The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

by Peter Ackroyd

  “As long as it is your own poetry.”

  “No. Not necessarily. Tell me who wrote this.” Then his voice changed to one richer and more melodious:

  “Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay

  To mould me man? Did I solicit thee

  From darkness to promote me?”

  “ Milton!” I called out from behind the screen.

  “What? Are you here?”

  “Yes. Paradise Lost.”

  LATER THAT MORNING WE set sail. Mary had expressed a desire to join us, professing herself quite well; so there were five travellers on board the Alastor, as he had named her. The chateau was some three miles distant, along the eastern shore, and as we sailed slowly towards it in a fitful breeze I recalled my childhood wanderings in the same lakeland region. Many times I had walked among the pines, or laid myself down in the scrub, in an ecstasy of communion with the world. Those happy far-off days now came before me again. “There it stands,” I said to them, leaning on the prow and pointing towards the shore. It was an old fortress of darkened stone, rising above an escarpment by the lake; there had been some upheaval here, in earlier ages of the earth, for the bank at this point was made up of rocks and boulders long since deposited. “Look at the loneliness of it,” Bysshe said.

  “It will be a damned hard job to secure our mooring.” Byron stood by the prow, with the rope in his hands. “I can get no purchase on these rocks.”

  “There is a landing bay there,” Polidori said. “By that outcrop of stone.”

  Within a few minutes we were standing on the shore. There was a path leading from the landing stage and climbing upward to the chateau itself: I went on ahead, to introduce the party to the present residents. When I knocked, the door was opened by a young man of no very prepossessing appearance; he had a weak left eye, and the purple stain of a birthmark on his left cheek. Assuredly, one side had let down the other. I introduced myself as one of a party of travellers, among whom was a famous English lord of great family. My lord had expressed an interest in visiting the fortress. Would it be possible for our party to be admitted? He replied in French that he and his wife were caretakers and that the owner, a German businessman, was away from home. I knew at once the language he would most easily understand. I brought out my purse and offered him a French louis, which he most gratefully accepted. By this time the others had reached the door.

  The young man led us into the master’s quarters, as he called them, a suite of rooms on two floors from which the windows looked out upon the lake and the Jura mountains. “We have not come to see the views,” Byron said to me. “Will you ask him to take us to the dungeons?”

  The caretaker had recognised the last word and, with a glance at Byron, he beckoned us to follow him down a stone staircase. There were two floors in the lower part of the fortress. On the higher of them were three cells, side by side, each of them with a narrow window carved out of the rock. They were in such a state of preservation that the leg-irons and manacles were still embedded in the walls. Shelley seemed ready to swoon, and Mary took his hand. “It has passed,” she said.

  “No. It has not passed,” he replied. “The doom is still in the air.”

  Byron had entered one of the cells and was carefully examining the leg-irons. “They are rusty. What do you think, Polidori? Caused by water or by blood?”

  “A witches’ brew of both, I should think.”

  “And here are marks in the floor,” I said, “where the chains scraped into the stone. Do you see these grooves?”

  “They are the marks of woe.” Bysshe had gone over to the last cell, and was holding onto the bars with a keen half-tremulous and half-expectant look. “I am trying to summon them up,” he said to me as I walked over. “I am trying to find them.”

  “They are long gone, Bysshe. Why should they wish to stay here? Of all places?”

  “Where suffering is most intense, we will find traces of it.”

  “I wonder who made up this jolly crew,” Byron was exclaiming to Polidori. “Poisoners? Heretics? It is all one now. The prisoners and the gaolers have all gone down to dust. And where are you going, Mary?”

  “To the lower depths. There is another staircase here.”

  I followed her down the narrow stone steps, which led into an enclosed space. There were no cells here, but I experienced an indescribable sense of menace and privation at the first sight of the stone walls and the stone floor. The caretaker came down behind us. “This was the place of execution,” he said to me in French. “Do you see that?” There was a blackened wooden beam running beneath the ceiling. “There the rope was suspended.” I translated this for Mary.

  “And this?” she asked. “What is this?” She pointed to a wooden trapdoor in the middle of the floor.

  “The waters of the lake were higher then,” the caretaker said to me.

  “I think,” I told her, “that this was a sluice gate for the bodies of the condemned.”

  “Alive or dead,” he said. “The living were bound with ropes.”

  “He tells me that they were dropped into the water.”

  “Then this is the condemned hold.” She looked at me steadily. “Abandon hope.”

  “I think,” I replied, “that we should join the others.”

  We climbed the stone staircase, to find Byron and Bysshe arguing over the proper name for the manacles that fastened the prisoners to the wall. “Gyve is a verb,” Bysshe was saying.

  “It is a noun,” Byron replied. “They are called gyves.” He turned to Mary. “You have been in the lower reaches?”

  “I feel as if I am sleepwalking,” she said. “Sleepwalking among the dead.”

  “Then we must revive you. Why not retire with Frankenstein to the upper mansion? There will surely be wine for you.”

  I asked the caretaker if we might rest in the living quarters, for a short while, and he willingly assented: no doubt he was anticipating another louis. He brought us two glasses of the sweet wine of the region, and we sat by a window overlooking the vineyards of the estate. “I cannot say I like this place,” Mary said. “In fact I have a distaste for it.”

  “Byron revels in it.”

  “Oh, he has a passion for excitement. He would visit Hell itself, just for the sensation of being there.”

  “He may have no choice in the matter.”

  “I am surprised at you, Victor.”

  “I am sorry. To speak of a friend in that way.”

  “No. Not that. I did not know that you believed in Hell.”

  “As far as I can see, Mary, Hell is all around us. We live in a fiery world.”

  Byron and Bysshe came into the room, followed by Polidori. “What was that about fire?” Byron asked me. “We have need of one here. Can one be lit?”

  “It would have been cold enough in those dungeons.” Bysshe had gone over to the window. “And there is another storm coming. Thank God we are off the lake.”

  There was a sudden flash, followed by a roll of thunder. Byron called out for wine, and showed every sign of joyful anticipation. The gathering storm clouds darkened the room in which we were sitting and the young caretaker, after kindling a fire, lit several candles in sundry old corners giving an effect of what Mary called “ghastly gleaming.”

  “I have an idea,” Byron said. “We must take advantage of this gloom, as Mary thinks it. We must hold a seance.”

  “Here?” Polidori asked him.

  “It is the best place in the world. Shelley has no doubt concluded that there are ghosts in the dungeon.”

  “I do not exactly think that.”

  “Where better to raise the spirits?”

  “The Swiss are a practical people,” I said to him. “They do not harbour ghosts.”

  “All lakes are haunted, Frankenstein. Large bodies of water attract lost souls.”

  “They may not wish to be called,” Mary said.

  “They will be in fighting form then. Ready for a tussle with the living. Do not be alarmed,
Mary. I always have a firearm in my pocket. We will sit at this table in the corner. Bring over the chairs, Polidori.”

  Byron then pulled the heavy velvet curtains over all the windows, so that the tremulous light of the candles became more intense. The storm was raging outside, as if all the elements were in contention.

  “You are acting,” Bysshe said, “as if you were the stage-manager of chaos.”

  “I know it. I was born for my own ruin. We need one more chair, Polidori.”

  So we sat around the table, our hands spread in a circle with our fingers touching. The table was in a dark corner of the room, but it was favoured by the heat of the fire.

  I felt ill at ease from the beginning, not least because of the intensity of my companions. I had expected Byron to be a sceptic in all spiritual matters, but he took part with all the excitement of a fervent devotee. I had long suspected that the English, despite their air of business and practicality, were a wholly credulous and superstitious nation. Why else do they love the tales of horror, as they call them? We all waited in darkness as Byron attempted to address “the spirits.” After he had finished his conjuration I thought I heard something move beneath the table. Mary heard it, too, and glanced at me. Byron spoke aloud once more, and then there was a hiss. I felt something crawling upon my feet. I screamed aloud, and then this-thing-leapt upon me. All was confusion. Polidori lit another candle, by the light of which his face was a mask of terror, and then he pointed at my lap. “A cat!” he said. “We have disturbed the cat sleeping beneath the table!”

  Bysshe sat through the proceedings with the strangest expression of apprehension upon his face. Mary was looking at him, no doubt recalling his reaction to Polidori’s tale. But he did not relapse into the same state. He began to laugh, a quiet convulsive laughter that racked his entire frame. She went over to him and put her arm around him. “I am calm,” he said. “Nothing whatever the matter.”

  Polidori opened the curtains. “I can see,” he said, “some faint patches of blue coming over the mountains. The storm is abating.”

  “Great God, I hope not.” Byron rose to his feet. “I live in storms.”

  I believe that it was at this moment that I decided I would leave my companions. I had warned them already that at some point I would make my way to the family estate at Chamonix. I wished to visit the graves of my father and my sister, unseen by me since the time of their deaths; but in truth I also craved solitude and silence. The endless chatter of this journey had wearied me. When I announced my decision that evening, on our return to the villa, Mary looked at me with something like resentment-I believe that she envied my departure to the Alpine regions of frost and snow. Bysshe urged me to stay, remonstrating with me in the most flattering terms of friendship, but I was not to be moved even by his persuasions. Byron said nothing, obviously considering my decision to be of little or no consequence to him. I had in fact conceived a certain dislike for his lordship. He gave the impression of being a great predator, both spiritually and morally, who would feed on one’s substance before casually casting one aside. He was a born actor, also, who at all times took pleasure in his performance. Such men are dangerous.

  I retired to my room, where Fred had put out my sleeping clothes, and lay down to rest. I must have slept for an hour or so, when I was awoken by a tapping at my window.

  21

  THE CREATURE WAS STARING at me. With his usual agility and speed he must have climbed up to the balcony before my room, and was now waiting for me to unlock the casement. I hesitated, and he knocked quite violently upon the window. Fearing his discovery, I allowed him to enter. Now he stood before me, looking at me with what seemed to be an expression of infinite pity. “Why are you here?” I asked him.

  “Where else am I to come, if I seek for a companion?”

  I was overcome at once by a sense of misery and foreboding. “I had not expected to see you. Not after-”

  “Marlow?” He put his hand up to his face, in a gesture of self-abasement. “I had rather be a piece of clay than what I am. Anything without sensation.”

  “You feel sorrow then? And regret?”

  “I do not know what I feel. I know only what I do not feel. Yes. Once I felt joy. In the first expression of my new life I felt wonder and gratitude. I was free. I looked upon the world with fresh perception of its glory. I was newborn, and in that state I felt the bliss of all creation. The hope and bliss have fled. This thing has crept into my heart, weighing me down to the dust.”

  “Guilt for your crimes.”

  “If you say so.”

  “You have murdered two young women, for no other reason than that they were in my company.”

  He turned from me, and walked back towards the window. “I wish that I had joined them.”

  “Do you mean that you wish to die?”

  “Look at me. Do you see me clearly? Why would I wish to live?”

  “Let me understand you better.”

  “I find no rest in the darkest night, or comfort in the brightest day. Is not death easy in comparison? Is it not to be desired?”

  “You wish to break this pact we have? This pact of life?”

  “So that I might be no more. So that I might abide in darkness and blackness and empty space.”

  I bowed my head, thinking of what he might have been and what he really had become. And was there also some blame to be attached to me?

  “Of all creatures, I should not be saved from death.”

  “If you wish to end, then surely you could hurl yourself from the summit of a high mountain or envelop yourself in flame?”

  “You know better than that. You have told me yourself. He who has died once can never die again. I have lain beneath the surface of the river, and my lungs have filled with water, yet I could not succumb. I have thrown myself from a cliff into the wild sea, but I have emerged unharmed. So I come back to you. The source. The origin of my woe.” He turned back to face me. “I know that you have repaired the electrical machines.”

  “You once tried to destroy them.”

  “Now they may be my deliverance.”

  “How so?”

  “I have been considering my plight. I do not know the precise means by which you restored me to life, but I have speculated. I have spent days and nights in meditation. I am aware of the galvanic force of the electrical fluid. That must have been your method, in some form or another. Surely you can alter the fluid accordingly and reverse the process of animation? Surely you can counteract the force?”

  It astonished me that the creature had arrived at conclusions similar to my own; it was as if there were a connection between us that surpassed the ordinary powers of sympathy. It surprised and delighted me, too, that he seemed now to embrace the prospect of his own destruction. There would be no reason to deceive him with promises of a female partner. “I can work to that end,” I replied. “I can study and experiment.”

  “Do not be long.”

  “I will work with expedition, when I have returned to England, but you will need to be patient. You still live on the estuary?”

  “In my little hut? Yes. No one comes near me.”

  “Will you go back there, while I persevere in my studies?”

  “Where else may I rest my head? I am a pale roamer through the night, but in the night and darkness I will remain.”

  “I will find you.”

  “No. I will know when you are ready. I will be there.” With these words, he left me. He went over to the window and leapt onto the balcony before vanishing into the quiet night.

  I COULD NOT SLEEP. When I guessed that the others had retired I went downstairs and let myself into the garden. I was reflecting upon the creature’s words, when someone sat beside me. It was Mary. “I wish you were not leaving us, Victor. I need your company.”

  “You have the others.”

  “What? Byron? Polidori? They are too concerned with their own selves to consider me.” She was silent for a moment. “I am fearful for By
sshe, Victor. He has become too excitable. Too fanciful. Recall his hysterics at breakfast. When I first knew him, such behaviour would have been unthinkable. Don’t you agree? Something is weakening him. You may think that it is his marriage to me.” She went on quickly. “I do not think so.”

  “It never occurred to me at all, Mary.”

  “And this is also odd. He never mentioned the story of his double before. Something is preying on his mind. He is be coming light-headed with anxiety. With some fear. Or premonition, perhaps.”

  “Of his fate?”

  “Yes. Precisely that.”

  I knew then that she feared his early death; she believed that Bysshe was acting strangely because he had some sense of his own demise. Why else had he become so interested in seances and ghosts and ghost stories? I tried to reassure her. “Surely he is excited by his travels,” I told her. “And, more especially, by the company of Byron. Bysshe has never lived in such proximity to another poet. It will affect him.”

  “Do you think so? I would wish that to be true.”

  “He is a delicate organism, Mary. One small touch-”

  “Yes. I know. But there is something else. I also fear a disaster! Over the past month I have experienced the strongest sensations of nervous apprehension. I have believed misfortune to be close to us.”

  “Do not say so.” I put my hand upon her arm. “I have noticed a change in Bysshe, too. But I think you are wrong, Mary. It is not fear. It is frustration. Unsatisfied yearning. He deems himself to be a good poet-”

  “A great one.”

  “I grant that. But his work is known to very few. He has no audience to delight. Not yet. In the company of Byron, whose volumes sell in their thousands, is there any wonder that he should seem ill at ease? That he should have fits of extravagant behaviour? It would be more wonder if he did not.”

  “I had thought of that. But Bysshe has no worldly temper, Victor. He is all fire and air. There is no earth in him. No jealousy.”