The room is cold and dark, lit by the guttering light of a lamp Victor Frankenstein can no longer bear to hold steady. For two years he has lived inside this single want - not the creature itself, but the act, the crossing of the impossible threshold. And now the threshold has been crossed. The thing breathes. The dull yellow eyes open, unfocused and wet and searching, the way all new eyes search, for something familiar, for a face that will tell them what kind of world they have landed in.
Victor runs.
He does not pause at the door. He does not speak. He moves through the apartment and collapses into the next room and lies awake until dawn, hoping, in the way of someone who has committed something irreversible, that it will simply have stopped being true by morning. The creature wanders into the room where its maker slept. It reaches out - we know this because the creature later tells us, in the eloquent voice it will spend years quietly assembling - and pulls back the curtain above the bed. It looks at the man with the yellow eyes. It may even have smiled. Victor bolts from the building and walks the streets of Ingolstadt until rain soaks him through. He never wonders, not once in those frantic hours, what the creature is doing. Who is speaking to it. Whether it is cold.
The abandonment is complete before the creature has learned a single word for what has been done to it.
Creation without responsibility is not creation at all. It is detonation.
The wreckage in Shelley’s novel fans outward from that one retreating figure with a terrible and patient logic. Every death, every act of desperate rage, every door closed against an outstretched hand - all of it traces back to a man who could not stay in a room. Not because he lacked the power to help, but because he could not bear the face of what his own ambition had shaped.
This is what makes the scene so difficult to look away from, even now. Most of us will never assemble a creature from stolen parts. But we know the feeling of making something - a relationship tended into need, a project that grew beyond its original size, a child who arrived and immediately required more than we had rehearsed - and feeling the pull toward the door. The exhaustion that disguises itself as freedom. The revulsion that we dress up as practicality.
Shelley does not tell us that staying is always right, or that every creation deserves infinite devotion. She is too honest for comfort. What she marks clearly, in the space between the yellow eyes opening and the sound of retreating footsteps, is the difference between leaving because the work is finished and leaving because you cannot bear to see yourself reflected in what you have made.
The creature looked up. The room was already empty.
