The Frankenstein Murders (22 page)

Professor Krempe studied my face for a moment before moving closer to one of the dissecting tables. Upon it lay the cadaver of a man who had worn in his life a heavy beard, and so his features were difficult to discern. What skin was visible on the face, neck, and arms showed that in his life, the man had been exposed to harsh sun and wind, so I guessed him to have been some type of labourer.

“We are all of us dying from the moment we are born. This corpse,” the professor informed me as he took the cadaver's hand and shook it as if greeting an old friend, “is perhaps two or three days old. Already it is discoloured and has begun to rot. The only
life left in this lifeless piece of flesh are the maggots that feed upon it.”

The professor paused momentarily to let the hand drop heavily back to the table, where it made a dull slapping sound. He continued to speak.

“The rate of decay depends entirely upon the environment in which the body is left at the time of death. If a body is left in the open air, uncovered and unprotected, it will likely decay in one week, or as much as a body buried beneath the ground will decay in one month. Temperature also has a great effect in that heat will significantly increase the rate of the decaying process and cold will slow it down.

“Generally speaking, a body in a casket buried deep in the ground can take many years, even decades, to decay fully. But do not be mistaken, Mr. Freame. As you can see by the cadavers laid upon the tables here, flesh and blood alone do not make life.”

At that moment, a group of workmen carrying another cadaver came into the room. They were followed by a group of students.

“My former colleague, Waldman, has sent word that you are wanting to speak with Frankenstein's former assistant, Dippel. You will find him at Dr. Bosch's asylum.”

More as a statement than as a question, I noted that Dippel was now Dr. Bosch's assistant.

“Dippel, that unfortunate soul, is now Dr. Bosch's patient, and an inmate of the asylum.” Having given me this unexpected news, the professor did not pause to wish me a good day, but went immediately to join his students. He called back to me over his shoulder.

“Mr. Freame, you must already have been made aware of your striking physical resemblance to Victor Frankenstein.”

I simply nodded to indicate my agreement.

“You would do well to make sure that the resemblance goes no further,” he pronounced, and with that, the professor turned his
attention once more and I was thus dismissed; this was confirmed by the appearance at my side of the professor's young assistant to escort me out.

As I walked away from the university, I could not help but compare the dissimilar portraits of Victor Frankenstein provided by his two former professors. Professor Krempe drew a picture of a sullen, indifferent fellow, where the man described by Professor Waldman was quite different. Waldman seemed convinced that Victor represented lost genius, but Krempe did not share this belief.

When I returned to the inn after my visit with Professor Krempe, it was to find that Mutt had returned from his search for signs of the DeLacey family. The news he had to impart was not as I would have wished. After searching and questioning anyone he could, Mutt had all but given up on finding any trace of the family. The only potential link he had discovered had come from a farmer who had rented a small cottage and some land to a family, a man and his wife and her father. It could very well be that those taken for man and wife were actually Felix and his sister Agatha, or perhaps that the farmer believed Agatha and Safie to be the same woman. The farmer had not seen anyone of the monster's description. He did not know from where the family had come as he did not recognize their accent. Where the family departed to was also unknown, although their departure was sudden, as if they were fleeing someone or something.

The next morning, Mutt had taken an early breakfast and left the inn before I rose. I indulged in a more leisurely breakfast, then made my way to the house where Victor Frankenstein had resided during his stay in Ingolstadt. The building was located just outside the confines of the university, and was of no particular era, but rather seemed to have been created in a number of stages with little or no concern for the earlier styles of the building. While
waiting outside the house, I reflected on the estranged relationship Victor Frankenstein had with the being he had brought to life. The monster that felt himself to be like Adam,
apparently united by no link to any other being in existence,
yet also knew that its state was far different from Adam's.

Both Adam and the monster were the first of their kind in nature. Born ignorant and in full adulthood, neither had been nurtured; they were left to fend for themselves. Adam was born to paradise, whereas the monster was born to an evil world which he shunned. Adam, born into a beautiful warm world, could name all he saw; for him, food was plentiful. The monster starved. Both were innately rational, and instinctively desired to understand. They shared a desire for a mate, but where Adam was created out of clay, the monster was created out of death. Where went the monster, death followed.

Mutt's arrival concluded my philosophical considerations. Our subsequent meeting with the landlord was lengthy, but we gained some understandings. It appeared that the landlord had a somewhat jaded view of the students to whom he rented lodgings. He painted a picture of students leading the dissipated life of the idle rich. With no little effort, I managed to gain information concerning Victor Frankenstein's assistant, Dippel. Dippel had had unfettered access to Victor's chambers, and would be seen entering and exiting at all hours of the day and night, but spoke to no one. After Victor Frankenstein deserted his chambers, Dippel continued to linger about the rooms, but he would never enter. Often, Dippel was found asleep on the doorstep, his presence announced by the crazed ravings in his sleep. Dippel's behaviour became increasingly erratic until the landlord was forced to have him removed by the authorities. Not long after that, the landlord heard that Dippel had been sent to an asylum.

The landlord also let us know that not long after Victor Frankenstein's arrival in Ingolstadt, he had forbidden the servants
to enter his rooms. Food and drink were left outside his door, and the tray would be picked up later, often with little on it having been touched. The rooms have lain uninhabited since Frankenstein left, and were even considered haunted by the servants, who have since refused to enter the chamber. A dark figure had been reported moving about the room; but, when investigated, no one was there.

The landlord would have been greatly more discomposed about the situation had it not been for the fact that Victor's rooms had continued to be paid for, even after he had left Ingolstadt. Alphonse Frankenstein, until his death, sent payment for Victor's room and instructions that the rooms should not be disturbed. Either wittingly or otherwise, the current heir, Captain Ernest Frankenstein, also continued payment. Eagerly, I climbed the stairs to Victor Frankenstein's former chambers.

Victor Frankenstein's rooms were in a solitary chamber at the top of the house, separated from the rest by a large gallery and staircase. It would have been easy for Frankenstein to enter and leave the rooms without notice. Using a key supplied by the landlord, we entered through a carved door at the top of the stairs. The chamber was dark, the small north-facing window let in little natural light; only many candles, even during the sunniest of days, would make it possible to see when engaged in any task that required precision.

The room had the look of an apothecary's shop. Glass containers and apothecary jars contained substances, now black with age, which had once been preserved in liquids. A repulsive cloying smell dominated, and I wondered aloud at the possibly that what invaded our nostrils was the rotten stench of cadavers that had sunk into the floorboards. The noisome stench threatened to overpower me; I was obliged to hold my handkerchief over my nose. Mutt's nose twitched incessantly, but he seemed otherwise little discomfited or discomposed.

The remains of what must have been Victor Frankenstein's electrical mechanism — that which had given the spark of life to his creature — had been made unrecognizable. The contraption had been smashed into pieces, making the original nature or the
functioning of the machine difficult to discern. I pushed about a few of the pieces with the toe of my boot and contemplated for a moment the possibility of reconstruction. The fragments were many and tiny, and so the task would be onerous. Captain Walton's impending departure from Archangel put limitations on my time in Ingolstadt, and there was yet much to do. Not without regret did I abandon the mechanism.

More unlabelled bottles and jars containing foul-smelling contents were scattered about on the table, some having been knocked over to allow their contents to spill out and harden. It was impossible to imagine what the containers had originally held. Broken glass from one of the jars lay beneath the table. This then may have been the source of the sound that had brought Henry Clerval rushing up the stairs in concern for his friend. With some trepidation, I retrieved a book from among the refuse, wine-coloured, thin, the binding worn from much handling. As I opened the book and turned its pages, I could imagine Victor Frankenstein engaged in the same activity, concentrating fiercely on the notes and images he had placed upon the now yellowing pages. Choosing randomly from the many pages of notes, I read:

With the first incision, I cut, downwards from the thorax, then opened the chest, whereupon the lungs collapsed immediately, contraction was evident. For the second incision, I cut across the abdomen. Inside, I found a heart of average size, and the liver and spleen were both firm and hard. The bladder and pancreas were unremarkable, but the kidneys were irregular in that one was unusually large, while the other quite small. Specimens of the heart, lung, and kidneys were removed to jars.

With each entry, Victor had provided more details of his findings supported by carefully drafted images. The notebook
explained in detail how to take a human body apart, but nowhere were there directions on how to put one back together and how to infuse it with life. It would involve no small feat to reconnect the nerves and arteries, thus the parts should be large, which in turn determined the size of his creation. Larger body parts would make it easier to work, and so the creature became a giant. In vain did I search for one of Victor Frankenstein's lab coats in the hopes that it, like the one the monster had taken to cover its nakedness, held in its pocket yet another of Victor's journals in which he documented his work with the human body.

Taking a few of the texts that remained off the shelf, at first I found nothing more interesting than the illegible scratches of ink in the margins similar to that found in the texts left in Victor's chamber in Geneva.

My eyes were drawn to a white object in the corner of the room. There, suspended from a pole, was what appeared to be the reconstructed skeletal remains of a small child of perhaps three or four years. Something about the appearance of the skeleton made the child seem malformed. The brow of the forehead was low, so the face appeared as if it had been pressed down by some heavy force; its death grin was made even more hideous by the presence of small, sharp teeth. Almost simultaneously, Mutt and I moved closer to the disturbing figure, halting simultaneously as the back of the skeleton became more visible and with it the appearance of a line of small bones leading from the pelvic bone. What in fact we gazed upon were not malformed human remains but rather simian.

Stepping through an open doorway, the bedroom beyond looked much the same as it might have right after Victor abandoned it, with only the addition of cobwebs and dust. The air in the room was stale, even after the two small shuttered windows had been forced open. Dust mottled the few streaks of sunlight that fought against the dirt accumulated on the windowpanes.
A modest-sized, canopied bed stood on one side of the room. Victor's version of the Frankenstein coat of arms, in bright colours so that the chimera was rendered in shimmering gold leaf upon it, was suspended above the head of the bed. A shattered cheval glass and a clothes press had been placed across the room from the foot of the bed. Amid shards and splinters of mirror scattered upon the floor below the frame, touched only by dust, lay a candelabra. This, and not the breaking of a glass container, may have been the sound Henry heard while waiting at the bottom of the stairs for Victor to descend. The question then was why had Victor done such a thing.

After bringing his creature to life, Victor had retreated to his bedroom and thrown himself onto his bed. He did not consider rearing his creation, but instead rejected, abused, and derided it for its ugliness. Stitched together from pieces of the dead, even had the most beautiful features been selected, it could only be horrific. The creature's only fate was to be the object of fear, scorned by anyone whose eyes fell upon him. With life came death, then life again; only his was a miserable existence that brought yet more death.

When Victor awoke, he saw the monster in the
dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the window shutters.
Frankenstein, afraid of the monster, recoiled when it reached for him.

At my request, Mutt and I re-enacted the scene between Victor Frankenstein and his monster. I played the role of Victor; Mutt, close to six feet and quite broad, made a convincing monster. Mutt started in the laboratory, but on account of the shards of glass and other debris, I opted to not have him begin by lying prone on the floor. I lay upon the bed in the other room, but to accomplish this, I had to first pull back curtains, then pushed aside the coverlet coated with dust. If the monster had come to the foot of the bed to grab Frankenstein, then he would have stood directly in front of
the mirror, the glass now in splinters on the floor along with the heavy base of the candelabra.