Dark Designs

by Flowers, Thomas S.

  The coughing in the classroom intensifies. Mr. Scarecrow is hacking and scratching at his face. Welts are forming.

  “The result of this chemical reaction is known as bertholite,” Jimmy says. “When you read the labels on household chemicals, you always see warnings about things that should not be mixed.”

  A small girl in the back of the room, so ferocious while she was crushing Jimmy’s original volcano with her cool scene boots, begins tearing at her throat, unable to breathe. Her eyes are red and watering.

  “Two of those things are bleach and drain cleaner,” Jimmy continued. “It creates chlorine gas. That is what you are experiencing right now. Bertholite was used as a chemical weapon during World War I. It was effective because as a heavy gas, it sank down into the trenches where the soldiers were hiding. In a room like this, however, with automated air conditioning and ventilation, the bertholite should be pulled up to the center of the room. Right about face level.”

  Trevor falls out of his desk, clawing at the tile floor as if it were soft dirt, and he could somehow tunnel his way out. The room is filled with the sound of coughing and gasping. Mr. Scarecrow, being closest to Jimmy’s volcano, takes the worst of it. The welts on his face swell to their true form as chemical burns. Blood streams down his cheeks onto his best sweater vest. His hands look like they have been slathered in dry ice.

  “This concludes my presentation,” Jimmy says. “Thank you for your time.”

  Jimmy surveys his work. Classmates struggling for breath, turning different shades of red and blue. Weak fists pounding against tempered windows, long glazed in and painted shut. Desperate tears streaming from rolled-back eyes.

  The monster in the black hoodie stomps to the back of the room. He walks on arms, legs, whatever is in his way. Crush. Destroy. Up from the depths. Jimmy reaches out with one white-gloved hand and snatches up the first place trophy, cradling it like a puppy, and heads for the door.

  Mr. Scarecrow, crumpled in a corner, points at Jimmy with his long, seared arm. “Murderer,” he croaks.

  Jimmy shakes his head, and points at himself. “Scientist,” he says.

  He steps into the fresh air of the hallway, closing the door behind him. He strips off his coveralls and his hoodie, letting them fall to the floor. With his foot, he shoves his discarded clothing into the crack under the door, sealing it off as well as he can. No one will discover what has happened for at least an hour.

  Jimmy thinks about science and monsters as he walks home, basking in the bright morning light, trudging with heavy feet, back into the ocean, underneath the foam.

  THE PROMETHEAN BRIDE

  Alec Robertson

  From the Collected Memoirs of F.R. Grey, Esquire

  Try as I might, I am consistently unable to recall to mind, the first time Robert Walton came to my attention at the club. I can still picture him now, where he used to sit next to the carved oak mule chest coffer by the window. Divested of his brown sovereign regency tailcoat with its velvet collar, he would sit, holding his copy of the Edinburgh Evening Courant up to the light and peering at the script over his spectacles. I still look over at that same velvet upholstered armchair, and remember the worthy wordsmith that had sat there.

  A typical braggart’s story begins with the setting of the scene, suitably exaggerated, and told in a loud voice. It was late afternoon in the Darien Club on 12 Chesterfield Street, off Curzon Street, Mayfair, in the City of Westminster. Cunnignham was speaking, having cast himself in the lead role in the theatrical production he was about to direct, featuring a recent heated conversation himself and George Campbell, Duke of Argyll had had in the billiards room upstairs.

  When such people tell a story in which they are the central character, all secondary parts are played by badly drawn caricatures. They themselves talk with exaggerated world-weariness; the character they have conjured up for themselves, a quite obvious prince among fools. A tobacco lord by trade, William Cunningham, the speaker, had a voice that was quieter, restrained and measured with a hint of self-pity. For his part the Duke had been given a voice that was relegated to a semi-canine growling waffle and meaningless bluster, demonstrating the low import of what he had to say. Attributing a dialogue that never was, Cunningham wished to ridicule and discard, seeking to acquire sympathy from his audience. It was a performance that, to my mind, lacked impact due to it being a role that three months previously featured a friend of his as lead.

  I lowered my paper, giving Cunningham’s mute companion a sympathetic look. The man smiled back. We had both heard what Cunningham professed to be and had reached an opinion as to what he was. Then began, “So I said…” the supposed prelude to commonsense entering Cunningham’s tale.

  The tale was brought up short when Cunningham, on getting up to ‘find that blasted Harker with my gin,' encountered an acquaintance of his, near the window and was loudly asking after his welfare. An inhalation of breath and Walton looked over at me.

  “A frightful bore,” I offered. And we both smiled.

  In the silence that had fallen, we began to talk. We smoked the same pipe tobacco from a tobacconist I knew on the Gray's Inn Road. A taste for a tobacco in common created a bond of familiarity, the shared experience of smoke establishing a camaraderie that led us, after much smalltalk, to speak of finer things. He was a man that you might notice in a crowd. Arrayed as always in his lavishly tied cravat, fine holland shirt with its full sleeves, square cut waist-coat with its pewter buttons, finely tailored breeches and stockings and well-polished black buckled shoes, a golden locket, like one that would contain the picture of a child, hung at all times from his watch chain.

  I idly mentioned my recent sojourn to the Dutch capital. For his part, Walton told me of his voyages to the northern parts of the globe on whaling vessels, on one occasion serving as an under-mate on a Greenland whaler. The impetuousness of youth had it seemed, driven him to seek adventure through the extremes of hardship. Conscious of his own experiences and having a pressing need to share them, Walton took some pride in how he worked harder than those he called ‘common sailors.’ Walton then, was something of an adventurer, had tried his hand at poetry to no acclaim, and was the kind of man that strongly desired the intimacy of a close friend. That, I suspect, is why he told me, with some hesitation, what was a secret tale of great significance that would, in the weeks that followed, serve to bind us together as such things inevitably do.

  Bearing a countenance that expressed the deepest regret, in a weak, brandy-fuelled moment, Walton began his tale with the practiced care of one that had told it so many times before. It began with Walton, at the age of 28, alone aboard a crowded whale-ship as he dreamt of journeying to ‘the land of mist and snow.’ He did not, however, dwell on this. His failure in this endeavor, it seemed, led him to prefer to talk of his meeting with one Victor Frankenstein while his vessel, hired in the Russian port of Archangel, was trapped within a vast, endless plain of ice in the frozen north.

  Enclosed by ice and encompassed in thick fog, Walton told of how he and his shipmates saw a man of immense stature, in a low carriage, fixed on a sled and drawn by dogs, half a mile from the boat and lost among the inequalities of the ice. This was in spite of their being very far from land. When the ice broke and the ship was free, the crew encountered another sledge, marooned on a large fragment of ice and with one surviving dog tethered to it. Containing a more normally proportioned man, emaciated through fatigue and hunger, Frankenstein—for it was he, who was eventually to die in Walton’s cabin.

  As conversation this was certainly novel and I indicated that I found his tale of great interest. Walton told of how, previous to this, Frankenstein, in some state of agitation, had striven to persuade him to destroy the larger man that he and his shipmates had seen upon the ice. Walton, on returning to his cabin, where the then lifeless Frankenstein lay, found the monstrous creature itself leaning over him, looking down upon what Walton called, “his creator.” When the monster left through the cabin wi
ndow and was borne away on an ice raft, Walton did not follow.

  I was of course intrigued and prompted him to tell me more of what he had encountered. Curiously, Walton told me of how through the discussions that he had with Frankenstein he came to feel that he had found the ideal companion that he so craved. His affection and admiration for Frankenstein, as he spent time with him, increased and he professed to still feel his loss even now. Like Walton, Frankenstein was a reckless adventurer, but, more so in the world of scientific discovery. I suspect also, that Walton’s sense of separation that he had experienced for so long among men of such differing backgrounds upon the ship drew him all the closer to one of Frankenstein’s familiar social station.

  A native Genovese, educated at the University of Ingolstadt, Frankenstein was to tell him a story of having discovered, what he called, “the spark of life” and this had drawn him to fashion a man from human and animal parts. On giving the creature life however, the enormity of what he had done caused him to reject his creation, fleeing from the creature’s newly brought sight.

  But the creature would not be denied, and was eventually to wreak a terrible vengeance. First his younger brother William, then his close friend Henry Clerval, and finally his wife on their wedding night were to die at the monster’s hands and Frankenstein was a broken man. There had, Walton believed, been a way in which Frankenstein could have avoided the slaughter however. On an attempt to climb the summit of Montauvert, Frankenstein had met with the monster, who expressed his wish for a mate to share what remained of his life.

  Hoping to rid himself of this living haunter of his footsteps, Frankenstein travelled to Orkney to fulfill this task. It was three years after he had created this man that had become the bane of his life, so it was not the first time he had brought life to dead flesh. Taking a cottage that he was to use as a laboratory, Frankenstein worked late into the nights, under insufficient light. At one stage in the narrative he spoke of a vision of his creation and in a dream attempted to tear it apart. Back in the waking world, Frankenstein told of how he saw his monster looking in through the window of his laboratory, grinning upon him and the new creation in malevolence.

  In a fit of madness, Frankenstein turned upon the half-finished creature, tearing it apart in a frenzy before fleeing the cottage. Two days later, he was to return to the house to gather his chemical instruments and dispose of the remains. Thus began the brutal struggle between man and his creation that was to end in the demise of both.

  And there the tale should have ended had it not been for Walton having a chance meeting in a notary’s office (coincidentally I found, a man of my own acquaintance) in Edinburgh. Walton was there to have a number of routine domestic attestations of documents carried out and had met with a ship’s captain that, having come there on business of his own, proved quite agreeable to chat. In the talk that followed, the seafaring gentleman spoke of how, on landing upon one of the isles in Orkney, he had heard many earnestly expressed rumours of a large woman that had been terrorising the local people. Such tales, he had explained, receive as much attention in the mainland cities as the many reports of large wildcats haunting the moors and forests. It was of course idle chatter but Walton saw significance in it.

  Here I could see that Walton was torn over continuing his tale although I could not guess why. What could he possibly impart that I would find more fantastical than of what he had already told? The silence dragged, Walton writhed in the void, the chasm into which his tale teetered, needed to be filled. And so Walton resumed his tale afresh, adding details, he explained, that it was his habit to exclude.

  "You see, the rumours revolved around a crofting family upon the island that had found and taken in a woman that some said had been washed up on the beach. Details were scarce and I suspected the seafarer's tale had been fuelled by strong drink somewhere in the telling. The woman they spoke of was great in size (in the region of eight feet in height) and thoughts abounded of her origins.

  "I had of course been intrigued by the cruelly injured specimen that I had encountered only briefly in that cabin and my attempts to put this new story from my mind proved fruitless. There were many miles between Whitechapel High Street where I had rooms and the Northern-most British isles and for two weeks this revelation was never far from my thoughts. But I felt the growing urge to see, or be driven insane by my own thoughts, how my late friend’s tale was to end, or be condemned to wonder ever after.

  "Although I had neglected my formal education somewhat, embarking on a seafaring life against my late father’s wishes, I had learned about Orkney from a book in my Uncle Thomas’s library which I had secured when I inherited my cousin’s fortune.

  "Once the decision was made, I felt strangely at peace. Travelling north by stagecoach, sleeping at inns along the way, I eventually put into port several days later on the island described by Frankenstein. Stepping into the herring boat that was to take me to the Orkneys, on the quayside of John o' Groats, it was only 10 miles to the archipelago of the 70 Orkney Isles. Landing at Burwick, a small village and harbor on the island of South Ronaldsay, from there I took another fishing boat to the port town of Kirkwall.

  "Staying overnight at an inn, I was able to secure a passage on yet another fishing boat to the island that Frankenstein had told me about, the following morning. It was, as Frankenstein had said, on one of the remotest of the Orkneys, being little more than a great rock, whose high sides were continuously beaten by towerring waves.

  "Standing on the cliffs looking out over the sea, the waves matched my moods. Having just stepped off the boat, I wandered around the island. The fisherman’s accent was too thick for me to understand properly but he was able to direct me to a small hamlet, one of which, he assured me, was an inn.

  "The local inn was little more than a cottage itself with one spare room set aside for travellers, of which there were few. The information I sought was easily found as the locals had not set themselves against talking to mainlanders, however southerly. It may seem foolhardy and indiscrete, but on striking up conversation with a fisherman, whose English language was passable, my enquiries were graciously received.

  "The fisherman, his name was Diarmid, sat close by the jetty in his thick woollen jumper smoking a pewter-lidded pipe and scrutinising the horizon. Diarmid told me the story of how a family on the island (he gestured vaguely), had found a woman in their byre suffering from hideous injuries and bearing terrible scars, and had taken her in.

  “Aye, it was a sad business that, so it was,” he said, and said little more.

  "When I asked as to what had happened, Diarmid looked grave and said that she had been driven out suddenly by the family. When I subtly pressed him further, he admitted that, at the time, he had seen the great figure fleeing to the coast emitting a sound that was both a strange sobbing coupled with heavy, laboured breathing. A giant of a woman, she had worn a simple dress that was far too small for her. Diarmid however, noticeably skirted over the events that caused the creature to be cast out of the crofter’s house. Going on, he told me that there had been several sightings of the creature about the island before she finally disappeared to what appeared to be much relief.

  "It was Diarmid’s belief that the creature had hidden in the caves for several nights, and then a fishing boat went missing. He himself claimed, on alighting from his cottage shortly afterwards, to have noticed a boat, far out in the choppy sea, heading towards the mainland.

  "Venturing further around the island I was to find that noone I spoke to wanted to talk to a stranger of what had happened that night, often casting glances towards the house where the creature had been nursed back to health as a place of ill-omen. I was myself reluctant to inquire too deeply into what had happened to the family that had so graciously opened their door to the unhappy creature."

  Here Walton’s countenance took on a far-away look. Of course I wanted to ask the pressing question as to whether the woman was of Frankenstein’s own making. As I clumsily made an
attempt, the club was suddenly plunged into uproar. Although I did not see it, having seated myself facing the wrong direction, I was informed later that Sir George Pultney had stood up, clutching his chest, before sliding to the floor.

  Naturally I feared for the ill man’s safety as Doctors Smollet, Seddon, and Carlyle all rushed to attend him. In danger of being suffocated by their chianti-fuelled zeal, the hubub that followed drew reminiscences of “the last time I spoke to him and he seemed quite well.” This was succeeded by expressions of awareness of how he appeared as he was borne upstairs and I became vaguely aware that Walton was no longer in his chair. I thought to seek him out later.

  It was customary for men of Walton’s nature and means to be a member of several clubs as this greatly helped progress within the professions. This also greatly hampered the prospect of my meeting him again at the Darien. I was however, surprised to see the figure of Walton once again, standing by the doorway to the British Coffee House in Charing Cross, a meeting place for Scots in London. Over a cup of Earl Grey, Walton apologised for his sudden departure. In the confusion, he informed me, he remembered that he had an engagement and left when it was clear Pultney would be fine. We subsequently agreed to lunch together in the club the following day.

  In my capacity as a notary public, I had arrived early to the club to authenticate the contents of a number of documents for William Molyneux, 2nd Earl of Sefton. Fortune smiled and my work was long completed by the time that Robert Walton entered the dining room where I had been waiting but a short time. The menu featured the very best of British game: grouse, partridge, wild salmon, gull’s eggs, potted shrimps, smoked eel and smoked trout. In the event, we both chose the latter, washed down with a claret that was not without its charm.