Anno Frankenstein

by Jonathan Green

  “Engaging probe now!” he declared, shouting to be heard over the furious snap and crackle of discharging electricity.

  As he hauled on the chain, a Y-shaped piece of metal bound with coiled copper wire descended from the vaulted roof, lining up with the galvanic radiation emitters and the top of the steel frame. As it drew closer, the probe became wreathed in crackling corposant.

  And then the connector fell into place.

  Lightning leapt from the electrode emitters to the frame, twisting all over the steel scaffold and around the body secured to it, like a writhing serpent of capricious power.

  The body was immediately wracked by violent convulsions, the thick trunks of its legs kicking at the frame and setting it jangling again – so much so that young Seziermesser looked up at it in alarm. The great arms tensed and thrashed against the manacles holding the altered body to the framework. The face contorted, giving rise to all manner of grotesque grimaces, teeth clenching, jaw twisting from side to side, eyelids flicking open one moment only to be squeezed tight shut the next.

  But then it was always like this. A birth was never an easy thing.

  “Enough!” Folter shouted, worried that the newborn might burst its staples or stitches if it kept thrashing in such a violent manner.

  Seziermesser threw the levers, breaking the connection between the capacitors and the frame. The body twitched once more, an expression of primal pain on its face, and then it sagged within its bonds and was still.

  As the noise of the machines died, Folter and his assistant waited with bated breath. This was always the worst part, waiting to see if the galvanic process had been a success.

  And then his creation’s chest heaved and it took its first ragged breath.

  “It’s alive!” Folter cried with something like paternal pride, as the monster’s eyes flickered open, and regarded him with blank incomprehension.

  He turned to Seziermesser.

  “Bring it down,” he instructed his subordinate, “and prepare it for imprinting.”

  He looked again at the monstrous thing hanging from the frame and felt pride swell within him.

  It didn’t matter how many times he brought a new life into the world; every single one was special, every one unique. Every one attested to the legacy of the primogenitor of them all, the great man himself, the legend that was Viktor Frankenstein.

  They were all Frankenstein’s children.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SIX

  Tabula Rasa

  “DON’T DELAY, NOW! Be quick about it,” Folter called after Seziermesser.

  “Yes, doctor. At once,” the young man called back, making a curious bowing motion as he backed towards the archway leading to the supply room.

  Folter turned back to the bank of machinery beside him…

  …and came face to face with a porcelain-skinned beauty, with high, sculptured cheekbones, a delicate mouth and lips full and red. He gave a faint gasp of surprise. For someone who could find beauty in something as grotesque as the thing still bound to the frame behind him, Doktor Folter found the woman’s natural beauty unnerving.

  The second thing he noticed about her was the congealed bloody hole in the breast of the tunic she was wearing.

  She smiled at him and the last things he noticed about her were the gleaming points of her unnaturally elongated canines.

  Without saying a word she grabbed Folter by the lapels – even though he loomed over her like some silver screen Nosferatu – and with one fluid action hurled him bodily between the crackling spires of the still active galvanic electrodes.

  There was a crack as loud as a thunderclap, and an explosion of light, and the laboratory was bathed in flickering incandescence.

  Folter hit the floor still twitching, a residue of discharging energy wreathing his body, the cooked flesh of his face and heat-fused lips smoking gently.

  On the other side of the archway, Albrecht Seziermesser crouched, nearly paralysed by fear, praying that he would be able to keep quiet and not give himself away.

  “PRISONER ZERO?”

  Hearing the honeyed, accented voice, Ulysses opened his eyes, as gentle hands shook him awake.

  “Hm?” he murmured, focusing on the vision of loveliness appearing in front of him.

  Was he dead? Was this vision of crystallised beauty an angel, come to carry him over into the next world? Had he in fact died back there in the psychotic surgeon’s operating theatre?

  “Are you Prisoner Zero?” the angel asked him again.

  “Am I?” he slurred, struggling to get his left eye to focus properly. But as he did so, bewilderment creased his face. “Katarina?”

  “You know who I am, then?” she said as she set to work unstrapping him from the gurney.

  “It is you,” he mumbled. “My, but this is turning out to be a day for renewing old acquaintances. We have to stop meeting like this,” he rambled on as she laid his left arm across her shoulders and hauled him into a sitting position, as easily as she would a tailor’s mannequin.

  “Come on,” she said – and Ulysses only realised then that she was in fact speaking English, despite her strong Eastern European accent – “we have to get you out of here.”

  Ulysses staggered willingly to his feet, his legs promptly giving way beneath him. But his saviour was there with a steadying arm around his waist, practically holding him upright.

  “Now why would you want to do that?” he murmured, still drunk from the shocking revelation of what had been done to him.

  “Because whatever it is you know is of paramount importance.”

  “But I don’t know anything!” Ulysses protested, immediately on the defensive, as his blonde-haired rescuer led him towards the door out of the insane laboratory, and ultimately to freedom.

  “You better had,” she chastised him with a smile, “otherwise I’ve ruined a perfectly good jacket for nothing.”

  Ulysses studied her fine porcelain features by the epileptic light of the shorting electrodes.

  “It is you, isn’t it?” he said. “Katarina Kharkova. Agent K?”

  “A pleasure to meet you,” she replied. “And you are?”

  Ulysses opened his mouth to answer her and then stopped himself just in time, as his mind cleared at last. Here he was in 1943, along with Katarina Kharkova, whom he had first met back in 1998. But in 1943, she hadn’t met him yet. The consequences of that, he decided, he could deal with another time.

  “You said it. Prisoner Zero,” he said chirpily, trying to pass the moniker off as if it were nothing of importance.

  The echo of a siren sounded from somewhere else within the complex, making the woman start.

  “Rasputin’s beard! I had hoped it would take them longer to realise what was going on...”

  “What is going on?” Ulysses asked her.

  Shifting his weight, she said, “Explanations will have to wait. Right now I have to get you out of here.”

  And with that, they left behind the lab, the smouldering corpse of Doktor Folter, the thing bound to the rusted metal frame, and the hidden, panic-stricken Seziermesser.

  THE NEWBORN STARED vacantly into space through mismatched eyes, gasping for breath after the unexpected exertion of its re-birth.

  And then, slowly, its eyes came into focus, as did its thoughts.

  To begin with they were a soupy miasma, a syrupy mess of congealed reminiscences and degrading memories. But as it hung there from the frame, this amorphous cloud of recollection condensed into remembrances of taste and touch, of sights and smells and sounds that were so distinct as to be almost tangible.

  It could recall a time before this one, before now, memories of another life lived, hopes and fears, betrayals and bonds of trust and friendship broken… loves found and lost… a wife, a child… people and places… laughter… desire… desperation… and a name.

  There was a sudden scraping sound and the newborn focused on the darkened archway on the other side of the laboratory. Someone was
coming, crawling back into the laboratory like a beaten cur.

  SEZIERMESSER LOOKED UP at the four-armed abomination, mouth agape, still in a state of shock after the way the SS officer had gained entry unannounced and proceeded to murder Doktor Folter.

  “Dee…” the brute beast still shackled to the tarnished steel frame mumbled.

  Seziermesser tensed. Had he really heard the thing speak? Or had it merely been an unintelligible grunt, like the incomprehensible gobbledygook mewling of an infant?

  That must be it, he tried to convince himself. When the creatures were awoken their minds were akin to those of newborn babes, hence their designation when in that unimprinted state. It was only the process of imprinting that gave them any wits at all. Until then, their minds were a blank slate, a tabula rasa, waiting to be written upon by the Enigma machines. Pure chance – that must be it.

  His master was dead – murdered – and Prisoner Zero had escaped, aided by the traitorous SS officer, or imposter, or whatever the witch was in truth. It was his duty to report the incident to the facility commandant Colonel Kahler, but not before he had completed what Folter had started in creating the super-soldier. After all, with a mad killer loose in the castle, what better bodyguard could there be than a four-armed Promethean with the strength of ten men?

  The most basic imprinting was all that was necessary and would not take longer than thirty or forty minutes – an hour at most – and then he would show the Colonel that he, Albrecht Seziermesser, Doktor Folter’s protégé, was the great man’s natural successor. It would then be but a small matter to convince Kahler of his suitability to take command of the Frankenstein Corps’ scientific division. He just needed to get the imprinting process under way and then report the incident before anybody else could tell him otherwise.

  Ducking back into the storage chamber, Seziermesser returned with a trolley bearing a pair of goggles, attached to a metal frame atop a portable transfer unit. All he had to do was link the transmission lenses to the lab’s Enigma engine, place them over the newborn’s eyes and initialise imprinting.

  “Dee,” the creature said again.

  Seziermesser froze. That was twice now. Could it really be a coincidence? They said lightning never struck in the same place twice, but the work carried out within the walls of Castle Frankenstein, by those men inspired by the work of the originator of their science, had already proved that wasn’t the case. So could it really be a coincidence?

  Despite knowing for a fact that the newborns retained no memories of their previous existence – or existences, in some cases – Seziermesser couldn’t shake the feeling that the monster’s mumblings were more than some freakish fluke. He knew it was the nature of the human brain to look for patterns in things and make connections where, in reality, there were none – like seeing shapes in clouds, or faces of Christ in the bark of a tree – but in this case, his scientific instinct told him that it was something more than mere random happenstance.

  He regarded the purple-skinned brute with the appraising stare of a scientist.

  “Dee...” it said again, and then, “Diet… Dieter.”

  Seziermesser could not suppress his growing astonishment any longer. The creature had quite clearly been struggling to vocalize a name. “Dieter?” he repeated, hoping against hope that this wasn’t merely some glitch of the galvanic process the body had just undergone.

  “Dieter,” the thing said again, more clearly still.

  THE MONSTER STARED down at the man in the blood-splattered surgical robe. The doctor was shivering, not with fear, but with excitement.

  That was it – Dieter. It remembered now.

  Dieter; that was who it had once been in what now seemed like a brief period lost in the never-ending mists of time. In another life, lived before this one, it had been called Dieter – Dieter von Stauffenberg.

  “Get me down,” the newborn gurgled, its voice thick with coagulated blood and saliva. “And find me some clothes.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Two Minutes to Midnight

  THEY DIDN’T STOP to rest until they were two miles from the entrance to the forgotten escape tunnel, taking shelter at last among the neglected tombs and tumbled headstones of a ruined graveyard that lay deep within the forest east of the castle. It seemed to Ulysses somehow appropriate.

  Blaring klaxon-cries ringing from the walls of the castle, they had made their way deeper into the dungeons, going Ulysses knew not where, until they came upon the loose flagstone in a web-strewn corridor and the steps that lay beneath it.

  The adrenalin rush of their escape had given Ulysses the strength he had needed to match the vigour of his rescuer. But now that they were well clear of the castle, he was glad of the opportunity to rest and succumb to the come-down that inevitably followed, sitting with his back to a crumbling crypt.

  He felt cold as the sweat evaporated from his goose-pimpling skin, and pulled his prison fatigues about himself.

  And then, of course, there was the eye-patch – or rather the combination of bandage, wadding and gauze covering his gouged eye socket.

  Agent K turned her eyes from the star spattered sky above to her shivering charge.

  “Here,” she said, slipping off her jacket, “put this on.”

  “But won’t you be cold?” Ulysses asked, taking the proffered jacket and putting it on nonetheless.

  “I don’t feel the cold,” she replied.

  Rubbing at his arms in an attempt to bring some warmth back into his body, Ulysses stared intently at his saviour with his one remaining eye. It still felt strange to view the world in this slightly off-centre way. He kept feeling like someone was going to jump out at him from his left. He realised he was over-compensating by turning his head slightly to the right to give himself – what he considered to be at least – a more balanced view of the woman.

  She looked no different to the last time he had seen her, except that she was keeping her hair in a slightly different style, and she hadn’t just had her throat torn out by a raging lycanthrope.

  And yet he knew that she was more than fifty years younger than the last time he had met her and fought alongside her, and she had yet to meet him.

  Looking at her now, he found himself thinking of Emilia again. He had thought about her a very great deal in the weeks since he had been taken captive by the Nazis and taken to Castle Frankenstein. He’d thought about how he’d been forced to leave her behind. The last he’d seen of her and her father was the two of them running from the fracturing dome of the moon base, being led to safety by someone who had seemed strangely familiar and yet whose face, seen only in shadow, Ulysses still could not place.

  And he had thought a lot about Nimrod too, his ever loyal manservant, faithful even unto death, and whose fate, even now, he was uncertain of. As he had stepped into the whirling sphere of light and been transported across time and space to war-time Germany, he had promised the old boy he’d come back for him. There had been many occasions during the last few weeks when he had wondered whether he would ever be able to make good that promise. But at this moment, shivering in the dark of a derelict cemetery, it actually seemed a real – if faint – possibility. He just didn’t know how he was going to do it yet.

  He’d pondered the idea for hours on end in the silence and isolation of his prison cell, but the only recourse he had been able to think of – other than building himself another time ship in which he could travel back to the future, which didn’t seem likely somehow – was to write a letter to his lawyers with instructions that they hire someone, at a future date, to save his friends at the crucial moment. After all, now that he was trapped in the past, who was to say that it hadn’t been that very man – who he would one day have instructed by his lawyers – that Ulysses had witnessed come to their aid at the eleventh hour? Putting those instructions in place now would simply close the loop and make the future match what he had already witnessed.

  “So,” she said, feeling h
is eye upon her, “tell me; what is it that you know, that the Nazis would interrogate you for so long?”

  He looked at her and gave a heartfelt sigh.

  “Come on, you can trust me.”

  “Yes,” he said, purposely turning his gaze from hers, to prevent her from mesmerising him, as she had once before, “I know.” He looked to the ground and the carpet of moss covering the broken ground of the graveyard. “But the truth is I don’t know anything – at least nothing that they didn’t know already.”

  “Then why didn’t they hand you over to the Frankenstein Corps sooner?”

  “Dashwood only interrogated me for so long because of his own paranoia. His mind’s completely gone now. He’s utterly mad, but he seems to have got the Nazis here on side.”

  “Tell me then. What is it you know and the Colonel Kahler knows that Mother Russia and her allies don’t?”

  Ulysses gave another weary sigh. Where only a moment before had been a renewed sense of hope, now overwhelming despair came crashing back in. For how could the two of them – a half-dead vampire and a half-blind prisoner of war – stop the Nazis from putting Dashwood’s plan into operation?

  “Project Icarus was what they called it,” Ulysses said, vacantly staring into the middle distance. “Although Armageddon or Doomsday would all do just as well.”

  Katarina looked at him, her face an inscrutable mask. Her manner implied that she had heard of, or even been party to, plenty of apocalyptic scenarios in the past. For all he knew, she might well have already lived through the First Great European War and the Crimean, maybe even going back as far as the Black Death that ravaged Europe during the fourteenth century.

  “So, what is this Doomsday weapon?” she asked.

  “Fire from heaven,” Ulysses said. “That’s pretty much it, really. The last time I ran into Dashwood he was calling it the Icarus Cannon.”