Mister Creecher

by Chris Priestley

  On one such dull afternoon, Billy found himself once more outside the gates of Montagu House. Frankenstein and Clerval were paying another visit to the British Museum and he, as usual, was in pursuit.

  He paused at the doorway, remembering the scene he had caused the last time he was here. He smiled at the very same attendant who had shooed him out of the building and received a good-natured smile in return. A new suit of clothes and a wash were all that was required to fool these idiots, thought Billy to himself.

  He let Clerval and Frankenstein get well ahead. He did not want to risk Clerval being sharper-eyed than the attendant.

  They took a different route through the building, pausing to look at some stuffed giraffes. Billy had seen a drawing of a giraffe in a book but had never expected them to be so huge. He wished he could see one alive.

  He noticed that Frankenstein seemed absolutely fascinated by a particular exhibit and he waited until he and Clerval had moved on before going to find out what it was.

  Billy was amazed to see a large box, like a coffin, containing the shrivelled remains of a human being. He was even more amazed to read that it was hundreds and hundreds of years old. It was an Egyptian mummy – a preserved body from ancient times.

  How could a body last so long without rotting and getting eaten by worms? It didn’t seem possible. It gave Billy the shivers. And to make it worse, there was something about its wrinkled, desiccated skin and sunken features that was horribly reminiscent of Creecher.

  He continued to follow Frankenstein and Clerval around the exhibits for a while, but his interest became exhausted long before theirs. As he was strolling along Great Russell Street, waiting for them to reappear, he saw the pale gentleman whose purse he had tried to snatch when he was last there.

  Billy smiled at the reminiscence as though he were an old man looking back at the fondly remembered wild days of his youth. It seemed like another Billy entirely. A clap of thunder boomed in the distance. The sky was black now, the air strangely clear and still.

  He was sure he could have walked straight up to the gentleman and his wife and never been recognised as the filthy street urchin he had been when last they met. The man was standing on the pavement reading The Times, seemingly oblivious to the drops of rain that now began to fall.

  ‘Listen to this, Mary,’ he said. ‘It says here that a Captain John Ross is to sail to the Arctic seas next month to map the north of Canada. Just imagine, all that ice. A frozen desert from horizon to far horizon. Let’s hope he doesn’t suffer the same fate as Walton, eh?’

  ‘The frozen north is all well and good, my love,’ his wife replied with a smile. ‘But if you have any hope of getting your family to the warm south, then I am going to require that you please pack your books away.’

  ‘I am at your service as always, my dearest,’ he answered, tucking his newspaper under his arm and following her into a house further along the street. The pavement gathered dark spots silently in his wake.

  Billy walked up to the building and looked in at the window. A fire was burning in the hearth and candles were lit, and the whole interior glowed with warmth that held Billy in a moth-like thrall. And, like a moth, his heart seemed to flutter in his chest.

  Inside he saw the woman walking here and there, doing her best to organise. Another woman about her age sat with a baby on her lap, while a small boy stood alongside, laughing at the baby.

  The pale gentleman walked by with a stack of books, and a maid held another baby in her arms, rocking it from side to side, while another young servant girl was polishing candlesticks before putting them in a trunk.

  The scene was one of such sweet domestic happiness to Billy’s eyes that he wanted the walls and windows to melt away and let him tumble in among those pretty women and laughing babies. That man, thought Billy, must be the happiest man alive.

  He was in the midst of these thoughts when suddenly there was a scream from inside the house and he saw that the man was shouting and pointing at him. He turned and there was Creecher standing beside him. They made their escape round the corner, ducking into a back street. Lightning flashed overhead, followed by a loud explosion of thunder. The rain poured down.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ said Billy.

  ‘I could say the same of you,’ Creecher replied.

  ‘You frightened the life out of that man.’

  ‘You are not here to watch him,’ said Creecher. ‘You are here to follow Frankenstein.’

  ‘I just . . .’ Billy began, but the truth was he did not know what to say.

  There was another flash of lightning and Billy turned to see the man from the house standing in the street, staring at them, his frozen figure reflected in the wet cobbles.

  ‘Who are you?’ he called, his voice faltering a little as he looked at Creecher.

  A blast of thunder rocked the sky above them and the rain seemed to fall with an even greater violence. It sounded like gravel hitting the street.

  ‘Who are you?’ he shouted. ‘What do you want here?’

  ‘We meant no harm, sir,’ Billy called back. ‘Honestly.’

  The man took a few tentative steps forward, his eyes fixed on Creecher. Lightning flashed again and illuminated the giant with alarming suddenness. The man staggered back, putting a hand to his face.

  ‘What manner of creature are you?’ he said. ‘Speak!’

  ‘You would not believe me if I told you,’ said Creecher gloomily.

  ‘You are French?’

  ‘Swiss,’ Billy interjected.

  ‘No,’ said the man, staring wide-eyed. ‘No. It can’t be. You are –’

  ‘Shelley!’ called a voice behind him. ‘Come inside, my darling.’

  The man turned to see his wife coming round the corner in a hooded cape, allowing Billy and Creecher to make their escape. When he turned back, they were gone.

  Billy managed to peer unseen round the corner of the street and watched as the man staggered sideways and clutched at a railing for support. His wife rushed to his side.

  ‘You have not been well, my love,’ she said. ‘Come in out of the rain. You’re soaking wet.’

  ‘Mary,’ he said, staring back towards where Billy and Creecher had been standing. ‘I thought I saw him . . .’

  ‘Who, my dear?’ she asked, following his gaze.

  He shook his head.

  ‘Nothing,’ he muttered. ‘It was nothing.’

  ‘Come along. The lightning has befuddled you. It always does.’

  He smiled weakly.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, shaking his head and staring once more at the place where Billy and Creecher had been standing. ‘The lightning. It must have been the lightning.’

  CHAPTER XVI.

  Billy stood across the street from the alleyway entrance to Frankenstein’s warehouse. He was nervous. It was late and the businesses were closed up. Thieves like a crowd. Billy hated to be so exposed.

  An owl was sitting on one of the chimney tops and Billy cursed. Everyone knew an owl was a bad omen. He was relieved when the bird finally hooted and flew off, with big, lazy flaps of its wings.

  Billy walked across the street and entered the alley, its chill gloom gathering about him like a damp cloak. The door was, as always, closed and, were it not for the fact that he knew Frankenstein to be inside, Billy would have assumed it empty.Creecher had told him to leave Frankenstein alone when he was in the warehouse, and not to attempt to follow him in, but Billy’s curiosity had become too great. He was tired of being kept in the dark. He had to know what Frankenstein was doing in there. He had to.

  He found himself looking again at the walls, searching for a window he knew was not there. He walked the length of the building until it met the back wall of the courtyard, which he climbed.

  Standing on that vantage point he could see that the gable end of the warehouse was also windowless and opened out on to a filthy ditch bordering a rubbish pit. The smell was foul, like rotting meat.

  Turning aw
ay from the stench, Billy noticed a drainpipe that ran down the building near the corner where he stood. It was a stout contraption, old but strong enough to bear his weight, he was certain.

  Billy was no burglar, but it looked an easy climb up to the roof and, once there, he would be hidden by a projection of the wall. His days with the sweep had numbed his fear of heights.

  Billy needed no further thought and was already climbing before he could raise any objections. Within moments he was hauling himself over the wall on to a small, flat leaded area that ran around the whole roof.

  Billy could see one of the large roof lights ahead of him, a honeyed glow coming from the window panes. He edged his way tentatively along, aware that his footsteps might be audible to Frankenstein below.

  Once beside the dirty, grime-stained glass, Billy paused, knowing that he could not be sure that Frankenstein might not choose that very moment to look up from his work and see his face peering in. But knowing that meant he either had to take the risk or simply climb back down, none the wiser.

  Billy had to know, so he had to look. Taking a deep breath, he rested against the roof slates and leaned round the window frame.

  It was a disappointment: the glass was so filthy he could see nothing but a vague glow below. So slowly and silently, Billy began to rub his coat cuff against the grime. At first this simply made the situation even worse, but he persevered and, with the addition of a large drop of spit, he had soon worked a small spy hole in the filth.

  Billy placed his face against the greasy glass and his eye over the hole of relative cleanness. It took a little while for him to make sense of what he saw.

  Frankenstein was working at a table way below – further below than Billy had imagined and the effect of that was dizzying enough to distract him from what Frankenstein was doing.

  Billy’s eye widened as he realised that there was a naked body on the table. The body was dead, Billy could tell, even from that distance, and he was also able to see that it was female. Frankenstein was leaning over it, doing something that Billy couldn’t see, obscuring the head and torso.

  Just as Billy made the connection between the body and that mysterious delivery by the men with the handcart, Frankenstein walked away, returning after a moment with a bow saw. Before Billy had time to grasp what was happening, Frankenstein placed the jagged blade against the cadaver’s forehead and, steadying himself for the effort, began to saw.

  Billy looked away, but only to see that there were further horrors in that room – body parts on the other tables and in tinted glass jars. It was a butcher’s shop of human meat.

  The tabletops were smeared with blood and the apron Frankenstein wore was likewise stained and flecked with gore. Lamplight flickered across an arsenal of knives and saws and blades of all kinds.

  The scene was nightmarish and made more so by the weird angle of view. Frankenstein walked into Billy’s sight once more and he seemed to shimmer and stretch, distorted by the glass and the light.

  He paused as if deep in thought and ran the back of his hand across his brow. Billy could see the trail of blood it left. Frankenstein slammed his hand down on the table and then threw a glass jar to the floor with a crash that sounded like it came from a mile away.

  Billy didn’t need to see any more. He edged away from the window as quietly as he had come, trying to rid his mind of the image of the white knuckles of Frankenstein’s fist as he clenched that thin ragged blade.

  So Frankenstein was an anatomist, a corpse-butcher. Billy had the thief’s hatred for that line of work. Surgeons were allowed to use the bodies of those who were hanged, as if the hanging was not punishment enough. Billy had seen men he knew taken to be chopped up by those ghouls.

  But there were not enough hanged convicts to go round, even in these lawless times, and so surgeons were forced to employ resurrectionists to pull the recently buried from their rest.

  But why was Frankenstein doing such work in England? Grave-robbing was a crime. And it made Frankenstein’s reaction to the hanging seem even stranger. Why would a man who thought nothing of butchering the bodies of the hanged faint at the sight of an execution?

  But maybe men like Frankenstein put the realities of such things out of their mind. Maybe when confronted by a hanging he was overwhelmed by guilt at the horror of what he was doing.

  Billy doubted this somehow. There was something about Frankenstein’s manner with the resurrectionists that did not suggest guilt so much as expediency. Maybe it was more the memory of his brother’s murder and of Justine’s execution.

  But surely Frankenstein’s work must contain some explanation for his relationship with Creecher. Had he done something to the giant? Was Creecher the victim of some kind of surgery that had gone badly wrong?

  This seemed to be confirmed by the grisly pleasure that Creecher took in hearing Billy’s report of the work going on in that warehouse. He quickly forgot his annoyance at Billy for taking such a risk.

  He showed a particularly ghoulish interest in the sex of the corpse. The sight had made Billy queasy enough, but the grin on the giant’s face made him feel even worse.

  ‘So Frankenstein’s a surgeon, then?’ said Billy.

  ‘Not a surgeon,’ said Creecher. ‘He is a scientist.’

  ‘A scientist? What’s that?’

  ‘It is a person who studies natural philosophy.’

  Billy looked baffled.

  ‘They study the world and how it works,’ said Creecher, by way of explanation. ‘They study the Earth and the heavens and the forces that act upon them. They study the oceans and the forests and the animals that live there. They study the minute and the cosmic. They study life itself.’

  ‘And is that what Frankenstein studies?’ said Billy. ‘Life itself?’

  Creecher looked at him for a long time before replying.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  And there the conversation seemed to end. Billy could think of nothing more to say and Creecher gave the distinct impression that he felt enough had been said already.

  ‘You must leave Frankenstein to his work,’ said Creecher after a while. ‘We cannot risk disturbing him.’

  ‘You don’t want me to follow him any more?’

  ‘Follow him to the warehouse, but there must be no more climbing to look in. I do not want Frankenstein to be scared off. Do you understand?’

  Billy nodded. Frankenstein scared off? It would be no hardship to avoid looking in on those horrors.

  ‘Follow him to the warehouse,’ repeated Creecher. ‘And anywhere else he goes. But no more.’

  ‘What about Clerval?’ asked Billy.

  ‘I told you, Clerval is not important to me,’ growled Creecher.

  ‘Does he even know what Frankenstein’s up to?’ asked Billy.

  ‘No,’ Creecher replied. ‘Frankenstein’s work is a secret to all but him and to me, and must remain so.’

  Billy nodded again.

  ‘His work is of vital importance to me, do you understand? Vital.’

  CHAPTER XVII.

  The family in Great Russell Street were not the only ones leaving London. The season was ending and the lords and ladies and well-to-do would be thinking about packing up their London houses and travelling back to their country estates.

  And Billy had his suspicions that Frankenstein and Clerval were about to move on, too. They no longer made calls on anyone and, though they still toured the sights of London, he had the impression that they had seen all they wished to see. He also noticed that the two men were buying new clothes – warmer clothes and stout boots. They were clearly envisaging walking in wilder terrain than the streets of London.

  Then, one morning towards the end of March, the two men stood at the door to their lodgings and shook hands with the landlord. A cart was brought to carry their bags and boxes of scientific equipment.

  Billy considered rushing back to the attic to warn Creecher, but thought it best to find out where they were going first. As soon as they
were out of sight he knocked at the door of their lodgings.

  The owner opened the door and smiled at him.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘My master has sent me to deliver a message to Mr Frankenstein, sir.’

  ‘Oh dear, I’m afraid you’ve just missed them.’

  Billy put his hands to his face and pretended to sob.

  ‘Now then,’ said the gentleman at the door. ‘What’s this? Why the tears, lad?’

  ‘My master, sir,’ replied Billy. ‘He’ll beat me, sir. I dawdled when I should have run, sir. If I tell him I’ve missed them, he’s going to be fearful angry. You don’t know where they’re headed, do you, sir? Maybe I could catch them.’

  ‘If you’re quick, you might,’ he replied. ‘They’re going to catch the coach from the Strand.’

  ‘Which coach, sir?’

  ‘The one bound for Windsor, and from there on to Oxford,’ replied the man. ‘Delightful gentlemen. Foreign, you know – but wonderful manners. I have some forwarding addresses somewhere. They asked me to send on any mail they received. Let me write them down for you, just in case . . .’

  Oxford? Billy had no clear image of Oxford, but found it hard to imagine that they would need heavy walking clothes for such a place. The man came back and handed Billy a folded piece of paper, which he put in his pocket.

  He set off to the attic and within minutes was climbing in through the window. His entry had raised a small blizzard of dust and, through its swirling cloud, he saw Creecher lying asleep on the floor, tucked in to the slope of the roof.

  Billy had rushed all the way there to warn the giant, but now he felt nervous about waking him. There was something so terrifying about that sleeping body. It took Billy right back to that first night. Again, there was no sign of life at all. He appeared, to all intents and purposes, a stone-cold corpse.

  Billy took a nervous step forward and the floorboard creaked beneath his foot. By the dim light seeping in from the filthy window, he saw Creecher’s dull yellow eye open. The giant breathed hard and then his whole body convulsed, as if sparked into life. Billy jumped back as the giant sat up and stared at him.