Burial
It appears that a citizen by the name of Charles Dubois, a farrier by trade, died of the ague in his nineteenth or twentieth year. His carcass (he being in life a well-made and robust fellow) was duly required by the People in order to rise again and serve as a New-Citizen.
However, mired in rustic backwardness, his parents and young wife conspired to give Dubois wasteful burial, compounding their crimes by commissioning illegal ‘Christian’ rites. Lying words were put about that rapid putrefaction had set in, making Revival impossible.
Grenade
Vigilant village Commissioner for Public Virtue, Victor Guadet, was not deceived. Acting on information, he led a force of Revolutionary Marshals to the secret midnight interment and ventured seizure of the corpse.
Disgusting to relate, force was offered against his lawful acts and injuries inflicted on both sides. Worse still, a grenade had, with evil forethought, been placed atop the coffin for just such an eventuality. When detonated it forever denied the People the continued service of Charles Dubois (deceased) and Commissioner Guadet likewise.
Immortal
Arrests were made of the surviving counter- revolutionaries, including the dead man’s parents and spouse. After swift Tribunal hearings sentence was executed in Bergerac before a large and appreciative audience.
The family Dubois have taken their son’s place and now march as cleansed New-Citizens in the service of our great cause! Their former names shall be blotted out forever from the immortal roll-call of the People!
Therefore harken oh citizens! Read and learn to your education and benefit: the Revolution is not thwarted in this life or beyond the grave!
Chapter 1: A DAY IN THE LIFE OF JULIUS FRANKENSTEIN (2).
For symmetry’s sake he started keeping a diary of captivity again. The day the two letters arrived it would have said.
‘Same. Petit déjeuner. Pretend to do research. Drink. Bed.’
The regime at the Grand Mausolée de Compiégne was less liberal than the Heathrow Hecatomb’s—incredible as that might seem. There was no need to send any Gallic equivalent of Sir Percy Blakeney to give Frankenstein a rocket for his lack of discoveries. Every single day he had to interact with Coventionary overseers: rough revolutionaries with no respect, and no manners; and not the slightest delicacy when they bristled their great moustaches and said what they thought of him. Each day he thought of killing one with his bare hands and getting it over with.
What stopped him was sure knowledge of the consequences. There was a guillotine facility in the central yard which saw daily use. After a travesty of a ‘tribunal’ they’d slice his head off. Within the hour both he and the man he killed would be stitched up and in the storage vats waiting to be reborn.
Conventionary Revivalist science was neither neat nor painstaking. They had no time for refinements. Their wars and purges and policy of ‘perpetual terror’ both demanded and supplied a massive flow of ‘New-citizens.’ Accordingly, under that ceaseless pressure Compiegne’s standard products made even the worst Heathrow ‘patchwork job’ looked polished. Frankenstein had seen women’s—even girls’—heads on male bodies, and recycled battle casualties so battered only mummy-style coiled bandages kept them whole. And in his case, if he transgressed they’d be in vengeful mood. God alone knew what freak-show they’d revive him as.
The danger was, that though his gaolers might be coarse as coal-bunkers in their studied way, some had the subtlety of torturers too. They sensed his particular fears and played upon them.
‘If you do go,’ they crowed (and ‘go’ in the Compiegne context meant one thing only: to the meat vats), ‘we’ll make sure you get extra serum. Just so that afterwards you’re aware.’
They really meant it. They laughed about it and chatted about that happy prospect over their evening bottle. They brought him especially botched examples of their handiwork and made them dance for him.
For a sad fact was starting to dawn on the Convention as it had on the English. Frankenstein was not the find they thought they’d made, and all he shared with his genius great-uncle was a surname. He’d been given his own mini Promethean facility but what emerged from it could just as well have rolled off the main production line, and with only half the time and trouble. The daily moustache-bristling grew ever more insolent.
Therefore, the sole promising option Julius had left to consider was escape—and the ball and chain about his ankle forced him to be realistic on that score.
So, he secured extra days with cunning. The bloody-hysteria-as-standard of the Mausoleum meant that his guardians were busy men and liable to distraction. When their attention wavered Frankenstein stole and stored exceptional body parts like robust torsos and thick-hewed limbs. Bribes and threats to lowly carters and ‘Charon-men’ also secured him first pick of any grenadier or guardsman that came in. Accordingly, in moments of crisis he could revive a sturdy New-citizen soldier twice as good as the ramshackle basic product. He’d explain it with mumbo-jumbo about ‘vascular enhancement’ or ‘muscle augmentation,’ (largely made up on the hoof) and the ‘Quality Control’ auditors would be sufficiently intrigued to give him a little while longer. But when stocks failed and he couldn’t directly repeat the trick those same old doubts about him spread. The dreadful day inched nearer.
The Revolution had its own special version of redundancy, notified via a sharp descending blade, and made all the more fearful by surprise. One day a man might be at his desk and the next he was gone and not to be mentioned again.
As motivational regimes went, it worked well. The Convention had long ago observed that fear made far better citizens than love.
* * *
Julius was still in good enough grace with the management to receive full rations. Petit déjeuner consisted of bread and sausage and a carafe of wine. Granted, the baguette was gritty pain de guerre, the sausage dubious and wine already dilute, but it counted as haute cuisine in a nation at continual war with itself or others for four decades.
Julius ate it mechanically, without pleasure, merely as a means of strength for another day, whilst trying not to think of the vile rumours circulated about what went into the sausage.
Before being perverted to its current usage, the Mausoleum had been a chateau, and quite a grand one. The usual thing had happened to its owners when the ‘mobile columns’ of the Second Revolution surged out into the countryside, and a few of their of their skulls remained perched on prominent architectural features.
After that the history of the place grew obscure and Frankenstein didn’t enquire too closely. It wouldn’t have been wise even if he’d actually wanted to know. The Convention didn’t care for too much dwelling on the past, holding it to be a symptom of reactionary tendencies—an invariably fatal disease. Suffice then to say that a succession of notables made the place their commandeered home as they rose and then fell in the bloody cauldron of revolutionary struggle. Often it all happened too quick for them to even take possession or enjoy much more than a weekend there. None left an impression, save for some bloodstains on the walls during contested evictions.
Then finally, when the chateau had become ill-omened and dilapidated enough to excite no one’s envy, the ‘Peoples’ Promethean Brigade’ arrived to stay. Beforehand, the unit had been in Paris itself, close to the guillotines and source of supply, but there’d been too many escapes and scandalous sights for the capital of a regime with a keen sense of its own dignity. Therefore, the Convention’s central committee (who’d recently deified ‘Reason’ as the State religion), deemed it reasonable to move things to less sensitive surrounds, a bit nearer the Front. There were already trains of wagons carrying the condemned from prison to Madame Guillotine, and so it took only minor administrative adjustments for them to press on a bit further and ferry the finished product to the Mausoleum.
Those wagon trains had been rolling for a decade now. There’d been ample time to purge the town of Compiegne of reactionary objectors, and restock it wi
th patriots and Mausoleum workers and their families. Now the whole locality was predicated on Promethean science and thus rather prosperous, in a grim sort of way.
Or so Frankenstein had heard, because he hadn’t actually ever seen the place, having arrived by night and in a sealed coach under escort. The Mausoleum’s gate slammed shut behind him and there he’d stayed ever since, as quarantined from normal life as if moved to the Moon. For, in its ten years of operation, there’d been opportunity to erect multiple high walls right round the former Chateau, both to keep ‘New-citizens’ in and prying eyes out. Therefore, all Julius could view now as he ate his breakfast sitting before high (barred) windows was a rumour of forest: a few tree-tops glimpsed over the fortifications, plus smoke columns from where the chimneys of Compiegne must be.
Other than that there was only sky to study—and the sincere wish to fly into it—whether in a galloon or on angel’s wings didn’t much matter.
It was quiet there as soon as (like all hardened Promethean scientists) you ceased to hear the continual Lazaran-lament. Similar to its English counterpart, the Mausoleum functioned in too much of a rush to get round to fitting steam-driven devices throughout. Instead, use was made of the muscle-power of its myriad reject products to make conveyor belts turn and serum-spears descend. They toiled for free, didn’t require coal to function, and when they finally broke down were readily replaced without recourse to mechanics. It… worked, by and large, and that sufficed.
Elsewhere, in less streamlined parts of Europe, scholars criticised Revivalist science’s sedative effect on all other fields of technological progress. They said that exploiting Lazaran power was like the mass slavery of Classical Times, removing the incentive for innovation. And as for its effect on public morals…!
But the Convention didn’t give a fig for what ivory-towered academics or theologians might think. Let them burble on, peddling ‘morality’ for their masters. The Revolution would get to their sleepy hollows sooner or later, and then there’d be an end to such idealist nit-picking...
Meanwhile, back in the Mausoleum and present, in his desperate casting about for positive developments Julius looked on the bright side. At least the absence of machines made for comparative tranquillity—so long as you were careful where you looked. Get that wrong and even silence wasn’t ‘tranquil.’
Frankenstein exercised great care, but 100% avoidance was never going to happen. Not there. For instance, there’d been a batch brought in the day before that were either victims of a lynch mob (nothing unusual in stressed and starving Revolutionary France) or else grapeshot from massed artillery (ditto). The carts held what looked more like off-casts from an autopsy than coherent corpses.
So, no—only by raising one’s eyes to Heaven (and pinching one’s nostrils) could you construct the delusion of living in a place where humans lived—that is to say real humans living real life. The tops of the Chateau’s tall towers (out of bounds to him) and clouds passing by in their eternal journey (likewise) conspired to bolter the notion. If he determinedly thought of nothing else they would metaphorically bear him aloft and above all this for… minutes on end.
Today Fate begrudged him even those minutes. Footsteps on the stairs to his door called him back to earth. He heard and hated them.
With good reason. Hobnails. It could only be one of the Mausoleum moustaches, here to upbraid him—or worse. Or perhaps that long anticipated moment had arrived and nemesis was approaching his door. A sudden strong premonition told him it might be the latter.
Frankenstein considered this and took a possibly last sip of wine. Fittingly, it was acid.
How much did he care? About that or anything?
Not much came the answer—so long as leaving this world was quick. And neat. And dignified. Which he knew to be asking a great deal. Too much probably, especially in present circumstances.
So then: goodbye cruel world—and damn your eyes!
Frankenstein dismissively clicked his fingers at existence—but the visitor took that as summons and entered.
It transpired Julius had libelled life without cause. It was not ‘that moment.’ Nor nemesis. Quite the opposite in fact.
A Mausoleum messenger stood before him, bearing letters that would save his life, not end it.
Chapter 2: R.S.V.P.
‘My dearest Julius,’ said the first letter, in a familiar wild hand.
‘How are you? How go your researches? Any news?
From your most fervent and true friend,
Lady Ada Augusta Lovelace, nee Byron.
xxx’
Frankenstein’s first reaction? He didn’t know how she had the nerve. Then a second’s reflection reminded him he knew all too well. Their history together should have led him to expect nothing else.
A sudden acid storm sloshed around his stomach, taking him to the verge of nausea. The sheer gall of the woman!
‘Any reply, monsieur?’
The messenger had waited, temporarily invisible to Julius.
‘What?’
‘Do you wish to reply, monsieur? There is opportunity. The man who delivered it awaits.’
Julius sucked his lips.
‘Well, that depends,’ he answered eventually. ‘Do you have a loaded gun to hand?’
Messenger took that as a no and departed.
Frankenstein crossed to the french windows of his cell cum quarters cum workplace. Sure enough, far down the drive of the Compeigne Mausoleum, just visible through the bars, beyond the gates and guards, waited a black coach. Before it stood a man who was almost certainly Foxglove, starring up at Frankenstein’s new home.
You had to hand it to them. Or her. If you didn’t hand it to her she’d snatch it anyway. Lady Lovelace had got in! She’d slipped away from the aerodrome kerfuffle and entered by some other means. Probably it was long arranged in advance and the whole galloon business—maybe all their post-Channel plans—a mere humouring of him. She must have been waiting for the first encounter with French authority in strength: a scenario with no prospect of shooting your way out. If they’d chanced to have been shipwrecked on a French rather than Belgian beach it would have happened then. Whichever way the dice fell, the outcome was pre-determined. Julius would be led up the garden path like a dumb beast with no understanding, to be delivered to the butcher.
Bile was mountaineering up his throat. He had to gag and try to think of other things. It proved impossible.
All manner of loose ends now meshed and locked into place. Disparate parts became an understandable whole. A sickening picture. Or perhaps a puppet show, starring Dr. Julius Frankenstein, singing and dancing without dignity to someone else’s tune.
For a second, if he’d had that hypothetical gun, he would have used it on the distant coach. Or maybe hurtled down the drive with it to get right up close and make sure of the job.
Of course, teeming soldiery would have stopped him long before he was within sniffing distance of escape or vengeance, but it would still be cathartic. The visible working out of his inmost thoughts.
Yet if that wasn’t on, it was always possible to take remote revenge. He could have the pleasure of denouncing Ada as she had him. One word, one raising of the alarm, was all it would take to have Mausoleum security all over that coach like rampant pox.
They’d find an Englishwoman—and an aristocrat to boot. An illegal. Someone who’d barged into a society where all things not compulsory were forbidden. Probably an expendable Lazaran spy they’d conclude, one of the rare sentient sort. The secret police would have a field day! Fouché’s men had their own ‘interrogation facilities’ in the Mausoleum, as they did in every state building. Julius sometimes heard the screams from them at night.
The chilling remembrance of which turned Frankenstein to another option. A wholly irresponsible and therefore highly tempting alternative.
It remained open to him to answer the impudent message. To re-engage with mad Ada. To replay their relationship a second time—and this time to play
it better...
Her coach still awaited. The Mausoleum messenger could be summoned back to deliver a reply
Which would say… what?
How am I? Answer: a prisoner, as before. In a Gallic mirror image of the Heathrow Hecatomb.
How goes my researches? They do not. They cannot. Which my captors must soon perceive.
And any news? No, no, no, no!
Or possibly... yes.
Julius suddenly recalled that the messenger had delivered two letters. The second lay in still virgin state whilst shock and outrage and multiple beckoning ways distracted him.
And betrayed him almost. The road of life forked. If Frankenstein had acted in haste and gone to her he might never have known there was a counter offer. A offer that blew Ada’s clean out of the water.
* * *
It was short but, when interpreted, sweet.
‘Mon Chère Frankenstein’
it read, in careless, V.I.P.’s hand. Then:
‘?’
Then:
‘N’
You could legitimately have commissioned a conference of scholars to decipher it, timidly exploring the multiple pathways of possible meaning till they were all set out, ready for rational conclusions to be made. Alternatively, you could, as Frankenstein did, shoulder aside all those imaginary academics and make an intuitive leap of faith over their gleaming heads. The end result was probably the same but with the added attraction of being stylish—and a lot quicker.
Since Frankenstein was a man in a hurry he happily took the short route. He also took up paper and pen and he wrote:
‘Mon Chère General
!
JF’
Frankenstein's Legions Page 20