Sometimes, naked here in the heated cabin, washing myself and my wrappings as best I can in melted snow, I take a closer inventory. What I see forces me to respect my maker's handiwork; his skill, however hideous its product, left no scars, no visible joinings anywhere. Such skill as he was unable or unwilling to exert again, when the time came_but I anticipate.
My navel might once indeed have been the terminal of the cord of birth—but I know that it was not. My two arms, both huge and muscular, seem, like my two legs, a matched pair—did each limb once live and grow upon a different body? And what of my brain? Could it conceivably be compound too, with all the languages that it contains? And the strange, fleeting memories, that sometimes come and go, and puzzle me. He would never tell me whence it came.
And, surely, no single human individual was ever cursed with this face I bear. Oh my creator, whose handiwork in other details approaches wizardry, if not Deity, why did you curse me so?
And why did you not give me a name?
Was hatred for me growing in you even then?
The earliest memories of my present life are not yet three years old. But in trying to sound even such shallow depths, I must part clouds more thick than any polar darkness. It seems to me that the first language that I ever spoke was German. But I cannot be sure. It may have been French, for I have spoken and can speak that too, and quite well. In whatever body my brain first grew, it learned much there; and some of what it learned, for good or ill, has come to me.
The first remembrance I can call up is of a tiny room. It is high up under someone's roof, because it has a slanted ceiling. Though the window is par-tially open, within closed shutters, the atmosphere is tainted with the smell of rotten meat, and acrid with chemicals and electricity. Logic—and perhaps other things as well—assure me that this is the room at the top of the house where the student Victor Frankenstein then lodged, in an old and quiet quarter of the Bavarian university town of Ingolstadt,—where he lodged, and where he did his secret work.
I am standing beside an empty table—there is just height enough for me to stand upright under the pitched roof—and feeling overwhelmed with the narrow meanness of this cramped and noisome room, that forms the only world that I as yet have known. Fitful flashes from a thunderstorm provide the only real illumination. The shelves that occupy most of the walls of the room, and the two other tables besides the empty one, are filled with jars, bottles, electrical apparatus, whose meaning I but dimly comprehend.
I am alone, and it is night, rain beating on the single window and dripping on the sill, thunder grumbling not far away. A sleepy human voice or two, in other, distant rooms of the big house, are murmuring about the dormer. A bolt has just struck somewhere in the near vicinity.
Though as far as I can tell this is the very beginning of my consciousness, I am not an infant mentally. I can walk. I do not foul myself with my own wastes. My hands are fumbling with something around my collar—somehow I have already acquired clothing, real clothing, much better than the rude wrappings that I am wearing now.
I know what a door is, and how to open one. And this door, anyway, is already standing very slightly ajar.
Moments later I am in another room, this one on the next level of the house down from the top. This is a small bedchamber; I draw back the curtain of the bed, and by the light of a guttering bedside candle I behold a young man lying there, fully dressed in good but neglected clothing, fitfully asleep. It was, of course, none other than Victor Frankenstein who lay before me, though I did not yet know his name. In some senses I recognized him. I think I understood even then, somehow, that he was someone of great importance to me.
The young man stirred as I gazed at him, and opened bloodshot eyes. He stared back at me with the horrified gaze of one who awakens to find that what he had thought a nightmare is indeed reality. His movement in the bed, edging away, wafted toward me a wave of fumes, strange to me then, but now, in memory, identifiable as those of brandy.
I stretched out a hand toward him, and uttered an inarticulate sound. What purpose was behind my gesture I do not know, but I intended no harm. He uttered a choked cry and rolled out of the bed on the side away from me. A moment later he had sprung past me and was out the door, and I heard the quick sounds of his booted feet descending stairs.
Exactly what I did immediately after that, what I thought, what I felt, I am not sure. I know only that I must have fled the house.
I find I must pause now in this effort. Those early memories are too strong for me.
Later_I must keep on with this journal for the sake of my sanity. And soon I must search the ship again, and more thoroughly, for provisions. Though if, as I suppose, her crew abandoned her when threatened by starvation, there seems little chance that any substantial stores remain.
For now, back to the fierce chore of remembering.
The next scene to come clearly out of the mist is set out of doors, in a gloomy November forest that must have been near Ingolstadt. It is early morning, shortly after dawn, some days after my first clear memory.
I have been sleeping, and today is my turn to be awakened. Someone, using a hound, has tracked me down. I emerge from chaotic dreams and stick my head out of my shelter, a half-fallen tree, to see two human beings and one hound staring down at me.
The young men are much too well dressed to be peasants. I need a moment to realize that one of them, dark-haired and slender, is the same man I saw lying in bed amid brandy fumes a few days earlier, terrified of me. Now, in daylight, the expression on his face is different, more complex, harder to describe or to understand. Fear has not vanished from his countenance, but it has been joined there by elation, shame, disgust, and pride, all struggling to dominate. His breathing is heavy, I think more because of this emotional turmoil than with the exertions of his trot through the woods behind his hound. The animal, not liking me—dogs seldom do—backs a little way into a thicket, grumbling.
"There you are," the young man said to me, confronting me, fists on hips. I have not the words, in English or any other tongue, to describe the mixture of feelings evident in his tone.
The other young man has hair of a lighter brown, and a frame not really much bigger. But somehow he seems hardier and sturdier than slender Frankenstein. He is so far exhibiting little except sheer astonishment. From the way his jaw works he would like to say something pertinent as he gapes at me, but thus far he is speechless. I will come to know him later as Henry Clerval.
Frightened, I too am wordless as I crawl forth and stand erect. As I leave the tree my movement pulls out with me the nest of leaves and grass that had kept me warm enough to sleep. I was on the point of running away, even as last time he, now my discoverer, had fled from me.
"Stay!" he said to me sharply. "I am Victor Frankenstein. I am your creator."
"Creator." Dazed by the idea, I mouthed the word back at him numbly. Standing, towering above him, I took an uncertain step toward him, once more reaching out a hand.
Frankenstein took a quick step back, and his hand went near the curve of a short wooden handle at his belt. I took no more steps forward. I understood the meaning of a pistol even then. Beside him, Clerval stood as if paralyzed.