Case File 13 #2 (15 page)

“I don't see how he could have been,” Nick said. “We didn't decide to come here until this morning.”

She patted her hair. “Because he did call the day after he left on his trip. The connection was terrible. It sounded like he was calling from the middle of nowhere. But I believe he said something about some girls and boys coming to see him.”

Angelo perked up. “What did he say?”

The librarian poked around her desk, searching through scraps of paper. “I thought I wrote it down somewhere. But I don't see it.” She looked at Angie and her friends. “Is one of you named Shelly, by any chance?”

Angie shook her head.

“How about Mary? The static on the line was horrible, but I thought he mentioned two girls named Shelly and Mary.”

“That's not us,” Tiffany said. “There are a couple of girls named Shelly at our school. But I don't know anyone named Mary.”

The woman continued to look around her desk, although Nick was pretty sure she was just turning over the same papers she'd already looked at. “Well, I guess it's not you then. I'm quite sure he mentioned a Shelly, a Mary . . . and possibly a Calvin?” She smiled at Angelo. “You wouldn't be Calvin, would you? You look like a Calvin.”

“No, sorry,” Angelo said.

Dejected, the six of them walked back to a circular table and took off their coats.

“I was really hoping he might have been able to help us,” Angelo said, sliding into a chair.

“You think he would have believed any of it?” Angie asked. “I can't imagine anyone who wasn't at the school that night accepting what we saw. Especially not a grown-up.”

“This dude's not like any grown-up I've ever met,” Carter said. “He's actually a little freaky himself.”

Nick scratched his head. It was going to be a long weekend. “What was that you were saying on the phone about research?” he asked Angelo.

“Nothing all that helpful at this point. There are just a few things that don't add up.” Angelo pushed his glasses up on his nose and squinted at his notebook. “First, the screws in Dr. Dippel's jaw.”

“The ones electricity was sparking from?” Tiffany shuddered. “Those freaked me out.”

“Well, he said they were from the Transnistrian war. But the only Transnistrian war I could find was fought twenty years ago. He looks a little old to have been a soldier back then.”

“Sometimes countries recruit anyone who can carry a gun,” Dana said. “Especially smaller countries.”

Angelo nodded. “That's true. But I also couldn't find any medical procedure that left screws poking out through the skin on a patient's jaw no matter how badly broken it might have been. Then there's the castle—the one he said his ancestors built. I could swear I've seen that castle somewhere before. But I searched castles from Transnistria and there's nothing that looks remotely like it.”

“It was a good thought,” Nick said. “But he didn't actually say the castle itself was from Transnistria.”

“I know,” Angelo said, clenching his pen in his fist. “That's why I wanted to talk to Mr. Blackham. I was hoping he might know more about the building. He's something of a European history buff. Then there's the thing with the wires. I noticed it the first night we were there and again yesterday. There are enough wires going into that school to power a building ten times its size. Why do they need so much power?”

Carter gnawed on a stale-looking Crunch bar he'd produced from one of his pockets. “Especially when all the lights are gas.”

“Wait a minute,” Nick said. And everyone at the table turned to look at him.

“What is it?” Angie asked.

He wasn't sure. Something about castles and electricity had clicked inside his head. But there was something else. “My mom told me to get a book. But one that wasn't about monsters.”

Dana waved a hand at the shelves and shelves of books surrounding them. “You have plenty of choices.”

Nick closed his eyes, trying to focus. The librarian said Mr. Blackham mentioned two girls named Shelly and Mary. Why did those names sound so familiar? And why did the idea of a castle and electricity make him think about what his mom had said. Separately they didn't mean anything, but together . . .

Suddenly his eyes snapped open. “I've got it!” He raced into the fiction section that was organized by the last names of the authors, and ran to the S's, ignoring the dirty looks shot at him by several adults.

Sherman, Sheehan, Sheldon
, there it was. He grabbed a paperback with a man standing in front of icy mountains on the cover and hurried back to the table. It was exactly the kind of book his mother had asked him
not
to get.

“It wasn't Shelly and Mary,” he said. “It was Mary Shelley.” That was an author any self-respecting monster lover knew and every eye at the table opened wide with recognition.

Nick slapped the book on the table with a bang that echoed through the library. It was
Frankenstein
, by Mary Shelley. “Mr. Blackham wasn't talking about girls. He was talking about Frankenstein.”

Angelo slapped himself in the middle of the forehead like a cartoon character who'd just had a great idea. “Of course. Frankenstein!”

Dana appeared a little embarrassed that she hadn't thought of it first. She tapped her fingers on the table. “You know, if Mary and Shelly weren't girls' names, maybe Calvin wasn't a boy's name. In fact, maybe Mr. Blackham didn't say
Calvin
at all.”

Angelo's eyes lit up. “The librarian said there was a lot of static on the line, so she might have misheard. Maybe he actually said
Galvan
. Are you thinking what I'm thinking?”

“Absolutely.” Dana jumped up. “I'll go get a book on scientists from the 1700s and 1800s.” She hurried into the nonfiction section of the library.

“I don't get it,” Carter said. “What's the big deal about some old monster book? Frankenstein wasn't even all that cool of a monster. The mummy was way better.”

“Frankenstein wasn't the monster,” Angie said. “He was the scientist.”

“Exactly.” Angelo picked up the book from the table. “In Mary Shelley's story, Frankenstein was a mad scientist trying to discover the secret of life.”

It was all starting to make more sense to Nick. “You think Mr. Blackham was trying to give us some kind of message? You think he knew about Dippel?”

Angelo flipped through the last few pages of his notebook. “I think he knew about Dippel and he was trying to tell us what he was up to at the school. It definitely explains all the power cables running into the building.”

Angie held out her hands. “Wait just a minute. What does any of this have to with Calvin or Galvan?”

“Luigi Galvani,” Dana said, returning from her search. She laid a heavy book on the library table and turned it around so the rest of them could see a picture of a man in a white wig.

Carter looked at the picture and snorted. “He looks kind of like George Washington. Wasn't he, like, the sixth president of the United States, or something?”

“Galvani wasn't a politician,” Dana said. “He was one of the first scientists to study bioelectricity and he was a pioneer in the field of neuroelectrophysiology.”

“I hope the rest of you got that. Because it went straight over my head,” Tiffany said, holding her palm about a foot over the top of her perfect hair. “Give this to us in sixth-grade terms. Or in Carter's case, maybe third grade.”

Carter made a face. “I may not be a brain. But at least I'm not a pioneer in neuro-ugly-ology like you.”

Dana turned to Angelo, who was so anxious to talk he was bouncing in his seat. “Go ahead and explain it to them,” she said.

Angelo leaned forward and took a deep breath like a teacher about to give a lecture. “Okay, so back in the 1700s scientists didn't know what caused muscle movement. Most of them thought it was controlled by air or blood flow. This was called the balloonist theory, popular with . . .”

Nick spun his finger in a “let's get on with it” gesture.

Angelo blinked, then bobbed his head. “Right. Anyway, back to Galvani. He was doing this experiment with a frog and static electricity when his assistant accidentally touched a charged scalpel to the leg of a skinned frog. When the electricity touched the dead frog's muscle, bam! It moved.” He waved his hands excitedly. “That's how they discovered that electricity, in the form of ions, is what causes muscles to contract. The theory became known as galvanism, which we now call neuroelectrophysiology.”

Carter opened his mouth in a huge fake yawn. “This is fascinating stuff, and I'm, like, totally excited to be spending one of my last vacation days learning science. But, um, so what?”

Angelo looked offended. “So what is that a lot of other scientists at that time did more tests using galvanism. Including on corpses. Some of them believed a dead person could be brought back to life by shocking the body. A lot of people think that's where Mary Shelley got the idea for
Frankenstein
. Doctors were searching for what they called the life force.”

Nick rubbed his temples. This whole thing was giving him a headache. “So let me get this straight. You're thinking that Dr. Dippel believes all this garbage? That electricity can bring dead guys back to life?”

“It's not as crazy as it sounds,” Dana said. “Every day people are discovering more and more about the connection between electricity and the human body. A jolt from a heart defibrillator can save someone having a heart attack. Electroconvulsive therapy is used on people with depression. Electrical currents control your eyes, your brain, and your heart.”

“What if he did it?” Angie whispered. “What if Dippel figured out how to use electricity to bring dead people to life? What if that's why he's collecting bodies?”

A horrible thought occurred to Nick. “The football team,” he said. “Maybe those kids were so big because they weren't kids at all. Maybe they were corpses he brought back to life. A team of monsters he was experimenting with.”

“Jake.” Tiffany gave a small squeal. “Are you saying Jake is a . . .”

“No,” Carter said, his face red. “Jake is
not
a monster. He's my friend.”

This was too much to take in at one time. Hundreds of thoughts flowed through Nick's mind. Dead bodies coming to life. Crazy experiments straight out of a horror movie. A mad scientist in a castle right in the middle of an otherwise normal California city. He never would have believed it if he hadn't seen some pretty strange things himself.

He scrubbed his hands through his hair. “Here's the one thing I still don't get. Let's say it's all true. Let's say Dippel really is stealing bodies and bringing them back to life. Why would he kidnap Cody? Cody's already alive. What use would he be in Dippel's tests?”

While the rest of them were talking, Dana had been slowly reading through her book. About three quarters of the way from the end, she put her hand to her mouth, “Oh, my gosh!”

“What's wrong?” Angie asked.

Dana shook her head, her eyes glassy and her face nearly as pale as the Sumina Prep headmaster's. “How could I not have known this? I've read
Frankenstein
three or four times.” She wiped a palm across her damp forehead. “There was another scientist who experimented with bioelectricity at the same time. But he didn't just study science. He also studied philosophy and religion. He claimed to have invented something called the elixir of life.

Nick didn't get it. “What's so bad about that?”

Dana bit her lip. She looked like she was going to cry. “This scientist went further than any of the others. In his writings he talked about soul transference—sending the soul of one person into the body of another. It's rumored that he actually tried it with a couple of corpses.”

“Calm down,” Nick said. “Just because some guy did crazy experiments two hundred years ago doesn't mean anyone would do something like that now.”

“You don't understand,” Dana said, physically shaking. “The scientist who did those experiments was born in the actual Castle Frankenstein.”

Angelo sucked in his breath. “I thought the Sumina Prep building looked familiar. That's where I've seen it before. It looks just like the paintings of the original Castle Frankenstein, in Germany.”

“There's more,” Dana said. “The name of that scientist—the one who tried to move people's souls—was Johann Konrad . . . Dippel.”

Angelo scratched his head and wrote nothing in his notebook. “Look,” he said, turning the page around. “If you take Sumina, and reverse the letters, it's
animus
. That's Latin for ‘life force.' They're going to try to steal Cody's animus. His soul.”

Nick tried to convince himself that the idea of stealing somone's soul was crazy. But there were too many clues for them all to be coincidences. “We have to go back there,” he said.