Anno Frankenstein

by Jonathan Green

  “The last time?”

  “It’s a photonic accelerator,” Ulysses went on, more like his old, verbose self now. “It harnesses the power of the sun itself, turning it into a beam of super-heated energy that will vaporise organic matter in an instant and even melt through rock, given time. And it is now in the possession of the Führer’s forces.”

  Katarina continued to regard him with the same expressionless stare. “And where did this Icarus Cannon come from?”

  “Ah, now that’s where this all gets a little tricky,” Ulysses said, grimacing as if in embarrassment or actual discomfort.

  “How so?”

  “I really don’t know how to put this,” Ulysses faltered.

  “Is it Magna Britannian technology?” she pressed, totally uncompromising.

  “No,” Ulysses answered, possibly just a little too hastily. He felt himself blush and then felt ridiculous for doing so. “I mean, sort of… but no.” He stopped, took a deep breath, and tried again. “That’s not the problem. The problem is the technology shouldn’t even exist in this day and age.”

  “What do you mean?” Katarina asked him. He could feel her aquamarine stare boring into him.

  “I mean it’s from the future.”

  At least that provoked a reaction, an eyebrow arching in unspoken disbelief.

  “And how do you know this?” she asked. He was glad she wasn’t dismissing the idea out of hand. But then, being a vampire herself, she should be open to ideas that might sound far-fetched to the rational mind.

  Ulysses met her gaze at long last. “Because I’m from the future too.”

  “I see.”

  “That’s what I know. You did ask.”

  Katarina said nothing.

  “But whether you believe me or not, I assure you that Germany now has all it needs to construct its own Icarus Cannon, a weapon capable of wiping out whole cities!”

  Ulysses sighed.

  “Whichever way you look at it,” he said, glancing at the ghostly lantern of the moon high above, “the clocks are set at two minutes to midnight. Doomsday is coming, and things aren’t looking too good for the Allies.”

  “Very well,” Katarina said, sitting up against a shattered memorial, “assuming that you are telling the truth, we must get you to Allied Command as quickly as possible.”

  “There’s no time!” Ulysses protested. “Any delay at this stage could cost us the war and re-write the course of history altogether. No, something has to be done now!”

  “Then what would you have us do?”

  Ulysses took a deep breath. “You’re not going to like it,” he warned her.

  “Try me.”

  “We have to go back to Castle Frankenstein. We have to find Daniel Dashwood and stop him. We kill him and then raze the whole place to the ground.”

  “Then what? Sow the ground with salt?” Katarina scoffed.

  “I said that you wouldn’t like it.”

  “We are an army of two,” the vampire pointed out. “A man tortured to within an inch of losing his sanity and a vampire who’s been staked once already since this – how do you say? – debacle began.”

  Ulysses made a point of casting his gaze around the broken tombs and ivy-clad crypts. “I don’t see anyone else here who could help us, do you?”

  “So when do you suggest we embark upon this suicide mission?”

  Ulysses stared at her intently. “Right now.”

  “But of course.”

  Katarina gave an exasperated grunt and fixed Ulysses with her penetrating glare.

  “You’re serious about this, aren’t you?” she said.

  “Deadly,” he replied.

  Katarina got to her feet and started checking the selections of firearms and throwing knives pocketed within the bandolier she had been hiding under her stolen SS uniform.

  “We won’t be able to get back in the same way we got out. I think it likely they will have discovered our escape route by now.”

  “Oh yes,” another feminine voice growled from behind them.

  The two of them whirled to face the voice. Standing beside the broken boundary wall of the cemetery was another woman clad in the funerary black uniform of an officer of the Schutzstaffel.

  The woman took a step forward into the moonlight and smiled, the silvery luminescence picking out an elongated canine as her lip curled back.

  “You can be sure of that,” said Major Isla von Haupstein.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Things That Go

  Bump in the Night

  “I WONDERED HOW long it would be before I had the misfortune to run into you again,” Katarina said, in German.

  “And I you,” Teufel’s adjutant snarled.

  Katarina tensed, unconsciously forming her hands into clawing talons. “How did you know?”

  “That you were still alive?” the other woman purred, pulling her jacket open with a flourish and shaking it free of her shoulders, the muscles of her arms and shoulders rippling as she did so. “The corpse stink of you is hard to miss.”

  “So you followed us,” Katarina said, hands poised over her weapons.

  “Yes, to see if the prisoner revealed anything more to you than we already knew.”

  “Which he didn’t.”

  The other smiled. “Disappointingly, no.”

  “So now what? You intend to talk us to death?” Katarina challenged. “Because I don’t believe for a moment that you plan on taking us prisoner again.” Her hands moved slowly towards the bandolier belt slung across her chest.

  “Oh, come now,” von Haupstein said. “We’re not going to resort to such primitive tools, are we?” She sounded almost disappointed. “Not when we have the opportunity to really test ourselves?”

  “Katarina, don’t be taken in by her,” Ulysses warned, unconsciously speaking in the same language.

  Von Haupstein snapped her head round.

  “Wait your turn!” she snapped, glaring at Ulysses as she kicked off her boots. “I’ll get to you after I’ve killed this bitch.”

  Ulysses clambered awkwardly to his feet, his every movement causing him pain. The eye-socket behind the thick bandage throbbed viciously.

  “So,” von Haupstein said, turning back to Katarina. “Are you going to do this or what?”

  “Why not?” the vampire replied, pulling the bandolier over her head.

  “Katarina, don’t be swayed by her,” Ulysses protested, as his rescuer cast her weapons belt aside. “You’re injured. Now isn’t the time to worry about your pride.”

  Katarina narrowed her eyes, settling into a fighting stance. “One on one, just you and me, to the death.”

  “Yes. Yours,” von Haupstein snarled, springing up onto a tilting headstone and then, barely hesitating for a moment, leaping at the vampire.

  Ulysses gave a cry of alarm as, flinging herself through the air, arms outstretched in front of her, von Haupstein began to metamorphose.

  Hands became savage claws, bloody talons bursting from the ends of her fingers. Thick hair sprouted from every inch of her exposed skin and even her spine arched and twisted as she changed shape. Gone was her luxurious mane of hair, replaced by a thick mane of coal-black fur. Her ears narrowed to arrow-tip points, her sinisterly beautiful face elongating, a muzzle distorting her features.

  Katarina met the snarling, spitting lycanthrope’s attack with claws raised. The momentum of the monster’s attack knocked her off her feet.

  The two of them went tumbling backwards through swathes of fallen leaves, the vampire rolling onto her back, using the force of the werewolf’s attack to bowl the creature over her head, planting both feet in the creature’s midriff and kicking upwards as she did so.

  All Ulysses could do was watch – helpless as he was, barely able to stand – as the two unnatural things battled each other.

  The lupine thing went flying through the air, less gracefully than before, and into the side of another crumbling tomb.


  There was a resounding clang as the wolf hit the railings surrounding the crypt, one of the rust-worn barriers giving way, the spear-tipped poles clattering to the ground amidst the growths of brambles and thistles.

  But the monster was on its feet again in a moment, lips curled back, fangs bared and already bloody from its cruel transformation.

  Katarina launched herself off the ground and impossibly high into the cold night air as the SS werewolf pounced again.

  It snarled in rage as its prey escaped it a second time, swiping upwards with a savage claw before it came to ground again, catching the vampire by an ankle and sending her spinning away through the air to land atop another broken crypt.

  On the ground now and on all fours, the werewolf briefly turned its lupine head towards Ulysses, growling like a mastiff, long strings of bloody saliva drooling from its jaws. Then – every muscle and sinew in its body tensing – it launched itself, bounding across the cemetery.

  Atop the tomb, Katarina prepared to meet the animal’s charge.

  Snarling like a hyena, the wolf sprang to the top of the tomb, but once again the vampire was ready for it. She twisted her body out of the way with preternatural speed, grabbing hold of great tufts of the creature’s mane.

  The two of them went sailing off the top of the crypt and crashed to earth on the other side. Ulysses heard a distinct snap that made him wince and which was followed by an animal howl of pain.

  Katarina Kharkova suddenly came flying back over the top of the tomb, arms flailing, trying to twist in mid-air.

  Before she even touched the ground, the wolf was springing back over the tomb after her, eyes aflame, a snarl of savage rage in its throat.

  The beast – all muscle, sinew, teeth and rage – landed on top of Katarina as she landed on her back, its paws pinning her to the ground. She wrestled her arms free of the beast’s hold, and caught its snapping muzzle in her hands just in time to prevent the werewolf from ripping out her throat.

  We’ve been here before, Ulysses thought. Or at least we will be, if she ever survives this encounter.

  In the stark monochrome moonlight, Ulysses saw the teeth marks in the wolf’s warped shoulder and the ragged flap of torn flesh, the creature’s blood glistening nearly black.

  The wolf yelped again as Katarina raked her fingernails across the soft flesh of its muzzle.

  Snarling in rage and pain, the wolf arched its back, pulling its head free of the vampire’s grasp, and lunged again, trapping Katarina’s shoulder in its vice-like jaws.

  Katarina screamed in pain. Ulysses jumped at the sound, feeling his own abused nerve-endings flare in sympathetic, half-remembered agony. Tortured or not, he could not stand by and let the wolf go unchallenged any longer.

  He stumbled past the grappling monsters to the fallen fence and picked up one of the railings, staggered back across the cemetery, holding his improvised spear in two hands, and thrust it into the werewolf.

  The beast howled again, throwing itself from the mauled vampire like a scalded cat. The railing spike slipped from its body even as it was wrenched from Ulysses’ hands.

  As Katarina lay writhing on the ground in agony, the werewolf turned its burning gaze on Ulysses. Utterly defenceless now, and not knowing what else to do, he began to back away as the beast stalked towards him. He shot anxious glances to either side of him, looking for anything that he could use as a weapon, but could see nothing other than rocks or broken masonry.

  A skull, lying amidst the mouldering earth and bones that had tumbled from another shattered tomb, crumbled under a heavy paw.

  Eyes on the wolf, he thought he saw a shadow moving through the darkness towards him. But then his attention was fully back on the beast as, a guttural growl building in its chest and its body tensing, it prepared for the kill. And Ulysses knew that nothing could save him now.

  Hatred burning in its near-human eyes, the wolf sprang, muscles uncoiling like wound watch springs, a mass of muscle and rage launching itself towards him.

  A huge hand emerged from the shadows between two tombs, snatching the leaping wolf out of the air by the scruff of its neck.

  The changed von Haupstein snapping and writhing within its unrelenting grasp, a thing that could only be described as a monster stepped out of the darkness and into the moonlight.

  It was at least eight feet tall, Ulysses judged, and immensely broad. Its face was a brutal mess of old scar tissue, and in the moonlight Ulysses took in the sallow complexion of its waxy skin and its misshapen nose. The bulk of its body was hidden beneath the long, battered travelling coat it was wearing.

  Ulysses and Katarina both stared at the giant, paralysed by shock. Neither of them moved.

  The creature looked down at the wolf snarling and twisting within its grasp, as if having forgotten that it was there. Clamping the lycanthrope’s snapping jaws shut with one hand and taking it by the shoulders with the other, it gave one sharp, brutal twist.

  “Bad dog,” it said.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-NINE

  Adam

  THE MONSTER CASUALLY let the limp body of Isla von Haupstein drop to the ground.

  Both Ulysses and Katarina remained where they were, staring up at the brute, not daring to move lest they draw the giant’s attention onto themselves.

  The monster slowly looked from the paralysed Ulysses, then to the prone Katarina, and back to Ulysses.

  “I could not help but overhear your conversation,” the giant rumbled, speaking English with a strong Austrian-German accent. “And I will help you.”

  Ulysses stared at the creature in shock and awe, taken aback not only by the fact that the brute was articulate, but that it hadn’t tried to kill Katarina and him as well.

  “Help us?” he spluttered, even the pain of his missing eye forgotten for a moment.

  “Yes. I will help you.” The creature said, reiterating its point. “For no one does anything from a single motive.”

  Ulysses stared at the brute, utterly dumbfounded. Had it just quoted Coleridge?

  “You want to enter Castle Frankenstein, do you not, with the intention of razing it to the ground?”

  “Yes. That’s right,” Ulysses murmured.

  “Then what is the point in sitting in darkness here, hatching vain empires, when we should let not England forget her precedence of teaching nations how to live?”

  “Paradise Lost,” Ulysses mumbled, utterly astonished. The monster spoke like a poet philosopher, but in the manner of a punch-drunk Bavarian prize-fighter.

  The creature smiled, displaying too many teeth that appeared strikingly white in the silvery moonlight. “You know your Milton.”

  Here was a creature that could quote Milton and Coleridge, and wring a werewolf’s neck without a second thought. It was something truly unique. And yet Ulysses had seen its kind before.

  Ulysses glanced back at the body then. It had lost some of its wolfishness and now resembled a near-human von Haupstein, although her face retained a certain snout-like quality, elongated fangs, and the sort of facial hair that many a member of the Hirsute Gentleman’s Club would have died for.

  He turned back to the brute that had killed her then and found himself studying the crazed contour-lines of scars that traced the lumpen topography of the monster’s face – the yellow, near-translucent skin, the watery eyes, the lank hair.

  “You are, and please excuse me for stating the obvious,” Ulysses began, “but you’re a product of the Frankenstein programme, or Project Prometheus, or whatever it’s called, aren’t you?”

  “No, I am not,” the creature said, and Ulysses heard an undercurrent of anger in the monster’s voice for the first time.

  Ulysses continued to stare at the creature in bemused fascination. “Then, if you don’t mind me asking –”

  “What are you?” Katarina butted in, coming to the point.

  She was sitting up now, applying pressure to the bite on her shoulder. Three savage slashes across her belly glisten
ed, bright crimson against her alabaster skin.

  The creature looked at her from beneath a beetling brow with darkly hooded eyes.

  “I was the first,” it said simply.

  “The first?” Ulysses couldn’t help but interject.

  “The original, if you prefer. I am Viktor Frankenstein’s son, his original creation.”

  Ulysses gasped. “I read Captain Walton’s account of your story,” he gabbled, “or rather Frankenstein’s story, as dictated to him by Viktor Frankenstein himself, I suppose. Shelley’s adaptation.”

  The monster tutted. “I have read it too. Far too melodramatic for my liking; and I could not understand why she felt the need to transplant Castle Frankenstein from Germany to Switzerland. But the bare bones of the story are there.”

  Glancing behind it first, the monster sat down on top of a tumbled tombstone, as if in an effort to make itself comfortable.

  “Although, if I remember rightly, that version of events concluded with you going to your death in the Arctic Circle,” Ulysses said, taking a seat on a hummock of grass.

  “Ah yes,” the creature said, staring into the night beyond the bounds of the cemetery. “So it did.”

  “So, what happened?” Ulysses pressed, his curiosity piqued.

  “You really want to know?”

  “Yes!” Ulysses said, suddenly feeling more alive than he had since coming to, under Castle Frankenstein. A sparkling glint lit his remaining eye and a delighted smile curled his lips.

  “Then I shall share my story with you.”

  The monster paused and cleared its throat.

  “Shelley is right in that I was overwhelmed by grief on discovering my father dead aboard Walton’s ice-bound ship. Our cat-and-mouse adventure – that had lasted so many years and taken us all the way from central Europe to the Orkney Islands – was over and the only family I had ever known was gone. And no matter whose fault it might have been to begin with, at the end I had driven my own father to his death in his pursuit of me.”