There is a fear of the dead coming alive, but this was more frightful: in a moment the body in front of me had gone through all the stages of decomposition before being reclaimed and restored to life. His skin seemed to quiver, with a motion like that of waves. But then he grew still. Now his appearance resembled nothing so much as wickerwork. His eyes had opened, but where before they had been of a blue-green hue they were now grey. The body itself had not been deformed in any way: it was as compact and as muscular as before, but it was of a different texture. It looked as if it had been baked. The face still had the remnants of beauty but was now utterly changed in hue, with the curious pattern of wickerwork I had already observed. All this was the work of an instant.
I stepped back in horror, and his eyes followed my movement.
I could not resist the strangeness of his gaze, and we stared at one another. I was observing someone who had gone beyond death and had returned, but what did he imagine that I was? I could see nothing in his eyes except the darkness from which he had come. His lips parted, and then there issued from him the strangest sequence of sounds I had ever heard: it was like a rolling cascade of tones and pitches, but utterly discordant and repulsive. They were the sounds from the depths, sounds which should have been muffled or stifled, but to my astonishment I realised that he was attempting to sing. He was singing to me, while he continued to gaze upon me, and I stood in such awe of him that I could not move. This was no longer Jack. This was something else.
I do not know how long I stood there, but he was at length overcome by some kind of convulsion of restlessness. He began to rise from the table. With no more effort than would suffice for the breaking of a twig he snapped the bands which held down his neck, wrists and ankles; then he sat upright.
He looked around the workshop, as an animal might survey his cage, and then once more turned to me. He smiled, if it may be called a smile; his blackened lips opened, and there was a frightful rictus running from ear to ear. I could see a set of brilliantly white teeth, all the more startling in his discoloured mouth.
I backed away, taking a few paces, and found myself against the wall of the workshop where I kept my glass vessels and retorts for experimental use. For a moment he seemed to lose interest in me. He noticed his penis, still erect, and with a groan he began to stimulate himself in front of me. I looked on in absolute astonishment as he laboured to produce the seminal fluid. What monstrous issue might emerge from one who had died and had been reborn? His most devoted efforts were unavailing, however, and he turned to me with a curiously submissive or perhaps embarrassed look. Did he consider me to be his keeper, or his guardian, or his creator? Had he sinned like Adam in the Garden?
He walked a few steps, and I noticed that his movements were light and vigorous. I saw that he was about to walk towards me and, in my alarm, I put out both of my hands in supplication. “No!” I shouted to him. “Come no closer, if you please!” He hesitated. I was not sure whether he still understood human speech, or whether my strident voice and gestures had deterred him.
He stood uncertainly in the middle of the room, and moved his head from side to side as if testing the muscles of his neck. He put his hands up to his face, and seemed perplexed by the mottled texture of his flesh; he examined his hands very carefully, and seemed not to recognise them as his own. Again he looked at me, craftily and almost cunningly; again I put out my hands to prevent him.
To my utter relief he turned away from me and began walking towards the door that led to the jetty. He raised his face as if he had sensed the river close by. He did not open the door; he pushed himself past it, overthrowing it with one blow of his right arm. He seemed to relish the scents of the night and the river, the tar and the smoke and the filth that accrue to the foreshore. He surveyed the scene of both of the banks, and then seemed to look keenly downstream towards the sea. He raised his arms above his head, in a gesture of celebration or supplication, and plunged into the water. He was able to swim at an extraordinary speed, and within a very few moments he was out of my sight.
My first sensation was one of relief, that my odious handiwork had left me, but that was quickly followed by a fear and horror so intense that I could scarcely stand. I could not bring myself to remain in my workshop, the site of that terrible rebirth, and I staggered along the foreshore until I reached Limehouse Stairs. It was not an area to be visited by night, but I had lost all sense of physical danger. I was beset by a horror more frightful than any with which a human being could threaten me. I sat upon the damp steps, with bowed head, seeing nothing ahead of me but darkness. I hoped that the foul being might disappear for ever-might even be lost in the sea, if that was indeed his destination. It was possible that he might have no memory of his origin, and never return to Limehouse or to London in search of the mystery of his existence. Nevertheless I had created a being that might become a terror to the world, unhewn and endowed with unnatural strength. A rat scuttled past me and dropped into the water. Or perhaps he might quickly lose his strength, as my hand had done, and revert to a position of incapacity or weakness? In that case he would be a wretched being indeed, but not one to instil panic fear. Yet what kind of being was he? Was he aware that he possessed human existence? Did he even possess a consciousness?
I stood up, and walked from the stairs to the church of St. Lawrence by the Causeway. Never had I felt so strong a need for comfort and consolation, from whatever source it might come, and I mounted the worn steps towards the great door. I could not bring myself to cross the threshold. I was an accursed thing. I had taken my stand outside the range of God’s creation. I had usurped the Creator himself. This was no place for me. It was then, I believe, that the fever fell upon me. I do not remember where I wandered, but I was in a mist of fears and delusions. I recall entering a public house, and being served gin and other spirits until I dropped unconscious. I must have been robbed, and left in the street, because I woke up in a stinking alley. Still I wandered. For a few moments I must have believed that I had returned to my native Geneva, for I spoke a few words in French and German; then I was buffeted by the crowds along the highway, and I recall that my body was soaking with sweat and ague. It began to rain, and I crept down a side street where the overhanging roofs were able to shield me. I had never been more wretched-I, who had dreamed of renown, was no more than a wanderer in the streets of men. I heard a sudden sound behind me, at the other end of the street, and a cat screeched. I turned around in horror. I was struck by the terror that he might be pursuing me; I fled back into the highway and, joining without choice or thought the steady stream of people, I made my way eventually into the central neighbourhoods of London. I had been weeping-for how long, I do not know-and a gingerbread seller passed me a red cloth as I leaned against the wall beside her stall.
“Do you know what you are doing?” she asked me.
“I must go on.” I wanted to ask her the direction in which I lived, but for that moment I could not remember the name of the street. I could not remember anything. She gave me one of her cakes; my mouth was too dry and inflamed to swallow it, and I spat it out before moving on. Some instinct, common to all life, led me home. I found myself in Piccadilly. I staggered and fell against a horse post, but then who helped me to my feet but Fred?
“Whatever has happened to you, Mr. Frankenstein?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what has happened to me.”
“You have had a mauling, you have.”
“Have I?”
“Do you know who did it?”
“I did it.”
He led me down Piccadilly and around the corner into Jermyn Street. I recognised the neighbourhood but then I became delirious again, and Fred explained to me later that I had been muttering words and phrases to myself that he could not understand. He washed me, put me in my bed, and called his mother. Mrs. Shoeberry ministered to me during the whole period of my fever. I discovered later that she piled the sheets and blankets on me “to force it out,” as she put
it; all the windows and doors to my room were closed, and a fire was left perpetually burning in the grate. I wondered that she did not stifle me to death. The first thing I recall is her sitting by me, with a piece of needlework on her lap.
“Oh, there you are again, Mr. Frankenstein. I am ever so glad to see you.”
“Thank you.”
“I suppose you would like some small beer, would you?”
“My throat.”
“It will be dry, sir. It has been torrid in here. It has been something fierce. Fred, bring some beer.”
“Saloop,” I said weakly. I scarcely recognised where I was, and was dimly aware of the old woman as someone I had met in the past. “Fred will brew it rich,” she said. “He is a good boy.”
Then I saw Fred standing at the foot of the bed, grinning at me and hopping from one foot to the next in his excitement. All at once the memory of my situation came back to me. “I knew you was coming round,” he said, “when you took some water from me.” I had no memory of this. “Before that, you was raving.”
“Raving? What was I saying?”
“Don’t you worry a bit about it,” Mrs. Shoeberry replied for him. “It was a lot of nonsense, Mr. Frankenstein. Fred, get on with that saloop.”
“But what kind of nonsense?”
“Devils and fiends and such stuff. I paid no attention to it.” I hoped that I had not said too much, and made a note to question Fred later on the subject. He brought me in a dish of saloop, and I drank it down greedily.
“How long have I lain here?”
“A little over a week,” she said. “The children have been doing the laundry. Would you be requiring some dry toast, Mr. Frankenstein?” I shook my head. I felt too weak to eat. Yet slowly, during that day and over the next week, I recovered my strength. When Mrs. Shoeberry had departed, quite satisfied with her payment of seven guineas, I questioned Fred about my ravings.
“There was a song you sung,” he said.
“A mountain song?”
“I would not know about that, sir. But there was no mountains in it.” Then he stood quite still, his arms hanging down against his sides, and recited:
Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round, walks on
And turns no more his head:
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.
It was all the more horrible coming from the mouth of an innocent boy. I knew the lines at once, since they came from one of Mr. Coleridge’s poems, but I do not remember being particularly impressed by them at the time of reading them. They must have been in the air around me, as I lay in a fever.
I was able to bathe, and dress, myself on the following morning. The one subject of course oppressed and haunted me like some giant despair. My enforced retirement had also left me restless and fretful: I could not keep still. I hailed a cab in Jermyn Street, and was taken to Limehouse where I leapt out and all but ran along the path towards my workshop. As soon as I came close to it I knew that he had returned: the door facing the river had been smashed by the giant blow he had delivered on first gaining his freedom; but now part of the brick wall beside it had been dislodged, and there were pieces of broken glass on the muddy ground that led to the jetty. I slowed my pace, and my immediate impulse was to flee or at least to conceal myself. But some graver sense-of responsibility, or of submission, I do not know which-overcame me. I walked towards the workshop, and entered through the gaping hole which he had left. The place was in ruinous disorder: the great electrical columns had been overturned and lay smashed upon the floor, and my experimental apparatus had been systematically destroyed. My notes and papers, as well as some bills of lading for the electrical equipment, had been removed from my desk; the cloak and hat that I had left behind, on that dreadful night, were also gone. He had taken some kind of revenge, and had then left the scene of his rebirth.
I was placed in a state of fearful indecision. The records of all my experiments had been taken by him, and the equipment had been destroyed by his hand, but what possible use could any of it now possess? My work had come to an end-or, rather, it had been usurped by the emergence of a living being. There was no more to be done. I decided then to leave the workshop, never to return. I was happy to imagine it falling into ruin, the home of scavengers and of seabirds, rather than to see any new dwellings built upon its accursed ground. It would be for me a place of mournful and never-ending remembrance.
I walked back through streets, familiar and unfamiliar, with a general apprehension that he did indeed “somewhere behind me tread;” there were moments when my own shadow alarmed me, and I looked back with dread on several occasions. There was often the echo of a footfall in the alleys and along the quieter streets, and again I would glance around in fear. Eventually I found myself in Jermyn Street, and the expression on Fred’s face was enough to tell me that I had sustained a great anxiety. “You look like you was touched by Old Nick,” he said.
“No. Not touched.”
“The gentleman came to see you.”
“Gentleman? What gentleman?” For a moment I believed him to be referring to the creature.
Fred seemed genuinely alarmed by my response. “No need to disturb yourself, sir. It was only him.”
He handed me a card on which Bysshe had scrawled a note to the effect that he and Harriet were intending to visit me early that evening: We have something, or someone, to show you.
I prepared myself for their arrival as best I could. I took a spoonful of laudanum to calm myself, having become acquainted with the merits of that preparation by Mrs. Shoeberry who seems to have dosed me liberally during my confinement. “There is nothing like it,” she had said just before leaving me. “It is safer than the drink, and more soothing to the soul.” I had indeed found it a palliative for wounded nerves, and had regained a measure of composure when Fred announced the arrival of Bysshe and Harriet. I had not seen Harriet since the days before the elopement to the Lakes, and she seemed to be much improved by marriage. She had more vitality and assurance than I remembered, assisted no doubt by the infant she was carrying in her arms. “This is Eliza,” she said. “Eliza Ianthe.”
“Not the first of my productions, Victor, but the finest.” There was so wide a difference, between Bysshe’s creation and my own, that I felt like weeping. A young woman followed them up the stairs, to whom I was not introduced; I took her to be the wet-nurse, and indeed Harriet gave her the baby after a moment’s petting.
“You look changed,” Harriet said to me as I took them into the drawing room. “You have become more serious. You are no longer a young man.”
“I have experienced much since I last saw you.”
“Oh?”
“But nothing of any consequence. Tell me, Bysshe, what is the news?”
“The usual record of crimes and miseries. You do not read the public prints?” I shook my head. “Then you know nothing of the outrages.”
“I lead a retired existence.”
“We are advertising a subscription for the families of the frame-makers.” I must have looked puzzled. “You should begin to live in the world, Victor. Fourteen frame-makers were executed at York last week. For the crime of wishing employment.” He then went on to inveigh against the undue respect that men paid to property, and began to enlist the history of Greece for the sake of his argument. Harriet and the wet-nurse sat exchanging remarks about the infant. His soliloquy reminded me of our evenings in Oxford, and I was curiously reassured by it. “So Harriet is not my property,” he began to inform me. “Eliza is not my property. Love is free. Its very essence is liberty, Victor, not compatible with obedience or jealousy or fear.”
“I am sure your wife will be pleased to hear it.”
“Harriet understands me perfectly well. We are in unity. No. We are a trinity now. The infant child is our saviour.” He continued in the same fanciful vein for a little longer, b
ut the events of the day soon began to render me weary. With his quick sympathy he realised that I was no longer in a suitable frame of mind to enjoy his society, and he rose to leave with good grace. “Victor must rest,” he told Harriet. “His spirits need restoring.”
“Will you not stay for supper?”
“No. Your need is greater. You look as if all the cares of the world had fallen upon you.”
“I have not slept. That is all.”
“Then sleep. Sleep is the balm for woe.”
They took their leave, with many professions of friendship, and I watched them as they made their way out of Jermyn Street in search of a carriage. The crowd surrounded them instantly and I felt a curious anxiety or fear on their behalf. It was a momentary sensation, but it left me more wretched than before. For the rest of the evening, I walked through the city. I do not know how I passed the succeeding days.
12
IT WAS A MORNING in November. The light of dawn filtered through an opening in the shutters, and I could discern the outlines of my shirt and jacket that Fred had folded; in the half-light they looked curiously alive, as if they had been waiting expectantly for me to awake. I slumbered again for a few minutes, in a blissful state of non-consciousness, before being aroused by the sound of horses in the street outside. I rose from my bed, and threw open the shutters. That is when I saw him, standing on the corner and looking fixedly up at my window. Yet at first I did not see him. He seemed to be part of a wooden porch there, wood upon wood, until he stepped forward. He was wearing my cloak, and my broad-brimmed hat, but I could not mistake him for a moment; the face was white, seemingly curved and crumpled like a sheet of paper, with the same blank eyes that had stared at me from the table in my workshop. He must have taken my address from the bills of exchange he had purloined, and now he had tracked me down. He stood quite still, and made no attempt to claim my attention. He simply looked up without expression. And then, very suddenly, he turned and walked away.
The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein Page 14
