His horrible grin widened with pride as he lifted a hand to indicate the unfinished body on the slab.
“You came all this way just to make a woman for yourself?” I muttered. With Ernst’s house burned to the ground, Raphael needed the only other laboratory in existence that would suit his purpose: Victor Frankenstein’s.
He shook his head. “You should know by now that no other woman will do for me, Nana. And I mean to have you—one way or another.”
He smiled at the headless cadaver on the slab. I put my hands to my throat, trembling. Now I understood why the body was not complete. Raphael wanted to top his creation with my head, to fashion his own “Nana” that he could teach and tame and possess, just as I had wanted to possess him. It hardly mattered whether he could succeed in revivifying Katarina von Kemp’s borrowed visage a second time; I would be dead regardless.
“Pathetic creature,” Ernst said. “If you have a soul, may God have mercy on it.”
With the stance of a seasoned fencer, he circled toward Raphael, lunging and feinting with the sword, inviting his rival to enter the swath of his blade.
Raphael advanced on him, beckoning. “Yesss . . . come, little stick-man. Let me break you.”
The gap between them closed. Ernst swished the blade, but Raphael dodged, remaining just outside the sword’s radius, his arms raised as if they, too, were weapons. The rivals danced around each other in a seeming standoff, then Ernst thrust the sword in a lethal jab toward Raphael’s heart.
Raphael had no fear of pain. He grasped the blade with both hands before the point touched his chest and did not even flinch when the keen edge razored his palms. The gashes leaked blood as Raphael twisted the sword out of Ernst’s grasp and broke it in two with a snap of ringing steel. He cast aside the pieces and slouched toward Ernst with an unhurried air, grinning at the easy kill to come. Ernst backed against the wall and pulled the other dueling pistol out from his belt. The flintlock’s hammer clacked impotently as Raphael seized Ernst by the throat.
Unable to find a weapon of my own, I dove toward the slab with its headless maiden. I dragged the naked cadaver off the wooden plank and held it up in front of me as if modeling a wedding gown. “Is this what you want?” I sneered to Raphael.
Raphael froze, Ernst gagging and gasping in his grasp. One small squeeze of his mighty hands and Ernst’s neck would crumple like a paper lantern.
With my left arm around the body’s waist to support its weight, I ran my right hand over the cold, porcelain flesh, cupping my fingers under one turgid breast and massaging it seductively. Syrupy blood dribbled from the open neck to stain my chin.
Raphael licked his raw lips as he watched me. “You leave her alone,” he rasped.
I flicked my gaze toward Ernst. “Whatever you do to him, I do to her.”
Raphael growled, shaking with frustrated rage. Then he threw Ernst against the wall and stepped away.
“Good,” I said. “Then take your plaything.”
With all my unnatural strength, I hurled the slack-limbed corpse at Raphael. The nude body slapped into him like a sack of flour, loose arms flopping over his shoulders. Despite his massive size, the blow nearly knocked Raphael over. He grabbed the headless woman around the waist, and they did a macabre, teetering waltz as Raphael tried to regain his balance.
Before he could steady himself I charged, hands poised like the horns of a stampeding bull. I barreled into Raphael and his unfinished bride, and the three of us tumbled to the floor together in a hideous ménage à trois.
I pushed myself off him, but before I could get to my feet Raphael shoved aside the corpse and grabbed my head with both hands, as if he meant to wrench it off my neck right then.
Instead, he pulled my mouth to what remained of his burned and blistered lips for a loathsome, slavering kiss. My own lips touched the slimed ivory of bare teeth where the flesh had burned away. Even his tongue had stiffened and deformed with scar tissue. I slammed his chest with all my force, clawed the cooked meat of his face until it squished under my fingernails, but he did not loosen his grip.
Then there was a sound like ripping curtains. Raphael howled and let go of me. As I rolled away, panting for breath, I saw that Ernst had taken off his coat and wrapped it around the broken end of the sword blade, which he’d driven deep into Raphael’s abdomen.
Before Ernst could release the blade, Raphael snarled and caught hold of Ernst’s forearm. With a single turn of his enormous fist, Raphael snapped the bones as easily as dry branches. Ernst screamed as his right hand flapped from a sagging sleeve of skin and muscle, the pinkish splinter of the fractured ulna needling out through torn flesh.
I did the same to Raphael’s leg.
Gripping him just above the left ankle with one hand, I rammed the palm of my other hand against his shin until I heard it crack. Raphael shrieked, releasing Ernst so he could reach for me.
I yanked on the broken leg. Raphael wailed and kicked wildly as I dragged him back toward the slab and the chains that dangled beside it.
“Ernst!” I yelled, struggling to lift Raphael’s leg toward the closest of the iron manacles. “The key!” I jerked my head toward the metal ring that hung from the wooden peg on the wall behind me.
Tears of agony streaking his face, Ernst propped his useless right arm against his chest and ran to snatch the ring from the peg with his left hand. I had to hold on to Raphael’s ankle with both hands to keep him from wriggling free. He tried repeatedly to get upright, but each time he sat forward it nudged the sword blade further up into his chest cavity, inching it toward his heart.
Holding the key ring in his teeth, Ernst opened the cuff of the manacle with his left hand. He pulled the chain toward Raphael’s foot, but it didn’t quite reach.
My grip on Raphael’s ankle slipped, and he thrashed even harder to shake me off. Hugging his leg to my chest and leveraging all my weight against it, I gave a final tug. Ernst snapped the shackle shut around the ankle. He did his best to hold the manacle closed while I took the key from his mouth and screwed it in to secure the lock.
The chain rattled and stretched taut, jerking the ring from my hand before I could remove the key from the shackle. Raphael crabbed forward on his hands and his one free foot and groped for the key. Still unable to sit upright, he extended his fingers toward the clattering ring that swung from the lock but couldn’t reach his elevated foot.
Roaring in frustration, he pounced at me, scrabbling along on his three good limbs until he’d pulled the chain as far as it would go.
“YOU MADE ME FOR YOU!” he bellowed when I shrank from him. Thunder amplified his anger. “WE BELONG TO EACH OTHER!”
I wanted to comfort him somehow, yet I dared not get too close. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.
Standing well outside Raphael’s reach, Ernst shook his head sadly.
Enraged anew, Raphael looked from the crooked shin of his broken leg, fastened in its iron cuff, to the stub of sword that jutted from his stomach. With an awful yell, he took hold of the nub end of the blade and drew it out of his gut with excruciating slowness.
“Good God,” Ernst breathed when he saw what Raphael intended to do. “We must end it. Now!”
As sporadic bursts of light shone through the windows from the thunderbolts outside, he scanned the black corners of the laboratory. Failing to find what he sought, he sprinted out the door into the gloom of the tower’s stairwell.
“Ernst?” I peered after him, wondering where he could possibly have gone.
Raphael grunted and roared with triumph as the last of the broken sword slid free from his wound. I sickened when he took the bloodied blade in his fist and hacked at his shackled shin right where the bone had snapped.
Like a wolf that will chew off its own leg to escape from a trap, Raphael meant to free himself at any cost.
“Ernst!” I cried as I saw the blade gradually cleave the foot from the leg. I backed toward the laboratory’s exit, ready to fight or flee, glancing arou
nd for any weapon close at hand. “Ernst!”
Only a thin strip of sinew still strung the foot and leg together. Blood spouted from the open stump. Any ordinary man would have slumped in death long before. Madness alone seemed to sustain Raphael. He slashed the last bit of muscle, then used the swinging chain that held his severed foot to pull himself up onto his right leg. Hanging onto the chain with his left hand for support and bracing himself against the wooden operating slab, Raphael brandished the sword blade in his right hand and smiled.
“I . . . can . . . always get a new leg,” he gurgled, swaying drunkenly. “Maybe I’ll . . . take one from Herr Doktor. But I need you.”
He raised the blade as if to dart it at me like a dagger.
Before he could let it fly, though, a thunderclap as loud as the trump of Judgment rocked the tower. The force of it threw me back against the laboratory wall.
A searing white light flared in the room, engulfing Raphael in its aura. Jagged sparks arced from the hanging chains to the tip of the steel blade in Raphael’s grasp. He juddered spasmodically, his muscles clenched in a death-grip, his hands unable to let go of either the sword or the chain even as the metal broiled his skin.
A thunderbolt had struck the lightning rod atop the tower. The electricity that had once infused Raphael with life now drained it away.
Then everything went dark, and I thought the Almighty had struck me deaf and blind. I could not hear Raphael’s titan body thump to the floor, for my ears still thrummed with the crash of the thunderbolt and all I could see was the ghostly afterimage of Raphael writhing in white radiance, arms flung wide like a wingless angel longing to take flight.
Smell was the first sense that returned to me: the charred odor of crisped skin. The hum in my ears quieted, and I could discern the pop and hiss of steaming meat. Curling vapor rose from behind the operating table where Raphael had fallen.
As the glare of the intense light faded from my vision, I could make out his slumped bulk on the floor. Above him, the chains swayed like slowing pendulums. One still had bits of burned flesh clinging to its links. Raphael lay with his right arm outstretched and did not move.
The strength ran out of my legs, and I slid down the wall until I curled into a trembling heap. Yet I did not take my eyes off Raphael. I needed to know that he was dead but could not bring myself to go near him, so instead I watched for even the slightest movement of his ruined body.
When a flicker of lightning revealed that his right hand had crept forward, I thought it might merely be a figment of my imagination. Then Raphael started to pull himself across the floor toward me, and I shuddered at the thought that somehow my single-minded fear had willed him back to life.
He crawled and mewled like a newborn still bathed in the blood of the womb. His eyes had lost their manic fire and now looked at me with such a frightened, lost confusion that I almost wanted to clasp the hand he lifted toward me.
“Nana?” he pleaded.
An ax fell on his neck with a wet clunk. I’d been so intent on Raphael, I hadn’t seen that Ernst had returned to the laboratory with a halberd he’d taken from one of the castle’s suits of armor. With his good left arm, Ernst held the long-handled weapon high up on its shaft so he could wield it like a hatchet.
Raphael’s head rolled away from the blade but the eyes remained open, gazing up at me as if awaiting an answer.
“No,” I whispered. “My name is Anna.”
Ernst dropped the ax and knelt to hug me.
CHAPTER 25
ANNA AT LAST
Raphael’s head rested at the bottom of the small hole I’d dug for it. His red-raw face had purpled to the color of a bruise, and the lidless eyes stared up at me with the same desperate yearning they had during his last moments of life. The white eyes had lost their luminosity, however, the irises dimmed to the gray of the day’s overcast sun.
I heaped the blade of my shovel with soil and levered it over the hole but could not bring myself to bury that face forever.
Ernst touched my shoulder with his left hand. “Do it, Anna. It’s time you both were free.”
I shut my eyes and flipped the blade of the shovel downward. Once the face was covered, I quickly filled in the rest of the hole and packed down the dirt. My arms ached from digging, and I leaned wearily on the spade. With Ernst unable to use his broken arm, I’d had to bury all the dead myself: the pieces of Hans, the headless body stitched together from murdered girls, the abominations Raphael had fashioned from the remains of the Frankenstein heirs. Once the storm had passed, I’d interred them all in the rain-soaked sod beneath the trees that ringed the castle.
I saved Raphael for last. Ernst insisted we cut up the entire body and bury the parts in separate graves.
“A little superstitious of you,” I said dryly. “Isn’t that what they used to do with suicides? To keep them from coming back as vampires?”
“The men whose corpses we robbed to make him should all have graves of their own,” Ernst replied, his splinted arm folded across his chest. He would never admit that, after seeing Raphael survive poison, fire, amputation, and lightning, he feared that even decapitation might not end our misbegotten creation’s existence.
We’d set Ernst’s broken bones the previous night. He dulled the pain by swilling an entire decanter of cognac he’d found in the castle’s front parlor. “To the best medicine . . . and the best doctor . . . I’ve ever had,” he said, lifting the decanter in a toast before guzzling the contents. Then he bit down on a rag, huffing and puffing with muffled screams as I pulled the bones into alignment and lashed them in place with narrow wooden boards and strips of torn linen.
After that, we’d searched the castle until we found the only bedroom that didn’t seem to have blood in it—a scullery maid’s quarters, by the look of it. I would have thought I’d never sleep again after all the horrors I’d seen that night, but once I lay down alongside Ernst on the chamber’s narrow cot, I dropped into unconsciousness almost immediately.
Although I’d cleared the estate of corpses the following morning, there was no way to erase all the blood from the scene of the massacre. Given Castle Frankenstein’s remote location and forbidding reputation, it might be days or weeks before anyone discovered the carnage. No doubt it would be attributed to the mysterious killer who’d terrorized the country of late and who would just as mysteriously vanish forever. Ernst and I would be far away by then.
Before we left, though, I had one more act of penance to perform.
I snapped an inch-thick branch off one of the surrounding elms, divided it into two unequal pieces, and lashed them together with twine to form a crude cross. I planted it on the spot where I’d buried Raphael’s head—a symbol of the better resurrection I wanted him to have.
“Does he have any hope of Heaven?” I asked softly as I contemplated the marker.
“As much as any of us, I suppose,” Ernst replied. “May God forgive us all.”
“But if he has no soul . . . then neither do I.” I began to weep. The dirt on my fingers smudged my cheeks as I wiped away tears.
Ernst turned me toward him, lifted my face to look into his own. “You have a soul, Anna. I know, because it is the one we share together.”
He kissed me, or maybe I kissed him. I cannot remember, and it does not matter. We walked away together and are together still. How long we shall be together and what will become of us is something only the true Creator knows.
THE END
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To give proper thanks to everyone who helped jolt this book to life would require a whole book in itself, but I want to give special mention to the following: my wife, Kelly Dunn, for her advice, comfort, commiseration, and unflagging faith in me; my father, Harry Woodworth, who supported me during the difficult period in which the novel was gestating and sadly passed away before seeing it published; my friends and first readers Peter Atkins, Wendy Rathbone, and Beth and Jim Sturges for reassuring me that, yes, it was actually a
pretty good book; the crew at Deranged Doctor Design for creating such a wonderful cover for the novel; the good people at Kindle Scout for selecting the book and helping me prepare it for publication; and all the family, friends, Through Violet Eyes fans, and complete strangers who nominated the book and encouraged their acquaintances to do the same. Each of you contributed a crucial piece to the creation that is FRAULEIN FRANKENSTEIN!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stephen Woodworth is the author of the New York Times bestselling Violet Series of paranormal thrillers, including Through Violet Eyes, With Red Hands, In Golden Blood, and From Black Rooms. His short fiction has appeared in such publications as Weird Tales, Realms of Fantasy, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Year’s Best Fantasy, Black Wings IV and V, and Midian Unmade. You are welcome to visit him online at www.facebook.com/stephen.woodworth2 or at www.stephenwoodworth.wordpress.com.
Stephen Woodworth, Fraulein Frankenstein
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