If i Die, Reheat my Tongue and Tripes

Should any of you be walking through a local cemetery some night next week, don't start clicking with palsy if you see a furtive character chaining down gravelids. Now that I have got control over my twitching extremities again, I am going to give my life over to public safety and keep fresh cadavers off the operating benches run by gentle savants of Dr. Victor Frankenstein's ilk. So just leave an unmilled coin by the crematorium and pass over, uh, sorry, on.

The case of multiple tremens that has kept me of peas of late was brought on by a film beamed at me last week. The title itself, "The Curse of Dr. Frankenstein," nearly sprung the sutures in my adrenals. I believe they had it in lights first night on Fifth Ave., but bats kept fluttering round the bulbs and the toasted bodies dropped into the wet concrete that was mixed ready for the monster's footprint. Anyway, tempted by tintypes outside the theatre featuring a six-foot-six car-case of which the top of his head was hemstitched on with leather thongs, I rolled a cripple for one and three and shambled into a matinee.

At half time I slid back into the middle stalls, checking to see that there was a radius of twenty empty seats around me. I get active during these films. Might have to fight it out with gibbering savages and y'gotta have room to operate ya kitset gatling. Besides, I'd hate to disturb anyone with the noise I made sucking at my plasma bottle. The film unrolled without incident, periodic chills setting my cells a-multiplying now and then, until the body was near completion. The producers then whipped out a charming conceit in the shape of a pair of eyeballs in good condition which the kind Doctor dangled in the viewer's face. As my ectoplasm billowed out over three rows I began to glow with a faint greenish light and howled for the culminating coat of shellac on the monster's lips.

Soon enough our hero was mobile, but his brain, damaged by a petulant English humanitarian, as you would expect, turned out a nud-nick. He just swayed around the local bush and garrotted a blind octogenarian. The british boy shot him in the eye and my little black cap did a jig as the blood spilled on to those grafted hands.

Frankenstein, however, resurrected him, patched up his eye and soon had him performing to order. By now the last shreds of plot had dissolved but I sat on, nurturing the blue mould on my palms and absorbing every new creak they threw at me. The film was episodic and not too much thought had been spent on situation but it looked good most of the time.

Eventually the monster got loose again and put a big scare into Frankenstein's fiancee on the castle roof. Frankenstein threw a lamp at him and he caught fire—you just can't get good synthetic men these days. It made a fine shot, and I'm sending to an address I know, one I've always found reliable, for stills of the sequence. He tottered around, flaming like a tarred pirate on the clifftop gallows and finally fell thru a skylight into a tub of acid, where both lights were deftly put out.

I relished the moody way Dr. Frankenstein remarked to a friend that "In half an hour a life's work has disappeared." My family shackled me down when I mumbled it three times at breakfast but the reader is with me.

Wiping away the thread of saliva coursing down my chin, I lurched out, and repaired with renewed vigour to my dank laboratory with the glistening scalpels and the row of blonde virgins chained to the wall.

Oh, by the way, they guillotined Frankenstein on a murder charge. The monster did it.