I don't fidget when I'm nervous, a quirk of my physiology. Instead, I forget to move at all. I stood still as a statue as Victor brought his wife to meet me.
Dread had settled into the pit of my stomach. He had never once mentioned his wife or his daughters. I gathered from his nervous energy that he had never mentioned me to them either. What was the nature of their relationship that he felt the need to keep such a monstrous secret? Where would I land in this domestic order? If there wasn't a place for me here, what else was there for something like me?
I almost forgot to breath as she swept into the room. She was beautiful and terrifying. Everything about her was precise, not a single hair out of place. She moved with an imperious air, a reminder that this household belonged to her and her alone. The lines and creases on her face spoke of more frowns than smiles.
"Elisabetta, this is Ella.”
Her eyes fell on me and there was the briefest flicker of shock before her face settled into intense displeasure.
"Oh Victor… why couldn't it have been a mistress you were running off to see?"
"Elisa, please. Can you not see what I have done? She is a miracle, she and I are going to change the world!"
"This is no miracle," she hissed. "This is an abomination. It is an affront to God and nature. Do you have any idea how much of our money you've wasted on your pursuits? We are ruined."
He deflated.
"I was trying to-"
"Oh, I know full well what you were trying to do," she snapped. "This… this thing will never replace the daughter we lost. In creating it, you have destroyed any relationship you had with your other daughters."
He closed his mouth, defeated.
My stomach sank. This was going worse than I had feared. I had expected displeasure from his wife, but the way he couldn't bring himself to defend me felt like a betrayal.
Worst of all, part of me began to think that maybe she was right. If the family were indeed in dire financial straits, it was because of me. If he hadn't dedicated his every waking moment in the past decade to my creation, maybe the family would have been better off.
His wife relented on one thing. I was to remain in the house. To turn me out would risk revealing me and would destroy any shred of reputation the family had left.
He showed me to an unoccupied room off the same hallway as the rest of the family. The room had an air of disuse, it was slightly too clean and smelled faintly stale. The furniture was plain and the walls were unadorned save a single portrait of a young girl.
A horrible chill settled over me. This was her room.
Since waking in this unfamiliar house, Victor had told me about his family, about his daughters. Ella had been the oldest, a vivacious elfin girl that Victor adored. When she was eight, a fever swept through the countryside, claiming the lives of several children including hers.
He didn't tell me the rest of the story, but with this new context, it wasn't difficult to guess. In his grief, he became obsessed with life and death. He threw himself into his research until it consumed him.
My being given this room was a symbolic gesture on his part and the thought made me absolutely sick.
He sighed heavily and dragged his hands across his face.
"That did not go as I hoped it would," he said. "I really wish you hadn't wandered into that village. We weren't ready."
"I'm sorry," I mumbled.
He glared at me and there was a hardness to him that I had only ever seen sparingly and never directed at me.
"You're sorry?? Do you have any idea what your misadventure cost us? Or how much it set us back? All the equipment, the research notes, it's all lost. You've set us back years and thanks to you, we're stuck here, in this… this place!"
He stomped over to the window and fumed. He had never spoken to me like that before, and it only made me feel more miserable. I knew he was lashing out, but he was right. It was my fault that we were here.
I swallowed and wiped my eyes. I wouldn't let him see me cry, not now. I wouldn't give him that satisfaction.
He squared his shoulders and turned back to look at me.
"Come… there are two more people you need to meet."
The twins were as different as night and day.
Florina was tall and fair and plump. The first time I saw her, she was wearing a garishly vivid pink dress with far too much lace. Her dark golden curls were piled elaborately upon her head; it must have taken an hour to get it just right. My first impression of her was of someone utterly vain and spoiled.
Upon seeing me, the expression on her face settled into something between horror and revulsion.
Ariane, in contrast, was slender and bony. Her mousy brown hair was cut short, barely past her chin and it was terribly unkempt. Her dress was a dull gray and I had the impression that she'd prefer to fade into her surroundings and disappear. A childhood illness had left its mark on her - she was pale and sickly and walked with a limp. She moved through the world with a deliberate gravity, her movements precise.
Her reaction was far more subdued than her sister's, but her eyes were filled with pure contempt, as if she resented my very existence.
Dinner that first night was an awkward, tense affair. Everyone at the table looked like they'd rather be somewhere else. Even Victor, who had insisted on it, became visibly uncomfortable after the first few minutes. He wrung his hands nervously and tried making idle chatter, pretending - and failing spectacularly - as if everything were perfectly normal.
Elisabetta sat at the head of the table, directly across from him. She calmly ate her dinner, but she glared at Victor with a terrible intensity. As dinner wore on, I realized that just beneath her placid facade, she was seething.
Florina was seated directly across from me. She made some effort to engage in Victor's chattering, but frequently trailed off to stare at me, wide-eyed, somewhere between disgust and terror, as if she feared I was carrying a deadly plague.
Ariane was seated between her sister and her mother and looked like she desperately wanted to be anywhere else. She hunched her shoulders and tried to make herself as small as possible, shrinking away from her mother and sister - I assumed, correctly, that I had been seated in her customary place at the table. She poked absently at her food and I caught her glancing at me a few times, her expression was still contemptuous. Of course whenever she noticed me looking at her, she flinched and she resumed scowling at her food.
Victor tried to incorporate me into the conversation, as if I were a perfectly ordinary dinner guest and this were a perfectly ordinary dinner. I responded to him with monosyllables and after several attempts, he gave up.
"Well, that could have gone better," he said after escorting me to my room, finally breaking the sullen silence that had settled over the household halfway through dinner.
"They don't like me," I said. " They don't want me here."
Victor stiffened slightly.
"They just need time. Maybe if you had put more effort…" he trailed off at my incredulous expression.
He sighed.
"Just… give them time."
He bid me good night and I settled onto the bed. The softness of it felt strange and alien. I had only ever slept on the cold metal table in his laboratory, and always in a drug induced nothingness.
I laid down amongst the puffy pillows and comforter and it felt like I was going to sink into it forever. For a horrible instant, I felt like I was falling, like I was drowning.
Gasping, I thrashed my way out of the bedspread. With my heart thundering and my chest tight, I perched on the edge of the bed and tried to will myself to relax.
Gradually my panic gave way to a vague sense of dread. The house was too noisy, it creaked and groaned. Mice scuttled unseen in the walls and the sounds of frogs and insects filtered in from the outside. The windows were too big, I felt exposed. I imagined the moon as a baleful eye, inspecting me, judging me.
I flicked the curtains closed and tried to settle on the bed once more. I finally managed to relax with a single pillow and sheet, the rest of the bedspread shoved to the floor.
Lying there, I thought about how I would never be perfect enough for Victor. There would always be more work to do. He couldn't conceive of a world in which he wasn't working on me.
I imagined the ghost of the little girl that must surely haunt this room. Her specter certainly haunted this family.
Finally, sometime after midnight, I slipped into a restless sleep, haunted by nightmares of torches and pitchforks.
Over the next few days, we settled into a tense rhythm. Victor woke me before dawn so that he could walk me through the garden in the quiet hours before the world awoke. He would then take breakfast with his family, leaving me to eat alone. He explained that he was trying to mend ties with them, get them used to the idea of me without actually having me in the room. In truth, I relished those moments alone, unburdened by the expectations or preconceptions of me.
Other than lunch and dinner, which we shared separately from his family, we spent the days either in his study or the laboratory, breaking only for lunch and dinner.
I dreaded the times when he led me to the hidden door and down the stairs into the sterile gloom of the lab. There were constant tests to be run, improvements to be made. I followed him with increasing reluctance, my resentment growing by the day. He either didn't notice or didn't care why I hated that space so much, and I didn't know which possibility was worse.
In stark contrast, the study was like a dream. Shelves lined the walls and they were filled with books, more books than I had ever imagined could fit in one place. A massive desk sat in front of a set of windows overlooking the back garden and the fields and forest beyond. The whole room smelled of books, of paper and ink and the varnished wood of the desk and shelves. The books covered every subject imaginable and I wished I could lose myself in them.
My one encounter with Ariane that first week came on the morning of the third day. Victor and I were in his study; he was at his desk reading correspondence and I had been granted a rare moment to browse the shelves freely.
Ariane entered without knocking, easing the door open with a quiet furtiveness. She froze in surprise, clearly not expecting the room to be occupied.
"Ariane?" Victor said, equally surprised by the intrusion. "What are you doing here?"
For a brief moment, her face brightened with something like hope and I felt a pang of pity for the girl. The moment evaporated when she realized I was also present and she fled the room without a word.
I saw no sign of Ariane for the next several days as she actively avoided us, but we occasionally passed Elisabetta and Florina in the halls. My stepmother regarded Victor with that same icy glare as always, completely ignoring me.
Florina stared at me openly, but as the days went on, the terror leached out of her expression, replaced by a haughty sneer. She seemed to realize that I was not a threat, but something beneath her. She relished her father's attention and it became clear that she held him blameless for the family's financial woes. In her eyes, all of the blame should fall squarely on me.
On the tenth evening, I had finally reached my breaking point. Victor was leading me to the lab for the third evening in a row. As he inserted the key into the hidden lock, my heart began pounding. The thought of being strapped down and poked and prodded once again had become unbearable.
The door swung open and he started down the stairs. Four steps down, he paused to look back at where I was rooted.
"Ella?"
"I… I don't want to go down there."
He cocked his head in confusion. In my short existence, I had never once shown any defiance and he was clearly unprepared for this.
"Ella, come."
His voice was sharp, with that same edge that had crept in and I found myself reluctantly obeying.
He led me down the stairs and began to light the lamps around the room. I stopped at the foot of the stairs and stared at the metal table.
"Ella, we still have a lot of work to do, it's for your own good."
"What good? What's the point? I'll never be perfect! I'll never be anything other than a monster!" The words spilled out of me, rising until they were almost a shout.
"Ella, you're not-"
"Your family hates me!"
He flinched. I had hit somewhere sensitive.
"They took one look at me and they hate me. The villagers saw me and they were so terrified that they hunted me down and killed me. What's the point of any of this if I'm just going to be hated and feared my entire life?"
Victor sighed.
"Ella, I don't want to have this conversation right now. Please just get on the table."
"No."
His eyes widened.
"What?"
"No. I can't. I'm… I'm done."
His face hardened. He grabbed my arm, but I shoved out of his grasp.
He reached again and I caught his wrist.
He stared at the hand clasped around his wrist. The shock and disbelief in his eyes turned to terror as he began to struggle.
At that expression of panicked fear, I gasped and released him. I watched in horror as bruises began blooming on his wrist.
I was far stronger than any normal human being, I was distantly aware of that fact. To see physical evidence of what that strength could do when applied carelessly shook me to the core.
Victor stared at me in shock, panting, unable to comprehend what had just happened.
"I'm sorry!" I gasped, shattering the silence.
He turned away, rubbing his wrist tenderly.
"I… I think… that will be all for tonight," he said shakily.
I returned to my room in a haze of guilt and horror. By the time I collapsed on the bed, tears had begun to fall down my face.
Alone with my thoughts, the too-soft bed and too-big windows took on a much more menacing quality. I desperately wanted to sleep, to lose myself to oblivion for just a few hours, but every tiny noise of the house put me on edge.
As the night wore on I absently tracked the trail of moonlight as it slipped across the room, once again imagining its baleful stare. When I closed my eyes, I saw his face - filled with terror as my grip crushed the capillaries just under the skin of his wrist.
I remembered the smell of smoke and the shouts of the mob. I felt the memory of the bullets that had torn through me, and the water that had enveloped and filled me.
I imagined the ghost of Ella again, but this time she wasn't alone. Beside her was the ghost of Maria, the violinist, who had been exhumed so that her brain could be stolen; to her other side, the ghost of the girl from the village whose face I wore - I didn't even know her name. I imagined all of them, all the young women whose bodies had been desecrated so that I might exist.
There was nothing left now but their ghosts and the monster that had been cobbled together from stolen pieces of them.
I must have fallen asleep at some point, because I awoke to a terse knock at the door. I blinked blearily at the mid morning sunlight streaming in through the window. Why hadn't Victor woken me at dawn like every other morning?
The knock came again and before waiting for an answer, Ariane pushed open the door and my stomach lurched.
Her eyes were red and puffy, and though they were dry, tear tracks still stained her cheeks. The glare she gave me was a tempest of contempt that I unconsciously tried to shy away from
"Come," she said tersely. "My mother needs to speak with you."
She turned and began walking down the hall, her steps as quick as her limp allowed.
I gathered myself to follow her.
"Has something happened?" I asked, fear prickling under my skin.
She ignored me, just stared straight ahead as she made her way down the hall.
We arrived at the parlor where my stepmother waited for us. There was something strained in her eyes. She sat perched on a seat, regarding me with that perpetual expression of disgust.
"That will be all, Ariane"
The girl hunched her shoulders and hesitated for a second. She stiffly turned and left the room, giving me one last contemptuous glance.
I stood before Elisabetta, perfectly still. Whatever this was, it couldn't be good. She studied me for what felt like an eternity, her stare cold and hard.
"My husband is dead," she said finally.
Ella's going to blame herself somehow, isn't she :(