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Herbert West: Reanimator

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« on: March 12, 2007, 02:35:23 am »

Part 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 man’s scream should give
horror, for it is obviously, not a pleasing or ordinary occurrence;
but I was used to similar experiences, hence suffered on this occasion
only because of a particular circumstance. And, as I have implied, it
was not of the dead man himself that I became afraid.

Herbert West, whose associate and assistant I was, possessed
scientific interests far beyond the usual routine of a village
physician. That was why, when establishing his practice in Bolton, he
had chosen an isolated house near the potter’s field. Briefly and
brutally stated, West’s sole absorbing interest was a secret study
of the phenomena of life and its cessation, leading toward the
reanimation of the dead through injections of an excitant solution.
For this ghastly experimenting it was necessary to have a constant
supply of very fresh human bodies; very fresh because even the least
decay hopelessly damaged the brain structure, and human because we
found that the solution had to be compounded differently for different
types of organisms. Scores of rabbits and guinea-pigs had been killed
and treated, but their trail was a blind one. West had never fully
succeeded because he had never been able to secure a corpse
sufficiently fresh. What he wanted were bodies from which vitality had
only just departed; bodies with every cell intact and capable of
receiving again the impulse toward that mode of motion called life.
There was hope that this second and artificial life might be made
perpetual by repetitions of the injection, but we had learned that an
ordinary natural life would not respond to the action. To establish
the artificial motion, natural life must be extinct--the specimens
must be very fresh, but genuinely dead.

The awesome quest had begun when West and I were students at the
Miskatonic University Medical School in Arkham, vividly conscious for
the first time of the thoroughly mechanical nature of life. That was
seven years before, but West looked scarcely a day older now--he was
small, blond, clean-shaven, soft-voiced, and spectacled, with only an
occasional flash of a cold blue eye to tell of the hardening and
growing fanaticism of his character under the pressure of his terrible
investigations. Our experiences had often been hideous in the extreme;
the results of defective reanimation, when lumps of graveyard clay had
been galvanised into morbid, unnatural, and brainless motion by
various modifications of the vital solution.

One thing had uttered a nerve-shattering scream; another had risen
violently, beaten us both to unconsciousness, and run amuck in a
shocking way before it could be placed behind asylum bars; still
another, a loathsome African monstrosity, had clawed out of its
shallow grave and done a deed--West had had to shoot that object. We
could not get bodies fresh enough to shew any trace of reason when
reanimated, so had perforce created nameless horrors. It was
disturbing to think that one, perhaps two, of our monsters still
lived--that thought haunted us shadowingly, till finally West
disappeared under frightful circumstances. But at the time of the
scream in the cellar laboratory of the isolated Bolton cottage, our
fears were subordinate to our anxiety for extremely fresh specimens.
West was more avid than I, so that it almost seemed to me that he
looked half-covetously at any very healthy living physique.

It was in July, 1910, that the bad luck regarding specimens began to
turn. I had been on a long visit to my parents in Illinois, and upon
my return found West in a state of singular elation. He had, he told
me excitedly, in all likelihood solved the problem of freshness
through an approach from an entirely new angle--that of artificial
preservation. I had known that he was working on a new and highly
unusual embalming compound, and was not surprised that it had turned
out well; but until he explained the details I was rather puzzled as
to how such a compound could help in our work, since the objectionable
staleness of the specimens was largely due to delay occurring before
we secured them. This, I now saw, West had clearly recognised;
creating his embalming compound for future rather than immediate use,
and trusting to fate to supply again some very recent and unburied
corpse, as it had years before when we obtained the negro killed in
the Bolton prize-fight. At last fate had been kind, so that on this
occasion there lay in the secret cellar laboratory a corpse whose
decay could not by any possibility have begun. What would happen on
reanimation, and whether we could hope for a revival of mind and
reason, West did not venture to predict. The experiment would be a
landmark in our studies, and he had saved the new body for my return,
so that both might share the spectacle in accustomed fashion.

West told me how he had obtained the specimen. It had been a vigorous
man; a well-dressed stranger just off the train on his way to transact
some business with the Bolton Worsted Mills. The walk through the town
had been long, and by the time the traveller paused at our cottage to
ask the way to the factories, his heart had become greatly overtaxed.
He had refused a stimulant, and had suddenly dropped dead only a
moment later. The body, as might be expected, seemed to West a heaven-
sent gift. In his brief conversation the stranger had made it clear
that he was unknown in Bolton, and a search of his pockets
subsequently revealed him to be one Robert Leavitt of St. Louis,
apparently without a family to make instant inquiries about his
disappearance. If this man could not be restored to life, no one would
know of our experiment. We buried our materials in a dense strip of
woods between the house and the potter’s field. If, on the other
hand, he could be restored, our fame would be brilliantly and
perpetually established. So without delay West had injected into the
body’s wrist the compound which would hold it fresh for use after my
arrival. The matter of the presumably weak heart, which to my mind
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 West’s assurance that
the thing was really dead. This assurance he gave readily enough;
reminding me that the reanimating solution was never used without
careful tests as to life, since it could have no effect if any of the
original vitality were present. As West proceeded to take preliminary
steps, I was impressed by the vast intricacy of the new experiment; an
intricacy so vast that he could trust no hand less delicate than his
own. Forbidding me to touch the body, he first injected a drug in the
wrist just beside the place his needle had punctured when injecting
the embalming compound. This, he said, was to neutralise the compound
and release the system to a normal relaxation so that the reanimating
solution might freely work when injected. Slightly later, when a
change and a gentle tremor seemed to affect the dead limbs; West
stuffed a pillow-like object violently over the twitching face, not
withdrawing it until the corpse appeared quiet and ready for our
attempt at reanimation. The pale enthusiast now applied some last
perfunctory tests for absolute lifelessness, withdrew satisfied, and
finally injected into the left arm an accurately measured amount of
the vital elixir, prepared during the afternoon with a greater care
than we had used since college days, when our feats were new and
groping. I cannot express the wild, breathless suspense with which we
waited for results on this first really fresh specimen--the first we
could reasonably expect to open its lips in rational speech, perhaps
to tell of what it had seen beyond the unfathomable abyss.

West was a materialist, believing in no soul and attributing all the
working of consciousness to bodily phenomena; consequently he looked
for no revelation of hideous secrets from gulfs and caverns beyond
death’s barrier. I did not wholly disagree with him theoretically,
yet held vague instinctive remnants of the primitive faith of my
forefathers; so that I could not help eyeing the corpse with a certain
amount of awe and terrible expectation. Besides--I could not extract
from my memory that hideous, inhuman shriek we heard on the night we
tried our first experiment in the deserted farmhouse at Arkham.

Very little time had elapsed before I saw the attempt was not to be a
total failure. A touch of colour came to cheeks hitherto chalk-white,
and spread out under the curiously ample stubble of sandy beard. West,
who had his hand on the pulse of the left wrist, suddenly nodded
significantly; and almost simultaneously a mist appeared on the mirror
inclined above the body’s mouth. There followed a few spasmodic
muscular motions, and then an audible breathing and visible motion of
the chest. I looked at the closed eyelids, and thought I detected a
quivering. Then the lids opened, shewing eyes which were grey, calm,
and alive, but still unintelligent and not even curious.

In a moment of fantastic whim I whispered questions to the reddening
ears; questions of other worlds of which the memory might still be
present. Subsequent terror drove them from my mind, but I think the
last one, which I repeated, was: "Where have you been?" I do not yet
know whether I was answered or not, for no sound came from the well-
shaped mouth; but I do know that at that moment I firmly thought the
thin lips moved silently, forming syllables 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!"
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