Monster

Chapter 7 - The Time Has Come

The funeral was beautiful. The room was filled with white flowers, people whose lives She and Her work had touched, and the sermon on the beauty of life swelled through the space. The funeral was also awful. The room was filled with reporters and the suffocating scent of flowers, and the sermon was unnecessary for a woman who believed God was nothing more than a socio-psychological construct created in order to find comfort and sense in a scary and confusing world.

The reception at our home was much better. While the funeral had been filled to the brim with people She'd never met, the after-party, as She would have called it, was for friends and the acquaintances we'd known personally and trusted. Her favorite former students, all of them successful doctors, scientists, and researchers in their own right, came to reminisce fondly about the demon professor who pushed them to greatness. Her colleagues who joked about how She had shown them up at every turn but damn if they hadn't basked in the glow of Her brilliance. Just being around my Goddess brought a sense of awe and wonder to one's life.

Several people mentioned "my father," asking how he was doing, giving condolences for his death as well as Francesca's, and frowning while they asked what my plans were now. A few secretive smiles could be seen mixed amongst the sympathetic expressions.

Those were the remaining people who knew. They were the people who'd been there.

I had just ushered the last guest out the door and begun cleaning up the discarded and forgotten champagne flutes when I heard a strange rustling, like paper falling. I stopped and listened for a second, then heard another, quieter, rustling. I followed the sound to the study and opened the door.

Inside I found Dr. Clerval crouched on the floor, trying to sort through what had been a neat stack of papers and was now a disordered pile. I watched for a moment as he hurriedly tried to scan through them, picking one up and flipping it over, then setting it down while he glanced at one in his other hand, muttering to himself the whole time.

"Is there something you need, Clerval?" I asked, my voice level and quiet, but firm.

The man jumped and nearly fell on his ass, his face going from shocked white to embarrassed crimson. I kept my face neutral but leaned against the door frame, my hands in my pockets. He cleared his throat. "I was looking for the documents Dr. Von Stein had promised to give me," he explained, trying to shuffle the papers in front of him back into a stack. He might have had some success if his hands hadn't been shaking.

"What documents would those be? She didn't mention anything of the sort to me," I replied and joined him on the floor. I began picking up the papers, looking at them as I sorted, and saw that they were various reports on Her old cryopreservation work.

As we put them in order, Clerval answered, "The notes from the cryopreservation experiments she did about fifty five years ago. She had made casual mention once that during her leave of absence she'd continued her work in secret, and that those notes were the only ones never published. I had hoped to look over them and see if there is anything useful for my own research."

I knew for a fact that Francesca would never have promised those notes to anyone, least of all a self-important ass like Clerval. She may have mentioned them in passing, but never what they contained or what they were for. Only She, a very few trusted colleagues, and I knew the purpose and results of those experiments.

I was the result of those experiments. And only I knew where those documents were kept – on a long-term archival DVD in a vault in Munich.

I took the papers from Clerval's hands and added them into my own stack, sorting them in like shuffling cards. "What makes you think those particular experiments are useful to you?" I asked casually, glancing at his face. A slight flush crept up his neck.