Page 10 of Her Creation

Alphonse’s friends, renowned in various academics, found her voracity enchanting. They brought her books and materials, indulged her with attention, entertained her questions with patience and even a tinge of pride. Once she could write, Victoria became utterly absorbed: notebooks lined with careful script, diagrams, queries, cross-references, the fervor of her mind pressed into paper. Her father encouraged it.

Mary did not.

With a heavy heart, she questioned Alphonse—society would not look kindly on a young woman whose mind dared wander beyond acceptable bounds. She worried when Victoria avoided the other girls at gatherings, preferring instead the companionship of her books. Delicately, she encouraged drawing, embroidery, music, and domestic skills: pursuits that would mark her as suitable and respectable. The natural sciences, she insisted, had no place in a lady’s education.

Thirteen-year-old Victoria, determined to please her mother, threw herself into this imposed discipline. For three weeks she studied drawing, the meticulous folds of linen, the symmetry of embroidery patterns. She trailed the maid Greta with persistent questions, absorbing household knowledge with a thoroughness that surprised even Mary. When her work was presented—exquisite sketches, handkerchiefs embroidered with such skill they seemed to shimmer—Mary’s heart softened, yet Victoria’s attention soon drifted back to her love of the forbidden world of science and nature.

Mary, though uncertain, relented, but with a warning: her daughter’s curiosities must remain known only to family and trusted academic friends.

It was not the only secrecy she enforced.

As Alphonse’s experiments grew stranger, more grotesque, Mary forbade discussion beyond trusted colleagues. Eventually, she refused even to hear them herself. Victoria, however, could never seem to learn enough. She trailed her father, listening intently to explanations, debates, and errors, absorbing knowledge as if it were her only source of nourishment.

Late one November, an English colleague arrived, bearing three books for Victoria. Dr. Paranthal, aware of his dear friend’s concern of the girl’s brilliance, believed he could quell her restless mind. Victoria, he surmised, merely required a diet of knowledge so esoteric, so extreme, that it might finally satisfy her hunger.

Thus, he presented De Occulta Philosophia by Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus’s writings on medicine and mystical chemistry, and Albertus Magnus, the philosopher whose studies straddled magic and theology.

Victoria devoured the texts. Day and night, with candlelight flickering on her pale skin, she traced letters and diagrams, her fingers smudging ink and dusting worn pages. Within a year, the books were soft, edges tattered from constant handling.

Alphonse watched with pride, his experiments, though increasingly unusual, growing more successful, and soon people traveled from distant lands for healing. Rumors spread, whispering that Dr. Frankenstein, blessed by God, could restore the dead.

Such fame elevated his social standing beyond all precedent. When he saved the Count of Bremen’s dying wife after three other doctors had failed, the aristocrat installed the Frankensteins in Vondricht Castle: a black fortress whose needle-thin spires tore at cloud and sky, visible from every village and town nearby. From the horizon, its dark silhouette marked the place where the unhealable were brought.

The locals named it Die Tausend-Schwerter-Burg, the Thousand-Sword Castle, after whispers swelled of Alphonse’s power: that even a body struck down by a thousand swords might rise again beneath his hands.

The castle became a symbol of both awe and terror. The nobility paraded Alphonse as a miracle incarnate, while lauding his supposed divinity—his name polished their reputations. Yet Mother Nature, unyielding, intervened.

With several of the other floors sealed and rendered inaccessible due to age and disuse, the basement laboratory remained a place of strict privacy. Enormous black doors loomed at the head of the dark stone stairs, kept locked to ensure that the castle’s modest staff, and anyone else who might wander too far, never descended out of idle curiosity.

Once the patients arrived, they were ushered through a rear entrance into the basement by way of a poorly lit, musty underground tunnel. The passage had been constructed centuries earlier as one of many sally ports, intended for escape during sieges fought in the era of the Thirty Years’ War. Though short, the tunnel proved eerily disorienting to both the patients and their travel companions with its enclosed darkness warping any sense of direction or time.

Alphonse would not permit patients or their illnesses to cross into the main house, though in the end it mattered little where Victoria was concerned, for she would come to spend nearly as much time in the laboratory as her father himself.

Not long after the move, Mary fell ill and died suddenly.

Grief fractured the household. Alphonse, confronted by a wound no skill could mend, flung himself into work. His experiments grew darker, more daring. Murderers, thieves, and the unwanted were brought secretly to the basement laboratory, the black heart of the castle, which became a place of whispered horror and exacting study.

Victoria followed relentlessly. She had never abandoned the forbidden knowledge of her books. Now, the loss of her mother hardened that hunger into conviction.

“We can bring her back, Papa!” she cried, tears streaming over her cheeks. “It is in the books! We only need to learn more!”

Alphonse, eyes blurred with grief, shook his head. “We are incapable of resurrection, my sweet. No matter our knowledge or skill, we are not God. We cannot bring back a departed soul. Your mother is gone.” But it was too late. The idea of resurrection was now embedded in the freshly clotted grief of Victoria.

Victoria’s fist struck the table, black hair tumbling over her face. “Why not? God is no great man, for if he were, he would not curse his children with such ailments as he does. He would not watch from a distance as they suffer were he anything but despicable,” Victoria shouted.

“Victoria Rose Frankenstein, I will not allow blasphemy in this house no matter your grief—what would your mother say?” Alphonse demanded.

“That she wants to come back to us—to me. We can bring her back!”

“Victoria…”

But her sharp eyes landed on the weary bags beneath the old man’s dull, miserable mahogany eyes, and she stopped any further argument. It had been weeks since her mother passed, and every day since she’d wondered if she would soon lose her father to grief. “I miss her. I miss her so much.” Victoria’s eyes tightened with sadness.

“You still have me,” he whispered.

“But for how long? How long until you are taken from me as well?”

That was the moment everything changed for Victoria. The moment she knew that even if she didn’t know enough to bring her mother back, she wouldn’t stop until her father was safe and she learned how she could keep him alive forever. Resurrection became her obsession.