available.”
I nodded my gratitude to him. Each night, though, the pull on me to leave the monastery grew stronger. It didn’t matter whether I slept or lay awake on my bedding, during those dark bewitching hours the urge pulling me away would become something both terrible and irresistible. This growing compulsion was as if something were pounding in my head, like the beating of savage drums. I could barely stand it, and by the first rays of the morning light I would be drenched in sweat as every muscle in my body strained to keep me from fleeing my cell. After four months I found that this urge continued long into the day, with not even my hard labors sufficient to beat it down. After the completion of another week’s stay within the monastery, I told Brother Theodore that I had to leave.
“Brother Friedrich, we are in the dead of winter. Would not it be better to wait until spring? I fear you entering into the wilderness in this harsh weather.”
“No. I cannot wait.”
He nodded as he accepted what I said. “You will be sorely missed, Brother Friedrich,” he said, his eyes brimming with a genuine sadness. “And not because of your great labors, but because of the warmth and compassion that you have bestowed upon us. I do fear that you will find the world that you will be entering every bit as harsh as these winter winds, as they rarely look beyond a man’s physical appearance to what resides in his heart. I worry about how you will be treated, but I know I cannot persuade you to stay against your wishes. Could you tell me what it is that has been troubling you so greatly, for I know it is far more than the accident that disfigured you. Perhaps by unburdening yourself your desire to leave us will lessen?”
I relented then and told Brother Theodore what had happened to my dearest Johanna. Up until that moment I had blocked out from my consciousness the terrible things that were said during my trial about the despicable acts that were committed against Johanna, but as I told Brother Theodore how her body had been so horribly violated before her murder a great anguish filled me and I became afraid that I would start tearing down walls with my very hands if I didn’t leave.
Brother Theodore’s face reflected his alarm. “My son, the tale you have told me is indeed awful, and one can only imagine your thirst for vengeance. But this will only lead you to ruin. Salvation will come from forgiveness. I implore you, do not let this wicked villain darken your soul any further. Even if you must leave here, find a way to banish this thirst for vengeance that is so consuming you.”
I shook my head, my body trembling with violence. Without another word I raced from the dining room where we were speaking and out of the monastery doors and to the woods beyond its walls, afraid of the terrible crimes I would wreak on these innocent monks if I stayed another minute.
CHAPTER
11
My obsession to seek out Victor Frankenstein only intensified after I left my brother monks, and at times I thought I would go mad hearing Frankenstein’s voice whispering to me as if his lips were only inches from my ear, both daring me and commanding me to find him. Over the next several months an insanity took me over. At nighttime I would steal into whatever nearby city or village I had arrived at the outskirts of during the day, and I would search for my enemy, often spying into windows and skulking through darkened homes. Some nights I would be discovered, and the innocent man or woman doing so would scream out in fear or swoon straightaway at the sight of me, but that didn’t deter me, and neither did the loathing that consumed me. As much as I despised myself for these noxious activities I was engaged in, I felt as if I had little control over my actions; as if I were little more than a puppet and invisible strings were controlling my movements.
The cold chill of the winter air had little effect on me; neither did the snow or freezing rain. I would spend my days either hiding in nearby woods or traveling to the next city or village. Sometimes I would spot men armed with muskets and swords searching the woods for me, but they were easy to elude, and the hounds that they would send after me had no better luck picking up my trail. In my growing madness, I would sometimes amuse myself by climbing the tallest oaks to watch them searching fruitlessly for me. Once darkness arrived, I would sneak among these people like a fiend to perform my own search, for Victor Frankenstein.
It was sometime during the last vestiges of winter, when the days were growing longer and the weather more pleasant, and the dirt roads had been transformed into little more than rutted mud, when I found myself back in my native Bavaria. That day I had traveled to the outskirts of a small village that was not more than a half day’s journey from Ingolstadt, and I hid in the woods close enough to where I could see several cottages. When night arrived, I once again engaged in seeking out my enemy, sneaking through one home after another. As I was searching though a stone cottage on the other side of the village, a young girl surprised me. She could have been no older than twelve, and was the picture of innocence as she stood in front of me in her long nightgown, her face freckled, her long yellow hair falling like fine spun silk past her frail shoulders. I could see so much of my dear Johanna in her innocence and her budding beauty, and when she asked me if I was there to murder her and her family and eat their bodies, it was as if a fever broke and the dreadful fog that had been enveloping my mind lifted.
“I am not here to do you or your family harm,” I said.
“Then why are you here?” she asked.
I did not know how to answer her. How could I explain the madness that drove me to such a fruitless activity? How could I possibly have expected to find Frankenstein with this haphazard searching of dwellings that I had been engaged in? Even if I had searched every home in Bavaria, what could I have hoped to accomplish? As I looked into the fear that shone in her eyes and accepted my culpability in its creation, and worse, saw how I was becoming the same abomination on the inside that I was outwardly, I fell to my knees and began to weep. My weeping continued until this same child later touched me lightly on the shoulder. When I looked up she offered me a piece of chocolate.
“You must have come into our home because you are hungry and needed food,” she said. “Here, please take this chocolate. I would give you more but this is all that I have saved from my birthday from last week.”
I took the chocolate from her. What else could I have done while she looked at me with such earnest charity? With the chocolate crumbling in my hand, I left the cottage and soon quit the village as I continued on into the woods.
I walked for many miles until taking a seat on a fallen tree that must have succumbed to the forces of nature many years earlier, and leaned forward so that my elbows rested on my knees, and dropped my head so that it lay heavy in my hands. I longed to be back within the gentle confines of the monastery, but even if I could find my way back to that hidden sanctuary, how could I face Brother Theodore after what I had done since leaving? And what would he now see in my heart?
When I had first woken up within Frankenstein’s lair, I had felt as if I were still Friedrich Hoffmann. Later, when I was employed and living freely among my fellow brothers at the monastery, I would also frequently envision myself as how I used to be and not as the abomination that I had become. My thirst for vengeance had brought about a madness that left me terrorizing the countryside for months, and now I could only think of myself as something ugly and twisted. My chest ached every time I imagined that young girl’s face and the sheer terror that had filled her eyes.
Even if I could retrace my steps, I could not go back to that monastery. Not with the way Brother Theodore and the other monks would look at me, and not with that urge that was still pulling me southwards. Although I now seemed free from that the invisible force that had made me perform my sinister nighttime excursions as surely as if I had been possessed by spirits and then exorcised, that same urge from before was still present within me. And the truth was that even if that madness had left me, I still thirsted for vengeance.
I sat for hours as I tried to make sense of everything that had happened since I had first woken up within Frankenstein’s laboratory. If that young girl had reported my unwelcome intrusion into her home, I didn’t see any evidence of it since no armed mobs had come searching for me. Given the muddy conditions, if a mob was looking for me they would have had no trouble following my footprints since I made no effort to hide them. But if a mob had come I would have offered no resistance. Death would have been a welcome release from the self-loathing and confusion that consumed me.
When dawn arrived, I left the fallen tree that I had been seated on so despondently and continued my
