THE YEAR WITHOUT A SUMMER

CONTENT WARNING: 

This content contains mature situations, violence, 

and what some may consider gore and inappropriate for children. 

Discretion is advised.

Chapter 13

The Year Without A Summer

1816, The Arctic. 

Urgently the quill darts out word after word across each line like a messenger running out of time. Victoria writes, "I traveled with knelis to the city of Knokke. He had frequented Knokke with Jacop to do trades and knew where to find a place for us to sleep. We had caught up with Ambroos, Gerbin and the children shortly upon arriving. Ambroos made a discussion and to the kids and Gerbin she stated that there was no monster. She past a creed that it was a traveling troop of the de police on their course back to France and she spoke fictitiously about the de police burning down the village and casting us into refuge. Ambroos spoke with conviction that this was the story they would tell from now on and that there would be no mention of me. A couple days after our arrival we were in the local market. There was a moment that in the crowds of traders and salesmen and patrons, I saw it. Hiding in a shroud. At least It seemed that way till traders began to converse with it. Maybe I wanted to see it again. Vexed with its presence imbued on my eyes the scare was enough to send me running. I knew then I must go for I have seen what lives are destroyed by the death that follows me. I purposefully left that night without a word to anyone. I kept moving with this sense that I was in chase. Certain I caught a glimpse of it again and again in every town I stopped in. I left The Kingdom of the Netherlands to find that the world was changing as a once unstoppable Napoleonic army had now fully rescinded to France. No matter, I was nimble in my transactions otherwise to also avoid the violence of Napoleon's contrived de police as I was south bound through France. Finally when I was in Italy, I boarded a fishing vessel. Working on the vessel till we reached the Arctic where briefly the ship became stuck. Eventually when it became free from the ice I off boarded before its departure back to Italy. Stranding myself in the Arctic tundra plotting to lure my creature. There is no telling if my creature still follows me. It is a position poised in paranoia. This running has persisted for three years. I am finally without rations. With the amount of time I have spent in rumination along the way I made a decision to trick my creature into following me to a place of no return. If my paranoia is eventually validated then I will have lured it away from the world, unable to harm another living soul trapping it in the Arctic. Other thoughts had crossed my mind in my ruminations such as what I was truly afraid of. Death was a simple enough answer that long sufficed the question till I recognized it was not death at all. Nor was it the absolutely violent disembowelment that my creature is capable of. I discovered within myself over time I am afraid I will never have a page in history. What I am most afraid of, is dying, insignificant. In my pursuit I have merely done such as that. Sinking lower than the feared title and I have less than what could be named infamy. I have erased myself. I have become titleless there for I have become nothing. A lifetime of research and academia, a valiant toil to gain the title I deserve. It was in those late hours where I paced in retrospect that I stumbled upon this epiphany to give up protecting myself for a dream I will never see. It was time to take action and do what needs to be done to stop the unstoppable. To put an end to my creatures treachery and quell my fears of a dismal future. A future where it will surpass us all. Where, an intelligent being with common place knowledge that was made by humans, cannot be used to better mankind in our search for advancing natural sciences, efficient medicine and human progress but instead eradicates the need for people. Beautiful, diverse, creative, loving, dreaming, wondrous people. Now I am here. Trapped in the furthest reaches of the Arctic with no hope to escape alive. This is the best chance I have to do the right thing. Now I must give up these thoughts as my ink will soon come to freeze I will close my last log remembering, him. My greatest love. My final hopes as my life fades into the colossal embrace of winter's breast are that I can gather the strength to see in my memory his eyes for the last time. All of my years obsessing, looking to create a medicine for you, an aid, a cure. I have followed one prospective clue to the next traveling all over to find answers, for you. I suppose I could not ask to change the past for there is no telling if I was endowed with more time, with you. For how history transpired easily how fickle life truly is, I just as fairly could have been dammed to less time with the gift of you. There are people living the whole of their lives in happiness. It does not matter if it is a quiet simple life or that of which lived in high society. There is truly a possibility of their unhindered happiness. I have regrettably let the pockets in which the years of happiness resided, escape me. The years in which happiness was its most powerful. My life with you was a small number of years, no will can make those years obtainable again. Happiness lives within small chambers of life. I see now everything was only obstacles leading to the chambers being found. I invite every life to learn appreciation for those small chambers for it is always with devastation that all of existence comes to reclaim them. The most powerful I have ever felt happiness t'was with you. Your kindness was a life force in you that whimsical stories have been written to be unattainable. Therefore how astonishing it was to receive you freely. The way you looked for me in all spaces and my name spoken by you felt deeply supernatural. I would never know a greater absolute love. It was all for you my darling F-"

 Impulsively she gasps to then turn as still with all the stillness of a ship frozen in ice. The ink has frozen. Victoria tries to scratch the rest of the name but she quivers and her attempt is weak never to finish the name. She looks over the captains quarters acknowledging that it is a dark 300 year old ice box. The cold has long set in as she closes the journal. Of all the ways the earth takes life back by swallowing it in its nature, Victoria thinks, a tomb of ice is the one she would be most amenable to. Between the battle of drowning in water, the vicious submission to fire and the gruesome disorient of poison, freezing is where death makes you a bed and coos you to rest for sleep is where you'll find peace. The cold is a blanket that never gets warm and the colder you get the more you abide to the dose of sleep. Not realizing how weak she's become she attempts to stand up when both her legs give out and she falls to the floor. 

 Victoria finds she is overexerted as her efforts are great to get up but without fruition. To what need, she thinks to herself, "Welcome this with dignity. My duress is pitiful thus why pile on more shame. I resign in this way not without shame. If my father could be in this room… if he could see me I know I would feel ashamed. If he were to be in this room… he would… he would… he would pick me up. He would tell me there is nothing to be ashamed of. I can hear his voice still- Bear the brunt of the worlds bold brass as all the world must, do it with integrity and do it without fear, tis doth there be no condoned shame if neither were in thyne possession for the worlds brass cometh unimpeded. It shall come for us all. Tis then thus thou beith without fight, then I see no shame in a soul who hath beith afraid. There is no shame in death. Seeith woe, and I seeith hate but there beith no soul of any woman or man who walks with goodness and still denounce to those in dying to be shameful. Be not concerned with the words nor notions of those who ne'er gardened within thyne self a bed of goodness to prosper. Nurture your goodness. Your trees, flowers, food – all substance of you, in your willing, beith the goodness for others for there is more the world holds, thee has but power in every trickle of time to give the world more good. For there is more than only the brass of the world.- My father embodied kindness and goodness like a morning spent in the shade of trees. A reliever of harshness, he made it easy to be around him. He was an easy man to love. He would see himself die than sooner allow for anyone to be in his stead. He was only ever pressing about a few ideologies. That death follows Frankensteins, that life was made for living and from I can recall most is that the proliferation of goodness is always worthy. You could deem someone worthy by their goodness. You could deem any fight worthy if it saw the preservation of goodness. You could deem self sacrifice worthy in a means of protecting goodness. You could deem love worthy if only goodness is what flourished.

 My father, how I have wronged you. I have been careless with your legacy giving way for it to be carried off like a voice on a draft. Yet still despite my horrid pain in lament I know there is no act I could be expected to perform in which you would not cloak me in your pride. 

 I still remember when he told me that he has seen imperfection with his eyes as much as he has breathed air. But has only ever known perfection to be invisible, played with in pretend, dressed in wardrobes of metaphor for what a collection of imperfect things looks like together. Never imposing perfection on me. Even at the heights of my childhood when I saw other girls be punished for going against what is expected of them my father encouraged me to do everything. He wanted me to obtain all the trappings of an educated man. That I ought to strive to be more than that even. To be a woman of erudition. That the sole purpose of my life was to be defined by me. Not to serve a husband and bear his children. The influence my mother had on my father was so impeccably vigorous that he implemented her ideologies daily from my upbringing of never lacking in education to a household order founded in reason. I saw him never in a moment to make a decision in which he was separated from himself. A great amount of his essential nature was rooted in the beliefs of kindness and goodness built with iron clad fervor for his positivity that no ideology could combat. No matter the presence of wretchedness and foulness in an army of words they would be met with no opposing infantry but instead an unassailable structure commanding acquiescence. Therefore when it was apparent he was conducting himself in what could be my mothers wishes and the whole of his self had to be put aside he did so happily, without ego, without strife. My father never remarried after my mother's passing nor have I ever known of him taking on another lover or mistress. My father and I traveled together quite often and on one of our journeys to the inherited ancestral Frankenstein castle I recall him explaining how my mother fondly missed the motherly nature of Germany. She spoke of it often of wanting to return there all the years their love bloomed and he had promised one day he would take her and she could feel the warmth of Germany's bosom again. It brought him great lament to keep his word not once while she was still alive. He chose the words engraved on her headstone plaque that resided under the feet of a statue chiseled in her likeness where her naked body is draped in a thin fabric while she cups a lotus flower before her face. The words engraved read- The whole of her life was spent weaving her love into others. Thus in truth there is still so much of her here.

 Possibly it was his way of keeping her alive, allowing her a legacy by evoking her foundations in me, for me to then impress those same foundations on the world. Unbeknownst to me till later in life twas his application of love for my mother that I would adopt. I would never disown the memory of a love and in my conviction have seen no reason why I shall not preserve each of their legacies. All except… my fathers, I suppose. My father, my gentle beautiful father. The nights we would read together by candle light. Oh father… I still feel the warmth of the room with you near. You in your chair and I in the window nook. Some nights by oil lamp and a many by the flicker of candle light. Some times till I fell a sleep against the glass. How quiet and impervious happiness was then. If only I could here you reassure me again, now. If only."

 She starts to pay close attention to her heart. She feels a slowness. A delay. Her pulse creeps to a pause frequently but she pushes for it to speed up breathing with struggle. In a moment there is a long pause to her heart beat that jolts her awake when it picks back up. She momentarily opens her eyes with a hazy screen over her vision. She realizes she has spent hours with her heart beat in observation. Her eyes ease close once again with her coat and gear visibly frosted over it is with positivism that Victoria is on the brink of freezing to death. The sensation of a hand running under her head compels her to attend consciousness. She can tell it is an immense hand in the way it pillows her head in size or so it feels. She opens her eyes to a slit. What she sees kneeling down before her in a red hooded shroud is her creature. A lonely tear falls out with no resources left to drop much else. Strange. There is no pain. She remembers the violent thrashing of the creature glowing with radiance. There is no glow. There is no thrashing. Absent is the expected grip of its crushing palms. This creature is considerate in that its hands and movement are gentle. With her vision blurred she tries to fix her sight and open her eyes more. 

 The creature removes its hood. That black stringy hair has grown back except where the stitches reside on its scalp in the middle and across and it drapes the creatures pale, almost translucid face. She can't see clearly but she knows it perceives her with a curiosity. While propping her head off the floor she hears it say in a deep, resonant, Scottish accent, "Mother."

THANK YOU FOR READING! 

For updates and news about the Dread Legacies follow us on Instagram 

 http://www.instagram.com/the_dread_legacies

You can check out the playlist for The Dread Legacies to listen to the music that inspired the story on Spotify and Youtube.