The Brilliance of A Monster................ By: Scarecrow76

(( For those that are still interested in my posts, I apologize I have not posted in a while but I am working on a new novel. I am first putting together an outlie of what I want to say in the story. I am sorry if it is not very original to some as I am building off of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein". Most write stories based on this novel in a 3rd person POV or from the scientist's POV. To my knowledge, this is the first from the "Monster's" POV. Of course I am not posting the finished product but I am interested in what people think of what I have done so far.>



Chapter I - The Genesis

In the year 1704 , I Conrad Devaux had been accused of a series of crimes I did not commit. I was accused of murder and rape of several women for which I was promptly executed at the gallows. My family and I never spoke after I was arrested and charged because in the minds of that time, you must have committed the crime if you are arrested or even suspected of it. They thought I was guilty because of this evident truth. My body was not claimed or buried in my family plot but rather the potters ground. where my body rotted in the sun until someone felt sorry for me and gave me the tender mercy of a proper burial. Then my grave was later exhumed by Arthur Von Frankenstein. He was a brilliant man who thought he could revive the dead but upon examination, he realized my body was not a great candidate for finding the technique to reanimate a corpse. Back then, they knew what organ was what but had misconceptions as to how they exactly functioned. Since my body was too decayed, my brain was in tact so Arthur then removed my brain and preserved it in a fluid of his own creation to preserve it for other studies. A year later Arthur had built a lab that was hidden within his family castle and estate and passed away within a year of the lab's completion.

Arthur's grandson Victor came back to Germany and took his place as the patriarch of the Frankenstein family and all of their holdings. He too was interested in reviving the dead. This desire however laid in slumber within him for 2 years when he quite by accident found the entrance to his grandfather's greater laboratory. He was first frightened and fled from the lab. Suddenly when he had calmed himself he recalled what appeared to be a series of several electrical generators. Victor had been an admirer of the surgeons who toured at the time who were demonstrating how fresh corpses would react to electrical stimulation from small generators at medical schools and colleges. Thst night he drank until he fell and passed out. When he came to, Victor was still quite intoxicated. With his inhibitions dulled, he decided to explore the hidden space he had found. He heard what sounded like foot steps in an office on the other side of the lab and went to explore. Now Victor was getting scared He quickly opens the door, he sees a man with a hunched back and both scream in terror. Then they realized that they knew each other. It was Igor whom was once the personal assistant to Arthur who now just worked in the stables. Victor's fear turned into verbal rage until Igor calmed him by explaining that Victor had forbade his ever telling Victor about the laboratory.

Victor plagued Igor with questions about what had been done there and what methods had been used and what were the results. Igor explained it all in great detail as he conversation went on for 7 or more hours. Then after a few minutes of silence, Victor decided to carry on with his grandfather's work and Igor cheerfully agreed to now be Victor's assistant. The very next night, they met in private to form plans as to how they could carry out their intentions The day after this, they began to brain storm and map out how to get bodies and how to succeed where Arthur had failed in his attempts to reanimate a corpse through electricity being the medium to try and do so. Soon they began robbing graves for the needed cadavers and transported the necessary equipment for these dark experiments that were resumed under the new eyes of another generation. Victor and Igor were perfect in their stealth when it came to roving constables making their rounds They occasionally had to kill a few witnesses who would then serve as "extras" on the surgical tables of the laboratory. At one point, Igor was blind in his left eye and agreed to allow Victor to transplant an eye from a corpse to see if the organ swap might restore Igor's sight. The procedure was then performed and his sight was restored. This made Victor confident that they could not fail in erasing death from a long list of human kind's list of dreadful things.

By now Victor had made many mistakes with incisions he had made on the stolen cadavers rendering them useless. These were fed to boars or sent afloat from the sewage and drainage tunnels beneath the manor where rats and other nasties waited for a meal of any kind. This caused a solitary problem of enormous magnitude. From all of the grave robbing, the locals now began standing watch over the cemetery in the village. The other cemeteries anyone knew of were old and largely forgotten. In other words, no fresh corpses. Ten miles to the north east of the village however was where they usually disposed of executed criminals.... the potters ground. So Victor and Igor would travel there every night and collect a nameless criminal who had been dispatched. The first few merely cooked on the tables as Victor and Igor applied the electrical stimuli slowly increasing the power. Victor thought about this problem and he found a solution. Instead of increasing the electricity slowly, hit the body with the maximum charge all at once and wait for the results.

Victor and Igor brought in the corpse of a man who had been hung for the crime he had been accused of. I say accused because I was not there to say he committed the crime. He easily could have been as innocent as was I when they sent me to the gallows and to my timely death in a time and a world where life was so cheap. Never the less, he was hung by the neck until dead. He was laid out upon the table, undressed and examined for injuries. His only major injury was a broken neck. There was a puncture wound from where the guards made sure he was dead by stabbing him once with a bayonet. Victor was able to repair and stitch the wound properly and then deemed the newest experiment to be ready. Igor warned that the equipment would be strained and might be destroyed by the flood of electricity and that it would instantly cook the newest corpse and perhaps start a blaze. Victor ignored him. But by no more than an oversight, 3 generators were not activated. When the surge of electricity found it's way to the dead man on the table, he let out a loud gasp for air, his eyes fluttered and for 2 minutes, his lungs functioned and his heart beat and the fingers of his left hand twitched. Then Victor foud dismay. After 2 minutes of what seemed to be signs of life, the man shifted his body and strangled from his wind pipe folding and fragments of his broken neck penetrating the stem of his brain.

Many more times Victor tried in this manner and time after time Victor failed to achieve his goal. He took a month to pour himself into all of his notes trying to find the flaw that was keeping him from his masterpiece discovery of immortality. As he read his studies over and over, Igor was the voice of reason that brought it all clearly into focus. "Master, the bodies we have collected have all had broken necks. We are uselessly playing God by restoring life to bodies that life can not hold on to. Let us find a victim of the guillotine master. A clean cut is so easily repaired." So they went to the potter's ground night after night and collected a few specimens of criminals brought to their end by the falling of the menacing blade that hung high above them. They never realized the oversight from before so all generators were online when they conducted the next phase of experimentation. In one body, the heart exploded, another had the brain turn to mush and ooze from the nasal passage. Just many gruesome reactions were the sole result of what they were trying to accomplish. Again they had come to a dead end until Victor realized, he would have to build a new man. Like the devil himself, Victor took God's creations and he began taking the best parts of the corpses found and started grafting them together calling it his creation. He grafted 2 of every vital organ with the exception of the brain in case one vital organ should fail from the enormous jolt the "new man" might still be capable of life.

From all of the dark experimentation, Victor had partially slipped into a morbid madness and a God complexity, the likes of which no one will ever understand. As a boy Victor's brother Henry had given his life to save Victor from freezing to death when he slipped through the thin ice of a lake nearby. Victor spent his life consumed with the grief and guilt of Henry's untimely passing. So Victor thought to himself "You gave your life to save me once and now I can return your life to you now that I am becoming a god. The authority of death over life". Victor demanded Igor to go with him to the Frankenstein family cemetery located on the manor and they exhumed what was left of Henry from the mausoleum in which he had been interred in. Once they brought Henry to the lab and examined him, his only partially preserved part was his brain. The first "new man" was now decided. It would be the best of the bodies being used for this experiment to be navigated by Henry's brain. On the night of the experiment Victor proclaimed his "new man" as being "perfect" and referred to it by Henry's name. All of the generators were online and the pieced together "new man" received his jolt with no response. Two more times Victor and Igor tried and no result and they simply powered down the generators and Victor slowly approached his abomination. Victor laid his head upon the creature's chest and sobbed and frustratedly pounded the chest of the creature. Suddenly, the eyes sprung open and both hearts began beating, 3 of the 4 lungs were breathing and the creature responded to touch and speech. Finally the hulky monstrosity stood and looked down upon Victor who was elated.

Victor did not realize his brother's mind was damaged by a combination of things. Oxygen deprivation, decay from being dead so long and the results of the crude embalming, dehydration because you can not preserve something that is wet and trauma of the death, embalming and transfer from one organism to the next caused by the transplanting. Victor asked his creature "Henry, I am your brother Victor! Do you remember me?!" The creature gently touched Victor's face and unable to speak, nodded that it remembered him. Te creature grabbed a scalpel and began to cut his own throat. Victor stopped him. He grabbed the creature's hand to stop the cutting and asked the "new man" why he was throwing away the gift that Victor had given him. He looked at Victor with a tear rolling down it's face and forced itself to vocalize "Not life....". The creature patted it's chest slowly and gently and garbled he said "no soul". Victor gently took his hands away from the creature's hand that still grasped the scalpel and the "new man" brought it's short life to a quick end. Victor realized that though he saw himself as an equal to Jehovah that he had not the power of a soul. His "new man" returned the living existence to many but Victor could not bring back and restore their souls nor create and endow them with one. Without a soul, there is no life.

Victor sent for his fiancé to come live with him in the castle as he tried to move on from the experiments overtly. Covertly however, he did not dispose of the "new man" remains and still had Igor keeping maintenance of the laboratory. So he decided it was time he and his fiancé spent their time on each other for a while. His fiancé she was traveling with mutual friends when she received Victor's letter. The friends all arrived to the castle noting it's ominous stature and gothic setting. Among the friends were Mary Shelley with her husband and lord Byron. They all spent many days and nights enjoying the company they were all keeping and o nights when the fog was too thick for walks and visibility made it impossible to detect approaching wolves they would tell jokes, sing songs, and tell each other stories of an assigned nature as a kind of contest. One night in particular lord Byron charged the group with the assignment of a scary story. Both he and Bob Shelley failed miserably to scare anyone. Mary sat in the corner taking in all of the nonsense. Victor's fiancé refused as she was not that creative as she sited. Now it was Victor's turn. He changed the names of everyone in the real events but told them the story of the experiments he had engaged in while living in the castle. But his fiancé and lord Byron saw through it. Lord Byron called him on it and his fiancé seconded the accusation. Finally Victor told the group to follow him and excitedly, they did.....

Proud of the flow this story is proving to have and that I thought it up.

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