My Formaldehyde Darling; or, A Redress for the Female Creature
By S.M. Hallow
He once told me the story of Icarus was not a warning against ambition.
It was a warning against the limitations of wax.
☼
“Elizabeth,” says Henry.
I slice the scalpel down your throat, and the dead flesh butterflies open.
Beneath lay the secret cherry of your larynx, which once named me beloved. There, too, lay the trachea that gasped at my sweet touches. My incision cuts an aisle through the noose’s bruise.
“Elizabeth,” he says again.
The scalpel in my steady hand cleanly slits your windpipe. The scent of the preservatives scorches my nose; my head pounds with each chemical inhalation.
My stomach quivers but does not sicken.
“Elizabeth, it is nearing midnight,” he says.
“I can finish the work alone,” I say. “Sleep if you must.”
“Elizabeth,” he says. “For God’s sake—Elizabeth, look at me.”
I raise my eyes to find him in the flickering dark. Curls of his ragged hair stick up in every direction, teased there by ceaselessly worrying fingers. He always did love to worry, our Henry, but I doubt you ever saw him like this, with deep hollows hanging beneath the cratered moons of his eyes.
“I’ve already made an incision,” I say. “I’ll replace her trachea, then I shall rest.”
I do not know to whom this trachea belonged, but I thank this nameless stranger, robbed in death to lend you a new voice. What will you sound like, I wonder, as I stitch you back together, thread by delicate thread. Will I still thrill when you pull me close and whisper, against my ear, that you love me?
“We need to discuss this,” he says. “It’s taking too long.”
“I’m working quite swiftly tonight,” I say.
“I meant,” he says, “the… resurrection.”
Undulating candle flames rust the room. Poor electricity ebbs in the sconces. Wallpaper peels in rat-scratched patches and spiderwebs dangle in the corners. It was the first out-of-the-way room Henry found, the first no-questions-asked nightmare we could transform into our macabre workshop. A macabre workshop that would be more suitable than the first disaster Henry saw fail.
“It is taking longer than I hoped,” I admit, “but I will not repeat… his mistakes. Would you have been party to this, if you thought I were at all like him?”
“No,” he says at once.
“Then you must trust me,” I say. “Rest. And in the morning, we will be one day closer to restoring Justine to the life she deserves.”
If there is anything more he might say, he swallows it when I return to my work. He retreats, and relief edges into my shoulders now that you and I are alone again. Soon, my love, my dearest Justine, I promise. Soon ours will be the love that conquered death.
☼
Behind the closed door of the water closet, Henry vomits.
Meanwhile, I open your chest.
We learned anatomy with each other’s bodies. Sometimes I think I learned to count by kissing your fingers, by trailing my palm up your ribs. When you kissed me, I measured my own heart as it pulsed for you rabbit-fast. Now here I am, warring against time, replacing your liver with someone else’s, tucking it inside of you and sewing it in place, as if it were a hidden pocket in a skirt.
This work can drive one mad. Tend to the liver and the stomach starts to go. See to the calf and the shoulder withers. By the time you’ve fixed the fingertips, the tongue is rife with rot. Labyrinthine, in a way: around every corner, another horror, with no way to the exit.
Henry emerges from the water closet, wiping bile from his ashen lips. He says, in a tattered voice, “I cannot do this anymore.”
My hands still in the midst of suturing your abdomen.
“But we aren’t finished,” I say.
“It is time for us to surrender, Elizabeth.”
No, I think, but my voice won’t come. No, don’t take her from me again.
It was Henry who told me this was possible. Henry who stole the notebooks and the diagrams. It was Henry who saw the original workshop, who found a place where we could replicate what had been done. All this time, every new organ, every piece of flesh, has been because he sought what I required from the charnel houses and delivered it.
“If you care about her,” I say, “don’t do this.”
“If you care about her,” he says, “then we must end this and bury her properly.”
“If you care about redemption,” I say, “we must see this through.”
I swallow hard.
“If you had told the judge what you knew,” I venture, “we would not be here now.”
He presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. A grimace twists his mouth, and his shoulders wrack with a sob. He knew of the daemon, glanced it in the shadows, fought it off with a torch. He listened to the mad rambles of its creator. If he suspected the true murderer, he said nothing until you were already swinging from the gallows.
Either you tell her or I will.
That was the ultimatum Henry gave him, and it was no mere bluff. When you died, Justine, I could not fathom a world without you in it, and Henry promised I would not bear your absence long. Now I promise you: we will not be apart much longer.
“This thing that motivates you to such lengths,” he says, and swallows— “Can it truly be called love?”
I soften. “Henry,” I say. “It can only be called love.”
He drags his hands down his face. His bloodshot eyes glisten. It is brutal work, and we were raised on the downy feathers and flower petals of all things sweet and delicate this world.
“For love, then,” he says.
As we work upon your body we speak of our memories, hoping each word may soak beneath your skin and remind you who you are. You are more than the girl whose mother couldn’t love her, who poor fortune thrust through our doorway. My aunt saw you as my mirror image, my perfect parallel, but that reduced you to my secondary, my spare. You are the girl who ran with me and Henry through the undulating fields of wildflowers, the girl who rolled her eyes at his poor attempts at poetry. You are the girl who held my hand in the rain as we ran through the storm-laden streets of Geneva back to my uncle’s home. You are the girl who danced on Henry’s arm every year at Christmastime, who winked at me across the hall. You are the girl who believed I deserved better than a fiancé who flew too close to the sun. You hated my fiancé long before he forgot who you were and what you were to me. You are the girl Henry and I loved.
You are the wax holding me together.
☼
A fly perches upon the open sphere of your eye. Henry bats it away while I work inside your chest. We are in the midst of our rough work when a fist pounds against the door.
My fingers freeze around your ribcage. When we sought out lodgings for our task, Henry delivered us to a cold, below-ground basement. No one has bothered us here. Even the landlady avoids meddling in our business, so foul is the stench of our quarter. My eyes rise to meet Henry’s. A question rises into my throat, budding with panic, but I dare not speak. The knocking comes again. Henry flinches.
“Elizabeth?” says the voice on the other side. A voice I know as well as my own. Deep, luxuriating, erudite. All the panic inside me transforms to rage, and a primal, crazed anger awakens in me.
“You didn’t,” I say, knowing he did.
The locked handle wobbles. “Henry, are you in there?”
“We needed help,” Henry confesses.
He abandons me to answer the door. In my hand, the scalpel blossoms with possibility. One lunge into his renal artery—but no. No. I inhale to disperse the idea like a cloud of dust. I inhale to make myself a different person. Your blood on my hands should mark a change in my autonomy, my capacity, yet the moment Victor Frankenstein breezes over the threshold, I am reduced to the shadow at his heels, the plaything, the pet.
“Elizabeth,” he says. “My first friend, my beloved. I’ve been so worried.”
To look at him is to look at Icarus as his wax body eclipses the sun.
To look at him is to look upon your death.
“Henry,” I say, “we do not need him.”
“Please,” says Henry, closing the door. “Please, just—to see it through. To end it.”
“We can do this without him.”
“I know that you can,” says Victor. “Of that I have no doubt.”
Of course he knows. It was the two of us, always, dissecting frogs and rabbits, pulling apart their soft bodies to learn what lurked within. Once, exploring the woods together as children, we came upon the vulture-stripped remains of a fox. We spent the afternoon observing what little meat was left, taking notes, admiring the scraps of its fur. Its skull still sits on my shelf at our home in Geneva, a token from another life. My aunt and uncle encouraged me to pursue his interests so that I would be his perfect match, his assistant, the mind he could pick when his grew dark with the tangles of self-doubt and despair. It was the two of us who peeled back the skin on this world, but only he made a wretched triumph of it.
“I did not come to undermine you, Elizabeth,” says Victor. “Nor to stop you. I came to beg your forgiveness for what I’ve done. What I’ve failed to do. Let me atone, Elizabeth.”
My jaw clenches. Atone. I think of you, Justine. I think of little William. Two dead, because of him and his pride. Yet here he stands, in his gentleman’s cravat and a frock coat, a wave in his hair, a plea in his eyes. What remains of this life if there is no mercy? What are the guilty to do if denied their chance at redemption?
“Very well,” I say, and swallow down the uneasy sense that I have betrayed you.
☼
Within days our workshop functions more smoothly, and the electricity—once a finicky uncertainty—runs with a humming guarantee. The rats, my Sisyphean nuisance, decrease in number. Jars containing liquid green as absinthe line the shelves, one brimming with eyes, another with ears, another fingers. Victor relieves Henry of the butcher and the graveyard, and returns with cases full of ice and fresh organs. While Henry ventures out of doors and into the bright new day to see if he can remember who he was before we were monsters, I pull out the ropes of your intestines, then sew a fresh coil inside of you.
Victor does not touch you. He does not try. He follows my instructions like a man assured his absolution lies in my hands; he hedges his suggestions, and I do not know if he condescends to me with this newfound desire for my approval or if he wishes to stroke an ego I do not have. Is this how a man makes amends? Or is this simply the face of the fallen Icarus—the Icarus blistered by melted wax, who has tasted the drowning sea?
Sometimes the careful way he catches my eye is enough to make me ache for him. Beneath my surges of sympathy, there is still the thorn wedged inside the nail bed: nothing he has suffered compares to your suffering. My flashes of tenderness are interrupted by stony resolve; I am water in the early spring, thawing and freezing between morning and evening as the earth vacillates between death and life. Would you forgive him, Justine? I would not say my feelings have advanced so far—but I understand him better than I like, having been raised beside him, my almost-brother, wetted down like clay and remolded until the shape of my soul echoed his. When I was born, I was my own; my love for him was trained into me until it split me apart.
I will credit him at least for the ways in which his foul expertise hastens our progress.
But he views you with the clinical objectivity that was trained into him during his years of study in Ingolstadt: to the academics and anatomists, a body is nothing more than a machine with parts that succeed or falter. To the poets, like Henry, and to the lovers, like me, a body is quite a bit more than that.
Ever your devoted surgeon, I remove your heart. I hold it in my hands for a long moment, this heart that I caused to race, this heart whose beating I helped to cease. Most of your organs I have simply discarded, but your heart—your heart I seal in a silver case, to keep forever, to give back to you when you wake. Together, Victor and I prepare your capillaries, your arteries, your veins.
“Tell me one thing,” I say. Victor wipes mercury from his hands with a rag that smells of turpentine. He raises his eyes to mine.
“How could you say nothing?”
I must hear him say it, if I am to be satisfied.
“I am a coward,” he confesses. Vindication swells inside me. So does disgust. “I was afraid.”
“You could have rendered all of this unnecessary if you’d spoken a single word.”
“I did not want to be correct. I did not want my wretched hands…” He pulls his lip under his teeth and lowers his gaze to your face. “I did not know what it would do, if I spoke against it. If it would kill a hundred more.”
“It,” I say. “Not he?”
Victor’s ashen eyes meet mine again. In the gaunt hollows of his cheeks, a hundred specters hang. “No.”
For the first time, he tells me the truth. A halted, stunted truth—a truth that darkens his underarms with sweat, a truth that makes his fingers quiver. A truth as raw as meat. Though Henry stole his notebooks and diagrams a long time ago, though this is a truth I already know, he confirms it, piece by piece, like relocating a bone into its joint. He tells me of the daemon, the wretch, the blasphemous creation he wrought, his upside-down Adam. He tells me of the night he brought it—him?—to life, just before Henry arrived and nursed him through the fever with all the fondness I’d expect. He tells me it was the fiend who killed William, who framed Justine. In that moment I approach the precipice of forgiveness, that glacial mountain, ancient and cold, and finally see a path forward. In that moment, I imagine how frightful it must have been for him to create something with the intent to undo his mother’s death only to stain his hands a deeper crimson. In that moment, I take Victor’s hand.
But for all he tells me, there is one thing he omits.
What his Adam asked of him.
☼
On the night of the season’s first violent thunderstorm, I submerge your body halfway into a tub of water.
And we wait—Victor, Henry, and I—until the thunder chokes out all other sound, until lightning spits across the sky like a bright insult. Then, and only then, as the gathering clouds signal apocalypse, does Victor pull the lever.
Electricity crackles across a series of metal wires. He draped them across the ceiling, anticipating this night, and attached their ends to you, to the tub of water. Water and electrical signals: who might have ever imagined our bodies and brains could be reduced to such simple materials? What easy work we must have been for a laughing God, and yet—
When you gasp your first breath, it is no less a miracle. My heart cracks open and I fall to my knees at your side, all my strength sapped, replaced by the satisfaction of nothing more than hope and grit.
Like a babe newly entering the world, you test your fresh set of lungs with a wail that could crumble the walls of Jericho. Your arms—stitched together at every joint—flail about, searching for the rim of the tub. I clasp your hand, and when you toss your head back, when your skull knocks against the tin, I call Henry to my side, and we raise you higher so you cannot hurt yourself.
“I am here, Justine,” I say. “My love, I am here.”
Agonized with rebirth, you writhe and the water sloshes. I anchor one arm across your clavicle, holding your head to my shoulder. My other hand clasps yours, though your fingers do not bend to caress mine. I did not expect a gentle awakening, but neither did I expect such torment. When I turn toward Victor in question, he smiles tightly and bows his head.
“Congratulations, Miss Lavenza,” he says. “You have accomplished a most remarkable feat.”
Remarkable.
Yes, my love. You are remarkable. So full of life, after being so cold, so inanimate. Tears spring to my eyes, and I tuck my face against the crown of your head, hiding my emotion and kissing your hair. All may be forgiven, and whatever happens next may be of our own design. There is no reason why we should not all be happy now; after all that we have done here together, it cannot be another way. What is the point of resurrection if not to pursue freedom?
Distantly, I am aware of the door slamming open. Of masculine voices whispering. Of Victor’s placating tones, and Henry’s sudden silence.
Yet I do not understand any of it until he looms over us, his shadow swallowing us in darkness. A hanging light swings behind his head, creating a fractured halo whose brightness burns my eyes.
To behold him is to behold your predecessor, imperfect yet immaculate—immaculate in the way Christ was immaculate, conceived by a single parent and given life with God’s methods. The macabre patchwork of his face. His jaundiced eyes. The rictus mouth stretched into a gruesome smile. A he, not an it, no matter Victor’s convictions. A monster of a man whose very countenance invites all to look upon my works, ye mighty—and rejoice what works might be achieved.
“My bride,” he says, in a gravel-rough hiss of satisfaction.
I hold you tighter. You are still screaming your way out of the grave; you are not here, not properly, and there is only me to shield you from William’s murderer, the beast who framed you. Victor and Henry’s silence may have killed you, but this daemon sent you to the gallows in his stead.
“Victor?” I call, but he does not come. He and Henry stand at a distance, each of them with their hands behind their backs, neither of them meeting my eyes.
“You must be Elizabeth,” says the daemon. “Do not worry. No harm shall come to you now.”
He bends down, and runs his fingers—stitched less expertly than yours—along your jaw.
“She is everything I have longed for,” he whispers, almost reverent. “A female of my own species, with the same defects.”
“Take her and go,” says Victor.
“What?” My stomach plummets into my knees. I snatch the daemon’s hand away from your cheek. “No—no, she is not yours.”
“We have an agreement,” Victor warns, before the daemon’s temper can flare to life. “A wife for a wife. Do not hurt mine and I will not hurt yours.”
It happens too fast: I pound his chest with useless fists, crying that he cannot have you, yet my hands are useless again. He lifts you from the tub, carrying you close to his chest the way any groom would carry his bride over a threshold. Henry, weakling milquetoast poet Henry, holds me back so that I cannot chase after you, and the creature, with those hands that strangled a child, absconds with you.
“No,” I sob, and it is Henry who restrains me while Victor slams a needle into my arm that makes the world bleed dark.
☼
If I had known Victor’s intentions.
If I had known why he wanted you alive.
The real reason.
What would I have done?
I think of Henry answering the door when Victor first arrived. I think of the scalpel in my hand. A hundred worlds permute from that moment: the world where I plunge the blade into Henry’s spine, then slice open Victor’s carotid. Or: the world where I hold a pillow over Victor’s face, and threaten Henry into silence. Or: the world where I hold a pillow over Victor’s face, and present his fresh meat as a gift to your body. Or: the world where I hold a pillow over Victor’s face, and dispose of him before Henry learns of my transgression.
In those worlds, I am a different Elizabeth, an Elizabeth whose brutal life made her brutal in return. In this world, the only brutality I ever knew was losing you. Maybe there is a world where I am clever, where I am quicker with my wit than with my forgiveness, where I do not sink so easily into old habits. In that sweetest world of all, I send Henry and Victor on a daylong errand, and in their absence, I revive you. In that world, we abandon the chamber of stone and gore. In that world, I steal you away to South America, to the Sahara, to the Arctic, to the widest and deepest pits of the Earth where no one will ever seek us, to a place where we will be together, where no man will use our bodies to make a bargain and pay a debt.
I lean my head against the back of the carriage seat. The rotations of the wheels upon the cobbled road vibrate through my still-throbbing temple. At Victor’s behest, we are driving straight back to Geneva, with orders not to stop. Victor and Henry sit on either side of me, keeping me away from the carriage doors, lest I try to escape.
I won’t try. I know what will happen to me if I do. No one will believe what we accomplished. Anything I say would be dismissed as the ramblings of a madwoman. Poor Elizabeth, Victor will coo. Shall we send you away to a place where you can rest and recover? And there I’ll stay, unless and until I agree to behave.
A full moon rises over the trees. Does he show you the moon? Does he sit with you under the stars, and remind you of their names? Does he touch your jaw, or tuck your hair behind your ear? I hope to God he does not. I can’t stand the thought of his hands reaching for you, as though you were his right. As though all your life amounted to was wifedom to a chimera.
“Please know, this is for the best,” says Henry.
“Don’t speak to me of what is best,” I snarl. How dare he speak of best. This is not best. It is a return to the softer world he craves, a normalcy that buries horror and pretends it does not exist. “You are a coward.”
But am I not the coward, Justine? Over and over I relive your first resurrected moments, which were our last moments together. My bride, he called you, before he even knew your name. Nameless himself, perhaps he did not realize such a thing carried immense value. And there I was—shocked stupid, too rattled to think of anything I might have done to save you. All those surgical tools, and I did not reach for a single one to fend him off.
I wish he’d killed me. I would have died trying to save you.
Now, whether I die two weeks or two decades from now, I will die Mrs. Victor Frankenstein.
☼
On my wedding night, as Victor locks the bedroom door, the perfume bottle begs me to break it and gut him with the shards. The hatpins in my drawers simmer with power; they beckon me, whispering possibilities. Femoral, subclavian, abdominal.
“You mustn’t be cross with me any longer, Elizabeth,” he says.
He touches a ringlet at my ear. I jerk away from him before he can tuck it away, before he can make me neat.
“It was to protect you,” he says. “Now that I have satisfied the daemon’s request, we are free to live as we ought to.”
“As we ought to.” My laugh is hollow as a skull. “You mean as you want to.”
“Elizabeth,” he says, four cloying syllables that entreat me to see reason, which, of course, means to see things his way, to capitulate, to break like a bone under the weight of him and heal myself in the shape he desires. “You have wanted to marry me since we were children. Should we not be happy now?”
Years ago, when he went to university and did not write me even once, somehow I still wanted him. Wanting him was my life’s purpose: Victor’s loneliness was the sole reason my aunt cared for me after my parents could not. My life was built around him; even once I fell in love with you, Justine, Victor was my duty, my expectation. By the time I was five I was promised; my wedding vows were practically sealed. Now I want to asphyxiate him when he falls asleep. Any pillow will suffice. Now I’m strong enough to do it, if he is foolish enough to stay the night with me.
“I will be happy when you rot,” I say.
“Elizabeth.” His sterner tone, now. The one that serves as my warning. “Don’t begin our marriage this way.”
“You began this, daemon.”
His eyes darken. A frown pulls at his mouth. He takes one step closer to me, and just as I brace for the slap, blood sprays across my cheeks. Victor’s heart, frenzied and rabbit-like, pulses inches outside of his chest. Crimson stains his groom’s wear, turns him sticky and shining in the candlelight. His grimace—of shock, of pain—lasts for only a moment before he slackens.
Like a scarecrow, he stands only because your arm uprights him.
Your arm burst through his chest. His heart in your palm.
“Strange,” you say. “I did not think he had one.”
Your new voice is deeper than before, and I melt upon hearing it. The pitch may differ, but the intonation is the same. Your fingers—how strong and agile they are!—squeeze his heart to pulp, with a slick sound of blood and muscle collapsing. When you drop it, it is no different than the meat scraps the dogs forage from the kitchen.
You remove your arm, and he falls, face first, into the heirloom carpet. While you gaze at him, my eyes never leave you. My miracle. My formaldehyde darling. How adept your musculature, how superior your stitches—in every aspect you are a marvel among marvels, my once and future love.
Made out of stronger stuff than wax and feathers. Born of my grief and my love. Look at you.
“I did the same to my mate,” you say.
“And Henry?”
“And Henry.”
You step closer. Tentative, at first. Inching, as though I’d bolt. I do not close the distance; I do not know if you want me to. With the finesse of a jungle cat, you roll toward me, and take my chin in your bloody hand.
“Elizabeth,” you say, for the first time in your new voice, with your new lips, your new lungs, yet it feels ancient, as though my name is at the root of you. “My creator.”
“Beloved,” I whisper. The breath hitches in my throat. Tears prick my lashes.
“Will you mourn him?” you ask.
“Mourn him!” I laugh, and that makes you smile, your rictus grin more beautiful than I could have imagined. Maybe I will ache for what we were, the four of us, when we were children, before we cracked open the world and bent it to our will. Maybe I will ache, for the rest of our days, that only you and I remain, but no. No, I could not mourn him. Not now.
“I saved your heart,” I say. “In a little tin case. But I…”
The tears spill over. Victor did something to render me unconscious, and I do not know what happened to the workshop. To the tin with your heart safe inside it. The dearest part of you, and I could not keep it safe.
“I lost it,” I confess.
You brush the tears from my cheeks. Your jaundiced eyes—so lovely I lose my breath—soften when they meet mine. When you kiss me, I raise my palms to your face, caressing the patchwork panels I sewed myself. Your flesh, cold and dead, makes me shiver as you pull me close. Your bloody hand finds my hip, staining my dress with your fingerprints, which is how it should be. You step back, tugging me with you. Your other hand, the clean one, takes mine. And we dance, slowly, across the carpet, around his body, through the puddle of his blood, our skirts collecting vermillion like yet another secret, the deep night syrup-slow, your kiss the vow I make.
S.M. Hallow is a Pushcart Prize nominee, part-time fairytale witch, and full-time vampire. Hallow’s stories, poems, and visual art can be found in CatsCast, Baffling Magazine, Final Girl Bulletin Board, Prismatica Magazine, Seize the Press, and Taco Bell Quarterly, among others. To learn more, follow Hallow on Tumblr & Twitter @smhallow.