“So here you are, my tormentor! Traitor! How dare you sit in the sunshine, while I live in darkness and despair!” It was Adam. Although I think now that my father should have named him Lucifer. In his pride and fury, he reminded me of the fiend himself.
My father rose and stumbled back. I screamed, thinking he might fall. We were sitting close to the edge of the cliff, with a view of another island across the firth and the waves crashing below. But he found his footing. I remember him standing there, against the blue sky, towering above me although really he was a foot shorter than I am.
“You cannot have her,” were the first words out of his mouth.
“Cannot?” said Adam. “She is mine. You created her for me, at my command. And now you dare tell me what I cannot have? Remember, Frankenstein—the lives of your family are in my hands. I have killed William—shall I also kill Ernest, and your beloved Elizabeth?”
“No, no,” said my father, putting his hands to his head. “Let me think, give me time to think . . .”
“You’ve had all the time you deserve,” said Adam. “You,” he said to me. “Come with me. You were created for me, to be my companion and mate. We shall go off to some desolate corner of the Earth, where we shall live out our miserable existence together.”
“I am not a you,” I said. “I am Justine, and I am a rational creature, capable of determining my own actions. I have no desire to go to some desolate place, nor yet to be miserable. I can guess who you are—my father told me that before me, he created a creature, deformed and malicious. You are that creature, are you not? And now you say I was created at your command. That may be true, but no promise my father made to you before my birth can bind me. I am capable of reasoned thought, and therefore free, so says Monsieur Rousseau. By your threats, you have already proven yourself unworthy of such as I am. I do not choose to accompany you.”
Adam stared at me in astonishment. “You have been educating her, reading and discussing with her. As you never did with me! Now I see the full extent of your cruelty, Frankenstein! You created her to mock me, to taunt me with the love I should have had, which you intend to keep from me forever! You rejected me as your son, and she has rejected me as her mate. At your command, no doubt!” He lunged at my father. I stepped between them, attempting to thwart his attack, but he was stronger than I was. He thrust me aside as though I were made of straw. And then I saw his hands around my father’s throat. I screamed again, and beat his back and arms with my fists, but to no purpose. I saw my father’s face go red, and then his body go slack, and there was nothing I could do to save him. I think there is no man on Earth stronger than I am, but Adam was not a man, not as ordinary men. He had the strength of Lucifer himself. In a moment, my father lay dead, strangled by the foul creature he had created. Adam lifted him up, then threw him, as though he had been a stone, into the churning waters below. And that was the last I saw of my father, Victor Frankenstein.
Adam turned to me. “Take me to your house,” he said. I led him to our cottage, farther down the cliff, where a hillock gave some protection from the wind.
And so began a period of my life that—I do not wish to dwell upon. For months, we lived as man and wife. I did what he bade me—the housework, preparing our food. Soon, we ran out, and although we had money, neither of us could take the boat to Mainland. He told me with what fear and cruelty he had been treated, how even children had pelted him with rocks. He was certain we would meet with a similar reception. Instead, he foraged among the hills, bringing back herbs and roots, sometimes an entire sheep stolen from a herd.
He spent his days looking at an atlas that was among my father’s books, determining where we should go. To the wilds of South America? To parts of Africa where the natives had never yet seen a white man? The Arctic? He wanted a place where we could live undisturbed and raise our children—for he wished us to have children. He did not know it was impossible, that in the process of assembling me, my father had removed the organ popularly believed to cause hysteria. From an excess of caution, I suppose. I am like any other woman, but—I cannot bear a child. I feared Adam too much to tell him the truth, and seemed to accept his plans. What else could I do? He was stronger than I, and ever watchful.
He tried, I think as well as he could, to make me love him. In the evenings, we sat by the fire and he would talk to me—of philosophy, history, literature. Indeed, if he had not been my father’s murderer and my captor, I might have been charmed. He was as intelligent as my father, perhaps more so, and I could speak with him on many topics. I learned much, during those conversations. But always, as the fire burned down, he would say, “It is late, Justine. Come to bed.” And I would remember that I was not a free woman.
I knew that if I left while he was foraging for our food, he would follow me. He had the senses of an animal, and I was the only one of his kind—his mate. If necessary, he would follow me to the ends of the Earth.
“We are man and wife,” he would say to me.
“Not in the sight of God,” I would say. “Not until we are united by a minister.” And then he would rage against religion, like a freethinker and radical.
Lying beside him at night, in the bed where my father had once lain, I thought of throwing myself off the cliff. After all, I was already dead. Surely God would not punish me? But then I thought, What if I am still Justine Mortiz, with an immortal soul? A soul that belongs to God and not myself, which will one day reunite with its true Creator? No, I could not kill myself. Not while I believed myself to still be God’s creature.