Frankenstein's Monster by Susan Heyboer O'Keefe

if to emphasize that I could spare no thoughts, gigantic waves walled me in. The fog hid their presence till the very end: without warning, great blankets of froth crashed down on me one after another. I dived underwater to escape their fierce weight. When I burst to the surface, gasping for breath, another wave would crash down, as if it had been waiting for me with sentient purpose. Time after time, I found myself turned round; time after time, while I stared at the compass, a pounding wave forced me back under.
    My precious boots became boulders strapped to my back, but their heaviness only tightened the wet knot of the sleeves tied round my waist, and I couldn’t free myself. Do not dwell on these things, I told myself. Not the weight, not the wind, not the waves. Each moment brought me closer to shore; I could think only of that.
    Bursting upward yet another time, I surfaced in an area where the fog had lifted enough to allow a ring of visibility a hundred yards across, eerily lit by a gibbous moon. What I saw was so amazing I cried out: the menacing humps of a school of whales. Then I realized I was seeing only hills of water, huge waves that had not broken to foam. I checked the compass, adjusted my direction, and swam.
    Something snaked across my face and chest, leaving traces of fire on my skin. Batting it away, I slapped against a spongy mass and found myself entangled in the long stinging tendrils of a jellyfish, and then of another, and another, until a huge swarm, bobbing on the waves, ringed me in with torment. I would have thought myself too numb to feel such pain, but a thousand needles pierced my body—and still the swarm extended before me. The salt water burned my wounds and made me suffer afresh.
    From a distance came a weird whistling sound, high pitched and keening. Water whipped away from the tops of the humps. I feared I was swimming into breakwater again. The whistling grew louder, and both water and air slapped me in the face. It was the wind funneling through the cliffs on either side of the strait. The thick dark gray of the fog was soon swept away, replaced by the purer black of night.
    Hour after hour I swam until monotony became my new danger. I saw only unending dark, felt only iciness, heard only the ceaseless howl of the wind. Somehow, without knowing it, I had drowned, I thought; I had died and gone to Hell. Sisyphus had his rock; I had the strait. But stroke and stroke and—dawn would come eventually, and I would reach England, as long as I kept swimming north. At last I saw the horizon, a dark sky above the darker sea. On my right were the changing colors of sunrise; before me, white cliffs, like a tremendous ice shelf. I no longer needed the compass.
    I pulled myself onto shore. People would soon be about, though I did not care. At the base of the cliffs I found a rotting boat and crept underneath its overturned shell. I fell asleep without bothering to untie the boots from my waist. It was not until I woke that I realized I had lost my journal. Amazingly, the clasp on the necklace had held; the little charms tinkle as I write this.
    The loss of my journal so stunned me that my first action was to break into the nearest firm, a solicitor’s office. A thin twig or the shaft of a small loose feather—these are always at hand, even if they are annoying substitutes for proper quills, which I am able to obtain only when a bird is large enough, and unlucky enough, to be my dinner. For ink, I have used everything from crushed berries to the water of simmered walnuts, from boiled-away coffee to lampblack. Even a small stoppered phial for the ink can be foregone awhile.
    But paper!
    A fresh diary is as rare as a friendly face, so I settle for stolen ledgers and account books, hoping not too many pages are already filled with numbers. An extra good in such thievery is this: where there are ledgers, there are quills; and where there are quills, there are phials, providing the convenience of not