“Ah!” The sick man’s eyes lit up as I entered his cabin. He must have been eagerly awaiting my evening visit. “Captain Walton,” he greeted me, “are you ready to hear the rest of my story?”
“Of course,” I said, “If you really feel up to it.” Victor Frankenstein nodded and shifted into a sitting position while I adjusted the pillows behind his thin shoulders.
“I feel much better now,” he said, although his voice was fragile, like the frost riming his cabin window.
I have personally nursed Victor Frankenstein from the moment we plucked his body off a shattered fragment of sea ice. I have celebrated inwardly as his strength returned and his eyes regained the spark of life. Yesterday, however, he suffered a relapse. Victor was standing with me on the deck of the Prometheus, staring at the horizon where grey sky and frozen ocean were welded together by a seam of buckled ice. Victor suddenly shouted and thrust an arm towards the distant purple ridge. He grabbed my collar with his free hand and demanded to know if I could perceive a ragged shape darting between the canted floes, approaching our vessel.
“I see nothing but shadows,” I informed him, and Victor collapsed.
Of course, Victor imagined that he had seen his creature. He feared another encounter with the monster he had created and abandoned but, paradoxically, also feared that the wretch would elude him and they would never see each other again.
I sat on a small wooden stool at his bedside and opened my journal to a clean page. “Please continue,” I said.
Victor frowned at the book. “You’ve been taking notes?” His black brows shifted a little, like ravens on a gate.
“Yes, of course.”
“But why? My story is not a legal document, rather an eruption of the soul.” His beautiful countenance became clouded. It was a strange and sudden objection. A few days earlier he had encouraged me to commit the tale to paper, to record his suffering for the world’s edification.
I responded with a polite deflection, speaking of my own thawing academic ambitions. “Long before I planned this voyage to the Arctic, I was a student, myself, at the University of Münster. My professor was Ferdinand Ueberwasser, a lecturer in Empirical Psychology. He believed that ‘truth’ was only revealed through a close examination of a person’s actual words and he always encouraged students to record important conversations, verbatim, whenever possible.”
The mention of my university days further revived Frankenstein; his intellectual curiosity had not been blunted by tragedy. “Oh, really?” Victor’s voice was playful. “And have you divined some ‘truth’ hidden amongst the furniture of my tale?”
“Yes, I think I have.” I flipped a few pages, and located a spot in a previous day’s narrative. “Ah, here it is. You said the monster extorted a promise from you, to fabricate a female counterpart for him, a wife who could soothe his loneliness.” Victor nodded. “You agreed, but soon realized it was a mistake.” My finger moved slowly over the transcription. “Ah! Here’s the passage. You speculated that if you made a female companion for the monster a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth and that was the reason you gave for destroying her.”
“Yes.” Victor bit his thumb. “Naturally, the creatures would thirst for children, but I couldn’t allow them to reproduce. So, I scattered the female’s limbs knowing the male was watching through the laboratory window. And later that night, I cast her disjointed body into the sea.”
“But that’s patently ridiculous,” I said. “You were solely responsible for the female creature’s biology. If you did not want her to produce children, you could have stitched an empty hatbox into her abdomen rather than a functional uterus. You could have hooked snooker balls within her viscera instead of ovaries.” I shook my head. “Your fear of monstrous offspring is a shallow evasion.”
“No,” Victor said, but his voice was suddenly dry and quiet.
I didn’t want to upset my new friend, but he would never be truly well, never truly at peace until he accepted the living truth within his own character. I flipped more pages in my notebook. “After you destroyed the female, your monster was heart-broken, and that same night, he left you with an uttered threat. He said I will be with you on your wedding night.” I wanted to look at Victor’s face then, but my own courage momentarily failed. I kept staring at the pages of my journal. “It’s obvious that you cultivated that violent response, deliberately. You destroyed his bride knowing full well that he would retaliate by destroying yours. You secretly wanted him to kill Elizabeth so you wouldn’t have to consummate your marriage.”
“But that’s ridiculous,” Victor said, “I loved Elizabeth, why would I want to harm her?”
I licked my lips. “The psychology is relatively straightforward. Elizabeth was your adopted sister. It was your mother’s dying wish that you and she marry, it wasn’t a free decision on your parts. In your mind, Elizabeth would always be a filial playmate. The betrothal would not have happened in any other circumstance.”
Victor moaned softly.
It was cruel, but I continued to educate my friend with his own words. “You remained at Ingolstadt for six years immediately following your engagement. You said the roads were too poor when your family begged you to return home for a visit.” I quickly glanced at Victor, and saw him chewing the inside of his cheek.
“I couldn’t disappoint her,” he said, being deliberately vague with his pronouns.
“You wouldn’t have disappointed Elizabeth,” I said. “You’ve described her letters in great detail. She offered you many opportunities to revoke your pledge, if you’d only been sensitive to her appeal.”
“But you’re saying I killed her, by proxy. Why would I . . .”
“Clerval,” I said, hiding my embarrassment by flipping through another series of pages. “You were in love with your friend, Henry Clerval. So, a sexual relationship with Elizabeth would have been a monstrous betrayal.” I paused. “You would have preferred a sham marriage, but you couldn’t depend on Elizabeth’s participation. Her sense of duty might compel her to insist on consummation.”
“Ridiculous,” Victor said.
“Is it? Who sat up with you all night, before your departure to the University of Ingolstadt?” Victor slid a little lower in his bed. “It wasn’t your fiancée, Elizabeth; she went to bed much earlier in the evening. It was Clerval you struggled to part with, Clerval who absorbed your sadness and tried to instill hope for the future. And look at the words you use to describe your friend . . .” My finger located the effusive list: “kindness, tenderness, passion, loveliness . . .”
“But . . .”
“He’s right.” A sepulchral voice came from the cabin window.
We both turned towards the sound. The monster’s grotesque face filled the frame, his breath had melted a clear dark oval in the hoar frost. The creature must have been clinging to the exterior planking of the ship like a bat, and listening to us.
His black lips parted, revealing teeth whiter than the ice that encased our ship, and the monster’s words were sharper than the winds swirling around the Prometheus. They easily penetrated the thin glass barrier. “When I killed Clerval, Frankenstein fell into a brain fever that lasted several months. He moaned and screamed and gnashed his teeth; his misery nearly killed him.” The great head shook. “That grief far exceeded the piddling tears shed over the corpse of his wife.” The creature pressed his face against the glass. For an instant, mullions strained, then the window exploded, and shards of glass fell onto the cabin floor. Streaks of blood dribbled into the crags and creases of the monster’s visage, where they quickly froze.
The window was too small to admit the creature, but his anger was so great it might have empowered him to shred the hull of the Prometheus and crawl through the rubble to join us.
Yet he remained outside.
Tendrils of snow explored the cabin while the monster laughed. “Did he tell you about his wedding night? Frankenstein left Elizabeth alone and unprotected in their bed chamber, while he walked the passages of the Inn, armed with pistols and knives.” The laughter suddenly vanished. “And I wondered why my great task was so easily performed.”
“No!” Victor said, gesturing towards me and my journal, “I was trying to lure him away from Elizabeth . . .”
“You lured me to her,” the creature said, but his voice was now a hoarse whisper. The words, meant to be an accusation, had been transformed into something profoundly sad. “You lured me,” he repeated, then the rage drained from his face. If the monster had come here intending to lay waste to the Prometheus, to kill Victor and everyone else on board, our conversation had scuttled those plans.
The monster may have experienced a spasm of sympathy for Victor, but I think it more likely he was gutted by the enormity of his own manipulation. He had experienced a measure of satisfaction during his protracted revenge, but it was stripped away by the sudden realization that he had been working in concert with Victor’s darkest desires.
He had always been Victor’s creature.
The giant face fell from the shattered window and we heard footsteps crunch on the snow, fade, then disappear.
“I must kill it,” Victor cried, trying to rise from his bed. There was a sudden explosive noise, like a cannon shot, as a nearby mass of sea ice fractured.
“My dear friend,” I said, easily restraining him with a hand placed on his trembling forearm, “think about what you’re saying. The monster could have killed you many times with his own hands, but he did not. Like all fiends, he wants to trick you into a soul-destroying act of self-slaughter. That’s all he has left; it’s all he ever had. The only hope for peace is to embrace the truth, and be honest with yourself.”
“Captain Walton!” The ship’s master appeared in the tiny cabin doorway. “The ice is starting to break up. Within hours we’ll be able to move again.”
“Strength,” I whispered to Victor, “from honesty, strength.”
*
Mark Thomas is an artist and writer living in St. Catharines Canada. He is a retired teacher and ex-member of Canada’s national rowing team. Check out his work at flamingdogshit.com.
New Critique 