My heart broke anew. I knew what such a thing would mean to Justine. She had lived in a constant effort to be right before God. She had even died because of it. “What did they do with the body?”

“It was burned. They would not give me the ashes.”

I closed my eyes and nodded, dropping this injustice into the sea of horrors already drowning me.

“I have been thinking,” he said. Then he ran his fingers through his hair. His eyes darted constantly to his window, either looking for something outside or yearning to be there himself. “But I cannot think here, in this house. I am going for a walk through the mountains. I may be gone a day or two. Please do not worry. I hope, in the majesty of their embrace, to find some clarity.”

I wanted him here to comfort me, but I did not know how to be comforted. So I nodded and let him pass by. He carried a leather satchel.

He did not smell like ink and paper.

—

Later that afternoon, I prowled around the exterior of the house, glaring up at it. I had offered this place to Justine as a sanctuary. It had betrayed her.

I had betrayed her.

A spray of violets was growing beneath Victor’s window. Justine had always loved violets. I stomped through the other plantings to get to them. Whether to tear them up or to admire them, I had not decided. But I paused when something caught my eye. Beneath Victor’s window were footprints. I slipped my own booted foot down into the depression in the mud.

The foot was easily twice the size of mine, larger than any I had seen before. There were no impressions of shoes or boots, but neither were there toes. I would have thought something had been dropped there, but the placement was exactly as though someone had been standing beneath his window, looking in as I was now.

They were footprints, but too large. Too large by far.

Monstrous.

I rushed back inside. Judge Frankenstein was wandering through the first floor. His shirttails were untucked, and his hair was sticking up on the back of his head. “Have you seen my pistol?” he asked. “I wanted to go shooting, and I cannot find it anywhere.”

Victor. The satchel he had carried with him out of the house.

A growing anxiety gripped me with viselike intensity. I had not imagined the monster in the woods. And Victor had seen it, too. He did not say—he could not say! But if the monster had been here…

William.