The Monster's Wife(20)

He smiled that boyish smile. It ground against his words like gnashing teeth. “He has been brought back with galvanism.”

“Brought back?”

His lips twitched excitedly. “It is a new discovery and has been much debated across Europe. It involves the harnessing of natural forces - the very lightning that splits the sky in a sea storm, Olga - for the purposes of reanimation.” As he spoke, his fingers absently flicked the pages of the book.

“I do not follow, Sir,” she said dully, unused to feeling stupider than someone. “Why is he throwing the coin? Is it his payment to the doctor?”

Frankenstein laughed. “Pay he should!” he cried, “damned dead wretch! Gold and diamonds for the privilege of being brought back from the grave!” He banged his fist in the book. “And if not diamonds, blood.” The last word was sharp and his eyes grew cold, the laughter gone from them. He tossed the book onto the floor as if he despised it.

Oona’s head spun dizzily between the conviction that he was a madman and the sensation of falling fast into some deep hole that had opened up underneath everything she was certain of, like the cave roofs when they collapsed and the cliff tops formed blue windows onto the sea’s destruction.





16


Oona turned away from the grotesque scene in the book and looked around the room for something real and reassuring. Her eyes lighted on an oak smoking cabinet that stood next to the writing. Behind its glass panels lay neither cigars nor tobacco, but a large jar full of yellowish water and a grey mass of worm-like flesh.

“A cow’s brain,” Oona murmured under her breath. There was nothing reassuring in that, though it was at least something she recognized.

The doctor seized her wrist, the demonic spark returning to his eyes. “Yes, yes. This is why you can help me, why I have need of you here, for it appears you know a little. Writing. Anatomy. Dissection. Not much but a little. Very soon you will discover more.” He pulled her along, his grip surprisingly strong. Too stunned to struggle, she followed him, past the box, getting no more than a glimpse of the sheet-draped table that had been her reason for coming.

He drew her towards a billiard table, abruptly dropping her wrist to reach for what lay in the middle. Whatever it was looked as if it had once been an oil lamp or perhaps a globe, now remolded so that it connected with a large copper wheel supported by a brass stand. He ran his fingers along the spokes connecting the stand to the wheel, checking the thin metal armpits that joined them to blunt-toothed cogs.

“The grandfather clock has been a great patron of mine,” he smiled wryly. “The old technology ceding to the new. Can you uncover that please?”

She looked to where he was pointing - the far side of the table, covered by a sheet. If some poor, dead girl lay beneath it, she did not know whether she would be able to keep her composure. Bracing herself, she walked around the table and pulled away the sheet to reveal two glass jugs without handles that were bulbous at the bottom. A shaky breath left her lips and somewhere inside her a wire loosened. Not yet. It had not happened yet.

She still had time to turn back.

“Take a closer look, if you like.” He gave her a self-assured smile that reminded her of small boys she’d seen on the beach once, competing to see who could pish furthest.

Looking more closely, she saw that one jug was turned upside down atop the other and liquid ran into it from a long tube that fed into the top. Blue-green fluid dripped down into the murky water of the bottom jug. Although the sides of the glass were stained green with the growth of pond slime, a large, spotted bullfrog was visible within, his gold eyes protruding above the water’s rim, his broad lips sometimes gaping as he swam to reveal the soft pink skin inside him.

“Hmn. Survived the plague,” she murmured.

He looked at her curiously. “What is that you say?”

She stood up straight, inwardly reproaching herself for being such a shoddy spy. “Nothing, Sir.”

“Well no matter,” he snapped, his fingers twisting at the wires that joined the copper wheel contraption to a length of wire that ran across the ceiling.

Looking up, she saw that it was held to the plaster by metal loops nailed at even intervals. Another length of wire ran down to grasp the tube feeding into the glass aquarium where the frog swam guilelessly round, as if looking for a way out. In between the frog’s prison and the wheel was a square of board with something nailed to it. Oona peered closer and saw that it was a long-legged frog, just like the one in the glass house, except this one was held onto the wooden board with lengths of twisted wire looped around its middle. A meat fly that had been buzzing around in the hazy light landed on the frog’s head. It walked a staccato circle, stopped, rubbed its front legs one over the other like an old woman chafing her hands. It jabbed its forked tongue once, twice into the milky jelly of the frog’s eye.

The doctor waved an impatient hand at the fly. “You see a resemblance?”

With an angry buzz, the fly flew off.

She thought of the severed hand, the hank of dark hair hanging off the pale body, and shuddered. “Resemblance to what, Sir?”

“The picture in the book, of course.” His fingers worked feverishly at the wires wrapped round the frog, twisting them together with those that hung from the ceiling.

With a sick lurch, she did see. The frog on the board was the dead man with the nightmare in his eyes. Frankenstein thumped the board down in the centre of the table and gestured to a shapeless object next to Oona, something her height and draped in a sheet.