Chapter 1: A Haunted Homecoming
The carriage wheels crunched to a halt on the gravel, the sound impossibly loud in the evening quiet. Elizabeth Lavenza smoothed the skirts of her travelling dress and took a steadying breath before the footman opened the door. The air that rushed in was cold, carrying the scent of damp earth and, underneath it, the faint, sweet-rot smell of decaying leaves.
Frankenstein Manor rose before her, a jagged silhouette against a bruised twilight sky. Its windows were dark, save for a flickering, sickly glow in one of the ground floor rooms. It did not look like a house waiting to welcome anyone home.
She climbed the steps, each one worn smooth in the center by generations of footsteps that now felt like ghosts. Before she could lift the heavy knocker, the great oak door groaned inward.
Victor stood in the doorway, framed by the gloom of the entrance hall. The light from the single gas bracket inside did him no favors. It carved deep shadows under his cheekbones and hollowed his eyes, which seemed to look right through her before focusing with a jarring intensity. His black hair, once so carefully arranged, fell lank and unkempt around his shoulders.
“Elizabeth.” Her name was a breath, not a greeting.
“Victor.” She offered a smile that felt fragile on her lips. “I came as soon as I received you’re letter. About William.”
He didn’t move to let her in. He simply stared, his eyes tracing the line of her cheek, the curve of her neck, with a hunger that had nothing to do with affection. His fingers, pale and long, twitched at his side as if fighting the impulse to reach out and seize her.
“You shouldn’t have come,” he whispered finally. The words were thin, strained. “This house… it is no place for you now.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s my home. And you are my brother.” She stepped forward, forcing him to give way or be touched. He flinched backward, allowing her across the threshold. The door shut with a definitive thud that echoed in the vast, cold space.
The grand hall was a tomb. A fine layer of dust blurred the surfaces of side tables. The marble floor was cracked, and the once-brilliant mirrors reflected nothing but more darkness. The air was stale, thick with the smell of cold stone and spent candle wax. Underneath it all was something else, a metallic tang, like old blood or rust.
“Where is everyone?” she asked, her voice too bright, too loud in the silence.
“Gone. Father and Ernest are in Geneva, managing affairs. The staff… I dismissed them. I required solitude.” He paced a few steps, a caged animal. His movements were jerky, unnatural. “They ask too many questions. They look too much.”
“Victor, you look ill.” She reached for his arm, but he spun away, putting the bulk of a carved chair between them.
“I am perfectly well! I am engaged in work of the utmost importance. Complex work. You wouldn’t understand.” He ran a hand through his hair, his gaze darting to the shadowed staircase. “You should retire. Your old room is prepared. It’s the only one fit for occupancy.”
“I didn’t travel for two days to be sent to bed like a child.” She kept her voice gentle but firm, the tone she used with nervous stagehands. “Tell me about William. The letter said only that he was found. It said nothing of how.”
Victor’s face contorted, a spasm of pure agony. He turned his back to her, shoulders hunched. “What is there to tell? He is gone. Taken from us. A precious life, snuffed out.” His voice broke. “The world is a cruel and random engine, Elizabeth. It grinds beautiful things to dust for no reason.”
“There is always a reason,” she said softly. “Was it illness?”
A harsh, dry sound escaped him. A laugh without humor. “Illness. Yes. A sickness of this world. A corruption.” He turned back, his eyes gleaming with a feverish light. “You sing of angels and love in your fine theaters. You do not know what walks in the dark just outside the candle’s glow. You have no idea.”
A cold finger traced its way down her spine. This was not grief. This was terror. “Victor, you’re frightening me.”
“Good.” The word was a whisper. “You should be frightened. Then you would leave. Please, Elizabeth. For the love you bear me, leave this place tomorrow. Forget this house. Forget me.”
“I will do no such thing.” She lifted her chin, the stage persona settling over her like armor. “I am here to help you. To share your grief. We are family.”
“Family.” He repeated the word as if it were a curse. His eyes devoured her again, lingering on the pulse at her throat. “Yes. You are. My most beautiful... sister.” He took a sudden, lurching step forward. “Do you ever think of that night? Before I left for Ingolstadt? In the garden. The things I said.”
Elizabeth’s breath caught. She remembered. The crush of his hands, the desperate, misplaced heat in his words. A confession that had felt less like love and more like possession. “Victor, that was a long time ago. We were children.”
“We are not children!” he shouted, the sudden volume making her jump. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “Forgive me. Forgive me. My nerves… they are not what they were.”
The silence that followed was thick and choking. From somewhere deep within the house, a door clicked shut. A faint, dragging sound echoed from the upper floors, like something heavy being pulled slowly across bare boards.
Victor’s head snapped up, listening. Every muscle in his body went taut. “You must go to your room,” he hissed, all urgency now. “Now, Elizabeth. Do not wander. Do not leave it until morning.”
“What was that noise?”
“Nothing! Rats. The house settling.” He was herding her toward the stairs, his hands hovering near her back but not touching, as if she were made of fire. “Promise me. Promise you will not leave your room.”
She climbed the first few steps, turning to look down at him. He stood at the bottom, a figure carved from shadow and desperation, the flickering gaslight making his face a shifting mask of anguish and yearning.
“I promise,” she said, not knowing if it was a lie.
He nodded once, sharply, then turned and vanished down the dark corridor toward his study, leaving her alone in the cavernous hall. The dragging sound did not come again. But as she ascended the rest of the staircase, the silence felt worse. It felt watchful.
Her room was as she remembered, yet utterly strange. The linens were fresh, but a film of dust coated the dressing table. A single candle burned, casting jumpy shadows that made the floral wallpaper seem to writhe. She placed her valise on the bed and went to the window, looking out over the neglected gardens.
A movement caught her eye—a deeper shadow detaching itself from the copse of trees at the property’s edge. It was large, and it moved with a strange, loping gait before melting into the darkness. An animal, perhaps. A stray dog. She shivered and drew the curtain.
Sleep was impossible. The house creaked and muttered around her. Victor’s face, his terrifying intensity, played behind her closed eyes. After an hour of listening to her own heartbeat, she lit her bedside candle and slipped out into the hallway.
The manor was a puzzle of memory and dread. She moved silently, the hem of her nightdress whispering against the floorboards. She knew where she was going. Victor’s old study, where as children they would read by the fire.
The door was ajar. A sliver of wan light cut across the corridor floor. She pushed it open.
The room was chaos. Books lay sprawled like fallen birds. Papers covered every surface, scrawled with diagrams that made no sense—musculature, bone structures, things that looked electrical. Chemical bottles, some empty, some holding cloudy fluids, stood in ranks on a side table. The air smelled of ozone and vinegar and something profoundly organic, like a butcher’s shop on a hot day.
The air smelled of ozone and vinegar and something profoundly organic, like a butcher’s shop on a hot day.
Elizabeth held her breath, the candle trembling in her hand. Her eyes scanned the frantic scrawl on the papers. Not anatomy, not quite. It was anatomy reassembled, a grotesque puzzle. Notes on galvanic response, on the preservation of tissue, on sourcing “materials of sufficient scale and freshness.” A receipt, tucked under a alembic, was from a medical supply company in Edinburgh. The listed items made her stomach turn.
Then she saw the sketchbook.
It lay open, a charcoal rendering so chilling her blood seemed to slow. It was a study of a hand, but monstrously large, the tendons like coiled ropes, the fingers ending in thick, crude nails. The page was smudged, as if Victor had sketched it in a frantic, sweating hurry. Beneath it, another drawing. A face, or the suggestion of one. Seams. The artist had drawn seams.
A cold draft licked the back of her neck, making the candle flame gutter and the shadows leap. The heavy velvet curtain by the far bookcase shifted, just an inch.
She didn’t notice. Her attention was fixed on a smaller, neater notebook. William’s name was on the cover. With numb fingers, she opened it.
It was Victor’s journal from the weeks before the tragedy.
“The specimen proves resistant to synergistic bonding. Degradation begins within hours. I must find a purer source.”
“The grave is a foul classroom, but the only one that will suffice.”
“My dreams are of the charnel house. Elizabeth’s face floats before me, a lily on a black pond. She must never know the mud from which I dredge.”
The entries grew more fractured.
“It breathes. God help me, I have made it breathe. The sound is a bellows in a tomb.”
“It is gone. I have unleashed a plague upon my own house. I heard it moving in the storm. A shape in the lightning. It understands. It hates.”
The final entry, dated the day before William was found, was a single, shaken line:
“It has asked for a companion. It has mentioned her name.”
A floorboard creaked, a soft, protesting sigh from the corner of the room near the curtain.
Elizabeth remained oblivious, her mind reeling, clawing at the edges of a truth too horrific to hold. She flipped another page. A lock of fine, pale hair—William’s hair—was pasted onto the paper. Beneath it, Victor had written just two words, over and over, until the nib had torn through the sheet.
My fault. My fault. My fault.
Behind the curtain, in the deep narrow gap between the bookcase and the wall, a pair of eyes watched. They were watery, jaundiced, but infinitely sorrowful. They followed the graceful line of her arm as she reached to turn the page, traced the shimmer of her blonde hair in the candle glow, the way her pale blue eyes widened in dawning horror. She was a vibration of light and color in this world of dust and decay and hidden, shameful things.
The thing in the shadows did not move. It held its own foul breath. The scent of her—clean linen, rosewater, a living warmth—was an agony. It was a memory of a world before the spark, before the rejection, before the endless, lonely dark. A sound built in its mismatched chest, a pathetic echo of the longing it felt when Victor had shown it portraits of angels and spoke of his radiant Elizabeth. It wanted to step forward. It wanted the light to fall upon her face and for her to look at it, just once, without screaming.
But it remembered the child by the lake. The shock, the revulsion, the shrill cries that had ended in terrible silence. This woman was that child’s family. She would not see a lonely wretch. She would only see the murderer.
The curtain trembled as a large, scarred hand, just like the one in the sketch, reached out. It stopped an inch from the velvet fabric, hovering. The fingers, crude and powerful enough to splinter oak, curled inward in a fist of pure restraint.
It would not reveal itself. To be seen by her would be a new kind of death. It let the curtain fall back into place, retreating deeper into the blackness, leaving only the faintest impression on the heavy fabric.
Elizabeth snapped the journal shut, a sharp sound in the silent room. The monster was gone, a shadow among shadows. She stood alone, clutching the damning book to her chest, the chill from the stone floor seeping through her slippers and into her bones. The truth was here, in this room, in these papers. And it was worse, so much worse, than anything she could have imagined.
From somewhere below, a door slammed shut. Victor’s frantic voice echoed up the staircase, calling her name.