“And no one cared to help you, did they? I could have taken you, too, at any point, and never suffered the slightest inquiry.” Victor did not say it meanly. He stated it as fact, because it was.

Mary turned to me. Her face was pale and her eyes shadowed. The binding I had put on her shoulder was already soaked through. “I am sorry to say, I do not have much faith that your marriage will be a happy one.”

Lightning forked overhead. Victor looked straight up, hungry with anticipation. I stood, creeping closer. A bolt of the lightning lanced down and hit the pole with blinding force. The air crackled, all my hair standing on end.

Victor reached over to throw a lever. I shouted, waving my pistol to get his attention. At the same moment, Mary stood and threw her knife at him. It spun through the air and hit his forehead, hilt first. Stunned, he stumbled back.

The lightning passed.

The lever was left unswitched.

There was a sizzle and a putrid scent of burned flesh and hair as Judge Frankenstein’s body was ravaged beyond repair by the current that Victor had failed to redirect.

“You have ruined it!” Victor screamed, leveling his pistol at Mary.

The windows behind him revealed a terrible dark shape running toward us. It crashed through the glass with an inhuman roar, slamming into Victor.

The monster was here.

Chapter Twenty-five: Did I Request Thee, Maker, from My Clay, to Mold Me Man?

THE MONSTER, TERRIBLE IN aspect from far away, was even more horrible to behold up close. His hair, long and black, hung lank from his misshapen head. The lines of Victor’s patchwork sewing made his skin ridged and puckered, portions of it different tones and a few sections withered like a mummy’s.

His lips were black like tar over teeth as straight and white as any I had ever seen. The contrast, rather than being pleasing, made both seem more alien and repulsive.

He grabbed for Victor, his massive hands misshapen and clumsy. The fingers had been fashioned roughly, lacking nails, the joints all wrong. Victor ducked, darting under the monster’s grasp and then leaping onto the table. He stood on top of his father’s mutilated corpse. The monster grabbed the edge of the table with a roar, intent on tearing the whole thing apart.

As soon as the monster touched the metal, Victor leaned over and flipped the switch. Whatever power was lingering from the lightning strike, it crackled and sparked, directed now into the monster.

The monster seized, straightening to its full colossal height, and then stumbled backward before falling against the wall and sliding down to sitting, its long legs splayed at an impossible angle. The feet, each as large as my thigh, were bare, revealing stunted, club-like appendages that ended in massive wolfish pads.