Frankenstein’s World
By John M. Burt
Thursday: Chapter Nine
[Synopsis: In
a world where Victor Frankenstein was a real person and where he founded the
field of vitalogy in 1776, in 1837 reporter Richard Adams Locke is
investigating the murder of a leading vitalogist. Was he killed by a friend? A rival? A member of some kind of secret
vitalogy-related conspiracy? Locke
interviews vitalogists, police detectives and other people in hope of finding
out. He has heard hints of something
called the Illuminati, and something else (or the same thing) called Mellonta Tauta (Greek for “We
speak now of future things”).]
On the
morning of June 14th, Locke woke with a terrible headache well
before Nereus knocked. He took his
spoonful of Blue Mass and opened a twist of paper he kept in the same
drawer. He inhaled the green powder inside
and waited for the ground moss to relieve his pain.
When Nereus
brought the pitcher of hot water, Locke put it on the floor and cautiously touched
his bare feet to it. He held his feet to
the almost-scalding water and over the next minute or so gradually immersed them. It also seemed to help, but he knew what he
really needed: coffee.
When he
lifted his feet out, he was alarmed by how red they were. They hurt almost as much as his head. Standing up, they were tender but didn’t seem
to have actually been burned.
The water was
still hot enough and clean enough for washing, in spite of some bits of lint
and a faint smell of cheese.
Washed and
dressed, Locke pulled his wideawake lower to shield his eyes and set out on the
street in search of coffee.
The place he
usually went to, on the same block as the Decatur, he found vacant, evidently
another victim of the Panic. Two
head-throbbing blocks further, he found a place where a sign hanging from a
ring in the mouth of a cast-zinc horse indicated that coffee was available, and
he went in.
A hoover,
immense but almost skeletal, limped from table to table. Rather than force the wretch to walk any
further, Locke sat at the counter.
When the
hoover made his way to the counter, he bowed gravely to Locke and said, “How
may I serve you, Master?” Both the bow
and the “Master” indicated the hoover was very old, and had been trained in
manners in the Georgian style.
“Er, coffee,
black, as strong as it comes.”
“A double, Master?”
“Um, yes,
fine.”
Locke watched
the hoover drain steaming water from one of two huge brass urns, then add pour
a tiny quantity of hot black liquid from a tiny pot that sat on top of the urn.
“Two parts of
buna and two of water,
Master,” the hoover said with a ghastly forced smile. “Just what a hangover needs.”
Locke ignored
this impertinence. He didn’t have the
energy to high-hat the creature.
Sipping his
coffee, Locke slowly turned to look around the café. Some were clearly like him, on their way to
work. Others looked as though they had
just left work, bolstering themselves with coffee on their way home. A few looked as though they had no jobs to go
to, and possibly no homes. Some people
spent the entire day in a café, nursing a cup or two while they read
newspapers, or wrote in notebooks.
He saw a copy of the New York Observer lying in an empty booth and opened it. He looked for news that didn’t have to do
with reanimated body parts, lethal conspiracies and threats to the nation. He did not succeed. Business, politics, crime -- everything
seemed to be touched by the products of vitalogy.
# A
British organization called the Temple of Hymen was opening a branch in
Manhattan, on Bleecker Street. They
claimed -- hinted might be a better word -- that they could cure impotence,
“marital incompatibility” and barrenness by the rental of one of their “Celestial
Beds”.
# A clerk
working at John Anderson’s tobacco
shop at Broadway and Pine had been found dead in the Hudson River. Cuts on her body and missing parts suggested
she had been the victim of a “burking” -- killed, in other words, for salable
organs.
# The State of Virginia’s Secretary of Science
had released a report saying that Carolina parakeets had caused forty million
dollars’ worth of damage to crops and property in the preceding years. The birds had been the messenger system of
choice in the 1820s, but they had been superseded by ravens. Message parakeets which had escaped, or been
released by thoughtless owners, had gone feral, interbred with wild stocks, and
become a pest far beyond what the original stock had been.
# P.T. Barnum had a new attraction at his Dime
Museum at Broadway and Ann Street: an extremely aged-looking Negress whom he
claimed was Joice Heth, age 136, who had been George Washington’s wet nurse.
# John C.
Calhoun, former Vice President and currently a Senator, had spoken on the
Senate floor on the status of the hoovers.
His own feelings were quite strong: he had grown up among the backward
and impoverished humans of South Carolina’s back country, who had worked the
land indifferently. He had seen the
bustling plantations and other commercial enterprises which had displaced them,
using hoover labor. In his latest speech, Calhoun staked an even
bolder position than before. He refused
to accept that the use of hoovers was in any sense a “necessary evil”,
declaring it “a good — a positive good.”
Calhoun
declared that “there never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in
which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor
of the other.” He compared the making
and employment of hoovers with “the various devices by which the wealth of all
civilized communities has been so unequally divided, with so small a share
allotted to those by whose labor it was produced, and so large a share given to
the non-producing classes. The devices are almost innumerable, from the brute
force and gross superstition of ancient times, to the subtle and artful fiscal
contrivances of the modern day. I might well challenge a comparison between
them and the more direct, simple, and honest mode by which the labor of the
resurrected is, among us, commanded by the living....”
He defended hoover slavery, and complained of the
need to discuss it at all: “The subject is beyond the jurisdiction of
Congress - they have no right to touch it in any shape or form.” He predicted
terrible consequences if it were asserted “that this Government had a right, in
the last resort, to determine the extent of its own powers, and enforce its
decision at the point of the bayonet.”
Determinedly,
Locke turned to the “letters to the Editor” section. He often found such letters amusing.
Two letters
denounced Barnum’s Joice Heth as a fraud, one claiming that she was a hoover
and another that she was an automaton made from gutta percha and
whalebone. Locke suspected both letters
had been written by Barnum himself.
Another
letter seemed to echo Locke’s own thoughts: “Hoover slavery is like the
Egyptian plague of frogs: one sits down to supper, and frogs leap onto one’s
plate. Music and theater are inaudible
due to the frog chorus. The parlor
grants no rest, the bed no sleep, even church grants no solace, for everywhere
there are frogs, frogs, frogs....”
Locke noticed
his coffee had gone cold. Although it
tasted horrible, he tossed the remainder of the cup down and hurried away to
Wall Street, where he was expected at the House of Usher.
Going further
south in Manhattan than he’d been in weeks, Locke found a bright,
modern-looking building at the corner of Broadway and Wall Street. A human receptionist in a smart checkered
suit ordered a hoover to escort him up to Miss Usher’s office.
Madeline
Usher was fairly new to New York, having built hoovers along with her late
brother at what had originally been the family home, in a remote location in
western Pennsylvania. The story of the
house’s destruction in a flood, with the complete loss of all equipment and
materials, and the death of Roderick Usher himself, had been a sensation two
years past. When Madeline Usher on her
own had moved to New York and rebuilt her business, the fame of the House of
Usher had grown enormously.
The hoover
led Locke up a flight of stairs and then, not to an office or a laboratorium,
but to a parlor that could have been in any upper middle class home. Sunlight streamed in through a row of
windows, beneath which was a couch and a couple of armchairs in which three
well-dressed ladies were having tea. The
only anomaly was that each of them had a large and rather ugly male hoover
standing by her, where normally a lady would be attended by a dainty female.
“Excuse me, Doctor,”
Locke’s escort said softly, “Mister Locke is here for his appointment.”
A thin woman
in a white dress looked up from her cup.
A narrow black ribbon and her black hair emphasized her very pale skin.
“I’m sorry,
Mister Locke, but I really don’t have time for a proper interview. I’ve had the unexpected pleasure of a visit
today from two colleagues from overseas.
The three of us have corresponded for years, but this is the first
chance we’ve had to meet face to face.”
Doctor Usher
gestured to a red-haired woman in black velvet.
“Miss Jane Greystone.” Her hand moved to point at the third woman,
brown-haired in a green dress. “Dottora
Beatrice Rappaccini.”
Locke bowed
deeply to each of them in turn, saying softly, “Doctor Usher. Dottora Rappaccini. And, er, Miss Greystone, or should I say
Doctor?”
The woman
shook her head, smiling sadly.
“I’m afraid
I’ve never been granted that degree. I
have inherited the title of Baronette, so you could call me ‘Lady Jane’ if you
insist, but I would prefer ‘Miss Greystone’.”
“Very well,
then, Miss Greystone. Please pardon me.”
She didn’t
wave the apology away, merely nodded.
“Narbon,”
Madeline Usher said to the hoover standing behind her, “bring Mister Locke a
chair.
“Mister
Locke, I can give you a few minutes, if you don’t mind interrogating me in this
setting. Do sit down.”
“I very much appreciate
your seeing me, Dr. Usher.”
Locke seated
himself. The hoover who had escorted him
to the parlor held out a cup of tea on a saucer.
“Well, Dr.
Usher, if your guests have just arrived, I presume they did not know Dr. Bullivant
at all...?”
“No,” Dottora
Rappaccini said. Locke noticed that the
hands which held her cup and saucer were covered with satin gloves which
reached past her elbows. He wondered if
this were the current Continental fashion.
“Nor I,” Miss
Greystone said.
“Not so much
because they do not live on Manhattan, Mr. Locke, as that like me, they deal in
industrial hoovers, rather than in domestic servants as Bullivant did.”
Locke
blinked.
“Er,
really? I’ll admit, I had assumed that
you ladies were in the same line as Dr. Foster.”
Soft,
ladylike laughter came at Locke from around the table.
“No,” Dr.
Usher said, smiling, “I’m afraid not.
Surely you’ve noticed that even our own attendants are not the usual
pretty things seen in a parlor like this.”
She pointed
at her own attendant, who had skin that was warty, almost scaly, and had
clawlike hands.
“Topo is made
for mining -- digging cinnabar, to be precise -- his skin is capable of
enduring both the bumps and scrapes of mining, and the damaging effects
cinnabar has on the skin.”
The Italian
lady pointed to her own servant, who was quite slender, and had amazingly-long
fingers. Locke had to look twice to
confirm that the creature did indeed have seven fingers on each hand.
“Cushing is made
for manufacturing watches and other small machinery.
“This is
Ouran. He’s a pongo, made from a
combination of human, orang-outang and chimpanzee organs.”
Locke was
interested by how she put the emphasis on the second syllable of “chim-PAN-zee”
rather than the last, which was how he’d heard it pronounced before.
“That’s
illegal in this country.”
Lady
Greystone nodded, smiling.
“Yes, but I have
a dispensation from your Department of Commerce for Ouran so that he’s counted
as a ‘specimen’ rather than a working hoover.
“In any
event, it is to be hoped that the law will be changed soon. It never made much sense. When Frankenstein built his Number One, ‘The
sepulcher and the slaughterhouse provided my material’.”
“I wonder
whether there will be a market for pongos in the U.S., though. The ape parts would all have to be imported,
and the duties on them would make it hard to compete with human parts.”
She shrugged.
“I don’t
know. There are persistent rumors of
some sort of hairy bipeds in the west.”
“Um, yes, in the
Oregon Country, I think.”
Rappaccini
inserted, “There is some speculation that the Limehouse Consumption originated
with a disease of African green monkeys that jumped to humans by way of pongos
built from humans and chimpanzees. If
that is the case, it would certainly dampen interest in building American
pongos.”
Lady
Greystone glared at her.
Leaving the
House of Usher, Locke found he had more than an hour until his appointment at
the laboratorium of Drs. Howard, Fine
& Howard.
“Mister Locke.”
Locke turned
to see that same odd hoover which had spoken with him outside the post office,
holding a small suitcase.
“I understand
you wish to speak with someone about future things.”
Interlude: Advertisements in the Observer
Gynebutyron
One of the great mysteries of
vitalogy was why it should be that self-pollution would have its well-known
deleterious effects on a man’s body, when no such degradation takes place
conjugally, even when relations are quite frequent.
The answer is as simple as it is
startling: during intercourse, as the woman absorbs the man’s essence, he
absorbs hers as well. The skin of a
man’s genitalia is unlike the skin anywhere else, and capable of easily
absorbing life-supporting substances such as are contained in natural female
secretions.
Until now, a bachelor’s choices
were limited to self-pollution (and a rapid decline in his health), continence
(and a slow one), and the favors of women of easy virtue (with the risk -- nay,
certainty -- of venereal infection).
Now, however, thanks to Doctor Benway’s Gynebutyron, a man can safely keep
his manly vigor throughout his bachelorhood.
By color, texture and odor,
Gynebutyron is indistinguishable from the natural female substance, and if
rubbed into the skin in the minutes prior to ejaculation, will be absorbed just
as readily and have the same ataraxic effect.
Gynebutyron -- just 25c for a
half-ounce jar
x----------------------------------------------------------x
Don’t Be the Hunter’s
Prey!
The hunter massacres
animals in droves, so he may pick out the choicest cuts for his own family and
neighbors, and ship the rest off to the city for market.
Don’t let a hunter
feed your children on his table scraps!
Buy the healthiest and
freshest meat from the Manhattan Central Farm.
We apply the most modern and up-to-date techniques of modern vitalogy to
ensure that meats of the highest quality are abundantly available at the lowest
prices.
Beef
* Pork * Chicken * Rabbit * Goat * Lombrick * Venison
And
Introducing Cuy Brava, the Taste of South
America!
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the June
Issue of
TALES OF
MYSTERY AND IMAGINATION
“The Man of Steel” by Herbert S. Phibes
“Nell, the
Little Hoover”, the last story of the late Charles Dickens
And
beginning this month, a new serial by Nathaniel Hawthorne: “The Scarlet
Numeral”
Seward’s
chimerical auction house
Announces the arrival of numerous fine draft
and riding chimerae
Mokes #
stalwarts # guays # ziegenbocks
All
fresh from the finest laboratoria
Auction on
Friday
Coming
Monday: industrial hoovers
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