Frankenstein's Monster (25 page)

Her eyes danced, but in sockets ringed with purple shadow. Daily she grows thinner, but she yields to her illness not an inch of her ferocity. Later in the day, she stuck two fingers into her mouth and yanked out a back tooth.

“It has been loose awhile now. The worm has found a way to eat even when I do not. Clever worm,” she said. “Soon it will suck the marrow from my bones.”

She tossed away the tooth, a pearl with a bloody stump.

During the night, the false excitement in her eyes was replaced by something softer, and in the morning:

“Life has not treated you fairly,” she said, over a breakfast
she did not eat. “And neither have I.” There was no sarcasm in her voice, just a sad, dreamy concern. She smiled. “I am all extremes, without moderation. Perhaps that is what holds us together.”

And more of Walton’s journal:

    
This morning I found blood on my pillow and thought, “Somewhere he bleeds.” Panic made my heart thrum like a netted bird’s: I was again being cheated! I had been robbed of everything—robbed now, too, of the last triumph left to me
.

I realized with relief that such a small spill of blood, like a finger tracing a mysterious word, could not signify his, our, death; no, if such a thief comes in the night, I will wake in a scarlet sea, I will gag on great mouthfuls of clots, and that is how I will know he is dead
.

He lives still, and for the moment, so do I. In my doubled soul, I envy the sliver of glass, the sharpened blade—whatever licked him with its cruel cutting edge
.

The groan of wagon wheels, a clank of metal, a hushed voice.

I touched Lily’s lips to be quiet. The night was damp and fell, with blinding fog and a frost so heavy I breathed ice. We were standing on the steps of a church, where I meant to stop for shelter. The building had coalesced from the mist, sudden, tall, menacing—its spire swallowed whole by grayness. Next to it was a graveyard. The stones in what must have been its older section canted at dizzying angles. The newer tombstones beyond disappeared in the fog, ghostly soldiers marching off to a ghostly war.

A whinny, another clank.

“Someone’s coming,” I whispered. “Be still.”

Now I heard the horse’s hooves as well. Their slowness, combined with the late hour, suggested someone who desired stealth as much as we.

At last: a smudge of bobbing light and then a man’s face, lit by a sickly yellowish cast. He walked in front of a wagon, a lantern held before him to mark the road. His expression was one of unsteady nerve, and he whispered to himself as he walked. The wagon followed the edge of the graveyard. After a few minutes, there sounded a metallic bang like a bell tolled and then damped. My mind had scarcely understood, when I doubled over with mirthless laughter.

“What is it?” Lily asked, who had trailed behind me.

“Everywhere I go, life seeks to teach me a lesson,” I said. “I asked the question, ‘What am I?’ and now life will answer. Or rather, death.”

I led her through the thickening fog. For the first time I felt resistance from her.

“What is that noise?” she whispered, holding back.

“You don’t recognize it? Of course not,” I said, chuckling. “Your life has been much too sheltered to have been exposed to the commonplace. It is the sound of my birth pangs.”

I pulled her into the graveyard, using the distant lantern as a beacon. As we approached, the fog muffled the light in hazy confusion, blinding us to, rather than illuminating, the surroundings.

The noise grew louder: a metallic scrape, a soft shush, scrape, shush, in a tireless rhythm. Realization widened her eyes. For a moment she refused to walk. I tightened my hold and urged her forward. Then she stuck out her chin and ran ahead, as if to say, “This, too, is just something else to see.” She caught her foot on a headstone and tripped.

“Who’s there?” asked a quavering voice.

“Friends,” I called out.

Hearing a sudden scramble, I rushed toward the light.

The lantern stood among the graves next to a shallow hole, out of which a man was clumsily trying to crawl; next to him lay an abandoned pick and shovel. At my hurried approach, the horse became skittish and trotted off. I hauled the man out of the hole by his collar. As he turned his fearful face toward mine, I was assailed by the reek of liquor. I patted his coat till I found a hard bulge and drew out a flask.

“The night’s work requires courage, does it not?” I let him go and handed over the flask. His hands trembled as he tipped it to his lips.

“I do nae know what you mean,” he said, his burr hoarse.

“Tell me, sir,” I said. “I’m a foreigner here. What’s the prevailing rate for bodies?”

“A grave robber!” Lily said.

The man peered at her in surprise.

“She’s a woman!”

“Is she?” I asked with bitterness. “I think she’s a sexless wretch. Still, it’s no matter that she is not a woman, since I, after all, am not a man.”

The false merriment in my words stung; I stifled what might have been a laugh—just as easily a moan—stepped into the hole, and picked up the shovel with feigned relish.

“Let me finish for you. I did say I was a friend, and I have some experience in this work, although I do confess it was from a different angle.” I undid my cloak and tossed it over a headstone. “Look at me, sir, and guess where your night’s work might lead.”

The man’s lips pulled back. “I do nae understand,” he said in a low voice.

“Nor should you. If you did, you would run away, babbling senselessly.”

I began to dig at a furious pace.

“Victor,” Lily pleaded, hugging herself. “I do not wish to stay here.”

“But think of the story you can tell at your next ball!” I said cruelly. “Remain here, if only for the anecdote.”

Perhaps emboldened by the liquor—or else convinced I was just a hallucination caused by it—the grave robber became increasingly calm. He seemed as much fascinated by me as by my assistance and looked on as I worked.

“We are much too far north to be of use to the medical school in Edinburgh,” I said to him.

“S’for a young doctor up in Malverness,” he answered. “Says he needs more trainin’.”

“And how many times has he asked for ‘more training’?”

“This is the third. But if he do nae know a head from a toe by now, I would nae bring my cat to him.” He stared at Lily with open curiosity. She edged away, wrinkling her nose. The only sound was the rhythmic digging of dirt. Into the silence I quoted:

“What a fine voice for recitin’,” the man said. His tone was tenuous, as if he wasn’t sure whether to attempt conversation. “Is it a song?”

“It’s a poem about a young girl who curses God when her lover does not return from war,” I answered. “One night, he appears on horseback! To her delight, he carries her off: she is at last to be married! She does not know that she is riding on a nightmare, and that her lover is already dead.”

Metal screeched against wood; both Lily and the grave robber jumped. I cleared the dirt off the coffin. I felt myself sink into the poem’s doomed hopelessness, and yet continued: “The dead man urges the horse on furiously until they arrive at his grave. There he tells the terrified young girl,
that
is her wedding bed. The young girl looks around and sees—”

Picking up the spade again, I broke the coffin lock, bent down, and wrenched off the lid. Lily clapped a hand over her nose and mouth, but stepped closer to look.

“What happens to the girl?” the man asked.

“She at last sees her lover for who he really is:

“But it’s too late,” I concluded, fixing my eye on Lily. “The dead lover descends into the grave, and howling spirits drag the woman down to join him.”

Death itself lived in the poem; it lived here in the graveyard, too, though with less art and more stink.

Slowly I unwrapped the winding sheet. Instead of a beautiful woman, before me lay a stout matron of fifty, her fleshiness slack as a deflated balloon, her ashen face spotted with black. I stared at her blank visage. If she had had a soul once, if any
human had one, it was gone now. What was left was as stupid and unyielding as the dirt. How could I expect any share in humanity when assembled from such as this?

I grasped the woman under her arms and began to haul her up like an unwieldy sack of flour. The task should have been easy for me, a second’s effort. I breathed rapidly, even panted, as if I had just dug a million graves. I left the body propped halfway out of the coffin and paused to quiet myself.

“Well,” the grave robber said. “It’s a great favor you’ve done me, but I don’t think you’ll be shoulderin’ the corpse all the way to Malverness. Let me see what’s happened to the wagon.” He wandered into the fog.

“Just leave it, Victor,” Lily urged when we were alone. Ignoring her, I once more put my arms around the body and lifted. This time I easily pulled it up over the edge and onto the ground. The same perversity that had brought me here tonight—that bid me grab a shovel and quote poetry—now made me sit at the hole, feet dangling, and gather the corpse up close. I balanced it on my lap as one might hold a child.

How could something so cold not be ice itself? The body made my flesh shudder in fits and strained my arms. I should have been loath to touch it. Instead—nerves throbbing, tears pricking my eyes—I smoothed the woman’s gray hair, cupped her chin to tilt her face up, pressed my lips upon hers, and with feigned fondness said, “Mother!”

“You cannot know her, Victor,” Lily said.

“There were many like her who helped form me.”

Whatever fear or hesitation Lily showed before was driven out by impatience.

“Yes, many like her,” she said, “and a whole herd of cattle as well!” She stamped her foot imperiously. “Now lead me back to the church, Victor. I am cold.”

I threw the body to the side, grabbed Lily by the back of the neck, forced her to her knees over the corpse, and pressed her head down till her face rubbed the dead woman’s.

“Cold, yes, but not half so cold as she!” Delirium ringed round my mind and began to dance. I gave Lily a final push and threw her onto the corpse. With a choked cry, she scrambled up, bumping into headstones, tripping on rough ground. I did not care whether she returned to the church or fled down the road; it was with both malice and kindness that I had shocked her.

I felt raw, as if my nerves had been sewn outside my skin, yet again I pulled the corpse onto my lap. However appalling it had been to thrust my hands into a tub of cooling animal guts, knowing mine were the same, it was more appalling to hold the human dead, knowing it had been violated to make me. Human life was sacred. I had come to recognize that, though I neither possessed what was sacred, nor could understand its secret.

Presently the grave robber returned without the horse and wagon.

“A wheel is stuck in a rut, and the horse is shakin’ behind a gravestone, like it heard your poem and did nae like it.” He raised an eyebrow at how I and my new acquaintance sat so familiarly.

“Come join us, sir,” I urged, unwilling to leave. The longer I stayed here, the more distance I would put between myself and Lily. “Sit with us and tell us your story, for surely there’s one behind your coming here tonight.”

“I’ll wager yours is more interestin’.” He sat down, but at several arm lengths away.

“I know mine,” I answered. “First, your name.”

“I’m Ailbert Cameron,” he said. “Cam to my friends, and
any as what digs graves for me.” He pulled his flask out of his pocket and was polite enough to offer it to me before taking a drink himself.

“I don’t drink,” I said, remembering that exceptional evening in Winterbourne’s study.

“Never?” His mouth gaped. “With a face like yours?” He gulped and turned as gray as the fog, perhaps realizing how much offense his words could cause—and not knowing if my temper matched my face.

“I did try it once …”

He so eagerly asked me to share the tale—which would distract me from his insult—that I could not refuse him. I pulled the corpse closer and tucked its head beneath my chin. What had seemed dreadful a short time ago had lost its ability to make me giddy with horror.

It had been about five years ago, I told him. I was in Spain, about twenty miles north of Barcelona, on a rainy night after a rainy day. I was soaked through; indeed, I could have wrung out my cloak and had enough to wash with. I came across cultivated land and a curious set of buildings; a second group was set up higher. I broke into one of the large buildings lower on the hill.

“I went inside,” I said. “My nose was assaulted: yeasty, then vinegary; fruity, then sour and rotten. Sweat covered my face, attracting tiny bugs that itched madly. Wandering around in the dark, I bumped into a huge wooden panel. It startled me, as the wood possessed the warmth of a living thing. It was a vat, just one of many—fermenting vats.”

“And in them?”

“Wine.”

“Nae to my likin’, but we each want death to taste a certain way. So there you were, vats on all sides. Were you brave?”

“It was an honorable match, though I was bested in the end.”

The corpse slipped, threatening to roll down and unwind its sheet back to the grave. I caught its neck in the crook of my elbow, stretched my other arm round its hips, then pulled the body onto the ground next to me.

Cam encouraged me to continue. I began to drink, I told him, and was soon flushed with wine, but shivering with the wet. I made a fire using empty casks. I was not drunk, I told myself, otherwise I could not have had the sober thought of keeping the fire on the stone floor and not the wooden one.