object:1f.lovecraft - Herbert West-Reanimator
author class:H P Lovecraft
subject class:Fiction
genre class:Horror
class:chapter
I. From the Dark
Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can
speak only with extreme terror. This terror is not due altogether to
the sinister manner of his recent disappearance, but was engendered by
the whole nature of his life-work, and first gained its acute form more
than seventeen years ago, when we were in the third year of our course
at the Miskatonic University Medical School in Arkham. While he was
with me, the wonder and diabolism of his experiments fascinated me
utterly, and I was his closest companion. Now that he is gone and the
spell is broken, the actual fear is greater. Memories and possibilities
are ever more hideous than realities.
The first horrible incident of our acquaintance was the greatest shock
I ever experienced, and it is only with reluctance that I repeat it. As
I have said, it happened when we were in the medical school, where West
had already made himself notorious through his wild theories on the
nature of death and the possibility of overcoming it artificially. His
views, which were widely ridiculed by the faculty and his
fellow-students, hinged on the essentially mechanistic nature of life;
and concerned means for operating the organic machinery of mankind by
calculated chemical action after the failure of natural processes. In
his experiments with various animating solutions he had killed and
treated immense numbers of rabbits, guinea-pigs, cats, dogs, and
monkeys, till he had become the prime nuisance of the college. Several
times he had actually obtained signs of life in animals supposedly
dead; in many cases violent signs; but he soon saw that the perfection
of this process, if indeed possible, would necessarily involve a
lifetime of research. It likewise became clear that, since the same
solution never worked alike on different organic species, he would
require human subjects for further and more specialised progress. It
was here that he first came into conflict with the college authorities,
and was debarred from future experiments by no less a dignitary than
the dean of the medical school himself—the learned and benevolent Dr.
Allan Halsey, whose work in behalf of the stricken is recalled by every
old resident of Arkham.
I had always been exceptionally tolerant of West’s pursuits, and we
frequently discussed his theories, whose ramifications and corollaries
were almost infinite. Holding with Haeckel that all life is a chemical
and physical process, and that the so-called “soul” is a myth, my
friend believed that artificial reanimation of the dead can depend only
on the condition of the tissues; and that unless actual decomposition
has set in, a corpse fully equipped with organs may with suitable
measures be set going again in the peculiar fashion known as life. That
the psychic or intellectual life might be impaired by the slight
deterioration of sensitive brain-cells which even a short period of
death would be apt to cause, West fully realised. It had at first been
his hope to find a reagent which would restore vitality before the
actual advent of death, and only repeated failures on animals had shewn
him that the natural and artificial life-motions were incompatible. He
then sought extreme freshness in his specimens, injecting his solutions
into the blood immediately after the extinction of life. It was this
circumstance which made the professors so carelessly sceptical, for
they felt that true death had not occurred in any case. They did not
stop to view the matter closely and reasoningly.
It was not long after the faculty had interdicted his work that West
confided to me his resolution to get fresh human bodies in some manner,
and continue in secret the experiments he could no longer perform
openly. To hear him discussing ways and means was rather ghastly, for
at the college we had never procured anatomical specimens ourselves.
Whenever the morgue proved inadequate, two local negroes attended to
this matter, and they were seldom questioned. West was then a small,
slender, spectacled youth with delicate features, yellow hair, pale
blue eyes, and a soft voice, and it was uncanny to hear him dwelling on
the relative merits of Christchurch Cemetery and the potter’s field. We
finally decided on the potter’s field, because practically every body
in Christchurch was embalmed; a thing of course ruinous to West’s
researches.
I was by this time his active and enthralled assistant, and helped him
make all his decisions, not only concerning the source of bodies but
concerning a suitable place for our loathsome work. It was I who
thought of the deserted Chapman farmhouse beyond Meadow Hill, where we
fitted up on the ground floor an operating room and a laboratory, each
with dark curtains to conceal our midnight doings. The place was far
from any road, and in sight of no other house, yet precautions were
none the less necessary; since rumours of strange lights, started by
chance nocturnal roamers, would soon bring disaster on our enterprise.
It was agreed to call the whole thing a chemical laboratory if
discovery should occur. Gradually we equipped our sinister haunt of
science with materials either purchased in Boston or quietly borrowed
from the college—materials carefully made unrecognisable save to expert
eyes—and provided spades and picks for the many burials we should have
to make in the cellar. At the college we used an incinerator, but the
apparatus was too costly for our unauthorised laboratory. Bodies were
always a nuisance—even the small guinea-pig bodies from the slight
clandestine experiments in West’s room at the boarding-house.
We followed the local death-notices like ghouls, for our specimens
demanded particular qualities. What we wanted were corpses interred
soon after death and without artificial preservation; preferably free
from malforming disease, and certainly with all organs present.
Accident victims were our best hope. Not for many weeks did we hear of
anything suitable; though we talked with morgue and hospital
authorities, ostensibly in the college’s interest, as often as we could
without exciting suspicion. We found that the college had first choice
in every case, so that it might be necessary to remain in Arkham during
the summer, when only the limited summer-school classes were held. In
the end, though, luck favoured us; for one day we heard of an almost
ideal case in the potter’s field; a brawny young workman drowned only
the morning before in Sumner’s Pond, and buried at the town’s expense
without delay or embalming. That afternoon we found the new grave, and
determined to begin work soon after midnight.
It was a repulsive task that we undertook in the black small hours,
even though we lacked at that time the special horror of graveyards
which later experiences brought to us. We carried spades and oil dark
lanterns, for although electric torches were then manufactured, they
were not as satisfactory as the tungsten contrivances of today. The
process of unearthing was slow and sordid—it might have been gruesomely
poetical if we had been artists instead of scientists—and we were glad
when our spades struck wood. When the pine box was fully uncovered West
scrambled down and removed the lid, dragging out and propping up the
contents. I reached down and hauled the contents out of the grave, and
then both toiled hard to restore the spot to its former appearance. The
affair made us rather nervous, especially the stiff form and vacant
face of our first trophy, but we managed to remove all traces of our
visit. When we had patted down the last shovelful of earth we put the
specimen in a canvas sack and set out for the old Chapman place beyond
Meadow Hill.
On an improvised dissecting-table in the old farmhouse, by the light of
a powerful acetylene lamp, the specimen was not very spectral looking.
It had been a sturdy and apparently unimaginative youth of wholesome
plebeian type—large-framed, grey-eyed, and brown-haired—a sound animal
without psychological subtleties, and probably having vital processes
of the simplest and healthiest sort. Now, with the eyes closed, it
looked more asleep than dead; though the expert test of my friend soon
left no doubt on that score. We had at last what West had always longed
for—a real dead man of the ideal kind, ready for the solution as
prepared according to the most careful calculations and theories for
human use. The tension on our part became very great. We knew that
there was scarcely a chance for anything like complete success, and
could not avoid hideous fears at possible grotesque results of partial
animation. Especially were we apprehensive concerning the mind and
impulses of the creature, since in the space following death some of
the more delicate cerebral cells might well have suffered
deterioration. I, myself, still held some curious notions about the
traditional “soul” of man, and felt an awe at the secrets that might be
told by one returning from the dead. I wondered what sights this placid
youth might have seen in inaccessible spheres, and what he could relate
if fully restored to life. But my wonder was not overwhelming, since
for the most part I shared the materialism of my friend. He was calmer
than I as he forced a large quantity of his fluid into a vein of the
body’s arm, immediately binding the incision securely.
The waiting was gruesome, but West never faltered. Every now and then
he applied his stethoscope to the specimen, and bore the negative
results philosophically. After about three-quarters of an hour without
the least sign of life he disappointedly pronounced the solution
inadequate, but determined to make the most of his opportunity and try
one change in the formula before disposing of his ghastly prize. We had
that afternoon dug a grave in the cellar, and would have to fill it by
dawn—for although we had fixed a lock on the house we wished to shun
even the remotest risk of a ghoulish discovery. Besides, the body would
not be even approximately fresh the next night. So taking the solitary
acetylene lamp into the adjacent laboratory, we left our silent guest
on the slab in the dark, and bent every energy to the mixing of a new
solution; the weighing and measuring supervised by West with an almost
fanatical care.
The awful event was very sudden, and wholly unexpected. I was pouring
something from one test-tube to another, and West was busy over the
alcohol blast-lamp which had to answer for a Bunsen burner in this
gasless edifice, when from the pitch-black room we had left there burst
the most appalling and daemoniac succession of cries that either of us
had ever heard. Not more unutterable could have been the chaos of
hellish sound if the pit itself had opened to release the agony of the
damned, for in one inconceivable cacophony was centred all the supernal
terror and unnatural despair of animate nature. Human it could not have
been—it is not in man to make such sounds—and without a thought of our
late employment or its possible discovery both West and I leaped to the
nearest window like stricken animals; overturning tubes, lamp, and
retorts, and vaulting madly into the starred abyss of the rural night.
I think we screamed ourselves as we stumbled frantically toward the
town, though as we reached the outskirts we put on a semblance of
restraint—just enough to seem like belated revellers staggering home
from a debauch.
We did not separate, but managed to get to West’s room, where we
whispered with the gas up until dawn. By then we had calmed ourselves a
little with rational theories and plans for investigation, so that we
could sleep through the day—classes being disregarded. But that evening
two items in the paper, wholly unrelated, made it again impossible for
us to sleep. The old deserted Chapman house had inexplicably burned to
an amorphous heap of ashes; that we could understand because of the
upset lamp. Also, an attempt had been made to disturb a new grave in
the potter’s field, as if by futile and spadeless clawing at the earth.
That we could not understand, for we had patted down the mould very
carefully.
And for seventeen years after that West would look frequently over his
shoulder, and complain of fancied footsteps behind him. Now he has
disappeared.
II. The Plague-Daemon
I shall never forget that hideous summer sixteen years ago, when like a
noxious afrite from the halls of Eblis typhoid stalked leeringly
through Arkham. It is by that satanic scourge that most recall the
year, for truly terror brooded with bat-wings over the piles of coffins
in the tombs of Christchurch Cemetery; yet for me there is a greater
horror in that time—a horror known to me alone now that Herbert West
has disappeared.
West and I were doing post-graduate work in summer classes at the
medical school of Miskatonic University, and my friend had attained a
wide notoriety because of his experiments leading toward the
revivification of the dead. After the scientific slaughter of uncounted
small animals the freakish work had ostensibly stopped by order of our
sceptical dean, Dr. Allan Halsey; though West had continued to perform
certain secret tests in his dingy boarding-house room, and had on one
terrible and unforgettable occasion taken a human body from its grave
in the potter’s field to a deserted farmhouse beyond Meadow Hill.
I was with him on that odious occasion, and saw him inject into the
still veins the elixir which he thought would to some extent restore
life’s chemical and physical processes. It had ended horribly—in a
delirium of fear which we gradually came to attribute to our own
overwrought nerves—and West had never afterward been able to shake off
a maddening sensation of being haunted and hunted. The body had not
been quite fresh enough; it is obvious that to restore normal mental
attributes a body must be very fresh indeed; and a burning of the old
house had prevented us from burying the thing. It would have been
better if we could have known it was underground.
After that experience West had dropped his researches for some time;
but as the zeal of the born scientist slowly returned, he again became
importunate with the college faculty, pleading for the use of the
dissecting-room and of fresh human specimens for the work he regarded
as so overwhelmingly important. His pleas, however, were wholly in
vain; for the decision of Dr. Halsey was inflexible, and the other
professors all endorsed the verdict of their leader. In the radical
theory of reanimation they saw nothing but the immature vagaries of a
youthful enthusiast whose slight form, yellow hair, spectacled blue
eyes, and soft voice gave no hint of the supernormal—almost
diabolical—power of the cold brain within. I can see him now as he was
then—and I shiver. He grew sterner of face, but never elderly. And now
Sefton Asylum has had the mishap and West has vanished.
West clashed disagreeably with Dr. Halsey near the end of our last
undergraduate term in a wordy dispute that did less credit to him than
to the kindly dean in point of courtesy. He felt that he was needlessly
and irrationally retarded in a supremely great work; a work which he
could of course conduct to suit himself in later years, but which he
wished to begin while still possessed of the exceptional facilities of
the university. That the tradition-bound elders should ignore his
singular results on animals, and persist in their denial of the
possibility of reanimation, was inexpressibly disgusting and almost
incomprehensible to a youth of West’s logical temperament. Only greater
maturity could help him understand the chronic mental limitations of
the “professor-doctor” type—the product of generations of pathetic
Puritanism; kindly, conscientious, and sometimes gentle and amiable,
yet always narrow, intolerant, custom-ridden, and lacking in
perspective. Age has more charity for these incomplete yet high-souled
characters, whose worst real vice is timidity, and who are ultimately
punished by general ridicule for their intellectual sins—sins like
Ptolemaism, Calvinism, anti-Darwinism, anti-Nietzscheism, and every
sort of Sabbatarianism and sumptuary legislation. West, young despite
his marvellous scientific acquirements, had scant patience with good
Dr. Halsey and his erudite colleagues; and nursed an increasing
resentment, coupled with a desire to prove his theories to these obtuse
worthies in some striking and dramatic fashion. Like most youths, he
indulged in elaborate day-dreams of revenge, triumph, and final
magnanimous forgiveness.
And then had come the scourge, grinning and lethal, from the nightmare
caverns of Tartarus. West and I had graduated about the time of its
beginning, but had remained for additional work at the summer school,
so that we were in Arkham when it broke with full daemoniac fury upon
the town. Though not as yet licenced physicians, we now had our
degrees, and were pressed frantically into public service as the
numbers of the stricken grew. The situation was almost past management,
and deaths ensued too frequently for the local undertakers fully to
handle. Burials without embalming were made in rapid succession, and
even the Christchurch Cemetery receiving tomb was crammed with coffins
of the unembalmed dead. This circumstance was not without effect on
West, who thought often of the irony of the situation—so many fresh
specimens, yet none for his persecuted researches! We were frightfully
overworked, and the terrific mental and nervous strain made my friend
brood morbidly.
But West’s gentle enemies were no less harassed with prostrating
duties. College had all but closed, and every doctor of the medical
faculty was helping to fight the typhoid plague. Dr. Halsey in
particular had distinguished himself in sacrificing service, applying
his extreme skill with whole-hearted energy to cases which many others
shunned because of danger or apparent hopelessness. Before a month was
over the fearless dean had become a popular hero, though he seemed
unconscious of his fame as he struggled to keep from collapsing with
physical fatigue and nervous exhaustion. West could not withhold
admiration for the fortitude of his foe, but because of this was even
more determined to prove to him the truth of his amazing doctrines.
Taking advantage of the disorganisation of both college work and
municipal health regulations, he managed to get a recently deceased
body smuggled into the university dissecting-room one night, and in my
presence injected a new modification of his solution. The thing
actually opened its eyes, but only stared at the ceiling with a look of
soul-petrifying horror before collapsing into an inertness from which
nothing could rouse it. West said it was not fresh enough—the hot
summer air does not favour corpses. That time we were almost caught
before we incinerated the thing, and West doubted the advisability of
repeating his daring misuse of the college laboratory.
The peak of the epidemic was reached in August. West and I were almost
dead, and Dr. Halsey did die on the 14th. The students all attended the
hasty funeral on the 15th, and bought an impressive wreath, though the
latter was quite overshadowed by the tributes sent by wealthy Arkham
citizens and by the municipality itself. It was almost a public affair,
for the dean had surely been a public benefactor. After the entombment
we were all somewhat depressed, and spent the afternoon at the bar of
the Commercial House; where West, though shaken by the death of his
chief opponent, chilled the rest of us with references to his notorious
theories. Most of the students went home, or to various duties, as the
evening advanced; but West persuaded me to aid him in “making a night
of it”. West’s landlady saw us arrive at his room about two in the
morning, with a third man between us; and told her husband that we had
all evidently dined and wined rather well.
Apparently this acidulous matron was right; for about 3 a.m. the whole
house was aroused by cries coming from West’s room, where when they
broke down the door they found the two of us unconscious on the
blood-stained carpet, beaten, scratched, and mauled, and with the
broken remnants of West’s bottles and instruments around us. Only an
open window told what had become of our assailant, and many wondered
how he himself had fared after the terrific leap from the second story
to the lawn which he must have made. There were some strange garments
in the room, but West upon regaining consciousness said they did not
belong to the stranger, but were specimens collected for
bacteriological analysis in the course of investigations on the
transmission of germ diseases. He ordered them burnt as soon as
possible in the capacious fireplace. To the police we both declared
ignorance of our late companion’s identity. He was, West nervously
said, a congenial stranger whom we had met at some downtown bar of
uncertain location. We had all been rather jovial, and West and I did
not wish to have our pugnacious companion hunted down.
That same night saw the beginning of the second Arkham horror—the
horror that to me eclipsed the plague itself. Christchurch Cemetery was
the scene of a terrible killing; a watchman having been clawed to death
in a manner not only too hideous for description, but raising a doubt
as to the human agency of the deed. The victim had been seen alive
considerably after midnight—the dawn revealed the unutterable thing.
The manager of a circus at the neighbouring town of Bolton was
questioned, but he swore that no beast had at any time escaped from its
cage. Those who found the body noted a trail of blood leading to the
receiving tomb, where a small pool of red lay on the concrete just
outside the gate. A fainter trail led away toward the woods, but it
soon gave out.
The next night devils danced on the roofs of Arkham, and unnatural
madness howled in the wind. Through the fevered town had crept a curse
which some said was greater than the plague, and which some whispered
was the embodied daemon-soul of the plague itself. Eight houses were
entered by a nameless thing which strewed red death in its wake—in all,
seventeen maimed and shapeless remnants of bodies were left behind by
the voiceless, sadistic monster that crept abroad. A few persons had
half seen it in the dark, and said it was white and like a malformed
ape or anthropomorphic fiend. It had not left behind quite all that it
had attacked, for sometimes it had been hungry. The number it had
killed was fourteen; three of the bodies had been in stricken homes and
had not been alive.
On the third night frantic bands of searchers, led by the police,
captured it in a house on Crane Street near the Miskatonic campus. They
had organised the quest with care, keeping in touch by means of
volunteer telephone stations, and when someone in the college district
had reported hearing a scratching at a shuttered window, the net was
quickly spread. On account of the general alarm and precautions, there
were only two more victims, and the capture was effected without major
casualties. The thing was finally stopped by a bullet, though not a
fatal one, and was rushed to the local hospital amidst universal
excitement and loathing.
For it had been a man. This much was clear despite the nauseous eyes,
the voiceless simianism, and the daemoniac savagery. They dressed its
wound and carted it to the asylum at Sefton, where it beat its head
against the walls of a padded cell for sixteen years—until the recent
mishap, when it escaped under circumstances that few like to mention.
What had most disgusted the searchers of Arkham was the thing they
noticed when the monster’s face was cleaned—the mocking, unbelievable
resemblance to a learned and self-sacrificing martyr who had been
entombed but three days before—the late Dr. Allan Halsey, public
benefactor and dean of the medical school of Miskatonic University.
To the vanished Herbert West and to me the disgust and horror were
supreme. I shudder tonight as I think of it; shudder even more than I
did that morning when West muttered through his bandages,
“Damn it, it wasn’t quite fresh enough!”
III. Six Shots by Midnight
It is uncommon to fire all six shots of a revolver with great
suddenness when one would probably be sufficient, but many things in
the life of Herbert West were uncommon. It is, for instance, not often
that a young physician leaving college is obliged to conceal the
principles which guide his selection of a home and office, yet that was
the case with Herbert West. When he and I obtained our degrees at the
medical school of Miskatonic University, and sought to relieve our
poverty by setting up as general practitioners, we took great care not
to say that we chose our house because it was fairly well isolated, and
as near as possible to the potter’s field.
Reticence such as this is seldom without a cause, nor indeed was ours;
for our requirements were those resulting from a life-work distinctly
unpopular. Outwardly we were doctors only, but beneath the surface were
aims of far greater and more terrible moment—for the essence of Herbert
West’s existence was a quest amid black and forbidden realms of the
unknown, in which he hoped to uncover the secret of life and restore to
perpetual animation the graveyard’s cold clay. Such a quest demands
strange materials, among them fresh human bodies; and in order to keep
supplied with these indispensable things one must live quietly and not
far from a place of informal interment.
West and I had met in college, and I had been the only one to
sympathise with his hideous experiments. Gradually I had come to be his
inseparable assistant, and now that we were out of college we had to
keep together. It was not easy to find a good opening for two doctors
in company, but finally the influence of the university secured us a
practice in Bolton—a factory town near Arkham, the seat of the college.
The Bolton Worsted Mills are the largest in the Miskatonic Valley, and
their polyglot employees are never popular as patients with the local
physicians. We chose our house with the greatest care, seizing at last
on a rather run-down cottage near the end of Pond Street; five numbers
from the closest neighbour, and separated from the local potter’s field
by only a stretch of meadow land, bisected by a narrow neck of the
rather dense forest which lies to the north. The distance was greater
than we wished, but we could get no nearer house without going on the
other side of the field, wholly out of the factory district. We were
not much displeased, however, since there were no people between us and
our sinister source of supplies. The walk was a trifle long, but we
could haul our silent specimens undisturbed.
Our practice was surprisingly large from the very first—large enough to
please most young doctors, and large enough to prove a bore and a
burden to students whose real interest lay elsewhere. The mill-hands
were of somewhat turbulent inclinations; and besides their many natural
needs, their frequent clashes and stabbing affrays gave us plenty to
do. But what actually absorbed our minds was the secret laboratory we
had fitted up in the cellar—the laboratory with the long table under
the electric lights, where in the small hours of the morning we often
injected West’s various solutions into the veins of the things we
dragged from the potter’s field. West was experimenting madly to find
something which would start man’s vital motions anew after they had
been stopped by the thing we call death, but had encountered the most
ghastly obstacles. The solution had to be differently compounded for
different types—what would serve for guinea-pigs would not serve for
human beings, and different human specimens required large
modifications.
The bodies had to be exceedingly fresh, or the slight decomposition of
brain tissue would render perfect reanimation impossible. Indeed, the
greatest problem was to get them fresh enough—West had had horrible
experiences during his secret college researches with corpses of
doubtful vintage. The results of partial or imperfect animation were
much more hideous than were the total failures, and we both held
fearsome recollections of such things. Ever since our first daemoniac
session in the deserted farmhouse on Meadow Hill in Arkham, we had felt
a brooding menace; and West, though a calm, blond, blue-eyed scientific
automaton in most respects, often confessed to a shuddering sensation
of stealthy pursuit. He half felt that he was followed—a psychological
delusion of shaken nerves, enhanced by the undeniably disturbing fact
that at least one of our reanimated specimens was still alive—a
frightful carnivorous thing in a padded cell at Sefton. Then there was
another—our first—whose exact fate we had never learned.
We had fair luck with specimens in Bolton—much better than in Arkham.
We had not been settled a week before we got an accident victim on the
very night of burial, and made it open its eyes with an amazingly
rational expression before the solution failed. It had lost an arm—if
it had been a perfect body we might have succeeded better. Between then
and the next January we secured three more; one total failure, one case
of marked muscular motion, and one rather shivery thing—it rose of
itself and uttered a sound. Then came a period when luck was poor;
interments fell off, and those that did occur were of specimens either
too diseased or too maimed for use. We kept track of all the deaths and
their circumstances with systematic care.
One March night, however, we unexpectedly obtained a specimen which did
not come from the potter’s field. In Bolton the prevailing spirit of
Puritanism had outlawed the sport of boxing—with the usual result.
Surreptitious and ill-conducted bouts among the mill-workers were
common, and occasionally professional talent of low grade was imported.
This late winter night there had been such a match; evidently with
disastrous results, since two timorous Poles had come to us with
incoherently whispered entreaties to attend to a very secret and
desperate case. We followed them to an abandoned barn, where the
remnants of a crowd of frightened foreigners were watching a silent
black form on the floor.
The match had been between Kid O’Brien—a lubberly and now quaking youth
with a most un-Hibernian hooked nose—and Buck Robinson, “The Harlem
Smoke”. The negro had been knocked out, and a moment’s examination
shewed us that he would permanently remain so. He was a loathsome,
gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help
calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable
Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. The body must
have looked even worse in life—but the world holds many ugly things.
Fear was upon the whole pitiful crowd, for they did not know what the
law would exact of them if the affair were not hushed up; and they were
grateful when West, in spite of my involuntary shudders, offered to get
rid of the thing quietly—for a purpose I knew too well.
There was bright moonlight over the snowless landscape, but we dressed
the thing and carried it home between us through the deserted streets
and meadows, as we had carried a similar thing one horrible night in
Arkham. We approached the house from the field in the rear, took the
specimen in the back door and down the cellar stairs, and prepared it
for the usual experiment. Our fear of the police was absurdly great,
though we had timed our trip to avoid the solitary patrolman of that
section.
The result was wearily anticlimactic. Ghastly as our prize appeared, it
was wholly unresponsive to every solution we injected in its black arm;
solutions prepared from experience with white specimens only. So as the
hour grew dangerously near to dawn, we did as we had done with the
others—dragged the thing across the meadows to the neck of the woods
near the potter’s field, and buried it there in the best sort of grave
the frozen ground would furnish. The grave was not very deep, but fully
as good as that of the previous specimen—the thing which had risen of
itself and uttered a sound. In the light of our dark lanterns we
carefully covered it with leaves and dead vines, fairly certain that
the police would never find it in a forest so dim and dense.
The next day I was increasingly apprehensive about the police, for a
patient brought rumours of a suspected fight and death. West had still
another source of worry, for he had been called in the afternoon to a
case which ended very threateningly. An Italian woman had become
hysterical over her missing child—a lad of five who had strayed off
early in the morning and failed to appear for dinner—and had developed
symptoms highly alarming in view of an always weak heart. It was a very
foolish hysteria, for the boy had often run away before; but Italian
peasants are exceedingly superstitious, and this woman seemed as much
harassed by omens as by facts. About seven o’clock in the evening she
had died, and her frantic husband had made a frightful scene in his
efforts to kill West, whom he wildly blamed for not saving her life.
Friends had held him when he drew a stiletto, but West departed amidst
his inhuman shrieks, curses, and oaths of vengeance. In his latest
affliction the fellow seemed to have forgotten his child, who was still
missing as the night advanced. There was some talk of searching the
woods, but most of the family’s friends were busy with the dead woman
and the screaming man. Altogether, the nervous strain upon West must
have been tremendous. Thoughts of the police and of the mad Italian
both weighed heavily.
We retired about eleven, but I did not sleep well. Bolton had a
surprisingly good police force for so small a town, and I could not
help fearing the mess which would ensue if the affair of the night
before were ever tracked down. It might mean the end of all our local
work—and perhaps prison for both West and me. I did not like those
rumours of a fight which were floating about. After the clock had
struck three the moon shone in my eyes, but I turned over without
rising to pull down the shade. Then came the steady rattling at the
back door.
I lay still and somewhat dazed, but before long heard West’s rap on my
door. He was clad in dressing-gown and slippers, and had in his hands a
revolver and an electric flashlight. From the revolver I knew that he
was thinking more of the crazed Italian than of the police.
“We’d better both go,” he whispered. “It wouldn’t do not to answer it
anyway, and it may be a patient—it would be like one of those fools to
try the back door.”
So we both went down the stairs on tiptoe, with a fear partly justified
and partly that which comes only from the soul of the weird small
hours. The rattling continued, growing somewhat louder. When we reached
the door I cautiously unbolted it and threw it open, and as the moon
streamed revealingly down on the form silhouetted there, West did a
peculiar thing. Despite the obvious danger of attracting notice and
bringing down on our heads the dreaded police investigation—a thing
which after all was mercifully averted by the relative isolation of our
cottage—my friend suddenly, excitedly, and unnecessarily emptied all
six chambers of his revolver into the nocturnal visitor.
For that visitor was neither Italian nor policeman. Looming hideously
against the spectral moon was a gigantic misshapen thing not to be
imagined save in nightmares—a glassy-eyed, ink-black apparition nearly
on all fours, covered with bits of mould, leaves, and vines, foul with
caked blood, and having between its glistening teeth a snow-white,
terrible, cylindrical object terminating in a tiny hand.
IV. The Scream of the Dead
The scream of a dead man gave to me that acute and added horror of Dr.
Herbert West which harassed the latter years of our companionship. It
is natural that such a thing as a dead man’s scream should give horror,
for it is obviously not a pleasing or ordinary occurrence; but I was
used to similar experiences, hence suffered on this occasion only
because of a particular circumstance. And, as I have implied, it was
not of the dead man himself that I became afraid.
Herbert West, whose associate and assistant I was, possessed scientific
interests far beyond the usual routine of a village physician. That was
why, when establishing his practice in Bolton, he had chosen an
isolated house near the potter’s field. Briefly and brutally stated,
West’s sole absorbing interest was a secret study of the phenomena of
life and its cessation, leading toward the reanimation of the dead
through injections of an excitant solution. For this ghastly
experimenting it was necessary to have a constant supply of very fresh
human bodies; very fresh because even the least decay hopelessly
damaged the brain structure, and human because we found that the
solution had to be compounded differently for different types of
organisms. Scores of rabbits and guinea-pigs had been killed and
treated, but their trail was a blind one. West had never fully
succeeded because he had never been able to secure a corpse
sufficiently fresh. What he wanted were bodies from which vitality had
only just departed; bodies with every cell intact and capable of
receiving again the impulse toward that mode of motion called life.
There was hope that this second and artificial life might be made
perpetual by repetitions of the injection, but we had learned that an
ordinary natural life would not respond to the action. To establish the
artificial motion, natural life must be extinct—the specimens must be
very fresh, but genuinely dead.
The awesome quest had begun when West and I were students at the
Miskatonic University Medical School in Arkham, vividly conscious for
the first time of the thoroughly mechanical nature of life. That was
seven years before, but West looked scarcely a day older now—he was
small, blond, clean-shaven, soft-voiced, and spectacled, with only an
occasional flash of a cold blue eye to tell of the hardening and
growing fanaticism of his character under the pressure of his terrible
investigations. Our experiences had often been hideous in the extreme;
the results of defective reanimation, when lumps of graveyard clay had
been galvanised into morbid, unnatural, and brainless motion by various
modifications of the vital solution.
One thing had uttered a nerve-shattering scream; another had risen
violently, beaten us both to unconsciousness, and run amuck in a
shocking way before it could be placed behind asylum bars; still
another, a loathsome African monstrosity, had clawed out of its shallow
grave and done a deed—West had had to shoot that object. We could not
get bodies fresh enough to shew any trace of reason when reanimated, so
had perforce created nameless horrors. It was disturbing to think that
one, perhaps two, of our monsters still lived—that thought haunted us
shadowingly, till finally West disappeared under frightful
circumstances. But at the time of the scream in the cellar laboratory
of the isolated Bolton cottage, our fears were subordinate to our
anxiety for extremely fresh specimens. West was more avid than I, so
that it almost seemed to me that he looked half-covetously at any very
healthy living physique.
It was in July, 1910, that the bad luck regarding specimens began to
turn. I had been on a long visit to my parents in Illinois, and upon my
return found West in a state of singular elation. He had, he told me
excitedly, in all likelihood solved the problem of freshness through an
approach from an entirely new angle—that of artificial preservation. I
had known that he was working on a new and highly unusual embalming
compound, and was not surprised that it had turned out well; but until
he explained the details I was rather puzzled as to how such a compound
could help in our work, since the objectionable staleness of the
specimens was largely due to delay occurring before we secured them.
This, I now saw, West had clearly recognised; creating his embalming
compound for future rather than immediate use, and trusting to fate to
supply again some very recent and unburied corpse, as it had years
before when we obtained the negro killed in the Bolton prize-fight. At
last fate had been kind, so that on this occasion there lay in the
secret cellar laboratory a corpse whose decay could not by any
possibility have begun. What would happen on reanimation, and whether
we could hope for a revival of mind and reason, West did not venture to
predict. The experiment would be a landmark in our studies, and he had
saved the new body for my return, so that both might share the
spectacle in accustomed fashion.
West told me how he had obtained the specimen. It had been a vigorous
man; a well-dressed stranger just off the train on his way to transact
some business with the Bolton Worsted Mills. The walk through the town
had been long, and by the time the traveller paused at our cottage to
ask the way to the factories his heart had become greatly overtaxed. He
had refused a stimulant, and had suddenly dropped dead only a moment
later. The body, as might be expected, seemed to West a heaven-sent
gift. In his brief conversation the stranger had made it clear that he
was unknown in Bolton, and a search of his pockets subsequently
revealed him to be one Robert Leavitt of St. Louis, apparently without
a family to make instant inquiries about his disappearance. If this man
could not be restored to life, no one would know of our experiment. We
buried our materials in a dense strip of woods between the house and
the potter’s field. If, on the other hand, he could be restored, our
fame would be brilliantly and perpetually established. So without delay
West had injected into the body’s wrist the compound which would hold
it fresh for use after my arrival. The matter of the presumably weak
heart, which to my mind imperiled the success of our experiment, did
not appear to trouble West extensively. He hoped at last to obtain what
he had never obtained before—a rekindled spark of reason and perhaps a
normal, living creature.
So on the night of July 18, 1910, Herbert West and I stood in the
cellar laboratory and gazed at a white, silent figure beneath the
dazzling arc-light. The embalming compound had worked uncannily well,
for as I stared fascinatedly at the sturdy frame which had lain two
weeks without stiffening I was moved to seek West’s assurance that the
thing was really dead. This assurance he gave readily enough; reminding
me that the reanimating solution was never used without careful tests
as to life; since it could have no effect if any of the original
vitality were present. As West proceeded to take preliminary steps, I
was impressed by the vast intricacy of the new experiment; an intricacy
so vast that he could trust no hand less delicate than his own.
Forbidding me to touch the body, he first injected a drug in the wrist
just beside the place his needle had punctured when injecting the
embalming compound. This, he said, was to neutralise the compound and
release the system to a normal relaxation so that the reanimating
solution might freely work when injected. Slightly later, when a change
and a gentle tremor seemed to affect the dead limbs, West stuffed a
pillow-like object violently over the twitching face, not withdrawing
it until the corpse appeared quiet and ready for our attempt at
reanimation. The pale enthusiast now applied some last perfunctory
tests for absolute lifelessness, withdrew satisfied, and finally
injected into the left arm an accurately measured amount of the vital
elixir, prepared during the afternoon with a greater care than we had
used since college days, when our feats were new and groping. I cannot
express the wild, breathless suspense with which we waited for results
on this first really fresh specimen—the first we could reasonably
expect to open its lips in rational speech, perhaps to tell of what it
had seen beyond the unfathomable abyss.
West was a materialist, believing in no soul and attributing all the
working of consciousness to bodily phenomena; consequently he looked
for no revelation of hideous secrets from gulfs and caverns beyond
death’s barrier. I did not wholly disagree with him theoretically, yet
held vague instinctive remnants of the primitive faith of my
forefathers; so that I could not help eyeing the corpse with a certain
amount of awe and terrible expectation. Besides—I could not extract
from my memory that hideous, inhuman shriek we heard on the night we
tried our first experiment in the deserted farmhouse at Arkham.
Very little time had elapsed before I saw the attempt was not to be a
total failure. A touch of colour came to cheeks hitherto chalk-white,
and spread out under the curiously ample stubble of sandy beard. West,
who had his hand on the pulse of the left wrist, suddenly nodded
significantly; and almost simultaneously a mist appeared on the mirror
inclined above the body’s mouth. There followed a few spasmodic
muscular motions, and then an audible breathing and visible motion of
the chest. I looked at the closed eyelids, and thought I detected a
quivering. Then the lids opened, shewing eyes which were grey, calm,
and alive, but still unintelligent and not even curious.
In a moment of fantastic whim I whispered questions to the reddening
ears; questions of other worlds of which the memory might still be
present. Subsequent terror drove them from my mind, but I think the
last one, which I repeated, was: “Where have you been?” I do not yet
know whether I was answered or not, for no sound came from the
well-shaped mouth; but I do know that at that moment I firmly thought
the thin lips moved silently, forming syllables I would have vocalised
as “only now” if that phrase had possessed any sense or relevancy. At
that moment, as I say, I was elated with the conviction that the one
great goal had been attained; and that for the first time a reanimated
corpse had uttered distinct words impelled by actual reason. In the
next moment there was no doubt about the triumph; no doubt that the
solution had truly accomplished, at least temporarily, its full mission
of restoring rational and articulate life to the dead. But in that
triumph there came to me the greatest of all horrors—not horror of the
thing that spoke, but of the deed that I had witnessed and of the man
with whom my professional fortunes were joined.
For that very fresh body, at last writhing into full and terrifying
consciousness with eyes dilated at the memory of its last scene on
earth, threw out its frantic hands in a life and death struggle with
the air; and suddenly collapsing into a second and final dissolution
from which there could be no return, screamed out the cry that will
ring eternally in my aching brain:
“Help! Keep off, you cursed little tow-head fiend—keep that damned
needle away from me!”
V. The Horror from the Shadows
Many men have related hideous things, not mentioned in print, which
happened on the battlefields of the Great War. Some of these things
have made me faint, others have convulsed me with devastating nausea,
while still others have made me tremble and look behind me in the dark;
yet despite the worst of them I believe I can myself relate the most
hideous thing of all—the shocking, the unnatural, the unbelievable
horror from the shadows.
In 1915 I was a physician with the rank of First Lieutenant in a
Canadian regiment in Flanders, one of many Americans to precede the
government itself into the gigantic struggle. I had not entered the
army on my own initiative, but rather as a natural result of the
enlistment of the man whose indispensable assistant I was—the
celebrated Boston surgical specialist, Dr. Herbert West. Dr. West had
been avid for a chance to serve as surgeon in a great war, and when the
chance had come he carried me with him almost against my will. There
were reasons why I would have been glad to let the war separate us;
reasons why I found the practice of medicine and the companionship of
West more and more irritating; but when he had gone to Ottawa and
through a colleague’s influence secured a medical commission as Major,
I could not resist the imperious persuasion of one determined that I
should accompany him in my usual capacity.
When I say that Dr. West was avid to serve in battle, I do not mean to
imply that he was either naturally warlike or anxious for the safety of
civilisation. Always an ice-cold intellectual machine; slight, blond,
blue-eyed, and spectacled; I think he secretly sneered at my occasional
martial enthusiasms and censures of supine neutrality. There was,
however, something he wanted in embattled Flanders; and in order to
secure it he had to assume a military exterior. What he wanted was not
a thing which many persons want, but something connected with the
peculiar branch of medical science which he had chosen quite
clandestinely to follow, and in which he had achieved amazing and
occasionally hideous results. It was, in fact, nothing more or less
than an abundant supply of freshly killed men in every stage of
dismemberment.
Herbert West needed fresh bodies because his life-work was the
reanimation of the dead. This work was not known to the fashionable
clientele who had so swiftly built up his fame after his arrival in
Boston; but was only too well known to me, who had been his closest
friend and sole assistant since the old days in Miskatonic University
Medical School at Arkham. It was in those college days that he had
begun his terrible experiments, first on small animals and then on
human bodies shockingly obtained. There was a solution which he
injected into the veins of dead things, and if they were fresh enough
they responded in strange ways. He had had much trouble in discovering
the proper formula, for each type of organism was found to need a
stimulus especially adapted to it. Terror stalked him when he reflected
on his partial failures; nameless things resulting from imperfect
solutions or from bodies insufficiently fresh. A certain number of
these failures had remained alive—one was in an asylum while others had
vanished—and as he thought of conceivable yet virtually impossible
eventualities he often shivered beneath his usual stolidity.
West had soon learned that absolute freshness was the prime requisite
for useful specimens, and had accordingly resorted to frightful and
unnatural expedients in body-snatching. In college, and during our
early practice together in the factory town of Bolton, my attitude
toward him had been largely one of fascinated admiration; but as his
boldness in methods grew, I began to develop a gnawing fear. I did not
like the way he looked at healthy living bodies; and then there came a
nightmarish session in the cellar laboratory when I learned that a
certain specimen had been a living body when he secured it. That was
the first time he had ever been able to revive the quality of rational
thought in a corpse; and his success, obtained at such a loathsome
cost, had completely hardened him.
Of his methods in the intervening five years I dare not speak. I was
held to him by sheer force of fear, and witnessed sights that no human
tongue could repeat. Gradually I came to find Herbert West himself more
horrible than anything he did—that was when it dawned on me that his
once normal scientific zeal for prolonging life had subtly degenerated
into a mere morbid and ghoulish curiosity and secret sense of charnel
picturesqueness. His interest became a hellish and perverse addiction
to the repellently and fiendishly abnormal; he gloated calmly over
artificial monstrosities which would make most healthy men drop dead
from fright and disgust; he became, behind his pallid intellectuality,
a fastidious Baudelaire of physical experiment—a languid Elagabalus of
the tombs.
Dangers he met unflinchingly; crimes he committed unmoved. I think the
climax came when he had proved his point that rational life can be
restored, and had sought new worlds to conquer by experimenting on the
reanimation of detached parts of bodies. He had wild and original ideas
on the independent vital properties of organic cells and nerve-tissue
separated from natural physiological systems; and achieved some hideous
preliminary results in the form of never-dying, artificially nourished
tissue obtained from the nearly hatched eggs of an indescribable
tropical reptile. Two biological points he was exceedingly anxious to
settle—first, whether any amount of consciousness and rational action
be possible without the brain, proceeding from the spinal cord and
various nerve-centres; and second, whether any kind of ethereal,
intangible relation distinct from the material cells may exist to link
the surgically separated parts of what has previously been a single
living organism. All this research work required a prodigious supply of
freshly slaughtered human flesh—and that was why Herbert West had
entered the Great War.
The phantasmal, unmentionable thing occurred one midnight late in
March, 1915, in a field hospital behind the lines at St. Eloi. I wonder
even now if it could have been other than a daemoniac dream of
delirium. West had a private laboratory in an east room of the
barn-like temporary edifice, assigned him on his plea that he was
devising new and radical methods for the treatment of hitherto hopeless
cases of maiming. There he worked like a butcher in the midst of his
gory wares—I could never get used to the levity with which he handled
and classified certain things. At times he actually did perform marvels
of surgery for the soldiers; but his chief delights were of a less
public and philanthropic kind, requiring many explanations of sounds
which seemed peculiar even amidst that babel of the damned. Among these
sounds were frequent revolver-shots—surely not uncommon on a
battlefield, but distinctly uncommon in an hospital. Dr. West’s
reanimated specimens were not meant for long existence or a large
audience. Besides human tissue, West employed much of the reptile
embryo tissue which he had cultivated with such singular results. It
was better than human material for maintaining life in organless
fragments, and that was now my friend’s chief activity. In a dark
corner of the laboratory, over a queer incubating burner, he kept a
large covered vat full of this reptilian cell-matter; which multiplied
and grew puffily and hideously.
On the night of which I speak we had a splendid new specimen—a man at
once physically powerful and of such high mentality that a sensitive
nervous system was assured. It was rather ironic, for he was the
officer who had helped West to his commission, and who was now to have
been our associate. Moreover, he had in the past secretly studied the
theory of reanimation to some extent under West. Major Sir Eric
Moreland Clapham-Lee, D.S.O., was the greatest surgeon in our division,
and had been hastily assigned to the St. Eloi sector when news of the
heavy fighting reached headquarters. He had come in an aëroplane
piloted by the intrepid Lieut. Ronald Hill, only to be shot down when
directly over his destination. The fall had been spectacular and awful;
Hill was unrecognisable afterward, but the wreck yielded up the great
surgeon in a nearly decapitated but otherwise intact condition. West
had greedily seized the lifeless thing which had once been his friend
and fellow-scholar; and I shuddered when he finished severing the head,
placed it in his hellish vat of pulpy reptile-tissue to preserve it for
future experiments, and proceeded to treat the decapitated body on the
operating table. He injected new blood, joined certain veins, arteries,
and nerves at the headless neck, and closed the ghastly aperture with
engrafted skin from an unidentified specimen which had borne an
officer’s uniform. I knew what he wanted—to see if this highly
organised body could exhibit, without its head, any of the signs of
mental life which had distinguished Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee. Once
a student of reanimation, this silent trunk was now gruesomely called
upon to exemplify it.
I can still see Herbert West under the sinister electric light as he
injected his reanimating solution into the arm of the headless body.
The scene I cannot describe—I should faint if I tried it, for there is
madness in a room full of classified charnel things, with blood and
lesser human debris almost ankle-deep on the slimy floor, and with
hideous reptilian abnormalities sprouting, bubbling, and baking over a
winking bluish-green spectre of dim flame in a far corner of black
shadows.
The specimen, as West repeatedly observed, had a splendid nervous
system. Much was expected of it; and as a few twitching motions began
to appear, I could see the feverish interest on West’s face. He was
ready, I think, to see proof of his increasingly strong opinion that
consciousness, reason, and personality can exist independently of the
brain—that man has no central connective spirit, but is merely a
machine of nervous matter, each section more or less complete in
itself. In one triumphant demonstration West was about to relegate the
mystery of life to the category of myth. The body now twitched more
vigorously, and beneath our avid eyes commenced to heave in a frightful
way. The arms stirred disquietingly, the legs drew up, and various
muscles contracted in a repulsive kind of writhing. Then the headless
thing threw out its arms in a gesture which was unmistakably one of
desperation—an intelligent desperation apparently sufficient to prove
every theory of Herbert West. Certainly, the nerves were recalling the
man’s last act in life; the struggle to get free of the falling
aëroplane.
What followed, I shall never positively know. It may have been wholly
an hallucination from the shock caused at that instant by the sudden
and complete destruction of the building in a cataclysm of German
shell-fire—who can gainsay it, since West and I were the only proved
survivors? West liked to think that before his recent disappearance,
but there were times when he could not; for it was queer that we both
had the same hallucination. The hideous occurrence itself was very
simple, notable only for what it implied.
The body on the table had risen with a blind and terrible groping, and
we had heard a sound. I should not call that sound a voice, for it was
too awful. And yet its timbre was not the most awful thing about it.
Neither was its message—it had merely screamed, “Jump, Ronald, for
God’s sake, jump!” The awful thing was its source.
For it had come from the large covered vat in that ghoulish corner of
crawling black shadows.
VI. The Tomb-Legions
When Dr. Herbert West disappeared a year ago, the Boston police
questioned me closely. They suspected that I was holding something
back, and perhaps suspected graver things; but I could not tell them
the truth because they would not have believed it. They knew, indeed,
that West had been connected with activities beyond the credence of
ordinary men; for his hideous experiments in the reanimation of dead
bodies had long been too extensive to admit of perfect secrecy; but the
final soul-shattering catastrophe held elements of daemoniac phantasy
which make even me doubt the reality of what I saw.
I was West’s closest friend and only confidential assistant. We had met
years before, in medical school, and from the first I had shared his
terrible researches. He had slowly tried to perfect a solution which,
injected into the veins of the newly deceased, would restore life; a
labour demanding an abundance of fresh corpses and therefore involving
the most unnatural actions. Still more shocking were the products of
some of the experiments—grisly masses of flesh that had been dead, but
that West waked to a blind, brainless, nauseous animation. These were
the usual results, for in order to reawaken the mind it was necessary
to have specimens so absolutely fresh that no decay could possibly
affect the delicate brain-cells.
This need for very fresh corpses had been West’s moral undoing. They
were hard to get, and one awful day he had secured his specimen while
it was still alive and vigorous. A struggle, a needle, and a powerful
alkaloid had transformed it to a very fresh corpse, and the experiment
had succeeded for a brief and memorable moment; but West had emerged
with a soul calloused and seared, and a hardened eye which sometimes
glanced with a kind of hideous and calculating appraisal at men of
especially sensitive brain and especially vigorous physique. Toward the
last I became acutely afraid of West, for he began to look at me that
way. People did not seem to notice his glances, but they noticed my
fear; and after his disappearance used that as a basis for some absurd
suspicions.
West, in reality, was more afraid than I; for his abominable pursuits
entailed a life of furtiveness and dread of every shadow. Partly it was
the police he feared; but sometimes his nervousness was deeper and more
nebulous, touching on certain indescribable things into which he had
injected a morbid life, and from which he had not seen that life
depart. He usually finished his experiments with a revolver, but a few
times he had not been quick enough. There was that first specimen on
whose rifled grave marks of clawing were later seen. There was also
that Arkham professor’s body which had done cannibal things before it
had been captured and thrust unidentified into a madhouse cell at
Sefton, where it beat the walls for sixteen years. Most of the other
possibly surviving results were things less easy to speak of—for in
later years West’s scientific zeal had degenerated to an unhealthy and
fantastic mania, and he had spent his chief skill in vitalising not
entire human bodies but isolated parts of bodies, or parts joined to
organic matter other than human. It had become fiendishly disgusting by
the time he disappeared; many of the experiments could not even be
hinted at in print. The Great War, through which both of us served as
surgeons, had intensified this side of West.
In saying that West’s fear of his specimens was nebulous, I have in
mind particularly its complex nature. Part of it came merely from
knowing of the existence of such nameless monsters, while another part
arose from apprehension of the bodily harm they might under certain
circumstances do him. Their disappearance added horror to the
situation—of them all West knew the whereabouts of only one, the
pitiful asylum thing. Then there was a more subtle fear—a very
fantastic sensation resulting from a curious experiment in the Canadian
army in 1915. West, in the midst of a severe battle, had reanimated
Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, D.S.O., a fellow-physician who
knew about his experiments and could have duplicated them. The head had
been removed, so that the possibilities of quasi-intelligent life in
the trunk might be investigated. Just as the building was wiped out by
a German shell, there had been a success. The trunk had moved
intelligently; and, unbelievable to relate, we were both sickeningly
sure that articulate sounds had come from the detached head as it lay
in a shadowy corner of the laboratory. The shell had been merciful, in
a way—but West could never feel as certain as he wished, that we two
were the only survivors. He used to make shuddering conjectures about
the possible actions of a headless physician with the power of
reanimating the dead.
West’s last quarters were in a venerable house of much elegance,
overlooking one of the oldest burying-grounds in Boston. He had chosen
the place for purely symbolic and fantastically aesthetic reasons,
since most of the interments were of the colonial period and therefore
of little use to a scientist seeking very fresh bodies. The laboratory
was in a sub-cellar secretly constructed by imported workmen, and
contained a huge incinerator for the quiet and complete disposal of
such bodies, or fragments and synthetic mockeries of bodies, as might
remain from the morbid experiments and unhallowed amusements of the
owner. During the excavation of this cellar the workmen had struck some
exceedingly ancient masonry; undoubtedly connected with the old
burying-ground, yet far too deep to correspond with any known sepulchre
therein. After a number of calculations West decided that it
represented some secret chamber beneath the tomb of the Averills, where
the last interment had been made in 1768. I was with him when he
studied the nitrous, dripping walls laid bare by the spades and
mattocks of the men, and was prepared for the gruesome thrill which
would attend the uncovering of centuried grave-secrets; but for the
first time West’s new timidity conquered his natural curiosity, and he
betrayed his degenerating fibre by ordering the masonry left intact and
plastered over. Thus it remained till that final hellish night; part of
the walls of the secret laboratory. I speak of West’s decadence, but
must add that it was a purely mental and intangible thing. Outwardly he
was the same to the last—calm, cold, slight, and yellow-haired, with
spectacled blue eyes and a general aspect of youth which years and
fears seemed never to change. He seemed calm even when he thought of
that clawed grave and looked over his shoulder; even when he thought of
the carnivorous thing that gnawed and pawed at Sefton bars.
The end of Herbert West began one evening in our joint study when he
was dividing his curious glance between the newspaper and me. A strange
headline item had struck at him from the crumpled pages, and a nameless
titan claw had seemed to reach down through sixteen years. Something
fearsome and incredible had happened at Sefton Asylum fifty miles away,
stunning the neighbourhood and baffling the police. In the small hours
of the morning a body of silent men had entered the grounds and their
leader had aroused the attendants. He was a menacing military figure
who talked without moving his lips and whose voice seemed almost
ventriloquially connected with an immense black case he carried. His
expressionless face was handsome to the point of radiant beauty, but
had shocked the superintendent when the hall light fell on it—for it
was a wax face with eyes of painted glass. Some nameless accident had
befallen this man. A larger man guided his steps; a repellent hulk
whose bluish face seemed half eaten away by some unknown malady. The
speaker had asked for the custody of the cannibal monster committed
from Arkham sixteen years before; and upon being refused, gave a signal
which precipitated a shocking riot. The fiends had beaten, trampled,
and bitten every attendant who did not flee; killing four and finally
succeeding in the liberation of the monster. Those victims who could
recall the event without hysteria swore that the creatures had acted
less like men than like unthinkable automata guided by the wax-faced
leader. By the time help could be summoned, every trace of the men and
of their mad charge had vanished.
From the hour of reading this item until midnight, West sat almost
paralysed. At midnight the doorbell rang, startling him fearfully. All
the servants were asleep in the attic, so I answered the bell. As I
have told the police, there was no wagon in the street; but only a
group of strange-looking figures bearing a large square box which they
deposited in the hallway after one of them had grunted in a highly
unnatural voice, “Express—prepaid.” They filed out of the house with a
jerky tread, and as I watched them go I had an odd idea that they were
turning toward the ancient cemetery on which the back of the house
abutted. When I slammed the door after them West came downstairs and
looked at the box. It was about two feet square, and bore West’s
correct name and present address. It also bore the inscription, “From
Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, St. Eloi, Flanders”. Six years before, in
Flanders, a shelled hospital had fallen upon the headless reanimated
trunk of Dr. Clapham-Lee, and upon the detached head which—perhaps—had
uttered articulate sounds.
West was not even excited now. His condition was more ghastly. Quickly
he said, “It’s the finish—but let’s incinerate—this.” We carried the
thing down to the laboratory—listening. I do not remember many
particulars—you can imagine my state of mind—but it is a vicious lie to
say it was Herbert West’s body which I put into the incinerator. We
both inserted the whole unopened wooden box, closed the door, and
started the electricity. Nor did any sound come from the box, after
all.
It was West who first noticed the falling plaster on that part of the
wall where the ancient tomb masonry had been covered up. I was going to
run, but he stopped me. Then I saw a small black aperture, felt a
ghoulish wind of ice, and smelled the charnel bowels of a putrescent
earth. There was no sound, but just then the electric lights went out
and I saw outlined against some phosphorescence of the nether world a
horde of silent toiling things which only insanity—or worse—could
create. Their outlines were human, semi-human, fractionally human, and
not human at all—the horde was grotesquely heterogeneous. They were
removing the stones quietly, one by one, from the centuried wall. And
then, as the breach became large enough, they came out into the
laboratory in single file; led by a stalking thing with a beautiful
head made of wax. A sort of mad-eyed monstrosity behind the leader
seized on Herbert West. West did not resist or utter a sound. Then they
all sprang at him and tore him to pieces before my eyes, bearing the
fragments away into that subterranean vault of fabulous abominations.
West’s head was carried off by the wax-headed leader, who wore a
Canadian officer’s uniform. As it disappeared I saw that the blue eyes
behind the spectacles were hideously blazing with their first touch of
frantic, visible emotion.
Servants found me unconscious in the morning. West was gone. The
incinerator contained only unidentifiable ashes. Detectives have
questioned me, but what can I say? The Sefton tragedy they will not
connect with West; not that, nor the men with the box, whose existence
they deny. I told them of the vault, and they pointed to the unbroken
plaster wall and laughed. So I told them no more. They imply that I am
a madman or a murderer—probably I am mad. But I might not be mad if
those accursed tomb-legions had not been so silent.
Return to “Herbert West—Reanimator”
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