Oct 10: FRANKENSTEIN
Frankenstein’s Monster calls Dr. Frankenstein his father, which makes him Dr. Frankenstein’s son. So I don’t wanna hear it.
…
He stands over the city, watching, waiting. Dressed in black and wearing a mask. It’s a city that never sleeps…and ever since he came back from the dead, neither does he.
Below, a scream.
He sets his book aside, Camus’s The Stranger. The streetlights are bright enough for him to read by. He isn’t sure where his father got his eyes, but they aren’t human; they see far better in the dark than human eyes do.
He leaps from building to building. His body still functions far better than those of the mortals below him, even though it is now hundreds of years since his first death. If he believed in the occult, he would have said that Death, having taken him in all his several parts once, had ever since chosen to pass him by—but ironically he does not believe in anything beyond mortality. There always seems to be a reasonable explanation. And yet perhaps reason itself is at fault.
The scream’s echoes seem to leave a trail in the air, a lingering hum.
He looks down upon a scene of tragedy. A figure lies on the ground, being beaten by two other figures carrying baseball bats and wearing steel-toed boots.
He drops down into the alley from above, an action that should have splintered bones and rendered flesh. In a low but unavoidable voice, he says, “So you risk my wrath, do you?”
The two figures shrink back against the brick.
“He killed our mother!”
“You know the law. Either you use the courts…or you face me.”
…
Later his sign—a pair of crossed bolts stitched with black thread—appears against the thick, unending cloud cover, projected from the top of City Hall. The polis, the people, call him. He terrifies them, and still they call. “For no matter how bad Frankenstein may be, he protects us from worse.”
The ways of men are madness. And still he comes.
A cackle of vile laughter echoes across the streets. Tonight there will be lightning…and mad scientists, summoning things far worse than he to reanimate the souls of their dead.
…
This one, I went, “What if I crossed Frankenstein from Penny Dreadful with something like the world of Gotham?“