The Man Who Made Adam

The ice fields, snow white walls on dark blue water, reached as far as the eye could see. Huge towers of glacial blue ice, occasionally cracking and crumbling in heavy footfalls into the ocean.

Leaning over the deck of The Terror, the steamer chugging hot and rusty above the purple-black abyss, John Rebus clutched at his coffee and wondered once again at the fates of those whose expedition he had been sent to rescue. He was a man much given to superstitions. These beliefs had always protected him upon the bitter swells of the Arctic circle. The fates of others, less superstitious men, were far less certain.

His melancholy gaze wandered and then fixated upon a gull that hung in space between the glaciers. Its lonely caw echoed off the pale monoliths. The sky darkened perceptibly, the wind cutting even through Rebus’s six layers of clothing. And the ice cracked as the steamer plowed forward, crunching against the debris.

To reach the North Pole was a quest of folly and desolation and darker things that gripped men's minds. But to others it spoke of high words. Driven by a purpose as stainless as the Arctic snows, as clean and as pure to the core as an ice mountain: this was the boundless spirit of man. Rebus scratched his head and looked down at his hand in alarm. His hair was coming out.

This fascination with what lay beyond the ice had preoccupied the British public’s imagination for nearly a generation. Grand gestures were made. To the great undiscovered country. To the final triumph of man over the Earth. Forty five souls on The Erebus had set out from the Port of Felixstowe 5 months hence, the bow circling ever deeper into the great white territory. Much ink and public yarn had been made of the expedition. And so when communications ceased some 2 months ago, it quickly snowballed into a national disaster.

Defiant in the face of mounting pressure, John Barrow, Second Secretary of the British Admiralty since 1804, made the symbolic importance explicit. If Britain failed to find the Northwest Passage to the Pole she “would be laughed at by all the world.” In an impassioned speech before Lords, he stamped his hand on the purple velvet and declared, “By God, we will find our brave explorers victorious, standing at the North Pole dead or alive under the Union Jack.”

But as Rebus now knew those very same brave explorers had abandoned ship long before they even got close. He’d found The Erebus, crushed between shifting pack ice like a grand piano caught in an industrial press. It was a cold tomb, and no doubt the crew had tried to salvage what food and courage they could and then set out into the cold blue expanse.

The expedition had been forced to march northward over ice for thirty-five days, hauling eight hundred pounds of gear, only then to discover that the ice itself had been drifting south, nullifying their gains.

Fighting desolation and starvation, scurvy and hypothermia, they survived by bleeding each other and drinking the blood from a shoe. If they had descended further, into anything darker, it was unthinkable to stain the English reputation with a moral horror far more often associated with savages.

Of course there were ways of surviving out in the pristine wasteland, as the Inuits had for hundreds of years. But the arrogance of Empire was blind and the ancient Gods of the North accepted their sacrifices with characteristic stoicism.

That they’d found evidence of this was surely enough, his first mate had argued, enough to return home from this cursed land. Yet not all of the crew had yet been accounted for. And so it was as Rebus churned with these most troubling thoughts that he first noticed the figure, cloaked in black and walking almost at a diagonal across the ice fields.

“By the Holy Blessed Virgin.” His first mate, George Flight, had appeared next to Rebus and crossed himself. The lone black figure was eerie, and it wasn’t just the cold that made Rebus shiver then.

Even if Rebus didn’t like it, didn’t like it one bit, he still sent the dogs out and the sleds. The apparition was a man all right, or what was left of him. His face was sunken and his eyes had become holes that gleaned with a light Rebus had only seen in fanatics and mystics. He would not speak and when he did his voice gasped with a bird-like call and he shivered and raged when men touched him. They stowed him below deck and not a man would go near him.

That night the gale broke. The Terror was brought to pitch blackness, churning in the waves and frozen winds. Steadying himself after a third glass of whiskey, Rebus took a lantern down into the depths of the cargo hold where they kept their find, holding to the freezing pipes for balance.

He found him there, wrapped in black, with only his face showing. And what a face. Rebus sat with the man in silence for close to half an hour, listening to the wind howling and the ice crackling, staring into his bony face in the flickering half-light. When the man finally spoke, his mouth thin but his voice deep and powerful, Rebus heard the fateful words that would haunt all his coming days.

“My name is Viktor Frankenstein and I have made Adam.”