The monster seized, straightening to its full colossal height, and then stumbled backward before falling against the wall and sliding down to sitting, its long legs splayed at an impossible angle. The feet, each as large as my thigh, were bare, revealing stunted, club-like appendages that ended in massive wolfish pads.
Victor leapt carefully off the table, retrieved his pistol, and pointed it at Mary. It shook with rage in his hand, but I did not doubt he would strike true. I turned, panic choking me, to find she had fainted from loss of blood, or from the shock of seeing the monster. Satisfied, Victor tucked the pistol back into his belt.
“You can put yours away, too, Elizabeth,” he snapped. “Either it does not work or you are incapable of shooting me.”
I dropped it to the floor, all feeling gone from my extremities. I could not tear my eyes away from the monster. Now that he was still, my gaze traced his form, unable to linger on any one terrible feature. Everywhere the mind rebelled against the shape of him, rejecting something so close and yet so far from humanity.
Finally, I settled on his eyes.
Though he appeared incapable of movement, his eyes were alive with emotion. Yellow sclera surrounded irises that were shockingly, perfectly blue. And as I looked at them, I realized I had seen them before.
“Henry?” I gasped.
Victor kicked one of the monster’s feet out of the way, stepping over the other. “Well. Some of him, anyway. I told you he was alive.”
A sob escaped my lips, and I dropped to my knees as this, the last part of my heart, was cut from me. I had saved no one I loved.
I had damned them all.
“It is funny,” Victor said, wrapping his hands in a towel and tugging the ruined remains of his father off the table with some strain. The skin had burned, sticking to the metal. “Even in that form, stronger and faster than any human, more capable of resisting the elements, still he is too kindhearted to kill me. But then again, it is not Henry’s heart. I cannot recall whose heart it is….Maybe it is her uncle’s? Whosever heart it is, it is not up to the task of killing me. Miserable wretch! He fills me with the deepest disgust. To think that I, who reached so high, could create such an abomination even the devil’s angels would turn away in fright.” He finished yanking his father free and forcefully tossed the remains against the far wall. The floor was littered with glass from the window. It caught the lights of the chandeliers and lamps, gleaming in the puddles of rain still gathering. Judge Frankenstein’s tortured and twisted earthly shell lay amidst the glass and the water.
“Do you love nothing?” I asked, able for now only to look at Victor. But even in the presence of the monster, Victor was far more monstrous.
“Only you.” He stated it as fact. But his expression was angry, his tone sharp. “Another body, wasted! And more mess to clean up.”
“I tried to protect you,” the monster groaned. I looked at it, shocked. Why would it would ever try to protect Victor? But its eyes were fixed on me.
Henry.
The monster.
“I saw you. In the city of my birth. Where all else was shadows and fear, I knew your face. I had awoken in darkness and terror, rejected by my creator. I ran, hiding, not knowing why I elicited such terror but unwilling to expose myself to more hatred. I was as a newborn infant, and instead of love and comfort found only bitterest rejection. I had no sense of myself, though. How I had come to be. What I had been…before. I knew only what I had seen since my eyes opened in his laboratory.
“And then I saw you, and I remembered. Not everything. But I knew your face when my own was alien to me. I followed you. I wanted to warn you, but the idea of you seeing me and crying out in fear bound me like a coward. I hid as a creature of the night, observing. I revealed myself to Victor to threaten him. To let him know I was watching, would always be watching. I would not allow him his evil pursuits, and I would not allow him to hurt you.”
It was not Henry’s voice, or his face, but they were almost his words. I was ashamed at my revulsion. I would have given anything not to be repulsed by him. But he was an outward reflection of all the evil Victor had practiced on the world.
“And I tried my best to kill you,” Victor said, checking some dials and refilling his vicious needle. “If I had not made you so damned strong, it would have been much easier. But I learned a great deal. I have had to comfort myself with that.”
I did not know what to say—feared I would never again know what to say. Tears threatened to overwhelm me, and I envied Mary her insensibility. I longed to leave this room, this consciousness, to leave behind forever my awareness of these horrors, my full knowledge of all I had lost and would yet lose.
Victor had won.
He looked up at the sky, where a rumble of thunder too close for comfort signaled that his work for the night was not yet finished.
“One more jolt should do it,” he said. “To snuff out that spark of life I should never have deigned to light in you.” He frowned, staring down at his first creation. “It will be very difficult to leverage you up onto the table.”
I looked at Mary, helpless. She was a perfect victim. Doubtless she was next for the table. I looked at the door. I could run. I could escape.
Victor sighed. “You really should be helping. I have always had to do most of the work. Run if you must. You do not want to see this part. You never did. But be assured of this: I will find you wherever you go. And when I do, I will be ready. You are mine. Nothing you can say or do will stop me from achieving my goal. Surely you, knowing me best in all the world, know that this is the truth.”
Shuddering, I turned back to Victor. My savior. My husband. I did know that. And I knew that, out there, the world held no help or pity for me. I nodded.
Some of his anger dissolved. “I know the process seems horrible. But you will not see or feel those parts. It will be as waking from a deep sleep. And when you awake, you will be as this abomination is—stronger, faster, invulnerable to the elements. Free from pain and fear. But you will not be a corruption like him. You will be like a seraph from on high. You will be perfected. All your life you have lived in fear and worry. I will keep you safe from ever fearing anything again.” He paused, and I watched as he deliberately softened his expression, put on the smile I had taught him to use. “I will let you look away. I will let you leave now and not observe any of my final trials. I take this burden on myself alone, to gift you with the result after I have waded through hell to deliver you heaven. Can you accept that?”
Defeated, exhausted beyond imagining, faced with the loss of my final friend and the impending destruction of my newest one, I raised my eyes to meet his. I would be strong. So much stronger.
“Will you let Mary go?” I asked.
He frowned. “She will be useful.”
“Please. No one I know. Not again.”
He sighed. “She knows about us, though. We will have to relocate. It will complicate things.”
“We could go back to Lake Como. I could paint while you…work. I would look away. Wait for you to finish. We have time.”
Victor’s shoulders relaxed. The true smile that only I could ever coax from him lit his face like sunshine breaking free from the clouds. “I sold the villa and emptied most of your accounts.” He gestured to a large leather trunk in the corner. “We can buy a new laboratory. Somewhere secluded. Somewhere I will not be interrupted again. Together.” He opened his arms.
“I only ever wanted to be with you,” I whispered. I stepped toward him, but I slipped, falling to the floor amidst the glass and the water. Victor rushed to me. He crouched down, reaching to help me up.
My fingers curled around a shard of glass. I jammed it into his side.
“Damnable bitch!” he shouted, staggering back out of my reach. The glass was still embedded in his side, sticking out of his torso.
I stood, another piece of g
lass cutting into my hand where I grasped it with all the strength I had left. I bared my teeth at him, a falser smile than the ones I had taught him to show. “I would have aimed for your heart, but there is only an empty space there.”
He staggered toward the table to retrieve his pistol. I rushed to beat him there, but we both stopped short. The monster loomed over us.
“I am ready to kill you now, I think,” the monster said.
Victor spun, grabbing me around the waist and grasping my hand so that the glass cut into it. He pushed my hand against my throat, holding the razor shard to the vein that supplied lifeblood to my whole body.
“If you move toward me, I will kill her!” I could feel Victor trembling, could sense that soon he would lose control. “I only need her body.”
The monster threw back its head and let loose that same cry that I had heard before. The one my own soul answered. The cry of the lost, of the damned, of the soul that found no refuge on this earth.
I wanted to make the same sound.
But I had already decided I would be stronger. I did not need Victor’s venomous resurrection for that.
“You cannot run with me,” I said. “I will slow you at every turn. And if you kill me now, what is to stop the monster from killing you? He will have no reason not to. If you kill me and still manage to escape, my body will be too large a burden. By the time you have access to another laboratory, I will be so far decayed I will not be of use. You lose me, Victor. Any choice means you lose me.”
His hand twitched, the glass cutting into my skin. A warm rivulet of blood stained my collar, bleeding down to dye my perfect white dress.
“You are mine,” he hissed in my ear. “I will never stop. I will follow you to the ends of the earth. And then you will know my power, and you will worship me as your creator, and we will be happy together.”
He shoved me forward. I stumbled into the table, where the remaining charge shook through my body, and, at last, blessed darkness claimed me.
“SHE IS WAKING UP,” a woman’s voice said.
I clawed my way back from the darkness, letting the agony of my body lure me toward consciousness. When I opened my eyes, Mary was sitting next to me, grinning.
“Did you get enough beauty sleep?”
I sat up, my head spinning. “Your arm!” I lifted my hand to her shoulder. It had been bandaged again; only a little blood had seeped through.
“I will survive. And so will Victor, unfortunately. You could not have stabbed him in the neck? Or in the eye? Or in the chest? Or in—”
I put my hand over her mouth. “Mary. I have not trained with glass shards. You will have to excuse my amateur aim.”
She pushed my hand away and waited for me to stand. Once I steadied myself, I helped her get up.
And then I had to look at the monster.
Henry.
As though sensing my thoughts, he spoke from where he lurked in the darkest corner of the room, shoulders stooped and face turned away from us. “I caught you as you fell and absorbed some of the shock so it did not kill you. Victor got away. I could not get him in time and lost him in the storm. He took a boat, and I do not swim or trust your boat to hold me. I am sorry.”
“It is not your fault. It is mine.”
Mary clucked her tongue. “Now then. I hardly think you can take credit for Victor. You did not make him do all that he did.”
“But I did not stop him.”
“When would you have?” Mary walked over to the leather trunk, opening it. “Oh, this is nice. He will be quite unhappy to leave all this behind.” She shut it again, then continued her exploration of the room. “Would you have stopped him when you were a child, depending on his family for survival? When you were locked in an asylum without any recourse for release?”
“I am not blameless.”
“Not being blameless is not the same as being guilty.” Mary smiled gently at me.
The monster shifted, trying to fold himself even smaller in the darkened corner. “Henry…,” I started, not letting myself look away from him.
“My name is not Henry. Not really. He is part of me, but I am not him.”
“What is your name, then?” Mary asked.
“It was Henry. And I think it was Felix, as well.”
“My uncle’s name was Carlos.”
“Then that is also my name.”
“It is quite a long name,” she said. “I think, because you are something new, you should name yourself.”
There was a pause, and then the monster nodded. “Adam,” he said. His voice rumbled as low as the thunder now receding from our mountain valley.
“I like it. Literary, with a touch of irony. It is a pleasure to meet you, Adam.” She busied herself with more snooping around the dining-room-turned-laboratory. I suspected she did it in part so she would not have to look at him. She had not believed me that he existed. Even in the room with him, I struggled to make sense of his form, disbelieving that it was real.
“I would be wary of the chemicals,” I said to Mary as she lifted the still-full syringe. “You do not know what they do.”
She scowled, as though her ignorance was more offensive than the chemicals themselves. She found a large leather folio full of loose papers. Her eyes widened as she opened it. “Victor forgot his research.”
The monster—the man—Henry—not Henry—Adam reached into his own rough cloak. It looked as though he had fashioned it out of a boat’s sail. From some pocket he withdrew a similar book. “I have his old one.”
“Where did you get that?” I recognized it from the horrible trunk in Victor’s first laboratory. And then I remembered. “You were there that night. I almost burned you to death.” I hung my head in shame. “I am sorry.”
“You did not know.”
“No, I am sorry for so much more than that. I was not fair to you—to Henry—in life. His first life. But whatever part of you is Henry, I used you. Not as cruelly as Victor used you, but I let you remain in love with me because it made me feel safer. Not because I had romantic feelings to return. I do not know that I have ever had those feelings, or that I could. They seem a luxury of safety and security.”
I paused, taking a deep breath and forcing myself to look at the monster. I would accustom my mind to him until my eyes no longer recoiled. I found Henry’s eyes in the midst of that ruined face, and I focused on them alone. “I put you in the path of that demon. And I provoked him deliberately to get him to come home, or to allow you to marry me and secure my future that way. I did not care which way it happened, which meant I did not truly care about your feelings. I used you. And for that I am sorry. I will always be sorry.”
“I understand now being trapped,” he said, his words slow and measured, each delivered with precise care around a swollen and clumsy tongue. “I am trapped by this body. There is no place for me in the world, no refuge I can find. I cannot even depend on the kindness of others, because it will never be freely offered to me.”
Mary worked her way across the glass-strewn floor to us. She took the first journal from Adam and stacked it with the second under her good arm. “Well. We have his research. We have his funds. We have his laboratory. It will be a while before he can set up again.”
“I say we do not give him the opportunity.” I looked around the home that had never been mine. The home I had always been desperate to be safe in. The home that, as a Frankenstein, I finally had claim to.
I knocked over the first vial I saw. Another, and another. I picked up a chair and swung it through the cabinet, destroying both Victor’s chemicals and the Frankenstein family china. I did not realize I was screaming until at last my destructive energy had spent itself. The room reeked of his materials; refuse added to the disaster on the floor.
I walked to the door bearing the Frankenstein family crest. “Do you thi
nk you can tear this down, Adam? I need to start a fire.”
He grunted in wordless assent. He easily tore the door off its hinges with his enormous hands, then threw it into the middle of the room. The second door followed. Adam went through the rest of the house, smashing furniture. Mary slowly dragged the trunk of money out with her one good arm while I retrieved the supplies I had hidden to use to kill Adam when I did not understand who the monster really was.
We threw it all together and formed a pyre in the middle of the dining hall. It was time to burn my history here, once and for all. We would rise from the ashes, reborn. Adam. Mary. And myself.
I took a match from the stove in the kitchen, then paused. “We should check the servants’ quarters. I would hate to murder someone by accident.”
“We only plan to do that on purpose,” Mary added helpfully. “But if anyone were here, I think they would have responded to all the noise.”
“The servants left when Victor returned,” Adam said. “I have been watching.”
“Good.”
“Should we place the body on top?”
I looked at the ruined form of Judge Frankenstein. He had claimed me and held me captive, seeking to possess me for my money. He was not as bad as his son. But he was certainly part of the reason Victor was who he was.
“This is not for him. This is for me.” I threw the match onto the pyre. We stayed until the fire drove us from the house. Then we stood, side by side, and watched as Frankenstein Manor was consumed.
“What do we do now?” Mary asked.
“Victor said he would chase me to the ends of the earth. I think I should make it a challenge for him.”
Mary laughed. “I would love to make him suffer.”
“You cannot mean to come with me! My road will be long and lonely and dangerous.”
She stared ahead at the flames. “My uncle is dead. I loved the bookshop because I loved him. If I returned to it, I would spend the next years fighting to keep it and eventually losing it because I am a single woman and such is the nature of the law. Besides, Victor knows I know the truth about him. I cannot imagine he will forgive or forget my role.”
The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein Page 25