The Ultimate Frankenstein by Anthology

Author:Anthology [Anthology]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

I, MONSTER

Loren D. Estleman

▼▼▼

I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames.

—The Monster

It was all so deadly familiar.

The farmers and innkeepers and harness-makers and their mad wives armed with torches and pitchforks, yammering like red Indians in the demented courage of the pack, the great wrinkled baying hounds loping clumsily, black lips skinned back from parchment-colored fangs as they tore at my tendons, drawing blood on every third lunge, the onlookers too cowardly even to join the mob shrieking orgasmically for my eyes and entrails; and I, the fistulous towering ogre of the collective carnal nightmare, lashed to a great makeshift wooden cross like some mutant Christ, borne straining and bellowing and pitching on a hydrophobic sea toward my fate in the puddle of light in the center of the arena.

Really, things were getting out of hand. The dogs at least would have to go. Most of the profits were tied up in bandages and iodine.

▼▼▼

I didn’t build a pyre.

Those who have read Robert Walton’s letters to his sister recounting details of the polar voyage that brought him into contact with Victor Frankenstein, published as Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, will recall that I took my leave of the explorer, and of Frankenstein’s corpse still warm upon the deck, with a pledge to remove myself from this plane through a conflagration. I did not lie, but neither did I carry out that design.

So efficient was the process of thought in the brain which my mortal creator in his fiendish perfectionism had selected, that I had decided against death by fire almost before I left that ice-locked vessel. What was burning but ordinary destruction for the most hideously extraordinary being in the history of the world? Had I journeyed all this way to the earth’s ceiling in search of a venue unlike all others only to end my wretched existence in the same manner that fishwives employed to dispose of their kitchen refuse? The answer, shouted back at me mockingly by the frozen cliffs, was a resounding negative.

I know not how many bleak days I wandered through the eternal twilight, tormented by the certainty that I could not end my torment. I gave no thought to food, nor to the hell-cold that lay like a gun barrel along my spine and made flatirons of my feet; until the very deadness of my extremities revealed to me in a flash—oh, ecstatic bolt!—that I need take no action whatsoever, that by doing nothing, nothing at all, I would invite the elements and my own poor clay to render me extinct.

I walked.

Walked as the cold clawed at my flesh, walked as hunger shredded my stomach like blind worms. I fancied I headed north, away from the cities of men and the treacherous warmth and sustenance that only pretended to nurture as they preserved this wretch for fresh cruelties, greater injustices, world without end; but in truth I had no instruments to point the way, and at least

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