The Papers of Victoria Frankenstein: Conclusion

Editor’s Afterword

When I finished reading this first packet of papers from Vickie Stone (Victoria Frankenstein?), I had many, many questions—just as any normal person would.  I tried to talk to Vickie about what she wrote—to ask her some of my questions—but she always just smiled at me, just said, “Wait till you’ve read everything.  Then I’ll answer your questions—if you have any.  You probably won’t.”

Well, she was both right and wrong.  When I finished all the papers, I didn’t any longer have some of the questions that I'd wondered about when I’d read only the first packet.  But I still had so many questions that she never did answer.

I remember, of course, the most basic question of all: Wasn’t Victor Frankenstein just a character in a story?  Didn’t Mary Shelley just make him up?  But—as I wrote in one of the footnotes—it’s possible that she based him on an actual person.  Well … a person from an actual family, anyway.

I had so many other questions, though—especially about her so-called “gifts” (her talents).  I wanted to ask her to prove to me that she could do so many of the things she claimed to have done.  I wanted her to show me the scales from the Lake Erie serpent.  I wanted to take one of those scales to a zoologist and find out what species it was really from.

And I wanted to know, too, how she ended up in my town.  Where was her father?  Why wasn’t she living in Franconia any longer? Did they ever rebuild their house?  What about Aunt Claire?  Did they every learn anything more about her?  If her family name was Wahl, is she related to the Frankensteins … to the Stones?  What had Vickie meant by that awful statement she’d made to me: “There’s no one left to tell”?  And what happened to Harriet Eastbrook? And what about the monstrous Blue Boyle?  And Dr. Eastbrook?  Where are they now?  Why hadn’t Vickie’s father destroyed the Frankenstein papers?  He says he’d thought about it—but why hadn’t he actually done it?  Was the journal Vickie found the one that belonged to Victor Frankenstein?  The one in which he recorded his experiments?  The one he used when he brought his infamous creature to life?

So many, many questions.  And, of course, the most important one: Why was I the only one to see her in Tyre Middle School?  How did she do that?  Why did she choose me?

But—as she said—at least some answers are in the later packets of papers she gave me.  The next one I find particularly intriguing.  I’ve called it My Homework Ate My Dog, for in that portion of Vickie’s memoirs she creates a very strange project for her school science fair.  Very strange.