The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein and Other Gothic Tales (3 page)

A young schoolteacher, who writes a little poetry on the side, is coming home to the boardinghouse where he lives on the top floor.
A red-haired girl, one of his pupils, runs up to him just as he steps onto the old boardinghouse stairway.

“Have you heard about the vampire, Mr Jacob?”
she asks him, squinting in the bright afternoon sunlight.
The girl goes on to describe the vampire and its activities as they in turn have been related to her.
“Of course, I know all that,” replies Mr Jacob.
“Well, see you tomorrow,” he says, crushing a cigarette underfoot.
(He doesn’t like his students to see him smoking if he can help it.)

That night Mr Jacob can’t sleep.
He knows this business with the vampire is just nonsense, but in the middle of the night certain things can get on your nerves that normally you wouldn’t think twice about.
He drags himself out of bed and opens the only window in his room.
How quiet everything is at this hour.
Somehow it seems as if he’s just noticed this for the first time.

The next day the reports about the vampire are verified by several honest and reliable persons.
There are eye-witness accounts of a floating figure with blood dripping from its mouth.
In addition, the body of a man from out of town was found that morning in his hotel room—drained of blood.
Mr Jacob, along with many others, concurs that he felt something strange was up the last few days…something, well, something he couldn’t exactly put his finger on.

Tonight Mr Jacob is taking no chances.
He sits by the sole window in his room hour after hour with a large crucifix across his lap.
Every little while he forgets himself and dozes off, but each time he manages to startle his mind back to alertness with just one thought about the vampire.

As the days go by, the situation worsens.
Many more bodies are found drained of blood.
Mr Jacob hasn’t had a decent rest since this terrible season of death began.
All night long he sits gazing deep into the darkness beyond that idiotic little window.
And he’s smoking too much.
One day he coughs up some blood into his hand—right in the middle of a grammar lesson!

Due to the inherent limits of the human will, Mr Jacob falls sound asleep one night by the window.
Maybe he is only dreaming when he hears these little taps on the glass, but it seems so real.
“No,”
he screams, leaping from the chair and knocking the crucifix to the floor.
He is shivering violently, as if some icy wind has rushed into the room and is tearing its way straight through him.
But there is no wind.
Outside the window all is quiet and dead.

The next day there is good news.
The vampire has moved on, everyone is safe once more.
Mr Jacob opens his window for the first time in weeks on a radiant morning in early spring.
Children are singing for joy in the street.
He suddenly closes the window and turns back toward his little room.

For Mr Jacob knows that everyone is suffering from a false sense of security.
He stays on his guard.
Night upon night he waits by the window, thinking one day the vampire will return…But for some reason she never does.

Late that summer nobody in town is surprised to hear that one evening Mr Jacob lost his balance and fell onto the street far below.
He’d started drinking heavily, poor man.
An unfortunate mishap…and just as the autumn semester was to begin!

The Superb Companion of André de V., Anti-Pygmalion

Tonight, as he stands smoking a cigarette and staring out his window upon a hazy avenue, M.
André de V.
has accomplished the supreme feat of the romantic dreamer.
From only the slightest experience with a real woman—Mlle.
LeMieux, the pursuit of whom would have been a futility—he has fashioned an ideal one of his imagination.

She is seated in a corner of the room: wise, beautiful, and content, she is the perfect complement to her creator’s temper and the unflawed realization of his unspeakably complex prerequisites.
He smiles at her and she smiles back, faultlessly reflecting both the kind and degree of sentiment in the original smile.
This and similar experiments have helped M.
André de V.
pass a great deal of time recently.

Later that night a letter is delivered to the room of M.
André de V.
He pours himself a brandy, lights his last cigarette (he forgot to buy some that afternoon), and slits the envelope with a sharp, silvery letter-opener.
Dear André
(the letter begins):

M.
André de V.
reads the letter about a dozen times, until the message really sinks in.
Then, still holding the letter in his hand, he returns to his position at the window.
Without turning toward the phantasm in the corner, he says to it: “Go away!
Please go away.
There’s not much point anymore.”

But the beautiful specter does not disappear as commanded.
Having already sensed its maker’s unspoken desire, she takes the sharp letter-opener from where he left it on the table and buries it deep in the back of his soft neck.

A young man with a sparse mustache is sitting in a large chair in the innermost chamber of his large house, where all his life he has lived in magnificent solitude off the fortunes made by his ancestors.
For him, simply drifting among rooms of dreamy half-lights kills the better part of any given day.

Tonight, however, he is disturbed by certain mental images he is not used to experiencing: brightly lit places, crowds of people, and soft laughter.
“Well, what do you think of that,” he says aloud.

Now an old servant walks into the room, and the young man watches him as he sets down a drink in a glass of finely carved crystal.
The young man hasn’t asked for this refreshment but he takes a few sips anyway, just out of pure courtesy to the thoughtful old domestic.

The servant stands by, and the young man keeps an eye on him.
When the servant bends down to collect the empty glass, the young man detects a slightly sour odor.
And for some reason he is horrified by the sight of the servant’s gaunt face.

“I think I’ll go out tonight,” says the young man as he makes a deliberately impulsive bound to his feet.
“Where will you go?”
asks the servant in a quiet voice.
“That’s no business of yours, now is it?”
answers the young man.
“Where will you go?”
the servant repeats, a total lack of expression on his face.

“Insolent old fool,” thinks the young man as he steps into the next room.
But the next room is exactly like the one he has just left.
And seated in a chair before him is a young man with a sparse mustache, a servant by his side.
Both of these figures stare at him, as if for the first time.
Then he returns to the other room, only now remembering—if just for a brief, lucid moment—that he had in fact asked his servant to fetch the glass of poison that sent him to this hell of dreamy half-lights.

The Scream: From 1800 to the Present

Near the close of the eighteenth century, William B.
is approaching his destination of a saloon on Boston’s waterfront.
As he passes through a narrow alleyway someone jumps him from behind and wraps a length of thin but strong rope around his neck.

While he is being choked to death he looks up and can see the moon over the tall shops and houses lining the alley.
He knows he is going to die and cannot believe the injustice of it on almost every level: that he should die so young, that he should die before he’d had a drink that night, that he should die without realizing a single one of the marvelous dreams which had sustained his life in the first place.

In his final moments he would have settled for the small satisfaction of releasing a scream to relieve somewhat the purely physical anguish of being strangled to death.
But his murderer, an expert waylayer, is pulling the rope too tight and not a sound is able to escape from William B.’s throat.
Later that night a pack of huge wharf rats nibbles the body before it is discovered by some local prostitutes.

The spirits of murder victims are notorious avengers.
They are well-known for lingering in the human world and “walking the earth” in search of their slayers.
Suppose, however, the spirit has no idea what its murderer looks like?
The spirit could haunt the scene of violence and perhaps nearby areas, hoping to pick up some gossip, a chance lead; but beyond this there isn’t much that can be done.

The spirit has such a marvelous revenge planned: to let loose its terrible scream, now an instrument of supernatural ferocity and horror, into the face of its murderer, killing him in one of the worst ways imaginable.
But the strangler is never found.
Eventually the passing years exceed the longest possible human life span.
The murderer has undoubtedly been dead for some time.
And how many years still remain to the spirit, haunted by its unfulfilled quest for vengeance!

The spirit happens to settle in a secluded but very pleasant-looking home, where undisturbed and undisturbing it watches the generations come and go.
Always, though, the spirit feels the suppressed scream it carries inside and the hopelessness of finding someone for whom this scream of his would mean something.

The spirit has a lot of time to think and wonder why he has never met others in a state similar to his.
This would be some compensation.
But the idea, like the passing generations, comes and goes and is never pursued very diligently.
His mind hasn’t really been clear at all since those last lucid moments of dying.

Toward the end of the twentieth century the spirit begins paying midnight visits to a beautiful and apparently lonely girl who lives in the house of well-preserved seclusion.
It seems she has fallen in love with the apparition that keeps her company in the dark hours of her solitude.

The spirit is now thankful for its fate, realizing that it is his anguished and imprisoned scream sustaining his presence.
While he has the scream within him he can stay on earth and be seen.
He now holds it inside like something extremely precious.

One night the spirit is keeping his appointment by the girl’s bedside when he sees it’s all been a mistake: the girl is neither lonely nor in love with him, though she is more beautiful than ever.
And someone else is lying next to her in the bed.

This is both a torment and a relief for the spirit.
Finally he has a reason to let go of his terrible scream, finally it will mean something.
It would annihilate the both of them while they slept.

“Did you hear something?”
the man sleepily asks the girl.
“Just barely,” she replies with her eyes still closed.
“Go back to sleep,” whispers the man.
“It was probably nothing.”

And it was nothing.
For the spirit now suffers the horrific revelation that after so many years the scream itself has died its own death, and has left him not only utterly alone, but also completely imperceptible behind his private wall of eternity.

William Wilson has a namesake who looks exactly like him, walks like him, and is his equal in any game of wits.
They first meet at Dr Bransby’s school for boys, in England.
There Wilson’s namesake is constantly thwarting his designs, challenging his superior status among their peers, and on the whole making things difficult for him.
Hounded beyond all human endurance, William Wilson one night takes leave of the school, aborting his academic career but at least ridding himself of his obnoxious twin.

Later on, however, Wilson’s namesake intrudes upon his life at the most inopportune times: to put a damper on his debauched parties at Eton by reminding him that immoderate drinking and late hours are bad for the soul; to expose his cheating at cards at Oxford; and overall to meddle in his nefarious affairs in most of the major cities of Europe (including, of all places, Moscow).

Eventually there is a showdown with swords between the two William Wilsons, and William Wilson, the original, wins.
Before he dies, the bloodied namesake utters the awesome pronouncement that William Wilson has killed only himself, not to mention all hopes of ever becoming a sane and decent individual.
Of course Wilson realizes that his twin was right all along, and soon after this regrettable duel he sits down to write the tragic story of his life as an apology and perhaps a warning to others.

While he’s writing, there’s a knock at the door.
At first Wilson doesn’t bother to answer it
(write, Wilson, write)
, but the knocking is so persistent that he finally does.
Standing in the doorway, dripping wet from the storm outside and suddenly illumined by a flash of lightning, is William Wilson’s namesake, back from the dead.

“May I come in?”
he asks.
Wilson steps aside in amazement and allows the gory twin to enter.
He has some trouble scrounging up a chair for his guest (the house was rented cheap and isn’t much on furnishings), though at last he turns up a small unvarnished stool, which the other Wilson checks for splinters before sitting down.

“I’ve found out a few things since the last time we saw each other,” Wilson’s namesake begins.
“You’ll recall that I was always admonishing you to change your ways and so on and so forth?
Well, I know now that my efforts were actually quite pointless.
There was nothing I could do or you could do or anyone else could do.”

“No,” protests Wilson.
“It was my own will,” he insists, “and nothing else which condemned me.”
“I’m afraid you are wrong, so wrong,” continues Wilson’s exasperated namesake, shaking his blood-stained head.
“It’s not just you, it’s everyone.
You’re just a little fish, my friend.
You think
you
were out to get yourself, you think
you
were perverse.
I don’t want to play the alarmist, but I’ve been some places and seen some things and believe me there’s nothing
but
perversity.
The machinery of this place operates entirely on the principle of friction, my friend.”
“I’ve lost the hope of heaven,” interjects William Wilson.
“Heaven, forget heaven,” replies the namesake.
“Heaven will be when the big, brainless William Wilson has torn everything up so bad that it’ll have to suck the whole mess back in and start over.
The point I want to make here is that now that we know what we’re up against, maybe we can make our peace and perhaps be of some comfort to each other.
This is a really unique opportunity.
Maybe—”

But William Wilson will not hear any more of this insanity.
He’s already suffered enough at the hands of his twin.
Taking up his sword, Wilson attacks the specter and savagely hacks him to bits.
(“There’s my peace with you!”
he shouts.) Then he goes around feeding the hunks of flesh to the dogs in the neighborhood, all the while admiring the simple hunger of the devouring beasts.

William Wilson soon afterward starves to death, for when he returns home he finds that the thought of what he’s done won’t let him stop laughing long enough to take any nourishment, or even a drink of water.

The Worthy Inmate of the Will of the Lady Ligeia

The lady Ligeia is a woman of great beauty—dark hair, high forehead, striking eyes—and also great learning.
Her husband, a man of only average looks and accomplishments, shares in her studies of occult wisdom, and to him it sometimes seems that he and his wife are treading on the bounds of forbidden knowledge.

From the very beginning there was perhaps something extraordinary about their marriage pact.
(For instance, Ligeia kept her last name a secret from her mate, and he never pressed the issue, never questioned this arrangement.) When the lady Ligeia is dying from an unknown disorder, her husband still doesn’t understand what she sees in him.
He feels unworthy of her love, which is incomprehensibly intense; he feels it is entirely unmerited.

When living, the lady Ligeia often spoke of the will to conquer death, the will to survive its terrible, seemingly inevitable victory.
Ligeia’s husband always affirmed her sentiments, however little he understood them.
Being an average sensual man, after his wife’s death he begins a new life with Lady Rowena Trevanion, of Tremaine, a blue-eyed blond woman from a distinguished English family.
However, not long into his second marriage he shuts himself away in a secluded room of bizarre décor: nightmarish colors, garish appointments, and weird, restless tapestries.
There he recklessly jeopardizes his mental balance with drugs and strange dreams.
His physical well-being doesn’t sustain any serious damage (he’s as fit as he ever was), but his second wife’s health, like her predecessor’s, suddenly and inexplicably seems to be declining.

He sees Lady Rowena suffer a series of relapses and recoveries, until to his eyes she has at last wasted away altogether, and dies in that secluded and fantastically renovated chamber.
Her lifeless form lies before him, but all he can think about is his first wife, his lost love, Ligeia.

By design, that strange room he built for himself is perfect for dreaming in, and now he is dreaming quite strenuously, dreaming with every ounce of his will about his first wife, the lady Ligeia.
He also takes an immoderate amount of opium as an aid to his dreaming.
At the same time the corpse of his second wife, Lady Rowena, seems to be exhibiting incredible signs of revived life—color in the face, faint pulsing of the heart—which then disappear, only to reappear after a brief interval.
This occurs off and on throughout the night and culminates in the supernatural resurrection not of Lady Rowena, but of the lady Ligeia, whom the widower of both ladies has dreamed back to life, supplying the body of his second wife to accommodate the first.

But the resurrection is an illusory one.
Lady Rowena is, in fact, not dead; nor is the lady Ligeia alive.
For all his efforts, their husband hadn’t dreamed either of them anywhere but has succeeded only in dreaming himself out of one world and into another.
Through this exercise of will he has finally merited the love of the dark woman whose raven hair is now spreading from the shadows of her shroud.
He has willed himself into her domain, from which no one ever escapes and which is the very source of the will itself.

And now they are both locked forever in the formless phantasmagoria from which emanates innumerable echoes of each gory and passionate throb of the Heart Divine.
Best of all, Ligeia has her husband back.

“Oh Rowena, Rowena,” he screams.
But nobody—never mind the blond, blue-eyed widow—can hear him now.

The Interminable Residence of the Friends of the House of Usher

A man of average height and features has just managed to escape the House of Usher only seconds before it collapses full force deep into the murky waters of the adjacent tarn.
The man runs under a nearby tree, seeking refuge from the violent storm which began and consummated that evening’s catastrophe.
Once there, however, he looks up and notes that the tree is leafless.
(Its limp branches are flowing freely in the wind and even its roots, unearthed, are waving around.)

The man of average height and features was spending a few days at the House of Usher at the invitation of a friend and former classmate, Roderick, who along with his twin sister, Madeline, owned the house and a fair amount of surrounding property, including a graveyard.

Roderick immediately impressed his childhood friend as a very sick man.
Only the softest sounds, the dimmest light, and a generally immobile routine could be tolerated by his morbidly keen senses and nervous system.

Still, the two friends managed to keep themselves entertained by reading rare books of occult lore, and sometimes Roderick would play, however quietly, unusual melodies on his guitar.
Roderick also tries to explain some unusual theories which lately have obsessed his supersubtle mind, theories about his relationship to the house and to his twin sister.
But at the time Roderick’s friend doesn’t really understand all this.

The visitor at the House of Usher is at first appalled by the desolate countryside, the unwholesome appearance of the tarn, and the shocking, if not dangerous, condition of the house itself.
After a while, though, these striking abnormalities cease to affect him the way they once did.
When Roderick announces that Madeline has died, he helps the bereaved brother inter the deceased twin without asking any questions.
(She had a rosy flush on her face!) Life at the House of Usher is then carried on as usual by its two remaining residents.

This state of affairs begins to decay when one night there’s a storm which upsets Roderick to the point of hysteria.
His housemate tries to calm him down by reading from a storybook.
But Roderick is inconsolable and now claims that the two of them locked Madeline in the family crypt while she was still alive.
His friend is unnerved by this outburst.
He had no idea things were so bad.
This was madness!

Even worse, Roderick is proved to be telling the truth when his sister staggers into the room, falls upon her twin, and they both end up in a lifeless heap on the floor.
The man of average height and features barely manages to get out of the house before that too goes down.
He stares at the empty lot where the House of Usher used to be, and then he turns away to seek a haven far removed from the site of this terrible ordeal.

But before he can take a single step he realizes that there is no longer any place he can go, no longer anyone who will have him.
Oh, the books, the shadows, and the horrible entombment of that poor girl.
How did he ever get into this one!
While the Ushers were effortlessly delivered to their doom by the hereditary freaks and weaknesses of their family, he came to the house, and stayed, of his own free will, and by the same will, without asking a single question, he too must now be consumed by the tarn whose diseased waters await his embrace.