HIGH STRANGENESS-Tales of the Macabre by Billie Sue Mosiman Read Free Book Online Page B

through the swells, lulled by an open sea that had not seen a storm in three weeks. The glass stopper from the port decanter rolled across the table like a marble. The Captain fetched i t and settled it into the bottle mouth.
    “ There were all those rumors of an 'experiment.' Dr. Frankenstein upon his death had a trail of gossip tagging at his coat. There were so many of his friends and loved ones who were so brutally dispatched. Strangled, weren't they?”
    Walton knew he must escape this interrogation before too long. He distrusted the dark look in the other man's eyes. If anyone suspected Frankenstein's monster actually existed, a new hue and cry would rise from the superstitious populace. Wh ere the world might wish to kill the devil, Walton hoped to question the creature until he could still all his questions about immortality, and the life waiting on the other side of death that only a man dead made to live again could answer.
    “ There are unf ortunate circumstances in every man's life,” he said finally in rebuttal. “ My own second cousin was knifed in London while on holiday.”
    “ So the stories are untrue — about the monster? They are fabrications?”
    “ They have never been more than that.”
    “ And you we re in the cabin with Frankenstein's body at the last and you did not see a tall substantial person who later leapt onto the ice to be carried away into the distance from your ship?”
    “ If I had, would I not admit it? My men saw all sorts of visions and suffe red innumerable nightmares when for a time we thought we would perish en masse, surrounded by frozen silence, far from home. Even I thought once I saw a veritable flock of black birds rising from behind the cliff of an iceberg. Crows!” Walton rubbed his f o rehead as if to dispel a bad demon camping there. He hoped his performance was believable. He'd not want rumor sailing back with this captain to alert curious explorers to follow him. Word, story, and gossip was like chaff on the wind; it could blow for h u ndreds of miles and put down anywhere.
    “ Yes, well, I understand the strain you and your crew must have labored beneath. I was in the Straits once myself on a long voyage when a typhoon overtook us. The mind plays wondrous games when under threat of annihil ation. Some men claimed an angel with a wing-spread a hundred meters wide swooped down from the top of a monstrous wave and lifted our ship from a deadly trough.”
    Walton finished his port, and satisfied his stomach had been revived to normalcy or some stat e near it, begged the captain's pardon for his early departure for bed.
    In his cabin, he took out the writing materials and sat at the small desk attached to the wall. He penned in his painstaking script:
     
    Dearest Margaret,
    The trip so far has been unevent ful, though far from boring. Just tonight the captain of this ship thought to examine me about the rumors brought back to the mainland from my trip with Frankenstein. Here it is twenty years after the fact, and still those stories will not be put to rest. I admonished my crew to forget what they had glimpsed so briefly, to hold fast to their tongues or evoke ridicule for a tale so unbelievable not one common man would take it as truth. Yet here we are, and the captain of ships sailing north to sea repeat g o ssip of an unlikely creature who visited my ship and then left it like a madman, flinging himself off to become frozen upon a triangle spit of sheer ice.
    I put the captain's curious nature to rest, I pray, but I know my entourage and many cartons of suppli es indicate I am trekking into the wildest reaches of the north, and my lie about scientific measurement of the wind velocities across the steppes of the plains does not satisfy every inquisitive mind who knows of it.
    Oh, if only I can be left alone!
    Never theless, I must tell you that despite the lingering spells of coughing I withstand and the regular stomach upsets that I ply with port and strong mind