Frankenstein's Legions (2 page)

‘You’re a thief!’ said the solicitor. It demeaned him, haggling in the street like this, a source of amusement to urchins and passers-by, but he knew Babbage’s yard and workshop held material worth ten times that, even at scrap value.

The scrap merchant looked down on the solicitor from a great height of commercial and moral advantage.

‘That’s rich coming from a land-pirate!’ he said. ‘Anyhow, I’m the only ‘thief’ interested in the deal. Take it or leave it.’

He spoke truth: word had got around and a sulphurous taint hung over 1 Dorset Street and all its appurtenances. Offers for the house and contents had been thin on the ground. What respectable family wished to buy an abode where it was a blessing the walls could not speak?  ‘Crimes against Nature,’ and ‘Unspeakable necrophilic depravity,’ as the judge had termed them, hardly enhanced property prices

Early hopes for some perfumed confirmed-bachelor house-buyer to appear and save the day went unfulfilled (there was never one about when you needed one). Accordingly, winding up Mr Babbage’s affairs had been a tale of woe and robbery and waste.

The hagglers had to leap for their lives as a hackney cab ploughed through without so much as a ‘mind y’backs!’ or flick of the whip. Arrogant prole-aristocrats!

Then, adding insult to injury, in passing it splashed them with mud and probably worse. Yet the indignity seemed strangely appropriate in the circumstances.

‘Done,’ snapped the solicitor. ‘And I damned well have been!’

Beggars (or buggers) could not be choosers—which was an apt epithet. By the time the solicitor’s fees and reasonable expenses were deducted from the proceeds of sale Mr Babbage might find begging his sole career option once his prison term was done.

The scrap merchant spat into his palm and offered to shake on it. The solicitor shrinkingly brushed two fingers past that general direction.

In went the scrap merchants’ street-arabs. Out in due course and in carts came metal components galore, off to be reused or recycled. A short while before they’d been Mr Babbage’s ‘Analytical Engine’: his hope of immortality and the blessing of mankind with mechanical computers.

So that was the end of that for a century or so.

*  *  *

When the sun set, the columns set out. There was no law against daylight movement, but it was for the best.

The Heathrow Hecatomb: a brutal slab of jerry-built concrete, devoid of the slightest humanising touch. Not even a Royal coat of arms graced the gate, for no one on earth, from high to low, wished their name associated with it.

Happily, Nature’s revenge for the blot on the landscape had a head start due to that careless construction. Rain selectively streaked those parts with excess sand in the mix and drove its fingers in. The Hecatomb’s hard edges were already crumbling. Particles of it dissolved down to whiten the dying grass below.

Accordingly, Heathrow Hecatomb wasn’t going to outlive the great Cathedrals it matched in size—but that hardly worried its begetters. It kept people out and other people (sort of) in, and that sufficed. Aesthetic considerations could go hang—and appropriately enough there were gibbets enough atop the place, gibbets so busy there was a queue for their services.

A moat had been started but never completed: the finished structure’s appearance and contents were found to be deterrent enough. Now the demi-ditch was a dog’s graveyard and rubbish-record of every successive inhabitant. Other than in the depth of winter it stunk to high Heaven and glowed yellow-green in the dark.

So, all in all, the Hecatomb was no adornment to Hounslow Heath!  Coaches passing through on the Great West Road put on a burst of speed—or even extra speed.

Because even before the Hecatomb arrived, ‘Heathrow’ had an evil reputation: the haunt of highwaymen and sad wanderers. As the name suggested it was a waste with a road running through it. Few lingered there by night and fewer still with honourable intentions.

Come the Hecatomb in the Year of Our Lord 1823, things soon reverted to business as normal—only more so. The scattered natives (innkeepers and/or misanthropes) barred all doors as dusk fell and then stayed indoors till morning. Highwaymen they could deal with, but now there were stories about escapes…

Unofficial escapes, that is. The regulated kind occurred regularly, as they did this particular night. The Hecatomb’s main doors cracked to spill yellow light onto the heath. There emerged scouts—bona fide human hussars in scarlet and gold—to check the coast was clear. They scattered all over the scene in the interests of thwarting spies and scandal.

Then redcoat infantry—living soldiery with torches blazing—trooped forth to line the first part of the route. It was a sad necessity. Newly Revived recruits sometimes chose their first breath of fresh air as the signal to mutiny, go mad or otherwise malfunction. Recycling body pits awaited them behind the Hecatomb.

Finally, to the tolling of a sombre bell, columns of new Lazarans emerged from the nest; those most complete and with best matched limbs to the fore. Conversely, the more shoddily made ‘Shamblers’ were placed at the back and shot if they could not keep up.

Fife and drum and flag parties proceeded each regiment, manfully trying to add vitality to what painfully lacked it—and to drown out the perpetual groaning.

The Lazarans’ grey uniforms were the least of their differences to the living men shepherding them along. The latter’s pale faces were just the result of lack of sunshine, the former’s the lack of something much more profound.

Down the Great West Road the Legions of the Dead marched to war. From a high window in the Hecatomb their creator watched them go.

*  *  *

At Longford, not a mile off, they were intercepted by emissaries so senior they could stop the column in its tracks. The colonel of the regiment didn’t like that: once you got new Lazarans going it was as well to keep them moving till they grew accustomed to military life.

Yet there was nothing he could do. The seals on the emissaries’ orders left no room for wrangling. The bugle call for halt rang out and most of the Lazarans remembered its meaning.

It was a dangerous moment. The living escorts were ordered to ‘stand ready.’

Meanwhile, the undead looked around and took in what little there was to see. God alone knew what their blank-palette minds thought, for their faces weren’t designed for expression. That quality of serum was reserved for higher grade revivals.

There’d been one occasion—and mercifully only one—when a whole corps had gone berserk and brushed aside their convoy. Acting on herd instinct they’d headed for inhabited areas and it eventually took massed cannon to stop them reaching Hampstead. Army gossip said their commander had been demoted so low he was currently saluting civilians in Shetland.

Praise be, there was no repetition now. Those who’d forgotten the stop signal were clubbed back into line and the ranks redressed with whips. Meanwhile, the emissaries reviewed this guard of no honour.

They picked a few of the best from the front: sturdy near good-as-new revivals, plus some immature specimens from the rear. Ideal candidates to become Ada’s Lovelace’s murderers and Mr Babbage’s bed-fellows. Then the silken strangers left with their selection and that was all the regiment ever knew of it.

 The colonel wasn’t favoured with names or explanations: not even a receipt. Old fashioned courtesy was just another casualty of the ‘Forty Year War.’  Government by dictat was something people gradually got used to: a subset of the purely temporary suspension of democracy.

It didn’t really matter. What did matter now, save winning the War and getting through life still vaguely human?  Besides, the colonel’s command would have bigger gaps than this torn from it soon enough.

‘March on!’

The colonel rode along the column, brandishing his sabre as encouragement —or something. He studied the Lazarans and they studied him.

‘I don’t know what effect they’ll have on the enemy’ he mused, ‘but by God they frighten me...’

It required a brace of ‘examples’ to be made before the regiment complied but eventually the march resumed.

Half a dozen ‘men’ down even before they’d passed Longford. It didn’t bode well.

*  *  *

Unfulfilled omens. Day two’s tally revealed only a couple had slipped away, off to terrorise the English countryside before the Yeomanry or peasantry hunted them down. Not bad considering.

The only fly in the ointment was a tight schedule. The necessary wide berth of London had taken longer than expected, made sticky by blocked roads. Clouds of cattle and sheep, on their way to feed the War just as the regiment was, were easily dispersed, for animals naturally sensed Lazarans and scattered. The curses of military shepherds were nothing to worry about.

Protesting Christians were more of a trial however. At Runnymede they met demonstrators. When they wouldn’t listen to authority or reason, the colonel had to resort to condign measures.

Shooting Quakers he had no problem with. Canting po-faced types for the most part, though the ladies in their prim bonnets excited not only his charity. It was the Catholics the colonel disliked dispersing the rough way. His Aunt had been a Papist and they suffered enough under the Penal laws as it was.

Still, if people put up barricades—even token flimsy barricades—on the King’s highway, they couldn’t complain when His Majesty’s new recruits were sent in. Which was ironic, considering these were the very same creatures the protest was on behalf of. Shocking scenes ensued.

Why, the colonel wondered, did Lazarans want to rape people when, strictly speaking, there was no point?  They were incapable of either pleasure or conceiving children. He sadly concluded it must be something innate in human (or ex-human) nature.

Living troops mopped up any resistance with bayonets and collected the bodies for recycling.

By Kingston the colonel concluded that only forced marches would get them to their ship on time. That meant moving by both day and night and snatched sleep in the saddle for those who needed it. He posted cavalry ahead to warn the natives.

Fortunately, Surrey was mostly heath and sparsely settled once you got past the London sprawl. Very ‘light land’ as surveyors termed it. Local magistrates did a good job and sent word so that minor roads paralleling the main one were cleared. After that, they made good time without further incident.

Though the colonel never knew it, besides the North Downs, where the old ‘Pilgrims’ Way’ brushed the Portsmouth Road, a man ruling an Empire which spanned one third of the globe (though only he recognised his rule) watched them go by.

From a drawing room in Loseley House, a mansion requisitioned from its ancient but ‘unpatriotic’ family, the man trained a spy-glass on the regiment as it shambled through the—now his—hamlet of Littleton. And since no one could see him, he shuddered.

It was imperfect picture in every sense. The elegant mother-of-pearl opera-glasses were not designed for such long-seeing. They gave only a fuzzy image: which given the view was perhaps just as well.

Another thing neither parties knew was that it was from this very regiment the observer had drawn Ada’s assassins and Babbage’s boys. Again, ignorance of the connection was probably for the best and thus bliss.

The peasantry had been recalled from the fields and children from their play. Presently, they huddled behind barred cottage doors and gripped rustic weaponry. The local militia  stood to arms hidden from sight behind a barn. No less frightened, the livestock had scented something and crowded against field boundaries as far away as possible. Yet the sun still shone bright, and wayside wild-flowers abounded. Together, their splendid normality almost overcame the affliction traversing Littleton’s narrow lane. Almost.

As the regiment passed his drive the man had his best view of the drab column, glimpsing details right down to paper-white flesh and dead eyes. Accordingly, the opera glasses were set aside.

‘How did things come to this?’ he reflected. ‘It really is appalling!

But that was mere emotion (high emotion by his standards) and therefore unworthy of him or any man. Plus nothing to do with anything. As he’d famously once said (and shocked his audience): ‘Thought is everything—but also leads nowhere.’

No, civilised minds should transcend first thoughts and come to cooler conclusions, thereby building their house on rock (as Scripture so wisely advised). What did he really think about the unnatural horror show parading before his very window?  Or, broader still, about the world-as-it-was come to see him in all its glory?

Answer came easy, in the form of another of his infamous epithets, said long before but in a similar death-connected context: ‘It is worse than a crime; it is a mistake!’ Which said it all as far he was concerned.

That settled, the man then chided himself that any old world-class intellect could describe the world. That was the easy bit. The point (and problem) was how to change it.

More difficult still, how could just one individual—even an exceedingly clever individual (such as he)—amend things for the better?

And, of course, have monstrous fun at the same time?

*  *  *

It was a quite a trip for name checks. Another important personage happened to see the new-forged regiment too. They crossed paths with Admiral Nelson, (Lord Merton, Duke of Bronte, Knight-commander of Naples, etc. etc.) as boats ferried him in his capsule to HMS Victory and them to their troopship.

Nelson curled his lip at their wafting stench of serum mixed with decaying meat—though, strictly speaking, in no position to cast stones himself.

*  *  *

In Germania the regiment proved its worth.

A stubborn salient of churned mud and rubble still described on maps as ‘The Prince-Archbishopric of Dresden’ was holding up the French armies. Any breakthrough by them there might lead to the recapture of Berlin for the umpteenth time. Occasion, it was decided, for a rare Allied counter-attack.