Frankenstein Unbound

by Aldiss, Brian

  Dropping the branches, I started what I feared would be a hopeless run back to the Felder. Foolishly, I had not even brought the automatic with me.

  I reached the automobile. I scrambled in.

  Only then did I turn to see what was happening, and how near my pursuer was.

  XXII

  * * *

  Great flat-topped sheets of cloud were moving out of the frigid lands, intermittently obscuring the moon. The scene by the tower was rendered in untrustworthy washes of light.

  Frankenstein’s monster stood outside the shattered door. He was not looking at me at all. He stared back into the dark from which he had emerged. I thought that one of his hands was extended. He took a pace back to the door.

  There was a hesitancy in his manner which was entirely strange. Someone took his hand. A figure emerged from the doorway, a figure almost as gigantic as he. It staggered, and he caught its elbow. They stood together, heads almost touching.

  He made her walk to and fro. I saw their breath on the frosty air. He was supporting her, an arm about her enormous waist. Her lumbering footsteps kicked up small flurries of snow.

  She was weak from postoperative shock, and had to lean against the wall. Her face was turned upwards towards the night sky. Her mouth opened.

  He left her, moving with that terrible needless alacrity back into the tower. From my hiding place, I strained to see her more clearly. Moonlight washed over her features, making of her eyes a perfect blank. It no longer looked like Justine. Another life occupied it.

  The monster returned, bearing a goblet. He forced her to drink despite her protests. She drank, and he flung the glass down, standing back from her to see what she did.

  She came uncertainly forward, step by step, feeling for her balance. She stood, arms extended but bent, and slowly moved her head from side to side. She turned with an automatic movement and began to walk, swaying from side to side at first, but gradually gaining a more regular rhythm.

  He dashed about her, solicitous but irascible. At one stage, he joined her, pacing with her, beating time with one hand. Then he stood aside again, still conducting, urging her to move faster. She went to lean against the wall—he made a vehement negative gesture—she staggered forward again.

  He began to run about in front of her, to turn, to perform grotesque dance movements that were not without some grace. She came to him hesitantly, and he took both her hands in his. Hesitantly, they began to trip from side to side, facing each other, he always encouraging her, like two lunatic children in a dance.

  She had to rest. He supported her, staring up at the tower. She was holding her side and explaining something.

  With a human gesture, he cupped his mouth with one hand and called upwards into the night.

  “Frankenstein!”

  As that great hollow voice sounded, dogs began barking in a nearby village, and were answered more distantly by wolves up in the hills.

  No reply came from the tower.

  After a rest, the pair began to dance again. Then he released her and ran about, as slowly as he could. She followed ponderously. Once she fell over, sprawling in the snow. He was upon her instantly, lifting her up with tender clumsy care, holding her scarred head against his cheek.

  He urged her to run again. He cantered behind the tower. She followed. She was cautious at first, but her movements were coordinating rapidly. She found she could wave her arms as she ran. He stood back to watch in admiration, hands on tattered knees.

  A strange mooing noise broke from them, which roused the dogs again. She was laughing!

  Now she gestured to him to follow her. She set off round the tower, with him in playful pursuit. They were as sportive as a pair of shire horses. When she reappeared, her bald head gleaming dully, her arms were extended and she was making the mooing noise again. To keep her moving, he pretended to be unable to catch her.

  As he ran, his hair streamed behind that helmet-skull like a plume.

  Her actions were less clumsy now, her movements faster. She stopped suddenly. He clasped her about the waist, she pushed him away with a gesture that would have felled a man. There she stood, moving her arms, her wrists, her hands, like a Balinese dancer at practice. She was grotesquely dressed in what I took to be nothing more than the two sheets that had covered her on the bench, clumsily knotted about her vast frame; perhaps because of that, there was something poignant in those androgynous movements parodying grace.

  Night brightened sharply, as if the moon had just disentangled itself from cloud. I looked up, startled to find how I had forgotten everything but the antics of these two monstrous beings.

  Two moons sailed in the sky.

  One moon was the crescent that until now had claimed sole tenancy of the night. The other, an extended hand’s span away from it, was almost full. They peered down on the world like two eyes, one half-closed.

  The disintegration of space/time was still taking place! —but this thought came to me not in any orderly way but as a confused recollection of a passage in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar—

  And graves have yawned and yielded up their dead;

  Fierce fiery warriors fight upon the clouds...

  The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.

  Death was very much on my mind, yet I could not tear my attention away from the cavortings of those two inhuman beings. Almost as if they had been awaiting the signal of an extra moon, they now took their prancings into a more intense phase. They stayed much more closely together, weaving intricate patterns round each other.

  Sometimes she stood still, providing a center for the storm of his movements; sometimes the roles were reversed, and he stood tensely while she whirled about him. Then their mood would change, and they would languorously intertwine and writhe as if to the stately music of a saraband. They were now deeply into their mating dance, oblivious to all that went on beyond the charmed circle of their courtship. Two moons in one sky were nothing to them!

  Again a change of mood. The tempo grew wilder. They danced away from each other, they darted towards each other. Occasionally, one would flick snow at the other— although by now the snow was well trampled over a wide area. As their motions became faster, so they moved in wider and wider gyrations. They were nearing the auto now, plunging towards it, backing away, seeing nothing but each other. I was too hypnotized to move. My plan to use the swivel gun was gone from my head.

  When she came very near, I had a clear view of her face, turned brightly to the moonlight. There I read conflicting things. It was the intent face of female in rut—yet it was also the face of Justine, impersonal with death. If anything, his face was even more horrific, lacking as it did all but a travesty of humanity; despite his animation, it still most resembled a helmet, a metal helmet with visor down, roughly shaped to conform to the outlines of a human face. The helmet had a tight slit across it, representing a smile.

  They joined hands, they twirled round and round and round. She broke away, uttering that mooing noise. She began to circle the tower again. Again he followed.

  The wolves were howling closer at hand. Their discord provided accompaniment for the chase that now developed between the two beings. She darted round and round the tower, running fast but waving her hands. He kept close behind, not exerting himself. As the pace warmed up, panic entered her movements. She began to run in earnest, he to follow in earnest. I cannot say at what speed they moved, or how many times she circled the base of the tower, running as if her life depended on it. He was calling, making inarticulate noises, grunting and angry.

  Finally, when his hand was on her shoulder, she half turned, slapped his arm away, and made as if to burst inside the tower for sanctuary. He seized her in the doorway.

  She screamed, a hoarse tenor noise, and fought. With one great heave of his hand, he ripped her flimsy garments from her.

  I saw that her reluctance to be taken had been feigned, or partly feigned. For she stood before him naked and brazen, and began
again a slow weaving movement of her limbs, without departing from where she stood. I could see the great livid weals of scars running across the small of her back and down her mighty thighs.

  He remained in a half-crouch watching her, the smile of the helmet very narrow now. Then he sprang, bearing her down into the trampled snow only a few paces from Yet’s body.

  That narrow smile was pressed to the scars on Justine’s throat. She half rose at one point, but he bore her down again. She gave her tenor scream, and the wolves answered. A light uneasy wind licked through the bushes.

  It was a brief and brutal mating.

  Then they lay on the ground like two dead trees.

  She rose first, searching out her sheets and knotting them indifferently about her torso. He got up. Gesturing that she was to follow him, he began to march along the path that led down the hill, and was quickly out of sight. She followed. In a moment, she too had disappeared.

  I was alone, dry of mouth, sick at heart.

  XXIII

  * * *

  For a while, I paced up and down in the clearing, consumed by a mixture of emotions. Among them, I have to confess, was lust, reluctantly aroused by that unparalleled mating. A natural if unfortunate association of ideas made me think of Mary and wonder where she was, in this increasingly confused universe. Sanctity and obscenity lie close in the mind.

  Along with my self-disgust went anger. For I had meant to slay the monster. There would have been no glory in it; it would have been just a brutal ambush, keeping myself as far out of danger as possible; but I had conceived it my duty to kill the creature—and his maker, too, for the same reason, that both represented a threat to mankind, perhaps even to the natural order. Had compunction stayed my hand, or mere curiosity?

  I felt little pride in myself, and knew I would feel still less when I had finished with Victor Frankenstein. He was still on the scene.

  Or could it be that his monsters had killed him after he had brought life to the female? No doubt that might have been their intention; certainly Victor had suspected as much. By remaining on his guard, he could have eluded them.

  I had not seen him leave the tower; maybe he had slipped out the back way. It was more likely that he would still be hiding in the tower, in which case I had to seek him out, which meant venturing back into those hateful rooms where machinery had pounded.

  My argument with myself had brought me to a standstill in the snow.

  The body of Yet sprawled not far away. Wolves lurked in the forest. I saw green eyes among the trees. But I had the automatic in my pocket, and was not afraid of them in the midst of so much that was more alarming.

  Cupping my hand, I shouted at the tower, “Frankenstein!”

  Complete silence. I should have said that the throb of machines had died some while ago, during the early stages of the mating dance. I was about to call again, when there was a movement in the dark beyond the shattered door, and Victor emerged into the clearing.

  “So you are still about, eh, Bodenland? Why don’t you fall silent on your knees before me? I gather you witnessed what I have achieved! I have done something that no other man has done! The power over life and death now belongs to mankind: at last the wearying cycle of the generations has been broken and an entirely new epoch is inaugurated...”

  He stood with his arms above his head, unconsciously aping the stance of an old prophet.

  “Come to your senses, man! You know you have merely succeeded in creating a pair of freaks and fiends that will multiply and add to man’s already great miseries. What makes you think they have not left here in all haste for Geneva and your house, where Elizabeth lives?” It was a cruel idea to stab him with, and he immediately showed its effect.

  “My creature swore to me—swore by the names of God and Milton!—that as soon as his mate was created he would flee with her to the frigid lands, never to return to the haunts of men. He swore that!”

  “What is his oath worth? Haven’t you created a patched thing without an immortal soul? How can it have a conscience?”

  I drew my automatic, wondering if I could work myself up to kill him. He seized my other arm, pleadingly. “No, don’t shoot, don’t be foolish! How can you slay me, who alone understands these fiends, when you spared the fiends themselves? Listen, I had no alternative but to galvanize the tissues of that female into life—you know how he threatened me. But there is a sure way how we can rid the world of them both. Let me create a third creature—”

  “You’re crazy!” Dawn was filtering in now. I could see the frenzy of enthusiasm in his face. A wind stirred.

  “Yes, a third! Another male! Already I have many of the parts. Another male would seek out my first creation in the frigid lands. Jealousy would do the rest... They would fight over the female and kill each other... Put away your pistol, Bodenland, I beg—I beg of you! Look, come inside, come upstairs, let me explain, let me show you my future plans—you are civilized...”

  He moved into the tower. My will paralyzed, I followed, still holding the automatic before me. There was a roaring in my ears, a desperate sickness overcoming me; my indecision thundered through me like waves.

  I was following him up the stairs again, listening to his voice, which babbled on, wavering between sense and nonsense, as he too was seized by fear and fever. The figure of death—all its factors of cruelty, sadness, and hate—was compounded between us. Sickly colors were in the air, whirring about us like moiré patterns.

  “... no purpose in life on this globe—only the endless begetting and dying, too monstrous to be called Purpose —just a phantasmagoria of flesh and flesh remade, of vegetation intervening—humans are just turnips, ploughed back at the end of the winter—the soil, the air, that linkage—like Shelley’s west wind—the leaves could be us—you know, you understand me, Bodenland, ‘like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, yellow and black and pale and hectic red, pestilence-stricken multitudes...’ Did you ever think it might be life that was the pestilence, the accident of consciousness between the eternal chemistry working in the veins of earth and air? So you can’t—you mustn’t kill me, for a purpose must be found, invented if necessary, a human purpose, human, putting us in control, fighting the itness of the great wheeling world, Bodenland. You see, Bodenland? You’re—you’re an intellectual like me, I know it—I can tell—personalities must not enter into it, please—we have to be above the old considerations, be ruthless, as ruthless as the natural processes governing us. It stands to reason. Look—”

  We had mounted somehow to his living room, transfigured by crisis like creatures in a Fuseli canvas. I was still pointing the automatic at him. He stumbled towards a desk as he was talking, opened a drawer, bent, began to pull something from it—

  I fired from close range.

  He looked up at me. His face was transformed in some terrible way I could not explain—it no longer looked like his face. He brought a child’s skull out into the light, placed it shakingly on the desk top.

  In a sepulchral and choked voice, he said, “Henry will make a suitable husband for—”

  A ragged cough broke through his speech. Blood spurted from his mouth. He put a hand to his chest. I made a move forward.

  “A husband for—”

  Again the blood.

  “Victor—” I said.

  His eyes closed. He was a small, frail man, young. He collapsed delicately, sinking rather than falling to the floor. His head went against the carpet with a gesture of weariness. Another choking cough, and his legs kicked.

  Perched on an ancient folio, the baby’s skull stared at me.

  XXIV

  * * *

  When I let the horse go free and set fire to the tower of Frankenstein, it was as much to burn out my crime as to have an end to Frankenstein’s notes and researches. Yet one of his notebooks I did keep; it was a diary of his progress, and I preserved it in case I ever managed to return to my own time.

  Well, we will say it like that. But my original personali
ty had now almost entirely dissolved, and the limbo I was in seemed to me the only time I knew. I did what I did.

  Leaving a great column of smoke behind me, I climbed into my automobile and drove to see if the Villa Diodati and the Campagne Chapuis were still in existence on this plane.

  They were not. The frigid lands began no more than a stone’s throw from where Mary’s door had stood. It will seem odd to say I was relieved; but there was relief in the discovery, for I felt myself too soiled to approach her again. There had been periods in my earlier life when the apocalyptic nature of some event—say, a severe personal humiliation—had caused me to return ever and again to it, obsessively, in memory; not just to recall it, but to be there again, in an eternal return such as Ouspensky postulates, as if some pungently strong emotion could cause time to close back on itself like a fan. But those occasions were nothing to the obsessive return in the toils of which I was now involved. I could not rid myself of Victor’s death, or of the mating dance. The two happened simultaneously, were one linked event, one in violence, one in the annihilation of personality, one in their intolerable disintegrative charge.

  Between the blinding voltages of these returns, I attempted to make my brain think. At least the graven image of reality had been destroyed for me, so that I no longer had difficulty in apprehending Frankenstein and his monsters, Byron, Mary Shelley, and the world of 2020 as contiguous. What I had done—so it seemed—was wreck the fatalism of coming events. If Mary Shelley’s novel could be regarded as a possible future, then I had now rendered it impossible by killing Victor.

  But Victor was not real. Or rather, in the twenty-first century from which I came (there might be others from which I had not come), he existed only as a fictitious or, at best, a legendary character, whereas Mary Shelley was a historical figure whose remains and portraits could be dwelt on.