"Victor and Elizabeth"

Frankenstein, YA and reimagined (a short story)

Part I: Victor

The only evidence of passing time in the cellar was a steady drop of rainwater through the cracks in the ceiling. The natural sound was a more consistent measure of what a minute was worth than any manmade clock could be.

            The cellar sat six feet below the kitchen, with layers of rats and mud to cushion the space between. Alphonse wished he had a better place to do his work, but the thick stone walls meant the room was the only place in his home that promised complete silence in which to concentrate. He couldn’t afford for any sounds to escape.

            Alphonse sat at his workbench, his bones protesting the stiffness of a stool that had belonged to his father. His father, another person he couldn’t bring back. A faded portrait of the man who had raised him rested on a shelf above the bench, including the black and white remains of another sketch. This one was of his wife, Caroline. He had handled the square piece of paper so many times that his fingerprints were now clearer than her face. When his wife had found him working down in the cellar many years ago, she had insisted he needed more light. But he refused, saying how all children come into the world with their eyes closed anyway.

            So instead of something bright, mounds of wax sat around the cellar. Even though their heat couldn’t expel the second skin of moisture that covered Alphonse’s body, the candles gave an almost-human glow to the cadaver on his workbench.

            The body—the woman, Alphonse corrected himself, for he was sure her soul still existed, buried beneath her naked bosom someplace where her heart had been—took up the entire space of his workbench. He had bought the bench so he would have someplace to repair clocks. A simple hobby. A safe hobby. A hobby that lasted until he realized he could fix time in a more literal way. 

            With nimble fingers, Alphonse threaded twine through a needle and set to work on the final wound in the body, a crevice that split the woman’s skin from the space between her pale breasts to the hollow of her bellybutton. The needle was an antiquated method, but it was reliable, and he usually relished in the satisfaction he got from seeing the stiches. The stitches meant work, and the work promised success. But not this time. This time, he had not come close to any kind of success. Instead, the woman remained before him as dead as she had left him only twenty-four hours ago. Scarlet fever.

            People like him were supposed to be immune to death. He had been convinced for so long that power and money would make him immortal, but true immortality was not a reward. It was a process.

            Alphonse had been working at this process for a long time.

            The woman still held an impressive amount of pink in her cheeks and her lips, and even with the lines growing from the corners of her eyes, she was as radiant as the day he had met her. After she died, he had hoped he could make her even better. And she had been, for a brief moment. He had replaced the pieces in her that no longer worked, he had bought chemicals to replace the life she had lost, and now she lay before him as whole and perfect as he could have made her had he begun with a blank canvas and even blanker emotions. And when he began to bring her back, he had both prayed to and defied the God who was supposed to have saved her the first time.

            Now he was God. Or he could have been, had she woken up. She was a perfect human but an imperfect creation, because while she existed, she was not alive. To Alphonse, those who only existed were past the point of fixing. So in defeat, he had reopened her one last time to remove her heart. He still believed that organ was worth something, and if it wasn’t, it was at least worth keeping.

            An echo of a footstep dug him from his thoughts. “Come here, boy,” Alphonse called into the darkness. “No son of mine will hide from creation.”

            His boy—not a boy, but a young man with seventeen years hanging on his shoulders—stepped out from behind a curtain. His hair stuck up around his head, and he had thrown a pair of wrinkled trousers over his nightgown. In the dim light, he looked too young to be in the cellar. But instead of retreating upstairs, Alphonse’s son approached the workbench, his eyes wide with something more terrible than fear—curiosity.

            His son glanced down at the cadaver. “Papa,” he said, his breath a cloud hanging on the stagnant air. “Why is Mother split open?”

            Alphonse didn’t look at his oldest son, and continued to sew his wife’s smooth stomach. His son was too smart for anything but honesty. “Because I was trying to bring her back to us.”

            The young man moved around the workbench toward the stool that sat across from his father. He shook his head, disbelief filling his face. But he sat down anyway. “We’re supposed to bury her tomorrow.”

            “And now we will.”

            A long silence passed before the boy spoke again. “You are trying to achieve something impossible, Papa.”

            Finally looking up, Alphonse stared at his son across the pale valley of his wife’s torso. An accusation hung from his boy’s heavy brow. But Alphonse had heard the dangerous thing that was not fear in his son’s voice.

            “Unlikely, yes. A risk, yes,” Alphonse replied. “But impossible?” He returned to his stitching. 

             “This is unnatural,” his son whispered, but he leaned over his mother, his eyes counting the stiches as his father made them.

            “Unnatural?” Alphonse repeated. “We have never been a natural family, my boy.”

            The fire in his son’s voice returned. “Do you expect me to go to school after what I’ve seen here? I cannot just leave—”

            “You will leave, and you will learn,” Alphonse said. “That is your responsibility now. Not this.” He gestured with his free hand to his wife’s body. “Not yet.”

            “Don’t speak to me like you would a child, Papa,” the boy said.

            “Not a child?” Alphonse repeated. He swore it was the children who were supposed to echo their parents, not the other way around. With a twist of his wrist, he held out the needle so the loose thread dangled in front of his son’s face. “Then you can sew her.”

            The boy pursed his lips and accepted the needle, his fingers eager. But with a glance down at his mother, his frown deepened and he held the needle out again. “I can’t.”

            Alphonse took the needle and resumed his work. “No, you can’t. Therefore you will do what you can, and that is learn. You are a boy, a student. Appreciate being a child.”

             The boy’s voice was weak when he spoke next. “I don’t want to be that. I want to be this. I want to be where you are. Creating.” As an afterthought, he added, “Aren’t you afraid of the consequences?”

            “Creation always has consequences,” Alphonse replied. Yes, his son was smart. He let himself grin as he said, “You were my best consequence, Victor.”

            The compliment hung limp over his wife’s body as fear flooded his son’s eyes. But it was not fear of bodies or blood or blasphemy. Alphonse recognized this kind of panic, had felt it himself. It was the kind of fear that belonged to children who realized they might not have the chance to be greater than their ancestors.

            Victor ignored the joke and pressed, “Aren’t you worried what this will do to our family? You will ruin our name.”

            Alphonse stuck the needle through his wife’s skin one last time, and then tied a knot in the twine. With a deep sigh, he leaned back, listening to the trickle of water. The rhythm matched his son’s sharp breathing. “I’m not desecrating our name,” he said, finally meeting his son’s stare. “I’m building it. The Frankenstein name will be one even God knows.”

Part II: Elizabeth

Three Years Later

Elizabeth dabbed an oily streak of purple onto her canvas and completed the sunrise.

            Dropping her brush onto the ledge of the easel she had dragged outside, she stepped back. She narrowed her eyes, more because the cold wind bit at her face than because she was seriously considering her work. She didn’t need clearer vision or any amount of education to see that the sunrise on the canvas before her was nothing compared to the natural painting rising in the distance over the Genevan Alps.

            Her painting was horrific.

            Elizabeth yanked her shawl further around her frame and resisted the urge to scream and count how many sunrises she had ruined. But those didn’t matter, because this one was supposed to be special. This one was supposed be different. This one was supposed to carry every sob the last week had given her.

            Her fingers as blue as the early morning snow at her feet, Elizabeth picked up her brush to start again. She bit her lip, glanced between her canvas and the world beyond, and chose another color. But when she jammed her brush into the small cup of water leaning on the canvas’ edge, her brush met ice. The water had frozen, and not for the first time that morning. She almost gave up, but the crunch of snow in her ears told her to stay a little longer.

            “How long have you been watching me?” she asked, skipping the water to paint dry. The bristles scraped across the canvas and the existing, still-drying paint.

            “Not long,” came the response.

            Victor appeared next to her, his figure a black silhouette against the harsh white of the snowy front lawn.

            “Liar,” she whispered just loud enough so he would know she was happy to see him. “I’m afraid there’s nothing to see this morning,” she added.

            “Nonsense,” he said, squinting at the canvas. “It’s exquisite. But not worth sacrificing your extremities. Why are you even painting outside on a morning like this? Your nose is blue.”

            “Because,” she said, nudging him back a step with her shoulder. Victor always watched her paint, but she could never tell if it was because he enjoyed seeing her create or enjoyed seeing her fail. “Because I’m trying to make the perfect sunrise.”

            Again, he studied the painting, except this time his dark brow rose to his hairline as his face softened. “Add red,” he said. In half a second, he swiped of glob of oil paint onto his pinking and drew a red scar across the middle of the painting. “There.”

            Elizabeth frowned, annoyed he had changed her painting; but her frown pulled deeper when she realized he had changed her painting for the better. “You’ll never get that paint off your hand,” she said, refusing to look him in the eye.

            “I’ve been messier,” he said, shrugging. “And there. It’s finished. You should come inside.” He stepped closer so that his chest pressed against her back. “To get warm.” When his next words came, they touched the exposed skin of her neck. “With me.”

            Elizabeth ignored him, but didn’t push him away. His body behind hers created a shield against the morning wind. “Careful, Victor,” she said. “Someone might think you’re in too good of a mood for someone who’s just lost his father.”

            “It’s a bright morning,” was his only answer.

            “I suppose it is. Happy birthday.”

            “Today?”

            Elizabeth rolled her eyes. “You didn’t forget. You’re too arrogant to forget.”

            “Arrogant?” he asked, putting a gloved hand to his chest in mock hurt. “I’d only be arrogant if I weren’t successful. And I am, as of this morning. I’ve been creating, like you.”

            “Your creation is different than mine,” she replied, still studying her painting. Not hers. Not anymore. Theirs. “Yours is a hobby. A disgusting one.”

            “It’s not a hobby, Elizabeth. That’s what I came out here to tell you—”

            “They say,” she said, cutting him off, “any act of creation is an act of sin because art of any kind is simply an extension of the original act of creation between Adam and Eve.”

            Before she realized, Victor’s lips were on the soft skin of her ear. “And what is the original act of creation?” he whispered.

            “Use your imagination.”

            “I am.”

            With a jerk of her wrist, Elizabeth loaded her paintbrush with a dollop of red and pressed the hunk of bristles and paint right into the hollow of Victor’s cheek, pushing him away. He leaned back to escape the paint, and with his face contorted into a hurt frown and the fresh snowfall streaking his dark hair with white, he looked double his twenty years. 

            “We should stop,” Elizabeth said, her voice small. She added another stroke of red to the painting, but now the sunrise was too red.

            “Stop what?” Victor asked, ignoring the paint crusting on his skin.

            “Stop speaking to each other the way we do. Stop looking at each other the way we do.”

            “But I like looking at you.” When she glared at him, he added, “Why is it wrong?”

            “We’re family,” she mumbled, now coating the canvas with any color of paint she could find that hadn’t frozen solid. “It’s unnatural.”

            After a long pause where Victor watched her stain her canvas red, he said, “There are more unnatural things in this world. And that’s the perfect name.”

            “What?”

            “Adam.”

            “Name for whom—?”

            A scream tore through the air.

            In the next moment, Elizabeth was on her back in the snow, staring up at the tattered remains of a rotted face. The creature’s eyes pulsed with thin red veins, what was left of its hair hung damp with sweat over its hollow cheekbones, and stitches like train tracks to an unknown destination ran over its gray skin. The creature screamed again, his teeth bared, but Elizabeth was frozen with the snow and had only enough presence for one, odd thought: Victor did it. He finally brought one back.

            Elizabeth braced herself as the creature’s teeth came toward her, but in the space of half a breath, Victor hurtled into the creature. Man and beast rolled away from Elizabeth, tearing and biting. Soon drops of blood painted the snow around the pair, and it was only when Elizabeth saw the red of Victor’s—or the beast’s?—blood on the white earth did she come back to herself.

            Her breath stuck someplace between her stomach and her throat, and she reached for the nearest weapon she could find and threw it. “Victor!”

            Victor glanced up at her voice and scrambled for the paintbrush that had landed a few feet away. The creature crawled after him. Victor grabbed the brush just as the creature pounced on him and enveloped him completely.

            Elizabeth screamed as Victor disappeared beneath the body of the monster, but the scream turned into a cry of joy as she saw the sharp end of the brush break through the back of the creature’s skull. With a heavy, human grunt, Victor pushed the now-lifeless body off and fell back into the snow, his chest heaving. Elizabeth sunk down next to him. Red blotches covered his face, but she couldn’t tell how much was blood and how much was paint.

            “Are you all right?” she asked, checking over her shoulder to see if the creature’s chest rose and fell like Victor’s. It didn’t. “Victor. Victor. What were you thinking? You can’t bring someone…you can’t bring him…he was your father, Victor. How could do this to him?”

            Victor sat up, his eyes sharp and framed by red. “How could I kill him?”

            Elizabeth shook her head. “How could you bring him back to life?” When he didn’t answer, she reached out to brush his hair away. But his eyes had abandoned her. They hung on the lifeless body of his father—or what was left of his father—a few feet away in the snow next to the canvas and easel, both of which had collapsed into the snow during the fight.

            “At least he’s at peace now,” Elizabeth said.

            Victor shook his head. “The goal wasn’t to make him peaceful.” His words were stiff and thick with promise and made Elizabeth feel colder than she had all morning. “The goal was to make him a man.”