Fraulein Frankenstein

by Stephen Woodworth

  As such times, I would stand on the prow for hours, inhaling salt and cold, keeping vigil until my face went numb from the frigid air. Every time we passed one of the floating glacial islands, I would scan its white banks for stranded castaways. My pulse quickened once as I spotted—There!—a misshapen, hulking creature lying beached on a berg’s shore. But, no—the fat form rolled over, and a tusked-and-mustached walrus lazily flopped into the water.

  After more than a month at sea, my hope dimmed. Then a Norwegian trawler sailed into view, the first sign of humanity we’d encountered since leaving port.

  “Ahoy!” Captain Walton shouted as our ships passed each other. “Have you seen any dogsleds on the ice around here?”

  When it appeared that no one on the other vessel understood English, he found a Russian crewman on the Michael who spoke rudimentary Norwegian to translate the question. Yes, the Scandinavians replied, they had seen two sledges, one of which seemed to be driven by a thick-limbed ape of a man. The news cheered me, and I redoubled my vigil at the ship’s prow, sleeping only a couple of hours each night.

  Just then, when prospects for our search had seemed to improve, a thick fog moved in, reducing visibility so much that it became too hazardous to move. We dropped anchor and waited. Still, I scrutinized the roiling mists for any shadow of movement.

  And then I heard it: a gunshot, ripping through the deadening tufts of fog.

  I knew the sound as intimately as my own heartbeat. It was the crack of the same dueling pistol Frankenstein had fired at me the night I was born. I was sure of it.

  I leaned over the ship’s rail, wishing I could part the silver mist through sheer force of will. Instead, I had to wait another half a day for the fog to lift.

  When it did, we found ourselves within a league of the vast polar ice cap. We cruised alongside the frozen shelf, seeking the source of the gunshot we’d heard. It wasn’t long before a sailor on the ship’s port side called out, “I think I see something!”

  I rushed to look where he pointed. At first, my heart shriveled with disappointment. The irregular brownish lump on the white landscape that the seaman had sighted was clearly just another walrus.

  As we drew nigh to it, however, we saw that the great fanged mammal lay dead, its belly slit open to disgorge entrails and blood. Beside the carcass rested a weather-blasted sled piled with sealskin packs. Two wolf-size Siberian huskies were tethered to the sledge, and they tore at a hunk of raw meat that had evidently been sliced for them from the slaughtered walrus.

  But where was the sled’s driver?

  Captain Walton sent a contingent of the ship’s crew to investigate. The men rowed a lifeboat over to the ice sheet. I watched, unblinking, as the sailors poked around the apparently abandoned campsite. One of them happened to be the ship’s cook, a grizzled Siberian ever on the lookout for a cheap meal to serve the crew. He bent down to scrutinize the flayed walrus to see what meat he could salvage, then let out a cry of surprise and revulsion.

  The cook motioned for his comrades to help him, and together they reached inside the slain animal and pulled out a babbling, barely living man. Smeared as he was with drying blood, the man was unrecognizable, yet I sensed at once he was none other than Victor Frankenstein. He had obviously sought shelter from the deadly Arctic chill in the insulating blubber and still-warm body cavity of the dead walrus.

  While the search party busied themselves with Frankenstein, I scoured the surrounding icescape with a spyglass, looking for other signs of life. If the baron had fired his pistol to kill the walrus, then maybe my brother was still . . .

  A black spot flicked across the shaky white circle of the telescope’s eyepiece. When I swung the lens back to where the spot had been, the dark shape slipped out of sight behind a ridge of ice overlooking Victor Frankenstein’s encampment. Another walrus? I could not tell.

  Despite his desperate condition, Frankenstein resisted the efforts of Walton’s men to rescue him. They had to restrain him in the rowboat as they ferried him back to the Michael.

  Although I was standing at the bulwark railing as the sailors dragged the baron aboard ship, the stricken nobleman did not even look my way. Perhaps it was because I had the hood of my fur coat pulled up so he could not see my face. Or maybe he failed to recognize me out of context; I’m sure I was the last person he expected to encounter on a ship in the middle of the Arctic. But I think the real reason he did not know me by sight was that I was no longer the same woman he’d fabricated in his laboratory.

  Still stained with blood, Frankenstein was so weak that he would have crumpled into a heap on the deck if a young boatswain hadn’t propped him up. Yet a manic energy animated him, and he seized the lapels of Walton’s coat, shouting German in the captain’s face.

  Walton patted the baron’s arm to soothe him. “Easy, friend! You must rest . . .”

  Frankenstein switched to English, desperate to make himself clear to the British captain. “No! You can’t take me. Don’t you understand? The demon is still out there! It’s still alive!”

  A shiver rippled through me that had nothing to do with the polar cold. Was it fear? Or exhilaration? Possibly both. Frankenstein hadn’t succeeded in killing my brother. There was still a chance I might see him again.

  The crazed nobleman raved about “the monster” and “the devil” as the boatswain half carried him to one of the ship’s cabins and laid him on its berth. The ship’s “doctor”—a carpenter by trade who practiced little medicine other than amputating gangrenous limbs with his saw—stripped off Frankenstein’s soiled clothes, washed the dried walrus blood from the patient’s body with warm water, and then wrapped him in heavy blankets. The baron slipped into a mumbling semiconsciousness. “Must find . . . can’t let it live . . .”

  For more than two days, he remained in a feverish delirium, and I fretted he would die without ever regaining his wits. With the temperature outside well below zero, he twitched in a private inferno, teeth chattering, face burning red, sweat bleeding from every pore.

  At last, in the middle of another night that was not night, Walton came to my cabin to announce that the baron’s fever had broken. “He’s awake now,” the captain said. “Do you want to speak with him?”

  I found myself unable to answer. Here it was, the moment for which I’d waited my whole brief life, and now that it had arrived I felt myself completely unprepared. I’d had so many questions to ask, so many emotions to express to this confounding man who’d given me life, yet I was tongue-tied, my mind a blank.

  “I’ll come,” I told Walton, “but don’t tell him who I am. The shock . . . might be too much for him.”

  With the captain’s permission, I accompanied him when he next went to check on Frankenstein. Wearing a plain dress and my auburn wig, I brought with me a cup of bouillon and a ship’s biscuit. While Walton stood off in a corner near the door, I seated myself on a three-legged stool at the side of the sick baron’s bunk, broke off a piece of the salt-crusted hardtack, and dipped it into the broth to soften it.

  Frankenstein rested in the bunk, propped up by a pillow and folded bolts of rough canvas. Peaked and skeletal, he nevertheless turned his mouth away when I tried to feed him.

  “No! There’s no time for that. The demon will escape.”

  “Then you will need your strength to hunt it,” I countered.

  The baron ceased his feeble resistance and permitted me to place the sodden biscuit in his mouth. He peered at me with heightened interest.

  “You are German?” he asked, noting my accent.

  I smiled, remembering all I had learned about Victor Frankenstein while pursuing him. “My father was Genevese,” I said.

  The apparent coincidence brightened his spirits. “I’m from Geneva as well! At least, I was until I assumed my family’s ancestral title and estate.” He sighed, regarding me with a look both fond and wistful. “A ministering angel from home!”

  I did not realize until that instant how much I had secretly c
raved his approval and affection. We hardly knew each other—he had been little more than a frightful ogre from my past—but it didn’t matter. The uncharacteristic warmth in his gaze filled my heart with a homesickness for a family I’d never had. I wanted him to accept me as his own, always.

  Would he be as warm to me if he knew who I really was? I doubted it. Yet I didn’t want the illusion to end.

  “That mouth should be eating instead of talking,” I chided playfully, and fed him another bite.

  He coughed out a chuckle and permitted me to nurse him without further complaint. Let him think I was just an ordinary girl, if it endeared me to him like that.

  The broth and biscuit restored the baron enough that Walton stepped forward to engage him in conversation. I surrendered the stool to the captain and retreated to the cabin’s corner, where I could listen unobtrusively.

  Walton turned out to be the ideal confidant to elicit the baron’s story—a father confessor to whom Victor Frankenstein could unburden his accumulated sins against man and Nature. Over the next several days, I gave Frankenstein his meals, then eavesdropped as he related the entire sequence of events that had led him to his present misery: how he had extrapolated the heretical theories of his mentor, Ernst Waldman the elder, to conceive the first artificial being; how the being’s hideousness had caused it to be shunned by even the humblest humans; and how the creature’s anguish of loneliness had devolved into rage against humanity in general and his creator in particular.

  Then Frankenstein came to the part where the monster had demanded a female companion to ease his isolation. I fought the urge to weep as I heard the revulsion with which the scientist described the “filthy process,” as he called it, and the “abomination” he had fashioned as a mate. Frankenstein was either so ashamed of his actions or so convinced I was dead that he lied to Walton and claimed he’d dismantled the female before ever granting it life.

  That was the unkindest cut of all—complete omission from my own life story. I felt as unwanted and orphaned as my brother must have.

  With Baron Frankenstein safely aboard ship, Captain Walton wanted to set sail for the pole again, but I begged him to hold off. “My cousin Victor’s health is too precarious,” I told the Captain. “We must give him a few more days to convalesce.”

  In reality, I was thinking of the black shape I’d spotted with the spyglass. If that had been my brother, my best hope was to lure him to me with Victor Frankenstein as bait.

  I stalled Walton for several days more, but my brother did not appear.

  Then the baron’s health took a turn for the worse. His fever rose, and he bobbed in and out of consciousness. When I came to feed him, he jerked awake and grabbed my skirts.

  “Elizabeth,” he breathed. “Please stay with me—I’ve missed you so.”

  I wanted then to tell the truth, to reveal myself and reconcile with him while there was still time, but he sagged back onto the pillow and his eyes rolled shut again.

  “We’ve got to get him back to civilization,” insisted Walton, who stood behind me. “He’ll die out here otherwise.”

  I sighed, gazing out the cabin window at the desolate and barren ice shelf. “You’re right, of course. Let us head for port at once.”

  We agreed to depart as soon as the crew had slept for the night, although in the weird perpetual twilight in which we floated, “night” was an arbitrary designation. Since Frankenstein occupied the ship’s only cabin, I went down to the berth below decks that Walton had prepared for me. A considerate gentleman, the captain had nailed sheets of canvas around the bunk to sequester me from the male crew. Attached to the curved wall of the hull, the narrow wooden niche bounded me on all sides but one as I crawled into it.

  The smell of oak and tar became stifling in the claustrophobic box that night, the bunk’s roof barely a foot above my face. The dankness of the ship’s hold seemed to blacken further, and I was seized by the impression that I lay not in a berth but rather in Katarina von Kemp’s coffin. Gasping and shrieking, I clawed at the closed lid until splinters needled up under my bloody fingernails . . .

  I banged my head on my ceiling as I jerked up in the berth. Despite my restlessness, I must have slipped into sleep and nightmare. The throbbing thump on my forehead brought me fully awake, and I rolled out of the bunk with a groan. Giving up on the prospect of rest, I crept out from my canvas stall. Around me, sailors still snored in berths like mine, the atmosphere in the hold rancid with the pent-up stink of their sweat. I tiptoed up the wooden steps and onto the main deck, preferring fresh air—no matter how frigid.

  I could not tell what time it was as I paced the ship from prow to stern. The clouds overhead remained ashen, illuminated from behind by a sun that never set, yet which we could not see. With the crew absent, the Michael seemed as desolate as a ghost ship. I guessed it to be about three in the morning, and looked up at the crow’s nest to see if the night watch was still alert.

  The lookout wasn’t there.

  I glanced around to locate the seaman who’d abandoned his post. Although the ship was at anchor, any number of perils could still threaten her, and someone needed to be vigilant and rouse the crew in case of danger.

  Turning to the aft of the vessel, I spotted a dark figure that appeared to be standing in front of the winch used to haul in the anchor. I believed it to be the missing lookout, for he wore the same sort of thick, fur-lined coat and cap the other sailors did. He did not move as I approached, nor did he acknowledge me as I hailed him, even though he seemed to stare straight at me. His face bore a ghastly gray-blue cast in the bleak day-that-was-night, and I soon saw why.

  The anchor chain had been wrapped around his neck, the thick iron links digging into his throat until they cut off the flow of blood to his head. The dead sailor only stood upright because the chain lashed him to the giant horizontal spindle of the anchor winch. His sightless eyes goggled from their sockets in a stare of permanent terror.

  I clapped a hand over my mouth to suppress a cry.

  I should have rung the ship’s bell right then to raise an alarm and wake the crew.

  Instead, I went and looked over the stern railing. The anchor chain ran from the spool of the winch down to an irregular polygon of ice that floated on the water a few yards astern. Because we were sailing in oceanic depths, the crew had replaced the shore anchor with a sea anchor, a construction of wooden beams and canvas cut from torn sails. The canvas sheets would increase the anchor’s drag in the water to slow the ship’s drift.

  But someone had pulled up the anchor and wedged it into the raft of ice to tether it to the ship. A large ax and a makeshift paddle fashioned from the wooden planks of a sled also lay on the ice, indicating how the raft had been crafted and propelled.

  He must have climbed the anchor chain, I thought as I raced toward the cabin where Frankenstein lay dying. If only the crew will stay asleep . . .

  The cabin door stood open, yet an opaque blackness blocked my view of the bed. The choking sobs I heard revealed what was in my way. Even on his knees, my brother’s massive frame virtually filled the low doorway.

  “I knew you’d come,” I said.

  He started, more frightened by the fact that I knew who he was than by any harm I could do him. “Who are you?”

  I pulled off my auburn wig and unwound the scarf from my scarred throat. “One like you.”

  “You.” He regarded me as if I were an apparition. Then his amazement curdled into contempt. “You are nothing like me.”

  “But I am.” I put my hands out to him, yet he cowered from my touch. “I’ve felt what it’s like to have no home, no family, no self.”

  “Oh? Have you felt what it’s like to have people chase you from their doors at the very sight of your face?” Tears glistened like fresh gouges in his grotesquely veined visage. “No. You are beautiful, so they take you in, shower you with comfort and affection, fight with one another over who will have you. You are nothing like me.”

 
; I realized then that he was grieving not for Frankenstein, but for himself.

  “I know how much you’ve suffered,” I began, “but—”

  He reared up, his height making the ship’s cabin resemble a room in a doll’s house. “Know? How could you possibly know? You left.”

  The accusation stung like a whip’s lash. “I didn’t understand then. I do now.”

  I went to the bunk where Victor Frankenstein lay, his face as gray and cold and still as the nightless day outside. I touched his throat, the stiff skin resisting my fingertips. There was no pulse.

  “We have only each other now,” I told my brother.

  “No,” he replied. “You have the whole world. I have nothing and no one. Listen. Here comes your proof now.”

  The cabin floor shuddered from the percussion of the waking crew moving about belowdecks. Soon they would come up top and see the murdered lookout. Then they would see my brother.

  “There’s still time,” I said. “We can leave now. Together.”

  He took a step toward me, the thick floorboards moaning under his weight, and his expression softened with a sweet wistfulness. “You would do that? You would forfeit all human company to spend a life alone and outcast with me?”

  The description struck me like a death sentence, but a sense of duty and familial loyalty forced me to accept it. “Yes.”

  “And would you . . . LOVE ME?” He thrust his face at mine, more ferocious and bestial than ever.

  I flinched and could not answer. I felt a kinship with him due to the bond of our common creator and unholy conception. I’d come to understand and even pity him for his lonely, wretched existence. But love? No. How could I explain that I could not feel that way about him, and that it had nothing to do with his appearance?