My very first memory is that of the sound of thunder. Even now, so many years later, the sound of thunder still frightens me.

My second memory is that of his rapturous smile.

I don't remember much else from those early days. It is so much of a haze, one moment blending into the next as I slid in and out of knowing, and the while as he tinkered with me.

"You and I,” he would say, “we are going to change the world. I must ensure that you are perfect."

Even as my awareness grew and developed, he would disappear for weeks at a time. Each time, he would strap me to the cold metal table and inject a cocktail of drugs that would keep me unconscious and inert for the duration of his absence. I would go to sleep one day only to wake and find an unexpected cool in the air from the changing of the seasons.

I complied because I trusted him. How could I not? He was all I knew and he was my father.

My entire world was the laboratory. And him.

He was the one who taught me language, how to speak, how to read. He taught me history and philosophy and mathematics. He taught me the natural and physical sciences. He taught me the skills and knowledge that I would need to exist in society.

He taught me music.

He named me Ella, after a daughter he had lost. I understand now that he designed me, purposefully, to be everything she never had the chance to become. I was to be his beautiful, perfect daughter.

Part of me still hates him for that, even now.

 

---

 

Perhaps I should take a moment to describe myself, as my physical appearance has defined so much of my existence. Victor was a scientist, his notes were detailed and precise, he endeavored to document his work objectively, but I was to be his perfect creation, his successes and failures made manifest. I will have to rely upon his notes, colored by his hubris as they may be. But first, I feel that I should provide some facts that are objectively true.

With a few exceptions, my body consisted of parts that originally belonged to young women whose ages had ranged from seventeen to twenty-four when their lives were claimed by accident or violence. Victor chose each piece according to his own sense of aesthetic.

Significant portions of my brain as well as my hands had originally belonged to Maria Francesca Sartori, a noted violinist. Victor had taken great personal risk to obtain these components and there was significant scandal when the body was discovered exhumed and dismembered shortly after its burial.

The rest of me had been carefully selected from various sources, ladies of grace and beauty. My legs had belonged to one dancer, my arms and feet from another. My face had been taken from a young woman who had been at the peak of beauty and vitality when her life had been cut short. My heart and lungs were taken from a farmer's daughter, a stout woman endowed with a strong constitution.

Every part of me was taken from some unfortunate soul. When I came into being, I was no more than the amalgamation of stolen pieces.

Victor recorded the moment of my awakening. The journals have long since been destroyed and his words only survive as memories now:

How can I decide the terrible rapturous moment of its awakening - of her awakening?

She is both beautiful and grotesque. I admit that part of me recoiled in horror at what I had accomplished. Were I a lesser man, I might have fled the room, abandoning her to her fate.

How can I begin to describe her?

I have carefully selected each of her components to complement the others, her body and limbs in perfect proportion.

Without blood in her veins, her complexion is sallow and translucent, scarcely concealing the muscles and arteries beneath. Her hair is black and lustrous, a stark contrast to her skin. I have attempted to minimize the scars from her assembly, but those she does have stand starkly against the rest of her skin.

Her most horrid aspect are her eyes. They were originally a beautiful blue, but despite my best efforts have been leached of color until they became a dull pale yellow.

Of course, none of this seemed strange or horrific at the time. My entire perception of the world was filtered through him. To him I was his perfect miracle.

That was the most dangerous lie he ever told me.

It never occurred to me that people might see me as a monster.

I knew that other people existed, but only in the most abstract way. I understood that there was somewhere beyond the locked door of that room. Somewhere out there was a world where all my lessons came from. It was somewhere that he disappeared to when he left me in my drugged sleep.

As time passed, the drugs he dosed me with began to lose their effectiveness. I began to dream during his absences. Fragments of someone else's memory would creep into my sleeping mind, painting fantastical scenes and I couldn't possibly know which parts were real and which were fantasy.

I began to comprehend the passage of time by the slant of the sunlight from the high windows and the scents that filtered into my tiny domain. I came to know the turning of the year, the chill of winter, the sweet heat of summer. I began to suspect that the world was far more vast and dynamic than I understood it to be.

Between the dreams and my studies, I became more and more curious about the outside world and a longing settled into the core of me. It was a longing for something I had lost, yet had never experienced for myself. I needed to discover what it was that I was missing.

Victor of course rebuffed all my requests to explore outside of the castle and its laboratory. He was always gentle, but firm.

"You're not ready yet," he would assure me. "We still have more work to do."

There was always more work to do.

As time wore on, resentment began to settle into me. I was curious, so desperately curious, but he continued to deny me.

He treated me like a child, but no human child was ever as strong or as clever as I.

One day, he miscalculated the dosage of the cocktail he used to keep me asleep. I woke and for the first time in my life, I was alone.

I managed to slip out of my bonds. The door to the laboratory was unlocked. Victor had either forgotten to lock it or never bothered in the first place. The castle was believed to be haunted by the inhabitants of the local village. Perhaps he relied upon that reputation alone to keep curious individuals away.

I left the castle and felt the sun on my face for the first time. It was already late afternoon and I found myself witnessing my first sunset, a glorious riot of colors against the clouds and snow capped mountains. I was staggered by the beauty of it.

He had denied me this beauty. 

Resentment twisted within me, souring the moment.

I spotted the village then, just a small cluster of buildings and a scattering of farms further down the valley. A narrow dirt road wound down through the fields and fens, down from the castle that was my home.

Victor was due to return the next day, I wouldn't be missed if I had just a brief adventure. In that moment I decided that I could descend the road to the village, just look around and be back tonight before he returned. I set out, barefoot and wearing only a simple white sleeping gown.

By the time I arrived, evening had fallen and the inhabitants of the village were settled in for their suppers. The light from the inn was warm and inviting. The sound of laughter and music beckoned me.

But as I entered, when all eyes fell upon me, the music and laughter turned to deathly silence.

A woman screamed. I realized with a detached sense of horror that her face resembled my own. When I asked Victor about her later, he told me that the innkeeper and his wife had a daughter, young and beautiful. The daughter's husband had found her with another man and had flown into a rage, murdering them both. The morning after the funeral, her grave was found open and empty, the body nowhere to be found.

To the villagers, I was a revenant wearing the face of a murdered girl, come back to terrorize them. Men began to shout and I fled back towards the castle.

I was more than halfway when the first bullet struck me. There was a crack of sound like the thunder I do hated followed by a sharp pain in my abdomen. I staggered to a halt and looked down at the spreading stain on my dress from the leaking icor.

Another shot sounded and I ran off the road into the fen. The muddy soil sucked at my bare feet and thorny plants tugged at my dress and my skin.

More shots tore through me, each one spilling more of the fluids in my veins. My vision tunneled and my breathing became shallow. The villagers fell behind, their movement impeded by the saturated ground.

I tripped, crashing into one of the countless pools that dotted the fen. I struggled, but I had already lost too much of my lifeblood.

I slipped under the water and drowned.

 

---

 

I gradually found myself drifting through inky blackness. I was once again only vaguely aware of the passage of time. I cannot say for certain how long I remained in that state of oblivion.

Floating in that space between life and death, I had the impressions of being moved, of voices, of being poked and opened up, of electrical shocks.

Then came the moment that light stabbed into me and my consciousness came flooding back.

I gasped air into my lungs, each breath cutting like knives into my chest.

I knew I had been dead before, or at least the donors of my various body parts had been dead, but I had no prior memory of those deaths. Victor had been very careful to excise any memories of that before my initial assembly.

He had taken no such care this time.

I remembered the mob of villagers chasing me through the fens. I remembered shouting and torches and pitchforks.

I remembered each bullet piercing my skin, the stench of the smoke, the feel of icy water filling my lungs, blackness taking me.

"Shhhh… you're safe now" I felt a hand smooth my hair. I wanted to scream.

Victor's face floated into my vision.

"Why?" I managed to croak.

"Hm?"

"Why did you bring me back?"

He smiled.

"You are my daughter. I love you"

"I didn't want to come back," I said weakly before losing consciousness.

 

---

 

When I regained consciousness, I was again strapped to a metal table in an unfamiliar room. Victor was hunched over some equipment lining the wall.

"This isn't the castle," I said. Not quite a question.

"Hm? No, after the… incident, the villagers raided the laboratory and burned the whole thing to the ground. I have been informed that my family's castle has been reduced to rubble."

He paused.

"That was two months ago. It's taken considerable effort for me to move you here and restore you. You're lucky I was able to find you at all."

My head spun.

"Where are we?" The room was unfamiliar, a cellar perhaps. The assorted scientific equipment was the type that had been omnipresent in my entire time at the castle, the exact sort of equipment that one needed to animate the dead.

"We're safe. This is my house, my wife's house."

"Your…?"

The revelation stunned me. I knew he had once had a daughter and he wore a wedding band, but it had never occurred to me that he might have a family.

He took off his glasses and rubbed his temples.

"Ella, I'm sorry. I wish I had prepared you better. “I wish you had waited until I could accompany you on your first trip outside."

I wanted to curl up, but my body was still strapped down. I realized then that my wrists and ankles were cuffed and chained to the table. My heart sank and all I could do was turn my head away from him.

"Can you unstrap me?" I asked.

"I'm sorry my dear, there's still much work to be done.”