This Monstrous Thing(49)

“Then it’s her. She wrote it.”

“It’s not.”

“It has to be.”

“No,” I said. “Mary didn’t write it.”

“Yes she did,” Clémence replied just as firmly. “You just don’t want it to be her.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re still sweet on her and you can’t bear the idea that she gave up your story to the world, so you’ve talked yourself into believing there’s no chance it could be her. It’s much easier to suspect Geisler or Oliver or someone who you’re already not fond of.”

“She wouldn’t write it.”

“Why not?”

“Because when you trust someone, they don’t do that to you.”

“And you trusted her?”

“I did.”

“Do you, or did you?”

“She wouldn’t write it,” I protested. “She knew everything about us and what we did, but she never told anyone. She promised . . .”

I stopped. Mary had kept all her promises—that was the way I had decided to remember her. All I’d thought about for two years was that she was gone and how much I missed her, not how she’d left. I’d forgotten the day she disappeared, the last time we spoke. The last promise she’d made me. The one she hadn’t kept.

We’d taken Oliver up to the castle, and it had seemed for those early days that no matter how badly things had gone, at least I had Mary to help me through. And so when she promised I could have my first sleep in three days and she’d stay awake to watch Oliver, I hadn’t even questioned that she meant it. I’d fallen asleep with my head on her shoulder and woken curled on the cold stone floor, just me and my alive-again brother, and when I went to find her, the man at her villa said they’d all gone home to London, just like that, without a word.

I didn’t want it to be Mary who wrote it because I didn’t want to think she could break promises to me so easily. But she already had, the day she left Geneva, long before Frankenstein.

“It’s Mary Shelley,” I said. “She wrote it.”

Clémence crossed her arms. “To think I kissed you for this when you knew the answer all along.”

“God’s wounds.” I dropped my head into my hands with a moan. “I’ve been such an idiot.”

“You’ve not been an idiot. It’s hard to believe that the people we love can do terrible things to us.”

“But why would she write it?” I snatched up Frankenstein and flipped through it like I’d find her name somewhere. “It’s not her story. She didn’t do any of it, she was just there.”

“That doesn’t matter. What matters is, you know it’s her, and you can find her and talk to her. Get Oliver out of Geneva, then find Mary Shelley. Convince her to tell everyone she wrote it and it’s all a bunch of tosh, none of it real. Then people will stop looking for the resurrected man and Oliver can have his life back. You both can.”

My heart was racing, but I felt steady. At the end of a long, dark road, a faint slash of dawn seemed to be finally breaking against the horizon. “That’s what I’ll do,” I said.

Clémence looked down at her mug, then up at the clock above the fireplace. “I’m going to bed,” she said. “Are you going to be all right?”

I nodded, though I still felt charged. Clémence stood and I thought she was going to leave, but she reached back across the table and put her hand on top of mine. “You can’t make people the way you want them to be, Alasdair. Sometimes you just have to love them how they are.”

And with that, she left me, and I sat up the rest of the night alone.


Once I realized Mary had written Frankenstein, I felt foolish for not letting myself believe it sooner. She knew us. She knew about the resurrection, and Geisler’s work, and just enough of the stories of our lives to create these shadow versions of us in Victor Frankenstein and his monster.

And she had wanted to be a writer. The whole time she was in Geneva, she’d been fed a steady diet of gothic stories by her friends, and she had devoured them like sweets. Some of them she passed on to Oliver and me, like the legend of a castle tucked in the foothills outside the city, a hundred years abandoned and supposedly stuffed with ghosts.

So of course, she decided, we had to find it.

“I don’t know exactly where it is,” she confessed as we started hiking up into the pines. “I’ve only heard about it from my friends.”

“If it’s your friends who told you about it,” Oliver called over his shoulder as he jogged ahead of her, “why don’t they take you?”

Mary fisted her skirts and tugged them up out of the mud. “They don’t go for that sort of thing.”

“So what sorts of things do they do?” I asked.

“Oh, you know, spirit summoning and exorcisms and demon worship.”

I stopped dead, at the same time Oliver turned back to her and said, “God’s wounds, are you joking?”

She laughed, but she didn’t say she was.

The slope had barely begun in earnest when a storm broke overhead, the hard-driving sort of rain that plagued the city that whole summer. The pathway went slick and muddy under our feet, and we all slipped more than once. I kept suggesting we turn back, but Oliver was in the lead and he had never turned back from anything in his life. Between him and Mary, everything was a dare. Everything was a contest of who would give up first. Mary wasn’t reckless like Oliver, just brave enough to make me feel boring in comparison.