Our Hideous Progeny, page 24
As I packed my things to leave, however, I heard another splash behind me. It was the Creature again, and in its mouth – delicate as anything – it held one of my pencils.
‘Oh,’ I breathed. I dropped to my hands and knees at the edge of the pool. The pencil, when I took it from the Creature, was wet and slightly dented by its teeth, but that did not matter. ‘You brought it back – for me?’
In answer, it merely blinked, its peculiar sideways eyelids darting across its eyes and back. I laughed and, to my surprise, found my own eyes welling with tears.
‘You’re . . . real, aren’t you?’ I whispered. A nonsense thing to say, but it simply tumbled out of me. ‘You’re really here. You know me.’
It pulled away, vanishing back into the water with nary a ripple. It did not return any more of my pencils, but I did not care. For a long while, I simply sat beside the water, spilling over with pride. What a beautiful, brilliant, marvellous thing! All at once, my anxiety of the past few weeks seemed to evaporate, the urge to keep the Creature secret overridden by the urge to tell someone of the miracle that had just occurred – that it had recognized me, thought of me, shown intelligence and care.
And in that moment, I knew precisely who that someone must be.
BEFORE I COULD lose my nerve, I ran back to the house and up the stairs, to where Maisie’s room lay. I rapped on her door, a giddy little syncopated sound. When her muffled ‘Come in!’ sounded through the door, I sprang inside, taking her hands in mine – they fitted so perfectly, how could I not? – and whispered:
‘I have something to show you. In the boathouse.’
‘Oh!’ Her eyes grew wide, her face lighting up in excitement. ‘But . . . are you sure? Are you allowed?’
For a moment, I was baffled. ‘Allowed? By whom – Henry?’
‘No, by . . . well, I don’t know! Whoever it is that has had you so bound to secrecy. Parliament? Scotland Yard?’
I held a hand over my mouth to stifle my laughter. ‘No, nothing like that! Come, you’ll see.’
We slipped out into the evening. Clarke was already in bed, and Henry dozing by the fire, so we would not be noticed as long as we returned before he awoke. A hazy blanket of mist had settled on the garden, and Maisie and I tiptoed across the grass like ponies, lifting our skirts to keep them dry.
‘Here it is!’ I cried once we were inside, unable to contain myself any longer. I thrust the lamp I had been carrying into her hands and strode forward.
‘Here what is? I can’t see anything.’
‘You will in a minute. Bring the light over here.’ I sat by the edge of the water, folding my skirts beneath me. Carefully, I drew my pencil from my pocket and dropped it into the water.
‘What am I looking for?’
‘Shh, just wait.’
Ever so slightly, the surface rippled. I could see the Creature’s silhouette down below, though one might easily have mistaken it for a shadow in the lamp’s flickering light – until it rose from the water with a mighty splash and set its head upon my lap.
‘Oh!’ I cried. I was soaked through, though I couldn’t bring myself to be cross about it in the slightest – for there it was, with a pencil once again gripped in its teeth and its head upon my lap. It might have been an accident, for all I knew, but I was touched regardless. Its skin was knobbly and uneven beneath my fingertips as I ran my hand up its snout, over its head, along the neat lines of stitching around its eyes.
‘You clever thing! I know I said earlier there were no more fish for you, but I think you deserve some after that.’ I turned to ask Maisie if she would pass me the bucket of fish scraps in the corner but, seeing the look on her face, the words died on my lips.
‘What is it?’ she said, her voice so quiet that I could barely make out the words.
‘Well, that’s what I was trying to show you. Come here and—’
‘What is it?’
The grand explanation I had practised for so long in my head was gone. I faltered. ‘It’s . . . do you remember me telling you about the ancient reptiles? Ichthyosaurs, mosasaurs, plesiosaurs?’
She stared at me as if I were speaking a foreign language. Her eyes darted quickly to the Creature and back, as though she couldn’t bear to look at it for too long. I wished suddenly that we had not made its teeth quite so sharp, its eyes quite so shining.
‘You said those went extinct thousands of years ago. Why does it have . . . God, Mary, why is it covered in stitches?’
‘Well, that’s precisely it, isn’t it! We had to make our own. My uncle – my great-uncle, that is – he was a man of science and . . . I had no idea, but I found some of his letters, and he said that he’d gone to . . . to cemeteries and the like, and . . . It was an experiment. He wanted to see if he could restore life, build a new sort of human, but we didn’t use humans, we used—’
‘You made this out of dead things?’ Maisie cried.
‘Yes, but . . .’ I scrambled for something, anything that would stop her looking at me with that awful expression on her face, that mask of shock and horror. ‘They’re not dead any more!’
‘You think that is better?’ She was nearly yelling now, her back pressed against the door, and I worried that someone in the house would hear. I rose to my feet, gently sliding the Creature back into the water, and went to take her hands. She snatched them away.
‘Maisie, please—’
‘This is wrong! It’s wrong, it’s unnatural!’ she gasped. ‘Good God, look at it, all those stitches . . . Can’t you see? It’s a mockery of—’
‘Of what? The natural order?’ My hands were shaking now, as well as my voice. Milling my hurt to anger, as I always did. ‘What is the natural order, anyway? The tendency of things to rot and die and . . . and hurt? Is medicine unnatural, then? Is this not just the natural progression of medical science, one thing to another?’
‘Months,’ she carried on. She did not seem to have heard a word I’d said. ‘You’ve been here for months, a year, and all this time . . . I thought that you couldn’t tell me, that you were doing something good and important and noble, but this is why you never told me, isn’t it? You knew it was awful!’
‘No! Maisie, I never meant to keep anything from you, I just . . .’ But even I did not know how to finish that sentence. I had meant to keep it from her, after all; and this was precisely why, I realized. I had been so afraid of what she might think, too afraid even to admit the possibility that she would not like it, terrified of turning around once more – as I had all those years ago, on the beach by the Needles – and seeing the face of the girl I adored twisted in disgust.
And I had been right to be afraid.
‘I ought to . . .’ She threw her hands up in the air. I wondered what she was thinking she ought to do. Throw us out? Have the boathouse torn down, and the Creature chased out into the firth?
‘Maisie—’ I said again, casting her name like a rope out to sea, desperate to catch her again. But the look she shot me then – so awfully, humiliatingly familiar – was enough to stop me in my tracks.
‘Don’t,’ she said quietly. ‘Just don’t.’
21
I have no friend, Margaret: when I am glowing with the enthusiasm of success, there will be none to participate my joy; if I am assailed by disappointment, no one will endeavour to sustain me in dejection.
*
‘Man,’ I cried, ‘how ignorant art thou in thy pride of wisdom! Cease; you know not what it is you say.’
— MARY SHELLEY, Frankenstein
THAT WAS THE last I spoke to Maisie for quite some time.
I had never been on this side of the coin. With Henry, I always knew that it would be he who cracked first; and moreover, it was nearly always he who had done something wrong. Here, it was . . . well, I still hesitated to say that it was I who’d done wrong. But I had upset her, at least. The thought nipped at me, buzzing around my head like a fly. I wavered back and forth as to whether I was self-righteous or repentant, angry at her for the way she’d reacted, or at myself for being foolish enough to show her.
‘You and Maisie are quarrelling, then?’ Henry asked when I joined him and Clarke in the parlour with our copy of Liebig’s Animal Chemistry, so that we might extract some quotes on the vital principle for our lecture. (Maisie had gone to bed with a chill, so for once we were not meeting in the boathouse, which Clarke complained stank of fish.) I stopped in the doorway, hands tight around the book’s spine.
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Because you’re usually off this time of evening doing cross-stitch or what-have-you. Is she too ill even for embroidery?’
I allowed myself a sigh. Weekend evenings such as this, it was true, I spent with Maisie – though it was reading we did together. I had not cross-stitched since I was sixteen.
‘Usually we do, yes. While you and Clarke are secreted in a cupboard playing . . . what likely story is it now? Snip, snap, snorem?’
‘Ladies, ladies,’ said Clarke. ‘If you’re quite finished, I have news to report.’ He held up a letter. ‘You’ll be pleased to know I’ve heard back from Mr Young. He says they have just such a carriage, and assures me there should be no problem with our borrowing it for a spell next month.’
The problem of how we were to move the Creature from its current location in order to present it had been a puzzle from the start. After a great many ridiculous ideas, we settled upon the very simplest: a wheeled tank, drawn by horses. This, we decided, would be far gentler on the Creature than travel by rail, and more private than by steamer (which Henry abhorred anyway, being terribly prone to seasickness). Henry claimed that he had seen just such a vehicle years ago, used to wash away debris from the street after a flood. And so Clarke had written to his ‘good friend’ Mr Young – was every man in Britain his good friend? – who worked as the Superintendent of Cleansing in Glasgow, to ask if his department possessed such a thing.
‘What does he ask in return?’ I queried, ever wary of Clarke’s innumerable friends.
‘Oh, nothing.’ He glanced through the letter, then shot Henry a pompous little smile. ‘Though I daresay a small donation to the department wouldn’t be out of order. What do you say, Henry? What shall I put you down for?’ He made a grand show of remembering. ‘Ah – that’s right. Forgive me, I forgot. No matter. I’ll just put something in your name. What’s another ten pounds on top of everything else?’
‘HERE WE ARE; I have your dinner! Now—Oh, what’s the matter? Not your favourite?’ I knelt down by the side of the pool, grimacing at the scraps of fish the Creature had just spat back into the water. ‘I know. But the cod didn’t look too good today; I suspect it’s the same batch they had out in the sun all day yesterday.’
Eventually, after much coaxing, it ate some haddock, though it flatly refused to come and rest its head upon the side when I clapped my hands, as I was trying to teach it to do; I supposed it felt it hadn’t been given a good enough incentive. Henry kept saying that if I insisted on training it like a dog, I really ought to withhold its food until after it had done its tricks – but I did not want to think of them as tricks. I did not want to wonder, every time it heard my clapping and came to greet me, whether it truly wanted to see me or if it was merely hungry.
‘Want to have a look outside, do you?’ I asked, seeing it nose against the wooden doors. Reaching through the net, which covered both the water and some feet above it, I undid the latch and pushed the doors open. Clarke and Henry would froth at the mouth if they saw me do this, but the net rose up so high – and the traffic on the firth was so far away – that I did not think there was any real risk in it. I watched as the Creature rested its snout in a square of the net, blinking in the narrow strip of sunlight that shone through the doors. I thought for a moment it might be basking, but when I sat down in the shade at the edge of the pool, it made a keening sound and swam over to put its dripping head in my lap instead.
‘There we go. Is the sun too strong for your eyes?’ I murmured, chuckling. I looked out across the firth, stroking the thin ridges of scales that ran along its brows. It was a bright and beautiful day, spring as I had not quite seen it in Inverness, the year before having been an unusually rainy one. The seabirds had returned in their clamouring thousands; heather blossomed on the hills, cowslips and dog violets upon the lawn; the sky shone blue through scattered clouds. It was beautiful – and yet, none of it affected me as I thought it should. There had been little to do lately, only waiting for arrangements to be made and replies to arrive, and I found myself listless. I spent long hours with the Creature, telling it my woes like a shepherd gone too long without human company. I took walks along the shore, down the same winding paths I had walked with Maisie once. I plucked buttercups and whitlow grass from the gaps in the rocks, fashioning them into tiny bouquets, only to drop them by the wayside on my return.
Occasionally, I took one to Maisie’s door instead. She had been ill for nearly a fortnight now – at first with a fever, which had worried me terribly, and then with a bout of her usual aches and pains. Her new doctor had said it was simply the result of the stress of recovery. She was not going to die, he had assured me on his last visit – and it had embarrassed me that he had felt compelled to say so, that I was so obvious in my worry, standing there wringing my hands like a fishwife awaiting the return of her husband from sea. It embarrassed me further still how relieved I was at his words; I had not been able to stop thinking, those two awful weeks, The last thing we would have ever done was fight.
I heaved a sigh, staring out at the distant shapes of boats upon the water. The Creature, perhaps sensing my glum mood, whined again and slid back into the pool.
‘Sorry, dear – it isn’t you. Here, look.’ I stood, squeezing the water from my dress – a pointless effort, really; it had been ruined long ago – and took a handful of pencils from my pocket. I had had to buy a new set in Inverness to replace the ones that had fallen into the pool, and so I thought I might as well let the Creature have the old ones, swollen and dented with toothmarks as they were. I held one against the water and waved it about, sending ripples racing across the surface. The Creature went absolutely still, its pupils widening.
‘Aha, you’ve spotted it!’ I grinned, holding the pencil like a dart. ‘Are you ready? There . . . go!’
The Creature darted forward and snapped it up with impressive speed. As it swam in circles about the pool, gnashing the pencil between its teeth, I took out my sketchbook. Although the diagrams for the lecture were long since complete, inked and rolled up in the corner of the under-stairs cupboard, I found I could not stop drawing the Creature. There was some subtle aspect of its likeness that I had not yet managed to capture, no matter how many portraits I drew. It inspired a kind of chill; the same odd thrill of primal fear that cries, Run, run! when the shape of a wolf or a tiger appears through the trees. Perhaps it is strange to say so, but that was one of my favourite things about our Creature. There is something romantic about feeding a predator from the palm of your hand, I think – a creature which might bite you if it chooses, but which chooses not to. But how does one set all that down on paper? How does one turn such awful beauty to lead and ink on a page?
It occurred to me that the very awfulness I loved so much was probably what had disturbed Maisie so deeply. I had thought us alike, she and I. I had thought that she of all people, who plucked worms from the dry ground after the rain and tossed them back into the soil, who read tales of murderers and highway robbers, would understand me. But instead I had found, yet again, that I did not know her at all.
And here, too, was another worry; for if Maisie could not love the Creature, then who would? The Royal Society would appreciate it, surely, for its scientific fascination – but the public? Henry and I had talked before, in that distant way of ideas that are so outlandish they may as well be dreams, of setting up our very own Geological Islands. An array of living, breathing fossils, each with its own enclosure, a zoo of the prehistoric. I had imagined an audience ooh-ing and aahing, children clapping in glee as the Creature fetched batons from the lake, our debts paid and our legacy secured. But after witnessing Maisie’s reaction, this image had begun to wither in my mind. Now I could only imagine it as a sort of freak show – spectators transfixed with horror, children crying in fright, youths sneaking in after dark to shoot peas at the Creature’s head. The very thought made my heart ache. I would never allow such a thing to happen, I thought fiercely; if I had to vet each visitor myself, if I had to keep it trapped in the boathouse for ever, I would.
Something nudged my leg then, and I gasped – but it was only the Creature, of course. I had not heard it creep up on me, it had been so silent. It lifted its head from the water and nudged its snout against my foot again, the wet pencil in its mouth leaving smudges of graphite on the hem of my dress.
‘Oh, you frightful thing,’ I murmured as I reached forward and took the wet pencil from between its teeth. ‘You beautiful, unnatural thing.’
‘SO: TO THE Edinburgh Geological Society on the twenty-third of May . . .’
‘The twenty-fourth.’
‘The twenty-fourth. Then the Geological Society of London on the twenty-first of June—’
‘Owen’s reading a paper then, too.’
‘Oh, good! I cannot wait to see his face! Are we doing the Royal Society of Edinburgh as well?’
‘No, they broke for summer at the end of April. And in any case, Sir Thomas Brisbane wrote back to call us “stark raving mad”, I believe were his exact words. I wonder what he will say when we read at the Royal Society proper.’
