An acknowledgment.
Carlsbruck was invented by Hammer Horror and became their generic East European town haunted by vampires, werewolves and, of course, the monster created by Dr. Frankenstein. There are many references in this story to characters in the Frankenstein movies, and to other movies created both in the 1930's by Universal Pictures, and later by the Hammer Horror stable. I am greatly beholden to these past efforts, which have made my work so much easier. Long may these motion pictures last, to inspire future generations of writers, artists and movie makers.
In the 1931 Universal Pictures movie 'Frankenstein', and in 'Bride of Frankenstein' four years later, they named the quintessential mad scientist Henry Frankenstein but where I reference him in this story I have kept his name as it is in the original novel, Victor.
Dr Victor Frankenstein was, according to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, educated at the university in Ingolstadt, a real place in Upper Bavaria. I have replaced Ingolstadt with Engolstadt in order to spare the good people of the real town the embarrassment of being associated with my story which is not directly about Victor, but Damion von Frankengeld, his cousin and first 'assistant'.
All the characters in this story - living, dead, and undead - are fictional. And where they resemble other, well known, characters these are either fictional themselves, or even - in some cases - mythological. May the ancient gods forgive me for my temerity.
Now read on...
29th May in the year 1784.
Pretty much everyone in this part of the world, I believe, knows of my cousin Dr. Victor von Frankenstein but few, I suspect, have heard of me. I am Dr. Damion von Frankengeld and I was at the University of Engolstadt when Victor was studying there. I travelled from our family estate near Carlsbruck, but I arrived a year after him, being his junior by eleven months. He took me under his wing and, to be honest, taught me far more than my tutors in my first two years.
We became co-conspirators in Victor's experiments, lurking in graveyards, or near gibbets, seeking body parts wherever we could find them. I was there when he achieved his first small successes, the twitch of a thumb, the flex of a leg, though by then I had already decided that reanimation was not the field in which I wished to experiment. It seemed to me that there was a way of creating new life that was much more pleasant to pursue, and far less likely to end up in conflict with the establishment.
There was still some degree of risk involved, as that method was frowned upon, outside wedlock, by the churches, and many of the worthies of the European nations. That method was, of course, sexual congress. And, when Victor seemed totally disinterested in the subject, I had to strike out on my own and explore what the fleshpots of Engolstadt could offer.
I discovered that there were taverns where upper rooms were available for a young man to experiment, and a ready collection of whores who would open their legs for a few shillings. I tried them all, in the name of science you understand, for it was important for me to understand the nature and degree of pleasure I could experience. I fucked young, beautiful, girls and more mature women. I 'dipped my wick', as the poets put it, in fat women and skinny lasses, in elegant tall Amazons and in midgets, or 'little people' as I discovered they preferred to be called. I had sex with the elderly grandmother of one of the tavern keepers in the same bed as his wife and daughter. A 'three for the price of two' offer I simply couldn't refuse. It became an all-night romp during which I forgot that I had an appointment to help Victor with his latest reanimation effort, a penis he had obtained that he hoped he could revive. I was too busy getting my own organ to rise repeatedly to the challenge and forgot the appointment.
But my failure of memory was ultimately a stroke of good fortune since, by not being in the laboratory that evening, I was able to avoid being caught up in the scandal that overtook Victor. The scandal caused him to be shunned by many of his contemporaries, and led to his rapidly being expelled from the Natural Sciences course.
We had taken to performing Victor's more extreme experiments in a small barn that Victor had rented close to our digs, for the University's facilities were too exposed for the level of secrecy he desired. Pure chance - and three related ladies - meant I happened to be absent from our makeshift laboratory when the university officials arrived to accuse Victor of what they called 'abhorrent experiments'. He, most generously, never mentioned my role in his work during their questioning. And, on their part, they were too busy declaring their disgust for his theories, and breaking things, to actually study the papers that were scattered over the benches so they failed to recognise that two different hands had been involved in writing them.
Within days Victor had returned home, expelled from the university in disgrace, and I was left on my own. Well not exactly alone, since there were many other students at Engolstadt, but I had found my peers to be dull fellows, offering little in engaging conversation. So I lived and studied by myself, with the occasional 'scientific' visit to tavern or brothel. I was not lonely, preferring my own company in the main. My modest housekeeping, and some other needs, were seen to by Helena, a widow of the town, who came to the apartment twice a week.
After Victor left I determined that I would not make the mistakes that he had made. I would keep my research away from prying eyes, and not draw attention to myself in the University. Victor had angrily challenged our tutors, argued regularly with them and with the other students. He even harangued the visiting lecturers, all of whom were senior and elderly men who took his presumption with ill-concealed annoyance. It was his undoing.
In contrast I was pleasant in lectures, seminars, dissections and laboratory work. I avoided confrontation, and wrote in my exams the approved answers. Thus was I able to quietly continue my work without interference from the tutors and lecturers, many of whom were fools. Occasionally I heard rumours of Victor's activities and it was clear to me that his obsession with creating life from dead tissue had not waned, and was increasingly getting him into trouble. He had renovated a tower of some kind on the Frankenstein estate and was working well away from the prying eyes of the people of Carlsbruck. Despite his precautions rumours about his nighttime excursions were rife in the taverns and coffee shops. My nighttime excursions remained more discreet and those who knew about them dismissed them as a young nobleman merely 'sowing his wild oats'. The idea that I might be studying the whores I met never occurred to them.
In my mind I was more interested in enhancing life rather than creating it. My life's work, I had decided, would be aimed at creating an elixir, or series of elixirs, that would enrich a person's experience of pleasure. I had studied the people around me and my observations showed that certain individuals seemed to gain more powerful experiences from, for example, sexual intercourse, the taste of a meal, or the sound of a musical instrument. I encountered many whores who genuinely enjoyed their work, welcoming a 'good cock into their cunt' as they described it. I observed gourmet diners who would obtain bliss from the subtle flavour of a truffle. I watched as the opera enthusiast would be transported by the voice of the diva singing an aria.
It seemed to me unlikely that the whore's vagina, the gourmet's tongue, or the ear of our opera goer, was radically different from the norm; indeed my anatomical studies on cadavers confirmed this. Unless suffering from a birth defect, or later injury or disease, these organs were all very similar. And when I compared the tongue of a known gourmet who lived to eat, with one of a rough labourer who simply ate to live, there were no structural differences I could detect. No, something deeper was happening, and I considered that if I could understand this process, and perhaps enhance it, I could be hailed as a benefactor to mankind.
I decided that the brain must hold the clues to the different experiences but, since I had nothing like the anatomical skills of my cousin, I determined to affect the organ with a chemical stimulus instead of surgery. This approach was supported by my studies of reports of the effects of brain surgery on mental patients; few of whom seemed to gain any benefit at all from the process. I started my research by examining the material in the university library, both descriptions and illustrations, about plants that caused changes in the mind. I discovered that certain fungi created hallucinations and the leaves of some plants, when burned and the smoke inhaled, calmed angry thoughts, and there were many, many, more. They formed the core of my studies and I soon earned a reputation at the university for an extensive knowledge of the toxic or beneficial effects of plants.
On one occasion I was able to offer a diagnosis of ergot poisoning for a group of citizens who had presented with mysterious symptoms. It did my reputation as a medical student no harm, particularly since I was polite and modest in my suggestion of the cause, and allowed my tutor to take all the credit afterwards.
I started to create my elixir by isolating the active elements from thirty different local fungi, weeds and herbs. Then I visited the Engolstadt Botanical Gardens and, with the permission of the curators and gardeners there, collected specimens from their more exotic plants. After a few months I had more than fifty different substances and my shelves were filled with an array of multicoloured ingredients that promised great things. None of them in isolation, of course, offered exactly what I wanted, and many of them separately, or in combinations, were deadly to life if too much was consumed. I understood well that it was unrealistic to believe that nature would give me the universal compound I desired from a single source. A lot of painstaking work was ahead of me purifying and combining the various mensactus.
Whilst I planned and laid the groundwork for my life's work I was, at the same time, taking my final written and oral exams. In these I was very successful and my father, mother and sister travelled to Engolstadt this day to witness me receive my award, my elder brother being too busy with the estate to travel. I was to become 'Herr Doctor'.
