Message #4897

[Zodiac]

Part 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 colleague’s influence secured a medical commission as
Major, I could not resist the imperious persuasion of one determined
that I should accompany him in my usual capacity.

When I say that Dr. West was avid to serve in battle, I do not mean to
imply that he was either naturally warlike or anxious for the safety
of civilisation. Always an ice-cold intellectual machine; slight,
blond, blue-eyed, and spectacled; I think he secretly sneered at my
occasional martial enthusiasms and censures of supine neutrality.
There was, however, something he wanted in embattled Flanders; and in
order to secure it 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 never-dying, artificially
nourished tissue obtained from the nearly hatched eggs of an
indescribable tropical reptile. Two biological points he was
exceedingly anxious to settle--first, whether any amount of
consciousness and rational action be possible without the brain,
proceeding from the spinal cord and various nerve-centres; and second,
whether any kind of ethereal, intangible relation distinct from the
material cells may exist to link the surgically separated parts of
what has previously been a single living organism. All this research
work required a prodigious supply of freshly slaughtered human flesh--
and that was why Herbert West had entered the Great War.

The phantasmal, unmentionable thing occurred one midnight late in
March, 1915, in a field hospital behind the lines 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. West’s
reanimated specimens were not meant for long existence or a large
audience. Besides human tissue, West employed much of the reptile
embryo tissue which he had cultivated with such singular results. It
was better than human material for maintaining life in organless
fragments, and that was now my friend’s chief activity. In a dark
corner of the laboratory, over a queer incubating burner, he kept a
large covered vat full of this reptilian cell-matter; which multiplied
and grew puffily and hideously.

On the night of which I speak we had a splendid new specimen--a man at
once physically powerful and of such high mentality that a sensitive
nervous system was assured. It was rather ironic, for he was the
officer who had helped West to his commission, and who was now to have
been our associate. Moreover, he had in the past secretly studied the
theory of reanimation to some extent under West. Major Sir Eric
Moreland Clapham-Lee, D.S.O., was the greatest surgeon in our
division, and had been hastily assigned to the St. Eloi sector when
news of the heavy fighting reached headquarters. He had come in an
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 officer’s uniform. I knew what he
wanted--to see if this highly organised body could exhibit, without
its head, any of the signs of mental life which had distinguished Sir
Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee. Once a student of reanimation, this silent
trunk was now gruesomely called upon to exemplify it.

I can still see Herbert West under the sinister electric light as he
injected his reanimating solution into the arm of the headless body.
The scene I cannot describe--I should faint if I tried it, for there
is madness in a room full of classified charnel things, with blood and
lesser human debris almost ankle-deep on the slimy floor, and with
hideous reptilian abnormalities sprouting, bubbling, and baking over a
winking bluish-green spectre of dim flame in a far corner of black
shadows.

The specimen, as West repeatedly observed, had a splendid nervous
system. Much was expected of it; and as a few twitching motions began
to appear, I could see the feverish interest on West’s face. He was
ready, I think, to see proof of his increasingly strong opinion that
consciousness, reason, and personality can exist independently of the
brain--that man has no central connective spirit, but is merely a
machine of nervous matter, each section more or less complete in
itself. In one triumphant demonstration West was about to relegate the
mystery of life to the category of myth. The body now twitched more
vigorously, and beneath our avid eyes commenced to heave in a
frightful way. The arms stirred disquietingly, the legs drew up, and
various muscles contracted in a repulsive kind of writhing. Then the
headless thing threw out its arms in a gesture which was unmistakably
one of desperation--an intelligent desperation apparently sufficient
to prove every theory of Herbert West. Certainly, the nerves were
recalling the man’s last act in life; the struggle to get free of
the falling 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
God’s sake, jump!" The awful thing was its source.

For it had come from the large covered vat in that ghoulish corner of
crawling black shadows.