Fred Saberhagen - The Frankenstein Papers

"They had me in jail once, sir, for two days, just for sleeping in the square, when I was younger. And I don't mean to go back to jail. No sir, enough of that for me."

"That's wise of you. So what did you do?"

His first impulse, he told us, had been to get the live man out of the house, and dump him somewhere else. But as soon as Karl had tried to lift the huge slippery body from the table, the victim had started to struggle ferociously, and had seemed likely to raise an outcry that would rouse the house, deaf landlady or not. Karl let him slump back on the marble slab, where he lay groaning faintly.

After an agonizing moment of indecision, Karl had decided that it was the Herr Doktor's work that had to go.

He told us, with the calm of one accustomed to handling corpses, how the dead construction on the table, the object of Frankenstein's labors for so long, and rotting now despite all efforts at preservation and reanimation, had come to pieces in his grip when he had attempted to lift it quickly. There was a large canvas bag available in the laboratory, in which some previous delivery had been made. Karl began stuffing chunks of body into the bag, like a butcher packing meat. Though the reconstructed frame was eight feet tall, or rather eight feet long, it was attenuated by dehydration as well as being weakened by surgery. The weight was no more, in fact was rather less, than that of a normal body of ordinary size.

Into the bag as well went the spare anatomy from around the room, and the clothing that had just been removed from the living victim. Karl's idea was that a naked man would be less likely to raise an immediate outcry or come running in pursuit when he woke up completely.

"You disposed of all the clothing?" I demanded. "What about the boots?"

"Your Honor, I—yes, these that I am wearing are his boots, I admit. They looked so good I couldn't throw them away, not like the rest of his strange garments. And when I tried them on they fit."

"Go on, then—wait!" My grip tightened on his arm. "Was there any other clothing in the room?"

"Any other… no sir. Why do you ask?"

"Are you sure?"

"Why… wait. Yes sir, there were the clothes that Herr Frankenstein had been getting ready for the person on the table to wear, on the day that person should be able to get up and walk about. Those things were all kept on a shelf in the laboratory. But they'd been sitting there for quite a while, and I never thought about them at the time—"

"Stop!" I cried. "Wait. On a shelf… yes."

Freeman grasped my arm. "My friend, what is it?"

"I am beginning to remember," I said to him. And bits and pieces were coming back to me, quite painfully. As they are now, once more, as I write about it.

Later _In that first moment of my cloudy awareness, on that November night, alone in that hideous, malodorous room, what had I been doing? My hands had been fumbling with my garments. Reaching to a shelf.

Getting dressed. Of course. If only—

Later _I have remembered—enough—and I am certain that now I know the truth. But I cannot tell it to anyone here, not even Freeman, my good friend. Nor dare I write it in this journal.

One consolation is that I know my name at last.

FINAL LETTER

April 7,1783 Ingolstadt

Dear Sir—

Looking back on the course of this investigation, I feel that I have been led from the unlikely and the improbable on to the inconceivable and the impossible. Now, once more, after yet another series of mystifying events, I write you from this quiet university town. Its peaceful aspect has not changed in the five months I have been gone, and the horrifying events that have concerned me since then, seem, at this moment, as remote as if they had never happened.

I believe—I am sure—that my companion has very recently experienced some substantial return of memory; that he is now satisfied that he has solved the riddles posed by the mystery of his being, and the question of his identity. But the knowledge, whatever it may be, has not brought him happiness, but rather the reverse; and no plea of mine will induce him to share it with me.

Briefly, this morning, he tentatively attempted to do so. We were seated out of doors on this pleasant spring morning, at one side of the town square, while around us the normal business of shopkeepers, workers, and loiterers went on—my friend's extraordinary figure has now been seen here so much that it has ceased to attract any very particular attention.

He leaned toward me, and interrupted a lengthy silence to say suddenly: "Freeman, you are my friend. You have risked your life for me. I owe you some kind of an explanation."

"I am relieved to hear you say there is to be an explanation, but I do not consider that you owe me one." Though of course I did. At that moment there was nothing in the world I wanted more.

But again he fell silent; I could see that, for whatever reason, the effort to explain was very difficult for him.

After lengthy private consideration, staring at the fountain and the pigeons, and now and then dartling me a worried glance, he began, or tried to begin, the answer I so desired to have. "Once there was a scientist—a philosopher—who wondered if it might be possible to create intelligent life, the equal of his own."

"A worthy ambition," I remarked, when a pause threatened to prolong itself unduly.

"Yes. Oh yes." My friend nodded. "And natural enough, I think. You see, although there were many others of his kind around him—and he had colleagues, who were interested in the same things_this philosopher still found the universe something of a lonely place. I wonder now—I wonder now sometimes if, perhaps, nobody loved him—if perhaps his researches would have followed a different direction if he had been loved."

I did not know what to make of this at all, and murmured or grunted something, in what I hoped was a wise and thoughtful tone.

My friend resumed. "They all did—all felt this loneliness—he and his colleagues too. They all felt tormented by the same questions."

I grunted again, encouragingly as I thought. But again my friend fell silent. He sat for so long without speaking, still staring into the flowing waters of the fountain, that I thought it necessary to prompt him.

"The philosopher," I said.

"Hey?" muttered my tall friend absently.

"The one who tried to create life," I reminded him. "I suppose that he never really succeeded?"

My companion started, and looked at me as if for a moment he did not recognize me. "Oh but he did," he said then, joylessly. "Yes, he succeeded. With the help of others. And then he found that his difficulties were just beginning. He felt a responsibility for the beings of his creation…"

"Beings?" I asked. "More than one?"

But yet another lengthy silence ensued. I waited, more confused than ever, but confidently expecting that eventually I should hear more.

But it was not to be. My companion arose suddenly, turned his back on our bench, and without casting another look in my direction walked away from me with long strides. In a moment he was out of the square; too late I jumped to my feet and made a halfhearted attempt to follow him; halfhearted, because I know it is impossible for mere human legs to keep up with the pace his legs can set. At the edge of town I caught one more glimpse of him as he vanished into the countryside. I am awaiting his return.

Item: There were strange sights reported in the sky above Bavaria last night, and I suppose that garbled rumors of the man-carrying balloons now being tested in France are somehow responsible. The descriptions were quite lurid; I should not be surprised to learn that the prescientific idea of stones falling from the sky is not, in these hinterlands, completely dead. God knows how such news—particularly that of the balloons, I mean_can travel so rapidly, but some of the populace here are excited, which excitement I suppose must be a thousand times intensified in Paris.