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fingers found Henry’s throat and squeezed until breath threatened to cease.
    “ What gives you the right to get in the way of my work? You speak of God to a man who abhors the very notion and dismisses religion as no more than a crutch for humanity to lean itself upon in times of woe. How dare you make such assumptions?”
    I cracked Henry’s head down onto the table. His arms flailed upward to stop my assault.
    “ For this, I cannot forgive you, Henry.”
    Another crack. Henry’s arms flailed about more weakly.
    “ Victor, please…I was only trying…”
    Henry’s head came down for one final blow. I felt the crack of the cranium vibrate through my fingers and into my arms. The feeling, at first, was nauseating. When the rivulet of blood pooled in the palm of my left hand, I realized the gravity of my situation.
    Murder.
    “ Oh, Henry,” I whispered, “what have I done?”
    There was no response. I knew there’d be no answer to arise from the lips of the dead. But coiled within the snake of tragedy, a gift was offered up. Henry had rebuffed my notion of life from death, and so it made for a poetic turn of fate that he would become central to that work. Within the ruined skull of the man who was my dearest friend, cooled the brain that would help to prove the Frankenstein Theory not only possible, but factual.
    From death to life.
     

ACT TWO
    The Elixir of Life
     

S I X
     
     
    From life to death. From friend to foe. Henry now lay on my table, his torso split with a textbook Y incision such that he’d become my latest illustrated man. I stood over my once beloved friend, gazing into the maze of intestine and musculature. Tears rained down from my eyes to mix with organ and flesh. Brother to brother, amen.
    “ Doctor,” Igor rasped dark and rough, his voice just shy of failing. “The cathodes are prepared for insertion.”
    I nodded, my eyes refusing to shift from the minutia of organs that had once orchestrated the ebb and flow of my dearest friend’s life.
    “ What was is now…no more.” I proclaimed.
    “ Yes, yes, Herr Frankenstein. Your poetry is as eloquent as it is fitting. But if your plan to send the spark of life coursing through those muscles has any chance of succeeding, we must act now.”
    Igor shoved the cathode paddles before me. I turned to take in the hunched, rat-faced man, his tiny eyes magnified by Fresnel-lens goggles.
    “ Ready yourself,” I whispered. My heart raced with expectation as a thunderous boom bounced off the walls of the laboratory. With each glorious dance of lightning, my machines of destiny promised life and mocked death.
    “ Doctor,” Igor shouted over the crash of thunder, and nodded toward the unmade corpse.
    I snatched the paddles from Igor’s outstretched hands, my thick rubber gloves bringing challenge to the slightest task.
    Another rumble of thunder, this one fainter than the last.
    “ Hurry, Doctor. We’re running out of time.”
    I turned to the table and plunged the paddles on either side of Henry’s motionless heart. Unlike the cadavers from university, Henry hadn’t been drained of blood. The body, being dead a few days, had already ripened, the muscles beyond rigor, and the vitreous thickened.
    “ Doctor,” Igor called out.
    “ Now!” I shouted.
    Fortune favored the moment. As Igor opened the voltage regulator to allow the passage of electricity through the cathodes to the paddles, a wicked bolt of lighting crashed into the iron rods protruding from the castle’s roof. Sparks danced about the laboratory, falling over much of the equipment and even into Henry’s vulnerable body. The slightest scent of cooked meat wafted into my nostrils. I could feel the power surging through the paddles and into the waiting heart, the vibration scintillating.
    The lightning died. The sparks faded. Igor powered down the converter and raced to my side. The festering stench of his foul odor replaced that of the singed flesh.
    “ Anything?” he