Peter Ackroyd - The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

“Now you see my handiwork,” I said.

He came in, holding up a lamp, and stood before us.

“Behold the creature. This is what I have made.”

“Where?”

“Here. Before you.”

“There is no one here,” he said.

“Have you lost your wits? See here. Beside me. Here he sits.”

“There is nothing beside you, except an empty chair.”

“Nothing? I do not believe you. I know you lie.”

“Why should I lie, Victor?”

“To deceive me. To betray me. To enrage me.”

“There is nothing here. No one is with you. There is no creature.” He walked over to my electrical engines. “This is sad stuff, Victor.”

“What are you saying? Tell me this then. Tell me who killed Harriet and Martha?”

He looked intently at me. “I do not know who killed them.”

“There now. You have no answer.”

“You have lived in your imagination, Victor. You have dreamed all this. Invented it.”

“How so?”

“Perhaps you wished to rival Bysshe. Or Byron. You had longings for sublimity and power.”

“Enough. You are filling me with despair.”

“And what evil you may have done!” He paused for a moment. “What has happened to Fred?”

“Who is Fred?” the creature asked me in a whisper.

I did not know how to respond. How could I explain the disappearance of the child who had loved me? How could I say that his body was to be found in the limepit by the foreshore?

Polidori looked at me and then he asked: “Did you destroy Fred also?”

“I said enough!”

I sprang at him. I lunged forward and destroyed him. No, not I. The creature tore him to pieces with his bare hands.

Then we wandered out, the creature and I, into the world where we were taken up by the watchmen.

Given to me by the patient, Victor Frankenstein, on Wednesday November 15, 1822.

Signed by Fredrick Newman, Superintendent of the Hoxton Mental Asylum for Incurables.

PETER ACKROYD is a master of the historical novel: The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde won the Somerset Maugham Award; Hawksmoor was awarded both the Whitbread Novel of the Year and the Guardian Fiction Prize; and Chatterton was short-listed for the Booker Prize. His most recent historical novel is The Fall of Troy. He is also the author of London : The Biography, Shakespeare: The Biography, Thames: The Biography, and Ackroyd’s Brief Lives series.