Peculiar Tales Read Online Free PDF Page A

wanting to get the whole thing off my chest for a long time. Why not? I’m getting pretty sick and tired, I can tell you, of sneaking around like this, reduced to playing these two-bit carnivals. God—you know how long it’s been since I had a girl ? I don’t mean that way, I mean a regular girlfriend? I don’t want to tell you!”
    That was too bad, too, because he was a pretty good-looking kid, like I been saying.
    When we got back to the carnival, the kid took me behind the tent where he’d shown me the monster. There was a pre-war Buick parked there and a trailer. As we entered the latter, I asked, “Your pal Frankenstein live in here, too?”
    “Hell, no. He couldn’t get through the door even if he wanted to, and, besides, he leaks all the time and stuff comes off him. And, Jesus, if you knew what he smells like. Naw. I got him fixed up with a cot behind the stage with a rubber sheet and all and a couple a buckets.”
    “Nice little set-up you got here,” I said, looking around. And he did, too. Kind of like a serious college student’s den. There were books everywhere, on shelves, in stacks, piled on the furniture. Really old books, too. Big things with crumbling leather covers and brass clasps and everything. Besides the books, there were rolls of parchment and sheets of manuscripts, all of which looked really old, too.
    “Take a look back here,” he said, leading me into the rear of the trailer.
    “Say, this is pretty impressive,” I said and meant it. If he was a student, he must’ve been a conscientious one, lugging a whole chemical laboratory around with him like that. God knows what all the stuff was ‘cause I didn’t. To me it was just a complicated maze of test tubes and beakers and flasks and bottles and curly glass tubes. There were alcohol burners under some of the flasks in which gruesome-looking liquids were bubbling and fizzing. It all looked exactly like the mad scientist’s laboratories you see in the serials.
    “What’s all this in aid of?” I asked. “Prohibition was repealed twenty years ago.”
    “Naw...I gotta make the stuff that keeps my friend going. It’s pretty complicated.”
    “Looked to me like the only thing that’d keep him would be about ten gallons of embalming fluid.”
    “It wouldn’t do any good,” he said as he pulled a heavy book from under a stack of papers and handed it to me. I opened it and looked at the first page. The paper was soft and linen-like. While it was still white, it felt old. I knew that paper like this hadn’t been made in a long time. The words “Das Tagebuch und die Aufzeichnung der Versuche von Victor Frankenstein, 1810-1816” were handwritten in ink that’d turned rusty with age. I flipped through the pages. They were filled with a crabbed, spiky-looking script, page after page of it, broken up with scientific formulas, drawings and sketches, mostly anatomical and some of them pretty nasty-looking, I can tell you.
    “You see,” he said, taking the book away from me, “once the secret of creating life had been discovered, the secret of immortality soon followed. Unfortunately, the results were, well, pretty appalling.”
    “You mean that thing...?”
    “Yes. Unfortunate...but now you can see why I must care for the poor fellow? I feel as though he’s my responsibility. After all, if it hadn’t been for that terrible experiment...”
    If he’d been telling me all this back in the tavern, I would’ve been insulted that anyone’d consider me such a low-grade moron as to think that I’d swallow even a word of such a tall tale... but here, in the gloomy recesses of the trailer, that looked like the cell of some medieval monk, surrounded by bubbling flasks and antique books... and with the memory of that inhuman horror in the tent...well, I have to admit I was getting kind of caught up in the con. I mean, if he was pulling some kind of scam, it was well worth the price of admission, whatever it was going to be. There was