Edited by Her 8th
Grade English Teacher,
Mr. Bob Walton
Packet
III: The Monster Among Us
(1996–1997)
a novel by
Daniel Dyer
Copyright © 2021 by
Daniel Dyer
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Dedicated to my immediate family:
Wife (Joyce), Son
(Stephen),
Daughter-in-law (Melissa),
Grandsons (Logan
and Carson).
I love them all profoundly.
Foreword
By Mr. Bob Walton
If you’ve read the earlier two collections
of The Papers of Victoria Frankenstein—and
you really should if you want to make much sense out of this volume—you know that I was, for a time, Vickie Stone’s eighth
grade English teacher.
I say “Vickie Stone,” but, as you learn in
that first volume, her actual name was Victoria Frankenstein, and, yes, if you
believe what she has written, it was that
Frankenstein to whom she was related—Victor Frankenstein, the young man who
created perhaps the most famous monster in the world.
The problems of such a claim arise
immediately, don’t they? I mean, weren’t Victor Frankenstein and his creature
just fictional creations? Weren’t
they born in the mind of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, who, in the summer
1816, dreamed it all up for a ghost-story competition among friends in Geneva,
Switzerland? Then expanded that story into a novel published in January 1818?
So we’re supposed to believe that Victor
was real? That his creature actually existed? That’s quite a
stretch, isn’t it?
***
In the first volume, I told you how I met
Vickie back in the fall of 1996 when she appeared one day in my class in early
October. As I wrote then, Vickie was a very quiet, studious girl—and the other
kids in the class barely noticed her. If at all. She didn’t contribute during
class discussions; I didn’t call on her. I mean, I wanted to, but whenever I made the move to do so, something Happened,
and changed my mind.
***
That fall—the final year of my long
teaching career—my department chair had urged me to teach more “classics” to my
students. She actually recommended Frankenstein,
which I’d not read at the time, and I thought that was a great idea.
And then I read it—and realized that very
few, if any, of my eighth graders could handle the reading. It was long; it was
complicated; the sentences were thick, the vocabulary very advanced. So … I
found a comic-book version of the story, and we read it (much to the dismay of my department chair!). And I showed my
classes parts of Frankenstein movies.
The kids wrote stories—that kind of thing.
I was astonished when Vickie Stone began
leaving notes for me, notes that corrected things I’d said in class about the
book—about Mary Shelley. How could she
know so much?
Eventually, as I’ve told you, she left me
many pages of her life story—pages she urged me to read but not to share with anyone else. She also
told me not to copy those pages.
But I couldn’t help it. I did copy them (which, later, I learned
that Vickie somehow knew), and, as
you know, I published them—in the two volumes previous to this one.
And this is the third—and, I fear, final—installment.
I’ve not heard a thing from or about Vickie Stone since this latest package of
her Papers arrived one day in the
mail.
***
A warning.
As I said with the earlier volumes, I am
very suspicious—more than suspicious—about the truth of what she’s written. I mean, I’ve tried to check much of
her detail—and so much just doesn’t appear to be true. Everything from the
names of people—to the names of many of the places, like Franconia, the southern
Ohio town where she and her father were living during the events she relates in
the two earlier volumes.
And she has clearly made up the
name of the town where I met her in northeastern Ohio. Here, she calls it
“Wisbech”; I’m not going to tell you its actual name. I guess I’m a little
embarrassed? I guess I want to protect, as much as I can, the reputation of the
place—and the school—where I lived and taught for many years.
As I did in the previous volumes, I have occasionally
used endnotes here to comment on the things she says. But I have not changed a
word she wrote. Not a single word.
As I’ve said, so much of what she said in her
earlier volumes is just so hard to believe! Her astonishing knowledge of and
skill in science, her weird and gigantic classmate (Blue Boyle), that strange
experience on that Ohio River island, the even stranger one on Put-in-Bay, a
catastrophic tornado, all topped off by that horrible incident at Niagara Falls
near the end of her second volume.
Are we really
supposed to accept all of that as fact?
When I’ve been unable to find virtually any
proof for any of it?
***
And speaking of
Blue Boyle. As I was preparing and taking notes on Vickie’s latest installment
of her papers, I one day received the oddest package in the mail. It was
rumpled and crumpled, and I could barely make out the handwriting, could barely
make out that the handwriting spelled my name. (How the folks at the Post
Office ever read it, ever got the package to me, is a mystery—no, a miracle.) I could
not read the postmark.
Inside that
package were some of the messiest handwritten pages I think I’ve ever seen—and
I saw a lot in my middle-school teaching days. (Oh, you would not believe!)
But I quickly figured out who they were
from.
From Blue Boyle.
It seems he had been keeping a rough
diary/journal of his own—and I do mean rough. It took every atom
of my skill in reading poor student penmanship to make out what he’d said—and I
didn’t always succeed. (Fortunately, his few diary entries were all very brief.)
The pages deal, roughly (there’s that word
again!), with some of the events that Vickie narrates in her own papers. So … I
thought I would include Blue Boyle’s observations here.
Needless to say, the differences between
his penmanship and sentence structure are, well, astonishing—not unlike the
differences between a torn paper kite and a jet airplane. So I fixed it so that
you could read it, too—though I wasn’t at all sure about some of the words he
used. All I can say is that I made my best guesses.
Except for the last entry, which was
surprisingly easy to understand.
***
So welcome to another journey through the
life of Victoria Frankenstein (a.k.a. Vickie Stone)—or maybe it’s just a
journey through her imagination? You decide. I honestly can’t.
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