Frankenstein's Monster

by Susan Heyboer O'Keefe

  It was empty.

  Cursing, I shredded the bedsheets in rage.

  Had I come too soon? Had I entered the wrong room? Had he already left Venice?

  The room held a desk, chair, book, and candle. After slipping the book into my pocket—for even now I could not ignore a gift from Chance—I saw that beneath it was a letter written in English. “My dearest brother,” the letter began. Dated a month ago, it was signed, “Margaret.” Was it Walton’s? Surely he was not the only Englishman in Venice.

  At last, on the floor I saw the large folded sheet that had enveloped it. The letter had come from a Mrs. Gregory Winterbourne in Tarkenville, England, and was addressed, I read with satisfaction, to Robert Walton, in care of an address in Rome. That had been scratched out and an address in Venice written to one side. The letter had taken this long to catch up with him.

  I let the sheet drop to the floor, snuffed out the candle, and stood in the darkness, thinking. Should I wait for his return? Where could he be at this late hour?

  The door cracked open and candlelight streamed in.

  “Signor?”

  I moved farther into the shadows.

  “Signor? You are restless again. Would you like wine? I know you said you never drink. For tonight only, it would help you sleep.…”

  An old woman stepped over the threshold. I pressed myself against the wall and whispered, “Yes, thank you, wine.”

  She stopped. Hesitation, then fear, crossed her broad, innocent face. She backed out of the room, slammed the door, and ran down the hall.

  A moment later I left the way I had entered.

  A wild shriek came from directly below me as a face showed in a first-floor window.

  “Help! Thief, thief!” I dropped to the ground, and the old woman saw me clearly. Her next words were choked. “It’s the giant!” she cried, leaning out of the window.

  Shutters along the street flew open. A man took up the cry.

  “The giant! Don’t let it escape! Kill it!”

  The cry was echoed by some while others hissed. Shoes flew at me. A boot struck me sharply in the head. With unnameable emotion, I shook back my hood. I had not stood undisguised before so many people in ten years. I had often wondered what might happen if I did, and here was my answer: hatred pouring from every open window.

  I stretched my hands out to the night sky. Under the eyes of the crowd I felt tall enough to wipe away the clouds and reveal the stars beyond.

  “Look at me!” I demanded of my audience.

  What was it that suddenly silenced them? In that brief moment of quiet, my arms still flung upward, I turned to each face, one after another, searching its expression for a clue as to what each person saw, what I was. I was hoping for the thinnest thread of connection. Instead, a wave of movement swept along the street: people making the sign of the cross and dropping their eyes. No one would meet my gaze.

  “What do you see? Tell me!”

  Would no one answer? Then—

  “I see a murderer!”

  “Murderer!”

  Someone threw a rotten cabbage. With that, every voice started up again, united in one obscene yell like a dissonant chord struck and pedaled and held. The loudest voice belonged to the old woman, who leaned out perilously far.

  “Murderer!”

  A chamber pot flew at my head. I saw it too late. It was a glancing blow, but it overturned, dumping its cold filth on my face. In it I tasted the heart of Venice.

  I seized the old woman by the scruff of her withered neck, dragged her out of the window, and held her up to the crowd, her tiny bare feet dangling like a hanged man’s.

  “Is it murder you want to see?”

  How quickly they had opened their windows to shout at me. Would they just as quickly come to the woman’s assistance? No one had come to help Lucio when his wife had been attacked. In that forsaken part of the city, no one had answered their cries.

  Again the crowd fell silent. I lowered my arm till the old woman’s body rested against mine and I could feel the frail drumming of her heart. Her eyes were closed; her lips murmured silent prayers. Between my thumb and forefinger her skull was as thin as an eggshell.

  Whistles blew from a distance, footsteps clattered, and the crowd yelled, “Here! The giant is here!”

  I threw the old woman to the ground and ran. At the end of the street appeared the patrol, the men’s faces set in boredom despite the double-time of their march. No doubt this was not the first cry of “giant!” they had investigated this evening. At the sight of me, their expressions caught fire and they charged, spreading out and cutting off my escape. I dashed down the nearest alley. It twisted like a tortured snake, dank ruined walls on either side. There was enough pitting and scarring to provide handholds, but my pursuers were close: they would have time to shoot me down if I tried to go straight up.

  The alley ended at a canal, wide enough to let two gondolas pass each other easily. I climbed over the wrought-iron railing, teetered on the edge of the brickwork, and leapt to the other side. Footsteps echoed down the streets here as well.

  Even the freaks of Venice had been aroused against me. Hunchbacks stoned me, and cripples created a gauntlet of crutches as I ran through the beggars’ quarters. Gleeful virulence united them. As long as I existed, there was someone beneath them they could despise.

  Through the last hours of the night I was chased in one long mad frenzy, up and down streets, along and over canals, from shadow to shadow. My mind drifted back to those final months when my father had chased me over the ice near the pole, the quintessential description of our relationship. I goaded him ever onward. I would never let him catch me, but I would never let him rest.

  Venice was avenging him.

  When I made my way back to the Fondamente Nuove, dawn had begun to lighten the overcast sky from black to dishwater. The dreariness gave the water the opaque milky blue of a cataract eye. I immediately thought of Lucio, then of what I had done to him. Fate had robbed me of possibility, but I had robbed Lucio of happiness he already had.

  A whistle pierced the air.

  “This way!”

  I jumped in.

  I stayed underwater till my lungs burned and my sight ran red with lack of air. When I could no longer bear it, I bobbed up between two gondolas, gasping. Voices exclaimed excitedly from close by:

  “It jumped in here!”

  “Did you see it? It was bigger than two men.”

  “Two? Three!”

  “It was hideous.”

  “There! Did you see something?”

  I swam along the dock; just as quickly the voices followed.

  Then I saw it: a gondola larger than the others, decorated like a macabre gift from a ghoul. From stem to stern it was draped in great pleats of stiff black and gold cloth that covered both sides of the gunnels and hung down into the water. Midway on the gondola’s length to the stern was a large canopy of the same black and gold material. Once more I ducked under. This time, I surfaced between the cloth and the wooden shell of the boat. Now I could keep my head above water without fear of being seen and so outwait my captors.

  It began to rain. Drops striking the thick, stiff material muffled the voices, except when someone stood directly overhead.

  “It’s useless,” I heard at one point. “He must have drowned.”

  More voices from a distance: soft weeping, the sound of arguing, and then, “We have nothing to do with this. Let us pass.”

  The gondola rocked wildly. A sharp thump and scrape, as if a trunk had been brought aboard and shoved aside, then the footsteps of people settling themselves. I had at last found my escape. When the gondola was pushed off from the dock, I would hold on. If the boat moved heavily, I hoped the gondolier would ascribe it to the trunk he carried.

  The trip was far shorter than I had hoped. After the trunk was unloaded and the people had stepped off, the gondola stopped rocking, as if the gondolier, too, had disembarked. The voices faded. After a few minutes
I slid out from under the drape. Only one other boat was tied up. The water was dimpled by the increasingly heavier fall of rain. All I could see was a pinkish stone wall lined with cypress trees. I did not recognize where I was.

  I swam along the wall and was about to pull myself up when I heard voices and hurried footsteps. The gondolier helped two women and a priest into the boat, then pushed off. In a few minutes two younger men approached furtively. They left in the other gondola and rowed in the opposite direction. Pulling myself out of the water and over the wall, I lay behind some thick bushes, waiting. When I was certain that the area was deserted, I ventured onto the grounds to see where I was.

  The tangled bushes gave way to more-sculptured arrangements of shrubs and flowers. Beyond this was a clearing in which stood a church. Fanning out from the church were graves and mausoleums. Some had the smallest of plaques; others, ornate headstones, embellished with leaves and vines and stony-eyed angels. Three graves were open. Not new graves—old ones beneath moss-covered markers. The freshly turned earth scented the air with decaying mold that not even the downfall of rain could erase.

  I advanced to the closest open grave. A cart was set next to it, shovels and picks abandoned on the ground. In the cart was a pile of bones, streaked with brown rivulets as the rain washed away years of accumulated dirt. At first I wondered what terrible deformity gave birth to so many bones within a single frame, then my eyes made out the curves of more than one skull. I was looking at the remains of several bodies thrown together like rubbish.

  I turned my head, blinking rapidly, caught unawares by both the sight and the emotion that it produced. And in turning, I realized for the first time that I could see water in the distance. I turned and turned again. Water in all directions.

  Life had scorned me once more.

  I had escaped from Venice only to be carried to its graveyard, the Isle of the Dead.

  San Michele

  June 5

  The sharp rain, drizzling through that place of fear,

  Pierces the bones gnawed fleshless by despair.

  How dismal, O Death, is the place of thy dwelling!

  The grave locks up the treasure it has found;

  Higher and higher swells the sullen mound—

  Never gives back the grave!

  Never gives back the grave?

  Obviously Schiller had never met my father.

  How strange it is: not that I am lying in a burial place, so true to my nature, but that I am writing in the sunlight, undisguised, open to the day! Despite the rare pleasure I take in this, the warmth and brilliance of the sun do not fool me. I cannot pretend I am a fop lazing in a pasture. I am a dead man resting in a graveyard.

  I know where I am only because Lucio told me the history of this place. Because Venice was running out of land, Napoleon made a decree that is followed today: Burials take place on San Michele. After a fixed time, each body, reduced by then to bones, is removed and put in a common grave on another island, which is used solely as an ossuary.

  When relatives still care about the deceased, they come to San Michele to accompany the bones to the ossuary. When no one cares, which happens more than civilized men are honest enough to admit, the diggers sometimes commingle the bones here to simplify their work, rather than bring each skeleton separately to the other island.

  No one lives on San Michele. The priest who cares for the church is a drunk, but has enough sense, or fear, to return to Venice each night. The gravediggers come on their own gondola. Though the island is small, I am able to hide myself. The mourners do not wander. They proceed from the boat to the church to the grave and return directly.

  Earlier today I met the priest. He believes he has met the Devil.

  Near noon, believing the last funeral had been held, and the last mourners had left, I came out of hiding only to discover the priest still here. He had collapsed in the bushes by the side of the church and knelt there, retching. My guess is that the gondolier had decided the priest was too ill to travel by water and would return for him later, when the danger of vomit in his boat had passed.

  The priest straightened, wiped his mouth, and turned around. He paled when he saw me and pressed his eyes tight.

  “Not another drop, sweet Madonna, I swear it!” he murmured.

  Roughly I pulled him up by his cassock and propped him against the church.

  “How often have you made that promise?” I asked. “How often this week alone?”

  “Too often, I know … But this time, this time …” He opened his eyes. Beneath their bleariness was a strange expression of resignation. “It is at last the end, no? You have come for me. It’s too late for promises. The Devil has come for me.”

  I sat back on my heels and laughed. I liked the idea. Why be some insignificant blot upon nature when I could be Satan himself?

  “So,” I said, playing my part. “You have been a bad man and a worse priest.” He nodded. “Even so, you hope, maybe even secretly believe, that you deserve forgiveness.”

  Clasping his hands at his heart, he asked, “Can the Devil have compassion?”

  He crawled toward me and clutched my leg. His chalky, perspiring skin elicited pity; the mingled smells of wine and vomit, disgust. I pushed him away.

  “What if I told you I wasn’t the Devil?”

  His drunken brain tried to understand my words. “Who are you?” he whispered. He caught hold of my hands: one was larger, rougher, and of a darker complexion than the other. There was no symmetry in me anywhere.

  The priest used his thumbs to trace the scars along my wrist.

  “It’s as though …”

  When he swallowed, his throat clicked.

  “As though what?” I prompted.

  “You were … saved?” he asked.

  “You mean, in the Church?”

  “No, saved, rescued from a horrible accident, and”—he gestured toward my mismatched hands—“patched together with the remains of those … who were less fortunate? A miracle of medicine, no?”

  Slowly I smiled, evilly I smiled, and shook my head.

  “No. This is how my unholy father made me. I was never a baby, never a child, never a youth, and so never a man.” I forced humor back into my words. “Maybe I am a god then, like Athena springing full grown from Zeus’s head.”

  The priest pulled away and dashed off the sign of the cross. Fearing, almost expecting, to be carried off by the Devil, he had developed a measure of acceptance. To be here on earth, helpless before me, was something else. He covered his eyes; tears slid through his fingers as he prayed.

  “Lord, please, isn’t there room in Your infinite mercy, even for one such as me?”

  They were words I myself had whispered many nights. I slapped his face. He fell to the ground and covered his head. While he lay there cowering, I dived off the dock. I stayed in the lagoon till at last the gondolier returned and helped the babbling drunkard off the island.

  June 6

  The rest of the day yesterday and all last night I did not sleep, pacing the graves like a restless ghoul thirsting for something to haunt.

  “The woman is dead. And if she was his, she deserves death!”

  Walton’s words have burned their way through my coarsened flesh: she deserved death—because she accepted the unacceptable, showed mercy to the merciless, brought life to the dead.

  Did Mirabella’s goodness damn her own soul? God is two-faced: overflowing with loving forgiveness, blazing with wrathful judgment. He himself does not know who He is. How then should men? And how do they not go mad, trying to live with such Mystery? Their God is like Walton forever lighting my funeral pyre, while Mirabella forever quenches it with her tears.

  Beneath these thoughts lies a single truth: whether Walton acted out of his own evil or as an agent of a vengeful God, he killed Mirabella. Thus, through him, I am her real murderer. I am the real Devil.

  Not even the Isle of the Dead should be home to me. I should be borne away by the waves until
lost in darkness and distance.

  June 10

  For days now, only black thoughts.

  Walton.

  Walton first, Walton last, Walton always.

  What long ago brought devastation to Frankenstein, what now has brought devastation to me, will surely bring the same to him: to destroy anyone he might love. The letter in his room is from his sister, Mrs. Margaret Winterbourne in Tarkenville, England. I will seek her out, and anyone else he cherishes, and destroy them first, just as I did with my father, just as Walton has done to me. When he receives news of these accumulated tragedies, he will rush home, knowing that only I could have done this.

  He will come home to his own death.

  I grin now as broadly as the smiling skulls around me. The diggers here are not too ambitious and often leave a job half-finished, slipping away once the funerals for the day have ended. It was quite easy to collect a dozen skulls and line them up in rows as a mute audience to my ranting.

  I gesture to my laughing friends and speak aloud: “If any condemn me—speak now!”

  Silence.

  PART TWO

  Dover

  October 1, 1838

  Neptune spoke, and high the forky trident hurl’d,

  Rolls clouds on clouds, and stirs the watery world.

  At once the face of earth and sea deforms,

  Swells all the winds, and rouses all the storms.

  Down rushed the night: east, west, together roar;

  And south and north roll mountains to the shore.

  Then shook the hero, to despair resign’d,

  And question’d thus his yet unconquer’d mind.

  With what a cloud the brows of heaven are crown’d;

  What raging winds! What roaring waters round!

  At length, emerging, from his nostrils wide

  And gushing mouth effused the briny tide.