Our Hideous Progeny

by C.E. McGill

Shame breeds fear, and fear breeds goodness, morality, better behaviour. Such is the hope.

Except that sometimes – as I can attest – shame and fear beget only anger instead.

Ladies are often criticized for being childish, I find – but it is hard not to be, when one’s life is so wholly in the hands of another.

We were all made of the same stuff, it seemed; the most significant difference between myself and the whale was not our species, nor our size, but the fact that I was alive and it was dead.

‘This country . . . this empire . . . is a ship, Miss Brown. It is hard enough to stage a mutiny from the deck, but if one starts in the water, well . . . One cannot afford principles, if one is trying not to drown.’

Do little boys ever grow out of being fools, I wonder? Or do they simply grow into something worse?

‘We shall steal fire from the heavens, and I shall not repent, even for one minute – for what sort of god would condemn us to such a cold world without it? We’re merely taking what should have been ours from the beginning.’

Sometimes, it felt as if every year that passed brought only another painful recollection, another bruise of a memory. Soon enough there would be not a single word which did not dredge up something I wished to forget, not a single part of me that did not cringe to the touch.

‘And Mrs Sutherland and I were childhood friends,’ Clarke added with a cloying smile. I smiled back, and in my mind’s eye, tossed my saucer as one might throw a discus and cracked his waxy forehead like an egg.

‘Yes,’ I said at last, aware even as I said it that I condemned my daughter to death. For if I had not married – if I had stayed on Wight and denied Mr Doyle and lived the rest of my life alone – she would never have died. But then she would also, undeniably, never have been born. Which was worse, I wondered? To deny her existence to begin with, or to give her life, however briefly, only for it to be snatched away? The latter seemed the crueller by far. And yet, selfish as it was – shocking as it was, for I was sure that not so long ago I would have done quite the opposite – it was this option I chose. For it was this option that led me here: to this house, this grand project, this endeavour which was the closest thing to a purpose that I had ever known.

Whenever a woman without children loved an animal or a cause or anything else – anything else besides that which she ought to love most in the world, that which she ought to spend all her days trying and longing for – it was thought to be a substitute for what she did not have.

But – and here was a thought I had kept buried for a very long time, too afraid even to think it – I was still not sure how much of that grief belonged to her, and how much belonged to the version of myself I had hoped to find alongside her. The bliss of motherhood. The completeness I would finally feel, holding her in my arms. The knowledge that I had at last completed the task for which God, or Nature, had made me.

‘But money cannot buy you talent, can it?’ I could not fathom why I was still talking; I was trembling with fear, my heart beating so fast it ached, but now that I had started, I could not stop. ‘You cannot buy ideas, or discoveries. Hence why you have to steal them.’ ‘Shut your mouth.’ If I had any sense, I knew, I would. But I have never been a sensible soul. I have only, ever, always, been angry.

But did I wish to find the answer? Was it worth it? Even if I happened to find the Creature again one day – as unlikely as that seemed – could it ever be repaired, or would it have to be entirely remade? And even supposing there was a way to make resurrected flesh heal and grow, to ensure that whatever beings I conjured forth would be free from rot and pain – what would such a science do, when unleashed upon the world? Would it bring forth a utopia free from suffering and sickness, as my great-uncle had hoped? Or a living nightmare of patchwork flesh, wherein a body is merely a means of conveying oneself from one place to another, replaced with a fresh vessel every time it grows too old?