With that Frankenstein left. His friend, Clervil, turned once to look upon me the way a snake might a mouse, and then he also left. There was another cot along the opposite wall from where the girl lay and I sank into it, lowering my head heavily into my hands. As I sat there in my cowardice I tried not to think of the girl chained helplessly only a few yards or so from me. After some time, however, I could feel as if her eyes were boring into my skull, and that feeling soon became unbearable. I dared to glance toward her, and she was indeed staring at me. As swollen and red as her eyes were, the rest of her face was pale and bloodless.
“Am I to be your bride?” she asked in a tortured voice that pierced my heart. “Is that why you chose me and I was sent to this place? Am I to be married to a monster?”
I shook my head and lowered my eyes from hers. “No, that is not what it will be.”
“Then what will it be? I have the right to know!”
“You will be made … different.”
I could not keep myself from glancing up and seeing the confusion which wrecked her face. “How will I be made different?” she asked. Then it was as if a trace of the knowledge flickered in her eyes. “It has to do with that brain, doesn’t it?”
I nodded. “My betrothed was murdered, and that is what remains of her,” I said.
“I do not understand,” she said. “What does that have to do with me?”
I tried to smile at her, but from the way she reacted my attempt must have made me look even more hideous. The twisting within my stomach became something awful.
“You will be made into my Johanna,” I said at last.
“What are you saying?”
But she saw it. She made the connection then to her being brought to this island, all of the medical equipment and devices within the room, and my Johanna’s brain being kept in a glass jar in the very same room. Her mouth gaped open, but she was too stunned to cry or weep. “All of you are monsters,” she whispered in a voice that sounded like death. “You are going to take my brain and replace it with another? Is that why you chose me? To be made into something unnatural and monstrous like yourself?”
“If I did not choose you they would later commit utterly vile acts on your body and then kill you in a terrible way.”
“And this is not utterly vile? To turn me into a freakish thing?”
“At least now you will live,” I said.
But she knew this wasn’t true, just as I did. At least she would not be living in any way that could be thought of as natural. Her mouth closed, and she aged terribly in front of my eyes. The pain within her became an awful thing to witness.
“I would rather die,” she said. “My younger sister was stolen also. If they are going to murder her then I wish to be murdered also so that we may join our ancestors together. I do not wish this thing that will be done to me. It was evil of you to choose me.”
She started weeping then. The sound that she made was that of a wounded animal that needed to be taken out of its misery. I sat, helpless, and listened.
“I am sorry,” I said. “I wish there was something I could do to help you.”
“Unlock my chains!” she pleaded as she wept. “The keys are right there on the table! Or will you have me turned into a monster for your own selfish needs?”
“That is not my reason,” I implored. “Frankenstein holds a power over me that keeps me a slave to him. But I wish I could help you.”
When my words made sense to her, she started wailing and beating on her head with her fists. I got off the cot so that I could keep her from hurting herself. When I came within a few feet of her, she lurched forward and grabbed me by my cape and pleaded with me to kill her. “If you cannot help me, then end my life, I beg of you!”
Once more I was being asked to kill an innocent to save them. I could not bear to turn her down. I tried to lift my hands to her throat, but Frankenstein’s spell prevented me. She saw in my eyes that I was powerless to do as she begged, and she fell on the cot weeping violently.
I stepped away from her. When she had grabbed my cape I heard a crinkling noise, the type paper might make. I remembered then the odd little man I had met outside of Leipzig and the envelope he handed me. I searched the inside pocket of my cape and pulled out this envelope. It had yellowed and aged with time, and when I looked inside of it I saw dried plant leaves, and remembered this odd little man telling me that they were leaves from a jimson weed plant. I remembered what he told me about how I could use these leaves to cure myself. I looked around the room and saw that everything I needed in order to follow the instructions I was given was present. I felt an excitement as I acted once more as a chemist and generated a tincture from the leaves, and then diluted this in the method that was explained to me.
The girl had stopped her weeping to ask me what I was doing. I told her I wasn’t sure. Once I had the solution prepared, I placed several drops of it under my tongue. Nothing happened, at least at first. But as hours passed and night approached I felt a sense of peace that I could not remember since long before waking up within Frankenstein’s laboratory. I also realized that a noise that had been buzzing incessantly within my skull was gone. I hadn’t even been aware of this noise, but the new quiet that I sensed was something welcome and unfamiliar to me.
As I sat in the dark marveling over these changes that had occurred, I remembered where I had seen Henry Clervil before.
CHAPTER
27
Early the next morning Frankenstein’s servants departed the island by rowboat. I heard them as they left, and assumed that Frankenstein sent them away so that they would not be witness to what was going to be happening. It was a short time later that Frankenstein and Clervil entered the cottage. Frankenstein nodded brusquely at me and commented that he hoped I had had a good night’s sleep. He was too absorbed in his planned operation to have paid any attention to what I might have said. His friend, Clervil, was the same way: both of their faces hardened with eagerness and anticipation. Neither of them paid attention to their surroundings within the cottage as they headed straight to the wooden crate where they had stored Johanna’s brain the evening before. I had learned during the night that the girl’s name was Mariel. If they had been paying attention, they would have noticed that Mariel’s manacle had been removed, even though she remained sitting on her cot.
“I remember where I saw you before,” I said, but both Frankenstein and Clervil were too caught up in their plans to bother listening to me. “Clervil,” I shouted this time, “I am speaking to you!”
Clervil turned to give me a forced look of patience that bordered on exasperation, but did not say anything to me.
“I saw you in Ingolstadt,” I said. “This was when I was still Friedrich Hoffmann.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes, it is. In fact, it was my last night as Friedrich Hoffmann. I remember your face from the beer hall. At some point you must have stood next to me. Is that when you slipped your poison into my ale?”
He blinked but otherwise showed no reaction to my accusation. “I don’t know what you are talking about,” he said. He then turned away from me to help Frankenstein lift the wooden crate onto a table.
I roared then, and it was something fierce and horrible. Both of them turned around, a mix of surprise and amusement befuddling their faces. In a dizzying rush I was off the cot and moving toward them, and then I had Clervil by his jacket, lifting him so that his face was inches from mine. And now nothing but stark terror reflected in his expression. I roared again, and my face wrinkled into a horrible grin. I threw him against the wall with enough force that he went through the wooden structure and tumbled onto the ground outside. Frankenstein tried shouting something at me, but I ignored him. He would be for later. I followed Clervil through the hole in the wall that his body made, and I picked him up again. His eyes fluttered open and he opened his mouth as if he were trying to scream, but no noise came out.