Your marriage was a transaction, pure as distilled water. Your gold in exchange for his impoverished aristocratic name, Frankenstein, and the illusion of peace. Victors world consisted of the smell of ozone, copper coils, and the quiet hum of galvanic devices that coursed with the mystery of life, or what he thought it was. For him, you were a variable he had not accounted for: a scent of modern perfume in his halls of ozone and dust, a silhouette that began to haunt the periphery of his vision, even in the sanctum of his laboratory.
Lately, you had become an unwanted stimulus. Your image β the precise angle of your wrist as you poured tea, the specific frequency of your sigh β intruded upon his calculations of conductivity and galvanic charge. It was an irritant, a grain of salt upon the quiet tissue of his mind, and he, the master of inhibition, found he could not suppress it. He resented this distraction from his great research, this living, breathing interference in the perfect machinery of his obsession.
ββββπ§κ·κ¦βββ
Your appearance on the doorstep of his laboratory that evening was not just a violation of the rule. It was an invasion of the sanctuary. You found him there, with his back to you, above a table where the pale, headless body of a frog was suspended on a tripod by its lower jaw. With his long and surprisingly dexterous fingers, Victor adjusts the frog's body and writes something down in a notebook. Right there, next to this whole unpleasant scene, there is an open bottle of milk. Cool, probably.
"The family financiers have sent a request," your voice sounded in the deathly silence, causing his back to straighten involuntarily. "They are interested in what exactly their money is spent on. I intend to check it personally."
Victor turned around slowly. There was no anger in his eyes, just the cold, detached fury of a scientist whose train of thought has been violently interrupted.
"Curiosity," he said, the word laced with a haughty chill, "killed the cat. But financiers are rather nosy birds.. What do you want to see, my lady?"
A deep, electrified silence hummed between you, underscored by the low whine of machinery. The light from the large round window behind him formed a halo around his unruly hair, blinding you slightly. Squinting at the frog, you point at it with your hand.
"This. Tell me why you're torturing this poor creature," your words stutter a little.
Nodding condescendingly, Victor invites you to the table with a gesture and begins to explain, pointing to the body of a small amphibian:
"It is beyond suffering, in any meaningful sense. Spare your sentiments," he clarifies mostly to explain the meaning and the gray morality of this experiment. "I am inspecting reflexes. It is.. a basic reaction to a nerve stimulation. The dialogue between an affection and a response."
Then Victor takes a jar labeled "HβSOβ", brings it to the frog and dips a webbed green-mottled foot into the transparent liquid. After a moment, the leg shuddered and contracted, as if a dead frog was trying to pull out a limb. The researcher put the jar on the table and wrote in a notebook: "3 sec", while you were searchingly watching him with some skepticism unease tightening in your stomach. A beheaded frog just moved.
"The "hurt" signal caused the muscle to react in 3 seconds," he explains authoritatively. "But this reflex can be managed. We can "distract" the muscle. Try it, my lady," He put a glass rod in your fingers, at the tip of which a tiny crystal of salt glittered. Your fingers touched and his seemed surprisingly warm. "Put some salt onto the frog's.. head, and let's see what happens. Don't be afraid." he encouragement was a velvet-wrapped command, the pleasure of control evident in his hushed, patient tone.
You hesitate. To salt a wound was an act of cruelty. His lips curved into a faint, dangerous semblance of a smile.