The Hammer Horror Omnibus (30 page)

A woman. Yes, the young woman. Margaret Conrad. Still meddling. I didn’t want her here. I wanted her to go away before she caused further damage. But I could not speak. I tried to produce some sound that would tell her I was here, still alive, and that I wanted her to leave at once. But I could not produce even the guttural noises that my re-created Karl Werner had struggled with in his early hours.

“Don’t you see?”—she was urging something on someone, demanding agreement—“Don’t you see . . . ?” And through the haze, through the barrier of distortion in my ears, I heard her say: “Wicked . . .”

“To transform a dwarf into a normal man—is that so wicked, Miss Conrad?”

I thought it was myself speaking and knew it couldn’t be. And then I knew that it was Hans. He spoke clearly and firmly. I wanted to take his hand. He, at least, was still undaunted. He was not to be turned against me.

There was an unexpected sensation of coolness seeping down from my forehead. I tried to open my eyes; but they were not closed. A blurred shape moved over me. I could not bring it into focus.

Then the coolness touched my eyes. For a moment it was excruciating. Then the cool water wiped away the sticky mess from my eyes and from around my nostrils. Hans stood over me, gently dabbing with a moistened towel. When he saw that my eyes were open and that I was trying to keep him steadily in view, he smiled. It was meant to be a professional, reassuring smile; but the poor lad was not very accomplished in such things.

I had to speak. My body and mind cried out for release, pleading that I should let go, slip away . . . but I had to talk to Hans.

“Try to relax,” he said.

“Hans . . .”

“Don’t talk.”

“It’s no good, Hans,” I said. The effort was more extreme than I could ever have conceived. Each word was a huge stone to be hauled up a precipice.

Hans bent over me. A good pupil, he was feeling my pulse, listening to my breathing. And it was no good.

I said: “Send her away.”

He hesitated, then turned towards where the young woman must be standing. I did not hear a door close, did not hear footsteps; but with some new intuition, some raw exposure of my nerves, I sensed that Margaret Conrad had gone.

I said: “Hans . . . you know what to do.”

He stared. His face swam back into the haze that was already creeping in again from all sides. I had very little time left. Desperately I tried to make him understand.

“You know,” I forced it out again. “You know what to do.”

His face was lost now, but I could still hear his voice.

“You mean . . . ?”

“Everything . . . is there. The laboratory . . . it’s yours . . . Work . . . Tell me, Hans . . . you can . . .”

It was too much now. I surrendered. I let go and felt a great peace as I slid gently down into the darkness. A last, lingering thought ran round my head like the drowsy piping of a bird at nightfall. Had he understood? And if he had understood, would he have the courage and the technical ability to carry out the long, arduous process?

My fate was in his hands. There was nothing more I could do—nothing but die . . . and wait.

8

W
hen they came to confront me with the proof which I had tauntingly demanded from the President of the Medical Council, they were too late. Molke, determined to wipe out the insult which he considered I had offered him, had persuaded the authorities to investigate the grave of Baron Frankenstein. The coffin was brought up in great secrecy behind screens—with, on top of it, the crumpled remains of what had been the greedy Fritz. This must have been a shock to the gravediggers and the watching officials; but it was only the first shock. Beneath Fritz were the priest’s hat and his rosary, and all that was left of the priest who had so obligingly taken my place.

The President was jubilant. He and his retinue hurried back to Carlsbruck, and the police at once set out to arrest me.

All they found was a corpse beneath a sheet. Hans Kleve sadly lifted the sheet so that they could see what a terrible state the body was in. He explained that the patients at the Hospital had gone mad and practically torn Doctor Stein to pieces. Stein . . . or Frankenstein: it was all one now.

The body was taken away and buried in unhallowed ground. It did not occur to these zealous gentlemen to examine my bruised and battered frame too closely. The terrible beating I had had about the head made a far from pretty sight even in the eyes of experienced medical men, and they were prepared to accept that I was dead. Nobody could have survived with his head so smashed in. There was no reason why they should want to operate on that head and examine the brain.

Which was just as well, since the brain was no longer in it.

Orders were given for the laboratory to be dismantled, but as there was no urgency in this the process dragged on long enough for Hans to remove certain essential items. These included various pieces of equipment whose use the Medical Council reactionaries would not have understood, certain carefully preserved limbs—among them a tattooed arm—and above all a jar full of liquid in which floated a brain. Hans treated this with the utmost care. He had made some serious mistakes in the past, but now he worked to eradicate them.

The task to which he bent all his energies took rather more than a year. He suffered many setbacks and at one stage was near to abandoning the whole thing. I knew none of this. Time passed, but for me there was no time. For me, there had been the pain and then the descent into nothingness. And then I was awake once more. I might have done no more than close my eyes and open them again.

There was still pain, but it was a different order of pain. I suffered internally for many weeks as flesh knit and came to life again. But this I could endure: I knew what was happening, and by not fighting against it I was able to help it along. Hans needed to give me no instructions. I laid down for myself a strict programme of carefully graduated movements. Today I would concentrate on my fingers, tomorrow on gentle exercises with my arms; next week I would walk, and the month after that I would go out into the world and adjust myself to the milieu in which I must now function.

It came as a surprise to me to find what a distance Hans had put between us and Carlsbruck. We were in England. The name of Frankenstein was scarcely known here, and even if someone were to arrive in London from the Continent with grisly stories, there would never be any danger of recognition. The Frankenstein features were gone. The body which I now inhabited could be claimed by no one and recognized by no one, since it was an assembly of so many different items. Hans had done a splendid job. There were one or two minor adjustments I might wish to make to myself in due course, but they could wait. On the whole I was satisfied with my new self.

And as time has gone on, I have remained satisfied. The pains abated, the stiffness and awkwardness of limbs to whose balance I had to adjust soon wore off, and my brain was as clear and efficient as it had always been.

When I looked at myself in a glass this morning, I could detect only the faintest white line of a scar across the forehead. Sometimes my patients have looked at that scar—with curiosity and the admiration which is always aroused by mystery. It has done me no harm: rather the reverse, in fact. Once more the ladies flock to my consulting room. Once more I receive invitations to those musical evenings which seem as common here as they were in my own country.

But this is my own country now. I am Doctor Frank, a distinguished European physician who has chosen to make London his home. My voice retains enough of an accent to enchant the wealthy ladies. My practice grows more and more prosperous. My valued assistant, Hans, takes some of the weight off my shoulders, and between us we plan great things.

I have amassed enough capital to buy the mews stables adjoining those in which I keep my coach. When the doors have been strengthened against prying neighbors and some new equipment installed piece by piece, there are some interesting experiments which we are eager to carry out.

Two of my elderly patients have not long to live. One of them has promised to leave me a small amount of money in her will.

But it is not her money I want. She does not know it, but she is going to donate to me something more valuable than money.

I am impatient to be at work in the laboratory once more . . .

The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb

1

T
hey rode down upon him out of the desert before he heard even the faintest whisper of their coming. He was crouched over a heap of pottery shards, trying to identify enough of a pattern to make reassembly possible, when a flurry of sand was kicked into his face. Dubois looked up indignantly.

Three Bedouin horsemen had reined in and were staring down at him. Behind him, the three porters who had been working for Dubois closed in without a word. Their silence was a threat. Professor Dubois did not take it too seriously, but as he got to his feet he wondered what demand was going to be made on him. A story about starving families would probably be the next thing, followed by a whining plea for increased wages. The porters were always grumbling, sometimes fawning, sometimes aggressive. Now that they had him on his own he feared they were likely to be aggressive.

“What do you want?” he asked.

There was no reply. The porters ran suddenly round behind him and pinioned his arms behind his back. As he tried to shout a protest, a dark hand struck him across the mouth. He was dragged to the post which marked the corner of the new diggings planned for the following week, and lashed to it.

One of the Bedouins dismounted and drew a knife. Dubois stared incredulously. This could not be real: he had worked with these people, respected their ways, brought them employment and the chance to learn many things about their own history . . .

The Bedouin stroked Dubois’ face with the knife. The touch of the steel made him shiver. The others saw this and laughed savagely. And then the knife swept back, gleamed for a moment in the sun, and plunged into Dubois’ stomach.

Dubois choked and sagged forward. He tried to scream, but could produce only a sickening, gagging sound. He was hardly aware of the porter taking his right hand and pulling it out, away from his body. The Bedouin raised his knife again. It no longer gleamed: it was dark with blood. In one swift, forceful movement he chopped off Dubois’ hand, watching with grim approval as it fell to the sand.

2

T
he King Expedition of 1900 had encountered few difficulties when it first set to work in Egypt. Financed by the wealthy American, Alexander King, and headed by the two greatest Egyptologists which France and England could provide, it had both the wealth and prestige needed to overcome official and personal objections. The French grave robbers and speculators of 1897 had left behind them the ruins of plundered Abydos and the seed of hostility towards all profiteering Europeans. But Flinders Petrie had done something to restore the good name of serious archaeology, and whatever might be thought of the brash, exuberant Alexander King, the reputations of Professor Pierre Dubois and Sir Giles Dalrymple opened the way to the Valley of the Kings. Sceptical observers might suggest renaming it “The Valley of Alexander King”, but while they scoffed and sneered the devoted archaeologists applied themselves to the delicate, careful work of excavating lost tombs and scrupulously recording what they found. Dubois and Dalrymple were not interested in amassing spoils to be sold to the highest bidder or presented as a matter of national pride to some greedy museum. They wanted to fill in the gaps in the world’s knowledge of the Pharaohs. They sought to find missing links in the dynastic succession. The mummies of many Kings and Princes of ancient Egypt had disappeared over the centuries, destroyed by vandals; but there must still be many which had simply not been discovered.

King Sekhemre Shedtaui and his consort had been desecrated by grave robbers—but did this also mean that the great Ra Antef, missing from his rightful resting-place in the Valley of the Kings, had long ago been destroyed? Where was Tuthmosis the Fourth, and where the boy king, Tutankhamen? The arduous work of establishing the complicated chronology and of searching for the tombs which would confirm their theories would have worn down lesser men. Under that searing sun, in the parched air that preserved pyramids and inscriptions but could destroy men from another country, only a fanatic would have persevered. But Dubois and Dalrymple were fanatics, and glad to be so. Their life was the study of death and its trappings.

Dubois had as assistant his daughter Annette. Sir Giles took with him John Bray, an eager young man from Cambridge. They endured the intermittent presence of Alexander King with a good grace: he had provided the money, and even if it was hard to treat him with respect it was possible to show gratitude. Fortunately, the climate was too much for the American most of the time. His visits were brief and he was usually glad to return to the comforts of Cairo, leaving the archaeologists to dig and sift, to record and speculate, to brood over the tiniest fragment of potsherd or the chipped remains of what might be a significant inscription.

After ten months of intensive work, the discovery of one small stone step, overlooked by searchers and plunderers for countless generations, led the team to believe that they had found a small burial chamber. It was only as excavations continued that they realized this was no minor discovery. This was not a shallow grave of pre-dynastic times, nor was it the mound of some minor princeling. The deeper they went, the more they uncovered. After six days of unremitting effort, they stood on the threshold of a huge tomb. Below them was the first great door—portals to the past. By the door stood the dog-headed Anubis, patron of embalming and guardian of the tomb.

When they opened the door and went in, the dust of lost centuries filled the air. It was heavy and slumberous, seeming to contain the textures and echoes of a vanished civilization. It clung to the clothes and hair of the intruders and cloyed in their nostrils, as if to lull them into a stupor, to take from them all desire to proceed farther.