Dr. Frankenstein's Daughters (14 page)

FROM THE JOURNAL OF
INGRID VDW FRANKENSTEIN

July 23, 1815

Good news! Walter has improved greatly. When I went to see him yesterday he was up and sitting. “Do you think Mrs. Flett’s remedies have helped?” I inquired, taking his hand as I sat beside him.

He shook his head. “Not really. My illness has its cycles and this last one has run its course. I’ll be much improved until it flares again.”

“Maybe it won’t flare again,” I suggested hopefully.

Drawing me to him, he kissed my lips. My eyes shut as I floated in the utter bliss of his touch.

“Maybe it won’t flare again,” he said softly. But I could tell from
his glum, wistful tone that the statement was more a hopeful dream than something he really believed possible.

“Ingrid, I am going away for a short while. I don’t want you to worry. I feel well enough for a trip to see my doctor. His office is in Inverness. It’s not very far.”

“Shall I go with you?” I offered.

“No. It is more restful for me not to keep up conversation. And this treatment will require me to be away from you. I would worry.”

I leaned my head against his arm. “All right. I’ll miss you.”

“And I you.”

“Will this treatment help you greatly?” I asked.

“I doubt it.”

At that moment it dawned on me that, in the back of my mind, I’ve been harboring the hope that the power of my love might be enough to cure him. And, in a way, it could be possible. My love can cure him. But not without effort, as I’ve been hoping. The mere fact that I love Walter with all my heart and soul will not be enough. It’s time to kick my lazy mind into action. I’m the daughter of a scientific genius. It’s time I began acting as such.

August 3

Yesterday I fell asleep down in the laboratory. For the last ten days I have almost lived down here, searching my father’s writings for
the key to helping Walter. Giselle and Uncle Ernest worry about me so I appear at the castle only long enough to eat and assure them I am still alive. I want to use this time while Walter is away to the best advantage.

Hopefully he is all right and benefitting from his doctor’s treatment. He had so little faith in the outcome, though. I have become obsessed with his cure.

Where do I start? Do I replace his injured parts? Do I run current through his body to recharge his nerves? Would this be a permanent fix or a temporary remedy that needed constant repetition? And if it required repeating, would his body be able to withstand it? Could he withstand the treatments even once?

How I anguish over these things! I pull at my hair as I read volume after volume searching for the key. The key! I relive my dream where Anthony tells me I need the key.

Dr. Sarlandière has not yet replied to the party invitation I had Giselle send. How I pray he comes! More and more I suspect that his work is relevant to my cause.

August 10

Walter has not returned. After ten days I went to check on him. The woman who cares for him was there cleaning and tending the horse. She complained that she had not heard from him or been
paid. I gave her what money I had in my bag and asked that she let me know the minute she hears from him.

I have been working tirelessly, reading and taking notes until my eyes burn. I try not to worry about Walter, but it isn’t easy.

Today I fell asleep in a chair down in the lab with another of my father’s albums still opened on my lap. When I awoke, I saw that the light was not quite so dazzling as it had been earlier. This did not tell me exactly how late it was, only that it was sometime in the evening. It is unsettling to live in a place where darkness never comes and the restorative quiet of the night is lost.

Longing for fresh air, I climbed the tall ladder up into the hovel and stepped out onto the rocky, windswept island. Immediately I was alert to the white sails of a boat out on the ocean. There is a distinctive pendant on the top of the vessel that I recognized as Walter’s — he has returned!

How my heart exploded with relief and happiness! But why hadn’t he sent word that he was home?

I made my way to the edge of rock overlooking the ocean. There I sat and watched him for a while. He kept coming nearer and his horse was on the beach so I assumed he might be coming in.

Restless, I began to wander the island. Random thoughts floated through my head as I listened to the call of the seabirds, the crash of the surf, and the roar of the wind.

Is it possible that my father’s malevolent nemesis had returned? Are Giselle and I in peril? If he is indeed back, can he be stopped? Reasoned with? Is this nemesis such a fiend that he still seeks vengeance even though my father is now dead?

It was while walking along lost in thoughts of this kind that my eyes fell upon what I at first took to be a large, smooth, moss-covered stone. Or was it a very big bird’s egg covered in seaweed? I wasn’t sure what a puffin’s egg looked like, though the birds were very common on these craggy cliffs.

It bobbed there, hitting the rocky edge of the island as the waves bounced it again and again against the stones. Curious, I squatted by the water and reached for it with my two hands.

No sooner did I have it in my grip than I screeched in horror at its slimy texture and hurled it inland onto the stones. It hit with a sickening plop before turning over once.

I couldn’t bear to look at it. Desperate to erase the sensation of slippery softness from my palms, I scrubbed them against my skirt. My fingers had sunk right into its top layer into something nauseatingly gelatinous below.

Slowly, though, curiosity got the better of me and I turned toward it.

At first I couldn’t comprehend what I was seeing, but within seconds I made sense of the distorted thing lying there.

It was a human head! Waterlogged! Wrapped in long black hair! Its eyes were milky white, but its features were recognizable.

Screaming with terror, I realized it was Giselle’s head!

I screamed. Screamed and screamed at the awful sight. I howled with horror until the rock under me seemed to spin and the blue of the sky was mixed with the brown-black of the rocks in a swirling vortex.

When I awoke from my faint, Walter was sitting beside me. The bow of his boat had been pulled up on the rocks. My head rested on his knee and he held my wrist, his thumb pressed on my pulse.

“Walter!” I cried, disoriented and surprised to see him.

“I saw you collapse. I came to see if you were all right.”

The horrid image of the head rushed back, causing me to tremble. “Did you see it, Walter?” I shouted as hysteria began to climb within me once more. “Giselle is dead!”

“No! No!” he said soothingly, holding me tight while I buried my face in his shoulder. “It can’t be Giselle. When did you last see her?”

“This morning.”

“That head has been in the water a long time.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive. I’ve seen dead soldiers retrieved from the water. I know what they look like in varying stages of decay. That head
might have been in a case or a bag originally, which would preserve it a while longer than if the fish were nibbling at it.”

That made sense. Though even despite its half-rotted state, the grotesque visage bore a striking resemblance to Giselle. And to me. It was as if gazing upon my own dead self staring luridly back at me from the grave.

Horrible! Horrible …

“Who could it be?” I wondered.

“I don’t know.” Walter rocked me softly for a few more minutes with his good left arm as I clutched his shirt. In a while, I was sufficiently composed to notice that he had acquired a wooden lower leg. It was the kind one saw in drawings of pirates.

He noticed me gazing at it, aghast. “It’s a beauty, isn’t it?” he commented. Though his tone was light, he didn’t smile.

“
This
was the treatment you underwent?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Does it help you walk?” I asked.

“It does. Though my knee aches fiercely and I still need a cane.”

“What should we do with the head?” I asked.

He held up a white cotton bag about the size of a pillowcase with a drawstring at one end. “I took this from my boat supply kit.”

I cringed at the idea of touching it again. “I couldn’t.”

“I’ll do it.” With great difficulty, he got to his feet and hobbled over to the head. He used his cane to work it into the bag and then
drew the cord shut. “Who would throw a dismembered body into the ocean?” he wondered. “Someone might have been trying to cover up the trail of a murder.”

“If I showed you something, do you swear you won’t talk to anyone about it?”

“Who would I talk to? I hardly speak to anyone but you anyway.”

“Swear?”

“I would raise my right hand, but I can’t. Yes, I swear.”

Now that I was calmer, I noticed that something about the tone of his voice had changed. His words sounded as though they were somehow impeded, stifled. In the sunlight I could see what looked like a stiffening of the skin that ran up the right side of his face from jaw to cheekbone. Too concerned to be shy, I ran my hand along his cheek. “What’s happened there?”

He gazed out to the ocean a moment. “Just another of the joys brought on by my illness.”

“Does it hurt?”

“A little,” he admitted. “It’s difficult to move my jaw and my tongue. Never mind about it. What is it I just swore not to tell?”

“Come with me. I’ll show you.”

He slowly followed me to the shed and left the sack by the door. He was amazed when I showed him the hatch leading down to the laboratory.

He was even more thunderstruck when I explained what was down there.

“I’ve heard rumors about Castle Frankenstein,” he said when I was through. “It was what I was alluding to the first time we met. I never dreamed there could be a fully equipped scientific laboratory down there.”

“It’s true. There is.”

He shook his head in disbelief.

“Can you manage to descend that ladder?” I asked.

“I think I could get down, though getting back up will be more difficult.”

“That’s all right. There’s another way out, if you don’t mind tunnels.”

“I’m all right with tunnels,” Walter assured me. “I’d better go first. If I fall, I don’t want to knock you off the ladder.”

“Don’t fall, it will only make my task harder,” I told him.

“Your task?” he questioned.

I nodded. “You’ll see.”

It took a long time for Walter to make it down the ladder. Several times I was sure he was about to slip. But I saw that he’d been strong when he was well, and his left arm and hand could still grip remarkably well. When he was halfway down the ladder, I followed.

At the bottom, I showed him everything — the equipment, the body parts in jars, my father’s albums. “I can make you better,
Walter,” I said as he scanned Victor Frankenstein’s notes. “Remember the doctor who thought he could cure you with electric current?” I flipped forward in the album to where my father had written of his contact with Jakob Berzelius, the Swedish chemist. Both of them were sure it could be done. “They figured out how to do it, but couldn’t control the electricity. But I think I know how to do that. I could give you a new leg and hand too — parts that will work like they should. I could even put new skin on your face.”

“You could, could you?” He was teasing, but only by half. There was an expression of keen interest on his face. “Where would you get these human body parts?”

“I know a man in Edinburgh I could contact.”

“You do?” He regarded me with a mixture of incredulity, amusement, and respect. “Aren’t you a remarkable girl?” he said appreciatively. “Full of surprises.”

“I am.” I saw no point in responding with false modesty. I was prepared for this. I understood the concepts involved, and my father had left behind a step-by-step guide to connecting and reconnecting body parts, then animating them.

“Would it be very painful?” Walter asked, which told me he was giving it serious consideration.

“We’ll numb you with strong alcohol.”

“How long will it take?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I’ll set up a recovery room for you down here. I’ll take good care of you.”

Walter grew quite pensive, surveying the surroundings, glancing at the albums, looking at me. “Ingrid, do you know why I took my sailboat out today?”

“No.”

“I was going to capsize it and drown.”

I gasped at the awfulness of this. “No! You couldn’t!” My eyes teared at the very thought.

“I was about to do it when I saw you in distress.”

Flinging my arms around him, I pressed my cheek against his chest. “Promise me you’ll never do anything like that again!”

“I can’t promise you that, Ingrid. I don’t want to be a sick, sad invalid slowly withering away until there’s nothing I can do for myself. Dismal as that sounds, it’s the future that lies ahead of me. The physician who amputated my leg said I should prepare for further disintegration.”

“No, that can’t be!” I said passionately. “I won’t allow that to happen.”

“I haven’t told you the worst of it. This hardening of the flesh on my face will spread. Before too long I will be encased in a mask of hard tissue, unable to speak or swallow. If I manage to survive that, it will continue on until I am in a head-to-toe cast of
hardened skin. I will desperately long to die. But by then I’ll have lost the ability to end my own life.”

Everything within me cried out against this. It couldn’t be! It wasn’t fair! There had to be a way to change his terrible fate.

“I’m not afraid to die,” Walter went on. “But I’m terrified of living in this way. So I have nothing to lose. I say we attempt your experiment. If I die trying, I’ll be no worse off than if I’d tossed myself into the ocean today.”

“Oh, it will work, Walter.” In that moment, I was sure of it. “I will contact my friend Anthony and have him get in touch with the body parts man, Gallagher, for me. As soon as I get the parts from Gallagher, we can start. You’ll see! I can do this.”

I hugged him tightly as tears overtook me. He let me cry a moment, stroking my hair tenderly. “No more crying now,” he said after a while. “You’re going to fix my problems, aren’t you? Didn’t you just tell me that?”