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Herbert West: Reanimator by H.P. Lovecraft
Herbert West: Reanimator
by H.P. Lovecraft
Written Sep 1921-mid 1922
Published in five parts, February-July 1922 in Home Brew, Vol. 1, Nos. 1-6.
I. From The Dark
Published Februrary 1922 in Home Brew Vol. 1, No. 1, p. 19-25.
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 school1 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 by 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 sign5; but he soon saw
that the perfection of his 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 WestÆs 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 potterÆs field. We finally
decided on the potterÆs field, because practically every body in Christchurch
was embalmed; a thing of course ruinous to WestÆs 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 WestÆs 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 collegeÆs 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 potterÆs field;
a brawny young workman drowned only the morning before in SummerÆs Pond, and
buried at the townÆs 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 beyoiid 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 bodyÆs 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 centered 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 WestÆs 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 potterÆs 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
Published March 1922 in Home Brew Vol. 1, No. 2, p. 45-50.
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 potterÆs 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 lifeÆs 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 the 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 kindiy 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 WestÆs 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 daydreams 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 WestÆs 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" WestÆs 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 WestÆs 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 WestÆs 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 companionÆs 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. Christ-church 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 monsterÆs 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 wasnÆt quite fresh enough!"
III. Six Shots by Moonlight
Published April 1922 in Home Brew Vol. 1, No. 3, p. 21-26.
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 potterÆs 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 WestÆs 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 graveyardÆs
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 potterÆs 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 WestÆs various solutions into the veins
of the things we dragged from the potterÆs field. West was experimenting madly
to find something which would start manÆs 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 potterÆs 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 OÆBrien -- 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 momentÆs 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 potterÆs 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 oÆclock 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 familyÆs 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 WestÆs 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.
"WeÆd better both go," he whispered. "It wouldnÆt 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
Published May 1922 in Home Brew Vol. 1, No. 4, p. 53-58.
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 manÆs 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 potterÆs field. Briefly and brutally stated, WestÆs 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; creatuig 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 potterÆs
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 bodyÆs wrist the compound which would hold it fresh for use after my
arrival. The matter of the presumably weak heart, which to my mind imperilled
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 WestÆs 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 deathÆs 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 bodyÆs 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 which 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
Published June 1922 in Home Brew Vol. 1, No. 5, p. 45-50.
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 could 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 colleagueÆs 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 had 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 neverdying, artificially nourished tissue obtained from the nearly hatched
eggs of an indescribably 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 of 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. WestÆs 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 friendÆs 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 aeroplane 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 officerÆs
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 WestÆs 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 manÆs last act in life; the struggle to get free of the falling
aeroplane.
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 GodÆs 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
Published July 1922 in Home Brew Vol. 1, No. 6, p. 57-62.
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 WestÆs 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
ammation. 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 WestÆs 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 professorÆs 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 WestÆs 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 WestÆs 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.

WestÆs 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 WestÆs 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
WestÆs 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 midmght, 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 WestÆs 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,
"ItÆs the finish -- but letÆs 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 WestÆs
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
talking 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. WestÆs
head was carried off by the wax-headed leader, who wore a Canadian officerÆs
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 Sef ton 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 either 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.




⌐ 1998-1999 William Johns
Last modified: 12/18/1999 18:43:51