Frankenstein, Part 5: The Ice

My dear Margaret, I write to you from a ship that has not moved in many days, held fast in a field of ice that stretches in every direction further than the eye can see. When I set out to find a passage through the northern seas, I imagined a hundred dangers, but never this slow white silence, in which my men watch the horizon and scarcely speak. Something has happened on board that I can hardly bring myself to describe, and yet I must, if only so that someone besides myself will know the truth.

Shortly after we became trapped, my crew and I saw, half a mile away across the ice, a sledge pulled by dogs and driven by a figure of enormous size, human in shape, which sped northwards and vanished among the frozen ridges. During the night the ice around us began to break apart. In the morning we found a second sledge drifting towards the ship on a great slab of ice. On it lay a single living dog and a man so close to death that, before agreeing to come aboard, he asked us, of all things, in which direction we were sailing. Only when I told him that we were bound for the north did he allow us to carry him below.

He was, he told me, a scientist from Geneva named Frankenstein. Over the days that followed, as his strength rose and fell, he told me a story that I would have dismissed as the ravings of fever, had I not seen with my own eyes the giant on the sledge. He had given life to a being assembled from the dead. That being had murdered his young brother, his dearest friend and finally his bride, and for months he had pursued it across Europe and into the Arctic with a single purpose: to destroy what he had made. Before long he made me promise that, should he die before his task was finished, I would complete it in his place.

Meanwhile, my men grew desperate. If the ice released us, they demanded, I was to turn the ship south at once rather than lead them any further into danger. I had no right to refuse them, and when, a few days later, the ice split open with a noise like thunder and a channel appeared to the south, I gave the order to sail for home. Frankenstein heard it from his bed. He tried to rise, could not, and died that same evening, his last words a warning to me against the ambition that had ruined him.

It was past midnight when I heard, from the cabin where his body lay, a voice so harsh and unearthly that I can hear it still. I went in. Over the coffin leaned a figure of such stature that it seemed to fill the cabin, its features lost behind matted hair, one enormous hand held out above my friend's face. Hearing me, it cut short its lament and made for the window, but I begged it to stay, and to my astonishment it did. Although I could not bring myself to look at its face, I listened, and its words were not those of the monster I had been told about. It grieved for the man who had created and then abandoned it, it raged at itself for the lives it had taken, and it told me, with a calm more chilling than any threat, that its own end was near.

"Nobody else will suffer at my hands," it said. "What I came to do is done. I shall travel north, to the farthest point of this world, and there I shall build a fire and burn this body to ashes, so that nothing of it remains to teach anyone how to make another like me." With that, it leapt from the cabin window onto a raft of ice that had drifted against the hull. I watched as the current carried it away, until it was lost in darkness and distance.