Clinging precariously to the wall, in the darkness outside the high, barricaded window, I had watched Frankenstein for several minutes before attempting to get his attention. I wondered as I watched him if now he were really going mad. His arms were filthy up to the elbows with the fat, blood, and offal of murdered women—or perhaps these latest specimens had not been murdered, but how could he know? I supposed that he was persisting in his efforts to create a female—if he is anything he is persistent. I assumed further that the bodies that surrounded him, in several stages of dismemberment, were those of women. But from the angle of the window I could not really tell.
His gaze was wild, and a certain new look of indecision in his movements suggested to my experienced eye that his mind was under strain, if not actually unbalanced. He was muttering to himself as he went through the laboratory procedures that I knew so well from watching him in Scotland.
As I watched him from outside, I was on the verge of deciding that there was no point in my trying to talk to him again.
But in the end I tapped at the window. It must have been a loud sound in his quiet room, but he went on with the task before him, suturing something, and did not hear me until my tapping had sounded for the third time.
Once Frankenstein's attention had been caught, he came over to the window at once, and looked out at me without demonstrating any great astonishment. To my surprise he behaved almost as if he had been expecting such a visit.
Victor opened the glass and the shutters of the window from inside, but the iron bars that guarded it were fixed in stone. Exerting all my strength, I managed to wrench one of the bars from its sockets, and, squeezing through the space thus created, climbed in to confront my creator.
I closed the shutters behind me, and for a long moment we stood staring at each other, I dripping with rain, he, less copiously, with preservatives and blood. We must have looked like two men—or two monsters—who had never met before and who perhaps might have nothing to communicate to each other. Seeing him at close range for the first time in many months, I thought that he looked ill.
It was left to me to utter the first words. "You have come back to them." The way I spoke the sentence made it an accusation, and I saw his face tighten.
I continued: "But never mind that. The window is open behind me, and if you wish to get away I will see you safely to the ground, and outside the wall of the estate. Beyond that your fate is up to you."
Frankenstein shook his head. "I suppose young Freeman has somehow communicated with you. But I do not wish to flee. You should do so, though, and quickly, for you will be in great danger if you are discovered here."
"I am not the only one."
He did not understand me, and shrugged irritably, thinking, I suppose, that I meant him. "I intend to stay," he replied. "It is the only way I have found that will allow me to do my work. It is not the money, I have that of my own. But I need privacy, protection. Saville has promised there will be no more—no more excesses on his part. I have exacted a solemn promise from him, and from Walton too."
"I see," I replied, after a moment. What I saw was that, with Frankenstein, argument would be as hopeless as remonstrance. There are some humans, like Molly, who insist on walking to their own destruction. And I had another purpose in climbing to his new laboratory, one that I felt was more urgent than trying to save him from himself. "Tell me," I pleaded. "Withhold no secrets from me now. Who am I? Where did my brain come from? And the parts of my body?"
He did not hesitate, but made a gesture embodying hopelessness. "I do not know."
"Not know! How is it possible that you should not know?"
"Because of the methods by which I worked." My creator seemed irritated, that anyone should bother him with such a question. "I should have kept better records, but I thought I could not take the time. Every minute I wanted to press on with the work itself—Metzger and Big Karl brought me my materials. They might remember, but I have never considered it important."
"Not important!"
"I told them what I wanted, the physical types and conditions, and paid them, and left the details to them. I cared nothing for the names of the people who had inhabited the bodies before I got them."
"You're telling me you don't know whose brain you used? Was it a single brain, can you at least tell me that?"
"Oh yes, yes." Frankenstein made a gesture of surprise and impatience, and looked at me as if I should have known better than to ask such a stupid question. "The brain is a very delicate organ anyway; the nervous connections are incredibly complex. Even with a single brain, the grafting would have been impossible, had I not been able to rely upon the almost miraculous effects of the electric fluid. I wouldn't have attempted to use parts of more than one."
"But—you can't say whose brain it was? What kind of a head did it come in?" I gestured helplessly.
"Oh. I can't say where the head came from. It was a man's, of course. Large, as I recall. There was something—noble—about the face, though of course in fact one gets that impression sometimes even in peasants. The medical school at Ingolstadt had a constant requirement for bodies, and the suppliers got them whenever people died in the homes for the poor and indigent in that area. Also…" He let his words trail off. Something changed subtly in his face.
"Also what?" I promoted, after a brief silence. "You have said that my brain is not that of a condemned criminal."
"No." Frankenstein shook his head judiciously. "I have no reason to think that it is that."
"What, then?"
"Well," he admitted reluctantly, "besides the poorhouses, that contributed bodies for research, there were the asylums."
A silence fell between us. But I felt no shock. With something of a thrill of pride I realized that I had become firmly confident in my own sanity. Calmly I asked: "Are you telling me I am a madman, then? But the languages I know, the history, the natural philosophy—how do you explain it all?"
"I cannot explain it," Frankenstein said simply. Then the tones of a professor crept into his voice. "A madman may know many languages. Or some stimulation by the electrical fluid may have had a healing effect upon the mind as well as the body. And the effect upon the body is undeniable. Even the marks of the sutures are gone—"
"Bah." Talking to him, trying to find out from him the facts of his science, was worse than useless. The electrical fluid dissolved everything, facts and logic along with all doubts, all questions. I had experienced it many times before, but never before so clearly realized the fact. Was it a clever reluctance to reveal secrets, as I had assumed for a long time, or was it possible that my creator really did not know what he was babbling about?
How could that be possible? He possessed a facility with jargon, certainly, and who, listening to an expert discuss his own field, really expects to understand all that they hear?
"Victor," I said. "I am less than seven and a half feet tall."
"Eh? But what has that…" He blinked at me, and became authoritarian again. "You are eight feet tall."
"No."
"There may have been some slight shrinkage."
"It isn't that."
"Then someone has been lying to you, or has taken faulty measurements. You are the work of my hands, and you belong to me, and I know everything there is to know about you." He cannot manage his own life, but has perfect confidence in what he knows, or thinks he knows, of mine.