The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

by Peter Ackroyd

  I walked outside where my attention was drawn at once to a line of Parisians standing and shuffling their feet outside a pair of folding gates. Some were obviously poor, some affluent, and some of that mixed nature known to the English as shabby genteel. But their variety interested me. They stood nervously and uncertainly before the gates, speaking not at all and keeping their eyes averted from one another. I asked the proprietor, who was standing in the porch of the inn, what this signified. “Ah, monsieur, we do not talk of it.” Why did they not speak of it? “It is bad fortune for the inn. C’est la maison des morts. La Morgue.”

  The house of the dead? I believed I knew to what he was referring. It was an institution well known in the city, where the unidentified bodies of the dead were put on display at certain fixed points of the day so that they might be recognised by friends or relatives. There are no doubt some who consider it to be an unpleasing spectacle, but I was delighted by the good fortune that had put it in my way. I could see nothing to loathe in nature. Just as there are some who love to walk in ruins, savouring the traces and sensations of old time, so I saw no objection to walking among the dead and the decomposed. The human frame is in a continual state of decomposition, day by day; its tissues and its fibres wear away, even as we use them, and I saw nothing to be feared in the close observation of that process. If I were to be practised in the art and method of anatomy, I must also observe the natural corruption of the human body.

  So I joined the waiting Parisians and, when the folding gates were unlocked by an official, I moved forward into the Morgue. I became at once aware of a peculiar and not unpleasing odour, much like that of damp umbrellas or of the wet straw generally to be found on the floor of a hansom cab. The air was humid, as if a coal fire had been introduced into the room. It was a long low chamber with small-paned windows, much like the interior of a London coffee-house. Where the seats and boxes might have been there were several shallow partitions, with sloping platforms fixed in them. On these the bodies of the dead had been placed, with their clothes hanging above them as a further means of identification. Each was protected from the inquisitive throng by a sheet of plate glass, just as if they were lying in the window of a shop. There were five on the occasion of my visit, three males and two females, and it was a nice calculation to determine the causes of their deaths. One middle-aged man, thickset with a heavy jaw and shaved head, appeared to have been burned; but the livid red bruising, and the swollen limbs, convinced me that he had been drowned. My guess was confirmed when I noticed the pool of water seeping below the body. The face of an adjacent female was almost unrecognisable, looking like nothing so much as a bunch of bruised and overripe grapes: I could fathom no reason for the savage pulping of her visage, unless it were some frightful accident. Yet she interested me. The rest of her body was quite untouched, apart from some streaks of blood and dirt, and it occurred to me that with a new head she might have been an object of lust. She could be identified now only by a lover, or perhaps by a parent.

  I did not approach these sights with any levity, but I did not feel the least repulsion; my principal feeling was one of fascination for the curious stillness of the bodies. Once the principle of life had left them they became vacant rooms, more devoid of animation than any waxwork or mannequin. You could imagine a waxwork to be capable of breath and movement, but no act of sympathetic imagination could grant these cold limbs life. I was looking at objects that would never be able to return my look.

  In another partition I found the body of an elderly man who had no mark upon him at all. I could tell from his curled boots, placed beside him, that he was an artisan or labourer. There was a curious feature about him, however. I noticed a slight wetness about his eyes, and what seemed to be a tear had settled upon his cheek. The residue of emotion, on what was now an empty visage, affected me in the strangest way. I turned to leave, and was caught momentarily in the crowd clustering around. I glanced towards the open door, at the far end of the low room, and for a moment caught sight of an elderly man standing beside it. He seemed to be exactly the man I had just seen behind the glass, as if by some intervention of the black arts he had brushed away the tear and come alive. Then he smiled at me. I knew all this to be a momentary illusion, but it did not lessen my horror. I walked slowly towards the door, where the official of the Morgue held out his hand for a pourboire, but the figure of the old man had gone. I was relieved to find myself in the open air of the street, and tried to dismiss the incident from my mind, but it lingered with me even as I climbed the stair to the chamber in the inn.

  My fellow traveller, Armitage, was lying on his bed fully clothed. Fresh as I was from the sights of the Morgue, for a moment he startled me. “Now, Mr. Frankenstein,” he said. “Will you sup with me? The wine here is very cheap.” He had a low, deep voice that for no reason at all irritated me.

  “An early night for me, I am afraid. The coach for Dijon leaves at daybreak. It will be a hard journey.”

  “So you need sustenance.” He was older than me, at the age of thirty or thereabouts, but he had an indefinably ancient manner. “You gentlemen of Oxford have been known to starve.”

  “How do you know that I am from Oxford?”

  “It is printed on your luggage. Eyes, you see. Good eyes.” I had already become aware that he was a salesman of optical goods. “The eye is a tender organism.” He spoke slowly, and with great emphasis. “It swims in a sea of water.”

  “I beg your pardon. It does not.”

  “Oh?”

  “It has roots and tendrils. It is like a trailing plant connected to the soil of the brain.”

  “Can we say that it is like a lily? It swims on the surface.”

  “You may say that, Mr. Armitage.”

  He smiled broadly, having settled the matter to his satisfaction, and clapped me on the back as if he were congratulating me for agreeing with him. “We must get you bread. And meat. And wine.”

  Over the rough meal, which the chambermaid brought to us, we exchanged the usual remarks. He lived in Friday Street, off Cheapside, with his father; his father manufactured the lenses and the spectacles, in a workshop on the ground floor of their property, while he acted as a commercial traveller. He had taken advantage of the peace to sail to France, with specimens of his father’s latest work. “You will not find lenses more finely ground,” he said. “You can pick out a distant spire by moonlight.”

  “Does he build microscopes?”

  “Of course he does. At the moment he has in hand a design that has cylindrical eyes, so to speak, that will make the smallest object clear.”

  “I would be very interested in that.”

  “You would? What is your study at Oxford, Mr. Frankenstein?”

  “I am concerned with the workings of human life.”

  “Is that all?” He smiled at me. I could not imagine him breaking into laughter.

  “That is how I learned of the nervous fibres of the eye.”

  “You are an anatomist then?” He suddenly became very grave, as if I had trespassed upon some private pursuit.

  “Not exactly. Not essentially. I cannot claim any great proficiency.”

  “Do you know how long the eye survives when it is released from its casing?”

  “I have no idea. Minutes, perhaps-”

  “Thirty-four seconds. Before its light is extinguished for ever.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “They dry very quickly, when they have left the socket. Do not ask me how I know.”

  “But if they were kept in an aqueous solution, what then?”

  “Then, Mr. Frankenstein, you would be considered to ask too much.” He began to eat, very slowly, the meat and bread upon his plate.

  I remembered the phrase from Terence. “Nothing human is alien to me, Mr. Armitage.”

  He did not answer but continued chewing on his meat. It was veal, as I remember, coated in breadcrumbs in the manner of my compatriots. I had very little appetite for it. Occasion
ally he would look up at me, with no particular expression in his eye beyond that of calm observation. Eventually he spoke. “My father had an interesting apprenticeship. From the age of fourteen he worked for Dr. John Hunter. Do you know that name?”

  “Indeed. Very well.” Hunter’s reputation as a surgeon and anatomist had reached me even in Geneva, where his Natural History of Teeth had been translated into French.

  “Dr. Hunter was a great observer of the body, Mr. Frankenstein. He made it his profession.”

  “So I have read.”

  “His surgical work was second to none. My father has known him to remove a bladder stone in less than three minutes.”

  “Truly?”

  “And the patient did not die.” Armitage concentrated once more upon his plate, where he was now very deliberately mopping up the crumbs with a portion of bread soaked in wine. “My father still has the stone.”

  “The patient did not want it?”

  “No. Dr. Hunter called it treasure-trove.”

  “But what happened to the eyes?”

  “I told you. The patient was still alive. Much to his surprise.”

  “Not his. The other eyes that were preserved in water. I presume that they were taken from the bodies of the less fortunate.”

  Armitage stared at me with the same curiously dispassionate gaze. “If the patient has died in the operating theatre, then to whom does he belong?” I said nothing, believing that I had already said too much. “Dr. Hunter took the view that, having been entrusted into his care, the body was his responsibility. It became, in a sense, his property.”

  “I would not disagree.”

  “Excellent. I am speaking to you now in the utmost harmony of good companionship. These facts are not widely known beyond the confines of the medical schools.” My mouth had become dry, and I swallowed a glassful of the wine. “Dr. Hunter believed that the limbs and organs of the deceased patient were of more value to his students than to the soil in which they would otherwise lie. There was a young man, one of Dr. Hunter’s assistants, who had a particular interest in the spleen. So-” Armitage stopped, and surprised me with a broad smile. “As we say in Cheapside, Mr. Frankenstein, it passed under the counter.”

  “And your father had a particular interest in eyes?”

  “He had always possessed perfect eyesight. It was remarked of him at a very early age. He became interested in the subject, as boys do. I do not know if you have in your country the travelling telescope?” I shook my head. “They are set up in the thoroughfare, and for a small sum you can purchase their use for five minutes. There was always one in the Strand. As a boy, my father loved it. So by degrees he became interested in the relationship between the lens and the eye. Do you know that the eye has its own lens, as permeable as a gas bubble?”

  “I was aware of it.”

  “It is covered by an exceedingly thin and fine film of transparent substance that my father has named the orb tissue.”

  “Your father is an experimentalist, then?”

  “I do not know if that is the word, Mr. Frankenstein.” Armitage poured us both another glass of wine. “I will tell you another secret. There were occasions when the patient did not die, of course. That was a source of great satisfaction to Dr. Hunter. But it posed another problem.”

  “Of what nature?”

  “Scarcity, sir.”

  “I believe I understand you. Scarcity of corpses. The readies.”

  “It is not a subject that normally arises in conversation. But it was a constant topic among Dr. Hunter and his assistants.”

  “How did it resolve itself?”

  “You have heard of the resurrectionists, I suppose?”

  “Only by report.”

  “They are not much mentioned in the public prints these days. But they operate still.”

  I was acquainted with the activities of these grave-robbers, or “resurrection men” as they were more generally known. There had been occasional reports of their activity even in Oxford, but there had been no sensations. They were more active in London, where they dug up the fresh bodies of the lately dead and sold them for large sums to the medical schools. “Dr. Hunter was obliged to use their services?”

  Armitage nodded. “Reluctantly. He told my father that if these purloined bodies helped to restore life to others, then he could not wholly regret their use.”

  “Life for death is a good bargain.”

  “You would be welcome on Cheapside, Mr. Frankenstein. My father agreed with you, and helped to negotiate with the men of the resurrectionist profession. He came to know them very well. He said that not one of them was ever sober.”

  “You say that they work still?”

  “Of course. It is a family trade. They frequent certain inns, where they can be persuaded to-” He raised his hand to his lips, in a gesture of drinking. “Unfortunately there was a trial of one of them, for the theft of a silver crucifix from one of the bodies. He blabbed out the name of Dr. Hunter.”

  “And then?”

  “It passed over quickly enough. But there was a pamphlet with his name linked to the vampire. You have heard of this entity, Mr. Frankenstein?”

  “It is a Magyar superstition. Of no interest.”

  “I am glad to hear it. It concerned Dr. Hunter at the time, but his work carried him forward.”

  “His work was his life.”

  “Yes, indeed. You are very perceptive, if I may say so.” He took some more wine. “You said that you were studying the workings of human life. May I ask what particular aspect interests you?”

  I believe that I hesitated for a moment. “I am concerned with the structure of all animals endued with life.”

  “To what purpose?”

  “I mean to discover the source of that life.”

  “But this would include the human frame?”

  “I am determined to proceed by degrees, Mr. Armitage.”

  “In such a vast undertaking, that is proper. I believe that only a young man could conceive such a scheme. It is tremendous. I would very much like to introduce you to my father.”

  “Certainly. I would like to see his eyes.”

  He laughed aloud at this, and clapped me upon the back again as if I were the best fellow in the world. “And so you shall. But beware. His look is very keen.”

  6

  BY THE TIME I ARRIVED IN GENEVA I was sore and weary; the journey across France had been a difficult one, made infinitely more uncomfortable by the heavy rain that started as soon as the coach had left Paris. Only my eagerness to see my sister kept up my spirits. My father’s house was in the Rue de Purgatoire, just below the cathedral; he had purchased it many years previously, for his business dealings in the city, and I knew the neighbourhood very well. A local boy acted as my porter, and I hurried ahead through the familiar steep streets above the lake.

  I was met by a house of silence. Eventually, after my repeated knocking, a young maidservant came to the door. I did not recognise her, and the slow-witted girl did not seem to know that there was such a thing as the son of the household. By dint of my long explanations, in her native dialect, reluctantly she allowed me to enter the house. Perhaps she discerned some resemblance between myself and Elizabeth. I learned from her that my sister was staying in a sanatorium in Versoix, a small town by the shore of the lake, and that my father had taken a villa there to be near her. It was too late to think of travelling and, in my exhaustion, I chose a bedchamber almost at random before sinking into a profound sleep.

  The next morning I set out on foot to Versoix. It was no more than two or three miles along the shore, and I took advantage of the fine weather to savour my return to my native land. It was pleasant to recall the quietness and good nature of my countrymen, especially after the surliness of the English, and of course the landscape of the mountains was infinitely superior to that of Oxford where the vaporous Thames and Cherwell are the only distinctive features. I was reflecting on these matters when, within the hour, I ha
d reached my destination.

  Versoix rests above the lake on a small natural plateau, and the grounds of the sanatorium stretch down to the water; it has always been a health-giving spot, and there have been found here the remains of a Roman shrine to Mercury. The local people believe that the god still lingers, but I ascribe the vital fullness of the air to the electrical discharges from the mountains. The atmosphere of the region is full of spirit.

  I made my way to the gates of the sanatorium, where I gained admission on the strength of my name: the honour of the family of Frankenstein is widely known. I had never entered such an institution before, and indeed I believe this to have been one of the first of its kind erected according to enlightened principles of public health. I was taken to my sister’s room, which proving empty, I was directed towards the shores of the lake. I was told that it was here that Elizabeth liked to sit and sew.

  I hardly recognised her. She had become so gaunt and thin that she seemed too weak to rise and greet me. “I am pleased to see you, Victor. I had hoped you would come.” There was such resignation, in her slowness and uncertainty, that I might have wept. Her voice, too, had changed; it had become higher and more plaintive.

  “How could I not come? I left as soon as I heard from Papa.”

  “Papa worries too much.”

  “He is concerned.”

  She smiled so serenely that it might have been an expression of defeat. “I often thought of you in England. You seemed so far-”

  I went up to her, and kissed her on the forehead. “But now you are home.” Once more she tried to rise from her bench.

  “Sit, Elizabeth. Do not tire yourself.”

  “I am always tired. I am accustomed to it. Is this not a beautiful place?” We were beside the lake, on a small peninsula of grass and trees; one of the frequent winds had stirred, and the surface of the water was troubled. I took her shawl, which she had placed beside her on the wicker bench, and covered her shoulders. “I enjoy the wind, Victor. It makes me feel that I am part of the world.” Her eyes had grown more prominent, in her sickness; she seemed to look at me with a new quality of intentness.