*
I went to bed, I can’t say when, but the sun was sinking and the cold started to draw itself up and around the house and the whole sky became grey, and I sensed bones approaching.
I lay on the bed in the dark, and there was breathing in my ears, right up close, breathing, breathing, and the gentle but persistent pressing of a mighty thumb and finger on my windpipe.
Some distance was required. A walk, to put some space between the things pressing in on me: the house, my mind, the house and its secrets, and Mary.
I’d determined to be straight out, but it took me hours to get sorted, for every time I found myself on the doorstep, pulling on my walking boots, I would stand and prepare to leave and then clomp back inside to pick up something I thought I had forgotten. Then I wouldn’t know what it was and I would stare at the wood turning grey with age all around me, and the cold fire, and then I would get to the doorstep where I would pull my boots on. Then I would have the feeling that I had forgotten something and I must have pulled my boots on a dozen times but I’m really sure I only did it once.
Finally, with some great effort not to think, I found myself on the path leading up from the house, away from the path down to the car, and town, and towards the high mountain. This meant pushing under the hanging branches of the final strip of forest before the climb really started, feeling the scrape of their needles on my neck here and there.
It was a cooler day, even in the sun, and in the gloom of the forest, cooler still, and I was glad I had brought a fleece to wear. I turned up its collar, pulled my woollen hat further down, trying to focus on nothing but each boot step, and listened to the sound of the dead forest floor giving with each footfall, the rustle of my clothes and the creak of the arms of the trees in the soft breeze. Patches of sun fell through gaps in the branches, and I could see past the trunks to sunlit alpine grass, tall and dying as winter approached.
I could still hear the cascade of water in the gullet of the valley, so soft and dispersed now, just white noise, white noise. I passed beyond the treeline to the open slopes, following a path trod into the ground by centuries of hooves, of goats, of cattle, of the mountain sheep and the occasional foot of Man, where, tilting my head against the high horizon, I made mental trigonometry. It might take an hour. Or maybe two, but I knew it was probably deceptive. Still, there, out of sight, was the peak of my mountain, the very centre of not just my triangular world, but the entire planet itself, and I had not yet visited, despite the weeks I had whiled away in my rotting gorge. I needed space, and I knew the peak of the mountain would offer it in infinite abundance.
The whole face of the heavens was blue, across the compass, just a wisp of white here and there, sidling from behind the peak, but which dissipated as fast as they arrived. I climbed, and inoculated by sunshine, I found ways to forget what had happened, for an hour at least, perhaps more. Yet still the peak was out of sight and as far away, therefore, as when I had set off.
As tired as old ghosts, I found a rock and let myself rest, trying to suck what little oxygen there was from the miserly air, gazing back down on the way I had come: the valley, the forests. There were glimpses of the winding road before it turned out of sight, glimpses of mountain streams before they entered the chasm of the valley, and then I saw a roof of a chalet.
Thinking it had to be mine, I smiled. It looked so innocent in the drifting afternoon, not a place of forbidden matters, but then I realised it was not my house at all. The roof was made of corrugated iron sheets, just like Étienne’s place, but while his had been replaced fairly recently and were mostly still steel-grey, this roof was rusting orange-brown across its entire surface. The configuration of the two chimneys was different. It was hemmed in by trees on all sides, unlike Étienne’s house. Yet I knew it couldn’t be far from where I had been staying these weeks, and I felt very stupid that I hadn’t seen it before.
I watched it for a time, as if it would do something, then laughed at myself, because, what would a house do?
It started to get cold, and I twisted round to look at the peak behind me and saw not just a few wisps of cloud but banks of darkness sweeping over from the other side of the mountain. They soon took the sun, and the temperature plunged. A ferocious wind slapped my cheek. I sensed there was something in the clouds, and soon saw ugly grey streaks of diagonals across the mountain. With that, I turned for home.
I wasn’t even halfway down the open slopes when the rain hit me, pattering on my shoulders as I hurried. Before I had closed the other half of the distance to the forest, the rain became sleet, and within no more than a minute, thick, heavy, wet snow. I put down my head and though I had my fleece, it was not waterproof, and the chill of snow started to seep into me. As I entered the protecting trees I made out another path, leading around the edge of the forest, and knew it was heading towards the other house whose roof I’d seen. I felt drawn to explore, but equally I felt pushed away. Besides, I knew it was ill-advised, to say the least, when I was already cold, and while the snow was getting heavier.
Inside the forest it was almost too dark to see now, and though most of the snow was kept from me, here and there a few solitary flakes would drift down in front of me, calm, having been removed from the will of the wind.
By the time I made it home I was shivering badly. Somehow I fingered a fire into life in the log burner, pulled off my sodden clothes and slumped into the armchair with two blankets across me.
I slept, waking fitfully then dozing again, vaguely thinking about triangles and the centre of the world. I thought about being trapped. About ghosts being trapped, about ghosts being tired. I thought about other creatures, other monsters, about stories from the mountains; stories I’d read about tunnels in the mountainsides, about pits deep inside caves, full of treasure, guarded by spirits and demons, and then I remembered how they used to think glaciers themselves were spirits. In brutal winters they would grow, descending from the Alps to destroy barns, houses, even whole villages, unstoppable, though they did indeed try to stop them. They called on bishops to come, and the bishops tried to exorcise the ice. Exorcise the ice, and remove their evil spirits, but in vain, of course.
And then I must have slept into the small of the night, because when I woke; my new visitor stood before me in the wavering half-light.
Firelight gives him an eerie glow.
I know. And I try to ignore.
I know who he is, but he seems to want to make sure.
He stands there, waves an arm in front of his body as if drawing a sash in the air with the backward sweep of his wrist.
‘Do you know me? Do you know me?’
I nod. How can I not? I have read his description a hundred times, after all: not his physical appearance so very much; but his behaviour, his actions. The wildness in his eyes, the air of intellect and fierce emotion; the still undimmed belief in goodness, hidden far below a surface of tragic pain. My god! I half-expect him to gnash his teeth and when he does, moments later, I am as much moved to laughter as fear. He’s just as she described him. Just as she made him.
Frankenstein.
Victor Frankenstein; that most melodramatic of characters; the hero and antihero of Mary’s abysmal novel.
‘I know you,’ I say. ‘Yes. Yes, I do.’
Frankenstein. Of course, most people these days know that Frankenstein is not the name of the monster, but the name of the man who made him. That was not always the case. Very often the lay-reader, or maybe it would be fairer to say cinema-goer, has confused the name of the creator with his creation.
And what is the name of the monster? He does not have one. Victor never gave him one. Or do I mean Mary never gave him one? (And what do we feel towards those who we do not even bother to name? What an act! Dehumanisation, no less.)
‘I would not be who she would have me be,’ Victor says, and starts to pace the room in a fashion so comical that I would laugh again, were I watching this on the safety of a screen, and not before my eyes. But s
ince it is happening before my eyes, it is … unsettling, to say the very least.
‘No!’ he declares, turning on his heel just before my desk, pacing back towards me. ‘I would not be who she would have me be!’
He stands, staring right through me.
‘And what would you rather be?’ I ask eventually.
He doesn’t answer immediately. A moment later, he sinks to both knees, and lowers his head into his palms. When he speaks, it is so softly that I can barely hear.
‘She made me a monster.’
That could be taken two ways, I think. At least, but I decide to go with the obvious.
‘I have to agree with you,’ I say. ‘And I hope that doesn’t offend you, but—’
‘She made me a monster!’ he repeats, standing, throwing his arms out wide like the worst amateur dramatician.
I look at the floor, holding up a hand in apology, again experiencing the weird mixture of the compulsion to laugh and the insipient feeling of fear.
‘I—’
‘Think on it!’ he cries. ‘Think on what she made me. At her bidding, I made her that creature. She portrays me as noble, as a man above ordinary men; wise and gifted, and yet look what she makes me do. I make her creature; and I call it her creature for I wanted no part of it; I make her creature and then her creature becomes a killer. Shunned and hated, it learns to hate as fast as it learns to read!’
I nod. That is true. It reminds me of another thing I find ridiculous about the book: that the monster learns to speak, to read, in fact, to enter into complex philosophical debate, and all by listening through the wall of the cottage where he’s hiding, listening to the conversations and readings of the peasant family. Oh, except they’re not really a peasant family, are they? No, of course not, they’re a noble family fallen on hard times, and ill luck, because genuine peasants would never do, would never have the depth of feeling or sensitivity to serve as protagonists in Mary’s snobbish tale.
But maybe the fault is mine. The lack of disbelief. I have no problems believing that Victor can compose a living man from the discarded body parts of the charnel house and the rotting bone-yard. Yet I pick holes in other equally improbable events. So is the fault mine? Or is it Mary’s for not convincing me with her story? Who holds the ultimate responsibility for the story? The writer or the reader, the reader or the writer …
Victor breaks from another reverie and paces the room again.
‘Yes,’ he says. He stops. ‘But none of this is my doing! And what else does she make me? The creature kills! Kills young William, my little brother. Accused of the murder is our maid, Justine, and though I know she is not guilty, do I do a thing to stop her going to her hanging? I do not! I merely do all I am good for; I wring my hands and bemoan my fate, but do I lift a solitary finger, say even a single word to save her neck from the rope? No!’
He scowls.
He rails and moans, as he draws a hideously painful depiction of himself; by turns he endangers half his family, and his friends too. Henry Clerval dies at the monster’s hands, and still Victor says nothing to anyone of what he has done; of why this is his fault.
‘Do you find it credible? Could any man be so cold, so callous? Hah! But this is what she would have me be. And there is not a damned thing I can do about it. She has me, for all time. She has me! And I tell you this. I tell you this as sure as I stand before you: my creation follows me, as I follow it. My creation will come, and will come soon!’
I find I do not want to laugh so much any more.
*
What do they say? Knowledge is knowing that Frankenstein is not the monster in Mary’s novel, while wisdom is knowing that Frankenstein is the monster in Mary’s novel. For Victor is a monster, no two ways about it. He creates a creature that kills the innocent, and does nothing to confess to his errors until it is too late for many innocent people. Yet he wants me to understand something else. At the least, he shares the blame for the actions of his creation with the god who made him, a god by the name of Mary.
But I do not like what he said about his creation following on behind. Something occurs to me, though, something very important.
‘Do you think you can be saved?’ I ask.
‘Do you know me? Do you know me?’
I see what he means, at once. He means he is what he is, and that he cannot alter from the way he was created. A sudden wave of despair engulfs not just me, but the room itself. He begins to pace in that all-too-familiar manner, and I wonder if he can be helped. Maybe I can help him, maybe it is possible to change your nature, no matter how hard it has been cut into the rock.
‘I would not be who she would have me be,’ he says, a little more quietly than before. Something is already tickling the back of my brain.
‘Yes, I see—’ I begin, but he cuts me off.
‘No!’ he declares, with less vehemence than before. ‘I would not be who she would have me be!’
The tickling at the base of my brain is growing more insistent. I try something.
‘Where were you born?’ I ask. ‘In Geneva, I think. Not so far from—’
‘She made me a monster!’ He cuts across me and I rise from my chair and circle behind him. He does not follow my movements, not even in the slightest, but stands before the fire.
‘Think on it!’ he cries. ‘Think on what she made me. At her bidding, I made her that creature of mine.’
Now I know for sure. He continues his speech, exactly as it was before, perhaps a touch quieter, and he paces the room, up and down and announces, ‘Do you find it credible? Could any man be so cold, so callous?’ just as he did before, in fact, every word, word for word, just as he did before, yet more quietly, more quietly, and by the time he reaches the end and stands in front of the fire, looking at nothing, at no one and says, ‘Do you know me?’ I feel a coldness slide up into my belly and I want to be sick.
I take the chair from my desk, and sit behind him, watching. It is too much to see his face, too much to see, as he goes over his lines, again and again, throws his arms wide, kneels, paces, turns and declaims his melodramatic life, stuck in infinite loops, growing quieter each time, as if someone is slowly turning down the sound on a television set. And then I see that he is starting to fade, this tired ghost. It’s the firelight I see through him first; showing through his leg are the flames of the log burner and I know he is going.
It takes an age, maybe an hour or more. An eternity in which he slowly dies before me. It is unbearable to watch, unbearable to hear, but gradually he goes, step by step, word by word; his voice fades and his body fades, until finally, he’s gone, and I am left with the final words of his that it was possible to hear.
My creation will come.
My creation will come.
I need to get out of here, not just out of this house, but away, gone for good.
Yesterday’s snow has vanished, more or less, as fast as it arrived, but I know I have been warned. It will come to stay permanently soon, and I already knew I would have to leave before then. Maybe I have failed, maybe not. I have a few tens of thousands of words done, but I know they are messy, disjointed. I know, with the awful gut ache that tells a writer these things, that they are not yet a book. Maybe they can be, maybe not, but I know my time here is over.
I start to gather my things, and there is not much to pack, because I brought very little. I will have to make several trips to the car, but I think I can get it down to three if I leave the unopened tins of food behind.
I stuff my clothes into my larger rucksack and take it to the door, pulling my boots on, crouching on the porch. I hoist the bag on to my back and set off, down from the house, on the track towards the car. An almost ludicrous fear that the car will be gone, or damaged, or unable to start when I get to it grows in me, and I find myself half-jogging the final stretch, only returning to a walk when I see it sitting on the bend, exactly as before, though with a thin sheet of icy snow covering it – a spotless and even blanket left from the fa
ll yesterday.
Wiping the snow from the boot with my forearm, I pop it open and stow my bag. Then I cannot stop myself from getting in and turning the engine over. It starts immediately and I laugh at myself for being so silly as to believe it might not have done. Still, I let it run for a while, warming the engine for a good five minutes till I’m sure it’s happy.
I set off back to the house; there’s a second bag: that’s my bedding. And then there’s my other stuff: the laptop, books, papers. I reach the house quickly enough, thinking I must finally be getting used to the lack of air up here, and barge the door open.
I’m halfway across the room when something stops me dead. My rucksack, the one I put in the boot of the car, is sitting in the middle of the rug in front of the fire.
*
I do nothing.
I mutter one short, bad word under my breath, and my skin starts to itch, feverishly.
*
I am out of the door again a few moments later, heading to the car with my bag on my back, and it’s only when I have been tramping for twenty minutes that I realise I should have reached the car, and that I realise that I’m walking uphill, not down, and that the bag is no longer on my back.
I stop dead, to see where I am; on the track up away from the house, towards the mountain, no, not exactly towards the mountain, because there, a short way through the trees, is that other house.
Turning, I put it behind me, and head back towards my house, and the car, but I have gone no more than another fifty paces when I see the other place in front of me. I’m closer this time.
I say the bad word again, and my hands start to shake. But it seems I have no choice, for though I try three more times to walk away from the house, it appears before me again each time.
Once more I swear, and hang my head in despair.
‘OK,’ I say, and I approach the house.
*
It’s old, at least as old as Étienne’s house.