Frankenstein's Monster (24 page)

Lily peered out through a crack in the shutters. “He’s wearing boots,” she said, considering her own feet. With her wedding slippers worn to scraps, she had put on a pair of the farmer’s shoes but they were ill fitting. “Perhaps his boots will be more comfortable than these.” She reached toward the latch, then pulled back.

“We’d have to leave at once. Tomorrow when he returns will be soon enough. We have the night before us.”

“Yes, the night.”

She sat on the bench, I at her feet, both of us listening as the animals were brought into the barn. Her face grew thoughtful, her eyes distant. Something made her unhappy; perhaps the talk of a simple domestic life emphasized her own uncertainty. The worm ruled her. What manner of future, if any, would it allow her?

As the sun set, red light glowed through the crack where the shutters did not meet, dividing the shadows with a single stripe of rose that moved across Lily’s face. She must have seen the same on mine for she bent forward and stroked my cheek.

“You are all pink—like a flower, like a sweet William.”

I caught her palm and kissed it.

“Now I must call you sweet Victor instead,” she murmured. A rattle at the door made me leap to my feet—then a
second rattle, as the shutters were tried and found locked. The boy was securing the cottage for the night.

Lily also stood up and faced the cold hearth. Placing my hands lightly on her shoulders, I felt what my eyes had not perceived: all her softness was gone. I had already seen her stomach’s bloat of starvation; now I felt how her softness had wasted to the thinnest pad of flesh. Despite that—whether because of the sunset’s forgiving shadows, or because of my own need for her not to be sick, at least for this one night—she was more beautiful than ever.

Standing behind her, afraid to see her face, I offered her my hand. Between us lay a chasm of immeasurable depth and width, unfathomable thought and desire. She reached up across the blackness, placed her hand in mine, and turned.

“Victor,” she whispered. She did not look up.

“Yes, Lily.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You have done nothing. It is I who am sorry. I have naught to give you. Instead, all I’ve done is take.”

“When we met,” she said, “it was already too late. Everything precious had already been thrown away. There was nothing left for you to take. I am sorry for that as well.”

Stepping away, she tried to free her hand.

“Shhh.” I would not let her go.

At my touch, she relaxed and let me pull her close. I bent low, nuzzled her hair, brushed with my lips the bare skin of her neck.

She broke my clasp gently and, without looking at me, walked into the bedroom. I heard a flint strike, the clothespress open and shut, the shoes softly drop, the straw mattress tick—then another sound, unfamiliar, a quiet
shush
repeated over and over.

I stepped through the open door. Lily sat on the bed facing away from me. She was dressed in a white nightshirt worn to a whisper, her clothes on the floor in a pile. The candle stood on the washstand between us, casting our separate shadows on separate walls.

The unfamiliar
shush
, repeated over and over, was the sound of Lily brushing her hair. The raven curls were knotted, their color had dulled, and yet—something about the gesture moved me in ways I could not understand. For eons, women have brushed their hair at night while their men watched. It seemed that all of time had led us to this moment.

Lucio’s wife had unpinned her hair and combed it with her fingers before she and Lucio made love.

And Mirabella …

I moved to Lily’s side. She knew I was crossing the room—I saw her hand pause in its downward descent at the sound of my footfall, saw her look up at the wall where my shadow covered hers—but when I came to her, pulled her to her feet, and embraced her, she shrank back. At first all I could see were her tears and the inexplicable anguish in her eyes. There was nothing else, nothing more important to me. What made her cry like this? And how could I comfort her?

“How dare you touch me!”

Despite her tears, her mouth writhed with repulsion.

“Dare?” I repeated, not understanding. I clutched her. Every struggle sent sensation roaring through my body. “Was I not invited to touch you? When I kissed your palm, did you not call me ‘sweet Victor’?”

“I say the same nonsense to the hound that licks my foot!” she cried, striking my face with the hairbrush. Cheek stinging, I knocked the brush to the floor, grabbed her arms, and wrenched them behind her back.

“I was led by the open door to your bed,” I said, fighting
to hold her tighter. “What man would not be teased by such an invitation?”

“A man, yes. I would not have teased a man.”

“You also should not have teased a monster!”

I seized her face and pressed my lips, as black as ash, against hers. Twisting her mouth away, she spat and wiped her mouth.

“A monster? Is that what you think you are?” she asked. “At best you are only some freakish animal.”

“Animal?” The word penetrated to the heart of my fears and echoed Walton’s accusations.

“Yes,” she said lightly. “An animal. You can be no more than the parts from which you claim to be made, can you? In the end, you are like some great hound given too much license, who eats from the table and sleeps on the bed.”

My hold on her loosened as passion was replaced by violence. She slid from my grasp. Instead of running, she stood not inches away as she continued: “You are not a man, Victor. Neither are you a monster. You are nothing.”

How quickly every drop of lust turned to blistering madness.

“You do not know the danger you put yourself in,” I said.

“You would give
me
the same warning as those street ruffians? At least that is more than you gave Harry Burke!”

Of itself my hand tightened into a fist and struck at her. At the last moment I turned an inch and slammed the wall next to her eye. Plaster fell to the floor in chunks. Lily jumped at the blow, but did not move from the spot. She laughed and cried at once, as though, in her lunacy, she was confused by what she wanted.

“Can’t you see how pathetic you are?”

She lifted her chin and held her arms wide. She was so close to me, so close and small, like a porcelain doll; so close,
so eager to be hurt. I seized the washstand and smashed it against the wall. Bowl and pitcher shattered, threw shards against her bare feet. The candle dropped, sputtered, smothered the room in black. Blindly I reached out. I grabbed her by the hair and dragged her to me.

“Do you know what my father thought of you?” she asked, voice tight. “My father thought your existence meant the end of all meaning in the world. But you are nothing so grand. If my father saw you now, all he’d see is a dog eager to lap cunt.”

Crying out, I knocked her aside, stumbled from the cottage, and ran into the woods.

I was not a man? I was not a monster? At best I was an animal? Then I would be one fully; she would not take that little from me: I would glory in it. Piece by piece I shed my clothes, that poor disguise of humanity that I had worn always in vain; piece by piece I shed the mask till I ran naked. In the thick underbrush, stickers and branches made a gauntlet that would flay me of this skin, stolen from men to hide the beast beneath. I ran mile after mile, deeper and deeper into the woods, until, at last, they claimed me for their own, and I was no longer not a man, no longer not a monster; I became in my mind an animal in truth, a wondrous, undiscovered species.

If only the woods had been magic as in a child’s story.… The illusion would have been complete: the forest could have woven enchantment about me and grown me hooves to cover the soles of my feet, fur to preserve my limbs and body. Imagining these, wishing for these, I felt my senses, ever sharp, flood with a beast’s thousand perceptions: I thought I smelled in the wind the next town. I thought I heard the breathy snores and muttered dreams of men, tasted a dozen women sleeping in their dozen beds.

The path before me tightened on either side with cruel
thorns and jagged twists of brambles, yet both gave way like silk against my imagined fur, caressing me into feverish pleasure. On and on I ran. At a point determined by instinct alone I turned and burst through the arching branches that formed the overgrown path. I found myself in a clearing where a herd of deer had been at rest. At first paralyzed, they rose up as one and leapt away, tails flicking as they scattered to the left and right.

Setting my eyes on a young doe, I rapidly closed the distance between us till her hooves snapped at me with each vault. I matched her leap for leap till I sensed her spirit flag under my ceaseless pursuit. Only then did I quicken my pace. I reached out, grabbed her from behind by the thighs, and forced her to slow. Her hooves battered my knees, then she reared up in front to try to shake me loose, but I held on until she stopped running. I grasped her firmly along her flanks till her kicking quieted to fearful shudders, and then lifted her up to meet me, to join with me as no woman ever willingly had. She panicked and once more I gentled her, this time with a low shushing moan. I was kind to her, though it was not kindness that had led me to such desperation.

At the last moment I cried out from the pain of knowing there had been no one human to accept me.

I was Victor Hartmann. Hart-man. Animal man. Lily had named me well.

Exhaustion overtook me. I woke hours later, naked. A thousand cuts scored my flesh, and my whole body ached and stung: that was the truth, not an imagined metamorphosis. I stood up and slowly retraced my path through the woods, piece by piece reclaiming the poor possessions I had shed, piece by piece again disguising myself as a man.

Walton alone understood me. Walton alone knew what I am. Now he is dead. What am I without him?

Dawn had just begun to pinken the sky when I could see in the distance the cottage’s thatched roof.

I stopped. The words had no sooner whispered in my ear than I realized my habit of poetry was only a trick, a novelty, a trained response: instead of feeling, I have learned to echo someone else’s feelings. On command, the parrot sings, and I quote a verse.

Last night I had fled the violence that awaited me in this place. In fleeing, did I truly choose against violence? Or did I simply choose a corruption deemed, in men’s eyes, much worse? Perhaps that is why I walked back to the cottage, for only by returning, and seeing Lily, and not being enraged, could I learn the answer.

She sat outside the door of the cottage, already prepared to leave, dressed in the shirt and trousers she had taken from the clothespress after her bath. Over these she wore a heavy jacket. Beside her lay my cloak and a small bundle, perhaps of food.

She stood at once at the sound of my step.

“I am sorry,” she said softly, her head low. Her eyes, fixed on the ground, were red and swollen; she was still crying. “The words I spoke … were not true. Nothing I said in that room was true.
Nothing.”

Even so small a reference to last night summoned up each poisonous remark. The blood beat in my temple, the skin there jumped, the heat rushed to my face. How might I answer such an apology? How might I regard the evidence of her tears?

I said nothing, fighting for self-mastery. On tiptoe, she reached up and for a brief wounded moment laid her palm
against my scarred cheek. Her hand, cool in the morning air, quivered like a butterfly’s wing. All I could see was how easily it might be crushed.

“My father’s opinion meant much to you, did it not?” Her ability to cut to the heart of me was unerring. “The words I claimed were his … those were my uncle’s words.” I still did not reply, and she said, “In the beginning, my father spoke well of you. He thought you had shown courage and restraint given my uncle’s treatment.”

“And later,” I said, speaking at last, “what did your father say later? After he had discovered the truth and tried to kill me? Before I then killed him.”

“Later, he spoke very little.” She risked a glimpse at my face, so swift a look I felt myself to be Medusa. “He was disappointed in himself for having reacted with such severity.”

“And you, Lily, are you disappointed in yourself? Will you now tolerate the freak and treat it as a man? Perhaps it does not matter. I’m certain you could hate a man just as well.”

“You are not a freak,” she said.

She touched me lightly on the arm, although her eyes did not meet mine, and she seemed to curl in upon herself and grow smaller. But I was not to be appeased.

“If I am not a freak, what am I?”

“I’m sorry,” she repeated, as though that answered my question.

“I think your sorrow is another lie. Your words of contrition are as deliberate as the words you spoke last night.”

This time her glance was sharp and direct.

“I am not my words,” she said, with a faint smile, as if to say that included the apology she had just made. “Here is my deed instead: I will stay with you.”

“Where is the benefit in that?”

She would have spoken again, rashly I think, but in the end
decided to keep still. I, too, kept still, till my blood beat more softly and my face felt cool in the dewy morning air.

At last I bent down to pick up my cloak and the bundle. I saw, for the first time, that Lily wore not the shoes she had yesterday taken from the cottager but a pair of boots, new and unmarked, save for a dark stain on one toe.

Three days without writing … My memories of the cottage and the woods were so painful, should I have used blood for ink? So short a time ago I had written,
I hasten toward, rather than from
. I did not know that within my mind hid another hunter.

With one step I vow to abandon Lily. Another step, and Winterbourne rebukes me for endangering the daughter I stole from him. A third, Walton gloats at my solitude. A fourth step, and I count the days with dark satisfaction. Another, and Lily says something that makes me fear for the future.

Yesterday morning, seeing a city in the distance, she said, “Oh what gossip I’ll inspire when I return home! Tarkenville will turn out, eager to see both my new house and me!”