The Testament

I grew up reading Mary Shelly, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allen Poe, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson and a host of other writers in the gothic, horror, and macabre genre. It still shows in my writing today. Writing was what got me into photography. I was born in 1954 and today is my birthday, and my gift to you is this story.

What if Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus added a last chapter - one that was told by the Creature?

“I was not born as men are. Such births are preceded by love and welcomed with joy. But I was not born, I was created, and my creation was neither preceded with love nor attended with rejoicing. My earliest awareness of my life was the stark horror and revulsion upon the face of he who made me.”

The Creature stopped and looked at the piece of vellum he had been writing on. He  huddled in the remains of the aft section of a vessel that had long ago been abandoned to the Arctic wasteland. He took a blotter from the lap desk he had stolen from Captain Walton’s chambers and rolled it over the paper. He smiled briefly as he thought about how the seaman who saw him had fainted in fear and trembling at the sight of him. The sight of him…the smile faded from his visage. He picked up the quill and dipped it into the bottle of ink that he had set beside his small fire to keep the fluid warm and began to write again.

An example of a 19th century writing desk. Sometimes referred to as a “lap desk.”

“I do not know if an infant recognizes its father’s face when he is born, or if the first face he looks into is filled with wonder, delight, or tears of joy. But I vividly remember my first look at Victor Frankenstein, the man who was both a father and a god to me. His expression was one of utmost revulsion and disgust. My first breath was not the whimpering cry of a newborn but the moan of a wretched thing from the depths of hell, except that I did not know what hell was yet. Frankenstein and mankind would have to show me that. I lay there struggling to…to what? To awaken, I think. To move as if I had been trapped in a nightmare and, if I could but shift, the spell would be broken.”

He stopped and stared at the glowing embers of the fire. A brisk breeze made them flame up and dance, sending sparks flying into the air. The Creature watched one of them waft gently into the air and then fade away as it cooled. “Out, out brief candle,” he whispered. He began to write again, “Why am I, wretched being that I am, writing this testament? Because I want men to know that I lived; I do not want to have existed only as a nightmare. I have either been consumed by hatred or the object of it for all my existence. But my reign is over, Victor’s sufferings are over, and my everlasting hatred has been fed. And I am haunted by the ghosts of William, Justine, Clerval and Elizabeth.” He held up his deformed mummified hands, as if they still bore the stains of his victim’s blood and cried out, “Oh, God bear me witness. I would that Frankenstein had never made me! I should have been a work of art, of beauty, his Adam; but he shaped me into a fallen angel. What could have been love was tormented into cruel and blind rage. Even the most docile beast will turn savage when caught in the painful trap of hatred and rejection.”

He dropped the quill and placed his face in his hands, his body racked by pitiful sobs. “Victor…my father and god…so generous, so devoted…can I never find pardon? Cannot even you who made me forgive me?” After some few minutes he stood and thrust several broken pieces of the ship into the fire. Ages of ice and storms had shattered most of the vessel that had not sunk beneath the tundra. “If I cannot make amends for the suffering I have caused, at least I can end mine own and make true my promise,” he said. The increasing wind and snow fall made it apparent that a storm was brewing.

The Creature picked up a small bundle of books that were tied together with twine and held them to his chest. They were the Bible, Paradise Lost, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, and Victor’s diary. He remembered when he had gone back to Frankenstein’s house in Geneva after murdering Elizabeth and stolen them. “Satan had his companions, who were detestable in mien because of their crimes against God, but you, Frankenstein, made me so hideous that even you turned from your creation in horror,” he thought aloud. “But where are my companions? I am a devil without even the company of fellow devils. What have I to keep me company except these, your books? I took them thinking they would teach me about who my maker was. But what I learned only made me realize the magnitude of your crime against me. I have learned more about the beauty of man from these tomes than I ever saw in the eternal justice of men.”

And then the Creature stood up and began to speak, addressing the growing darkness and the winds that were beginning to constantly groan under the weight of their impending snowfall. Like a lawyer before an imaginary jury he began to present his case, his words becoming louder and more torturous as he proceeded: “Your poets write what a noble piece of work is man. The Almighty has endowed him with reason enough to explore the sciences, with a form and design that is like that of an angel. He has made man’s ability to comprehend the world around him like that of God Himself, knowing good from evil. But what has man done to me? Man created me; man made me what I am. I am despised and rejected among men, loathed by my creator, and feared by his fellows. What should such fellows as I do as we crawl between heaven and earth? Is it not enough that I carry hell within me?” The last was bellowed to the heavens as if the Creature expected God Himself to answer. But God was silent.

The Creature’s words were smothered by the soft sounds of the wet falling snow. Then, with urgency, as if he were under a deadline he said, “Why do I plead my case where none can hear it? It is in written words that my story shall survive, and I shall tell it. I will not perish without a record of the crimes that I seek redemption from, or the calumny committed against me that should make the Judge of Heaven feel some semblance of pity for my plight.” Then returning to his writing, he began to feverishly transcribe an account of his creation and the rejection by his maker, as well as the society that drove him to commit his crimes. Several times he would stop and weep, or curse his lot, or howl at the elements as if they were a jury sitting in judgment of his soul. He would pause only to throw more scraps of wood from the savaged vessel onto the fire. After a few hours of this exchange between his thoughts and the scraps of paper he was collecting in the desk he stopped and slumped, collapsing in the snow in exhaustion.

Thus he lay for some time, his dull yellow eyes half open, his black lips parted and his breathe emerging as plumes of steam might issue from a tea kettle; his yellowed skin and black locks of hair becoming dappled with the pure white snow, as if it were nature’s way of comparing its purity with what he was. Finally he sat up and crawled over to the writing desk, picked up the pen and, dipping it into the last remnants of ink, began to write, “My soul…do I possess a soul? I have the capacity to love; I feel myself capable of a love that could extinguish the passion and poisons of the rage that consumes me; so does that mean I have a soul? I can feel sorrow, I can reason: does that not qualify me to be human? Is the manner of my creation the source of my damnation? How can one who is soulless be damned? I will explore this last mystery.”

With that he carefully wrapped the papers, tying them with twine, and placed them inside the desk. He lavishly doused himself with kerosene and then chained and locked himself to a stake in the middle of the funeral pyre he had built for himself, and dropped a burning piece of kindling onto the wood. As the flames sprang up, searing his flesh, he saw a spark break loose and float towards the writing desk. A sudden gust of wind blew the desk top open, and the spark settled on his papers and they began to burn, fanned by the wind.

As he watched the flames consume the papers, he struggled to break free and stop the conflagration that was consuming his testament. But, realizing the futility of his actions (he had chained himself too well), he laughed bitterly and cried out, “Eli, Eli! Lama sabachthani?”*

*Matthew 27:46, Mark 15:34, Psalm 22:1 “My God, My God, why have You forsaken me?”