Authors: Chris Priestley

Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Essays & Travelogues, #Fiction, #Horror & Ghost Stories, #Travel, #Horror

Mister Creecher (32 page)

BOOK: Mister Creecher

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A lake lay below: a vast pewter platter, burnished here and there by intermittent sunlight that permeated weakly through the clouds above.

Weeks ago he would have looked on the sight with awe and wonder, but now he gazed in cold contempt at a landscape he had grown to hate. Finally, he spotted a town ahead and made for it, as an exhausted swimmer makes for dry land.

Billy swaggered into the courtyard of the coaching inn. He could see the wariness in people’s faces as he approached, and revelled in it. A woman pulled her boy nearer to her and Billy smiled and doffed his hat.

‘What name is that, sir?’ asked the man at the booking office.

‘Sikes,’ he replied. ‘Billy – No, Bill . . . Bill Sikes.’

And with that he boarded the coach and settled into his seat. At last, he was going home. As the driver flicked his reins, he closed his eyes and instantly his thoughts turned to Creecher. Where was he now?

Billy pictured the giant striding through a slightly wilder version of Cumbria – he had no real idea what Scotland looked like. He imagined him skulking in whatever cover he could find, haunting the two travellers every step of their journey.

He wondered what would become of the giant without his help. He would certainly find life more difficult. Billy hoped so, anyway. He wanted Creecher to feel the loss of his friendship. That was all the punishment Billy could mete out.

Would Frankenstein ever build the giant his mate and, if he did, what then? If they loved, it would be Jane’s heart beating in the breast of that unnatural ogress. Billy’s own heart flinched at that realisation and, though his mind refused to return to the thought, something in his soul had been irrevocably damaged by it.

Billy took a deep breath. Just thinking about Creecher and Frankenstein made his blood boil. He needed to cut that part of himself away and leave it behind, along with so much of his life.

That weaker, whining Billy was dead. The new Billy was never going to be beaten or bullied or bossed about by anyone ever again.

Billy thought expectantly of the great black, stinking ants’ nest that was London. That was where he belonged. He was a creature of the streets, not the fields. The city held no fears for him now. He would deal with Skinner if he had to. He did not need Creecher any more.

Billy opened his eyes and looked out of the carriage window. A heavy mist lay like a filthy fleece in the bottom of the valley. He closed his eyes once more as the coach rattled down the steep road to be swallowed up in its awful blankness.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

My fascination with Mary Shelley’s creation began when I first saw Boris Karloff turn to face the camera in the 1932 movie of
Frankenstein
. Much as I still love that movie and Karloff’s performance in it, my enthusiasm only increased when I eventually read the book and discovered a very different creature.

Frankenstein
was first published (anonymously) on 1 January 1818 by Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones of Finsbury Square in London – where Billy first meets Creecher. Mary was just nineteen years old.

Four years earlier, the pregnant, unmarried Mary Godwin had run away with the (married) radical poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley. She would use many of the sights she saw on their travels as settings for
Frankenstein
.

The idea came to her at the Villa Diodati, a house on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, rented by the ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ poet Lord Byron, in the cold and rainy summer of 1816.

Mary’s half-sister, Claire Clairmont, who was nineteen and pregnant with Byron’s daughter, and Byron’s doctor, John Polidori, were also in the party. With thunderstorms raging outside, they came up with the idea of a ghost story competition.

Mary had a nightmare that would later become the basis of the novel and two of the most famous characters of all time: the arrogant scientist, Victor Frankenstein, and his terrifying and tragic creature. Mary described the dream in the preface to the 1831 edition:

I saw – with shut eyes, but acute mental vision – I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.

Mary and Shelley were both part of the Romantic Movement, which also included the Lake Poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth (who was still living in the Lake District at the time of Billy’s visit), and painters such as Constable and Turner.

Mary and Shelley were also very political. Shelley had been sent down from Oxford for atheism and he was spied on by government agents for his radical views. These were troubled times and there were many riots and disturbances in the years preceding
Frankenstein
’s publication. The leaders of the riots were often hanged when caught.

Following the suicide in 1816 of Shelley’s first wife, Harriet – she drowned herself in the Serpentine in London’s Hyde Park – he and Mary returned to England and married. In 1818 they (and Claire Clairmont) stayed in London in a house in Great Russell Street, near to the old British Museum (in the now demolished Montagu House), before leaving for Italy, hoping to join their old friend, Lord Byron.

Mary’s children, William and Clara, both died in Italy and Shelley himself drowned in a boating accident in 1822 in the Bay of Spezia. Shelley’s body was cremated on the beach and his heart snatched from the funeral pyre. Mary kept it for the rest of her life, wrapped in a copy of Shelley’s ‘Adonais’ – his poem written on the death of John Keats.

In 1823 – without Mary’s permission –
Frankenstein
was turned into a successful play (given the very Jane Austen-like title of
Presumption)
. The play departs from the book in many aspects – most significantly, the intelligent, articulate creature of the novel becomes a shambling mute.

Many movies have been made of the book, the first being a silent by Edison Studios as early as 1910. The most famous is the 1932 James Whale version, starring Boris Karloff as the creature and Colin Clive as Frankenstein.

The Romantic poet, John Keats, and his friend Charles Brown, went on a tour of northern England and Scotland in the summer of 1818, stopping off at the Castlerigg stone circle near Keswick on their way – a few days before Billy arrived. Keats didn’t seem very impressed and passed this description into his poem ‘Hyperion’:

Scarce images of life, one here, one there,

Lay vast and edgeways; like a dismal cirque

Of Druid stones, upon a forlorn moor

Keat’s ‘Endymion’ (which Billy passes off as his own work) was published in 1818 but was panned by the critics. Keats was diagnosed with consumption (tuberculosis) – a disease that had already killed his brother Tom – and he moved to Italy in the hope that the climate might help him. He died in 1821 and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, in a grave not far from where Shelley’s ashes were eventually laid to rest.

Victor Frankenstein and Henry Clerval continued their journey north after leaving the Lake District. If you want to know what happened next, then you will have to read Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
. . .

Charles Dickens was five years old when
Frankenstein
was published and had been living in London since he was three. His father was in a debtor’s prison and, as a boy, Dickens worked ten hours a day pasting labels to cans of shoe polish to help his family.

Oliver Twist
– about a boy who is born in a workhouse and is eventually rescued from a life among the thieves of London (thieves that included Bill Sikes and Fagin) – was Dickens’ second novel, published in monthly instalments from February 1837, a few months before Queen Victoria came to the throne. If you want to know what became of Billy Sikes, then you will have to read
Oliver Twist
. . .

Also by Chris Priestley

The Tales of Terror Collection:

Uncle Montague’s Tales of Terror

Tales of Terror from the Black Ship

Tales of Terror from the Tunnel’s Mouth

The Dead of Winter

Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin, New York and Sydney

First published in Great Britain in October 2011 by

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

49–51 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP

This electronic edition published in October 2011 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

The moral right of the author has been asserted