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Herbert West: Reanimator

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Zodiac
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« on: March 12, 2007, 02:33:21 am »

Part 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 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 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 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 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!"
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