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In the early hours of the morning, when the sun had yet to make any claim on the sky, I startled awake to a bright flash of lightning. Silhouetted against a hill parallel to our path, I thought I saw the figure from the street. The figure from my nightmares. It ran with inhuman speed, its gait close to a man’s but horrifyingly off in some unnamable way. I closed my eyes in terror. Another flash of lightning forced them open.
Nothing was following us.
I sank back against the seat, closing my eyes and thinking only of home. The home that was, once again, mine.
AS JUSTINE AND I were rowed with patient and even strokes across the lake, I remembered my first time here. How frightened I had been. How the house had felt like a predator, waiting to devour me. Now, as I looked at it, it seemed infinitely lessened. Did the spires not stand up so much like teeth as grave monuments? Did the gates swing not so much to catch us as to wave us wearily inside?
I had pictured my return as triumphant. But I sat passively watching the house grow closer as someone else took me there. I realized then: for all my striving, all my hoping and fearing and traveling, I had worked this hard to stay in the same place.
The sun was almost setting, the day nearly done. I did not anticipate home and my bed the way I had expected. Justine sighed happily, taking my hand and squeezing it. “Look! William is on the dock, waiting for us!” She waved so vigorously at her little charge that the boat rocked.
I smiled, too, with a wave. Mine did not so much as add a ripple to the lake.
Everything was not the same, though. Judge Frankenstein, thankfully, had not yet returned from the mysterious trip that had allowed ours, making it less likely that he would speak with Justine and discover my illicit travels. Not that he ever spoke with Justine—in her more than two years at the house, I could not recall a single conversation between them—but it was still a relief. Being caught in my lie about Henry was more than enough. I did not want Justine knowing I had tricked her into chaperoning me without express permission.
With the judge gone, and with the freedom of knowing I would not be thrown out, I prowled the house with a possessive aggression. Perhaps some in my position, having finally obtained a measure of stability after so many months of worry, would collapse into bed, or spend their time reading or painting or simply relaxing. But art had long been a performance for me, a way to convince the Frankensteins of my value. There was no one to convince now. Art brought me no joy, and my canvases were left blank.
I moved from room to room, pulled by an invisible, nagging thread. Things familiar—my four-poster bed, the leaded windowpanes, even my own paintings—had a layer of uncanny discomfort. I walked as if in a dream through a simulated version of life in which I was certain that if I just turned around quickly enough, I would find the truth of the dream: A wall melted to reveal the bones of the house, groaning and fracturing under the weight of us all. The ghosts of Madame Frankenstein and her long-lost second child, watching how well I kept her charge, even beyond the grave. The desiccated corpses of my own parents, too unknown to be anything to me but lifeless husks.
Yet no matter how many rooms I prowled, no matter how many times I spun, certain someone was watching me, there was never anything worth noticing.
The house was the same.
The people in it were the same.
Victor was coming home, and we would be the same.
What, then, had changed?
The estate felt lessened and cheap under my newly critical eye. Now that I did not have to fear losing this sitting room, I saw that the velvet sofa was all wrong, the dimensions of it too big for the space. It was furniture designed for a grander room. Rather than improving the space with its fineness, it emphasized how claustrophobic the room was, how low the ceiling, how bulky the fireplace.
Everywhere I looked was the same. Soulless paintings too big for the walls they hung on. A dining table set for twenty that only ever fed four. It was all boastful artifice hiding the truth:
The house was dying.
I saw it all now: The dusty corners. The cracked and fading paint. The doors that did not hang quite right, either never closing all the way or closing so tightly I feared being locked inside a room, unable to open them again. Half of the fireplaces were boarded up. The other half either heated the rooms to stifling oppression or did little to cut the ever-present draft. Any room that might ostensibly have visitors was stuffed with overtly ornate furniture, scrolling wood and gilt and velvet. And any room that would not was either empty or a graveyard of broken, useless items.
The only room with any real life was the nursery. I spent more and more time there with Justine, Ernest, and William. And even though I had done my best to avoid the boys all these years—preferring to be responsible for only Victor rather than taking on even more Frankensteins—they were…rather delightful. It was probably Justine’s effusive love of them infecting me, but Ernest was at an age where he tried to speak like an adult, and William was at an age where he tried to copy Ernest, and they were both so absurd and simple and easy to please.
“Actually,” William said, watching Ernest pack his things for school one morning, “I am going to school soon, too.”
“That is an incorrect use of the word actually,” I said. “You were not correcting him or disputing any information, merely stating a fact.”
Justine frowned at me. “You hush! If you dare correct another thing he says, I will banish you! And, William, you are not going to school soon. I have you all to myself for a few years yet.”
William gave her a sloppy, wet kiss. I wanted to wipe my own cheek just seeing it. Ernest and I shared a knowing look of disgust, then laughed.
Victor had never been this way, even as a child. They were nothing like him. Maybe it was because they had Justine instead of me. Had I truly helped Victor, or had I made him even more unusual? The madness I had seen of his work in Ingolstadt made me wonder.
But he had gone mad without me. Not with me.
Shaking off the worry, I volunteered to see Ernest off at the dock for school. I was tempted to row into town with him and check to see if there had been any letters, but that promised anxiety. It had not been that long. I would wait.
Victor would write.
“Should I bring you back a flower?” Ernest called as the boat pulled away.
“No! Bring me back an equation. The most beautiful equation you can find!”
