Dark Labyrinth 1 (8 page)

Oddly enough, Victor Frankenstein begged for mercy. “Ingolstadt is a civilized town and should not bow to superstitions.” But the crowd wanted some medieval touch of justice for such heinous crimes, and they already had an upcoming hanging. Very reasonable and persuasive, the Baron’s son suggested, “Perhaps the headsman’s axe should be brought out of retirement? The chopping block could be set up in the town square, as in olden days.”

This sated the bloodlust of the people. And so the old executioner’s axe was sharpened by the vengeful blacksmith, who fervently believed the tinker had stolen and killed his daughter Maria.

Hands tied behind his back, the falsely accused tinker was brought out and forced to his knees. As his neck was stretched across the bloodstained block, his frantic gaze caught a last glimpse of one man in the crowd. Victor Frankenstein looked intensely interested, a scientist studying a specimen. The tinker felt the ripple of a completely different kind of fear. Why was the Baron’s son looking at him so . . . hungrily?

Because the headsman’s axe was razor sharp, and the cut exceedingly swift, the flash of pain seemed as gentle as a feather. The stutter of his heartbeat stopped.

#

Victor checks the machines, adjusts the electrical flow, then hurries back. He presses down on the cloth windings of the sturdy chest. “Live!” he shouts, as if the dead parts will hear him and obey his command.
“Live!”

Victor hammers his fist down on the sternum. The torso is thick, muscular, like a suit of armor around the two implanted hearts . . . a blacksmith’s chest.

#

His broad chest was always smeared with soot and smoke from the forge, his hair singed from sparks and cinders. His arms were strong from pounding on an anvil, pumping the bellows.

He had a good wife and fine children, whom he loved more than anything else. But his oldest daughter, Maria, had disappeared a year ago while picking mushrooms in the woods. Many boys and girls had vanished around Ingolstadt—yesterday, even a baby had gone missing! When Maria had been lost, the blacksmith and his wife spent agonized days combing the hills, calling the girl’s name, praying for her safety . . . and then, resigned, weeping for her soul.

To fill the emptiness, the blacksmith adopted a new apprentice, an orphan boy whose parents were killed in a forest fire. Though the boy worked hard in the smithy, no one else’s son could make up for lost Maria.

A traveling tinker had been arrested and charged with the crimes. The blacksmith and his wife were both convinced he had abducted their little girl. Even next to the blistering heat of the forge, the blacksmith shuddered to imagine the things the stuttering foreigner must have done to Maria. . . .

Sparks flew from the grinding wheel as he sharpened the headsman’s axe. The monstrous criminal would pay the price the following day. The bitter but unsatisfying taste of vengeance bubbled like bile in the blacksmith’s throat.

He closed his eyes, quoted scripture to himself, and prayed for forgiveness. His wife often came to sit with him in the smithy, to comfort him by reading aloud from the Bible while the apprentice boy continued the daily work, hovering close to the blazing fire.

Lately, instead of words of consolation, he was more interested in stories of demons, how the darkness of Satan was a shadow over the land—such as the rituals the guilty tinker no doubt performed with the blood of children while his wolf, his demon familiar, watched.

The blacksmith could not get Maria’s musical laughter out of his head. She had loved to ride on her father’s broad shoulders as he walked down the streets. She had played with other children, plucking flowers from the meadows, even running up to Castle Frankenstein where the old Baron showed them the exotic animals in his menagerie.

Now she was gone. The damned tinker had done terrible things to her!

When the blacksmith saw the fiery forge and the sparks flying from the grinding wheel, he thought of Hell’s inferno where this razor-sharp axe would send the evil tinker. He intended to stand so close to the chopping block that the hot and satisfying blood would splash onto his face.

Finished, he lifted the sharpened axe from the wheel, but it seemed very heavy all of a sudden. The blacksmith tried to stand. His apprentice came closer, looking worried.

Though his chest and arms were strong, the blacksmith’s heart was weak. The thudding sounded hollow in his chest, the slowing blood flow faded to a faint roar in his ears. He found himself falling. As the executioner’s axe dropped to the ground, his last thoughts were of his wife, his daughters. How would they survive without him?

Then he clung to the vision of lost Maria, her large blue eyes, her laughter. He collapsed dead to the smithy floor, unable to watch the execution after all.

#

At last, with the bandages removed, the dull yellow eyes open. The lids flutter, the transplanted eyes flick from side to side, seeing the grandeur of the lightning storm outside, the frenzied apparatus in the laboratory. Flashes, sparks, little fires.

#

He liked to stare into the flickering flames and watch the hungry elemental spirit devour wood. His eyes had an unhealthy yellow tinge, as if part of the fire’s glow hovered there.

He had lived with his family in a cottage near old Baron Frankenstein’s hunting preserve. The summer was dry, and a lightning strike started a nearby fire, which raged in the night. He awoke, smelling bitter greenwood smoke in the air, then crept outside to watch the swift fire come like a marching army. He went far from his house, to a high rock outcropping where he could sit and watch. The hypnotic flames enraptured him so that he did not even think about his family trapped inside the cottage as the fire engulfed it. He had never seen the house look so beautiful, so bright and cheery and ablaze.

Then the flames curled in a different direction—maybe the wind changed, or maybe the fire simply chose to avoid him. When the villagers found him later, they considered it a miracle that the boy had survived, while his family was overcome by smoke.

Though an orphan, he was old enough to be taken in as the blacksmith’s apprentice, where he loved to toil near the blazing heat of the forge. When he pumped the bellows, he made the heat blossom like a flower. He was accepted by the blacksmith and his family, who were grieving over their missing daughter. They thought they understood the boy’s “loss.”

The young apprentice went alone into the forest—an excuse to build secret fires, some of which (not unintentionally) got out of hand. One of his blazes nearly burned down the Baron’s hunting lodge.

Later, he was the loudest voice demanding that a tinker, convicted of being a warlock, be burned at the stake. The apprentice wanted to see a person tied to an upright log, the flames consuming clothes and flesh. He was furious when Victor Frankenstein insisted that the man be beheaded instead. Why did the Baron’s son have to meddle? The fire would have been so glorious, a spectacle he could have remembered for the rest of his life!

It was either irony, or divine justice, that the vengeful blacksmith had died while sharpening the headsman’s axe. Now, the apprentice did not know his future. He was too young to work the forge himself, and he feared the distraught widow would sell the business and turn him out into the streets.

The future did not concern him. The apprentice saw one way to make everything right. On the night after the tinker’s head was chopped off, he lit a flaming brand from the blacksmith’s forge and set the smithy building on fire.

But that was only a start. He went to the jail and then the magistrate’s home, setting them alight as well. It was sure to be the greatest fire in the history of Ingolstadt. The apprentice made no attempt to hide what he was doing. While the alarms rang and people rushed out to help douse the fire, angry men chased after him.

The arsonist ran. One of them shot him in the back with a musket, and the ball lodged just beneath his shoulderblade. The pursuers were coming closer, shouting for his blood, carrying torches as they hunted him down. He staggered into the Baron’s hunting preserve, until he reached a swollen, fast-flowing stream. He tried to cross it, but he was too weak. When he stepped into the icy, rushing water, he could barely keep his footing.

The pursuing mob shot at him again. Another musket ball shattered his leg, and he fell into the water. As he was swept downstream, he caught a glimpse of Ingolstadt and the smoke rising into the air. He hoped his fire would burn for a long time.

His head was dunked under the fast current, and he couldn’t breathe. As the musket shots drained the life’s blood out of him, the apprentice gulped frigid water, praying for fire, yet the spark within him was extinguished. The darkness was cold and wet, but finally his eyes saw a spark again, lights . . . life.

#

The mosaic of a monster is alive, functioning, but without a mind it does not truly live.

Victor attaches an electrode, unleashes a flood of condensed lightning. A sharp shock pours into the head, like a musket touching off a flash of gunpowder, the last surge of memories. A mind adrift, separate. Thoughts run like raindrops down an uneven pane of glass.

#

Despite his wealth and bloodline, he had never been a strong man, the runt of the litter. His younger brothers—even his sister—spurned him, though the noble title was his by birthright. Years ago, as a boy, he had turned his feelings of inferiority against small animals—secretly killing cats, clubbing puppies. The young, helpless ones were the most gratifying.

Copying the more eccentric European nobles, he had purchased exotic animals from foreign lands, darkest Africa, South Sea islands, the Americas. He kept a menagerie on his estate, and though the miserable creatures did not live long, he replaced them with other specimens as fast as they died. His son Victor delighted in having so many dissection subjects for his medical studies.

The Baron’s fondness for strange animals made him popular among the children. Generous and benevolent, he would let them stare at the creatures, even pet the tame ones.

Most of the time he could control his urges. Most of the time.

And when it became imperative that he follow his obsession, he had a special private hunting lodge deep in his forest preserve with secure doors and stout shutters. After he lured the children out to the cabin, just like in the story of Hansel and Gretel, he would lock them in so he could have his way with them over and over; then he would kill them and bury them out in the forest.

All the servants at Castle Frankenstein were familiar with their master’s habit of slipping off for solitude. No mere peasant would dare to accuse, or even suspect, Baron Heinrich Frankenstein. A wandering band of gypsies or a suspicious stranger could always be blamed for the latest disappearance. Over the years, many were arrested; a shepherd had been hung and a tinker had been beheaded that very day, both accused of the same crime, providing a convenient excuse for the little “lamb” he had just stolen. . . .

Back at the Castle, he regularly told the cook to prepare veal, suckling pig, a fine tender lamb, or fresh kid spitted over a fire. Innocence seemed to give the flesh a better flavor. Thus, once a new idea had occurred to him, he couldn’t drive it out of his head. What might be the taste of another sort of tender flesh?

Only two days ago, he had wandered the streets of Ingolstadt in a filthy disguise, until he saw the chance to snatch an infant, still breast-fed. After roasting all day over a slow fire, the flesh would be succulent, better than veal.

Now, as the forest darkened around the hunting lodge, the Baron was glad to be away. The meat was still on the spit over the fire, almost ready for an evening feast, when he heard the shouts of searchers outside, musket shots. From the window of his cabin, he looked down the steep slopes to Ingolstadt. The city itself seemed to be on fire!

Alarmed, the Baron went to the door and threw it open just as the constable and six guards rushed up the path. “My Lord Baron, beware! There is an arsonist in these woods. We are hunting him—”

Then the constable saw what was on the fire. One of the guards cried out in horror before he began to retch. The old Baron could not slam the door quickly enough. . . .

Locked in the jail—the same cell that had held a strangler only two days before—the Baron confessed. Despite his admission, the torturers still wanted to break his arms and scourge him. The townspeople howled for his blood, ready to lynch the old Baron, and only a contingent of guards reluctantly prevented them from doing so. His noble rank would not save him. The magistrate had no choice but to sentence him to death by a slow garrote in the public square.

Victor—now the new Baron Frankenstein—came to see him. Oddly, the intense young man showed no revulsion at his father’s crimes, no greed for the position of power he now held. He looked at the older man clinically, as if he was already making plans.

Victor turned to the jailer. “It is a pity what my father has done. He always had such a fine mind.”

#

The beating hearts grow stronger. “He’s alive!” Victor cries. “Alive!”

The yellow eyes are open, the patchwork body twitches and trembles. Victor unwinds the gauze to reveal the scars on cadaverous flesh. He unstraps the restraints binding the arms and legs. The creature is awake now, aware.

“I made you. You will be greater than the sum of your parts!” He looks at his creation with pride. “Can you hear me? Do you know who you are?”

Yes, the pieced-together man knows who he is: The hands and lungs of a strangler, the legs of a thief, the head of a hired assassin, the torso of a vengeful blacksmith, the eyes of an arsonist, one heart from an axe murderer and the other from a wrongly executed man, the mind of a child molester and baby killer.

Voices clamor through him, so many identities roiling in a single body. Fusing the cacophony into a consensus, he remembers the Bible he read in his blacksmith persona, a particular verse from the Gospel of Mark. The other converging memories and lives know it as well, and they all agree.