Frankenstein's Bride Read Online Free Page A

others. Where they strained, the other threw them about like so many children's bricks.
    There came a cry, as the men hurled one on to a pile on the jetty, as if the crate had struck, or almost struck, another man.
     Yet, as if in a frenzy to get done, he continued to haul them out, not acknowledging the protest. Then came another cry. The
     ogre (for so he seemed), then clambered in an ungainly way into the barge, apparently dragging a crippled leg behind him,
     and went on unloading from inside the vessel. I watched him stagger a little as the water moved the barge, then raise a cask
     above his head and almost hurl it into the arms of another man, who reeled and nearly lost his footing. Someone, to provide
     more illumination, set light to a pile of wood and tarred rope on the jetty. Just as the resultant stench struck me, the light
     caught this vast creature, flickered away with the wind, then caught him again, revealing him more clearly. The face was heavy-browed,
     heavy-jawed and seemed twisted somehow, as if malformed at birth. It was a face such as one sees sometimes on those unfortunate
     enough to have come into the world feeble-minded. I could not see his eyes. They were hidden under jutting brows. His shoulder-length
     black hair blew about in the wind. I noted his feet were bare—cruel in such weather.
    As he stood on that swaying deck I thought of some old figure from mythology, half-brute, half-human. So seized was I by this
     extraordinary spectacle I forgot for a moment my predicament, alone in freezing fog and darkness, yet as it came back to me,
     to my horror, the creature threw back his head and gave a great howl, a howl of agony. I do not know how to describe this
     sound. It was not the cry of a wolf or other beast but the cry of a man, as if in unbearable pain. And as he howled he pointed
     an arm in a flapping sleeve, in my direction. I froze—but no—he had not seen me, found some mad prejudice against me. He was
     pointing beyond me, and a little to my right, up the strand, across the road in the direction of the houses of Cheyne Walk,
     the direction whence I had just come.
    The bargee, at the head of his barge while the off-loading proceeded, did not hesitate. He leapt instantly from his position,
     crossed the body of his vessel and brought up his arm and crashed some heavy object, a bludgeon or a piece of wood across
     the side of the head of the pointing figure. Then, shouting something I could not properly hear, he did the same thing again,
     with all his force. In the face of the blows which would have toppled a normal man, this ogre dropped his pointing arm and
     threw it round his head, to ward them off—and went back to his work again.
    And I, suddenly more afraid of all this than I was of my lonely walk, hurried away, dreading footpads less than something
     so terrifying, so pathetic and, I sensed, so contrary both to Nature and civilization. Yet I told myself, walking the ruts
     of the road from Chelsea, this was surely only a sad example of an idiot, a poor creature lacking in his wits, distorted in
     body, face and mind; no doubt hideously exploited for his strength by his fellow man. He would be paid little and beaten when
     he would not work. I pitied him and pondered why God, in his wisdom, had seen fit to make so many of his creatures fall so
     short of the Divine. Came the heretical thought that perhaps our world is not controlled by God but is an arena for the eternally
     waged battle between God and his opponent. Had that creature on the strand been created at some time or in some place where
     the Devil reigned? Men have been burned at the stake for saying aloud what I then thought.
    I did not know then that man was not made either by God or the Devil, but by a far more terrible creator—another man.
    I sped my steps along the river, through the wastes of Pimlico and eventually to the Strand, where the increasing light from
     windows and busier streets encouraged me. I