Frankenstein's Monster (2 page)

The creature flung itself at me. For the first time I knew its full enormity, as if a mountain had fallen on my back, breaking every bone, crushing the meat of every muscle to pulp. I stretched out my arm but was able only to brush the tip of the knife; it spun like a compass needle gone wild, skittering closer to the water with every revolution
.

The creature seized the knife and with its own huge hand stabbed downward at mine. The blade pierced both skin and bone and severed my middle finger. I screamed, Margaret. Even before my shock dissolved, I screamed at the sight, so much like a woman I am ashamed to remember it
.

Blood sprayed across the ice. I dragged myself to my knees. Numbly I thought, how strange that my finger is so far away. And not only the finger, Margaret: the blade had wedged between the knuckle of the fist and the gold band you had given
me years ago. Now both lay apart from me, the one still encircling the other
.

With a flick of the knife, the creature knocked my finger into the water. The pale, slim shape sank quickly—a flash of white, a glint of gold, then black. A howl tore from my chest
.

Without speaking, the creature stood up and walked away, as heedless of the climate as it was of me. It could go where no man could, to the very pole if it wished
.

Ignoring the fire that engulfed my arm, I pulled on my glove and tried to staunch the bleeding by pressing the cloth of the empty finger down into the wound. Cradling one hand with the other, I began to walk back to the ship. Both gloves were soon soaked with blood. I grew dizzy, reeled in circles, and collapsed. My men found me and cauterized the wound right there. One man brought out the tinder box he is never without, another tore his own gloves to threads in order to feed the feeble blaze, a third held a blade to the flames till it glowed
.

I had not thought the pain could be worse till they pressed the red brand against my flesh
.

On ship the surgeon had to reopen the wound to remove the splintered bone down to the joint, then recauterize it
.

Last night I tossed between a sleepless horror of all that had happened and feverish dreams in which over and over a glint of gold was swallowed by darkness. This morning I shook pitifully with just the slight effort of pulling myself up through the hatch, my hand useless, throbbing with indescribable agony. On deck I was startled to see that the landscape had shifted dramatically. At first fury deadened my pain: while I had slept, the crew had mutinied and turned the ship from its northern course. Then I
realized we had been hemmed in by peaks of ice. Inch by inch they crept closer. All day I waited on their slow dance of death. In the early afternoon, a fog lowered, plunging the world into madness, for within the misty white hid the more dreadful stony white that would kill us
.

Then, Margaret, not two hours ago, the whole ship shuddered and jerked! Wood screamed as an iceberg ground against us. Men flew to the side to try to push away the ship; their desperation gained us an inch relief. Before coming to my cabin to write this, I inspected the damage and watched the line of men with buckets. It is not a bad leak, but more than can be bailed in the time needed to repair it. If we stay, we shall drown by teacups. I share the ship’s humiliation: little by little it bows, forced into submission by Nature. The prow will be the first to dip, the lovely figurehead, which reminded me of you, the first to taste the waves
.

I had thought to bury Frankenstein at sea, shrouded in canvas. He shall still be buried at sea, but now in the coffin of my ship. Water is his grave; ice, my keep. Eternal Justice has prepared this place for the rebellious; here my prison is ordained in utter whiteness, and my portion set, as far removed from God and the light of Heaven as from the center thrice to the utmost pole
.

There is one chance left. The crew has begged me to give up my goal—only for now!—and try to make our way south on the ice till we reach either land and a settlement, or open water and a venturesome ship. I have ordered the line of bailers reduced by half to free up men to unload such supplies as can be carried. I will add this log to the pile. A pallet is being hastily built for me, but I must find the strength to walk. I would not burden my
men. Only a quarter may survive the trip, Margaret, and those by God’s grace alone.

God’s grace
 …

I no longer know what that means
.

I still see, burned into my eyes as if I had stared too long into the sun, the dull glint of gold ever beyond my reach
.

I killed my father again last night.

It was the same dream as always, my father and myself pursuing and pursued till I no longer knew who he was, who I was; indeed, if there were any difference between us.

In the dream my father chases me over a stretch of the Arctic, as he did in the weeks before his death. Once more I flee from his wrath and at the same time lure him on. I drive the sled dogs wildly. As the dogs pant, their spittle freezes and is swept backward by the wind to hail needles against my face. Fog rises from the ice and clings thickly to the dogs: I am pulled along by white devils from Hell.

Devil
. Was that not his very first word upon seeing me rise up? What had he wanted from his labors that I proved so poor a substitute?

In the dream, as in life, he chases me endlessly. As it cracks wide, the ice beneath us roars like a wounded behemoth. Huge white blocks are shoved upward in nightmare architecture. At last I abandon the sled and cross the broken ice on foot. Greater and greater are the blocks I must climb, the gaps I must leap. Black water laps at the edges of ice. My father is nearby. I hear him mutter “fiend” and “abomination.” His face appears, framed by white mist; it mirrors my own horror and hatred. I reach out. My fingers curl around his throat, as his reach out to mine. He laughs. I wonder if my face shows the same delight. That is all I remember before waking. I know that I have killed him. I do not know if he has killed me.

It has taken me these ten years to be able to recognize that Victor Frankenstein was my father. If he had lived, might he have learned to call me his son?

Walton is coming. I feel it in my scarred flesh like an old rheumatic who aches at the coming rain. He is close by, but not here in Rome, not yet. How much time do I have?

I have been here in Rome so long now I almost dare think of it as home. The dream is a warning that I must never grow comfortable. Rome must be like any other city, simply one more place where Walton will track me down.

A city as magnificent as Rome reminds me more brutally than usual that I am only a distant witness to life, and I wonder if I should have done as I had said long ago and rid the world of my unnatural presence. Was it cowardice that stopped me? Can I be so human as to claim that defect? No matter. I did not do it. Although I be a created thing, an artificial man, I cling to my existence.

My premonition spoke true: Walton has found me again. I flee Rome tonight.

I am safe for the moment, having taken shelter in one of the catacombs just outside the city. Tonight I shall slip away and travel north. From there I will decide my next destination. For now, I sit watch among my dead brothers. The candlelight flickers over their noble skulls and is swallowed by the blackness of their eyes. If the ratlike scratching of my pen
disturbs them, they voice not their complaint. Once I was like them, peaceful and still, the life that animated my bones long forgotten and blown to dust. Then my father, seeking a frame upon which to hang his evil art, claimed me as his own.

How many lives had I lived before being brought together as I am? As many lives as parts? Was I man, woman, animal? My two hands, my two feet, are so mismatched they clearly come from four separate people. My brain, my heart, each had separate hopes and ambitions. What had I seen? What did I know? Do I know it still even now?

How uncannily Boethius wrote:

My father robbed me of more than he knew, orphaning each part of me of its past.

Enough! With Walton on my scent, I must make new plans.

I had foolishly thought myself safe in Rome and had settled among the dark alleys of that city within a city, the Vatican. My face was always covered with the hood of my cloak. To hide my true height, I remained at all times crouched, knees bent as I sat on my haunches, and even walked thus, my body twisted and stooped like a hunchback’s; the girth created by my shoulders and knees and elbows made it appear as if a head had been stuck on top of a boulder. My dead limbs could hold the position for hours. Only in Saint Peter’s did I rise up to stand. My dimensions were more suited to the grandeur of the basilica than the dwarfish men who had constructed it. I spent my nights there; by day I sat on the steps out front and begged alms, a dented cup before me with a few coins in it.

For what? The coarseness of my body allows me to thrive
on the meanest food: in the countryside, roots, nuts, berries, an occasional animal; in the city, the refuse of others. A slice of fresh warm bread rubbed with garlic and drizzled with olive oil, the taste of which the poorest Roman knows intimately, is to me ambrosia.

No, it was sustenance of another sort I found upon those steps: I glutted myself on the sight of Rome’s women as they hurried to market or strolled to an assignation. How easily I was swept up by their beauty.

Just last week, while I was begging in St. Peter’s Square, a woman ran by. Although she was clearly distressed, her face and form were so exquisite I had to gaze on her awhile longer. Her complexion was pale and her hair, fair; I imagined her not a native but a visitor from a Nordic clime, come here, perhaps, for the sake of true love. I wondered how a virtuous and refined lady came to be wandering the streets of Rome alone. What possible complaint was so ignoble as to sully those graceful features? I fancied that only I could alleviate her suffering, if she would but let me.

At a discreet distance I followed the blonde woman to a street where potted plants adorned windowsills and gave each house a cheerful air. At one such place she stopped and rapped sharply on the door. A servant answered. Immediately my beautiful lady accused the girl of stealing a plum when she had accompanied her mistress to the blonde woman’s house yesterday. Bright spots of anger mottled her queenly face, her eyes grew ugly, and, as with a rabid dog, foam gathered in the
corners of her lips. She struck the servant forcefully; the girl would have fallen if she had not held on to the door frame.

“No!” I cried, rushing forward.

I felt as if I had been in a museum, staring rapturously at a portrait of ineffable beauty, only to have a stranger slash it with a razor. I drew a coin from my cup.

“Replace the plum with this,” I said. “It was only a little thing, and the girl may have been hungry. Only do not frown so.”

The woman turned to me. Her expression changed from fury at the girl, to haughtiness at a beggar’s impudence, to astonishment and fear. Her eyes fixed on my hand. I looked down, thinking the coin had been transformed into a spider. I saw what she saw: I had reached out so far from under my cloak that I had bared my wrist and thus exposed the ugly network of scars where my huge hand had been attached to my arm. Would that my father had been a neater surgeon!

At that moment the mistress of the house came from within to inquire about the disturbance. Terrified, the blonde woman ran into her friend’s house and bolted the door behind her. But before I could slip into the alley, even before she told her friend about me, she had regained her shrill tongue and continued to berate the servant for the eaten fruit.

I do not know when to act and when to be still.

I cannot help but equate beauty with greatness of soul. My own self validates this: I am a monster, in both appearance and truth. So when I see a beautiful woman, I think I must be seeing an angel.

The men of Rome, too, gave me sustenance. I was fascinated with the priests and brothers, the professors and their young students. Scholars visited from around the world, and, as in every city I have ever passed through, I often heard as many as five different languages in one day. Through the years I learned them without thought, much as a greedy child
devours cake: one minute the cake is on the outside; the next, it is on the inside; and the child not once had to think of how to chew or how to swallow.

But in Rome, it was so much more than mere words: it was what was said. Close to the Vatican, the men filled the air with dizzying talk of history, literature, mathematics, natural philosophy, art, and, of course, their curious theology. It is one thing to read a stolen volume of Augustine—so easily acquired in this city, as are writing implements; it is quite another thing to be so close to conversations about original sin as to be fanned by the gesticulations of argument. How I longed to join in, to pose one of the many questions that have plagued my solitary reading.

Yesterday they argued about body and soul:

“What are you saying, Antonio?” an elderly priest asked, his breath hard and earnest with the topic. “That the soul is just the motor of the machine?”

“He’s right, Antonio,” agreed another priest. “That’s Descartes, not theology. The soul is an act. It does more than inhabit the body; it creates the body.”

“The body is penance,” said the beleaguered Antonio, a young man with a wispy beard, clutching a pile of books to his thin chest.