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

about,” he said.
    I looked at his books again. “What about where you came from?” I asked. “Do you ever wonder about that?” I’d thought about the question a lot in relation to my own origins.
    “Victor made me,” Frankenstein said, patiently, as if he were talking to a child.
    “Sure, he stitched you up,” I said. “But where did the rest of it come from?”
    “The rest of what?” Frankenstein said, frowning.
    “Your. . . .” I struggled to find the right word. “. . . life.”
    We could have been brothers, Frankenstein and me. We were both strange creations, brought into existence under mysterious circumstances. I’d woken up in a cave in the middle of nowhere, with no idea of who or what I was other than the few memories Christ had left me, he’d woken up on a table in Victor’s lab, with who knows what going on in his mind. Both of us monsters.
    “Life doesn’t come from anywhere,” Frankenstein said. “It is just always there.”
    “Tell that to all the people in the cemetery outside,” I said.
    “Death is just a different state of life,” Frankenstein said. “Victor understood that when he made me.”
    “You’re starting to sound like a mad scientist,” I said.
    “I was alive before I was who I am now,” Frankenstein said. He touched different parts of himself: his arms, his legs, his chest. His head. All taken from different bodies. “When those others died, the life did not leave. It just. . . .” Now it was his turn to struggle for words. “Went to sleep,” he finally said. “Victor woke it again, only this time in my body.”
    “How do you know that?” I asked. This was one of the Big Questions, after all.
    “I remember it,” Frankenstein said. “Don’t you?”
    Okay, so maybe we weren’t so alike after all.
    “I’m going to need a drink for this one,” I said. I nodded at the scotch. “Do you mind?”
    “You are my guest,” Frankenstein said, handing the bottle back to me. He really had been working on his manners.
    So I poured some scotch into the lone glass and took a long sip, and then another.
    “You were saying?” I said.
    Frankenstein stared at the dead body on the conveyer belt, a look on his face as if he were remembering something long since forgotten.
    “I wasn’t me then,” he said. “I was the others. Although I wasn’t really them either, when I was dead. When we were all dead. We were no one. We just were. And we waited, forgotten in the ground.”
    “Waited for what?” I asked.
    Frankenstein looked back at me. “Why, to be again,” he said. “What else?”
    “Carry on,” I said and took another sip of the scotch. It was too early to be drinking, but if sitting in the basement of a crematorium talking the secrets of life with Frankenstein doesn’t call for a drink, I don’t know what does.
    “I longed to be again,” Frankenstein said softly, looking at the incinerator now. “That is what I remember. I was not, but I longed to be. And then Victor dug me out of the ground in all those pieces and made me be. And now I am someone. And I have other someones for friends.” He tapped his head with a finger and smiled at me. “We are alive and life is everywhere and we all are.”
    I finished the rest of the glass, taking that in. His understanding of life and death was far different than mine, but that didn’t mean it was any less valid. It’s a big universe and we are all multitudes and all that.
    I put the empty glass back down on the shelf. “I’d love to keep talking philosophy and the meaning of life with you,” I said, “but I’ve got a rather pressing problem that I think only you can help me with.”
    “You need to dispose of more body parts,” Frankenstein said, nodding.
    “I told you not to bring that up again, but yes,” I said. I held up my hand and wiggled my ring finger. “I want you to take this finger.”
    He stood and came over to take my hand. He looked at my finger like a jeweller appraising a