The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein

by Kiersten White

  A brilliant streak of lightning illuminated us in the center of the lake. We were in the midst of a rising maelstrom. Rain slashed down with cutting force, soaking us in seconds. Still we pulled on the oars, undeterred from our deadly design.

  “The pistols will not work!” Mary shouted. I could barely hear her over the storm. “They have gotten too wet!”

  I nodded. We each had a knife, though we had hoped to be able to use the pistols. I remembered the ease with which Victor had overpowered me. It filled me with shame. Had I fought harder, or faster…But if the bodies found in the river were any indication, Victor had had a good deal of experience capturing and subduing people.

  We finally made it across the churning lake. We slipped over the dock, buffeted by the storm. The night had given itself to violence. A tree crashed to the ground with a tremendous crack and we both jumped, barely dodging the branches. The wind pulled my hair from the pins Mary had given me, and long wet strands whipped my face with stinging blows.

  The house was waiting. None of the bedroom windows glowed warm; only the entry hall held a hint of light. Another flash of lightning threw the building into perfect relief, and I noticed one detail that had changed in my absence: a long pole, topped with a metal orb and wrapped with coils, now rose from the roof over the dining room, soaring far above the sharp peaks of the house.

  “He made another laboratory,” I whispered. But the wind and the rain stole my words. I grabbed Mary’s arm and pointed, screaming my observation in her ear. She nodded grimly, wiping water from her eyes. I gestured to the back of the house, where I knew we could climb the trellis and pry open a loose window in my bedroom.

  I entered my old home like a thief in the night. I was there to steal the life of its heir. I set my feet on the richly polished wood floor on which generations of Frankensteins had trod. My soaked skirts dripped a steady puddle of water that would damage the wood if left unmopped. As a child, I would have cleaned it immediately, wishing to leave no trace of myself and no opening for censure.

  I leaned over and wrung out my hair all over the floor.

  After my time in the asylum and our nighttime travel here—Mary and I had slept during the day, hidden in a barn—the room was a riot of visual stimulation. I had always liked it as a child, but now I saw the garish roses on the wallpaper as pale imitations of reality, like everything in this cold house. The windows were draped with heavy cloth, which blocked both light and the view of nature’s majesty. Next to one window was a painting of the same mountains one had only to step outside to see.

  Perhaps that was why Victor was so desperate to imitate life with his own twisted version. He had never been able to feel things as deeply as he should; he had been raised in a home where everything was pretense and no one spoke the truth.

  Not even me.

  I had accused Victor of creating a monster, but I had done the same.

  Mary clambered in next to me. She looked around with a raised eyebrow, taking in the velvet stool, the gilded vanity, the hulking four-poster bed. Every covered surface was a different fabric, a different pattern. Anything that did not work in another room had been given to me. I did not know whether I was dizzy because of anticipation and nerves, or because I was no longer acclimated to the chaos of Frankenstein castoffs.

  “How did you manage to sleep in here?” she asked, throwing our now-useless pistols onto the bed. The door was open, fortunately, so we would not risk its loud release from its frame.

  “I did not sleep much.” All the nights I had sought Victor for comfort from my nightmares trailed in my wake as I walked like a ghost through the house where we had grown up together. We passed the nursery, where I had vowed to him I would never love the baby his mother was carrying more than I loved him. Where Justine had spent most of her happy hours. Where William had grown, joyful and careless.

  We passed the library, where I had soothed Victor and felt so triumphant for coaching him on how to hide his rage and hatred from others; then passed the door to the servants’ wing, where he had implicated Justine using my own technique.

  Everything I had known of him, everything we had shared, rose like the dead before me, rotted through to show the horror of what festered beneath the skin.

  “What about the father?” Mary whispered as I furtively checked the kitchen. It was empty. The maid and the cook must have been in their rooms, though they had not yet readied the house for the night. Or perhaps Victor, in his pursuit of privacy for his studies, had dismissed them.

  I prayed that they had actually been dismissed, and not dismissed, as unfortunate Gerta had been.

  “At this time of night, Judge Frankenstein will have already retired to his bedroom. If Victor raises an alarm before…” I paused, knowing what had to be done but loath to admit it aloud. “If his father finds us, I will speak to him. He has a financial interest in keeping me alive.”

  “Then I will be certain to stand behind you.” Mary smiled grimly.

  I pointed to the double doors leading to the dining room. I had to guess that that was where Victor was, based on the location of his metal device. He certainly would not be sleeping—not when there was work to be done.

  The doors were closed. On them, carved and stained and polished, was the Frankenstein family crest that I had so often run my fingers along over the years. The shield that protected them was my shield now, too, according to the law. I was Elizabeth Frankenstein, married into this diseased and broken family tree. Which somehow made me even more their possession than I was when I had depended on them for everything.

  I thought of the woman in the asylum, locked away for daring to want a life free from pain and abuse. How mad she must have been indeed for dreaming such a thing was possible.

  Bleak sadness soaked and chilled my anger as certainly as the rain had chilled my clothes. What hope was there in a world such as this? Was Victor really so wrong to look for ways to circumvent the demands of nature? Because if we had grown to be this way as a society through nature, surely nature itself was as corrupt and malformed as Victor’s monster.

  I had tried to warn Mary about the monster, but I could see that she did not believe me. It was just as well. She already believed in the real monster and was prepared to face him.

  “Are you ready?” Mary whispered. She pulled out her knife.

  I nodded, cold down to my soul and trembling as my pale fingers wrapped around the handle of my own knife. I wished we were there with an army at our backs. Wished I knew someone, anyone, who would believe us about Victor’s true nature. Wished this desolate responsibility fell on anyone but me.

  So do all guilty wish to foist their burdens onto others.

  I pushed the doors open, brandishing my knife and bracing myself. Mary screamed, and I whipped around, looking for her attacker. But then I saw what had made her cry out: she was screaming at the horror of the scene before us.

  Victor stood with his back to the windows. Between us was the table where we had eaten, the table I had often squirmed at, wishing we could leave his father’s presence. It had been covered by a metal sheet, and on that lay a body. Judge Frankenstein’s sightless eyes stared up at where the ceiling and roof had been cut away to make an opening for the metal rod courting the storm’s lightning. Towels and sheets had been discarded along the floor to soak up the rain.

  Victor looked up at me and frowned. Rain dripped from his hair down his face. It almost looked like he was crying.

  Victor never cried.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked. Mary raised her knife. He cursed, pulled out a pistol, and shot her. She staggered back, falling through the doorway and onto the floor.

  “No!” I screamed, turning to help her.

  “Stop!” Victor commanded.

  “Shoot me,” I snarled.

  “I do not want to shoot you,” he said, exasperated. “
I keep this pistol in case the creature returns.” I ignored him, kneeling at Mary’s side. Her shoulder was bleeding freely.

  “He did not hit anything too important.” I pulled a tablecloth off a table in the hallway. The table had always held flowers several days past their prime, their scent cloying and fulsome. The flowers there now were so old, they were covered in fuzzy black mold. The vase tipped off and shattered on the floor. I used my knife to cut a portion of the tablecloth and pressed it to her wound, using another strip to tie it off.

  “Of course I did not hit anything important.” Victor stood over me, with the pistol trained on Mary. “That would be a waste of good material. But if you do not do what I say, I will shoot her in the head. I do not have much use for her brain. Drop your knife.”

  I dropped it. He kicked it away with disdain. Mary’s had been lost in her fall; I did not see it anywhere.

  “What are you wearing?” Victor scrutinized my clothes with as much horror as that with which we had viewed the body on the table. I still wore the nurse’s uniform, with a cloak buttoned at my neck. “Go and change immediately.”

  I was aghast at his priorities. “I have just escaped from the asylum where you trapped me, have come here with the express purpose of killing you, and you want me to change my clothes?”

  He kicked Mary viciously, and she cried out in pain. “We do not have time to argue. If lightning strikes, I need to take immediate advantage. Any delay will ruin the whole process and render the body unusable. And then I will have to prepare another one.” He gestured meaningfully at Mary. “So go and change.”

  He waited until I was moving, then nudged Mary roughly with his foot. “Into the laboratory, please.”

  I tensed to pounce on his back, hoping to throw him off balance, but he angled himself toward me so he could watch my progress while keeping the gun trained on Mary. She was pale, her clever features pulled tight with pain. She was in no condition to fight him. Her injured arm hung limply at her side.

  She turned her back to me as though she was cringing. Her limp arm hid the knife, tucked in her hand and half up her sleeve.

  “Go and change, Elizabeth,” she said. “He is right. You look dreadful.” She walked into the dining room and sat heavily in a chair by the door.

  I raced through the halls and upstairs to my old bedroom and put on one of my white dresses; it felt like preparation for a ritual I wanted no part of. All our rituals as humans seemed to revolve around birth and death—marriage being the exception, though my wedding had been a ritual intimately connected to death, given my choice of partner.

  I had no weapons in my room other than the useless pistols. But Victor did not know they were useless! I tucked one into the broad, heavy pleats where my skirt met my waist at my back. If I minded the angles I presented to him, he would not see it.

  Taking a steadying breath, I marched back to Victor’s new laboratory to be reunited with my husband and my deceased father-in-law—who might not be in that state much longer. I had not cared for him in life; I did not care to be reunited with him after his death.

  “Much better,” Victor said, barely glancing up from where he was reading gauges and measurements on his array of instruments, the use of which I could only guess at. “You may sit. I have to concentrate.” He gestured with the gun toward a chair on the opposite end of the room from Mary. I moved to sit beside her instead, and he cocked the hammer of the pistol. “You may sit over there.”

  Mary watched him with more curiosity than fear. “Did you kill him?” She was using exactly the right tone to keep him calm. We had already disrupted his process, and he was liable to snap at any moment. It was what I would have done—what I should have done. Gotten him talking.

  “Hmm?” Victor seemed confused about whom she was referring to. Then he looked down at the naked body of his father. Incisions, black and neatly sewn up, went down each pale limb and in numerous tracings across his broad chest. The throat, I saw, bore old markings.

  He had been strangled.

  “Yes,” I answered. “Victor killed him.”

  Victor followed my eyes to his father’s throat and tapped it thoughtfully. “The key is not to crush the windpipe. That is a challenge! I learned that lesson in a frustrating sequence of events I do not care to relive. You have to squeeze hard enough to cut off the supply of blood to the brain until they pass out. And then you simply continue until they stop breathing. I tried a lot of other methods, but they were too messy or too destructive to the materials. I lobbied for Justine to be executed in some other way, but they would not listen to me, and I could not tell them why. It took so much time to replace her neck and throat. I might have succeeded if I had not had to waste all that effort.” He glowered.

  “How many have you killed?” Mary kept her tone conversational, not accusatory. “Do you keep trophies, other than their body parts?”

  Victor flinched, a look on his face as though he had smelled something unpleasant. “I do not enjoy it. I regret the necessity of the killing. I tried for some time working with reanimating tissue that had been dead for longer. But the deterioration was too much. The connections I needed for the current to enervate a whole body were broken down. Fresher material was required.” He paused, holding a vial of noxious-looking yellow liquid. “I did not think I could do it. The first time was awful for me.”

  “For him, too, I imagine,” I said.

  Victor surprised me, his lips twitching with a smile that previously would have felt like a gift. “His suffering was brief. I had to live with the high price of my ambitions. It has been a burden, I assure you.” He rested the gun on the table, still pointed at Mary, as he injected the liquid into his father’s milky, unseeing eyeball. I did not look away.

  I would never again let myself look away.

  “If you admire the stitchwork,” he said to Mary, gesturing to the black lines of thread, “you should compliment Elizabeth. She is the one who taught me to sew. It is quite wearing on the hands, though.” He took the gun again and lifted both hands, turning one empty palm up and considering it thoughtfully. “It is all quite demanding. This hand has to be capable of the most minute cuts. One slip, one twitch, and I can ruin an entire body’s usefulness. Not to mention the strength required to strangle someone. I had never considered the sheer physical demands before I started. It was all lofty mental ideas, problems explored on paper.” He sighed. “Such is the nature of science, though. At some point theory must be turned into reality, and there will always be more work than anticipated.”

  Mary tutted sympathetically. “It must have been exhausting, killing my uncle. He was not a small man.”

  Victor looked up at his pole, then turned another dial. “Who was your uncle?”

  “Carlos Delgado.” Her calm deteriorated in the face of his ignorance. “The bookseller! Your friend!”

  He frowned, searching his memory. “Oh! Yes. I had just lost much of my material because of a trial amount of injection gone wrong. I needed a replacement immediately. He showed up at my door. It was bad luck, really. But tell me, did anyone look for him? No. No one ever did. All the men I took from the dark streets, the drunks, the foreigners, the vagrants looking for work. No one ever looked for them. And that is what brings me comfort. I gave them a purpose higher than they ever had in their lives.”

  “I looked for him!” She took a deep breath, deliberately relaxing. “I looked for him.”

  “And no one cared to help you, did they? I could have taken you, too, at any point, and never suffered the slightest inquiry.” Victor did not say it meanly. He stated it as fact, because it was.

  Mary turned to me. Her face was pale and her eyes shadowed. The binding I had put on her shoulder was already soaked through. “I am sorry to say, I do not have much faith that your marriage will be a happy one.”

  Lightning forked overhead. Victor looked straight up, h
ungry with anticipation. I stood, creeping closer. A bolt of the lightning lanced down and hit the pole with blinding force. The air crackled, all my hair standing on end.

  Victor reached over to throw a lever. I shouted, waving my pistol to get his attention. At the same moment, Mary stood and threw her knife at him. It spun through the air and hit his forehead, hilt first. Stunned, he stumbled back.

  The lightning passed.

  The lever was left unswitched.

  There was a sizzle and a putrid scent of burned flesh and hair as Judge Frankenstein’s body was ravaged beyond repair by the current that Victor had failed to redirect.

  “You have ruined it!” Victor screamed, leveling his pistol at Mary.

  The windows behind him revealed a terrible dark shape running toward us. It crashed through the glass with an inhuman roar, slamming into Victor.

  The monster was here.

  THE MONSTER, TERRIBLE IN aspect from far away, was even more horrible to behold up close. His hair, long and black, hung lank from his misshapen head. The lines of Victor’s patchwork sewing made his skin ridged and puckered, portions of it different tones and a few sections withered like a mummy’s.

  His lips were black like tar over teeth as straight and white as any I had ever seen. The contrast, rather than being pleasing, made both seem more alien and repulsive.

  He grabbed for Victor, his massive hands misshapen and clumsy. The fingers had been fashioned roughly, lacking nails, the joints all wrong. Victor ducked, darting under the monster’s grasp and then leaping onto the table. He stood on top of his father’s mutilated corpse. The monster grabbed the edge of the table with a roar, intent on tearing the whole thing apart.

  As soon as the monster touched the metal, Victor leaned over and flipped the switch. Whatever power was lingering from the lightning strike, it crackled and sparked, directed now into the monster.