He thought on that before shaking his head. “I could not do that. I could not hurt Elizabeth in that way.”
He turned to glance at me, but I had already left his side so that I could spy on him from a distance. He stood startled with the same dazed expression upon his face that you would see on a deer that had been surprised by a hunter. He turned slowly around to search for me, and on realizing that I was gone, he continued with his walk, his gait now slower and more unnatural. As I watched him, I wondered why I had made those suggestions, for if he followed either of them they would rob me of my vengeance. I decided it was because I knew he would be incapable of showing the necessary courage to do either of what I had suggested, for he was not in any way the changed man that he proclaimed himself to be.
CHAPTER
30
From a distance I witnessed Frankenstein’s wedding ceremony, and later spied on their celebration. I watched as he armed himself with a pistol and a dagger, and later as he and his bride boarded a boat on Lake Geneva. Did he really believe he could escape me by water? Had he already forgotten how I had been constructed? While the boat moved faster than any man, I had little problem in racing along the shores of the lake so that I could follow it. I was there to watch them when they departed the boat to spend their wedding night in a home in the resort town of Evian. I spied on them as they walked hand in hand along the shore, and then as they sat together. When Frankenstein’s bride entered the house by herself, I stole along the outer walls so that I could go through her bedroom window and surprise her. I did this so quietly that at first she did not hear me. When she at last noticed me she opened her mouth to scream but was too frightened to do so.
“I am not here to harm you,” I said, “but to convince you to abandon the fiend whom you have married.”
She stared dumbly at me as if she could not understand what I was saying. I felt pity for her, but I needed her to leave Frankenstein on his wedding night. I knew it would strike a fatal blow that would send him reeling. Just as Henriette could have once been an anchor for me in keeping my thirst for vengeance in check, this woman seemed to be a similar anchor for Frankenstein; she was the only thing holding him to his false hope that he could live a normal life. If she was gone he would be set adrift. His last few months would be spent in utter turmoil.
“When Victor Frankenstein resided in Ingolstadt as a medical student, he had me and others murdered, and he later created me in this monstrous form.”
She shook her head, my words finally making sense to her. “No,” she insisted. “You are lying!”
“I am not lying. My name used to be Friedrich Hoffmann, my betrothed’s name was Johanna Klemmen. He had both of us murdered.”
I had saved several of Frankenstein’s illustrations for this purpose, and I handed them to her. Her mouth gaped open as she looked at them and understood what they portrayed.
“These are Frankenstein’s,” I said. “He arranged for almost two hundred young women and children to be kidnapped, and these are just a few of the acts that he was going to have performed on these innocents. I have since saved them, but it is what your new husband was going to do. This is the monster that you married, and you must leave him now. I will help you.”
I reached out to touch her arm, and she turned on me as a cornered animal might, throwing the papers in my face.
“You are the fiend!” she cried. “You are the monster! And you are not worthy of speaking my husband’s name!”
If she had said anything other than that, I would have carried her away if necessary so that I could show her more evidence of her husband’s crimes and convince her of his evil, but those words blinded me. I was lost within them and the rage that they stirred up within me. When reason came back to me she was dead by my hands. It had happened in the briefest of moments, but I had throttled her and left her sprawled dead on the canopy bed. I was still struggling to understand what I had done when Frankenstein swung the bedroom door open and raced into the room. He looked first at his bride and understood by the dark purple marks along her neck what had happened. Then he turned toward me, enraged.
“Now you know how it feels,” I said.
He began fumbling for his pistol, but before he could have it pointed at me I was already out of the window and racing away. It was too early still to take my final revenge on him, and I was reeling from what I had done to his bride. Even with what she had said to me, she was an innocent and did not deserve what I did, and there was nothing that I could think of that could justify my action. All I could feel was an empty hollowness in the pit of my stomach. But I tried not to think of it, and instead only imagined how I had injured my enemy, and what would be happening next.
I allowed Frankenstein to bury his bride before I acted on the rest of my plan. The spell that I had spent months rendering upon him would draw him to me when I desired, and my plan was to bring him to the most desolate spot on the planet so that he could die alone and so that his body would never be found by man. I had been planning this for many months. More than just planning. Ever since I learned of his release from that Irish prison, this was all I had been able to think of. Now that I was finally acting on my plans, all I felt was emptiness, and whenever I would try to imagine my Johanna to comfort me, I would instead be haunted by the image of Frankenstein’s bride dead by my own hands. But my following through with my plans was all I could think of, so I led Frankenstein back toward his castle. Many times I would stop and wait for him to catch up to within a mile of me before I would continue. When I reached the castle, I headed north, and used the spell to keep drawing Frankenstein after me.
This journey continued for many months as we passed through deserts and glaciers. I still had gold and jewels on my person, and at one of the remote villages I encountered, I traded some of these for fur clothing, supplies, a dog team, and a sled. Perhaps the people I traded with had never seen a European before and assumed that I was typical of other Europeans, for they showed no alarm at my sight. While the cold did not bother me, at least not in the way it did when I was Friedrich Hoffmann, I rid myself of my cape and used then only the furs that I had acquired. After leaving this village, I traveled for several hours before stopping to wait again for Frankenstein. When he appeared on the horizon I saw that he had also acquired a sled and a team of dogs.
I kept heading north, for I would take us to the North Pole itself if I had to to see my enemy drop. It was then that I passed a most peculiar thing. A ship stuck in a sea of ice. At first I wondered why anyone would attempt such a foolish trip, and then whether everyone on board had perished. This second question was answered when I saw activity on deck. I decided whatever their reason for being out in this icy wilderness was their own, and I continued on a short distance so that I could be hidden from the ship but still watch for Frankenstein. A day passed as I waited, and it was only then that I spotted Frankenstein’s sled. The ice had broken where he was, and he had been set adrift. His dogs were gone and he lay seemingly unconscious on his sled. I watched as men from the ship rescued him.
I could not believe this had happened. If Frankenstein had expired on that piece of ice I could have been satisfied with my revenge, but now I did not know whether he was dead, or whether they would be restoring him back to health. For days I worried about this, and resisted the urge to steal aboard the ship to check on my enemy. If he survived I would later draw him back to me, and if he died I had to believe that I would somehow know this. So as difficult as it was, as much as the unknowing gnawed at my soul, I settled in to keep watch over this ship.
These were torturous days; the sun ever present in the sky, almost as if to mock me and not even allow me a moment of darkness so that I could attempt to sleep and escape the thoughts that were nagging at me. The journey had taken longer than I had expected, especially now with my enemy aboard this icebound ship, and I hadn’t brought enough food for my team of dogs. I tried setting them free, hoping that they could find something to hunt in this wilderness, but they were too exhausted from my pushing them these many days and I had to watch as they withered and died around me, adding more blood to my hands.
I do not know how many days I kept vigil on this ship, for it was impossible to tell with the sun always in the sky, but I knew it was many, possibly several months. At one point the sea ice broke up enough to open a passage of escape for this ship, but it stubbornly remained where it was. It was perhaps two days after this had happened that I felt a shift inside of me and I knew that my enemy was dead. I had no choice now; I had to steal aboard this
