“I saw a monster. Like a man in form and shape, but no man created by God. It was as though a child had crafted a figure out of clay—disproportionate, too large, unnatural in both shape and movement. I cannot describe it except to say it was wrong. And I do not believe it is the first time I have seen it.”

“A monster,” he repeated. He spoke slowly, his words perfectly even, like the ticking of a clock. “You hit your head very hard.”

I scowled at him. “After I saw it! And now I am certain I saw it watching me in Ingolstadt, and again on the journey home.”

“And you said nothing?”

“I thought it a dream.” If the charnel house man had never been here, then it was some other presence I felt, some other nagging sense of having been watched since Ingolstadt.

“Does it not make more sense that it is still a dream? A product of your injury and your extreme upset? Maybe inspired by something you might have seen—an image? Or a nightmare?” He spoke carefully. He was holding something back from me. I could see it in the way he seemed to look everywhere but into my eyes.

“I am not the one who falls delirious into fevers! I have never dreamed anything like this. How would I have even conjured such a…” I paused. I had not had time to connect the two, but now that I could separate myself from the sheer panic and terror of being in front of the thing, I realized I had seen something like it before.

A drawing.

In Victor’s notebook.

Did he know I had seen his notes? Was that why he had suggested that the product of my injured mind had been inspired by an image?

Or was there some other reason he was being evasive? “When you were sick, when I found you,” I said, hesitant, as I sorted through what I wanted to reveal and what I wanted to hold back, “you said ‘It worked.’ Your experiment worked. What was it?”

Victor’s face briefly contorted in rage. I flinched and he turned his back, picking up a book and then setting it down. When he finally spoke, his voice was so measured and calm I could hear every hour I had spent teaching him to control himself. “It does not matter. Whatever I said, I was out of my mind. Nothing I did in Ingolstadt was successful.”

I did not want to push. I did not want to risk one of his fits when he was so newly restored to me. But I could not let this stand, not when Justine was threatened. “Are you certain? Sometimes when you have your fevers, you forget things. Things that happen just before you fall ill. Things that happen before you are confined to your bed. Is it possible that—”