“Our employer wanted us to begin work immediately,” Dr. Clevenger said, looking down her aquiline nose at the figure of Rhyme, who was seated with an old and well-preserved book open on her lap. “You spent half the afternoon baking cookies and now that you’ve finally deigned to show your face in the lab, you’re reading a book?”
“You might try it some time,” Rhyme said.
“Print is dead,” Clevenger said.
“That makes it an excellent place to turn for insight into our subject, doesn’t it, Sandy?” Rhyme said.
“Dr. Clevenger, if you please,” she responded. “I didn’t spend two and a half years in college to be referred to by my first name.”
“Fun fact about Frankenstein,” Rhyme said. “Though it now carries the byline of Mary Shelley, its first edition was published anonymously.”
“Fascinating,” Dr. Clevenger said. “By which I mean, completely irrelevant.”
“Trivia games often report that it was published under her husband’s name, but his name appeared on the foreword. There was no author listed for the first edition. The story which eventually came out when it was republished under Mary’s name was that she had written it while the pair of them were riding out a volcanic winter with Lord Byron, at his home… in Lake Geneva, Switzerland.”
“Oh, you’ll give him his title,” Clevenger said. “I see how it is.”
“Another fun fact,” Rhyme said. “While the movies which have been so seared into the collective consciousness depict lightning as the ’spark of life’ which gives the creature animation, the book, which is told from Frankenstein’s perspective, does not include that element.”
“How does he do it in the book?” Spinnerette asked, having paused in directing a trio of Webmistress’s grunts who were delivering crates of lab equipment.
“Well, the book doesn’t say, does it?” Rhyme said. “The entire story is framed as a cautionary tale told by a dying man. It wouldn’t make much sense for him to blab the secret he wanted to die with him to any crazed sea captain who stumbles along. No, all he says is that he gleaned the secret by carefully studying certain books of ancient lore… Albertus Magnus, Agrippa, Paracelsus.”
“So why aren’t you reading them?” Spinnerette asked.
“I have read them, Janie,” Rhyme said with a sneer. “And so have a lot of people, and none of them can resurrect the dead. But you see, even if he wouldn’t commit the exact process to paper, Victor as good as told us how to find it: by carefully studying his book. His ego, his hubris, the very same thing which drove him to create life in the first place, demanded he tell the world about his triumph and his failure.”
“So this is your theory?” Clevenger asked derisively. “That Victor Frankenstein was a real person, that he actually achieved the reanimation of the dead, and that the book in your hands is his actual journal which contains coded instructions on how to recreate the feat?”
“Well, when you put it that way, it sounds crazy, Sandy,” Rhyme said, slamming the book shut and throwing it to Spinnerette. “Janie, get the brain dead musclebags out of here, and take the boys with you.”
“Like I even want to be here,” Spinnerette said.
“Don’t you have a plane to catch?” Rhyme said.
“Oh, you’ll get your stupid oil,” Spinnerette said. “Don’t you worry about that.”
“I’m not worried in the slightest,” Rhyme said. “You should be worried about what happens if you come back without it.”
Dr. Clevenger stepped between them.
“Ladies, if I wanted to watch a pissing contest…”
“You could probably find a few choice video clips on Janie’s computer,” Rhyme said. “Run along, little lap-spider.”
Spinnerette headed for the lab’s door flanked by the henchmen, but she stopped before going through it and turned to look over her shoulder.
“I’m not finished with you,” she said to Rhyme.
“Oh, I hope not,” Rhyme said, smiling wickedly. “Because I haven’t even gotten started with you.”
“Enough!” Clevenger said as Spinnerette hurried out of the room. She placed a large metal cylinder on the lab table, undid a series of latches around the bottom, and then lifted off the top and sides to reveal the well-preserved head of an aged man, with wrinkled skin and a fringe of white hair around the edges of a bald pate. There was a noticeable puff of cold air coming off the specimen, with swirls of mist condensing around it.
“Ah, ze president of ze Herr Club For Men,” Rhyme said. “He seems to have lost a few members. You didn’t freeze it, did you?”
“No, just kept it cool to retard decomposition,” Dr. Clevenger said. “Do you recognize him, then?”
“Karl Heinrich Drossen,” Rhyme said. “Nazi cyberneticist. This is the face of the man who was supposed to build Hitler a better Aryan. I doubt very much he cared about the fuehrer’s ill-informed ideals of racial purity, but the ability to test his theories unfettered by any oversight or arbitrary rules of ethics would have appealed to him. The Nazis cared only about results, and so did he.”
“A man after my own heart,” Clevenger said.
“If only he could get to it,” Rhyme said. She gestured to the head. “What is your prognosis, doctor?”
“Considering that he’s dead? Fairly good,” Clevenger said. “There’s nothing wrong with his brain except the fact that it’s not connected to anything approximating a heart and lungs. The only sticking point is that he’s been that way for over a week.”
“Why should that matter, though? I know that conventional wisdom has for the longest time held that if somebody is to be brought back from beyond the brink of death, from the point of physical death, then the key thing is to do it quickly before brain damage can set in,” Rhyme said. “However, there’s a growing body of evidence which suggests that any damage not caused by the injuries themselves were caused by the gross shock of being forcibly revived. After all, if the physical apparatus of thought is intact, then why should the length of time it spends inert matter?”
“You say ‘physical apparatus’ as if there were more to it than the brain.”
“Gods save me, a physicalist,” Rhyme said, putting the back of her hand up to her forehead and sighing dramatically. “Why am I not surprised? Such limited imagination… such inability to see what’s right in front of your own nose. Or should I say, behind it.”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“Not on earth, Sandy, but beyond it!” Rhyme said, leaping up onto the table. “There are more things in my philosophy than are dreamt of by your science, Horatio. Consciousness, doctor, I am talking about consciousness. Not the garbage-in, garbage-out processing of stimuli, not some Rube Goldberg arrangement of electrochemical switches, but actual human consciousness as qualitatively felt and experienced by every human being on the planet!” She paused and cocked her head to the side. “Or maybe that’s just me, and all you zombies really are here for my amusement.”
She paused for a beat, and in that silence a blast of electricity struck Rhyme in the chest, knocking her off the table and sending her crashing against the wall. Dr. Clevenger stepped around the table and strode over to stand over her twitching and smoking body, holding a tiny blue pistol in her hand.
“Et tu, boobé?” Rhyme croaked.
“So very sorry, Ms. Henderson, but in my professional opinion, you’re a dangerous lunatic with no real expertise to contribute,” she said. “Penny dreadfuls and philosophy are not going to bring Herr Drossen back among the ranks of the living. When I told my employer you would be essential to the task, I knew there was only an outside chance you’d be able to make a coherent contribution as a lab assistant.”
“Assistant?” Rhyme repeated derisively.
“But for all your deluded nonsense, you are uniquely suited to show me the secret to reanimating the dead… after all, you’ve performed that task many times already today,” Clevenger said. “The secret to immortality isn’t hidden away in some overwrought gothic novel, Ms. Henderson… it flows in your veins.”
“And what are you going to tell your employer?” Rhyme asked. “Our employer. Mistreatment of a fellow female ranks pretty high on her list of sins.”
“Don’t insult my intelligence, Ms. Henderson,” Clevenger said. “You know she doesn’t actually care about the plight of women nearly as much as she cares about herself. I’ll tell her that you proved too dangerous to work with in a more conventional fashion, and she’ll accept that. Why? Because like Herr Drossen and myself, what she really cares about is results.”
Down on the floor, Rhyme started to laugh. Joints that had popped, their cartilage and fluid sacs literally cooked by the electrical blast, had begun to heal. Bones that had splintered from the impact were knitting back together.
“What’s so funny, you disgusting little mongrel?” Clevenger demanded.
“A smarter person than you would have waited a little longer to see if I really did fail before turning on me,” Rhyme said. “Because you can’t do it the other way around. When it turns out you can’t make the head of Orpheus sing on your own, you can’t very well turn around and ask me to help.”
“The odds of me failing are about the same as you succeeding,” Clevenger said.
“Exactly,” Rhyme said. “And there’s something else you’ve forgotten.”
“What, do you imagine, is that?”
“There’s no getting rid of me, doctor,” Rhyme said. “I come back. I always come back. Whatever you do to me, I’ll be back. ‘I will revenge my injuries: if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear; and chiefly towards you my arch-enemy, because my creator, do I swear inextinguishable hatred. Have a care: I will work at your destruction, nor finish until I desolate your heart, so that you shall curse the hour of your birth.’ I’m afraid it’s tit for tat, dear Sandy, and you’ll have a lot to answer for.”
Clevenger pulled the trigger and a bolt of lightning slammed into Rhyme’s body again, leaving her smoking and twitching, and then deathly still. She discharged the weapon twice more, leaving the villainess’s body blackened and charred.
“Twit,” she said, pocketing the device. She went over to an intercom mounted on the wall and punched in a code.
“Progress?” Webmistress said.
“Not yet,” Clevenger said. “But I thought you would like to be informed immediately… Ms. Henderson has gone rogue, relatively speaking.”
“Damn!”
“It’s not a total loss,” Clevenger said. “I prevented her from harming the specimen, and I believe we may still be able to get what we need from her, if you’re willing to stretch your principles a bit.”
There was a thoughtful pause, and then Webmistress spoke again.
“Do what you have to,” she said. “I freed her and she double-crossed me. But, Dr. Clevenger?”
“Yes?”
“I expect results.”
Cassandra Clevenger smiled.
“Understood,” she said. “I’ll just need some minions to help make her secure, and then I’ll get to work.”
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