"They were shown the door, too." To this day, the Count is understandably piqued about the copyright snafu involving the use of his image. He sees his face everywhere, and does not rate compensation. This abrades his business instinct for the jugular. He understands too well why there must be a Real Wolf Man. "Bud and Lou and you and me and the big guy all went out with the dishwater of the Second World War."
"I was at Lou's funeral," says Larry. "You were lurking the Carpathians." He turned to Blank Frank. "And you didn't even know about it."
"I loved Lou," says Blank Frank. "Did I ever tell you the story of how I popped him by accident on the set of—"
"Yes." The Count and Larry speak in unison. This breaks the tension of remembrance tainted by the unfeeling court intrigue of studios. Recall the people, not the things.
Blank Frank tries to remember some of the others. He returns to the bar to rinse his glass. The plasma globe zizzes and snaps calmly, a man-made tempest inside clear glass.
"I heard ole Ace got himself a job at the Museum of Natural History." Larry refers to Ace Bandage; he has nicknames like this for everybody.
"The Prince," the Count corrects, "still guards the Princess. She's on display in the Egyptology section. The Prince cut a deal with museum security. He prowls the graveyard shift; guards the bone rooms. They've got him on a synthetic of tana leaves. It calmed him down. Like methadone."
"A night watchman gig," says Larry, obviously thinking of the low pay scale. But what in hell would the Prince need human coin for, anyway? "Hard to picture."
"Try looking in a mirror, yourself," says the Count.
Larry blows a raspberry. "Jealous."
It is very easy for Blank Frank to visualize the Prince, gliding through the silent, cavernous corridors in the wee hours. The museum is, after all, just one giant tomb.
Larry is fairly certain ole Fish Face—another nickname—escaped from a mad scientist in San Francisco and butterfly-stroked south, probably to wind up in bayou country. He and Larry had shared a solid mammal-to- amphibian simpatico. He and Larry had been the most physically violent of the old crew. Larry still entertained the notion of talking his scaly pal into doing a bout for pay-per-view. He has never been able to work out the logistics of a steel fishtank match, however.
"Griffin?" says the Count.
"Who can say?" Blank Frank shrugs. "He could be standing right here and we wouldn't know it unless he started singing 'Nuts in May.' "
"He was a misanthrope," says Larry. "His crazy kid, too. That's what using drugs will get you."
This last is a veiled stab at the Count's calling. The Count expects this from Larry, and stays venomless. The last thing he wants this evening is a conflict over the morality of substance use.
"I dream, sometimes, of those days," says Blank Frank. "Then I see the films again. The dreams are literalized. It's scary."
"Before this century," says the Count, "I never had to worry that anyone would stockpile my past." Of the three, he is the most paranoid where personal privacy is concerned.
"You're a romantic." Larry will only toss an accusation like this in special company. "It was important to a lot of people that we be monsters. You can't deny what's nailed down there in black and white. There was a time when the world needed monsters like that."
They each considered their current occupations, and found that they did indeed still fit into the world.
"Nobody's gonna pester you now," Larry presses on. "Don't bother to revise, your past—today, your past is public record, and waiting to contradict you. We did our jobs. How many people become mythologically legendary for just doing their jobs?"
"Mythologically legendary?" mimicks the Count. "You'll grow hair on your hands from using all those big words."
"Bite this." Larry offers the unilateral peace symbol.
"No, thank you; I've already dined. But I have brought something for you. For both of you."
Blank Frank and Larry both notice the Count is now speaking as though a big Mitchell camera is grinding away, somewhere just beyond the grasp of sight. He produces a small pair of wrapped gifts, and hands them over.
Larry wastes no time ripping into his. "Weighs a ton."
Nestled in styro popcorn is a wolfs head—savage, streamlined, snarling. The gracile canine neck is socketed.
"It's from the walking stick," says the Count. "All that was left."
"No kidding." Larry's voice grows small for the first time this evening. The wolfs head seems to gain weight in his grasp. Two beats of his powerful heart later, his eyes seem a bit wet.
Blank Frank's gift is much smaller and lighter.
"You were a conundrum," says the Count. He enjoys playing emcee. "So many choices, yet never easy to buy for. Some soil from Transylvania? Water from Loch Ness? A chunk of some appropriate ruined castle?"
What Blank Frank unwraps is a ring. Old gold, worn smooth of its subtler filigree. A small ruby set in the grip of a talon. He holds it to the light.
"As nearly as I could discover, that ring once belonged to a man named Ernst Volmer Klumpf."
"Whoa," says Larry. Weird name.
Blank Frank puzzles it. He holds it toward the Count, like a lens.
"Klumpf died a long time ago," says the Count. "Died and was buried. Then he was disinterred. Then a few of his choicer parts were recycled by a skillful surgeon of our mutual acquaintance."
Blank Frank stops looking so blank.
"In fact, part of Ernst Volmer Klumpf is still walking around today . . . tending bar for his friends, among other things."
The new expression on Blank Frank's face pleases the Count. The ring just barely squeezes onto the big guy's left pinky—his smallest finger.
Larry, to avoid choking up, decides to make noise. Showing off, he vaults the bartop and draws his own refill. "This calls for a toast." He hoists his beer high, slopping the head. "To dead friends. Meaning us."
The Count pops several capsules from an ornate tin and washes them down with the last of his Gangbang. Blank Frank murders his Blind Hermit.
"Don't even think of the bill," says Blank Frank, who knows of the Count's habit of paying for everything. The Count smiles and nods graciously. In his mind, the critical thing is to keep the tab straight. Blank Frank pats the Count on the shoulder, hale and brotherly, since Larry is out of reach. The Count dislikes physical contact but permits this because it is, after all, Blank Frank.
"Shit man, we could make our own comeback sequel, with all the talent in this room," Larry says. "Maybe hook up with some of those new guys. Do a monster rally."
It could happen. They all look significantly at each other. A brief stink of guilt, of culpability, like a sneaky fart in a dimly lit chamber.
Make that dimly-lit torture dungeon. thinks Blank Frank, who never forgets the importance of staying in character.
Blank Frank thinks about sequels. About how studios had once jerked their marionette strings, compelling them to come lurching back for more, again and again, adding monsters when the brew ran weak, until they had all been bled dry of revenue potential and dumped at a bus stop to commence the long deathwatch that had made them nostalgia.
It was like living death, in its way.
And these gatherings, year upon year, had become sequels in their own right.
The realization is depressing. It sort of breaks the back of the evening for Blank Frank. He stands friendly and remains as chatty as he ever gets. But the emotion has soured.
Larry chugs so much that he has grown a touch bombed. The Count's chemicals intermix and buzz; he seems to sink into the depths of his coat, his chin ever-closer to the butt of the gun he carries. Larry drinks deep, then howls. The Count plugs one ear with a finger on his free hand. "I wish he wouldn't do that," he says in a proscenium-arch sotto voce that indicates his annoyance is mostly token.
When Larry tries to hurdle the bar again, moving exaggeratedly as he almost always does, he manages to plant his big wrestler's elbow right into
the glass on Blank Frank's framed movie poster. It dents inward with a sharp crack, cobwebbing into a snap puzzle of fracture curves. Larry swears, instantly chagrined. Then, lamely, he offers to pay for the damage.
The Count, not unexpectedly, counter-offers to buy the poster, now that it's damaged.
Blank Frank shakes his massive square head at both of his friends. So many years, among them. "It's just glass. I can replace it. It wouldn't be the first time."
The thought that he has done this before depresses him further. He sees the reflection of his face, divided into staggered components in the broken glass, and past that, the lurid illustration. Him then. Him now.
Blank Frank touches his face as though it is someone else's. His fingernails have always been black. Now they are merely fashionable.
Larry remains embarrassed about the accidental damage and the Count begins spot-checking his Rolex every five minutes or so, as though he is pressing the envelope on an urgent appointment. Something has spoiled the whole mood of their reunion, and Blank Frank is angry that he can't quite pinpoint the cause. When he is angry, his temper froths quickly.
The Count is the first to rise. Decorum is all. Larry tries one more time to apologize. Blank Frank stays cordial, but is overpowered by the sudden strong need to get them the hell out of Un/Dead.
The Count bows stiffly. His limo manifests precisely on schedule. Larry gives Blank Frank a hug. His arms can reach all the way 'round.
"Au revoir," says the Count.
"Stay dangerous," says Larry.
Blank Frank closes and locks the service door. He monitors, via the tiny security window, the silent, gliding departure of the Count's limousine, the fading of Larry's spangles into the night.
Still half an hour till opening. The action at Un/Dead doesn't really crank until midnight anyway, so there's very little chance that some bystander will get hurt.
Blank Frank bumps up the volume and taps his club foot. A eulogy with a beat. He loves Larry and the Count in his massive, broad, uncompromisingly loyal way, and hopes they will understand his actions. He hopes that his two closest friends are perceptive enough, in the years to come, to know that he is not crazy.
Not crazy, and certainly not a monster.
While the music plays, he fetches two economy-sized plastic bottles of lantern kerosene, which he ploshes liberally around the bar, saturating the old wood trim. Arsonists call such flammable liquids "accelerator."
In the scripts, it was always an overturned lantern, or a flung torch from a mob of villagers, that touched off the conclusive inferno. Mansions, mad labs, even stone fortresses burned and blew up, eliminating monster menaces until they were needed again.
Dark threads snake through the tiny warrior braid at the back of Blank Frank's skull. All those Blind Hermits.
The purple electricity arcs toward his finger and trails it loyally. He unplugs the plasma globe and cradles it beneath one giant forearm. The movie poster, he leaves hanging in its smashed frame.
He snaps the sulphur match with one black thumbnail. Ignition craters and blackens the head, eating it with a sharp hiss. Un/Dead's PA throbs with the bass line of "D.O.A." Phosphorus tangs the unmoving air. The match fires orange to yellow to a steady blue. The flamepoint reflects from Blank Frank's large black pupils. He can see himself, as if by candlelight, fragmented by broken picture glass. The past. In his grasp is the plasma globe, unblemished, pristine, awaiting a new charge. The future.
He recalls all of his past experiences with fire. He drops the match into the thin pool of accelerator glistening on the bartop. The flame grows quietly.
Good.
Light springs up, hard white, behind him as he exits and locks the door. The night is cool, near foggy. Condensation mists the plasma globe as he strolls away, pausing beneath a streetlamp to appreciate the ring on his little finger. He doesn't need to eat or sleep. He'll miss Michelle and the rest of the Un/Dead folks. But he is not like them; he has all the time he'll ever need, and friends who will be around forever.
Blank Frank likes the power.
VICTOR
Karen Haber
▼▼▼
The man feels his body dying by inches. His toes are like wood. His lower legs are without feeling. He is alone in the icy wastes, unattended. As the numbing spreads upward through his chest he is surprised by the gentle warmth that accompanies it. He sinks gratefully into that warmth, draws it up around him as he would thick bedcovers. Yes, he is safe in a snug bed. It is the house around him that is cold. And he is not young. He is old, old and weary. The space around his cot is crowded by his memories, by the sepia-toned shades that stalk, transparent, before him over the hard wooden floor.
▼▼▼
Justine swings like a pendulum, like a clapper inside a bell, slowly, back and forth, hanging by the neck from the rope that has killed her. Her skin is pale, almost white. A trickle of red blood seeps from her slack, open mouth.
"Oh, God," Elizabeth cries. "It's terrible. Why didn't you save her?" She turns from the high window in their hideaway and her eyes are dark with revulsion. "They hanged her for you. For your crimes. I know that now."
"No," he says. "I'm innocent. I meant no harm, ever. Should I have
turned myself in? Would you have me stripped and dead before that howling mob?"
Elizabeth is unrelenting. His beloved bride is judge and jury. "Better that you did and saved your immortal soul. What evil did Justine commit? Her only mistake was in being born, in living with us, working for us. And in caring for poor William. You killed her. You and your morbid, damned creature."
"No," he says. "Wait, Elizabeth. Don't go."
But she is gone, like the rest of them. Killed by his ambition. The wind rushes in through the open window and the sound of its passage is like that of a soul in agony. He is alone in the darkness.
▼▼▼
Sinews like pink cords, like the strings of an instrument. Pluck them and they echo the theme of life. Victor leans over the cadaver on the dissection table, fascinated. He is skilled with the knife, and he cuts here, cuts there. He will learn the secrets of the body, and science will empower him to use them.
Red stains climb up his gloves and sleeves as he works within the body cavity and the damp cloth clings to him like a clammy second skin. He ignores it. He will do great things with what he learns. The name of Frankenstein will be added to the scientific and medical brotherhood, to the great pantheon of knowledge.
Determined, he pursues nature. But not through wooded glen and sunlit meadow. The fascination resides for him in the charnel house, the graveyard.
"Still chopping and probing?" Henry Cherval asks. He is peering around the door, his nose wrinkling at the sour smell of formaldehyde. "Whew! What a horrid odor. Come out into the daylight and sniff the sweet air."
"Later, Henry."
"You're as fixed on this as you were on Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus." Henry shakes his head. "Professor Waldman has diverted you from philosophy into necrology."
"He showed me that philosophy dealt merely with words," Victor says. "But science contains the essence of life. Not death, Henry. Life."
"There's a letter from Elizabeth on the table."
"Later."
▼▼▼
He tries to lift numbed arms, raise his numb head. So warm. He lies back upon his deathbed, waiting patiently. He knows that if he is too eager, death may elude him. He has chased this quarry for years, knows its moods and caprices. He has learned not to be eager.
No pills, razors, rope. Best to lie here, eyes closed and sunken in huge sockets. Quiet, yes. It will be drawn to him by the ease, by the quiet. A shy rabbit, death. He chuckles at the thought. Oh, he'd trapped it once or twice. Or so he'd imagined. But always, always, death had escaped him. Danced away maddeningly, just out of reach. The brush of a whisker, the touch of a cottony tail as it went past him. "Wait for me," he'd cried, as tearful as any Alice, out of wind and running hard. "Oh, please, wait."
All his life, he had run fast, had run hard to catch up, to catch it and beat it. Dry laughter rattles in his thin, dry throat. To win against death. To turn it back as though it were a soft cotton blanket fresh from the laundry and not a filthy, web-like shroud. He chuckles again. So young and arrogant. How good to have been that, to have had that angry impatience, once, long ago. Before the reckless flight to the Northern ice to evade his nemesis.
▼▼▼
Geneva glistens in the summer sunlight, a jewel-like city with neat, clean streets and busy, good-natured citizens. Victor has grown up there, the scion of a distinguished family deeply rooted in service to the community. In Geneva, the name of Frankenstein is synonymous with men of law. His father had married, late, the daughter of an old friend. Their eldest son, Victor, has inherited his mother's determination and his father's love of knowledge.
"Victor thinks that the world is a secret which only he can discover," his father says.
"Give him time, then, and opportunity," says his mother. "And when he's ready, give him his cousin Elizabeth as a bride."
His youngest brother William, pampered favorite of the household, with plump pink cheeks and golden hair like silk to the touch. Waiting by the door, jigging up and down, and tugging at Victor's jacket.
"Where are you going?"
"To the Academy."
"Take me. Take me along, please." The blue eyes shine with adoration at the older brother.
Victor is accustomed to the childish worship and careless of it. "Don't you want to go see what Nanny's about?"
"Nanny takes care of babies. I want to go with you."
He smiles sadly. "When you're older, perhaps."
"Now." The lower lip juts out in playful petulance.
Victor pats the child on the shoulder. Pushes him away. "Perhaps when you're older."
In the sitting room, Victor's mother turns to his father. "Victor is like a second father to that boy."
The Ultimate Frankenstein Page 22