Free Frankenstein's Monster by Susan Heyboer O'Keefe Page A

my hands: one was larger, rougher, and of a darker complexion than the other. There was no symmetry in me anywhere.
    The priest used his thumbs to trace the scars along my wrist.
    “It’s as though …”
    When he swallowed, his throat clicked.
    “As though what?” I prompted.
    “You were … saved?” he asked.
    “You mean, in the Church?”
    “No, saved, rescued from a horrible accident, and”—he gestured toward my mismatched hands—“patched together with the remains of those … who were less fortunate? A miracle of medicine, no?”
    Slowly I smiled,
evilly
I smiled, and shook my head.
    “No. This is how my unholy father made me. I was never a baby, never a child, never a youth, and so never a man.” I forced humor back into my words. “Maybe I am a god then, like Athena springing full grown from Zeus’s head.”
    The priest pulled away and dashed off the sign of the cross. Fearing, almost expecting, to be carried off by the Devil, hehad developed a measure of acceptance. To be here on earth, helpless before
me
, was something else. He covered his eyes; tears slid through his fingers as he prayed.
    “Lord, please, isn’t there room in Your infinite mercy, even for one such as me?”
    They were words I myself had whispered many nights. I slapped his face. He fell to the ground and covered his head. While he lay there cowering, I dived off the dock. I stayed in the lagoon till at last the gondolier returned and helped the babbling drunkard off the island.
June
6
    The rest of the day yesterday and all last night I did not sleep, pacing the graves like a restless ghoul thirsting for something to haunt.
    “The woman is dead. And if she was his, she deserves death!”
    Walton’s words have burned their way through my coarsened flesh:
she deserved death
—because she accepted the unacceptable, showed mercy to the merciless, brought life to the dead.
    Did Mirabella’s goodness damn her own soul? God is two-faced: overflowing with loving forgiveness, blazing with wrathful judgment. He himself does not know who He is. How then should men? And how do they not go mad, trying to live with such Mystery? Their God is like Walton forever lighting my funeral pyre, while Mirabella forever quenches it with her tears.
    Beneath these thoughts lies a single truth: whether Walton acted out of his own evil or as an agent of a vengeful God, he killed Mirabella. Thus, through him, I am her real murderer. I am the real Devil.
    Not even the Isle of the Dead should be home to me. I should be borne away by the waves until lost in darkness and distance.
June
10
    For days now, only black thoughts.
    Walton.
    Walton first, Walton last, Walton always.
    What long ago brought devastation to Frankenstein, what now has brought devastation to me, will surely bring the same to him: to destroy anyone he might love. The letter in his room is from his sister, Mrs. Margaret Winterbourne in Tarkenville, England. I will seek her out, and anyone else he cherishes, and destroy them first, just as I did with my father, just as Walton has done to me. When he receives news of these accumulated tragedies, he will rush home, knowing that only I could have done this.
    He will come home to his own death.
    I grin now as broadly as the smiling skulls around me. The diggers here are not too ambitious and often leave a job half-finished, slipping away once the funerals for the day have ended. It was quite easy to collect a dozen skulls and line them up in rows as a mute audience to my ranting.
    I gesture to my laughing friends and speak aloud: “If any condemn me—speak now!”
    Silence.

 
    P ART T WO
     
Dover
October
1, 1838
    Neptune spoke, and high the forky trident hurl’d
,
Rolls clouds on clouds, and stirs the watery world
.
At once the face of earth and sea deforms
,
Swells all the winds, and rouses all the storms
.
Down rushed the night: east, west, together roar;

And south and north roll mountains to the shore
.
Then shook the hero, to