Frankenstein's Monster (28 page)

Though from John o’Groat’s to the Mainland is only twenty miles, crossing proved difficult. We offered our stolen horse as payment but were refused, once with a gesture to ward off evil. The superstitions of the land are a trifle to those of the sea: Lily and I were simply too strange to bring aboard.

I had come so far only to be stopped within sight of the islands! I dared not put a boat in the water myself with Lily as mate. In an instant we could be struck by a wild winter gale, and she might drown.

In the end it was a gale that set us back on course.

Two days ago, near dusk, the sky lowered, showing an unnatural orange beneath the gray. In minutes the wind doubled, tripled in strength. Everywhere people raced to secure their boats, fasten shutters, collect children, herd pigs and chickens into their homes. Doors slammed at my request for shelter till only Lily and I were alone on the street.

The rain was a sudden driving onslaught that washed the color from her face. Hail flew sideways with the wind, beat her cruelly, and made her stagger beneath its force. I tied the horse to a fence and hammered against the nearest door till its wooden lock splintered, then I pushed Lily inside and stood her shivering body before the fire. Squawking chickens and an old woman in a corner chair were the only occupants. At our violent entrance, the woman grabbed a knife.

“Help! Help! Murderers!” she cried, her voice too thin to be heard over the storm. With the latch broken, I set a bag of grain before the door as a stop for the wind.

“I mean you no harm,” I said. “No one else would help and the woman is ill. Surely you would not send us back out?”

“Murderers!” the old woman repeated, now less with fear than sly delight. Her tiny black eyes shone, and she shook the
knife. From the kettle at the hearth, I ladled out a bowl of soup for Lily. The old woman leaned forward. “And thieves, too.”

She said nothing else, not even when I removed my cloak to dry it before the fire.

For hours the storm battered the cottage. The wind whipped smoke down through the chimney so often I put out the fire despite the cold. Hail and sand pelted the shutters and drove through the tiniest cracks to sting my face. From outside I could hear our horse fighting its confinement till I heard a snap, then galloping.

At last, the storm passed, giving us several quiet hours before dawn. Lily slept, while the old woman and I eyed each other. I asked her name, where we might find passage to the Mainland, and whether she preferred her murderers beheaded or hanged.

“Is it over?” Lily asked, waking. “Can we make it to the island today?”

“No one will take us,” I said, slipping on my cloak. “We’ll have to go up the coast.”

“Ask for Doughall MacGregor,” the old woman said, startling me. “Tell him his granny says to take you over as a favor.”

“Why?”

“For nae murderin’ me.” She grinned, showing a single tooth.

Though the horizon was just beginning to pale, the town was awake. People busied themselves setting right the damage; even more hurried to the shore with baskets. MacGregor was one of them. Large and muscular, black haired and bearded, he possessed the same beady eyes as his grandmother.

“Mr. MacGregor,” I called to the man who had been
pointed out. “I’m looking for a ride to the Orkney Mainland. Your grandmother said we were to ask you.”

“Did she now?” Without slowing his step, he looked at Lily, then at my hooded face. His friends looked at us with the same curiosity. “And why would my granny say that to two oddities such as yourselves?” When I could not answer, both he and the other men laughed. “I’m to do it because you did nae murder her, am I right? Do nae worry. My granny is nae murdered a good three, four times a year, and afterward she always sends the poor soul down to me. I’m waitin’ with my breath held for when she realizes she’s nae murdered every day of her life.”

“Then you’ll take us?”

“Nae today. Today we gather tangle before the tide takes it back,” he said, referring to the seaweed washed up by the storm.

“Yes, today!” I said hotly. “We must get there today!” I had waited time enough and could not endure a moment longer. The vehemence of my response made MacGregor break stride. He stared intently at us, peculiar strangers who would make such demands of him.

Lily stepped forward and touched his arm. Her silent gaunt face and teary eyes were more persuasive than my temper, for his friends whispered among themselves.

“Go on, Doughall, do this boon for your granny. We’ll nae be missing what you would have gathered anyway, such a wee bit it’d make nae difference.”

After a moment, MacGregor good-naturedly cursed his friends, then led us to his boat.

Despite the forced nature of our coming aboard, MacGregor spoke easily the entire trip. He never asked what called us so urgently to the Mainland. He simply talked about the sea:
miraculous accounts of mermaids and mermen, the Fin Folk, and the seal people who could shed their fur skins to walk the shore as humans.

I had hoped he would sail us to the top of the Mainland to the town of Brough Head. The tiny nameless island I wanted, the island where my father had created then destroyed my mate, was about five miles off Brough Head into the Eynhallow Sound, not on any map and so far west as to be nearly in the ocean. On this point MacGregor was firm.

“As long as I’m on the Mainland, I have business I can do in Orphir,” he said, “so I’m puttin’ ashore at the bottom.”

By now the sky was dark again and the water white-capped and choppy; at twice more the distance, Eynhallow would take MacGregor out of the natural harbor of Scapa Flow into the Atlantic, so I asked no more of him. From Orphir, it was about fifteen miles overland to Brough Head. What were fifteen miles and another day?

When we landed, MacGregor said, “Whenever you’re ready to go back, I’m in Orphir most Wednesdays in the morning. Just ask for me at the market.”

“Thank you,” I said. “You’ve been very generous.”

“Nae at all. I’m rightly in for two favors, I suppose,” he said with a wink. “There are two of you. And neither one of you murdered my granny.”

“Come, let me show you something.”

Yesterday, when Orphir was some miles behind us, I led Lily onto the strip of land between the Loch of Harray and the Loch of Stenness and from which both lakes can be seen at once. With the dark sky and heavy air, one might believe the water could rise up from either side to engulf us.

“Do you see the standing stones?” I asked Lily. “I discovered them during my first journey here. There are two separate sets.” Their pattern became clearer the closer we walked. “The four thin stones are the Stones of Stenness,” I said. “The larger group that forms the big circle is the Ring of Brodgar. It’s believed that the ancients built the Stones of Stenness as a temple to the moon and the Ring of Brodgar as a temple to the sun.”

I brought Lily to the Stones of Stenness. Their sharp angular surfaces against the leaden sky hinted of menace, as if the tallest of them at five meters could call down demons on a day such as this.

“Stand here,” I said, placing her in the middle.

“Why?” she asked with suspicion.

At first, I thought this remembered ritual was well suited to a woman’s sentiments and hoped it might work to soften Lily—that if I first gave her a wedding of sorts, it might ensure her giving me my wedding night. Now, looking at her face implacable in the gray light, I remembered that she had already had a wedding.

“Couples pledge their faithfulness here,” I continued, knowing it was now too late to stop. “The woman stands within Stenness, the man in Brodgar, and each swears an oath of fidelity. Then they come together at that stone there fallen out of the circle,” I said, pointing, “called the Stone of Odin. There is a hole that pierces it. The lovers join hands through the hole and so seal their oath, which is considered binding to the death.”

Lily’s voice was soft: “We are not lovers, Victor.”

“Have you not promised me?”

I am not my words
. My limbs began to tremble—unaccountably, because for once I felt no anger.

“What would you have me do?” she asked.

I told her what to say, believing that she had to be told, that such words were as alien to her nature as they were to mine. Then I left her within the uneven square of Stenness, prisoner within the four knifelike thrusts.

The Ring of Brodgar where I was to stand formed a huge circle nearly fifty meters across. It was surrounded by a moat, dry now, carved from the bedrock. Of the dozens of stones worn round with wear, only half still stood upright.

I reached the center of the ring and nodded to Lily as a signal that we might speak in unison what I had composed while on MacGregor’s boat. Because I thought it was what a woman wanted to hear, I used once more that word Biddy Josephs first used: “I give myself to you and take you to be mine. I will love you and no other, now and for always.”

What spells did Lily chant instead? For, although she spoke, there was no concurrence between the movement of her lips and the words I had bid her say.

Slowly we walked toward each other, the fallen stone of Odin between us. Kneeling, I thrust my hand through the hole. From the other side Lily’s hand, small and cold, slipped into mine, then quickly pulled away.

We stood up and faced each other over the stone. Behind her a single fork of lightning cleaved the sky. No thunder sounded. Without speaking, Lily pointed to Mirabella’s necklace. I removed it from my wrist and fastened the little chain of charms round Lily’s throat.

It did not matter whether Lily had echoed my words or not.

I knew we were both liars.

It is nearly midnight. The hour hovers between the old year and the new, in that precise moment when there is no moment, when time ceases and no man can be born or die.

I have arranged for us to be taken tomorrow to the nameless bit of rock where my father set up his laboratory. I had almost given up finding someone who would take us there. It was not that anyone recognized me from ten years ago. I had hid myself while following my father, swimming to the rock during the night and keeping to its far side when “deliveries” were rowed in. No, it was the island itself that frightened them. No seal rests, no bird roosts, no boat lands there. For more than ten years the rock has lain foul in the water, as if the whole sea could not wash it clean. It is there I go, this outcropping of Hell, on the promise of being saved and given back a life I never had.

Walton’s journal:

    
He is close, too close for words, he rushes toward me and no longer waits to be pursued. The wind on my face is his breath; the dark sky overhead, his murderous glance. I have waited in anticipation and now I wait in fear. He is not where I expected. He is behind me now. I have overreached my mark and now the beast is at my back
.

The island sits like a jagged skull emerging from black water: steep sides, cavelike depressions for eyes and nose, a strip of stony beach for a toothy grin. Above us, birds screeched warning. A tern, then a bonxie dived straight down at us. We nearly capsized the boat dodging to avoid them. The captain
sailed the boat closer to the island, and the birds fell back as if giving us up for lost.

Fresh blood smeared the notes I forced on the captain. The notes were from his creditors: he was the only one in town who would take us here, and threatening his creditors the only payment he would accept. A few debts had been released unwillingly, as the blood testified. The captain’s eyes shifted from water to sky to jagged rock; all the while he licked his lips. He had been drunk when he agreed to take us last night and drunker still this morning; however, the nearer our destination, the more sober he grew.

Lily pointed to the skull.

“Is the place feared because of its shape?” she asked.

The man’s anger was sudden. “Are we fools to you?” he snapped.

I had to press him for the story, what the villagers thought had happened there.

Devoid of most life, the island had never been considered more than just a reference point when landing on the Mainland Orkney. Then, ten years ago, a foreigner arrived and rented one of its huts. The stranger paid well to ensure his privacy.

Huge crates from England and the Continent arrived, reeking of death and decomposition. The area’s few farm animals began to disappear; others were found mutilated. Every scoundrel who went missing was believed to be on the island, dying or already dead, though none would put a name to it. Unnerved by the odors and by the sights half-glimpsed through the window at night, the island’s few inhabitants left. Soon the stranger’s hired brutes would only pull their boat close to shore, throw those increasingly dreadful items referred to as “supplies” onto the sand, and row away.

The town was poised between terror and outrage. Unable
to confront the man, the people left the pub and rallied round a newly arrived shipment. Our captain himself had been present that day and was one of those who had favored opening the crate. He remembered eyeing the crushed bottom corner that bore a dark seeping blotch, remembered hearing a rustle from within, a faint scratch at the boards.

He wanted to open the crate. He truly did.

“In the end nae one o’ us would take a hand to it.” He trimmed the sails so that we drew parallel to the island. “For all the liquor in us, we were just too scared.”

One night, fishermen returning late saw the stranger in a skiff a distance from shore. The stranger waited till the clouds overspread the moon, then dumped large bundles into the water. When the deed was reported, a group of men at last sailed out. They were too late: he had vanished.

“And inside the hut?” Lily asked. “What did they find inside the hut?”

“An awful gory mess. The worst had been cleaned up, which only made you wonder what had been there before.” Two days later, a head washed up with the tide. It was badly decomposed. From its long strings of hair it was presumed to be a woman’s.