Frankenstein’s
World
By John M.
Burt
Wednesday:
Chapter Seven
On
Wednesday, Locke found telegrams from several more vitalogists in his
mailbox. Some offered to meet him in a
week or more, in spite of his emphasizing the need for timely interviews in the
newspaper business. A couple politely
declined (which surprised him, since this was more than propriety
required). One sent an angry rejection
which demanded that he never again be contacted by Locke or any other newsman
(as though Locke could have granted such a thing). Still, he received invitations to meet with Drs.
Usher, Brandreth and Foster that very day.
Doctor
Andrea Foster offered to meet Locke briefly that morning, before her first
client of the day arrived at nine, so he dressed and shaved quickly and made
his way to her Hester Street office by ten minutes after eight.
He’d
have been there some minutes earlier, except that he hadn’t remembered that the
intersection of Hester Street and Mulberry Street was at the pinnacle of Bayard
Mount. Not much of a hill, but it was
the highest point on Manhattan Island, and it had taken him awhile to climb the
sharply rising Hester Street. There had
been talk, Locke recalled, of leveling the hill and using the rubble to fill in
the severely polluted Collect Pond.
Instead, the pond had been renovated and become the centerpiece of a
park whose proximity had made the Hester Street neighborhood a fashionable one.
As
the corner of Hester and Mulberry came into sight, Locke saw a crossing sweeper
shoveling dung into a wheeled cart. He
passed crossing sweepers every day, but this time he actually paid the creature
some attention: a small hoover in a white coat and square white cap, his narrow
black moustache providing his gray face with an unusual bit of character. He wondered whether the hoover had to shave,
or if he simply only grew hair in the middle part of his upper lip. Watching the hoover calmly going about his
task, Locke remembered how filthy the streets of his childhood had been.
Locke
was met at the door by a very humanlike red-haired hoover in a maid’s
uniform. She looked more suited to the
parlor of a well-to-do family than to a business. But after the hoover had shown him to a seat
in Dr. Foster’s waiting room and offered him a cup of tea, it occurred to him
that the maid was more than a doorkeeper.
She served as a model of what customers could expect if they came to
Foster for servants. Every family wanted their hoovers to be as handsome, which
was to say as humanlike, as was on offer.
Locke
waited (without tea), and pondered what it was that made the hoover so
humanlike. Her body and face were very
skillfully crafted, but there was something more to it, some additional
characteristic that she had. He still
hadn’t managed to put his finger on it when the maid returned to invite him
into Dr. Foster’s receiving office.
When
Locke finally saw Dr. Foster, he was unable not to stare. The resemblance between Foster and her maid
was quite acute. Clearly she had made
this hoover in her own image, down to details like the exact shape of her nose
and the arc of her hairline.
Foster
smiled, knowing perfectly well what had caused Locke to fall silent.
“What
do you think of my Helen?”
Locke
swallowed and said, “She’s a very impressive accomplishment on your part.”
“Thank
you. As you doubtless know, I specialize
in making hoovers for household service, and I happen to think I produce a
better line of servants than anyone else in New York.”
“Quite
possibly in the country, Doctor. Your,
er, Helen is the most humanlike hoover I’ve ever seen.”
“Thank
you. I do strive to make hoovers who are
better suited to domestic service than any others.”
At
this point, Locke knew he ought to get to the questions he really needed to
ask, about Bullivant’s death, but he couldn’t restrain himself.
“Er,
I must ask you, Doctor, besides your own surgical skills, what is it that makes
your Helen seem so humanlike?”
She
smiled.
“Well,
it happens that my patent has just been approved, so I can let you be the first
lay person to know about it.
“Do
you know, Mr. Locke, why hoovers almost always have that strange pallor to
their skin?”
“Not
really, no. I presume it’s due to the
same effect that so often causes their hair and eyes to change color.”
“A
good guess, and partly right, but the main problem is their blood.”
She
went to a cabinet and took out a jar of red liquid that looked very much like
blood. But that wasn’t right, hoover
“blood” was the elixir vitae,
which was a pale straw color. This was a
vivid, rich blood red.
“The
pigment of the skin provides part of human coloring, and the red color of the
blood cells provides the rest. Aside
from those two, the human body could easily be as transparent as a jellyfish.
“This
is the type of elixir I infuse
my hoovers with, and that is the secret of getting their coloring to come out
so humanlike.”
“Most
excellent, Doctor. But how do you get elixir to turn red?”
“I simply added a bit of ordinary cochineal
dye to the elixir. It does no harm to the hoover, and lasts for
months before the hoover needs an injection of a little more.”
“If it’s so simple, I wonder why no-one ever
tried it before.”
She shrugged.
“The obvious often escapes people – hadn’t
you noticed?”
Having put Dr. Foster at her ease with
flattery, Locke managed to get good answers out of her during the rest of the
interview. Unfortunately, although she’d
apprenticed under Bullivant, she hadn’t had much contact with him in recent
years, and so couldn’t add much to what he already knew. She did say that they had last spoken about
eight months ago, and he had mentioned that he had joined a new lodge called
the Illuminati.
Locke left just before Dr. Foster’s first
client was due to arrive. Dr. Brandreth
had offered to meet him at 10:45, and Locke decided he could deviate from his
routine by eating before eleven, just this once. On his way to Brandreth’s facility on
Attorney Avenue, Locke stopped at a cafe on Ludlow and had a “lombrick” -- a
segment of earthworm as thick as a half-dollar and as long as a man’s hand, on
a bun.
No comments:
Post a Comment