Frankenstein's Monster Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Susan Heyboer O’Keefe

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  THREE RIVERS PRESS and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  O’Keefe, Susan Heyboer.

  Frankenstein’s monster : a novel / by Susan Heyboer O’Keefe.—1st ed.

  1. Frankenstein (Fictitious character)—Fiction.

  2. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PS3565.K415F73 2010

  813′.54—dc22

  2010005583

  eISBN: 978-0-307-71733-7

  v3.1

  For Steven Chudney,

  for joining me in a leap of faith

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Reader’s Guide

  PROLOGUE

  Near the Arctic Pole

  October 13, 1828

  Captain Robert Walton. Private log.

  Behind me, stiffened with frost, lie the remains of Victor Frankenstein.

  It is so cold I expect ice and not ink from my pen. Hoar encrusts the inside of the porthole, icicles drop from the hinge, and over this page my breath hangs like a cloud. Should I turn, I might find even the corpse in my bed to be dusted wholly white.

  I must write quickly, for my log may be all that survives me—but—O Margaret! How can I describe what has happened without appearing to be mad?

  I said I would keep a true record for you of all events occurring during our separation. You imposed on me exile; I would have turned that exile into an occasion of grace. If I had succeeded in discovering the North Pole, I would have enlarged man’s knowledge of our Lord’s sovereign majesty—and you would have welcomed me home; for could I have been thus favored as God’s servant unless He also deemed me worthy of forgiveness?

  The answer is no. Now I have been exiled by God as well.

  My hand trembles with more than cold, and these words, which only you have the power to comprehend, condemn me with their wavering letters and great blots of ink.

  Some weeks ago, I rescued a man from the ice. Though half-dead, he should not have been alive at all. Resolve had fed him the scalding food of obsession, giving him a fiery strength to survive.

  He said his name was Victor Frankenstein.

  He said he had discovered the secret of creation.

  Ever since I rescued that poor man, he told me over and over a story both fantastic and profane about a huge creature made by his own hands, which then rose up against him and destroyed all he loved. Realizing his folly, Frankenstein pursued the thing till he had tracked it to these desolate regions.

  His words were those of a man driven mad by the elements, for, in truth, who could undertake what he had claimed, much less imagine an act of such presumption? Yet, despite his madness, there was between us a wild affinity that pulled at me as the North pulls at the needle and that made me listen day after day as he unfolded his tale. I finally understood that he was clearly the friend denied me all my life. You know how I have suffered in this regard, Margaret; how I’ve believed myself fated to solitude, alone but for you. Yet even knowing my anguish, you can only guess at my admiration for him and my hunger for his fellowship and love.

  Already I envisioned the pleasure of your meeting, already grew jealous of your too-generous affection for each other.

  But the evil that has isolated me still grips me in its jaws: my rescue came too late for Frankenstein to regain his health. The clear weather failed, and so did he. He died yesterday before dawn as the icy wind keened in mourning. I do believe the sweetest part of me died with him.

  It was strange to have found my twin in one whose desires were so blasphemous as to turn the natural into the unnatural. And then he died … I became afraid to look in the mirror. Whose face would I see reflected? If I pulled back the blanket from the corpse, whose face would be there?

  I have not truly repented.

  Oh, Margaret, dare I put such thoughts onto this page you may yet read?

  Frankenstein’s last thoughts pursued his delusion to the end.

  “Must I die,” he asked, “and my persecutor live? Tell me, Captain Walton, that he shall not in the end escape.”

  I could not refuse comfort to one so disconsolate, and I said, thinking my words meaningless, “He will not.”

  “You shall take up my burden? O swear it! Swear you shall take it up—for the sake of all men, for the sake of your dear sister, swear to me you shall hunt down the creature and destroy it.”

  “I give you my word.”

  He pressed my hand, then once more I was alone.

  I lost all count of time standing watch over him, until at last the crew grew fearful at my grief and sent two men to bring me above deck.

  Death followed me, matching my pace, tread for tread.

  Later, a noise drew me back to the cabin. Hanging over the corpse stood a manlike form, gigantic in stature, distorted in proportions. Its face was concealed by long locks of ragged black hair, and one vast palm was extended toward the body. When the creature heard me, it turned, and I saw its face. Never have I seen a vision of such appalling hideousness. Involuntarily I flinched and shut my eyes. Then, all at once, I remembered, dear Sister. All at once, I believed.

  Frankenstein, my dearest friend, had not lied. There truly lived a creature that had been created by man.

  “I am a wretch,” it said.

  Its voice was soft, lovely, and beguiling, which made it all the more horrible to hear such evil words uttered by its black, scarred lips.

  “I have murdered the lovely and the helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept; I have grasped to death his throat who never injured me.” He turned back to his creator. “He, too, is my victim. I both pursued him and enticed him to follow until he fell into irremediable ruin. Now there he lies, white and cold and unmoving.”

  “And finally free from your power to torment him!” I cried out.

  “Am I free from his? Like any man, I desire fellowship and love. He has cursed me to a lifetime of hatred.”

  “Like any man?” I repeated. “Do you mock me? Do you mock him?”

  It tried to straighten but the small quarters prevented it from doing so.

  “Is it mockery? There is no place, no one, for me—here, or anywhere—as he surely must have known. Now he is dead who called me into being.”

  Its expression grew decisive.

  “I, too, shall be no more, for where else can I rest but in the death I was born from? Mayhap my spirit will find the peace that my body never had.”

  Having said this, it rushed past me and up to the deck, leapt from the ship, and landed on an ice raft that lay close to my vessel. It was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.

  Can a man change so quickly, Margaret? We are promised that, by grace, salvation can come in an instant; I already knew condemnation could be as swift. Suddenly there was something at work in my soul that I did not understand.

  What did the creature’s existence mean
? What did it mean to me? I had pledged my word to destroy what I thought did not exist—a pledge empty of all intent save to comfort my dear brother.

  Then I saw it, Margaret. Then I heard it speak.

  In a single moment, my empty pledge became a solemn vow. Naught else mattered but its fulfillment.

  I ordered the ship to change course away from the main passage to follow what I alone had seen. The creature had said it would destroy itself; it had said it would return to death. But what were lies to a murderer?

  I had to see the vow fulfilled, Sister.

  I had to see the thing dead.

  Midmorning, as the passage ahead narrowed, the sails fell slack. No wind lifted the canvas, no cloud drifted by to be mirrored in the flat glassy water. The world was still, lifeless, and white, the only movement the subtle encroachment of ice both before and behind me, too slow to be seen, yet always present at the corner of my eye.

  I set a watch to climb the rigging, to line the rails, to peer out over the ice, searching—for what? For anything that should not be, I told them. For hours, for days, the crew watched in silence. Boards creaked though no one walked the deck; ropes slapped though no wind stirred. In the distance, cracking ice roared. The men leaned forward and stared, so still for so long, their clothes, their very beards grew thick with frost. Even their eyes seemed glazed as they stared unblinkingly.

  On the third day, on the third watch, all the crew cried out at once: in the near distance, a thin curl of smoke. Next to it stood a black blot against the white. It appeared all at once, as if our eyes had been enthralled until the thing wished to be seen.

  I slipped a hunting knife into my belt and ordered the dinghy into the water. Two men rowed me to the large floe. I bade them to return to the ship and then walked toward the smoke until I reached the end of the ice, where it broke off in sheer angles to the black waves beyond. There, at the very edge, the creature had made its camp.

  It sat amid a pile of strangely shaped, upward juts of ice, a king in a ceilingless cave, making its throne among stalagmites. Neither the sharpness nor the rawness of the ice seemed to bother it. Indeed, the fire that had attracted me burned several feet away—and the fuel that fed it was the thing’s outer garments. Clearly it had no need for warmth.

  With indifference, the creature watched me approach, regarding me with that visage so horrible I did not know how I might look on it and live.

  Priests are advised not to address the Devil when they mean to exorcise it. Why did I speak? Why did I listen? I should have leapt upon it at once and slit its throat.

  “You said you’d return to death.” My breath came hard and fast, my body spewing out the too-frigid air. “Instead, you still live. You could have disappeared. I would not have known. You could have gone to the very pole and stolen my only other treasure—and I never would have known my loss.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Robert Walton, captain of the ship.”

  “You’re angry.”

  Its dispassion infuriated me.

  “You murdered my dearest friend. Now he is gone. And you still live!”

  “I spoke in unexpected grief. He was my father.”

  “Father?”

  Ripping off my gloves, I pulled the knife from my belt and threw myself at it. It was like throwing myself against stone. At once it seized my throat and shook me. In its giant fist, I was as small as a child. I slashed wildly; my blade raked its neck. With its dreadful features drawn up in rage, it threw me to the ground, kicked my arm, and sent the knife skidding toward the water. I scrambled after it. What power would I have without my knife?

  The creature flung itself at me. For the first time I knew its full enormity, as if a mountain had fallen on my back, breaking every bone, crushing the meat of every muscle to pulp. I stretched out my arm but was able only to brush the tip of the knife; it spun like a compass needle gone wild, skittering closer to the water with every revolution.

  The creature seized the knife and with its own huge hand stabbed downward at mine. The blade pierced both skin and bone and severed my middle finger. I screamed, Margaret. Even before my shock dissolved, I screamed at the sight, so much like a woman I am ashamed to remember it.

  Blood sprayed across the ice. I dragged myself to my knees. Numbly I thought, how strange that my finger is so far away. And not only the finger, Margaret: the blade had wedged between the knuckle of the fist and the gold band you had given me years ago. Now both lay apart from me, the one still encircling the other.

  With a flick of the knife, the creature knocked my finger into the water. The pale, slim shape sank quickly—a flash of white, a glint of gold, then black. A howl tore from my chest.

  Without speaking, the creature stood up and walked away, as heedless of the climate as it was of me. It could go where no man could, to the very pole if it wished.

  Ignoring the fire that engulfed my arm, I pulled on my glove and tried to staunch the bleeding by pressing the cloth of the empty finger down into the wound. Cradling one hand with the other, I began to walk back to the ship. Both gloves were soon soaked with blood. I grew dizzy, reeled in circles, and collapsed. My men found me and cauterized the wound right there. One man brought out the tinder box he is never without, another tore his own gloves to threads in order to feed the feeble blaze, a third held a blade to the flames till it glowed.

  I had not thought the pain could be worse till they pressed the red brand against my flesh.

  On ship the surgeon had to reopen the wound to remove the splintered bone down to the joint, then recauterize it.

  Last night I tossed between a sleepless horror of all that had happened and feverish dreams in which over and over a glint of gold was swallowed by darkness. This morning I shook pitifully with just the slight effort of pulling myself up through the hatch, my hand useless, throbbing with indescribable agony. On deck I was startled to see that the landscape had shifted dramatically. At first fury deadened my pain: while I had slept, the crew had mutinied and turned the ship from its northern course. Then I realized we had been hemmed in by peaks of ice. Inch by inch they crept closer. All day I waited on their slow dance of death. In the early afternoon, a fog lowered, plunging the world into madness, for within the misty white hid the more dreadful stony white that would kill us.

  Then, Margaret, not two hours ago, the whole ship shuddered and jerked! Wood screamed as an iceberg ground against us. Men flew to the side to try to push away the ship; their desperation gained us an inch relief. Before coming to my cabin to write this, I inspected the damage and watched the line of men with buckets. It is not a bad leak, but more than can be bailed in the time needed to repair it. If we stay, we shall drown by teacups. I share the ship’s humiliation: little by little it bows, forced into submission by Nature. The prow will be the first to dip, the lovely figurehead, which reminded me of you, the first to taste the waves.

  I had thought to bury Frankenstein at sea, shrouded in canvas. He shall still be buried at sea, but now in the coffin of my ship. Water is his grave; ice, my keep. Eternal Justice has prepared this place for the rebellious; here my prison is ordained in utter whiteness, and my portion set, as far removed from God and the light of Heaven as from the center thrice to the utmost pole.

  There is one chance left. The crew has begged me to give up my goal—only for now!—and try to make our way south on the ice till we reach either land and a settlement, or open water and a venturesome ship. I have ordered the line of bailers reduced by half to free up men to unload such supplies as can be carried. I will add this log to the pile. A pallet is being hastily built for me, but I must find the strength to walk. I would not burden my men. Only a quarter may survive the trip, Margaret, and those by God’s grace alone.

  God’s grace …

  I no longer know what that means.

  I still see, burned into my eyes as if I had stared too long into the sun, the dull glint of gold ever beyond my reach.

  PART ONE

  R
ome

  April 15, 1838

  I killed my father again last night.

  It was the same dream as always, my father and myself pursuing and pursued till I no longer knew who he was, who I was; indeed, if there were any difference between us.

  In the dream my father chases me over a stretch of the Arctic, as he did in the weeks before his death. Once more I flee from his wrath and at the same time lure him on. I drive the sled dogs wildly. As the dogs pant, their spittle freezes and is swept backward by the wind to hail needles against my face. Fog rises from the ice and clings thickly to the dogs: I am pulled along by white devils from Hell.

  Devil. Was that not his very first word upon seeing me rise up? What had he wanted from his labors that I proved so poor a substitute?

  In the dream, as in life, he chases me endlessly. As it cracks wide, the ice beneath us roars like a wounded behemoth. Huge white blocks are shoved upward in nightmare architecture. At last I abandon the sled and cross the broken ice on foot. Greater and greater are the blocks I must climb, the gaps I must leap. Black water laps at the edges of ice. My father is nearby. I hear him mutter “fiend” and “abomination.” His face appears, framed by white mist; it mirrors my own horror and hatred. I reach out. My fingers curl around his throat, as his reach out to mine. He laughs. I wonder if my face shows the same delight. That is all I remember before waking. I know that I have killed him. I do not know if he has killed me.

  It has taken me these ten years to be able to recognize that Victor Frankenstein was my father. If he had lived, might he have learned to call me his son?

  April 16

  Walton is coming. I feel it in my scarred flesh like an old rheumatic who aches at the coming rain. He is close by, but not here in Rome, not yet. How much time do I have?

  April 18

  I have been here in Rome so long now I almost dare think of it as home. The dream is a warning that I must never grow comfortable. Rome must be like any other city, simply one more place where Walton will track me down.