Page 11 of Love Immortal
Ten
“ I am glad to see everyone here today, safe and sound,” Dacian Bathory says as his solemn gaze sweeps over the auditorium the following Monday. It’s only for a moment, but he pauses on me as though making sure I am indeed here, unharmed, and not floating downstream with my blood drained or drowning in my nightmares.
A curl of unexpected pleasure at being singled out by him brushes my skin. I haven’t seen or talked to him since last week, when I thanked him for speaking to the library on my behalf, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t thought of him. I wonder what he said to Ms. Tarnow that she considered “high regard.” I’m not fishing for compliments, but after the ice-cold reception he gave me the first week of class, I’m dying to find out what changed his mind. Does he see something in me now that he didn’t see before? The very thought kindles a spark in me, a desire to know more about him. If I’m not careful to tamp it down, it very well may turn into an all-consuming inferno.
Mr. Bathory’s gaze shifts to the slumbering shape several rows behind me, and he sighs in annoyance. “Although it seems some still prefer the embrace of Morpheus to talking about literature…isn’t that right, Mr. Stockton?”
Unsurprisingly, Eric does not wake up when his name is called.
Fiona rolls her eyes in the seat next to me. “Seriously? Again? I can’t believe this dude.”
There’s a murmur of low voices in the auditorium, and I find myself awash in embarrassment on Eric’s behalf since he’s clearly not capable of feeling any himself.
By this time, Mr. Bathory is fed up with Eric’s lack of decorum as well. In a few steps so swift and graceful that I wonder if his shiny black shoes even made contact with the wooden floors or if he simply glided up the steps like an apparition, he makes his way to Eric’s seat in the top row. “Mr. Stockton,” he repeats, gazing down at Eric like an owl zeroing in on a mouse. “WAKE UP.”
I jolt. It’s not that Mr. Bathory’s voice is particularly loud, but somehow, it rings out like a bell struck in a tower. It resonates inside the walls of my mind like he spoke the command directly into it.
Eric jerks upright. “What?” he yelps, startled.
There is a look of panic on his face that the circumstance doesn’t quite merit. Falling asleep in class and being called out by the professor is no joke, but Eric doesn’t have a sense of shame, as we’ve established. Yet he looks positively mortified, as though he was expecting to see the devil himself upon opening his eyes.
“Late night?” Dacian asks with a cold intensity that would make a grown man cower.
“Um…” Eric opens and closes his mouth several times but fails to produce a coherent response. He looks like he barely knows where he is.
Dacian grants him no mercy and continues to pin him down with the crumbling power of his glare. “Perhaps you should ask your generous family to invest in a wonderful modern invention called an alarm clock.”
Eric’s bloodshot eyes blink stupidly.
Mr. Bathory, however, doesn’t wait for a verbal response. He turns around and smoothly descends back to his desk. “Let us embark on today’s discussion, which involves monsters.” He addresses the rest of the class in his usual alluring yet aloof manner, as though he has already forgotten about Eric’s existence or considers it completely insignificant. “And this time,” he adds meaningfully, “it concerns a real monster made of flesh and blood—not merely a ghost, or an illusion, or a figment of someone’s troubled imagination. ‘…If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear,’” he quotes from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein , which is the assigned reading for today’s class.
I let my shoulders slump against the back of my chair as the music of Mr. Bathory’s voice fills the room, lulling my senses. What just happened with Eric was weird . I can’t believe Mr. Bathory didn’t kick him out of class. That’s what I would have done. But perhaps Dacian Bathory is too cool for that. It would mean admitting that Eric’s rudeness ruffles him, and he seems so above that. But seriously, what’s going on with Stockton?
I sneak several glances back at him. He looks fidgety. His spiky blond hair is a limp mess, and there are dark bags under his eyes. Is he on drugs? That would explain the jitters. The idiot is throwing his life away, not to mention thousands of dollars in tuition and whatever his family is spending to rent that mansion in the mountains. Mads Jr. and company are probably going to level it; over the weekend, everyone rushed to party at their place to avoid the campus-wide curfew, the drugging incident all but forgotten. I grit my teeth. I guess that standoff with Alessandra in the dining hall achieved what she intended.
“Now, why would he do that, Mr. Evergreen?” Mr. Bathory asks suddenly. I’m so distracted thinking about the stupid legacies that I almost miss his question. Of course he’s chosen to call on me when I wasn’t paying attention. Just my luck.
“I…uh—” I stammer, trying to execute the old-age maneuver of quickly rewinding the last bit of someone’s speech while assembling a response that makes some semblance of sense. I think he was talking about the violence Frankenstein’s creature inflicted upon Victor’s friends and family for rejecting him. “Because he was lonely?” I venture hesitantly.
Mr. Bathory’s eyebrows rise. There’s a notable intensity in his voice when he asks, “And do you think loneliness is reason enough to commit heinous crimes, Mr. Evergreen?”
“Um…” He’s standing no more than five feet away from me. We’re still in the middle of class, of course, but there’s suddenly a surreal quality to the scene. The soft white light coming from the window seems to bend around Mr. Bathory’s dark silhouette, reminding me of artists’ renderings of black holes in distant galaxies. Again I find myself caught in his eyes like they have the gravity of their own, stronger than the pull of anything else around us. It’s so hard to think clearly when he looks at me like this. But what chances do I have at escaping him when even light eventually gets trapped inside black holes and time stops? I read Frankenstein in high school and reread it just before class; it’s not an unfamiliar story. Yet my mind feels like it, too, is swirling toward the event horizon.
“I don’t condone it,” I finally manage to reply. “But I understand where his resentment comes from.”
“I think the creature did it because he didn’t understand that his actions were evil,” Fiona adds, mercifully rescuing me. “Victor didn’t teach him what was right and wrong before completely abandoning him to fend for himself.”
Mr. Bathory tips his head, curious. “Do you consider Victor to be a good person, then, Ms. Onayemi?”
The question surprises Fiona. “Well, no, I wouldn’t think so. He placed a lot of importance on someone’s physical appearance while judging their worth as a person. That speaks of superficiality and a flawed value system. Plus, there’s the whole unethical experiments thing, and let’s not forget about the grave robbing.”
“But you still expect him to make good, morally correct choices even though he is not a good person?” Mr. Bathory asks.
Now that his attention is on Fiona, my brain has regained the ability to function. “I don’t think the results of Victor’s choices have anything to do with him being good or ethical,” I say, reinserting myself into the discussion. “The issue is that he created something, then refused to take responsibility for his creation until it was too late. Therefore, Victor shares the blame for what the creature did—and for his loneliness.”
“What about free will, then?” Mr. Bathory folds his arms, still not satisfied with my answer. “Doesn’t the creature possess it?”
“He does,” I agree. “But if he doesn’t know anything about the world or the extent of his own powers, can you trust him to exercise it properly?”
“As much as you can trust a child running with scissors,” Fiona adds.
Mr. Bathory’s eyelashes flutter in surprise at her metaphor, but his lightless gaze stays on me. “Then are you suggesting that the true monster of the story isn’t the sad creature who murders out of rage and rejection, abandoned by a madman who wants to play god, but the madman himself, the human , who refuses to accept the consequences of his actions and bear responsibility for his blind ambition?”
“Yes,” I say quietly.
The sharp angles of Mr. Bathory’s face soften a little. “Perhaps you are right, Mr. Evergreen,” he says, sounding oddly withdrawn. Like he’s thinking of another time or place—a distant memory, another dark story of monstrous deeds and evil men. “I suppose in Victor’s case, it wasn’t too late for him to tame the monster and seek atonement for their shared crimes, however futile. If only all villains were so fortunate as to find a path toward redemption. But alas, therein lies the difference between fiction and reality.”
There’s a slight curl to Mr. Bathory’s mouth when he says this, but the bone-deep sadness that permeates his words would hardly allow me to call it a smile.