“There were many like her who helped form me.”
Whatever fear or hesitation Lily showed before was driven out by impatience.
“Yes, many like her,” she said, “and a whole herd of cattle as well!” She stamped her foot imperiously. “Now lead me back to the church, Victor. I am cold.”
I threw the body to the side, grabbed Lily by the back of the neck, forced her to her knees over the corpse, and pressed her head down till her face rubbed the dead woman’s.
“Cold, yes, but not half so cold as she!” Delirium ringed round my mind and began to dance. I gave Lily a final push and threw her onto the corpse. With a choked cry, she scrambled up, bumping into headstones, tripping on rough ground. I did not care whether she returned to the church or fled down the road; it was with both malice and kindness that I had shocked her.
I felt raw, as if my nerves had been sewn outside my skin, yet again I pulled the corpse onto my lap. However appalling it had been to thrust my hands into a tub of cooling animal guts, knowing mine were the same, it was more appalling to hold the human dead, knowing it had been violated to make me. Human life was sacred. I had come to recognize that, though I neither possessed what was sacred, nor could understand its secret.
Presently the grave robber returned without the horse and wagon.
“A wheel is stuck in a rut, and the horse is shakin’ behind a gravestone, like it heard your poem and did nae like it.” He raised an eyebrow at how I and my new acquaintance sat so familiarly.
“Come join us, sir,” I urged, unwilling to leave. The longer I stayed here, the more distance I would put between myself and Lily. “Sit with us and tell us your story, for surely there’s one behind your coming here tonight.”
“I’ll wager yours is more interestin’.” He sat down, but at several arm lengths away.
“I know mine,” I answered. “First, your name.”
“I’m Ailbert Cameron,” he said. “Cam to my friends, and any as what digs graves for me.” He pulled his flask out of his pocket and was polite enough to offer it to me before taking a drink himself.
“I don’t drink,” I said, remembering that exceptional evening in Winterbourne’s study.
“Never?” His mouth gaped. “With a face like yours?” He gulped and turned as gray as the fog, perhaps realizing how much offense his words could cause—and not knowing if my temper matched my face.
“I did try it once …”
He so eagerly asked me to share the tale—which would distract me from his insult—that I could not refuse him. I pulled the corpse closer and tucked its head beneath my chin. What had seemed dreadful a short time ago had lost its ability to make me giddy with horror.
It had been about five years ago, I told him. I was in Spain, about twenty miles north of Barcelona, on a rainy night after a rainy day. I was soaked through; indeed, I could have wrung out my cloak and had enough to wash with. I came across cultivated land and a curious set of buildings; a second group was set up higher. I broke into one of the large buildings lower on the hill.
“I went inside,” I said. “My nose was assaulted: yeasty, then vinegary; fruity, then sour and rotten. Sweat covered my face, attracting tiny bugs that itched madly. Wandering around in the dark, I bumped into a huge wooden panel. It startled me, as the wood possessed the warmth of a living thing. It was a vat, just one of many—fermenting vats.”
“And in them?”
“Wine.”
“Nae to my likin’, but we each want death to taste a certain way. So there you were, vats on all sides. Were you brave?”
“It was an honorable match, though I was bested in the end.”
The corpse slipped, threatening to roll down and unwind its sheet back to the grave. I caught its neck in the crook of my elbow, stretched my other arm round its hips, then pulled the body onto the ground next to me.
Cam encouraged me to continue. I began to drink, I told him, and was soon flushed with wine, but shivering with the wet. I made a fire using empty casks. I was not drunk, I told myself, otherwise I could not have had the sober thought of keeping the fire on the stone floor and not the wooden one.
He nodded. “It’s the sober thought that’s most cunning.”
“I stripped, laid my clothes out to dry, opened another bottle, and fell asleep. I was wakened by a shriek. I tried to lift my head. Somehow it had tripled in size. After great difficulty, I succeeded in opening my eyes. I looked down and saw two gigantic bare feet, which greatly alarmed me until I recognized them as my own. Then I looked up. Before me stood a line of nuns. They had come to hear Mass and had smelled the smoke.”
Cam slapped his knee appreciatively. “It would reform any man, a sight like that.”
“When I tried to cover myself, the floor rolled beneath me like storm waves.
“ ‘Keep still,’ one of the nuns said, ‘or we’ll be cleaning up puke. And don’t clutch yourself like that. You’ve nothing we haven’t seen before, though not quite so …’
“ ‘So big, María Tomás?’ one of the older nuns offered.”
At this I stopped talking. Cam poked me.
“And then?”
“Then Sister María Tomás sobered me up and told me to go and drink no more,” I said, forcing myself to smile.
I stopped my story there. Cam’s lips moved noiselessly as if he were already adding a more comic conclusion to the tale to suit his retelling. At last we both stood, the corpse still on the ground between us. I lifted it up and swung it onto my shoulder.
“You best find your woman now,” he said. “It’s late.”
“I wish I could persuade her to remain in the church. Let her plague whoever first comes to pray in the morning.”
“You’d be rid of her then?”
“She is mine neither to leave nor take.”
“Well, this one is,” he said cheerfully and patted the dead woman’s rump.
He led me to the horse. After I put the body in the wagon, I threw my cloak in the back next to it and lifted the wheel out of the rut.
Lily must have been nearby the whole time, for she rushed out of the fog.
“You cannot leave me, Victor,” she pleaded. Like a child, she pulled at my sleeve.
Silently I climbed into the wagon and helped her up next to me. Cam nodded, a satisfied expression on his face.
The ride was long and bumpy: Cam in front; Lily, myself, and the corpse in back. After a while, Lily leaned her head close and, with her eyes cast downward, whispered: “Your words to me in the graveyard … I have always believed your story of being the Patchwork Man, but seeing you there holding the corpse, and knowing you are the same …”
There was something in her voice I had never heard before and could not identify, something soft and at the same time unsettling. Perhaps the graveyard had revealed to her not just my past, but her own immediate future.
Remembering my father’s journal, I said, “Book knowledge is never quite as vivid, nor as bloody, as experience.”
She found my hand and traced the scars where it was joined to the wrist. “You were trying to frighten me in the graveyard, weren’t you? So that I would not stay?” I shook her off. “I will not be frightened, Victor, not by what you are or by what you were.”
As if to prove her words, she lay down and, using the bundled-up dead body as a pillow, fell asleep.
December 11
Cam left us at the edges of Malverness, the better to slip unseen into town with his illegal delivery. It was just before dawn. By the time I found the market square, morning had fully come. The place was busy with peddlers, farmers, housewives, and servants, all haggling over the prices of buttons and lace, eggs and butter, turnips and beets. Hunched over, I watched the crowd, wondering whether it would be better to beg or to steal something for Lily. She would not be able to eat it, but I would rather waste the food than have none for her if she asked.
Lily snatched the hood from my head and showed my face.
“Stand up!
Let them see who you are!” she said fiercely.
I thought she mocked me, yet no smirk deformed her mouth.
I stood in the middle of the market square, as good as naked. I could not read what thoughts lay behind the widely opened eyes as people gasped. Lily, too, stared as if seeing me for the first time. But this was not a party for the gentry. This was business—food on the table, and clothes on the back—and so, in a few moments, business went on, even if conducted at a wary distance.
It is late afternoon as I write this at the side of the road, my face once more covered, even though there is no one here to see it. Just a few minutes ago Lily approached shyly, holding an oatcake.
“You should eat it,” she said, offering me her own sparse meal. “I’ll only gag on it. Cake?” She tucked it into my hand. “I think they call it that to tease children.”
“Why did you bare my face?”
“Was I foolish to have done it?” She turned away, her expression remorseful. “I have been foolish all along.”
She ran across the road and into the field. What new trick was this? Did she expect me to go after her? Raw with uncertainty, I remained where I was.
Only now do I remember that in this last town I did not look for another place where I might leave her.
December 12
There is no word to describe Lily’s behavior. Against expectation she has been sweet and mild and neither morose nor giddy. She speaks softly, touches me with a light, lingering hand, and stands so close as to insinuate herself into my every breath. More astounding, she looks grieved when I pull away.
It was easier living with her hatred than expecting deviousness. It was easier knowing I could leave her at any time than wondering if she may hold something for me.
At such moments I fear that the world has shown me more compassion than I have ever known, but that Walton had so poisoned my mind I could not or would not see it—and perhaps never will. Lucio, Reverend Graham, Winterbourne … the people in the market who stared but did not attack me. Even years ago, there were those who saw and did not turn away.
Since talking to Cam, my mind has wandered again and again to that part of the story about the winery I had not shared, the part about Sister María Tomás.
Sister María Tomás was a plump woman of middle age in whose red-cheeked face one could see both the dazzling beauty of her youth and the bare skull of her inevitable death. Her wit was sharp, her criticism sharper. She spoke and laughed and walked more loudly than anyone, yet was given to such meditative silences she could not be roused.
When I had first awakened in the winery, I could not lift my head from the floor. The nuns stood fixated. Finally, María Tomás shooed them into action—the ones who were not in a faint or had not run off—sending them to Mass with the instruction that someone rush back with the abbess, the abbot, and Brother Mateo, who acted as physician for both communities.
Waiting for them, Sister María Tomás removed her veil to let me cover myself, which still left her head and hair swathed in a white wimple, snug around her face and neck. She sorted through my clothes to see what had dried. Each effort of my own made the room tilt, so she tried to pull on my breeches for me. The movement was too much. Quickly she knocked over an empty cask and rolled it to where I lay. I vomited till I sank to the floor, trembling and weak. When I opened my eyes, I saw the abbot, the abbess, and Brother Mateo looking on.
Brother Mateo was the oldest of them and the shortest.
“This must be the monster the man spoke of,” he said calmly.
“What man?” asked the abbess. She stood just inside the door, clearly troubled by my presence.
“Late last night a man knocked at the gate and wanted to know if we’d seen a monster.” As he spoke, he tried his own luck with my breeches. “The thing would murder us in our sleep, the man said, so we must give it up at once.”
The abbot’s brows drew close in a frown.
“What should we do?” he asked the abbess.
Before she could answer, María Tomás blew out a derisive breath, grabbed the breeches from Brother Mateo, and shook them impatiently.
“What should we do? We should wrap the poor creature in a sheet and care for him right here till he can dress himself.” She quickly dipped her white-capped head. “Forgive me, Reverend Mother, Father Abbot,” she said, without a trace of apology in her voice. “I speak out of turn. As always.”
“Well, Father,” said the abbess. “I’m glad the visitor is relying on your generosity and not mine. However”—her mouth stretched thin in a tight smile—“I suspect there’ll be more vomit to clean up. I offer you Sister María Tomás for help.”
Attacked by nausea, headache, and dizziness, I did not realize my vulnerability until later. Walton had been just yards away, while I had been drunk, dulled to threat, at times unconscious and snoring. The lesson was quickly taught to me again. Walking on wobbly legs to the monastery’s sickroom, I heard that the strange man had returned that morning.
“What did you tell him?” I asked Mateo, at last able to speak.
“Brother Porter answered the door. He said there was none beneath our roof whom God did not love.”
“Brother Porter has not seen me,” I said, smiling grimly.
Other monks visited throughout the day, one by one peering into the sickroom. The rule of silence was helpless before me, and my presence was debated in forbidden whispers: I was a drunkard. A murderer. The Devil himself. I was a portent. A prophet. A test of faith.
The next day, the abbot and the abbess explained their dilemma: They could not endanger their communities’ safety. They did not want to endanger mine. They could not allow their contemplative existence to be disturbed. They did not want to expel a soul in need. No one spoke for an unbearable length of time, and then they left.
Sister María Tomás was the only other nun I saw, as women never entered the monks’ living quarters; indeed, even in the church, they remained behind a screened-off area. Her heavy footsteps, direct speech, and boisterous laugh echoed throughout the monastery halls, despite her entering and leaving from the outside directly into the sickroom. Brother Mateo, who might be at my side praying, would frown as if his ears hurt and slip out before she arrived.
She was not always full of noise. Sometimes, she would spend an hour doing no more than studying my face.
“You are like a tremendous quilt of God’s people,” she said, her words uncannily close to the truth. “There must be a story in each stitch, and a lifetime in each seam. Will you not tell me what happened?”
“I did not know that nuns were confessors,” I said.
“We are not, but we’re just as curious!” Then, hearing someone in the hall, she scooped up a book and read aloud an edifying tale of martyrdom.
María Tomás told me why she was allowed such freedom with me. She was often intolerant of her sister nuns. The abbess thought that caring for someone as extraordinarily “different” as me was a providential opportunity for María Tomás to learn acceptance.
Had I been dropped back in time to the Dark Ages? When and where else might a monster appear at the door and thought to be didactic? Her own attitude was more earthy.
“I believe Reverend Mother is hoping you are a murderer,” she said cheerfully. “You will save her the trouble of strangling me herself.”
“You have not learned to be more accepting then?” I asked.
She laughed, because she always laughed.
“You are beyond ugliness,” she answered. “But you are neither willfully stupid nor willfully mean-spirited, unlike some of my sisters. Therefore, I doubt that you can teach me—at least not the lesson Mother hopes I will learn!”
I malingered, relishing each extraordinary moment. My fourth morning there, María Tomás entered the room with an expression that told me everything before she spoke.
“You must leave,” she said. “No one here fears you,” she lied. “It is that strange man. He will not quit the grounds. Just n
ow he tried to force his way into the convent itself and almost became violent.”
I nodded and stood up to leave.
She had hastily arranged a plan. At that very moment, the abbess was arguing with Walton and would finally allow him to search the convent buildings—with several brothers accompanying him, of course—while all the nuns gathered in the chapel. He could search the monastery as well, she would say, although she had no authority to allow such a thing. While he searched the convent, I would sneak out on the far side of the monastery and flee.
“The plan is too obvious!” María Tomás sighed. “But there’s no time to be clever.”
She put together some items to take with me: enough bread and cheese for several days, candles, two blank ledgers for journals, and a Bible. Patting the wrapped package, she said, “The ledgers were my idea, the Bible was Reverend Mother’s. She hopes you will find in it the road to Godliness.”
“What do you think I’ll find, Sister?”
Her expression softened to a saint’s smile, holding within it a saint’s sadness.
“Good stories. Consolation. I hope much more. For many, Heaven and earth themselves are there to be found.”
As we parted, she took me by the cloak and pulled my face down to hers.
“My prayers will be with you,” she whispered, “for I fear the life you must lead.”
She kissed my lips, both cheeks, my closed eyes, and my forehead. Her mouth was sweet and as soft as a blessing against my skin. What manner of lover might she have made, what manner of mother, if she had not chosen her present path?
I stepped through the door from the sickroom to the outside and felt, as keenly as a razor’s slash, the difference of those few feet from inside to outside. María Tomás grabbed my cloak again.
“Remember this,” she said fiercely: “ ‘And God created man to his own image: to the image of God he created him. And God saw all the things that He had made and they were very good.’ ”
I roughly jerked away and left.
December 13
I must learn that Walton’s hatred lived in his heart alone. And though Lily is Walton’s niece, what she feels is hers alone. Over time it might turn to genuine warmth, just as mine toward her is softening.
Frankenstein's Monster Page 20
