Anno Frankenstein

by Jonathan Green

  There were more cries of alarm, and the truck bounced over the body of another soldier. She caught a glimpse of Dina as she stumbled, one of the enemy falling on top of her.

  Keeping her head down, she spun the truck around, skidding across the courtyard towards the keep. If she could create an effective barrier between the escapees and the enemy, some of them might yet make it out of there alive.

  THE PIN PULLED free.

  “No!” Dina screamed, understanding all too well the fate that was heading her way. She desperately scrabbled at the buckles to free rid herself of the harness.

  And as her frantic fingers failed to release the buckled clasps, the tears flowed freely, a wail of dread escaping her clenching throat.

  THE SHOCKWAVE OF force that rippled outwards from the epicentre of the explosion, where Dina had been standing, sent soldiers tumbling before it, guns flying from their hands, and shredded the stacked barrels and crates.

  The force of the blast treated all alike, regardless of which side they fought on, throwing Hercules, Cookie and Cat – and even Trixie’s limp body – back through the open doorway behind them.

  JINX FELT THE force of the blast as the window of the driver’s door shattered, hurling shards of razor-sharp glass into the cabin with her, nicking her skin.

  She felt the power of it as it lifted the turning truck into the air, flipping it onto its side, the battered chassis kicking a trail of sparks from the cobbles of the courtyard, like a miniature firework display.

  Jinx lay there, in a tangle of limbs, every part of her aching, hearing nothing but the muffled thrub-thrub of her pulse in her ears, temporarily deafened to all else by the blast.

  Slowly she became aware of crunching footsteps coming towards her. The footsteps stopped and then she felt rough hands seize her wrists and drag her unceremoniously clear of the wreckage of the cab through the shattered windscreen, her rescuers deaf to her breathless whimpers of pain.

  HERCULES OPENED HIS eyes and looked up into the cold, hard face of a German soldier. The muzzle of a machine-gun was pointing directly into his face.

  He tried to sit up and winced as a crimson spear of agony lanced through the back of his skull, forcing a cry of shock, as much as pain, out of him.

  He automatically put a hand to the back of his head. It felt hot and tender to the touch and his fingers came back red and sticky.

  “You!” the soldier snapped in German. “Get up!”

  Wincing from the pain of the blow he had received to the head, his vision swimming in and out of focus, Hercules struggled to his feet. Now under armed guard, he and the other survivors of the Monstrous Regiment’s ill-fated assault on Castle Frankenstein – Cookie, Cat and Jinx – were dragged back inside the keep.

  Henry Jekyll was still slouched in the chair in the centre of the room, but behind him, Colonel Kahler had been joined by a black-suited SS officer and a raven-haired woman with a lean, hungry physique that matched her predatory flint-grey eyes.

  “So these are the ‘men’ you have been hunting, Lieutenant-Colonel?” Kahler said, addressing the man in black.

  “Indeed,” the other replied.

  “And they’ve been giving you the run around for how long?”

  The SS officer gave the commandant of Castle Frankenstein a sharp, venomous look.

  “We have them now,” he said calmly, “that is what matters. And we have their secret weapon too.” With one leather-gloved hand he patted the squirming Jekyll on the shoulder.

  “So, do you wish to interrogate them, Lieutenant-Colonel Teufel?” Kahler asked.

  “We have their secret weapon,” Teufel repeated. “Do with them what you will. I have no further need of them.”

  “Take them away,” Kahler instructed the prisoners’ armed guard. “I’m sure Doktor Folter will find a use for them.”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll get you out of here,” Hercules called back over his shoulder to Jekyll, as they were led away.

  Kahler’s laughter sent an chill tingling down his spine.

  “Who did you think it was who betrayed you?”

  Hercules felt his cheeks redden in anger. “Only under duress,” he hissed.

  “Under duress?” Kahler snorted. “Listen to yourself. You’ve seen what happens to the good doctor here when he’s put under pressure.”

  Hercules could feel the colour draining from his cheeks as he understood the full implication of Kahler’s words.

  “The monster he hides within would have torn this castle down brick by brick, stone by stone.”

  “I don’t know what it is you have over him but…” Hercules faltered as he realised that he couldn’t imagine what Kahler could possibly have on the ‘good’ doctor. “But he would never have betrayed us willingly.”

  “Oh?” Kahler laughed. “You really think that, do you?”

  Hercules turned imploring eyes on Henry Jekyll now. The doctor was sweating, his skin having acquired an unpleasant waxy sheen. “Could you?” he said weakly, the words almost sticking in his throat.

  Jekyll swallowed hard, the lump of his Adam’s apple bobbing as he did so.

  “Why?” Hercules asked. “We came to rescue you!”

  “They can cure my condition,” Jekyll replied.

  “Cure you?” Hercules retorted. “When the greatest minds of Magna Britannia couldn’t?”

  “They can cut Hyde out of me.”

  That was it then, Hercules thought. Jekyll’s betrayal was complete.

  “Judas!” Cookie spat.

  At that, Kahler snorted in derision once again. “Welcome to Castle Frankenstein,” he half-chuckled. “I would say enjoy your stay, but you won’t.”

  And with that the survivors of the raid on Castle Frankenstein were led away, now prisoners of the Third Reich, their fates sealed.

  Act Three

  Frankenstein’s Children

  “Society’s needs come before the individual’s needs.”

  – Adolf Hitler

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-THREE

  The Man in the Ion Mask

  CASTLE FRANKENSTEIN, DARMSTADT, GERMANY, 1943

  THE MAN CAME to, to find himself being slapped repeatedly across the face.

  Blearily he opened his eyes, struggling to focus on the person in front of him. There was the impression of an armoured helm, but that couldn’t be right.

  Fighting unconsciousness, he drifted out again for a moment.

  “Wake up!” a voice snapped. It sounded as if the voice was coming from another room.

  He struggled to open his eyes again but his eyelids felt as heavy as lead.

  “I said wake up!” the voice came again, louder this time and accompanied by a mighty blow across his face that snapped his head round and shocked him into opening his eyes properly at last.

  The chair he had been tied to rocked on its legs, threatening to tip over.

  There was blood in his mouth. Mustering what strength he could, he spat a great gobbet onto the stone-flagged floor. Probing at the inside of his cheeks with the tip of his tongue, he felt a molar give within the gum and wondered how many more blows it would take before it came out altogether.

  A claw-like hand grabbed hold of his chin and pulled his head round. He winced, half-closing his eyes again under the glare of the lamps positioned behind his interrogator. All he could see of the gravel-voiced individual now was a silhouette of a hooded figure, almost monastic in appearance.

  Blinking as his aching eyes slowly adjusted to the brightness of the arc-lights, he tried to focus on the shaded face in front of him.

  It was metal; he was sure of it.

  “What’s your plan, eh?” the helmed figure demanded.

  He stared at the metal mask in confusion and bewilderment as he struggled to recall who his interrogator was, where he was, what he was doing there, and why he was being interrogated at all.

  His memories were a muddied blur, like the grains of sands in a tide-churned rock pool.

 
He remembered the dome cracking apart like an egg as it was assaulted by the unreal energies unleashed by the whirling Sphere… His hideously-deformed nemesis turning and leaping into the ball of pulsing light…

  He remembered scrambling up to the top of the twisted dais, hesitating before the malevolent machine… Following his enemy through… The unimaginable power of the forces unleashed by the device, the thunderous power of the vortex tearing an opening through time and space, joining two realities that Time and Nature had never intended should meet…

  He remembered falling through time, the past, the present, the future… a myriad possibilities… an infinite number of potential realities… briefly bearing witness to the entirety of God’s grand design, enough to drive a sane man out of his mind and make a madman lucid again…

  He remembered a ball of incandescent heat, like a captured sun, falling through the years like a blazing comet, the chronosphere leaving a trail of unresolved potentialities as the tapestry of time unravelled in its wake, with him cocooned at its centre, shivering as impossible fractal patterns of frost etched their way across his exposed skin…

  He remembered the tamed sun evaporating, melting away like ice on a magma floe, and feeling vitrified earth beneath him, as hard and as smooth as glass that splintered and cracked even as he warily rose to his feet, not knowing where – or when – he was…

  He remembered feeling unbearably hot, as he was plunged into darkness, where before, trapped beneath the chromosphere of the miniature sun, he had felt so unbearably cold…

  He remembered the acrid stink of burnt hair and the orange glow of scorched fibres at the elbows of his environment suit…

  He remembered the sudden cold gust of air that took him by surprise, inhaling a great lungful of the pine-scented air, underlaid with the suggestion of damp and leaf mould…

  And then torch beams stabbing the darkness… the roar of an engine… the harsh glare of searing sodium headlights… the clatter of rifles taking aim and cries of “Halt!” and “Sieg heil!”

  After that one moment of clarity, everything became muddy again, one day of imprisonment within the bowels of the castle blurring into the next, the interrogations becoming confused, until he could barely remember who he was, let alone what he had told his tormentor. Only it obviously hadn’t been what he wanted to hear. But he remembered now.

  Peering up through eyes blackened and swollen from the beatings he had received, he saw the metallic faceplate now. He saw the thin slit it bore in place of a mouth through which the desperate man’s rasping words came, and the rectangles cut for his eyes, that the man inside might look out upon the world. It was lit from within by an eerie ice-blue glow as the ion mask struggled to stabilise the cellular structure of his face and prevent it from collapsing altogether.

  “Daniel Dashwood,” he said, a chuckle flavouring his pronouncement.

  “What was the plan?” his interrogator demanded once again.

  Ulysses Quicksilver laughed at that, more bloody spittle flapping from his lips. “There wasn’t any plan. There’s never a plan. Haven’t you heard? I make it up as I go along.”

  The robed, masked figure took a step back, raising a gloved hand as he did so, as if he were about to strike Ulysses unconscious. But then, suddenly and unexpectedly, the furious tension left the man’s body and he lowered his hand.

  “No matter,” came the rasping voice from behind the mask. “There’ll be no-one coming to help you this time. You will remain here, in this squalid dungeon, to end your days in misery, knowing that there’s nothing you can do to stop me. The Führer’s armies will win the war and turn Magna Britannia into part of the Über-Fatherland.”

  “What, with you as its puppet prime minister?” Ulysses mocked. “Think your face will fit?”

  “If the Führer wills it.”

  “Magna Britannia shall never belong to Germany,” Ulysses snarled, although he would have liked to have been more convinced himself.

  “Oh, come now, Quicksilver. Magna Britannia’s been German since the Hanoverian Succession of 1714. Hitler’s just finishing the job, forging the two nations into one great empire – the greatest power the world has ever seen! One that will be undefeatable!”

  “They said that about the Roman Empire too.”

  “Words,” Dashwood spat, retracting a twisted skeletal claw that had once been a fine, firm hand. “Just words.”

  The Nazi was but a shadow of his former self, of the handsome man in his prime Ulysses had met at the séance to raise old man Oddfellow’s ghost. But then, he had endured years of torment and suffering, having been cast into the time-stream by Ulysses’ actions.

  “That’s all you have,” he hissed, his voice a disgusting slobbering sound, as if he couldn’t clear his mouth of saliva.

  Ulysses lifted his head. As sense and feeling returned to him, he immediately wished it hadn’t. He could feel every strained muscle, every throbbing bruise, every cracked rib, with every breath he took. The vertebrae in his neck protesting, he regarded the shrouded figure – looking like some iron-masked grim reaper.

  “And what do you have?”

  Dashwood laughed at that. “You remember the Icarus Cannon, don’t you? That cocky bastard Shurin couldn’t resist showing it off to you, and then faking his own death within its beam. The thing about death by heat ray, of course, is that it leaves behind nothing that can be used to tell you anything about a body, other than that it was carbon-based.”

  He hesitated, and Ulysses heard the slurp of his indrawn breath.

  “And then there’s the cavorite. Imagine what the world would be like if the Nazis were to have the first colony on the Moon. And advances in Babbage engines that men in this day and age could only dream of. And half a dozen other future technologies, existing here and now in 1943; a gift to the Führer from the future.”

  Dashwood suddenly leaned in close and Ulysses saw the scarred eyeballs behind the mask – irises and pupils split and twisted – bathed in the eldritch blue light, his nose wrinkling at the miasma of ozone and decay that Dashwood carried about him like a shroud.

  “And do you know what the best part about it is?” he hissed.

  “If I’d known you’d only come to gloat,” Ulysses muttered, “I would have –”

  “No!” Dashwood snapped, cutting him dead. “The best part is you won’t be able to do anything to stop me. You’ll die in this place knowing that I beat you!”

  “So this is personal now, is it?” Ulysses said. “And here I was believing that you were motivated by some misguided sense of Aryan superiority, a warped wish to see a better world, free of conflict and suffering. And yet all along, all you were really interested in was getting one over on me.”

  This time, the force of the blow sent the chair toppling sideways, Ulysses hitting his head on the floor so hard it nearly knocked him senseless again.

  “You’re no threat to me now, and I can see that you’re not going to tell me anything I don’t already know,” Dashwood scoffed. “You have outlived your usefulness.”

  He turned and marched across the room to where the outline of a door showed, delineated by a thin crack of light. There, he stopped and turned the expressionless plate of his mask on Ulysses one last time.

  “But I’m sure the Frankenstein Corps will be able to make something of you. If you know what I mean.”

  And with that, the cackling gargle of a chuckle trapped in his throat, the twisted, revenge-driven monster that had once been Daniel Dashwood left the cell, leaving Ulysses Quicksilver to contemplate his fate.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Being Inhuman

  A THIN COLUMN of smoke was still rising from the battlemented and machine gun-encrusted walls of the fortress-factory when Katarina Kharkova emerged from the treeline at the top of the westerly escarpment overlooking Castle Frankenstein.

  And it was an imposing place indeed. Along with the soaring towers, the high walls and the looming keep, the fortre
ss bristled with gun emplacements and look-out posts. The snaking trail of pylons that she had followed from the devastation of the Darmstadt Dam continued into the complex of the corpse-factory, coils of humming power lines spooled between them like crackling Christmas tree decorations. Radio aerials and broadcasting transmitters rose amid the smoking chimneys of the fortress itself.

  The external walls of the castle might be in shadow, but it was lit from within by a pulsing infernal glow, like some demonic throbbing heartbeat, as if the place that changed the dead into the living – and vice versa – was some hellish, living thing in its own right.

  She had heard the sounds of gunfire, revving engines and explosions before she even crested the rise of the hill. Arriving in the aftermath of the assault, she had decided to wait awhile before proceeding with her own plan. Things had not gone as she might have hoped up until that point. But it was barely past midnight; so what difference would another hour or two make? She just had to make sure that she was done before daybreak.

  Of course, at one stage, it had been touch or go whether she would even make it this far.

  After her attempt to liberate the British Agent from Schloss Geisterhaus was thwarted by a tank and five-foot-long splinter, Katarina hadn’t come to again until after the Nazis had removed the spear of wood pinning her to the back wall of the atrium. Even then, she had remained semi-conscious.

  As they carried her out into the sunlight, her skin began to itch, as if she was suffering from a chronic case of sunburn or had fallen into a bed of nettles.

  It wasn’t until they were preparing to throw her onto the hastily-constructed funeral pyre they had created for her – at the Devil’s behest – that she managed to muster enough of her strength and her wits to fight back.