Frankenstein: The Cottage in the Woods (Adapted)

After I left your town, Frankenstein, I wandered through the forests for days, cold, hungry and bewildered by every sound. When I walked into a village, the people screamed, fled or threw stones until I ran back into the fields, and I understood that I must never be seen. At last, half-frozen, I came upon a small cottage, and against its back wall I found a low, windowless shed, a hovel, where I could hide. A narrow crack in the wall let me look into the main room. My only intention was to survive the winter.

The family consisted of an old man, who was blind, and his two grown children, a young man called Felix and his sister, Agatha. They were very poor. I soon noticed that the young people often went without food so that their father could eat, and I, who had been stealing part of their supplies at night, was so ashamed that I stopped at once. Instead, I began gathering firewood for them in the dark and leaving it by their door. I shall never forget their astonishment the first morning they found it.

Watching them, I discovered that these people communicated their thoughts and feelings to one another by sounds, and I became determined to learn them. Progress was painfully slow, until the spring brought a stranger to the cottage: Safie, a young Arabian woman whom Felix loved, and who spoke not a word of his language. As Felix taught her, I learned alongside her, repeating every word in the darkness of my hovel, and by the time she could speak, so could I.

But knowledge brought misery with it. One day, catching sight of my reflection in a pool, I started back, unable at first to believe that the monster staring up at me was myself. The more I learned about human beings, the more clearly I saw that there was no place for me among them. And yet I could not give up hoping that these gentle people, of all people, might accept me, if only they came to know my heart before they saw my face.

The old man was the key. Being blind, he could not be horrified by my appearance, and he would hear my words before anyone judged my face. So one autumn day, when the sun was shining on the red leaves and the three young people had set out on a long walk, I knocked at the cottage door. "Who is there? Come in," said the old man. I told him that I was a traveller on my way to some friends whom I loved but who had never seen me, and who, I feared, would reject me. He listened with great kindness. "I am blind and cannot judge your face," he said, "but there is something in your words which persuades me that you are sincere."

Overcome, I seized his hand. "Now is the moment!" I cried. "Save and protect me! You and your family are the friends I am seeking. Do not abandon me now!" At that very instant, the door opened, and Felix, Safie and Agatha walked in. Agatha fainted, and Safie, too frightened to help her, rushed out of the cottage. Felix darted forward, tore me away from his father, whose knees I was clutching, hurled me to the ground and struck me violently with a stick.

I could have torn him limb from limb, as easily as a lion tears apart an antelope. But my heart sank within me as though with some bitter sickness, and I did not raise my hand against him. When he lifted the stick once more, I fled from the cottage and, unnoticed in the confusion, crept back to my hovel, the marks of his stick still burning on my back.