Monster

by Dave Zeltserman

  “That is good,” Brother Theodore said. “As you know we try to refrain from speaking, although none of us have taken a vow of silence. It is only that freedom from the spoken word provides us a solitude that we prefer. There are times, though, when words are necessary, especially for many of our new members who arrive here with heavy hearts. If you ever feel the need to unburden yourself with speech, please know that I am always available.”

  I nodded my gratitude to him. Each night, though, the pull on me to leave the monastery grew stronger. It didn’t matter whether I slept or lay awake on my bedding, during those dark bewitching hours the urge pulling me away would become something both terrible and irresistible. This growing compulsion was as if something were pounding in my head, like the beating of savage drums. I could barely stand it, and by the first rays of the morning light I would be drenched in sweat as every muscle in my body strained to keep me from fleeing my cell. After four months I found that this urge continued long into the day, with not even my hard labors sufficient to beat it down. After the completion of another week’s stay within the monastery, I told Brother Theodore that I had to leave.

  “Brother Friedrich, we are in the dead of winter. Would not it be better to wait until spring? I fear you entering into the wilderness in this harsh weather.”

  “No. I cannot wait.”

  He nodded as he accepted what I said. “You will be sorely missed, Brother Friedrich,” he said, his eyes brimming with a genuine sadness. “And not because of your great labors, but because of the warmth and compassion that you have bestowed upon us. I do fear that you will find the world that you will be entering every bit as harsh as these winter winds, as they rarely look beyond a man’s physical appearance to what resides in his heart. I worry about how you will be treated, but I know I cannot persuade you to stay against your wishes. Could you tell me what it is that has been troubling you so greatly, for I know it is far more than the accident that disfigured you. Perhaps by unburdening yourself your desire to leave us will lessen?”

  I relented then and told Brother Theodore what had happened to my dearest Johanna. Up until that moment I had blocked out from my consciousness the terrible things that were said during my trial about the despicable acts that were committed against Johanna, but as I told Brother Theodore how her body had been so horribly violated before her murder a great anguish filled me and I became afraid that I would start tearing down walls with my very hands if I didn’t leave.

  Brother Theodore’s face reflected his alarm. “My son, the tale you have told me is indeed awful, and one can only imagine your thirst for vengeance. But this will only lead you to ruin. Salvation will come from forgiveness. I implore you, do not let this wicked villain darken your soul any further. Even if you must leave here, find a way to banish this thirst for vengeance that is so consuming you.”

  I shook my head, my body trembling with violence. Without another word I raced from the dining room where we were speaking and out of the monastery doors and to the woods beyond its walls, afraid of the terrible crimes I would wreak on these innocent monks if I stayed another minute.

  CHAPTER 11

  My obsession to seek out Victor Frankenstein only intensified after I left my brother monks, and at times I thought I would go mad hearing Frankenstein’s voice whispering to me as if his lips were only inches from my ear, both daring me and commanding me to find him. Over the next several months an insanity took me over. At nighttime I would steal into whatever nearby city or village I had arrived at the outskirts of during the day, and I would search for my enemy, often spying into windows and skulking through darkened homes. Some nights I would be discovered, and the innocent man or woman doing so would scream out in fear or swoon straightaway at the sight of me, but that didn’t deter me, and neither did the loathing that consumed me. As much as I despised myself for these noxious activities I was engaged in, I felt as if I had little control over my actions; as if I were little more than a puppet and invisible strings were controlling my movements.

  The cold chill of the winter air had little effect on me; neither did the snow or freezing rain. I would spend my days either hiding in nearby woods or traveling to the next city or village. Sometimes I would spot men armed with muskets and swords searching the woods for me, but they were easy to elude, and the hounds that they would send after me had no better luck picking up my trail. In my growing madness, I would sometimes amuse myself by climbing the tallest oaks to watch them searching fruitlessly for me. Once darkness arrived, I would sneak among these people like a fiend to perform my own search, for Victor Frankenstein.

  It was sometime during the last vestiges of winter, when the days were growing longer and the weather more pleasant, and the dirt roads had been transformed into little more than rutted mud, when I found myself back in my native Bavaria. That day I had traveled to the outskirts of a small village that was not more than a half day’s journey from Ingolstadt, and I hid in the woods close enough to where I could see several cottages. When night arrived, I once again engaged in seeking out my enemy, sneaking through one home after another. As I was searching though a stone cottage on the other side of the village, a young girl surprised me. She could have been no older than twelve, and was the picture of innocence as she stood in front of me in her long nightgown, her face freckled, her long yellow hair falling like fine spun silk past her frail shoulders. I could see so much of my dear Johanna in her innocence and her budding beauty, and when she asked me if I was there to murder her and her family and eat their bodies, it was as if a fever broke and the dreadful fog that had been enveloping my mind lifted.

  “I am not here to do you or your family harm,” I said.

  “Then why are you here?” she asked.

  I did not know how to answer her. How could I explain the madness that drove me to such a fruitless activity? How could I possibly have expected to find Frankenstein with this haphazard searching of dwellings that I had been engaged in? Even if I had searched every home in Bavaria, what could I have hoped to accomplish? As I looked into the fear that shone in her eyes and accepted my culpability in its creation, and worse, saw how I was becoming the same abomination on the inside that I was outwardly, I fell to my knees and began to weep. My weeping continued until this same child later touched me lightly on the shoulder. When I looked up she offered me a piece of chocolate.

  “You must have come into our home because you are hungry and needed food,” she said. “Here, please take this chocolate. I would give you more but this is all that I have saved from my birthday from last week.”

  I took the chocolate from her. What else could I have done while she looked at me with such earnest charity? With the chocolate crumbling in my hand, I left the cottage and soon quit the village as I continued on into the woods.

  I walked for many miles until taking a seat on a fallen tree that must have succumbed to the forces of nature many years earlier, and leaned forward so that my elbows rested on my knees, and dropped my head so that it lay heavy in my hands. I longed to be back within the gentle confines of the monastery, but even if I could find my way back to that hidden sanctuary, how could I face Brother Theodore after what I had done since leaving? And what would he now see in my heart?

  When I had first woken up within Frankenstein’s lair, I had felt as if I were still Friedrich Hoffmann. Later, when I was employed and living freely among my fellow brothers at the monastery, I would also frequently envision myself as how I used to be and not as the abomination that I had become. My thirst for vengeance had brought about a madness that left me terrorizing the countryside for months, and now I could only think of myself as something ugly and twisted. My chest ached every time I imagined that young girl’s face and the sheer terror that had filled her eyes.

  Even if I could retrace my steps, I could not go back to that monastery. Not with the way Brother Theodore and the other monks would look at me, and not with that urge that was still pulling me southwards. Although I now seemed free
from that the invisible force that had made me perform my sinister nighttime excursions as surely as if I had been possessed by spirits and then exorcised, that same urge from before was still present within me. And the truth was that even if that madness had left me, I still thirsted for vengeance.

  I sat for hours as I tried to make sense of everything that had happened since I had first woken up within Frankenstein’s laboratory. If that young girl had reported my unwelcome intrusion into her home, I didn’t see any evidence of it since no armed mobs had come searching for me. Given the muddy conditions, if a mob was looking for me they would have had no trouble following my footprints since I made no effort to hide them. But if a mob had come I would have offered no resistance. Death would have been a welcome release from the self-loathing and confusion that consumed me.

  When dawn arrived, I left the fallen tree that I had been seated on so despondently and continued my aimless wandering.

  Over the next six days I avoided man as best I could and tried to keep my wanderings to the darker depths of the forest. Early on I came across a lost troop of French soldiers who seemed every bit as miserable as I was. I stayed hidden under a canopy of leaves and branches and watched them as they argued about a number of subjects, including their whereabouts and their dwindling supplies. A couple of them insisted vehemently that they never would have embarked on this campaign if they had known that a devil had been let loose within the Bavarian countryside. When I saw what must have been their commanding officer trying to silence their squabbling with the threat of his saber, I had seen enough and stole quietly away. I shuddered minutes later when I heard the eruption of fighting among them and the death cries that followed. They were as damned as I was.

  As I continued with my travels I would go back and forth in my mind between despairing over whether I would ever find Victor Frankenstein to desiring to quit Europe and flee instead to the darkest jungles of the Amazon so I would forever be free of man and my damnable quest for vengeance. All of this left me weary, but I did not allow myself to sleep. I was too afraid of the dreams that would invade my mind.

  It was on the sixth day after the feverish control over me had broken that I found myself wandering aimlessly through the forest and my thoughts interrupted by the shouting of men. They seemed to be arguing heatedly, with several of them claiming that the Devil had been unleashed upon their countryside and that that by itself proved the existence of witches. This got me curious, and I followed their voices to see what this was about. Keeping myself hidden behind a thick covering of bushes, I saw that I had wandered near a village. A group of forty or so men and women stood in front of a small wooden cottage, their faces reflecting anger and excitement. As I followed their argument, it seemed as if most of them were in agreement that the woman living in the cottage was a witch, with one lone man trying to argue the ridiculousness of their charges. This man was middle-aged and of strong bearing. Tall, broad shouldered, thick-jawed. He was patiently trying to explain how the belief in witchcraft had rightfully been banished from the minds of all but the most ignorant. One of his opponents, a round-bodied man who had the look of a butcher, took exception to this.

  “You calling us ignorant then, Karl?” this man demanded.

  “No, I’m not saying that. But let us not travel back a hundred years to those dark years when superstitions ruled. We live in an enlightened age. We now know witches never truly existed. This has been proven beyond any doubt. How could they exist under the watchful eye of the Almighty?”

  “Then how do you explain the appearance of Satan? If Satan is running free in the countryside, then there are certainly witches to do his bidding!”

  “Come now, Ernst. Let us not jump to conclusions. We do not know that anything has been seen. All we are hearing are fanciful stories, that is all.”

  “Fanciful stories? So you are calling them all liars?”

  “I am saying that the same hysteria that caused people seventy years ago to burn and drown innocent men and women as witches may be making people now believe they are seeing a devil when all they could be seeing is a wild beast, perhaps an exceptionally large bear, and imagining in their hysteria that this animal is something supernatural.”

  “And what of the girls who are being stolen?”

  “Again, these are just stories! If you really believe this nonsense about Henriette being a witch, then let us bring her to a court and have them decide her guilt.”

  A woman’s voice shrilly interrupted them, yelling out that there was no question about this witch’s guilt. The voice belonged to a plain woman of around thirty who had pushed herself to the front and stood red-faced in front of Karl, the man who was trying to reason with them.

  “She has bewitched my husband!” this dumpy frau insisted. “We can prove right now that this is so, unless you are in league with her and wish to keep her evil hidden from us!”

  This last accusation of hers got the heavyset butcher scowling suspiciously at Karl, as well as several of the other men edging closer to him. He noticed this and realized that he himself was close to being accused of being a witch, and a cautiousness set into his eyes as he closed his mouth and did not argue any further.

  A young woman was dragged to the front by several men. She was of a different type from the frau. Although her dress was little more than rags, it did little to hide the suppleness of her body. Even in her dire situation and with the contempt toward her accusers that hardened her expression, her heart-shaped face and fire-red hair radiated beauty.

  Her right hand was grabbed, and the butcher cut it with a knife to draw blood. This blood was then marked on the forehead of a small, timid-looking man who stood next to the frau, and who must have been her husband. Once the blood was spread over his forehead, he yelled out that he was no longer bewitched.

  “This witch’s spell has been broken,” he exclaimed. He turned to look at the frau and with a forced smile added, “I no longer desire her, but once again only desire my dear wife!”

  “There never was any spell!” the red-haired young woman insisted. “Herr Brunnow is a lecher who has many times tried to put his hands on me! The only reason he has had little desire for his wife is because she is shaped similarly to a hog!”

  The wife in question stepped forward to slap this young woman but instead fell to the ground in convulsions. That seemed to be the final straw and the young woman was dragged away while others went to the aid of the convulsing victim. Karl, the man of reason who had tried earlier to argue sense to this mob, stood by helplessly and watched.

  I could barely believe what I was seeing. Marking a victim of a bewitching with the witch’s blood to break a spell was an old wives’ tale that had long ago been forgotten, and here it was being dragged out again. Was I the cause of this? Was my being seen in other cities and villages the cause of this resurgent belief in witches? I watched, dumbfounded, as the wood cottage the young woman was thrown into was set ablaze.

  They were going to burn her alive.

  Without any thought of the consequences I rushed out from my hiding place. At first there was little more than looks of dumbfounded amazement on the faces of the members of the mob in front of me, then several of the men tried to block my advance, but once I knocked them aside, the others ran off. I kicked in the door of the burning cottage and dashed in without breaking stride. The young woman inside lay collapsed on the floor. The fire had yet to consume her, but the smoke was thick inside, and it must have been suffocating her. Although my eyes began to tear badly and the flames licked at my body, I made my way through so I could carry her out to safety. I held her in my arms as I ran from the burning cottage. Once outside, my path was blocked. Many of the men had armed themselves with pitchforks and other weapons and stood waiting for me. The frau still lay flopping around on the ground as if some unseen force had a grip on her and was shaking her like a child would a rattle. Her husband ignored this to point a bony finger at me and shout that I was proof that the woman was a wi
tch. That the Devil himself had come to rescue her.

  I slung the young woman over my shoulder, and as the men came toward me with their weapons I batted them aside—not hard enough to kill them but hard enough to send them flying. Soon a path opened up before me and I ran, ignoring the shouts and curses of the men behind me. Within seconds I entered the forest and the safety that it offered. I kept running until I had left the village far behind me. When I came to a clearing and a soft bed of grass, I lay the young woman upon it.

  She was unconscious and her breathing remained shallow. While my field of study was chemistry, I had a small understanding of medical procedures, and understood that her breathing was being restricted by the smoke that she had inhaled. I needed to breathe fresh life into her or she might perish where she lay. Gingerly I opened her mouth and blew air into her. After a minute of this she began coughing, and I backed away from her. When she opened her eyes and they focused on me, a dismal look weighed on her features.

  “Am I in Hell?” she asked, her voice weak, the effects of the smoke still heavy on her. “Is that why Satan is standing over me?”

  “I am not Satan,” I said. “I am a passerby who rescued you from the mob who tried to burn you within your cottage. You are still alive and of this earth.”

  She closed her eyes, and for a long moment I became worried that the fire had ended her life regardless of my efforts. But I detected that she was still breathing, even if only shallowly, and her eyes opened again. This time they held a dullness to them as she stared at me.

  “You have taken me to feast on my flesh,” she said in a despondent whisper.