The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein and Other Gothic Tales Read Free Page A

incomprehensible to anyone but himself.
    After the opera is finished and the star is taking her bows, the phantom notices that one of the heavy walkways above the stage is loose and about to come plummeting down right on his student’s lovely head. He leaps onto the boards, pushes her out of the way, and is himself thoroughly crushed by the falling wreckage.
    The phantom of the opera is bleeding freely and behind his mask his eyes are drowning. “Who’s that?” someone asks the girl whom the phantom of the opera taught to sing so well. “I’m sure I don’t know!” she answers as her strange and tormented teacher dies.
    But her words do not contain a hint of the inexplicable emotion she feels. Only now will she really be able to sing from the heart. But she realizes there is no music on earth worthy of her voice, and later that night her monstrously heavy heart takes her to the bottom of the Seine.
    The phantom of the opera is a genius.
     
    The Unspeakable Rebirth of the Phantom of the Wax Museum
     
    The phantom of the wax museum is walking down the street with his new girlfriend. Even though he is wearing a benignly handsome face, which he designed himself, there remains something repellent and sinister in his appearance. “No decent girl would go out with him,” mutters an old woman as the couple passes by.
    The phantom of the wax museum was once a gentle and sensitive artist who worked very hard shaping beautiful lifelike representations of figures from history and from modern times. A prosperous craftsman with no head for finance, he was cheated by his business partner and left for dead in a burning studio, where his masterpieces in wax melted one by one into nothing.
    He, however, escaped, though in a badly disfigured condition, and from that day on he was mentally deranged, a sadistic demon artist who every so often submerged young women in vats of boiling wax and afterward displayed them for profit to the unsuspecting patrons of his museum. “A genius!” the public exclaimed.
    The phantom of the wax museum is about to press the button that will cause his new girlfriend, presently unconscious, to descend into one of those famous bubbling vats. But quite unexpectedly some plainclothes detectives burst into the room and stop him. They rescue the girl and corner her would-be killer at the top of the stairs, just above the eagerly gurgling vat.
    Suddenly, in this moment of great stress, the phantom of the wax museum sees a gentle and sensitive face in his mind’s eye. He remembers now, he remembers who he was so long ago. In fact, he remembers precious little else. What was he doing and who were these people at the top of those stairs?
    “I beg your pardon,” he starts to say to the detectives, “could you please tell me—”
    But the youngest of the detectives is a little quick to fire his gun, and the evil phantom of the wax museum goes over the rail, disappearing beneath the creamy surface of the furiously seething vat.
    One of the older detectives stares down into the busy pool of wax and in a rare reflective moment says: “If there’s any justice in this life, that monster’ll boil for eternity. He killed at least five lovely girls!”
    But at the moment of his death the fortunate phantom of the wax museum could remember only one girl: his beautiful Marie Antoinette, which he’d finished a few hours ago, or so it seemed, and which he knew he would never see again.

 
     
     
    Gothic Heroines
     
    The Perilous Legacy of Emily St. Aubert, Inheritress of Udolpho
     
    Emily St. Aubert has had a very difficult life. When only a young woman she sees the death of both her parents: her mother, whom Emily finds out was not her real mother, and her wise father, whom Emily adored. “O Emily, O Emily,” cries her boyfriend Valancourt when she is carted off by the menacing Montoni to the somewhat broken down but nonetheless imposing castle named Udolpho.
    At Udolpho there are a multitude of secrets: secret