Chapter Text
You arrive, as always, just as the rest of the University of Ingolstadt is emptying itself into the streets.
Students swarm down the stone steps in noisy clusters, their chatter about examinations and weekend escapades bouncing off the cold façade of the old medical building. One of them nearly bowls you over, too engrossed in recounting the scandal of Professor Heidenreich’s latest lecture to notice the existence of doors, corners, or other human beings.
Future doctors, you think. Heaven help us all.
The lamplighter has only just finished his rounds. A trembling procession of yellow flames wavers in the iron sconces, throwing long, spindly shadows across the marble columns. The place looks deserted, haunted even. But to you it’s a kind of cathedral: underfunded, unloved, and entirely yours.
Your keys chime softly as you fit one into the lock of the heavy side door marked Anatomical Archives: Faculty Only. The brass plate is so scratched it now reads something closer to Anatomical Ar es On, but you suppose that’s appropriate: entropy has seniority here.
“Good evening, gentlemen. I’m back.”
The jars, crates, and towering shelves don’t answer.
Your small desk sits wedged between two cabinets of anatomical specimens: skulls, preserved organs, and the occasional unidentifiable curiosity suspended in amber fluid. The lamplight glints off their glass enclosures as you cross the room, casting warped reflections of your moving form as you begin your nightly routine. Hang your coat, wind the clock, open your ledger, and light the single lantern that watches over your corner of the forgotten wing.
The wing – which always smells of old paper, older dust, and enough formaldehyde to pickle a horse – is colder than the rest of the university. The faculty insists it’s because the heating pipes were never extended this far, but you know the truth: administration simply wants to forget this place exists. Too many scandals originated here.
Too many theories that strained the limits of acceptable scholarship.
Too many brilliant young men that had burned out in these silent rooms.
Men like Victor.
You adjust the strap of your satchel, letting your hand trail over the dusty countertop where Victor had once spread his notes: those pages covered in meticulous script that too often devolved into feverish scrawl. He’d always worked with a tremor of urgency, as though the world would collapse if he paused long enough to sleep. The faculty had called it mania.
You, his friend, had called it passion.
And why not? Passion was the only way to describe how Victor had looked whenever he’d spoken to you of his plans and plots, eyes illuminated with the fire of his latest impossible dream.
A fire that had now gone out forever.
Snuffed out by the North Pole.
A cold corpse delivered back to Bavaria via the Royal Danish Navy.
Oh, Victor. What in god’s name were you doing up there?
Your thoughts are interrupted when footsteps sound in the corridor: light, hurried, decidedly human. You straighten just as Professor Brackenridge materialises in the doorway like an apparition summoned by the scent of paperwork.
Marvellous, just marvellous. I knew my night was going too well!
“Ah, there you are,” Brackenridge mutters, with the air of a man expecting the archives themselves to greet him with a curtsy…and possibly a hot toddy. His powdered wig sits askew, shedding talc like early snowfall, and his spectacles cling to the tip of his nose in open defiance of gravity.
“Evening, Professor,” you say, the words immaculate even if the sentiment behind them is held together with spite.
“Hm.” His eyes flick over the shelves. “I trust you are maintaining a thorough catalogue? Administration is still reviewing the matter of faculty oversight. We cannot have another –” He clamps his mouth shut before the name escapes.
You let the silence bloom, heavy and uncomfortable.
“Another Frankenstein incident?” you supply, tone smooth as varnish over a blade.
Brackenridge winces. “Yes. That.” He flutters a silk handkerchief before continuing, “In fact, that is why I’ve come. I need you to complete a full inventory of the cranial specimens tonight – every skull, every fragment, every mislabelled object – by morning.”
You raise a brow. “That’s a rather enthusiastic timeline.”
“It is necessary,” he snaps, chest puffing. “The administration expects precision. Accuracy. Order. And after all that unpleasantness with…well, we must ensure nothing…questionable has found its way into the collection.”
“No spontaneous reanimations in the skull cabinet,” you say lightly. “I’ll make note.”
He bristles. “Just catalogue what is already here. No experiments. No interpretations. No –” his lip curls faintly, “ – imaginative liberties.”
“Of course, Professor,” you say. “I’ll keep my imagination firmly leashed.”
“Hmph.” He turns, the scent of stale tobacco drifting in his wake. “The inventory. On my desk by morning.”
When he’s gone, you breathe out slowly. Victor hated these kinds of tasks. And Brackenridge.
You’re not far behind on either count.
When the building settles back into its familiar hush, you make your way into the deeper stretch of the archives, past the neatly labelled shelves, past the freshly catalogued jars waiting for their next inventory, and finally to the sealed wing the university pretends doesn’t exist.
Every institution has its forgotten bones.
The lock gives under your key with a soft, reluctant creak.
The old anatomical theatre waits on the other side, its tiered benches curving around the central table like the ribs of some enormous fossil. Dust blankets everything in an undisturbed layer. The air hangs heavier here: too many whispered discoveries, too many secrets never meant for daylight.
This was where you last saw Victor alive.
He’d been pacing in tight, uneven loops, muttering to himself, fingers smudged with ink and something he wouldn’t name. He’d tried to explain his revelation to you. Urgent, trembling, too big for ordinary speech. The words had tumbled out half-shaped, then collapsed entirely, as though the idea inside him strained against the limits of language.
“I’m close,” he’d whispered. “Closer than anyone has ever been.”
You place your hand on the edge of the operating table, near the spot where Victor had braced himself, where ambition had sharpened into obsession, where his mind had begun to tilt –
Your lantern flickers.
What –?
You stare at the flame. You stare at the shadows beyond. At light slipping where it shouldn’t, at echoes tangling themselves in the rafters.
Something creaks above – no doubt the old building settling like an elderly spine in winter.
Just some old ghosts, nothing more. You shrug once, and return to your corner of the archives.
Setting the lantern on your desk, you quickly pull on your gloves and open your ledger. Familiar movements. Muscle memory. Still, they feel a shade stiffer tonight, as though your hands prefer focusing on Brackenridge’s assignment rather than whatever your imagination thought it spotted in the dark.
You clear your throat, if only to hear something human.
“All right,” you murmur, easing into your chair. “Cranial specimens – let’s get this over with.”
The archives, as usual, offer no objections.
You roll crates into the lamplight. Wooden boxes sealed with wax, stamped with the university’s crest and a number only half legible. Skulls, fragments, occasional oddities whose cataloguing has been politely postponed for decades. You lift the first lid and begin sorting through the contents with practiced care. Bone meets lamplight, and you note each ridge, each marking, each irregularity with a steady hand. The soft scratch of your pen settles into the room like a small, loyal companion. Word by word, line by line, you bring order to the forgotten.
And you weren’t going to give Brackenridge the satisfaction of finding any errors.
After the first hour, you push the latest crate aside and reach for the next. Heavier than it looks, dust puffs up as you drag it onto the table, and you cough into your sleeve.
Wait – this isn’t cranial samples.
The crate bears no label. No cataloguing number. Only the beginning of a faint, smeared name scrawled across one side, the rest lost to grime.
Fr
Your breath catches. You lean closer, brushing away more dust. Yes. There it was, just as you thought. The ghost of a signature you know too well.
Frankenstein.
A strange warmth floods your chest: part grief, part anticipation.
“Well,” you murmur into the stillness, “what have we here, Victor?”
You don’t hear as up above, in the darkness beyond the lamplight, something shifts it’s weight.
You break the wax seal of Victor’s crate with deliberate care, easing the lid aside. Inside, papers sit in loose stacks, tied with string that looks ready to surrender at a touch. You lift the top bundle.
Familiar handwriting greets you instantly.
Elegant loops giving way to jagged slashes whenever he got too excited to keep the letters even. Margins crowded with frantic sketches and theories, whole sentences savaged into illegibility –
And suddenly you were back.
Back in long nights spent arguing over ideas too strange for the faculty lounge, of Victor leaning over a desk while insisting – half teasing, half serious – that silly things like sleep and food and fresh air were necessities only for a weaker breed of scientist.
A tiny breath of laughter escapes you. Equal parts fondness and ache.
“I warned you they wouldn’t let you keep these after you were expelled from the Royal College of Surgeons,” you murmur, shaking your head. “But no – I was the overly-cautious one, remember?”
Your voice seems to reach too far in the quiet room.
You settle onto your stool, pull the lantern closer, and slip the string free. Your fingertips drift across the first page: Speculations on the Electrodynamic Induction of Vitality. You huff a soft, rueful sound. “Always trying to out-title the entire Royal Society.”
You don’t notice the darkness tightening at the edges of the room, as though listening.
“Then again, why pander to the Society? They never saw you clearly. The disciplinary tribunal especially – what a day that was. Better than Shakespeare.” You exhale softly. “But even I…even I could see how your work pulled too hard on you. Too much passion. Too much momentum. You were just…” You search for a word that doesn’t wound. “You were too driven, sometimes. And far too alone in it all.”
You read on.
Victor’s sketches become more fragmented – anatomical studies left half-shaped, principles written without explanation, frantic marginal notes: Need stronger current for the tribunal demonstration. Must test tonight –
The scrawl devolves from there into formulae.
Into madness.
You close the notebook gently, almost reverently.
“I still don’t know why you left without a word. I wish I could understand what truly happened to you –”
Your lantern flares, then steadies.
You look up, startled – but nothing is there. Nothing you can see. You sigh, rub your eyes, and carefully put Victor’s notes back into his crate.
“Damn ghosts are going to lose me my job,” you mutter.
You arrive to work earlier than usual the next night.
It’s not something you announce. Not to the porter who gives you a sleepy nod, not to the lamplighter stretching his pole toward the courtyard sconces, and certainly not to the handful of faculty wafting through the halls like paper-thin ghosts. If questioned, you’d claim simple diligence. Reliability. Archivist’s pride.
But the truth lies folded in pages alive with urgency and restless brilliance: Victor’s notes.
You want more time to read them properly, to understand where Victor’s ambition surged too far, to understand where he began to slip.
But mostly, you just wanted to remember.
Your first thought as you lock the door behind you is that the building is colder than usual tonight. Your breath fogs faintly in the lantern’s glow.
“Do they think we’ll work better if we can’t feel our fingers?” you mutter, rubbing your arms as you descend the hall. Your footsteps land strangely soft. Absorbed, somehow, by the dark.
Usually you greet the familiar jars, crates, and cabinets as you pass. A mental nod to a bisected femur preserved in alcohol. A quiet hum at the row of dissected avian wings labelled Comparative Structure – Incomplete. Even the jar containing the malformed jawbone usually gets a silent hello.
Not tonight.
Tonight your mind is anchored elsewhere. To the crate discovered by accident. To Victor.
But work comes first. It must.
You hang your coat, light your lantern, open the ledger: the familiar motions feel faintly hollow. Your eyes keep drifting toward the corner of the records room where you’d stashed the crate, slotted beside the forgotten wing’s door.
“Work first,” you tell yourself, though your conviction wobbles. “Notes after.”
A crate of seven skulls – three human, two porcine, one canine, and one you aren’t ready to hazard a guess at. You check molar wear, suture lines, signs of trepanation. You compare each to the old catalogue, strike out incorrect entries, add new ones with cramped, hurried handwriting.
Next comes a drawer of mandibles, tagged decades ago in a rushed hand you’ve long since learned to distrust. You relabel them: Adult male, partial; Juvenile, preserved; possible pathological deformation.
Your quill scratches unevenly. You have to rewrite a label. Then rewrite it again when you transpose two specimen numbers. You nearly drop a tray of preserved organs: six kidneys in varying states of dissection, floating in formaldehyde.
“Calm down,” you whisper, breathing through your frustration, palms pressed briefly to your temples. “Get through it. Then the notes.”
By the time you finish your last assigned crate (a set of oddly scarred rib bones stored in a box far too small) your heartbeat is already pushing ahead of you.
Finally. You turn towards the corner where Victor’s crate is sitting –
– and you stop.
You feel it before you see it. A prickle at the base of your spine.
Something is wrong.
You force a long breath and lower your lantern. Victor’s crate sits where you left it.
But the lid…the lid is askew.
Not fully open. Not how you left it. Just…angled. Shifted. As though someone meant to close it but didn’t know how much noise a wooden box makes on stone.
After a moment, you approach slowly, lantern held out before you. The shadows tremble as the flame wavers.
The string you unwound from Victor’s notes last night is no longer coiled neatly beside the stack. It lies on the floor in a loose spiral, as though dropped. The papers are also no longer in the order you left them. You had definitely placed the top page face down. Now it lies face up.
You stare at Victor’s jagged handwriting, your pulse thundering in your ears.
There’s a moment – a single, absurd moment – where you consider that perhaps you forgot how you left things. That in your excitement, you knocked something askew.
No, not possible. You are meticulous. Even when you aren’t trying to be.
You feel it again, that prickling awareness, like cold fingers walking up your spine.
Someone had been here. Someone had touched Victor’s notes.
“…Who?” Your voice is barely a whisper. It vanishes into the rafters.
You swallow hard and gather Victor’s papers with careful, shaking hands, restoring them to their bundle. You tuck the errant page back into place, smooth the folded edges of the notes, and retie the part of the string that remains. But you cannot shake the certainty:
You are no longer the only soul who remembers the forgotten wing.
The disturbances don’t happen all at once.
They unfurl slowly, over days – small shifts, tiny misalignments, the kinds of inconsistencies you would’ve ignored if you didn’t already feel the building holding its breath.
At first, you blame yourself.
You are tired – you work too hard after all, isn’t that what everyone always says?
You are distracted – Victor’s notes haunt your thoughts long after you leave the archives, their ink-black urgency clinging to the edge of your dreams. Who wouldn’t be unbalanced by suddenly encountering the written remnants of a dead friend?
But then the irregularities begin to stack up – quietly, deliberately – like footfalls muffled by snow.
You’d only been gone a few minutes – just long enough to fetch a reference volume from the library’s upper stacks – when you return to your corner of the archives and stop short.
The lantern on your desk is lit.
Not faintly glowing, not sputtering back to life from some overlooked ember. Lit, its flame steady and tall, casting clean, bright circles across your papers.
You pause in the doorway, a frown tightening your brows.
You remember snuffing it before you left. You always do. Years of archival training have made the gesture automatic: wick lowered, flame out, glass cooled.
And yet the lantern burns as if it’s been waiting for you.
“I just…I just forgot,” you murmur, though the words sound thin even to your own ears.
Your gaze drifts toward the back wing. Victor’s crate sits where you left it. Closed. Unmoved. Or so you tell yourself.
You resist the urge to go and check.
The next night, a stack of preserved specimens you sorted yesterday have been rearranged.
Not carelessly, not haphazardly, but with a strange, deliberate intent. Jars are no longer in neat rows or by category; some lean toward others as if drawn by invisible connections, a few have been angled slightly, facing one another across the shelf, while a single jar rests apart.
You stand over the display, pulse quickening at your throat.
No student would dare come down here.
No professor would condescend to enter the records room.
No archivist works your shift.
“Is someone here?” you call, voice firm but cautious, into the dim records room.
Silence answers, thick and patient, carrying no hint of reply.
The next night, restraint collapses entirely.
You run straight to Victor’s crate the moment you enter, lantern tight in your grip, pulse rattling like a caged thing. The dust around its base is disturbed again. Curved arcs sweep wider than any human step could make, deliberate, careful, as if someone had lingered there long enough to study it.
The lid is closed. Perfectly closed. Aligned so precisely it seems deliberate. And that precision terrifies you more than an open crate ever could.
You lift the lid.
Victor’s notes lie in neat bundles, but one detail strikes you immediately – the top page has been turned. Not tossed aside, not haphazardly. With purpose. Your eyes catch the frantic scrawl, letters slanting into panic.
It was the same page Victor had written the night before the hearing. The page that spoke of electrical currents. Of bringing life to that horrific half-torso in front of the whole tribunal. Of changing the face of science forever.
Someone had touched this. Someone had read it. And read it more than once.
But why?
Your stomach knots.
…perhaps for the same reason I did. For the fever, the obsession, the urgency that clings to every line.
For a heartbeat, the thought roots in your mind: They understand Victor’s notes the same way I do.
…but if this is what they wanted – to read Victor’s notes – that means they’ve got what they wanted.
“I don’t understand,” you murmur. “Why do you keep coming back?”
During the day, you tell yourself nothing is wrong.
It’s easier to believe that the shiver crawling along your spine in the records room is just the cold. Easier to assume the displaced objects are your own lapses in memory. Easier to dismiss the soft creaks overhead as nothing more than the old building settling into the night.
Easier. Cleaner. Rational.
But tonight…
Tonight, reason feels thin as vellum, ready to tear at the slightest touch.
You descend the stone steps into the Archive of Pathologies, lantern held close, its golden light trembling across rows upon rows of preserved horrors. You hum under your breath as you move through the familiar motions: lighting the sconces, unlocking the specimen cases, setting your ledger neatly on the desk. The rhythm should steady you.
It doesn’t.
The air is wrong tonight. Too still. Too dense. It feels as though the room has been holding its breath, waiting for you to arrive.
“Just nerves. Just…nerves.” Your voice wavers and dies against the silence.
Above you, something shifts in the rafters – a soft, deliberate drag.
You go rigid.
Your pulse thuds against the cage of your ribs, urging you: run, run now, don’t look back. For a moment, you picture yourself bolting for the door, scattering keys, dignity, and years of professional training behind you.
But the instinct passes. Or rather, you choke it down. You force a breath in, another out. Your muscles creak as you unspool them from their panic-tight coil.
Routine, you tell yourself. Routine is a rope you can hold.
So you turn back to your worktable with deliberate, measured motions, each one a small act of defiance against the part of you that still insists something is watching from above.
If something wanted to leap down and tear me apart it would’ve done so already. Creatures with murderous intent rarely bother with courtesy pauses. And if it’s a ghost…You swallow, steadying yourself. Well. That would be embarrassingly on the nose, wouldn’t it? An anatomical archivist fleeing from the dead. Sets an awful precedent. Next thing you know, the cadavers will start filing workplace complaints.
You force your attention to the specimen in your gloved hands: a kidney, shrivelled and grey, suspended in a jar whose lid never sits quite straight. You record the accession number with painfully deliberate care. But your fingers keep slipping, your breath keeps snagging, and every time your quill scratches the page, you swear you hear something shift in the dark. Quiet, alert.
Watching.
You steady the next jar, adjust its label, anything to keep your thoughts contained. But they keep circling the same dread-filled questions:
Who’s here? Why Victor’s notes? Why stay after reading them? Why…watch?
Your throat dries. You swallow once. Keep – keep working. Just keep working.
You try.
You really do.
But the air presses at your back, warm where the room should be cold, and suddenly you can’t hold your tongue. Almost without meaning to, you whisper:
“He…”
The word hangs there, fragile as dust.
You try to stop. Truly, you do. But the stillness of the room had changed – subtly, undeniably.
As though something has leaned closer in the dark.
You inhale shakily.
“He used to…stay late,” you manage, barely more than breath. “All the time. Before everything went wrong.”
The silence absorbs the words.
“He’d – ah – he’d always come to the library after lectures,” you continue, voice catching. “Ink on his sleeves…hair all wild…perpetually looking as though he’d sprinted all the way from the laboratory.”
The words keep coming.
“He’d start talking before he even reached me. Didn’t matter if I was reading, or writing, or trying to eat a damned sandwich: he’d launch right into whatever theory was consuming him that hour. And I’d pretend to be annoyed,” you admit, voice softening despite your fear. “Roll my eyes. Tell him he talked too fast. But I…I didn’t mind. He was – lord deliver me – he was extraordinary to listen to when he was like that.”
Your chest tightens. Your hand drifts toward the desk, steadying yourself.
“He’d pace between the shelves,” you continue, the memory gathering momentum, “gesturing so wildly I thought he’d knock the lamps over. And he’d argue, oh how he’d argue. Half the time he didn’t even need me to answer back, he just needed someone to absorb the overflow.”
You blink hard, vision blurring.
“And I did. Gladly. I let him pour every impossible idea into me. I thought –” Your breath stutters. “I thought that perhaps if someone just listened, maybe he wouldn’t burn himself out.”
You pause.
“And now you – whatever you are – are listening like he used to talk,” you say into the dark. “As if every word matters.”
The air tightens, responsive. Aware.
Every thought you’d just spoken about Victor – every confession, every memory – has been swallowed with a kind of feverish devotion, as though your recollections were scripture.
And all you can do is sit there, caught in the fragile balance between dread and something far stranger, as the darkness above bends toward you like a congregation before its preacher.
The next night, the archives feel expectant the moment you step inside.
You busy yourself with the lantern, trimming the wick, adjusting the flame, pretending you don’t feel the dark leaning closer in quiet anticipation.
But memory presses at you, insistent. And the presence is waiting.
“All right,” you murmur.
The rafters above remain motionless, but something in the silence sharpens – attentive. You swallow and begin.
“I visited Victor’s home in Geneva once. Before the tribunal. Before he turned himself inside out with ambition. There, he was Baron Victor Frankenstein,” you say with a wry tilt of your mouth. “He tried not to use the title. Hated what it implied. Hated that massive house most of all: cold stone, echoing corridors, paintings of ancestors staring down like they were waiting for him to fail – or so he said.”
Your fingers trace absent shapes on your knee.
“His parents were already gone by then. His mother – he loved her dearly. She died too young. And his father…well, he never forgave the old man.”
A faint stir touches the darkness.
“But William,” you say, softer now, “his younger brother – he was sunshine in human form.”
You smile despite yourself.
“That boy dragged Victor out of every brooding spell and into the garden whether he wanted it or not. I think he was the only person alive who could tease Victor and not receive a lecture in return. And Victor loved it. Loved him. No matter how he pretended otherwise.
“I remember one morning – fog rolling off Lac Léman, mountains looking like half-formed dreams. Victor tried to show me the study where he intended to ‘change the world,’ but William burst in and hauled him off to skip stones at the shore instead.” You laugh under your breath. “And Victor went. Complaining the entire way, of course. But he went.”
A quietness settles over the room.
“I think…it ended up being a very good visit,” you admit. “Better than I’d expected. He wasn’t the scandal waiting to happen then. He was just Victor. Awkward. Brilliant. Aggravating. Kind.”
You look down at your hands.
“And for a little while, Geneva didn’t feel cold at all.”
The next night, you started speaking before you'd even opened your ledger. “One thing I will never forget is his modified galvanic cradle. Now there was a masterpiece of academic malpractice.”
A soft creak above. You decide to interpret it as encouragement.
“So there we were, brand new scholars in the medical school, full of the usual promise and arrogance. Victor had had this idea, the kind that made responsible adults visibly age. He claimed he could accelerate tissue responsiveness – as though tissue were simply lazy and needed a firm motivational speech.” You laugh – really laugh this time, warmth cutting through the cold room. “He built the device out of copper wire he definitely didn’t purchase himself, parts of a telegraph, and something he swore was a ‘salvaged oscillator.’ It looked like a torture instrument clobbered together by a sleep-deprived magpie.
“Well, naturally, he insisted we test it. ‘Perfectly safe,’ he said. ‘Stable,’ he said. Which, coming from Victor, should have been stamped with a warning: combustible optimism label.”
You find yourself smiling at the memory.
“He flips the switch. And the thing – whatever it was on the table – lets out this…noise. Like a cat, a kettle, and a very small demon all trying to escape the same cupboard. And the smell…Three students fainted. Three! Folded into themselves like damp linen. One poor soul vomited into a specimen jar – I’m still impressed by his aim.
“And there’s Victor. Staring serenely at the smoking cradle and saying, ‘Hmm. That’s new.’ Then, as sparks start flying, he asks if I can hold the chassis steady while he ‘makes a minor adjustment.’”
You sigh, fond and exasperated all at once.
“And of course I did. Because I was young and foolish and apparently willing to die in the pursuit of knowledge. Or at least in the pursuit of keeping Victor from electrocuting himself.”
You rest your hands on the table, nostalgia warming your chest despite the cold.
“So you see,” you tell the unseen thing above, in a tone of long-practiced confession, “if something catastrophic was ever going to happen because of Victor’s work…well, statistically speaking, I was always going to be right in the middle of it.”
The next night, you exhaled sharply. “Fine. Here’s one Victor wouldn’t have written in his precious notes.”
Your fingers drum once on the desk. “We had a fight once. A real one. The kind that should’ve ended everything. The kind that had sharp, ugly heat.”
You huffed.
“He’d been awake for, what, three days? Four? Stank of ink and desperation and other things I won’t mention. And he had the nerve, the absolute audacity, to tell me I lacked vision.”
A humourless laugh escapes you.
“Me. The one who covered his shifts. The one who dragged him out of the laboratory before he collapsed. The one who kept reminding him that having a pulse was not optional.”
You feel the air around you draw closer. Your jaw works for a moment before the words spill out again.
“He called me small-minded. Said I couldn’t grasp the scope of what he was doing. And I…well – I told him he was burning himself alive for an idea he couldn’t even articulate without scribbling over half a stack of vellum.
“I told him genius wasn’t an excuse to be unbearable.”
Your hand curls into a fist as the memory sharpened. “He yelled. I yelled louder. Students stared. Brackenridge nearly burst a vein. And Victor –”
You stop, breath catching at the edge of memory.
The silence around you feels reverent.
“He did follow me afterward,” you say, though the words scrape on the way out. “Cornered me in the courtyard, wind in his hair, ready to start round two. But he didn’t. He…steadied. Told me he respected me. Needed me. I told him needing someone is not the same thing as respecting them. As listening to them.”
Your throat tightens despite yourself.
“But I stayed. Not because he was a genius – god knows that gets old fast– but because under all the dramatics and brilliance and damn theatrics, he was still Victor. And he was mine to argue with.”
The next night, like the previous few nights, there’s still nothing. Nothing moves. Nothing speaks.
But you can feel it – the awareness in the room, the silent shifting of the atmosphere around your shoulders.
“…and after Victor mixed those particular chemicals together – against everyone’s advice, including the porter who couldn’t spell ‘nitrates’ but knew danger when he smelled it – the eastern wing of the university was never the same again. The alchemy professors still insist it was an improvement, but that’s only because they didn’t have to breathe in the fumes for three days.”
You dust off your hands, turning back to your notes.
“And now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to get back to work before the memory of Victor’s explosions gives me respiratory damage.”
You last longer than you thought you would.
Hours pass in steady, disciplined silence. Cataloguing, sorting, writing, anything to keep your hands busy and your mind from wandering. You cling to the familiar motions as though they might shield you: quill to parchment, jar to shelf, breath in, breath out. For a while, it works.
But the questions don’t die.
They wait. They press. They gather behind your ribs like a storm:
Why? Why linger in these halls? Why pore over Victor’s notes? Why listen to me? My stories?
You try to shove the thoughts aside, but they circle back, louder, sharper, impossible to ignore. Curiosity begins to thrum beneath your fear – not replacing it, but threading through it, insistent.
Eventually, your hand stills. The quill lowers.
The silence is immediate, like the very air is paying attention.
You swallow. “Are you there?”
Not movement – no. The absence of it. As if something that had been quietly shifting just out of sight has frozen, listening.
Your palms dampen. Your pulse flutters painfully. You curl your fingers against the edge of the desk, grounding yourself.
“I know you’re there,” you say, barely above a whisper. You hesitate, but the need to understand pushes you onward. “And I…I want to know why.”
You draw a shallow breath.
“I want to know why Victor’s notes matter to you. Of all things, those scribblings – his frantic sketches, his rambling theories – they’re hardly the sort of work I’d imagine a… a ghost would be interested in. Nor the stories I’ve told.”
You wet your dry lips. “Did you know him? Did you know Victor Frankenstein?”
The quiet deepens so abruptly it feels physical, brushing cold fingertips along your skin.
“He was a brilliant man,” you murmur, standing from your desk because sitting feels too vulnerable. “But…I’ll admit it, there was always a darkness in him. A hunger that frightened even the people who loved him. And now I find someone moving in the shadows, reading his notes, listening to me recount the man he used to be.”
Your breath shivers out.
“Who are you?”
Silence answers. Thick and heavy, as though the shadows are drawing closer rather than retreating. You swallow, heart hammering.
“Please,” you whisper, almost pleading. “Won’t you say something?”
For a long, trembling moment, the world holds utterly, impossibly still. Then –
A sound cracks the silence.
A low, shuddering inhale, hesitant, as though a set of lungs were remembering the act of breathing. And then, from up in the shadowy rafters above the record room –
A voice.
Deep. Gravelled. Uneven, catching as though on old, invisible wounds. But unmistakably human.
“I…knew him.”