~Frank~

Paragonas Vaunt

EXTRACT

Chapter One

A New Life

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a scientist in want of a reputation must necessarily build himself a Frank.

It is a rite of passage for any scientist, but especially for the mad ones. An engineer will build a steam dirigible. A chemist will distil something evilly green and poisonous in the bottom of a glass tube. An alchemist will cackle to himself and turn a large pile of gold into a somewhat smaller pile of gold.

And a scientist will build a Frank.

Ostensibly their goal is to master and then demonstrate the fundamental skills of their profession. To set out their stall to others in their field. To make their mark, show the world what they are capable of creating. Show how they could reward their patrons or punish anyone foolish enough to mock them.

Also, the task of building a Frank weeds out the scientists who aren't good enough.

In the same way as if the engineer crashes his dirigible, or the chemist poisons himself, or the alchemist turns his workshop into a smoking crater occupied only by a smouldering pair of boots, if a Frank runs amok he will remove from the pool a practitioner who couldn't cut the mustard.

More mad scientists are killed, when their Franks run amok, than the profession would care to admit.

It doesn't help that Franks are usually built to overly-generous proportions, with hugely muscular limbs and barrel chests.

It doesn't help that a scientist's chief sources of raw materials to create his Frank are the lunatic asylums and the prisons, and the flesh they use is thus tainted by madness at best, and evil at worst.

And then, least helpful of all, is the manner in which they are brought into being.

I ask you, if you were dragged back from the peaceful, silent slumber of the grave, brought jolting back to life by the passing of an agonising bolt of galvanick current through your inert brain, if you awoke, cold and confused and in pain, in the laboratory of a madman, strapped to a table, how would you feel? If you were to look down and find your entire body to be that of a stranger, a horrible harlequin, a mix and match melange of misbegotten parts, how would you feel?

How then, if all the foregoing had befallen you, all the insults and travails that had brought you to this low point, how then would you feel if your maker, rather than greeting you as a father to a beloved son, instead tortured you, goaded you, prodded and probed you, before finally consigning you to some dark cellar of their castle, forgotten and unloved?

So, if the scientist succeeds in building his Frank, and succeeds in breathing life into it, and it doesn't immediately kill its master in rage and despair, the poor tormented thing is usually consigned to a life of neglect.

Shunned. Shut away.

~O~

For my part, I was shunned as well.

~O~

My name is Heidi Klein and I was born in 1798 in a small village in the Alps. Do not trouble yourself to look for it now; the war of 1812 did for it, as surely as it did for my family.

The story of how I came to be seeking employment at Professor McAnarchus' castle is too long to recount here in detail. You will not be interested in the time I spent on the shores of Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816, when I worked as maidservant to a group of itinerant writers, though the episode revealed I have an easy facility with new languages, English included. I enjoyed that time very much, and I fancy I came to be regarded as something of a fount of local knowledge, which the writers hungrily consumed. They told me tales of far-off lands, and I shared local tales, of the tradition of the Frank and other such things.

Nor will you be interested in my time working in a tavern in the village of Ettingen, and will not welcome me recounting the story of the bargains a young barmaid must make in order to keep her virtue intact, the things she must hold in her hand or take in her mouth to deflect unwanted attention from her other, more private places. Those tawdry tales will be of no interest to you, so I will spare you the salacious details.

I would be obliged to disappoint you in any case, since I must admit I never did any of those things, instead relying on my wits, and the tavern keeper's protective nature, to keep myself from being tapped among the beer casks.

I think it will suffice to say of that time that when the keeper died, and the tavern passed through various hands until it came to the possession of a most disagreeable man by the name of Jürgen Schmidt, the new owner arrived with the notion that ownership of the tavern necessarily meant I should pass through his hands as well. Disabusing him of that notion left Schmidt with a broken wrist, and me without a home or means of income.

Basel was my best hope for finding work, particularly since a new scientist had recently taken up residence. That arrival was obvious from the cloud of noxious vapour which rose around his castle, and the shiny spike of a freshly-installed lightning conductor atop the tower where his workshop was located.

You may wonder why scientists, particularly the mad ones, need a seemingly endless supply of young women to work for them in their castles. I had wondered this too, ever since my enquiries in the city taverns had revealed no work for me as a barmaid, but several dark mutterings that if I were enough in need of employment to risk it I might enquire at the castle.

"McAnarchus is his name," the tavern owner told me, "But be careful. He is a beast."

"No my love, McAnarchus is the name of the scientist," his wife interjected, "I don't think the beast has a name, not officially."

The tavern owner gave his wife an odd look.

"Of course I know it's the name of the scientist," he said, rolling his eyes, "I meant to say the scientist McAnarchus is not a pleasant man."

Still, I had little choice but to try my luck.

Thus it was that I found myself standing in the Small Hall of Professor McAnarchus' draughty, damp castle, while the Professor himself walked around me, paying far more attention to my figure than to the hand-written letter of reference Miss Mary had given me, back on the shores of Lake Geneva.

Schmidt, of course, had given me no such valedictory send-off. Nor, with his wrist broken, had I expected one.

I gazed up at the vaulted ceiling high above, and reflected that if this was the Small Hall, the Great Hall must be truly gargantuan, and likely even harder to keep warm. The Professor appeared not to notice the cold.

I craned my head around to look at him as he stood behind me, openly gazing down at my posterior, and I wondered for a moment whether I hadn't in fact leapt from frying pan to fire in my escape from the tavern in Ettingen.

My anxiety was not assuaged by the way his hand suddenly shot out to grasp my face, his fingers cradling my jaw, angling my head to the lamplight as he examined my neckline.

"Hmmm," he said at last, "Fine bone structure. Decent musculature."

He stood back.

"Fräulein Klein," he said, and switched to English, "Miss Small. How appropriate. You are indeed small."

"I am around the same height as my sisters," I replied, switching to English myself. I could see he was surprised I had understood him. A flash of anger crossed his face, just for a moment, and then was replaced by an expression of studied insouciance, as if he hadn't just been caught slighting me.

"And I am near as tall as my older brother," I added.

I didn't add that my brother had been badly afflicted by the measles one winter, and had never grown much after that point. Nor did I mention that my father's pet name for me had been Maus, even when I was full-grown. I am, I admit, truly not that tall.

"No," he said, gesturing towards me, "Small."

And then I realised he was pointing at my chest.

I am indeed petite of build, slim, with narrow hips and not much in the way of top-hamper to attract the male attention. But I did not need the Professor to tell me that, and I bridled somewhat, but held my tongue.

I needed the work, you will recall.

"You may be wondering why I need to employ a young woman of comely appearance in my household?" said the Professor.

Well, quite.

At least he had made the observation that I was comely, or implied it, which was some consolation. Not that I was fishing for compliments from this stranger.

"I need an assistant to support my work with my latest creation," the Professor continued, by way of explanation, "my previous assistant, who has been with me since I left Edinburgh, decided the duties were... not to her taste."

Edinburgh. That explained the Professor's strange attire. Beneath a conventional shirt and waistcoat he wore a skirt of heavy cloth in a strange pattern of blue and green criss-crossed bands. Later, I learned this garment was known as a kilt.

I also learned the old joke about Scotsmen.

Is anything worn under the kilt?

I wasn't inclined to find out whether the punchline was true.

"Can you tell me about your creation?" I asked instead.

He glanced in what I supposed was the direction of his tower laboratory, just visible through the high smoke-stained windows of the hall.

"A promethean homunculus," he replied.

"Oh, a Frank?" I replied, and he twitched.

"Under this roof, you will not use that term," he said, sharply, "Here we may refer to it as a creature, or a creation, or even a thing if you must, but never as a... that word."

He spread his arms wide.

"Some people refer to them as simulacra, but what I have created is no mere copy. It is an entirely new creation, the utmost embodiment of the very apex of the scientific art. I have taken God's work, and I have perfected it!"

There was a gleam in his eye.

He looked appraisingly at me again, clearly weighing up whether I might serve his purpose.

But of course I would serve his purpose. A pretty Bavarian girl, with little blonde plaits and a dirndl dress and a cute smile? I met his primary criteria, despite my diminutive stature.

And I could also speak English fluently. None of the other girls he had seen could speak English well enough to understand what he wanted from them, it later transpired, and his explanatory miming had had them - to a one - running for the door.

I liked to think that working in a country tavern had made me a little more resilient than that.

Looking back, I am not sure I was right.

Chapter Two

Shock and Awe

The chamber atop the tallest tower was circular, around fifty feet across and twenty high, presumably stone-walled, though the bookshelves covering every surface to a height well above my head made that a supposition rather than a certainty. Above the shelves, the walls gave way to a copper dome, green with verdigris and inset with glass panels smeared by old, sooty grime.

At the peak of the dome a set of heavy cables hung down all the way to the floor, where they vanished behind a rack of glass jars, holding a barrage of copper-coloured metal plates suspended in a clear liquid. From the jars came smaller cables which led in turn to a heavy wood and brass framework of dials and levers, and thence to...

In front of the frame, on a raised stone dais, was some sort of large table, or bed.

Or, perhaps, a mortuary slab.

The reason it put me most in mind of a mortuary slab was that there was a body on it.

It was covered head to toe in a heavy white sheet, but the shape was unmistakeable. After all, I had seen my village after the chasseurs had passed through.

It was also huge, nearly eight feet from the top of the head to the tip of the toe.

I do not know why scientists always try to fashion their Franks as intimidatingly huge as they can. There is no good reason for this that I can discern. It is not as if they are any good as henchmen, they are rarely much use as manual workers, and they are too unpredictable for even the most menial tasks.

It is as if a scientist's statement of their scientific prowess, of their creation of new life, has to be as overwhelming and uncompromising, as brutal as the act of creation itself.

But there we are.

"Would you like to see?" he said, a note almost of nervous pride in his voice, and he took hold of the sheet and drew it down over the body's head.

The figure on the cold slab might at first glance have been taken for sleeping, such was the vision of calm repose on the countenance now revealed. It was a man, his head large and square, his brow and jawline heavyset. His hair was dark, close-cropped.

So much for the normal.

His skin was a pallid grey, with no hint of colour, the flesh of a blood-drained corpse, and as I looked closer I could see the hair on his crown was tufted and patchy where it had been jaggedly furrowed by the ugly scar which circumnavigated his cranium. There was a heavy leather strap around his forehead, holding his head securely in place.

"What is his name?" I said.

"It has no name."

"What was his name, then? When he was alive?"

"The question is meaningless. The constituent parts come from a dozen different donors. A score of them. Who among them, whose name would you choose? The thief? The murderer? The madman? They are all just raw material."

I immediately called him Frank.

In my head, naturally, not out loud.

The Professor continued drawing the sheet down.

The corpse's neck was circled by a livid purplish scar, the only colour so far, puckered by the traces of heavy stitches. The body had a huge barrel chest, hairless, its great bands of muscle riven by a deep Y-shaped disfigurement which ran diagonally down from each shoulder, meeting just below the rib cage, before carrying on down the abdomen.

There were more straps, banding around the chest, the waist, the upper arms and wrists.

It was at this point I realised the body must be naked.

Is anything worn under the sheet?

I took an involuntary step back as the Professor continued drawing the sheet down over a flat, muscular belly, lower, before revealing a thatch of dark hair which I knew would presage... of course, you will know as well as I what it presaged.

I screwed my eyes shut, not prepared to look.

I heard the Professor sigh in exasperation.

He said nothing, but I could tell he was waiting for me.

I put a hand over my face, and from between splayed fingers, I opened my eyes.

My mouth fell open in shock.

Where on earth had the Professor found it? A masculine member so immense, so outlandishly outsized? It was grossly out of proportion even to the immense scale of the creature.

So transfixed was I, unable to take my eyes from the club-like thing laid along the length of the creature's thighs, that I barely took in the rest of him, the muscular legs, the bands of scarring where the legs had been lengthened, where extra musculature had been sewn in. The mismatches of skin and proportion that told a story of different donors, different sources for the component parts.

My gaze was only for the creature's manhood.

The Professor chuckled.

"Magnificent, isn't it?" he said.

I was unsure if he meant the whole creation or just its penis.

"It's..." I replied, and swallowed nervously, "Why is it so big?"

I was unsure if I meant the whole creation or just its penis.

"Why? Because my homunculus shall be the best, the mightiest yet created!"

He spread his arms wide.

"He will be the greatest, the most magnificent! The ultimate expression of the will to dominate, to strike fear into the hearts of all who dare challenge me!"

That gleam was in his eye again.

"He will certainly frighten the ladies," I murmured.

The Professor continued on as if I hadn't spoken.

"He is magnificent, isn't he?" he insisted.

I noticed then that the Professor had referred to his creation as "he" for the first time. But here, with this - thing - on display before me, there was hardly any denying its maleness.

"He is..." I started to reply.

Magnificent? Or terrifying?

"...overwhelming." I finished, lamely. "Awe-inspiring."

In all senses of the term.

Standing back, looking at the thing in sum, it was indeed overwhelming. Any individual part, save perhaps for that one, was tolerable, bearable, but the whole thing together was... grotesque.

I wanted no part of it. Of whatever this was.

I took another step back.

"Shall we rouse him?"

I had only just found the presence of mind to close my mouth, but now I gaped again.

"He is alive?"

"Alive is not the right term. I have animated him for short periods, using the galvanick apparatus you see here. But now I have you I can impart to him the spark which will animate him permanently, give him autonomous existence. Watch."

The Professor stepped to his apparatus of controls and dials, and threw a large knife-blade switch, which sparked alarmingly.

Apart from the brief spark, nothing much seemed to happen.

Slowly he turned a small, innocuous-looking dial.

Nothing still happened.

Then I noticed the liquid in the glass jars had started to bubble and, after a few moments more, the body on the slab started to twitch.

The transition, when it happened, was swift. One moment the slab held a cadaver, its muscles clenching in stimulated reflex, with no energising spark save the current passing though it, its brow furrowing in the likeness of pain yet with no sense of real animation, and the next moment there was a man there, his eyes open and staring upwards as if roused from a deep, dreamless sleep.

"Help me bring him up," said the Professor, and directed me to one of two large wheels mounted either side of the head of the bed. We spun them, and the slab slowly pivoted, bringing the creature - the man - upright.

We stopped just short of vertical, the creature leaning back within the girdle of his restraints but his eyes now darting restlessly around the room until - finally - they settled upon me.

His gaze was fierce. Intense.

Implacable.

I quailed before his pitiless stare.

"Good! Good!" the Professor exclaimed, "He likes you! That is excellent. It will make it easier to carry out the circulatory calibration."

I had no idea what that meant, but I was uncomfortably aware that, with the bed now near-upright, the sheet had fallen to the floor and I was standing before an entirely naked giant, his immense member near the level of my chin.

"If you are ready, Miss Small, we will commence the next phase," said the Professor.

I was not sure I welcomed the Anglicisation of my name, but I did not voice a complaint. There were larger things to worry about.

I had been on the verge of leaving, and yet my curiosity was piqued.

I was, I admit, immediately fascinated by the process. By this immense creature, the overwhelming sense of brooding power rising from it, the realisation of this incredible, unhallowed endeavour, the expression of will and messianic folly that must be necessary to cause it to come into being. This frightful thing, this hideous phantasm, this statement of ungodly intent.

I wanted to know what would happen next.

That was what caused me to stay. Not its physical, virile presence, not that stupendous engine of reproduction hanging before me like a totem pole, that vision of masculine ruin.

Not that.

"What should I..?" I said at last, not knowing what I was supposed to do, where I was supposed to stand.

"While I adjust the animating current, you... arouse it."

"Arouse? Do you mean... enrage him?"

"No, not that! I mean arouse it! Stimulate it!"

The Professor saw my blank, uncomprehending face, and sighed in exasperation.

"Surely you must grasp my meaning?" he snapped, "Excite the creature! Titivate it! Incite its ardour! Invigorate its generative apparatus!"

"What, you mean... touch his..."

"I don't care how you do it! You're a woman, your feminine wiles are your own purview, I do not pretend to understand them. Display your feminine charms, such as they are, if you think they are sufficiently adequate to the task. Or grasp it in your hand. Whatever you need to do, do it. I simply need the membrum virile to engorge so I can calibrate the circulatory system at full extension. So virile the membrum, Miss Small!"

I stared at the creature, aghast.

No wonder his previous assistant had absconded.

The creature stared down at me from the shadow of its craggy brow.

"H-hello, Frank," I said quietly enough that the Professor would not hear my use of the name.

The creature's lip twisted slightly, but he didn't speak.

"Can he speak?" I asked.

"Hmmm?" said the Professor, hunched over the dials of his console, "Oh, no, I haven't given it vocal cords. The last thing I want from a homunculus is having it grumbling at me while I work."

He laughed.

"Imagine it! It would be like the table complaining to the carpenter about the quality of his joint-work."

I stood four-square in front of the creature and willed myself to look at its manhood. His manhood.

I willed myself to take a step towards it.

Could I do this?

Could I rise to the occasion? Could that... that thing rise also?

I tried to imagine taking it in my hand as the Professor had suggested. Would my fingers meet around its girth? Could I even lift its weight? Of course, if I were carrying out my task properly, I wouldn't need to bear its weight for long.

It would lift by itself.

I gulped inwardly at the thought.

But then, if it did become erect, would it reach out to touch me, here where I stood?

I couldn't face touching it. Not... yet. But the sense of revulsion I felt, knew I should rightly feel, was underlaid by another feeling I could not place and did not want to acknowledge, so I pushed that sentiment downwards, buried it.

I held my revulsion and my fascination in taut balance as I resolved to do what was needed. After all, I had cheekily shown myself to the occasional boy in the past, even allowed them to touch me once or twice, how was this any different? As long as I didn't allow myself to think it was any different, I might overcome my natural reticence.

I locked eyes with the creature, and tried to remember, though my mind was empty of coherent thought, what boys like girls to do.

I couldn't touch him, so what was the other thing?

"Hello Frank," I said once more, "My name is Heidi."

I gave him my best, most winning smile.

Frank's mouth twitched into a half-rictus in reply.

"Do you think I am pretty?" I asked, and put my hands on my waist, swaying my hips slightly. Slowly I brought my hands upwards, up my sides, and splayed my fingers beneath my breasts.

Frank said nothing, of course, so I pressed on.

I positioned myself so he could see what I was doing but the Professor could not. I wasn't here to give everyone in the castle a free show, after all. Frank's eyes followed my movements, and then dropped to my front as I took up the laces fastening the front of my bodice.

I twirled my finger around a loose end, playing lightly with it as I tilted my head coyly.

Carefully, deliberately, I undid my laces, unpicking the knots and then slowly, ever so slowly, loosening the ribbons that criss-crossed down my front.

I heard a low growl.

It was Frank, making a noise deep within his throat, soft yet absolutely penetrating. It reached into me and stirred something, deep inside me.

Something primitive.

It was as well that I had already unlaced my bodice, as the air seemed all of a sudden much closer, my breathing tighter, and if I hadn't already loosened my clothing I think I might have fainted. Certainly my fingers seemed to have lost their usual deftness.

Hands trembling, I reached up and, not quite believing my brazenness, cupped my breasts beneath the thin cotton of my blouse, before hooking fingers into the neckline of the material.

I saw, actually saw, Frank's penis twitch.

I cannot express how guilty, how ashamed, how proud I felt at that moment.

I had caused this immense thing to stir into life.

I had done that.

I girded myself to take the next step.

It had to be done. Best get it over with quickly then.

Quickly I dragged down the front of my blouse, and spilled my breasts to Frank's view. Just like that. Just pulled down my blouse and displayed myself to that reanimated monster.

The effect on Frank was instantaneous.

Silently, smoothly, steadily, inexorably, his penis rose, filled out and rose, swinging up to point at me. I took an involuntary step back, then gathered myself and resumed my place. It was big, but it couldn't quite reach to touch me.

The monstrous thing was fully upright now, the bed's reclining position causing its bulbous tip to point directly at my face. The skin was grey, like the rest of the creature, but as I watched there seemed the merest hint of a flush of colour right at the core, among the folds of its cloaking foreskin.

"Excellent! Excellent!" the Professor exclaimed, and stepped to Frank's side, "Now to stabilise him."

He plunged a syringe into the meat of Frank's arm, and depressed the plunger to inject a shimmering blue liquid into his body.

Frank didn't react, didn't even flinch as the needle punctured his skin, so intent on me was his concentration.

"The calibration is complete, Miss Small," said the Professor, "All is done for now."

I remained where I was, watching Frank, transfixed.

Gradually, I could see colour suffusing his flesh, the skin becoming pinker. The nearest part of him to me, that club of maleness, started to pinken too, the tip beneath its fleshy hood darkening to a deep purple, as livid as the scars on his body.

It looked wicked.

For some reason, I wanted to touch it.

Perhaps simply to see if it was warming with its renewed life, perhaps for some other reason.

It was at this point I realised I was still standing before the giant, my bared breasts in my hands, and - it embarrasses me to recount this - I was further surprised to find my nipples were swollen, tender and inflamed.

I could not explain why. The room was warm, after all, not cold. Sweltering it must be in there, in fact, since I was feeling quite flushed.

Clearly there was no need for me to keep disporting myself in this flagrant manner, and yet, for no reason I can recount, I did not stop. On the contrary, I clasped my hands in the small of my back - unthinkingly, I imagine - which had the unintended effect of pushing my chest forward to display myself even more brazenly.

I deny this was a deliberate act. Yet I was rewarded, if that is the appropriate word, with a twitch from the monster's penis before me, and the slight glisten of something liquid at the tip.

I did not get to find out the cause of that glint in its eye, because at that moment the Professor brought proceedings to a halt, reaching up to clap a cloth pad over Frank's mouth. I caught a strong smell, sweet and cloying, on the air.

"Chloroformic aether," he said, by way of explanation, as Frank's eyelids drooped, "It is the latest thing in anaesthesia."

Within moments, Frank was insensate. It took a few moments longer for his penis belatedly to receive the message, and then it too slackened, drooping back onto his hip as the Professor lowered the table flat again.

I experienced an almost overwhelming urge to straighten it along his legs, between the valley of his thighs, to arrange it more neatly, but then the Professor swept the sheet back up over his patient and hid the sight of it from my view.

Almost hid it. I could still see its shape, bulging under the fabric of the sheet.

But the moment had passed.

The Professor stopped short of entirely covering Frank, instead drawing the sheet up to his neck, and tucking it around his shoulders. With surprise, I noticed the cloth was now rising and falling with the steady motion of respiration.

Frank was breathing autonomously.

"Good, good," said the Professor, and then, glancing at me, said, "Cover yourself, Miss Small, lest you make yourself out to be a strumpet."

It was only at that moment I remembered my breasts were yet uncovered.

For some reason, that detail did not seem as important as I might hitherto have expected. Perhaps I was too enthralled by what had just transpired.

For I had brought the dead to life.

At least, I had played my part in bringing the dead to life.

To be absolutely fair, I had played my part in bringing his part to life.