Olga was cleaning up in the lab when a harrowing howl echoed along the drafty chambers of the ancient manor from the direction of the mistresses’ bedchamber.  “Oh no,” she thought, “the time has finally come.”  She rushed there.

Sitting bedside and sobbing over an inert young woman of exquisite beauty was the lady doctor.  Olga approached the bed and rested a hand on her convulsing shoulder.  The pale blue eyes of the deceased stared upwards into eternity.

So Bridget had at last succumbed after struggling bravely for so many weeks. Her death Olga had foreseen but not the change wrought in the normally stoic and hard character of her employer, whom she had never witnessed the prey of any tender emotion.  Something in her seemed to have broken completely. Olga was deeply touched and attempted to soothe Dr. Hilda.

“She suffers no more my mistress.  She is at peace now.  She is with the Lord.”

The doctor looked up wildly at her assistant through a mess of tangled brown hair, her eyes livid green flames behind a curtain of tears.  

“More of the fairy tales from your village little Olga.  Things they make up to satisfy the fearful and the weak-minded.  Why did God make you a cripple then Olga?” she shouted, “why did he give you a crooked spine?  And why did he bring this horrible plague here?”  She held Bridget’s lifeless hands.

“Why did he take my anchor, my shore, my lighthouse, my beacon in the darkness, why did he take my love from me?”  

Bridget was serene in death in the midst of these lamentations.  The disease had stolen none of her beauty, had almost rather enhanced it.  She looked as if waiting for a reviving kiss as in the fairy tale.  Hilda perhaps thought so as she did kiss her but the lips remained cold and the dead gaze did not waver.

All of a sudden the doctor regained her self-possession.  She rose, wiped away her tears and pulled her hair back into a bun.  She commanded with her customary sternness that brooked no rebuke: 

“Bring the gurney Olga, we are taking her to the lab.”

“But no my lady, you cannot mean..”

“Do as I say.” she replied calmly but Olga did not move.  She stood with a look imploring her mistress to change her mind while her heart beat a grim tattoo and her knees shook.

“DO AS I SAY!” she shouted and Olga, quaking with fear, complied.

They removed Bridget’s clothes and laid her out on the operating table adjacent to which was an infernal looking contraption, Dr. Hilda’s second greatest invention, an electrical generator: a huge box of black steel with two tentacle-like rubber cables tipped with metal diodes.  A bronze crank jutted from the side and atop was a magnetic coil.

“My lady, you cannot do this. You know what the serum does to the animals.  Think of poor Dieter!”  

As Olga pleaded she nonetheless cranked the machine until the coil began to spark.  Hilda had seemingly divested her grief by means of a single idea, a mad idea. She ignored her servants’ pleas and busied herself in her lab, lighting burners and carefully mixing chemicals. 

Dieter had been their beloved German Shepherd.  He got rabies and had to be put down to their great grief.  But it was an opportune time for the doctor.  Since her expulsion from University she had never stopped working on her grand project, her re-animation serum.  At the time Dieter passed she was sure it was ready for its’ trial run.  

The joy, the happiness they felt when the experiment concluded and Dieter’s tail whipped again and his noble head rose with a whimper.  The women, all three of them, embraced and wept. Beloved Dieter was back and more importantly Dr. Hilda Heilbronner had made the greatest discovery in scientific history.  Immortalization!  The mind that had defeated the great god Death.

And at first Dieter seemed relatively normal, placid but somehow lacking his former affectionate nature. He ran off that night and stayed away which was unlike him.  Then they heard of the cobbler who was found brutally mangled and the child torn to pieces.  Dieter returned later the next afternoon, blood dripping from his maw.  Hilda shot him with her fathers’ hunting rifle. Poor Dieter.  

Since then a steady stream of recently deceased dogs had been supplied through a contact at the local shelter.  For safety’s sake they were not allowed to roam free but caged and monitored.  Alas for every modification Hilda made to her serum none had turned out any better.  They would seem astonished and bewildered at first but would allow themselves to be stroked and petted.  But within days, sometimes hours, sometimes minutes they would turn vicious, snapping at the hands that tried to feed them, barking and howling in rage.   Olga had the thankless job of putting down and disposing of them.

Hilda meticulously mixed her concoction, her great invention, amidst a glass menagerie of bubbling beakers and decanters filled with liquids of strange colors. Years before at University they had called her mad, when she was taken seriously.  Usually they just laughed.  

To them she was always a freak: a woman with a superhuman intellect and an ambition so great it would have earned a man disapproval.  In her this hubris was completely unacceptable.  So when rumors got out about her and the lovely Bridget Heidegger it confirmed everyone’s ideas about her as “unnatural”.  It was the excuse they had been looking for.

She came home to her family’s estate in shame and ignominy but with a prize that made it all worthwhile, the great beauty Bridget, who surrendered her own place in society to live with the genius scientist she had fallen in love with.  Her father was elderly and senile and so raised no objection to the new domestic situation or to Hilda’s taking over of his disused laboratory.  Within a few weeks of their arrival he was dead and the estate belonged to Hilda.

“Do you remember how the villagers spat on us, how we narrowly avoided being lynched, she and I?  You remember.  You had not come to work for us yet but you were there, I saw your little hunched figure, your pock-marked face.  Yours was the only face with any sympathy, that’s why I took note of you.  These stinking burghers, petty merchants, lousy peasants, wrathful, hateful, frothing at the mouth like poor Dieter and all because we dared to love each other. And Bridget from one of the oldest families in Saxony.  She could have married a duke.” 

Hilda stirred a fine powder into her mixture and loaded a syringe.   

“She was the only one who believed in me Olga, in my right to be a scientist and to dare all, in  my love for her and in my desire to vanquish death and suffering from the face of the Earth.  Is she ready for the voltage?”

The great black machine thundered and sputtered like an angry god.  Olga carefully attached the diodes to Bridget’s temples and bound her wrists and ankles with leather straps. Lacking a screwdriver she tightened the manacles with the sharp end of a knife and left it lying there on the operating table.

Hilda approached and with a deep breath injected the corpse in the neck.  She nodded slightly to Olga who spun a dial that sent the charge into the corpses’ brain.  Bridget’s body quaked and rattled.  Her hair stood on end and her eyes bulged.  After thirty seconds, the doctor waved her hand and Olga turned the generator off.  They watched.

The merest hint of a light flickered in the formerly dead eyes.  The pupils dilated; their gaze drew back from eternity.  Bridget’s chest heaved in a great gasp and she looked at Hilda and Olga with bloodshot, terrified eyes.  Hilda screamed:  “She’s alive!”  

A cold chill ran down Olga’s spine.  It was not just bringing Bridget back from the dead.  In that scream she heard the madness of her mistress.  She remembered sermons at her old village church.  She was afraid of damnation. She could feel the flames of hellfire licking at her soul.  The doctor, in ecstatic delirium, freed the monster from its’ restraints.

“No, no Miss Hilda, she must be tested first.  We don’t know..”

The doctor slapped her assistant hard across the face.  

“You want me to put her in a cage?  My Bridget?  Get out of my laboratory.  Get out and leave us be!” she shrieked.  

Olga fled the room but hid and peered behind the door.  She saw the heavy axe the servants used to chop wood propped against the door jamb.  She grabbed it and held it to herself.

Freed, the monster named Bridget sat up and moved its’ limbs awkwardly like an automaton.  It pursed its’ lips and bared its’ teeth in gruesome imitation of a smile.  It looked at the doctor quizzically and spoke in a dry, chalky rasp : “Hildaaaa...”  

Olga shivered at the sound.  Great gusts of wind shook the trees outside.

The doctor beamed and caressed the monsters’ face: “Yes my love, I am here.”

Olga was chilled by the monsters’ expression, the frozen grin, the wide-open bloodshot eyes that never blinked, the wild red hair that stood straight up.  It was the embodiment of her resurrector’s madness.  

The monster leaned forward and the doctor eagerly kissed its’ mouth.  It suffered this intimacy for a moment and then bit down hard on Hilda’s lips, eliciting a little scream.  The monster took hold of her hair and pulled her back fiercely.  Hilda gasped and even smiled a little, as if this was a game they had played before.  She continued gently to stroke the monsters’ face.  

“Is it you my love?  Are you in there?  If you are in pain I can help you.  I love you.  Understand I could not bear to live my life without you.  We can try together.  My life is worth nothing without you.”  

The monster leaned forward. Hilda pressed it to her neck and leaned her head back in rapture.  The monster nibbled her neck then bit down, not without tenderness.  The doctor fondled the monsters’ heavy breasts.  Would they make love?  The monsters’ restless eyes saw the knife. It happened before Olga could so much as make a noise.

As Hilda moaned in delight the monster grabbed the knife and plunged it into the doctors’ stomach.  Hilda wailed piteously and looked in shocked disbelief at the monster whose face did not change.

“Why...did...you...bring...me...back?  I want to be dead.  I want to sleep.”  

She twisted the blade.  

With a clean thwack Olga sheared off the monsters’ head.  Blood spouted from the neck as the body fell to one side, its’ limbs flailing wildly.  The head fell to the other, still attempting to speak, the jaws working but making only bloody gurgling sounds, the eyes spinning.  

Olga took her mistress in her arms.  The wound gushed.  The doctor’s face was blue and blood streamed from her mouth.  As the life left her body she looked into the scarred, pock-marked face of the weeping Olga.  

“I never noticed” she said weakly, with her last breath, “how beautiful you are until now.” 

The doctor expired and Olga held her, alone now.