VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN: You've all heard the story. Although you've probably all heard different stories. There've been so many retellings. Not even my name stays the same. Sometimes it's Victor, sometimes it’s Henry or Heinrich. Sometimes I'm a doctor, sometimes I’m a baron. Sometimes the monster gets my name. There are so many versions even I can't be quite sure which is real.
I stole corpses to make the body. That bit's true. I would cut them down from the gallows or dig them up from the cemetery. Drag them back to my room, cut off a foot or whatever part I needed, and then get rid of the rest. Usually I'd drag it to a house party and leave it in the kitchen. No one noticed. It never occurred to me that instead of cutting up all these different bodies and sewing the pieces together, I could probably have just used one whole one. You know how it is when you get so focussed on a particular plan that you miss something more obvious. Besides, I suppose I thought it wouldn't be a monster without all the scars and bolts.
The research too. I did all that. No one had made anything so complex before. I went to the top and bottom of creation for that monster. I became an expert in branches of science that don't even exist yet. I calculated. I saw what happens when atoms smash together and galaxies fly apart. I saw how the world began, and how life started, and how it will all end. I knew everything. The Modern Prometheus, they called me. They knew I was up to something, something great … I mean, something terrible … but they didn't have an inkling what it was that I was sawing and gluing and stitching together in my room. The whole corridor stank of dead bodies, but no one suspected, because it was student accommodation.
Time went by. I didn't keep track. Months, a year, maybe two. My father wrote sarcastic little letters saying, “I trust you’re not neglecting your studies”. I didn't reply, but it did make me start to realise I had a problem. But I thought I could control it. I thought, I'll just get the monster finished and it'll all be out of my system. And it was; in a way.
It was on a dreary night of November. I put the last bits in to the monster - the eyes, snapping them into place like the final pieces of a jigsaw. I had him laid out on a special workbench that would rise up into the thunderstorm through a hatch in the roof, carrying both of us, for effect as much as anything. I cut the rope and we shot up and the electricity struck and I was looking down into those eyes … and this is the last thing I can remember, the very last thing before it all gets confused, is looking down into those dead yellow eyes and suddenly, without anything having moved, they were looking back.
I don't think I shouted “IT'S ALIIIIIIVE!” But I might have done.