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I had tried to warn Mary about the monster, but I could see that she did not believe me. It was just as well. She already believed in the real monster and was prepared to face him.
“Are you ready?” Mary whispered. She pulled out her knife.
I nodded, cold down to my soul and trembling as my pale fingers wrapped around the handle of my own knife. I wished we were there with an army at our backs. Wished I knew someone, anyone, who would believe us about Victor’s true nature. Wished this desolate responsibility fell on anyone but me.
So do all guilty wish to foist their burdens onto others.
I pushed the doors open, brandishing my knife and bracing myself. Mary screamed, and I whipped around, looking for her attacker. But then I saw what had made her cry out: she was screaming at the horror of the scene before us.
Victor stood with his back to the windows. Between us was the table where we had eaten, the table I had often squirmed at, wishing we could leave his father’s presence. It had been covered by a metal sheet, and on that lay a body. Judge Frankenstein’s sightless eyes stared up at where the ceiling and roof had been cut away to make an opening for the metal rod courting the storm’s lightning. Towels and sheets had been discarded along the floor to soak up the rain.
Victor looked up at me and frowned. Rain dripped from his hair down his face. It almost looked like he was crying.
Victor never cried.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. Mary raised her knife. He cursed, pulled out a pistol, and shot her. She staggered back, falling through the doorway and onto the floor.
“No!” I screamed, turning to help her.
“Stop!” Victor commanded.
“Shoot me,” I snarled.
“I do not want to shoot you,” he said, exasperated. “
I keep this pistol in case the creature returns.” I ignored him, kneeling at Mary’s side. Her shoulder was bleeding freely.
“He did not hit anything too important.” I pulled a tablecloth off a table in the hallway. The table had always held flowers several days past their prime, their scent cloying and fulsome. The flowers there now were so old, they were covered in fuzzy black mold. The vase tipped off and shattered on the floor. I used my knife to cut a portion of the tablecloth and pressed it to her wound, using another strip to tie it off.
“Of course I did not hit anything important.” Victor stood over me, with the pistol trained on Mary. “That would be a waste of good material. But if you do not do what I say, I will shoot her in the head. I do not have much use for her brain. Drop your knife.”
I dropped it. He kicked it away with disdain. Mary’s had been lost in her fall; I did not see it anywhere.
“What are you wearing?” Victor scrutinized my clothes with as much horror as that with which we had viewed the body on the table. I still wore the nurse’s uniform, with a cloak buttoned at my neck. “Go and change immediately.”
I was aghast at his priorities. “I have just escaped from the asylum where you trapped me, have come here with the express purpose of killing you, and you want me to change my clothes?”
He kicked Mary viciously, and she cried out in pain. “We do not have time to argue. If lightning strikes, I need to take immediate advantage. Any delay will ruin the whole process and render the body unusable. And then I will have to prepare another one.” He gestured meaningfully at Mary. “So go and change.”
He waited until I was moving, then nudged Mary roughly with his foot. “Into the laboratory, please.”
I tensed to pounce on his back, hoping to throw him off balance, but he angled himself toward me so he could watch my progress while keeping the gun trained on Mary. She was pale, her clever features pulled tight with pain. She was in no condition to fight him. Her injured arm hung limply at her side.
She turned her back to me as though she was cringing. Her limp arm hid the knife, tucked in her hand and half up her sleeve.
“Go and change, Elizabeth,” she said. “He is right. You look dreadful.” She walked into the dining room and sat heavily in a chair by the door.
I raced through the halls and upstairs to my old bedroom and put on one of my white dresses; it felt like preparation for a ritual I wanted no part of. All our rituals as humans seemed to revolve around birth and death—marriage being the exception, though my wedding had been a ritual intimately connected to death, given my choice of partner.
I had no weapons in my room other than the useless pistols. But Victor did not know they were useless! I tucked one into the broad, heavy pleats where my skirt met my waist at my back. If I minded the angles I presented to him, he would not see it.
Taking a steadying breath, I marched back to Victor’s new laboratory to be reunited with my husband and my deceased father-in-law—who might not be in that state much longer. I had not cared for him in life; I did not care to be reunited with him after his death.
“Much better,” Victor said, barely glancing up from where he was reading gauges and measurements on his array of instruments, the use of which I could only guess at. “You may sit. I have to concentrate.” He gestured with the gun toward a chair on the opposite end of the room from Mary. I moved to sit beside her instead, and he cocked the hammer of the pistol. “You may sit over there.”
Mary watched him with more curiosity than fear. “Did you kill him?” She was using exactly the right tone to keep him calm. We had already disrupted his process, and he was liable to snap at any moment. It was what I would have done—what I should have done. Gotten him talking.
“Hmm?” Victor seemed confused about whom she was referring to. Then he looked down at the naked body of his father. Incisions, black and neatly sewn up, went down each pale limb and in numerous tracings across his broad chest. The throat, I saw, bore old markings.
