Frankenstein Unbound

by Aldiss, Brian

I saw him glance involuntarily upwards, as if in the direction of Heaven or, possibly, the floor above. The latter was more likely; he did not seem to have a great deal of time for God.

  “But what a project!” he said. “To improve on one’s first blundering attempts...”

  “You are mad! Do you want two fiends after you, instead of one? At present, your monster has reason to spare your life. But when you have equipped him with a wife—why, it will be in his interest to kill you!”

  He rested his head on his hand with a weary gesture. “How can you comprehend the difficulties of my situation? Why am I talking to you like this? The creature has uttered the direst of threats—not against my life, which is of little account, but against Elizabeth’s. ‘I will be with you on your wedding night!’ That was what he said. If he cannot have a wedding, he will not allow mine. If I will not bring his bride to life, then he will rob my bride of her life.”

  Something in my throat almost choked me. He had revealed more of his degraded sensibilities than he knew, in thus equating himself with his travesty of life and Elizabeth with some monster yet uncreated.

  I stood up. “You already have one implacable enemy. In me you will have a second unless you agree that we go tomorrow into the city and lay the entire matter before the syndics. Do you plan to populate the world with monsters?”

  “You’re being too hasty, Bodenland!”

  “Not a moment too hasty! Come, agree!—We go in the morning?”

  He sat looking at me, his mouth turned down in a bitter line. Then, abruptly, his gaze lowered, and he began to fiddle with a knife.

  “Let’s eat without quarreling,” he said. “I’ll decide after the meal. Look, I’ll get us some wine. You’d like to drink some wine.”

  His face was shining, maybe from the heat of the lights. He looked more than ever as if stamped out of metal.

  There were bottles of red wine on a cabinet, and elegant glasses beside them. Victor snatched up a bottle and two glasses, and took them behind his curtain into the kitchen. “I’ll open this bottle,” he called.

  He was some while. When he returned, he carried two brimming glasses.

  “Drink, eat! Though civilization crumbles, let those who are civilized remain so to the end! A toast to you, Bodenland!” He raised his glass.

  I was overcome by a fit of coughing. Could it be—could it possibly be—that he had poisoned or drugged my wine? The idea seemed too melodramatically absurd, until I recalled that all melodrama has its basis in the lurid facts of earlier generations.

  “It’s so hot under your lights,” I said. “Could we not open a window?”

  “Nonsense, it’s snowing outside. Drink up!”

  “But that window over there—I thought I heard a noise at it a moment ago...”

  That was more effective. He was up and over to it, peering behind the wooden panel that blocked its panes.

  “Nothing there. We are far enough above the ground... But that fiend is capable of building a ladder...” This was muttered apprehensively to himself. He came back and sat down, raising his glass again and staring at me intently.

  Now I raised my glass with more confidence, for I had switched it for his. We both drank, staring at each other. I could see the nervous tension in him. So compulsively did he watch me empty my glass that he drained his own in unthinking sympathy.

  I let my mouth fall open and set my glass down heavily on the table, allowing my head to fall back against the chair and my eyes to close, in the imitation of unconsciousness.

  “Precisely—” he said. “Precisely—”

  He struggled to get up from his chair. His glass fell to the floor, and landed on a rug without breaking. Victor would have fallen too, had I not run round the table and caught him as he staggered. His body was completely limp. His heart still beat, and a dew of sweat lay on his forehead.

  When I had stretched him out on the floor, I stood over him. Now what should I do?

  My position was not the most comfortable one. Below me was Yet, and even if I bluffed my way past him, the monster lurked outside. In any case, now if ever was my chance to ruin Victor’s plans. As Frankenstein’s gaze had recently done, my gaze turned up to the ceiling, beyond which lay the laboratory—with all its gruesome secrets now accessible to me!

  XVIII

  * * *

  The spiral stair wound upwards, clinging to the rough stone wall of the tower. I hastened up its wormy treads. The door at the top was fortified with extra timbers, and there were newly installed bolts on the door.

  I slid back the bolts and pushed the door open.

  Beyond was a completely cylindrical room, its beamed ceiling some nine feet high. One arc lamp burned in the middle of the room, sending a gleam spluttering over the accumulated apparatus of the laboratory. Frankenstein’s lights generated a great deal of heat. To keep the temperature low, a skylight in the ceiling had been opened a crack; a few flakes of snow drifted about the room before melting.

  My interest—my fascinated, horrified interest—was centered on a great bench to one side of the room. A monstrous form lay on it, covered by sheeting. I could see by its outline that it was at least dimly human.

  Of the machines clustering about the bench, I formed no clear idea, except that, by the head, a tank of a red liquid stood above it, dripping its contents down a tube which led under the sheet. And there were other tubes and other wires which crept under there, coupled to other tanks and other machines which quivered and labored as if they also had some dim expectation of life. They did their work to the accompaniment of siphoning and sucking noises.

  A terrible fear was on me. The place smelled of preserving fluid and decay, laced with other stenches. I knew I had to approach that silent figure. I had to wreck it and the equipment sustaining it, but my limbs would not propel me forward.

  I looked about the place. On the wall hung beautiful diagrams in the manner of Leonardo da Vinci of the musculature of limbs and the action of levers. There were elegant Calcar skeletons from Vesalius, and diagrams of the nervous system, as well as anatomical charts marked in many colors. On shelves to one side stood retorts containing limbs with the flesh still on them, floating in preserving fluid—human limbs, I supposed, but did not attempt to identify them. And there were preserved sexual organs, male and female, some of them unmistakably animal. And a series of fetuses beginning to decay in their jars. And what I took for a womb, slowly flaking apart with age. And numerous models in colored waxes, built to imitate the things in the jars. And other models, of bones and organs, made in wood and various metals.

  One whole shelf was devoted to the human skull. Some had been sawn laterally, some vertically, to reveal the complex chambers inside. Some had been partly filled with colored wax. Others were cosmeticized in a strange way, with banked eye sockets, raised cheekbones, altered brows, modified noses. The effect was of a row of fantastic helmets.

  My fear was leaving me, overtaken by curiosity. In particular, I studied for some while a figure chalked on a great blackboard which stood close to the bench bearing the sheeted body.

  The chalk figure outlined a human being. There were perfunctory indications of a face; flowing hair and the more carefully sketched genitals showed that a female was depicted. Departures from normal human anatomy were marked in red. The diagram represented six extra ribs, thus greatly increasing the lung cage. The respiratory system had been modified, so that air could be breathed in through the nose, as customary, but out through apertures behind the ears. A magnified detail drew attention to the skin; although I could not understand the symbols appended, it looked as if the idea was that the outer skin should have less sensibility, by the withdrawal of nerves and capillary blood vessels from the outer layers of the epidermis—in fact, that a sort of hide should develop over the flesh which would render its owner fairly immune to extremes of temperature. Again, the urogenital tract had been modified. The vaginal area served purely for purposes of procreation; a sort of vestigial mock pe
nis was provided on the thigh from which urine could be expelled. I looked at this detail with some interest, thinking it would probably tell a psychologist a great deal about Victor Frankenstein’s thought processes during this period of his engagement.

  Perhaps the most unusual feature of the diagram was that it represented the figure as having a twin backbone. This allowed for great strengthening in a traditionally weak region. The pelvis was also fortified, so that greater musculature was allowed in the legs. I thought of that spectral figure I had seen climbing Mont Salève so rapidly, and began to understand the magnitude of Frankenstein’s accomplishments and ambitions!

  Across one side of the laboratory, a noble four-paneled screen embossed with emblematic figures had been drawn. Skirting the bench with its sheeted figure, I went and looked behind it.

  This was—what do I call it? A charnel house? A dissecting room? On a slab and piled into a stone sink were torsos of human beings, one or two of them opened and filleted like pigs’ carcasses. And there were legs and knee sockets and slabs of unidentifiable meat. A slender female torso—headless but with arms—was pinned to the wall; one shoulder had been flayed to reveal a network of muscles.

  I looked away at once. It was a gruesome cache of spare parts!

  Now I turned to the principal occupant of Frankenstein’s laboratory, to that sheeted figure lying on its bench surrounded by snuffling machines. I told myself that this was merely a self-set problem in human engineering. Small wonder that the monster regarded his creator as God Almighty! Until now, I had looked on the legendary Frankenstein as a sort of piecemeal dabbler in cadavers, a small-time crank who haunted crypts and graves for mismatched eyes and hands. My error was the fault of movie makers and other horror merchants. My dear Mary had had a truer idea when she called Victor “the Modern Prometheus.”

  Even so, the error may have started with Mary. For she had in some fashion, through her perceptive and precog-nitive powers—which in many ways she shared with Shelley—received Frankenstein’s story from thin air, as far as I could determine. No doubt that story contained many scientific theories which she had had to omit from her tale, being unable to comprehend them. I would have been forced to do the same myself. Only now was it clear to me what an achievement was Victor Frankenstein’s, and how strong in him must be the desire to continue his line of research, whatever its consequences. So I stepped forward boldly and pulled the sheets away from what they concealed.

  There lay a great female figure, naked except for the pipes and wires that fed or drained her.

  Clutching the sheet, letting a great hollow groan escape me, I staggered back across the room. That face! That face, though the hair had been shaven from its head, leaving the skull bald and patterned with livid scars—that face was the face of Justine Moritz. Her eyes, muzzy with death, seemed to be regarding mine.

  XIX

  * * *

  For a space, my heart was almost as still as hers.

  Now I saw starkly, for the first time, the villainy and the sheer horror of Frankenstein’s researches. The dead are impersonal, and so perhaps it is of no special moment that they should be disturbed—or so I might once have argued on Victor’s behalf. But to press into service, as though it were no more than a compendium of useful organs, the body of a servant, a friend—and a friend, at that, who died for a crime attributable to one’s own negligence—well, this moral madness placed him beyond human consideration.

  At that moment, the determination came to me to kill Victor Frankenstein as well as his creature.

  Yet, while one part of my mind was reaching this decision, while horror and moral indignation were mounting in me, another part of my mind was working in an opposite direction.

  Despite myself, my regard was still held by the stupendous figure prone before me. The body had been formed from more than one carcass. Skin tones varied, and scars like scarlet ropes ran about the anatomy, so that one was reminded of a butcher’s diagram. I could not help seeing that the amendments sketched on the blackboard had been executed; the modified organs were in place. The legs were far from female. They had too much muscle, too much hair, and were tremendously thick at the thighs. The extra ribs had been added, giving an enormous rib cage, topped by gigantic if flaccid breasts, powerful enough to suckle a whole brood of infant monsters.

  My reaction to all this was not one of horror. For Frankenstein’s researches I felt horror, yes. But confronted with this unbreathing creature surmounted by that frozen but guiltless female face, I felt only pity. It was pity mainly for the weakness of human flesh, for the sad imperfection of us as a species, for our nakedness, our frail hold on life. To be, to remain human, was always a struggle, and the struggle always ultimately rewarded by death. True, the religious believed that death was only physical; but I had never allowed my instinctive religious feelings to come to the surface. Until now.

  Victor’s plan for this creature’s coming resurrection would be a blasphemy. What had been done, in this inspired cobbling together of corpses, was a blasphemy. And to say as much—to think as much—was to admit religion, to admit that life held more than the grave at the end of it, to admit that there was a spirit that transcended the poor imperfect flesh. Flesh without spirit was obscene. Why else should the notion of Frankenstein’s monster have affronted the imagination of generations, if it was not their intuition of God that was affronted?

  To report my inner thoughts at such a moment of crisis must be to vex anyone who listens to this tape. Yet I am impelled to go on.

  For the conflict of emotions in me caused me to burst into tears. I fell on my knees and wept, and called aloud to God. I buried my face in my hands and cried with helplessness.

  Perhaps one detail I have not mentioned led to this unexpected response in me. On the stool by the side of the female stood a jar with flowers in it, crimson and yellow.

  There was another turn to the screw of my misery. For at that moment I thought I saw that all my previous beliefs in progress were built on shifting sand. How often, in my past life, I had claimed that one of the great benefits the nineteenth century had conferred on the West had been science’s liberation of thought and feeling from organized religion. Organized religion, indeed! What had we in its place? Organized science! Whereas organized religion was never well organized, and often ran contrary to commercial interests, it had been forced to pay lip service, if not more than that, to the idea that there was a place in the scheme of things for the least among us. But organized science had allied itself with Big Business and Government; it had no interest in the individual—its meat was statistics! It was death to the spirit.

  As science had gradually eroded the freedom of time, so it had eroded the freedom of belief. Anything which could not be proven in a laboratory by scientific method—anything, that is to say, which was bigger than science—was ruled out of court. God had long been banished in favor of any number of grotty little sects, clinging to tattered bits of faith; they could be tolerated, since they formed no collective alternative to the consumer society on which organized science depended so heavily.

  The Frankenstein mentality had triumphed by my day. Two centuries was all it needed. The head had triumphed over the heart.

  Not that I had ever believed in the heart marching ahead alone. That had been as grievous a thing as seeing the head triumph; that had caused the centuries of religious persecutions and wars. But there had been a time, early in the nineteenth century, in Shelley’s day, where the head and the heart had stood a chance of marching forward together. Now it had disappeared, even as Mary’s diseased creation myth had prophesied.

  Inevitably, I am elaborating after the event in intellectual terms. What I experienced as I fell on my knees was a metaphor—I saw the technological society into which I had been born as a Frankenstein body from which the spirit was missing.

  I wept for the mess of the world.

  “Oh, God!” I cried.

  There was a sound above me, and I looked upwar
ds.

  A great beautiful face stared down at me. For a moment—then the skylight in the beamed roof was flung up, and Frankenstein’s Adam came leaping down to stand before me in his wrath!

  Until this wretched point in my narrative, I believe I have given a fairly good account of myself. I had acted with some courage and endurance—and even intelligence, I hope—in a situation many men would have found hopeless. Yet here I was, sniveling on my hands and knees. And all I could do at this terrible invasion was to rise and stand mutely, with my hands by my sides, staring up at this tremendous being, whom I now saw clearly for the first time.

  In his anger, he was beautiful. I use the word “beautiful” knowing it to be inaccurate, yet not knowing how else to counteract the myth which has circulated for two centuries that Frankenstein’s monster’s face was a hideous conglomeration of second-hand features.

  It was not so. Perhaps the lie drew its life from a human longing for those chills of horror which are depraved forms of religious awe. And I must admit that Mary Shelley began the rumor; but she had to make her impression on an untutored audience. I can only declare that the face before me had a terrible beauty.

  Of course, terror predominated. It was very far from being a human face. It resembled much more one of the helmet faces painted on the skulls in the rack behind me. Evidently, Frankenstein had been unable to create a face that pleased him. But he had given patient thought to the matter, just as he had to the rest of the alien anatomy, and he had ventured on what I can only call an abstraction of the human face.

  The eyes were there, glaring down at me from behind defensive cheekbones, as if through the slits of a visor. The other features, the mouth, the ears, and especially the nose, had been blurred in some fashion by the surgeon’s knife. The creature that now stared down at me looked like a machine, lathe-turned.

  His skull almost knocked against the beams of the ceiling. He bent, seized my wrist, and dragged me towards him as if I were no more than a doll.