Winterstein's Monster

Winterstein’s Monster

            Kusala was a very frightened city. There was a serial killer on the loose. Every other week another corpse was found. Not only that, but there were body parts missing. Sometimes the eyes, sometimes the brain, sometimes the heart. And the police were making no progress. But to be fair to the Zombie Police, they had never been trained to investigate, only to follow orders in locking up the enemies of the government.

          If the police had been interested in investigations, they might have taken an interest in the strange goings on at the Kusala Museum. This sinister memorial for the one-party state faithfully and reverentially preserved all the relics, bones, charms, chains and instruments of torture from this bygone age.

          Visitors to the museum had been complaining for months of the strange sickly smell of formaldehyde which permeated the museum. But the janitor at the museum, Professor Winterstein, had always explained that there was nothing unusual about the smell, because he had to use formaldehyde to preserve the bones and relics which would otherwise be eaten by termites, or even by the visitors. For this was a very hungry time in the starving city of Kusala.

          But if there had been any detective to detect, he would have found that the sweet sickly smell of formaldehyde was not coming from the exhibits on the lower floors, but was permeating slowly down from the uppermost floor. It was here that Professor Winterstein had his own apartment, right under the glass dome which formed the roof of the museum.

          Or rather, to be more precise, this was where Winterstein had his laboratory, where he also lived as a recluse. For the professor was also an earnest and dedicated researcher into the occult, dedicated to finding the secret of eternal life. More precisely, his project was to collect the parts from various corpses and sew them all together into a new human being. And not only into a new human being, but a superman. A man of extraordinary intelligence, wisdom, courage and strength. For Winterstein was one of the most dangerous people on Earth – he had a passion to do good.

          One of the most mysterious aspects of the serial killings was that the victims were mostly prominent citizens, and always with a different part cut out. The body of a politician was found his tongue cut out. The body of a judge had been found with no brain. The priest had no heart. The wrestler had both his arms missing. The city’s most famous womanizer was found with his essential equipment entirely missing.

          All this was because Winterstein was following his theory that society is flawed because of our human imperfections. We had clever people with no heart, people who talked excessively but without brains, and fools with excessive reproductive energy to reproduce more fools, and so on. Winterstein’s aim was therefore to build a perfectly balanced man whose parts were all excellent – a superman!

          But the theory went further. Winterstein had seen that government, like the human body, had its own specialized parts. The executive was the tongue, which gave the orders, the judiciary the brain, parliament the rules, the opposition the devil’s advocate, civil society the heart, the media the eyes, investigating agencies the nose, always sniffing. But each part was always arguing with the other, and government was going nowhere.

          So Professor Winterstein had the brilliant idea of bringing all the best of these organs into one body. And this one body would unite all the different organs of the state, which would then work together without argument or discord or conflict, provided everybody did as they were told by Superman. All the previous failings of the one-party state would now be overcome as it was personified into the rule of Winterstein’s Monster.

          And then, after Winterstein had sewn together all the parts, and erected the high copper antenna above the museum, there finally came the fateful night of a big thunder storm, the climax to Winterstein’s great experiment. Down came a great bolt of lightning straight into the borrowed heart of the monster, who quivered with life, and lurched up from the huge laboratory bench and staggered in the direction of the brilliant professor.

‘You are my Superman!’ squealed Winterstein, ‘Look at yourself in the mirror! See how beautiful you are! You have all the best qualities of several humans all rolled into one!’

‘You fool,’ roared the monster, as he staggered towards the mirror. ‘I am an ugly monster, not made in the image of God but in the image of the idiot Winterstein! How shall I ever find a wife?’

‘You are made from all the very best organs,’ squealed Winterstein excitedly, ‘all working in perfect harmony’

‘They are all working against each other,’ bellowed the monster, ‘I’m in the most terrible agony.’ So saying the monster picked up little Winterstein and hurled him off the museum roof, where he met his death by crashing into the Freedom Statue, which remains to this day with broken chains.

And then Winterstein’s Monster leapt down from the museum roof and into the city, where people screamed and threw stones when they saw him coming. So he ran all the way to Zumbubwe, where One-Party Monsters are better understood.

And for the next week a strange sickly smell of formaldehyde pervaded the entire city of Kusala, so much so that the government had to put out a statement that the chemical had been found leaking from all Zombiebeef products, and that all the directors had been arrested.

And that was the last time that anybody tried to re-introduce the one-party state in Zombieland.