Readers of the original Frankenstein might recognize a familiar face in this chapter! (Who for some reason I couldn't add into the list of characters.)
Disclaimer: I'm not Mary Shelley, whether in ghost form or revived from the dead. Though Frankenstein is in the public domain, I don't own the story.
DE LACEY: It is night in the Garden of Eden. Do you see the moon?
CREATURE: There. There it is.
DE LACEY: Describe it to me.
CREATURE: Solitary.
DE LACEY: That's a good word. Good.
CREATURE: And sad, like me.
DE LACEY: Why is it sad?
CREATURE: Because it is solitary.
-Nick Dear, Frankenstein, scene 18
A bright-white flash of lightning pierced the grime of the tenement window. Seconds later, rain began to thud against the building, seeking any way inside.
Eva set down her book and stared out at what she could see of the blue-black sky, hungry for another glimpse of light to cut through the darkness.
There-another one, temporarily overpowering the candles lighting the tiny shared room. The lightning broke through not only the acrid, claustrophobic tenement, but another, deeper darkness within her. A darkness nothing had been able to shatter.
While others had lifetimes behind them, whether long or short or difficult, Eva had nothing. Not even the shape of things in her past.
But the flash-it had come the closest so far to breaking that darkness. It struck a void, a negative, like the sunspots she could see against the inside of her eyelids, and illuminated the edges of something at the back of her brain.
Eva flung the window open so that she could lean out into the storm, ignorant of the damp. Rain soaked her hair, her dress, her skin as she searched the sky for another bolt of light. Foolish, yes-but she could almost see what she was missing. Almost, if she looked just a bit longer.
Lightning, with thunder fast on its heels, tore across the gray Scottish sky. Eva felt the crackle in the air across her skin, blinked away more sunspots shaped like a ragged scar. She waited, her fingers white-knuckled on the sill, for inspiration to come.
When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make…
But the lightning, again, had only scratched the edge of something buried, which she could not unearth.
Eva cut a glare at the sky, as if the creator of lightning storms were holding that vital information back from her. Her hooded gaze turned downward, to the stories of stone below her, the source of the caked-on stench and endless chatter of too many bodies crammed into one space. The assault on her senses wasn't helping her concentration. How anyone could think here, she'd never know.
She had to get out into the storm.
A shapeless blue coat, trousers, and a cap-the clothing of a laborer-became her disguise. Most dresses were regrettably short on her, even for a lower-class woman. They attracted questions. It was easier to go about dressed as a man once she left her tiny shared bedroom.
The tenement contained hundreds of rooms, but in the storm, many shelter-seekers huddled on the steps. At the top of the staircase, she loomed over these, still careful to keep her hat low.
Every step had to be deliberate, carefully controlled. As hidden as possible behind long, loose fabric. The way she moved, from the roll of her feet on the ground to the swing of her arms as she walked, wasn't quite normal. It wasn't that she was ungainly, or that her steps were hitched by pain or a restricted range of motion. Her movements were simply … unnatural, as if her joints and bones were only playing at being human, and no amount of mimicry could fool watchful, suspicious eyes.
So Eva pressed herself close to the wall as she descended, trying to attribute the awkwardness of her gait to an equally awkward route. She stayed silent, hoping no one would look at her too closely before she made it out into the gale.
No-the subsequent flashes of lightning didn't bring her further illumination other than brief, physical bursts in the sky. Disappointing. But out here … maybe that was all right. She could worry about that later. This temporary failure was no reason to go scurrying back inside in defeat.
The sheer force of the downpour had chased almost everyone inside. But she felt her arms spreading, her face tilting back beneath the brim of her hat to catch as much of the rain as she could.
There were moments she hated being alone. But times like this, surrounded by chaos she chose, she thought she could manage it for a long, long while.
She soon found another benefit: the street along South Bridge, full of shops and backed by tenements-including hers-had been vacated just enough for her to walk along it without raising a fuss.
The shopkeepers had gone inside, moving crates of their wares in bit by bit. One of them had left a crate of apples unattended. Eva paused at the edge of a building, eyeing the shiny fruit and then the lighted windows of the shop.
With the tingle of electricity in the air still making her feel giddy, temptation was just a bit too much.
In the marketplace during sunny days, the very few times she'd been out, she knew the rule. Pay quickly, keep your voice and head down, speak as little as possible, don't attract attention.
But if people weren't around? Don't seek them out. It would hurt everyone far more if she did and someone decided to scream.
She wrapped her fingers around a red orb as she passed and bit into the crisp flesh, precisely timed with yet another crash of lightning.
Someone shouted across the alley from another Old Town tenement. It was not so dark out that she couldn't see wide eyes, a rounded mouth, a look of horror from through the window.
Eva's fingers clenched harder around the stolen fruit. She waited, an animal frozen in the moment before fight or flight. Would the other person scream?
No-but they did shout for help. Familiar words reached her: Monster, devil, demon. More voices joined the first, along with shadows behind illuminated windows.
She hid her face behind hunched shoulders and a sudden turn back towards her tenement. She dropped the apple in the mud in case it could incriminate her further. Curses were among the first words she learned, and they fell from her lips as she left the South Bridge and re-entered the Pandemonium of the creaky, overcrowded building.
The unwashed, exhausted demons huddled on the steps gave her a hundred leery stares, but she didn't slow down, even to readjust her anxious stride.
Would they come racing inside to find her?
Even when her door was shut, she found her hands creeping up to cover her uncanny features.
How stupid could she have been, exposing her face like that? Already she could hear the shouts, feel the flung rocks and clubs battering her skin. Her heart thudded, as if she were running once more, again taking refuge for days in a Greyfriars mausoleum. They hadn't looked for her among the dead. But would that be enough this time?
The door opened behind her and she spun, wild-eyed.
Agatha poked her head into the room, her yellow plait swinging over her shoulder. "Eva?" A gentle query, edged in confusion and a foreign accent. She remained mostly behind the door in a partial cringe.
Eva forced her hands and eyes down. She faltered a moment before reaching for the table and a half-skinned potato. Her thumb rubbed over the slick and rough patches marked by where she'd peeled away the skin. She set the knife to it once more, and slices fell like curling dead leaves into a pan.
The door closed, and the weight of Agatha's stare rested hot on her shoulder. Eva's lips pressed as she tried to ignore the look.
"Are you all right? You're soaking wet." Agatha had stepped close to see for herself, eyes narrowed in a slight squint.
Eva nodded once, carving away the last of the brown skin and dropping the slippery peeled root into a pot. She grabbed another, as if that would stave off any further prying.
Of course, this being Agatha, nothing would. "You were outside?"
"Just opened the window." Her voice was husky and hoarse and deep, forcing her to speak softly as often as possible. Eva paused and, at the same moment, both of them glanced to the open frame. Rain dripped down the wall beneath the sill, puddling on the floor. Drops had scattered over the table, and the cover of Eva's book. She grimaced.
"Eva!" Agatha lapsed into French as she darted across the room and slammed the window shut. "We're all going to get sick if you let in the cold!"
"Sorry." Her heart was still thudding to the point that she had to set down the potato and knife or risk cutting herself.
"You've forgotten an awful lot of things, but how could you be so foolish as to forget that?" Agatha scolded. She took a breath as if to continue her tirade, and then paused, catching herself. "No-I'm sorry, Eva. I shouldn't have-"
"Not you." Eva made a dismissive gesture. She'd endured far worse than a somewhat sharp reminder. She picked up the book she'd been reading-Songs of Innocence and Experience-and swept her sleeve over the cover.
Agatha gave her another long look, and Eva became self-conscious of the bulky men's clothes she was wearing and the way the wet fabric dripped and clung incriminatingly to her skin. "You were outside. The window alone couldn't get you drenched like that."
What use was there in lying? She was no good at it around those with far more practice. "I thought … I thought I remembered something."
Agatha caught Eva's shoulder. She had to reach up to do so; Eva stood as tall as a man. "The lightning jarred your memory?" The young woman made some exclamation in French. "We need to have these wild storms more often!" She grabbed one of Eva's hands. Eva noticed that her flinch was minimal this time. "Do you think a storm had to do with your accident?"
Both of them glanced down at Eva's hands, which she held out for inspection. Incisions that had only recently turned to scars lined her fingers and wrists at the joints and along major vein networks, vanishing up her sleeves to cover her whole body. They emerged at her collar, trailing up her jaw to weave between the line of her dark hair and her sallow skin.
Whatever had hurt her had also left some kind of unnatural damage to her eyes, giving her yellow, bloodshot sclera and oddly gray irises. No one liked to meet her gaze, even though Agatha usually made the effort.
Then, of course, there was the way she moved, which she had to hide when among other people.
What accident could cause such damage and leave her alive?
But Agatha persistently ignored this logic. Agatha believed Eva was the victim of some accident that had robbed her of her memory and left deformity in its place. It was a nice explanation, but there was too much amiss about the theory.
For one, an amnesiac should remember much more than Eva could. Just the other day, Agatha had-unwittingly, of course-teased her over forgetting what dreams were. And there were hundreds of other little nuances to life in Edinburgh, only ever adding up, never decreasing. But no matter what other evidence presented itself, Agatha stubbornly clung to her conclusion.
Perhaps because the alternative was, even for someone so full of empathy, simply too much to bear.
"I'm sorry," Eva exhaled. The gravel in her voice was especially strong with the weight of disappointment. "Nothing else."
"You're sure? That was the first thing you've recalled since you came here," Agatha persisted.
Eva gave her a close-lipped smile. "Yes. But … nothing else."
Thunder rumbled overhead, followed by a series of German curses through the thin wall behind the stove. Agatha's look turned dry. Her hand fell from Eva's. "There goes Monsieur Schneider again, cursing God. Not the wisest idea in a lightning storm."
Eva snorted. Not that she had seen anyone smitten before, and there was a lot of cursing God in the tenement. Maybe there was a Creator she could curse as well, to join in the chorus of bitterness. But when she considered it, there was only one being that came to mind.
The face, looming over her with an odd, twisted expression she still couldn't quite name. But a mortal one, not a celestial being gazing with the indifference so many around her seemed to prescribe on Him.
"Railing against the heavens doesn't ever seem to help," Agatha said, putting a spoon in the pan of potato skins. There was a new edge to her tone. She never complained aloud, but what she didn't say formed the edges of something that had gone wrong in her life, too.
"Maybe they … rail," Eva tasted the new word, "against the wrong person. Someone else caused their suffering."
Agatha gave her a curious look. But she shook her head, giving a crooked and slight smile. "If I knew who to blame…" she said, deflecting attention. The Frenchwoman smiled in return and went back to making dinner.
But Eva did have a guess as to whom she'd direct her curses if she had only a little more information about who he was. And it wasn't God.