Mutating DNA destroyed the perfection of his work. If only he had known about DNA back then, what tragedies could have been averted! Understand, Father, I’m not trying to pass the blame onto him for my failure. No, my failures were mine and mine alone.
So, he continued on the same path as that poor creature from two centuries ago. His beauty was consumed, devoured by every gene that composed him. He continued to change, to degenerate. He quickly became the most repulsive thing I have ever seen.
It was on a Thursday, somewhere around six-thirty in the morning. I had stepped into his room, but the bed was empty, and his sheets were missing. Then I heard the strange sound of a sobbing voice from the corner of the room. It was him, sitting there on the floor, alone, with his sheets pulled over his head and body. “What’s the matter? Why are you hiding?” I asked him. But he just continued to sit there, sobbing like a child in pain. I walked closer, then knelt down on the floor beside him. I gently put my hand on his shoulder. “Why are you covering yourself?”
He lowered his head, which I could only tell by the way the top of the sheet dropped. “I’m ill. . . . I think I’m dying.”
I chuckled, but only to reassure him. “Is that so, Doctor? What’re you basing this diagnosis on? C’mon, let me examine you.”
He agreed, slowly pulling the sheet down as his head turned to look at me.
Father, I swear, it was all I could do not to retch right there. His skin was yellow and covered by welts and lesions that released a thick puslike secretion. His once-ocean-blue eyes had sunk deep into the two black sockets of his face. The lips were shriveled away and exposed his teeth, with gums a shade of green.
“You haven’t seen the worst,” he said, with that hideous face turned toward me. He dropped the sheet to reveal the maggots that had started to eat at the dead skin on his chest.
He released a chilling scream, and I yanked my arm back, crawling away from him like a crab on the floor. His words resounded with panic, and he begged me for help, but I couldn’t even look at him.
He yelled again, but this time for Linda. In response, she came running into the room.
Linda helped him back into bed, and she gave him a massive dose of antibiotics to treat the infection that was sweeping through his body like a wildfire burning out of control. She started him back on intravenous fluids to nourish that dehydrated body, then performed the sickening task of cleaning those dead areas of flesh and removing the infestations that had begun to feed on his skin. Lastly, she sedated him, with a dosage four times greater than that which would be required of any normal human being.
Only when that was done, did she turn on me. And she truly did turn on me, Father. I had seen Linda be aloof, excited, enthusiastic, despairing—virtually the gamut of emotions. But this was the first time I saw her angry.
She demanded to know why I had deceived her into believing that all would be well with him, why I didn’t confide in her. She had become so much closer to him, she should have been told.
I reluctantly showed her the results of the extensive tests done on him. There was little for Linda to do but to accept the tragic decay that nature and my stupidity had created for this man, if you still choose to use a word that in all actuality no longer applied to him.
Linda looked up from the test results, looked at me coldly with those blue eyes, and then slapped my face. She called me something I’d rather not repeat in front of you, Father, and then left the building, leaving me to face him alone.
My initial reaction was to wish him dead and to bring an end to what I perceived as suffering. Or maybe I just wanted to quickly dispose of my mistakes, save my good name and reputation at his expense. Or perhaps both. I’m just not sure anymore—so many thoughts were going through my head . . .
It took me a few minutes, but I eventually strolled back into his room. Yes, Father, you heard me correctly. I strolled, oh-so-casually, as if nothing were wrong. Lord, how very good I was at deception—it’s something they teach you in medical school. After all, you don’t want the terminal patients to know they’re going to die, you have to give them hope. I would still have him believe that there was absolutely nothing to be concerned about.
Yet, he, too, had become a master of surprise, but without malice or intent. And that’s what made him truly different from me, his creator. There wasn’t a deceptive bone in his body.
No, actually, that’s not what made him different. It’s what made him better.
He took me totally by surprise when I returned. He should have been unconscious with all the medication Linda had given him, but no. He was fully alert and was sitting upright in his bed, carefully reading a copy of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. His head moved from left to right, scanning each word, but only on one particular page.
I sat down on the bed next to him, having overcome the initial shock of his advanced deterioration. I smiled and asked him how he was feeling. To this question he made no reply. Then I asked him why he was reading the same page over and over.
He looked up at me through his sunken eyes, then down to his book again. “I read something that I don’t quite comprehend.”
I took the book politely from his hands. “What don’t you understand?”
His twisted fingers pointed at the section he’d been reading. “This!” he said, tapping insistently on two particular paragraphs.
I pulled out my reading glasses, but before I could even put them on, he quoted the text aloud:
“ ‘And we men, creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. The intellectual side of man already admits that life is an incessant struggle for existence. And before we judge them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison or dodo, but upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years.’ ”
I looked at him when he finished his recital. “It’s just a story!” I tried to sound firm, but the words sounded hollow even to my ears.
“Something must have inspired a man to write this.”
I repeated that it was just a story—nothing more, nothing less.
Then he asked if humans ever exterminated other forms of life as Wells described in his story. Reluctantly, I told him yes. I had been willing to withhold information from him, but somehow I could never bring myself to actively lie to him.
Besides, it didn’t matter, admitting to this truth about our species with the capacity to commit murder or genocide. The decision was already made. I would terminate his life as quickly as possible. I was afraid of him, I admit it. And I suspect that he feared me as well.
He slowly closed the covers of his book, then held it near to that foul chest as we sat staring suspiciously at each other.
By that evening Linda still hadn’t returned. At approximately six-thirty P.M., twelve hours after I found him in the corner, I filled the hypodermic needle with a drug that would end his life. The weather had turned foul. Thunder roared and lightning flashed, and a cold, hard rain pelted the windows. When the injection was prepared, I placed it in the front pocket of my lab coat and made my slow, cautious approach into his room. I expected to find him in his bed, where I had last seen him. But he was standing by the only window in this area of the building, the lightning casting sinister shadows on his lesion-ridden face.
He stared at me with a look of fear and said, “You have no right to do this. It is a miserable life, yes, but a life that I still cherish nevertheless. I love my books and can appreciate the beauty of the written word. The sound of music moves me—each stroke of the violin, the thunder of a symphony. I think. I dream. I feel! And what I think of and feel presents no danger to anyone. I have within me the capacity for love and beauty, the likes of which you have never seen before. So who are you to decide life
or death for me? What authority gives you the right to deprive me of life?”
I pulled the blue safety cap off the end of the needle and stared back at him.
“Wait!” he exclaimed, holding out his arms to stop me. “I’ll leave you! You’ll never have to see this face again. I give you my word.”
“I’m sorry, but—”
He laughed. “I’m to die, but you’re sorry? You’ll drop me into a hole, cover me with dirt. I’ll never see the sun or the stars again, but you’re sorry? At least be honest, Daniel. Tell me that I make you sick to your stomach. Say that I’m not fit to breathe. Look me in the eyes and tell me that you despise me. But don’t just stand there and say that you’re sorry—please.”
How could I possibly continue on with this? Could you? Could anyone?
I wasn’t as cold and calculating as I had counted on being, Father—which I’m sure comes as a relief to you. But before I had a chance to recap the tip of the needle, I felt my arm yanked out to my side. It was Linda, soaked from the storm, who had returned only to overhear us talking.
God, Father, it all happened so fast!
The needle flew out of my hand. Time suddenly slowed down as the needle flew through the air. It only took half a second for it to pierce the skin of her hand like a dart, but it seemed an eternity.
Linda staggered backward, while pulling the needle out from the back of her hand. To this day I could not say for sure if it was a teardrop or rain from her drenched blond hair that trickled down her cheek, as she collapsed on her knees. Then she glanced up at me with a look of disbelief in her eyes. She struggled to speak but said nothing.
Her death was quick, and yet it, too, took forever. It seemed she spent hours falling to the ground and closing her eyes and no longer breathing.
The creature pushed me aside as he raced to her. He just sat there on the floor, cradling her in his lap, stroking her blond hair with his deformed hand—crying.
As for myself, I couldn’t move. I hadn’t even heard her come in, and all of a sudden she was dead—murdered, not by the creature, as I’d feared might one day happen, but by a careless happenstance.
No—no, it is absurd to blame fate. I was the one who prepared the drug, I the one who intended to use it. Perhaps legally I could conceivably be exonerated from an actual charge of murder, but in my heart I knew that I had killed Linda Kauffman.
The woman I loved.
When he felt the last beat of her heart, when her warmth had left her, his eyes turned to look at me. “Tell me who’s the monster now, Doctor!” He then slowly stood up and shook those fists at me. He released a scream that echoed throughout the building. He went into a blind rage.
I waited and welcomed his revenge—but, to my surprise, he never laid a hand on me. He turned his anger on the technology instead. He smashed the equipment, tore sockets and plugs from the walls, kicked over the computers. The lights in the room flickered. Sparks exploded around him. There were bursts of smoke, then fire. When he was certain that his task was complete, when everything around us was destroyed, he slowly walked over to where Linda lay dead on the floor. He gently picked her up and held her body close to his chest. He tilted his head so that the side of his check rested against her forehead. I heard him scream again as he carried Linda to the door.
Suddenly he stopped, and turned from the waste, holding Linda in his arms. He stared at me through the smoke and fires. “How very low an animal,” he said, “this creature called man!”
And then he left—carrying her away with him under the light of a full moon.
For my part, I just stood there, mouth agape, unable to move, unable to utter a sound. Fires blazed all around me, and soon—was it moments? hours? years later?—I heard the sirens that heralded the arrival of the fire department.
THREE
Oh, Frankenstein, I am thy creature . . . I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous. —The Creature, 1792
The thought of returning home to Waterford had always filled me with romantic expectations. Memories of Connecticut promised to fulfill all my desires for familial peace and routine. Memories of New England beckoned and evoked images from Currier and Ives and the charm of Norman Rockwell.
But my return home some two weeks after Linda’s death was far from romantic, I can assure you. I was a shadow of my former self, a hollow wreck of a man. Most assumed it was because my “research” had been lost in the fire. The chairman of my department had made all kinds of reassuring noises, saying that the insurance would cover the lightning damage—for that was my cover story, Father, that lightning had destroyed the lab.
Since it was already December, and the university would be shutting down for Christmas break, I went home.
In truth, I had nowhere else to go. I was miserable, an empty wretch—fitting punishment for my crime of having raped nature of her miracle and mystery.
The conductor announced our arrival at the station in New London, and then the train jerked to a halt. From outside my window I heard the sounds of Christmas carols being played by a brass band. I shook my head bitterly. There was no peace on my Earth, no good will toward man in my heart this holiday season.
As the crowds of passengers walked by me, I reached for my suitcase. But I took my time. There was no reason to rush. There certainly wasn’t anyone waiting for me on the platform. No warm greetings, no hugs, no excited faces. There was only the cold of a New England December outside, nothing more or less than I deserved.
I stepped onto the concrete platform and took a moment to turn up the wool collar of my topcoat, feeling the frigid winds that swept past me from outside. As I leaned over to pick up my bag again, I caught a quick glimpse of a face that was a grim reminder of what I had done. It was my own reflection, there in the glass of the train’s door, unshaven, with eyes that looked tired and defeated. I lowered my head, staring down to the dirty sidewalk. Feeling weak and sick to my stomach, I fumbled for the handle of my suitcase.
All of a sudden I heard a man calling out to me. “Danny!”
I slowly turned to look over my shoulder. Only one man ever called me by that diminutive, and there he was: my father.
He stood amongst the crowd, wearing those wire spectacles and that ridiculous old flannel hunting cap like a true Connecticut Yankee, waving his arm over his head and smiling.
For the first time since—well, truly, Father, for the first time since I was introduced to Linda back in Anchorage, I felt good. True, I’d had a sense of achievement when I first imbued life to my creation, but that was always leavened by the tragedy of the Granger —and that soon passed when I realized the wretch I’d created.
But now, seeing my father again, I was happy. It was rather an odd feeling, actually, but I embraced it wholeheartedly.
My dear sister, Nicole, was there at the station with my father. It seemed like only yesterday she was the child who saw me off to the service. Now she had grown into a very attractive young lady, with blue eyes and a face that would certainly make the angels bow in envy. Her cheeks were rosy, and that smile was warm and genuine.
Her voice was so very excited, and she told me about the turkey father had bought for our holiday dinner. It was the biggest she had ever seen, Nicole said, then told me about the Christmas tree they had decorated. It would be the very best Christmas ever, she promised—hugging me—saying how good it was to have the whole family together again.
We drove to my family’s home in Waterford—a great white house with black shutters and gables looking out to the moon and the shadows of the trees. Diamond-shaped windowpanes, glimmering on the living room—such a marked contrast from my sterile lab or my cramped apartment. A gloriously old-fashioned structure, built in 1784. It had started to snow when we left the train station, and by the time we reached the house,
a fresh blanket of snow that glistened with all the brilliance of fine crystal from the setting sun lay across the ground. Such a wonderful change from the rain that had plagued New Jersey ever since that horrible night.
The wonderful smell of eggnog from the kitchen . . . the peaceful symphony of a crackling fire in our woodstove . . . the twinkle of white lights strung around a Christmas tree in the living room. All seemed well. . . .
The scenery grew dark. Part of me remembered that I was asleep in the guest bed at my family’s home in Connecticut. I dreamt again of that hallway with its peeling wallpaper that led to the very same grand room where I had confronted the mysterious stranger who spoke of a woman by the name of Elizabeth. Nothing had changed. There echoed again that ghostly sound of a piano playing The Moonlight Sonata deep from within the darkness. As I moved closer, I could see the image of a person whose fingers struck the keyboard by what used to be a fireplace. “Is that you . . . ?”
“Who?” a voice, strangely familiar, answered, though not the one I’d heard in my last dream-trip to this dilapidated house. “Victor Frankenstein? Is that who you’re looking for?”
“Who are you? Where’s . . .”
The silhouette behind the piano turned in to the dim light to look at me. “Don’t you recognize me, Daniel?”
It was Linda.
Her face was a pale blue, with dark circles under those eyes that stared back at me, wildly. Linda raised a hand to cover her lips and giggled. “Poor Daniel,” she said, laughing and shaking her head. “You didn’t listen to Victor, did you? He told you that a sleeper should never be awakened. And now it’s out there—waiting—watching every move you make.”
This ghostly image of Linda stood, then appeared to float in a circle as she danced to the step of a ballerina, singing, “Poor little Daniel, asleep upon his bed. He led the creature home, and soon they’ll all be dead.”
She stopped abruptly, holding her arms out to her sides, and bowed, then giggled again. Her voice carried throughout the wreckage of this damned house, and she repeated, “Poor Daniel.”
Frankenstein: The Legacy Page 4