XXV (the lost epilogue of Frankenstein)
I gazed upon the icy tundra with bleak resignation that this was my life. I held not illusions, which could spark different sentiments. Despondency had fled months ago to find better sport in beaten poets, leaving me with empty purpose and resolve. I was resolved to enacting the final consummation of my series of woe, upon an earth beyond caring, drinking all spilt life bloods and choking down deathly ashes indiscriminately. Oh, Gaia! How I lament that your heartless beauty can no longer tempt the unbridled desire it once did. The desire to live as one of your sympathetic denizens, to cherish another life with innocent revelry…That I will die disillusioned is inevitable, for no other state of perception could will such an act, as I planned, so. I no longer associated with Lucifer's burning jealousy nor the vengeful stirrings of that poisonous, torturous lake, flicking its heated tongue, riveting my flesh from within. Rather I felt as Judas Iscariot or Cain in the afterbirth of their humanly crimes, hideously remorseful, though never would I retract my logic that revenge was justified. Yet, I thought of Frankenstein. Sweet Frankenstein, my creator whom I murdered. I killed my God, only to find myself, soon after, needing death. So, perhaps, that I may be formally judged by my God's God.
The stars, letters of the heavens, bespoke little upon their clouded and stained pages. They too were resolved. Resolved to deny me any message of comfort, though I was, at any rate, incapable of receiving comfort, for I was now beyond reception to distress. One cannot comport oneself in any existing manner without the other. However, I did lament. Still, weeping was not the mode through which I passed the endless days and nights, which eventually consumed one another to form an endless dusk. No, only resolve and inconceivable regret.
That the world at large, in the future, may never speak of me, that the words, "Frankenstein's monster," may never pass the lips of the living again, I shall be then a peaceful, monstrous spirit. Ate shall not burn by my side; Hell's jaws may not open their maw to reveal my demoniac soul, if soul I had, with piercing agony and rent, stitched flesh making my convulsions too horrible for the bend of any imagination to bear. I shall not surface again, as a shade to finish my business. I may take the hand of Leviathan, us both fearsome devils, and suture the mouths shut that ignorantly speak those words in awe.
I wrenched my massive form through the wind, which to normal human beings was unendurable, though to me it was a remedying stimulus to hours filled only with silent nothingness. Sensual oblivion. I ripped a nearby pine tree from the ground, dragging it back up the frigid hill, where I was assembling my funeral pyre. Are you watching, Frankenstein? I posed the question every time my funeral pyre grew. I wondered if any fire could burn hot enough to cleanse a stain like the one upon my heart. Sunken dreams of redemption hung on that question, as little William once hung to the hem of Elizabeth's skirt, but I stole the light from their eyes that I was otherwise to be denied, had I not resorted to dastardly mechanisms. The boy…He was not supposed to deny me, yet, I knew now, as I should have then, he was too human to ever love my demonic structure.
The Hell created on earth for my demise and torture had torn such screams from my throat. Those guttural cries after Felix and Safie's rejection had surely rung from the halls of Valhalla to the depths of Hel's deepest pits, the source being my phthisic organs, each so carefully collected and so carelessly revived.
I stared into the face of eternity, as my ending approached, and fire hungered to efface my being from this world. I left the pile again to collect more material for burning. Dear pines, that you are safe from the cold, only to burn in Hell with me, whom even your sightless, thoughtless beauty has forsaken, is ironic in a most disturbing fashion. Thy needles attempt to pluck my yellowing skin. My dermal disgust. The lumped flesh that encompasses my being. It was naked now, and I gazed at it again with the ghost of regret. My clothes had long since retired, after I fled from my creator's cold side, and the justified, agitated gaze of the honorable Captain Walton, for the northernmost wilds with their icy supplications and sparse vegetation. How much hatred and fiendish pleasure I held in Frankenstein's decline, only to find upon his ultimate destruction, the deepest grief. A person that held such sickly delight for my revenge's appetite for so long, suddenly appeared to me as the most beautiful man to have ever lived. If only, he could have loved me…
The pile grew greater and grander in design, as this secret chapter in history drew closer and closer to its culmination. Fate herself grew more and more anxious to complete her designs for my incomparable and inconsolable life.
I stood in the center of the pyre, holding the flint stone set I had stolen long ago, in passing through yet another village of afeard citizens. I struck flint against his brother, throwing sparks against the dry, sardonic pines, cynical towards death and chemical alteration.
The flames licked up, touching my flesh, eagerly embracing my death; I did not cry or scream, but stood resolved. Thy love, in its own way, is my death, oh, God of mine. For, to live without that love or the possibility of that love, to live that way is surely to die. Anon, I leave this world begging, from the core of my being, its affections to the last. Oh, God of mine!
The flames burned for days, the scent of singed flesh driving any brave creatures of this arctic Hell to madness, for the pyre carried madness in its smoke and ash. May no man discover the secrets of Frankenstein and once again submit to the recitation of this ghastly tale.
"If I had never lived, that which I love
Had still been living; had I never loved,
That which I love would still be beautiful—
Happy and giving happiness."—Lord Byron's Manfred