Chapter 19 — the second laboratory

Victor takes a small stone hut on a windswept Orkney island, almost uninhabited — three other huts on the whole island, all of poor fishermen, none of them speaking to him. He sets up his second laboratory inside. The work, he discovers, is more disgusting to him this time than it was the first. He is older. He understands what he is doing more fully. He has spent two years now living with the consequences of the first creation. He is also, by his own honest admission, more squeamish about the materials. He works fitfully and slowly, often spending whole days unable to enter the hut at all.

He thinks, repeatedly, about what he is making. A female of the Creature's kind. She might, despite the Creature's promises, want children. She might refuse the bargain — having not been a party to it — and be more dangerous than he is. The two of them might breed a race that would, in time, threaten the human world. He turns these objections over again and again. The female is being assembled all the while. By the time she is two-thirds finished, he is in a state close to despair.

One afternoon, working at his bench by moonlight, he looks up at the small window of the hut and sees the Creature standing outside it, watching him at his work. The Creature is smiling — a smile of expectation, of relief that the work is being done. The smile, more than the threat of him, makes the decision. Victor stands up, looks at the half-finished female on the table, and lifts the candle. He has chosen.