Fraulein Frankenstein

by Stephen Woodworth

  “It’s not me who needs His mercy.” He shoved Meyer hard against the door, drew a hunting knife from a sheath on his belt, and held the blade against the groundskeeper’s quivering double chins. Meyer blubbered but gulped down his cowardice when Stefan pressed the knife’s edge close against the skin.

  Stefan jerked his head toward the church entrance. I slid the unfastened chain off the handle of the other door and held it open as Stefan muscled Meyer inside the chapel’s vestibule.

  I darted a glance across the plaza at Pastor Georg’s house. Its windows glowed invitingly, and a wave of homesickness washed over me.

  How many sleepless nights had I caused the pastor and Birgit with my disappearance? Would they still welcome me if I went back to them now?

  Yet I shrank with shame at the possibility that they might see me at this moment, sneaking into God’s house to interrogate a man at knifepoint. Perhaps it was merely my guilty conscience, then, that made me think I saw a solitary spectator in the square—a dark figure on a pale horse. It withdrew into the maw of an adjacent alley and dissolved in darkness.

  I hastened into the church and shut the door behind me.

  Safely hidden from view inside, Stefan thrust Meyer up against the nearest wall, the point of his blade about to incise the man’s jugular.

  “T-t-take wh-wh-whatever you want!” Meyer babbled. “I . . . I can show you where they keep the silver.”

  “I want nothing from you,” Stefan muttered in disgust, “but what you know of her.”

  He nodded to me, and I lowered my hood.

  Even in the dimness of the benighted chapel, Meyer’s eyes goggled when he saw my face. “I . . . she . . . I . . . never saw her before.”

  “Lying dog!” Stefan pricked the skin of the groundskeeper’s gullet, and a driblet of blood trickled down the curve of the knife blade. “Did you give her that scar on her throat? Shall I give you one to match it?”

  Meyer wriggled and whimpered. “No! I swear it! First time I saw her, she had but one wound on her, and I didn’t put it there!”

  My body tingled in sudden fear while my head went numb and cold, as if it were not part of my body. “What wound was that?” I asked.

  “A hole in the chest, right over the heart.”

  The specter of a hundred nightmares rose in my mind: the decapitated cadaver on Victor Frankenstein’s slab, a suppurating red gash between its stiff breasts.

  My own voice sounded foreign to me. “When did you see this?”

  Meyer gaped at me in surprise, as if I should have known the answer. “When I buried you.”

  CHAPTER 12

  UNEARTHING THE TRUTH

  “More lies!” Stefan scoffed and prepared to jab Meyer with the knife’s tip again.

  I held up my hand. “Wait. Let him explain.”

  Meyer snickered hysterically. “If anyone has lies to explain, it’s her. She’s an impostor or a witch or a devil—but she’s not the girl I put in the ground. That one was stone dead!”

  “Can you believe such nonsense? Let us finish him and be off.” Stefan raised his blade, awaiting my cue.

  “I do believe him.” My speech came slowly, as if I’d just drained a cup of hemlock. “Where did you bury this other woman?”

  “In the churchyard.” Sensing I was on his side, Meyer addressed me, babbling quickly. “It had to be an unmarked grave—no one could know—but Herr von Kemp insisted it be in hallowed ground.”

  I waved Stefan back. “Let him go.”

  Scowling, Stefan released the groundskeeper with a shove but kept the knife poised to strike. Meyer made a show of smoothing his dirty coat as I stepped up until we stood face-to-face.

  “Take us to the grave,” I commanded. “And bring your spade.”

  #

  The forbidden ghastliness of our errand required the three of us to tarry in the Stadtkirche until late in the evening, when no one would witness our desecration. We emerged into deserted lanes of blackened storefronts, the city as still and desolate as the cemetery we intended to defile.

  The moonless night made the short walk to the churchyard seem like a descent into an underground abyss. Meyer found a lantern for us, but Stefan insisted on carrying it and kept the light hooded most of the way so as not to attract attention. He made the reluctant groundskeeper take the lead, prodding him forward with the blade of the shovel.

  As we reached the graveyard’s rusted gate, the slow clop of a horse’s hooves echoed through the chasm of empty streets behind us.

  We all froze, certain that the city’s night watchmen were about to arrest us for being vile graverobbers. The peculiar amplification and distortion of sound in the vacant maze of stone walls made it impossible to tell from which direction the hoofbeats came and whether they were approaching or receding. They stopped as abruptly as they’d started, yet no horse appeared. Only the beating of our hearts thumped in our ears.

  “Enough,” Stefan said at last. “Let’s be done with it.”

  The chains Meyer removed from the gate clanked like angry revenants in the night, until I thought the noise would roust the whole city from its slumber. Once inside the cemetery walls, Stefan unveiled the lantern. The gray wraiths of chiseled angels and granite crosses materialized in the gloom before us.

  Meyer weaved clumsily between the listing headstones and statuary as he led the way, his bearings made fuzzy by the liquor he guzzled from a hip flask to calm his nerves.

  “Here . . . this way.” He paused, swaying, took another swig, then stumbled in the opposite direction. “No, wait! There.”

  He pointed so emphatically that he nearly pitched forward and fell flat on his face.

  A forlorn willow drooped its branches over a forgotten plot at the far end of the churchyard. Below the tree, a cherub perched atop a marble obelisk, its baby face bowed in mourning. Unlike most of the other markers, the carving on this memorial was sharp and crisp, unmarred by the wear of wind and rain or the green cancer of moss and lichens. The polished plane that should have featured an epitaph was blank.

  “Just as I told you!” Meyer trumpeted. “Herr von Kemp couldn’t bury her in Liebeheim, so he paid me to plant her here, where no one would know her. There, I’ve done what you asked—I’m off.”

  Stefan blocked his exit with the shovel. “Dig.”

  The groundskeeper squealed like a stuck pig. Nevertheless, he grabbed the spade and jammed it into the sod at the base of the obelisk. The turf there bore shoots of fresher grass than the bedraggled overgrowth elsewhere in the churchyard.

  The earth did not seem as sunken and dense as in the other plots, either. It turned easily, and, even working at his slothful pace, Meyer didn’t take long to excavate a waist-deep pit. Stefan goaded him on, lantern in one hand, knife in the other.

  I peered down into the growing hole, and my nose filled with the mineral-and-mildew fragrance of loam.

  Meyer had dug only four feet down—rather than the usual six—when the spade struck the hollowness of wood. He’d evidently been as lazy in gravedigging as in every other chore.

  No splendid casket lay in that hole, merely an oblong crate such as one might find in the cargo hold of a ship. Already damp and fragile with rot, the lid cracked when Meyer put his full weight on it. His foot broke through the wood and got snagged between two jagged planks. He dropped the spade, shouting as if the corpse had caught hold of him.

  “Imbecile!” I hissed. “Get it open! I need to see.”

  Cursing, Stefan sheathed his knife and set aside the lantern, then jumped into the pit. He seized the shovel and staved in the makeshift coffin. As the wood splintered, Meyer yanked his foot out, tumbling back against the slope of the hole. Stefan pried open a gap in the lid above where the corpse’s head should have been and lifted the lantern over it.

  The box was empty.

  “Ha! Just as I thought.” Stefan grinned up at me. “There’s no dead woman there because you are here—alive.”

  The blood drained from my fac
e, its skin gone colder than the frigid night air. Stefan probably thought he had put to rest my worst fears when, in fact, he had confirmed them. Victor Frankenstein must have spotted the newly turned earth while foraging for cadavers to dissect and had disinterred the remains of Katarina von Kemp. That meant I was the headless woman on the baron’s operating table . . . or, at least, part of me was. Where the rest of me had come from and how I now lived I could not even bear to imagine.

  Shudders convulsed Meyer as he saw the crate’s barren interior. He, of all people, knew what—or who—had been there.

  “You are a devil.” The groundskeeper scrabbled up the incline of loose dirt on the far side of the grave. Back at ground level, he ran wildly, tripping and picking himself up again and again until he vanished into the dark.

  Stefan let him go. “Pay him no heed,” he said, setting the lantern and spade at the grave’s edge so he could climb from the pit. “Whatever nightmare he put you through is over.”

  He put his arms around my waist, but they failed to warm me.

  My nightmare was not over. It had only begun.

  Seeing me disconsolate, Stefan lifted my chin. “There is nothing to keep us apart now.”

  He kissed me avidly, and I clutched at his love as proof that I really was a living woman, not the thing that should have been in that grave.

  The muffled clump of hooves on turf advanced on us as if from the recesses of an awful, half-remembered dream. Stefan and I started, and out of the cemetery’s sepulchral night mist rode the black-coated horseman on the pallid gray mare. I believed Death himself had come to reclaim me.

  With difficulty, the rider swung himself off the animal and hobbled toward us. He wore an old military sword belt, from which he drew a black walking stick that I recognized at once. Nevertheless, I was dumbstruck when the footlight eeriness of the lantern illuminated Joseph von Kemp’s shriveled visage.

  His complexion was ashen, and he wheezed with every step. Indomitable will alone had enabled him to survive the long journey on horseback and the damp chill of the late hour.

  “Once more, you pierce my heart, Katarina,” he gasped out, tears glistening on his bony cheeks. He unsheathed the sword from his cane. “Must I pierce yours again, as well?”

  I dodged, slumping sideways to the ground as he thrust the blade at me. In a flash, I understood: we were doomed to reenact the original death of Katarina von Kemp, when, in a jealous rage, Joseph had skewered his unfaithful wife.

  But this time, Stefan was with me. When Joseph made another feint at my prostrate form, Stefan’s hunting knife deflected the killing point from my midriff.

  “You.” Joseph narrowed his eyes in venomous hatred. “You should have been the one to die all along.”

  With a deft flick of his wrist, he whipped the sword’s tip up to slash Stefan’s forearm. Stefan cried out in pain, a line of blood oozing from his skin as his hand popped open and dropped the knife.

  Disarmed, Stefan grabbed Joseph’s sword hand with his good arm and attempted to wrench the weapon from him. Years of épée training, however, had made the old man swift and shrewd. With his free hand, he swung the wooden scabbard of his cane up in a vicious blow to his rival’s head. Stefan sprawled beside the open grave, dazed and groaning.

  Joseph towered over his fallen enemy, raised his sword for the coup de grâce. Scuttling on hands and knees, I snatched up Stefan’s hunting knife and plunged it into the meat of Joseph’s thigh. He screamed and wobbled as his weakened leg buckled, the hilt of the knife jutting from his hip like an extra limb.

  The moment’s interruption gave Stefan the chance to regain his senses. He grabbed the spade that lay beside him and leaped to his feet.

  “Let us be, old man!” He swung the shovel like a halberd at Joseph’s head.

  A sickening thwack sounded as metal hit skull. Knocked sideways, Joseph collapsed into the open grave and lay unmoving on the broken box of Katarina’s coffin. Spooked by the violence, Joseph’s horse whinnied and ran off.

  Time stopped as Stefan and I gazed down at the body in the pit, only now comprehending the enormity of what we’d done. A gash bisected the gray hair on Joseph’s scalp, welling dark fluid.

  “He would have killed you,” Stefan whispered, as if I’d demanded a justification. “He would have killed us both.”

  Stefan scooped sod from the pile beside the grave and tossed it down over the still form in the pit. Dirt clung to the bloody edge of the shovel blade.

  As soil salted onto Joseph’s face, he moaned, eyelids fluttering, lips spitting grit. He woozily tried to push himself onto his hands and knees.

  “Wait!” I said. “He’s not dead . . .”

  Far from stopping, Stefan shoveled faster, plowing heavy swaths of dirt in on top of Joseph. The avalanche of earth mashed the faltering old man flat. Even when sod had blanketed the entire floor of the grave, though, the soil feebly heaved, as if crawling with worms.

  I gagged, remorse clotting my nostrils and windpipe like inhaled mud. I hadn’t meant Joseph any harm; I only wanted to be free of him.

  Even worse than witnessing my husband’s premature burial was seeing the ruthlessness writ on Stefan’s face as he filled the pit. How could my sweet young boy turn so brutal? And yet, had Joseph been any less savage, willing to kill me twice for the same offense? Was this what love did to men?

  “Did it have to be this way?” I asked sadly as Stefan finished his hellish work.

  “Yes.” He stamped on the new burial mound to tamp down the loose-packed soil. “And now we have no choice but to leave this place forever. Tomorrow we start our new life, and it will be as if all this never happened.”

  I let him enfold me, if only to block my sight of the grave. “I pray you’re right.”

  CHAPTER 13

  ECLIPSED HONEYMOON

  Stefan wiped the bloody mud off the spade and left it propped by the cemetery gates along with the extinguished lantern. He felt certain that Meyer would not tell anyone about Joseph von Kemp’s murder for fear of incriminating himself, but it was only a matter of time before Fräu Hauptmann sent out servants to search for her missing master. Stefan and I needed to be far away by then.

  With only stars to light our path, the road out of Darmstadt was treacherous to travel. Stefan insisted that we get away from the city before sunrise, however, so he cajoled our skittish steed into picking its way forward in the dark.

  After several hours of slow progress, we had secluded ourselves in the nearby forest, and Stefan at last decided we should rest until daybreak. He tethered our horse in a thicket off the side of the road, and we nestled together in the hollow of an enormous oak, wrapped together in Stefan’s riding cape. Although I would have thought sleep impossible with all the terrors of the evening churning in my mind, I dropped into blessed oblivion almost at once.

  I started awake sometime later, unsure how many hours had passed, afraid we’d overslept when we should have been fleeing. Stefan’s arm still draped across my shoulders, feeling heavier than before.

  He must still be asleep, I thought.

  But when I turned my head toward him, I found myself eye-to-eye with the creature from Victor Frankenstein’s laboratory. It smiled in delight, gusting carrion breath over decayed teeth and graying gums as it crushed me closer for a kiss . . .

  I twitched awake again, gasping as if I’d been smothered. I checked my surroundings to make sure I was not in another frightful dream. In the predawn twilight, I saw Stefan standing beside our horse, pawing through one of the saddlebags.

  “Well! You’re awake at last.” He grinned. “It’s about time! We must be on our way by sunrise. Here . . .”

  He handed me a small jug of white wine from the horse’s pack, then sliced some hard cheese and dry sausage for me with a jackknife. I ate ravenously but with a certain nausea, for everything reminded me of the previous night: Stefan cut the food with the jackknife because his hunting knife lay buried with Joseph von Kemp. While still in the gra
veyard, Stefan had used wine from the jug I now held to clean the cut Joseph had inflicted on his arm, then bandaged the wound with strips torn from his shirtsleeve. He’d since rolled both sleeves up past his elbows. Only a purple-stained rip in the cloth along his right bicep hinted at how close Stefan had come to death.

  Despite this, he acted like a boy on a lark. When we finished our simple breakfast and set out on our journey again—skirting Liebeheim and the von Kemp estate by several miles—he serenaded me with Papageno’s songs from The Magic Flute, singing in a voice more energetic than musical until I laughed with joy. The day was perfect and golden, the surrounding hills green and glorious, and we reveled in the majesty of the birds in the air and the stags in the forest. We waved in fellowship to everyone we passed, and it was easy to pretend we were newlyweds on a honeymoon rather than murderers running for our lives.

  Stefan waxed romantic, rhapsodizing about our new beginning. “You shall be . . . Johanna!” he said playfully. “And I shall be Wolfgang, since you like Mozart so much. Of course, when we are alone, you shall always be my Trina.”

  He reached behind him to pat my hip. I smiled and hugged him, wanting to believe the fantasy he painted. A cozy cottage of our own and a blacksmith shop that would support us and our family of adorable, tow-headed children.

  Though we had not made it to the Prussian border by that afternoon, Stefan chose to stop for the night in the town of Dörnberg. We found a pawnbroker willing to purchase one of the diamond rings from my jewelry chest, and Stefan used the proceeds to buy me two beautifully embroidered peasant dresses befitting my new role as Johanna, as well as shoes and a shift and a fine new outfit for himself.

  Famished from our travels, we feasted on a meal of roasted pheasant, after which Stefan secured a room at one of the finest inns in town. We ran up the stairs, giggling, giddy with euphoria.

  We had barely set down our things and locked the door of the chamber when Stefan caught me up in his arms. I yelped, then laughed as he carried me to the bed.

  “Tomorrow, we shall be married,” he murmured with sudden solemnity, gently laying me out before him. “But I must have you tonight.”