Frankenstein Unbound

by Aldiss, Brian

  I worked my way—somewhat fearfully, I admit—into a gloomy stand of pines, and there found several fallen branches which I was able to drag back to the cave. They would suffice for a respectable blaze.

  The fire started without much trouble. The warmth was welcome, although now I was nervous anew, thinking my fire would attract anything lurking near at hand. I was too nervous to go looking for birds or small animals which, I fancied, might be caught half-frozen in the undergrowth. Instead, I crouched near my hissing flames, nursing my leg and keeping one hand close to a sturdy length of branch.

  When the marauder came, I glimpsed him through drifting snow and smoke. No sound—the universal white blanket saw to that. Only silence, as I rose in fear, weapon in hand, to confront him. He seemed to me huge and shaggy, with his breath hanging about his face in the chilly air.

  Then I was struck from behind. The blow landed on my shoulder. It had been aimed at my head, but I moved at the last second, prompted by some intuition of survival. I caught a glimpse of my assailant, of his ragged and ferocious face, as he paused before hurling himself at me. In that instant, I brought up my branch, so that he caught it right in the face.

  He fell back, but the other man, the one I had seen first, came running forward. I whirled my branch. He was armed with a stout length of post, which came up and broke my blow. Before I could deliver another, he had grasped my wrist and we were fighting face to face, nearly falling into the fire as we did so.

  I glimpsed the other man getting up and tried to break and run. But they had me! I was trapped. I curled up and kicked out wildly at their shins, but I was at their mercy now. They hacked me in the ribs and then proceeded to batter me about the head.

  The fight—the very life!—went out of me. Sprawled in the snow and dirt, I lost command of my senses. It was not complete unconsciousness; instead, I drifted in a helpless state, unable to move. In some broken and unhappy way, I was aware that the two villains stopped kicking and beating me. I was aware of their voices but not of what they said. Their words came to me only as a series of hoarse gasping noises. And I was aware that they were doing something with my fire. I was even aware that they were leaving, but the interpretation of all their actions only filtered through some while later. It was as if, owing to the punishment I had received, all the close and companionable cells of my brain had been spaced round the frozen world, so that it took half an hour for intelligence to march from one department to the next. My personal space time was as dislocated as the impersonal one.

  At length, I did manage to roll over and sit up. Then, after a further interval, I was able to drag myself into my little cave. I had a flimsy recollection of being afraid of getting drowned; now I had a flimsy suspicion that I might be buried under snow and never rise again to the surface.

  It was the cold that forced me to move. I saw then, through the one eye that would open, that my fire was scattered, that only a few wisps of smoke rose here and there. Later, the knowledge filtered through to me that the two ruffians—escaped prisoners like myself, without a doubt—had attacked me solely on account of my fire. To them, it represented infinite riches, well worth committing murder for.

  And was it not infinite riches? Unless blindness was setting in, darkness was. I would freeze to death this night unless I had some warmth.

  And there was something else. A noise I recognized among the eternal wastes of silence. Recognized? What ancestral thing in me prompted me to know the cry of wolves?

  Somehow or other, working on hands and knees, I drew more branches before my little retreat. Somehow or other, I got a flame going again.

  There I lay, half-roasted on one side, freezing on the other, in a sort of trance, more abjectly miserable than I can tell. If I died on this hillside, I would not even know where or when the hillside was.

  At some point in that dreadful night, the wolves came very close. I feebly pushed more wood on my fire to make a brighter blaze. And at some point I was visited.

  I was in no fit state to move a muscle. However, I managed to pry my one good eye open. The fire had died down, though several branches still glowed red. Someone stood carelessly among the embers, as if having his flesh charred was the least of his worries. All I could see were feet and legs, and they looked enormous. The legs were clumsily encased in gaiters.

  In a feeble effort at self-preservation, I put up one arm to ward off a blow, but the arm fell down as if it would have nothing to do with such an idea. I could see my hand, lying palm upwards and seemingly a great distance from me. Huge scarred hands thrust something into my hand, a voice spoke to me.

  Much later, searching my memory, I thought I had heard it say in deep and melancholy tones, “Here, fellow outcast from society, if thou canst survive this night, draw strength from one who did not!” Or something to that effect—all I recalled incontrovertibly was that old-fashioned construction, “if thou canst”...

  Then the great figure was gone, swallowed as soon as it turned, into the drifting dark. So too my senses went, into their own night.

  XV

  * * *

  When I woke, I was not dead. I hauled myself into a sitting position and peered about with my one good eye. The fire was out, or all but, and my limbs felt as lifeless. But I knew I could manage to stagger to my feet and find fresh kindling. I felt a little better, and was aware of hunger pangs in my stomach.

  Then it was I thought to look about on the ground near me, recalling that strange visit—had it happened?—in the night. A dead hare lay on the trampled ground, its neck twisted. Someone had brought me food. This was the thing that “did not survive the night.”

  Someone or something had had compassion on me...

  My thought processes were still numb, but I got feebly into action, moving more and more strongly as I sought out wood for a fresh fire. The sight of the flames leaping up did much to hearten me. Swinging my arms, I brought a little circulation back into my aching body. I pressed snow against my bruised face, and managed to melt more snow in my mouth to quench my thirst. Eventually, I was strong enough to concentrate on tearing the hare into pieces, impaling the joints on sticks, and thrusting them into the glowing heat of my fire.

  How marvelously good they smelled as they seethed, bubbled and cooked! It was the smell as much as the taste which convinced me that I was still Joe Bodenland, and still destined to struggle on among the living.

  The snow stopped falling, but it remained intolerably cold. I decided to strike out while I could and hope to find help and possibly shelter. It was instinct as much as rational decision—thought was still far beyond me. Indeed, the disintegration of my old personality had taken another long step forward. I was now just impersonally a man, striving against the elements.

  Moving with no clear sense of direction, I arrived at last at a wooden hut, set in a clearing in the forest which covered that part of the mountain.

  The pure white drifts of snow against the door of the hut convinced me that nobody had been that way recently. After clearing away the snow, I managed to enter the hut.

  Inside were a few necessities, a large bearskin, a stove, some kindling wood, a chopper, even a very hard garlic sausage hanging from a beam. What luxury! In one corner hung a crucifix, with a Bible lying below it.

  I stayed there for three days, until the snow began to melt, dripping in stealthy drops from my little roof. By that time my body was recovering, my damaged eye was seeing again.

  Cleaning myself to the best of my ability, I left the hut and set out downhill, in what I hoped was the direction of Geneva. My attempts to look like a normal human being again were evidently not too successful—at one point in my journey, I came on a man crouching over a small brook from which he was trying to drink. Looking up, he saw me, and at once jumped up and ran crying in terror into the bushes!

  Now that my thought processes were working again, I was eager to discover what dreadful catastrophe had overtaken this part of the world. I could only suppose that the co
llapse of space time in my own day was slowly spreading outwards from the source, like a bloodstain oozing across an old sheet, threatening many deep-seated continuities. The very idea raised an image of a gradual disruption of the whole fabric of history until, at some stage, the rupture would seriously interfere with the creative processes of Earth themselves. And then, perhaps far back in the dim Permian Age, sufficient harm might be done for the further development of life forms to cease.

  No doubt that was too gloomy a picture. Possibly the timeslips in my own day were already dying out. Perhaps the damage here was only minor, a last tremor before the fabric of space time mended again.

  Whatever had happened in space, I had reason to believe that the displacement in time must have been relatively slight. For what had visited me in my weakest hour and provided me with food if not that damned creation of Frankenstein’s? And, if it were so, then that drama of retribution was evidently not yet played out. Surely it was no later than the winter of 1817?

  On that I should soon be able to check. Meanwhile, one thing at least appeared certain. If I had encountered Frankenstein’s creation, then the creator himself could not be far away. To him at least I could turn for assistance. He would be obliged to offer me some aid, knowing I had information to help him in his pursuit of the monster.

  Accordingly, I would go to see him first. Taking care to avoid certain members of his household...

  So the rational mind lays its rational plans. And then I came to a promontory of rock from which I had a view of Geneva, and was shaken.

  The city was there, surely enough, but the lake had gone, and so had the Jura beyond it!

  Instead of the lake, my gaze rested upon a broken expanse of scrub. Here and there were dotted beggarly trees or thorns and, right in the far distance, something white gleamed—sand or ice; but, for the rest, there was no predominant feature on which an eye could fix. No roads, no villages, not so much as a solitary building, not even an animal. I saw a riverbed, biting deep into the land, but nothing to suggest that a lake had ever been there or that man had ever trod there.

  I stood staring for a long while. There must have been another timeslip. But where and when had this unattractive slab of terrain arrived from? So dismal was it that I thought first of Byron’s prophetic poem of the death of light, and then of the lands that lie north of the line of the Arctic Circle. The displacement looked to be of considerable extent, much larger than the chunk of 2020 which had brought me to 1816, or the chunk of some mysterious medieval land which had arrived earlier on my front doorstep. I could see no limit to the desolation ahead.

  For a while, I turned over in my mind the notion that these timeslips affected me alone. I was weary, and my brain was not working effectively. Then I realized that almost everyone in what I had once regarded as my own day was probably in a similar predicament, that the shattering effects of the war had probably distributed most of 2020 back and forward throughout history!

  This implied that this tract of wild land might have come from my own time, the epicenter of the disturbance, and so might be instrumental in restoring me to my own day!

  So I resumed my descent towards a much-changed Geneva.

  The gates of Plainpalais, by now familiar, were wide. Beyond them, everything was chaos. It was midmorning, and the streets were thronged with people and animals.

  The flood had caused tremendous havoc, breaking down many buildings. Though it had gone now, its mark was everywhere, not least in a great dirty universal tide-line it had painted, seven feet above ground level. That mark decorated humble dwellings and proud buildings, churches and statues.

  Now the streets were dry again. So the flooding had not been from the lake—which hitherto I had assumed to be the case; maybe it had come from the river whose bed, now dried, I had seen from my eminence on the hillside.

  This hypothesis was roughly confirmed by what I saw when I came to the quayside, or what had been the quayside when the lake existed. The level of the new arid ground was several feet above that of the land on which Geneva stood. The river, suddenly materializing, would have poured straight down into the streets, flooding everything, including the prison.

  Something had already been done to mend its path of devastation. I saw no bodies, although I did not doubt that many people had drowned. But the damaged houses were pathetic to see, and wreckage was still being pulled from alleyways and lanes.

  A few coins remained in my pocket. I spent almost all of them on a visit to a barber and on a meal, after which I felt my humanity returning. About my ruined clothes I felt less concern, for I noticed that the flood had made many people shabby.

  There was the Frankenstein house! It was too solidly built to have suffered serious damage. All the same, it bore the dirty tidemark along its façade, and the garden had been very much beaten down. All vegetation was dying, after July had felt the breath of January.

  Remembering what had happened to me the last time I entered this unhappy house, remembering too that I was an escaped jailbird, whom most of the Frankenstein manage would not hesitate to give back into custody, I decided that the wisest course was to keep the place under observation and wait until I could be sure to speak to Victor. So I settled myself in a small tavern just down the street. From one of its windows I could see the Frankenstein gate.

  The hours passed and there was no sign of my quarry. A servant came out of the side gate and returned later, but that was all. As I waited, doubts crowded into my mind. Perhaps I should have formed a better plan; perhaps I should have made instead for the Villa Diodati, to see if I could secure any friends and allies there. At least it would have given me the prospect of seeing Mary Shelley again. Her presence had never left me—throughout my worst hours, her pleasant entrances solaced my misery. Just to see her again!

  I was only a refugee at present. With Victor’s assistance, it might be possible to retrieve my car; I thought also that I could sell him scientific information, and so escape from my destitute condition. Then would be the time to go seeking dear Mary again. So I stuck obstinately to my original plan.

  With dusk, I was forced to leave the tavern, and paced up and down the muddy street for warmth. The villa opposite the Frankenstein mansion was deserted. Maybe the family had fled after the flood, or maybe they had all been drowned. I climbed into the garden and crouched in the porch, from whence I had a good view of the street.

  A dim light came on behind a blind in the Frankenstein mansion. That would be Elizabeth’s room.

  I sat looking at that light for almost two hours, by which time I was desperate. I decided to break into the house in whose porch I was sheltering, and search for food and clothes.

  Some of the panes in the lower windows had been shattered by the flood. Putting my hand in one window, I turned the catch and forced it open. I climbed onto the sill, paused, jumped in.

  I was immediately seized. Some foul glutinous thing got me by the legs and ankles. I staggered and slipped in it, falling against a sofa to which I clung. Gasping, I pulled out my lighter and held it above me to look round the room.

  The room was silted up with mud, several inches deep in most places and very deep in one corner. All the furniture had been thrown together, tables and sofas and chairs all in one filthy jumble. Nothing remained as it had been, except for some pictures aslant on the wall. When I got up to walk, glass crunched under my feet.

  In the hall lay a body. It was half-hidden by mud, so that I trod on its legs before I realized what it was. I peered down and for a moment believed that I had come on Percy Bysshe Shelley. How to account for this impression, I do not know, except that the body belonged to a young man of about Shelley’s age. Perhaps he had been so fascinated by the sight of the advancing waters that he had delayed his escape too long.

  I climbed the stairs. Nothing had been disturbed here, although the air of desertion and my timid light lent the place a sinister aspect. I tried to banish the idea of a drowned Shelley by conjuring up the memory
of Mary stepping into Lake Geneva and looking back at me over her shoulder; instead came a more ferocious image—that of a gigantic man leaping towards me: not the best picture to help one through these present circumstances.

  Standing on the upper landing, I could hear a faint continuous noise. It was the sound of mud and moisture, the kind of sound which conjures up bare seashores with the tide far out and clear skies overhead. Mastering my fears, I began to open doors.

  The young man’s room was easy to identify. I went in. The blind was down at the window. An oil lamp stood by the unmade bed. I lit it, turning the wick low.

  He had plenty of clothes he would never need again. I cleaned my legs off on his bed covering and selected a pair of rather fancy trousers from his wardrobe. The only shoes that would fit me were a pair of ski boots. They were dry and strong; I was pleased with them. I also found what I took to be a sporting pistol, with a beautifully engraved silver stock. I pocketed it, although I had no idea of how it worked. More usefully, I found coin and notes on the dressing table, and pocketed them.

  Now I felt ready for anything. I sat back on the bed, trying to decide if I should not confront the Frankenstein household openly. After the catastrophe, they would hardly find it as easy to summon police as they had done before. Thus reasoning, I fell asleep. Such is the soothing effect of property.

  XVI

  * * *

  The glistering sound of mud was still in the house when I woke, sitting up angrily, for I had not intended to sleep. The lamp still burned. I turned it as low as possible and looked round the blind at Frankenstein’s house. No light showed there. I had no idea of how long I had slept.

  It was time to leave. One job of housebreaking must be followed by another. I would enter the house opposite, and determine whether Victor was still about or not.