Frankenstein Unbound Read online

  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 Sécheron 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.

  IV

  * * *

  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 Sécheron, 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 weight of his argument, 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, gray 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 counselor, as his father and grandfather had been before him.

  The counselor 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 counselor’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 Saleve.”

  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 little 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. Stern-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 belo
ngings—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.

  V

  * * *

  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 roomful 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 receive 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.

  Through the binoculars, I traced the path I had taken the night before when following Victor.

  As I half expected, Victor had returned to the scene of his younger brother’s murder. No doubt he had fled straight there from the pressures of the court. I could not see him well; he was mainly hidden behind trees, and motionless. Although I scanned the terrain round about him anxiously, I could discover no sign of the monster.

  Locking the car, I began to climb the hill.

  So far, I have evaded a central issue. Now it was forced on me. The accidents that had brought me back into the past were real enough. My whole being accepted the fact that I was, at least in some fashion, in Switzerland in the year 1816, in the month of May.

  But Frankenstein? He was a fictitious character, a myth, wasn’t he? There was no way that I could understand whereby he could exist. The fact that I was where I was might be highly unlikely; that did not make his being there any more likely. In fact, I had to admit it, I found his existence impossible to explain. Although I was about to confront him, my experience told me that he was—well, I’ve no words for it: on a different plane of reality.

  At last I was up on a level with him. The lake was below, the dull tinkle of cowbells came up to me. A peaceful enough spot, yet made profoundly melancholy by reason of its associations. The trees in their light spring foliage held no cheer.

  Frankenstein was walking to and fro now, muttering to himself. In my hesitation to step forth lay this question: Supposing that this encounter revealed my unreality rather than his... ? As I was about to move forward, a whole cloud of doubt precipitated itself upon me. The frail web of human perceptions was laid bare. I stood outside myself and saw myself there, a poor creature whose energies were based on a slender set of assumptions, whose very identity was a chancy affair of chemicals and accidents.

  “Who’s there? Come forth if you still haunt this place, damned being!”

  Maybe I had made some inadvertent noise. Victor was confronting me, his face white and drawn. I saw no fear there.

  I stood forth.

  “Who are you, and what do you want with me? Are you from the court?”

  “Herr Frankenstein, my name is Bodenland, Joseph Bodenland. We met at the hotel yesterday. I apologize for intruding upon you.”

  “No matter, if you have news. Is a verdict out yet?”

  “Yes.” I had recovered myself by now. “Justine has been condemned to death. The verdict was the inevitable one in view of your silence.”

  “What do you know of my affairs? Who sent you here?”

  “I am here on my own account. And I know little of your affairs, except the one crucial thing which nobody else seems to know—the central secret of your life!”

  He was still confronting me in a pugnacious attitude, but at this he took a step back.

  “Are you another phantom sent to plague me? A product of my imagination?”

  “You are sick, man! Because of your sickness, an innocent woman is going to die, and your fair Elizabeth is going to be plunged into misery.”

  “Whoever or whatever you are, you speak truth. Unhappy wretch that I am, I left my native fireside and alienated my home to seek strange truths in undiscovered lands. My responsibility is too great, too great!”

  “Then you must yield some of it to others. Go before the syndics of Geneva and declare your error. They will then do their best to right what has gone wrong: at the least, they can set Justine free. It’s useless to come up here and luxuriate in your sins!”

  He had been wringing his hands. Now he looked up angrily. “Who are you to charge me with that? Luxuriate, you say! What do you know of my
inner torment? Rendered all the worse by the high hopes I once had, the desire to wrest from Mother Nature some of her deepest secrets, however dark the passage down which I might tread. What cared I for myself? Truth was everything to me! I wanted to improve the world, to deliver into man’s hands some of those powers which had hitherto been ascribed to a sniveling and fictitious God! I made my bed in charnels and on coffins, that a new Promethean fire might be lit! What man ever achieved what I have achieved? And you speak of my sins!”

  “Why not? Isn’t your ambition itself a sin? You admitted your own guilt, didn’t you?”

  His manner became less wild. Almost contemplatively, he said, “Since I am an atheist and do not believe in God, I do not believe in sin in the sense you intend the word. Nor do I believe that the zeal of discovery is a cause for shame. But guilt I believe in, oh yes! I sometimes think that guilt is a permanent condition with me and, possibly, with all men in their secret hearts. Perhaps religions have been invented to try to exorcise that condition. It is guilt, not age or misunderstanding, that withers cheeks and drives friends and lovers apart.

  “Yet why should this condition be? Whence does it come? Is it a modern thing? From now onwards, are all generations to feel guilty? Because man’s powers grow, generation by generation. So much have we achieved, so much more is there to achieve. Must that achievement always carry the maggot of guilt in it?

  “Or perhaps guilt has always been a condition of man, since the early days of the world, before time rolled out like a long slumber across the universe. Perhaps it is to do with the nature of his conception, and with the lustful coming together of man and woman.”