The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein by Peter Ackroyd

great excitement, while explaining to Lang the importance of Coleridge’s lecture.
    “Do you mean to say,” he asked me, “that you are willing to test your wildest fantasies?”
    “The imagination is the strongest possible power. Do you not recall that Adam dreamed, and that when he awoke he found it truth?”
    “In the same narrative, Victor, there is a warning against the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.”
    “Are we to be prevented from reaching up to the branch? Surely not.”
    “I am a mere student of theology.”
    “Where there is nothing more to learn?”
    “The ways of God are infinite. But I do not share your—”
    “Ambition?”
    “Craving. Your fierce desire to explore unknown ways. You have spoken to me of the forbidden knowledge of the adepts. Of the ancient conjurors.”
    “Not conjurors. Philosophers. Men of science.”
    “Of the secreta secretorum of their arts. And I must say that I have been alarmed.”
    “My dear Lang, there are people alarmed by Faraday and by Mesmer. All new forms of thought and practice provoke disquiet. What did Coleridge just say to us? Under the force of the imagination, nature itself is changed. Faraday has awakened dead limbs with his electrical fluid. Mesmer has relieved suffering invalids of all pain. Is that not an alteration in nature’s laws?”
    “It cannot lead to good.”
    “Is the passage from death to life not good? Is the alleviation of pain not good? Come now. You must think like a man, Horace, not like a theologian.”
    We fell into silence, my companion uttering a subdued farewell as we parted from each other in the quad, but I climbedmy staircase with a light heart. Coleridge’s valedictory words, on the shaping role of the imagination, had aroused my enthusiasm to such a pitch that I could think of nothing else. I mixed myself a hot collation of rum and milk, a legacy from my days in Chamonix, and then retired to bed with a fixed determination to rise early and to pitch myself into my studies.
    When I placed my head on the pillow, however, I did not sleep; nor could I be said to think of anything in particular. My mind was like a canvas on which a succession of images passed. Once, when I had been ill of a fever in Chamonix, the same sensation had possessed me; it was as if my imagination had become my guide, leading me forward in a direction over which I had no possible control. As I lay in my bed in Oxford I saw Elizabeth, as she would have been had she still been in life; there were pictures of my father climbing steadily, along the side of a vast glacier that threatened to overwhelm him; there were pictures of Bysshe, fleeing across an open plain with a girl in his arms. And then, most tremendous of all, I saw myself kneeling by the bed of some gigantic shadowy form. This bed was my bed, and the shape was stretched out upon it. Yet I could not be sure of its nature. Then it began to show signs of life, and to stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.
    I must have lapsed into sleep, for I can then only recall a sequence of sounds like some roll of drums in the prelude to an opera. I heard a gate creaking upon its hinges and then swinging back, a number of heavy steps, a key turning and then a door opening. I opened my eyes in terror, to find Florence entering the room. “You will miss the service, Mr. Frankenstone,” she was saying. “You must rouse yourself.”
    Never had I washed and dressed myself with such relief, tofind the phantasms of the night quite dispersed. I rushed down into chapel, where I saw Lang blinking and yawning as if he had not slept at all. I was about to join him in hall for breakfast, after the service, when the porter brought over to me a note. “This has been left for you, sir,” he said. “Just this morning.”
    There was a message scrawled in pencil on a small sheet of paper torn from a notebook: May I see you? I am by the bridge at the end of the street . It was signed by Daniel Westbrook.

    I HURRIED DOWN THE