“Oh, Victor,” I sobbed. I yanked the list free and shoved it into my purse. Lowering my head, I saw in the far corner something square and inorganic wrapped in an oiled sheet. I reached in as carefully as I could, gagging again as my hand brushed something cold and soft. I pushed past it and grabbed the item I wanted. I pulled it out and slammed the lid of the trunk closed.
It was a book. For some reason, though, it frightened me more than anything else in the room. Moving away from the horrible supplies, I opened the well-worn leather covers of Victor’s journal.
His handwriting, tiny and cramped, as though he feared not having enough space to get his thoughts down, was as familiar to me as my own. There were dates, notes, anatomical drawings. At first they were of animals and humans. And then they were of something…not quite either. I skimmed the words through my tears, his handwriting growing more frantic with each passing page.
The final page was a drawing of a man. More than a man. The proportions were wrong, the scale monstrous. And beneath it, written with so much force it was carved into the paper, the words I WILL DEFEAT DEATH.
I closed the journal and dropped it on the floor. Numb, I went back to the trapdoor and climbed down, closing it over my head. One hand still had not recovered from the shock of touching the metal table, and the other was cut. I slipped, falling down the last few rungs. I stood just as an insistent fist pounded on the door.
I opened it. “Sorry!” I said breathlessly. Justine, Mary, and an older gentleman stood waiting. “This quarter frightens me. I did not want anyone else to get in.”
“Elizabeth!” Justine took in my bloodied hand and doubtless wild expression.
I forced a smile. “I slipped trying to tidy up. Come, we must get Victor away from here.”
I led them into the room, hoping they would not be curious. Fortunately, Victor’s state was so obviously dire that they did not bother exploring anywhere else. Though Mary peered around the room with narrowed eyes, she helped leverage Victor out of bed. “What is that smell?” she asked.
“We have to get him into the carriage. Hurry!” I rushed them through the entryway, praying they would not look up and want to check the room there. When they were all safely outside, I closed the door firmly.
“At least it is over now,” Justine said with a relieved sigh. I still had work to do, but I smiled in companionable relief as though I, too, were leaving that horrible place behind forever.
Justine took my elbow, wrapping my hand in her clean handkerchief. My dress was covered in dirt and grime. Bright spots of my own blood stood out as if it had been spilled on filthy snow.
“You were right to come,” Justine said. “He needed you.”
He always had. And he did now more than ever. I had to help Victor get well, and I had to protect him. I could not let anyone discover the truth:
Victor had gone mad.
THE DOCTOR, A STATELY gentleman whose clothes told a story of a satisfied and wealthy clientele, had a room in his offices for cases like Victor, where the patient needed both seclusion and extra care.
I saw Victor safely settled, taking care to inform the doctor of his history of intense, prolonged fevers.
“He grows quite delirious,” I said, smoothing Victor’s curls away from his forehead and placing a damp cloth there. A matronly nurse hovered nearby, waiting for me to get out of her way. “He may say things that make no sense or sound horrible, but when he wakes he will have no memory of them because they are nothing more than fever dreams.”
The doctor nodded impatiently. “Yes, I am quite familiar with fevers. There is no need to expose yourself to further strain, Fräulein Lavenza. He will be well taken care of. You may visit him in the mornings, but we reserve the rest of the day for quiet repose. It is good you found him when you did. Another day or two and he might have perished from burning away all his body’s fluid.”
“Yes,” I murmured, kissing Victor’s cheek and then moving away from his bed. “That is a bad thing to burn.”
Some things, however, still needed burning.
In the sitting room, Mary and Justine waited. Justine was fidgeting nervously, looking at the ever-decreasing light out the window. She shot up like a spark from a flame when she saw me. “Elizabeth! How is Victor?”
“They have settled him in. I am certain he will be well. Thank you, Mary, for securing such a capable doctor so quickly. We were lucky to find you, for a number of reasons.”
Mary nodded, pulling on her gloves and adjusting her hat. “I am glad I came with you. My uncle would be happy I helped Victor. I wonder now if he was the last person to see Victor well. Though, obviously, Victor must have been in good health at that point. Otherwise, my uncle would never have left him there.”
“Unlike Henry,” I said, my thoughts dark and already clogged with ash and char.
Justine edged closer to the door. “Henry left so many months ago, though. He would have stayed, as well. Do we have anything else to do here? It will be nightfall soon, and we will be locked out!”
Mary looked quizzical.
“Our landlady leaves much to be desired,” I explained. “She locks the door at sunset and has informed us that if we are not inside by that time, we will not get inside at all.” I realized then that I had a problem. I could not be locked in all night, but I needed some reason to impose more on Mary’s hospitality.
“Actually…” I paused thoughtfully, as though it were only just occurring to me. “I would hate for some crisis in Victor’s health to happen in the night and be unable to receive word of it or rush to his side. Mary, you have already done so much for us, but could I beg one further favor?”
“Of course. You need not even ask. You are welcome in my home this night and any others you might need. Though I have only one spare bed.”
“I can sleep on the floor,” Justine offered.
“Nonsense. We have a perfectly good room we have already paid for.” I paused again, exaggerating my thought process for their benefit. “I need to pick up some new clothes for Victor so he has clean items for the morning. I will buy them—I have no desire to go back to his residence! Mary, could you see Justine back to the boardinghouse and safely stowed inside? And then I will meet you back at your house to be available should Victor need me. It should only be for this one night, after all. Tomorrow we will have a much better sense of how quickly he will recover.”
Both women accepted my perfectly sensible plan, though Mary seemed alert to how often I had sent her and Justine away together. But it worked. And it was a plan that situated me closer to the river, in an unlocked room, with no dear friend highly attuned to me to startle awake upon my leaving.
I left Mary’s address with the doctor and waved Mary and Justine away in the carriage, then turned resolutely to face my unwelcome tasks.
* * *
—
There was a graveyard connected to the city cathedral, but that was too public and did not match the name of the one on Victor’s list. I once again slipped outside the walls protecting the good people of Ingolstadt—this time avoiding the gatehouse that had troubled me so the first time.
It was nearing sundown when I reached my destination. The trees were hunched over, weeping with accumulated rain. A one-room house on the edge of the meandering green expanse had a light in the window, and I knocked determinedly. At the last moment I drew my cloak closed to cover my dirty, bloodstained dress.
A man as hunched as the trees opened the door. “Can I help you?”
“I am here on behalf of my father, who is the caretaker of the cemeteries in Geneva. He has had a recent string of grave robberies and is at pains to gather information. As I am here to visit my sister and her family, he has asked me to inquire whether you have experienced anything similar.”
The man frowned, looking out past me. “You alone?”
“Yes
.” I lifted my chin and smiled as though the fact were neither unusual nor troublesome. “My sister has recently given birth and cannot leave the house. I only just remembered my promise to my father and slipped out to fulfill it before she needs me again.”
He sighed, rubbing at the white stubble on his jaw. “They been taking jewelry?”
“Yes.”
“Well, nothing like my troubles, then.”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
He raised a bushy eyebrow at me. “I live next to a university. When people steal from my cemetery, they do not take jewelry off the bodies. They take the bodies themselves.” He shook his head. “Dirty, damnable business it is, too. I have been offered money for the bodies, but I have never taken a bribe. Not a single one. I patrol most nights, but I am an old man. I have to sleep sometimes.”
I nodded, my sympathetic horror unfeigned.
“Tell your father to consider himself lucky it is just the jewelry that goes missing. Much easier to hide than a gaping hole where someone’s brother was laid to rest.”
“I—I will. Thank you, sir.”
He waved sadly and closed the door. I turned toward the cemetery. As evening quietly claimed the day, everything turned from green to gray to black, soft and silent. I imagined creeping in with a shovel, looking for the most freshly turned soil. Digging until my hands blistered. Then pulling a body free, tugging its limp weight, tripping over roots and low headstones, the body falling to the ground that was supposed to have claimed it, kept it safe…
It was all so much work. I could imagine Victor doing it once, twice even. But surely he had found a better way.
The other address listed was a charnel house, a sort of repository for bodies of the poor. Deceased who had no relatives or benefactors with money to pay for proper preparations ended up there to be buried in paupers’ graves.
Where the cemetery had been damp and serene, the charnel house was dank and repulsive. I knocked on the door and was greeted by a person with more of weasel about him than man. His tiny eyes were narrowed in suspicion, his few remaining teeth blackened and sharp.
“What do you want?” he growled.
I raised an eyebrow imperiously. “I am here on behalf of an interested buyer.”
The man coughed so long and hard that I feared he would lose a lung. Finally, he spat a blob of mucus onto the floor at his feet, some of it landing on one of his boots. I suspected that was the only polish they ever got. “Let me guess: Henry Clerval?”
I gasped in shock. Henry had bought bodies for Victor? I could not imagine it. It made no sense.
And then I realized—Victor must have used Henry’s name so that his would not be known by so low a creature as this man. It was clever, really. And it made my job easier: I would not have to try to bribe this man into silence about Victor’s activities.
“Yes,” I said. “Henry sent me.”
“So mister high-and-mighty needs more supplies, does he? Why would he send you?”
“He has been ill. But he is finally able to resume his…studies.”
The man sneered, his mouth puckering with greed as he tried to sound casual. “Lots of other buyers these days. Buyers who pay in advance. Always a demand with the university. He thinks he can just come back and claim the best goods again?”
“What do you mean?”
“The tallest! The strongest! The strangest! Has a taste for the unusual, your Henry. Treats me like a market where he can haggle over the price of apples! I have not missed him, no, not one bit. But I have missed the payments he owes me.”
His eyes kept darting to my purse, and I resisted the urge to clamp my hand over it. I was holding my cloak to hide my dress, and any movement might reveal my true state.
“I see,” I said coldly. “I will have to consult with him as to whether he wishes to continue to give you his patronage.”
The man’s face twitched as he attempted to smile. “I can give you a deal. I just received two bodies—foreigners, no family to claim them. No one to complain if the bodies never find the cemetery grounds. But you pay now and pay what he owes me.”
I stepped back, failing to hide the revulsion on my face. How could Victor have stooped so low? How could he have associated with such a repulsive man and such soul-curdling activities?
“Where are you going?” He lunged forward and grabbed my wrist, his hand cold. I shuddered at his grasp, imagining what else those hands had touched that day.
“I am leaving, sir. Let me go.”
He yanked me closer. My cloak flapped open, and he noted my appearance, growing rougher. “Not until I get what Henry owes me! You think I am dirty because of what I do? That he can stay away and be clean and fancy?” He turned toward the open door, pulling me along with him. “I will show you what filth your Henry trades in. I will show you what he thinks he can forget debts on.”
I should have screamed. I knew that I should be screaming. But I could not manage it. I had been too well trained in silence. But I could not go into that building. I had seen horrors this trip; I did not wish to see any more. And I did not want to know what he would do with me behind closed doors.
My heart racing, my tongue frozen, I reached up to my hat with my free hand and pulled one of the long, sharp pins used to keep it in place. And then I stabbed that pin down into the man’s wrist as hard as I could, taking care to aim for the space between the two bones of the forearm so it would go all the way through.
He screamed in surprise and pain, releasing me. I turned and ran.
His angry shouts followed me, but thankfully, footsteps did not. When I was safely back within the city walls, I leaned against a brick building and struggled to catch my breath. My heart continued pounding as though I were still being pursued.
I wished I could not imagine Victor doing business with him, but I could. Victor had left, possessed by the need to defeat death, and without me here to temper his obsessions, he had descended to hellish depths.
I had driven Victor to this madness. I would repair it in any way necessary.
* * *
—
Secluded as we were across the river, our only regular company Henry and occasionally his parents, we managed to avoid most illnesses that took toxic root and spread like mold in Geneva during the long winter months.
When I was nearly fifteen, however, illness found me and staked its claim with ferocity to make up for lost time. I fell into darkness and pain. Doctors must have been called, but I was sensible of none of it, lost to the violence of a body destroying itself. My world burned. It ached.
And then it felt like nothing at all.
The border between life and death had fascinated Victor for so long. I had crossed that border coming into this world—changing places with my mother, who died as I was born. I felt certain that once again I was on the edge of it. On one side: Victor. Justine. Henry. The life I had built with such vicious determination. On the other: the unknown. But the unknown beckoned, promising rest from pain. Rest from sickness. Rest from the endless striving and manipulating and working, working, working just to keep my place in the world.
But a cool hand on my brow broke through. Whispered pleadings, an endless stream of them, led me from those dark, unknown lands like a trail of crumbs glowing white in the moonlight to lead me home. After a time, days or weeks, I finally opened my eyes to find my determined savior.
Madame Frankenstein.
I had expected Victor or Justine, the two in the house who loved me. But I had underestimated how much Madame Frankenstein depended on me. How terrified she was of what would happen if I were to leave them.
Her eyes shone with mania, and she pressed my hand to her hot, dry lips. “There you are, Elizabeth. You can never leave. I told you that. You have to stay here, with Victor.”
I had not the strength to nod. My th
roat, parched and cracked, could not force out the words. But I held her gaze with my own, and we were in agreement.
Then Madame Frankenstein crawled onto the bed next to me and fell asleep.
Within a day I had regained enough strength to sit up and take some nourishment. But my gain was Madame Frankenstein’s loss. She had disobeyed the doctor’s orders, exposing herself to my illness in order to nurse me. The fever had abandoned me and claimed another prize.
When the doctor came to move her to her own room—which, it was clear, she would never leave again in this life—her fingers curled around my wrist like a manacle. “This is your family,” she said, her voice rasping as though she had swallowed a live coal. The same coal burned with imagined red light in the intensity of her gaze. I realized she was not, finally, declaring me a true part of the family. She was assigning them to me as a burden lifted from her shoulders and deposited onto my own. “Victor…is…your…responsibility.”
The doctor and Judge Frankenstein carried her from my bed. Her head lolled to the side so her eyes could watch me the entire time as they bore her away. I pushed out of the bed and away from the ghost of Madame Frankenstein already taking residence there, though she yet lived.
Sliding against the hallway walls for support, I stumbled to Victor’s room. I found him, there, barricaded in amidst a fortress of books. His candle was burned low; his clothes, usually so meticulous, were dirty and in a state of disarray. His bed, unslept in, now functioned as a desk and bookshelf in one.
“Victor,” I whispered, my voice not yet healed from long disuse.
He looked up, eyes unnaturally bright in contrast to the dark and hollow space around them. “I had to save you,” he said, blinking as though seeing me and not seeing me at once.
“I am better.”
“But you will not always be. Someday death will claim you. And I will not allow it.” His eyes narrowed, and his voice trembled with fury and determination. “You are mine, Elizabeth Lavenza, and nothing will take you from me. Not even death.”