The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein and Other Gothic Tales (2 page)

Count Dracula recalls how he was irresistibly drawn to Mina Harker (née Murray), the wife of a London real estate agent.
Her husband had sold him a place called Carfax.
This was a dilapidated structure next door to a noisy institution for the insane.
Their incessant racket was not undisturbing to one who was, among other things, seeking peace.
An inmate named Renfield was the worst offender.

One time the Harkers had Count Dracula over for the evening, and Jonathan (his agency’s top man) asked him how he liked Carfax with regard to location, condition of the house and property, and just all around.
“Ah, such architecture,” said Count Dracula while gazing uncontrollably at Mina, “is truly frozen music.”

Count Dracula is descended from the noble race of the Szekelys, a people of many bloodlines, all of them fierce and warlike.
He fought for his country against the invading Turks.
He survived wars, plagues, the hardships of an isolated dwelling in the Carpathian Mountains.
And for centuries, at least five and maybe more, he has managed to perpetuate, with the aid of supernatural powers, his existence as a vampire.
This existence came to an end in the late 1800s.
“Why
her
?”
Count Dracula often asked himself.

Why the entire ritual, when one really thinks about it.
What does a being who can transform himself into a bat, a wolf, a wisp of smoke, anything at all, and who knows the secrets of the dead (perhaps of death itself) want with this oily and overheated nourishment?
Who would make such a stipulation for immortality!
And, in the end, where did it get him?
Lucy Westenra’s soul was saved, Renfield’s soul was never in any real danger…but Count Dracula, one of the true children of the night from which all things are born, has no soul.
Now he has only this same insatiable thirst, though he is no longer free to alleviate it.
“Why her?
There were no others such as her.”
Now he has only this painful, perpetual awareness that he is doomed to wriggle beneath this infernal stake which those fools—Harker, Seward, Van Helsing, and the others—have stuck in his trembling heart.
“Her fault, her fault.”
And now he hears voices, common voices, peasants from the countryside.

“Over here,” one of them shouts, “in this broken-down convent or whatever it is.
I think I’ve found something we can give those damned
dogs
.
Good thing, too.
Christ, I’m sick of their endless whining.”

The Insufferable Salvation of Lawrence Talbot the Wolfman

According to ritual, the wolfman has just been shot with a silver bullet by the one who loved him, and whom he loved.
He falls to the ground where a thick layer of autumn leaves absorbs much of the impact of his body.
The woman is still pointing the revolver—using both hands—when the others in the hunting party arrive, summoned by the gunshots they heard.

A tall man in a tweed sportcoat puts his arms around the woman.
“Don’t worry, he can’t harm you anymore,” the tall man says to her.
But the wolfman never even touched the woman to begin with.
Literally.

Lawrence Talbot was the human name of the wolfman.
He was in his late thirties, unemployed (with prospects), and unmarried.
While traveling through Eastern Europe, hiking about forests much of the time, he was attacked by a large wolf and bitten once or twice.
After being examined by a doctor, he didn’t give the incident a great deal of thought…until the following month, when he saw the full moon through the diamond-paned windows of an English country house where he was a guest.

He had fallen in love with the daughter of the man who owned the house, and he was secretly intending to ask her to marry him.
But after the first full moon opened his eyes to what he had become, he knew his life was over.
He was a murderer, however involuntarily.
Before the next full moon he made the woman promise that if anything should happen to him, well, his one wish was to be interred in the mausoleum on the grounds of her father’s estate.
“I promise,” she said solemnly, though she understood neither the promise itself, nor the solemnity with which she uttered it.

Lawrence Talbot wanted to know he would still be close to this woman after his death.
But he never imagined that he would also be able to hear her voice, and other voices, while unfortunately being unable to respond.

“Aren’t we supposed to cut out its heart now?”
asked one of the men in the hunting party.
(Well, so what if they do?
He loved her with every part of himself and would still be capable of sensing her presence on the frequent visits she would undoubtedly make to the mausoleum.) “No, nothing to do with the heart,” says another.
“I think we’re supposed to burn up the whole thing right away, and then scatter the ashes.”

“Yes, that’s quite true,” adds the tall man.
“But what do you say?”
he asks the woman.
She is weeping, “I don’t know, I don’t know.
What does it matter anymore?”
(No, it does!
The promise, the promise!)

Some of the men complain about how hard it is to turn up decent tinder in a forest where it had rained so much that autumn.
Every leaf, every twig they find seems to be slick and damp, as if each one has been stained with some beast’s oily slobber.

The phantom of the opera is a genius.
Before he became the phantom of the opera he was a composer of only average talent, a talent that was taken advantage of by a greedy swindler who stole the young composer’s music.
He tried to get revenge on the villain, and in the process his face was severely disfigured by some chemicals which splashed into it and caught fire.
Afterward he moved into the sewers directly beneath the opera house, and he also became a genius.

In the middle of the opera season the phantom kidnaps a rather mediocre soprano and devotes many weeks to training her voice down in the resonant caverns of the Paris sewer system.
He tells the girl to sing from the heart, rapping his chest once or twice to make her aware she is singing from his heart too, and maybe other people’s.
This is the basic message of his instruction, though he still exasperates his student with hours and hours of scales, ear training, and so forth.

One day she gets fed up with all the agony this man is putting her through, and out of despair, not to mention curiosity, rips off the mask that hides his hideous face.
She screams and faints.
While she is passed out, the phantom takes this opportunity to return her to the upper world of the opera house.
For whether she knows it or not, she is now a great singer.

When the girl regains consciousness from the terrible shock she experienced, her days with the phantom of the opera seem like no more than a vague dream.
Later in the season she is starring in an opera and gives a brilliant performance, which the phantom watches from an empty box near the stage.
Over and over he raps his chest with satisfaction and a sadness so personal and deep as to be incomprehensible to anyone but himself.

After the opera is finished and the star is taking her bows, the phantom notices that one of the heavy walkways above the stage is loose and about to come plummeting down right on his student’s lovely head.
He leaps onto the boards, pushes her out of the way, and is himself thoroughly crushed by the falling wreckage.

The phantom of the opera is bleeding freely and behind his mask his eyes are drowning.
“Who’s that?”
someone asks the girl whom the phantom of the opera taught to sing so well.
“I’m sure I don’t know!”
she answers as her strange and tormented teacher dies.

But her words do not contain a hint of the inexplicable emotion she feels.
Only now will she really be able to sing from the heart.
But she realizes there is no music on earth worthy of her voice, and later that night her monstrously heavy heart takes her to the bottom of the Seine.

The phantom of the opera is a genius.

The Unspeakable Rebirth of the Phantom of the Wax Museum

The phantom of the wax museum is walking down the street with his new girlfriend.
Even though he is wearing a benignly handsome face, which he designed himself, there remains something repellent and sinister in his appearance.
“No decent girl would go out with him,” mutters an old woman as the couple passes by.

The phantom of the wax museum was once a gentle and sensitive artist who worked very hard shaping beautiful lifelike representations of figures from history and from modern times.
A prosperous craftsman with no head for finance, he was cheated by his business partner and left for dead in a burning studio, where his masterpieces in wax melted one by one into nothing.

He, however, escaped, though in a badly disfigured condition, and from that day on he was mentally deranged, a sadistic demon artist who every so often submerged young women in vats of boiling wax and afterward displayed them for profit to the unsuspecting patrons of his museum.
“A genius!”
the public exclaimed.

The phantom of the wax museum is about to press the button that will cause his new girlfriend, presently unconscious, to descend into one of those famous bubbling vats.
But quite unexpectedly some plainclothes detectives burst into the room and stop him.
They rescue the girl and corner her would-be killer at the top of the stairs, just above the eagerly gurgling vat.

Suddenly, in this moment of great stress, the phantom of the wax museum sees a gentle and sensitive face in his mind’s eye.
He remembers now, he remembers who he was so long ago.
In fact, he remembers precious little else.
What was he doing and who were these people at the top of those stairs?

“I beg your pardon,” he starts to say to the detectives, “could you please tell me—”

But the youngest of the detectives is a little quick to fire his gun, and the evil phantom of the wax museum goes over the rail, disappearing beneath the creamy surface of the furiously seething vat.

One of the older detectives stares down into the busy pool of wax and in a rare reflective moment says: “If there’s any justice in this life, that monster’ll boil for eternity.
He killed at least five lovely girls!”

But at the moment of his death the fortunate phantom of the wax museum could remember only one girl: his beautiful Marie Antoinette, which he’d finished a few hours ago, or so it seemed, and which he knew he would never see again.

Emily St.
Aubert has had a very difficult life.
When only a young woman she sees the death of both her parents: her mother, whom Emily finds out was not her real mother, and her wise father, whom Emily adored.
“O Emily, O Emily,” cries her boyfriend Valancourt when she is carted off by the menacing Montoni to the somewhat broken down but nonetheless imposing castle named Udolpho.

At Udolpho there are a multitude of secrets: secret passages, secret stairways, secret motives, secret murders, tracks of blood from secret persons, moans from secret chambers, from secret nightmares, Italian secrets, Italian love, Italian hate and revenge.

At one point Emily sees the wax replica of a corpse with a worm-eaten face which she takes to be real.
And it might as well have been.
Eventually Emily is rescued by Valancourt, delivered from Udolpho, and not long afterward the pair are married.
But complications arise.

Emily and Valancourt seem made for each other.
Both have been through quite a lot but neither has been poisoned by their sorrow, their suffering, or by months spent deep in the midst of vice.
Their simple, everyday natures remain unharmed and intact.

At night, however, Valancourt lies awake in bed, eavesdropping on the things Emily whispers in her sleep: secret things.
After a few weeks of this, Valancourt is looking very haggard.
In a matter of months he is hopelessly insane, and one day goes running off for parts unknown.

Emily now spends much of her time alone.
To occupy herself she writes poems, as she has always done, atmospheric little pieces like “To Melancholy,” “To the Bat,” “To the Winds,” and “Song of the Evening Hour.”

Sometimes she cannot help asking herself if she was not deceived from the very start about the virtues of Valancourt.
Why, he was no better nailed together than that crumbling old castle of Montoni’s.
That awful, terrible place.

What was its name again?
Ah, yes…Udolpho.

The Irreproachable Statement of the Governess’ as to the Affair at Bly

The governess is writing an account of her experiences at Bly, where she had charge of two parentless children named Flora and Miles.
She was hired for the job by the children’s uncle following a rather perfunctory interview at his office in Harley Street.
Despite the brevity and formality of this encounter, however, the governess fell deeply in love with her employer.
Or so it seemed to Mrs Grose, the housekeeper at Bly, when the governess told her about the meeting.

Among other things, the governess writes of her amazement at the two beautiful children and of her resolve to devote herself body and soul to their upbringing in hopes that someday her devotion would be appreciated by the man in Harley Street.
At least so much we are led to believe.

The governess now writes of the horrors at Bly.
These are dire events involving the ghosts of two former retainers, Miss Jessel and Peter Quint, whom the governess suspects are trying to possess the souls of the children and through them perpetuate the unholy romantic alliance they carried on in life.
However, this situation is not spelled out in so many words.
Due to her subtle and indirect prose style, it is often difficult to tell what the governess is claiming.

During her time at Bly, the governess writes, she saw the fiendish figures of Quint and Jessel standing outside windows and upon high ledges, lurking in the shadows at the foot of a stairway, and poised unmoving across the serene waters of a pond on the expansive estate.
But she conquers her terror of these visitations, she tells, because at all costs she must protect the children.
They are innocents after all.
No matter what debased acts they have been led into committing, so the governess says, they may still be saved and, under her ever-watchful supervision, be returned to a sinless state.
Accordingly, she packs up Flora and sends her to London, because, as the governess asserts, “Bly has ceased to agree with her.”
Now it only remains to challenge Miles regarding some awful secret.
The dead, however, are very tenacious and do not easily give up the pleasure of unexpectedly appearing at windows and preventing secrets from being told.

One overcast day, the governess confronts Miles and begins her interrogation of him.
What wickedness had he committed, she wonders, if any?
Staring at them through the paned windows of a pair of French doors is the evil-eyed Quint.
The governess rushes over to defend Miles from being wholly possessed by this demonic apparition.
Each of them now seems to be making a bid for the boy’s soul, as far as can be gathered from the governess’s oblique relation of this tense scene.
Tragically, Miles’s heart stops beating during the ensuing struggle, whatever its precise nature, and he falls dead into the arms of the young woman.

So concludes the governess’s recounting of the dreadful incidents that she vows to have occurred at Bly.
There is only one more thing to tell, another turn of the screw, so to speak, to tighten a loose element of the story.
To wit, despite the catastrophic outcome of the governess’s first appointment in her profession, she nevertheless manages to gain employment elsewhere.
One might well wonder how she was able to carry on that occupation, given the trauma she had by all accounts endured at the very start of her career.
It almost seems she kept to herself much of what happened, and left it for her readers to work out the whole of what really took place.
And why shouldn’t she?

For some doings are simply too foul and degenerate to be told without equivocation, if not outright prevarication.
Those at the inquest into the death of Miles could barely make sense of the governess’s testimony, which probably contributed to their exculpation of her of any wrongdoing in the affair.
Even though she told so much, she could never tell all of the evil in which she became entangled.
At the very least, a disclosure of that kind might have prevented her from finding another position like the one she had at Bly, where she proved herself a trustworthy member of the household and appeared for all the world a generally decent individual—a mentally and morally sound person who could not imaginably be someone with designs of a nature that could ever result in the death of a child.
To think otherwise would have been too much for the good citizens probing the case.
Beguiling as the governess presented herself, it was not…NO, there was nothing…HOW could it be—as if such a thing…And that was the end of it.
As Mrs Grose testified at the hearing into the affair at Bly: “An upright young lady, she was, to be sure.
And so
attentive
of the children.”