Fredric Clerval
Victor,
I have seen your most recent letter. You are a liar and a fiend. I have hired a detective to find both you and my son. If my son has been ruined through association with you, I will take everything your family has ever owned and find a way to make you pay for the corruption of my son in the courts, as well. You will find that my wrath can reach you even on the moors of Scotland.
Fredric Clerval
I had never known Henry’s father well, but I cringed to think of what news the detective would bring back. It would not end well for poor Henry. If Monsieur Clerval was this harsh to Victor, I doubted he would show any kindness to his son.
Another letter was from Judge Frankenstein. I opened it with trepidation.
My Son,
I do not know what possessed you to leave us in the midst of so much trouble. It was poorly done. Regardless, you should know that Elizabeth has gone. Where, I do not know. She left without warning.
We need her back. I cannot lose her. Not after everything else. Please return home and help me find her.
Your father,
Alphonse Frankenstein
I set down the letter, shocked. I had expected accusations, condemnations. Instead, I found only desperation to have me back. I felt the first pang of guilt toward the man who had allowed me to become part of his family. He had lost so much, and I, ever ungrateful, had not even told him where I was going.
I resolved to make peace with him when I returned. And that would be done with Victor, safe, at my side. It was the kindest thing I could do for Judge Frankenstein.
The second letter was more recent and postmarked from London, which shocked me.
Victor,
Fredric Clerval has taken some notion of revenge in his head. I cannot dissuade him from seeking you out. I fear for what mischief he might create for you on foreign soil, where I have no influence. I have followed him here and will endeavor to find you before he does.
If you see that idiot son of his, tell him to write his damned father a letter.
Alphonse Frankenstein
Judge Frankenstein and Henry’s father! Both in England, perhaps getting close to Scotland now. I did not know whether that made things easier or harder for me. I hoped it did not affect me at all. Neither of them had any idea the forces of life and death Victor was wrestling with.
Only I could help him.
* * *
—
It was twilight when George steered the boat up onto the rocky shore of the tiny island Victor had claimed. One other boat was there, though it looked as though it had not been used in some time.
“I do not want to cross back in the dark,” George said. “Makes navigation tricky. Will you be all right?”
I nodded, wishing he could see my warm smile beneath my veil but preferring anonymity. “I will. And I can take the letters up myself so you do not have to delay. Thank you so much for your kindness today, George. I am forever indebted.”
He ducked his head, tipping his cap. “I hope things go well for you.”
“I hope so, too.” If Victor was not here, I faced a long, uncertain night on a cold, inhospitable island. I turned to the steep and jagged tumble of black rocks. There was a barely visible trail that wound its way up to a narrow plateau. I followed it, stepping carefully in the fading light. The first cottage I saw—though cottage was a generous word for something that looked more suited to being a chicken coop—was empty and, much like the docked boat, held no evidence of recent inhabitants.
The second was dark, as well. I peered in the windows. There was a cradle by the cold fireplace, no books or pens or anything that made me think it was Victor’s.
I walked on. The island was not large, but I could have been wrong in my judgments. Perhaps the first cottage had been Victor’s. Or I had come to the wrong place and missed him yet again.
Just as I was certain my entire life would be spent in pursuit of Victor, I passed an outcropping of lichen-splotched boulders and saw a third cottage. This had a cramped living space and a larger wooden outbuilding attached to the rear wall. Though the whole thing leaned from decades of relentless wind, it seemed sturdy enough.
There were no lights here, either, but I rushed forward with more hope. The cottage was at the highest point of the island, and the wind whipped me with vicious force. It whistled through the rocks, singing a mournful and solitary song. I nearly lost my veil, and as I turned to catch it, I saw on the horizon of the sea two lonely boats bobbing far offshore—my only company for the night.
Bracing myself for disappointment, I opened the door to the cottage. Inside, I found a sparsely furnished space: a stove, a cot, a table with one chair. On the table was a journal. My heart pounding so loud I could hear the blood pulsing through my veins, I stepped across the slate floor and looked down. The last lingering light of day revealed Victor’s handwriting.
I had found him.
Letting out a trembling sigh of relief, I resolved to sit and wait. His things were here; he would be back eventually. And when he returned, I would tell him I had discovered the truth and wanted him with me. We would fight this monster together, as we should have from the beginning.
But I wondered—what was he doing out here? Did he hope to lure the monster to such a secluded spot? To keep it away from me, or to destroy it?
The outbuilding could contain anything. Or it could be empty. But I suspected with growing excitement that it held a trap for the monster, or some other means of destroying it. That must have been the work Victor referred to.
I took the lamp from the table and lit it. As I went back outside in the shrieking wind, the flame nearly went out in spite of its protective glass globe. I pushed open the door to the outbuilding and was immediately assailed with strange chemical scents I both recognized and was repulsed by.
It was another laboratory, I realized, a split second before I saw what was on a metal table in the center of it.
Or rather, who was on a metal table in the center of it.
JUSTINE LAY AS THOUGH sleeping, but there was something terrible in the stillness of her face. Truly relaxed, it lost the shape of her life, her happiness, her soul.
It was Justine, and it was not.
It was only a body.
But it was her body.
I wanted to run from this place. But I could not run from Justine, not when she needed me. Because she needed me still.
How could Victor do this? How could he violate her so completely? She lay beneath a short sheet, her head and shoulders exposed and her feet bare. I twitched to cover them so she would not get cold but could not bring myself to touch this…thing. This thing that had been my beloved Justine.
It was a foolish impulse to protect her from the cold anyway, and knowing it would not matter made me feel all the worse. What he had done to preserve her body thus I did not know, but there were stitches up and down her arms, across her shoulders, down to her chest beneath the sheet. The greatest concentration of work was done immediately below and above her neck. On her throat was no evidence of the rope that had cut her tragic life short. I wondered what the rest of her, covered by the sheet, looked like, then gagged and turned away so I would not have to look at what had been done to her.
How had she ended up here? For what purpose? The explanation crept upon me, rising along my spine until it settled like a sickness in my brain.
The monster had not implicated Justine merely to punish Victor.
It had framed Justine as a means of getting her body.
This must have been what the monster was talking to Victor about on the mountain! A demand for Victor to create it a mate as horrible as itself. But why would Victor agree? He knew that what he had created was an abomination. I did not doubt that, from the little he had told
me while he was sick and delirious. So why would he be willing to do something this wretched for that creature?
And then I realized: The monster had already killed. It would do so again. And doubtless it had watched long enough to know how to manipulate Victor. The monster had threatened to harm me. No wonder Victor had ranged so far to conduct his devilish experiments! He had to draw the monster away from me.
We had cost Justine her life, and now we had cost her body its rightful peace in death.
Wild rage consumed me. I lifted the lamp above my head to burn this sacrilege done to her body. But the sight of the light catching in her chestnut hair, still shining and lovely in death, stopped me.
I sat on the frigid floor, where the edge of the table blocked my view of Justine save one lock of her hair that hung over the side. What would Justine want?
She would want to be alive. She would want to be with William. I could not give her any of that. All I had given her was death. And even that was a cursed and threatened state, thanks to me.
Justine deserved better. She had not attended the burials of her mother or her siblings. She had been denied the chance to grieve. And she had been denied her own body’s Christian burial. She deserved one, as proper as I could manage. I did not want what was left of her mortal frame to remain forever on this blighted island.
And I would not allow the monster to have her in any form. I did not care if it threatened my life, or even if it killed me. Victor would disagree, but my safety was not worth this steepest of costs.
Justine would rest in the peace she should have had during life.
I formed the vaguest of plans. There was a boat docked on the shore. I would take it. After I had cared for Justine, I would come back for Victor.
I wrapped the sheet around Justine, covering her face. I was not strong enough to carry her, though I longed to cradle her to me like a child. There was a wheelbarrow in the corner of the makeshift laboratory. I cleared it of the chemicals and tools that rested inside, then moved it to the table and maneuvered her body into it.
It was no easy task pushing the wheelbarrow down the steep and rocky path. Several times it nearly overturned, and I feared I would do yet more violence and disrespect to Justine’s body by tumbling it over the rocks. But I managed to transport my precious cargo safely down to the dock, where the lonely boat bobbed in the waves.
I set her body inside, mindful of her head. Mindful that such attention to her feelings no longer mattered, but not caring. I laid my own cloak over her body, covering her completely. I hesitated before untying the boat, though, something tugging my attention back to the island. Justine’s body was safe. But as long as there was a laboratory, the monster could find a way to force Victor to do its will. And Victor would be pushed down this most heinous of paths. I could not forgive him for Justine yet, but I could protect him from further crimes against nature and goodness.
The wind was at my back as though urging me to hurry. It whispered danger in my ears, tugged my veil, tangled through my hair to pull me along. It need not have urged me so. Once decided, I would not have let that laboratory continue to exist for anything in this world.
I did not want to enter it again, but with Justine’s body gone, it looked merely like a chemist’s or a surgeon’s room. If I had not known what hellish purposes the instruments served, what unnatural terrors those chemicals unleashed on the world, I would have been entirely uncurious.
I lifted the nearest glass bottle, intent on spilling it across the metal table so that the fiendish platform might burn in some form. Then I heard footsteps grinding across the rocky trail.
Toward the house.
I had come here to rescue Victor. But now that I had seen what he was doing—what he would have done, had I not discovered it and prevented him—I could not face him. My revulsion and anger would be plain on my face. Knowing what I did about his motivations and his obvious distaste for the work, I could perhaps forgive him eventually. He did what he did out of love and a desire to protect me.
But the cost!
Even now I could picture him carefully cutting open Justine. Filling her veins with some substance to take the place of the blood that had fed every blush of her lovely cheeks. Opening her chest to see the heart that had beaten with such love and devotion, now a dead thing until he was ready to force it violently back to life.
What would come back? I wondered. Surely Justine’s soul had long since fled this mortal plane. Free of the cruelty that had separated it from body, off to join her beloved William to care for in death as she had in life. Would this resurrected Justine be a shadow? With her mind and heart, but without anything good or lovely to animate them?
Perhaps that was why the monster had had no qualms about murdering a child. Victor could create life, yes. But he could not give it a soul, a higher morality, that thing which separated us from animals. That was why his experiment had both succeeded and miserably, devastatingly failed.
I dimmed the lamp, hoping Victor did not note its absence. I did not want to confront him until I was settled in my own emotions. Otherwise, how could I carefully guide his? Peering out the thick, warped glass of a small window, I saw that he carried his own lantern, and willed him not to come in here. My hopes were answered as he instead entered the cottage. It shared a wall with the outbuilding, and I could hear the muffled sounds of a body settling into a space.
And then I heard new footsteps. Louder by far, and syncopated with a rhythm no human stride would make.
I might have rationalized away my fears—We were so remote! How could the monster have come here?—but the desolation and harshness of this island seemed by its very form to have warned me that I would find only unholy things here. I knew the monster was with us. I cowered, pressing my ear to the wall. If the monster looked first to check on the progress of his unwilling mate, I would be discovered. I shuddered with relief as I heard the door to the cottage open once again. It was selfish of me to wish the monster on Victor, but I was in far more danger.
“Abominable demon.” Victor’s voice carried through the wall. “Why are you here?”
The monster answered, its tones so low I could not understand the words.
“Never will I create another like you, equal in deformity. Leave my sight forever.”
There followed a conversation that, because of some shift in position, I could not make out. Victor was enraged, and the garbled and tortured voice of the monster was impossible to interpret. I imagined he shrieked and growled, grunting his wishes and forcing Victor to glean some meaning from them.
Finally, Victor shouted, “Devil, cease! Do not poison the air with your filth. I will have nothing further to do with you. I am no coward to bend to your threats. Leave me. Nothing can bar me from my decision.”
My heart soared. Though I had removed Justine, it was evident Victor had already repented of his willingness to do the creature’s bidding. He would not have brought her back to life, even without my intervention.
And in that moment, I understood in part what had driven Victor in the first place. Because as soon as I knew Justine would, of a certainty, not be brought back…I wondered if she could be.
If I knew I would get her back—even without a soul, with just her heart and mind—would I ask him to do it?
It was more tempting than I cared to admit. I, who had struggled so, who had loved so little in my life, could be tempted to break the very laws of God. Could consider tampering with a creative force that had obviously bent itself to destruction. How much worse must it have been for Victor, who had the actual ability to call forth life? How much harder to resist the temptation to defy the natural bounds of our mortal coil?
But we both knew the cost, even if I would pretend I did not. I had already resolved it. If I confessed to Victor what I had seen, he would have to explain to me what he had done to Justine’s body and what
he might have done further. I did not want to speak of it.
Ever.
Victor could keep this secret. I would leave it to him so that I could forgive and love him still.
The door to the cottage flew open, and as that barrier was broken, I could at last understand the monster. To my shock, his voice, though deeper than any man’s, was accompanied by speech as eloquent as any I had ever heard.
“Your hours will pass in dread and misery! Soon the bolt will fall which must ravish from you your goals forever. You have stripped me of everything save revenge—revenge, henceforth dearer than light or food! I may die, but first you, my tyrant and tormentor, shall curse the sun that gazes on your form, which hides so much. I, the monster, who shrinks now from sight, while you walk freely! Be careful what you do, Victor, for I will watch with the patience of a snake.”
“Leave!” Victor said, as cold and eternal as the wind buffeting the island. “Your mere presence offends me.”
“I go. But remember, I shall be with you on your wedding night.”
I shuddered, dread seizing me. This proved that I remained the monster’s target. Victor was not yet free of its demands, nor ever would he be.
But as long as Victor had something the monster wanted, he was safe. Assured of that, I sank against the wall. Victor was safe. I might be living under an unseen blade hovering ever ready to cut my soul from my body, but so long as I had breath, I had the same goal as the monster: revenge.
* * *
—
I sat for some time considering the laboratory. With Victor in the cottage, I could not destroy it. And I was not ready to face him. He still thought me an angel, still thought he had protected me by keeping me unaware of all this. I did not know how he would react if he knew that was not the case. Doubtless he was already close to his breaking point, which could trigger a blind rage or a delirious fever.