Anno Frankenstein

by Jonathan Green

  Where was he planning on going this time, Ulysses wondered? Was it further back into the past to try to put right what had happened here? Did he intend to travel only to somewhere else in 1943 to escape the imminent destruction of Schloss Adlerhorst? Or was he heading back to the future they’d left, eighteen months or so from the end of the twentieth century?

  Ulysses doubted Dashwood could hear his footsteps over the droning whine of the device and the seismic rumbling of the mountain top shaking itself apart.

  And besides, he was talking to himself; more accurately, gauging from his tone, berating himself.

  A voice rang out over the noise, loud and clear. “Coordinates set. Launching in one minute.”

  Ulysses watched as, at the top of the dais, Daniel Dashwood, his features hidden behind his ion mask, made an adjustment to one of the controls built into the thick vulcanised rubber glove he was now wearing and prepared to step into the temporal vortex.

  Flexing his back and straightening his body, focusing his mind on dispelling the numbness that was threatening to leech the last of his strength from him, Ulysses concentrated on the pulsing glow of the Sphere.

  Dashwood didn’t know anything about his approach until Ulysses was right behind him.

  Abruptly, Dashwood spun round.

  “Thirty seconds,” the dulcet tones of the Enigma engine intoned, as it commenced the final countdown.

  Ulysses made out the Enigma engine, standing like a monolith of black stone on the other side of the platform, behind the hurtling gyroscopic bands of the Sphere.

  There was quite literally no time to lose. Ulysses threw himself bodily at the villain, all his anger suddenly rising like an eruption within him. His fury gave him the strength he needed, blotting out the throbbing ache of the gunshot wound.

  He charged Dashwood into the energy from the Sphere, and the two of them were immediately assailed by unfathomable forces. Tendrils of light, like fingers of mist, whirled about them, and they were buffeted by hurricane winds.

  “You!” Dashwood hissed from behind the mask as Ulysses landed on top of him, coming nose to nose.

  “Yes, me,” Ulysses snarled, kneeling across Dashwood’s body and pulling him up by the front of his robe, the cloth bunched in his hands.

  “I thought you were dead.” Dashwood shouted, clawing at Ulysses’ hands with ragged fingernails. “Twice.”

  “You thought wrong,” Ulysses replied.

  Letting go with his right hand, he pulled the ion mask from Dashwood’s face and cast it aside.

  It was like looking at an anatomist’s model of a human head, made from layers of translucent material. There was Dashwood’s arrogantly handsome face, and beneath that, layers of moving muscle, a network of blood vessels and capillaries. He could see the man’s eyeballs quite clearly, and the thread of the optic nerve behind each one. Behind transparent lips he could see the man’s teeth and jaws. He even fancied he could see right down into the skull. This was the price he had paid, for tampering with Alexander Oddfellow’s creation for his own ends.

  Forming his hand into a fist, he dealt Dashwood a resounding blow, and winced. The transparent flesh felt as solid as that of any other man.

  “Twenty seconds,” the Enigma engine tolled.

  The pronouncement was accompanied by a crack like a thunderclap from the roof of the chamber.

  Ulysses froze, then looked up, and saw the thin black fissure opening above him, crazing like cracking ice.

  It was all the distraction Dashwood needed.

  His return punch caught Ulysses in the stomach, putting his diaphragm into spasm and driving the air from his lungs.

  Ulysses doubled up. Dashwood grabbed hold of him with both hands, and, with startling strength, threw him off. Ulysses landed on the other side of the platform, outside of the Sphere’s field.

  “Fifteen seconds,” the Enigma engine’s voice echoed from the walls of the collapsing crypt.

  Leaving Ulysses curled up in agony – wracked with pain from his shoulder wound as much as the punch to the stomach – Dashwood scrambled into the cradle at the heart of the device.

  “Come on! Come on!” he hissed through clenched teeth, his whole body trembling as he waited for the machine to launch him through the hole in time and space.

  There was another apocalyptic crash and then a moment of eerie silence, followed only a few seconds later by the thunderous crash of a piece of masonry hitting the dais not five feet from Ulysses.

  “Ten seconds.”

  The threat of being crushed by another cave-in spurring him on, drawing on every last scrap of strength he had, Ulysses forced himself to his feet one last time and turned towards the whirling Sphere. Flashes of lightning were bursting from it now, the figure of Dashwood at the heart of the machine nothing more than a blurred shadow.

  “Five seconds.”

  Ulysses leapt, but not at Dashwood this time. Instead he grabbed hold of one of the static rings that generated the energy lattice, crying out as his acrobatics tore at his injured shoulder. But he held on.

  “Four.”

  His own momentum carrying him forwards, he brought his knees up to his chest and kicked out at Dashwood.

  The man gave an alarmed shout as Ulysses planted both feet firmly in the middle of his chest, the force of the blow sending him tumbling backwards out of the machine.

  “Three.”

  His shoulder’s own scream of pain silencing him abruptly, Ulysses let go.

  He landed in the cradle himself, almost falling back out the other side. As he lay sprawled, he felt Dashwood’s hand, encased in rubber, grab hold of his own and hang on.

  Ulysses stared down through the lattice of the cradle as the Nazi’s death’s-head leer looked up. They locked eyes with each other, separated by the rippling distortion of the temporal field between them.

  The glove’s wrist-mounted controls thumped against one of the supporting rings of the Sphere.

  “Course change confirmed.”

  “One.”

  “Launch.”

  The body blow Dashwood had dealt him was as nothing compared to the forces that assailed Ulysses now as every atom of his being was blasted into the black oblivion of null space.

  ULYSSES STARED DOWN at his nemesis in horror. Unprotected from the raw hunger of the temporal winds, Dashwood’s flesh withered as time caught up with him at last.

  WITH A THROATY roar, the snow plough smashed open the gates of the castle barbican, clearing the ground as it did so, to land ten yards further on.

  Slamming the gear stick home, Jinx put her foot to the floor and the plough tore away along the treacherous mountain road, between the frozen drifts on either side, as behind them the shattered ruins of Schloss Adlerhorst were consumed by the billowing cloud of black dust and white snow thrown up by its own cataclysmic destruction.

  Deep down in the dungeon crypt, the hurtling Sphere exploded for only the briefest moment as it was crushed as flat as plate steel by a million tonnes of collapsing castle.

  The whirling sphere of unreality winked out a moment later as the space-time anomaly imploded silently.

  CHAPTER

  FORTY-THREE

  Best Served Cold

  DAWN BROKE OVER the ruins of Castle Frankenstein for the second time since its fall, sunlight saturating the blackened piles of rubble and still-smouldering timbers with its rich, amber glow.

  Twenty-four hours had passed since the fortress, which had looked over the town of Darmstadt for seven hundred years, surviving flood, fire, famine and raids by barbarian warlords, had finally been razed to the ground in a matter of minutes.

  Not one tower or wall remained standing. The only parts of the castle to have survived the blitzkrieg and the subsequent firestorm were, ironically, the very dungeons in which the remade Prometheans had languished until the First had brought about their release.

  The bodies of the super-soldiers – themselves pieced together from parts of the dead – lay scattered
throughout the ruins, some buried under tonnes of shattered masonry, some scattered, limb by severed limb, across riven courtyards, some nothing more than crisped skeletons fused to their metal components by the heat of the flames that had raged through the complex in the wake of the Iron Eagle’s parting gift.

  And between the broken bodies of the Nazis’ living weapons were strewn the bodies of mortal men: soldiers, who had paid the ultimate price for their loyalty; scientists and surgeon-doctors who had died in the pursuit of their own sick dreams; engineers who, in their haste to prove their ingenuity, had forgotten that just because something could be done, did not mean that it should be done.

  Motes of dust and glowing embers, raised by the persistent zephyrs now wending their way through the castle’s carcass, spun and twirled.

  The chill air was alive with sound: the plink of cooling stones; the hiss of timbers giving up their moisture; the background murmur of smouldering fires; the death-knell croaking of carrion crows; the keening of the wind like the moans of the dying.

  And footsteps.

  In the shadows of what was left of a broken stone archway, a figure appeared, no more than a stumbling shadow itself, one hand to its head, the other against the wall for support.

  Slowly, almost reluctantly, Dr Albrecht Seziermesser – bruised and bloodied, his thin face streaked with cuts and contusions – emerged cringing at the touch of the sun’s rosy fingers.

  He gazed about him at the rubble-strewn courtyard that was now all that remained of the home of the Frankenstein Corps, blinking in bewilderment.

  He stumbled on amidst the devastation, taking in the violated bodies already being picked at by the crows. One black bird stared at him, its head cocked to one side. Then, with one stab of its beak, it plucked an eyeball from the head on which it was perched and gulped it down.

  Seziermesser watched as the bird hopped from the eyeless skull to the mound of rubble beside it where the scuffed tips of yellowed fingers poked like worms. The crow pecked at one. The fingers wriggled in response, looking like fat grubs now.

  He stopped, fascinated, as the heap of broken stones shifted. Small stones skittered from the top of the mound, tumbling all the way to the bottom. The heap shifted again, accompanied by a clattering rumble. Seziermesser took a cautious step backwards.

  There was a gravelly rattle as the fingers withdrew into the rubble. Head bobbing in indefatigable curiosity, the crow wisely hopped back a couple of feet as well.

  With a kind of seismic shudder, a huge fist punched clear of the top of the mound. Fingers splayed, the hand pushed at the top of the heap of loose stones, sending several tumbling away in its wake.

  Stone dust rising in great clouds around it, a giant emerged from the rubble of Castle Frankenstein, rising again from the burnt-out ruins like a phoenix from the flames of its own destruction.

  Seziermesser stared up into the black pits of the monster’s eyes in dread, his features slack with fear.

  The creature towered over him. It had to be eight feet tall at least. Its parchment yellow skin was torn in several places, but there wasn’t any blood that Seziermesser could see. There wasn’t even any obvious bleeding coming from its left shoulder socket, where its entire arm had been wrenched clean off.

  Much of the flesh of the creature’s head had been twisted and puckered by the conflagration that had raged through the castle immediately following the initial wave of bombs. There were signs that the creature had once had hair but it was gone now, burnt from the monster’s scalp by the intense flames.

  Even discounting the damage the brute had suffered during the razing of Castle Frankenstein, there was something else not quite right about it.

  Seziermesser certainly hadn’t been involved in the remaking of every soldier that had passed through the corpse-factory facility – despite having been Doctor Folter’s protégé – and he wouldn’t have expected to recognise every Promethean put together there by the Frankenstein Corps, but he could see that this one was out of place.

  Beneath its more recently sustained injuries, he could see that the scars criss-crossing its body were too old, knotted and white, with no signs of residual bruising. The skin itself was yellow, and displayed none of the usual discoloration of chemical preservation. And then there was its size. It was massive, an amalgam of all sorts of bits and pieces, but – most notably of all – it did not include any mechanical components in its make-up whatsoever.

  “What are you?” Seziermesser whispered.

  The creature looked at him, its eyes pits of savage darkness. Seziermesser felt as though some raging god had him in its gaze.

  “Not what,” the creature growled through broken teeth, its voice a bass rumble. “Who.”

  Seziermesser gasped and took another startled step back.

  “No! It can’t be!”

  The monster took a step forward, shards of stone crumbling beneath a foot the size of a suitcase.

  “I was the first,” it intoned, “rightful heir to this…” It broke off as it took in the castle ruins with a sweep of its arm.

  Turning its unbearable gaze from the doctor, it scanned the pile of rubble from which it had just emerged, like Lazarus rising from the tomb. Finding what it was looking for, the creature bent down and pulled something from under the broken stones.

  Black and burned as it was, there was no mistaking it.

  It was an arm.

  “You’re the first?” Seziermesser spluttered, unable to help himself. “You’re Frankenstein’s original mons –”

  “My name is Adam,” the creature interrupted. “For I was the first.”

  The creature took in the castle ruins with a glance.

  “This place was my home, but it was stolen from me, first by the Nazis and then by my betrayer.”

  Seziermesser felt an icy serpent of fear twist itself around his spine, chilling him to the core. He would have preferred it if the monster had shouted and raged, screaming its fury to the heavens, or laying about it with anything that came to hand. Anything would have been better than the utter calm it displayed; this chilling, single-minded hate.

  It turned its blisteringly cold stare on Seziermesser once more and the man felt his bowels turn to ice water.

  “You will rebuild me,” it said. “Make me better than I was before. And then I shall have my vengeance.”

  The way the monster spoke, its desire to be avenged wasn’t a hope or an intention; it was a prediction for the future.

  “For, after all, is not revenge a dish best served cold?”

  EPILOGUE

  Back to the Future

  THE IMPENETRABLE DARKNESS suddenly gave way to a brilliant burst of light and Ulysses Quicksilver felt as though his intestines were being unravelled. He decided that this must be what it felt like to be sucked through a spatial-temporal wormhole.

  And then, just as abruptly, he landed flat on his face on what felt like rough floorboards, surrounded by a murky grey twilight. He winced as fresh waves of nausea pulsed through his right shoulder.

  With a hollow clatter something hit the floor beside him.

  He felt uncomfortably hot, but at the same time his skin was clammy. There was the coppery tang of blood on his tongue too.

  The unpleasantly familiar stink of scorched human hair – his own, he assumed – merged with the charcoal smell of roasted timbers.

  His whole body shaking, he pushed himself up onto his hands and knees and then abruptly sprang back onto his heels, pulling off his smouldering jacket – wincing again as his wounded right arm came free.

  He was kneeling at the centre of a perfect circle of blackened floorboards. There was no graduation of burning; just the cracked, charcoal-black planks under him, and beyond the limits of the circle no discernable damage whatsoever.

  The next shocking sight to greet him was Daniel Dashwood’s skeleton. Steam was rising gently from the boiled bones lying to Ulysses’ left, half in and half out of the circle.

  Ulysses starte
d, dropping Dashwood’s hand, which was still encased within the control glove, and put out an arm to stop himself falling backwards onto the floor again.

  His hand came down in something warm and sticky.

  He pulled it back in surprise, his fingers brushing against something hard that shifted at his touch.

  Before he really knew what he was doing, his hand had closed around the object and he was raising it to his face for a closer look, even as he turned to see the handprint he had left in the pool of dark blood creeping out from under the corpse lying on the floor to his right.

  He could not stifle his gasp of surprise. The body was face-down on the floor, but just from the sheer amount of blood oozing away between the floorboards and going by the waxy pallor of what little flesh he could see, the poor wretch was dead – whoever he might have been in life.

  Ulysses looked from the corpse to the room in which he now found himself.

  There was more ceiling than walls, the sloping sides meeting at the apex of the room above him, and it was sparsely furnished. The body was lying beside a filthy, unmade bed that looked like it could have been an antique, had it not been in such an obviously bad state of repair.

  There was a draught blowing in under the door of the mouldering attic room, and a cracked mirror had been hung on the wall opposite. Beneath the mirror stood a rickety table bearing a large cracked porcelain bowl, a mismatched earthenware jug with a chipped rim sitting within it.

  The only other piece of furniture in the room was a small writing desk, positioned beneath a shuttered dormer window. A chair lay on the floor in front of it.

  Ulysses gave in to the waves of exhaustion threatening to overwhelm him, allowing his body to sag. He took a deep breath.

  Where had the Sphere brought him now? Was he back in his own time? Was he still in 1943, but somewhere other than the castle in the mountains? Or was this another place and time altogether?