Story © by Allan Muenzler 1997
All Rights Reserved

THE FRANKENSTEIN NEEDA

by Allan Muenzler AKA VonBek

Dr. Cadric Von Frankenstein was not what you would call a handsome man. Nor was he really a doctor, but that is another story entirely. His back was stooped from the long days he spent as a child leaning over railings and contemplating his future ascendancy into the literary world while spitting upon passersby below. The recipients of Cadric's viscous gift would then glare at the young man above, only to avert their eyes when confronted with his tortured yet absent gaze. He seemed to be looking right through the world and frowning at what he discovered beneath the facade of reality. And since most people tend to avoid the uncomfortable, young Cadric von Frankenstein found himself spending many an afternoon alone, spitting on humanity.

Introduced at an early age to literature as an alternative to human companionship, Cadric became a voracious reader, poring over every page with all the passion of a chemist mixing solutions. Late at nights, alone in his bedroom, he would jerk a pencil across the page, trying to imitate the passion of the literature by mimicing their pen-strokes. The next morning, Trevor would awake, read over what he had completed, and promptly wad the paper up, tossing it into the wastebasket. He dreamed of being a writer, of being worshipped, sought out at conventions and book stores, being the influence of others. But there was something missing from the words that he birthed upon the blank page. Cadric's words were mechanical, voiceless; he wrote like a machine that had analyzed the great works of the past and randomly combined them and had the audacity to proclaim, --This is true literature.

Surprisingly, Cadric sold a few stories and one novel writing in this fashion, but the fame he drunkenly grasped for still eluded him. The critics would lambaste his work, citing his lack of originality and his stilted stylistic methods. --To hell with the critics, Cadric would mutter, cutting the offending article out of the magazine and tossing it into the wastebasket, which, incidentally, had not been emptied since his childhood and thus was brimming with wadded sheets of paper full of his and the critics' mimicry. Soon enough, the young Cadric von Frankenstein became known in literary circles as Copy-Cad; which was never said to his face, of course, because, although literary circles can be cruel, they are not that cruel.

At the young age of twenty-one, Cadric von Frankenstein finally attended his first writer's convention. And there, he learned the greatest and most horrible secret of the literary kingdom. He learned the secret of the needa. Despite his constant frowns and furrowed brow, Cadric attracted the attention of another young struggling writer, Shelley Wollston. What she saw in the tall gaunt man will never be known. Perhaps she mistook his torturous gaze and troubled scowls for a mask hiding the oft-injured heart of a romantic. Maybe she thought she could heal his stunted writing by showing him the secret and, at the same time, fulfill her destiny to write with passion.

Whatever her intentions, Shelley Wollston initiated perhaps the most grotesque episode in literary history when she strode to within inches of Cadric von Frankenstein and whispered, --I can show you the secret of writing, the secret of the needa.

A flame of hope alit in Cadric's heart and he followed the girl into a nearby elevator and watched as she punched a button for the thirteenth floor. --We'll have to go to my room, for privacy, of course, she explained, smiling. Cadric examined her carefully and realized that he might even have found her attractive if he hadn't been so possessed with his own narcissistic desires. She had a petite figure and long black hair and a face that was marred only by a small scar on her right cheek. But she was one of them, and therefore beneath him. He would endure her company only long enough to learn this secret that held all the hopes of exalting his writing career. Cadric grimaced, wondering if this entire situation was nothing but a charade for the girl's barbaric lusts.

As he entered her hotel room, Shelly touched his forearm, leading him to the bedroom in that shy secretive way that a Jesuit leads the altar boy to the confessional for special confessions. --What is this secret?, asked Cadric, almost snarling. The girl jumped a bit at the harshness of his voice and hesitation flickered in her eyes. Cadric cursed himself, something he did quite often, and added, in a more gentle voice, --I am so eager to learn the secret of the needa from you. He placed special emphasis on the last word, hoping that flattery would work where chicanery would not.

She smiled and sat on the soft bed. --Well, when two writers perform the correct ceremony, they bring into existence a needa. Cadric frowned as Shelly continued, --A needa is like a love-child, a sort of muse, that is able to elevate both parents to the passionate writing that is only dreamt of by the hermit.

--What do these needas look like?

Shelly shrugged. --They look like human females, except that they grow at an advanced rate until they reach pre-puberty. They seem to shine, especially in sunlight. Did you see all the young girls in the lobby?

Realization dawned on Cadric von Frankenstein as he realized why all the other authors had female children. They weren't real children; they were needas, that despicable but essential offspring of the love of two writers. --And what is the special ceremony that is needed to produce a needa?, Cadric asked, already knowing the answer.

Shelly smiled and grabbed her sweater at the bottom, pulling up. But Cadric von Frankenstein was already on his way out of the door, determined to find an unattended needa to kidnap. Shelly, never having handled rejection well, promptly drew up a bath and slit her wrists, the blood pooling around her naked torso.

And so it was that the young needa of two very promising writers disappeared at that convention along with Cadric von Frankenstein, although his retirement from the literary world was looked upon more as a boon than anything else. Taking a train to his grandfather's long-deserted castle in Thuringia, Cadric assembled a massive laboratory in the bowels of the musty stone structure and begin to perform experiments upon the kidnapped needa, who had descended into a comatose state, her once shining skin now pallid. After one month and twenty days, the needa finally perished due to either the horrid experimentation done upon her frail body or a case of acute loneliness. Cadric nearly incinerated her body in a fit of rage that was entirely unusual for someone who considered himself above such things as paltry human emotions. But at the very last moment, when the corpse was inches from the large furnace that burned beneath the castle, Cadric capitulated to reason and decided to perform an autopsy.

And so he did, learning absolutely nothing about the composition of a needa, because a needa seemed to be in every way exactly like a young girl. But Cadric kept the various limbs and organs, neatly severed and separated into plastic baggies he kept in his freezer and labelled with a black magic marker. The few guests he entertained over the next ten years would quietly remark on the bag marked Spleen that was next to the icemaker; but never in earshot of Cadric, for they were not sure how the spleen had gotten there and were somewhat protective of their own.

During this hiatus from public life, Cadric perused many tomes of knowledge, both modern and ancient, in an effort to uncover the secret of the needa's creation. But misfortune dogged him at every step of his search as books would crumble to dust at that precise moment when the secret was to be revealed or the words changed position, turning succulent prose into bland gibberish; so he enrolled in a correspondence course at the University of Munich and became a doctor of necromancy. That particular degree plan is no longer available due to the masses of black-cloaked imbeciles who became doctors of necromancy and raided morgues, sprinkling lemon juice on cadavers and calling on some obscure demon to raise their new minions to an undead sort of life, which, surprisingly, against all laws of science, but what is science but another name for magic, they did, but instead of obeying the commands of the necromancers, the undead entered the workforce and became charter accountants and toll booth collectors and the like and created an unemployment scare and a general sense of unease until the university finally dismantled its necromancy program and revoked its doctorates of necromancy, but then this was many years after Dr. Cadric von Frankenstein's great crime against the community of writers and so shouldn't be dwelled upon in this particular story.

Relying on memory, Dr. Frankenstein attempted to reassemble the corpse of the young needa he had kidnapped and subsequently dismembered and frozen, and he nearly got it correct, except he forgot the spleen, which remained next to the icemaker in the freezer. But then what does a needa need with a spleen, anyway? Using threads from a carpet given to an ancestor by Charlemagne and left lying in his grandfather's foyer, Dr. Frankenstein sowed up the stitches and wounds that he had made a decade earlier and soon a newly assembled needa corpse, sans spleen, was before him. Then taking some lemon juice and sprinkling it on the body of the cadaver, he called out to Larry, a demon from ancient Sumer, to give life to the needa.

Larry, like most ancient demons, out of work and generally bored, having nothing better to do, lifted his pinky and gave life to the needa corpse. Then the demon returned to tending his garden outside of his house in Waxahachie, where he grew, among other things, Tonka toys.

Dr. Cadric von Frankenstein allowed himself a triumphant laugh when the needa opened her thread-strewn eyes and spoke those magic words every writer longs to hear. Well, not --We're going to publish your story, but the other words that writers long to hear, at least from a needa, --Daddy.

And so Dr. Frankenstein began scribbling on a piece of discarded paper, letting the words flow to him from his very own home-built needa. And this is what he wrote:

Cold so cold so cold so cold so cold so cold so

before he stopped the movement of his pen across the page and stared at the scrawled words that were now given a sort of life, an undead life. And then Dr. Cadric von Frankenstein, finally understanding what so many writers fail to, calmly ascended the tallest tower in his grandfather's castle and leaped from it. As it was only ten feet tall, he only succeeded in breaking his arm and bruising his body. But as luck would have it, Dr. Frankenstein's botched suicide became a success story when a compilation of Shakespeare's works plummetted from the sky and caved his head in.

And what was the secret that he finally understood? What was the true purpose of the mysterious needa? These are the questions that many writers reflect on when they hold their words up to the mirror of life.

The resurrected needa, by the way, went on to become an IRS auditor.

by:   Allan Muenzler aka VonBek

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