Frankenstein Unbound (14 page)

When I woke, I was not dead. I hauled myself into a sitting position and peered about with my one good eye. The fire was out, or all but, and my limbs felt as lifeless. But I knew I could manage to stagger to my feet and find fresh kindling. I felt a little better, and was aware of hunger pangs in my stomach.

Then it was I thought to look about on the ground near me, recalling that strange visit—had it happened?—in the night. A dead hare lay on the trampled ground, its neck twisted. Someone had brought me food. This was the thing that “did not survive the night.”

Someone or something had had compassion on me...

My thought processes were still numb, but I got feebly into action, moving more and more strongly as I sought out wood for a fresh fire. The sight of the flames leaping up did much to hearten me. Swinging my arms, I brought a little circulation back into my aching body. I pressed snow against my bruised face, and managed to melt more snow in my mouth to quench my thirst. Eventually, I was strong enough to concentrate on tearing the hare into pieces, impaling the joints on sticks, and thrusting them into the glowing heat of my fire.

How marvelously good they smelled as they seethed, bubbled and cooked! It was the smell as much as the taste which convinced me that I was still Joe Bodenland, and still destined to struggle on among the living.

The snow stopped falling, but it remained intolerably cold. I decided to strike out while I could and hope to find help and possibly shelter. It was instinct as much as rational decision—thought was still far beyond me. Indeed, the disintegration of my old personality had taken another long step forward. I was now just impersonally a man, striving against the elements.

Moving with no clear sense of direction, I arrived at last at a wooden hut, set in a clearing in the forest which covered that part of the mountain.

The pure white drifts of snow against the door of the hut convinced me that nobody had been that way recently. After clearing away the snow, I managed to enter the hut.

Inside were a few necessities, a large bearskin, a stove, some kindling wood, a chopper, even a very hard garlic sausage hanging from a beam. What luxury! In one corner hung a crucifix, with a Bible lying below it.

I stayed there for three days, until the snow began to melt, dripping in stealthy drops from my little roof. By that time my body was recovering, my damaged eye was seeing again.

Cleaning myself to the best of my ability, I left the hut and set out downhill, in what I hoped was the direction of Geneva. My attempts to look like a normal human being again were evidently not too successful—at one point in my journey, I came on a man crouching over a small brook from which he was trying to drink. Looking up, he saw me, and at once jumped up and ran crying in terror into the bushes!

Now that my thought processes were working again, I was eager to discover what dreadful catastrophe had overtaken this part of the world. I could only suppose that the collapse of space time in my own day was slowly spreading outwards from the source, like a bloodstain oozing across an old sheet, threatening many deep-seated continuities. The very idea raised an image of a gradual disruption of the whole fabric of history until, at some stage, the rupture would seriously interfere with the creative processes of Earth themselves. And then, perhaps far back in the dim Permian Age, sufficient harm might be done for the further development of life forms to cease.

No doubt that was too gloomy a picture. Possibly the timeslips in my own day were already dying out. Perhaps the damage here was only minor, a last tremor before the fabric of space time mended again.

Whatever had happened in space, I had reason to believe that the displacement in time must have been relatively slight. For what had visited me in my weakest hour and provided me with food if not that damned creation of Frankenstein’s? And, if it were so, then that drama of retribution was evidently not yet played out. Surely it was no later than the winter of 1817?

On that I should soon be able to check. Meanwhile, one thing at least appeared certain. If I had encountered Frankenstein’s creation, then the creator himself could not be far away. To him at least I could turn for assistance. He would be obliged to offer me some aid, knowing I had information to help him in his pursuit of the monster.

Accordingly, I would go to see him first. Taking care to avoid certain members of his household...

So
the rational mind lays its rational plans. And then I came to a promontory of rock from which I had a view of Geneva, and was shaken.

The city was there, surely enough, but the lake had gone, and so had the Jura beyond it!

Instead of the lake, my gaze rested upon a broken expanse of scrub. Here and there were dotted beggarly trees or thorns and, right in the far distance, something white gleamed—sand or ice; but, for the rest, there was no predominant feature on which an eye could fix. No roads, no villages, not so much as a solitary building, not even an animal. I saw a riverbed, biting deep into the land, but nothing to suggest that a lake had ever been there or that man had ever trod there.

I stood staring for a long while. There must have been another timeslip. But where and
when
had this unattractive slab of terrain arrived from? So dismal was it that I thought first of Byron’s prophetic poem of the death of light, and then of the lands that lie north of the line of the Arctic Circle. The displacement looked to be of considerable extent, much larger than the chunk of 2020 which had brought me to 1816, or the chunk of some mysterious medieval land which had arrived earlier on my front doorstep. I could see no limit to the desolation ahead.

For a while, I turned over in my mind the notion that these timeslips affected me alone. I was weary, and my brain was not working effectively. Then I realized that almost everyone in what I had once regarded as my own day was probably in a similar predicament, that the shattering effects of the war had probably distributed most of 2020 back and forward throughout history!

This implied that this tract of wild land might have come from my own time, the epicenter of the disturbance, and so might be instrumental in restoring me to my own day!

So I resumed my descent towards a much-changed Geneva.

The gates of Plainpalais, by now familiar, were wide. Beyond them, everything was chaos. It was midmorning, and the streets were thronged with people and animals.

The flood had caused tremendous havoc, breaking down many buildings. Though it had gone now, its mark was everywhere, not least in a great dirty universal tide-line it had painted, seven feet above ground level. That mark decorated humble dwellings and proud buildings, churches and statues.

Now the streets were dry again. So the flooding had not been from the lake—which hitherto I had assumed to be the case; maybe it had come from the river whose bed, now dried, I had seen from my eminence on the hillside.

This hypothesis was roughly confirmed by what I saw when I came to the quayside, or what had been the quayside when the lake existed. The level of the new arid ground was several feet above that of the land on which Geneva stood. The river, suddenly materializing, would have poured straight down into the streets, flooding everything, including the prison.

Something had already been done to mend its path of devastation. I saw no bodies, although I did not doubt that many people had drowned. But the damaged houses were pathetic to see, and wreckage was still being pulled from alleyways and lanes.

A few coins remained in my pocket. I spent almost all of them on a visit to a barber and on a meal, after which I felt my humanity returning. About my ruined clothes I felt less concern, for I noticed that the flood had made many people shabby.

There was the Frankenstein house! It was too solidly built to have suffered serious damage. All the same, it bore the dirty tidemark along its façade, and the garden had been very much beaten down. All vegetation was dying, after July had felt the breath of January.

Remembering what had happened to me the last time I entered this unhappy house, remembering too that I was an escaped jailbird, whom most of the Frankenstein manage would not hesitate to give back into custody, I decided that the wisest course was to keep the place under observation and wait until I could be sure to speak to Victor. So I settled myself in a small tavern just down the street. From one of its windows I could see the Frankenstein gate.

The hours passed and there was no sign of my quarry. A servant came out of the side gate and returned later, but that was all. As I waited, doubts crowded into my mind. Perhaps I should have formed a better plan; perhaps I should have made instead for the Villa Diodati, to see if I could secure any friends and allies there. At least it would have given me the prospect of seeing Mary Shelley again. Her presence had never left me—throughout my worst hours, her pleasant entrances solaced my misery. Just to see her again!

I was only a refugee at present. With Victor’s assistance, it might be possible to retrieve my car; I thought also that I could sell him scientific information, and so escape from my destitute condition. Then would be the time to go seeking dear Mary again. So I stuck obstinately to my original plan.

With dusk, I was forced to leave the tavern, and paced up and down the muddy street for warmth. The villa opposite the Frankenstein mansion was deserted. Maybe the family had fled after the flood, or maybe they had all been drowned. I climbed into the garden and crouched in the porch, from whence I had a good view of the street.

A dim light came on behind a blind in the Frankenstein mansion. That would be Elizabeth’s room.

I sat looking at that light for almost two hours, by which time I was desperate. I decided to break into the house in whose porch I was sheltering, and search for food and clothes.

Some of the panes in the lower windows had been shattered by the flood. Putting my hand in one window, I turned the catch and forced it open. I climbed onto the sill, paused, jumped in.

I was immediately seized. Some foul glutinous thing got me by the legs and ankles. I staggered and slipped in it, falling against a sofa to which I clung. Gasping, I pulled out my lighter and held it above me to look round the room.

The room was silted up with mud, several inches deep in most places and very deep in one corner. All the furniture had been thrown together, tables and sofas and chairs all in one filthy jumble. Nothing remained as it had been, except for some pictures aslant on the wall. When I got up to walk, glass crunched under my feet.

In the hall lay a body. It was half-hidden by mud, so that I trod on its legs before I realized what it was. I peered down and for a moment believed that I had come on Percy Bysshe Shelley. How to account for this impression, I do not know, except that the body belonged to a young man of about Shelley’s age. Perhaps he had been so fascinated by the sight of the advancing waters that he had delayed his escape too long.

I climbed the stairs. Nothing had been disturbed here, although the air of desertion and my timid light lent the place a sinister aspect. I tried to banish the idea of a drowned Shelley by conjuring up the memory of Mary stepping into Lake Geneva and looking back at me over her shoulder; instead came a more ferocious image—that of a gigantic man leaping towards me: not the best picture to help one through these present circumstances.

Standing on the upper landing, I could hear a faint continuous noise. It was the sound of mud and moisture, the kind of sound which conjures up bare seashores with the tide far out and clear skies overhead. Mastering my fears, I began to open doors.

The young man’s room was easy to identify. I went in. The blind was down at the window. An oil lamp stood by the unmade bed. I lit it, turning the wick low.

He had plenty of clothes he would never need again. I cleaned my legs off on his bed covering and selected a pair of rather fancy trousers from his wardrobe. The only shoes that would fit me were a pair of ski boots. They were dry and strong; I was pleased with them. I also found what I took to be a sporting pistol, with a beautifully engraved silver stock. I pocketed it, although I had no idea of how it worked. More usefully, I found coin and notes on the dressing table, and pocketed them.

Now I felt ready for anything. I sat back on the bed, trying to decide if I should not confront the Frankenstein household openly. After the catastrophe, they would hardly find it as easy to summon police as they had done before. Thus reasoning, I fell asleep. Such is the soothing effect of property.

The glistering sound of mud was still in the house when I woke, sitting up angrily, for I had not intended to sleep. The lamp still burned. I turned it as low as possible and looked round the blind at Frankenstein’s house. No light showed there. I had no idea of how long I had slept.

It was time to leave. One job of housebreaking must be followed by another. I would enter the house opposite, and determine whether Victor was still about or not.

Leaving by a window on the stairs, I was able to avoid the mud that carpeted the ground floor.

At the front gate, I paused. The sound of a horse in harness, of its hoof idly striking a stone! Peering between the uprights of the gate, I saw that the horse stood before Frankenstein’s gate harnessed to a phaeton—or so I believe that type of carriage was called; it was open and had four wheels. It may have been the horse that roused me from my sleep.

I got into the street and stood in the shade, waiting to see what happened. In a moment, two figures appeared dimly by the side of the house. A muttered word or two. One disappeared back into the darkness. The other stepped boldly forward, came through the side gate, and climbed into the phaeton. Dark though it was, I had no doubt that it was Victor Frankenstein; the darkness surrounding his present movements was so characteristic of him.

Directly he was in, he jerked impatiently at the reins, called to the horse, and they were off! I ran across the road and jumped up, clinging to the side of the phaeton. He reached over for a whip in its cup.