This Monstrous Thing(27)
“He doesn’t think himself a hero,” I said. “He thinks he’s a monster.”
Geisler frowned. “I’ll take that into account.” He tossed the book to me, and it landed with a flump on the chaise. “You should acquaint yourself with it, Alasdair. This may prove more trouble than I’d care to deal with.”
“How could a book be that much trouble?” I asked, though even as I said it I thought of the Frankenstein badges in Geneva.
“Because the whole continent is reading it,” Geisler replied. “The account of a man turned monster. No one on God’s green earth would want to come back if it meant coming back like this.” He drained his teacup and set it back in its saucer so hard I was surprised it didn’t shatter. “I recommend you spend the day reading,” he said, glancing out the window at the sky turning from black to gray as the day surfaced. “I can’t imagine you have anything else to occupy yourself.”
He started for the doorway, but I called after him, “What happens . . . ?” and he stopped. I swallowed. “What happens if I say yes? If I agree to study with you?”
“Then we’d go to Geneva immediately,” he replied. “We’d fetch Oliver and bring him here, where you both will be safe.”
“What about my parents?”
“If you’re certain they’ve been arrested, then our time may be running out. With enough evidence, a conviction could happen before the end of the year.”
I tallied the days in my head and realized that left us just shy of three weeks. “Could you help them?”
“I could try. I promise I will try.”
I stared hard at the fireplace for a moment, my teeth working on my bottom lip. It seemed too far away to touch, too unreal to imagine that in a few weeks my whole world could be different. I could be free of my parents, free from Geneva and running and being so bleeding afraid all the time. I could be doing real, important work, work I’d dreamed about doing most of my life. And I’d have Geisler to help me take care of Oliver—I’d be free of him too.
“We can’t leave until the snow clears,” Geisler said. I could feel him watching me. “If you need to think about it.”
“I don’t,” I said, and I looked up at him. “I’ll go with you. And I’ll show you where Oliver is.”
His face relaxed back into almost a smile. “I’m glad to hear it. It’s the only sensible option, you do realize that, don’t you?” I nodded. Geisler took a few steps back into the room and placed his hand on my shoulder—a gesture more fatherly than anything I could remember receiving from my own father. “You’ll be safe this way,” he said. “You both will.”
“And what about Frankenstein?”
His eyes narrowed, mouth tightening to a thin razor in the firelight. “I suggest you take some time to read it,” he replied. “Perhaps you can figure out who wrote your story.”
Talking with Geisler left me empty and exhausted, and I went straight up to my room and collapsed onto the bed. My ears were ringing and I felt so thick with what he’d told me that I couldn’t think clearly. As the sun rose behind the storm, I tried to sleep for a few more hours, but my eyes kept snapping open—like they were attached to springs—and finding their way to the writing desk where Frankenstein lay. The green binding looked more acidic than emerald now.
I didn’t last long against it. I threw back the bedcovers and snatched the book off the desk, then slid down in front of the fire, my back against the headboard, and cracked the spine.
It only took a few pages before my stomach started to roll.
The story starts on a steamship expedition in the north, when a group of explorers pull a man called Victor Frankenstein, half-starved and frozen, from the ice. And as he dies, Frankenstein tells the captain the story of his life and the work that led his to dying in the Arctic.
Reading Victor’s narration was like listening to myself speak, as though I’d been hurled years into the future and was reading the diary of an older version of myself. It wasn’t my exact history, but the parallels were clear. We both began our lives as children of privilege and science, fascinated by clockwork and mechanics and the men made from it.
And Ingolstadt!—God’s wounds, Frankenstein left Geneva when he turned eighteen for Ingolstadt, same as I wanted to, to study clockwork and medicine and making metal limbs that move at the body’s command. He even had a professor to guide him, and I kept picturing the man red-bearded like Geisler. But Victor took things further than his professors thought he could. He wanted to use clockwork to reanimate dead tissue and restore life. He was cleverer than everyone else, and he knew he could do better work than anyone before him.
And then—there it was.
It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils.
The resurrection: it stared up at me from the pages like a ghost.
I lingered over that scene for a long time, read it three times over and tried to wed it with my memories of my own dreary night in November and map how they differed. It was bleeding strange to see what felt like the climactic moment of my life boiled down to a single page of short sentences that bellowed true inside me.
How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the mechanical wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavored to form from cogs and gears? I had desired it with an ardor that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.