Frankenstein, Part 3: The Creature's Request

I had not seen the creature for nearly two years when the news reached me that my little brother William had been found strangled near Geneva. An innocent girl, Justine, was hanged for the crime, and I alone knew the truth: that the murderer was the being I had made with my own hands. Unable to bear the company of my family, whose grief I had caused and could not confess, I set out alone that summer for the valley of Chamonix, hoping that the mountains might do for me what no human being could.

One morning I climbed to the summit of Montanvert, where the great glacier lies like a frozen sea between the peaks. I had been sitting there for perhaps an hour, my spirits lifted for the first time in months, when I saw a figure in the distance. It was coming towards me at a superhuman speed, bounding over crevices that had cost me many anxious minutes to get around. As it drew nearer, I recognised it. Shaking with fury and disgust, I decided to stand my ground and fight it to the death.

It did not attack me. It stood a little way off, its face twisted with a bitterness that was terrible to see, and it spoke calmly. It had expected such a welcome, it said; all men hated the wretched, and how much more must its own maker hate it. Then it asked me to listen before I judged. "I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend." Were I to hear its story and still wish it dead, it promised, it would accept my verdict. I agreed, though less from pity than from a curiosity I could not suppress, and we went together to a hut on the mountainside, where it lit a fire and talked until nightfall.

What it told me there I have already set down: the cottage in the woods, the family it had loved in secret, the stick that had driven it away. But it is what the creature demanded once its story was finished that I must now record. "You must create a female for me," it said, "with whom I can live, as hideous as myself. This is my right, and you shall not refuse it."

I refused. Not if it tortured me, I said, would I make a second creature and let the two of them spread their evil across the world. It reasoned with me patiently. If I gave it a companion, they would leave Europe for ever and live in the untouched wilderness of South America, eating acorns and berries, harming no one. If I refused, it would devote itself to my destruction.

For a long while I said nothing, and as the fire burned low, I felt my resolve weaken. There was justice, I thought, in some of what it said. At last, against every instinct I possessed, I gave my consent, on condition that it swear to leave Europe, and keep far from every place where people lived, the moment it had its companion. It swore by the sun and the sky above us, and then it was gone, racing down the ice far faster than any man could run. I walked down the mountain in the dark, knowing that I had promised to do again the one thing I had sworn never to repeat.