A Mortician's Dream
What if your great uncle was Jack The Ripper, and he had an ulterior motive? Victoria Frankenstein explores a well-hidden scientific journal found in her mother's basement. Word Count: 1313
“Please state your name and date of birth for the record.”
“Victoria Frankenstein. 13th December, 1987.”
“Why, Miss Frankenstein, did you create The Monster?”
Victoria always had a fascination with the dead. Mother Frankenstein stated it must run in the family. She never quite knew what her mother really meant.
This was until a short time before Victoria sat down at her cluttered workbench in the dark, overcrowded basement filled to the brim with all the ridiculous things her mother had hoarded for over forty years. It was evening time, with nothing but the dim, orange light of a faulty table lamp lighting her work.
“…another body missing vital organs has been found along the river Thames…” the crackling radio resonated through the quiet basement. She paused her work to tune the radio — cadavers around South East London had been turning up with their organs or limbs surgically removed and pieces of flesh meticulously cut away. How brilliantly fascinating, as Victoria had thought.
Six months before Victoria constructed her nightly routine of sitting at the quiet workbench for hours every night, working on her latest project, her mother died. It was to be expected — she was frail and in a hospice by then. Her last words had been, “Make me beautiful for my next life, my darling daughter.”
The next time Victoria saw her was on her table. There was something eerie about gluing her mother’s eyelids shut.
After Mother Frankenstein’s funeral, Victoria returned to her childhood home. She had to get everything in order. It had been left in a state once her mother had been moved into hospice. Victoria was to spend a few days sorting through her basement of mismatched collections.
The Frankenstein Family were strange, to put it lightly. Everyone were trained doctors, but most of them ended up as medical examiners, or in Victoria’s case, a mortician. No-one really acted they way they should. There was something fundamentally wrong with each of them…they must’ve been born with a screw loose.
While Victoria sorted through the generations of faded, damp paperwork, she discovered a musty, leather-bound journal stuffed into a crevice of the basement wall. This house had been in the family since the Victorian times — it was hers now, and with no other family to lay claim to anything left here, she supposed this peculiar journal was hers now too.
Victoria became utterly fascinated with the contents — freakishly so. It was dated 1888, from her ancestor — a however-many-great uncle — Victor.
Victor Frankenstein was obsessed with creating life from the deceased. He, again, a doctor-turned-undertaker, studied and notated detailed experiments on the matter. Victoria mulled over the journal that night until the small hours of the morning.
After finding a few familiar names, notable dates, all scribbled down into this barely-legible journal, Victoria spent the night researching. She discovered her family’s secret — she was the great niece of the infamous Jack The Ripper. All hopes of organising Mother Frankenstein’s house had just shattered — she was unequivocally obsessed with these brilliant experiments, just as her ancestor had been.
The journal seemed to switch something on in Victoria’s brain, turning the couple of already-loose screws a little looser. In fact, by the time the police discovered her and her…creation, they were likely missing entirely.
“Not just any monster…” her head tilted back with a childlike glee as her laughter echoed off of the pale walls of the stuffy, enclosed interview room. The officers’ blood ran cold, the spark of an electrifying chill running down their spines. “…but my mother! She’s been reborn!”
Frightful reports of grave robberies around Whitechapel, and limbless, skinless, organ-less bodies floating about the Thames filled London with terror — Jack The Ripper had fallen upon Whitechapel once more — all while Victoria Frankenstein listened in, hand-stitching veins to flesh, nerves to muscle, and tendons to bone.
Victoria arose with a crude smile, one of achievement. She dodged the clutter — which still remained, despite it being six months since she moved in — finding her way through the dingy basement. She had maintained her regular life, her mortician life, and she remained secluded. No-one knew of her business, and that’s the way she liked it. No-one could impose on her truly fascinating experiments.
“You’ll be right as rain,” she spoke, her tone as cold as the steel of her work table, “just you wait, mother…”
Laying quilts of flesh upon intricate layers of nerves, veins, lymphatic systems, organs, tendons, and muscles, Victoria believed she had outdone herself. She had spent years making corpses as pretty as they had once been in life, and this time she made Mother Frankenstein pretty for her next life — her new life, that she was creating.
Victoria tweaked the mechanics of her great uncle’s experiments, as equipment had upgraded greatly in those hundreds of years, but she followed the detailed steps to a T — even the small experiments on smaller cadavers. The ribbit of a frog would follow her through the basement, as did the sinister meow of a solitary black cat. Experiments that had been successful, but they were not as grand as her pièce de résistance.
Stitching together the last of the flesh over bone, a vicious storm brewed overhead. Victoria questioned whether this was an omen from God — one of dismay or approval, she couldn’t quite tell. She ultimately knew what she must do. According to Victor’s notes, a lightning storm had circled the house during his final experiment, which he had planned to use to course life through his creation’s veins. This was the last of his entries, however. Whether Victor had been successful is what Victoria was to find out.
Having acquired a defibrillator from her family’s funeral parlour, she summoned her own, less volatile, form of lightning — electricity from the steel of her paddles, conducted by the electro-gel she smothered across the stitched chest of her homemade cadaver — her mother’s brain, and the skin, bones, viscera of those younger who passed by her steel work table.
A glint of insanity lit up in Victoria’s pale eyes as she laughed, mouth and eyes as wide as can be while bearing teeth. She pressed the paddles to her curated flesh, and the cadaver jerked and creaked as a fire began to ignite within its veins. Quickly, Victoria rested her ear to the bosom, desperate to hear that thump, like awaiting for the cry of a newborn. Once again, Victoria shocked the corpse. As her ear laid to the chest of Mother Frankenstein’s new body, the thump…thump…thump…of new life beating within this once-dead heart resonated through her skull.
Maniacal laughter echoed through the damp space that was Mother Frankenstein’s basement. Victoria took a step back in admiration, as the cadaver began to twitch, creak, moan, and groan.
Victoria had been careful, making sure that the bodies were not recognisable, however she was so wrapped up in the details of a Victorian experiment, she had completely forgotten one thing — DNA. They traced every single corpse, all ninety-seven of them that had washed up on the banks of the Thames, to Frankenstein’s Funeral Parlour, and straight to Victoria Frankenstein herself.
Thump, thump, thump…but it wasn’t the heart of Victoria’s creation this time, rather the firm fist of a Detective Inspector upon the front door. She had mere moments with her newborn Mother before they invaded the house, finding her cradling her experiment, who groaned and wheezed with new-found life.
As the police shackled Victoria and tore her away from the bosom of Mother Frankenstein, the monster cried out with a raspy, sinister voice, “Daughter…” leading Victoria to laugh with absolute glee that her and Victor’s experiment had worked. She had created life from the deceased.
Though, what would happen to Mother Frankenstein now?