thing to witness.
“I would rather die,” she said. “My younger sister was stolen also. If they are going to murder her then I wish to be murdered also so that we may join our ancestors together. I do not wish this thing that will be done to me. It was evil of you to choose me.”
She started weeping then. The sound that she made was that of a wounded animal that needed to be taken out of its misery. I sat, helpless, and listened.
“I am sorry,” I said. “I wish there was something I could do to help you.”
“Unlock my chains!” she pleaded as she wept. “The keys are right there on the table! Or will you have me turned into a monster for your own selfish needs?”
“That is not my reason,” I implored. “Frankenstein holds a power over me that keeps me a slave to him. But I wish I could help you.”
When my words made sense to her, she started wailing and beating on her head with her fists. I got off the cot so that I could keep her from hurting herself. When I came within a few feet of her, she lurched forward and grabbed me by my cape and pleaded with me to kill her. “If you cannot help me, then end my life, I beg of you!”
Once more I was being asked to kill an innocent to save them. I could not bear to turn her down. I tried to lift my hands to her throat, but Frankenstein’s spell prevented me. She saw in my eyes that I was powerless to do as she begged, and she fell on the cot weeping violently.
I stepped away from her. When she had grabbed my cape I heard a crinkling noise, the type paper might make. I remembered then the odd little man I had met outside of Leipzig and the envelope he handed me. I searched the inside pocket of my cape and pulled out this envelope. It had yellowed and aged with time, and when I looked inside of it I saw dried plant leaves, and remembered this odd little man telling me that they were leaves from a jimson weed plant. I remembered what he told me about how I could use these leaves to cure myself. I looked around the room and saw that everything I needed in order to follow the instructions I was given was present. I felt an excitement as I acted once more as a chemist and generated a tincture from the leaves, and then diluted this in the method that was explained to me.
The girl had stopped her weeping to ask me what I was doing. I told her I wasn’t sure. Once I had the solution prepared, I placed several drops of it under my tongue. Nothing happened, at least at first. But as hours passed and night approached I felt a sense of peace that I could not remember since long before waking up within Frankenstein’s laboratory. I also realized that a noise that had been buzzing incessantly within my skull was gone. I hadn’t even been aware of this noise, but the new quiet that I sensed was something welcome and unfamiliar to me.
As I sat in the dark marveling over these changes that had occurred, I remembered where I had seen Henry Clervil before.
CHAPTER
27
Early the next morning Frankenstein’s servants departed the island by rowboat. I heard them as they left, and assumed that Frankenstein sent them away so that they would not be witness to what was going to be happening. It was a short time later that Frankenstein and Clervil entered the cottage. Frankenstein nodded brusquely at me and commented that he hoped I had had a good night’s sleep. He was too absorbed in his planned operation to have paid any attention to what I might have said. His friend, Clervil, was the same way: both of their faces hardened with eagerness and anticipation. Neither of them paid attention to their surroundings within the cottage as they headed straight to the wooden crate where they had stored Johanna’s brain the evening before. I had learned during the night that the girl’s name was Mariel. If they had been paying attention, they would have noticed that Mariel’s manacle had been removed, even though she remained sitting on her cot.
“I remember where I saw you before,” I said, but both Frankenstein and Clervil were too caught up in their plans to bother listening to me. “Clervil,” I shouted this time, “I am speaking to you!”
Clervil turned to give me a forced look of patience that bordered on exasperation, but did not say anything to me.
“I saw you in Ingolstadt,” I said. “This was when I was still Friedrich Hoffmann.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes, it is. In fact, it was my last night as Friedrich Hoffmann. I remember your face from the beer hall. At some point you must have stood next to me. Is that when you slipped your poison into my ale?”
He blinked but otherwise showed no reaction to my accusation. “I don’t know what you are talking about,” he said. He then turned away from me to help Frankenstein lift the wooden crate onto a table.
I roared then, and it was something fierce and horrible. Both of them turned around, a mix of surprise and amusement befuddling their faces. In a dizzying rush I was off the cot and moving toward them, and then I had Clervil by his jacket, lifting him so that his face was inches from mine. And now nothing but stark terror reflected in his expression. I roared again, and my face wrinkled into a horrible grin. I threw him against the wall with enough force that he went through the wooden structure and tumbled onto the ground outside. Frankenstein tried shouting something at me, but I ignored him. He would be for later. I followed Clervil through the hole in the wall that his body made, and I picked him up again. His eyes fluttered open and he opened his mouth as if he were trying to scream, but no noise came out.
“Why did you poison my ale?” I demanded.
“I-I did not! I swear—”
I slapped him across the mouth. Not hard enough to kill, or even injure him severely, but hard enough to break several teeth loose from his mouth. I knew the answer to what I was asking him, but I wanted still to hear the words from him.
“Do not lie to me or I will crush your head like a grape!”
I grabbed his skull and applied enough pressure to make his eyes bulge.
“I only did as Victor asked,” he cried.
“Frankenstein sent you to poison me?”
“Yes! Yes!”
“And he sent others to defile and murder Johanna Klemmen? Or did you do this? Or did he?”
Clervil was sobbing now, and in his tears he stammered out that Frankenstein had hired others to murder Johanna.
“Stop your crying now or I will slap you again, but this time with enough force so that you will lose all your teeth!”
He stopped his crying and pathetically begged me for mercy. “Please, I beg of you, I myself have a betrothed—”
“Shut up! Why did Frankenstein want to murder Johanna Klemmen, and arrange for me to be punished for this crime? Answer me!”
Clervil squeezed his eyes shut before answering me. “He needed an educated brain for constructing you,” he whimpered weakly. “When he learned of your betrothal to Johanna Klemmen, he wished also to perform this experiment to test the nature of attachment. He needed brain material from two young lovers.”
He told me only what I had long suspected, but there was no longer any doubt of Frankenstein’s culpability in the murders of Johanna and Friedrich Hoffmann. I threw Clervil then, sending him traveling twenty feet through the air. When he landed, he lay quietly for a moment. Then surprised that I had let go of him, he staggered to his feet, and in his panic to escape me he tripped and fell after only a few steps. His head struck sharply against a rock, and from the way his skull cracked open I knew he was dead. I left him to return back to the cottage.
The scene within the cottage showed Frankenstein cowering on the floor with his hands and arms covering his face to protect himself as Mariel struck blows at him, all the while screaming her hatred at him. I pulled her off of him.
“He deserves to die for what he has done,” she forced out, her eyes simmering with her rage, her small white face shining in its violence.
