The Ultimate Frankenstein

by Byron Preiss (ed)

  Fearing a weapon, I moved toward him, but he extended nothing more lethal than a small white pasteboard. At length I took it and read the legend printed on one side:

  CLARK FLOREY

  President, W.W.G.

  I read the initials aloud. They meant nothing to me.

  "World Wrestling Guild," he explained. "I'm a promoter."

  ▼▼▼

  The dogs would definitely have to go. Despite the rehearsed histrionics of the hired "peasants" and the cheering and catcalls of the crowd, I made a mental note to talk to Clark about it after the bout.

  It was a small enough complaint. I had no conflict with the new haircut that created the illusion my head was flat on top, nor with the plastic electrodes secured to my neck by a flesh-colored collar, although the latter sometimes gave me a rash in auditoriums that lacked air conditioning, but I would not be mauled by animals before I had even set foot in the ring.

  The auditorium in this case was in Cleveland, and my opponent, waiting patiently on the ropes while I worked up the crowd with some convincing bellowing prior to bursting free of the bonds that held me to the cross, was Sloan Van Whale, the Dutch Terrorist, with whom I was to wrestle two falls out of three, no disqualifications, in a classic Texas Cage match for the World Wrestling Guild heavyweight championship. The house was sold out, with a ten percent cut of the gate guaranteed to me under my contract with Clark and a commercial endorsement deal in the works if the network approved of the ratings from the night's telecast. I had already appeared on the cover of Abs and Pecs, and there was talk TV Guide wanted to interview me for an article it was preparing on the resurgence in popularity of professional wrestling. And why not? I was largely responsible.

  I was billed as Frankenstein.

  Father would be so proud.

  THIS ICY REGION MY HEART

  ENCIRCLES

  Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem

  ▼▼▼

  HE HAD come back. She had always known he would, because she had imagined it so.

  She had imagined his form: moving slowly from shadow to shadow, as one with the weathered faces of the brick and stone, at times almost indistinguishable from pillar or hitching post. Sleeping in an abandoned stable space or beneath a tree in Hyde Park.

  Once she had imagined his face, too, but she could not reimagine it now. She could be sure only that, as always, it was a live visage properly dead. A too-vivid dream. Once before she had dreamed such a thing: that her firstborn and first-dead babe had come back to life, that the sweet little thing had been only cold, that she and Shelley had rubbed it before the fire, and it had lived. But when she'd awakened there had been no baby; her Mary Jane was still dead.

  How was it she had so long survived this beautiful and monstrous Imagination, when with regularity it repulsed and wounded her? Her own dear Shelley had not survived. It seemed to her now that he had been little but Imagination in its purest, most beautiful, most dangerous form, inspiration for both Victor Frankenstein and the Monster, neither of them wholly recognizable after all these years.

  Shelley's features would not have been recognizable, either, that July day on the beach off Via Reggio. They had tried to keep the details from her, but she had persisted. There had been his green jacket, and in the pockets his volumes of Keats and Sophocles. His beautiful face had been bloated and pulled apart by the dark sea. But she would have recognized him by his form, by the shadow his soul had cast.

  During the past few days she had glimpsed such a shadow stretched out across a neighboring rooftop on Chester Square, and once in a distant garden stiff and erect as a giant scarecrow. This shadow was soulless, and she knew at once who cast it. She almost welcomed him, although she was so afraid.

  He had come back, and with him he'd brought some of the icy regions of his exile. The weather was extraordinarily cold. She had lain down in January, and now she thought February must be fast approaching. She had always disliked the English climate, but she could not remember a London January ever quite so cold.

  But why call this creature a "he," unless this was, indeed, Shelley returning to her, making his way back out of the icy emptiness, the wasteland beyond passion and poetry? Such thoughts filled her with guilt, as if she were the abomination. She was a foolish old woman.

  The Monster wrapped the cold about itself like a winding sheet, as if for protection. She had touched the window glass once but could touch it no more; the distant shadow beyond it had burned her fingers with its ice. The air in the street appeared solid, full of light, and much too cold to breathe. She wanted to warn her son Percy not to go out but could not quite manage it. She had never been able to keep her children safe.

  Birds froze on the branches. Their dark bodies littered the pavement. Each day the dark form seemed closer. She wondered if she should warn the Queen, Buckingham Palace being only a short distance away. But even if she could, what might she say? She could talk to her of Shelley, but not of this other bringing its ice deep into the heart and soul of England. Victoria's strong affection for her Albert was widely known, but what did the Queen understand of spirit and Imagination?

  Out in the square dogs grew heavy with sheaths of ice and collapsed into their fur. Mary saw that the glass in the window had begun to crack, the fissures so crisp and definite that she wondered if they might lie across

  her eyeballs instead. Warm, wet fingers tracked the cold of her throat. What could it want?

  "What do you want?"

  Outside her window, ice thundered and moaned with the Monster's cries, and London paid no heed.

  The Monster had come for Shelley's heart. It was hers. She would not give it up.

  Mary knew her husband's heart more intimately now than ever when he was alive. It was as though, without referent during the more than twenty- eight years since Shelley's drowning, she had recreated his heart for herself, endowed it with a new kind of life.

  Imagination, Mary thought, and, although her body ached with new pain and her spirit with old, "the beaming face of Imagination peeped in, and the weight of deadly woe was lightened." She smiled. Some twenty years ago, when she'd written those words, she'd been amazed and distressed to discover even moments of happiness, and she'd thought she knew everything about both woe and Imagination. How strange, she thought now as she'd thought all her life, how strange a thing her life had been!

  Kind, gloomy Edward Trelawney had first presented Shelley's heart to Leigh Hunt, snatched unconsumed from the flames of the beach pyre which Mary had been unable to bring herself to attend. She'd been told, and had not been surprised, that the body had been slow to burn, had finally separated after three hours, the unusually large heart apparently impregnable to the fire. Again and again her Imagination had conjured vivid, not entirely unwelcome visions of the scene: hand bandaged, eyes glistening with tears from smoke and grief and pain, Trelawney saying nothing as he passed Shelley's heart to another, though far lesser, poet.

  At last Shelley's heart had been returned to Mary, and she had kept it with her all these years. She had wrapped it in linen and in the lines of his poem "Adonais," and—although written as an elegy to a man he had not much liked—they had come to speak to her as if they'd always been closest to her beloved's heart:

  I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar!

  In the miserable little house at Pisa, always so vulnerable to floodwaters and now suddenly and permanently flooded by Shelley's absence, the heart had been as agitated as she was, had never been able to find a place. It had rested briefly on table, shelf, rain-grayed corner of the floor, for Mary had been unwilling to believe any surface capable of supporting it for long and had worried that the baby would somehow stumble on it and would know what it was, or, equally horrible, would not know.

  At Albaro, her dreadful first home alone, the wrapped heart had reposed on her desk. His heart, then, had occupied very nearly the same space as her own while she set about what was to have been her one life-task: commemorating the only creature wor
th loving and living for, the essential being who had been both trapped and enshrined in a fragile image, now shattered, now freed, while she was left to go on as best she could.

  But with each move thereafter, the package containing Shelley's heart had become simply a part of the household furnishings. In all the London flats—Speldhurst Street, Somerset Street, Park Street—in Putney, now here at 24 Chester Square, it had been scarcely more remarkable to her than this mirror or that chair. And yet still his words would come back to her, as if the pressure of his heart had rubbed them from the manuscript and launched them into the air:

  ... a grave among the eternal . . .

  The words came into her like a whisper from his heart. Sometimes it seemed a desecration to her, and dangerous, that Shelley's heart had not been burned, sometimes a miracle.

  Waking from dreams she could remember if she wanted to, Mary found herself staring at the cold mantel where, in this room, the heart package had always sat. Her own habitual unmindfulness of it disgusted her, and she said aloud, "Monster." It was a name she'd often used for herself in the journals no one would ever see, and now, halfway to the grave, she dared say it aloud: "Monster!"

  As if in reply there was a shifting outside her window, a shadowy fall of snow, a cracking as of long-unused limbs bending and seeking purchase on the outer walls. It had come back. Fear had descended now into weariness, and Mary rolled over, away from the mantel and the window and the heart, and thought to go back to sleep, for there would be nothing again today worth waking to.

  Something was in her bed, something small and solid and very still at about the level of her waist. Mary reached down among the bedclothes and touched the object, gasped and pulled her hands back, forced herself to find the thing again and extract it and hold it up. With great effort of will she did not drop it, held it at arm's length and stared. Mary Jane, dead in her bed again. Her baby girl, dead.

  The baby was not really there. Mary's hands were empty. Trembling, she lay back on her pillow and thought how alone she was, how alone she'd always been, estranged from her fellows and estranged from herself. Those who accused her of having a cold heart were wrong: her heart was hot, searing, but the core of her was protected by layers and layers of ice that had allowed her to survive.

  Outside her window the city cracked beneath the weight of ice, and a hungry, half-imagined shadow made its way awkwardly toward her room. Shelley's words provided no comfort:

  He had adorned and hid the coming bulk of Death.

  Mary struggled out of bed and crossed the few steps to her window. The sun had risen into a painful glaring of snow-filled sky, turned the room and her white nightgown gray. The birds were silent, their beaks packed with ice. Toward her from among the skeletal trees was coming a very small figure, with the wide-legged toddle of a child just learning to walk. As Mary watched, mesmerized by a horrible and impossible hope, the sun rose another sliver and illuminated the child's face. Mary's throat constricted as though a hand had closed around it. "Clara!" she cried aloud. Her little girl—dead these thirty years, her health sacrificed for her father's who had died anyway—looked up at the sound of her name, and Mary, though unable to move, was frantically thinking how she might open the window and climb out and run across the cold blanket of sunrise and this time save her daughter, when the child was gone.

  But another child was there. Older, sturdier, closer to her, blond hair glinting in the early sun. William. Willmouse. Willy Blue-Eyes. His death foretold by three years in the book of the Monster: William is dead! That sweet child, whose smiles delighted and warmed my heart, who was so gentle, yet so gay. Victor, he is murdered. And foretold, too, the mother's culpability, inescapable no matter what the circumstances of her child's death: "Oh, God. I have murdered my child!"

  Mary was not surprised to see William after the others. But her heart stopped at the sight of him, long enough for her vision to fill in with blackness as though the sun had never risen, would never rise again, or as though its rising made no difference anymore. What cruelty was this that sent her dead children to her now, to remind her that she had taken for herself, however unwillingly, years and years of life that should have been theirs? To remind her, too, monstrously, that she would sacrifice them all again, even darling William, for one more day with Shelley. She managed to get the window open, skinning her knuckles on the ridge of ice, and to thrust both hands out into the frigid air, but her gesture sent William away again and she was alone. . . . earth's shadows fly .. .

  Shelley's heart had known it all.

  She was not alone. When she turned and staggered toward her bed— thinking she might sleep at least until her surviving son and his wife began to stir and she must accept another day for living—her bed was already occupied. A female figure, head thrown back halfway off the mattress, black mouth open and marked throat exposed, features blurred and mingled, skin yellowed and taut in the slanting light so that Mary said aloud, "Fanny!" and then, "Harriet!" and knew that it was both. Her love for Shelley and his for her had murdered them both; the marks of her hands and his were on both their hearts, and, given the choice, she would without hesitation do it again.

  From where she stood with her back chilled by the icy breeze from the half-open window, the bed was between her and the door. At the foot of the bed was a space just wide enough for her to pass through sideways. She pressed herself against the wall and began to sidle along it, hoping she could escape from this room with the specter in the bed, into the early- morning liveliness of her son's family, which was as bright and open and unencumbered by genius and shadows as he was.

  But the figure reached for her. "Fiend!" Mary shrieked. "Leave me alone!"

  The face was a monstrous composite of the women Mary had killed— her sister, Shelley's first wife, and someone else she could not quite name. "You will always be alone," the woman murmured, "until you take me in."

  The woman was holding her hands out palms up, obviously in supplication. The woman wanted something from her, and Mary was moved to a primal kind of pity, but horror and revulsion were stronger and she took a few more steps along the wall toward the door.

  "Don't deny me, Mary."

  Her breath already short and wheezing, Mary bolted. Too soon, though, or too late, because the woman slipped between her and the door, like a shadow when the light has shifted. Arms encircled her waist. Hot breath like smoke, sweet as the grave, misted her eyes and took her own breath away. There was an explosion inside her head, a burst of exquisite color and then the rush of darkness, and in that moment she saw who the woman was. "Mother!" she cried.

  Her mother, whose life and very name she had taken for her own, embraced her so tightly that Mary felt her heart and her skull split open. Her mother rushed into her mind and body and reclaimed them. "You created me!" her mother was whispering, but of course that wasn't true; Mary was her mother's creature, given life and then abandoned.

  Mary fell sideways and struck her temple on the corner of the bed.

  Thinking there must be blood, she meant to raise a hand to the wound, and discovered she could not. She managed to drag herself up onto the bed and turn herself over so that she could breathe. Her entire left side was paralyzed. The apparition was gone, and she was alone in the room, hearing the household waking around her and knowing it had nothing to do with her anymore, staring quite without intention at the packaged heart on the mantel over no fire.

  Once, very young, she had come upon a gray cat nibbling yellow roses. "Shelley!" she had called in delight to her not-yet-husband. "Here is a cat eating roses! She will turn into a woman!" And Shelley, charmed, had written it down.

  Mary tried to sit up, and found she could not. She could not reach the wrapped heart on the mantel, and could lift only one hand to press on her own heart which was, remarkably, still beating. She had lived with Shelley —breathed the same air, dreaded and courted the same shadows, watched the same cat eating the same roses—for a brief, whole lifetime; she had lived with
out him nearly four times as long, a lifetime that was not yet finished. She suspected that, by now, he was more real and present to her in his absence than he'd ever been while physically alive in this corporeal world.

  Now as she was preparing at last to join him, Mary thought she should unwrap the linen and, for what would be the last time, encounter Shelley's heart directly. Touch it. Smell it. Take measure of what remained of it. Observe its color and shape. Hold it against her breast (her nipple an eye that had so frightened him at Diodati, seeing the future, suckling the past) until her own heart stilled. She did not think she had much time.

  She could not reach the "Adonais" with Shelley wrapped at its heart. She could not get out of bed; the mere thought of trying to move all those muscles in concert and sequence was ludicrous. She thought to summon Percy or his Lady Jane to fetch the heart for her, but the bell had been placed on the table at her left side, where last night it had been perfectly accessible, and now she couldn't raise or lower her fingers to ring it.

  Someone came anyway. There were purposeful footsteps and harsh, rapid breathing. Mary tried to speak her relief and gratitude, and to tell what it was she wanted. For some reason, she was afraid. For some reason, she was weeping, and she herself could scarcely make sense of the guttural sounds that came from her throat.

  It was not kind Jane come to do her bidding, nor her son. It was not Shelley at her door, inside her cold room with the sunrise, at her deathbed, although she had more than half expected him as guide. It was not any of the spectral women who had appeared to her earlier. She knew, suddenly, who it was.