The Monster's Wife(21)
“Uncover it.” He took out a handkerchief and scrubbed at the sweaty band of forehead under his shock of yellow hair.
Oona pulled the sheet away to reveal a great copper spring made of tubing as thick as her arm. The spring coiled around a copper tub that tapered to a cone at its top end. This too was connected to the intricate web of ceiling wires.
“A galvanic coil. It’s part of the circuit I’ve made. And now we are ready to create something so much more mysterious, more astounding than that.”
Frankenstein grabbed a handle that jutted from the wheel on the stand and began turning it. Slowly at first, then faster, faster making the cogs spin frantically.
The coil crackled into life, filling the air with a buzz, a storm cloud hum that made her mouth taste of metal and her skin thrill. There was a cut across the frog’s belly where the wires probed inside. A spark flew from the place where wire touched flesh, one dizzy star, then another.
Another fountain of blinding sparks shot from the wire armpits that joined the cogs to the stand. The water in the aquarium bubbled and the living frog swam round wildly, panicked. The soft, red strings of the dead frog’s innards pulsed against the loops of wire pinning it onto the board. A sticky pool of translucent frog blood ran under the creature’s pale, gleaming body. Then its leg twitched once, twice.
With a croak, it bucked against its bindings. Frankenstein stopped the wheel. He bent to the frog, his body obscuring what his hands did. It jumped free of him, slippery and lithe as any pond frog. When it reached the corner pocket of the billiard table, it stopped, the dark ovals of its eyes embedded in liquid gold, gleaming, blinking. And the dead man came out, his hands and feet bound in graveclothes, his face wrapped in a headcloth. Jesus told them, “Unwrap him and let him go!”
Oona watched the frog, rapt. A moment before, it had been a dead thing, white-fleshed, belly-up on its wooden board. Now the mottled flesh of its soft-padded fingers shone with new moisture and its cream throat pulsed with each quick breath. Flesh reanimated. What he had said was true. Beside her, Frankenstein stared too, sucking in each moment of new life. His pupils were big and dark, like someone under a spell.
She’d never seen anyone look at something with that sort of mad intensity before. But he didn’t seem to share her pleasure in seeing the creature rise from the dead like Lazarus. The corners of his mouth pulled down into a harsh frown and his skin was pallid with sweat. When he turned to face her, she recognised the expression on his face. It was hatred.
17
That night, the storm returned. Huddled in the croft, Oona lay staring at the dark, her mind a busy tongue fretting sores in the mouth. The wind tore angrily at the heavy peats that protected the roof of the cottage. A door banged over and over and a branch clawed the window. Her thoughts spun, endless as the cogs in the doctor’s machine, flicking out sparks part memory, part nightmare. The dead frog waking. The feeding fly rubbing its hands. That glimpse of the sheet and whatever lay beneath.
After the frog came alive, the doctor’s mood had changed. He’d ushered her out before she had a chance to spy any further and slammed the door shut, that hateful look still on his face. She’d walked back home, shaking, the elation she’d felt at seeing the frog come alive bruising into something darker. The Bible would call it necromancy, what he’d done, a practice so abominable it made you unclean even to see it. She sat up in bed, scratching her neck, her cheeks, her legs. She felt achy and sick.
In the darkness, everything shouted and clawed. Necromancers burned their children as offerings. They spoke to the dead. Was that what the doctor had done? Whoever did these things was an abomination to the Lord. Murderers, sorcerers, their portion was in the lake that burns with fire. Their lot was the second death.
Unless it was all a parlour trick meant to deceive her, like the man at Hamnavoe Fair who pulled doves from his scarf and rabbits from his hat. Sleight of hand intended to distract her from finding out what he was really engaged in. But she would find proof. She would do better than she had and not fall under the spell of his strange magnetism or listen to his lies. Clutching her ears, she threw herself down miserably and pulled the blanket over her head.
She must have fallen asleep, because she woke to hoarse shouts tearing the cloth of her dreams. She sat up and the covers fell from her, the colours of her sleeping life melting so that she couldn’t call back the dream’s pleasant story, although she knew Ma had been in it somewhere, smiling at her.
The shout rang out again, but it wasn’t a person calling. It was Toby, his barks echoing across the yard, though she didn’t remember letting him out in the night. With a groan, she swung her legs over the side of the bed and pulled her bedcovers around her. In the cold light, eyes swollen with sleep, she followed the sound of Toby’s yelps half blindly.
She crossed the freezing floor, past the long-gone-out fire in the hearth. Granny lay curled in a ball in her wicker chair the way children sleep, with blanket half over her head. She’d taken to spending the night there recently, as if her actual bed was too much bother to sleep on.
Toby started up again. If he kept on he’d wake the whole valley. He sounded frightened, his gruff barking a counterpoint to the squawks of the hens. They shouldn’t be outside either, not in a storm. In a moment she saw the reason for the exodus. The door to the cottage hung off its hinges.
Out in the yard, the storm had gouged and torn more than the door. It had taken half the fence with it by the looks of things. She sighed. Sometimes the wind was brutal, hurtling over the flat, bleak land from the sea, smashing branches, tearing off roofs. A crow perched on what was left, hunched low, feathers puffed out, watching her. The wind picked up again and the creature huddled to one side, moving along the wood of the fence post that leaned drunkenly, white in the middle where it had splintered. She took a step closer and the crow jumped up and flew off. Near the fence post, a bucket lay on its side, its water long since spilled. Where the scrubby patch of barley peppered the mud, clods of earth churned up and the green stalks were broken near the root or pulled up whole, scattering chaff and unripe seed.