He closed his eyes and said to me, “Living your life alone, such as I have, gives the mind ample time to consider many things, both wonderful and tragic. I am afforded the luxury of viewing this world around us with an impartial eye, a gift from having existed in the shadows, safe from all those commonly shared misconceptions held by humanity. And I have come to realize that ignorance is the only sin that an intelligent mind can truly commit.”
He stared down at me through those eyes that I once considered so hideous. He said that I should never allow myself to be counted as one among the ignorant. Then he pointed in the direction that would lead me home, saying last, “Go now, Daniel. But take with you the knowledge that there are those in this world who hold your name with deep affection and admiration.”
As I prepared to take my leave of him, at least for the time being, he started coughing. It was a terrible coughing spell that knocked the very wind out of him. He was wheezing as he struggled to breathe, and he lost his strength. His legs grew limp and he braced himself against a large maple tree to keep himself from falling to the ground, clutching his chest as if to calm his pounding heart.
I remained there with him until his pain subsided. And soon he appeared somewhat relieved of this affliction that momentarily weakened that powerful body of his. Still, I realized that he hadn’t much time left, and I was consumed by a sense of dread, now considering what my life would be like without his companionship.
* * *
“The time at length arrives when grief is rather an indulgence than a necessity, and the smile that plays upon the lips, although it may be deemed a sacrilege, is not banished.” Victor Frankenstein once wrote this in his journal, a very long time ago. My father was gone, and nothing was going to change this tragic fact. So I turned instead to this task of reaching my hands into those dark recesses of that seemingly hopeless void that we call death.
The time had come to begin my work on Linda, that she might breathe and walk again. He paced the floor as I worked, filled with nervous anticipation. His spirits were high, and he never once doubted my abilities to perform what he referred to as “the great miracle.”
My work with implanting a healthy new heart and kidneys was performed without flaw. And my scalpel moved with absolute precision. I can think of no perversion to this; with death amounting to nothing more than a minor obstacle to overcome.
And when the last stitch was pulled tight, I ran my fingertips atop of her cold, yet soft flesh—feeling like the artist standing in admiration of his own work created by endless hours of passionate labor.
There she lay with outstretched arms upon that wooden table, resembling an Egyptian mummy. I’d wrapped her in bandages and covered her with white sheets; endless tubes nourished and monitored her.
My eyes finally danced over to where he stood, not more than twenty feet away from this crude operating table. “Magnificent work, Daniel! But when will she awake?”
“Soon,” I answered, peeling off the blood-stained rubber gloves. “You must be patient. But I should remind you that there is every reason to suspect that the brain is damaged. She may have no memory of either you or me, nor facts about her own life.”
He dragged himself past the computers, some stacked on wooden crates, then over to the table where she rested—awaiting that spark of life. He gently held her face in his hands. He was quiet for some time. . . .
“Then we shall just learn to love each other all over again,” he finally said, staring down at her. “She may have no memory of me, but the warmth of her smile must still exist somewhere within.”
From that moment I don’t believe he ever slept, guarding this place outside in the cold from intruders by day and watching me work at night. He continued to pace the floor, as an expectant father might, occasionally asking, “When will she awake?”
My answer to him was always the same. “Be patient. The work with her is a fragile process.”
Then finally did the day come that we both had waited for with such great anticipation. It was under the dark, cold skies of a night in January that I stood over that lifeless body, paddles in hand to deliver a quick jolt of electricity that would spark her heart into beating once again.
My hands pressed the paddles firmly against her chest. Her body jolted, but the monitors recorded no activity by the heart, and Linda continued to lie there—lifeless. I did this again, then for a third time, until he noticed the fingers twitching on her left hand.
There was a scream that could easily be heard from a good mile away. It was a scream, through that bandage-covered face, that played upon the nerves like shattering glass. She thrashed upon the table in a wild frenzy, like a wild animal snared in a trap, her fingers digging into the wooden surface, causing them to bleed.
A scream that sounded eerily like the mad corpse of Linda from my dream, the one who so taunted me. . . .
The screaming ended only after I sedated her, with the creature holding her down; after that, I strapped Linda to the table.
When these convulsions subsided, I carefully cut open the bandages that covered her head, quickly revealing a face frozen with an expression of panic. A set of dark, empty, soulless eyes stared back at me.
The Bible speaks of a soul, does it not, Father? I tell you that these eyes betrayed no evidence of such a thing. My suspicions were correct—tragically so. That brilliant and caring mind that Linda did once possess was indeed damaged, far beyond repair. And that expression of horror on her face was conceived by only the very worst of nightmares that the human mind can imagine. Yet, he saw none of this. He tried to speak with her—to show his deep affection through a touch of his hand to her cheek, trembling with panic as it was. But she hissed back at him, much like a snake. And she would have certainly bitten him if it weren’t for the leather strap over her forehead.
Still, he rested his head against her chest. He wept. His eyes turned to stare up at the ceiling. “Why must I always be punished?”
There was only one thing left to do. I had no other choice but to return her into those cold hands of death. He must have sensed this. He slowly turned to look at me.
“No! I won’t allow it! Not again!”
He grabbed my scalpel. I was physically incapable of stopping him, and my pleas to him not to be a fool fell on deaf ears. From across the room I screamed, “For God’s sake, don’t do it!” But he ignored me, and he cut the leather straps that held down this creature that bore only vague resemblance to Linda.
“Forgive me,” he said, then he freed her.
She rolled off the table and scurried out into the night like a wild animal released from its cage, and from the dark I heard a scream.
“Do you—do you have any idea what you’ve just done?” I yelled, but he only stood there shaking his head—crying—refusing to even look at me.
It wasn’t long before the stories began circulating among the townspeople. There were sightings—and reports of some sort of a primitive animal, who walked on two legs, attacking livestock. I should remind you that Waterford is a farming town. One sheep, found torn to shreds, its pieces half eaten, was more than any one citizen was going to tolerate. But she, or it, or whatever the hell you might call this thing that I had awakened, was not the sole source of their rumors. No! He left me that night, chasing after her in a desperate attempt to be with his beloved Linda. And oh, yes, did they see him as well. A man of gigantic size—twisted—hideous, with a face that even God would consider repulsive.
The townspeople—my neighbors—started talking among themselves in small groups. They met on the streets and at the restaurant near Jordan’s Pond. I heard them as I wandered the town in a daze, considering what to do next—unshaven, still in the very same clothes I wore during her resurrection. I passed by them. From a corner table I sat with a cup of coffee, listening to their wild descriptions. . . .
“It walked like a hunchback, with a face that looked badly burnt,” said one fellow, a farmer, a man well known to my family.
“No!” someone else insisted. The man stood up, resting his hands in the front pockets of his overalls. His face was weathered from many hard years of farming. And he said, “It was much smaller—the size of a woman. But it couldn’t have been a woman, not like any I’d ever seen. It moved on all fours, on its hands and feet, just like a dog, but with the speed of a cat. And it just sat there under a full moon, the leg of a sheep in its hands, with the animal’s blood soaking its face, while it chewed out muscle and skin.”
Then a waitress asked him, “How’d you come across it?”
“Heard the dogs bark in their pens from my bed. I ran into the woods, and that’s when saw it, sitting on the ground. It looked back at me. I’ll never forget those eyes. Black as an onyx, they were. And it snarled, then sprang to its feet, running into the woods. . . .
“Pieces of the poor damn sheep were scattered, and the snow was bright red from blood. Lord, I’ve never seen so much blood. And from a sheep that was still alive, wiggling on its side in the snow like a worm. Had to get my rifle to put the poor animal out of its misery.”
The old farmer slowly rose from his stool. His eyes grew wide. He pointed his finger out toward a sea of faces held fixed to every word he spoke. “That’s when I saw him!”
“A man?” asked the waitress. “Who’d you see?”
“Who? More like what. It was gigantic—twice my own size. The face and hands were all yellow. A few strands of hair hung over its head. I saw teeth but no lips.”
“Did you get a shot off at it?” a man asked from the counter.
He slowly shook his head to say no. “I took aim at it, but then . . . That thing talked to me. He did! Believe me, it actually talked.”
“What’d it say?” another farmer asked him. “You sure it wasn’t just making noises that sounded like talking?”
“No, it talked to me. Said it was sorry . . .”
The fools! The damn fools made a resolution among themselves to lock up all the livestock: sheep, cows, every living thing on their farms. They cut off her food supply. And I would remind you that it was the dead of winter. There was no wild game to hunt.
Except for man!
Fresh meat was meat. Her taste wasn’t the least bit discriminating. The fools. They would save the lives of their farm animals at the cost of their own!
But what was I to say? What could I have said? That these creatures seen were concocted in a laboratory? Just bits and pieces sewed together, then given life? I can hear the laughter now, calling me insane.
I tried to say that their hopes to push this creature out of the area in search of food elsewhere would fail. But they quickly disagreed.
“Sorry, Doctor,” a man said to me. “This is a job best left for us to handle.”
You see, they were hunters—men accustomed to the woods and the ways of nature. That’s what they thought, at least. And given most normal circumstances they would have been right.
So I said nothing more. I wished them the very best of luck. And considering his intellect and strength, combined with her feral behavior that best resembled a homicidal psychopath, they were going to need every bit of luck they could muster among themselves.
Margaret O’Brien was a woman whom everyone in town knew. And like most, she never missed Wednesday night bingo at the local firehouse. Poor, sweet old Margaret. If only she had stayed home that night after the livestock was secured by the farmers.
Margaret was the first of her human victims. And come dawn, when her car was found abandoned at the far end of the firehouse’s parking lot with the side windows smashed out, the townspeople immediately launched a search of the woods nearby.
It didn’t take long for volunteers to find what was left of her. I’ll spare you the details, Father, but suffice it to say, she was in much worse shape than the sheep. It was clear that this same wild creature, seen attacking livestock, was to blame for that grisly murder of this mother of five, grandmother to three.
Afraid? No, I wasn’t afraid, I was terrified! To know that she was out there—somewhere. So I vowed to put an end to this catastrophe by finding her the next morning. I climbed a hill in the predawn hours and moved cautiously through the woods. The hills of Connecticut from the background were still wrapped in their night robes of mist when I set out. A morning breeze shook the sleep from the pines; their drooping green limbs curled and ruffled in the wind.
A journey into the tangled woods of Waterford is very much like a journey through life, Father. The miracle of life is that each new day brings fresh hope—for atonement, redemption, or a new direction to lead a straying soul home. It gives the soul boundless pleasure to perceive the main path after being hopelessly tangled in a labyrinth of misguided pursuits. But it also brings many false paths, or ones that lead nowhere.
The weather and visibility were both on my side, once the mist cleared away. It seemed as if nature was pleased with me, for once. In a small clearing I chained a sheep I had stolen from a neighboring farm to a tree for bait, then waited ever so patiently in the brush with my father’s rifle—well, truthfully, my rifle now. . . .
Then finally I heard the sheep cry out. I quietly put my finger against the cold steel trigger and closed my left eye. I braced my left elbow atop my knee.
And then I saw her, scurrying toward the animal on all fours.
Linda was still dressed in bandages, but they were torn and blood soaked. She jumped toward the sheep, and I squeezed the trigger. . . .
A shot fired out like a crack of thunder. The hills in the background re-echoed the shot that I fired, and I saw Linda take a spin, her left hand clutching the opposite shoulder.
She screamed.
Just as I would always remember the moment I first met Linda in the admiral’s office in Anchorage, I also will always remember that blood-chilling scream.
As she attempted to run from the clearing, I put a second shot into her leg. She still tried to crawl away on the surface of the snow-covered ground. That’s when I finally made my approach.
When I stood over her, she hissed back at me. I pointed the rifle to her forehead. But before I squeezed off that last shot that would shatter her head and put an end to such a miserable existence, I said, “Forgive me Linda, please.”
Then I closed my eyes.
I pulled the trigger.
It was finally over.
Then I looked for him. I was sure he’d be somewhere close by. But no, I didn’t see him, not when I picked Linda up and put her over my shoulder, and not when I carried her to that deserted barn where I had revived her.
When I arrived at his secret place, I set Linda down in the middle of the room where all of modern technology surrounded us. She wore an expression still frozen with horror that not even death could erase. The dark soulless eyes. That vague resemblance of a once-magnificent woman.
Over by the generator I found a five-gallon can of gasoline. I poured gasoline over everything. It filled me with a certain sense of satisfaction. Everything! The computers, her body, the entire floor, in fact. Nothing was spared.
I struck a match and tossed it into the building from outside. A fierce explosion knocked out the walls. The roof collapsed, and the pile of wreckage burst into flames. It burned! It was a cleansing fire, and everything was consumed. But still, there was no sign of him. And if he were anywhere close by, the fire would have certainly alerted him. I should point out that his health was failing, or so I thought. I was certain that he was either dead or dying somewhere in the woods. Or maybe he broke through the ice of a pond.
I did look for him, Father, truly. Many times, in fact. I would start at sunrise, combing every section of woods in town. You see, I was haunted by the thought of him slowly dying somewhere, unable to move, and I was afraid that the wildlife, as scarce as it was for this time of the year, would have at him—eating him alive. It was a horrible thought, but that’s what I feared for him. Still, I found nothing.
The journal was never destroyed. Why? That’s the one
question I can’t answer. Part of me wanted to destroy it. I even brought it down to our kitchen woodstove once. I opened its cast iron door. I stared into the flames, holding the book in my hands. But something told me not to. I don’t know why. I simply couldn’t.
Instead, I decided to return it to Oxford, in England. I took my leave of my family, extended my sabbatical at Princeton, and booked a flight across the Atlantic. I planned to bury this disaster in the famous university’s archives, where Novelli had found it, or at least the first half, and hope it stayed buried for at least another two hundred years.
FIVE
Shall each man find a wife for his bosom, and each beast have his mate, and I be alone? I had feelings of affection, and they were requited by detestation and scorn. Man! You may hate; but beware! Your hours will pass in dread and misery, and soon the bolt will fall which must ravish from you your happiness forever. Are you to be happy while I grovel in the intensity of my wretchedness? You can blast my other passions; but revenge remains—revenge, hence forth dearer than light or food! I may die; but first you, my tyrant and tormentor, shall curse the sun that gazes on your misery. Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful. I will watch with the wiliness of a snake, that I may sting with its venom. Man! You shall repent of the injuries you inflict. —The Creature, 1793
In England I found nothing but life and movement. In the small pubs of London I lost myself in the flux and passions of carefree tavern folks. Small groups would arrive and refresh themselves—toss a few darts, receive quick winks from the barmaids, flick them under the chin, and be swept out into the streets as new arrivals took their place. There was singing, joking, questions, and greetings: Fine weather! Your health? Hello—goodbye. In London I found youth. In England I found life! I stayed at an inn near the marketplace of London. And I would have enjoyed the dinner they served me better if the manager hadn’t joined me at the table. His face was long and his questions, if possible, even longer. Luckily, another traveler arrived who had to answer his same questions and in the very same order.
Frankenstein: The Legacy Page 7
