Mechanized Masterpieces: A Steampunk Anthology (38 page)

With the sudden death of my youngest brother, my wedding day was in view, and with it, the unfolding of my mother’s prophetic dreams for me, and the opening of her final letter.

Upon Victor’s return to the house, we were able to rejoin our ragged family together in mourning the loss of William. But even the air of grief that pervaded our home could not disguise that Victor was very much changed since his last visit, and grief was only a fraction of his transformation. Father noted instantly the loss of weight and pale, hollow expression Victor wore. He was deeply troubled, and insisted it was the loss of William that dogged his steps, but Father and I knew that there must be more.

Every day that passed, Victor kept to himself, locking his doors and shutting himself away to work on whatever it was he had brought home with him. Rarely did he eat or sleep, or even change his clothes. He was unkempt and unaware of his surroundings, and it was painfully clear that something had happened during his studies abroad that had changed him deeply, and not for the better.

I waited and waited, even sleeping with the final letter from my mother under my pillow. My anxiety toward the discoveries yet to be made was keeping me very much awake at night. I had pored over the other notes and diagrams, and even considered bringing them before Victor. It would break my silent oath to my mother, but at least it would get Victor’s attention, if not some answers regarding the scientific and utterly mysterious nature of the pages.

The day, at last, dawned, and it was with the eagerness of a child upon Christmas morning that I rose and pulled the envelope from under my pillow, the anticipation too much to bear any longer. With trembling fingers, I opened the envelope and unfolded carefully the letter contained within, which was comprised of two pages. The first began thusly:

My dear child Elizabeth,

I am more proud of you than ever I could begin communicate to you, and I can only pray that you know and feel this truth deep in your heart. Like Galatea, the perfect woman sculpted by Pygmalion and brought to life by the gods, you have always been the perfect daughter, and you will make the perfect woman in your own right as you continue your life married to Victor. You have always been my angel, and with loving thoughts, I here endow you with my blessings upon this, your wedding day.

I am pleased past reckoning that you will be joined eternally to Victor on this day, although I know your reading this letter is a sign that I have passed and am not there to weep joyfully for your beauty in person. I truly hope your father is present to witness the junction of your soul with Victor’s, and thus the realization of the dream he and I shared since your very early childhood.

It is not only the dream of your parents, my sweet Elizabeth, but it is the hope of others whom you know not. Others who have invested both time and money into the formation of our family and the lineage which you may yet see to fruition once you are wed.

My good-hearted, loving girl! Oh, how I wish I could explain this all in person. But the Fates had other plans for me, my angel, and took me away before these truths could be explored. Be not frightened, my daughter, for you have the strength within you to prevail through any circumstance, large or small.

By now, I wonder what little things have happened to you along the way. As a child you were bold but not careless, and only rarely did you bleed from injury in playtime. You never scraped your knees or cut your little fingers. I wonder if you have had any injuries since? I wonder if, since your fever, you have even been remotely ill at all?

I wonder, of course, but I may hazard to guess that you have not been ill, and any injuries you may have sustained were minor—including the ones which could have been major. I dare not dream what may or may not have happened to you, but I do trust you are whole and in one piece and still ticking, as it were. You have always been strong, my darling, but perhaps until recently you did not truly know how strong.

The other pages in these packets must have baffled you so, the diagrams and notes and correspondences. I trust you kept it all whole and safe, having shown it to no one. Now that it is your wedding day and your life to be changed henceforth forever, I must ask you to burn everything, including this letter, when you are done reading it.

The truth is that the gypsy’s fortune foretold of my daughter being an incredible force for good. I was determined to fulfill this prophesy, and thus made my studies in anatomy and physiology, as well as medicine, hoping the studying would lead me to answers as to how my girl child would be born in the first place, and then from that to encourage her to be ready for her chosen path.

When I miscarried my firstborn daughter, I was truly devastated, and thought I would never recover from the grief, but my doctor at the time had another suggestion, and through the miracles of science, found a way to use my biological matter and create you, my angel. For you see, although you did not come directly from my womb, your blood is the same as my own, and you are truly my daughter.

But science is not perfect, my angel, and though your creation was successful, you were very sickly as an infant, and my good friend Doctor Moreau was forced to take drastic measures to ensure your survival, to assure me that you would not break or grow ill in your youth, that by the time I was able to rescue you from your poor foster family, you would still be alive and well.

 You must forgive me my somewhat peculiar methods, Elizabeth, for I love you, and did all that I did out of selfless love for you. I know your previous interests in scientific theory and literature, and thus I know that while rather fantastic, all this is indeed possible, and you know it, deep in your steel-infused bones.

I know this must all be quite a shock, my child, but remember always and above all that you are my angel, and your destiny lies with Victor. That is why you could not know until your wedding day. Victor must not know what you truly are. If his scientific mind begins to suspect that you are more than a sweet and loving human being, I cannot tell what he may do. If you love and obey him, all will be well, but never forget that you are destined to protect him, even if that means you are protecting him from himself.

Now, you must prepare for your married life, and think no more upon the things I have told you. Know that I am proud of you and will always love you, my angel, my daughter, Elizabeth.

Yours in eternity,

Your mother, Caroline

I found that I was weeping in silence. I felt my hands shaking as I read and re-read the letter a thousand times in those few minutes. How could any of this be true? And yet the strangeness of it rang with familiarity. The fever dream of my mother with the tools bending over my prone form flashed into my mind, and I saw it clearly; it was an act of what theorists and surgeons would call vivisection, and my mother was carefully mending my inner parts with her own two hands, transferring her own blood and providing the broken pieces of my organs with matter of her own.

I flipped the letter to the next page, and saw a full diagram of myself, with skeleton and major organs showing, with notes in my mother’s hand which described the changes that she and her Dr. Moreau had made over time. It was true that I was strong and exceedingly healthy, but it was also true that I was not simply human: my bones were lined with steel, some of my organs replaced with industrial clockwork.

 The scarlet fever of my youth had been a ruse to excuse the necessary surgery my mother had performed to fix the inner cogs of my cardiovascular system. She had managed it successfully, but at the cost of her own health, for, to provide me with immunity from disease, she was forced to take from her own organs. It seemed impossible . . . and yet, there I was: in many ways, I was not and had never been fully human.

This revelation was the most unusual wedding gift I could ever have imagined.

The arrival of the servants to rouse me and help me dress for the wedding interrupted my thoughts. Immediately, I threw the letters onto the fire, so that they might not be found and their content discovered by the wrong persons. I admit it was then something of a struggle to convince those attending me that I was not ill. I assured them I was simply overcome with the emotions of the day to come. In a daze, I was prepared and dressed and sent to church.

At the ceremony, I gazed at Victor, who seemed as agitated as I was that the wedding was finally taking place, and I wondered what it was that had changed him so markedly from the clever, loving boy I had grown up alongside. Had it been the death of our mother? Had it been some cruel professor he had encountered in school? Had some other milestone taken place, one that I knew not?

During our vows, it occurred to me that perhaps Victor had discovered my secret; perhaps it was out of shame, disgust, and even revulsion that he had lost all interest in me and had postponed the wedding for so long. If he already knew, then I could not be held responsible for my mother’s wish that I keep the truth from Victor. I resolved to get Victor alone as soon as I could after the ceremony, to try to sound him out and see what he knew.

I did not have to work very hard at separating my husband—how new and strange the word!—from the rest of the party, for after the meal, Victor steered me by the arm to our wedding chambers and closed the door behind us.

“My love,” said I, suddenly nervous and choosing to make a light joke, “are we not meant to wait until after all the guests have gone home to consummate our vows?”

Victor, pale and cold-eyed, gave me what would have been called a withering glance. “Do not be so lewd, Elizabeth. It does not suit you.” He moved about the room quickly, checking the latches on the windows and doors and investigating all the nooks and crannies of the chambers.

“Victor, you have barely spoken to me all day; indeed, barely spoken to me these last several years. We were once the most loving of childhood companions. What has happened to you, and why aren’t you happy on the day that Mother longed so much to see for herself?”

Victor turned to look at me, the pain in his eyes evident. He looked as though he had not slept in weeks. “This is not about you, Elizabeth.” His voice trembled, and I was sure then that it was with fear.

I pressed on. “What is it, then, which has broken you? What is it that you have kept secret from Father, from Ernest, from me? I am your wife now, and I must know what brings such horror to my husband’s eyes.”

He paused long, then, and crossed the room in a few great strides to stare into my face, searching, demanding.

“I have done what others failed to do,” he intoned, a creeping note of ecstatic pride in his voice like the tendril of a curling, growing vine. “The secrets of Nature are mine, now, and I hold the spark of Life in my hands.”

I was surprised. It was certainly not what I had expected him to say. “What do you mean by this?”

“You will not understand,” he hissed scornfully.

“Then explain it to me,” I demanded. “What do you mean by the secrets of Nature being yours?”

Victor’s voice dropped to a whisper. “I have become God. I have brought the mystery of Life to matter that was dead. And my creation lives, now seeking his wrathful vengeance upon me and those I hold dear. He is coming tonight and I must end his miserable—”

I felt an anxious laugh bubble up from my chest. “What are you saying? Victor, what do you mean? The mystery of life? Dead matter? This is insane,” I heard myself say, despite the pounding in my chest that reminded me my heart was made with metal. Insanity was not too far from reality, I thought, recalling my mother’s words.

Victor’s gaze was full of fire. “I have created new life from old, from death, and he is angry, and he took William, and he vowed to be with me upon my wedding night, and I refuse to allow him to win—”

“Oh, Victor!” I exclaimed, the memory flashing before my eyes, causing my breath to run short and my knees to tremble. “What have you done?”

The image of the ungainly giant whose hands had no doubt been the source of William’s untimely demise was burned onto my vision. The sudden revelation that Victor was claiming responsibility for the existence of the creature was almost too much. That Victor had spent his time searching for the spark of Life only to bestow it upon a dead thing, just to prove that he could do it . . . I could practically hear my mother’s voice in my head:
‘Your destiny lies with Victor, to love and obey and protect him, even if from himself
.’

I was numb as Victor declared that he must lock me in our chambers for safety until the thing was dispatched, and watched him go in shocked silence. I had reached the culmination of my young life, having married my intended and uncovered the incredible truth about myself through my mother’s letters, but I felt utterly empty, and did not know which way to turn.

Victor may once have loved me, I was fairly sure, but there was no longer love, for his life had been overrun by fear and guilt and ego. He had tampered with the very seams of the world, the very magical ties that keep the universe together. Having stumbled across some kind of answer, he thought himself a god, and intended to banish his creation into the cold blackness of death once more, as God banished Lucifer to Hell.

I changed into my nightgown and brushed out my hair in slow, trembling motions. There was no question in my mind that the giant creature I had seen was the product of my husband, the ill-begotten creation of Victor’s scientific toils and research. I understood that Victor meant to kill it, partly in revenge of William’s death, and partly for his own terror, but I felt that Victor did not discount the possibility of his own death in the process. And I? I was meant to wait in silence, something that seemed impossible, knowing my own hidden strength. I knew it was my duty to obey my husband, but it was also my duty to protect him. What would Mother say if she could see Victor, and know what sins he had committed?