CHAPTER 1 (part1) 

Victoria Frankenstein

Frankensteins have a status that their wealth provides where their homes and castles were among even the envy of royalty, whose voices shudder when they rumor the Frankenstein name in whispers to both the wives and their title holding husbands. Amid November’s autumn the year 1805 where in high society the children are safe to roam the corridors within their warm manors and city homes. To grow plump with meals their mothers never cook them and shop of new attire regularly to wear the finest clothes that they can afford a tailor to seam for them. Surely there are those who cry in secret at the resentment of a passive family groomed by its society. Those cries are subdued by the remedy of lavish balls, exquisite and expensive theater and the hourly doses of wines and spirits. It cannot be denied that these people are living comfortably while enjoying the splendors of the world. With loyal subjects to handle mundane everyday tasks it frees up their time to find leisure, to enjoy the arts, to taste the abundance of food served freely and actively attend parties and weddings. Yet in theses crowds of crystal cups and silk dresses there is no Frankenstein. Nor are they found in quiet corners or private dinners. Not within the lecture halls or university class rooms. England has not seen a Frankenstein amidst its streets in eighteen years.
Far from society in the southwest of Germany, bordering France, the Frankenstein castle resides. A Schloss castle with seven stories looms mountainous on a rock in the middle of a massive lake. Complete with flying buttresses, countless towers, domes and wings. A truly visionary love-letter to Gothic architecture. A mighty landmark for the Frankenstein’s symbol of status.

Thick forest and wild mountain range lay on the opposite side of the lake from the castle resembling an oil painting of yellows and hazel hues where the green of spring is dying.
As the evening makes its comfortable arrival the castle lives silently with emptiness. Without a soul to see the setting sun pass through its hundreds of windows. No maids, no cooks, no loyal servants have roamed these halls in some weeks and the quiet that rests on the walls is one shrouded in mourning. An abandoned grave yard of bouquets can be found in the ballroom. Their dried up and withered corpses gone unloved. Piles of melted candles can be seen crowding the corners of a few rooms. The stillness of time throughout the castle, black fabric draped across portraits, mirrors, and scattered furniture has left nothing more than the solemn silence of a once illustrious home.

As the dawn is snuffed out by a starless night sky; a woman of forty-four with black hair is asleep against a window pane in a stone-quiet hall. She inhales the frost that passes like a phantom through the window. It brushes her cheek and nose. In time the stone walls absorb the cold. Without urgency Victoria Frankenstein awakes raising the lids of her deep set eyes and through the window she views her castle grounds in the throws of night. Her body resting on an icy cushioned window nook. The comforts of wealth have clearly taken care of her as she appears younger than her age with fair skin. For a moment she is still and all is calm. Reflecting in her eyes is a crackle of lightning that scrapes across smoky black clouds. An electrical storm is rising. She then brings her legs off the nook and marches with a haste through the halls. The walls are adorned with hanging oil lamps that are not lit with ornate patterns of callous shadows from floor to ceiling. She passes them one after another journeying to the other side of the castle. Her clothes are a custom stitching opposed to the common fashion of wearing a fall front gown or tubular skirt she instead wears a pair of dark trousers, a tweed vest and a simple, long cotton coat that have been tailored to her body and designed by her own personal seamstress. Her hair loosely wafting behind her before reaching the master bedroom.

What is meant to be a bedroom doubles as a library where each wall is covered up by dark wood bookshelves; each one filled with red leather bound journals in row after row. Each journal is guaranteed to be filled with her documentation and notes. There is a window that reaches from floor to ceiling, climbing a precise twenty-five feet. Aggressively she draws the curtains back on it. Living beside the window is a writing desk. The loyal tools of her workshop are loose parchment paper, a quill and ink and a loop handle candle stick holder all neatly prepared on top of her desk. Before she can light the candle a silent tide of light splashes the drafty room in a blink. A light explodes to life on the match stick she uses to ignite the desk’s candle.

Adjusting the quill between her fingers she eagerly sits down to a blank sheet of paper. In a moment she ponders how there is a razor judgment for a woman who has such wealth and still makes no allegiances with the men who wish to grow their fortunes larger. To add to her position she is alone in her ancestral home which leaves many to speculate suspicions especially in high society. “Hmm… Then what a rare and fortunate position I must be in.” she thinks, “A rare case of one such woman. To be alone with her thoughts and allowed to think unhindered. With the wealth to make actions of her ideas. Monstrous ideas. Committed as any man, I am, only because I live as... the other”

She starts writing with her ink dipped quill in the weak glow of dying candle light. She sits at her desk assertively, writing every word with self appointed discipline. She can smell stale musk when wetting the hemp parchment paper with every line of ink. Her black wavy hair falls to one side resting on a shoulder. The music of rain hitting the glass of her windows can he heard coinciding with the quiet scratching sound her quill makes when writing. She writes:

“I, Victoria Frankenstein, on this the year 1800 and the 5th. November the 5th, believe it is of the upmost importance to journal additional details before I conduct my experiment in any case of misfortune throughout. I have, for twenty-two years, researched rare cases of a disease. From these cases I have taken blood from men and woman for further studies. The samples origins – Egypt, The year 1700 and 83.
A man with this disease was mummified. The disease allowed him to survive thousands of years in dormant as long as his organs remained removed from his body. He was the most powerful of all cases I have ever encountered. His blood, immortal. I expand on this case in further detail in my journal labeled ‘King of the dead’.

Point Pleasant, The Americas, The year 1700 and 84.
This case is still shrouded in grand mystery. Blood was obtained from a massive creature that was black and winged with red eyes. I have documented this encounter in further detail in my journal labeled ‘Point Pleasant’.

Gevaudan, France, The year 1700 and 85.
A woman who was relieved of ailments or any harm by her disease also would suffer to a frontal lobe takeover while her body underwent a flooding of hormones of both estrogen and testosterone and adrenaline in the night of full moons. I expand on this case in my journal labeled ‘Beast of Gevaudan’.

Lastly, I have obtained blood from my love of 19 years, Voivode. He is a man truly cursed with every purposeful enrichment of the phrase. There is a tremendous amount of similarities his version of this disease shares with a variety of illnesses. His pale complexion could define him as having the white plague but he shares no other symptom, and defies the end result of the disease which is death. Rabies has a common connection to a painful sensitivity to sunlight. Thus, his case has more than just a sensitivity to sunlight. It whittles his body, destroys his flesh and rumples him into a chard living-carcass. Porphyria causes a hyper sensitivity to light as well but never to a damaging extreme such as he experiences. There must be an ingestion of blood if he is ever to be damaged by the sun in order to recover therefore an absence of the need for blood is his general everyday living. In spite of these factors Voivode is immortal. I expand further on his case in my journals “The son of the dragon”.

All four cases are like any disease with damning drawbacks but in all four cases there is a profoundly rare healing factor that I hope and dream I can enable in dead human tissue. I am far from understanding how this blood and disease truly functions and if there is any such way to manipulate it but if I could it would mean an advancement in medicine that would give the recently deceased a second chance at life. A cure to child illnesses possibly those as such as measles. The potential is there for bettering the well being of all human life. There is no fathom to limitless progress humanity can propel to. The death of the young who potentially hold answers and keys to creating a Utopian future can be given a second chance to gift us with their imagination. Less creativity and love will be lost so we all can rise higher as the human collective. No mother will have to lose their child again. Evidently no child will have to lose their mother to have life.
My motivation overflows with a terrible exuberance in my every waking day. To see success in a one in a trillion probability would mean more than changing the world, more than the advancements of medicine and more than a bright and bold future. In truth what is most important to me is that it would mean I would get back the heart I lost in this world. The love in me this world extinguished.

It is with tremendous shame and dismay that I must disclose a wretched confession. In the past day I have grave robbed the body of a Mathys Holl, who has passed in the last week. He met his demise in an accident as he came to collapse under a wind mills water wheel. He suffered cranial damage in the back and top of his skull destroying his brain. I transplanted into him a brain and eyes. I have surgically implanted 4 electricity conduits into the body. Two on either side of the torso. I have also combined the blood of all four previously mentioned cases. The result was a biological lumination that I believe is two chemicals that I have known to be common in sea life was present in two separate collections of blood. With only enough to fill two vials after mixing. I will be injecting one full vial into the body while it lay in a vat of water. Soon after I will engage an electrical current from a battery that will be connected to the four electricity conduits in the torso. Allowing for electricity to course through the body.

To further explain, in the year 1700 and 96 I began funding the experiments of Alessandro Volta. He is an Italian Physicist that was working to invent a machine that will produce electricity over a long period of time, steadily. I take no credit for his work having only been present for his experiments eight or so visits in under ten years. When he finally invented the voltaic pile in the year 1700 and 99 we worked together in secret to create a version of the voltaic pile that produced 100-200 watts instead of 1-2 watts which is what his invention initially supplied. We eventually became successful and I posses such one machine that I have named ‘the box”. I will use it to produce a steady current of electricity into the body through the electricity conduits in the torso for over the course of six hours. The hope is that the end result will be the aforementioned disease in the combined vials of blood will take hold of the cells while they are surging with a steady current of electricity. Allowing for the cells to adopt the diseases regenerative affects and heal the dead cells back to life. If there is no problematic occurrences and I am without harm I shall return to record my findings. This concludes my record.”

Placing the quill beside the ink jar, Victoria turns to get up from the desk but half way up she stops herself and a hurt curried on the love of her heart now runs through her, drenching her eyes in longing. Gently, she sits back down. Her hand resting on the desk calmly drifts over to pick up the quill once again. Her eyes gloss with sentiment as the point of the quill starts a new page. She writes, “I said goodbye to my love today. I watched from my windows as his charcoal black horses took his carriage through the castle gates. I stared with painful concentration hoping I could somehow see through the charter’s black painted windows and maybe catch a glimpse of him once more. I watched him leave; though I am not unfamiliar with the sight it does not make it any less difficult. I stayed long after he was gone when the sun peeked over the horizon. I looked on till I fell asleep against the pane.”

(continue to part 2)

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