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“Do not despair. To be friendless is indeed to be unfortunate, but the hearts of men, when unprejudiced by any obvious self-interest, are full of brotherly love and charity.”
― Frankenstein
The old man sits alone in his rocking chair by the dwindling fire. His winters spent alone in prayer and repentance have seemed to grow longer each year, and each year he wonders if this will be the last. The days are lonely and the nights are cold in the cottage, and the old man worries for his health. He is old, and it is hard to care for himself - particularly now that his sight has failed.
When the stranger knocks on the door, the old man is not afraid; he is grateful. Before the old man can invite the visitor in, however, the door opens with a creak of hinges, and the stranger enters.
The old man is a little taken aback, but he recalls what the cottage looked like a year previously, before his sight had failed for good - now that his family have gone for the winter, the cottage likely appears abandoned. This stranger cannot be faulted for seeking shelter in a seemingly unused building, the old man supposes. He calls out - if the visitor has not realised the cottage is inhabited, he may flee in embarrassment, but he may also come closer and provide company. Any visitor is a welcome distraction from the cold and the loneliness.
“Who goes there?” he calls out. He does not like being unable to see who has entered the room - it has been one of the hardest parts of his blindness to adjust to. “Please, who is it? Answer me.”
The stranger does not answer, but neither does he flee - the old man can hear them breathing. He waits for a response as long as he can bear, but his patience is thin and this stranger is, after all, in his home. He waits, but the stranger still does not speak.
Now the old man does grow tense - there are many good reasons a stranger might knock on the door, and several that they might enter uninvited, but fewer good reasons to do so and then not introduce oneself. The old man tries again.
“Tell me. Why are you here?” he asks, firmly but not unkindly - it would not do to offend any visitor, least of all one of uncertain motivation.
There is another pause and the shuffling of steps on floorboards, curiously muffled, and at last the stranger speaks.
“Travel,” the stranger says, in a hoarse, soft voice.
A man, then - and one clearly the worse for wear, by the sound of it. The old man’s tension evaporates in an instant. The cottage is miles from any well-trodden traveller’s path, and even from the outside it is clear there is nothing in it worth stealing - anyone who approaches such an isolated, dilapidated cottage uninvited must be dearly in need of aid.
It has been years since the old man has been in a position to aid someone, and he is glad to be useful - he welcomes the stranger warmly, offering what little he can and making his apologies for his lack of formal hospitality. The stranger’s footfalls are close now, though still somehow too quiet. He takes light, tentative steps towards the table, and when the old man offers brandy, the stranger repeats the word as if he has never heard it before.
The old man frowns, curious. The stranger has barely spoken two words, but there is something about his voice that is unusual. He wonders if perhaps the reason the stranger failed to answer him was that he did not understand the question.
“Your language. You have a hard time speaking it. Are you not from these parts?” he asks.
Rather than an answer, the old man hears liquid being swirled in a bottle, then a loud smash as the stranger drops the brandy. The old man jumps, startled, but the stranger flinches back hard. He does not need sight to know that the stranger is cowering in fear - he makes no attempt to conceal his panicked breathing.
“Are you afraid?” he asks. “There’s no need to be,” he says, softening his voice. The stranger’s breathing begins to sound almost like crying, and the old man is reminded of his son when he was very small. He reaches out with both hands, beckoning the stranger closer. “What are you afraid of?”
“Everything,” the stranger near-whispers. His hand finally meets the old man’s, and it’s hard for him to hold back a gasp. The stranger’s hands are freezing - not just cold like he’s been outside without gloves, but as cold as the grave. It’s not a phrase that the old man usually uses, but for some reason it’s the first thing that comes to mind. This man is as cold as the dead.
Once he gets past the alarm of how cold he is, the old man feels the hand, seeking equally to comfort the stranger, and to find out any information he can about him. Since losing his sight, the old man has learned that hands can speak. There is a great deal to be learned about a person from the feel of their hands and the way they use them. The way they take the old man’s hand, the first impression, says a great deal - a firm handshake, a gentle clasp, a delicate pressing of their fingers into his.
This stranger doesn’t quite take the old man’s hand; he rather pushes his fingers towards it. It’s a silly thing to think, but the old man’s first impression is that it’s like the stranger is blind, not he. The stranger reaches out strangely, as though he does not know how far to stretch his arm, or how to take a hand in his own. He does not fold his fingers around the old man’s as most people would do, and simply allows him to search his skin.
What the old man finds there is more disturbing than the cold. The stranger is covered in scars - thick, raised scars, with stitches still inside. At first, he thought it was just one or two, but the old man loses track after he counts the ninth - the scars seem to run into each other, in strange patterns - curves and circles, rather than the usual straight lines that stitching up a gash leaves.
“You’ve been hurt, have you not?” the old man asks.
“Hurt,” the stranger repeats, as though he’s practicing the word on his tongue. The old man hears the rustle of clothing as the stranger bends down, hears him kneel before him. He places a hand on his cheek, to feel his features, and jerks slightly in shock at how badly scarred the man’s face is. It’s worse even than the hands, scars overlapping and crossing each other. The skin of the cheek under his ring finger feels different to the skin of the forehead under his index finger, and the middle finger rests not on an eyebrow, but on a thick band of scarring that almost crosses the eye itself. This man must have been hurt by a fearsome weapon, the old man thinks. He would have been less badly damaged by a cannon blast.
“Your hands and face have scars,” he says. He feels the man’s jacket, and is unsurprised at what he finds. “And you are wearing uniform. Were you injured in battle?” he asks.
The stranger does not reply, but the old man does not expect him to at this point - the battle that injured him must have been like hell on earth. The old man knows that no survivor escapes a battle like that in one piece - men either lose their limbs, their minds, or their memories. The stranger before him seems to have retained only the first.
The stranger presses closer, and involuntarily releases a small sound - one the old man has heard faintly many times over the past year, and he makes a connection.
“You were hiding in the mill gears, were you not?” he says. “Aha!” he laughs, pleased at his own realisation, and the stranger copies, making a hoarse sound of his own. With his hand still on the stranger’s cheek he can feel that the stranger is smiling, though it is odd and contorted with all the scarring.
The old man had known someone was living in the mill room. His eyesight may have failed, but his hearing had become sharp in return, and he had heard the shuffling and rustling of a person living in the disused room. He had mentioned it to his son once, but when his son had gone to look and found nothing, the old man had let it lie. The rustlings were infrequent, and he began to assume that the stowaway had left - but then the gifts had begun. Firewood, at first, then baskets of gathered berries, and even a new livestock pen. Given that the mill hadn’t run in years and that their stowaway clearly had no interest in harming his family, the old man had been happy to let them believe in the Spirit of the Forest. The old man knew that the gifts had not come from a spirit. Whoever had brought them was better - he was real.
The stranger’s hand comes up to stroke the old man’s beard. His hands are enormous, - somehow too large, the old man cannot help but think - but unbelievably gentle. It is strange, to think that these scarred hands could build a livestock pen overnight, lifting enormous wooden beams alone, and yet are capable of stroking so carefully that the man scarcely feels it at all.
“There is something in your voice which persuades me of your good will and kindness,” the old man says, patting his arm.
“Kindness?” the stranger repeats, as though the word is foreign to him in more ways than one. The old man thinks back on how the stranger had cowered after breaking the bottle, and has a terrible suspicion that it is.
In a moment, he makes a decision.
“Stay with me,” he says. “Share my food and fire. I would be delighted to share what little I have with you, and would be greatly helped by your companionship. And…” he pauses, realising that the stranger may not be comfortable with such a one sided exchange. “You could read to me,” he suggests.
“Read?” the stranger murmurs. The old man nods, pleased.
“Make this your home, and I your friend,” he says, and smiles down at the stranger.
“Friend,” the stranger says, testing it out on his tongue. “Friend,” he repeats, like he’s realising he’s heard it before, and the old man hears the tell-tale rustle of a nod. Then, he feels the stranger take his hand in those long, ice cold fingers, and lifts it. He places the old man’s hand atop his own head, and pats it up and down. The action is unusual, and not the sort of thing one grown man does to another, but the stranger’s actions feel certain. It is the first truly certain movement the stranger has made.
The old man is struck with the sensation that he is not, in fact, talking with a grown man as he had thought, but with a child. It is an odd sensation. Until now, the stranger had seemed to be an amnesiac, or perhaps addled by a bomb blast too close to his head. Both of these explanations would make far more sense than the idea that this great man has somehow returned to childhood, but the old man cannot disregard the thought.
The old man, however, does not have time to ponder it now. He pats his friend on the head as he does to his grandchildren, and somehow ignores the way that even the top of the man’s head, which would normally be the warmest place on the body, is as cold as the grave.
The stranger presses closer, leaning into the old man like a child leans into its mothers knees, and the old man puts his arms around him.
“Friends,” he declares. The stranger smiles into his lap.
Once again, the old man feels that he has a purpose in life. He feels renewed, the stretch of time before his family returns no longer bleak and bitter cold, but full of the warmth of companionship. The old man teaches his new friend to lay the fires in the grates and teaches him how to cook and clean, then begins teaching him how to read. His friend is intelligent, and takes to the lessons well. His speech begins slow and fumbling, constructing sentences oddly at first, and the old man wonders what his native tongue was - it surely cannot be this one. No amnesia could remove the knowledge of a man’s native tongue from his head. He learns quickly, however, and by the end of the Book of Lamentations his voice is clear and confident. By the end of Corinthians, he hardly makes any mistakes at all.
Rather than devoting his winter to solitude and desperate repentance of his past as he has the last years, the old man devotes his time to the rehabilitation of this lost soldier. Although the more time they spend together, the less certain the old man is of his initial assessment of his new friend as a soldier. The man does not move like a soldier - the old man cannot see it, but he can sense it. He does not move with the surety that even the worst amnesiac soldier would have. The old man would have put it down to his injuries, but something tells him that the injuries don’t bother him as much as one might assume. He moves awkwardly, but freely, like a newborn fawn stumbling through the grass - not with the ginger, stiff movements of a badly wounded man. He is immensely strong, pulling himself up and down the rafters with ease, and lifting and chopping huge logs with no difficulty. No, he is not injured, despite what the condition of his skin may say.
Additionally, the man’s size, which the old man had observed to be very large, has proved upon further examination to be far, far larger than any soldier the old man has ever seen. The old man has, through necessity, become quite skilled at estimating a person’s body size by listening to their footfalls, estimating the length of their stride. This man has the longest stride the old man has ever heard, and the old man guesses his height at well over six feet. The first time the man escorts the old man arm-in-arm, the old man extends his guess - his own head barely reaches above his friend’s elbow, meaning that he must be closer to seven feet than six, perhaps even exceeding seven feet. The old man then wonders how such a giant could survive unnoticed in the mill gears for so long.
That question is one of the few he receives an explanation for. The man has an incredibly long stride, allowing him to take fewer steps, and the steps he takes are barely audible. It is rather hard to track him around the house at first, and the old man can’t understand how a man of such immense size can move so lightly until he realises that the other man does not wear any shoes. It seems impossible that it does not pain him - as winter draws in and the ground grows colder, frostbite is a real concern - but his friend does not seem to even notice.
His friend’s wounds, too, are not quite what they first seemed to be. The wounds seem to cover every surface possible; everywhere the old man has laid a hand upon him, he has found a scar. The largest area without scarring is the left forearm, but the smoothness of unmarred skin here seems even stranger than the scarred skin does, because it is banded by scarring at the elbow and at the wrist. It reminds the old man of nothing so much as a tree branch that has been grafted on. The old man can think of no explanation, no bomb or gun that could have done this to a person - to scar him so heavily in some places and in such odd ways, and yet leave him completely unmarked in others. The old man has not stripped the man bare and run his hands across every inch of his skin, but he feels sure that if he were to do so, he would find scarring crossing every area of the body in the same nonsensical patterns.
The sutures embedded in the scars are their own curiosity. The old man is familiar with the texture of stitched wounds - the feel of threads poking through swollen, raised skin; the slight weeping of fluid as the wounds either heal or fester, depending on the luck of the injured man and the skill of the surgeon; the pained hiss of the injured man as a finger brushes the wound. This man makes no hiss of pain as the old man’s fingers explore them. The scars themselves are not bumpy and warm. The stitches are impossibly small and neat; more akin to the tight, durable stitching that holds a leather satchel together than the large, easy-to-remove sutures of a surgeon. The surgeon who performed the stitches must have spent hours labouring over the task.
It is this thought that gives the old man pause. No army surgeon would have the time to perform such extensive, delicate work; they scarcely have the time to knock a man out with whiskey before chopping his ruined leg off. The old man has heard of amputations performed so quickly that the surgeon’s own finger was cut off in the process, causing the surgeon to die of infection. He does not know of any surgeon - nay, any man on earth capable of performing the suturing that his friend has undergone. It is the work of a master tailor, not of a battlefield barber-surgeon. And it is completely bizarre.
A week or two into their friendship, the old man has to teach the younger to wash. It further cements his certainty that the man was never a soldier, as regular and effective washing is drilled into the men even deeper than the knowledge of how to load a gun, and thus this deficit raises further questions as to the man’s origins. (It matters little, of course, but the old man cannot help his curiosity.) The old man knows little of psychological problems or of amnesia, and he assumes that one could forget how to wash, if the damage were great enough. Certain connections in the brain could be severed, certain memories lost, causing the amnesiac not to connect the production of body odour with the need to wash.
What he cannot explain is the odour his friend develops.
The normal odour of an unwashed human is not particularly pleasant, but neither is it truly repulsive. Ordinarily, the smells of the oils of human skin, of sweat, and of unwashed hair are unpleasant but unremarkable.
The smell of his friend cannot be described the same way.
Rather than the expected mustiness of oily skin and unwashed hair, after a few days, the man develops the pervasive, cloying smell of death.
The old man cannot understand it. It ought to be impossible, but the scent is unmistakeable. It is not the sour smell of old sweat nor the putrid scent of infection - it is the stench of death and rot and decay. His friend’s smell began as the ordinary musty oily scent of skin, but was underlaid with that strange sweetness that only the terminally sick and dying carry with them, despite being clearly neither ill nor dying himself. Then, as he remained unwashed, his scent changed again. He began to exude the scent of decaying meat, left out too long. The old man finds himself reluctant to describe his friend’s scent as that of a rotting corpse, but there is no other way to describe it. It is not merely a similarity to decay, as some unfortunate people smell similarly, at the end of a hard day’s work, to ripe onions. There is no natural odour of old sweat in it - it is entirely the stench of a dead body. The old man teaches him to wash and teaches him to do it regularly and well, as he had taught his children and grandchildren, but though the scent could be washed away, the memory of it would linger. It is not the sort of thing one easily puts out of one’s mind.
The old man teaches his friend to wash by demonstrating on himself, but also by taking the cloth in his hands and washing his friend’s back for him, to demonstrate the correct amount of pressure to use. His fingers brush his friend’s bare back, and despite the water having been heated for bathing, his friend’s skin is still ice cold. This, together with the smell that had not yet been washed off, gave the old man pause. Somehow, his young friend (for the old man feels certain that his friend must be young, despite his enormous size) carries both the chill and the stench of death.
It is hard for the old man to ignore such a combination.
One night, while his friend is out collecting wood for the fire, the old man thinks on these traits of his friend. The stench of death and decay. The skin as cold as the grave. The impossibly tiny stitches covering every inch of skin. Not for the first time, the old man wishes passionately that he could see. He does not know what his friend is, but he is becoming less and less certain that he is a natural creature of this Earth.
The old man does not believe in spirits or shades. He believes in God, and in God’s divine Creation. He has taught his friend to read from the Bible, taught him all the scriptures, and his friend has not shrunk, nor hissed, nor cowered apart from that first night. Therefore the man cannot be a devil or demon - no demon could bear to read from the Bible as his friend has. Perhaps he could be a nephilim - one of those giant children of man and angel. However, the old man cannot make himself believe it.
The old man has taught his friend folklore and literature too - unlike the stories of the Bible, these stories are nothing but stories, but there are creatures mentioned that may match his description. However, the old man can think of none. His friend is surely not a ghost nor a goblin. He is far too large to be a kobold, and not large enough to be a giant - even if the old man believed in any of these things. His family’s belief that he is the Spirit of the Forest seems the likeliest, but the old man knows that his friend is no spirit. Though the flesh is too scarred and the blood is too cool to be normal, he is flesh and blood.
On an evening, the old man often rocks in his chair, thinking. He organises his observations and facts in his mind and examines them from every angle every night, and every night he fails to solve the mystery.
The old man struggles with the question for weeks. He knows he cannot ask his friend - any normal man would think the old man senile, if he were to suggest that he is a creature of myth, and if his friend is a creature of myth, it would likely frighten him, and end their friendship - but after the snow falls and the world is made clean and new, his friend brings it up himself.
“I want to know who I am,” he murmurs, gazing down at the cover of Paradise Lost. “Where do I come from?”
The old man’s heart clenches for his friend and the genuine sorrow in his voice.
“God took your memory just as I wish he would take mine away,” he says. He pauses, then decides it is time to tell his friend his story. “Many years ago, I took a man’s life,” he says. His friend does not react in horror, and so he goes on. “A good man. And I have been atoning for it ever since.”
His friend reaches out to pat the old man’s knee in comfort, just as the old man had done to him when he became distressed in the past. The old man takes his hand gratefully.
“Forgive, forget. That is the true measure of wisdom; to know you have been harmed, by whom you have been harmed, and choose to let it all fade,” the old man says. It is the absolution he wishes he could be given. The man he killed can never forgive nor forget him; he is dead. The old man must live with his actions. But he can try to spare his friend the same regrets.
“But I cannot forget what I cannot remember,” his friend whispers.
“Do you recall nothing?” the old man asks.
His friend is silent for a long moment, and the old man begins to wonder if he has somehow offended him. He lets go of the old man’s hand, and starts to pace.
“In my dreams, I see memories,” he murmurs. “Different men. All... pieces. I remember fire and water… and sand under my feet,” he says. “And a word.” He takes a step. “A single word.”
“What is it?” the old man asks.
“Victor.”
The old man has many ideas for what that all could mean, but none of them make sense. It sounds like a battlefield, but he is by now sure that his friend was never a soldier - these memories of a battlefield surely cannot be his own. But they cannot be someone else’s, either - the doctor-scientists of London and Berlin and Geneva have accomplished many things, but transference of memory is not one of them. Like many things about his friend, it defies explanation. With no other advice to give, the old man suggests;
“Go to it; the word.”
And his friend does.
It is a day’s walk to the place from whence he came - his friend knows little about it, but this, he is sure of. The old man bids him farewell with a warm hug and pat on the back, and his friend leaves, heading east. The cottage is cold and lonely without him, and the first day passes without incident, but the second day - the day of his friend’s return - the old man finds himself unable to focus on prayer, but instead worrying about his friend more and more with every hour that passes and he does not arrive home. His friend is strong and capable, but naive. Will he return safe?
The old man should not have allowed himself to become so distracted. On the second day, the wolves come.
If he had been focused on silent prayer and repentance rather than anxious fretting, perhaps he would have noticed their howls sooner, been able to hide himself faster, but he is old and slow and blind and he cannot find his way over the deafening howls coming from all directions. He cannot guess which direction the snarling comes from before it is directly next to his ear and teeth are in his neck. The old man cries out, and prays to God that his friend will return.
His prayers are answered - the cottage door crashes open, off its hinges, and his friend roars in rage and fury, a sound the old man has never heard a human make. The wolves attack him too, and the old man tries to bid him to flee, but he can hardly speak, let alone shout. Then, the snarling and howling changes tone. It takes the old man a moment to make out what is happening in all the chaos and pain.
His friend is fighting the wolves. And somehow, he is winning.
The old man listens (for what else can he do?) as his friend tears the wolves limb from limb, picking them up and smashing their brains against the flagstones. His friend breaks the spine of another, then lets out a bellow of rage; an animalistic roar. A strange tone overtakes his voice when he shouts, the old man has observed before, and it happens now - it sounds almost as if a second voice is overlapping his own, as if a second set of vocal cords are present in the man’s throat.
His friend roars in fury at a volume that ought to be impossible, and the surviving wolves turn tail and flee, running back into the woods.
His friend has saved him. But the old man knows it is too late.
His friend picks him up gently, and sets him down in a chair as carefully as one sets down a sleeping baby. The great hands that had just moments ago torn a wolf’s spine in half now cling to the old man’s robe like a child clings to its mother’s skirts.
“You came back,” the old man wheezes, ignoring the pain, and setting a tender hand against his friend’s cheek.
“I found what I am,” his friend says, his voice filled with pain of its own. “What I am made from.”
He pauses, gritting his teeth in anger and sorrow, and the old man thinks he feels a tear slip down his friend’s cheek.
“I am the child of a charnel house,” his friend whispers. “A wreckage. Assembled from refuse and the discarded dead.”
The old man wants to ask what he means by this, but his thumb brushes across one of the stitched scars on his friend’s cheek, and he understands. He thinks one last time of the stench of death and the chill that follows his friend; of the foreign memories that plague him in his dreams; of the strange patterns of impossibly neat stitches that connect his friend’s skin like patchwork and circle his limbs like grafted branches.
It is impossible, and infernal, and wrong, but the old man knows it must be true. His friend has never told a lie.
Now, though, his friend falls silent, like he cannot bring himself to speak the final bit of the truth.
“I am a monster,” he weeps.
The old man takes the man’s face in his hands, holding him tenderly. The old man has so much more he wants to tell his friend, but this will have to suffice.
“I know what you are,” he tells him. “You are a good man. And…” he says, struggling for breath. “And you are my friend.”
The old man has many regrets in life. There are many things he wishes he had not done. But as the old man succumbs to his wounds, they fade away. He thinks only of the things he does not regret, and whether his friend is a monster, a devil, or an angel, he is blameless in his own existence. The old man does not regret their friendship for a single second. There is only one thing he wishes he had done differently for his friend:
He wishes he had asked his friend’s name.