Frankenstein's Monster (29 page)

I pulled my cloak closer against the grisly tale. Though I myself had witnessed much of this, the story was freshly grim when told from the outside.

“You heard no more of the stranger?”

“Nae a word,” said the captain. “Till you.”

With a touch, he let the sail fall slack. We bobbed on the forbidding water. All was silent but for the wild cries of the birds in the distance.

“I do nae trust a man whose face I can nae see.” Sweat broke out on his forehead and he wiped it away. “What’s your business here?”

“You would not wish to know,” Lily answered.

His eyes flicked to her. “What is yours?”

She smiled with thin, silent lips.

At last the captain let the sail fill with wind and landed us.

Now his boat grows ever distant as I sit writing this entry. Beside me on the stony beach are our few provisions: food, water, and large blocks of peat, as the island is treeless and has only bushes for kindling. On the sand, pulled up beyond the tide, is a dinghy and oars for our return trip.

Although I have had a single feverish thought the last days of this journey, I am now reluctant to go up and enter the hut. Lily said that being here will free me of the past and give me back my stolen life.

Will it? Am I not yet a man? I am already a fool. I have a fool’s mind, a fool’s heart, to do what I fear, what I
know
is doomed, is damned. More than appetite spurs me now. Over these last days I have seen the gentleness in Lily’s expression change into a death’s-head grin, but I am caught in a web. Struggle only entangles me, so I lie still and wait for the spider.

When I at last put down my pen, gathered the provisions, and climbed the hill, I found that Lily had passed by the two stone huts closest to the trail and gone on to the third. There the door canted inward, attached at one rusted hinge. The thatched roof had collapsed and made a rotting veil that obscured the entrance to the inner room, which my father had made his laboratory. No furniture, no chemical apparatus, not the tiniest shard of glass from a broken vial remained to indicate his presence.

I crossed the threshold. A chill brushed me like dank breath.

“Lily?”

“In here.”

Unerringly she had found the right hut. Unerringly she had found the right room. I swept aside the fall of thatch.

Inside, it was bare except for a stone block that was long enough and wide enough to hold a creature that matched me in size. Now Lily lay there, stretched out like a corpse awaiting burial, arms at her sides, eyelids lowered. With her pale shadowed skin and sunken cheeks, her death was not difficult to imagine, and I gasped. She laughed softly at the sound.

Turning away, unable to touch her so soon, I laid the peat in the hearth, then grabbed a fistful of thatch to help the blocks catch fire.

“This is like a huge altar,” Lily said. “And I am the sacrifice. Or perhaps
she
was. She’s still here; did you know that? I can feel her. We share a close kinship, my sister and I. Each of us is your bride.”

“She was never my bride.” Striking the flint, I remembered the scarred mass that had been so like me; remembered the pulpy face that already held anguish and anger before it had taken its first breath. My trembling hand betrayed my hatred of ugliness. “I did not want her. I only wanted not to be alone.”

“And now it is different?”

“Yes,” I said, looking at Lily, wondering how that might be possible.

She leaned on her elbow and half-rose. “Am I like her?” she asked coquettishly, a girl teasing a suitor. “Am I unnatural?”

“No!” The word came too quickly and she laughed again. “It was never a woman,” I said. I stepped close to the block of stone. “It was never alive.”

“And yet she is here. What would have given her life is still here, still waiting for the body she would possess. Perhaps I should let her take mine.”

Lily lay back down and gave herself up to the darkness. She took my hand where its thick scar bound it to my wrist. She slipped my hand under her jacket and shirt and, sighing, held my hand against her cold breast. Although its weight and fullness surprised me, I could number her ribs with my fingertips; I could feel her heart beat wildly beneath my palm.

“She is in this room,” Lily said. “I can feel her.”

“Do not speak of such things,” I whispered, hoarse with desire.

After so much waiting, fulfillment seemed suddenly too soon. Should I make tea first? Should we stroll the island like honeymooners, coyly postponing the bridal bed? Was there a way to pretend that Lily did not lie on a stone block once washed in blood?

We had both come here, if not for the same reason, then to perform the same act and, I now saw, to perform it quickly. Stretching out beside her on the stone, I felt what any oaf must feel in knowing he is too big, too clumsy, too ugly. Then I felt a greater torment. I looked at my hand and wondered what women it had touched during its first, its
natural
, life. I felt a tingling throb in my lips and wondered whose mouths they had once covered with kisses.

Did she understand?

She reached up to loosen my shirt.

“You have never let yourself be seen before, have you?” she said, misinterpreting my hesitation. “Do not worry. That day at the farmhouse when you bathed, I spied on you from the window.”

“And that night you refused me.”

She shook her head and uncannily echoed my thoughts: “I was made not for such pastoral settings, but for this.”

She spoke dispassionately even as she half-rose at my side to bare each part of me for her inspection. Like a seamstress
examining a bolt of cloth, she fingered the dramatic changes in skin texture where each limb was joined to my torso. She found on me red hair and black, brown hair and blond; a section of skin, too, curiously hairless and as smooth as a woman’s. She tasted my every scar and counted each stitch that held me together.

I lay unprotesting, each touch bringing me exquisite pleasure and impossible pain. If only I had seen the smallest kindness in her face, if only there had not been such hunger … She stripped me in every way possible, herself remaining protected from revelation of her own soul.

I pushed aside her clothes and saw what I had only felt before: her breasts full, distended, a harsh contrast to the boniness of her frame. The diseased bloat of her stomach reminded me that the worm was with us still. The unpleasant image sent through me a powerful yet enervating thrill. Again reading my thoughts, Lily leaned over and whispered,
“She
is here, too.”

“No, do not speak.”

There would be no words of endearment, neither truth nor lie. I knew everything she would not say; I knew everything I feared she might. So I closed her mouth, covered it with mine, held her, and stroked in memory the soft body I had not touched before, as Lily ran along the cliffs at Tarkenville, and again, draped in purple silk at the party, as she took my arm in hers and led me into the ballroom. Once she had been the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She was no longer beautiful, but she was mine.

The night of the party she had tossed her head and offered the sweet length of her throat to my greedy sight. Now she leaned down over me and offered it to my lips. I kissed it and felt its sweetness reduced to sharp ridges. I tasted in its hollow dirt and salt. I smelled sweat, but oh, too, I smelled the
remembered scent of lavender. If I closed my eyes, she might be beautiful once again.

“Take me now,” she whispered.

Humanity and inhumanity met and joined in us; I did not know which would be more changed for it.

The remembered smell of corruption choked me, and I opened my eyes. Like a graven funerary ornament, Lily was a stone angel kneeling above me, her eyes fixed at a spot beyond me. What was she thinking, what was she feeling? From every corner she gathered in the darkness. She wrapped her arms around herself, hugged the darkness close, and breathed it in like smoke.

“She is here,” she whispered.

“No!” I tried to cry out. The word was unintelligible, crushed to a groan.

Afterward Lily looked down at me as from a great height and laughed.

“I have never lain with a corpse before. And now I have.”

Still laughing, she pushed away and quickly dressed.

For a hellish eternity I lay on the stone willing myself to do no more than breathe. If I moved, it would be to murder her.

At last I found pen and ink and paper and set down the above, writing into existence a tether to hold my sanity tight.

Having written down my torment, writing again now hours later, I still feel violence pulse beneath my skin in the hot throb of my heart, in the steady tick of the tiniest vein. In violence I was all and everything, I was my own creation. Now, without the snapping of bones and the pouring out of blood, what am I?

A monster would have killed her. And though the coldest part of me can see that her proud armor is insanity, the larger part of me knows that a man would have left. Once I was at least one of these. Now I am neither.

Days now since I have written.

Days since my mind has thought in words.

Days and days with but the thread of silence to stitch the days together.

If Doughall MacGregor heard the silence between us, he did not remark upon it when I sought him out in Orphir to take us away from the accursed Orkneys and sail us back to John o’Groat’s. Instead he filled the silence with the sound of his own voice, once more spinning tales of life on the sea. It was late by the time we landed, and MacGregor invited us to spend the night before moving on to wherever our next destination might be.

“Granny has more room than me,” he said, “but in the week since I’ve seen you she was nae murdered twice, and I dare nae send you back to her.”

With a nod I accepted, deciding that this very night I would leave the cottage as he and Lily slept. In the silence I had come as far as that, knowing I must quit Lily’s presence or myself go mad. If her father’s image again tried to summon up my culpability, this time I could chase it back down to darkness with the knowledge that MacGregor was a good man: I could leave her with no better protector.

After a dinner of fish chowder, which Lily did not eat—prompting a new set of tales from MacGregor about privations forced on him at sea—I stood up and said I would walk along the beach for a time. Lily eagerly ran to the door ahead of me, as if she knew my intentions and thought that this was when I would abandon her.

I set off briskly. If I could not leave this moment, at least I might so exhaust her she would sleep more soundly than usual tonight and not hear me steal away. The evening was
pleasant enough for a long walk—mild, windless, and with a rare warmth. Sunset painted the air an ever-darkening red, till at last sea and sand blended invisibly, marked only by an occasional faint glimmer from a rush of foam.

“Wait,” Lily called at last. Struggling in the sand, she had fallen behind. I stopped and looked backward. I could no longer see the lights from MacGregor’s cottage.

“Take my arm, Victor,” she said. “I am tired and ready to go back. Besides, you have ignored me all day.” She spoke as easily as if we had conversed this evening and the days before it. “It is one thing to ignore me when we are alone and quite another when others are present,” she said. “I would have you show me the respect I’m due. Perhaps, when my house is restored and I return home, I will find a position for you—something in the garden, I think, since you have such a fine talent for digging.”

She floundered in the soft sand, then struggled to her feet, and slapped at her dirty trousers. Was she incensed because she had fallen or because I would not play at being her servant? It did not matter. Tonight all this would end.

“My
arm
, Victor.” She waved it impatiently. “I need you to guide me back. I do not have your cat’s eyes!”

“Now there’s an ugly thought,” I said. “Perhaps it’s true. Or perhaps I merely see with the eyes of a man who has long had the habit of darkness.”

“You see with a
man’s
eyes? Oh yes,” she said hotly. “That means you see nothing at all!”

Refusing to be baited, I moved past her to return to MacGregor’s.

“Do
you
understand, Victor?” she asked, her voice rising. “You demanded an answer from me. Now I ask you,
Do you understand?
Of course you don’t!” She grabbed at me. “You are
as blind as any man, blind now with stupidity, that night blind with lust.”

“Blind?”

“I offer you a position in the grandest house in Northumberland,” she said, “and your silent refusal is full of contempt: ‘I am too good to serve her now because I have seen her tremble with pleasure.’ That night you saw only what you wanted to see. Just as you did not see what you did not want to see.”

“You are right, Lily, I do not understand,” I said gently, taking her arm to coax her into returning. My time with her was now short enough to count by hours, and that helped me keep my patience.

“Poor Victor. In your blindness, you did not see I was not a virgin. You did not see there was no blood to mark my purity.” Her grin yielded to disgust. “I have not seen blood of any sort these past six months.”

“Six months?”

“I am with child, Victor! I was three months gone when you first arrived at my estate. Did you think I would otherwise let you touch me? You didn’t see my hatred, just as all along you did not see my swelling stomach.” She turned on me. “Could I not have been plainer? Did I not say a thousand times how the worm battens on me like the leech it is?”

“The worm. I thought it was the bloat of disease. I thought you were dying.”

“It
is
a sickness, and I
am
dying. I know what children make of a woman—nothing! I will be like our little songbird, Cassie Burke.” She pressed her hands to her temples. “I drank Biddy Josephs’ foul expellants. I followed
you
, enduring arduous travel, galloping on horses, starving myself to starve
it
. I deliberately taunted you that night in the cottage so you would
strike me. You turned away at the last moment, and the brat is with me yet.” She continued bitterly: “I had hoped the doctor in Drexham would rip it out. He would not. But the thing is small, small enough for you to have deceived yourself. Its size is my final hope—that it will not survive being born. If it does, it most assuredly won’t survive its first few moments of mothering.”