The Dead Hamlets: Book Two of the Book of Cross by Peter Roman Page A

sang, and then his voice trailed off when he saw me.
    “Hello, Frankenstein,” I said.
    I know what you’re going to say. Frankenstein was the name of the scientist, not the creature he created. It’s a classic mistake to confuse the two. Well, Frankenstein is what the creature has decided to call himself these days. Who am I to argue with him?
    Frankenstein stared at me for several seconds and then dropped both saw and arm to the ground and rushed at me. I stood my ground.
    “Cross!” he rumbled and swept me into his arms in his best attempt at a bear hug. He was getting better at this whole human thing. “You are alive!” he said.
    “Today, yes,” I said. “But I make no promises about tomorrow.”
    He let go and stepped back, gazing at me. “You drowned in the sea,” he said.
    I had to think about that one for a moment. There had been so many deaths over the years, and more than one of them had been a drowning.
    “With that big ship,” he prompted. “The one they turned into a movie.”
    “Oh, right, the
Titanic
,” I said. I’d snuck on board by impersonating a . . . well, it’s probably enough to say my plan to rob the first-class cabins didn’t end that well. “I floated back to the surface and things turned out all right,” I said. Nothing like resurrecting in the middle of the night drifting alone in the ocean, with no land or other people in sight. At least I’d had the stars for company. “How did you hear about that anyway?”
    Frankenstein smiled and glanced back at the body. “I have my sources,” he said.
    “I imagine you do,” I said. “You mind if I close the door?”
    “My home is your home,” he said. He pointed at the chair. “Please, sit.”
    So I closed the door and sat in his chair and felt the residual warmth of the incinerator behind me. Frankenstein sat on the edge of the bed and smiled at me. I had a feeling it had been a while since he’d had visitors. Of the living kind anyway.
    I gave him the bottle of scotch I’d bought and he took it with an even larger smile.
    “You have always been very thoughtful,” he said.
    “I just drink a lot,” I said. I looked at the arm and the saw still lying on the floor. “Spare parts?” I asked.
    He nodded and held up one of his arms. “This one is wearing out,” he said. “I need to replace it. That one has a nice tattoo on it.”
    I saw that it did. A woman riding a bomb. Well, she could keep him company for a while.
    We weren’t that different, Frankenstein and me. I needed grace to survive; he needed fresh body parts. We were both freaks of nature. And we were both dreadfully misunderstood.
    “So how have you been?” I asked him.
    “I have been busy with work,” he said. “People never stop dying.”
    “It’s always a growth industry,” I said. I looked at the bookshelf. It was mainly philosophy books: Nietzsche, Locke, Hume, the classics. But there were a few other cultures represented: the Tibetan Book of the Dead, some Buddhist sutras, that sort of thing. “Tackling the big questions, are you?” I asked.
    “That is Victor’s influence,” Frankenstein said, smiling that lopsided smile of his. “He is curious about matters of the soul.”
    “Aren’t we all,” I said.
    He cocked his head, as if listening. “And consciousness,” he said. “He wants to know where it begins and where it ends.”
    I could see how Victor Frankenstein might be preoccupied with such matters. After he had died, his creation now sitting before me had taken the brain from Victor’s body and put parts of it into his own head, sewing their brains together. I’d never asked Frankenstein how exactly he’d managed that. Some things are better not known. But he’d managed to keep Victor alive, in memory if nothing else, and the two of them were the same being now. So that was something.
    “And what have you learned about consciousness?” I asked.
    Frankenstein shook his head at me. “That it is not worth thinking