Mommy's Little Monsters

Dr. Sawbones

They were my greatest creations. Well, they still are, I suppose. Of all my attempts at life they're the only ones that survived. And how she loved me for them. She adored me.

When I think of life before her...those cold nights I spent with my experiments, I shudder to think of the life I lead, if you can call it that. I had not known love until that time. We first met in the autumn of 1830 in Edinburgh, Scotland. She found me drunk, half dead in the churchyard with a shovel in my hand. I remember the smell of her perfume and the touch of silk, but I still do not remember how we returned to my laboratory. When I woke up, the room was filled with moonlight. I was cleaned up and had been put to bed. A magnificent woman stood before me dressed in the finest clothes I had ever seen. She had her back to me and was staring intently out my window. I began to sit up and speak, but she turned to me a silenced me.

I lay still until she turned back to me and smiled softly. "You are not much for the Resurrectionist career, my friend."

I knew what she meant. I was horrible at it. I used to be part of a gang of them. They could knock out a body in less than an hour, but I was always the one slowing them down. It was my job to fill the grave back in and make it look like no one had ever been there, but the bobbies always knew, and soon they found our trail and I was cut. My supply of bodies was shut off, and my income had shriveled up. I was left to the bottle with nothing to show for it.

I sat up in bed and saw a crystal decanter of brandy on my table. The piece was so immaculate and the matching glass was so divine that they looked out of place in my little hovel. I drank heartily and in no time had drained the finery. I remember that my vision was blurred, but I watched the figure dressed in blue wander around the room.

"Do you consider yourself a 'modern Prometheus?'" she asked me.

"What?"

She turned towards me. "You've read Frankenstein, haven't you? Or at least you've heard of it. I dare say that this is precisely what I pictured his own laboratory would look like." She stared at my wooden slab of a medical table and the mismatched wires that hung from the open skylight. Have you been successful?"

I sobered up very quickly at that moment. She knew what I was trying to accomplish. No, I could not read, but I knew exactly who Dr. Frankenstein was. I had heard this story told and retold since the novel was published. I was enamored with Galvanism. In my younger days, I had gone to an exhibition with my father. A man's newly dead corpse had been on display, propped up inside a wooden crate, skin pulled back and nerves exposed; a generator had been set next to him. The medical man standing next to the box swore that, through the science of Galvanism, the dead could be reanimated. I remember being so enthralled as the spark flew in every direction off that generator, like fireworks. The probes were shown to the crowd and then touched to the exposed nerves. Women shrieked and men cried out as the dead man's arm raised towards the onlookers. The probes were touched again to the man's arm and it bent at the elbow; again and it straightened and fell to his side. I was a believer from that day onward, and I had spent every available moment on attempting to recreate the mystery that had been described in literature and had been proven by science. Mostly I experiment on animals I found in the streets, but occasionally I was able to conduct a trial or two on a human body.

The woman sat in a hard wooden chair across from me now as she waited for her answer. And I grew hot and embarrassed as I gave it to her.

"Not yet, madam."

She nodded and turned her eyes downcast. "Pity," she said. "How long have you been researching this particular topic?"

"Almost three years now, Madam."