I remember almost nothing about the bed or the room, for I could look at nothing but his eyes. I felt no fear this time, but a sense of tremendous expectancy made me tremble. After tonight, I knew, neither Stefan nor I would be as we were.
His lips alighted on mine, a brief taste to tantalize me. When my mouth sought more, he nudged me away, wordless yet commanding. Then he started at my feet, as if to torment us both with prolonged desire.
After discarding my leather shoes, he pushed the skirt and petticoat of my new dress up to my knees so as to remove the garters that held my stockings in place. Peeling back the silk skin of the hose an inch at a time, he suckled upon the bare flesh beneath. The tender suction of his mouth against the inside of my thighs caused every fiber of my body to trill with sensation. In the graveyard, I’d felt that even my own limbs did not really belong to me. Now I rejoiced in being made whole again. This was my leg, my body—I was a woman, and alive!
Stefan wrapped his arms around my hips and nuzzled the haunches with swelling passion, tonguing and delicately nipping at the skin as he kissed his way up from the knees to the crux between my legs. As his questing mouth found my most secret places, I gasped to stifle a cry, for I had never known such intimacy. I hugged his sweet face with my thighs, my fingers clenching the luxuriant golden curls of his hair so that I might hold him there forever.
Too soon, Stefan ceased the deliriously ticklish kisses along the lips of my sex. I opened my eyes to see why he had stopped, and disappointment turned to delight as I watched him shed his Hessian boots and leather breeches. I barely glimpsed the fullness of Stefan’s manhood before I felt it submerged in the wetness of my womb.
Now I did cry out. Nothing had prepared me for this strange invasion, the feeling that this piece of another human being was now, in some sense, a part of me. Yet this bizarre appendage filled the void within me in a way that I never thought possible, physically and emotionally bonding me to this man like an umbilicus. I wrapped my legs around him, panting as every thrust drilled deeper into the cavern of my being.
In a frenzy of lust, I tore open the front of his new white shirt to spread my hands over the broad plateau of his chest. Stefan fumbled to loosen the drawstrings of my dress, then sat me up on his lap. While still inside me, he yanked the bunched clothes off over my head, shift, stays, petticoat, and all. I threw my head back, flaunting my nakedness, shivering in anticipation of his ravishing caresses.
Nothing happened.
I looked up, wondering if Stefan were toying with me, withholding his kisses until I begged for them. He stared down at my body with such an attitude of revulsion that I crossed my arms over my bosom in sudden shame.
“What’s wrong?” I glanced down self-consciously and answered my own question. In the soft light of the oil lamp the chambermaid had lit for us, the scars that fused my limbs and head to my torso stood out like ridges of livid sealing wax. In the delirium of my desire, I’d forgotten I was no ordinary woman.
But it was not my wounds that seemed to appall Stefan. Instead, he prodded a small, innocuous strawberry birthmark beneath my left breast as if it were some vile insect. He flinched from the touch in disbelief and disgust.
“Who are you?” He shoved me off him. “You are not my Trina! Who are you?”
I had no answer. In that instant, I realized I did not know Stefan any better than he knew me. I hadn’t been in love with him—I had been in love with that look of adoration he gave me. The look that truly belonged to the dead woman, Katarina von Kemp, whose pristine, headless body did not have a strawberry birthmark.
It was a look I would never see again.
“Meyer was right. You are a demon.” Stefan seized my throat. “Who are you? What have you done with my Trina?”
I shook my head. “No! You . . . don’t . . . understand . . .”
He choked off my denial, pinning me against the headboard of the bed. Tears of grief flooded his eyes as he throttled me, for he must have recognized at last that he really had lost his beloved Trina forever.
I did not have time to feel sorry for him. Starved for air, my head pulsated like an apple bursting with maggots. My vision shimmering into blackness, I battered my fists against his iron chest, but he only tightened his stranglehold. I clamped my fingers around his wrists to pry his hands free, but he would not let go.
At that point, my humanity evaporated in sheer terror. As I blindly thrashed for self-preservation, a dark wellspring of strength geysered within me—a strength I hadn’t wielded since the night of my birth in Castle Frankenstein. My muscles clenched and contracted with unnatural force as if galvanized by lightning.
Sharp cracks sounded as of tree boughs breaking, and Stefan’s grip slipped from my neck. The screams I heard I soon realized were his.
I painfully sucked air through my lacerated windpipe. Even before my vision cleared, I could smell the blood. Gouts of it jetted from the ragged, red tears where I had snapped Stefan’s wrists. His left hand flapped loosely on a tongue of skin, the ivory spar of a fractured ulna stabbing forth from the severed arm. The right dangled from the string of a single tendon, dead fingers still twitching.
His golden skin now white as alabaster, Stefan resembled a shattered Greek statue, shrieking as he stared at the ruin of his arms. With his life’s blood saturating the bedsheets between us, I knew he would not live more than a few minutes in any event.
Helpless though he was, I had become a beast feral with fear. I sprang forward and locked my arms around his head. Those lips I had craved wriggled to let out another scream as my fingernails dug into that sweet face. Hugging his head against my bare breasts, I wrenched it backward on its neck. I kept twisting even after I heard the vertebrae snap apart. The tatters of his throat tore free from his shoulders, spilling crimson as his body slumped onto the mattress.
A hush descended that seemed to petrify the world. I curled, naked as a babe, with Stefan’s head in my lap, his blood greasing my bosom and stomach and running down between my legs. As the red haze of my madness lifted, I did not immediately feel horror or remorse, only a wide-eyed amazement at the impossibility of the scene before me.
Who could have done such a thing? I wondered dimly, blinking at my dismembered fiancé.
It then occurred to me I had witnessed such an atrocity before, when Victor Frankenstein’s creature—his other monster—had profaned a marriage bed with the slaughter of a newlywed.
I tilted Stefan’s face up to gaze into his staring eyes, but the blue in them had already dulled to unseeing glassiness. I briefly fantasized about saving the head.
If I could attach it to another body and revivify Stefan with Promethean fire, I thought, then maybe he would understand what it is like to be me.
I knew such an act would be futile, however. The being I resurrected would no more be Stefan than I was Katarina von Kemp. Besides, I had no idea how such things were done.
But I intended to find out.
I do not remember how long I sat there in a daze before I became aware of the frantic rapping on the door and the alarmed inquiries that the innkeeper and chambermaid shouted from the hallway.
“Herr Schmidt! Fräu Schmidt! Are you all right?”
The names meant nothing to me at first, and I thought the inn’s staff must have come to the wrong room. Then I recalled the identities Stefan had invented for us: Wolfgang and Johanna Schmidt. Of course. The innkeepers had heard his cries and come to investigate. Soon they would break down the door and accuse me of his murder, drag me away to be decapitated by the guillotine. Truly a punishment to fit the crime.
Stefan’s head rolled off my lap and landed on the wooden floor with a thud as I leaped from the bed. Grabbing the wadded clothes we’d cast aside, I swabbed as much blood as possible off myself and wriggled into a fresh shift from my satchel.
Struck with inspiration, I took hold of Stefan’s boots, one in each hand, and dipped the soles in the pond of blood that had formed around the bed. I stamped red fo
otprints on the floor, alternating left and right, marking paces from the bed to the room’s casement window. I unlatched the window and tossed the boots out into the street below.
Leaving the window wide open, I hastened to extinguish the oil lamp. I groped to retrieve my satchel in the darkness, then folded myself into the chamber’s small wardrobe and shut myself inside.
The chamber door’s latch rattled as the innkeeper tried his master key in the lock. An instant later the glow from a candle flame outlined the cracks in the wardrobe doors. The chambermaid shrieked, and I knew they had found Stefan.
“My God!” the innkeeper exclaimed. “How . . . ? Wait! Look here.”
Footsteps scuttled across the room in the direction of the open window. “The fiend escaped this way. I must fetch the police at once.”
I held my breath, not daring even to shiver. A swarm of other voices began to buzz. The commotion had evidently drawn the curiosity of the inn’s other guests.
“Please, stand back! All of you!” the innkeeper commanded them. To the chambermaid he added, “Let no one enter this room until I return.”
“You can’t leave me here alone!” she protested.
“You won’t be alone,” he replied wearily. “Half the city is filling the stairwell as we speak.”
The closing door cut off their conversation. I waited until I heard the innkeeper’s key clatter in the lock again before I risked climbing out of the wardrobe. Operating as much by touch as by sight in the lightless room, I found the other new dress I’d bought that day—the one not steeped in blood—and hastily draped it over myself without bothering to put on stays or a petticoat. I then stuffed as much of Joseph von Kemp’s jewelry as I could into the drawstring bag I used as a purse, which I hung around my neck.
Taking nothing else with me, I went to the open window, wincing as my bare feet stepped in still-warm, slippery liquid. I climbed onto the sill and glanced down into the street below. A small crowd had already gathered there, and among the thicket of hats I could spot the black, fan-shaped hump of a policeman’s Napoleonic bicorne. Fortunately, they were all looking down to examine Stefan’s bloodstained boots.
Since I had no way to get down without being seen, I determined to go up. The window was right beneath the inn’s roof, but to climb onto it I would have to get out from under the roof’s overhang.
I quietly reached out to pull the casement toward me. Placing both hands on top of the thick wooden square of paned glass, I lifted my right leg up to hook it over the window frame. No sooner had I done so than my left foot slipped off the windowsill.
The casement swung away from the window ledge. My left leg swayed free over the heads of the crowd three stories below as the window’s hinges groaned from the strain of supporting my weight, threatening to break loose. The noise made a few of the people below squint upward in the darkness.
Now I consciously called upon the unnatural strength within me. With the palms of both hands and the insole of my bare right foot anchored on the window frame, I managed to get my left foot planted on the casement. From this awkward crouch I balanced on the window frame and grabbed hold of the roof’s edge above me, pulling myself up onto the shingled slant one leg at a time.
As confused shouts stirred the throng below, I scuttled up to the slant’s peak and away along the rooftops that connected the inn with the neighboring shops and businesses along the street, just as I had seen Frankenstein’s creature do in Darmstadt.
I knew I would have to find it. Him. The mate I’d scorned the night I came to life.
CHAPTER 14
THE WIDOW
“I heard the monster tore the head clean off.”
My face hidden behind the curtain of my mourning veil, I managed not to react to the speaker, a languid dandy seated opposite me in the narrow coach in which we rode.
“No man could maul a body that way,” said his less-flamboyant companion, a middle-aged gentleman with a staid frock coat and a neatly trimmed goatee. “More likely, the villain had a dog rip the fellow up. Perhaps even a trained wolf.”
The dandy dabbed at his nose with a silk handkerchief, as if he could smell the carnage himself. “I understand he took the wife with him. I shudder to think what became of her. One can only hope they catch and send the scoundrel to the scaffold before the week is out.”
Although I remained as still as I could in the lurching carriage, the more well-mannered gentleman took note of me at last. “I fear we are upsetting our gentle companion,” he murmured to the dandy. “She has obviously had enough of tragedy. I do apologize, dear lady. I’m sure you have already learned more than you wanted to know about the lurid crime in Dörnberg.”
“No, actually.” I regarded him distantly through the mist of black lace. “I know nothing about it.”
In reality, I’d heard about nothing but the savage killing of “Wolfgang Schmidt” and his wife for more than a day now. Although I had fled on foot all night to reach the neighboring town of Dörnheim, the news had traveled faster than I did, spread by itinerant merchants traveling from town to town before dawn to sell their wares. When I visited a pawnbroker to sell one of my rings, the man regaled me with the latest whisperings about the horrid double murder. When I went to buy shoes for my bruised and blistered feet, the cobbler could talk of nothing else. When I bought my widow’s weeds, the seamstresses chatted incessantly between themselves while taking my measurements, ghoulishly reveling in every grisly detail of the story while pretending to abhor it. They paid no more heed to me than if I were a dressmaker’s dummy.
Indeed, I needn’t have worried about being implicated in Stefan’s murder at all. People could not believe that a mere woman could be capable of such an act of savagery, so they assumed that I, “Johanna Schmidt,” had become a victim as well, carried off to some unimaginably horrendous fate.
I wanted them to go on thinking so. Hence, my mourning attire. Not only was it appropriate given that I had lost both my husband and my lover, it permitted me to hide my face from the world. The women at the dress shop told me it would take them at least a week to sew a funeral gown for me, but I insisted that they alter one of the store’s existing dresses as best they could so I could leave town by coach immediately. My journey would take me through familiar places, and I did not want anyone to recognize me as Johanna, Katarina, or Liesl. I vowed never again to go by a name someone else imposed upon me.
I arrived in Darmstadt that evening and signed into an inn as “Fräu Neumann.” All that night and the following day, I kept myself cloaked in black from head to foot. When I walked through the streets, the townsfolk made way for me as if I were the Grim Reaper himself. The clerks at the wigmaker’s and the dressmaker’s were somber and solicitous to me as I purchased the items I required for my new incarnation.
As I stepped out of the milliner’s, I caught sight of Birgit emerging from the butcher shop we used to frequent. Despite my desire to remain unnoticed, I stopped and stared.
Birgit went about her business with no visible sign of distress. No doubt she’d had plenty of time to accept my disappearance. But she looked so much older and more haggard than I remembered that I wanted to tear off my veil and run to her, to hug her and say, It’s your Liesl! I’m here, I’m safe—you don’t need to grieve for me anymore.
Instead, I turned and walked in the opposite direction like the complete stranger I now was. That life was over, Liesl long dead.
I was Anna now. Anna Frankenstein, a family name I felt I owned by birthright since it had belonged to my father, my creator.
The next morning, I rose early in my room at the inn and put on one of the cheerful, fashionable frocks I’d purchased. Regarding my reflection in the chamber’s mirror, I pinned up my blonde hair so that I might cover it with the wig of auburn curls I’d also obtained. I smiled at the effect. I hardly recognized myself.
When I was ready, I packed my other personal belongings in my new valise and portmanteau and hired a coach to convey me di
rectly to Castle Frankenstein.
Memories assaulted me as we ascended the winding path up the wooded hill—the sizzle of lightning in my bones, the whistle of musket balls from the baron’s guns, the whiteness of Elizabeth’s rag-doll corpse flung upon her bridal bed. I regressed to the frightened newborn I’d been when I first awoke in the castle, and fought the urge to stop the carriage and flee through the forest on foot as I had before.
The panic passed as soon as the coach drew to a halt at the castle entrance. The matching towers of the old fortress, so ominous in the night, seemed stately, almost quaint in the gentling light of day. I steadied myself and followed the coachman as he carried my luggage up the steps to the front doors. I had a role to play and could not afford a moment’s lapse in courage or concentration.
Fixing a bright smile on my face, I rapped the doorknocker.
As I’d hoped, Victor Frankenstein’s elderly manservant opened the door, looking older and more irascible than ever.
“Hans! You dear fellow . . .” I bustled forward to clasp his hand, thereby pushing my way past the threshold. “Oh, it’s even lovelier than I remember!” I gushed, making a show of marveling at the artwork in the foyer. I waved a hand back toward my luggage on the stoop. “Oh, could you have one of your men fetch my things?”
The flabbergasted butler finally found his tongue. “Forgive me, fräulien, but . . . who are you?”
I feigned shock. “You don’t recognize me? I mean, I know it’s been a long time. I was hardly more than a child the last time I was here, but . . .” I gave him an impish smile, challenging him to identify me.
Hans studied my features, frowning with self-doubt. Perhaps he saw traces of that wild woman who’d escaped the castle tower or that “Hungarian scullery maid” who’d delivered flowers on Baron Frankenstein’s wedding night.
“You look familiar,” he admitted.
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