“But I see the elixir is ready,” announced Kane, breaking out of his mood. Administering a few amber drops to the fluid, he carefully lifted the chalice of glowing liquor.
“Here, drink this quickly,” he ordered, extending the vessel.
“I won’t drink your poisoned drugs again.”
“Drink it, Dessylyn.” His eyes held hers.
As in a recurrent nightmare – and there were other nightmares – Dessylyn accepted the goblet. She raised it to her lips, felt the bitter liquor touch her tongue.
A knife whirled across the chamber. Struck from her languid fingers, the crystal goblet smashed into a thousand glowing shards against the stones.
“No!” shouted Kane in a demonic tone. “No! No!” He stared at the pool of dying phosphoresence in stunned horror.
Leaping from concealment, Mavrsal flung himself toward Kane – hoping to bury his cutlass in his enemy’s heart before the sorcerer recovered. He had not reckoned on Kane’s uncanny reflexes.
The anguished despair Kane displayed burst into inhuman rage at the instant he spun to meet his hidden assailant. Weaponless, he lunged for the sea captain. Mavrsal swung his blade in a natural downward slash, abandoning finesse in the face of an unarmed opponent.
With blurring speed, Kane stepped under the blow and caught the other’s descending wrist with his left hand. Mavrsal heard a scream escape his lips as his arm was jammed to a halt in mid swing – as Kane’s powerful left hand closed about his wrist and shattered the bones beneath the crushed flesh. The cutlass sailed unheeded across the stones.
His face twisted in bestial fury, Kane grappled with the sea captain. Mavrsal, an experienced fighter at rough and tumble, found himself tossed about like a frail child. Kane’s other hand circled its long fingers about his throat, choking off his breath. Desperately he sought to break Kane’s hold, beat at him with his mangled wrist, as Kane with savage laughter carried him back against the wall, holding him by his neck like a broken puppet.
Red fog wavered in his vision – pain was roaring in his ears . . . Kane was slowly strangling him, killing him deliberately, taunting him for his helplessness.
Then he was falling.
Kane gasped and arched his back inward as Dessylyn drove her dagger into his shoulder. Blood splashed her sweat-slippery fist. As Kane twisted away from her blow, the thin blade lodged in the scapula and snapped at the hilt.
Dessylyn screamed as his backhand blow hurled her to the stones. Frantically she scrambled to Mavrsal’s side, where he lay sprawled on the floor – stunned, but still conscious.
Kane cursed and fell back against his worktable, over-turning an alembic that burst like a rotted gourd. “Dessylyn!” he groaned in disbelief. Blood welled from his shoulder, spread across his slumped figure. His left shoulder was crippled, but his deadliness was that of a wounded tiger. “Dessylyn!”
“What did you expect?” she snarled, trying to pull Mavrsal to his feet.
A heavy flapping sound flung foggy gusts through the window. Kane cried out something in an inhuman tongue.
“If you kill Mavrsal, better kill me this time as well!” cried Dessylyn, clinging to the sea captain as he dazedly rose to his knees.
He cast a calculating eye toward the fallen sword. Too far.
“Leave her alone, sorcerer!” rasped Mavrsal. “She’s guilty of no crime but that of hating you and loving me! Kill me now and be done, but you’ll never change her spirit!”
“And I suppose you love her, too,” said Kane in a tortured voice. “You fool. Do you know how many others I’ve killed – other fools who thought they would save Dessylyn from the sorcerer’s evil embrace? It’s a game she often plays. Ever since the first fool . . . only a game. It amuses her to taunt me with her infidelities, with her schemes to leave with another man. Since it amuses her, I indulge her. But she doesn’t love you.”
“Then why did she bury my steel in your back?” Despair made Mavrsal reckless. “She hates you, sorcerer – and she loves me! Keep your lies to console you in your madness! Your sorcery can’t alter Dessylyn’s feelings toward you – nor can it alter the truth you’re forced to see! So kill me and be damned – you can’t escape the reality of your pitiful clutching for something you’ll never hold!”
Kane’s voice was strange, and his face was a mirror of tormented despair. “Get out of my sight!” he rasped. “Get out of here, both of you!
“Dessylyn, I give you your freedom. Mavrsal, I give you Dessylyn’s love. Take your bounty, and go from Carsultyal! I trust you’ll have little cause to thank me!”
As they stumbled for the secret door, Mavrsal ripped the emerald-set collar from Dessylyn’s neck and flung it at Kane’s slumping figure. “Keep your slave collar!” he growled. “It’s enough that you leave her with your scars about her throat!”
“You fool,” said Kane in a low voice.
“How far are we from Carsultyal?” whispered Dessylyn.
“Several leagues – we’ve barely gotten underway,” Mavrsal told the shivering girl beside him.
“I’m frightened.”
“Hush. You’re done with Kane and all his sorcery. Soon it will be dawn, and soon we’ll be far beyond Carsultyal and all the evil you’ve known there.”
“Hold me tighter then, my love. I feel so cold.”
“The sea wind is cold, but it’s clean,” he told her. “It’s carrying us together to a new life.”
“I’m frightened.”
“Hold me closer, then.”
“I seem to remember now . . .”
But the exhausted sea captain had fallen asleep. A deep sleep – the last unblighted slumber he would ever know.
For at dawn he awoke in the embrace of a corpse – the mouldering corpse of a long-dead girl, who had hanged herself in despair over the death of her barbarian lover.
Roberta Lannes
A Complete Woman
Roberta Lannes has been teaching junior high school English, art, and related subjects in her native Southern California for more than twenty years. After a short stint in stand-up comedy, her writing career began in the early 1970s with contributions to literary reviews and material for other comedians.
She made an impressive horror debut with her short story “Goodbye Dark Love” in Dennis Etchison’s 1986 anthology Cutting Edge, since when her distinctive and very dark fantasy has been published in Lord John Ten, Fantasy Tales, Splatterpunks and Splatterpunks II, Alien Sex, The Bradbury Chronicles, Still Dead, Dark Voices 5, Deathport, The Mammoth Book of Werewolves, Best New Horror-3 and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror Seventh Annual Collection, amongst others. She is currently working on a dark fantasy novel entitled Perversion of Angels and is the occasional co-host, with Steve Barnes, of 90.7 FM KPFK’s Hour 25 radio show in Los Angeles.
The author explains that “it was during a heated argument over the origin of homosexual behaviour and lifestyle that ‘A Complete Woman’ first crept into my consciousness. Long ago, in my naivete, I believed being gay was solely a result of conditioning, environment, opportunity, and preference. When challenged about the genesis of preference, I fell back on the psychological terms of ‘modeling’ and ‘reaction-formation’. I was summarily blasted for relying on an inexact science. I realized then, I didn’t know enough (as we all know, knowledge is power).
“Disgruntled, I went home and read. Recently an article on the genetic predestination theories, now being touted loudly by gay activist groups and their spokespeople, put things in perspective for me. Sexual preference is predominately determined in our cells. This story was written for all those idiots who still believe that all gay people, and transsexuals, have a choice.”
I AM BLIND and mute. I have not yet been given arms or legs, and I miss wiggling my toes when I wake up. There’s so much I miss, but to think of running my fingers through my hair, or watching a sunset, is to make worse my pain. And after all, I chose this path.
The day nurse arrives at six in the morning, she tells
me. I have no way to judge time except by what I hear. And I know well how words can fool. At night, the doctor’s sister sits with me. She says she’s an insomniac, that to sit and read as I sleep is a joy. I don’t believe that, but then doubting the veracity of what these women tell me is the only sport I have sometimes. I am at this point, essentially, not much more than a mind.
The morning rituals revolve around bathing me, feeding me, and removing anything I’ve evacuated during the night. One of my two day nurses puts classical music on the radio. I smile and make approving moans. Of the two, she is my favourite.
My bath is alternately soothing and painful. The tubes that snake from my shoulders and hips are cleaned, as are the unique dressings of synthetic skin, the areas round them scrubbed of my dead skin and anti-bacterial salves are massaged in. This portion of the bath is agonizing, and only my anguished groans communicate that. If it is too painful, I’m given opiates.
When I’m doped, I cannot enjoy the best part. The one nurse, my favourite, moves her hand, with the soft soapy cloth, over my new nipples, down to the tender hungry flesh between what will be my legs. She knows the pleasure it brings me and lingers at her chore. I believe the great spasms that contort my face and torso in climax bring her pleasure. I can hear her breath go ragged in its rhythm.
After the morning ministrations, I am left to the darkness. The music plays softly without much distraction so that I can dream about the future and lament my past. Until the doctor arrives.
The doctor. Ah. His face remains clear in my mind, as do his pianist’s hands, tall rangy body and wavy brown hair. Though I did not choose to do this because he was handsome, brilliant, and eloquent, these things made my decision easier. I can recall the evening he came to me. And our every word.
Cancer had robbed me of my breasts and lymph nodes, and I was in chemotherapy. I had a gloomy prognosis and no hair. The doctor came in just after visiting hours. There was no one to visit me, my having reached the age of seventy-eight and successfully maintained a reclusive existence as a writer and researcher. So when two strangers in street clothing approached my bed, I was addled and nearly shouted for the nurse.
The older man spoke. “Please Miss Craig, I am a doctor.” His voice was deep, timbre soothing.
I was my usual harsh and uninviting self. “What is it?”
He watched me cross my wizened arms over my sexless chest.
“I am an admirer of your work. I’m quite fascinated by the lives of renaissance artists, particularly musicians, and your books have a wonderfully gossipy tone to them.”
“Well, a man of taste and questionable ethical standards. You like your history presented with a bit of sensationalism and sometimes slanderous speculation.” He grinned at that. I remember feeling sad at that moment, dismayed that I hadn’t the form nor visage to attract such a man any longer. A man who shared my greatest obsession, as well.
“I hope you won’t be upset, but I took the liberty of going over your chart. I’m not an oncologist, but it seems you let things metastasize a bit too long.”
“Yes, well, I’m paying for that gaff now, aren’t I?”
“Yes, unfortunately. I’d like to offer you some hope, though.”
As I struggled to sit up, he reached over to the position controls and raised the head of the bed for me. I cocked an eyebrow, scrutinizing him.
“What makes you think you can give me something a whole phalanx of physicians hasn’t been able to do?”
“Your prognosis is poor, your age notwithstanding. But I have given others the potential for a new life. I’d like to give that to you, as well.” He nodded to the young man beside him. I squinted, my glasses misplaced somewhere in this unfamiliar place, but saw nothing extraordinary.
“What is it, magic spells? Youth serum? More surgery?”
“I’m not offering you a panacea, Miss Craig. Without getting into serious medical jargon, I’d characterize it as a full brain transplant into a viable alternative head and body system.” He waited for my response, his manner guarded.
Had someone told me of this possibility before my cancer, I don’t know what I would have thought, but as I lay weakened, old and depressed, in a bed I might never get out of again, I considered it. After laughing heartily.
He was surprised by my laughter. I believe he expected me to be horrified or amazed. I don’t know why I laughed, but it felt marvelous.
“This is really quite serious, Miss Craig. I chose you for so many reasons, one of them your sense of pragmatism.”
He seemed so young, vulnerable, and self-righteously indignant just then, I simply fell in love with him. “My dear doctor . . .”
“Dr Chernofsky . . . Kenneth.”
“Dr Chernofsky, it’s obvious you completely believe in what you’re doing, but I don’t think you’ve ever been in my position before. It’s not every day one is approached with such a fantastic offer.”
“Yes, it is fantastic. Rare and marvelous. But so are you. Minds like yours are so extraordinary, they shouldn’t be allowed to pass into oblivion. And think of it. I can compose the kind of body you want. I am Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo when it comes to surgery.” He put his arm around the young man and moved him closer. “I brought along one of my completed works.”
I looked the young man over more studiously. “Then you’ve done this ghoulish surgery before?”
“Yes, but you should know it isn’t sanctioned by any medical board or school in the United States.”
“It’s illegal?”
“Not illegal in the sense that it’s been outlawed. It’s just not done. But it will be when I can establish the basis for its acceptance. Simon, the others, and hopefully you, will help me there.”
I turned to an example of the last chance I was going to have. “Young man, tell me, is it painful?” The pain I’d already endured seemed to be fading as I considered this radical move.
He smirked. “I wish I could tell you otherwise, but it was very painful. Tranquilizers and pain killers were given to relieve the symptoms, with much success. And I must admit, now, this long after the surgeries, it was worth it.”
I turned to the doctor. “Hooray for modern chemistry. How long does this Frankensteinian feat take?”
His shoulders tensed ever so slightly. A touchy area, I assumed. He looked at the young man.
“Simon took almost a year to be complete.”
“A year? I don’t understand.” I was growing wearier by the minute.
“When I began my experimental work, professionally I was reattaching severed limbs; bone to bone, muscle to muscle, artery to artery, and reconnecting things, like detached eyes to optic nerves. My expertise is lauded here.” He had a copy of a medical journal. I dismissed it. “Gradually, I learned plastic surgery techniques to make the reattachments almost invisible. The brain attachment was highly experimental for two years, until I perfected it. Even then, it required doing the entire assembly work limb by limb to a torso and head. A long and tedious process.”
“Pardon my silly question, but wouldn’t it save time just to put a brain in a head that’s already attached to an entire body?”
“That’s not a silly question at all. Of course it would expedite things. But as yet, I haven’t stooped to finding an Igor to slip into graveyards or hang out at accident scenes. I am donated bodies and parts of bodies through private hospitals all over the world. I have never been sent an entire body in the condition of health and appearance I require. That you would find worthy.”
“I suppose if I were to go through with the pain and gore, I would want it to be worth my while. So there’s no getting around the bit-by-bit procedure?”
He shrugged as he shook his head. “As portions come in of the quality I need, I use them.”
“What if I die before you find a great head?” I chuckled.
“That’s not going to happen. You see, I have the perfect head and torso right now. You must decide within the next few hours.”
> “Hours?” I was suddenly filled with adrenaline and rest was far from my options.
“She’s perfect. Came to me this afternoon. Her brain is dead, essentially, so I’ve got the remainder of her body on life support. I don’t want any deterioration, so I need to operate soon.”
I began to ask myself questions I couldn’t imagine anyone asking themselves, except in some piece of fiction. If I had the chance to live another fifty years, would I take it? Could I exist in another person’s body? Would I be able to do all the things I do now, and more? Would it be worth it, ultimately?
And was I really going to die as soon as I guessed, if I did nothing? I know my troubled face showed my confusion.
“Simon, talk to Miss Allison Neary Craig.” By way of introduction, he went on. “Simon Le Fevre. My latest completed man.”
My jaw dropped. “The novelist? He’s dead.”
“Yes, he was. He uses another name now.”
I was incredulous. “He was ninety years old when he died of pneumonia. I know. I read the paper.” I pulled the young man closer, looking him over.
“I took him before he died. I won’t bore you with the details.”
My mind was truly reeling now. I’d read all of Le Fevre’s works. Powerful novels of profound conflicts of spirit. He’d even written one about Julius II, the Pope who was one of the renaissance’s primary artistic supporters. A flawless work. And I’d been lying there all that time right beside him.
The young man was not older than nineteen, average in stature and pleasant in appearance, but not the colourful character I’d known of before. If this man had the mind of Simon Le Fevre, with another lifetime, he could create such great works! The doctor reflected my amazed delight.
“Simon, meet Allison Neary Craig.”
He held my hands. I was enthralled. “I don’t believe this.” I shook my bald head.
The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein (Mammoth Books) Page 52