"Except that the door wasn't locked on this one night."
"Yes sir."
"Go on. There were two bodies, you say."
"Yes sir. Then I saw a half-empty bottle, with brandy in it, on one of the tables in the room, where usually there was no such thing. And I thought, well, the good Doktor works hard, why shouldn't he, once in a while? A little drink now and then is good for a man. And I was about to sit down and try just a little of the brandy myself. But then I saw that the new body wasn't right."
"Wasn't right? What do you mean by that?"
"Well, there it was, not set neatly to one side on the table—there would have been room—but just sprawled right on top of all the work that Herr Frankenstein was always warning me and Metzger not to touch. And the new one was huge, sir. It was as big as you are, I suppose."
"Go on."
"And worst of all, it had all its clothes on. If there was one thing that the Herr Doktor was always telling me, it was 'Karl, take their clothes off and be sure you get rid of them.' The clothes, that is. Very particular on that point, he was."
When I thought about it for a moment, that seemed logical to me. A naked body would be harder to trace and identify, should there ever arise any dispute with angry relatives or medical school officials. And it would also, of course, be easier to examine and work with.
"So what did you do, Karl?" I asked.
"It seemed to me, Your Honor, that there was only one thing I could do. I got busy taking off the clothes. I had them all off—and then I realized that the body was still alive."
"Alive!"
"Yes sir. That was a bad moment for me, I tell you. A bad moment."
"Were you drinking on that night, Karl? Before you found the brandy bottle in the laboratory, I mean."
"Well, sir, no. Well, only a little. Just a little cheap wine was all I had before I came into town to see Herr Doktor Frankenstein. And then, once I got there, I hardly had time to take even a little nip out of the brandy bottle before I started to notice things, like the new body having its clothes on. But I saw that bottle just sitting on the table and I thought, why not? After that lightning bolt I needed something to help me pull myself together."
"Go on."
"Only a little something… you see, I thought it unfair of Frankenstein to say what he sometimes said about my work. I wasn't—I am not—a drunken fool, as the gentleman once accused me of. I did good work for him, always."
Freeman was indignant. "You had been drinking, then, that night, when you went to see him. When you got there you probably couldn't tell a live body from a corpse."
At that the peasant became resentful. "I could tell, sir! I could tell. It was just…"
"Not until you had the body stripped. Anyway, what happened then?"
The remainder of the story came out in bits and pieces. Amazed to see and feel a shudder of life run through the giant frame under his hands, Karl had let it slide back to the table. All he could think of in that horrible moment was that someone, either Metzger or the Herr Doktor or both of them, had made a catastrophic mistake. They had brought a body here before the man was dead. Perhaps—Karl still shuddered, telling us his fear—perhaps Metzger had even tried to kill the man, to provide a suitable specimen, and had failed.
Karl himself, or so he protested to us, has never hurt anyone in his life. I can believe that that is true, or almost true. Like so many huge men, he gives the impression of having basically a gentle nature; and I believe that his nature is basically a timid one as well.
So to me the claim is quite credible, that it never entered Karl's mind to complete the job that Metzger perhaps had bungled, to finish off the helpless man before him. I can believe that Karl thought only of how to separate himself from the catastrophe that was sure to bring down trouble on the Herr Doktor's head, and that he did what he could to destroy or confuse the evidence before escaping.
"They had me in jail once, sir, for two days, just for sleeping in the square, when I was younger. And I don't mean to go back to jail. No sir, enough of that for me."
"That's wise of you. So what did you do?"
His first impulse, he told us, had been to get the live man out of the house, and dump him somewhere else. But as soon as Karl had tried to lift the huge slippery body from the table, the victim had started to struggle ferociously, and had seemed likely to raise an outcry that would rouse the house, deaf landlady or not. Karl let him slump back on the marble slab, where he lay groaning faintly.
After an agonizing moment of indecision, Karl had decided that it was the Herr Doktor's work that had to go.
He told us, with the calm of one accustomed to handling corpses, how the dead construction on the table, the object of Frankenstein's labors for so long, and rotting now despite all efforts at preservation and reanimation, had come to pieces in his grip when he had attempted to lift it quickly. There was a large canvas bag available in the laboratory, in which some previous delivery had been made. Karl began stuffing chunks of body into the bag, like a butcher packing meat. Though the reconstructed frame was eight feet tall, or rather eight feet long, it was attenuated by dehydration as well as being weakened by surgery. The weight was no more, in fact was rather less, than that of a normal body of ordinary size.
Into the bag as well went the spare anatomy from around the room, and the clothing that had just been removed from the living victim. Karl's idea was that a naked man would be less likely to raise an immediate outcry or come running in pursuit when he woke up completely.
"You disposed of all the clothing?" I demanded. "What about the boots?"
"Your Honor, I—yes, these that I am wearing are his boots, I admit. They looked so good I couldn't throw them away, not like the rest of his strange garments. And when I tried them on they fit."
"Go on, then—wait!" My grip tightened on his arm. "Was there any other clothing in the room?"
"Any other… no sir. Why do you ask?"
"Are you sure?"
"Why… wait. Yes sir, there were the clothes that Herr Frankenstein had been getting ready for the person on the table to wear, on the day that person should be able to get up and walk about. Those things were all kept on a shelf in the laboratory. But they'd been sitting there for quite a while, and I never thought about them at the time—"
"Stop!" I cried. "Wait. On a shelf… yes."
Freeman grasped my arm. "My friend, what is it?"
"I am beginning to remember," I said to him. And bits and pieces were coming back to me, quite painfully. As they are now, once more, as I write about it.
Later_In that first moment of my cloudy awareness, on that November night, alone in that hideous, malodorous room, what had I been doing? My hands had been fumbling with my garments. Reaching to a shelf.
Getting dressed. Of course. If only—
Later_I have remembered—enough—and I am certain that now I know the truth. But I cannot tell it to anyone here, not even Freeman, my good friend. Nor dare I write it in this journal.
One consolation is that I know my name at last.
FINAL LETTER
April 7,1783 Ingolstadt