next bout of pig-sticking, or whether they could find a partner for the mess ball, or how to keep their rough and ready subordinates sane. At the age of twenty, I was controller, protector, adviser, tax-collector, administrator, magistrate, mediator, father-figure, all things to all men.

Sometimes now, more and more rarely, I go up to town to spend a day or two at my club. My fellow members like occasionally to hear tales of India from me and some of the younger ones josh me gently, asking about the rope trick and similar myths.

Forget the rope trick, for it is just that, a myth. I have seen fakirs perform strange acts, although these have been feats of physical endurance rather than supernatural demonstrations.

But I did once know a rishi – a holy man – whose powers far transcended such cheap displays. My recollections of that man are what scare me when I think of death. What I discovered of his capabilities impressed and terrified me to such an extent that I have never before told any person of them, mainly because I believed that I would be thought quite mad. However, sixty years and more after the event, I don’t much care what anyone thinks of me.

My sub-district covered perhaps two or three hundred square
miles and contained a number of different villages. My supervisor, Barr-Taylor, was an older district officer who would call upon me once every two or three weeks to receive my reports, discuss problems, advise me where necessary, sometimes accompany me on visits around the territory. Most of the time I was left to my own devices, my sole aide being a fiercely dignified old Baluchi Pathan named Mushtaq Khan.

It was during one of Barr-Taylor’s visits that I first heard of the rishi. My senior had decided to stay the night, probably to satisfy himself that I was adept at the social graces, district officers at times having to entertain passing dignitaries.

We were sitting on the verandah before dinner, sipping at our gins-and-tonic, listening to a multitude of night-noises and chatting about things in general.

We had been discussing my programme of visits and Barr-Taylor said, “Tell me, Rowan, have you been out to Katachari yet?”

Katachari was one of the nearest villages to my HQ but I had not yet visited the place. I had chosen rather to go to the farthest communities first, believing that those nearby would know of me through the local gossip and could attend me more readily if my help was needed.

I explained this to Barr-Taylor who said, “Take my tip, see the place as soon as possible. The local zamindar’s name is Gokul. Give him my compliments when you meet, we’re old friends. But it’s not really Gokul I want you to meet. There’s a rishi in the village, fellow called Aditya.”

He offered a cheroot and we lit up, blowing clouds of noxious smoke at the ferocious mosquitoes which were just starting their evening forays.

“Very interesting man, Aditya,” my senior continued. “He turned up in Katachari a few years ago, told the locals that it was his destiny to die there. As you’d expect, they were deeply honoured, welcomed him, built a small home for him and his wife, they’ve looked after him ever since. Of course, there is an element of quid pro quo, the rishi being expected to pray for the village, intercede with the deities, comfort the sick and the old, that sort of thing.

“You were born in India, Rowan, so I’m not trying to teach you things you don’t know. I’d guess you’re thinking there’s nothing very unusual about this, it’s a common enough occurrence. But Aditya is different. He claims to be over two hundred years old, says that his extraordinary will-power has kept him alive. Now I’m not saying that I believe this, but he’s assuredly very well on in years and he speaks of certain events as if he was an eye-witness, describes them very convincingly. There does seem to be an inexplicable power about
the man. I’ve been in the service for thirty-odd years now, and Aditya manages to make me feel like a callow youth.”

Barr-Taylor pulled a face and drew deeply on his cigar. “There’s something else,” he admitted, “I have to confess that although he has given me no reason, there is something about Aditya that frightens me.”

He stabbed a skinny forefinger at me for emphasis. “Don’t delay, Rowan, go to Katachari as soon as you can. This is your district, and if there are likely to be any problems, then you should be aware of them.” Barr-Taylor raised his head and sniffed. “Is that korma I can smell? Let’s go and see what Mushtaq Khan’s got for dinner, shall we?”