Frankenkids

FRANKENKIDS

Other books in the Nightmare Club series

Help! My Brother's a Zombie
Mirrored
A Dog's Breakfast
Guinea Pig Killer
The Wolfling's Bite

THE NIGHTMARE CLUB

FRANKENKIDS

BY

ANNIE GRAVES

ILLUSTRATED BY

GLENN M
C
ELHINNEY

FRANKENKIDS

Published 2012

by Little Island

7 Kenilworth Park

Dublin 6W

Ireland

www.littleisland.ie

Copyright © Little Island 2012

Illustrations copyright © Glenn McElhinney

except house on front cover and pii by Jacktoon

ISBN 978-1-908195-29-6

All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owner.

British Library Cataloguing Data. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Book design by Fidelma Slattery @ Someday

Printed in Poland by Drukarnia Skleniarz

Little Island received financial assistance from

The Arts Council (An Chomhairle Ealaíon), Dublin, Ireland.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For all my pets, past and present — but especially past

A
nnie Graves is twelve years old, and she has no intention of ever growing up. She is, conveniently, an orphan, and lives at an undisclosed address in the Glasnevin area of Dublin with her pet toad, Much Misunderstood, and a small black kitten, Hugh Shalby Nameless.

You needn't think she goes to school – pah! – or has anything as dull as brothers and sisters or hobbies, but let's just say she keeps a large black cauldron on the stove.

This is not her first book. She has written six so far, none of which is her first.

Publisher's note: we did to try to take a picture of Annie, but her face just kept fading away. We have sent our camera for investigation, but suspect the worst.

Look, this is my book and I wrote it, even if the mysterious stranger was the one who told the story … Other people do tell the stories, but I'm the one who writes them down, because I'm the author, and that's what I'm good at –
very
good at, actually.

But I'd better say thanks to my delightful editors at Little Island. And those nice Arts Council people and all. And whoever makes the tea. And the pictures. (They're good, I have to say. Even the one of me.)

And thank you for buying my book. You are clearly a person of exquisite taste.

O
K, you know how it goes. My house. My friends. Sleepover. Everyone tells a story – and it better be scary!

So this night, after someone had told a pretty spooky story (I thought) and we were all just recovering, this sneering voice comes from a corner.

‘Call that a scary story?'

I
love
a good dramatic entrance.

Even
I
jumped a little as a tall boy stepped out of the shadows.

A
strange
tall boy. His skin was pale, marble white, making his yellow eyes and dark red lips stand out. I had to look away. And his voice. His voice …

‘That wouldn't scare pimples off my Aunt Petunia,' he said, smirking.

We made room for the mysterious stranger in the circle of the Nightmare Club and he started to tell his story.

‘You know Frankenstein wasn't the monster?' he said. We all sighed at the same time. (We
knew
that.)

‘Frankenstein was the mad scientist who made the monster. He's the really scary one.
Dr
Frankenstein.'

We settled ourselves down and listened. And this is the story the strange boy told …

O
f course,
Frankenstein
is an old story that's been told to death. Movies. Books. Games. Mash-ups. Costumes. Cereal boxes. Music videos.

It's all fake anyway, right? But it was enough to get my uncle to try his hand at this Frankensteining business.

See, Uncle Fraser was lonely. He was old. He had no one to leave his money to. And he lived in a big old falling-over-all-by-itself house, away from everyone else.

If he hadn't become a mad scientist on his own – people would have invented stories about him anyway.

But that's what he did. He went mad and tried to build himself … a
friend.

I didn't know Uncle Fraser. My family wanted nothing to do with him after that time he tried to chew the tail off our dog, Mr Snookles.

All I have as proof are the stories I've heard. The eyewitness accounts, the newspaper cuttings and the tales whispered by kids in playgrounds.

Uncle Fraser started small, they say. (It's what you do, scientifically speaking, when you're becoming a mad scientist. You start small.)

First you draw plans on paper napkins and roam the streets talking to yourself, smelling like you haven't had a bath in years.

Then you start telling passers-by.

You might yell at an old lady at a bus stop. Or shake a kid outside a corner shop.

It builds your reputation. Word travels fast, and once the world thinks you're a mad scientist, well, the rest is easy.

Uncle Fraser locked himself into his big house as soon as the complaints started.

First it was the town officials asking him to leave the old ladies at bus stops alone.

Then parents worried that shaking their precious children would dislodge a brain cell.

And when the police started asking if he knew anything about dead family pets being dug up from their graves, it was time for Uncle Fraser to retire from public life.

By now Uncle Fraser had collected a
freezer full of dead family pets:

Dogs.

Cats.

Hamsters.

Budgies.

Snakes.

Rabbits.

Parrots.

Weasels.

Tortoises.

Even a monkey.

If I had to guess, the most fun part would be putting things together, inventing the combinations.

Brain of a tortoise.

Body of a hamster.

Hind legs of a small dog.

Front legs of a monkey.

Maybe the tail of a snake.

Trial and error would be the best way.

Then there'd be all that cutting through flesh and sewing sinews. Cobbling muscle and bone together into working order.

At first, nobody noticed anything.

Then the town energy board began to record odd spikes in electricity.

The police got reports of break-ins where the criminal hadn't stolen anything but extension cables had been left plugged in …

Of course it was Uncle Fraser trying to zap life into his budgie-cat-monkey-tortoise.

Or his tortoise-hamster-dog-monkey-snake.

Or his spider-parrot-weasel-rabbit.

And that needed far more electricity than Uncle Fraser had in his own house.

Thanks to those trusty extension cables with their mega-amount of electricity, and an
awful
lot of luck, Uncle Fraser managed it.

Pamela was his first success.

Part parrot, part cat, part monkey.

The electricity coursed through Pamela's body with different parts springing to life faster than others.

Unknown to Uncle Fraser, that night was Hallowe'en.

It was a local Hallowe'en tradition for kids to dare each other to visit the huge house with the crazy old man in it.

And this Hallowe'en was no exception.

As Uncle Fraser spewed electricity into the half-cat, half-monkey with parrot wings, the Landy brothers were creeping up the drive to the house.

They jumped every time a flash lit up the overgrown garden around them.

And then they laughed.

And then they crept a little closer.