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Herbert West: Reanimator

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« on: March 12, 2007, 02:34:15 am »

Part 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 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.

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