Fred Saberhagen - The Frankenstein Papers

Once convinced that we intended him no harm_rather that there were prospects of a reward if he told us what we judged to be the truth—Karl agreed to relate to us his version of what happened on that famous November night.

Even as he was speaking, I recalled the hints and mysterious suggestions we had heard about the boots of Big Karl, and took note of his footgear. His boots indeed looked strange, and very strange the more I looked at them—though the longer I gazed, the more there grew in me an unsettling sensation of familiarity . The boots appear to be fashioned of some type of gray, smooth leather, and they look clean and well cared-for despite the shabbiness of the rest of his undistinguished costume.

But, to his story, as he told it to us. On that November night he had been at home until midnight, brooding upon certain problems that had arisen between him and Frankenstein, his employer. Around the middle of the night, determined that some sort of understanding should be reached, he had set out on foot from the village to see the Herr Doktor Frankenstein, to talk to him. There was apparently nothing very unusual in Karl's deciding to pay a visit at such an hour; in fact it was more usual than not for him to come and go at Frau Bauer's lodginghouse late at night. The Herr Doktor always liked to work late, because that way it was easier to keep secret certain things about his work, from his landlady and other curious people. Karl had no trouble in appreciating that point.

He had arrived without incident at the house, and made his way as usual up the back stairs. He was standing in the upper hall of the big old house when a bolt of lightning struck, near enough to make his teeth rattle, as he expressed it. If the lightning had not touched the house itself, which was protected by its iron points upon the roof, it had certainly come very near to hitting it. Karl had been startled and frightened by the flash, and even momentarily dazed.

"It rattled the teeth in my head, gentlemen," he repeated solemnly, looking from me to Freeman and back again. After the lightning he had had to pause for a moment, standing in the little upper hall. Then he had shaken his head and gone on.

On approaching the laboratory door he had noticed that no light was coming out around it, and even that the door itself was slightly open. The darkness was something of a disappointment—it meant that Frankenstein must have given up his labors for the night—but the open door was really an oddity. Only once or twice before had the Herr Doktor forgotten to lock up after himself. Karl had a key also, and thought that Metzger must have one, because both of them sometimes made deliveries at odd hours.

But the unlocked door was only the beginning of the night's surprises. When Karl stepped into the room, to see if the Herr Doktor might have left a message, or perhaps some payment for him, he received instead the next in a series of shocks, the last of which would be almost the equal of the stunning bolt that had afflicted him outside.

His eyes grew wide as he told the story, gazing earnestly at Freeman and myself. "There was two on the table, gentlemen. I didn't know what to think."

Freeman glared at him. "What do you mean, two on the table?"

"Two bodies, sir." The peasant nodded somberly at both of us. "The first thing I think when I see that is that Metzger—he was the other fellow who sometimes brought bodies—has come in ahead of me and made a delivery, and then he forgot to lock up when he left. When Metzger brought them from the medical school sometimes he would leave them just like that. The old lady and her servants never came up to that room, sirs; they knew that Herr Doktor Frankenstein would always keep the door locked, and didn't want them there—"

"Except that the door wasn't locked on this one night."

"Yes sir."

"Go on. There were two bodies, you say."

"Yes sir. Then I saw a half-empty bottle, with brandy in it, on one of the tables in the room, where usually there was no such thing. And I thought, well, the good Doktor works hard, why shouldn't he, once in a while? A little drink now and then is good for a man. And I was about to sit down and try just a little of the brandy myself. But then I saw that the new body wasn't right."

"Wasn't right? What do you mean by that?"

"Well, there it was, not set neatly to one side on the table—there would have been room—but just sprawled right on top of all the work that Herr Frankenstein was always warning me and Metzger not to touch. And the new one was huge, sir. It was as big as you are, I suppose."

"Go on."

"And worst of all, it had all its clothes on. If there was one thing that the Herr Doktor was always telling me, it was 'Karl, take their clothes off and be sure you get rid of them.' The clothes, that is. Very particular on that point, he was."

When I thought about it for a moment, that seemed logical to me. A naked body would be harder to trace and identify, should there ever arise any dispute with angry relatives or medical school officials. And it would also, of course, be easier to examine and work with.

"So what did you do, Karl?" I asked.

"It seemed to me, Your Honor, that there was only one thing I could do. I got busy taking off the clothes. I had them all off—and then I realized that the body was still alive."

"Alive!"

"Yes sir. That was a bad moment for me, I tell you. A bad moment."

"Were you drinking on that night, Karl? Before you found the brandy bottle in the laboratory, I mean."

"Well, sir, no. Well, only a little . Just a little cheap wine was all I had before I came into town to see Herr Doktor Frankenstein. And then, once I got there, I hardly had time to take even a little nip out of the brandy bottle before I started to notice things, like the new body having its clothes on. But I saw that bottle just sitting on the table and I thought, why not? After that lightning bolt I needed something to help me pull myself together."

"Go on."

"Only a little something… you see, I thought it unfair of Frankenstein to say what he sometimes said about my work. I wasn't—I am not—a drunken fool, as the gentleman once accused me of. I did good work for him, always."

Freeman was indignant. "You had been drinking, then, that night, when you went to see him. When you got there you probably couldn't tell a live body from a corpse."

At that the peasant became resentful. "I could tell, sir! I could tell. It was just…"

"Not until you had the body stripped. Anyway, what happened then?"

The remainder of the story came out in bits and pieces. Amazed to see and feel a shudder of life run through the giant frame under his hands, Karl had let it slide back to the table. All he could think of in that horrible moment was that someone, either Metzger or the Herr Doktor or both of them, had made a catastrophic mistake. They had brought a body here before the man was dead. Perhaps—Karl still shuddered, telling us his fear—perhaps Metzger had even tried to kill the man, to provide a suitable specimen, and had failed.

Karl himself, or so he protested to us, has never hurt anyone in his life. I can believe that that is true, or almost true. Like so many huge men, he gives the impression of having basically a gentle nature; and I believe that his nature is basically a timid one as well.

So to me the claim is quite credible, that it never entered Karl's mind to complete the job that Metzger perhaps had bungled, to finish off the helpless man before him. I can believe that Karl thought only of how to separate himself from the catastrophe that was sure to bring down trouble on the Herr Doktor's head, and that he did what he could to destroy or confuse the evidence before escaping.