The morning after my arrival I found myself once more drawn to that evil amphitheater. The scene had reverted back to show the couples happily waltzing across a ballroom floor with not even a glimmer of malice discernible in the faces of the dancers, and the women fully clothed in their fine ball gowns without any evidence of them having been torn off the previous night.
Later that afternoon I discovered illustrations that were made for the drama they were planning, and what I saw was beyond vileness, beyond depravity. I stared in shock at these sketches, and could not imagine any human mind designing such acts. It was hard even to imagine Satan himself dreaming up such evil. There were hundreds of these illustrations, but I could not view more than a dozen of them without feeling whatever was left of my own soul rotting inside of me. I tried to burn those damnable drawings in the fireplace, but Frankenstein’s black magic compelled me to place them back where I had found them.
After seeing those pages I could not do nothing. I waited until the workmen left the dungeon, and then I snuck down there with the intention of freeing the prisoners that were being held, but Frankenstein’s same evil spell prevented me from doing this. The keys to the cages were hanging on a nail in the wall, but when I tried to pick them up my arm fell dead to my side. Not seeing my form in the dim light, the young girls and children cried out to me, pleading to me to save them, but I couldn’t no matter how hard I tried. In the end I fled the chamber, too ashamed to face these poor innocents.
That night I was required to dine with Frankenstein’s company, as I was every night that I would remain within the castle, but as I had done previously, I drank enough brandy to deaden them to me and their voices became little more than a droning in my ears. After dinner I found myself once more drawn to the amphitheater, and the scene displayed upon the mural was similar to that of the other night, with the men cruelly ripping the women’s gowns from their bodies, and in some cases, their knives drawing blood across their victim’s faces. The fascination that this mural held for me disgusted me, and as tempted as I was to return at midnight I avoided doing so again.
I did not sleep that night, and I used those twilight hours to search more of the castle without anyone’s knowledge. It was past daybreak when I found a secret panel that held Frankenstein’s library of rare occult texts, but only moments later I heard noises of others within the castle awakening, and since I did not wish to have anyone stumble upon me and learn of my discovery, I placed the books back within their hidden compartment.
The next night, when the rest of the inhabitants of the castle were asleep, I returned so that I could read this occult collection undisturbed. The manuscripts were ancient, their bindings all of aged and cracking vellum, although with one of the books I had the thought that human skin was used, as well as blood instead of ink. I handled these books carefully so that their pages would not crumble apart in my hands. Several of them were written in Greek, others in Latin, and I could feel the evil emanating from them simply by holding them. It was a loathsome activity, touching and reading these books, and it took me four nights to complete my task. It was in the last of these books—the one that I believed had human skin as its binding—that I found the spell that Frankenstein had cast on me to make me his unwitting slave, but nowhere within its pages could I find a counter-spell. I was ashamed to realize that I was relieved by this, for it left me with no choice but to allow Johanna to be brought back to me.
This knowledge that I was a compliant if not necessarily willing participant in Frankenstein’s plans filled me with a new revulsion that sent me reeling. I had been trying to believe that I was only an innocent prisoner within the castle walls, the same as the caged children; that since there was nothing I could do to save them, none of this was my fault. But was I secretly hoping that I would be left with no choice but to allow Frankenstein’s plans to play out? Left to my own accord, would I be willing to sacrifice not only one of them but all of them if it would bring Johanna back to me? How could I be above their evil if I were secretly glad that I could not prevent it? These questions preyed on me, and sent me roaming the castle like a ghost. For the rest of the day I barely paid attention to where I wandered, or to the amused looks with which Frankenstein and his guests favored me. It was as if I were walking listlessly inside of a nightmare that I could not wake up from, and it was in this dark state of mind that I found myself back in the amphitheater at midnight.
Frankenstein and his other guests were already assembled there. It must have been a nightly ritual for them. And Frankenstein was right. At that hour the actors within the mural moved freely and without any care that they were being observed. Their movements were fluid and held an eerie quality, and the scenes that played out were every bit as inhuman as the illustrations that I had seen for Frankenstein’s planned drama. The women all had their clothing torn off, and in some cases were dead, having had their throats cut so savagely that their heads hung as if by a thread from their bodies. The women who were still alive all had at least one or more of their limbs cut from their bodies, and blood flowed from them every bit as much as it would have from a living person, and it left a red stain spreading across the dance floor. When they opened their mouths wide to scream, no sound emanated from them and their screams remained trapped within that nightmarish mural. Whether the women were alive or dead, it did not stop the men from raping and sodomizing them in ways that earlier would have been unimaginable to me. Some of the men would turn to grin wickedly at us, others were too caught up in their bloodlust to notice that they had an audience. As each depraved act unfolded, Frankenstein and his guests applauded with an animalistic fervor, their own faces burning feverishly as if they were in a spell. As I watched, I found my own legs increasingly growing unsteady, and when the actors within the mural turned to acts of cannibalism I staggered out of the room before the swimming within my head sent me crashing to the floor.
I was only a few yards from the amphitheater when my legs gave out from under me, and I crawled desperately to find a dark corner where I could lose the memory of the images that I had seen play out on that mural and the sound of the enthusiastic applauding and cheering from Frankenstein and his guests.
I made my way into one of the boudoirs where the noises coming from the amphitheater were muted enough to where I could almost ignore them. An iciness ran through my body, my skin as cold and damp as a corpse’s. I pushed myself into a sitting position and rocked back and forth as I grasped my knees, and kept telling myself that what I saw wasn’t real, but only the imaginations of a madman.
Except that the acts that had played out on that mural were very much like the fates that were intended for the prisoners being held within the dungeon, and for some, what was planned for was far worse, at least according to the few illustrations that I had looked at.
If I could, would I be able to save them, even if it meant that my Johanna would be forever lost to me? And even if I remained powerless to stop Frankenstein from carrying out his atrocities, would the fact that I secretly wished to remain powerless damn my soul every bit as much?
But at least I was saving one of them from that cruelty. I tried to take solace from that, but failed miserably.
For the rest of my days in the castle I avoided the amphitheater, but nothing I did could stop those images from torturing me.