Monster

by Shane Peacock

  “That will cost you more, sir, you know that.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Fifty quid, agreed?”

  “Why, certainly, my good man. I promise.”

  “You is good on your promises, sir.” He walks over to the table where Jonathan is tied down, picks up Thorne’s rifle, which had been leaning against a wall in darkness behind the table, and goes out the door.

  “What an imbecile,” says Godwin after he leaves. “Of course I am good on my promises. If you do something like he shall now do for me, I pay you. It is a simple equation. I suppose, in a sense that makes me a moral man, doesn’t it, Edgar?”

  “It must be you who made the monster. It MUST be! Why are you denying it?”

  “Because I do not tell lies. That is indeed immoral. I have made no monster, not yet.”

  “Then what murdered Professor Lear? What murdered Alfred Thorne? I have seen a drawing of its face, a monstrous face!”

  “That sounds like a judgment of someone’s appearance that is not pleasant. It is beneath you, Master Brim.”

  “You should let us go. We could work together to find this creature. We would help you. We could capture it together, and then you could examine it, learn how it was made.”

  “I have no need to capture it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Because the so-called monster of which you speak—and that truly is a terrible thing to say about him—is in this very room.”

  Godwin steps toward the table and stands over Edgar. He reaches up and turns on the bright lights above. As he does, his head is in profile and Edgar can see that the light is shining right through the side of his face.

  “I am the monster,” says Godwin.

  II

  Where there is knowledge, it will pass away.

  1 Corinthians 13:8

  19

  Tiger is finally entering the Lear home on Progress Street, in Kentish Town, and discovering, to her horror, that it appears to be empty. After Edgar had vanished in his hurrying cab, she’d had trouble hailing a ride. She’d had no idea where he was going. Then the horse on her hansom had gone lame and she had had to travel the last few miles on foot. She curses herself for taking so long to get here, for leaving Lucy alone. The cannon sits pointing toward the front door, unused. She takes the pistol out of her pocket and puts both hands on it, a finger on the trigger as she searches the rooms, hoping to find something. She points the barrel head high.

  “Bloody freak,” she whispers, “come to me.”

  But she discovers nothing. She walks through the living room and spots the bits of blood on the floor. Lucy put up a fight, she thinks. She nods and almost smiles.

  Tiger paces for a long while, her speed picking up, unsure what to do. She needs to find Lucy, find Edgar, find Jon…find Godwin.

  She almost stumbles over two books that must have been knocked to the floor during the struggle. She bends down and picks them up. They are both hers, volumes she had brought with her from home when she knew she would be staying at the Lears’. The first is A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. She has been thinking more about the fight for equality lately and this is an important tract, written by Mary Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, perhaps the first book ever written on this subject. But Tiger turns to the other book, Mary Shelley’s own, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Maybe this novel can somehow tell her something. Tiger loves that it was a nineteen-year-old woman who wrote it. The story seems to her to be about many things, not just about making a monster, but about how men have such egos that they believe they are like gods. But she bought this book because of Edgar. She wants to understand him, this sensitive boy. More importantly, this book has been scaring the life out of her and she’s loved that sensation. It makes her feel alive.

  She opens it and sees something she hasn’t noticed before. It’s the dedication at the front. Mary Shelley has dedicated her famous novel to her father. Tiger reads his name, Mary’s maiden name.

  GODWIN.

  Then she hears a thud at the front door.

  —

  Back at the lab, Edgar is staring up at the great surgeon.

  “Your face!” he cries, unable to stop himself.

  “Ah, the light has caught it just right. Intriguing, isn’t it?”

  “What’s…what’s wrong with you?”

  “You see, my boy, I have another face.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have reconstructed my visage so that it is much more acceptable to the human eye. I shall turn my head about for you now and see if you can see it any clearer.” He turns his head slightly, back and forth. There is something visible underneath again…like another face. It almost seems as though the visage beneath is much like the one that Annabel drew!

  “Do you get it now?” asks Godwin.

  “You! It was you!”

  “Yes, I had to pay a few visits.”

  “But how…you removed your face?”

  Godwin laughs out loud. “I believe that is indeed humor! No, I cannot remove my face. I am beginning to think your brain may be inferior. That is not good. Perhaps I will not use the sponge in your skull. Perhaps it should be the girl’s. The human female brain is smaller, you know, but is so wonderfully connected. Thus, the fairer sex can do many things at once, not a masculine specialty. The male brain, on the other hand, has severe divisions, thus males focus well, not always a feminine strength. I really should slice up your brains and put them together. That would be best! But, Edgar, you must show me that you can think better than this! I do not remove my face! It is much cleverer than that. I will show you.”

  Godwin walks over to a shelf with several rows of big jars by the door. He takes something out of one of them.

  “I keep this face in this jar in order to wear it when needed. It is an exact replica of my original, or the one that was given to me. It is made of human skin. Quite exquisite, took me years to construct. I thought it would work well when eliminating your friend Lear and entering Miss Tilley’s home and Thorne House. It had the correct dramatic effect, put everyone in the right frame of mind. Fear, my boy, is such a useless and yet powerful and debilitating thing. And human beings are so susceptible to it. They are such fools about it.” He is holding the face in his left hand. It looks like wet dough, though it has eyes, eyebrows and a hole for a nose and mouth. The skin is yellow and there are rubbery black lips on it, everything remarkably realistic. “Here, try it,” he says and slaps the skin down onto Edgar’s face. “Humor!” he exclaims. “You are Frankenstein’s creature!” He smiles. “Just like me!”

  Edgar feels like he may throw up. The thick human skin is moist on his face. He wants to tear it off but his hands are tied. He shivers and shakes his head violently and sends it flying into the air. Godwin catches it with the snap of his hand, a lightning fast reflex.

  “Ah, I was given such skills!”

  “What did you say?”

  “The man who made me gave me such skills!”

  Edgar swallows. “The other thing…” He stares at the surgeon and can barely get his breath. “…about Frankenstein’s creature. Why did you say that?”

  “Because,” says Godwin, striking a pose, “I am not just any monster. I am HIM!”

  —

  Tiger leaps to her feet as the front door closes with a slam. Whoever is entering doesn’t seem to be concerned about sneaking up on her.

  “Edgar?” she says, lowering the gun. “Why are you slamming—”

  Graft’s wide body appears in the hallway. He has Thorne’s rifle in his hand and is raising it toward Tiger. She raises her weapon back at him.

  “Just the lass I was looking for,” he growls. “You is coming with me.”

  Tiger pauses. Her heart is pounding.

  “Where?” she asks.

  “To the Midland Grand Hotel. Lovely accommodations they ’ave there, and you is going to the top floor, the toppermost of the poppermost.”

 
; “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

  “Oh yes you is, my dear. Now put down that gun. Girls shouldn’t be playing with things that ain’t in their line. Hand it over.”

  “Say that again.”

  “Hand over the man’s weapon, little girl.”

  Tiger squeezes the trigger and puts a bullet right through the center of his forehead.

  20

  “You are him?” gasps Edgar.

  “Yes, I believe I am, though I was not made by the hand of Victor Frankenstein. That book is a fiction, you know, and he is not real, not like I am. He is a mere character. It is a curious thing, this making up of stories that human beings do. Novels are lies, but I have discovered that they can tell great truths.”

  “You aren’t human! No wonder you are doing this!”

  “Come, come, such a naïve view of humanity. I have learned, and you should know, that there is no greater evil on this earth than that which is perpetrated by human beings. After all, some horrible man made me! Some evil creature decided he could create a life and then ABANDON IT!” His face grows red.

  Edgar struggles with the straps. “What do you mean some horrible man?”

  Godwin steps away from the table and looks up at the great pole thrust into the hole in the roof. There is another crash of thunder and the flash of lightning. “I do not know who gave me life, though I have done a lengthy study and have my suspects: three in particular, all great scientists from the past who are said to have attempted the re-animation of dead flesh! One of those, a man named Aldini, famously experimented on an executed criminal and made him move his muscles and lift a leg and open an eye with the use of electric current right here in London. Mrs. Shelley would have been an impressionable child at the time. But it may have been one of the other two creators!” He pauses for a moment and then stares off. “I came to consciousness in Germany in a forest near the Swiss border, naked, bloodied and scarred, the soles of my feet ripped to shreds. I had been running away from someone!”

  “But that doesn’t mean you are a creature made by the hand of man. Maybe you just suffered from some terrible occurrence and it may have been a head injury that caused you not to remember what—”

  “It was more than a century ago!” shouts Godwin. “I am a human being with no lineage! No father or mother! No childhood!” Edgar hears Lucy shudder on her table. The handsome surgeon looks at her and then back at Edgar and walks toward him, coming to a sudden halt at the operating table. He stares down at his own body and then moves his arms as if they were foreign objects. “And these were different then.” He unbuttons his shirt, exposing his throat. Edgar can see a faint scar running all the way around the muscular neck. Godwin undoes his cuffs and rolls up his sleeves, exposing his powerful arms, his forearms and biceps, all swelling with thick muscle too, admired by the nurses at the London Hospital. He shows Edgar similar faint scars around his wrists. “My hands were put on here, quite intricate work. He must have used the best parts from others.” Then he leans down, bringing his face up to within inches of the boy’s, and separates the hairs on the top of his own head. Edgar’s bulging eyes see another scar encircling the scalp. “This,” says Godwin, “is where the fiend opened the skull he gave to me and put in another brain. A good one, mind you, a brilliant one. I often wonder where he found it. One admires his taste…and his skill.” Godwin presses the top of his head into Edgar’s cheek and the boy can feel how flat it is under the carefully combed hair. Edgar again senses that he will retch. Godwin stands back and begins to elegantly fix his collar and pull his sleeves back into place. “I have repaired these scars so they are almost invisible. But alas, I re-drew some for my attacks on Professor Lear, Miss Tilley and Mr. Thorne.”

  “Why are you doing this to us?” asks Edgar. “If such a horrible thing was done to you, why would you perpetrate such a horror on anyone else?”

  “An excellent point, very skillfully put, perhaps your brain will indeed be of significant use.” He pauses. “This is why: I am a scientist and a supporter of progress but also a supporter of myself, I’m inwardly prone, as I have learned all human beings are. I must go on living and science must keep progressing. What I am doing this evening is indeed regrettable, in a way. I wish I could spare you and your friends. But the problem is that you know of my existence. I will not be allowed to live if people know what I am. If you think about it, you will understand. So, it is a mere fact that you must be removed, a mere scientific fact. I knew of that revenant you murdered in the Lyceum Theatre, that “vampire,” as human beings call it and Bram Stoker characterized it. It is in the interest of such creatures as the revenant and I to be aware of each other’s existence, so he and I were searching for evidence of beings such as ourselves. The revenant actually discovered me in my hospital when he was in London. He wrote to me. He said someone was on his trail. I kept abreast of him after that and knew you killed him, was nearby when it happened. I arranged for you to be brought to the hospital to apprentice to keep an eye on you. I queried you about your guardians, your friends and your integrity. The latter worried me. But I thought I might spare you. But you kept asking the wrong questions and sneaking around. So, I put the destruction of all of you into motion. And here you are!” Godwin turns away and paces. “I simply have to kill you, Edgar. I wish I could be sad about it, cry about it, since it seems to me that you and your friends are excellent people, and the girl on this table appears to be lovely, I think…I’m not sure. And you and I both lack a father—we are connected in that way. But you see, I cannot cry for you, myself or anyone. I have tried. Let me try once more.”

  There is near-silence again in the room, though the rain is now pounding down on the roof. Godwin holds his big hands over his face.

  “No,” he says after a while, “I have no sense of sadness. I don’t believe my tear ducts work well, anyway. And I’m not certain that sadness, crying, that sort of weakness, is helpful in this world, which as I say, should be built upon improvement. A real man, a man of resource and industry, does not cry.”

  Tiger, thinks Edgar. In his paralyzing fear, he had forgotten about her. But at any moment, he fears that the door will be flung open and Graft will appear carrying her limp body in his meaty arms.

  “You have read Frankenstein, I am sure?” asks Godwin.

  Edgar nods.

  “Well, who hasn’t? It is universally considered a marvelous human creation, though I personally do not understand what is so great about it. It is a mere fiction concerning a situation similar to mine. And fiction is nothing next to science! Some people say they are moved by Frankenstein, and it has certain impressive literary elements, yes, but I cannot perceive anything more. The monster is a bit of an emotional wreck, a sissy as some say these days. Still, I am honored that it is essentially me within the book’s pages. And it really is, you know. She saw me.”

  “Mary Shelley?”

  “Yes, I didn’t know that for many years, but I am sure of it now. You see, I actually was near her in Switzerland in 1816 when I was hiding out in the forests near Lake Geneva. That was the year the skies were dark throughout the summer, something to do with a massive volcanic eruption in the Far East.” He stops for a moment and seems reflective. “I saw a young woman one day in June in the forest. She was a lady with copper-colored hair and pale skin and an intriguing expression of inquisitiveness and intelligence in her eyes. There was a man with her, blond with a beautiful face and a faraway look in his countenance, and another man with dark hair and intense eyes. There was a second young woman too, who kept staring at the dark-haired man with what I now understand to be love, or lust. I hid in the woods and watched them. Then the extraordinary one with the unique hair drifted off alone picking wildflowers, just the beautiful ones. I had a sudden desire to murder her. I had been killing human beings in those days. I’m not sure why, though it may have come from a hatred of humanity that consumed me for a while before I understood the great opportunities available to me. But when I saw this
woman’s face clearly I could not take her life. There was something about her. I stood up as she approached, a twig snapped and she looked directly at me. I was perhaps a hundred feet away, somewhat camouflaged amidst the greens and browns of the forest. The look on her face wasn’t fear. It was more like fascination. Then I dropped down to hide myself, and when I looked up through the leaves, I could tell that she couldn’t see me anymore. But I heard her speak. My senses are extraordinary. ‘What was that?’ she said to herself. Then she shook her head and laughed, but almost immediately and very quietly said something else, a remarkable thing: ‘That might be an idea!’”

  “Let us go!” cries Edgar.

  “I followed them from a distance. They went back to the place where they were staying: a wonderful house on the lake called the Villa Diodati. It was there, you know, where she began to develop the story for the great novel. It has been some guidance to me in understanding who I am. I even took my name from its dedication. It seemed so appropriate!” Godwin walks over to Lucy and looks down on her. “It took me nearly a century to learn the science of medicine. I had merely been on the run for many years, fleeing from people because I was grotesque: with my size, long black hair, scars and yellow teeth. I have replaced all my teeth, you know, covered them. Do you like them?” He offers his dazzling smile. “I settled into farming in a distant countryside in northern Germany, away from people, and I grew crops and raised chickens and fed myself. I only employed superior breeds. With my prodigious strength, I could do almost anything, and my extraordinary brain allowed me to learn how to read, and I purchased scientific books and devoured them. It became a mission of mine to do what had been done to me. Though the circumstances of my creation had been unfortunate, upon reflection it all seemed awfully clever. Science! The reason for living! I have been employed at many hospitals and have further developed my plastic surgery with each appointment. If I only had feelings, perhaps I wouldn’t be doing this tonight!” He turns back to Edgar and almost runs into him. “Can you tell me a jest, a joke? I would like to see if it can make me laugh!”