Frankenstein: The Prisoner

The men led me to the magistrate, an old, kind-looking man named Mr. Kirwin, who listened to the witnesses one by one.Some fishermen said that the night before, they had found the body of a young man on the beach, with the black marks of fingers on his neck.When I heard about the marks of fingers, I remembered the murder of my brother, and my legs began to shake.

Mr. Kirwin took me to the room where the body lay, to see how I would react.How can I describe what I felt when I saw the lifeless body of Henry Clerval lying before me?I threw myself on the body and cried, “Have my evil plans taken your life too, my dearest Henry?”

Then a terrible fever took hold of me, and for two months I lay near death in a prison bed.In my madness I called myself the murderer of William, Justine and Clerval, and begged the people around me to save me from the monster.Luckily, I spoke in my own language, so only Mr. Kirwin understood my words.

When I finally woke, weak and thin, I wished that I had died instead.Mr. Kirwin was kind to me; he brought a doctor, found me a better room, and wrote to my family.“Someone has come to see you,” he said one day, and my heart froze, because I thought it was the monster.

But it was my father who walked in, and I stretched out my arms to him with tears of joy.“Elizabeth and Ernest are safe,” he told me, and those words were the best medicine I could have.At the trial, it was proved that I had been on the island of Orkney when Clerval’s body was found, so I was set free.

Yet freedom meant nothing to me; the air of the whole world felt like the air of a prison.My father took me on board a ship for home, and I lay on the deck, looking at the stars and listening to the waves.I knew the monster was still alive, and I could not forget his words: “I shall be with you on your wedding night.”