Frankenstein: The Night It Woke (Adapted)

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For two years, I had lived for that night, and I had paid for it with my health, my sleep, and every letter from my family that I had left unanswered. It was a November night, and the rain was beating on the windows. At one in the morning, the candle was nearly gone, the instruments were arranged on the table, and I was bending over the creature that I had built from pieces. I was as tense as a student facing an examination on which his whole life depends. Then I saw it: a dull yellow eye opening, a long breath, a tremor running through the limbs.

How can I describe what I felt? I had chosen his features to be beautiful. His hair was glossy and black, and his teeth were like pearls. But the beauty only made the rest more horrible. His yellow skin barely covered the muscles and arteries beneath it, his eyes were watery and almost the same color as the sockets, and his lips were thin and black. The work had been completed, and the dream that had sustained me for two years had turned into a nightmare, and I could not breathe.

I rushed out of the laboratory, unable to bear the sight of what I had made. All night, I walked up and down in my bedroom, too agitated to sleep. At last, exhaustion took over, and I dreamed. I dreamed that I was walking in the streets of Ingolstadt with Elizabeth, whom I loved, and that I kissed her. But as my lips touched hers, they turned pale and cold, and in my arms, she became my dead mother, wrapped in a shroud, with worms crawling in the folds of the cloth.

I woke up trembling, drenched in sweat, and my teeth were chattering. By the dim, yellow light of the moon, I saw the wretch at the side of my bed. He had drawn back the curtain, and his eyes, if they can be called eyes, were fixed on me. His jaws were opening, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. He may have spoken, but I did not hear. One hand was stretched out, as if to hold me back. I escaped, ran down the stairs, and spent the rest of the night in the courtyard, listening to every sound, afraid that the demon I had made was coming.

At dawn, I walked through the wet streets, unable to go home, and I kept looking over my shoulder. I had no idea where I was going. I was near the coach station when a carriage stopped, and out of it stepped Henry Clerval, my oldest friend, who had come to study. The sound of his friendly voice almost made me weep. I brought him up to my rooms, afraid of what we might find.

But the laboratory was empty, and the bedroom was empty. The creature was gone. I laughed out loud, wildly, like a man who has just been saved from drowning, and Clerval stared at me in alarm. Then a fever took hold of me, and for months I lay in bed, talking nonsense, while my friend nursed me back to health.

It did not occur to me, even in my delirium, that what I had brought to life could not simply vanish. It had not been destroyed. It had only gone out into the world, alone, with no name and no teacher, and it was learning everything from the beginning.