The Frankenstein Testament

Belfast, North Ireland, December 1839

The dog looked like it was dead. It did this when there was nothing around it to stimulate what remained of its decayed senses. It just lay there inside its cage, inanimate. Its milky white eyes, cloudy with corruption, were open but unseeing. A slight reflexive movement of the chest imitated breathing but the guttural rasping that accompanied it spoke of lungs ruined and rotten.

The dog had been his first experiment and he sometimes chided himself for keeping it. It stank. It was dangerous and it had no real use. Sometimes he told himself it was to study the long term effects of his work but inside he knew that the real reason he kept it was sentimentality.

The dog had once been Bobby, a faithful old Irish terrier that had belonged to his father. At thirteen years old and riddled with arthritis, Bobby had come to the end of his useful life. Despite that, the dog was not ready to die. It had struggled like a demon as he had drowned it in a tin bath full of water.

The scientist looked down at the pair of ragged scars on the back of his left hand and gave a wry smile. Bobby had got his own back. At the conclusion of the reanimation process the dog had started back to life and staggered across the table. He had reached out his arm to stroke the beast and quick as a flash it sank its teeth into his hand, pulling and tearing the flesh and opening twin wounds that had required thirteen stitches.

At first he took this as a sign of success- he assumed that the dog had remembered the last few moments of its life and was trying to continue the struggle- but that conclusion had proved wrong. It soon became clear that the dog's previous pleasant nature was gone and all that remained was base instinct. Worse, its viciousness had increased and all intelligence beyond base cunning erased.

All his subsequent experiments had resulted in the same disappointment. What he had achieved so far was reanimation rather than resurrection and it galled him. He had performed a miracle yet he was no closer to his actual goal. What he so longed for was still as far away as ever. The creatures he created were driven by vicious, feral instincts that were more savage than anything they had possessed in life. They appeared to have no memories of their previous life. All personality was gone. Their eyes were empty, pitiless and without recognition. Had he been a religious man he would have said they were soulless. To make things worse the decomposition process continued, albeit at a slower pace.

His eyes flicked towards the large wooden barrel that sat in the corner of the room. For several seconds he gazed at it, his eyes filled with a desolate look. A single tear sprang from the corner of his right eye and trickled down his cheek.

With a sudden surge of frustration and anger he banged his fist on the wooden table beside him, sending a tinkling rattle through the glass apparatus on it. Arrangements and stacks of glass vials, flasks and tubes covered the table, each vessel filled with a luridly coloured chemical liquid and heated from below by oil lamps that made them bubble and fizz. Inside the tubes a chemical reaction was brewing that would reverse the miraculous process that he had invoked to bring his creations back to life from death.

The dog had to go.

He had no choice now. Even keeping it here in his laboratory, caged and under lock and key on the top story of his fashionable town house had been a tremendous risk. Now that his latest experiment had escaped it was completely out of the question. The barrel would have to be moved as well. He could no longer take such risks.

With a sigh he turned away from the dog and the boiling chemicals and poured a measure of port into a Penrose glass from Waterford. The ruby liquid and the exquisitely cut glass glittered and sparkled in the light of the fire and the oil burners beneath the chemicals. He took his drink and went to the window.

Pulling aside the heavy velvet curtain, he gazed out into the night. From the towering heights of the fourth floor of his townhouse he could see right out across the town of Belfast. Gas street lamps illuminated the square below but much of the town was in darkness. The occasional light of a window or a pub dotted the night and over to the west the lights of a vast mill blazed as even now, well after midnight, it continued to churn out unending reams of cotton or linen cloth.

Somewhere out there, in the darkness between the lights, the creature he had created was loose.

God help whoever ran into it.