The Monster's Wife(54)

Knives. A neat row of them. They gleamed silver in the firelight. Scissors and scalpels like the ones Victor used to cut things apart.

Her head whirred, skin filmed with sweat, cold though the room was hot. Her hands dropped from the bag. She fell against the wall, reaching behind herself to clutch the rough stone and feel something, anything real.





47


Victor was deep in some fever dream, his eyes beetling under the thin-skinned lids. Oona picked up the jug and threw the remainder of the water over him. His head jerked up, the good eye blinking furiously. She held the bag where he could see it.

“You have been staying here.” She couldn’t keep the fury from her voice.

“What?” His gaze moved blankly between the bag and the scalpel she held in her other hand.

“Do not lie to me, Victor. I know you have been here. Who else would keep knives like these in such a bag? Did you bring May here? Did you hurt her?” She waved the scalpel wildly. She was losing control, eyes blurring, voice cracking.

Fumblingly, he caught her wrist, his fingers slipping from it almost at once. “Oona I would never...” His hand moved to her face. “Oona, please, listen.”

She wiped her eyes angrily and put down the bag, but not the knife.

“Please...sit.” He smoothed a space on the palette beside him.

She shook her head, crouching on the floor, her hand clutching the scalpel so hard that the join between blade and handle cut into her. “Is this story about a monster...is it even real?” Her voice was high at the end and sounded mad even to her. She was losing any sense of what was the truth and what was lies.

Victor reached for her again. His hand found her arm, the fingers pressing her skin. Despite herself, she found the touch reassuring. She looked into his eyes. They were clearer now. If only she could see inside his head and know the truth.

When he began talking, his voice sounded far away. “I grew up in Geneva with people I love with all my heart. Mother, Father, my cousin Elizabeth and my young brother William, a beautiful boy... When I reached manhood, I followed my passion for natural philosophy and went to study in Ingolstadt. There, I undertook research into the secret of life. It was dark work. I dissected not only animals, but humans...”

He paused, his eyes flicking anxiously over Oona’s face. “My work required illicit connections. During the course of it, I became entangled with a most unpleasant man. Barely a man - no I would not grace him with such a name - a monster - a vile fellow, ugly as sin, scarred and hairless and wicked. The man you saw.”

He pulled his hand from her and pressed it to his face. For a long time, there was no sound but the rattle of the window timbers, the howl of the gale down the chimney.

When Victor spoke again, his voice was barely a whisper. “This creature murdered my brother William. A young girl - a maid like yourself, who worked in our house - was hung for the crime. Later, he stalked me into the mountains and even in the icy wastes where I had gone to grieve, he found me.

“There, he admitted the crime and struck a Devil’s bargain. He ordered me to continue my research into the secrets of life, work he would use for his own dark purposes. In return for this, he would refrain from killing the remainder of my loved ones.” He held her gaze, eyes wide and intent so that she couldn’t look away.

She pressed her hands to her temples and closed her eyes so she didn’t have to see him. Instead she saw the dead girl’s hand washed up to shore and May, so slight and so reckless, so easy to hurt.

She took a deep breath, drawing her fear and anger inwards, letting it swell before she spoke. “So you came here and he followed you. That is what you meant when you said you brought Death to our island.”

He turned his face towards the fire, frowning. “Indeed, the beast is here, bound on ruining me once more.”

Oona stepped back, squeezing her body into a small nook by the door. Her sympathy had contorted into something else. A vision of the chicken coop flickered before her eyes: torn necks, congealed blood, Toby’s whimper of shame and the look of blank shock in Granny’s eyes.

“Everyone I love lives here, or did. You are so compelled by the sorrow of your own story, you’ve neglected to think of the cost to everyone else.”

He looked at her vaguely as if the words only made partial sense, then he waved his hand. “No, no, the monster’s vendetta is with me. He will only harm those dear to me. You and the others, you will all be quite safe.”

Oona swallowed hard, stung and at the same time ashamed that she felt so. She went on, her voice a notch more waspish than before. “And what about May? Has he harmed her?”

“Oh Oona, I hope not.”

She leaned over, turning his face towards her. “So this is not your hiding place?”

He shook his head.

“Then whose is it? Who would be keeping a bloody nightgown and a bag full of knives in my parents’ house?”

He covered his face again. “Gott im Himmel. It is him.”

She watched all night by the dying light of the fire, the knife clutched in her fist, her back pressed to Victor’s sleeping form. For all her anger, she was glad of the warmth that bled from his body to hers. It gave her some comfort at least.

Grey light spilled through the cracks in the shutters and around the makeshift door and still her bones stayed clenched. She must see the monster first if he came to the window and be ready for whatever he planned. Even if those footsteps circling the shack were his and his voice sounded somewhere out there, she saw no sign of him.