H.P. Lovecraft. Herbert West: Reanimator
Herbert West: Reanimator
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written Sep 1921-mid 1922
Published in six 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 school 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 signs 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 West's 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 potter's field. We finally decided on the
potter's field, because practically every body in Christchurch was
embalmed; a thing of course ruinous to West's 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 West's
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 college's 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
potter's field; a brawny young workman drowned only the morning before in
Summer's Pond, and buried at the town's 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 beyond 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 body's 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 West's 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 potter's 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 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!"
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.
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