Orkney Isles, September 1, 1790
They ran into the night, heading for the ruined barn, and nothing lunged from the darkness to menace them. “There was nothing there,” William whispered as they gained the shelter of the building. “I saw nothing; I heard nothing; he is afraid of something only he can see.”
“Perhaps it was not just laudanum, then,” Elizabeth whispered back.
They waited, holding still, for long enough that she started to shiver from the wind and the reaction to the interview they had just concluded. Hearing absolutely nothing that might indicate the presence of a monster, they dared to light the dark lantern (“I shall miss the matchsticks when we go home,” Elizabeth murmured) and found a more comfortable place to sit. Half of the building’s roof had fallen in during past winter snows, but the other half seemed sound enough, and under this, they made a nest of somewhat moldy straw and sat back to take stock.
William opened the pocket watch and set it down where they both could see it. The fourth face was asleep. Elizabeth thought of discretion—just in case there was something lurking about outside after all—and covered it with a fold of her skirt.
“We can’t leave until it shows us we’ve changed something,” she said.
“We couldn’t leave before tomorrow in any case, unless we stole a fishing boat,” William pointed out. “In all honesty, Elizabeth, I do not think there is anything out there. Viktor Frankenstein carries his phantasms with him.”
“I think that makes it more urgent that we stay until we are sure he will not change his mind back,” Elizabeth said. “Otherwise, he might see some phantasm that threatens him as effectively as we convinced him.”
A flash of colored light through the white fabric of her skirt proclaimed the fourth face to have awakened, and she snatched it up eagerly.
And beheld monsters tearing each other to pieces at the Battle of Dover, while dirigibles loomed over their heads.
Tears sprang into her eyes, but she tried to keep them out of her voice. “It’s not a failure yet,” she said, as though saying it could make it true. “The images did not change immediately after Waterloo. It only means we must stay until we are sure.”
“Which we shall.” William too spoke with deliberate cheer. “We’ll be right here, should it prove necessary to waylay Viktor Frankenstein and change his mind again.” She might have been fooled by his voice, if there had not been light sufficient for her to see the clenching and unclenching of his left hand. “Come here,” he added. “You must be cold.”
She nestled against him, and they watched the slice of sea and sky visible through the space where a door should have been. The winds died down as the high tide came in, until at last the water seemed quite gentle, almost motionless under the eye of the quiet moon. A few fishing vessels specked the water, and now and then the breeze wafted the sound of voices, as two night fishermen called to each other. Eventually even those voices ceased, and Elizabeth almost drowsed in the silence. The pocket watch cycled through the brook, the ship, the knights on the mountainside, the desolate street of 1885, the Battle of Dover, and a drowsy darkness of its own.
Suddenly a splash reached Elizabeth’s ear. Startled, she lifted her head from William’s chest. Another splash, and she felt all William’s lean muscles tense beside her. Elizabeth reached out careful fingers, took up the pocket watch, and quietly shut it, lest its light betray them. Then she held as still as she could and listened.
She identified the sound after a moment—the rhythmic swoosh and splash of oars in water. Another fisherman, come long after his fellows had gone to their beds? Somehow she did not think so. She craned to see more of the ocean through the broken door, and was rewarded by the sight of a boat coming into the bay from the mainland. It had only one passenger, but as he leaped into the shallow water to bring the craft to shore, she could see the enormous height and the overlong gorilla-like arms. At this distance, she of course could not see the scars that creased his dead face.
She shrank back against William, and he held her. There was nowhere for them to go, and indeed they dared not go far. They must hear what happened between Frankenstein and his monster.
The monster climbed the cliffside with some dislodging of stones, but no grunts of effort. Elizabeth had a perfect view of it as it crested the cliff, pulling itself up with its huge muscled arms, its scarred face betraying no effort at the motion. It set its feet on the cliff top and straightened with an ease that hinted at the greatness of its strength. The moonlight shone full upon it, and she recognized the lines and scars and stitches of the face that had loomed over her a week ago and two weeks from now, in this very cottage. A casual swipe of its hand had flung her hard to the floor. She had not quite had time to be afraid of the hulking, hard-eyed beast then, but she did now. How would Viktor possibly hold out against its threats, if its very appearance was so daunting?
The monster stomped past the barn, displaying no apparent interest in it, and circled around to the back of the house. Elizabeth knew exactly when it reached the kitchen window; the creature’s howl of anguish and fury split the night. For an instant she was back in the alleyway, that first night of this mad adventure, held by Maxwell’s urgent hands against a cold brick wall. Watching over his shoulder as a monster fell, shrieking, to a construct’s Gatling-gun fire.
She blinked, and she was in the barn, pressed close to William’s side, feeling the patter of his heartbeat and the quick rise and fall of his chest. The monster stomped past the barn again, reached the front door of Viktor Frankenstein’s cottage, and yanked it open.
Elizabeth tried to remember to breathe.
“You have destroyed the work which you began,” the monster’s hoarse voice came from the direction of the cottage, strangled guttural voice mangling the French words. With the door and windows both open, the words carried clearly over calm water and through the calm air. “Do you dare break your promise?” the creature went on. “I have endured toil and misery: I left Switzerland with you; I crept along the shores of the Rhine, among its willow islands, and over the summits of its hills. I have dwelt many months in the heaths of England, and among the deserts of Scotland. I have endured incalculable fatigue, and cold, and hunger; do you dare destroy my hopes?”
“Begone!” Viktor Frankenstein responded, but in a voice that quavered. “I do—I do break my promise. Never will I create another like yourself, equal in deformity and wickedness.”
“Wicked!” The monster let the word echo for a moment. “If I am wicked,” it continued, “who made me so? Did I not tell you, upon the occasion of our former parley, that my vices are the children of this forced solitude which I abhor? My virtues will necessarily arise when I live in communion with an equal. I am as you made me; if you had not created me a form so hideous that all recoil from it, if you had not cast me forth to dwell in a world that despised me, I might have become a being of love and benevolence.” The monster’s voice caressed the next words—slowly, lovingly. “If I were not so horrible that your brother William called me an ogre, he and the maiden Justine would be living still. Any crimes I have committed must be laid at your door.”
Elizabeth had felt some pity for the creature at the beginning of this speech, but rage boiled inside her at its conclusion. At Viktor’s door? His alone? The first evil was his, certainly, but the second was yours. Did someone take your hands and place them about William Frankenstein’s throat?
“Murderer of my brother!” Viktor Frankenstein replied. “You swear to be harmless, but you have already shown a degree of malice that should reasonably make me distrust you, and with every breath you remind me of your past villainy. I believe vengeance is all you live for now, and this request a feint that will increase your triumph by affording a wider scope for your revenge. I will not aid you.”
“Slave, I before reasoned with you, but you have proved yourself unworthy of my condescension. Remember that I have power; you believe yourself miserable, but I can make you so wretched that the light of day will be hateful to you. You are my creator, but I am your master—obey!”
This command was followed by a crash and a cry, and then a longer, higher-pitched scream. Elizabeth tensed to jump up and run, but William’s hand closed over her wrist.
“We have to do something!” Elizabeth whispered, struggling. “Protect him somehow—”
“What are you going to do?” William hissed in her ear. “Build a weapon sufficient to take the monster down?”
“Shall each man find a wife for his bosom,” the creature wailed from the cottage, “and each beast have his mate, and I be alone? I had feelings of affection, and they were requited by detestation and scorn. Are you to be happy, while I grovel in the intensity of my wretchedness? Yes, I live for vengeance now! I may die, but first you, my tyrant and tormentor, shall curse the sun that gazes on your misery—unless you here and now commence the creation of a second companion for me.”
“I refuse,” Frankenstein gasped, “and no torture shall ever extort consent from me. Shall I create another like yourself, whose joint wickedness will desolate the world? You may torture me, but I will never consent.”
There was a long, long silence. “Man,” the creature said then, “you will repent of the injuries you inflict.”
“Devil,” the man replied, “cease, and do not poison the air with these sounds of malice. I have declared my resolution to you, and I am no coward. Leave me; I am inexorable.”
“I go,” the monster said. “But you shall reap what you have sown. I shall be with you on your wedding-night.”
“If that is to be the fulfillment of my destiny,” Viktor Frankenstein replied in a tone of great weariness, “if that is the hour I shall die, then let it be so. That consequence I cannot undo, but I will not sacrifice the whole human race to ensure my safety. It would be an act of the basest and most atrocious selfishness.”
There came then the sound of a blow, and a heavy fall, and cry. Then silence. Then the monster stomped from the cottage, scrambled down the cliffside, and cast its boat upon the water. Propelled by the monster’s strong arms at the oars, the little craft shot toward the mainland with the swiftness of an arrow, and was soon lost amidst the waves.
Elizabeth released her held breath in a long and shaky sigh. To her intense relief, new sounds came from the cottage: a man’s groan, a scrape of a chair over a wooden floor, uneven footsteps and water splashing from a jug into a bowl. Viktor could not be badly hurt, then.
Elizabeth’s hands shook as she located the pocket watch and opened it. The fourth face was alight, and showed the image of the meadow. Wind rippled through the grass and dimpled the surface of the water.
The water turned gray and menacing and rose into a looming ocean wave. It crashed down upon the little ship, and for a moment seemed to have overwhelmed it, but the ship struggled back upright.
Its flying pennants turned into the banners of the mountainside knights, whipped out straight and proud in what appeared to be a strong wind. The dazzle of sunlight on armor almost blinded her. William shifted impatiently, then resettled himself, holding still but with his left hand clenched.
The images disappeared and reappeared. The ship fought with the waves and the knights rode out to battle and the meadow lay drenched in peace, but no image of monsters tearing each other apart at Dover materialized.
“Are they off the chessboard, then?” William asked the air—in a whisper, as though he feared angering whatever force supplied the images.
As if in answer, the embattled ship dissolved into the London street.
William and Elizabeth bent their heads over the watch. The street was shrouded by mist, through which a gaslight burned. In the background, factories rose aggressively against the horizon, pumping from their chimneys smoke that thickened and yellowed the fog. The place did not, thank God, have the dead and desolate feel of the London Napoleon’s Empire had crushed beneath its heel. But no constructs marched through it, either—the yellow fog was split by no blue lightning.
“They’re not there,” Elizabeth said. “Neither of them are there—” And then she burst into tears.
It was a brief shower, quickly spent, and William assured her, entirely understandable given the strain they had both been laboring under. She scrubbed her face dry with his handkerchief and settled back to study the image of the London street when it reappeared.
“It’s—better,” she said, belatedly cautious. “It’s different, at least.”
“Then it has to be at least a little better.” William raised his head to give her a shaky smile. “We’ll go and see tomorrow.”
The thumps and scraping sounds from the cottage had not ceased. “What is he doing in there?” Elizabeth wondered.
“I cannot imagine.” William eased away from her, stretching. “Shall we go and see?”
They were quiet and careful, and Viktor was too occupied with his employment to spare any attention for the window. He had lit all the candles again, and by their light was walking to and fro, folding garments and placing them into trunks, adding the remnants of his mostly destroyed chemical apparatus. A great red mark stood out lividly on his cheek, and he walked as though he had sustained an injury to his leg—after a moment, Elizabeth identified with a jolt of sickness the odor in the air as that of burned flesh, and guessed what kind of injury—but for all that, an odd aura of peace hovered about him.
“He is packing,” William whispered. “Perhaps he is going home.”
Viktor Frankenstein left the cottage in the small hours of the morning, carrying a large basket. He hesitated for a moment before descending the cliffside path, looking about him. “Little brother?” he called. “Elizabeth? Are you still near me?” Hidden once more in the barn, Elizabeth and William looked at each other. Before they could decide whether to answer, Viktor kept talking as though they had. “I will keep my promise. I go now to commit to the ocean what remains of my horrible experiment. I shall not have the tools I need to attempt it again, and I will not leave the remains of the female creature to terrify the innocent inhabitants of this island. In the morning, I go to Clerval in Perth.”
He descended the path, put his basket aboard a little skiff, and sailed away from the shore. Elizabeth watched him until he vanished from her view.
“He was brave,” she said to William. “Mad, perhaps, and selfish all his life until now, too arrogant and self-absorbed to see what affect his actions had on others, but brave in the end. If he cared for his own life more than a future he would never see, he might have yielded to the monster’s threats.”
Viktor Frankenstein did not return. The sun rose, and the wind picked up, and the waves crashed below, but there was no sign of the returning skiff. The watch in Elizabeth’s hands, however, continued to show the third 1885 and continued not to show the Battle of Dover, so—
“The change seems to be holding,” William said. “I think we have done what we came here to do.”
They slept in shifts, and the sun made its long summer path across the sky, and Viktor did not return. But nor did the fourth face change its cycle of images. At last the hour grew late enough that they might use the watch for travel again, and Elizabeth tried combination after combination of dial settings, trying to convince it to take them to Waterloo, that she might see what transpired in the absence of monsters. The watch proved immune to this desire, and likewise refused to take them to 1820 in Hartwich. But when the image of the third 1885 appeared, and Elizabeth tentatively brushed her thumb over the knobs, the Orkney sea and sky wavered momentarily out of existence.
She let go at once and sat, breathing. “Did you feel that?” she asked William. Foolishly; she could tell by his expression that he had.
“I would like to go and see what the future looks like now,” William said. “Then we can decide if any other adjustments seem worth the risk.”
“Forward, then,” Elizabeth said, more bravely than she felt. “To see what we have wrought.”