Both wagons were painted in what once might have been bright colors—possibly reds and blues with gold trim—but now hardly more than faded browns. The paint had been chipped and worn away by the elements over the years, but the red logo on the side of each wagon was still prominent in the sunlight:
PROFESSOR DARTANI’S ASYLUM OF HORRORS
The old man saw that Gort was already seated in the driver’s seat on the lead wagon and was reacting with a nod to his approach. Gort was an enormous, brutish man with short cropped hair. His muscles, rippling like mountains, bulged from his dirty T-shirt. He extended a powerful hand for the old man to grasp and helped him aboard the wagon. Any luck with her, Professor?” inquired Gort in gruff voice that sounded as if it were mixed with the rocks in the road beneath the wagons.
Professor Dartani scowled. “There will be other women,” he replied. Then, he said, “Gort, drive on!”
Gort snapped his whip over the heads of the two great black stallions that drew the two-wagon train. The driver was huffing and snorting, almost in competition with the horses, and frequently spat into the passing, winding trail.
It was a while before either of the two men spoke again.
“You really think we’ll make some money in Ingolstadt?” inquired Gort.
The wagons shifted and swayed a few times on the precarious mountain trail before the corpselike Professor Dartani responded.
“You have no need to worry about that, Gort,” said the professor, his dry hair bristling like white straw in the breeze. His almost toothless mouth wrinkled into a smile pulled back against his sunken cheeks. “I have never failed you before.”
“Guess not, professor. I just hope no one in Ingolstadt recognizes me.”
“I doubt news travels that fast... or that far,” replied Dartani.
“But,” said Gort, looking at the Professor and then bringing his attention back to the road ahead, “this Ingolstadt town is supposed to be such a small, hick place, that... I mean, I don’t see how we can make any real money up in this neck of the woods.”
“Fool!” snarled Professor Dartani, the only man living who had dared to reprimand Gort. “This is a superstitious town we’re going to. Superstitious peasants and villagers, they are. These are the kinds of people that go off and drive a stake through the first corpse they discover showing no signs of decay. These are people who believe that everyman with eyebrows growing together is a werewolf.”
Instinctively, Gort brought one hand off the reins to feel his own eyebrows.
“Idiots!” exclaimed the Professor. “Fools one and all! They will be more than glad to come to our little show. For then they’ll have the chance to confront the demons that go bump in their nightly dreams and they’ll be able to laugh at them, thrill to them, to symbolically purge them.”
Gort smiled. “Yeah, and we’ll be able to purge them of their money. And maybe do a little robbing on the side. Yes, Professor, that sounds all right to me.” He turned his head slightly as he spoke, and the long-healed knife scar that ran diagonally across his forehead gleamed with anticipation and blood.
When the traveling horror show finally rumbled and creaked into town, Professor Dartani said, “Stop here, Gort. This seems to be one of the main streets. I doubt we’ll have to wait for too long.”
The old man’s words were hardly an exaggeration. His eyes were staring at a high church tower when he heard the first small group of people begin to walk, murmuring amongst themselves, toward his wagons. Soon the street was crowded with citizens some of whom wore modern clothing, others preferring to dress in more traditional Germanic garb. They buzzed about the streets more of them coming out of their homes and shops to huddle about the pair of joined circus wagons.
One man, quaintly clad in short leather pants, a vest, a pair of high woolen socks and whatever else was required to complete his European image, first read the logo on the wagons, then cast a derisive look directly at the show’s proprietor.
But Dartani, accustomed as he was to public scorn, ignored him, noting instead the nearby town hall, an official appearing building from which a man stared through one of the windows. It was difficult to see from this distance, even with the sunlight bathing the window. But the man seemed to be fairly husky and sporting a long mustache.
Meanwhile, the townspeople continued to gawk at the lurid Professor Dartani’s Asylum of Horrors logo emblazoned on the two wagons, the red letters suggesting that they had been painted in blood. Beneath the lettering was a crudely rendered painting of a cloaked skeleton menacing a large breasted, scantily dressed red-haired woman with a meat cleaver dripping with crimson gore.
By the time Professor Dartani stood up by the lead wagon’s driver’s seat, he was peering out over an impressively large crowd, some of whom were pushing each other to get up close to the show.
Deep inside, Dartani was laughing at them — these fools who mumbled amongst each other in an insectlike drone. He felt contempt surge within him as several women, noticing the unsubtle painting of the distressed damsel, gasped, nearly fainting, and turned away from his crude attempt at advertising.
Then the mummylike showman raised his hands and brought his audience to a silent hush. A cruel smile creased his lined face. Dartani knew that the audience was his to manipulate as he saw fit.
The Professor grabbed a megaphone from behind the driver s seat, holding it in his shaky hands, then brought it to his lips.
“There is no need to crowd, my friends,” he told them, speaking their native language fluently and with little trace of an accent. “There is room for all of you to see and hear my many wonders.”
There was another murmur rising from the group of spectators, then a collective silence.
“I am Professor Dartani,” he said through the megaphone, condescendingly bowing his head, “and this is my Asylum of Horrors. Yes, my friends, horrors... brought to your fine town for your own entertainment and amusement... the horrors that long haunted your nightmares.” He made certain that his every word was milked for every iota of its melodramatic worth.
And as the Professor spoke, Gort, virtually ignored as his master continued his speech, watched the crowd, imagined the money that might have been stuffed into their pockets, and chuckled.
“They are all here, my friends,” said Dartani. “Imagine! Werewolves, seeking out their human prey by the light of the full moon! Blood-sucking vampires, creatures subject to the laws of their own hellish bible, the Ruthvenian, riding the night winds with the bats and searching for throats… your own throats with their dripping fangs!”
He saw that at least half of the crowd reached for their own neck, as if for protection.
Gort’s forehead shown livid in the bright rays of the sun.
The ancient man grinned as he saw the scar. It reminded him of his first meeting with Gort and the impression that souvenir of an earlier violence had made upon him. The brute had fled the United States, where the authorities had been pursuing him for a number of crimes including murder, kidnaping, armed robbery and arson. The Professor had found Gort one day hiding from local gendarmes in the Swiss Alps. Naturally, Dartani, who had been in need of a servant with Gort’s brute strength and total lack of any sense of morality, hid the fugitive in his wagon, eventually making him his driver. They made a perfect team, Dartani and Gort, and it didn’t even require the Professor’s overpowering mental abilities to bring him under his control. Gort was grateful to the professor for saving him from the police and sheltering him and had no qualms about utilizing his apelike prowess on several occasions to save the old man from some lone gendarme.
Gort continued to drive the horses along the unpaved road. A sign soon told the two men that Ingolstadt was not a very long drive away.
“And zombies,” the Professor went on exuberantly, gesturing as he spoke, “walking dead men, once as alive as you or I, now wandering the Earth with no wills of their own and existing only to obey the evil commands of their voodoo masters! Witches
, my friends, and warlocks, conjuring up all manners of supernatural evil from the flaming pits of Hell!”
The man who had been watching Dartani and his crowd from the town hall window was now bolting down the street as fast as his stocky body would permit.
Gort’s head turned as the man approached the wagon pushing his way through the enthralled crowd. The townspeople, noticing who the man was, parted, letting him pass between two columns of humanity. The man cast one look at the leering skeleton and the half-naked victim, then coughed loud enough to command the group’s attention.
“Harrummphf!” he announced himself. “Now see here! What is the meaning of—?”
But his words were suddenly drowned out by the amplified voice of Professor Dartani:
“Ghouls . . . feeders on human corpses, devourers of the rotting flesh of your loved ones!” Dartani’s words were reaching a fevered intensity as he continued, “Even Satan himself, who — “
“I say, you there!” shouted Mayor Krag, finally tugging at the Professor’s pant leg.
Dartani shook his foot, trying to free it of this meddlesome intruder.
“Torture devices! The Iron Mistress and the rack, both used to make people confess to crimes too heinous to describe here on a public street!”
But even as he prepared to pitch more of his show’s promised attractions, the Professor noticed that the crowd was now paying less attention to him and more to the roly-poly man who was standing directly below him. Dartani set aside the megaphone to gaze with burning eyes at the mustachioed man.
“And to what do I owe this undignified interruption?” said Dartani, his voice cracking.
“Undignified? Why, how dare you call me – ?” Mayor Krag was silenced when he realized that the Professor’s unsightly face was looking right at him. “Here, here,” said the town’s most prominent official, “what do you think you are doing in my street?”
“Doing?” replied Dartani in his most sarcastic voice. “What does it look like I’m doing? Why, I am promoting my show.” He made a stiff yet proud gesture to the wagons. “And what do you think you are doing, my overfed friend?”
Krag’s eyes widened. “Why — why, I am putting an end to all of this nonsense. That’s what I am doing! And I am also going to see you and all of this junk out of town, that’s what!”
Dartani grinned, looking somewhat like a split and dried-up orange. He made sure that his voice sounded as scratchy as possible. “You are? And just who are you to think you have such power, my overweight friend?”
Krag’s face flushed, his cheeks like cherries, as he saw that citizens were waiting for his reply. I am the Mayor,” he said, taking his most dignified stance and placing his thumbs in the pocket of his vest. “Mayor Krag. That is who I am. And my power is my authority. And I say that cannot set up your chamber of horrors here in Ingolstadt.”
Dartani noticed that Gort’s huge fists were clenching. He touched his servant’s shoulder and shook his head slightly. That as all that Gort needed to remain calm, at least for now.
“There is nothing offensive about my show,” said Dartani, speaking loud enough to be heard by the entire crowd even without the use of his megaphone. “My torture devices are but reproductions of the originals and are non-functional. The vampires, zombies and other creatures are no more than dressed-up store window mannikins. I bring to your town nothing more than vicarious thrills.”
“Our town is fed up with horror,” said Mayor Krag. “Many years ago, Ingolstadt suffered its own horror. We do not care to suffer anymore, even to be reminded of it by your artificial horrors.”
The Professor noticed the collective look of terror that had suddenly appeared on the faces in the crowd. They were most certainly remembering or thinking about something of which he was not even aware. He wondered what recollection, what abomination that was far worse than anything his traveling show could provide, could arouse in them such fear. Already he was vowing to learn the answer, after he had dealt with the pompous Mayor.
“Bah!” said Dartani. “You speak in riddles. Perhaps you actually believe in the monsters depicted in my show?”
“What I believe or do not believe is not the issue here,” Krag returned gruffly. “But we have had more than our share of misfortune in the past and want no reminders of that in the present. There is already too much fear, too much tension, too much dread of every shadow. We don’t need your vampires and ghouls and whatnots to bring us anymore nightmares.
“But —" Dartani began to protest.
“I’ll not hear another word about it,” said Krag. “The matter is officially closed. I am the Mayor here. And I say that you will pack up your ghouls and torture racks and leave our town, unless you would prefer setting up your exhibits in our very fine jail.”
The Professor saw Gort grow tense suddenly at the Mayor’s mention of the jail, but ignored him. He said, in fact, not a word. But his green eyes were burning like a cat’s, searing directly into the eyes of Mayor Krag.
And though the town official tried his best to avert his vision from the Professor’s, he was caught — held rigidly — in what appeared to him a glow of greenish light. Krag was not knowledgeable in the realities of psychic bonds. All that he knew was that something now existed between him and the showman, something so potent that the gathering of townspeople, the circus wagons, even the town of Ingolstadt itself were blurring, throbbing, vanishing to some unknown netherworld.
To Krag, all that existed was himself and Professor Dartani!
Then Dartani also disappeared, leaving behind only those two fiery orbs floating in a sea of shapeless vibrations.
As the eyes faded away to nothingness, a strange, inexplicable pressure began to crush the Mayor’s brain. His body perspired and shook until at last he desperately threw his hands to his face and hysterically rubbed his eyes.
After an eternity, his vision began to refocus.
When again he saw his beloved Ingolstadt, there was no sign of Dartani, his oafish and silent assistant, the black stallions or the two Asylum of Horrors wagons.
“Are you all right, Mayor Krag?”
The Mayor looked at the townsman standing beside him, then at the crowd of people who had been watching the cadaverous pitchman, but were now only concerned with himself.
Krag felt as though some unknown power had taken hold of his vocal cords, but that the force had finally released him. “What happened to me?” he said, relieved.
“You must have been standing there for at least five minutes,” said the man next to him. He was Heinrich Franz, whom the Mayor had known for most of his life.
“What?” said Krag with astonishment. He looked at his old friend incredulously. “Five minutes? But that is . . . utterly impossible!”
Whether or not it was, something had happened to him and the Mayor could not explain it. Then he turned, hearing the sound of distant wagon wheels. He could see the two circus wagons passing beneath an archway that led outside his town. For a moment, the Mayor considered running after the two wagons, to demand an explanation and most probably toss these two foreigners into a jail cell.
But the crack of a whip made the two black horses accelerate into a trot, pulling their burdens faster. Before the Mayor could take a step, Professor Dartani’s Asylum of Horrors had left the archway behind and was already rolling to merge with the verdant splendor of the forest.
CHAPTER IX:
A New Frankenstein?
When the old train crawled to a stop in the quaint German station, Dr. Burt Winslow was greeted by a small crowd of people.
He pulled open the freight car door and looked out from the darkness. There were approximately thirty-five townspeople standing at the end of the depot platform. None of them seemed to be smiling and a few carried picket signs with words scrawled hastily in English:
We Don’t Want Another Monster-maker!
Burt Winslow —Leave Ingolstadt!
Dr. Winslow — The New Frankenstein!
; Yet, somehow Winslow’s gaze was drawn away from the group of scowling people and to a beautifully smiling face and shining mass of auric hair. Lynn was flanked by two men in gray work clothes, the two that he had arranged to be here waiting at the station, but he was concerned now only with the young woman. Her finely featured face and her trim yet shapely body seemed to be more perfect than he had fantasized during his lengthy journey back to Europe.
Winslow was sorry that Lynn had to be subjected to the villagers’ signs of protest. But, even though it was obvious, by the gap separating them, that the townspeople were also shunning her, the woman did not seem to mind. Her eyes enlightened the moment that she saw him and exclaimed joyously, “Burt! Oh Burt!”
“Lynn!” he returned, jumping from the boxcar.
They rushed toward each other, meeting somewhere between the train and the grumbling crowd. Immediately they embraced and Winslow crushed Lynn against him, feeling electrified as he felt her firm body press against his and smelled the familiar ambrosia of her favorite perfume. He let his face slides against the smoothness of her cheek. For a brief eternity, they looked longingly into each other’s eyes. Then, without a word, the two lovers, separated for so long, joined their lips in a passionate kiss.
When at last they parted, Winslow could hear that the complaints of the crowd had grown louder.
“Burt,” said Lynn, “you’ll never know how much I missed you. And I’m sure you’ve got so much to tell me.”
“I will, darling,” he answered. “But later. Right now, I think we have some company to deal with.”
The scientist had just noticed that Mayor Krag was also standing on the platform. The official’s roundish face bore the same expression of animosity that had been there when last he and Winslow met. His stance gave the impression of an army general ready to lead his soldiers on a charge against the enemy.
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