Chapter Text
❣Victor ❣
(1857)
There are regions of the earth where God's mercy seems to have withdrawn His hand, where no church bell rings, no hearth burns, and no warm human breath dares linger long against the wrath of creation. I had entered such a place. Before me stretched the vast and terrible dominion of the North, a kingdom of ice and punishment, white as a burial shroud and just as merciless. The sea had frozen into a wild and broken plain, jagged with blue ridges and black fissures that yawned like the mouths of the dead. Above, the heavens hung low and colorless, as though the sky itself had been leeched of life. Even the wind did not sing here—it screamed.
And still I followed him.
My dogs strained at their harnesses, gaunt things with steaming flanks and frantic eyes, their paws bloodied from the cruel road. The sled jolted over a rise of shattered ice, and I nearly lost my footing, my body weakened as much by exhaustion as by the fever of my purpose. My hands, though gloved in fur, burned and ached as though the cold wished to strip me to the bone. Frost clung to my lashes. My breath came harsh and ragged into the scarf wound about my mouth. Yet none of this suffering, no torment inflicted by nature or Providence, could rival the agony that spurred me onward.
For somewhere ahead of me, crossing this desolation with unnatural endurance, was the being I had once called into life.
The creature.
Even now, I cannot write the word without feeling some inward convulsion of the soul. There are names that ought never be spoken, acts that should die unborn within the secret chambers of the human mind. Yet mine did not die. It took shape beneath my hands. It opened its burning eye. It breathed. And then it ruined me.The wind struck broadside, nearly pitching me from the sled, and I uttered a bitter curse into the storm.
"Go on!" I cried to the dogs, my voice breaking in the open waste. "Go on, damn you! Faster!"
They answered only with desperate effort, dragging me over the frozen sea as though they too were caught in my madness, though less willingly. I had long since ceased to measure time with any reliability. Days and nights bled together in this accursed latitude, where the sun loomed pale and weak, and the darkness did not always descend so much as thicken. I knew only pursuit. Each morning—or what I judged to be morning—I rose with my vengeance half-frozen in my breast and resumed the chase.Sometimes I found traces of him.A distant silhouette standing upon an ice ridge like some giant specter carved of shadow and snow. A line of tremendous footprints impressed deep into the drift, where no ordinary man could have trodden with such force. Once, beneath the shelter of a jutting wall of ice, I discovered the remnants of a fire, still smoldering, and beside it a crude mark scratched into the frost-hardened earth with a sharpened bone:
Follow.
No other word. No plea. No apology. No taunt, even, unless the whole of his existence were not mockery enough. I remember staring at that single command until the letters blurred. There was a dreadful intimacy in it, as though he knew my soul too well to waste effort on elaborate cruelty. He knew I would follow. He knew that every horror he had wrought had bound me to him more securely than chains. He knew, perhaps, that in some dark chamber of conscience I believed myself less his pursuer than his appointed shadow. I destroyed the fire with my boot and moved on.
Toward evening, if that dim decline of light could be called evening, the weather worsened. Snow came not in soft descent but in violent sheets, driving slantwise across the ice until the world seemed no larger than the circle of visibility before my face. The horizon vanished. The earth and sky became one monstrous pallor. I could no longer distinguish distance, shape, or direction except by instinct and those faint signs he left me, too deliberate to be accidental. He wanted to be followed. At times, I thought the very vastness of the Arctic had become his accomplice, preserving him and torturing me in equal measure.I pulled the sled to a halt beneath the partial shelter of an ice hummock and dismounted stiffly. My legs trembled treacherously beneath me. The dogs collapsed in the snow, panting. I bent over, bracing my hands upon my knees, and shut my eyes against a sudden wave of dizziness.
In that darkness behind my lids, Geneva rose before me.
Not the Geneva of civic pride and summer promenades, but the lost Geneva of my youth: lake water bright as glass in the morning light; the gardens of our house breathing roses after rain; William laughing as he ran ahead upon the path, his curls bright with sun; Elizabeth's voice carrying determined and clear through the open windows; and Elanore—
I opened my eyes at once and recoiled as if I had touched a wound.
"Why should I think of her here?"
Yet the image had already come, and with it that old, secret discomfort I had never fully named. Elanore, Elizabeth's elder sister, was never the ornament of a room in the way her sister was. Society, which is ever blind and always certain of its own judgment, had made its distinctions early and cruelly. Elizabeth was grace, strength, and laughter. Elizabeth was the cherished diamond every drawing room wished to claim. But Elanore—with her grave silences, her searching gaze, her refusal to flatter fools, her bousterious laugh, and the way her imaginative mind spoke—had always unsettled people. Men did not know what to do with a woman who thought too much. Women forgave beauty more readily than intelligence, and forgave frankness least of all.
I had known them both since youth. My mother admired Elizabeth openly, warmly, and with the easy affection the world bestowed upon those fashioned for admiration. Elanore was treated kindly, yes—but with that careful, measured kindness which is more painful than unguarded dislike. She was welcomed because she belonged near Elizabeth, because William adored her stories, because our families had long been intertwined in affection and habit. Yet even in company, she stood somehow apart, not by timidity, but by an inward remoteness that no invitation ever quite crossed.
I remember one autumn evening before all had gone to ruin. The candles had just been lit in the parlor. Rain struck the windows in silver threads, and William, then no more than a boy, sat at Elanore's feet begging for another ghost story. Elizabeth played some quiet piece upon the pianoforte, the notes soft as breath, while I leafed distractedly through a volume of Agrippa half-concealed upon my lap. Elanore, glancing up from William's eager face, caught me watching the old text.
"Still searching among the dead for secrets?" she asked.
There had been no reproach in her tone. That, perhaps, was what disarmed me. Only curiosity. I shut the book partway.
"There are truths in old knowledge modern men are too vain to see."
She gave the faintest smile—sad, thoughtful, difficult to interpret. "Or too wise to touch."
William groaned. "Do not begin to argue. Tell the story, Nellie."
It was one of his names for her. He used it with a boy's unquestioning devotion, and she softened whenever he did.
"I shall tell it," she said, stroking his hair, "but only if you promise not to cry out and wake the house when the ghost comes scratching at your shutters."
He swore solemnly, and she began.
I do not recall now the particulars of the tale, only the cadence of her voice in the dim room, low and rich as dusk gathering over water. Even then, there had been something of the gothic heroine about her—though she would have scoffed at the notion—a woman formed not for the polished ease of salons but for storm-lit corridors, candlelit vigils, and ruined abbeys where truths hid better than in daylight. Elizabeth glowed in the company. Elanore seemed made for shadow. And yet in those shadows and even the lit rooms, Eleanore was the glowing light.
Would that I had understood shadows better then.
The storm intensified, hurling me back into the present. I forced my frozen fingers to work at the clasp of my satchel and drew out a crust of bread, hard as wood. I could scarcely swallow it. Everything in me revolted except the compulsion to continue. I ought to have rested. A rational man would have waited out the weather, husbanded his strength, and preserved life where he could. But reason had long since become a pious word with little rule over me.
I heard it then. A sound unlike the wind, though the wind nearly devoured it—a low, distant cry, not human exactly, but carrying enough of human anguish to stop the blood in my veins. I stood motionless, listening. Again it came, borne over the ice from somewhere beyond the storm's veil.
Not grief.
Laughter.
My hand flew to the pistol at my belt, though I knew how futile that comfort was. The sound moved, vanished, returned farther off, as though the thing that uttered it traversed the broken sea with impossible speed.
"You fiend!" I shouted into the white void. "Coward! Show yourself!"
The only answer was the shrieking gale. But I knew he had heard. He always heard.
I mounted the sled once more and drove the dogs onward, reckless now, my mind set aflame by the certainty of his nearness. The snow thinned for one miraculous moment, and there, upon the crest of a distant ridge, I saw him. He stood against the pallid sky like some profane monument raised to blasphemy. Larger than any man, wrapped in dark skins that snapped in the wind, his frame terrible in its proportion and strength. Even at that distance, there was something unmistakable in the set of his shoulders, in the awful intelligence of his stillness. He did not flee at once. No—he turned his head, and though I could not see his features clearly, I knew with a horror beyond sight that he was looking directly at me.
Then he lifted one arm and pointed north.
A gesture both command and invitation.
The next instant, he vanished beyond the ridge.
My whole body shook—not from cold, but from that old and poisonous mixture of hatred, fear, and dreadful recognition. I lashed the dogs forward so savagely that one yelped. The sled careened over cracked ice. I nearly overturned. My heart hammered as though it would break through my chest. The world narrowed to pursuit, to the ridge ahead, to the black shape just gone from sight.
North.
Always north, into the emptiest reaches of the earth, as if he meant to drag me to the very lip of creation where no witness but God could behold our end. And why not? Had not all this begun with my own impious reaching? In youth, I had wished to penetrate the hidden laws of life, to storm the citadel of nature and seize from her that which belonged to heaven. I had dreamed not only of discovery, but of glory. Let no man pretend that ambition comes clothed in noble language alone. Mine was a hunger to surpass, to command, to become singular among mortals. I desired to stand where none had stood. I desired, in secret, to rival the divine.
And what had I fashioned from that desire?
Not Adam.
Not even a beast content with instinct.
But a being abandoned at birth into terror and loneliness, with strength beyond men and a soul twisted by misery into vengeance.
Yet even now, as I drove myself toward him across this coffin-colored waste, I could not grant him innocence. He had chosen blood. Chosen cruelty. Chosen to make himself the scourge of all I loved. Whatever eloquence he might once have gained, whatever sufferings he might lay at my feet—and there were many, God knows—did not wash clean the dead. William's face rose before me again, bright and trusting, and I nearly cried aloud.
"My brother," I whispered.
The words vanished in the wind.
I had been beside William when he died. The word and name he spoke, "monster," still rings in my ears. That fact had gnawed at me like an internal rat through every month since. Nor had I been the guardian I ought to have been to any within my circle. I had withdrawn into secret labor, shut away from human sympathy, from duty, from tenderness, until the thing I created broke loose upon the very world I had neglected for my obsession. If guilt were ice, I should have belonged to this land long before I entered it.
Night gathered—or what passed for night. A dim violet murk spread over the frozen plains, and the first pale streamers of aurora uncoiled overhead like celestial wounds opening in the dark. Green fire trembled across the heavens. The beauty of it was almost indecent. To see such splendor above so much desolation seemed some cosmic mockery. I have often thought nature indifferent, but in that hour she appeared worse than indifferent—magnificent.
At last, the dogs could go no farther. Their pace faltered into stumbling misery, and one collapsed entirely. I halted again beside a field of ice blocks piled like ruined cathedral stones. The comparison struck me so strongly that I looked twice. There they stood in the murk, blue-white and immense, as if some ancient sanctuary had been shattered and buried here by a wrathful God. I tethered the team and set about making a small shelter from canvas and sledge boards, though my fingers had gone so numb I could scarcely knot the cords.
As I worked, I spoke aloud without intending to, my voice low and hoarse.
"What are you now?" I murmured into the dark. "Murderer, demon, son—"
I stopped, horrified at the final word.
Yet it hung between myself and the frozen air with intolerable force.
For what else was he, in the blackest and most monstrous sense? My work. My sin. My issue. That which bore the stamp of my hand, even in deformity. If I hunted him now with the fervor of a righteous avenger, it was not righteousness alone that propelled me. There was shame in it, too. Shame that what I had made walked the earth bearing, however grotesquely, the evidence of my trespass against the natural order.
I entered the meager shelter and wrapped myself in furs, though they gave little warmth. The aurora pulsed through the seams in shifting green ribbons. Sleep did not come. Whenever I shut my eyes, memory came instead.
My laboratory.
The rain striking the roof in a ceaseless hiss.
The smell of chemicals, rot, damp stone, and something metallic beneath it all.
My instruments lay out in dreadful readiness.
The assembled form upon the table, immense and still beneath the jaundiced light.
How magnificent I had believed myself in those final hours. How feverishly exalted. I remember speaking aloud though no one stood near to hear me.
"Only one more galvanic sequence," I had whispered, hands trembling not with fear but anticipation. "One more turn and—"
And what? Triumph? Apotheosis?
I see myself then as though observing a stranger: hollow-cheeked, wild-eyed, consumed by sleepless ambition and so divorced from ordinary moral feeling that I scarcely resembled a man among men. The storm outside had raged. Lamps had flickered. The room seemed poised between worlds. And when at last the body stirred—when the chest labored, when the fingers twitched, when that watery eye opened beneath its lid—I did not feel wonder.
I felt horror so complete it was almost a revelation.
No dream of beauty remained. No rhetoric of progress. Nothing but the obscene fact of life where it ought not to have been, and my own soul recoiling from the fruit of its labors.
I pressed both hands over my face in the freezing shelter, but memory did not relent.
The eye-opening.
The lips are drawing back.
The first breath.
"God forgive me," I said.
The wind outside dropped suddenly, as though listening.
Then, from somewhere not far beyond the ice walls, came the unmistakable crunch of footsteps.
Heavy. Slow. Deliberate.
I seized my pistol and lurched upright, every nerve ablaze. The dogs outside whined but did not bark. A shadow crossed the thin seam of light at the shelter's entrance, enormous and distorted.
"Victor."
His voice.
No storm, no distance, no passage of time could have made me mistake it. Deep, roughened, yet carrying that strange, terrible capacity for feeling which made it more dreadful than any inhuman growl would have been. There was intellect in it. Memory. Pain.
Hatred surged through me with such violence that I nearly tore the canvas aside at once and fired blind into the dark.
But I did not.
Perhaps because some more primitive terror held my hand. Perhaps because I knew one shot would not end him. Or perhaps because beneath everything else there remained that cursed desire to hear him, to understand the ruin I had authored, even while I longed to annihilate it.
Again he spoke, nearer now.
"Victor Frankenstein."
I rose to my full height, though it was a poor, shivering thing compared to him, and fixed my grip upon the pistol.
"Come in then," I said through clenched teeth. "Come, behold your maker."
The shadow at the entrance stilled.
And in the breathless, polar dark, with the dead world listening round us, I waited for the monster to enter.
Then there was silence, but suddenly from the darkness I felt a hand. The hand grips my ankle as the looming shadow of my creation emerges and jerks me from my tent, dragging me across the ice as I scream.
Surely death will be upon me soon.
Oh, how wrong I was.
---
The pain. Oh, the pain brings me back yet blinds me. I feel it in my lungs, my arm, and my very heart. Fragments of the moment flee before my eyes. My creation taunting me, mocking me for my efforts in trying to destroy him, but all in vain. He had plunged the dagger in my shoulder and then took my lit dynamite in his own hands.
"Captain, over here!"
I hear unfamiliar voices and see light, but my consciousness is way.
"You- put your faith- in this? This?!" I hear the creature's voice boom as I'm pulled back into the memory. I can see the ship captain and other men assessing me, but the memories are too great.
"You- think- this- will unmake me?" The creature takes the bag- the rest of the sticks of dynamite- and matches. He hands them to me.
"Light it then. And hope it does. But if it does not, I will come for you- again! And make you regret it. Light it... Light it!!!"
I obey. Trembling and covered in blood. The Creature embraces the dynamite as if it were a baby- a prize- a cherished possession tight upon his chest as I hand it to him.
He grins at me with his unnatural, perfect white teeth. "Run."
---
I gasp awake with a jolt. I feel the warmth around me. I sit up on the cot and gaze around frantically as if the creature himself were still next to me. As I see no creature and hear the groans of wood, I remember where I am.
The captain, who appears to be a doctor, tries to settle me.
"What- are you doing?" I stammer.
The Doctor and the Captain turn. I lean on my injured arm, grimacing as I begin to climb from the bed.
The captain looks to me "English- can you understand English?"
I nod as the Doctor speaks, "We are trying to save you, my good man."
"Where am I?"
The captain motions, "You are on the Danish Royal Ship Horisont. My name is Captain AlfredAnderson."
"Put me back on the ice," I command.
They both look puzzled as Anderson speaks, "I don't understand."
" How many of your men did it kill?" I ask, quivering as the events from my rescue last night begin to resurface. The gunfire, the screams, and every roar.
Anderson clears his throat. "Six."
Doctor Udsen hands him a drink.
I tremble as more guilt of death consumes me. "It will come back and kill many more. All of you, if necessary- unless you put me back on the ice and let it take me," as I point to the door.
"It's over. The body sank in the frozen waters, carried away, probably miles away, by the very current that wedges this ship into the ice. It is dead."
I smash the glass in my hand onto the floor as fury and fear overtake me. "It is not! It cannot die! I should know! I have tried to destroy it- time and again!... Whether you believe me or not, it will come back for me. And you have to promise me: When it does- You will put me back on the ice and let it take me... "
Anderson is perplexed, and the Doctor is fearful. He motions the Doctor out with a nod. As the doors close, he leans in, "What manner of creature is that-? And what manner of God or devil made him?"
Trembling, the memories over the past few brief years come flooding back. I can only point a finger at my bare chest as I confess.
"I did."