Monster

by Dave Zeltserman

  It was clear that Elizabeth Lavenza was in love with him. I could see it in the way she would look at him and how she would blush when he would hold her hand. Why she could not see him for what he was, I could not say, but he fooled all the others also. In his emaciated state and having gone through what they believed to be an appalling ordeal of having his childhood friend murdered and himself falsely accused of the crime, they looked upon him as if he were a wounded bird that needed to be brought back to health. When I would see them act this way my blood would boil, and I would be sorely tempted to quit my hiding and rush to them so that I could explain his true nature and the crimes that he had committed and the further evil that I had prevented. But I knew it would do no good, and besides, doing so would go against my plans. Still, it would rankle me to witness this, especially watching Elizabeth Lavenza act in this fashion, for she otherwise appeared to be an intelligent and generous woman.

  I was not surprised when Frankenstein announced his engagement to Elizabeth, although I was actually surprised in the way he acted with her; for he doted on her and showed her only gentleness, and it mostly seemed sincere. For a long time I wondered about this, for I knew he was incapable of truly loving her, or anyone except himself. Eventually I understood his behavior. He needed to convince himself that he loved her. As long as he could grasp what she offered him, he would be able to fit in with society and pretend that he was like everyone else. What she was really offering him was a chance of normality, or at least the facade of normality.

  I waited until a week before Frankenstein’s impending marriage to surprise him while he strolled alone in the woods nearby his father’s house. At first he nearly fell over from fright, but as I walked alongside him so that there was only a foot’s distance between us, he tried to act as if I wasn’t there.

  “I hope you have not forgotten about me,” I said.

  “I have not,” he answered, his voice barely a whisper.

  “Good, good, for I have not forgotten you. I would congratulate you on your upcoming wedding, except it will not be a pleasant day for you. I should correct myself. The day itself might be pleasant, I cannot say, but your wedding night will certainly not be.”

  He tried looking at me but could not force himself to do so. I had stripped myself of my cape for this meeting, for I wanted him to remember clearly what he had turned me into. We continued walking together and Frankenstein after some time attempted to clear his throat so that he could talk.

  “I am a changed man,” he said at last, his voice sounding strangled. “Before, it was as if I was under a dark spell, but that spell has been broken. I beg your forgiveness and I offer my sincerest apologies for what I have done, and I promise you that I will live out the rest of my life performing acts of contrition.”

  I laughed at that. “In the months that I have watched you I have yet to see you perform a single act of contrition,” I said. “But even if you are sincere in what you are telling me, do you think an apology is appropriate for the crimes that you have committed? My murder, Johanna’s, Charlotte’s, as well as all the kidnappings?”

  We walked for several hundred more yards before he asked in that same strangled voice, “What would you have me do?”

  “You could travel back to Ingolstadt and confess your crimes and let yourself be broken upon the wheel as I was.”

  The little color he had left bled out from his complexion. “They would think me a madman if I did that and they would only lock me up in an asylum,” he said.

  “Possibly. Still, it would be something. Or you could instead write out your confession and hang yourself by your own hand. It would be a cowardly way to end it, but at least a modicum of justice would be served.”

  He thought on that before shaking his head. “I could not do that. I could not hurt Elizabeth in that way.”

  He turned to glance at me, but I had already left his side so that I could spy on him from a distance. He stood startled with the same dazed expression upon his face that you would see on a deer that had been surprised by a hunter. He turned slowly around to search for me, and on realizing that I was gone, he continued with his walk, his gait now slower and more unnatural. As I watched him, I wondered why I had made those suggestions, for if he followed either of them they would rob me of my vengeance. I decided it was because I knew he would be incapable of showing the necessary courage to do either of what I had suggested, for he was not in any way the changed man that he proclaimed himself to be.(tinku)

  CHAPTER 30

  From a distance I witnessed Frankenstein’s wedding ceremony, and later spied on their celebration. I watched as he armed himself with a pistol and a dagger, and later as he and his bride boarded a boat on Lake Geneva. Did he really believe he could escape me by water? Had he already forgotten how I had been constructed? While the boat moved faster than any man, I had little problem in racing along the shores of the lake so that I could follow it. I was there to watch them when they departed the boat to spend their wedding night in a home in the resort town of Évian. I spied on them as they walked hand in hand along the shore, and then as they sat together. When Frankenstein’s bride entered the house by herself, I stole along the outer walls so that I could go through her bedroom window and surprise her. I did this so quietly that at first she did not hear me. When she at last noticed me she opened her mouth to scream but was too frightened to do so.

  “I am not here to harm you,” I said, “but to convince you to abandon the fiend whom you have married.”

  She stared dumbly at me as if she could not understand what I was saying. I felt pity for her, but I needed her to leave Frankenstein on his wedding night. I knew it would strike a fatal blow that would send him reeling. Just as Henriette could have once been an anchor for me in keeping my thirst for vengeance in check, this woman seemed to be a similar anchor for Frankenstein; she was the only thing holding him to his false hope that he could live a normal life. If she was gone he would be set adrift. His last few months would be spent in utter turmoil.

  “When Victor Frankenstein resided in Ingolstadt as a medical student, he had me and others murdered, and he later created me in this monstrous form.”

  She shook her head, my words finally making sense to her. “No,” she insisted. “You are lying!”

  “I am not lying. My name used to be Friedrich Hoffmann, my betrothed’s name was Johanna Klemmen. He had both of us murdered.”

  I had saved several of Frankenstein’s illustrations for this purpose, and I handed them to her. Her mouth gaped open as she looked at them and understood what they portrayed.

  “These are Frankenstein’s,” I said. “He arranged for almost two hundred young women and children to be kidnapped, and these are just a few of the acts that he was going to have performed on these innocents. I have since saved them, but it is what your new husband was going to do. This is the monster that you married, and you must leave him now. I will help you.”

  I reached out to touch her arm, and she turned on me as a cornered animal might, throwing the papers in my face.

  “You are the fiend!” she cried. “You are the monster! And you are not worthy of speaking my husband’s name!”

  If she had said anything other than that, I would have carried her away if necessary so that I could show her more evidence of her husband’s crimes and convince her of his evil, but those words blinded me. I was lost within them and the rage that they stirred up within me. When reason came back to me she was dead by my hands. It had happened in the briefest of moments, but I had throttled her and left her sprawled dead on the canopy bed. I was still struggling to understand what I had done when Frankenstein swung the bedroom door open and raced into the room. He looked first at his bride and understood by the dark purple marks along her neck what had happened. Then he turned toward me, enraged.

  “Now you know how it feels,” I said.

  He began fumbling for his pistol, but before he could have it pointed at me I was already out of the window and r
acing away. It was too early still to take my final revenge on him, and I was reeling from what I had done to his bride. Even with what she had said to me, she was an innocent and did not deserve what I did, and there was nothing that I could think of that could justify my action. All I could feel was an empty hollowness in the pit of my stomach. But I tried not to think of it, and instead only imagined how I had injured my enemy, and what would be happening next.

  I allowed Frankenstein to bury his bride before I acted on the rest of my plan. The spell that I had spent months rendering upon him would draw him to me when I desired, and my plan was to bring him to the most desolate spot on the planet so that he could die alone and so that his body would never be found by man. I had been planning this for many months. More than just planning. Ever since I learned of his release from that Irish prison, this was all I had been able to think of. Now that I was finally acting on my plans, all I felt was emptiness, and whenever I would try to imagine my Johanna to comfort me, I would instead be haunted by the image of Frankenstein’s bride dead by my own hands. But my following through with my plans was all I could think of, so I led Frankenstein back toward his castle. Many times I would stop and wait for him to catch up to within a mile of me before I would continue. When I reached the castle, I headed north, and used the spell to keep drawing Frankenstein after me.

  This journey continued for many months as we passed through deserts and glaciers. I still had gold and jewels on my person, and at one of the remote villages I encountered, I traded some of these for fur clothing, supplies, a dog team, and a sled. Perhaps the people I traded with had never seen a European before and assumed that I was typical of other Europeans, for they showed no alarm at my sight. While the cold did not bother me, at least not in the way it did when I was Friedrich Hoffmann, I rid myself of my cape and used then only the furs that I had acquired. After leaving this village, I traveled for several hours before stopping to wait again for Frankenstein. When he appeared on the horizon I saw that he had also acquired a sled and a team of dogs.

  I kept heading north, for I would take us to the North Pole itself if I had to to see my enemy drop. It was then that I passed a most peculiar thing. A ship stuck in a sea of ice. At first I wondered why anyone would attempt such a foolish trip, and then whether everyone on board had perished. This second question was answered when I saw activity on deck. I decided whatever their reason for being out in this icy wilderness was their own, and I continued on a short distance so that I could be hidden from the ship but still watch for Frankenstein. A day passed as I waited, and it was only then that I spotted Frankenstein’s sled. The ice had broken where he was, and he had been set adrift. His dogs were gone and he lay seemingly unconscious on his sled. I watched as men from the ship rescued him.

  I could not believe this had happened. If Frankenstein had expired on that piece of ice I could have been satisfied with my revenge, but now I did not know whether he was dead, or whether they would be restoring him back to health. For days I worried about this, and resisted the urge to steal aboard the ship to check on my enemy. If he survived I would later draw him back to me, and if he died I had to believe that I would somehow know this. So as difficult as it was, as much as the unknowing gnawed at my soul, I settled in to keep watch over this ship.

  These were torturous days; the sun ever present in the sky, almost as if to mock me and not even allow me a moment of darkness so that I could attempt to sleep and escape the thoughts that were nagging at me. The journey had taken longer than I had expected, especially now with my enemy aboard this icebound ship, and I hadn’t brought enough food for my team of dogs. I tried setting them free, hoping that they could find something to hunt in this wilderness, but they were too exhausted from my pushing them these many days and I had to watch as they withered and died around me, adding more blood to my hands.

  I do not know how many days I kept vigil on this ship, for it was impossible to tell with the sun always in the sky, but I knew it was many, possibly several months. At one point the sea ice broke up enough to open a passage of escape for this ship, but it stubbornly remained where it was. It was perhaps two days after this had happened that I felt a shift inside of me and I knew that my enemy was dead. I had no choice now; I had to steal aboard this ship so that I could bear witness to his lifeless form. I did this carefully, and was undetected as I snuck aboard and crept below to the captain’s quarters, where somehow I knew Frankenstein lay.

  He was dead, as I had known he was. As I looked upon his corpse all I felt was hollow inside, for I had achieved little with my vengeance other than allowing it to consume me and twist me into something as malignant as my enemy. I remembered Brother Theodore’s words when I had left his monastery; how he was afraid that my thirst for vengeance would lead to my ruin. He was right. Now that my enemy was dead I could see clearly what I had done. With my murder of an innocent woman I had doomed myself and had lost Johanna forever. I understood also why I had approached Frankenstein a week before his wedding. It wasn’t to taunt him. At a subconscious level I must have been hoping that he would act on one of the suggestions I made; I must have known that otherwise I would ruin myself. He was an evil man and he deserved his death, but not by my hands and not at my ultimate cost.

  It was as I was staring at Frankenstein when the door to the cabin opened and the man who must have been the captain of the ship entered. I forced myself to look away from my enemy so I could meet this man’s eyes. In all of my contempt and hatred for what I had allowed myself to lose for this villain’s death, I forced out in a harsh whisper, “This is my victim. In his murder my crimes are now consummated.”

  The look this captain gave me was one of utter revulsion. I could only imagine then the lies that Frankenstein had told this man during his months aboard his ship. With my voice strangled I said that I would leave him alone with this most worthy creature, and with that I escaped through the cabin window, landing on an ice floe that took me swiftly away from the boat.

  CHAPTER 31

  The ice floe carried me for many miles. I thought that I would perish aboard it, and looked forward to that fate, but eventually it brought me to a barren landscape of ice and snow. I traveled south for many days and did not die as I expected and hoped for. Instead I reached a remote village, where I was able to trade the last of my gold for supplies, animal hides, and tools. I did not bother with acquiring another sled and dog team, for where I was going I wished to be alone without even the company of animals. I loaded all of my purchases on my back and trekked until I found an isolated area by a lake, and there I set about bringing down trees and building myself a small cabin. Once this was built I decided this would be where I would wait out my final days far away from other men. The lake had fish I could catch, and there were berries and nuts and mushrooms in the woods nearby to further sustain me.

  I had not slept for months, at least not more than a few minutes at a time when I would drift into unconsciousness while I kept my vigil over that ship, and even before then, I had slept little while burning for my vengeance over Frankenstein. That first night after I finished constructing my cabin I slept fully and deeply, and had no dreams.

  As the days passed, whether I slept or not I would spend the nights laying on my bed of animal hides, and as dawn approached I would leave my cabin and perform my daily chores, which amounted to gathering firewood and nourishment, although some days I would take on projects, such as constructing crude furnishings for my cabin. Once my chores were completed I would sit by the lake and pray for forgiveness for the murder I had committed and for my betrayal of Johanna.

  Years passed as I lived this way and waited for death, but death’s release seemed to escape me. I did not age, nor did I get sick. During this time I was not once able to dream of Johanna. While my dreams were generally serene, I prayed that she would visit me once more, but this never happened. When I would remember that one dream I had had of her when I was held within Frankenstein’s castle, I would remember how s
he told me that she was afraid that she would lose me, and tears would come to my eyes. Not over my own loss, but of how I had abandoned her.

  I do not know how many years had passed when my peace was invaded by a foreign and unpleasant noise that made me think of how rampaging elephants might sound. I sought out the source of this noise, moving swiftly from my cabin and through the woods nearby. The scene that I came across sickened me. Dozens of women and children stood huddled with a few old men among them. They were close to what I knew were vehicles, except they were too large and had no horses to pull them. I would later learn they were motorized transport machines and were the source of the noise that had disturbed me. What sickened me was the sight of the soldiers. Their uniforms had a special malignancy about them, and they were setting up what I knew were weapons, although they were of a sort that I would never have imagined. They were there to slaughter defenseless victims. Women and children and old men! When I heard them speaking my native German I was outraged! Was this what my fellow countrymen had degenerated into, to commit such horrific atrocities?

  I broke a heavy branch from a tree and threw it with all my might at them, knocking down two of them, perhaps even killing them. The third of them turned his weapon toward me and it spat out metal that ripped my flesh and bit cruelly into me. This injured me greatly, but in my rage I still had enough strength to rip down another branch and throw it at him, and saw that the blow crushed his skull.

  The ones who were going to be massacred were now safe. I had little strength remaining in me. I turned and struggled to make it back to my cabin so that I could die in peace. I wondered if that was what had kept me alive for all these years, to save these people as a way to help atone for my crimes. I collapsed on the ground a mile from my cabin and crawled the rest of the way, but I did not die. Over time my injuries healed. Death still would not come to me.