Blood Lite

No Problem

Don D'Ammassa

I swear I had good intentions. I know that sounds pretty weak, but it's the truth. Look, I'll tell it the way it hap­pened and you can judge for yourself.

My name in Herbert Franken and I've been working toward a master's degree in biochemistry at Brown Univer­sity for the past year. My parents wanted me to go into the family business, but I don't even like pizza and I wanted more for myself than a life sweating over pepperoni and tomato sauce. When the oven exploded and killed them both, as well as burning down the restaurant, I took it as a sign that I'd made the right choice.

Brown allocated space for its grad students in the labo­ratory building, but it was hard to concentrate there with people coming and going all the time. No problem. The insurance had left me pretty well-off, so I decided to clean out part of the basement and put together my own facility. I was working on monitoring rates of cell degeneration, so I didn't really need a lot of room.

That meant going through all the boxes and crates and trunks of family memorabilia that my parents had stored there, most of which they hadn't even looked at after shipping them all the way here from Europe. Some of it I threw out, and most of the rest went into a storage locker. The only thing I kept at the house in Managansett was a crate full of old journals that looked like family histories.

It cost more than I expected to outfit my laboratory, even with buying used equipment where possible, but it only took a few weeks to get everything delivered and installed to my liking. The only drawback was the venti­lation. There were two tiny basement windows, but they didn't provide much circulation. No problem. By opening the bulkhead door that led up into the backyard I even had a refreshing breeze.

So now I guess I should tell you about Mrs. Williams. Gretchen Williams was my neighbor, an elderly retired nurse who had lived in the small cottage next door for as long as I could remember. She had to be at least seventy, but she might have been a lot older than that. Her skin was dark and wrinkled like the dried fruit you find in trail mix. My dad used to call her the "neighborhood inspector" because she walked up and down the streets every once in a while with a pencil and pad, looking for code viola­tions she could report to the town hall—broken windows, visible garbage cans, peeling paint, things like that. Once when I was a kid, she caught a whiff of some concoc­tion I'd cooked up with my chemistry set and came over to complain, and on another occasion she walked right into our house, demanding to know when Dad was going to trim the front hedge. She was an incredibly nosy woman, asked all sorts of personal questions, and either didn't realize how unpopular she was or just didn't care.

My parents had never talked much about our family back in Germany and I always suspected that they were involved with the Nazis or worked in a concentration camp or something like that. I remember one time Dad let something slip about the family castle, but he insisted he was joking and got mad when I pushed, so I let it go. The journals were likely to answer at least some of my questions. Once my first experiments were under way, I had to spend a lot of time waiting for dead organic matter to get even deader, so I pulled one of the journals out and started reading. They were in German, naturally. No prob­lem. I'd grown up speaking German at home and English everywhere else.

They were pretty dull, actually, at least until I found my multiply great-grandfather's oversize, brass-bound account of his experiments. The name inscribed inside the cover was a bit of a shock: Viktor Frankenstein. I thought it must be some kind of elaborate joke, but there was no question about the age of the journals, and when I read through the first few pages, I felt a flicker of excitement. His observations were crude by contemporary standards, but there were hints of an acute intelligence and an almost supernatural insight into the processes of life. I was struck by some coincidental similarities with my own work, and read on far into the night.

The next morning, I threw out the cultures I'd started, ordered some new equipment, and began rearranging the lab.

Please don't get the impression that I had suddenly turned into some kind of mad scientist. I had no intention of digging up dead bodies at midnight, erecting a lightning rod on my roof, or stealing brains from Brown University. Nor were there any hints of such madness in the journal. The experiments described there were limited to rats and other lab animals. Contrary to the story promulgated by Mary Shelley, who may have known my ancestor socially, there was no suggestion that Viktor ever experimented on human subjects. At least not in the journals in my posses­sion, which ended abruptly in 1816.

With modern equipment, I was able to duplicate and improve on Viktor's work in a matter of weeks. I quickly confirmed what the journals had already suggested. The process could indeed generate vitality from dead cells, but there was no possibility of restoring the higher functions except on the most rudimentary level. A dead mouse's heart might resume its pumping, the tiny form might even stand and walk about and even go through the motions of eating or drinking, but it might just as easily begin gnaw­ing on its own tail. Even among lower animals, the mind is more than just the physical structure of the brain.

One Saturday morning, I found Mrs. Williams's cat in my yard, chewing on a dead sparrow. After chasing the cat back over the fence, I examined the tiny corpse, which appeared completely undamaged, other than the miss­ing head. I couldn't resist the temptation, injected some of my serum into the cooling body, and was immediately rewarded by a slight fluttering of the wings. I hadn't antic­ipated the possible consequences, however, and I wasn't quick enough when it suddenly rose into the air and began flying around the basement. Its movements were random and had I thought to close the bulkhead door, I could have captured it in short order. Unfortunately, it blundered through the opening and quickly vanished. The stimulat­ing effects of the treatment would wear off after a few hours, so presumably no harm was done.

A few days later I was preparing a new experiment when Mrs. Williams came boldly down the cement steps, demanding to know what I was doing. "I open the kitchen window this morning and what a stink! I thought some­thing must have died over here." Her appearance was so unexpected that I didn't react until she was halfway across the basement. "What's this stuff, then? Are you making drugs down here?" She looked at the lab equipment sus­piciously. "I'll bet the police would be interested to know about this, young man."

I stood up and advanced on her immediately, angry at the intrusion and concerned that she might damage some­thing. "This is private property, Mrs. Williams. You have no right to come in here."

"Got something to hide then, do you?" She reached out toward my spectrometer and I caught her wrist reflexively. "How dare you!" Her face twisted in outrage. "How dare you lay hands on me!"

"Please get out of my house or I will call the police." My voice trembled. I felt like a child again, terrified of adult authority. I had never had the courage to so much as set foot on Mrs. Williams's property. For years I had been convinced that she was a witch, and that irrational fear quickened my pulse.

"Call them then! I'd like to see you explain all of this!"

And she reached toward the bubbling vials where I was brewing a fresh batch of the revitalization serum.

I only meant to push her away, but she was a tiny woman and I'm not a small man.

She lost her balance and fell over so quickly that she never even cried out.