COSTAS ZAPAS

Frankenstein REC NOVEL

translated by Joshua Barley edited by Irene Noel

Column Books This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, or locales or persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental. Copyright © 2014 by Column Books All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. For information address Column Books Rights Department at [email protected] First Column Books paperback edition July 2014 For more information or to book an event or an interview with author Costas Zapas contact Column Books at [email protected] or visit the book website www.frankensteinrec.com Jacket design and illustration by Vasilis Tikos ISBN:978-618-81313-0-9 ISBN:978-618-81313-1-6 (ebook)

PROLOGUE

1

The young reporter's investigation had begun a while before, on that nightmarish evening of the ninth of February, which had changed her life forever. She was sitting, exhausted, on the cheap sofa in her apartment, somewhere in the centre of the small town. The part of town where kids cover the walls of apartment blocks with graffiti and landlords rub it off with acid, shouting angrily. She must have fallen asleep, although her dream was so vivid that to the young reporter it felt utterly real. She was in a place that was overwhelmingly, eerily desolate. The darkness was so palpable that she could scarcely breathe. 1

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She was running - someone was chasing her. The huge figure of a man in an old hooded coat. It concealed him completely and made him seem enormous. Although the huge man was moving slowly, every so often he came nearer and made as if to grab her. As so often happens in these dreams, the young reporter very soon tripped and fell down onto a road that sank beneath her as if it were made of an elastic skin. She crawled along it, screaming, to get away, but the shadow of the giant hooded man was already beginning to engulf her. The young reporter looked behind her, trying as best she could to keep her cool, and not to die of fright. But what she saw before her made her panic even more. The huge hooded man was already standing over her. She could hear his breath, the breath of darkness. The man slowly lifted up his hood, with a hellish certainty. Only if you saw her face, if you managed to enter her nightmare at that moment and share her anguish, would you really understand her fear. Hell was before her, the beast that each of us hides within us, waiting for the right moment to unveil it, sowing death in anyone who stands in our way. All over the face of the huge man, who now looked like an ancient giant from a sinister fairytale, there were stitched scars still dripping blood. As if someone had sewn him up alive with skin stolen from corpses, purposefully leaving his wounds unhealed. He looked at her as if he had found a companion, bride to a hideous crime, to keep at all costs beside him. To steal her, out of the world of dreams, as a companion in his dark reality. 2

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The giant seized her in his arms and held her high up to the sky like a trophy, howling in pain and fury. The last thing the young reporter remembered from the dream was the sound of her own haunting cry, ringing out like thunder.

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She would have forgotten it all like any other nightmare that comes from the dungeons of our neurosis some queer nights, and makes us think that we are lying in our coffin in a polyester shroud, had the young reporter not woken up sweating on the cheap sofa in her apartment where she had fallen asleep - and found herself this time face to face with a real, live fear. On her limbs were threads from surgical stitches, dripping blood, just like those which bound the wounds of the creature in her dream. They weren't stuck on tightly, nor did they stop her moving. They were left on her like maggots, by someone trying to frighten her, or perhaps warn her about some approaching danger. Whatever the reason, however, this person had managed to enter her apartment. And, more importantly, her dream. It was a sign for her.

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She got up, drenched in fear, and gathered up the surgical stitches, shutting them into an empty glass jar. They were the first proof of a crime that still had not happened, but which surely concerned her and which she had to avert. She sealed the glass jar tightly, looking at the blood on the surgical stitches. It was still fresh. She stowed it away in a small, dirty closet with mouldy green wall-paper. There she threw all the junk she didn't need. She sat on her cheap sofa and tried to think. But before she had come to grips with everything that had happened to her, to find a logical explanation, she felt her heart beating fit to burst. Her head about to break from the throbbing of her heart inside her brain. She shut her eyes to come to her senses. The more she withstood it, the more intense her headache became. The pain drove into her body with every heartbeat. Her eyes were squeezed shut. A black hole was sucking them in. The young reporter managed to open her eyes again and looked around her in fear. Her heart sounded calmer now and hurt less. But something didn’t add up. She couldn’t work out if she had fallen asleep again and was in a nightmare, or if her life from here on would in any case be a nightmare between this reality and another frightening reality in another dimension, full of beasts and agony, which had burrowed into her apartment and even more into her mind. She dug her nails into the cheap sofa, as if she was trying to pin herself to it, and looked in front of her. The glass jar had fallen on the floor, broken into many small pieces. The glass was clean of blood. And no surgical stitches were to be seen, even though she had just put them there. 4

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She froze in a draft of cold air. She cowered in the corner of the cheap sofa and looked around her apartment more carefully. Now it seemed as though a murky grime had spread around it. She could only see shadows - and in particular, the huge shadow of the beast, standing over her in her apartment. The young reporter started to tremble. She had to stop the cavern of madness from swallowing her. She had to reconcile herself with the darkness. And perhaps with the beast, coming closer and closer to her. Almost inaudibly, in the silence of the apartment, she stammered: "Who are you?" The huge beast came even closer. Now the cold draft was coming out of his mouth. The surgical stitches were on his face again. They closed his wounds shoddily, dripping blood. He spoke to her as if they had known each other a long while. His voice stuttered. "It's me. Don't you remember me?" The ghastly shape of the beast was desperately near her. She could feel his rough skin touching her. She had to say something, to answer this nightmare that froze her blood and came from the world of the dead. She thought that honesty would perhaps be best. Besides, how could she know a dead, disfigured human being? An unknown wanderer from the dark kingdoms? And if he had come to her today, it must have been because of some mistake. She tried to answer him calmly. "No".

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The beast smiled and began to laugh slowly. The spasms in his face stretched the surgical stitches and tore open his wounds even more. His face was awash with blood. He now spoke with anger, but also with an accursed pain that no living person could endure. He said to her: "Remember!" Once more, she shut her eyes in terror. Now there was no sound in the small apartment. It was as if she was alone. As if she had escaped, if only for a little while. She took a breath and opened her eyes again, to be sure that she really was alone. When she opened them what she saw was so hideous that her cries woke the whole neighbourhood. In no time two or three police patrol cars had gathered beneath her apartment in the block where she lived. The blue lights of their sirens reached the fourth floor of her apartment. They blinked slowly on the main wall of the sitting room, lighting it up. There, written in surgical stitches dripping blood, was a name: FRANKENSTEIN.

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CHAPTER ONE

1

A year and a day later, at dawn on the tenth of February, the young reporter was wandering, drunk, around the large park with the tall trees opposite her apartment. The night before, to exorcise the evil, as she liked to say, she had gone out with some friends to celebrate the dark anniversary of that nightmarish night that had so genuinely changed her life. They must have drunk more than two bottles of tequila. She was stumbling ready to fall. She knew that alcohol was bad for her and that she mustn’t even smell it, but she was the kind of person who did not like to be 7

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controlled and so she took no notice. Besides, she had been through so much in the meantime that she had decided to live by her own rules and to work out her fate alone. At the heart of the matter was the diagnosis she had been given by a quiet, middle-aged neurologist. For a short while he was her lover too, and so she trusted him. She suffered from narcolepsy. An illness that meant she might fall asleep at any time, anywhere, and unfortunately this was not the only thing to disturb the neurons of her brain. Because in her narcoleptic fits she saw nightmares, something like "visions", which became more intense over time and had nothing to do with her condition - her narcolepsy. To get to the bottom of the mystery, these nightmares needed a second diagnosis, more difficult than the first. She was forced to become a kind of guinea pig, to have electrodes put on her skull for long enough to follow the reactions of her brain during her narcoleptic fits, and the nightmarish visions which accompanied them. From these tests they concluded that the part of the brain responsible for dreams was working in her head like a Kalashnikov chemical. It was overloading her with fantastical information. As if her organism was excreting something like a natural hallucinogenic, a human LSD, which had established itself there and was stimulating her already susceptible neurons. And as if all of this was not enough, she needed a third diagnosis, since there was something else which no one could explain. Not even the scientists. These strange visions were not incoherent, like hallucinations interchanging their

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false reality in quantum leaps, but structured, with the mathematical accuracy of Aristotelian logic. Each vision would begin exactly at the point where the previous one had stopped. As if a dark story was unfolding in her mind, with a past, present and future, and she was the messenger who would piece together this ghostly puzzle, to record the story as it had happened, and as it was happening now, in her visions, which seemed more vivid than ever. This story had dominated her life since that evening when she came face to face with that name for the first time, written on the wall of her sitting room in surgical stitches. The name of Frankenstein. Of course, as soon as she woke up in the morning, she concluded in terror that this had to be another vision. Or rather two, the first two visions that she had truly lived through. The first two narcoleptic fits of her life. For with the first light of day she saw that her apartment was as she had left it before sleeping, before slipping into her incurable - as it seemed - illness. There were neither surgical stitches nor broken glass jars nor, of course, blood-graffiti on the wall of her sitting room. The only thing that was real and seemed to have been imprinted on her mind in some sort of flash, between her sleeping and waking, were the blue lights of the sirens of the patrol cars. They really had come to her apartment block. But she did not care to find out why, since she had other questions to solve which concerned her more. Besides, she didn't want to have much to do with her neighbours. Some rude elderly people who seemed to have taken root there. And she was sure the whole building

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belonged to them. She was the only tenant in this group of flats and they showed her their disapproval at every opportunity.

2

Everything had happened so quickly that any other girl of her age could have gone mad. But the young reporter was made of sterner stuff. Her mind, admittedly unusual, was also wily and made her stubborn enough to overcome any difficulty that would have undone the average person, with her dark, and extremely abrupt, sense of humour. The middle-aged neurologist, for example, had fallen in love with her when she herself, off her own bat, made the third diagnosis, as yet inconclusive to the experts. She had sat opposite him in his bourgeois surgery, her arms folded on her chest, and had spoken to him with all the audacity she could muster, and all the arrogance of a first-year medical student attempting a wild diagnosis. "I think I'm suffering from “Frankenstein's disease", she declared. The neurologist looked at her for a while perplexed, but almost immediately burst out laughing. "There is no such disease". The young reporter did not let it go.

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"You'll get into the medical journals. You’ve made an important discovery!" The neurologist suddenly became serious. "Me?" The young reporter at once smiled at him to calm him down, and to stop him getting carried away. "I'm having you on". A fleeting romance followed and ended swiftly due to their difference in age, and not least because the young reporter now had other things on her mind to preoccupy her and from which no one could extract her. Essentially, all her passions were one. One myth to spark her imagination, and to which she had decided to dedicate her life. A chimera, a search for the hidden truth of the larger myth around life, death and ultimately, resurrection. The secret of eternal life. And this myth was none other than that of Frankenstein. Perhaps his name was not actually written on the wall of her house in surgical stitches. Nor, perhaps, did that beast exist in the real world, in the one she encountered in her small flat. Perhaps everything was a foul trick of the mind, as the middle-aged neurologist had explained to her, and in narcoleptic fits it overloads some patients with a hallucinogenic chemical, enough to make them see visions and lose the distinction between reality and fantasy. But from another point of view, this illness, these visions, even this strange hallucinogenic chemical, had chosen her. There was no doubt that they were all telling her some story in their own nightmarish way, a story that was, in any event, unique.

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She was now convinced that when she had learnt the whole story, right to the end, she would be the only mortal to know it. She would in other words have discovered how to release humanity from death. And this because in the year that had passed since then she had researched the myth of Frankenstein more than anyone had before, and had come to the conclusion that it was not a fairytale, as was believed until now, but the true story of a group of intellectual alchemists, founded by the young doctor Victor Frankenstein, who in 1817 had managed to overcome death, using the secret powers of electricity, and to bring the dead back to life. These sorcerers of eternal life, the old alchemists, still lived today. They were around her somewhere and were waiting for the right person to appear. They had been looking for two centuries. And that person was her. She was ready to find them. To meet them. And why not, to live forever too.

3

For something of such cosmic proportions to occur, it was not enough for her to be an average person, with the behaviour and ease of youth, which in any case did not particularly satisfy her.

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She had often thought that she was wasting precious time in things that bored her unbearably and wore her out daily. Now she wanted one goal. One holy grail. And she would find it even in hell, since she knew now that too much kindness irritated her. She preferred straightforward, sincere people. She had no problem with each person's idiosyncrasies, nor with their choices. Even if they liked collecting human skulls. As long as they didn't pretend to be something they weren't. Besides, she had come to the conclusion that man, as an entity, is a vessel governed by the tri-polar principle of mind, body and spirit. When they are united, they become one unique being, and they create the real, unified human. A spiritual Argonaut of the universe, but one who also needs some kind of material key to arrive there. Something, perhaps, like the alchemical power of electricity. If this was correct, she would conquer it. In every way possible. She would go into the circle of alchemists, who live eternally and observe humanity. And sometimes they even determine its course. Of course, she had to be careful, since she knew that history repeats itself every so often, and she did not want to end up being burnt like a witch in a square. It would be better for her to behave like the girl next door, who liked dark stories with ghosts and beasts. That way she would make her investigation unobtrusive, feigning innocence, and hiding its much more serious goal. The time had not yet come to reveal it to others in all its philosophical dimensions. She would only frighten them, and they would bear her a grudge in the most accursed way.

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More than anything, they would want - as always - their share of the discovery.

4

The first thing she did to muddy the waters a bit and to carry out her investigation about the Frankenstein myth discreetly - the myth, that is, that most others believed it to be, though she knew now that it was a real story - was to change her appearance. She seemed very serious for her age, and this seriousness created distance, something which did not suit her. Like the reporter that she was, she would try to interview everyone who knew something, irrespective of their level of education or whether they were rich or poor. Besides, with the narcoleptic fits she had started to get used to the idea that she would be living in at least two worlds. In the fantasy world of her visions, which might be nightmarish, but provided her with rare information for her investigation, and in the real world, which often seemed to be more nightmarish, but which certainly also concealed important information. So, since she was going to change her appearance, she did it radically. With a change that she would never have dared in the past. It wouldn't have even crossed her mind.

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She decided that those girls who are crazy about gothic books and films were just the thing for her. Without much thought, she cut her hair short, almost like a boy, and spiked it, nail-like, on her head, dyeing it a platinum blonde which seemed adolescent and modern. She started wearing black eye shadow and black lipstick, to give a permanently melancholy look, with a light, white powder on her face to give her an otherworldly appearance. She emptied the cupboards of all her clothes with the ease of a rich kid, threw them into the rubbish and replaced them directly - using some money she had saved with black, gothic clothes and off beat accessories. A pair of towering black platform shoes with metal taps - which looked more like army boots than girls shoes - rounding things off. But it would take more than that for her to get all the information she wanted from the fans and passionate followers of strange, supernatural stories. They weren’t people she knew or had ever had any contact with before, so they would have to get to know her before she could become part of their circle. Her first thought was that she could gain their trust by creating a blog on the internet, which she did fairly easily on her own, calling it, naturally, "The Frankenstein Disease". In no time at all, in just one week, she had more than three thousand followers, and her first admiring fans, some of them already asking urgently to meet her. There was really nothing to it, more than telling the story and sharing on her blog those first two nightmares of the ninth of February, with the surgical stitches and the beast.

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The other way to boost her popularity with the ardent goths, and also to make ends meet - since she had to work somewhere to earn money and on no account did she want to lose her job as a reporter on the local TV station - was to tell her boss, the local media mogul, that she would no longer be covering anything other than stories relating to the paranormal. She would need to persuade him that this was just the thing to boost the ratings and increase the income to his local station. If he could leave her alone to do her job. And, compensate her, perhaps, with a small increase in salary. The media mogul was a greedy old man who insisted on dyeing the few hairs remaining on his head a chestnut brown, which ran as soon as he began to sweat. He seemed interested, and provided her with a camcorder to record any stories she could get. But he refused to give her any other support, whether technical or physical. And a pay rise was out of the question. The young reporter knew that at least she would be allowed to do what she wanted, so she accepted his offer and kept her expenses down to the minimum. To earn a bit more, she used the same camcorder for all the videos she shot for her blog, and charged all the recording expenses to the local station. She overcharged as much as she could, to supplement her small wage.

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5

The fact was, she worked very hard and passionately. Day and night. With no time off. By the end of one year she had managed to gather an astonishing amount of information about the myth of Frankenstein. Things that had never been spoken about until now, and that probably confirmed what she had always maintained. That it was in fact a true story. So she was rewarded with a double success. Her program on the paranormal on the local TV station exceeded every expectation in its ratings, making her something of a local star reporter. Of course, her beauty contributed too, in combination with the gothic style that she had adopted, making the adolescent audience go crazy, bringing in adverts and income to the old, orange-haired media mogul. He now refused even more obstinately to increase her salary, boldly asserting that she would have achieved nothing without him, even though he hadn't lifted a finger to help. Her most runaway success, however, was on the blog, where she uploaded all her best videos, to infuriate the local media mogul. He couldn’t stop her doing it since he had made no work contract or agreement, to avoid paying her national insurance. He was frantically searching for a way to stop these free transmissions of hers, which he thought were depriving

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him of income from advertisements. As if her blog belonged to him as well as everything else. The young reporter ignored him and carried on passionately with her investigations, with the result that her blog with the strange name “The Frankenstein disease” began to get tens of thousands of visits every day. She was being sent information and every kind of story about the myth of Frankenstein from all over the world, in an astonishing stream which she could hardly manage to process. Of course, the first pieces of information were already accessible to anyone in a library. To anyone, at least, who wanted an initial understanding of what had actually happened at the time, that led to the development and writing of the legend for the first time. The myth of Frankenstein was contrived and written by a nineteen year-old English girl, Mary Shelley, the daughter of a radical political philosopher, William Godwin and of a pioneering - for her time - feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft, who unfortunately died a few days after the birth of her daughter Mary, leaving behind another daughter, Fanny Imlay, from her first marriage. Mary's father remarried Mary Jane Clairmont, who also had two children, Charles and Claire, from her first marriage. Early on in Mary’s life she began her great romance with the poet Percy Shelley, who was already married to Harriet Shelley, with whom he had a son, Charles. Two years later, however, Harriet drowned mysteriously in the Serpentine in Hyde Park, while her son Charles died a little later, also mysteriously. Around the same time, Fanny Imlay, the step-sister of Mary Shelley, committed suicide.

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Mary and Percy Shelley, now married, went together to Switzerland, where they stayed in Lord Byron's villa, along with his secretary, the young doctor John William Polidori. After a tremendous storm that lasted days and confined them to the villa, they decided, accepting Byron's challenge, to each write a horror story to get over their boredom, at least until the howling storm allowed them to leave the villa again. Thus Mary Shelley wrote "Frankenstein" and John William Polidori "The Vampyre". Soon after, the novel "Frankenstein" was published anonymously. Everyone, however, thought it was the work of Percy Shelley, since he was already a famous poet and intellectual in England. Immediately after, "The Vampyre" was also published, but as a work of Lord Byron. Polidori strongly contested this and began judicial proceedings, since the work was his, but then he was found dead shortly afterwards in unclear circumstances, at just twenty six years of age. Lord Byron fled to Greece to avoid the scandal. He too died, suddenly, as if from a curse that seemed to have already begun to hound them. Mary Shelley, despite all this, managed to put her name to the next edition of "Frankenstein", and thus the work now definitively belonged to her. This was the last good thing that happened in her life. Immediately afterwards there began for her an even more accursed dance of births and deaths. She had her first child with Percy Shelley, a girl who died after a few days. One year later they had a second child, William, who also died, three years later. Mary, now desperate, gave birth to a third child, a girl whom they named

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Clara Everina and who also died in unclear circumstances, just like the two previous children, one year later. Shortly afterwards her husband, Percy Shelley, drowned, on a sea journey somewhere off the Italian shores, and she never saw him again. Not even as a corpse, since they buried him secretly and without her consent in Rome. Her father William Godwin also died unexpectedly. Mary, utterly crushed, shut herself away in her house in England, never to come out again. In the end she died too, alone, on a terrifying night in 1851, when an electrical storm had broken out in London, just like that of 1817 which had forced them to shut themselves in Lord Byron's villa in Switzerland. Unfortunately, she carried with her the secrets of all the deaths. This was about as much as the world knew of the story of Frankenstein and of those who had contributed, or had been part of its creation, whether intentionally, or by chance. But the young reporter realised pretty quickly that all this was nothing more than a recording of births and deaths, albeit with an added dose of mystery. Of course, people were not focussing on the birth of the myth, which was at the heart of her own research. Nor its consequences, which might be in evidence to this very day. What if, for example, those old alchemists had discovered the key to eternal life through the transformational power of galvanism, and they only used the myth as an allegory, to be unlocked and understood in the future, but only by the initiated. That would make all the sudden deaths occurring at such lightning speed very suspect, suggesting more of an escape than a death.

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Or they could be explained in another way. Perhaps some of these people had contrived their own deaths, in order to cover their tracks and be forgotten, so they could live a new life. After all, they would have to remain anonymous, to change identity and nationality at will and generally to pass unnoticed if they were to go on living forever. The young reporter had a presentiment that they were all still alive. And the research she had done so far made her certain that very soon she would find them.

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The true story of Frankenstein was indeed very different. What had been published up until now was intended to be deliberately misleading so as to confuse reality with myth by turning the things that really happened at that time into an imaginary novel. As her investigation continued, she realised that the novel itself was written in symbols that, interpreted by someone in the know, would lead on to a different truth. For example, Mary Shelley and her husband, the poet Percy Shelley, certainly did maintain a close friendship with Lord Byron and they did visit him often in his mansion in Switzerland, the famous Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva.

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But as far as she could see, that was where the truth ended. Because the key figure in all these encounters was in fact the young doctor, Victor Frankenstein, who really had been alive at that time, and was an actual person, unlike everyone else in the story of Frankenstein. In no way was he simply the imaginary hero of a novel. Also real and, in fact, playing a significant role in the aristocratic society of the time, were the parents of Victor Frankenstein, his father Baron Alphonse Frankenstein and his mother Caroline Beaufort, as well as his little brother, William Frankenstein, while surely the imaginary figure was in fact John William Polidori, who seems to have been brought into the myth to conceal the identity of their real friend and companion, Victor Frankenstein. Mary Shelley’s brilliant idea of representing them all as the imaginary heroes of a novel, concealed secrets that had to remain tightly sealed within a close circle of intellectual aristocrats, who had already dedicated their lives to the more sacred goal of delivering humanity from death. And for this goal they were already prepared, at least on a technical level, since Shelley was a fanatical follower of the theories of Luigi Galvani. He had studied them closely and passionately believed in their practical application. The vast estates of Lord Byron, who strongly supported anything that might overcome mortality - which seemed to him and to everyone else unbearable, both for philosophical and practical reasons - provided Percy Shelley with all the equipment he needed to convert, along with Mary Shelley and Byron himself, the labyrinthine basements of the mansion on Lake Geneva into a huge workshop of galvanism and alchemy.

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Electrical batteries, which Byron's close friend Alessandro Volta had invented, dominated the space like huge black buildings. The most important link in all this - the most decisive for what would happen next - was the young doctor Victor Frankenstein, whose aristocratic provenance would protect them from any likely slander. They had chosen him because of his firm views on everything that was beyond the physical, that overtook the physical and defied logic. And especially, on account of his unbelievable - for his age - knowledge of medical matters, galvanism and alchemy. He seemed to them to be the most suitable man for the job. That is, for the practical application of the enlightened theories of electricity on the human body. For the renaissance that it might be able to bring to humanity. And ultimately, for the Promethean linking of these theories to God, and resurrection from the dead.

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It would have been fairly difficult not to choose this young genius, who combined the beauty of mature adolescence with an innate knowledge and perception of the

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world, and all the things surrounding us that we cannot understand. For Victor Frankenstein himself things seemed simple and accessible, even when they were apparently invisible. It was as if he could just look at something and it would immediately unveil its secret dimensions, not only in the present, but in everything that would be discovered and said about it in the future. Electricity, for example. For Victor Frankenstein all its capabilities were still obscure, and certainly beyond the physical. It would take many experiments to unveil them, and the tacit acceptance of all the hermetic texts of the great medical philosophers - Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus and Paracelsus. And there was of course that sacred mineral, whose value had been forgotten over the centuries, but which must be at the beginning of everything if their experiments were to succeed. The amber elektron, as the real father of electricity, Thales, had named it. The young doctor Victor Frankenstein had explained all this to Lord Byron and the Shelleys from the outset. He insisted that if they wanted his support in creating a god, he would have to have complete freedom of thought and action, even if this went beyond the conservative morals of their time concerning life and death. The truth is that he met with no opposition from them. The Shelleys and Lord Byron were themselves pioneers, and confident in the importance of their enterprise. They quickly and very generously gave him every assurance of their faith in him.

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For a start, Lord Byron's mansion now became the home of Victor Frankenstein. He lived there permanently with all the comforts that his aristocratic habits demanded and including a dozen trusted servants whom he had hired personally - at Lord Byron's expense of course - from among the poor inhabitants of the small town on Lake Geneva. And particularly people who had no family and who tended to live alone. They grew attached to him in time, since he provided them with work and a relatively comfortable life in the Villa Diodati, which in normal circumstances would have been inconceivable. For a while the doors of the mansion remained open at night, since Victor Frankenstein personally supervised and collected - and always at night - all the valuable materials he needed, which arrived from all parts of the world, to equip himself for his experiments, without forgetting, wellmannered as he was, to thank Percy Shelley, who was already in charge of ensuring a constant and unrestricted power supply for his experiments, with the two huge batteries that dominated the basements of the villa. The constant comings and goings ended finally when the last reactant arrived, after many delays, and after being transported firstly by sea from Greece to Italy - and the bad weather did not favour these journeys - and then by road to Switzerland. Victor Frankenstein had been most anxiously awaiting it, since it was the most crucial material of all. Crude, ancient, unprocessed amber from Greece, the homeland of Thales himself.

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8

And here there was a gap in the young reporter's information, which she had not managed to fill in with the facts. Neither with what she had been sent on her blog, nor with the occasional snippets of information sent to the television station that the local media mogul saw fit to pass on to her, after deliberately keeping it from her until she had to beg for it. Such was the young reporter's passion for the truth about the Frankenstein myth that she had gone so far as to beg the man whom she had actually helped, by bringing in so much money from the advertisements on her program. Of course she knew that in time the gap would be filled with information which sooner or later she would gather. But for now there were other, more practical matters preoccupying her. Her head was about to split. The influence of the tequila she had drunk at the anniversary party had begun to

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change from a merry drunkenness to nasty bodily symptoms, with no indication of how they would develop. Because of her narcoleptic fits she was forbidden to drink, as the middleaged neurologist had told her in no uncertain terms. The young reporter was still tripping over. With every step she felt her head hurting more. She sat on a bench in the large park with the tall trees. It would shortly be dawn, and the morning chill would perhaps clear her head and help her get her information in order. What she knew for sure was that from the very day that Lord Byron's villa was equipped with everything that the young doctor Victor Frankenstein had asked for, a series of murders had begun in the small town on Lake Geneva. In time, these became more frequent and also more extreme. Several inhabitants of the small town had disappeared, leaving bloodied garments behind, or pieces of their nails and teeth - indications of violent struggles with their murderer. This murderer seemed merciless, uninterested in how old his victims were. He killed adolescents and the elderly, men and women with the same ease, and managed furthermore to make them vanish. It was as though he was gathering them all together somewhere, in some macabre, hidden collection. His frenzy and sinister fervour were such that in no time dozens of people had disappeared. Their corpses couldn’t be found, which made the remaining inhabitants of the small town on Lake Geneva even more outraged. It made them act with equal violence, taking the law into their own hands.

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The people’s suspicions turned immediately to their aristocratic neighbours, since all the night-time comings and goings, and equipment being delivered under a veil of secrecy - which was in any case impossible to maintain in such a small place where every whisper could be heard - had created a palpable sense of fear and suspicion, which needed little to erupt into violence. All the victims came from the same social class - that is, they were poor people, unprotected by the establishment, and with a history of oppression by the aristocracy. And so, one evening, the people living around the lake took their revenge. Not just for these recent murders, but for the past and for their ancestors. With no warning, they burned down Lord Byron's villa and violently drove out its inhabitants. What happened next was already well known to the young reporter. Lord Byron hid himself and died mysteriously in Greece, Shelley drowned off the shores of Italy and was buried hastily and unlawfully in Rome, and Mary Shelley returned to London and shut herself away at home, where she died a few years later. According to the myth - and as far as the young reporter was concerned this was true, and she based her whole investigation on it - the young doctor Victor Frankenstein had managed to escape and was still alive today, keeping with him, for two centuries now, the secret of eternal life. In the end the young reporter's drunkenness prevailed over her headache and she fell asleep on the bench in the large park with the tall trees opposite her flat, exposed to the morning chill which had covered the park with fog.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Costas Zapas is an author and film director, born in Athens, Greece. Named by Cineuropa as "one of the most outstanding directors of contemporary auteur cinema" and by the Guardian as "one of the main protagonists of the burgeoning Greek new cinema wave", he is one of the most original auteur directors in Europe. His feature film "Minor Freedoms" was financed and coproduced by Lars von Trier’s production company Zentropa. His first novel was published in 2001 to critical acclaim in Greece. “Frankenstein REC” is soon to become a feature film by Minus Pictures.

For more information, visit our site www.frankensteinrec.com www.amazon.com/dp/B00LBIAMV2 Follow updates twitter.com/FrankensteinREC www.facebook.com/FrankensteinRec

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