Frankenstein Lives Again (The New Adventures of Frankenstein) Read Online Free PDF Page B

virtuous, physically perfect, immune to disease, and the recipient of eternal life. The book told how, on one stormy November night, he brought his creation to life with the power of the lightning and his own chemicals and devices.
    “The rest of the puzzle was easily fit together. By now, I knew the events in Mary Shelley’s novel almost word-for-word. I remembered how the Monster, after Victor Frankenstein had refused to grant him an artificially created female, had killed his maker’s loved ones, culminating with Victor’s bride Elizabeth, and how Victor had chased the Monster through Russia, across the Mediterranean Sea, and finally to the North Pole. Captain Walton actually saw the being after Frankenstein perished from overexposure to the elements. He watched as the Monster promised to destroy himself in a blazing funeral pyre, then jumped off his ship to his waiting ice-raft. Walton, of course, was instrumental in recording the facts that eventually became Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein .
    “The important fact here is that I had proven that there was a Victor Frankenstein who had, apparently, created a living giant man... in a laboratory in Ingolstadt. What remained for me to do was to prove the existence of that so-called Monster and that it did, in fact, attain life.
    “And that, my friend,” said Winslow, “is what brought me here.”

    * * *

    Pierre Dupré's face seemed to grow wider as his mind digested the facts in Winslow’s narrative. He stared at the younger man, seemingly trying to decide whether or not to believe him.
    Winslow grinned. “I told you that you would not believe me.” He crushed out his smoldering cigarette butt in the seat’s ashtray. “You probably think I’m mad. If you do, I won’t hold it against you.”
    The Frenchman still looked puzzled. “Mad?” he replied. “No, I don’t think so. Somehow this ‘madness’ seems to make some strangely convoluted sense. Maybe I’ve been hypnotized by the sound of the train wheels or perhaps I’m just gullible. Whichever it is, I’m afraid I believe you. Ha! Perhaps I am the one who has gone mad!”
    The American laughed.
    “But your story is not, obviously, finished,” said Pierre.
    “Not quite,” said Winslow. “You’ve probably guessed by now why I’m here. Yes, I’m going to find that so-called Monster — bring it back to my castle in Ingolstadt, and bring it back to life.”
    Dupré could not remain silent. “But,” he started, “I mean, wasn’t the Monster destroyed by his own hand here in the Arctic? Didn’t he burn himself to death?”
    “He promised to,” said Winslow. “But we don’t know that he did, according to Mrs. Shelley. Somehow, I feel that he would somehow know just how precious his life was — even his artificially bestowed life — and maybe decide to hold onto it, before striking the match that’d doom him forever.”
    “All right, then. Given that the Monster did not commit suicide, as he promised to do in the book, then you must still realize that the Arctic is quite a big place, Monsieur . You Americans have an appropriate expression, something about a haystack and a needle. How do you propose to find your Monster?”
    “First of all, according to Frankenstein’s journal, the Monster simply cannot die, unless he is literally destroyed. That means the cold of the Arctic should do little more than freeze him solid. I believe that the Monster is out there someplace, frozen in a state of suspended animation, waiting for someone to find him. As to just how I'll accomplish that seeming impossibility, that’s where the legend will come into play.”
    “Legend?” asked the Frenchman.
    “There is a legend in these parts,” said Winslow, “that there is some mysterious Ice God who watches over the Eskimos . . . from a tomb of ice.”
    “Ice . .. God?” Dupré's eyes opened wider.
    “A being, or deity if you prefer, so awesome, so enormous, so terrible to behold that no one dares even