Fraulein Frankenstein

by Stephen Woodworth

“It’s Anna!” I laughed gaily. “Anna—Victor’s cousin from Vienna. Surely he told you I was coming.”

  The old man wavered between irritation and embarrassment. “I’m afraid not, fräulein. We are expecting the master’s aunt Lenya and her family—all the way from Salzburg. Are you with them, perhaps?”

  “No, I’m from the other side of the family.” I shook my head in annoyance. “I suppose he didn’t get my letter. The mail service these days! One simply can’t depend on it.”

  “Fräulein,” Hans interrupted, “the baron is not here. He has been away for more than a week.”

  “He’s gone?” This time, my consternation was genuine. I had come to see Victor Frankenstein; if he had disappeared, my whole charade would be for naught. “When do you expect his return?”

  “I know not,” Hans replied. “I am sorry.”

  I twirled one end of my scarf about my finger. “Then perhaps I could meet Elizabeth? Papa was so upset that we couldn’t make it to the wedding—”

  “I regret to inform you that the baroness . . . passed away.”

  I put my hands to my mouth as if hearing the news for the first time. “How dreadful! Poor Victor must be devastated.”

  “Yes, fräulein. It has been hard for us all.”

  “Alas! It seems I’ve come all this way in vain.” I glanced significantly at the valise and trunk the coachman had abandoned on the doorstep. “Well, I don’t want to intrude. I dismissed the carriage, but I’m sure I can hire another—”

  The prospect of leaving a young woman without a roof over her head apparently roused the old man’s spirit of hospitality.

  “Oh no, Fräulein Anna, I won’t hear of it!” He actually smiled and patted my hand. “I am sure the baron would not object to your stay here in his absence. I’ll have the maids prepare a room at once. Allow me to have someone see to your things.”

  He bowed and was about to depart.

  “The baron’s absence . . .” I asked idly. “Does it have to do with his work?”

  Hans paused, frowning again. “I beg your pardon?”

  “You know. His research.” I nodded toward the closed door of the tower that contained the laboratory.

  A fit of palsy struck the aged servant as he contemplated the tower’s entrance. “I . . . cannot say. Do forgive me.” He bowed and hastily waddled off.

  #

  Hans made sure the staff treated me as an honored guest. The maids prepared my bedchamber and saw to my every need, and the cook catered to each whim of my appetite. Indeed, with the house otherwise unoccupied, they seemed relieved to have someone to serve.

  Over the next few days, I took advantage of my isolation to comb through Victor Frankenstein’s massive library in hopes that his books might give me the answers I could not get from him. I silently thanked Fräu Hauptmann for her grueling lessons in literacy as I devoured volumes of anatomy by Vesalius and tracts on the electrical stimulation of dead muscle tissue by Luigi Galvani and Erasmus Darwin. In particular, I noted and transcribed into a journal those passages where Frankenstein had jotted comments in the margin with an inked quill.

  Gradually, the full scope of his godlike vision—and his blasphemous audacity—became clear. As I turned the pages, my fingertips prickled as if charged with static. I was reading about my own conception.

  The books, though edifying, did not tell me the two things I most wanted to learn: how Frankenstein had fashioned and given life to his creations and where he was now. But I had a good idea of where I might find those answers.

  Late one night, long after I had supposedly retired for the evening and the entire household had gone to bed, I put on a dressing gown and crept from my room. With a single candle in my hand, I descended the main staircase to the castle’s entrance hall. Dim and daunting in the candlelight, the door to the laboratory tower awaited me, pregnant with secrets. I had the uncanny sensation that I was a disembodied spectator in my own dream. At any moment, I expected to see myself burst forth from that door, half-clothed in a crude smock and trailing torn bandages, crazed with fright and gibbering like an orangutan. If that happened, I thought, I would scream in repulsion.

  Nothing emerged from the door, however, and the house remained quiet. To my surprise, the latch opened when I tried it, and I ascended the flights of stone steps in the square tower with a swelling sense of déjà vu. A creeping, irrational fear seized me. By going back to the place where I had been made, could I somehow be unmade, as if I were returning to the womb?

  When I reached the door at the top of the stairs, I halted. Though no light peeped from the keyhole, I was paralyzed by the sudden certainty that Hans had lied—that my entire stay in the castle had been a clever trap and that Victor Frankenstein waited for me beyond that door, waited to carve up my body into its component parts and reassemble them into a better, more obedient creature.

  Let him try, I thought, anger displacing fear.

  I tested the latch. It was locked.

  I cursed and rattled the handle, but it would not give. I could have searched for the key, but I had little chance of finding it; for all I knew, Frankenstein had taken it with him.

  Then I recalled my dark reservoir of strength—the way I’d snapped Stefan’s wrists like twigs.

  I set my candleholder on the floor and placed my right palm flat on the door, directly above the latch. Bracing my left side against the stone wall, I inhaled, eyes shut, drew back my right hand and, with a shout, slammed the palm into the wood. The impact sent judders of pain up my arm, but I heard a metallic clink as the iron latch broke in two and the door finally yielded and swung inward.

  The vacant laboratory had been scrubbed clean of any evidence of necromancy. Where the stench of alcohol and blood once oppressed me, there was now only a dusty, sterile odor of disuse. No vats and jars of pickled organs crowded the shelves, no shards of glass or stains of gore marked the flagstones of the floor. The marble dissection table, where the headless cadaver of Katarina von Kemp had lain, gleamed a pristine, ghostly white as I waved my candle over it. A queasy aura of unreality pervaded the barren chamber, and an entirely new fear possessed me: perhaps I was merely mad, and had imagined the whole episode of my unholy birth.

  But I had not imagined the scars on my body, I sternly reminded myself, nor had I imagined the horrors I’d inflicted upon Stefan.

  I moved on to the nearer end of the room, where a desk sat heaped with ledgers and parchments. One of the leather-bound books lay with its vellum leaves open. Spread-eagled on the pages was a grotesque parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, a detailed sketch that Victor Frankenstein had made of his proposed monster. It depicted the portions of the body he would graft together and the precise placement of the electrodes that would jolt the being to life. Frankenstein must have propped open the book to that page to castigate himself for the abomination he’d unleashed.

  I pawed through the volume, panting with excitement. Here at last, I held the grimoire that would permit me to replicate the dark miracle of my creation. All I lacked now was the surgical skill for the operation.

  I tucked the book under my arm and was about to leave when the light from my candle fell across the patchwork of papers scattered on the desk. They consisted mostly of pages torn from local newspapers ranging from Le Journal de Genève to the Darmstädter Zeitung. “Awful Murder” and “Child Strangled” read two of the boldface headings, accompanied by dense blocks of cramped typescript that recounted the crimes.

  Along with these articles, Frankenstein had spread a map on the table. With his quill, he had drawn circles around the location of each killing and scribbled a corresponding name next to each: Wilhelm, Justine, Elizabeth, Clerval, Krempe. In addition to these circles, Frankenstein had drawn an arrow pointing to the city of Ingolstadt with the legend “Waldman?” scrawled beside it.

  Next to the map rested a crumpled handbill. “Have You Seen This Man?” the leaflet asked. Its text gave an account of the suspect’s alleged killings. The
drawing below the print was crude and inaccurate—it softened the monster’s freakish features to mere human ugliness, as though the artist did not believe the true hideousness of what the eyewitnesses must have described to him. Still, I recognized my intended mate easily enough. Except I couldn’t think of him that way. We were both offspring of Frankenstein, and he felt more like a sibling to me than a paramour. My dear brother in death.

  I took the handbill and map and folded them inside Victor Frankenstein’s book. I knew now where I had to go.

  #

  When Hans found me waiting in the foyer at first light the next morning, my portmanteau and valise beside me, he seemed taken aback

  “You are leaving us, Fräulein Anna?” he asked, sounding rather hurt.

  “Yes,” I responded. “I’m afraid I must.”

  The servant put a hand on his chest and bowed. “I hope we have given no offense.”

  “Oh, no! You have been nothing but kind and generous.” My gaze drifted to the valise, in which I had stashed the book and map I’d collected from Frankenstein’s laboratory. “I have a . . . family obligation.”

  CHAPTER 15

  FAMILY REUNION

  At the end of two days’ travel from Darmstadt, the carriage I’d hired bumped over an old stone bridge that spanned the swirling currents of the Danube. For several minutes we paralleled a high medieval wall until we came to a hexagonal, spired tower of reddish brick—the Kreuztor, or main gate to the venerable city of Ingolstadt.

  After rolling through the Gothic archway into the metropolis, the coach wound between rows of buildings roofed in red clay tile. Finally, it deposited me at a local pension, where I intended to stay for the duration of my visit. My research had led me to Ingolstadt because I’d learned that Victor Frankenstein had studied under a professor named Ernst Waldman while at the university there. When I asked my driver for directions to what I supposed was a famed institution, however, I feared I’d come in vain.

  “The university?” The graying coachman brushed his horses, seeming to prefer their company to that of his passengers. “Why, the school shut its doors more than ten years back. No money.” He extended an arm to the south. “But you may see what’s left of it if you take this street to the right.”

  I thanked him but secretly despaired that my efforts to find Frankenstein had been frustrated yet again. Nevertheless, as soon as I had locked my luggage in my room at the pension, I walked down the lane the driver had indicated toward what had once been the University of Ingolstadt. Perhaps someone in the neighborhood would know where I might find Dr. Waldman.

  As I proceeded along the avenue, I could not help but note the number of police patrolling the vicinity. Uniformed in black bicornes and pale blue military tailcoats with red cuffs and gold epaulettes, the officers seemed to be knocking on every door, conducting a house-by-house search. In addition to their usual heavy walking sticks, many of the policemen were also armed with muskets or swords—a rare show of force during peacetime.

  The crowd of murmuring gawkers in the street became so thick that I had to plow my way through the masses to reach the university. They were clustered around what I soon learned was the school’s former Anatomy Building, a two-story structure in the classical mode with symmetrical wings, a columned portico, and a semicircular cupola at its center. A hedge-lined path through formal gardens led to the entrance, but when I tried to advance toward the walkway, a stout police officer with the jowls of an old foxhound blocked my way.

  “I can’t let you go in there, fräulein,” he said. “It’s not safe.”

  “Oh. Well, perhaps you could help me. I’m looking for Dr. Waldman. Do you know where I might find him?”

  The policeman glowered at me. “And who would you be?”

  I nearly said “Anna Frankenstein,” but instinct made me withhold the name. “A friend of the family,” I answered instead.

  He harrumphed. “If it’s Dr. Waldman the elder you seek, you’re a day too late.” He turned toward the Anatomy Building and aimed a sausage-thick finger up at the main window in the cupola. A hole gaped in the center of its fractured panes and fragmented glass. “Someone hurled him to his death last night,” the policeman informed me.

  “How horrible!” I tried to appear surprised, although I’d already guessed the worst. I pictured my brother’s malformed face and imagined what those policemen with their swords and muskets would do if they found him during their manhunt through the city. “Do you know who would do such a thing?” I asked ingenuously.

  “We know the very man: a former student of Dr. Waldman’s named Frankenstein,” the policeman asserted. “Yesterday, he was seen here, where the doctor has kept a surgery since the university closed. Frankenstein has now disappeared. But rest assured, fräulein—we shall find him.” He waggled a fat thumb over his shoulder. “Dr. Waldman the younger is there, if you want to offer your condolences.”

  I looked past the officer to the small fountain he indicated in the building’s courtyard. A disconsolate young man sat on the fountain’s rim, head in hands, as a different policeman interrogated him. The young Waldman’s long, delicate fingers clenched the wavy black locks of his hair as if to pull them out by the roots. In response to some particularly probing question, he lifted his face in weary attentiveness, revealing a countenance whose cerebral brow and magnetic green eyes bore an expression of such profound sadness that it made me ache in sympathy just to look at him.

  “Do you wish to speak with him?” the jowly policeman asked.

  “No.” I gave the grief-stricken Dr. Waldman the younger another brief glance. “Not yet.”

  #

  And so it went in every town to which I tracked Victor Frankenstein. He would arrive too late to stop his creation from butchering yet another of his dearest friends or relations, and I would inevitably just miss my chance to plead with the baron before he raced off in pursuit of the murderous Cain he’d fathered.

  As we moved ever northward, into the highest latitudes of Prussia and from thence into Russia, my brother began to kill complete strangers, leaving a string of mutilated bodies for his progenitor to follow. Everywhere, the pattern was the same: rumored sightings of a grotesque Goliath on the prowl; a series of hideous slayings, usually of innocent women and children; then the appearance of an ascetic, well-educated stranger who queried the inhabitants about the crimes and seemed intent upon hunting down the brutal malefactor. I knew that, unless I interceded, there could be only one outcome if Creator and Destroyer met—mutual annihilation.

  When I reached the bleak, isolated port of Archangel, I thought I had at last cornered my quarries, their flight surely cut off by the frozen swells of the icebound White Sea. I described Victor Frankenstein to the local merchants, communicating as best I could with gestures and what scraps of German, English, and French the local peasantry understood. Yes, they said, they had seen such a foreign gentleman a couple of weeks earlier. In fact, he had purchased a sledge, sled dogs, and supplies from them and set out across the desert of ice, evidently following the tracks created by the runners of another sledge that had been stolen the day before.

  Indicating my desire to go after him, I asked if I could buy a similar sleigh. The Russians laughed and shook their heads.

  “You would do better to buy a boat,” they said, pointing out the enormous cracks that were splitting the sea’s surface into a mosaic of jagged ice sheets. “The spring thaw has already begun. If your friend is still alive, he will be swimming soon.”

  I gazed out over the gray patchwork of breaking ice in the bay. I’d come too far to stop now. If I needed a boat to find Frankenstein and my brother, then a boat I would buy.

  As Fortune would have it, when I sought a ship to hire for the search, I made the acquaintance of an adventure-seeking English mariner by the name of Robert Walton. Dauntless and ambitious, Walton had come all the way from his home in Britain to the remote Russian coast to fit out an expedition set on locating the earth’s magnet
ic pole and seeking out a northern passage to the Western Hemisphere. He was only too happy to aid my quest in exchange for funding his enterprise with the sale of some of my remaining jewels.

  “And who is this fellow you’re trying to find?” the dapper young captain wanted to know.

  “My . . . cousin,” I replied, conducting our negotiations in Walton’s native English. “He became deranged and reckless after his wife’s death, and I fear for his safety.”

  “And I fear for yours, young lady,” Walton admonished me. “The Arctic is a harsh, unforgiving place. I will do my best to rescue your cousin if I can, but I will risk neither my crew’s life nor yours for his sake. Do you understand?”

  I nodded gravely. “Yes.”

  And with that, we sealed our partnership.

  Even after we had fully provisioned Walton’s ship, a schooner dubbed the Michael in honor of the port’s patron archangel, it languished in the icebound harbor. I agonized in suspense for weeks as we waited until the water had cleared enough for us to set sail. Every day that passed increased the chance that Frankenstein and his creature would kill each other—or that the fathomless Arctic sea would swallow them both.

  When at last we embarked, the days had already become unnaturally long, with only a few scant hours of night to divide dusk from dawn. We sailed out into an ocean still treacherous with massive bergs of floating ice whose hidden crags could stave in our hull. Walton posted a round-the-clock watch in the crow’s nest, and several times the crew scrambled to bring the ship about when the cry of “Iceberg!” rang out.

  With the ice sheet fragmenting around them, Frankenstein and my brother could have headed in only one direction: north, toward the pole. And so we followed the quivering needle of the ship’s compass out of the White Sea, through the Barents Sea, and into the Arctic Ocean.

  As we neared the pole and the summer solstice, night disappeared altogether and time seemed to stop, suspending us in a dismal limbo of overcast gray. The flat plane of the still water reflected the serrated landscape of glaciers on the horizon and the bleak slate of sky above, creating the illusion that the entire world had been inverted. Becalmed for days due to lack of wind, we would drift like a derelict between breathtaking palaces of ice. Their pinnacles reached twice as high as the ship’s masts, and melting runoff had hollowed vast nautilus chambers in the hearts of the bergs.