Mary's side of the room: blue wallpaper with a pattern of white flowers, blue and white checked curtains, a bra.s.s bed with white linen, a small desk on which she has put daffodils in a vase. Diana's side of the room: Indian silks in reds and pinks and oranges, like an exotic sunset. A divan covered with pillows beside a table carved to resemble an elephant. Clothes strewn all over the floor, because she is incapable of keeping anything neat. Everywhere: statues of Hindu G.o.ds, buddhas with fat bellies, an onyx dog from Africa, a collection of bra.s.s bells, dyed baskets, the detritus of Empire. A vanity inlaid with ivory and strewn with cosmetics that, Mary tells her, will eventually ruin her complexion. Mrs. Poole refuses to clean Diana's half of the room. "Let her learn to pick up after herself," she says, uncharacteristically.

What would we do without Mrs. Poole? Her father worked for the Jekylls, and his father before him. She takes care of us all, makes certain that Justine isn't starving herself on a diet of lettuce and parsley, that Diana gets up by noon so she can make her curtain call. She feeds my cats.

My room is not very interesting. I was born in Argentina and then reborn on my father's island in the South Seas. Perhaps that is why my room is as English as possible. Roses on the wallpaper, a rose chintz on the armchair. A mahogany suite: bed, dresser, wardrobe. A bookshelf filled with Jane Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot. A desk where I write my potboilers.

The Mysteries of Astarte The Adventures of Rick Chambers Rick Chambers and Astarte Rick Chambers on Venus Invasion of the Cat Women I look down at the page in the typewriter: "No mortal man can resist me," said Astarte, pulling back her veil. The eyes that looked at him shone like twin stars in the night sky, dark and yet luminous in her white face. The perfect mouth, with lips curved like the famous bows of the Phoenicians, laughed.

Harold fell down before her, worshiping her beauty. Even Professor Hardcastle wiped the sweat from his brow. Only Rick remained calm.

"Your beauty, Madam, is most impressive. But I am an Englishman, and I prefer justice."

That will be The Death of Astarte. I have already been paid for The Resurrection of Astarte and Rick Chambers, Jr. in the Caverns of Doom.

On the bed, three cats lie purring: Alpha, Omega, and Bess. I found them one morning, three ragged kittens mewing by the kitchen door. Poor things. How difficult it must be, to be a kitten in London, always running from dogs, always in danger of being run over by cartwheels. Of course we took them in. The club is a refuge for them as well, and I am particularly fond of cats.

III. What We Talk About Sometimes we talk about our fathers.

Justine: "My father loved me. He made me from the corpse of a girl who had been a servant of the Frankenstein family. She had been hanged for a crime she did not commit, and he had preserved her body, antic.i.p.ating that some day he might be able to once again give her life. He even gave me her name, to commemorate her innocence.

"I can't begin to tell you what a wonderful childhood I had! My father guided me gently through the various stages of knowledge. He taught me the words to describe the world around me: the birds, the plants, the phenomena of nature. He taught me to read, and in the evenings we would read together: Paradise Lost, The Sorrows of Werther, Plutarch's Lives. But he was always haunted by the memory of the creature he had created, and eventually that creature came for him. At his death, I lost my father and my only friend. Until"- she looks at us, sitting and listening to her, the firelight on our faces-"until I found you." And we look away politely, while she blows her nose into a handkerchief.

Beatrice: "For so many years I was angry at my father. I thought, he had no right to make me poisonous, to make my only playmates the plants of his garden."

Helen: "He had no right. Seriously, Beatrice, you're too forgiving. You need to learn to stand up for yourself."

Mary: "For goodness' sake, let her finish. You're always interrupting."

Helen: "That's because I can't stand to see any of you justifying them. I mean, seriously. They were abusive b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, and that's all there is to it."

Catherine: "I have to agree with Helen. Abusive b.a.s.t.a.r.ds seems, you know, fairly accurate. I mean, look at my father."

Beatrice: "I don't think you can compare my father to yours, Cat. No offense, but your father was a butcher. Mine brought me up himself, in a beautiful garden-"

Mary: "I agree that there are relative degrees of- well, although I don't like to say it, abusive b.a.s.t.a.r.dhood. But Bea, he never taught you anything. All that time on his hands, and he never took any of it to sit you down, teach you about your own biology. So you ended up poisoning the man you loved, basically by accident-"

Beatrice: "I should have known."

Diana: "Why in the world would you blame yourself? I'm with Helen. They were b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, the lot of them, even Justine's sainted Papa Frankenstein. Look at me, born in a brothel. My mother died of syphilis."

Mary: "You can't generalize your story to all of us."

Diana: "Oh, right, now you're taking the other side. My story is our story, or have you forgotten, sister?"

Justine: "For goodness' sake, why are we arguing? I know perfectly well that my father wasn't perfect. But why should I remember all his faults? Why can't I remember the good times we had together, how kind he could be?"

Helen: "Because that's like lying to yourself. We've all been lied to. Do we really want to lie to ourselves as well?"

And then we are all quiet, and stare into the fire.

"My father," Helen continues, "was a scientist, like yours. He took my mother from the gutters, where she was starving, fed her, educated her, seduced her, and then experimented on her. She had a vision. She saw something she could not, or perhaps did not have the guts to, understand- the G.o.d Pan, source of all order and disorder, Alpha and Omega, to whom all things in the end will come. Nine months later I was born, daughter of the respectable Dr. Raymond and of Pan. It's not hard to understand why, as a teenager, I tried to destroy the world. Sometimes I wish I had. I mean, look at it. The other day, a man tried to steal my pocketbook. He was drunk, red-eyed and reeking of gin, and I turned and started hitting him with my umbrella. I thought, I could have destroyed you all- the beggars, the bankers, the filthy streets of London."

Catherine: "So, why didn't you?"

Helen: "Well, I married Arthur around that time, and then Leda was born. I would have had to destroy Regent's Park, and ice cream, and prams. It just didn't seem practical. Besides, I didn't want to give my father the satisfaction."

Mrs. Poole comes in. "Would any of you ladies like some tea?"

IV. A Peaceful Domestic Scene Sometimes when Helen comes, she brings her daughter, Leda. She's a solemn child, with black hair that curls past her shoulders, genuinely hyacinthine. When she smiles, you can faintly hear the clashing of cymbals, the strings of the lyre plucked, the chanting of Bacchantes. You pause, thinking, I must be imagining it, and then you realize that no, you really are hearing something otherworldly. Once, I saw her in the garden, playing with a boy who had horns on his head, and the legs and hooves of a goat.

"She can't control it," says Helen. "She's too young. I couldn't control it either, at her age."

Leda is only twelve. But we can see in her, already, what we all seem to have, what I would describe as a mark, if it were not so variable.

I look in the mirror. I am, everywhere, golden brown: brown hair, brown skin, golden eyes. If you look at them too closely, you will begin to feel strange. You will realize that my pupils are slitted, except in the dark. That I do not blink as often as I ought to. And my face, although well-shaped, is seamed with scars.

We all have the mark, but in different ways. Mary, our golden-haired English girl, sits too still, is too placid for human nature. If you sit with her long enough, you will start to become nervous. Justine, willowy, elegant, is too tall for a woman, or even a man. Diana, lively and laughing, suffers from attacks of the hysteria. She will, suddenly, begin to pull out her hair, cut her arm with a dinner knife. Once, when she was younger, she almost bled to death. Beatrice, beautiful Beatrice who moves through the house like a walking calla lily, kills with her breath. When we gather together for dinner, she sits at the far end of the table. She has her own dishes and plates, which Mrs. Poole collects wearing gloves.

You could, I suppose, call us monsters. We are frightening, aren't we? Although we are, in our different ways, attractive. When we walk down the street, men look, and then look away. And then perhaps look again, and away again. Some of us don't leave the house more than we have to. The butcher delivers, and Mrs. Poole goes to the grocer's. But not even Justine can stay inside all the time. Sometimes we have to just, you know, get out. Go to the library, or the park. Personally, I'm sorry that veils are going out of fashion.

Imagine us in the evenings, sitting by the fire in the clubroom. I am reading from The Yellow Book. Justine is darning a sock. Mary is sketching Beatrice, who is posing by the window, which is open at the bottom despite the autumn chill.

"When will Diana return from the theater?" Beatrice asks.

"I really don't know," says Mary. "She has a new hanger-on, some sort of Viscount. I just wish she'd be more careful."

"Well," I say, "if he does anything to hurt her, we'll sic Beatrice on him."

"Or Justine," says Beatrice.

"Me?" says Justine. "You know I wouldn't hurt a fly."

"Yes," I say, "but he wouldn't know that. You look frightening enough."

"I couldn't. I mean, it would be terrible. . . ." says Justine.

"Oh, for goodness' sake," I say. "When the villagers come with pitchforks, what are you going to do? Hide in a hayloft? We should be ready to- I don't know, tear their throats out." This is London, but how far away are they ever, the villagers with pitchforks?

"Let's get back to the story," says Mary, the conciliator. "I want to know whether what's-her-name is going to have an affair with Lord-what's-his-name?"

"That was the last story," I say. "Haven't you been listening?"

"You know I don't like that modern stuff, except your books, of course." I happen to know she never finished Rick Chambers and Astarte. "I just want you to stop bothering Justine. Can't you see she's upset by all this talk of violence?" She turns back to her painting. "Bea, hold your head up a little. You're drooping."

A peaceful domestic scene. An ordinary evening among monsters.

V. How I Joined the Club I knew Justine before we joined the club. We were in the circus together, the Giantess and the Cat Girl. The manager was a good man, a Polish Jew who called himself Lorenzo the Magnificent. When I joined his Traveling Circus of Marvels and Delights, Justine had already been there for two years. She sat outside the sideshow tent, taking tickets from the patrons. She also had an act with two dwarves dressed as clowns and a pony that kicked on command.

There is an etiquette in the circus. Everyone is polite to one another, but still, the performers have a certain contempt for the sideshow, and vice versa. The performers were proud of their tricks, walking the high wire, riding bareback, being shot from a cannon. But we needed no tricks in the sideshow. We were the tricks. We could perform without moving a muscle.

I was Astarte, the Cat Girl from Egypt. I have no tail and my ears are almost normal, just a little pointed at the tips. But you should have seen me in my costume! Cat ears, cat tail. I certainly looked the part. I would growl with fury and show the customers my claws. I even purred for the gentlemen who paid extra to stroke me. Atlas, the Strong Man, stopped them if they went too far. I was always a respectable cat.

Atlas was in love with Justine. He even asked her to marry him.

"Why don't you?" I asked her. We had become friends, in part I think because of our similar family histories. Her father had made men out of corpses. Mine had made men out of animals. They were, in a sense, in the same profession.

"I just can't," she said.

"Is it your sainted Papa? Are you afraid that you'll never find a man with his charm, his erudition? It's true that Atlas is not exactly literate . . ."

"You're making fun of me. Please don't, Cat. No, it's something else."

I waited.

"You have to promise that you won't tell anyone."

"Who would I tell? It's not as though anyone else would understand."

"All right. The creature- the one my father made. He wanted me to be his mate. One day, he attacked me. You think I'm strong, but he was so much stronger. He had his hand around my throat . . . If he had wanted to kill me, I'm sure he would have. But that wasn't what he wanted, at least not then. I can't . . . I really can't talk about it anymore." Tears were streaming down her face.

"Oh, Justine . . ." I said.

"So you see," she said, finally blowing her nose on a handkerchief. She seemed to have an endless supply of them. "I'll never marry any man."

I put my arms around her, and we sat together on one of the packing crates, listening to the elephants trumpet.

With the circus, we toured the provinces. That was when I fell in love with England, its greenness, its freshness. That was when I created Rick Chambers, the quintessential English gentleman, Eton and Oxford and cricket and the sun never setting and all that. Astarte will never defeat the English gentleman, no matter how many times she lures him into her bed. Of course, he'll never defeat her either. It would be boring if the English gentleman ever won.

Those were happy days, more or less, with Justine, and Lola the Bearded Lady, and Harold the Wolf Boy, and the two dwarves, Pip and Squeak. The pay was low, but we were like a family. However, they were destined to end. Lorenzo was in debt, and even the Traveling Circus of Marvels and Delights could not pay the full amount.

"If only I had the Black Widow!" he said mournfully, one evening as we were eating our supper together around a campfire. The Black Widow was a new marvel, a beautiful girl whose breath was as deadly as the deadliest poison. She was not in a circus, but at the Royal College of Surgeons. Medical men were attempting to determine what made her so toxic. It was Beatrice, of course, but Justine and I didn't know that then. We knew of her only from newspaper articles.

"Poor girl," Justine would say, reading them.

"Why? It says that even the Queen has gone to see her. Imagine the price people would pay, if she were in the sideshow."

"To kill everything you touch! I think that must be terrible."

"If you say so. Personally, I think it would come in handy sometimes."

Two days before the circus was to break up, when Justine and I were wondering what we were going to do with ourselves, a woman came to see us. She was dressed in black, and heavily veiled. When she drew back her veil, we saw a beautiful face, with an olive complexion and black eyes, obviously foreign-looking, yet it would have been difficult to tell what country she came from. She looked so completely exotic, yet at the same time so ordinary, like an English lady. Aha! I thought. If I ever write a book about Astarte, I'll make her look just like that.

"Miss Frankenstein, Miss Moreau," she said. "I'm delighted to make your acquaintance." Her voice was deep, musical, and I almost imagined that I heard the sound of lyres as she spoke. "I understand that your employment is almost over. I've been authorized to offer you membership in a very exclusive club."

VI. The Reports of our Deaths The reports of our deaths have been greatly exaggerated.

Justine: believed dismembered, her body parts thrown into the sea.

Beatrice: believed poisoned by a toxic antidote.

Helen: believed strangled by a hangman's rope.

Catherine: believed killed by Moreau's hand.

And yet, as you see, we survive.

VII. The Stories We Tell Mary: "People often don't know that my father had a wife. She was left out of the case history that was written shortly after his death, I suppose to protect her privacy. Poor Mother! She was only eighteen when she married, and he was in medical school. She was so proud to have married a doctor. My grandfather was a country vicar, and she had been educated at home by my grandmother, taught to sew and sing hymns and keep hens. She didn't understand when my father began refurbishing the laboratory, conducting experiments. When I was fifteen, shortly before she died, she told me, 'Your father was a good man. Never forget that, Mary. It was his science, his fatal science, that ruined him. If only it had been a woman! Read your Bible, Mary. In it you'll find everything you ever need to know. Never give in to the curiosity that killed your father.' "

Beatrice: "There's nothing wrong with science. In itself, it's neither good nor evil. It's simply a way of looking at the world."

Mrs. Poole: "Well, then why does it lead to all those nasty mad scientists, I want to know? No, Miss Beatrice, I think all that science and experimenting should be left alone, especially by young ladies like yourselves. Mrs. Jekyll was a good, upstanding woman, and she was right. Everything you need to know, you'll find in the Good Book."

Beatrice: "Science saved me, Mrs. Poole. When I recovered from Professor Baglioni's antidote, it was late afternoon. Where could I go? I loved my father, but I didn't want to return to his garden, which had been my prison for so many years, or to the lover who had so cruelly rejected me. Instead, I wandered around Padua, trying to find the university. When I finally found the front gate, I asked to see Professor Baglioni.

"He was startled to see me. I think that he had, in an indirect way, tried to kill me, absolving himself of blame because he had not been sure of the result. I told him, 'If you don't help me, I'll go to the authorities and accuse you of attempted murder. I may be a monster, but I'm also the daughter of the famous Dr. Rappaccini, who has cured many of the townspeople, including the mayor's wife. Do you think they'll ignore me?' I don't know, really, if the authorities would have listened to me, but he was already frightened and uncertain of his position, so he did what I asked.

"He took me to his villa and brought me all of his books on natural philosophy, particularly botany. When those weren't enough, he brought me books from the university library. I spent months studying them, trying to understand my own physiology. I wanted to remove the poison from my system. I think part of me still hoped I could return to my Giovanni and say, 'Look, I'm a normal woman now.' I still wanted him to love me. But I could find no way to alter my condition.

"One day, he told me of my father's death. My father had continued his studies, but without me to tend the garden for him, he had slowly been poisoned by its fumes. How I cried! All the anger I had felt toward him melted away, and I felt only an emptiness. I was now alone in the world. I left the seclusion of the villa and offered myself to the learned men of the university for study. When they could give me no answer, I went to another university, and then another. I traveled from city to city, from Padua to Milan, Geneva, Paris, and finally London, always hoping that someone would find a cure. Without that hope, sometimes I think I would have lain down on the earth and simply died. Finally, I decided that I would become a scientist myself. If I could not find an answer in books or from learned men, I would have to experiment. So I followed in my father's footsteps. I wonder if he would have been proud of me?"

Mary: "I'm certain he would have. You're doing wonderful work."

Diana: "How do you do it, Mary? You always agree with everyone. You never say anything mean or lose your temper. Honestly, I think it's creepy. Sometimes I think you're a doll that a magician brought to life and taught to behave from a good conduct book. I have no problem with Bea making potions, but we shouldn't pretend that any of us will ever be normal. Sometimes when I'm with the Viscount, all I want to do is bite him until he bleeds and lap up the blood. Cat knows what I'm talking about."

Catherine: "I often want to bite someone. The butcher looks so delicious, carrying those glorious hunks of meat!"

Diana: "Exactly. Well, you girls know my history. My mother was a wh.o.r.e, who didn't know she was with child until after my father died. She figured out what was what quickly enough, and Mrs. Jekyll paid though the nose- until my mother died of syphilis at twenty-one. I was sent to an orphanage run by nuns. How sick I became of their pieties! At night, when they thought all the girls were sleeping, I cut their habits to shreds and p.i.s.sed in the communion cup. I rang the bells at the wrong hours. Finally, they decided the orphanage was haunted and brought in a bishop for an exorcism. But it was all me, of course. When I was old enough, I left to follow my mother's trade. Don't tell me that any science is going to make me normal."

VIII. The Stories We Tell, Continued Catherine: "I killed my father. I bit him and bashed his head in. And when a ship finally came close enough to the island, I pretended to be in distress so the captain would take me aboard. He believed I was an English lady whose ship had been captured by pirates, and who had finally been left to starve on a deserted sh.o.r.e. That was the only way he could explain my scars, and of course I told him that I could not remember anything before my time on the island. He brought me to England, and his wife cared for me. She taught me how to dress, how to eat with a knife and fork, all the things my father had not taught me. She wanted to adopt me as her daughter- they were childless- but one day when I was sitting in the parlor, darning a sock, her little dog came by, a yapping little dog that had never liked me, and bit me on the ankle. So I bit it back. When she came in, its corpse was dangling from my jaws. She started screaming . . . I left with only the clothes on my back. I begged in the streets for months before Lorenzo asked me to join his circus."

Justine: "Those were good days with the circus, weren't they?"

Beatrice: "How did you join the circus, Justine?"

Justine: "Do we have to talk about it?"

Beatrice: "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to distress you. I was just curious."

Justine: "All right. But it's hard for me to talk about- I'd rather forget. The creature my father had made wanted a wife, so my father made me. But after he had completed me, he realized that he could not give me to the creature. So, he made the creature believe he was destroying me by rowing out and throwing a sack full of stones into the sea. Then, he took me to a cottage on the coast of Scotland, even more remote than our previous location had been. 'I won't give you to that monster,' he told me. 'You have the ability to reason and to appreciate the beautiful. You are not like him, and you will not belong to him.' The creature, supposing I had been destroyed, did not follow us. And so for a few years, a few happy years, we were left in peace.

But one day, the creature found our cottage. He was determined once more to have my father make another like himself. And there, on the sh.o.r.e by that northern sea, he saw my father playing with me, the bride who had been meant for him. We were throwing a ball back and forth, one of my favorite games at that time- remember that although I was full-grown, I was only three years old. He was in such a rage that he ran toward my father and strangled him with his bare hands. And then he attacked me . . .

"He forced me to live with him in that cottage, to read him the books my father and I had read together, to sit by the fire with him as though we were man and wife. But one night, as he lay asleep after drinking the last of the whiskey in the house, I stuck a kitchen knife into his heart. And then I ran, sobbing, because I had killed the man who had been both brother and husband to me, the only one, as far as I knew, of my kind. I lived on berries, the bark from trees, and what I could steal from farmyards- the slop left for the pigs, the grain scattered for the hens. Once, a man tried to shoot me with a gun. Another time, boys threw stones at me. Finally I came to a town, and there was a circus. It was, of course, Lorenzo's Traveling Circus of Marvels and Delights. The tent was so bright, so cheerful, scarlet and yellow in the middle of a field. And I heard music . . . Although I was sick and starving, I walked closer to see where the music was coming from. But there, just by the tent, I fainted. When I came to again, I was in Lola's caravan, and Lorenzo was looking at me, smoothing his mustache. Cat, you remember what a black mustache he had. We were convinced he dyed it. 'Young lady,' he said, 'I have a proposition for you.' I was terrified! I had never seen a human being before, except my father. But I accepted his offer to join the sideshow. What choice did I have? I had no way to earn my living in the world. I had only the knowledge my father had given me, and the fact that I was, you know, different."

Beatrice: "Why do we always die in the stories?"

Catherine: "Because we're not the ones who write them."

IX. The Secrets We Tell Each Other Justine: "Once, I killed a man. I put my hands around his neck and strangled him. I didn't mean to- he threatened to shoot me with a gun."