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He had been strangled.
“Yes,” I answered. “Victor killed him.”
Victor followed my eyes to his father’s throat and tapped it thoughtfully. “The key is not to crush the windpipe. That is a challenge! I learned that lesson in a frustrating sequence of events I do not care to relive. You have to squeeze hard enough to cut off the supply of blood to the brain until they pass out. And then you simply continue until they stop breathing. I tried a lot of other methods, but they were too messy or too destructive to the materials. I lobbied for Justine to be executed in some other way, but they would not listen to me, and I could not tell them why. It took so much time to replace her neck and throat. I might have succeeded if I had not had to waste all that effort.” He glowered.
“How many have you killed?” Mary kept her tone conversational, not accusatory. “Do you keep trophies, other than their body parts?”
Victor flinched, a look on his face as though he had smelled something unpleasant. “I do not enjoy it. I regret the necessity of the killing. I tried for some time working with reanimating tissue that had been dead for longer. But the deterioration was too much. The connections I needed for the current to enervate a whole body were broken down. Fresher material was required.” He paused, holding a vial of noxious-looking yellow liquid. “I did not think I could do it. The first time was awful for me.”
“For him, too, I imagine,” I said.
Victor surprised me, his lips twitching with a smile that previously would have felt like a gift. “His suffering was brief. I had to live with the high price of my ambitions. It has been a burden, I assure you.” He rested the gun on the table, still pointed at Mary, as he injected the liquid into his father’s milky, unseeing eyeball. I did not look away.
I would never again let myself look away.
“If you admire the stitchwork,” he said to Mary, gesturing to the black lines of thread, “you should compliment Elizabeth. She is the one who taught me to sew. It is quite wearing on the hands, though.” He took the gun again and lifted both hands, turning one empty palm up and considering it thoughtfully. “It is all quite demanding. This hand has to be capable of the most minute cuts. One slip, one twitch, and I can ruin an entire body’s usefulness. Not to mention the strength required to strangle someone. I had never considered the sheer physical demands before I started. It was all lofty mental ideas, problems explored on paper.” He sighed. “Such is the nature of science, though. At some point theory must be turned into reality, and there will always be more work than anticipated.”
Mary tutted sympathetically. “It must have been exhausting, killing my uncle. He was not a small man.”
Victor looked up at his pole, then turned another dial. “Who was your uncle?”
“Carlos Delgado.” Her calm deteriorated in the face of his ignorance. “The bookseller! Your friend!”
He frowned, searching his memory. “Oh! Yes. I had just lost much of my material because of a trial amount of injection gone wrong. I needed a replacement immediately. He showed up at my door. It was bad luck, really. But tell me, did anyone look for him? No. No one ever did. All the men I took from the dark streets, the drunks, the foreigners, the vagrants looking for work. No one ever looked for them. And that is what brings me comfort. I gave them a purpose higher than they ever had in their lives.”
“I looked for him!” She took a deep breath, deliberately relaxing. “I looked for him.”
“And no one cared to help you, did they? I could have taken you, too, at any point, and never suffered the slightest inquiry.” Victor did not say it meanly. He stated it as fact, because it was.
Mary turned to me. Her face was pale and her eyes shadowed. The binding I had put on her shoulder was already soaked through. “I am sorry to say, I do not have much faith that your marriage will be a happy one.”
Lightning forked overhead. Victor looked straight up, h
ungry with anticipation. I stood, creeping closer. A bolt of the lightning lanced down and hit the pole with blinding force. The air crackled, all my hair standing on end.
Victor reached over to throw a lever. I shouted, waving my pistol to get his attention. At the same moment, Mary stood and threw her knife at him. It spun through the air and hit his forehead, hilt first. Stunned, he stumbled back.
The lightning passed.
The lever was left unswitched.
There was a sizzle and a putrid scent of burned flesh and hair as Judge Frankenstein’s body was ravaged beyond repair by the current that Victor had failed to redirect.
“You have ruined it!” Victor screamed, leveling his pistol at Mary.
The windows behind him revealed a terrible dark shape running toward us. It crashed through the glass with an inhuman roar, slamming into Victor.
The monster was here.
THE MONSTER, TERRIBLE IN aspect from far away, was even more horrible to behold up close. His hair, long and black, hung lank from his misshapen head. The lines of Victor’s patchwork sewing made his skin ridged and puckered, portions of it different tones and a few sections withered like a mummy’s.
His lips were black like tar over teeth as straight and white as any I had ever seen. The contrast, rather than being pleasing, made both seem more alien and repulsive.
He grabbed for Victor, his massive hands misshapen and clumsy. The fingers had been fashioned roughly, lacking nails, the joints all wrong. Victor ducked, darting under the monster’s grasp and then leaping onto the table. He stood on top of his father’s mutilated corpse. The monster grabbed the edge of the table with a roar, intent on tearing the whole thing apart.
As soon as the monster touched the metal, Victor leaned over and flipped the switch. Whatever power was lingering from the lightning strike, it crackled and sparked, directed now into the monster.
The monster seized, straightening to its full colossal height, and then stumbled backward before falling against the wall and sliding down to sitting, its long legs splayed at an impossible angle. The feet, each as large as my thigh, were bare, revealing stunted, club-like appendages that ended in massive wolfish pads.
