Read Online The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein by Peter Ackroyd - Free Book Online Page B

of the low room, and for a moment caught sight of an elderly man standing beside it. He seemed to be exactly the man I had just seen behind the glass, as if by some intervention of the black arts he had brushed away the tear and come alive. Then he smiled at me. I knew all this to be a momentary illusion, but it did not lessen my horror. I walked slowly towards the door, where the official of the Morgue held out his hand for a pourboire , but the figure of the old man had gone. I was relieved to find myself in the open air of the street, and tried to dismiss the incident from my mind, but it lingered with me even as I climbed the stair to the chamber in the inn.
    My fellow traveller, Armitage, was lying on his bed fully clothed. Fresh as I was from the sights of the Morgue, for a moment he startled me. “Now, Mr. Frankenstein,” he said. “Will you sup with me? The wine here is very cheap.” He had a low, deep voice that for no reason at all irritated me.
    “An early night for me, I am afraid. The coach for Dijon leaves at daybreak. It will be a hard journey.”
    “So you need sustenance.” He was older than me, at the age of thirty or thereabouts, but he had an indefinably ancient manner. “You gentlemen of Oxford have been known to starve.”
    “How do you know that I am from Oxford?”
    “It is printed on your luggage. Eyes, you see. Good eyes.” I had already become aware that he was a salesman of optical goods. “The eye is a tender organism.” He spoke slowly, and with great emphasis. “It swims in a sea of water.”
    “I beg your pardon. It does not.”
    “Oh?”
    “It has roots and tendrils. It is like a trailing plant connected to the soil of the brain.”
    “Can we say that it is like a lily? It swims on the surface.”
    “You may say that, Mr. Armitage.”
    He smiled broadly, having settled the matter to his satisfaction, and clapped me on the back as if he were congratulating me for agreeing with him. “We must get you bread. And meat. And wine.”
    Over the rough meal, which the chambermaid brought to us, we exchanged the usual remarks. He lived in Friday Street, off Cheapside, with his father; his father manufactured the lenses and the spectacles, in a workshop on the ground floor of their property, while he acted as a commercial traveller. He had taken advantage of the peace to sail to France, with specimens of his father’s latest work. “You will not find lenses more finely ground,” he said. “You can pick out a distant spire by moonlight.”
    “Does he build microscopes?”
    “Of course he does. At the moment he has in hand a design that has cylindrical eyes, so to speak, that will make the smallest object clear.”
    “I would be very interested in that.”
    “You would? What is your study at Oxford, Mr. Frankenstein?”
    “I am concerned with the workings of human life.”
    “Is that all?” He smiled at me. I could not imagine him breaking into laughter.
    “That is how I learned of the nervous fibres of the eye.”
    “You are an anatomist then?” He suddenly became very grave, as if I had trespassed upon some private pursuit.
    “Not exactly. Not essentially. I cannot claim any great proficiency.”
    “Do you know how long the eye survives when it is released from its casing?”
    “I have no idea. Minutes, perhaps—”
    “Thirty-four seconds. Before its light is extinguished for ever.”
    “How do you know this?”
    “They dry very quickly, when they have left the socket. Do not ask me how I know.”
    “But if they were kept in an aqueous solution, what then?”
    “Then, Mr. Frankenstein, you would be considered to ask too much.” He began to eat, very slowly, the meat and bread upon his plate.
    I remembered the phrase from Terence. “Nothing human is alien to me, Mr. Armitage.”
    He did not answer but continued chewing on his meat. It was veal, as I remember, coated in breadcrumbs in the manner of my compatriots. I had very little appetite for it. Occasionally