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“It is not your fault. It is mine.”
Mary clucked her tongue. “Now then. I hardly think you can take credit for Victor. You did not make him do all that he did.”
“But I did not stop him.”
“When would you have?” Mary walked over to the leather trunk, opening it. “Oh, this is nice. He will be quite unhappy to leave all this behind.” She shut it again, then continued her exploration of the room. “Would you have stopped him when you were a child, depending on his family for survival? When you were locked in an asylum without any recourse for release?”
“I am not blameless.”
“Not being blameless is not the same as being guilty.” Mary smiled gently at me.
The monster shifted, trying to fold himself even smaller in the darkened corner. “Henry…,” I started, not letting myself look away from him.
“My name is not Henry. Not really. He is part of me, but I am not him.”
“What is your name, then?” Mary asked.
“It was Henry. And I think it was Felix, as well.”
“My uncle’s name was Carlos.”
“Then that is also my name.”
“It is quite a long name,” she said. “I think, because you are something new, you should name yourself.”
There was a pause, and then the monster nodded. “Adam,” he said. His voice rumbled as low as the thunder now receding from our mountain valley.
“I like it. Literary, with a touch of irony. It is a pleasure to meet you, Adam.” She busied herself with more snooping around the dining-room-turned-laboratory. I suspected she did it in part so she would not have to look at him. She had not believed me that he existed. Even in the room with him, I struggled to make sense of his form, disbelieving that it was real.
“I would be wary of the chemicals,” I said to Mary as she lifted the still-full syringe. “You do not know what they do.”
She scowled, as though her ignorance was more offensive than the chemicals themselves. She found a large leather folio full of loose papers. Her eyes widened as she opened it. “Victor forgot his research.”
The monster—the man—Henry—not Henry—Adam reached into his own rough cloak. It looked as though he had fashioned it out of a boat’s sail. From some pocket he withdrew a similar book. “I have his old one.”
“Where did you get that?” I recognized it from the horrible trunk in Victor’s first laboratory. And then I remembered. “You were there that night. I almost burned you to death.” I hung my head in shame. “I am sorry.”
“You did not know.”
“No, I am sorry for so much more than that. I was not fair to you—to Henry—in life. His first life. But whatever part of you is Henry, I used you. Not as cruelly as Victor used you, but I let you remain in love with me because it made me feel safer. Not because I had romantic feelings to return. I do not know that I have ever had those feelings, or that I could. They seem a luxury of safety and security.”
I paused, taking a deep breath and forcing myself to look at the monster. I would accustom my mind to him until my eyes no longer recoiled. I found Henry’s eyes in the midst of that ruined face, and I focused on them alone. “I put you in the path of that demon. And I provoked him deliberately to get him to come home, or to allow you to marry me and secure my future that way. I did not care which way it happened, which meant I did not truly care about your feelings. I used you. And for that I am sorry. I will always be sorry.”
“I understand now being trapped,” he said, his words slow and measured, each delivered with precise care around a swollen and clumsy tongue. “I am trapped by this body. There is no place for me in the world, no refuge I can find. I cannot even depend on the kindness of others, because it will never be freely offered to me.”
Mary worked her way across the glass-strewn floor to us. She took the first journal from Adam and stacked it with the second under her good arm. “Well. We have his research. We have his funds. We have his laboratory. It will be a while before he can set up again.”
“I say we do not give him the opportunity.” I looked around the home that had never been mine. The home I had always been desperate to be safe in. The home that, as a Frankenstein, I finally had claim to.
I knocked over the first vial I saw. Another, and another. I picked up a chair and swung it through the cabinet, destroying both Victor’s chemicals and the Frankenstein family china. I did not realize I was screaming until at last my destructive energy had spent itself. The room reeked of his materials; refuse added to the disaster on the floor.
I walked to the door bearing the Frankenstein family crest. “Do you thi
nk you can tear this down, Adam? I need to start a fire.”
He grunted in wordless assent. He easily tore the door off its hinges with his enormous hands, then threw it into the middle of the room. The second door followed. Adam went through the rest of the house, smashing furniture. Mary slowly dragged the trunk of money out with her one good arm while I retrieved the supplies I had hidden to use to kill Adam when I did not understand who the monster really was.
We threw it all together and formed a pyre in the middle of the dining hall. It was time to burn my history here, once and for all. We would rise from the ashes, reborn. Adam. Mary. And myself.
