HIGH STRANGENESS-Tales of the Macabre (7 page)

I will wait a f
ortnight for your reply and if you beg that I not search out the being for your sake, I will have to live on unfulfilled and wretched, stumbling through the dark labyrinth that is my mind, my eyes seeking contact with heaven as the last reprieve. You know
my hope has always been never to cause you harm or a moment's worry, but if you could see a way to release me from guilt at my proposed voyage, if you feel strong enough to unfetter your brother from his familial attachment for this one last endeavor, thi
s
one last adventure, I will bless your name as a saint forever.

Your loving brother,

Robert

* * *

Robert Walton accepted the glass of port offered to him by the Captain. “
I trust this will settle my stomach. Nothing else has been capable of it.”
He drank
a swallow, relishing the fine bodied taste upon his parched tongue. He had not eaten or drunk anything in hours due to how his digestion was misbehaving.

“
It surprises me the voyage has been so difficult for you. We all know what a fine vessel you sailed y
ourself at the helm as her good captain, sir.”

Walton sighed and lowered the glass from his lips. “
I am afraid that was long ago. It has been many years since I've set foot aboard a ship.”

“
And longer yet since you've been this far north, I expect?”

“
When
I came back from these regions on my last trip where my crew considered mutiny and the ice mountained around the ship's decks like walls, I swore never to brave closing in on such utter misfortune again.”

“
Ah, well, these waters are not as dangerous for our ships today as they were in your time.”
The Captain brought the decanter to the table where the overhead swinging lantern flame pierced the etched decanter glass and threw prisms of colored light dancin
g
onto the polished teak planks. “
I heard stories of your last trip. Sailors I served with in my youth told us tales I scarcely believe.”

Walton glanced up, then abruptly away. He tested the port, willing his stomach to subside its rumbling. “
Sailors favor
tales that can be retold, tales never to be taken at face value, my friend.”

“
Yes, but the things I heard...”

“
I dare say they weren't true.”

The Captain eyed Walton skeptically. He was not a man to be put aside from curiosity. “
The man? The great huge bea
uteous monster who came to Dr. Frankenstein's cabin? He was a myth?”

Walton nodded. “
A creature of fevered imagination. You must recall we were facing extinction. Had not the ice floes broken apart and moved, we would have all died a cold death together.”

The Captain drank his port in silence a while. The ship swayed gently through the swells, lulled by an open sea that had not seen a storm in three weeks. The glass stopper from the port decanter rolled across the table like a marble. The Captain fetched i
t
and settled it into the bottle mouth.

“
There were all those rumors of an 'experiment.' Dr. Frankenstein upon his death had a trail of gossip tagging at his coat. There were so many of his friends and loved ones who were so brutally dispatched. Strangled,
weren't they?”

Walton knew he must escape this interrogation before too long. He distrusted the dark look in the other man's eyes. If anyone suspected Frankenstein's monster actually existed, a new hue and cry would rise from the superstitious populace. Wh
ere the world might wish to kill the devil, Walton hoped to question the creature until he could still all his questions about immortality, and the life waiting on the other side of death that only a man dead made to live again could answer.

“
There are unf
ortunate circumstances in every man's life,”
he said finally in rebuttal. “
My own second cousin was knifed in London while on holiday.”

“
So the stories are untrue
—
about the monster? They are fabrications?”

“
They have never been more than that.”

“
And
you
we
re in the cabin with Frankenstein's body at the last and you did not see a tall substantial person who later leapt onto the ice to be carried away into the distance from your ship?”

“
If I had, would I not admit it? My men saw all sorts of visions and suffe
red innumerable nightmares when for a time we thought we would perish en masse, surrounded by frozen silence, far from home. Even I thought once I saw a veritable flock of black birds rising from behind the cliff of an iceberg. Crows!”
Walton rubbed his f
o
rehead as if to dispel a bad demon camping there. He hoped his performance was believable. He'd not want rumor sailing back with this captain to alert curious explorers to follow him. Word, story, and gossip was like chaff on the wind; it could blow for h
u
ndreds of miles and put down anywhere.

“
Yes, well, I understand the strain you and your crew must have labored beneath. I was in the Straits once myself on a long voyage when a typhoon overtook us. The mind plays wondrous games when under threat of annihil
ation. Some men claimed an angel with a wing-spread a hundred meters wide swooped down from the top of a monstrous wave and lifted our ship from a deadly trough.”

Walton finished his port, and satisfied his stomach had been revived to normalcy or some stat
e near it, begged the captain's pardon for his early departure for bed.

In his cabin, he took out the writing materials and sat at the small desk attached to the wall. He penned in his painstaking script:

Dearest Margaret,

The trip so far has been unevent
ful, though far from boring. Just tonight the captain of this ship thought to examine me about the rumors brought back to the mainland from my trip with Frankenstein. Here it is twenty years after the fact, and still those stories will not be put to rest.
I admonished my crew to forget what they had glimpsed so briefly, to hold fast to their tongues or evoke ridicule for a tale so unbelievable not one common man would take it as truth. Yet here we are, and the captain of ships sailing north to sea repeat g
o
ssip of an unlikely creature who visited my ship and then left it like a madman, flinging himself off to become frozen upon a triangle spit of sheer ice.

I put the captain's curious nature to rest, I pray, but I know my entourage and many cartons of suppli
es indicate I am trekking into the wildest reaches of the north, and my lie about scientific measurement of the wind velocities across the steppes of the plains does not satisfy every inquisitive mind who knows of it.

Oh, if only I can be left alone!

Never
theless, I must tell you that despite the lingering spells of coughing I withstand and the regular stomach upsets that I ply with port and strong mind control, I am so excited to be on my way at last to find either the monster or his bones, that I hardly
s
leep. Adrenalin races through my body and clouds my brain day and night. I cannot thank you enough for giving me leave to make the trip.

I hope this finds you well from your bout of sickness, that you do not fail to pray for my soul, and that you know my l
ove resides with you even as the waves press me onward to an uncertain future. This quest has such hold on me that not even physical ailment, interrogation, or the fear of finding that what I seek can delay me in the least.

Your devoted brother,

Robert

* *
*

Walton had hired bearers to carry his supplies north through a wasteland of snow and ice. Across great flat plains they trekked, spidery shapes of shadow struggling across the whiteness of open tundra, beset by winds
so cold it froze the bits of hair the men failed to shave from their cheeks and chins. White blinding light swept down from across the far craggy mountains so that tinted glasses and goggles covered everyone's eyes from the pain and the possibility of the
loss of eyesight.

Where he was going, Walton did not know, save north. He consulted the compass every hour, making sure the troop of tired and bedraggled men not lose their way. At each towering snow bank, natural ice cave, or deep crevice they came to, he
paused to search the white pristine realm for evidence of habitation.

His hired men were beginning to balk, to hang back and walk in sullen groups to speak among themselves in whispers. Walton felt their reluctance growing with each new day, and he despai
red that he would find anything to prove to him Frankenstein's being was either dead or alive before his companions, like the crew of his last ship, threatened to abandon him to his intractable mission.

He would die if left alone. They must not leave him n
ow!

It was twenty-two days into the trip, having passed two outposts where their group spent time warming by fires and taking home-cooked food. They were six days distant from the last hamlet of the north. Already four of his men had turned back, slipping
away in the night while he slept, when Walton chanced upon an artifact that made his heart leap with joy. Just at his feet as he trod relentlessly up a slippery hillside of ice, he spied something glinting in the torturous blaze of sunlight. He bent to re
t
rieve it, to peer at it closely. Finally he raised the tinted goggles and turned the item over in the palm of his gloved hand. It was a flint stone, shaped by human hands, chiseled by other rock, perhaps, but unnatural in shape. The being had done this, h
e
knew it! He was close by, surely. Frankenstein's creation had found flint; this meant he had fire and had discovered a way to survive the cold and ice that would have claimed him if his suicide had not.

Walton smiled a little smile, his lips just curving
slightly beneath the covering of thick wool over his mouth. He looked back over his shoulder at the men coming along behind him, and quickly shoved the stone into a pocket.

The thrill was such to spur him to even greater expenditure of his energies, and th
at day he covered two more miles than on most days before. His bearers grumbled and called out pleas that he slow down, but nothing could hold back Walton's immense desire to find the dark treasure of the north.

It was near sundown when the night came drop
ping over the plains like a black sheet, that Walton found the place he had dreamed might actually exist.

Around the bend of a mountain's foot, he happened upon a curved wall of ice, the south side of another ice cave carved into the mountain's belly as if
God had taken a giant scoop and hollowed out a cavity. He hurried forward, racing the dying sun to the lip of the wall. Grabbing hold of it with his left hand, he swung around to peer into the vast opening.

There!
Walton stood rooted to the spot, stunned.

In a great gaping hole with a roof overhead of shining ice reflecting the last shards of sunlight was the evidence that Walton had always hoped would be found. It was all primitive, disorganized, but recognizably made by human hands for human comfort. The
re was a bed of limbs against a far wall, taken, Walton surmised, from some far region in the area where trees must grow. There was a cold dead heap of coals indicating fire for warmth and cooking. There was a cave man's ax, made of a length of timber and
a sharpened stone attached to the head with sinew strips from an animal's hide. There was a pile of bones, tiny ones and larger, the marrow gnawed for nourishment and then the bones were discarded all in one place.

This is where the glorious being lived.

A
nd he lived yet! The coals were not scattered, the bed undisturbed and ready for a man to lie his head down for a sleep. He lived, he lived!

The first men to catch up with Walton wandered into the cave and began looking around in disbelief. Some shuddered.
Some laughed and then abruptly lost the impetus to laughter. One, the leader of the hired men, a bear of a man with biceps as enormous as cannon balls, came to Walton and said, “
What does this mean? Who or what lives here?”

“
I don't know,”
Walton replied
truthfully. “
I hope it is the man I've come to find, but I don't really know.”

“
We were told you were a scientist.”

“
And that I am.”

“
Come to measure wind with strange instruments.”

“
I am afraid that was not quite the truth.”

The leader glanced around befo
re turning again to Walton. “
You hunt a man who would live alone in this icy wilderness, someone who would live like an animal hibernating in a cave of ice? What manner of demon is this?”