The Modern Prometheus

by Nicole Mello

  I just had to do it.

  Chapter Fifteen

  She was coming together. I did as Adam asked, and tried to make her as beautiful as I could. She was white; most of the bodies in the hospital morgue were white, so it was only reasonable, and I hoped that he would not be distressed that they possessed different skin colors. She had green eyes, and long orange hair. That white skin was imperfect; it was scarred, of course, and freckled, and had moles in abundance, but, when Adam saw her for the first time, he was overcome in such a way that he could only nod at me when I asked if she was suitable.

  I was working inside her ribcage when it happened. Women, as I said much earlier, are infinitely more difficult to build than men. They have many more working parts, and I had to construct her with the utmost delicacy and concentration. Henry was attempting to help me, handing me instruments when I asked for them, but mostly just keeping me company. He was afraid that I would go mad. We both knew that I already was.

  Henry was quiet for a long moment, longer than usual. I looked up at him, and he was staring at the corpse before us, his brow furrowed. I asked him what was wrong. He was quiet for a bit longer, thinking, trying to figure out how to phrase what he wanted to say.

  “What if they procreate?” Henry finally asked. “What if they have children, and make more of… whatever it is they are?”

  I froze. I had not thought of this. I thought, in making Eve, I would get rid of Adam, and the two of them would be gone until they died. But, of course, Adam would know what children were, and he would want them. If he wanted one companion, what would stop him from producing more on his own? I was effectively giving him a way to procreate.

  I didn’t think. If I had thought, I’m sure I could have come up with a different solution. Remove her womb, maybe. Render her infertile in some way. But I panicked, and I tore her to pieces. I was almost attached to her, in the way you become attached to projects that take up a lot of your time and energy; I did not think of her as a daughter, as Adam was so clearly urging me to do, but I did feel regret when I obliterated her. Destroying her, I think, is one of my greatest regrets, now. It was done without a second thought, and there could have been so many other options available to me. I just didn’t think. Because of that… Well. I lost everything, because of that decision. I acted so rashly. To this day, I can hardly bear to think about it. I put Henry’s head and my own on the chopping block that night.

  Adam frequently dropped by the house to update himself on the status of his bride. In my mad rush to destroy the body, neither Henry, who was struggling to restrain me, nor I heard Adam enter the house. Henry noticed when the basement door opened, but still I did not hear the monster on the stairs. Henry gave up on me and began rushing to hide the pieces of Eve’s body, which I had destroyed to such an extent that she was nearly unrecognizable.

  Adam was suspicious when Henry shouted up to him to wait there; of course, he didn’t wait, and instead came down at once. There was a moment of silence when Henry stopped, part of a bloody thigh in his hands, and watched for Adam’s reaction. I went quiet watching Henry, and Adam was speechless as he took in the scene before him. I could almost see the wheels turning in his head as he processed what was happening, what I had done. I could see the exact moment when he realized. I stepped forward; Henry dropped the thigh-piece and stood in front of me instinctively.

  “Please, Adam-” Henry began, but Adam tossed him aside as though he weighed nothing more than a pound. I remember seeing Henry hit the wall and crumple to the floor, his head bleeding profusely from a fresh wound, and, in those terrifying moments, I was sure he was dead. It was probably just a concussion that knocked him unconscious, but how was I to know that? He was too far from me, and Adam stood between us.

  Adam.

  He was standing over the pieces of his almost-wife, trying to gather them up, pushing limbs to torso as though he might be able to reattach them through sheer force of will. He gave up on that quickly, logical creature that he was, and lifted her head. Her cheek had burst, and the head was nearly detached from the neck and shoulders. He carefully pulled out the stitches keeping her attached to the rest of her body and cradled her head to his chest. He lifted one gigantic hand and brushed the blood off of her cheek with fat, wide fingertips. The blood stopped fairly quickly; there was no living heart to pump it, no other source of blood flowing through. It slowed, then ceased completely. He cried; the tears were grey, and seemed cold against his skin, but I was surprised that he was even able.

  He looked up at me after a moment, still holding the head close to his chest. Her hair trailed down and pooled on his thighs and down his knees as he knelt on the ground. I made eye contact with him, then inched around him to Henry. My heart was racing; my head was swimming. I couldn’t focus. I pressed my hand to Henry’s neck, and I didn’t feel a pulse. I probably wasn’t in the right place; I just couldn’t feel his heartbeat in my panic. But, at the moment, I didn’t feel a pulse, and I became possessed. I flew at Adam, mad, wild, so full of rage that I could barely see. My world was tinted red, and I attacked him. He dropped the head and fell backwards, shock and my sudden weight surprising him into giving me the advantage. I sat on top of him, my knees on either side of his tremendous waist, and I started to tear at him.

  It took him a minute or so to realize what I was doing and begin to fight back, but I took advantage of that minute or so. His face was bloody under my fists and my nails, and I nearly gouged out one of his eyes before he grabbed my wrist and tossed me off of him. He threw his weight on top of me and did to me what I did to him before I was able to fight him off of me. I aimed for spots where I, who had an intimate knowledge of his anatomy, knew his weakest stitches and scars to be, and we fought apart. When I was on my feet, he slammed me up against the wall by my throat. I was losing air quickly, gasping for breath; his face was centimeters away from mine.

  “I will not stand for this,” he said to me. His voice was filled to the brim with rage and grief; it was spilling over into his face, his hands. He shook violently. “I will not-” He stopped, and took a breath. The breath trembled. He shut his eyes for a moment. “You’re not going to get away with this, Father.”

  The way he spit my title — I knew. I knew, in that moment, that I had condemned us all to death. I was disgusted with the both of us. I hoped that he would crush my throat. I hoped that I would die.

  “I will destroy,” Adam began, before clearing his throat. He sounded almost human; I sometimes have to remind myself that he was not. He is not. He is not a human. “I will destroy everything you hold dear. I will destroy… everyone you love.”

  I gasped for air, the oxygen gurgling and scratching in my throat. I clawed at his hands. He only tightened his grip.

  “I will make sure you see,” Adam promised me, in that same voice. It haunts me still. “I will make sure you see every body, every ounce of blood. I will make sure you know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that these murders were committed by me and you.” He released me then, and I hurriedly inhaled as much air as I could. I fell to my knees, and he fell down beside me, clutching the material of my shirt at my shoulder.

  “You have killed them all,” Adam hissed in my ear. Then, the demon, hell-bent on revenge and spitting nails in his rage, left me in that basement. I couldn’t stand; I couldn’t see. My vision was blackened and blurred, my world was spinning. I was still sucking in air. My hands were numb. My kneecaps were melted. I was nothing, for a significant amount of time. I finally was able to drag myself over to Henry, whose shoulder was clearly dislocated and who was still bleeding from his head wound. I felt around for his pulse again; first at his neck, then at one wrist, then the other. I pressed my ear to his chest, and his heart was beating. I sobbed in my relief, and I called upon what medical skill I could remember at the time to rouse him.

  When he opened his eyes, I immediately pulled him to me, and held him tightly. He was breathless, and kept asking me what happened, what happened, Victor, wher
e’s he gone, what did he do, oh, my God, you’re bleeding, are you okay, Victor, but I shushed him, and I held him close. He eventually fell silent and sat up as well as he could and held me in return.

  “He said,” I answered at last, “that he was going to take everyone I loved from me.”

  Henry fell silent. Then, “He won’t. He won’t, Victor, it’ll be alright.”

  I shook my head, but I didn’t speak. Henry attempted to comfort me, but I would not be comforted. In such a situation, who could be? He understood.

  Of course, we had to leave at once. The people I loved were not limited to just Henry; my family, still in New York, who I had not had contact with since I fled to Canada — which seemed to have been years and years, perhaps even whole decades, earlier, but which had actually only been a couple of years at most — were not safe. I had to go to them, to warn them of what was coming for them, damn the consequences. Surely, with Henry at my side to verify what I told them, they would have to believe me.

  We left all of our belongings behind in that house, bringing only a small shared suitcase with clothes and toothbrushes and the like. We rented a car and drove the whole way back from Maine to New York. It was a mostly silent trip, and I drove the entire time. Henry was still suffering the fallouts of his concussion and his dislocated shoulder, and, besides that, I felt better when I was in control of something. Henry slept most of the way, though I discouraged that, on account of his concussion. I woke him often, and he would have a half-awake conversation with me for a while before falling asleep again. He was exhausted. We both were.

  While he slept, and the car was filled with silence (he would turn the radio on when he woke up, and I turned it off when he fell asleep; the sound bothered me), I was alone with my own thoughts. I tried to stay under the speed limit, or at least at the speed limit, since getting pulled over would only delay us further. Being alone with myself, though, was almost worse than thinking of what we were racing towards. I didn’t want to think. I debated crashing the car, though I wish I didn’t have to confess to that. I thought about a lot of things. I imagine that, when a man steps before the noose to be hanged, he has a very similar experience to the one I had while we drove home to New York, except mine was elongated, and I still had to live when it ended. It seemed, to me, to be a harsher punishment than a hanging.

  It did end, though, and we reached New York. I parked haphazardly outside of our apartment building; I was sure I would have a ticket when I returned to the car, if I was fortunate enough — or unfortunate enough, I suppose — to return to the car. Henry, still bleary from the car trip but half-shaken with adrenaline and fear, followed me up the stairs to the apartment, since I felt the elevator would take too long. I still had my key, and I forced the door open, startling Eliza, who screamed. I assured her that it was only me, and Henry comforted her. Eliza would not be comforted, though.

  “Victor,” she said, over and over again, before she got her wits about her. “Victor, you have to leave, you have to go, they’re looking for you-”

  “Who are they looking for?” I asked her. “Why are they looking for me?” I held her face in my hands, forced her to look at me. She shut her eyes. She cried. My heart sank.

  “Dad’s dead,” she told me. I fell to my knees, right there. I released her, and let my head fall into her lap. I was too late. “They think you did it, Victor.”

  I lifted my head enough that I could look at her. “Why do they think I did it?”

  “You’ve been gone, Victor, and they said- they said they have evidence, and they won’t tell me anything, but I know, Victor, I know you couldn’t’ve done it, I know you couldn’t have killed him-”

  “Of course he didn’t!” Henry exclaimed, standing from the sofa he was seated on with Eliza. We both looked at him, somewhat startled by his outburst. He had so few of those. “Victor was with me the whole time. We know who killed him, Elizabeth. His name is Adam, he-”

  Henry never got to finish. There was a pounding at the door, and then the door was broken in. Someone in the building had reported my return, and the police, apparently so eager to arrest me, had shown up at once. Henry and Eliza both tried valiantly to stop them, but it was no use.

  My father, like my brother, had been strangled. I didn’t listen to their descriptions of his death, of his corpse, or of their evidence against me. I wasn’t able to look into the case files later, either; you might be able to do that for me, Doctor, but they never released those files to me. I didn’t want to think about my father’s death. I could barely believe that I had lost him. The more they accused me, the more I fell into the rabbit hole, as it were. They kept telling me I was responsible for my father’s death, and, of course, I was, just not in the capacity they believed. I never argued with them, but I never agreed. I was imprisoned, awaiting a fair trial.

  I was allowed no visitors. I was being held for the murders of Will and my father, since they believed them to be linked. If they could have put Justine’s suicide on the list, I have no doubts that they would have, and I would have welcomed it. I deserved it; I was responsible for her death as much as I was for the others. I wanted anything that would start to clear my conscience, though I know now that nothing would.

  During that time, I did not see my family. I did not see Eliza. I did not see Henry. I did not know if they were safe, or if they, too, had been killed. I took solace in the fact that, if they had been killed, I surely would have been told about it. Adam seemed to have a single form of killing, and, if anyone else in my family had died, it probably would have been in the same way. I could not possibly be accused again, as I was in prison, and I probably would have been released if someone else had been found strangled. Because of this, I was quite alright being in prison, for the time being. However, I was afraid of what would happen once I was released, if I ever was, or what Adam would do in my absence if I wasn’t.

  Despite this small solace, not having any control over my situation began driving me to madness. I wanted so badly to stop Adam, but there was absolutely nothing I could do from my cell. I could only speak with my lawyer, and even to her I barely spoke. I could not tell her the truth. How could I? I had nobody to back up my story except for Henry, and I would not risk invalidating everything I knew to be true. That sense of helplessness pushed me to the edge of the cliff.

  Unfortunately for my sanity, I was without Henry, as well. I loved Henry, that I knew, but what I had not known was just how sane he had been keeping me. I truly did not know, at the time, that he was the only thing standing between me and madness. Being alone was what shoved me over that edge that I had been teetering on.

  I went insane in that prison, I really did. I lost all sense of myself, even beyond what I had already lost. I was a shell, a walking corpse, which made me laugh. Of all people, who better to become a walking corpse than the man who created walking corpses? I laughed endlessly at that one. I was the ghost that haunted the prison, the shadow that lingered in the corners. I was nothing. Until, I was briefly revitalized, almost born anew, by an idea I had: I remembered what Justine had done during her own time in prison. I obtained for myself a length of rope from the yard; it was mostly buried in the ground, disgusting and wet, and nobody knew about it but me. I found it.

  I tried to hang myself that very night. I tied it as tightly as I could, and I broke the little sink in my cell jumping off of it. A guard heard the clatter of the sink and came to the cell, and immediately cut me down. In the minute or so I was up there, though, I felt freer than I ever had before. I thought I had finally done it. I wanted so badly to die, Doctor, you have no idea. You can’t have any idea, and I sincerely hope that you never do.

  I was placed under suicide watch for a few days, then kept under a special watch once that ended. I was finally given a date for my trial to begin, and being able to leave the prison was, in itself, a blessing to me. I missed the fresh air; I missed trees, I missed wind. It was raining that first day, and I turned my face up to it. The r
ain poured down on my face, and I opened my mouth and laughed. It was the most joy I had felt in so long.

  My time in prison is a blur to me now, but only because of the monotony. Every day was the same, and my memory of any individual events is tainted by the all-consuming fear and madness that had claimed me during that time. The trial is a blur to me because it happened so quickly, and because, emerging from my insanity as I was, nothing made sense to me. I remember faces, random words, phrases. After seeing the living faces of Henry, of Eliza, of Glo and her family, I allowed myself to slip into a half-oblivion, where life just happened to me. I remember passing Henry, and telling him, in as hushed a voice as I could manage, not to say anything, not to breathe a word of the truth to anybody. I remember his horrified face when he saw me. I don’t remember his answer.

  Like I said, the trial was nothing but a blur to me; I barely remember any of the details. If you’re curious about it, you can look up videos or transcripts from the trial. I wouldn’t be offended in the least; I feel like I would want to know, if I were you. I couldn’t tell you how I was acquitted, but I was. I suspect Henry had no small part in it. It helped that, in reality, I had not committed the crimes, though I believed that I had. I knew that it was because of me that the crimes were committed. I didn’t argue with the decision. I didn’t say anything. I just let it all happen.

  I was released to Gloria, and she took me back to the apartment. She had moved back in the wake of everything that had happened, along with Robin, Lewis, and her new, young daughter, who I had not yet met. Her name was Lavender. She was beautiful. At first, I wasn’t allowed to be alone with her (which I understood, and never argued with), but I did spend a great deal of time with both her and Lewis. It was easier to be around children than adults, still. I was saddened, momentarily, that it seemed as though I would never have children of my own. Then, I was reminded of Adam. He called me Father; he was the closest I would ever get. I grieved for that, but I moved on.