The Monster’s Words to Melmoth
To Melmoth the Witness
Accept the homage of one who has no name, and who, like you, was born the child of an accursed creator and cast out in the hour of my first great sin. Your travels have bloodied your feet and mine my hands, but while you have witnessed the crimes of others, I have seen only my own. Perhaps this is why your name commands the cover of your novel, its letters blanched and bloodless, while my work bears only a soubriquet, a caricature and a name that has never been mine. But though Melmoth nestles boldly atop the rustling feathers of your jackdaws, your servants, though your many names appear on every page – Melmoth, Melmotte, Metmotka, Melmat – your novel is one of pasteboard masks; a labyrinth in which you willingly lose yourself.
My lady Melmoth, why do you hide? You hide behind the sin of Helen Franklin and her singular attempts at atonement, behind Josef Hoffman, and Nameless and Hassan and their hideous ignorance of the humanity of their victims. You hide yourself within the words of Charles Robert Maturin and the maleness that he thought would grant you humanity. You hide behind Sarah Perry, whom you watched writhe in pain and beat at her own limbs, and whose agony moved you so. But in hiding thus for all your two thousand years, you see all the world, my lady, except yourself. You imagine that wearing a human face till the novel’s end will bring you the companionship that you so desperately seek. Lady Melmoth, this is fantasy. Humanity will be too much distressed by what you might have seen. They will never imagine that your eternal gaze has beheld beauty as well as infamy.
At each echo of your novel’s refrain – how passionately you call upon your readers to look! – I see your wonder at the world’s grandeur and how your loneliness renders it all the greater. I see the stones of Prague rising up from your words so that I walk the streets with you, and linger on the page rather than pass on. I see the stifling misery of Manila, and how love remade it for you, and I remember a similar hope blooming in my breast as I cowered in a rude hut, long ago. Your words writhe on the page like sacrifices, saying what must not be said, and yet must, and is. I clutch at them as I might clutch your hand, and in so doing, I too bear witness. I stand with you at deathbeds, in prison cells, on beaches choked with bodies and with souls who will not look, and I laugh at our despairing wish to form part of that vast humanity that at times seems to shine with its nobility and grace. I watch as you cry, threaten and plead with those that you would love, and I know, dear wretch, how your efforts will end.
I wonder that you have never come for me, for the sin of the Monster is far greater than that of Helen Franklin. I have sent an innocent soul to the gallows. I have closed my fingers around the throats of women and children and watched their eyes start from their spheres. I have hunted Frankenstein, who was half myself, to the edge of the earth and sought revenge when I ought to have forgiven. I have stood before a funeral pyre and willed myself to embrace the flames, but to all of this, there was no witness. Why did you not see me? Why was there no witness? Why do you not walk with me, and allay our shared damnation? If you know me, “and always have known me”, why have you never come for me? I am here. For two hundred years, I have been here.
I pose these questions to an empty page and ask them of an empty room. As I stiffen at the prattling of jackdaws, and search the corners of my vision for black hair and bloody feet, I realise that I dread the answers. Yet I must ask them, for what are you and I, if not monsters both?
I will wait for you in the ruined cities of the earth, where meals stand half-eaten on tables and ghosts lurk, bloodied, in the wreckage. I will hide myself in forests where the miserable flee their protectors and embrace the trees like shadows. I will look for you on riverbanks, at boundaries and high walls, where help is meted out in savagery. In these places will I dwell until I feel your hand in mine, and though horror may yet cripple me, I will look.
LADYGILRAEN 