The Monsters We Deserve by Marcus Sedgwick
(This innermost tale is no stranger to bigotry and insipid hatred: we’re introduced to ‘The Turk’, who at last seems to be about to buck the trend that the swarthy are evil while the fair are good, until he turns out to be a devious and manipulative fiend. The fact he’s referred to as The Turk, and not given a name, should have been a warning. There’s more to be said later about not giving names to things …)
To return to the book: in the letters, which open and close it, we learn through the voice of Walton, the polar explorer, that there never was a more inspiring man than Victor, that he is wise and good and eloquent and passionate and and and tragic (of course) but above all, noble.
Thus this is Mary’s pronouncement upon Victor too. It would be stretching the point to believe that we’re meant to think that Walton is deluded in his view of his new friend. That we are meant to read, cynically, between the lines and deduce that they are all as bad as each other. There’s so much else that is clumsy and nothing that is sufficiently refined about the book to suggest Mary had anything subtler in mind.
And yet, that is the point: they are all as bad as each other, because Mary’s own snobbery runs through the book – a strand of its DNA, its genetic code. (If you doubt that, read her travel journals.)
*
But.
Now I have to stop. It’s getting late. Later than I thought. I see we’re in the deepest part of the night and I should be sleeping, not whining about this book. Besides which, I can feel something else coming out of me, something I dislike very much to mention. Though I will. I will. I must, if I am to be honest about this business. It’s this; there are things I respect about the book. Quite a few, in fact, and I will get to them all, but for now, consider this: it was written by a nineteen-year-old girl, at a time when women were not exactly welcomed as writers, to put it extremely euphemistically. That’s remarkable. And I do value that much about it. Furthermore, it achieved lasting fame. That is also a truly remarkable thing for any book to achieve. I’ve always said that no matter how bad a book; if it is successful then it is fulfilling some function, it has some strong points, there must be something good about it, or it would have been consigned to oblivion. It would have been made extinct by the process of natural selection that stories are vulnerable to, every bit as much as animal species.
And now, I hear something – the thing that you probably suspect is the dark in me.
Envy. How can a book this bad have been so successful? Well, there’s nothing new about that. Yet what do I think? Can I really step away from my feelings about it as a writer? Detached? Or am I as big a snob as Mary, driven by my envy of its power? I don’t know the answer … and then, there’s another matter, darker still. And I draw the line under that.
*
This is not the time to think about such things. I will sleep. And tomorrow, I’ll write about the thing I love the most about Frankenstein, the novel.
How it came to be.
You join me at a bad moment. For the night has other ideas.
It’s so clear, so true, so obvious that the night deals with us differently from the day, that we barely say it. What could be more stupid to point out? But then, that’s a daytime voice speaking – it’s easy to be clear-minded and rational when the sun is shining.
Try thinking the same thing by darkness and see how different it feels.
Try saying:
There’s nothing under the bed,
there’s nothing under the bed,
I am sure that there is nothing under the bed, in the daytime.
Nothing troubling about that.
But say it again when the sun is on the other side of the world, as your candle gutters and wanes, as the shutters gently shift in the wind; then remember that there is barely any wind up here. Listen to the silence that has settled in. Try it. Hear it. Believe yourself to be in a dark house on a dark mountain in the dark centre of a mountainous triangle, graven on the ground not with stones, or paint, or anything physical, but with the emotions of the dead.
It is dark, it is dark; you cannot see, and that darkness of your eyes is swathed in silence. Is that a noise, or not? The generator stopped again. Did I restart it, or not? Sometimes I can hear it thrumming in the cellar which is far, far down below me, but connected through the ancient bones of the house – its skeleton of massy wooden beams upon which the whole house rests its weight – so sound is transmitted a long way.
Thrum, thrum.
No. No thrum. I left it to sulk. Didn’t I? Now it’s the middle of the blackness and it’s hard to recall, hard to be sure about anything. And yet, I can hear a noise, I can.
It sounds like …
… like breathing. Close up. Next to me. Around me. Somewhere, the sound of breathing.
I did leave the generator running. That’s it. It’s the huff and sigh of the motor as it goes about its ignorant business of making electricity from the multi-million-year-dead mineral remains of microscopic creatures that once crawled across the ocean floor. An ocean floor that is now thrust five thousand feet into the air, and which, covered in interminable fir trees, surrounds me.
Then I remember. I didn’t restart the generator this time. I did not, and now I know how I know. I didn’t want to cut my hand again in the dark, and as I think that, the cut gives a single zinging throb.
I can hear the breathing. Still.
Slow, deep, right close to me somehow.
Then I know what it is! It’s me! So I hold my breath.
Yet the breathing continues.
I listen to it, eyes wide, seeing utterly nothing and focusing only on the breathing, the breathing, the breathing, until, with a shudder, I sit up, banging my head on a beam, fumbling for the electric torch, switching it on and swinging it this way and that in the gloom.
Nothing.
And the breathing has stopped.
I do not sleep again. Not this night. I ask myself this: do monsters always stay in the book where they were born? Are they content to live out their lives on paper, and never step foot into the real world? It’s very late before the sun creeps over the mountain opposite and shows itself, by which time I have been clinging to the grey dawn for hours, beaten and drawn, beaten and drawn.
On the other side of the world, people die.
It is 1815. The tenth of April. The Island of Sumbawa.
For several centuries, a monster has lain dormant, miles underground. Now, Mount Tambora’s moment has come. For several days previously, warning sounds of detonations have been heard across the Dutch East Indies, as far away as Java, 800 miles distant. The monster is waking up.
Now, at around seven o’clock in the evening on the tenth day of April, 1815, the real eruption arrives. Three columns of fire rise from the peak of the volcano and merge into one. The entire mountain turns into a mass of molten rock. Stones the size of a man’s head are ejected into the sky, raining hard on the surrounding landscape.
People flee in horror, but there is nowhere to run. The pyroclastic flow of superheated lava rolls down the mountain and wipes the village of Tambora from the face of the earth. Tsunami spread across the seas, tidal waves devastating communities far, far away.
The mountain blows itself apart. Before the eruption, it stood at 14,100 feet high. By the end, it stands at 9,354 feet, having spewed eleven billion tons of ash and rock into the air, along with poisonous sulphur gases, causing death by lung infection. The ash lies thick on the ground, as deep as 3 feet as far away as 50 miles, destroying crops, killing cattle and livestock, causing starvation and disease. More than seventy thousand people die.
Impenetrable darkness reigns for two days as the ash cloud envelops the proximity of the island. Weeks pass, the ash is swept across the whole world, borne on global winds. 1816 arrives, the weather of the whole planet is affected: in China, the Americas, and on the other side of the world, in Europe, temperatures fall way below average. The ash cloud blocks the light of the sun.
Worldwide climate events wreak
In Europe, famine is inevitable, as crops of potatoes, wheat and oats fail everywhere. Prices rise steeply; riots, looting and arson become commonplace. It is believed that two hundred thousand people die as a result of the famine; with the resulting violence being worst in Switzerland, where a national emergency is declared. People begin to speak about the end of the world. In one town in Belgium, a woman thinks the sounds of soldiers’ horns are the last trumpets signifying the end of the world, and throws herself from a rooftop.
*
The eruption of Mount Tambora remains the largest observed volcanic eruption in recorded history; eclipsing that of Vesuvius, of Santorini, even of Krakatoa.
It is also the reason that a teenage girl called Mary sits down to write one of the most influential tales of horror of all time: Frankenstein.
1816: the year without a summer.
Close to the city of Geneva, three young British runaways rent Maison Chapuis, a house in the grounds of the Villa Diodati, which is in turn being rented by a most notorious man – Lord Byron: a great poet, perhaps an even greater villain. Famous for his excesses, and his violent temper. Mad, bad and dangerous to know; that was first said of Byron. Famous above all for his many love affairs, and scandalous liaisons, with men and women, and even boys half his age. The outrage that finally sees him decide to lie low in Switzerland for a while being rumours of incest – an affair with his half-sister, Augusta.
The runaways are the younger poet, Percy Shelley, his lover, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, just eighteen years old, and Mary’s step-sister, Claire Claremont, a few months younger. Like a woman committing suicide, Claire has come to throw herself at Lord Byron; to rekindle a dalliance of which he has become bored. Mary and Percy have come to escape problems at home; debt and dishonour; having first fled (again with Claire) to Europe two years before, when the girls were just sixteen. Scandal follows them still: Percy remains married to his first wife, Harriet, whom, along with his child, he abandoned, to pursue his affair with Mary,
Completing the party of five is Byron’s doctor, and sort-of-friend, John Polidori; a quack by Byron’s own admission, but a tolerable drinking companion; an ear for his woes, a salve to his ego.
*
The party intended to roam the hills outside the city, and sail on the lake, but thanks to a volcano on the other side of the world, the weather lets them down. It is cold. It rains incessantly. They are trapped inside, day after day in an endless twilit debauchery of wine, opium and … more.
They talk, hour after hour, they brood and pace, they throw out wild ideas and discuss the edges of humanity. They read. They read ghost stories; German ghost stories translated into French.
Finally, one night, Lord Byron declares they should each write a ghost story of their own. At first they all agree, yet Percy Shelley and Byron himself seem to tire quickly of the game – they are poets, and prose does not suit them. Claire is not a writer; she does not try. Polidori is not a writer either, but he does; producing a scrap of a story that he would later expand as The Vampyre, the first long prose story about the undead creature of horror. And inspired by his employer, Lord Byron.
And then there’s Mary, who does not write to begin with, cannot arrive at an idea for days and days, until finally, in some sort of ‘waking dream’, she sees a scene of a ‘pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together’.
So, a monster is born.
*
It’s a wonderful story. Not the novel, but how it came to be. Though there’s more to it, of course. Things that are odd, things behind the writing of the book that scare me more than any word that Mary would come to write.
Later. There’s time for that later. I have to stop now. My hand is throbbing, quite badly; writing seems to make it worse. What a time to cut it, when I need to work, and I still don’t really know how. For some reason my head is throbbing too, a headache that’s been coming and going for days.
It’s long after dark. The chalet is asking to settle down for the night, and I am running out of logs for the stove and the fire; tomorrow I will have to spend some hours bringing more inside.
Cold colonises the wooden walls of the house; the night lifts up. Silence spreads as I put down my pen, my scribbling done. With the scratching of the nib gone, it occurs to me that I ought to be able to hear that breathing. That breathing. Ought? What do I mean by ‘ought’?
I listen, I strain, talking myself down from fear and imagination’s riots, but there’s nothing, and I tell myself I’m tired, and leaving my dog-eared copy of Frankenstein on the desk, make my way up to bed.
Horror.
It’s how I’ve made my living for almost thirty years. And it’s become harder; stories used to flow from my mind like water from the source outside; endless, pure, fresh, free.
Now, making a book is like pulling a root from the ground. It does not want to come. Part of it, I know, is that I have come to detest what I do: I scare people, and if I disturb them sufficiently, I make money. That’s what it comes down to, and it’s sick. The world is full of horror enough, isn’t it? I know we had this conversation six months ago. And I told you I would write nothing more about darkness; that I would write nothing more at all unless it spoke of beauty and light. Yet here I am, pulling roots from the ground, pulling roots from the ground. The world is full of horror enough, and I come face to face with the facts. The fact that people do not seem that interested in mundane descriptions of beauty, or even in beautiful descriptions of the mundane. That they care not for how a thing like a story arrives in front of them, only that they be gripped by it. Horrified. And then, the fact that people seem to want to be upset, disturbed, troubled by unreal stories of horror only makes me feel … What?
The only word I can come up with is this; empty.
I feel empty. I feel done.
*
I woke this morning, scooping the book – the book, the damn book – from the floor where I left it last night, on yes, the floor, and returned dutifully to my desk.
I stare at what I have written; stare, without blinking it seems, staring my writing in the face, staring it down. But I blink first. I stand, so fast I send my chair skidding on to its back behind me, and I flee.
*
Two days pass. I get no work done. I don’t make notes, I don’t even try.
*
Oh.
Yesterday I walked down the track to the car, drove to town, a half an hour of hairpin bends. I am not unaware of the change that comes over me when I leave the mountain, but yesterday it seemed even more pronounced than usual. Something is different on the mountain. Or maybe it’s me that’s different. How can you decide these things?
Town was normal, so normal, I forgot what I’m doing and why I’m here. My hand throbbed but my head felt better. Clearer. I bought food. I drank a cup of coffee in Le Central, nodding at the locals drinking Pastis at eleven in the morning, people whose faces I have seen in this bar or that, and come to know, and like.
Across the street, I saw Étienne. He didn’t see me. I sat like a stone, not knowing how to move, not knowing how to leave; finding that the only thing to be done was to stare at my coffee. And then I had drunk it, and I had to move after all. The house was waiting for me, and I could not avoid its call any more, or the pull of the book sitting on my desk.
*
I drive back up the mountain, noting details I haven’t seen before: a chalet or two tucked away in the forest on the hairpin bends; a path into the trees that soon disappeared from sight under a bed of golden-brown beech leaves.
As I lock the car, gathering my shopping, I realise something. I realise that I finally know what has been bothering me about the house, about the side of the house. My mind must have decided to wake up and become alert, and I suddenly have the
The house.
You enter the living floor at the back of the house – the side highest up. The entrance to the cellar is on the opposite side, facing the valley. Every time I make the journey to the cellar to restart the generator, something bothers me, and now I know what it is. The journey is too far. Too steep.
As I get to the end of the track to the house, I dump my bags by the door, without even going inside. Setting off down and around the side of the house once more, heading to the cellar, I judge heights and distances, and then, as I reach the side of the house that faces to the valley, I see them. Windows. Two, shuttered tight. Above them I see the two windows I am familiar with; those by my writing desk and the kitchen area. There is an entire floor of the house I didn’t even know existed.
My skin crawls. Something that until this moment I had always taken to be a metaphor appears to be real, a feeling so strong I stare at the bare skin of my arm, to see my hair standing on end.
I stare at the closed, shuttered windows; blind eyes, wondering lots of things at once: such as why Étienne did not mention this floor, why he didn’t show it to me, why I didn’t notice those extra windows from outside, and, above everything, I am wondering what is hidden in there.
I breathe the creeping sense away from me, I head inside; there must be a way to get to this floor, and I simply haven’t seen it before, no stairs to get anywhere apart from the ladder to my bed. I stand in the centre of the room, turning round, gazing, puzzling it out, and then I see it. The cupboard, the walk-in cupboard. It’s not a cupboard at all. It’s the entrance to a staircase. I know this because the door is open and I can make out a handrail leading into a pit of darkness below.