Grey Matter

The night was in grim mood and wanted the whole world to know about it. The quality of the darkness of this night was brooding and almost teenaged in nature, but the night wasn’t quite in that sort of mood and knew better than to go there. No one needed that in their lives.

However, not content with the oppressive darkness, the night wrapped itself in a shroud of clouds and then it wrung them out fiercely. Still this did not suit the night, it wanted to express its grim mood some more, so it lit the night with a chaotic streak of lightening.

The subsequent crack of thunder, that accompanied that flash of lightening, rattled the windows with violent intent. The bullied windows, were already contending with an unwarranted barrage of rain and wondered what they had done to deserve such an assault. The windows scowled and moaned ever so quietly about their lot in life. This was not what they had signed up for. Bad enough they’d been fitted in a draughty and ancient castle and looked as out of place as a fish dressed as a flamingo, doing its thing on a disco dance floor that had seen better days.

The night, made it’s point again. This time the lightening lit up the large, cobweb bedecked  room and elicited a cry of frustration from one of the two occupants.

“My eyes!” 

This exclamation was followed by an arm held against the temporarily blinded eyes. Dramatic was that arm, and unseen to this actor her companion smiled at such antics.

“Close the curtains, Carol!” barked the dramatic actor.

Carol Igor shrugged, “yes mistress,” she said to her mistress. These words she had been taught by her father, and these words she had questioned, because surely this level of slavish language was not required in this enlightened day and age? Her father had shaken his head in something like disappointment, it was difficult to tell. Her father had no neck to speak of and so his shaking head looked out of kilter with the rest of his body and Carol feared that it may fall from his shoulders were he not to cease such movement. 

Carol’s father told her that she had a lot to learn. When he saw the fires of disobedience and defiance continue to burn brightly in her eyes, he relented and explained himself further. As far as Carol’s father, Igor Igor, was concerned, you had to play the game and the pleasantries and manners he conveyed helped create a certain dynamic. Igor was after a quiet life and in being ever present and ever so polite, he found that he often blended into the background and was not called upon all that often. “Make it easy on yourself,” he had told his daughter, “you’ll have a job for life if you do as I say and do everything you can not to stand out.”

Carol had nodded and smiled in a way intended to convey her understanding, but the quiet and observant Igor had seen no acceptance of his words and he foresaw trouble ahead for Carol. Igor died knowing that the Igor dynasty was likely to come to an end with his passing and that his grandchild was likely to be a chartered accountant, or something of that dull and tragic nature.

Nevertheless, Carol shut the curtains. The pay was good and although she felt curtain shutting was beneath her, she crossed the room and pulled the long and ancient curtains closed against the petulant night. She did her best not to cough as the dust cloud from the curtains enveloped her and held her in an eyewatering and asphyxiating embrace.

The other occupant of the room did not note the dust, too absorbed was she in the work at hand.

“That’s better,” she said, as she returned to her task, “I need you to hand Carol, for as long as it takes.”

Carol sighed. She sighed a sigh that was as audible and conspicuous as a sigh could be and she directed this straight at her mistress’s downturned face. Carol had been looking forward to finishing up, preferably in the next hour. She had a date with a box set, a bottle of red and an array of snacks that she had painstakingly amassed over the last fortnight. The prospect of being at her mistress’s beck and call into the early hours darkened her mood such that it matched the night.

“Is there a problem?” the mistress did not look up from her work, but her voice was stern and there was a warning contained within her words.

“It’s supposed to be my night off,” Carol did not heed her mistress’s warning.

“You can take any other night off,” the mistress told her, “tonight we must attend to the pinnacle of my life’s work and indeed the life’s work of my father and his father before him and some additional, quite helpful work from their forebears too.”

Carol sighed again, this sigh an inferior echo of her first.

“What is it?” barked the mistress.

“It’s hardly brain surgery!” Carol wailed churlishly.

Baroness Hilda Frankenstein looked up from the brain she was performing surgery on, “is that a joke?” she hissed.

Carol found herself unwillingly looking into the enraged face of her boss and had to look away under the searing heat of Hilda’s anger. Her eyes fell upon the brain that Hilda was working on. Bother, she thought to herself. Yet again she had chosen the very worst words possible. It did not help that she didn’t see this as a job for life, she was saving up so she could travel the world and find her thing. It also did not help that she hadn’t taken Hilda at all seriously. The aristocracy had some strange ideas at the best of times, and Hilda was as about as out of touch as the best of them. So Carol had dismissed her boss’s hobby entirely, and she had paid no attention to her whatsoever. Only now, as she gazed at the strange, grey, moist cauliflower that Hilda had opened up and was scratching about in, did she realise that Hilda was deadly serious about this hobby of hers.

A real brain? Carol thought to herself, an actual real brain? 

Carol looked across at the large table in the middle of the room and for the first time, she took a proper look at the shape underneath the sheet. There was a body lying on that table and from the size and shape of it, it was the body of an impressively built man.

All those deliveries. Carol had carried parcel after parcel into this room and not once had she understood what Hilda was about and what it was that each and every parcel contained. How did you arrange for body parts to be delivered to your door? Carol would be checking the internet later and make no mistake about that. If Hilda was building herself a man from pieces she’d ordered from the internet then Carol could…

Could what?

The possibilities were endless, but Carol didn’t have a clue as to what she should zero in on. Carol would drown in an ocean of possibilities, that was why she had to get out there into the world and find something different. Do something different. Be something different.

Right now though, Carol had to dig herself out of a hole. She had to take her foot out of her mouth and get with the program. Foot out of my mouth! Carol smirked at this thought.

The smirk did her no favours.

Hilda’s enraged stare intensified.

Carol shook her head, “apologies, mistress.” She wanted to say more, but a fitting explanation eluded her, so she tried to look suitably sorry for her transgressions.

Hilda nodded, “well let’s get on shall we?”

“Yes, mistress,” Carol agreed.

“Good,” said Hilda, “now pass me the forceps.”

Carol stepped to the side of her mistress and pondered the impressive array of surgical tools before her. This was a depressing array of incomprehensible tools as far as Carol was concerned. 

Forceps?

“Come on!” snapped Hilda, “I don’t have all day! The brain has to be fresh and we have to work quickly!”

Fresh? Carol tried not to think about that, nor where Hilda had found that brain.

Eventually, after much random deliberation, she decided upon a shiny instrument, one that looked interesting and above all sharp, and she passed it to Hilda. Hilda did not look up from the delicate work she was in the midst of, she reached out her free hand to grasp the instrument that Carol had selected for her. Too slowly, Carol understood that she should not have presented the tool point end first and there was a horrendous cry as Hilda’s hand enclosed the wickedly sharp blade. 

Hilda, in a considerable amount of unanticipated pain, dropped the tool and stumbled around her lab. There was much crashing, squealing and wailing, together with impressive gouts of blood that left eye catching splash patterns upon the lab surfaces.

Carol’s eye was momentarily taken by the spray of blood that painted the middle of the white sheet that draped the body on the table. Hilda had gone for a magnificently endowed model. There was no skimping when it came to the specification of this section of the body. Carol’s estimation of her boss leapt upwards and she quite forgot that it would be her who would be cleaning the mess that Hilda was making in the lab.

“What did you do!?” gasped Hilda.

Carol reluctantly tore her goggling eyes away from the day dream inspiring body part and looked towards Hilda, wondering what it was that she had done, barring wounding her boss in a way that would require an entry in the health and safety log. Carol was quite proud of this initiative of hers and this would be the first time the health and safety process has been followed.

“I..” began Carol as she stepped forth to attend to her injured mistress.

“No!” cried Hilda in absolute and abject anguish.

Carol’s eyes went wide at this outburst, but also at the squidgy feeling underfoot. She realised two things in rapid succession, that she has stepped upon something truly awful and also that whatever she has stepped upon was a problem and the problem was this; the substance combined with the stone floor was creating an unstoppable forward motion under her foot that was set to propel her foot forwards at an alarming and shocking rate.

“Eeee!” cried Carol as her foot launched forwards and she was thrown into the air in an inelegant arc that saw her head hitting the ground first with a resounding crack that made the outside thunder take to its feet and clap in appreciation.

“My brain!” Hilda cried as she wiped some of the squished brain from her lab coat with her still functioning right hand. 

Her left hand, she cradled against her chest, the bleeding now staunched and that particular drama over.

Hilda stood there surveying the scene of chaos for a moment. Her face blank of any expression. 

“This would never have happened when Igor was here,” she said absently to herself, then she propelled herself into a blur of activity, there being little time to salvage something or anything from the mess that Carol had caused.

Cogs whirred in the large and genius filled mind of Hilda Frankenstein and she formed an alternative plan. A useful plan. A plan that she would make work even if it took all of this grumpy and disruptive night.

*

When Carol opened her eyes, she did not know where she was. 

Then the shock of the fall came back to her like a reluctant spectre. 

She must have knocked herself out as she hit the floor, she thought to herself as she stared up into the impossibly high ceiling of the lab. Impossibly high, and yet not so high as it should be from the floor of the lab. She was not on the floor. She was higher up than that.

“What…?” she said with a mouth that felt gummy and just all wrong.

The sound of that word of hers was very wrong too. 

Automatically, compelled by something that she knew she should fight, but did not have the wherewithal to, she turned her head to the right and looked down upon her stricken body. Her body lay where she had fallen, and it was forever changed.

Carol gasped as she saw the dread detail of that change. Understanding of her changed state seeped into her like the cold of hyperthermia, numbing her and stifling the scream she wanted to give voice to.

The top of her head was missing.

“I’m having an out of body experience,” she said, voicing this disjointed thought of hers.

“Oh, you’re very much having an in a body experience,” Hilda corrected as she loomed into sight above her.

“What have you done!” said Carol suddenly becoming animated, but not getting very far with her animation, as she discovered she was bound to the table she lay upon.

“Careful!” warned Hilda Frankenstein, “you don’t want to pop any of your stitches my dear Mr Grey.”

Carol went slack with the full horror of her new existence. 

Mr Grey?

Carol knew only one Mr Grey and he was a fictional character who…

Carol was a little bit sick in her mouth as the gravity of the situation hit her in the face like a leaping wet salmon.

“We’re going to have a lot of fun together you and I,” said Hilda, eyeing Carol’s body with a very specific type of hunger.

“But I…” began Carol.

“You were never cut out for Igorring, we both know that,” said Hilda, “and you did want to do something different, didn’t you? You even wanted to be something different…”

“How…?” murmured Carol.

“How did I know that?” asked Hilda, “you talked to me while I put the finishing touches on your new body. I think this arrangement is going to suit us both fine, don’t you?”

Carol looked up at Hilda and something strange occurred. Hilda looked different, she looked remarkably different and then Carol couldn’t remember how she had looked before. There was something alluring and attractive about this Hilda, and Carol felt herself responding to the intelligent and powerful woman who stood over her.

Or rather, he felt himself responding.

“What’s happening? asked Carol as he felt himself continue to transform into something other than the Carol he had once been.

“Apart from the obvious?” Hilda said eyeing a part of Carol’s anatomy that Carol had previously found to be quite, quite marvellous and was now outdoing itself in the marvellous stakes and making Carol feel sensuously marvellous with the promise of much more marvellous to come.

“Oh,” said Carol gruffly.

“Oh indeed,” said Hilda with a knowing smile.

“I…” said Carol.

Hilda stroked his cheek, “I have read the theory, but could only hope it was correct. You are adapting, Ca… Christian. You are a product of your surroundings and now you are an amazing specimen of a man.”

“I wanted…” said the last remnants of Carol.

“And your wish is being fulfilled. You will never again be my servant,” smiled Hilda as she began to undo the bindings holding Christian Grey down on the table, “I on the other hand will very much enjoy the odd spell as yours, master.”

The embarrassed night skulked away leaving it to the newly dawning day to deal with the sordid goings on in Hilda Frankenstein’s castle…