Aila looked at me appraisingly. “I think he is well enough, if he is dosed well and wrapped warmly.”
“Good,” said the monster. “I want him out of my house as soon as possible. Walton, you will travel by land to a village on the coast, where you will be picked up by a whaler on its way to Archangel. There, you will remain until you are well enough for the long journey back to England. And for God’s sake, stay there! This is no place for a gentleman adventurer. Aila would find the Pole more quickly than you could find your own … well, I shall not say that in front of my daughter.”
Did she understand the nature of her father? Of how he had been created from corpses by my friend, Victor Frankenstein? Alas, my poor Victor, who had suffered so much! It came to me that I should tell her—I should warn her that her own father was a fiend in human form, a daemon of the pit. But as she stood beside him, with her hand in his, her cheek against his arm, so calm and confident, I shuddered at the thought. I could not tell her of her own dreadful parentage. And it came to me, as well, that if I did, the monster might kill me directly afterward. So I said nothing.
And that, my dear sister, is how I ended up once again, for the second time, at a sanatorium in Archangel—the same sanatorium, where luckily the sisters recognized me and treated me kindly, calling me Walton the Arctic Explorer—admiringly, although some of them did giggle, but then girls do, you know.
I look forward to once again sitting by your fireside, drinking tea out of the Sèvres service that our mother left you, eating Mrs. Asher’s cakes and little sandwiches. Please remind her that I particularly like the curried eggs and the watercress. I return to you a broken man—love lost, dreams and ambitions unfulfilled. But I shall henceforth take pleasures in the little things of life, and my own hearth, or rather yours, dear sister, for as I have no home of my own, I hope you will allow me to spend considerable time at Chatworth with you and Charles and the children. Please tell him that I am looking forward to seeing him again, and to continuing our discussions of Roman politics in the time of Julius Caesar.
I almost forgot to mention that, before I left, Aila asked me to enclose a letter to you, no doubt some reminiscences of our time together and directions for my care. It is a bit lumpy, I do not know why, most likely because of the quality of the paper. You know she does not have access to fine linen weave in the far North! But I enclose it here. I look forward to seeing you soon, my dear Margaret.
Your loving brother,
Robert
Dear Margaret,
I hope you don’t think it rude of me to address you informally. Your brother, Robert Walton, told me a great deal about you, both in his delirium and when in his right mind, for the man never stops talking. Forgive me, he is your brother, but the tedium of hearing his stories over and over again almost drove me mad. I do not know how you can stand it. You may recognize my surname, for Robert spoke incessantly of his friend Victor—the man my father taught me to call grandfather, although I scorn the lineage. Among other deficiencies, my grandfather seems to have been a careless researcher.
From what he has said, or did not say, it seems that you too are interested in the science of botany. It is one of my fascinations, and I hope that someday I can study in Europe at one of the institutes, or perhaps a botanical garden. I write to you now asking if you would perhaps care to correspond, and I enclose several seeds, with a description of their characteristics and properties, that may interest you as examples of the local flora. I do not believe they have yet been studied by European scientists.
If you write to me at the enclosed address in Archangel, the letter will reach me, although slowly in my present remote location. But I look forward to hearing from you, and to learning that I have a sister in science who is as dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge as I am.
Yours sincerely,
Aila Frankenstein
Contributors
LINDA D. ADDISION (“One Day of Inside/Out”) is the first African-American recipient of the Bram Stoker Award® and has received four awards for collections in the Poetry category. She was also part of two books that were finalists. She is the only author with fiction in three landmark anthologies that celebrate African-American speculative writers: the award-winning anthology Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction (Warner Aspect), Dark Dreams I and II (Kensington), and Dark Thirst (Gallery Books). Her work has made frequent appearances on the honorable mention lists for Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and Year’s Best Science-Fiction. She has published over 300 poems, stories and articles, and is a founding member of the writer’s group Circles in the Hair (CITH) and a member of SFWA, HWA, and SFPA.
MICHAEL BAILEY (co-editor) is a writer, editor, book designer, and a resident of forever-burning California. He is the recipient of the Bram Stoker Award®, Benjamin Franklin Award, over two dozen independent accolades, and a Shirley Jackson Award nominee. Publications include Palindrome Hannah and Phoenix Rose (novels), Scales and Petals, Inkblots and Blood Spots, and Oversight (collections), and over sixty published stories, novelettes, and poems. Edited anthologies include Qualia Nous, The Library of the Dead, You Human, Adam’s Ladder, four volumes of Chiral Mad, and more. He recently finished Seven Minutes, a memoir about surviving one of the most catastrophic wildfires in history. Future books include Psychotropic Dragon, Seen in Distant Stars, The Impossible Weight of Life, and Hangtown (titles subject to change). Find him online at nettirw.com.
LAIRD BARRON (“Ode to Joad the Toad”), an expert Alaskan, is the author of several books, including The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, Swift to Chase, and Blood Standard. He is a three-time recipient of the World Fantasy Award (four-time nominee), the Bram Stoker Award® (five-time nominee), a three-time recipient of the Shirley Jackson Award (fourteen-time nominee), was nominated for the Theorore Sturgeon Memorial Award, numerous times for the Locus and International Horror Guild Awards. He was also nominated for the William L. Crawford IAFA Fantasy Award. Currently, Barron lives in the Rondout Valley of New York State and is at work on tales about the evil that men do.
MAX BOOTH III (“I Am Your Neighbor”) was raised in Northern Indiana on an unhealthy diet of horror movies and Christopher Pike paperbacks. He now lives in San Antonio, Texas where he is constantly trying not to get shot. It is harder than you think. He is the author of several novels, including Carnivorous Lunar Activities (Fangoria) and the forthcoming Touch the Night (Cemetery Dance). His nonfiction has been published online at Fangoria, LitReactor, CrimeReads, and the San Antonio Current. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Perpetual Motion Machine, the Managing Editor of Dark Moon Digest, and the co-host of Castle Rock Radio: A Stephen King Podcast. Visit his website TalesFromTheBooth.com to learn more, and follow him on Twitter @GiveMeYourTeeth.
M.E. BRONSTEIN (“Sounds Caught in Cobwebs”) is a PhD student in Comparative Literature based in northern California who writes dark fantasy when she should be working on her dissertation. Her work has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Metaphorosis, and Literary Orphans, and she is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and Clarion UCSD. You can find her at mebronstein.com.
NADIA BULKIN (“Operations Other Than War”) writes stories, thirteen of which appear in her debut collection, She Said Destroy (Word Horde, 2017). Her short stories have been included in editions of The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, The Year’s Best Horror, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror. She has been nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award five times. She grew up in Jakarta, Indonesia with her Javanese father and American mother, before relocating to Lincoln, Nebraska. She has a B.A. in Political Science, an M.A. in International Affairs, and lives in Washington, D.C.
RAMSEY CAMPBELL (“Brains”) is noted by The Oxford Companion to English Literature as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer.” He has been given more awards than any other writer in the field, including the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers
Association, the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild, and the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. Among his novels are The Face That Must Die, Incarnate, and others. He recently brought out his Brichester Mythos trilogy, consisting of The Searching Dead, Born to the Dark, and The Way of the Worm. His novels The Nameless and Pact of the Fathers have been filmed in Spain, where a film of The Influence is in production. Campbell lives on Merseyside with his wife Jenny. His pleasures include classical music, good food and wine, and whatever’s in that pipe. His website is at ramseycampbell.com.
KRISTI DEMEESTER (“Umbra Sum”) is the author of Beneath, a novel published by Word Horde Publications, and Everything That’s Underneath, a short fiction collection from Apex Books. Her short fiction has appeared in a variety of publications including Ellen Datlow’s The Year’s Best Horror, Vol. 9 and 11, Stephen Jones’ Best New Horror, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volumes 1, 3, and 5, in addition to publications such as Pseudopod, Black Static, The Dark, and several others. In her spare time, she alternates between telling people how to pronounce her last name and how to spell her first. Find her online at www.kristidemeester.com.
SCOTT EDELMAN (“Only Bruises Are Permanent”) has published nearly 100 short stories in magazines such as Analog, PostScripts, The Twilight Zone, and Dark Discoveries, and in anthologies such as Why New Yorkers Smoke, MetaHorror, Once Upon a Galaxy, Moon Shots, and the recent Harlan Ellison tribute anthology The Unquiet Dreamer. His collection of zombie fiction, What Will Come After, was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award® and the Shirley Jackson Award. His short science fiction has been collected in What We Still Talk About, and his most recent collection, Tell Me Like You Done Before (and Other Stories Written on the Shoulders of Giants) was published in 2018. He worked as an assistant editor for Marvel Comics in the 70s, writing everything from display copy for superhero Slurpee cups to the famous Bullpen Bulletins pages, with scripts appearing in Captain Marvel, Master of Kung Fu, Omega the Unknown, Welcome Back, Kotter, and others. He created the character Dr. Minn-Erva, recently portrayed by Gemma Chan in the Captain Marvel movie. Edelman worked for the Syfy Channel for more than thirteen years as editor of Science Fiction Weekly, SCI FI Wire, and Blastr, and was the founding editor of Science Fiction Age, which he edited during its entire eight-year run. He also edited SCI FI magazine (previously Sci-Fi Entertainment ) for more than a decade, as well as Sci-Fi Universe and Sci-Fi Flix. He has been a Bram Stoker Award® finalist eight times, and a four-time Hugo Award finalist.
M. FERNSTER / HAGCULT (cover artist, illustrator) is a freelance illustrator who specializes in the spooky and macabre; the shadowy spaces that make life fun. HagCult has had work featured in several publications, such as Rue Morgue (Ghoulish Gary’s art column, “The Fright Gallery”), HorrorHound Spring 2016 Annual (Featured Artist), HorrorHound Fall 2015 Annual (1 of the top 10, “A Nightmare on Elm Street” alternative movie posters), Alternative Movie Posters II: More Film Art from the Underground (by Matthew Chojnacki), Framed: The Poster Art of Murder by Death, Shadows Over Main Street: An Anthology of Small-Town Lovecraftian Terror, Vol. 1, and MetroPulse: Oct. 31, 2013 (“Season of the HAG”).
THEODORA GOSS (“Frankenstein’s Daughter”) is the World Fantasy and Locus Award-winning author of the short story and poetry collections In the Forest of Forgetting (2006), Songs for Ophelia (2014), and Snow White Learns Witchcraft (2019), as well as the novella The Thorn and The Blossom (2012), the debut novel The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter (2017), and its sequel, European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman (2018). The final novel in the series, The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl, was published in October 2019. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, Seiun, and Mythopoeic Awards, as well as on the Tiptree Award Honor List. Her work has been translated into twelve languages. She teaches literature and writing at Boston University and in the Stonecoast MFA Program. Visit her at theodoragoss.com.
BRIAN HODGE (“Butcher’s Blade”) is a prolific writer in a number of genres and subgenres, as well as an avid connoisseur of music. His most recent works include the novel The Immaculate Void and the collection Skidding Into Oblivion, companion volumes of cosmic horror. His Lovecraftian novella The Same Deep Waters as You is in the early stages of development as a TV series by a London-based production company. After a year lost to the endless business of family deaths, more of everything is back in the works again. He lives in Colorado, where he also endeavors to sweat every day like he’s being chased by the police. Connect through his website (www.brianhodge.net), or Facebook (facebook.com/brianhodgewriter).
ALMA KATSU (Foreword) is the author of The Hunger, a reimagining of the story of the Donner Party with a horror twist. The Hunger made NPR’s list of the 100 Best Horror Stories, was named one of the 21 best horror novels written by a woman, and was selected as a most-anticipated Spring 2018 pick by The Guardian, Bustle, Pop Sugar, io9, and many other media outlets. The Taker, her debut novel, has been compared to the early works of Anne Rice and Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander for combining historical, the supernatural, and fantasy into one story. The Taker was named a Top Ten Debut Novel of 2011 by Booklist, was nominated for a Goodreads Readers Choice award, and has been published in over 10 languages. It is the first in an award-winning trilogy that includes The Reckoning and The Descent. Ms. Katsu lives outside of Washington D.C. with her husband, musician Bruce Katsu. In addition to her novels, she has been a signature reviewer for Publishers Weekly, and a contributor to the Huffington Post. She is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins Writing Program and Brandeis University, where she studied with novelist John Irving. She also is an alumni of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Prior to the publication of her first novel, Ms. Katsu had a long career in intelligence, working for several US agencies and a think tank. She currently is a consultant on emerging technologies.
VICTOR LAVALLE (“Spectral Evidence”) is the author of the short story collection Slapboxing with Jesus, four novels, The Ecstatic, Big Machine, The Devil in Silver, and The Changeling, and two novellas, Lucretia and the Kroons and The Ballad of Black Tom. He is also the creator and writer of the Bram Stoker Award®-winning comic book Victor LaValle’s Destroyter. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including a Whiting Writers’ Award, a United States Artists Ford Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Shirley Jackson Award, an American Book Award, and the key to Southeast Queens. He was raised in Queens, New York, and now lives in Washington Heights with his wife and kids. He teaches at Columbia University. He can be kind of hard to reach, but he still loves you.
BRACKEN MACLEOD (“Not Eradicated In You”) is the Bram Stoker Award®- and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of the novels Mountain Home, Come to Dust, Stranded, and Closing Costs, coming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He has also published two collections of short fiction, 13 Views of the Suicide Woods and White Knight and Other Pawns. Before devoting himself to full-time writing, he worked as a civil and criminal litigator, a university philosophy instructor, and a martial arts teacher. He lives outside of Boston with his wife and son, where he is at work on his next novel.
JOSH MALERMAN (“One Last Transformation”) is a New York Times bestselling author and one of two singer/songwriters for the rock band The High Strung. His debut novel, Bird Box, is the inspiration for the hit Netflix film of the same name. His other novels include Unbury Carol and Inspection. He lives in Michigan with his fiancé, the artist/musician Allison Laakko.
USMAN T. MALIK (“Ressurection Points”) is a Pakistani writer of strange stories and a resident of Florida. His work has appeared in several Year’s Best collections, won the British Fantasy and Bram Stoker Award®, and been nominated for the Nebula and World Fantasy. He likes running and occasional long hikes. You can find him on Twitter @usmantm.
LISA MORTON (“Imperfect Clay”) is a screenwriter, author of nonfiction books, and award-winning prose writer whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide
to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening.” She is the author of four novels and nearly 150 short stories, a six-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award®, and a world-class Halloween expert. Her most recent book, Ghost Stories: Classic Tales of Horror and Suspense (co-edited with Leslie Klinger) received a starred review in Publishers Weekly, who called it “a work of art.” Lisa lives in the San Fernando Valley and online at www.lisamorton.com.
DOUG MURANO (co-editor) is the Bram Stoker Award®-winning editor of Behold! Oddities, Curiosities and Undefinable Wonders, and co-editor of the Bram Stoker Award®-nominated Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories. He is an Active Member of the Horror Writers Association, and was the organization’s promotions and social media coordinator from 2013-15. In 2014, he served on the World Horror Convention’s steering committee as its social media director. For his efforts to modernize and professionalize the Horror Writers Association’s marketing and P.R. machine, he was awarded the 2014 Richard Laymon President’s Award, the organization’s highest honor for volunteers.
JOANNA PARYPINSKI (“Matryoska”) is a writer of dark speculative fiction whose work has appeared in Black Static, Nightmare Magazine, Haunted Nights (edited by Ellen Datlow and Lisa Morton), New Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (edited by Jonathan Maberry), The Beauty of Death, Vol. 2 (edited by Alessandro Manzetti and Jodi Renee Lester), Tales from the Lake, Vol. 5 (edited by Kenneth W. Cain), Nighscript IV, Vastarien, and more. Her novel, Dark Carnival, was recently published by Independent Legions Press. She holds an MFA from Chapman University and is a member of the Horror Writers Association. She currently lives in the L.A. area and teaches English at Glendale Community College.
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