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“Get out,” he said. “You can’t be here. I’m doing important work here.”
“This isn’t a surgery,” I said. “It’s a slaughter-house.”
He straightened up, and, with almost prissy precision, put his scalpel down beside the woman’s body. “No,” he said calmly. “A slaughter-house is a place of death. This is a salon dedicated to life. Look beyond the obvious, Mr. Taylor. I am working to frustrate death, to cheat him of his victims. I take dead flesh and make it live again, all through my own efforts. You have no idea of the wonders and glories I’ve seen inside people.”
He came out from behind the table to face Suzie and me, wiping the blood from his bare hands with a bit of rag. “Try to understand and appreciate what I’m doing here. I have gone far beyond merely duplicating nature. Now I seek to improve on her work. I use only the most perfect organs, reshaped and improved by surgical skills perfected over centuries. I . . . simplify things, removing all u
“How many?” I said, cutting him off roughly. There was something almost hypnotic in the brute certainty of his voice.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “How many what?”
“How many victims, you bastard! How many good men and women died at your hands, to make your perfect bloody creature?”
He actually looked a little sulky, angry that I hadn’t got the point, even after he’d explained it all so carefully.
“I really don’t know, Mr. Taylor. I don’t keep count. Why should I? It’s the parts that matter. It isn’t as if they were anyone important. Anyone who mattered. People go missing all the time in the Nightside, and no-one ever cares.”
“He does,” said Suzie, unexpectedly. “Part of why I love him. He cares enough for both of us.”
The Baron looked at her uncertainly, then turned his attention back to me. “Progress always has a price, Mr. Taylor. Nothing is ever gained without sacrifice. And I sacrificed them.” He gestured at all the bodies on all the tables, and smiled briefly. “I do so love an audience. A failing, I admit, this need to explain and justify myself... But I think I’ve rattled on quite long enough. Am I to understand that Joan Taylor and Stephen Shooter will not be joining us?”
“No,” said Suzie. “They rest in pieces.”
The Baron shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I still have my nurses.”
He snapped his fingers, and a whole army of bamboo nurses appeared out of the bare stone walls, snapping into existence, to fill the space between us and the Baron. They surged forward, bamboo hands reaching out to Suzie and to me, but this time I was prepared. I’d been waiting for them. I took the salamander egg from my coat pocket, crushed it in my hand, and threw it into their midst. The egg exploded into flames, and a dozen nurses immediately caught fire. Yellow flames leapt up, jumping from nurse to nurse as the bamboo figures lurched back and forth, spreading the flames with their flailing arms. In a few moments the cellar was full of juddering, burning figures, a hellish light dancing across the bare stone walls. Suzie and I were back by the door, ready to make our escape if necessary, but the Baron was trapped with his back against the far wall. He watched helplessly as the nurses crashed into his trestle tables, overturning them and setting them on fire, too. And in the end he had no choice but to shout the command Word that shut them all down. The figures crashed to the floor and lay there, still burning. The sound of crackling flames was very loud in the quiet.
Suzie and I moved forward into the cellar again, stepping carefully around blackened bamboo shapes. The Baron studied me thoughtfully. He didn’t look nearly as worried as I’d thought he would. He had the air of someone who still had a card left to play.
“Wait,” he said. “I’m sure we can reason together.”
“I’m pretty sure we can’t,” said Suzie.
“You must meet my latest creation,” said the Baron. “See the results of my work. Creature, stand! Show yourself!”
And from a dark, concealing shadow in one corner, something stirred and stood up. It had been sitting quietly on a chair all this time, so inhumanly inert it went u
I hated it on sight. There was something . . . wrong about it. Perhaps simply because it didn’t move like anything human, because its face held no trace of human thoughts or human emotions. I felt the same way looking at the creature as I did when surprised by a spider. An instinctive impulse to strike out, at something with which I could never have any empathy.
“Isn’t it marvellous?” said the Baron von Frankenstein, moving forward to place one large and possessive hand on the creature’s bare shoulder. “Hermaphroditic, of course. Self-repairing, self-fertilising, potentially immortal.”
No breasts and no obvious genitals, but I took his word for it. “Whose brain did you use this time?” I said finally.
“My own,” said the Baron. “Or at least, all my memories, downloaded into a brain wiped clean of its original patterns. Computers have made such a difference to my work. You see, Mr. Taylor? Even if you kill me here, my work goes on. I go on, in every way that matters.”
He patted his creature fondly on the shoulder. It turned its perfect head and regarded him thoughtfully, turned and placed its perfect hands on the Baron’s face, and ripped the Baron’s head right off his shoulders. The body fell jerking and kicking to the floor, the neck stump pumping blood, while the creature held the Baron’s slack face up before its own. The Baron’s eyes were still moving, and his mouth worked, though no sound came out.
“Now that I exist, you are redundant,” said the creature, to the Baron’s dying eyes. Its voice was like music; horrible music—with nothing human in it. “I have all your knowledge, all your techniques, so what use are you? Yes, you made me. I know. Did you think I’d be grateful?”
“I can’t believe he didn’t see that one coming,” said Suzie.
The creature looked into the Baron von Frankenstein’s eyes, satisfied itself that its creator no longer saw anything, and tossed the head aside. Then it turned slowly, thoughtfully, to consider Suzie and me.
“Nice operation the Baron had here,” said the creature. “Think I’ll take it over.”
I shook my head. “Not going to happen.”
“You can’t stop me,” said the creature.
Suzie shot it in the chest at point-blank range. The blast blew half its chest away, and the impact sent the creature staggering backwards. But it didn’t fall, and when it regained its balance the huge wound was already repairing itself. The creature’s mouth moved in something that would have been a smile on anything human.
“My creator made me very well. The best work I ever did.”
I raised my gift, searching for the link that held all the creature’s separate parts and pieces together, but there wasn’t one. The Baron hadn’t used science or sorcery to put his creature together, only expert surgical skills honed over lifetimes of work. I dropped my gift and looked at Suzie.
“We’re going to have to do this the hard way. You ready to get your hands dirty?”
“Always,” said Suzie Shooter.
So we took a scalpel each, slammed the creature to the floor, and took it apart piece by piece. There was a lot of kicking and screaming, and in the end we had to burn all the pieces separately to stop them moving, but we did it.