Beyond the Curtain of Dark (v1.0), page 5
“Always pleased to meet the Press, Dan. Publicity is the life of show business, as the man said. I’m Stanley Arnold: call me Stan.”
“Then Frankenstein is just your stage name?”
“What else? You act kinda dim for a reporter, are you sure—?” He waved away the Press card that Dan pulled from his breast pocket. “No, I believe you, Dan, but you gotta admit the question was a little on the rube side. I bet you even think that I have a real monster in there!”
“Well, you must admit that he looks authentic. The skin stitched together that way, those plugs in his head—”
“Held on with spirit gum and the embroidery is drawn on with eyebrow pencil. That’s show business for you, an illusion. But I’m happy to hear that the act even looked real to an experienced reporter like yourself. What paper did you say you were with?”
“No paper, the news syndicate. I caught your act about six months ago and became interested. Did a little checking when I was in Washington, then followed you down here. You don’t really want me to call you Stan, do you? Stein might be closer. After all—Victor Frankenstein is the name on your naturalization papers.”
“Tell me more,” Frankenstein said in a voice suddenly cold and emotionless.
Dan riffled through the yellow sheets. “Yes…here it is, from the official records. Frankenstein, Victor—bom in Geneva, arrived in the U.S. in 1938, and more of the same.”
“The next thing you’ll be telling me is that my monster is real!” Frankenstein smiled, but only with his mouth.
“I’m betting that it is. No yogi training or hypnotism or such can make a man as indifferent to pain as that thing is—and as terribly strong. I want the whole story, the truth for a change!”
“Do you…?” Frankenstein asked in a cold voice and for a long moment the air filled with tension. Then he laughed and clapped the reporter on the arm. “All right, Dan—I’ll give it to you. You are a persistent devil and a good reporter and it is the least you deserve. But first you must get us some more drinks, something a measurable degree stronger than this execrable beer.” His New York accent had disappeared as easily as had his German one; he spoke English now with skill and perfection without any recognizable regional accent.
Dan gathered their empty glasses. “It’ll have to be beer—this is a dry country.”
“Nonsense! This is America, the land that raises its hands in horror at the foreign conception of doublethink yet practises it with an efficiency that sets the Old World to shame. Bay County may be officially dry but the law has many itchy palms, and under that counter you will find a reasonable supply of a clear liquid that glories in the name of White Mule and is reputed to have a kick of the same magnitude as its cognate beast. If you are still in doubt you will see a framed federal liquor license on the far wall, legitimatizing this endeavor in the eyes of the national government. Simply place a five-dollar-bill on the bar, say Mountain Dew, and do not expect any change.”
When they both had enjoyed their first sips of the com likker Victor Frankenstein lapsed into a friendly mood.
“Call me Vic, Dan. I want us to be friends. I'm going to tell you a story that few have heard before, a story that is astounding but true. True—mark that word—not a hodgepodge of distortions and half-truths and outright ignorance like that vile book produced by Mary Godwin. Oh how my father ever regretted meeting that woman and, in a moment of weakness, confiding in her the secret of some of his original lines of research…”
“Just a minute,” Dan broke in. “You mentioned die truth, but I can’t swallow this guff. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly wrote Frankenstein; or, The Modem Prometheus in 1818. Which would make you and your father so old…”
“Please, Dan—no interruptions. I mentioned my father’s researches, in the plural you will note, all of them devoted to the secrets of life. The Monster, as it has come to be called, was just one of his works. Longevity was what he was interested in, and he did live to a very, very old age, as will I. I will not stretch your credulity any further at this moment by mentioning the year of my birth, but will press on. That Mary Godwin. She and the poet were living together at this period, they had not married as yet, and this permitted my father to hope that Mary might one day find him not unattractive, since he was quite taken by her. Well, you can easily imagine the end. She made notes of everything he told her—then discarded him and used the notes to construct her despicable book. Her errors are legion, listen…” He leaned across the booth and once again clapped Dan on the shoulder in a hearty way. It was an intimate gesture that the reporter didn’t particularly enjoy, but he didn’t complain. Not as long as the other kept talking.
“Firstly she made papa a Swiss; he used to tear his hair out at the thought, since ours is a good old Bavarian family with a noble and ancient lineage. Then she had him attending the University of Ingolstadt in Ingolstadt—when every schoolboy knows that it was moved to Landshut in 1800. And father’s personality, what crimes she committed there! In this libellous volume he is depicted as a weeping and ineffectual man, when in reality he was a tower of strength and determination. And if this isn’t enough, she completely misunderstood the meaning of his experiments. Her jim-crack collection of cast-off parts put together to make an artificial man is ludicrous. She was so carried away by the legends of Talos and the Golem that she misinterpreted my father’s work and cast it into that ancient mold. Father did not construct an artificial man, he reactivated a dead man! That is the measure of his genius! He travelled for years in the darkest reaches of the African jungle, learning the lore of the creation of the zombie. He regularized the knowledge and improved upon it until he had surpassed all of his aboriginal teachers. Raise the dead, that is what he could do. That was his secret—;aird how can it be kept a secret in the future, Mr. Dan Bream?”
With these last words Victor Frankenstein’s eyes opened wide and an unveiled light seemed to glow in their depths. Dan pulled back instinctively, then relaxed. He was in no danger here in this brightly lit room with men on all sides of them.
“Afraid, Dan? Don’t be.” Victor smiled and reached out and patted Dan on the shoulder once again.
“What was that?” Dan asked, startled at the tiny brief pain in his shoulder.
“Nothing—nothing but this,” Frankenstein smiled again, but the smile had changed subtly and no longer contained any humor. He opened his hand to reveal a small hypodermic needle, its plunger pushed down and its barrel empty.
“Remain seated,” he said quietly when Dan started to rise, and Dan’s muscles relaxed and he sat back down, horrified.
“What have you done to me?”
“Very little—the injection is harmless. A simple little hypnotic drug, the effect of which wears off in a few hours. But until then you will not have much will of your own. So you will sit and hear me out Drink some beer though, we don’t want you to be thirsty.”
Horrified, Dan was a helpless onlooker, as, of its own volition, his hand raised and poured a measure of beer down his throat.
“Now concentrate. Dan, think of the significance of my statement. The so-called Frankenstein monster is no stitched up collection of scraps, but a good honest zombie. A dead man who can walk but not talk, obey but not think. Animate—but still dead. Poor old Charley is one, the creature whom you watched going through his act on the platform. But Charley is just about worn out. Since he is dead he cannot replace the body cells that are destroyed during the normal wear and tear of the day. Why the fellow is like an animated pincushion from the act, holes everywhere. His feet—terrible, not a toe left, keep breaking off when he walks too fast. I think it’s time to retire Charley. He has had a long life, and a long death. Stand up, Dan.”
In spite of his mind saying No! No! Dan rose slowly to his feet.
“Aren’t you interested in what Charley used to do before he became a sideshow monster? You should be, Dan. Old Charley was a reporter—just like you. And he ran across what he thought was a good story. Like you, he didn’t realize the importance of what he had discovered and talked to me about it. You reporters are a very inquisitive bunch. I must show you my scrapbook, it’s simply filled with Press cards. Before you die of course. You wouldn’t be able to appreciate it afterwards. Now come along.”
Dan walked after him, into the hot night, screaming inside in a haze of terror, yet walking quietly and silently down the street.
FEVER DREAM
By Ray Bradbury
They put him between fresh, clean, laundered sheets and there was always a newly squeezed glass of thick orange juice on the table under the dim pink lamp. All Charles had to do was call and Mom or Dad would stick their heads into his room to see how sick he was. The acoustics in the room were fine; you could hear the toilet gargling its porcelain throat of mornings, you could hear rain tap the roof or sly mice run in the secret walls. If you were very alert, sickness wasn’t too bad.
He was fifteen, Charles was. It was mid-September, with the land beginning to bum with autumn. He lay in the bed for three days before the terror overtook him.
His hand began to change. His right hand. He looked at it and it was hot and sweating there on the counterpane, alone. It fluttered, it moved a bit. Then it lay there, changing color.
That afternoon the doctor came again and tapped his thin chest like a drum. “How are you?” asked the doctor, smiling. “I know, don’t tell me: ‘My cold is fine, Doctor; but I feel lousy!’ Ha!” He laughed at his own oft-repeated joke.
Charles lay there and for him that terrible and ancient jest was becoming a reality. The joke fixed itself in his mind. His mind touched and drew away from it in a pale terror. The doctor did not know how cruel he was with his jokes! “Doctor,” whispered Charles, lying flat and colorless. “My hand, it doesn’t belong to me any more. This morning it changed into something else. I want you to change it back, Doctor, Doctor!”
The doctor showed his teeth and patted his hand. “It looks fine to me, son. You just had a little fever-dream.”
“But, it changed, Doctor, oh, Doctor,” cried Charles, pitifully holding up his pale wild hand. “It did."
The doctor winked. “I’ll give you a pink pill for that” He popped a tablet onto Charles’ tongue. “Swallow.”
“Will it make my hand change back and become me, again!”
“Yes, yes.”
The house was silent when the doctor drove off down the road in his carriage under the quiet, blue September sky. A clock ticked far below in the kitchen world. Charles lay looking at his hand.
It did not change back. It was still—something else.
The wind blew outside. Leaves fell against the cool window.
At four o’clock his other hand changed. It seemed almost to become a fever, a chemical, a virus. It pulsed and shifted, cell by cell. It beat like a warm heart. The fingernails turned blue and then red. It took about an hour for it to change and when it was finished it looked just like any ordinary hand. But it was not ordinary. It no longer was him any more. He lay in a fascinated horror and then fell into an exhausted sleep.
Mother brought the soup up at six. He wouldn’t touch it.“T haven’t any hands,” he said, eyes shut.
“Your hands are perfectly good,” said Mother.
“No,” he wailed. “My hands are gone. I feel like I 58 have stumps. Oh, Mama, Mama, hold me, hold me, I’m scared!”
She had to feed him herself.
“Mama,” he said. “Get the doctor, please again. I’m so sick.”
“The doctor’ll be here tonight at eight,” she said, and went out.
At seven, with night dark and close around the house, Charles was sitting up in bed when he felt the thing happening to first one leg and then the other. “Mama! Come quick!” he screamed.
But when Mama came the thing was no longer happening.
When she went downstairs, he simply lay without fighting as his legs beat and beat, grew warm, red hot, and the room filled with the warmth of his feverish change. The glow crept up from his toes to his ankles and then to his knees.
“May I come in?” The doctor smiled in the doorway.
“Doctor!” cried Charles. “Hurry, take off my blankets!”
The doctor lifted the blankets tolerantly. “There you are. Whole and healthy. Sweating, though. A little fever. I told you not to move around, bad boy.” He pinched the moist pink cheek. “Did the pills help? Did your hand change back?”
“No, no, now it’s my other hand and my legs!”
“Well, well, I’ll have to give you three more pills, one for each limb, eh, my little peach?” laughed the doctor.
“Will they help me? Please, please. What’ve I got?”
“A mild case of scarlet fever, complicated by a slight cold.”
“Is it a germ that lives and has more little germs in me?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure it’s scarlet fever? You haven’t taken any tests!”
“I guess I know a certain fever when I see one,” said the doctor, checking the boy’s pulse with cool authority.
Charles lay there, not speaking until the doctor was crisply packing his black kit. Then, in the silent room, the boy’s voice made a small, weak pattern, his eyes alight with remembrance. “I read a book once. About petrified trees, wood turning to stone. About how trees fell and rotted and minerals got in and built up and they look just like trees, but they’re not, they’re stone.” He stopped. In the quiet warm room his breathing sounded.
“Well?” asked the doctor.
“I’ve been thinking,” said Charles, after a time. “Do germs ever get big. I mean, in biology class they told us about one-celled animals, amoebas and things, and how, millions of years ago they got together until there was a bunch and they made the first body. And more and more cells got together and got bigger and then finally maybe there was a fish and finally here we are, and all we are is a bunch of cells that decided to get together to help each other out. Isn’t that right?” Charles wet his feverish lips.
“What’s all this about?” the doctor bent over him.
"I've got to tell you this, Doctor, oh, I’ve got to,” he cried. “What would happen, oh just pretend, please pretend, that, just like in the old days, a lot of microbes got together and wanted to make a bunch, and reproduced and made more—"
His white hands were on his chest now, crawling toward his throat.
“And they decided to take over a person!” cried Charles: '
“Take over a person?”
“Yes, become a person. Me, my hands, my feet! What if a disease somehow knew how to kill a person and yet live after him?
He screamed.
The hands were on his neck.
The doctor moved forward, shouting.
At nine o’clock the doctor was escorted out to his carriage by the mother and father who handed him up his bag. They conversed in the cool night wind for a few minutes. “Just be sure his hands are kept strapped to his legs,” said the doctor. “I don’t want him hurting himself.”
“Will he be all right, Doctor?” The mother held to his arm a moment.
He patted her shoulder. “Haven’t I been your family physician for thirty years? It’s the fever, he imagines things.”
“But those bruises on his throat, he almost choked himself.”
“Just you keep him strapped, he’ll be all right in the morning.”
The horse and carriage moved off down the dark September road.
At three in the morning, Charles was still awake in his small black room. The bed was damp under his head and his back. He was very warm. Now he no longer had any arms or legs, and his body was beginning to change. He did not move on the bed but looked at the vast blank ceiling spaces with insane concentration. For awhile he had screamed and thrashed but now he was weak and hoarse from it, and his mother had gotten up a number of times to soothe his brow with a wet towel. Now he was silent, his hands strapped to his legs.
He felt the walls of his body change, the organs shift, the lungs catch fire like burning bellows of pure alcohol. The room was lighted up as with the flickerings of a hearthplace.
Now he had no body. It was all gone. It was under 61 him but it was filled with a vast pulse of some burning, lethargic drug. It was as if a guillotine had neatly lopped off his head and his head lay shining on a midnight pillow While the body, below, still alive, belonged to somebody else. The disease had eaten his body and from the eating had reproduced itself in feverish duplicate. There were the little hand-hairs and the fingernails and the scars and the toenails and the tiny mole on his right hip, all done again in perfect fashion.
I am dead, he thought. I’ve been killed, and yet I live. My body is dead, it is all disease and nobody will know. I will walk around and it will not be me, it will be something else. I will be something all bad, all evil, so big and so evil it’s hard to understand or think about. Something that will buy shoes and drink water and get married some day maybe and do more evil in the world than has ever been done.
Now the warmth was stealing up his neck, into his cheeks, like a hot wine. His lips burned, his eyelids, like leafs, caught fire. His nostrils breathed out blue flame, faintly, faintly.
This will be all, he thought. It’ll take my head and my brain and fix each eye and every tooth and all the marks in my brain, and every hair and every wrinkle in my ears, and there’ll be nothing left of me.
He felt his brain fill with a boiling mercury. He felt his left eye clench in upon itself and, like a snail, withdraw, shift. He was blind in his left eye. It no longer belonged to him. It was enemy territory. His tongue was gone, cut out. His left cheek was numbed, lost. His left ear stopped hearing. It belonged to someone else now. This thing that was being bom, this mineral thing replacing the wooden log, this disease replacing healthy animal cell.
He tried to scream and he was able to scream loud and high and sharply in the room, just as his brain flooded down, his right eye and right ear were cut out, he was blind and deaf, all fire, all terror, all panic, all death.
