Mayhap I laughed.
Abovedecks and below, I explored the Caliban. After hurriedly perusing and securing for myself both the packet of letters that Walton had written his sister and the copy that he had made, I returned to the bow mast and cut down the author of my grotesque form and so of my pariahhood. Frankenstein’s skin had pulled tight to his bones. His limbs had less pliancy than wood, not because rigor mortis had untowardly persisted but rather because the fluids of life had frozen in his veins. In this way was my maker rendered a macabre monument to his own vanity and hardness of heart. There on the deck, I kneaded him into a parody of flexibility. Then I threw him over my shoulder like a sack of meal and quitted the Caliban, leaping to the ice from a height that would have staggered a being of merely human parentage.
I stopped copying. If Jumbo had written this sensational stuff, he was laying claim to a sideways sort of kinship to a European scientist named… well, Frankenstein. He’d also confessed to an unspecified murder or murders: “I had slain before.” That thrilled me. I mean, it’d taken me nearly a month to persuade myself Jumbo, despite his size and looks, meant no one, least of all me, any harm. And now I’d just read four words in his own hand that shot down all my hard-earned notions of his harmlessness.
I lit a cigarette. The butts of a couple of others lay smoldering in the ashtray on my desk. My tongue tasted like a charred wedge of bologna.
Then a calming thought occurred, a thought that made more sense than tagging Jumbo the mad golem of an eighteenth-century anatomy student and chemist by the name of Frankenstein: Jumbo was writing a book, a novel. His bulk and his lopsided face had led him to see himself in Karloff’s screen monster-which he really didn’t much resemble-and to write an original story featuring himself in the monster’s role. That theory tied up a few of my frayed nerves.
I went back to reading and copying:
With Frankenstein’s corpse as freight, I struck out from Walton’s ship towards the south. In the long dusk at that latitude, directions were hard to verify. Still, both the rush of ice-capped sea currents and the benison of fuller sunlight told me that I had intuited my course aright. Even the lovely gyre-making of a raptor, shadowed on the snow, seemed to approve my migration route. Oddly, I had no idea what my destination must be or why I had undertaken this grueling journey; a month or more ago, I had thought to end all my journeyings in the swift uprush of a funeral blaze.
Almost insensate, I trudged the whiteness. I steered by the low-riding sun on a southeasterly oblique that at length brought me off the ice onto a vast range of undulant snow. I scarcely paused, either to moisten my parched lips or to poke beneath the glacial crust for a root or tuber with which to propitiate the gods of hunger. Whenever I chanced near crude fishing villages or inland settlements, I took pains to avoid confrontation with the inhabitants. I fled men as the tundra wolf does.
Indeed, I had for companions on one leg of my journey a pack of wolves. They trailed alongside, eager for me to stumble under the dead Frankenstein and so succumb to their fangs. Once, half exasperated, half exultant, I stooped and compacted a missile of ice. Immediately, I dispersed the pack by hurling this frozen shot into its ranks. It slew-yea, nearly decapitated-one lean but shaggy animal, the example of whose demise vividly impressed itself upon the others.
One morning, after a rare surrender to the call of sleep, I awoke to find myself and the inert nearby form of my creator surrounded by reindeer. These lithe beasts browsed that terrain as if he and I had inextricably melded with it. No alarm, or even skittishness, did we provoke in them, not even when I arose from my bed of snow and once more lay my father’s corpse over my shoulder. For miles, it seemed, I trudged with these deer, migrant with them, a fallen seraph among the ice waste’s ghostly kine.
An unexpected change in the weather at last effected our separation from the herd. A wind of gale proportions blasted ice grains across the snowscape. I howled into this howling. Land forms but an arm’s length away shewed as blurred geometries. I failed at them, for I wished both contact and certainty. Between the roaring gusts, I sometimes thought I saw fantastic cliffs, as white as milk and evanescent as truth.
At length I came to those ill-seen ramparts. Like a thousand panpipes the storm whistled, even as snow sleeted in interthreaded sheets. A channel in the rock led me blindly upwards. Had I known the precariousness of my ascent, with a corpse as entrammeling cargo, I would have thrown myself upon the nearest rock face and clung to it like an apperceptive lichen. Fortunately perhaps, I had no such understanding of the danger and so proceeded with the singlemindedness of a zealot.
It would have eased my task to drop Frankenstein and struggle on alone, but a stubborn scrupulosity prevented me; a perversity, many might accuse, for at some point on my trek I had resolved to recompense myself upon this man, who had so aggrieved and hurt me, by tearing his heart from his breast. I intended to feed that cold organ, piece by bitter piece, to the hawks of the Kara Sea, and no hardship met on my way could turn me from this aim.
The passion of my will notwithstanding, I weakened. The wind’s howling, combined with the unrelenting sting of ice and blasted rock, vitiated my strength. Fatigue came. In time, groping along a narrow ice ledge, I chanced upon a crevasse, a doorway into shelter. I crawled in, dragging my passenger with me. Here I obtained to a peacefulness in which I had nearly lost faith. Here, indeed, I slept.
Let me rather indite that like a peltless bear, I hibernated. How long I lay thus stupefied, wrapped about my sire’s body, I cannot tell. Somewhere in that sleep, I drifted so near the ivory reef of extinction that I dreamt myself moored to it. The deepest flint of my awareness now took as dead the foundered body that it had once animated. That iota’s last spark guttered towards darkness. Insofar as consciousness remained to me, it exulted in the nearness of its extinguishment.
Time passed. More time succeeded to this. Then, to my initial dismay and bewilderment, my shelter’s roof fell in-clamourously, precipitously-and a myriad spectacular figures of lightning revived me to the long heartache of the world. Precisely how this revival occurred, I cannot relate. Why it should have happened capsulates a mystery even more recondite. Lightning, thunder, biting sleet-meteorological phenomena seldom seen in train-assaulted my cavern, quickening in me the blood-borne engines of life. Although Frankenstein, my author, of course continued dead, I had reluctantly arisen. The outcome of this fleer at mortality lay hidden in the ice rains of the night and the unforeseeable weathers of tomorrow…