Frankenstein Unbound

He raised his hands. Then he said, more soberly, ‘And the guilt rests with me …’ and lowered his arms to his side.

I should be more particular in my description of this singular man. A side-view of his face was reminiscent of profiles seen on coins and medals, for his features were clear-cut and sharp. And one has to have some distinction to appear on a medal. This clarity, aided by his youth, made him handsome, though there was about the handsomeness something of the coldness of a coin. His features were a little too set. The melancholy that had struck me at first was very much a part of his character.

Rain began to fall in large heavy drops. As I recalled, storms spring up rapidly about the Swiss lakes, appearing to arrive from all corners of the sky at once. The thunder burst with a grand crash above our heads, and the heavens flung down their contents upon us.

Over to the north-west, the dark bulk of the Jura was flickeringly lit. The lake became an intermittent sheet of fire. The heavy clouds that had gathered about the summit of Mont Blanc boiled from within. The world was full of noise, dazzling light, blinding darkness, torrential rain.

All of which served merely to raise Frankenstein’s spirits. He walked more briskly now, still climbing, picking his way fast and carelessly, so that he could keep his face turned up as much as possible to the source of the storm.

He was shouting aloud. Much of what he said was lost in the noise, but once, as we climbed a precipitous path and were no more than four metres apart, I heard him cry aloud the name of William again. ‘William, my dear little angel! This is thy funeral, this thy dirge!’

With similar cries, he staggered out on to more level ground. I was about to break from sheltering rock and follow when I saw him stop aghast and raise one arm involuntarily in a gesture of self-protection.

In that broken place, rocks and shattered boulders lay in a half-circle, ruinous pines growing among them. My immediate thought was that Frankenstein had encounted a bear, and might at any moment come dashing back and discover me. Blunderingly, I moved to my left among the boulders, being careful to keep behind them and not be seen. Then, crouching down, I peered out through the pouring rain and saw such a sight as I will never forget.

Frankenstein was backing away, still holding that defensive gesture. His jaw hung open, and he was near enough for me to see the rain dashing from his face – when lightning showed him at all. Before him, a monstrous shape had emerged from a clump of shattered pines.

It was no bear. In most respects it was human in shape, but gigantic in stature, and there seemed nothing of the human being in the way it suddenly paced forward from the trees. The lightning came again, and a tremendous stroke of thunder. I was staring at Frankenstein’s monster!

As if to increase my terror, there came at that instant a pause in the electric war overhead. Only far away among the trees did a flickering still galvanize the distant Jura. We were cast into impenetrable blackness, with the rain still cascading down and that devilish thing on the loose!

I slipped limply to my knees in extreme terror, still staring ahead, never daring even to blink, though the rain poured down my forehead and over my staring eyeballs.

There was another streak of lightning overhead. Frankenstein had slumped back against a tree-trunk for support, his head lolling back as if he were about to collapse in a faint. His monster, the creature he had created, was striding towards him. Then blackness again.

Then more lightning. The gigantic figure had passed by Frankenstein as if the latter did not exist. But it was coming towards me. I saw that its arms did not swing properly as it walked – but, oh, how fast it walked!

Another great peal of thunder, then more lightning. The abominable thing took a tremendous leap. It was above me on the rocks, and then it sprang into the darkness behind me. For a moment I heard its footsteps in something between a walk and a run, then it was gone. I was left crouching in the rain.

After a while, I pulled myself together and stood up. The storm seemed to be moving over a little. Frankenstein still leaned against the tree, bereft of movement.

During one flash of lightning, I saw a refuge, standing some way behind me. I could take the rain no longer. I was frozen, although the weather had only a half-share in that. As I headed towards shelter, I glanced south, where the broad shoulders of a mountain – its name is Mont Salève – stood against the troubled sky. There I saw the monster again, swarming up the cruel face. It went like a spider, climbing almost perpendicularly. It was superhuman.

I burst into the hut, gasping and shuddering, and stripped off jacket, shirt, and undervest. Between chattering teeth, I was talking to myself.

In the hut were a wooden bed, a stove, a table, and rope. A rough blanket lay neatly folded on the bed. I snatched it up and flung it round me, sitting there shaking.

Gradually, the rain petered out. A wind blew. All was silence, save for the dripping roof outside. The lightning ceased. My trembling ceased. My earlier excitement returned.

I – I – had seen Frankenstein’s monster! There was no mistaking it.

Of its face I had no clear idea. The twenty-first century 4-D representations had prepared me for something horrific; yet my impression was of features more frightening than strictly horrifying. I could not recall the face. The light was so confusing, the monster’s movements so fast, that I had a memory only of an abstraction of sculptured bone. The overall impression had been fully as alarming as anyone could have anticipated. Its creator’s reaction to it had merely added to my alarm.

Putting on my wet clothes, I moved out of the hut.

I had thought the moonlight was diffused through cloud, so general was the dim light. Once I was outside, however, I saw that the sky was almost free of cloud and the moon had set. Dawn was breaking over the world once more.

Victor Frankenstein was still in the clearing where I had last seen him. As if immune to discomfort and pain, he stood in his damp cloak with one foot up on a stone. Resting his weight on his bended knee, he was staring motionless over a precipice towards the lake. What he looked at inwardly, I know not. But his immobility, long maintained, hinted at the heaviness of his thoughts, and lent him something of the awe that attached to his odious creation.

I was about to make quietly down the hillside when he moved. Slowly, he shook his head once or twice, and then began to make the descent. Since daylight was flooding into the world, I was able to stay at a distance and keep him in sight. So we both came down from the mountain. Truth was, I more than once looked back over my shoulder to see if anything was following me.

The gates of Geneva were open. Wagons were going out empty, heading for the forest. I saw a spanking stage emerge and take the road that led to Chamonix, its four horses stepping high. Frankenstein entered between the grey walls, and I ceased to follow him.

3

This record so far has been dictated in one long burst. After watching Victor Frankenstein walk towards his father’s house, I came through Geneva and back to Sècheron and my automobile. The Felder was as I had left it; I climbed in and put this account in my portable tape-memory.

My heart-searchings must have no place here. Before getting to the murder trial, I will note two incidents that occurred in Geneva. Two things I wanted above all, and one of them was money, for I knew old systems of currency were in operation throughout the nineteenth century. The second thing I found quickly by looking at a newspaper in a coffee-shop: the day’s date. It was May 23rd, 1816.

I scanned the paper for news. It was disappointingly empty of anything I could comprehend; mainly there was local news, with a great deal of editorializing about the German Constitution. The name of Carl August of Saxe-Weimar figured largely, but I had heard neither of him nor of it. Perhaps I had naively expected headlines of the HUMPHRY DAVY INVENTS MINERS’ SAFETY LAMP, ROSSINI WRITES FIRST OPERA, HENRY THOREAU BORN, kind of thing! At least the newspaper’s editorial columns served to remind me that Geneva had become part of Switzerland only in the previous year.

My quest for money also held its disappointments. I had on my wrist – besides my CompC phone, now useless – a new disposable watch, powered by a uranium isotope and worth at least seventy thousand dollars at current going price in U.S.A., 2020. As a unique object in Geneva, 1816, how much greater should its value be! Moreover, the Swiss watchmakers were the best equipped in the world at this time to appreciate its sophistication.

Full of hope, I took the watch in to a smart business in the Rue du Rhône, where it was examined by a stately manager.

‘How do you open it?’ he asked.

‘It won’t open. It is sealed shut.’

‘Then how does one examine the works if something goes wrong?’

‘That is the whole virtue of this particular make of watch. It does not go wrong. It is guaranteed never to go wrong!’

He smiled very charmingly at me.

‘Certainly its defects are very well concealed. So too is the winder!’

‘Ah, but it does not wind. It will go forever – or at least for a century. Then it stops, and one throws it away. It is a disposable watch.’

His smile grew still sweeter. He looked at my clothes, all creased and still damp from the night’s activities. ‘I observe you are a foreigner, m’sieu. I presume this is a foreign watch. From the Netherlands, perhaps?’

‘It’s North Korean,’ I said.

With the tenderest of smiles, he proffered my watch to me in an open palm. ‘Then may I suggest you sell your unstoppable watch back to the North Koreans, m’sieu!’

At two other establishments I had no better luck. But at a fourth I met an inquisitive little man who took greatly to the instrument, examining it under magnifying glasses and listening to its working through a miniature stethoscope.

‘Very ingenious, even if it is powered by a bee who will expire as you leave my premises!’ he said. ‘Where was it made?’

‘It’s the latest thing from North America.’ I was learning caution.

‘Such a timepiece! What is this “N.K.” inscribed on its face?’

‘It stands for New Kentucky.’

‘I have not even seen this metal before. It interests me, and I shall have pleasure taking it apart and examining its secrets.’

‘Those secrets could set you a century ahead of all rival watchmakers.’

We began arguing over prices. In the end, I accepted a derisory sum, and left his shop feeling sore and cheated. Yet, directly I stepped out into the sunshine again, my superior self took over, and I looked at the matter differently. I had good solid francs in my pocket, and what did the watchmaker have? A precision instrument whose chief virtues were useless to anyone in this age. Its undeviating accuracy in recording the passage of time to within one twenty-millionth of a second was a joke in a world that still went largely by the leisurely passage of the sun, where stage-coaches left at dawn, noon, or sunset. That wretched obsession with time which was a hallmark of my own age had not yet set in; there were not even railway timetables to make people conform to the clock.

As for the workings of the watch, there was another item this world was mercifully without: uranium. That element had been a twentieth-century discovery and, within a few years of its first refinement, had been used in new and more powerful weapons of destruction.

Even in the United States of Korea – in my day, one of the foremost manufacturing countries of the world, with the deepest mantle-mines – in 1816, the peoples of the Korean peninsula would be painting exquisite scenes on silk and carving delicate ivory. Between slaying each other by the sword, admittedly, in preparation for more energetic centuries to come …

The more I thought about it, the shedding of my watch became symbolic, and I rejoiced accordingly.

If I was learning about time, I was also learning about my legs. They brought me through the city and back to Sècheron in good order. I had not walked so far for years.

I’m in the automobile now, my last little bastion of the twenty-first century. It is uranium-powered too. I returned to the spot where my home once stood, looked affectionately at Tony’s bright plastic ball in the knot of pampas, and left a plastic message pad beside it with a message for Mina, in case the area does a timeslip again and she happens to be there.

This brings my record up-to-date. I must sleep before relating what happened at the murder trial. I am fit and charged with excitement, beside myself in a strangely literal way. Maybe it is obvious what I shall be compelled to do next.

4

Before I describe the trial of Justine Moritz, I must set down what I know about Frankenstein, in the hope of clarifying my mind.

The little I know is little enough. Victor Frankenstein is the eponymous central character of a novel by Mary Shelley. He amalgamated parts of human bodies to create a ‘monster’, which he then brought to life. The monster wreaked destruction on him and his house. Among the general public, the name of creator and created became confused.

I remember reading the novel as a child, when it made a great impression on me, but the deplorable pastiches and plagiarizations put out by the mass media have obliterated my memory of the original details. Although I know that the novel was published in the nineteenth century, the actual date escapes me. The author was Mary Shelley, wife of the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, but very little of her life comes back to memory. Also, I had the impression that Victor Frankenstein was purely an invented character; however, recent events have somewhat shaken my preconceptions of probability!

From the first moment I set eyes on Frankenstein, at the hotel in Sècheron, I had the impression of a man with a burdensome secret. After selling my watch, I thought further about him, and perceived a link between his past and my future. The aspirations of the society of my day were mirrored in miniature in that watch: the desire that it should never need maintenance, should never run down. Such were Victor Frankenstein’s perfectionist obsessions in relation to human anatomy, when he began his investigations into the nature of life. When he reflected on how age and death laid waste man’s being, and saw a means of interfering with that process, he acted as harbinger to the Age of Science then in its first dawn.

Was that not the whole burden of his song, that nature needed in some way to be put to rights, and that it was man’s job to see it was put to rights? And had not that song passed like a plague virus to every one of his fellow men in succeeding generations? My supremely useless watch, product of endless refinement and research, target of envy for those who did not possess one, was a small example of how his diseased mentality had triumphed. The Conquest of Nature – the loss of man’s inner self!

You see the leaps my mind takes. I lived but one day of the spring in 1816 and I was full of love for it – and of hate for what man had done to change that sturdy and natural order.

Even as I say it, I know my statement to be sentimental and truth to be more complex than that. To regard the people and society of 1816 as ‘better’ than those of my day would be a mistake. For I had already sat through a grave miscarriage of justice.

The trial of Justine Moritz began at eleven. The court was packed. I managed to get a fairly good seat, and it was my fortune to sit next to a man who delighted in explaining the nuances of the case to a foreigner.

He pointed out to me the benches where the Frankenstein family sat. They were noticeable enough. While the rest of the courtroom was filled with excited anticipation, covert but gloating, the faces of the Frankensteins were all gloomy. They could have been members of the House of Atreus.

First came old syndic Alphonse Frankenstein, bent of shoulder, grey of hair; but his gaze, as he looked about the court, was still commanding. As my companion informed me, he had held many important posts in Geneva, and was a counsellor, as his father and grandfather had been before him.

The counsellor was consoled by Elizabeth Lavenza, who sat next to him. I thought she was startlingly beautiful, even in her grief, with her fair hair tucked under a dainty mourning bonnet, and her slim upright figure. She had been adopted as a small child by the counsellor’s wife, now dead – so said my companion, adding that it was well known that she would marry Victor, and so come into a deal of money. She had instigated a series of protracted lawsuits in her own right with authorities in Milan, Vienna and a German city, trying to reclaim a fortune supposedly left her by a defecting father. Maybe news of these extensive litigations, as well as her beauty, drew many pairs of eyes towards where she sat.

Victor sat on her other side. He was pale and composed at first, his features rigidly set. He held his head defiantly lifted, as if he wished no man to see him in dejection; somehow I felt the gesture very characteristic, and was able for the first time to recognize his arrogance.

Next to Victor was his brother Ernest, slender and rather dandyish in his dress although, like the rest of his family, he was in deep mourning. Ernest fidgeted and looked about him, occasionally addressing remarks to his elder brother, which Victor made no noticeable attempt to answer. The two brothers were present in court because of the foul murder of their younger brother, William, who had been found strangled.

‘Poor little lad, only six-and-a-half years old!’, said my companion. ‘They do say he was sexually assaulted, but the family’s trying to keep it hushed up.’

‘If that was so, surely his nurse would not have tampered with him.’

‘Oh, she did it right enough, make no mistake about that! The evidence all points to it. You never know about people nowadays, do you?’

‘Where was the child murdered? At home?’

‘No, no, outside the city, up in the hills, where he was playing with his brother Ernest. Out by Plainpalais, towards Mont Salève.’

Then I understood more fully Frankenstein’s quest in the storm of the previous night! He had been seeking out the spot on which his little brother was strangled – and we had encountered the murderer there.

Waves of cold ran over me, over my flesh and through my body. I thought I was about to faint, and could pay no attention as my companion pointed out the Clervals, a wealthy merchant family, of whom Henry Clerval was a close friend of Victor’s; Duvillard, a rich banker, and his new wife; Louis Manoir; and many other local notables. Victor turned once, to nod to Henry Clerval.

What struck me about the Frankensteins was their youth, the father excepted, of course. Set-faced though he was, Victor was certainly not more than twenty-five, and Elizabeth probably younger, while Ernest was still in his mid-teens.

When Justine Moritz was led into the box, I saw that she also was extremely young. A rather plain girl, but with the radiance of youth on her face, though that radiance was well subdued by her present predicament. She spoke up properly when questioned.

I cannot go into the whole trial; time is too short. Despite excellent character-witnesses, among them Elizabeth, who delivered an impassioned plea on her maid’s behalf, Justine stood condemned by one piece of circumstantial evidence: a locket containing a picture of her late mistress had been found in her belongings – a locket which the child William had been wearing only the day before the murder. The girl could not explain how the locket came to be among her clothes, and it was clear that her protestations of innocence were in vain. The feeling of the court was almost a tangible thing: something vile had happened and someone had to pay for it. Justine was captive: Justine must pay.

Tremors of horror were still racking me. For only I and one other person in that courtroom knew the truth, knew that the hand which had dispatched William had been neither a female hand nor a male one, but the hand of a terrible neuter thing!

My gaze went frequently to the other bearer of that awful secret. Whereas Elizabeth was composed, though pale, Victor became increasingly nervous, rubbing his forehead and his lips with a handkerchief, hiding his eyes in his palms, staring about in a distraught fashion.

Would he rise and declare his knowledge? But what could he say that would find credence here? Nobody else had seen his monster! Such a tale as he would have to tell would be instantly dismissed, the court being in the frame of mind it was. As well might I have risen and said, ‘I will tell you what really happened, for this trial and the real issues involved will one day become the subject of a great novel, and I am a man from two centuries into your future who read that book as a lad …’

Preposterous! But the temptation to intervene grew nevertheless, particularly as I saw things turning against the innocent maidservant.

Victor could bear it no longer. There was a scuffle and he stood up, pushed past brother and friends, and dashed from the courtroom.

Elizabeth stood up, a commanding little figure with one hand half-extended, and watched him go. The proceedings continued.

When all had been said that could be said, the judge made a brief summary, the ballots were cast, and the verdict was solemnly delivered. Justine Moritz was found guilty of the murder of William Frankenstein, and was sentenced to be hanged within the space of two days.

5

If the phrase is not inappropriate here, there was no time to be lost. I tied a tarpaulin over the car and paid a farmer with a horse to drag it through the streets of the city and out to the Plainpalais gate. Fortunately, the good citizens of Geneva had enough else to think about at this juncture.

I knew that there was one place, and one place only – and there one person only – to which I might turn for help!

When I had paid the farmer off, I started my car, my remaining outpost of another century, and drove along a road which led close to the lake. Little I cared then who saw me. My superior self was on a quixotic errand!

Quixotic or not, I had no real idea of where I was going. Or rather, I had an idea, but it was of the vaguest. Far more clear in my mind were recurrent pictures of Victor trembling as if with fever; Elizabeth, fair and beautiful and composed; Justine, pleading without effect for her life before a room full of people covertly eager for her blood; and the creature Frankenstein had made – that gigantic figure without a face, striking fear and worse than fear wherever it went. Although I knew it moved rapidly, all I had of it in my memory was a series of still pictures, captured in rain by lightning. It was enemy to the world, yet the world knew nothing of it! What a madman Frankenstein was to have created such a thing, and to hope to keep its existence a secret!

I tried to recall details of Frankenstein’s ghastly history. How would he act if he knew that his career was to be made into fiction, to serve as an object lesson, and a name of opprobrium, to the generations that followed him? Unfortunately, I had not read Mary Shelley’s novel since I was a lad; such recollection of it as I had was obscured by the travesties of it I had watched in 4-D on film, TV, and CircC.

At this juncture, I realized that I had driven close to the point where the boat had landed me the previous evening. I was not far from where the boy William had been murdered. I stopped the car.

There were binoculars in the Felder. Nor had I forgotten the swivel-gun mounted on the roof. The thought that such armament was compulsory for anyone privileged enough to own a private car in my own time reminded me that, Napoleonic Wars apart, I was now in an age where the safety and sanctity of the individual was taken for granted. If you read this, Mina, no doubt you will realize what was in my mind; supernaturally fast Frankenstein’s creation might be, but the swivel-gun would stop him.