Fraulein Frankenstein

by Stephen Woodworth

  Mopping rain from his brow with his sleeve, the peasant hung his lantern on a hook to the right, levered the bar up to one side, and pulled one of the two doors open just enough to sidle through the gap. When he retrieved his lantern and entered, I crept in after him. Although I could not be sure what harm the peasant might do me, I could tell that as long as I was in the stranger’s presence, Frankenstein would not dare to come near.

  I kept well outside the aura of the stable hand’s lantern as he moved from stall to stall, alternately soothing and berating the horses for their noise. The animals must have sensed my presence, however, for their agitation only increased. Fortunately, the peasant dismissed their restlessness as a reaction to the storm outside.

  “Devil take you all!” he grumbled when both coos and threats had failed to calm them. I crouched behind a pile of hay as he trudged out, only exhaling when he barred the barn door.

  Penned in darkness with the horses, I buried myself in the straw to conceal my body from both human sight and animal scent. The horses quieted as they gradually forgot about me, and this impromptu nest lulled me with such a sense of warmth and security that I succumbed to the oblivion of sleep.

  I then had what may have been a dream.

  The clatter of hooves awakened me. The horses brayed with anxiety again, and I was certain that I’d been discovered. I peered out through a small hole in the hay but could see no one. Cautiously, I raised my head. Doves that were roosting in the rafters above me suddenly scattered, the frantic flutter of their wings causing me to look up.

  Through the square windows near the roof, the storm’s glimmer played upon a shape. It hunched at the edge of the loft like a gargoyle. Rain had pasted its black hair to its livid brow. Ebon eyes peered, unblinking, down upon me. Watching me . . . or, perhaps, watching over me, a sentinel to defend me from Frankenstein and any other hostile humans.

  Whatever its motives, the creature remained as motionless as statuary. I fixed my gaze on the loft even as the stable went dark again, every muscle tensed for flight in case the giant should come for me.

  When lightning next shimmered in the barn windows, the loft was vacant.

  I stifled a cry and kept utterly still, straining to catch any glimpse or sound of the thing. I stayed that way until the storm ended, until the dreary gray sunlight of an overcast dawn seeped into the loft.

  The creature was not there. Perhaps it had never been there.

  Although the immediate menace of Frankenstein was gone, the morning brought no comfort. Having slept little the previous night, I felt the vigor of fright give way to the dull disease of exhaustion. I sprawled in the hay in a stupor, leaden weariness weighting my limbs. The grassy smell of straw and manure that had made the stable seem so snug during the storm now sickened me. And I was still lost and alone among beings I did not understand and could not trust.

  I wanted to leave the stable before the peasant returned, but to my dismay I discovered that the barred doors could only be opened from outside. The horses grew restive as soon as I revealed myself. The noise would rouse their master before long. In search of another exit, I cast my eyes upward—to the loft. If I had, in fact, seen the creature perched there, it must have climbed in through one of the open upper windows. But they were all so high above me . . .

  I was so preoccupied with finding a way to reach those windows that I was still standing dumbly in the center of the barn when I heard the peasant lifting the bar from the doors. With no chance to burrow back into the hay, I hurried to press myself against the wall to the left of the barn’s entrance. I held my breath and hoped he wouldn’t notice me.

  The right door creaked outward, flooding the barn with daylight, and the irascible stable hand shuffled inside. Again, the restlessness of the horses worked in my favor, for their clamor irked him, drawing his attention.

  “Be still, you miserable nags, or I’ll whip the lot of you! Come now, Gretchen—time for work.”

  As he went to the mare’s stall and began fitting her with a bridle, I scurried through the open door.

  Still wary that Frankenstein might be lurking in the woods behind me, I meandered onward, deeper into the forbidding maze of civilization. White cliffs of buildings three stories high walled me in on either side, studded with windows trimmed in red. The gray dawn awakened the town, compounding the risk of discovery. Many times I had to scuttle into the narrow alleys off the main thoroughfare in order to avoid the street vendors with their pushcarts and the shopkeepers who were setting out their wares.

  With no object other than self-preservation, I wandered the jagged avenues in a kind of delirium, stupefied by my new surroundings yet driven by a need I could not name. An agonizing emptiness cramped my stomach and dizzied my head, until I reeled from weakness. Only when I caught the warm gravy scent of stewed rabbit on the air did I learn the craving that compelled me.

  Hunger.

  All caution departed as my yearning body staggered toward the source of the smell. I tottered from a dim passageway between two boardinghouses into a small plaza. In the plaza’s center was a baroque structure of reddish stone whose spire dominated the cityscape—the town’s Stadtkirche, or city church. A mass of beggars and cripples had congregated around the octagonal chapel at the near end of the building. There, a balding man in a black cassock and a matron in a drab gray dress ladled stew from an iron pot into bowls fashioned from loaves of bread. The indigents ranged in age from children barely able to toddle to shriveled crones propped on walking sticks, but each accepted the offered food with a humble bow. Some wore rags as frayed as my smock, many were missing limbs or were disfigured by pox, and all stank of filth. Yet, as I lurched into view, ravening like an animal, the paupers scattered, so terror-struck they even abandoned the meal they’d come to beg.

  Only the minister and the matron remained, aghast at my bestial appearance. The woman dropped the ladle and grabbed the silver cross that hung on a chain around her neck, kissing the symbol and whispering under her breath. The pastor merely whispered “My God!” as I ripped a stew-saturated loaf from his hands and tore into it with my teeth, gagging as I tried to swallow without chewing.

  “Child, who are you?” He bent over me as I squatted on the ground and gorged myself. “Where is your family?”

  Even if I had understood him, I would not have answered, so intent was I on stuffing my mouth with bread and meat.

  “She must be mute,” he concluded. “Perhaps even deaf. We must tend to her.”

  The matron regarded me with a fretful look, the cross still at her lips. “Georg, are you sure . . . ?”

  “Birgit!” he admonished her. “She is a child of God!”

  Little did he know that he and I did not share the same Creator.

  Unconvinced, Birgit continued to worry at her cross while I wolfed my bread. Although I would have eaten three more loaves like it, Birgit reluctantly took my hand and pulled me upright.

  “We must get you inside.” Casting embarrassed glances up and down the street to see who might be watching, she tugged my smock closed over my exposed bosom and hurried me across the square to the townhouse that served as the parsonage. Too dazed and weary to resist, I allowed myself to be led like a docile cow. These people had given me food, and that was reason enough to stay with them.

  Once we were inside the sparsely furnished abode, Birgit shut the curtains on the front windows, muttering her thoughts aloud. “I suppose we shall put you in Gerta’s old room. There might even be a dress to fit you. But not until you’re clean.”

  She herded me down a hall of lacquered wood and into a barren room that contained little more than a cot, a stool, and a wardrobe. After forcing me onto the stool, she bustled out the door, holding the hand that had touched me away from her as if it were tainted. Several minutes later, she returned with a chamber pot of water and a scrap of stained linen.

  “Can’t have you looking like you sleep in a sty.” She soaked the cloth and swabbed my face with it, washing
the smeared gravy from my mouth and the dirt from my brow. Though she believed me deaf and dumb, she kept chattering to me in an indulgent way, as if pampering a pet.

  “There!” she chimed with a final, triumphant swipe. “You look almost human now.”

  To have me admire her handiwork, she led me to a framed pane of silvered glass. Other than a crucifix hanging on the opposite wall, it was the room’s only ornamentation. It was positioned so you could see the cross in the mirror’s reflection—spirituality and vanity in perpetual confrontation.

  “See what a pretty girl you are!” Birgit said as I gaped at an image I did not understand was my own.

  I put out my hand, half expecting to touch the soft cheek of the woman who reached toward me. Though the glass stopped my fingertips, I pressed them against the fall of blonde hair, still damp and tangled from Birgit’s cleaning. It amazed me when the head in the mirror cocked in tandem with mine, for I felt peculiarly detached from the form I wore, as if I were merely manipulating a marionette. I did not know what Birgit meant by “pretty” and neither liked nor disliked the features of the woman before me: large, almond-shaped azure eyes; a straight, slightly upturned nose; prominent cheekbones; and a strong chin. Framed by the flaxen mane, the face possessed a vaguely leonine appearance.

  “You’ll have plenty of time to preen later,” Birgit chided as I gazed at myself. “First, we must get you into some decent clothes.”

  She peeled the wretched smock off my shoulders. Unschooled in modesty, I let the garment fall to the floor without objection.

  “Oh . . . oh, my.” Birgit backed away from me, mouth bobbing as she hyperventilated. She gawped at me with such horror that I wondered if my appearance were truly that repulsive. “Georg! Georg!”

  She ran from the room to fetch the pastor, leaving me to contemplate my own nakedness. The body I examined was trim and well-proportioned, the ivory skin still grimy from my escape but otherwise unblemished. Yet one thing did mar its purity: at my shoulders and hips, the red lips of puckering scars had been cinched together with rag-doll stitches. Another such seam formed a circlet around my throat.

  I leaned toward the mirror, traced the black tracks of the stitches all the way around the nape of my neck and back to my windpipe. My skin stippled with gooseflesh, for I needed no lessons in anatomy or medicine to know that no living thing should survive having its head severed.

  At that moment, I realized I was a monster.

  CHAPTER 3

  FIRST WORD

  Pastor Georg blanched when he first saw my wounds, his mouth quivering as speech failed him.

  “The cuts must not be deep,” he said at last, refusing to believe what could not be possible. “The girl was obviously savaged by bandits, then treated by a physician.” The minister nodded, convinced by his own argument. “A miracle she survived, truly. Clothe her, Birgit. Providence has consigned her to our care while she heals.”

  The woman’s face plumped in a grimace as the clergyman again assigned responsibility for me to her. Nevertheless, she dutifully attempted to drape a dress over me, but I kicked and batted her away every time she moved to throw the bunched cloth over my head.

  “Oh, you cur!” she cried when I boxed her ear. “You want to be treated like a dog, eh? Very well!”

  Birgit shoved the dress under her arm and huffed out of the bedchamber. She returned some minutes later with a wily look, the dress in one fist, a stew-drenched loaf in the other. As I leaped for the food, she yanked it from my reach.

  “No, you don’t! First this . . .” She brandished the dress. “Then this.” Once more, she tantalized me with the bread.

  My gaze flicked between her hands, from requirement to reward. When Birgit next presented the dress, I remained still, permitting her to pull it over my head and to maneuver my arms into its puffy sleeves. The garment, which had evidently belonged to the “Gerta” who once occupied this room, did not really fit me. The skirts barely reached my knees, and I chafed at the tight tailoring beneath my breasts. I pouted at Birgit, glaring toward the loaf she’d set aside while dressing me.

  “Fair enough.” She handed me the bread. “You’ve earned it.”

  Still famished, I seized the loaf, but something stopped me from eating. This woman’s kindness had stirred a sense of civility in me.I wasn’t sure how to behave. I recalled the supplicants outside the church and mimicked them, bowing my head in gratitude.

  Birgit’s eyes widened. “You understand.”

  I then stuffed the heel of the loaf into my mouth, gobbling in an abandon of appetite.

  Birgit sighed and stroked my hair. “Poor dear. We really must find something to call you,” she mused. “Georg says you are a child of God. From now on, you shall be Liesl.”

  I continued to glut myself, unaware that I had been christened. I felt as detached from this strange name—this label placed upon me—as I did from the unfamiliar reflection I saw in the mirror.

  Therefore, I was perplexed and unsettled when, as I later joined them for a humble dinner, both Birgit and Pastor Georg applied the name to me with every sentence they spoke, the way one does when domesticating an animal. “We are so pleased to have you with us, Liesl.” “Would you like more sausage, Liesl?” “Liesl! Do not stick your fingers in the soup.” And, like an animal, I found myself responding to the name, reflexively turning my head to whoever spoke it.

  “You see, Georg?” Birgit said. “She hears.”

  The minister nodded, peering intently at me across the table. “So she does. Perhaps she listens as well.”

  I averted my eyes, for he seemed to stare straight into my mind. Would I be as welcome in their home, I wondered, if he could see my true history?

  When the time came for sleep, Birgit had to lie on the cot in Gerta’s room and pretend to doze in order to demonstrate the bed’s purpose to me. Having only slept on a barn floor during my short life, I had difficulty accepting that I could be given such comfort. I lay stiffly between the goose-feather mattress and linen sheets. Despite their enveloping softness and the crushing fatigue I felt, I found it hard to keep my eyes closed, even when Birgit took away the candle that provided the room’s only light. The bed made me uneasy for a reason I could not grasp.

  Only when I slipped into a fitful slumber did I learn why the act of lying on the cot bothered me so, for I dreamed I was shackled to a slab instead, wrapped in gauze rather than linen. Lightning seemed to sear through me and I jolted awake, screaming.

  Chest heaving, I sprang upright in bed, relieved yet perplexed to find the room awash in daylight. The night, which had seemed endless while I lay awake, had dissolved into nightmare.

  Birgit blustered into the room, wiping flour from her hands onto her apron. “Good Lord, child, what is it?”

  She sat beside me on the cot, patting my back to calm me. I sobbed and made shapeless vocal slurs. I wanted so badly to communicate everything to her—about my unnatural conception and the well-dressed man and the malformed giant in the laboratory—but the subtle art of speech eluded me, and I snarled in frustration.

  “It’s all right,” Birgit cooed, rubbing my shoulder. “Don’t be afraid, Liesl. You’re safe here.”

  The name, which I had greeted with suspicion the night before, now pacified me—made me feel like I belonged. My sobs quieted to a soft mewling.

  “That’s better. Now let us get you some breakfast.”

  Birgit took my hand to lead me to the kitchen, but as we neared the home’s foyer, I overheard a voice that made me wonder if I had awakened from one nightmare into another.

  “A scullery maid of mine. She had a jealous lover who did frightful violence to her with a knife.”

  Pastor Georg stood with the front door ajar, conversing with a visitor on the stoop outside. I couldn’t see the stranger—and didn’t need to. I knew the cold, clipped tones of that voice better than my own.

  Birgit regarded me with alarm as I staggered back against the wall, shuddering. “Liesl?”
r />   I didn’t answer but glared instead at the open door as the unseen speaker went on.

  “I sewed up her wounds,” he said with professional nonchalance, “but the girl ran off, fearing the lover would come back for her. I’m afraid she might perish without medical attention, and I thought she might have fled to town. Have you seen her by any chance?”

  The minister’s lips parted to answer and he eased the door open a bit as if about to invite the visitor inside. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of me, pallid and trembling.

  “I’m sorry, Baron Frankenstein,” he said firmly to the man on the doorstep. “I have seen no one such as you describe. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must bid you good day.”

  He shut the door before the visitor could make any objection.

  The pastor’s protectiveness ought to have reassured me, but the mention of that name—the first I’d ever heard—only made my heart beat faster.

  Damn you, Frankenstein! the giant had moaned. You made her pretty . . .

  “F-frahnk . . .” I bellowed my lungs to push the sound out, my mouth squirming to mold vowels and consonants. “Frahnk . . . en . . . shhhhteiiiiiin!”

  Pastor Georg looked ashen as he came down the hallway toward me. “Birgit, we must teach this girl to speak,” he said hoarsely. “She must tell us what he did to her.”

  CHAPTER 4

  FRANKENSTEIN’S BRIDE

  For the first two months I stayed with them, Pastor Georg and Birgit did not let me leave their house, lest the Baron or any of his confidants should see me. I did not object to my confinement, however, for I had a world of things to learn.

  Poor Birgit had not a moment of peace, for whether she was cleaning, cooking, sewing, or praying, I pressed her to teach me the words to describe what she did. I would point at a pot, a thimble, a blanket, a Bible, and bleat plaintively until she told me the name for the object. I proved an extraordinarily apt pupil, picking up the language as easily as if the vocabulary were already embroidered in the fabric of my brain. Perhaps it was.