Frankenstein, Part 4: The Broken Promise

I had chosen the most remote of the Orkney islands for my work: a bare rock battered on every side by the sea, with thin grass, a handful of half-starved cows and three huts. In one of them, a single room lit by a window that faced the sea, I spent my mornings at the task I had promised to complete. My creature had demanded a companion, a female as hideous as himself, with whom he would vanish into the wilds of South America, and in return I would never see him again. For months the promise had driven me on. Now, with the work half finished, it was beginning to crush me.

One evening the light failed before my work was done, and as I sat idle in the gloom, watching the moon climb out of the sea, I let myself think clearly for the first time. Three years before, I had given life to one monster, and what his cruelty had already cost me I can scarcely bear to set down. Was I now to make another, whose nature I could no more predict than I could his? What if she proved even more vicious than the first, and took pleasure in cruelty for its own sake? Nor was there any reason she should respect a bargain struck before she existed; she might find him as repulsive as everyone else did, and leave him lonelier and angrier than ever. And if they did go off together, what then? In time there would be children, and after them a whole race of such beings, strong enough perhaps to sweep humanity from the earth. Was I to inflict that danger on every generation to come merely to buy a little peace for myself?

I raised my eyes, and my blood turned to ice. The creature's face was pressed to the glass, pale in the moonlight, and a ghastly grin spread across it as he watched me among the instruments of my promise. He had followed me, I realized, across every mile of my journey, lurking in woods and sleeping among rocks, and he had come now to see his bride finished.

Never had I seen such malice in a face. In that instant I knew what I must do. Shaking with rage, I seized the half-made body that had cost me months of labor and tore it apart before his eyes. From outside came a long cry of despair that I hear to this day, and then he was gone. I went out, turned the key behind me, and vowed that I would never take up that work again.

Hours later, as I sat alone by the window, a boat scraped against the stones below. My door was thrown open, and he stood before me. "So you have torn apart what you yourself began," he said, his voice unsteady. "You would go back on your word? I have endured more misery than you can imagine, and now you would take from me my only hope?" I told him that nothing would make me create another like him. His tone changed then. "You are my creator," he said, "but I am your master. Obey!" I would not, I answered, and no threat of his would move me.

He looked at me for a long moment, and in his face I could see that he understood I would not yield. "Every man may take a wife, and every beast may have its mate, and I alone must have no one?" he said. "Very well. I go. But remember: I shall be with you on your wedding-night." Before I could reach him, he was out of the door and in his boat, which sped away across the dark water and soon vanished among the waves. The room was silent again, but his words remained, and I believed, fool that I was, that it was only my own death they promised.