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My beloved sister,
I have no doubt that I will never send this letter to you, as I must shield you and all others from the grim truth of what has transpired this night. You have taken in the tale of the creature who I now see always stalked and haunted this venture.You have walked alongside our sick storyteller, just as I have, though you are many miles away, and absorbed its grief and abhorrence. But this...this night, I have witnessed things that would forever mar a mind even as tenacious and shrewd as yours. Still, though this paper may be burned before the ink is dry, I long for a companion to help me organize my racing thoughts. The thought of you gives me hope, dear sister, and so it is with you in mind that I recall for the last and only time the fate of my friend Frankenstein.
Last evening, shortly after retiring for the night, I penned the last words and breath of Frankenstein with tears in my eyes. That part, no doubt, you will receive, and you will be convinced that he succumbed to a tragic but peaceful death aboard our vessel. Great God, would that it were still so simple!
The body was left in his sickbed for the night, covered in a solemn sheet, as we officers resolved to decide in the morning whether it would be nobler to return his remains to his family, should they be located, or give him to the sea. It was just as I sat finishing my letter to you that I was stirred from my trance by the most unnerving sounds coming from the room where the remains lay. At first, I thought another crewman must have grieved our friend as deeply as I, for I took the groaning sounds to be sobs by the bedside. But when I drew closer, I heard the unmistakable rattle of death that emanated from Frankenstein’s throat in his last hours.
Could it be? I hardly dared to hope. Could it be that Frankenstein had not fully slipped from us, but rather fell into a catatonia from which he had now woken?
I crept into the hall and chanced a peek through the door, slightly ajar. Though it was dark save for a sliver of moonlight, I could see clearly that there were two silhouettes: one, that of Frankenstein prone on the bed, and the other like no man’s silhouette I had ever seen before. I knew at once it was the creature Frankenstein had spoken of. He was truly towering, over seven feet tall and as broad-shouldered as a circus strongman, and I saw that Frankenstein had made no exaggeration. He wore the furs and leather of the locals, and as he lowered his great seal hood, his profile was grim and hideous. When man encounters a face that is distinctly human or distinctly beast, he can come to terms with it; it is the in-between that shakes him to the core. Though it pains me to confess it, I was frozen with terror, frozen as the ice around our boat that doomed our mission.
The death rattle breathing sounded again. My hunch was correct--it was the lungs of Frankenstein that struggled to expel air once again. He was alive, if I can call such a state living. The creature hunched over him, and I saw the tools of a doctor dwarfed in his massive hand, glinting in the moonlight.
Now this I cannot even put down into words, Margaret, though they are being written only to burn. It cannot be repeated. It cannot be chanced. You may recall that Frankenstein said he would never share his secret to reviving the dead. Having seen it with my own eyes, I now know this secret. Though I hungered for it at Frankenstein’s mention, I understand now that it must never be shared. I will be its sole carrier, and if God is good, it will go to my permanent grave with me.
At the peak of my horror, the ship suddenly underwent one of its jolting shifts in the ice, causing the door to the room to be thrown open, revealing the creature fully to me and I to him.
How can I describe his face? It was true what Frankenstein had said, about the wide-mouthed grimace and gray-tinged skin and unhealed scars from where he was stitched together in the laboratory. But his eyes...his eyes had to be seen to be understood. They were yellow and clouded over, like those of a dead man’s, but they were lit from within by the fire of unmistakable life, intelligence, and emotion. That emotion upon seeing me was shock, then rage, then a sort of bitter satisfaction that I continue to turn over and over in my mind.
“You see, Frankenstein?” he said, looking at me but not addressing me, in a voice that was gravelly and shredded from underuse. “Your friend has come to witness your moment of damnation. No doubt you’ve told him your wretched tale, and now he will see that you, not I, have been the monster to be feared all along.”
Frankenstein could not or would not speak, but on his face there was an agony I had not seen even in the most haunting parts of his story or the moments leading to his demise. His eyes shone with pleading, but we both knew my efforts to help him would be futile. Have you witnessed, sweet Margaret, the final moments of an injured animal begging for death?
The demon continued, “There was a time, my old friend and creator, that I pitied you; I abhorred myself above all other things in this world you brought me into. I pitied your fate of torment, and I mourned all the bodies that lay strewn along the path of our journey together. But then, one night as I lay stalking you here in your sickbed--oh yes! it was always I, never a figment of your addled guilt--I glimpsed the journal of your companion here.
Not only did you dare for happiness, for the companionship you cruelly denied me, but you had the brazenness to leave behind a fiction that absolves you. You thought you might rest easy in the sweet release of death, having no one but I, exile of mankind, to know of your true nature? Frankenstein, you are a fool.”
At last, though I know not how, I found my voice.
“Wretch!” I cried. “Your words of silver do not convict me. Was your bloodthirst not satisfied by the countless innocents you have slain? Did you feel so denied of your justice that you would commit the same evil act upon your creator as he did unto you, so that you could kill him again yourself? A coward--I call you a coward, to slaughter a man already once dead!”
And then the creature did the most terrifying thing he could, more terrifying than charging me with murder in his eyes: his rotting lips split into a hideous smile as he threw his head back in laughter.
“You think I mean to kill Frankenstein? That I would employ such evils only to send him back into death’s embrace? No, stranger, this is not the fate of your friend. When I said I abhorred myself for the murders of these many years, I spoke truly. I shall never shed another drop of humankind’s blood, not even yours. You must live on, you see, for if there is to be any account of the life of the scientist and his creation, it must be complete.”
The creature took Frankenstein in his arms, slung his leather bag of instruments around his shoulders, and walked to meet me at the doorframe. No more than an inch from my trembling body, he filled the space entirely, ducking his head to get through. Before he bore away into the night forever, the last thing he said was this:
“At last, I have the friend and companion of my own kind I so longed for! And no one else need be killed, nor any body of an innocent person defiled. Frankenstein, your broken promises have indebted you, and now the debt will be paid in full.”