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Mary and I sat side by side, rowing our way across the lake that long had been the border of my home. Now it carried me to my dark purpose: to end the boy who had brought me there. Waves blacker than the night slapped at the sides of our boat, gusts of wind carrying spray to our faces. I imagined the lake baptizing us, consecrating us for our unholy task.
Surely nature abhorred Victor.
A low rumble of thunder passed through the valley, echoing off the mountains in the distance. The waves grew choppier, the wind stronger. Hanging on the gusts was the distant, lonesome cry of some beast in agony.
My heart had made the same cry too many times. I turned my face from the unseen creature’s pain. I could not shoulder anyone else’s, not even that of a poor dumb beast.
Tonight, I would kill Victor. Tonight, I would destroy the last remnants of the foundation I had spent my entire life building. Would I be left to sift through the rubble, to see whether anything I was, was worth salvaging? Or would I fall, too?
A brilliant streak of lightning illuminated us in the center of the lake. We were in the midst of a rising maelstrom. Rain slashed down with cutting force, soaking us in seconds. Still we pulled on the oars, undeterred from our deadly design.
“The pistols will not work!” Mary shouted. I could barely hear her over the storm. “They have gotten too wet!”
I nodded. We each had a knife, though we had hoped to be able to use the pistols. I remembered the ease with which Victor had overpowered me. It filled me with shame. Had I fought harder, or faster…But if the bodies found in the river were any indication, Victor had had a good deal of experience capturing and subduing people.
We finally made it across the churning lake. We slipped over the dock, buffeted by the storm. The night had given itself to violence. A tree crashed to the ground with a tremendous crack and we both jumped, barely dodging the branches. The wind pulled my hair from the pins Mary had given me, and long wet strands whipped my face with stinging blows.
The house was waiting. None of the bedroom windows glowed warm; only the entry hall held a hint of light. Another flash of lightning threw the building into perfect relief, and I noticed one detail that had changed in my absence: a long pole, topped with a metal orb and wrapped with coils, now rose from the roof over the dining room, soaring far above the sharp peaks of the house.
“He made another laboratory,” I whispered. But the wind and the rain stole my words. I grabbed Mary’s arm and pointed, screaming my observation in her ear. She nodded grimly, wiping water from her eyes. I gestured to the back of the house, where I knew we could climb the trellis and pry open a loose window in my bedroom.
I entered my old home like a thief in the night. I was there to steal the life of its heir. I set my feet on the richly polished wood floor on which generations of Frankensteins had trod. My soaked skirts dripped a steady puddle of water that would damage the wood if left unmopped. As a child, I would have cleaned it immediately, wishing to leave no trace of myself and no opening for censure.
I leaned over and wrung out my hair all over the floor.
After my time in the asylum and our nighttime travel here—Mary and I had slept during the day, hidden in a barn—the room was a riot of visual stimulation. I had always liked it as a child, but now I saw the garish roses on the wallpaper as pale imitations of reality, like everything in this cold house. The windows were draped with heavy cloth, which blocked both light and the view of nature’s majesty. Next to one window was a painting of the same mountains one had only to step outside to see.
Perhaps that was why Victor was so desperate to imitate life with his own twisted version. He had never been able to feel things as deeply as he should; he had been raised in a home where everything was pretense and no one spoke the truth.
Not even me.
I had accused Victor of creating a monster, but I had done the same.
Mary clambered in next to me. She looked around with a raised eyebrow, taking in the velvet stool, the gilded vanity, the hulking four-poster bed. Every covered surface was a different fabric, a different pattern. Anything that did not work in another room had been given to me. I did not know whether I was dizzy because of anticipation and nerves, or because I was no longer acclimated to the chaos of Frankenstein castoffs.
“How did you manage to sleep in here?” she asked, throwing our now-useless pistols onto the bed. The door was open, fortunately, so we would not risk its loud release from its frame.
“I did not sleep much.” All the nights I had sought Victor for comfort from my nightmares trailed in my wake as I walked like a ghost through the house where we had grown up together. We passed the nursery, where I had vowed to him I would never love the baby his mother was carrying more than I loved him. Where Justine had spent most of her happy hours. Where William had grown, joyful and careless.
We passed the library, where I had soothed Victor and felt so triumphant for coaching him on how to hide his rage and hatred from others; then passed the door to the servants’ wing, where he had implicated Justine using my own technique.
Everything I had known of him, everything we had shared, rose like the dead before me, rotted through to show the horror of what festered beneath the skin.
“What about the father?” Mary whispered as I furtively checked the kitchen. It was empty. The maid and the cook must have been in their rooms, though they had not yet readied the house for the night. Or perhaps Victor, in his pursuit of privacy for his studies, had dismissed them.
I prayed that they had actually been dismissed, and not dismissed, as unfortunate Gerta had been.
“At this time of night, Judge Frankenstein will have already retired to his bedroom. If Victor raises an alarm before…” I paused, knowing what had to be done but loath to admit it aloud. “If his father finds us, I will speak to him. He has a financial interest in keeping me alive.”
“Then I will be certain to stand behind you.” Mary smiled grimly.
I pointed to the double doors leading to the dining room. I had to guess that that was where Victor was, based on the location of his metal device. He certainly would not be sleeping—not when there was work to be done.
The doors were closed. On them, carved and stained and polished, was the Frankenstein family crest that I had so often run my fingers along over the years. The shield that protected them was my shield now, too, according to the law. I was Elizabeth Frankenstein, married into this diseased and broken family tree. Which somehow made me even more their possession than I was when I had depended on them for everything.
I thought of the woman in the asylum, locked away for daring to want a life free from pain and abuse. How mad she must have been indeed for dreaming such a thing was possible.
Bleak sadness soaked and chilled my anger as certainly as the rain had chilled my clothes. What hope was there in a world such as this? Was Victor really so wrong to look for ways to circumvent the demands of nature? Because if we had grown to be this way as a society through nature, surely nature itself was as corrupt and malformed as Victor’s monster.
