Our Hideous Progeny

It was a grey and foggy March day when we brought it to life at last.

I had expected there to be thunder, or at the very least some rain; I had expected that, on such a momentous occasion, Nature would have been obliged to provide us with a fitting backdrop. But evidently Nature felt that she owed us no favours, as the morning dawned dull as always, wreathed in a thick mist that dampened clothes and sound alike as it crept over the hills.

I took a measure of grim satisfaction in Clarke’s bedraggled appearance as he let us into the boathouse. He had come to us bright-eyed and brimming with confidence; now, in his rumpled shirtsleeves, with grey shadowing his jaw and the skin beneath his eyes, he seemed but a dim reflection of his former self. Henry, meanwhile, outshone us all in his morning coat, the same he had worn on our honeymoon in Lyme, and which had shown the dust of the chalk cliffs so badly. Perhaps he was hoping to make a good first impression.

We examined our instruments one final time: the bellows, to provide the breath of life; the stove in the corner, to drive the spring chill from the room and make its cold flesh warm again; the beakers of elixir upon the worktable, bubbling merrily on their burners. I measured out a vial and handed it to Clarke to administer. Then, having nothing else to do, I leaned in close to the Creature and laid a hand gently upon its neck.

‘Is it warm enough, Mary?’ Henry asked. I nodded, startled to hear his voice; the room had been so silent before, as still as a church mid-prayer. We had built here, in this half-ruined boathouse on the edge of the Moray Firth, a temple to our own strange gods – to Chemistry and Anatomy and Electricity.

There was an acrid smell in the room as the procedure began. The air felt prickly and sharp, bursting with potential, like the moment before lightning strikes. But there was no bang, no flash, no grand transformation – only something dead one minute, and alive the next. Its flippers twitched; its great curved back began to rise and fall of its own accord. And its eyes! I will always hold dear to my heart the fact that I was the first to see those golden eyes open, to see its reptilian pupils narrow and focus on my own – for in those eyes I saw, for the first time, proof that we had created something truly alive.