Frankenstein Unbound

by Aldiss, Brian

  “Do you know that your characters are alive today, only a few miles down the road in Geneva? You must know, Mary! You must have read the newspapers and seen that the maidservant, Justine, was on trial for murdering—for murdering one of her charges.”

  “Why do you come to tax me about things—things that move only in my mind and my dreams?”

  She started to weep, and cry that her life was difficult enough without further complications. I began to comfort her. What started as an innocent embrace grew more intent, as I held her and kissed her lips, soft with crying.

  “Percy accuses me of not being loving enough. Oh, Joe, do you find me so?”

  “Oh, Mary, I had to journey two centuries to find such a lover! There never was a love like ours before! Dearest Mary!”

  “My dearest Joe!”

  And so on. Why do I tear my heart by recalling our words then?

  In our restlessness, we walked about the house, talking, touching each other.

  “You must not reproach yourself at any time. You know I must go... Just remember me as a spirit who brought you good news you richly deserved, no more!”

  “Oh, much more, very much more! But two centuries... I am dust to you, Joe, no more than moldering bones...”

  “Never have you been less than a living spirit.”

  We took little William with us into the garden. Mary brought out a rough-and-ready picnic on a cloth and we sat under old apple trees on which the apples were already beginning to glow with ripeness. Great moon-daisies were shedding their yellow petals all round us; a mint grew in the grass which made the air extra sweet. But I had to return to the subject of Frankenstein.

  “Something has happened to us, Mary, that enables us to step between worlds. It may not last. That’s why I must go. For while I have it in my power, I must put an end to Frankenstein’s monster. You have told me that your book is not finished. But to track the creature down, I must have advance information. Tell me what happens after the trial of Justine.”

  She bit her lip. “Why, it is the history of the world. The creature naturally wants a soul mate. Frankenstein repents some of his harshness and agrees to make one, a female.”

  “No, I don’t remember that in the book. Are you sure?”

  “So I have written. That is as far as I have got.”

  “Is this female made? Where? In Geneva?”

  She frowned in concentration.

  “Frankenstein has to go away to make it.”

  “Where does he go?”

  “He has to make a journey, as we must...”

  “What do you mean by that? There is a close link between him and you, isn’t there?”

  “He’s just my character. Of course there’s an affinity... But I don’t know where he goes, only what his intentions are. And of course his creature follows him.” We sat in silence, watching William play, and listening to the sound of insects.

  “You’ve told me nothing about your future. What books are written? Do people still believe in God? Did socialism come in? Is my father’s name still honored? What do women wear? Has Greece been liberated? What things do people eat?”

  “Human nature is the same. If that changes at all, the change is gradual. We have had wars greater than the wars against Napoleon, fought with more terrible weapons and less mercy, and involving most of the nations of the globe. People are still malicious because they are miserable. Women are still fair and men still love them, but there are fashions in love, as in other things. We hope the human race will continue to exist for millions of years, and grow to more understanding but, in the year 2020, the world seems to be falling apart at the seams.”

  And I told her about the timeslips, and how I had found myself back in her time.

  “Take me to see your car. Then perhaps I may believe I am not dreaming!”

  She carried William, and I led her, holding her small hand, back to where the automobile was parked. Unlocking it, I made her climb in, showed her the swivel gun, the maps, and many other things at hand.

  She made no apparent effort to take it in. Instead, she stroked the back of the driving seat.

  “This is beautiful material. Is it from some hitherto undiscovered animal, surviving perhaps in the Southern Continent?”

  “No, it is plastic, man-made—one of the many tempting gifts of Frankenstein’s heirs!”

  She laughed. “You know, Joe, you are my first reader! A pity you don’t remember my book a little better! A pity I do not have a copy bound to present you with! How grandly I would inscribe it... Are you going now?”

  I nodded, suddenly almost too full of emotion to speak. “Mary, come with me! You are a displaced person, I swear!—Come and be a displaced person with me!”

  She held my hand. “You know I can’t leave dear Shelley. He means to mend the world, but he needs me to mend his clothes... Do you like me, Joe?”

  “You know it goes beyond that! I worship and respect your character. And your body. And your works. Everything that is Mary Shelley. You are woman and legend— all things!”

  “Except the fictitious character by which I am best known!”

  “It stands greatly to your credit that you warned the world about him.”

  We kissed and she climbed out onto the track, clutching Willmouse to her neat breast. She was smiling, although there were tears in her gray eyes.

  “You must say my farewells to Lord Byron and Shelley. I am ashamed that I have abused their hospitality.”

  “Don’t spoil things by being conventional, Joe! We have been phantoms out of Time.”

  “Oh, dearest Mary...”

  We smiled hopelessly at each other, and I started the auto rolling, back in the direction of Geneva.

  For a long while I could see her in the rear-view mirror, standing in the dusty road in her long white dress, holding her child and looking after the Felder. Only when she was out of sight and I had turned a corner did I remember that I had left the little willow leaf from her body lying upstairs on her Sophocles.

  She would see it when she climbed up to bed that night.

  XI

  * * *

  Geneva began to seem almost a familiar place to me, with its thriving waterfront, grand avenues, narrow streets, and busy horse traffic.

  I had left my automobile behind a farmer’s barn beyond the city walls, and was making my way to Frankenstein’s house. I had resolved that I would make an alliance with him, persuading him net to create a female creature and helping him to hunt down and exterminate the creature already at large in the world.

  As if that quest were not macabre enough in itself, I went as if under some sort of malediction. For the date was now early in July. So I had ascertained from newspapers. The harvest I had seen gathered a few kilometers away was back on the stalk.

  Even allowing for the probability that time was no nonstop streamliner, faring ever forward at the same speed every day of creation, some fresh interruption of Nature must have occurred to explain its present serpentine course. Two possibilities came to mind. The first was that the time shock I had suffered was inducing some highly lifelike illusions. The second was that the grave time ruptures of my own age, produced by the damage done to space time, were sending their ripples backwards.

  This second possibility was the one I preferred, especially since I saw on reflection that such ripples might produce some of the effects of the first possibility. The time distortions might cause mental illusions in their own right.

  One of those illusions was my persistent sensation that my personality was dissolving. Every act I took which would have been impossible in my own age served to disperse the sheet anchors that held my personality. Embracing Mary Shelley, enjoying her love and her perfumes, had produced the greatest solvent effect so far. It was a strangely anomic creature who strode up to the door of the house of the Frankensteins and rapped for admittance.

  Once more the manservant was there to show me into the drawing room. Once more, that room was empty. But
only for a moment. Pale Elizabeth came in, imperious and dressed in a satin dress, high-waisted and very decolleté, with Henry Clerval at her side. He was as ruddy as she was pale, his manner as indolent as hers was severe and to-the-point.

  Clerval was a round-faced man, pleasant of feature, I thought, but his expression was far from friendly. He made no attempt at any civility, and left Elizabeth to do the talking.

  She said, “I cannot imagine why you have returned here, Mr. Bodenland. Do you have any more messages to bring me from Victor Frankenstein?”

  “Am I so unwelcome, ma’am? I did you a small service once by delivering a letter. Perhaps it is fortunate for my own sake that I have no further letter now.”

  “It is unfortunate for you that you brazenly appear at all.”

  “Why should you say that? I had not intended to trouble you on this occasion. Indeed, I may say it was not my wish to see you at all. I hoped to speak to Victor, or at least have a word with his father.”

  “The syndic is indisposed. As for Victor—you probably know his whereabouts better than we do!”

  “I have no idea where he is. Isn’t he here?”

  Clerval now decided it was his turn to be unpleasant. Coming forward accusingly, he said, “Where is Victor, Bodenland? Nobody’s seen him since you delivered that last message. What passed between you on that occasion?”

  “I’m answering no questions until you answer a few. Why should you be hostile to me? I’ve done nothing to offend you. I spoke to Victor twice only and had no quarrel with him. You have more reason to wish him harm than I have, isn’t that so?”

  At that, Clerval came forward angrily and seized my wrist. I struck his arm down and stood ready to hit him again, harder. We glared at each other.

  “We’ve good reason to have our suspicions of you, Bodenland. You are a foreigner with no settled establishment, you did not pay your hotel bill at Sécheron, and you have a horseless cabriolet that smacks of strange powers!”

  “None of that is your business, Clerval!”

  Elizabeth said urgently, “Here they come now, Henry!” And I had already heard footsteps in the hall.

  The door was flung open and two burly men in boots, sturdy breeches, coarse shirts, and bicorne hats marched in. One had a pistol in his belt. I doubted not that they were law officers, but did not linger for a second look, being already at the casement windows into the side garden. Clerval I pushed aside.

  As I dashed out, Ernest Frankenstein loomed up. They had had the forethought to post him in the garden. He was a slip of a lad. I struck him in the chest and sent him reeling. The delay was enough for Clerval to catch me and seize me from behind. I turned round and caught him a blow in the ribs. He grunted and got an arm round my neck. I brought my heel down on his instep, and then caught his forehead with my knee as he instinctively doubled with pain.

  That last was a luxury I should not have allowed myself, for the toughs were on me. They got in each other’s way at the window. Ducking under their grasp, I fell into the garden, staggered up, running already, dodging a flying kick from Ernest, and was away down the path.

  They had a long, long garden, with a high wall at the end. There was a trellis against it, which I could climb— but quickly enough?

  As I flung myself at it, pounding footsteps were behind me. I hauled myself to the top of the wall, looking back as I prepared to jump.

  Ernest was almost at my legs, then one tough, then the second, halting on the path, then Clerval and Elizabeth back by the house. The second tough was aiming his little pistol at me, using both hands to steady his aim—he had had sense enough not to fire when running and waste his one shot. He fired even as I jumped.

  I fell into a lane. It was not a very high jump. The ball had hit me in the leg. It was not a bad wound, but entirely enough to make me land badly and wrench my ankle.

  Staggering up, I leaned against the wall, panting and gasping, wondering how severely I was hit. With one leg bleeding and one crippled, I had no chance. My pursuers swarmed over into the lane and seized me.

  In a short while, limping and protesting, I found myself at the local prison, pushed into a filthy stinking room with some two dozen other malefactors.

  How bitterly I thought that night of the happiness I had left that morning! How longingly I recalled that other bed, with Sophocles beside it and Mary in it, as I camped out on unsavory sacks among the dregs of humanity who were my new companions!

  By morning, I was covered in bites from a number of loathsome insects who fed better than I did.

  However, I was far from despair. After all, I could not be punished for the death of Victor Frankenstein if he was not dead. Nor was I as isolated as might at first appear. For I knew there were English-speaking visitors in Geneva if I could only establish communication with them; they might be induced to take up my cause. And the Shelley party were near at hand—though the fluctuations of the time scale made it hard to determine whether they would recognize my name if they heard it. And there was the great Lord Byron, a powerful name, a man well known to espouse the cause of freedom. Perhaps word could be got to him.

  Meanwhile, my first efforts must be to attract attention to myself and have myself removed from this common Bedlam in which I was shut.

  In any case, I needed attention. Though my wound from the officer’s ball was not much worse than a flesh wound, it hurt me and looked bad. My trousers were caked with blood. Accordingly, without ever rising from my sordid bed, I lay and groaned and babbled, and altogether gave a wonderful impression of a man in extremity.

  Since I was one of the first to awaken, my noise was far from popular, and I received a few kicks and blows from my neighbors, in their kindly efforts to speed my recovery. Their ministrations only aided my cries. Eventually, I stood up screaming, and then pitched down and rolled over in an attitude which (I hoped) suggested death!

  A warden was called. He turned me over with his foot. I moaned. Another officer was called, and I was carried away, with much clanking of keys, eventually to find myself in a small room, where I was dumped in a negligent way on a table.

  A doctor came and examined me; I moaned throughout the inspection.

  My wound was probed and bandaged, and then the fool of a medico bled me, evidently under the impression that it would calm a supposed fever.

  As they carried away a pannier of my blood, I felt almost as bad as I pretended to be. I was then dragged into a solitary cell, locked in and left.

  There I stayed for two days. I was given some repulsive food which, by the end of the second day, I trained myself to eat. It gave me a bowel disorder within the hour.

  On the third day, I was marched before a prison officer, who perfunctorily asked me my name and address, and if I would confess to where I had concealed the body of Victor Frankenstein. I protested my innocence. He laughed and said, “One of our foremost counselors is hardly likely to have an innocent man imprisoned.” But he was good enough to allow me some writing materials before I was taken back to my cell, formally charged with murder.

  XII

  * * *

  Letter from Joseph Bodenland to Mary Godwin:

  My dear Mary Godwin,

  Your novel found many readers of whom you never knew. This letter may never find you. But perhaps my compulsion to write in these circumstances is as strong as yours!

  Nothing but disaster has attended me since I left your side. My one solace is that I was at your side. That is consolation enough for anything.

  My hazy memory of your novel suggests that you were entirely too kind to Victor’s betrothed, Elizabeth, and more than entirely too kind to his friend, Henry Clerval. Between them, they have had me imprisoned, on the false accusation of having murdered Victor.

  My release may come any day, since Victor has but to reappear among the living for the accusation to be proved false on all sides. However, you of all people know how erratic are his movements, moved as he is by guilt and persecution. To misquote you: “H
e is elusive because he is miserable.” Can you help me maybe, by discovering his whereabouts, and perhaps persuading him—through a third party if necessary—to return to his home, or to communicate with the prison officials here? He can bear me no malice.

  How much time I have had to meditate on what transpired between us! I will pass in silence over my feelings for you, for they can mean little to you at present (though I am in some doubt as to when “at present” is), though I assure you that what briefly flowered between us one morning is a flower that will not perish, however many mornings remain.

  What I will write about is the world situation in which I find myself. I bless you that you are an intellectual girl, like your mother, in an age when such spirits are rare; in my age, they are less rare, but perhaps no more effectual because of their greater numbers, and because they operate in a world where the male principle has prevailed, even over the mentalities of many of your sex. (I’d say all this differently in the language of my time! Would you like to hear it? You are an early example of Women’s Lib, baby, just like your Mom. Your cause will grab more power as time passes, boosted by the media, who always love a new slant on the sex thing. But most of those fighting girls have sold themselves out to the big operators, and work the male kick themselves, clitoris or no clitoris. End quote.)

  I had put Victor down—and your poet too, I have to confess—as a liberal do-gooding troublemaker. This troublesome wish to improve the world! “Look where it’s got us!”—that was the assumption behind all I said at Diodati the other evening.

  It was too easy an assumption. I can see that now, locked in this miserable cell with no particular guarantees that anything good is ever likely to happen to me again. When Justine Moritz was in this prison, the world outside had prejudged her before her trial. Perhaps I am being prejudged in the same way, if my name is even mentioned outside.

  But who would there be to speak for me, who would take up my case? In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it will be different, at least in the nations of America, Japan, and Western Europe. That stone curtain will not descend which now shuts off the inmates of prison from the free world outside. Among prison inmates, I do not include debtors—but in the future, governments will not be foolish enough to imprison people merely for a debt.