The Stitched Promise

Her existence began as a lifeless marionette. She was a soulless assemblage of organs and bones waiting for a pilot to take the helm. Yet even in that state of terrible suspension, she was predestined to take my hand. It was part of the promise.

My creator, Victor Frankenstein, had taken great and ungodly leaps in scientific study by stitching me together from strewn body parts, but he had lacked the foresight - or perhaps the mercy - to create a partner for me. When I met him in the jagged mountains of mainland Europe to lay bare the story of my wretched life, it required a great deal of argument (and the retelling of the murder of his infant relative) before he would concede that I needed a mate. And even then, only reluctantly - as a man signs a treaty with a pistol at his temple.

The deal was simple in its architecture, if not in its consequences: he would build me a wife; she and I would withdraw to South America; and I would not invoke my wrath upon the world. It was not sealed with a handshake, but with a nod - and with the mutual understanding that reneging would mean death.

And so he traveled across the European continent to find a place where the promise could be fulfilled in secrecy. I shadowed his footsteps like a dark omen - through the valleys of Germany and the Netherlands - then stowed away aboard a cargo ship to follow him across the English Channel. He came to rest in a remote Scottish territory called the Orkneys and took up residence in a humble thatched hut. He began to build my wife in little time.

And so I spent many a day crouching upon the stones of the Orkneys, watching my creator through the window while the salt-laced wind lashed and flayed at my spirit. I despised the unforgiving nature of the weather, but at least I could be comforted by seeing behind the hazy glass - my bride-to-be being slowly, painstakingly assembled.

I spent hours simply staring through that window as though it were a portal to another world. How extraordinary it seemed. That my dream of companionship lay just beyond that thin sheet of imperfect glass, accumulating, limb by limb.

I devoted most of my waking hours to a private worship of her - her forming body, her mystery, and her impossible beauty. If I was not foraging for berries or watching through the cold pane, I was writing in the mud - sentimental, ungainly verses that I would have been ashamed of, had shame any purchase left on me. She had become my religion, and I her most fervent and ridiculous devotee.

I gave her a voice, in what little language the mud would allow:

“My darling bride,Why can’t you come tonight?

’Because I am preparing myself.

Let’s not make haste.’”

Thoughts of her colonized every hour. I knew she was only an unanimated corpse - cold, inert, assembled from the silence of charnel houses - but that did not prevent me from constructing, in the theatre of my mind, an entire life for us. My idea of her was, of course, perfect. I imagined caressing her stitched face; I imagined us staring at one another with something no living soul had ever been willing to offer me. Recognition.

Frankenstein, however, shared none of my enthusiasm. He was a stir-crazy scientist bent on accomplishing an ungodly feat once more - neither for accolades this time, nor for the intoxication of discovery, but for peace. A grim and joyless commerce. His cheeks had become hollowed pits; his eyes, burnt-out husks. He moved with the stiltedness of a figurine, his hands trembling as they hovered above the table where his second creation lay.

I wished, more than once, to go to him and say: You are overseeing my marriage. Have some love in your heart. But then - had he possessed any love for me when I first awakened, we would never have arrived at this sorry arrangement. He would have made her freely, out of something resembling paternal grace, and not as a currency with which to purchase his own safety.

Frankenstein knew his future depended on the success of this second awakening, and so he prayed. On the second week of his endeavour, I crept close enough to his hut to hear him through the thin walls: “O most gracious Father God - give me the strength to continue this ungodly task, for it is necessary to keep the world at peace.”

It offended me, in the way that only the unloved can be offended, that my future partner was being assembled out of calculated necessity rather than love. But I spent only an hour in that bitterness before releasing it. I had no power to change his heart. I had never had that power. I had only ever had my hands, and the terrible things they were capable of.

As the days grew colder, the wind sharpened to a blade. The cold did not trouble my body - it never had - but the tension did. The promise hung between us, held together by desperation and scientific knowledge alone. One misstep, this deep into the work, would have been fatal. There were nights when I fought back something I could only call tears, at the thought that she might never wake. That I might remain, forever, the only one of my kind.

She was a mosaic of marble-white flesh and the deep gray of the grave. To any other eye, she would have been a nightmare. To mine, she was the only perfect mirror in a world of opaque glass - my Eve, yet unborn, stitched together from the silent refuse of the earth.

“I dream - indeed I do dream -

About the moment we share our first kiss,

For it is that moment that will

Etch itself in my heart.”

Then came the terrible night I had felt approaching for weeks, the way one feels a storm before the sky gives any sign of it.

I saw him pause in his work - a pause unlike the others, not the pause of fatigue, but of a man arriving at a decision. A moment of terrible lucidity. His gaze drifted toward the window, toward the darkness where he knew I lurked. He saw me. I did not hide. I let the moonlight catch the yellow of my eyes, the jagged architecture of my scars, the sheer and terrifying scale of my silhouette. I wanted him to see the debt he owed. I wanted him to see, with perfect clarity, the catastrophe that would be unleashed should he fail me.

“O Heavenly Father - take my hand, and my knife!”

Victor took up the knife. My heart - that heavy, thudding engine of sorrow - nearly stopped. In the original scripture of his soul, I understood what he meant to do. I watched the muscles in his jaw tighten; I saw the flicker of what men like him call virtue - that instinct which whispers it is better to destroy a monster than to risk a race of them. He looked at her throat, at the delicate, stitched seam of her neck. For a heartbeat, the blade descended.

Then he stopped.

He looked back at the window, and I saw a different quality enter his eyes. It was neither the fire of the scientist nor the zeal of the martyr. It was the cold, grey calculus of a man who understood, at last, that he was already lost. He looked at the blade. Then at the door. Then at me. He was weighing the lives of his beloved Elizabeth, his father, his friend Clerval - against the abstract horror of what my companion might one day represent. And in that weighing, I saw the precise moment the scales tipped.

He knew then, with a clarity that only the doomed possess, that I was a force of nature - not a problem to be solved, but a consequence to be managed. To renege was to write a suicide letter in the blood of everyone he loved. If he destroyed her, I would not merely kill him. I would unmake his world until he begged for the mercy of the sea.

The logic of desperation asserted itself. A peace treaty, signed in flesh.

He set the knife down. A shudder racked his thin frame - so violent I thought his bones might splinter. He turned back to the chemical vats, the wires, and the galvanized instruments of his art. The work resumed. But the rhythm was different now. He was no longer a creator. He was a prisoner paying his ransom, stitch by reluctant stitch.

“’Why was I denied a voice

When he was about to destroy me?′

Because you hadn’t been born.

‘Then what am I, but words on dirt?’

Everything to me.”

Days passed. Prayers passed. But ever since that night at the window, I was his God, and we both knew it.

I scratched a thought into the dirt, one evening, that I could not account for: If all humans are creatures of light, and I was assembled from their parts, then why does the darkness allure me so?

Apart from that: I was livid at Frankenstein, to put it with some delicacy. To put it without delicacy would have required approximately two hundred pages of unintelligible noise, and I had neither the patience nor the mud for that.

The days accumulated, each one marked by small, incremental progress. One more wire. And again. One more seam. And again. One more milliliter. Until, at last, the day arrived - heavy and electric, as though the sky itself had been waiting.

The Day of Reckoning.

I watched, mesmerized, as he began the final sequence. I could imagine the air inside the hut thickening with ozone and vitriol. I pressed my face to the glass, my breath fogging the pane, my pulse galloping in a frantic and uneven rhythm. I remembered, unbidden, my own awakening - the agony of the first breath, the searing brightness of a world that had not asked to receive me, the immediate and soul-crushing revulsion in my creator’s eyes. I made a silent vow, there in the dark: she would not have that. Whatever else she inherited from this grim transaction, she would not have that. She would have me.

Victor moved like a man in a trance. He adjusted the leaden rods that pierced the roof to gather the energy of the approaching storm. The sky above the Orkneys had turned a bruised and swollen purple, groaning with the weight of unshed lightning. I felt the static rise in my own hair. It was that familiar hum of accumulated power that had once, in a cold apartment in Ingolstadt, called me into being.

“Do it,” I whispered into the wind. “Finish the work, and I shall vanish into the mists of the south. Fail, and I shall be the last thing you ever see.”

The lightning struck.

It was a sustained, blinding shriek of light that turned the night into a bleached and terrible noon. The hut seemed to vibrate down to its stones; the instruments of his art glowed with a ghostly blue fire.

Then - silence.

The storm softened to a dull, rhythmic rain. Inside the hut, the smoke cleared. Victor stood at the table’s edge, paralyzed, his hands gripping the wood. His hair was disordered, his coat singed at the sleeves. He did not move. He was staring at the woman.

At first, there was nothing. She lay as still as the rock beneath the sea. My heart sank into an abyss I had not known before and would have given anything not to know then. Had he tricked me? Had he introduced some quiet sabotage into the work?

Then her hand moved.

It was a small, spasmodic twitch of the fingers - a gesture so human, yet so alien in its mechanical abruptness. A moment later, her chest heaved. It was a shallow, wet sound: the sound of lungs tasting air for the first time in their reconstructed existence.

Victor retreated to the far wall, watching her with a fear that was religious in its intensity. He had created another demon. He had doubled the curse upon the earth. These thoughts were visible in him as plainly as if he had spoken them aloud.

I moved to the door. I did not wait for an invitation.

The wood groaned as I pushed it open, the salt spray following me into the warmth of the laboratory.

The woman sat up. Her movements were jagged, uncoordinated - much as mine had been in that long-ago apartment in Ingolstadt. Her hair, long and black, fell over her shoulders in tangled mats. She turned her head slowly, with the careful deliberateness of someone learning what a head is for.

Her eyes were the color of wet straw - yellow, clouded - yet possessed of a startling, nascent intelligence. She surveyed the room: the glass jars, the burning lamps, the trembling man pressed against the far wall. Then she turned, and she looked at me.

In that look, there was no horror. There was no scream. There was only a profound and wordless recognition - the recognition of one orphan meeting another. We were made of the same discarded history. We were the children of the charnel house, the unwilling heirs of a science that had never considered what it owed us.

Victor let out a long, shuddering gasp. The full weight of what he had done - the sheer, logical finality of his surrender - seemed to collapse the last of his endurance. His eyes rolled back. His knees buckled, and he crumpled to the floor, the victim of a nervous exhaustion so complete it looked, for a moment, like death.

I did not move to help him. My creator was a man of the past. My future sat before me on the table.

I approached her slowly, mindful of my size, of the shadows I cast, of everything about me that had ever caused recoil. I extended my hand - a hand that had strangled and destroyed, that had committed acts which no accounting could fully settle - but a hand that now trembled with something entirely different. A desperate, unholy hope.

“You,” I said. My voice was a low, grating rumble that mirrored the sound of earth moving against earth.

She looked at my hand. Then, with a grace that already surpassed my own, she raised her arm. Her skin was cold (the temperature of the room) but as our fingers touched, something passed between us. Not warmth, precisely. But the recognition of shared solitude. The understanding that neither of us had chosen this, and that perhaps, in each other, we need not endure it alone.

“Come,” I whispered.

I knew Victor would wake. I knew his conscience would eventually reassert itself - that he might hunt us or flee from us, that the world would not simply permit us to disappear. But for now, the debt was settled. He had chosen the lives of his beloved over the destruction of his work, and in doing so, had set us free.

I gathered her into my arms. She was heavy, her limbs still stiff with the residue of her previous states, but she did not resist. I wrapped her in the heavy woollen cloaks I had stolen for precisely this purpose, shielding her from the sight of the man who had built her with resentment in his heart.

We stepped out of the hut and into the Orkney mist. The rain moved over us in soft curtains, washing the smell of chemicals from our skin. Behind us, a lamp overturned in the wind, and the light in the hut flickered and died, leaving Victor Frankenstein alone in the darkness of his own making.

Ahead lay the sea. And beyond it, a world that did not yet know we were coming.

For the first time since I had opened my eyes in that cold German winter - since I had reached out toward a face that flinched away from me - I did not feel like a monster. I felt, instead, like the second half of a perfect whole.