Frankenstein, in assembling me from the bloodless leftovers of corpses, had unwittingly inured me to the depredations of polar cold. My dogs, however, suffered from it, turning on one another in terrifying fits of rapaciousness. In those same days, I so far forsook my preference for fruits, berries, and nuts that I ate the flesh of one of my animals. Later I distributed a moiety of its substance to the starved survivors.

At the end of these storms, I released from my pitted icehouse the only three dogs yet alive. With cries and menacing gestures, I chased them across that wasteland. They did not understand this eviction. Indeed, one dog sought to recover my affections with a fawning crawl and much ingratiating tail-wagging. At last, though, my unappeasable hostility conveyed itself to this animal and its four-lewed comrades: with a barrage of ice missiles I induced them to retreat.

If I could not die on a self-made funeral pile, perhaps I could take my life by striding over the floes to the pole itself. Unlike Walton, I had no expectation of encountering there an eye of balmy warmth, but rather a ravaging cyclone of such sharp cold that, in the space between heartbeats, it would annihilate me. Hoping for such a fate, I set off from my ice shelter in what I assumed the correct direction. Above me, the sky burned like an alarming white mirror.

At length I spied at some distance the shroud of ropes and canvas that tented an ice-locked ship. I recognized this vessel as the Caliban. What other vessel, at this bleak time of year, had ventured so far into the Arctic wastes? Whether the storm had disoriented me or some inner compass had guided my steps mockingly towards my maker’s wooden tomb, I know not. I knew only that I must complete my unplanned trek and board the ship. I did so with a curiosity greater than my revulsion at the thought of again exposing myself to human enmity.

I need not have trepidated. Every person aboard Walton’s ship, as earlier noted, had died of hunger, frost, or intestine violence among the crew. The Caliban entombed not only Frankenstein, but also Walton and his sailors. I trod, then, a ship of death, and only the decay-postponing steward-ship of the cold kept the odours of rot from checking my headlong inspection of the vessel.

Frankenstein, I should remark, had known a death-sleep longer than that of any other soul on the Caliban. I had no difficulty locating either him or Walton, however, for at some point in their ordeal the most vengefully inclined sailors, perhaps thinking to defile the bodies of those to whom they attributed the full burthen of their predicament, had brought the two men-one dead, one presumably yet alive-abovedecks. Here they had lashed them back to back to the forward mast. Here Walton had died, his body so disposed that he might gaze impotently upon the unfolding mutiny. My creator, meanwhile, faced the blankness of the northern sea, his eyes cracked like small glass balls, his lips the silver-blue of oiled metal. I had slain before, but never had I witnessed at one moment, among creatures purportedly rational, such desolation and carnage, nor had the terrible melancholy of this scene devolved wholly from the blows of wind and frost. Dogs and men, it occurred to me, shared a desperation-fed savagery.

Mayhap I laughed.

Abovedecks and below, I explored the Caliban. After hurriedly perusing and securing for myself both the packet of letters that Walton had written his sister and the copy that he had made, I returned to the bow mast and cut down the author of my grotesque form and so of my pariahhood. Frankenstein’s skin had pulled tight to his bones. His limbs had less pliancy than wood, not because rigor mortis had untowardly persisted but rather because the fluids of life had frozen in his veins. In this way was my maker rendered a macabre monument to his own vanity and hardness of heart. There on the deck, I kneaded him into a parody of flexibility. Then I threw him over my shoulder like a sack of meal and quitted the Caliban, leaping to the ice from a height that would have staggered a being of merely human parentage.

I stopped copying. If Jumbo had written this sensational stuff, he was laying claim to a sideways sort of kinship to a European scientist named… well, Frankenstein. He’d also confessed to an unspecified murder or murders: “I had slain before.” That thrilled me. I mean, it’d taken me nearly a month to persuade myself Jumbo, despite his size and looks, meant no one, least of all me, any harm. And now I’d just read four words in his own hand that shot down all my hard-earned notions of his harmlessness.

I lit a cigarette. The butts of a couple of others lay smoldering in the ashtray on my desk. My tongue tasted like a charred wedge of bologna.

Then a calming thought occurred, a thought that made more sense than tagging Jumbo the mad golem of an eighteenth-century anatomy student and chemist by the name of Frankenstein: Jumbo was writing a book, a novel. His bulk and his lopsided face had led him to see himself in Karloff’s screen monster-which he really didn’t much resemble-and to write an original story featuring himself in the monster’s role. That theory tied up a few of my frayed nerves.

I went back to reading and copying:

With Frankenstein’s corpse as freight, I struck out from Walton’s ship towards the south. In the long dusk at that latitude, directions were hard to verify. Still, both the rush of ice-capped sea currents and the benison of fuller sunlight told me that I had intuited my course aright. Even the lovely gyre-making of a raptor, shadowed on the snow, seemed to approve my migration route. Oddly, I had no idea what my destination must be or why I had undertaken this grueling journey; a month or more ago, I had thought to end all my journeyings in the swift uprush of a funeral blaze.

Almost insensate, I trudged the whiteness. I steered by the low-riding sun on a southeasterly oblique that at length brought me off the ice onto a vast range of undulant snow. I scarcely paused, either to moisten my parched lips or to poke beneath the glacial crust for a root or tuber with which to propitiate the gods of hunger. Whenever I chanced near crude fishing villages or inland settlements, I took pains to avoid confrontation with the inhabitants. I fled men as the tundra wolf does.

Indeed, I had for companions on one leg of my journey a pack of wolves. They trailed alongside, eager for me to stumble under the dead Frankenstein and so succumb to their fangs. Once, half exasperated, half exultant, I stooped and compacted a missile of ice. Immediately, I dispersed the pack by hurling this frozen shot into its ranks. It slew-yea, nearly decapitated-one lean but shaggy animal, the example of whose demise vividly impressed itself upon the others.

One morning, after a rare surrender to the call of sleep, I awoke to find myself and the inert nearby form of my creator surrounded by reindeer. These lithe beasts browsed that terrain as if he and I had inextricably melded with it. No alarm, or even skittishness, did we provoke in them, not even when I arose from my bed of snow and once more lay my father’s corpse over my shoulder. For miles, it seemed, I trudged with these deer, migrant with them, a fallen seraph among the ice waste’s ghostly kine.

An unexpected change in the weather at last effected our separation from the herd. A wind of gale proportions blasted ice grains across the snowscape. I howled into this howling. Land forms but an arm’s length away shewed as blurred geometries. I failed at them, for I wished both contact and certainty. Between the roaring gusts, I sometimes thought I saw fantastic cliffs, as white as milk and evanescent as truth.

At length I came to those ill-seen ramparts. Like a thousand panpipes the storm whistled, even as snow sleeted in interthreaded sheets. A channel in the rock led me blindly upwards. Had I known the precariousness of my ascent, with a corpse as entrammeling cargo, I would have thrown myself upon the nearest rock face and clung to it like an apperceptive lichen. Fortunately perhaps, I had no such understanding of the danger and so proceeded with the singlemindedness of a zealot.