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I took the lamp from the table and lit it. As I went back outside in the shrieking wind, the flame nearly went out in spite of its protective glass globe. I pushed open the door to the outbuilding and was immediately assailed with strange chemical scents I both recognized and was repulsed by.
It was another laboratory, I realized, a split second before I saw what was on a metal table in the center of it.
Or rather, who was on a metal table in the center of it.
JUSTINE LAY AS THOUGH sleeping, but there was something terrible in the stillness of her face. Truly relaxed, it lost the shape of her life, her happiness, her soul.
It was Justine, and it was not.
It was only a body.
But it was her body.
I wanted to run from this place. But I could not run from Justine, not when she needed me. Because she needed me still.
How could Victor do this? How could he violate her so completely? She lay beneath a short sheet, her head and shoulders exposed and her feet bare. I twitched to cover them so she would not get cold but could not bring myself to touch this…thing. This thing that had been my beloved Justine.
It was a foolish impulse to protect her from the cold anyway, and knowing it would not matter made me feel all the worse. What he had done to preserve her body thus I did not know, but there were stitches up and down her arms, across her shoulders, down to her chest beneath the sheet. The greatest concentration of work was done immediately below and above her neck. On her throat was no evidence of the rope that had cut her tragic life short. I wondered what the rest of her, covered by the sheet, looked like, then gagged and turned away so I would not have to look at what had been done to her.
How had she ended up here? For what purpose? The explanation crept upon me, rising along my spine until it settled like a sickness in my brain.
The monster had not implicated Justine merely to punish Victor.
It had framed Justine as a means of getting her body.
This must have been what the monster was talking to Victor about on the mountain! A demand for Victor to create it a mate as horrible as itself. But why would Victor agree? He knew that what he had created was an abomination. I did not doubt that, from the little he had told
me while he was sick and delirious. So why would he be willing to do something this wretched for that creature?
And then I realized: The monster had already killed. It would do so again. And doubtless it had watched long enough to know how to manipulate Victor. The monster had threatened to harm me. No wonder Victor had ranged so far to conduct his devilish experiments! He had to draw the monster away from me.
We had cost Justine her life, and now we had cost her body its rightful peace in death.
Wild rage consumed me. I lifted the lamp above my head to burn this sacrilege done to her body. But the sight of the light catching in her chestnut hair, still shining and lovely in death, stopped me.
I sat on the frigid floor, where the edge of the table blocked my view of Justine save one lock of her hair that hung over the side. What would Justine want?
She would want to be alive. She would want to be with William. I could not give her any of that. All I had given her was death. And even that was a cursed and threatened state, thanks to me.
Justine deserved better. She had not attended the burials of her mother or her siblings. She had been denied the chance to grieve. And she had been denied her own body’s Christian burial. She deserved one, as proper as I could manage. I did not want what was left of her mortal frame to remain forever on this blighted island.
And I would not allow the monster to have her in any form. I did not care if it threatened my life, or even if it killed me. Victor would disagree, but my safety was not worth this steepest of costs.
Justine would rest in the peace she should have had during life.
I formed the vaguest of plans. There was a boat docked on the shore. I would take it. After I had cared for Justine, I would come back for Victor.
I wrapped the sheet around Justine, covering her face. I was not strong enough to carry her, though I longed to cradle her to me like a child. There was a wheelbarrow in the corner of the makeshift laboratory. I cleared it of the chemicals and tools that rested inside, then moved it to the table and maneuvered her body into it.
It was no easy task pushing the wheelbarrow down the steep and rocky path. Several times it nearly overturned, and I feared I would do yet more violence and disrespect to Justine’s body by tumbling it over the rocks. But I managed to transport my precious cargo safely down to the dock, where the lonely boat bobbed in the waves.
I set her body inside, mindful of her head. Mindful that such attention to her feelings no longer mattered, but not caring. I laid my own cloak over her body, covering her completely. I hesitated before untying the boat, though, something tugging my attention back to the island. Justine’s body was safe. But as long as there was a laboratory, the monster could find a way to force Victor to do its will. And Victor would be pushed down this most heinous of paths. I could not forgive him for Justine yet, but I could protect him from further crimes against nature and goodness.
The wind was at my back as though urging me to hurry. It whispered danger in my ears, tugged my veil, tangled through my hair to pull me along. It need not have urged me so. Once decided, I would not have let that laboratory continue to exist for anything in this world.
I did not want to enter it again, but with Justine’s body gone, it looked merely like a chemist’s or a surgeon’s room. If I had not known what hellish purposes the instruments served, what unnatural terrors those chemicals unleashed on the world, I would have been entirely uncurious.
I lifted the nearest glass bottle, intent on spilling it across the metal table so that the fiendish platform might burn in some form. Then I heard footsteps grinding across the rocky trail.
