Brought to life on the workbench of Victor Frankenstein, the Creature demonstrated superhuman intelligence and learning abilities immediately. Perhaps its most striking features is its yellow skin and strange eyes.The Shelley-Wollstoncroft Papers conclude with it being sighted on the Arctic wastes, heading northwards, presumably to self-destruction.
Fifty years later, the seas are ruled by the enigmatic 'Captain Nemo' who commands a self-manufactured vessel of astonishing capacity and power. He supplies revolutionaries, destroys warships, and broods over the rotting carcass of Grenville's Revenge.
Aronnax does not really supply much information but what he looks like beyond that he is tall, pale, and symmetrically constructed: he does note however that his eyes are unusually far apart.
Professor Aronnax's account ends with the professors escape from captivity; Nemo is assumed to have been destroyed in the Maelstrom whirlpools off the Norwegian coast. (The Mysterious Island appears to explain Nemo's origin and provide his concrete death, but is riddled with inconsistencies when compared to Aronnax's account. The most telling being that The Mysterious Island occurs in 1865 to 1867, while Aronnax definitively dates the Maelstrom event to June 2 1868! The Mysterious Island is disinformation. How much did the Creature pay Verne?)
In the 1890's, a tall , thin man calling himself 'Doctor Nikola' appears and there are reports of strange and terrible experiments and bizarre schemes in pursuit of a Tibetan process of raising the dead. Nikola is slender, 'perfectly formed' with strange eyes and 'white, toad-coloured skin' He has a pet black cat he calls Apollyon ( 'The Destroyer', also known classicly as Abaddon)
Twenty years later, a tall, 'yellow-complected' man with strange eyes, and commanding ever stranger scientific breakthroughs is revealed by the detective work of a Burmese police commissioner.
Calling himself 'Doctor Fu Manchu': a sobriquet as unrealistic as 'O'Irish' or 'MacScotsman' he masquerades as a vaudeville Chinaman with pigtail, lisp and inscrutable expressions. Fu Manchu mugs for the metaphorical camera, but the Clouseau-like Denis Nayland Smith can never see the joke, and swallows the masquerade hook, line and sinker. He is accompanied at all times by a creature described as a small black marmoset called Peko. This in itself is strange because Peko is the name of an Estonian god of brewing and crops.
At around this time, a dope-fiend by the name of Costigan reports a wild narrative involving a skeletal figure known as 'Old Skullface' 'Kathulos' or simply 'The Master' who was reputedly found drifting in a strange sealed sarcophagus in the Atlantic. I imagine that one of Nemo's strange, decked-over submersible dinghies could have been described as a 'sarcophagous'. Costigan's opium addiction is cured by the administration of a powerful stimulant that converts a weak and dying addict into a physical powerhouse. It does not entirely cure his mind; the climax of his account features a hallucinogenic dream centered around a Mesoamerican pyramid built deep in the heart of London.
In 1946, a tall, thin man calling himself 'Jonas Sown' claims to have 'come out of China' and to have instigated the second world war.
The trail grows cold here.
If the Sown lead is actually unconnected - and the connection is very tenuous - than the Creature perished at some point during the Second World War. He would have been around 130 years old, but we have no data on the ageing rate of artificial beings.
No trace of the Nautilus has ever been found, yet in 1963 the US Navy tracked a single-screwed submarine operating at depths and speeds no other submarine has ever reached.
In 1972, the Norwegian Navy was involved in a two week long battle with a small cigar-shaped submarine that ultimately escaped unscathed.
So where is the Creature today?
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