Return of the Wolf Man (43 page)

As if that weren’t fascinating enough, the letters also discussed two wayward experiments of Frankenstein’s. One was a man built from the bodies of the dead and brought to life by bolts of lightning. The other was a woman, a fresh cadaver that had been revived in a similar fashion, with one difference: in her skull was a brain that had been artificially created in a laboratory.

Over the years, the baroness wrote that she’d heard stories of the whereabouts of the man, whom she referred to as the Monster. But of the man-made woman, whom she called the Monster’s Bride, there were no stories. As far as she knew, the body remained where she had last seen it, buried in the rubble of the destroyed laboratory. And she had no idea where her husband’s notebook had ended up, the journal that recounted the step-by-step creation of both the Monster and his Bride.

An artificial man and woman,
Glendon thought,
made when modern surgery was still young.
The genius behind it must have been extraordinary. The things that could be learned from those notebooks and those remains would be incalculable.

Glendon looked again at the vast collection in the darkened room. He gazed at the skulls and the weapons, the gems and masks, the oddities and curiosa. The remains of the Monster or his Bride belonged here. So did the journal of Dr. Frankenstein.

The semester was ending soon. Though the baroness had not said exactly where her husband’s laboratory was, she had described the terrain precisely.

Like his grandfather, Wilfred Glendon III lived to solve scientific mysteries. And he knew without a doubt that he was about to embark on one of the greatest scientific treasure hunts of all time.

To be continued . . .