H.P. Lovecraft - Herbert West: Reanimator

H.P. LOVECRAFT

HERBERT WEST—REANIMATOR

Written September 1921–mid 1922
Serialized in Home Brew, February-July 1922

CONTENTS

* Part 1. From The Dark
* Part 2. The Plague-Daemon
* Part 3. Six Shots by Moonlight
* Part 4. The Scream of the Dead
* Part 5. The Horror From the Shadows
* Part 6. The Tomb-Legions

PART 1. FROM THE DARK

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 specialized
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 realized. 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 shown 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 skeptical, 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 rumors 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 unrecognizable 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
unauthorized 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 favored 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
demoniac 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 revelers 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.

PART 2. 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 skeptical 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
kindly 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 marvelous 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 demoniac fury upon the town. Though not as yet licensed
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
disorganization 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 favor 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 neighboring 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 organized 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 demoniac 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!"

PART 3. SIX SHOTS BY MOONLIGHT

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 sympathize 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 February, 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 demoniac 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 showed 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 rumors 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 rumors 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.

PART 4. THE SCREAM OF THE DEAD

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
galvanized 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 show 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 recognized; 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 traveler 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 imperiled
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 neutralize 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 February 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, showing 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 vocalized 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!"

PART 5. THE HORROR FROM THE SHADOWS

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 civilization.
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-centers; 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 demoniac 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 unrecognizable
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 organized 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 specter 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.

PART 6. THE TOMB-LEGIONS

When Dr. Herbert West disappeared a year ago, the Boston police questioned me
closely. They suspected that I was holding something back, and perhaps
suspected graver things; but I could not tell them the truth because they would
not have believed it. They knew, indeed, that West had been connected with
activities beyond the credence of ordinary men; for his hideous experiments in
the reanimation of dead bodies had long been too extensive to admit of perfect
secrecy; but the final soul-shattering catastrophe held elements of demoniac
phantasy which make even me doubt the reality of what I saw.

I was West's closest friend and only confidential assistant. We had met years
before, in medical school, and from the first I had shared his terrible
researches. He had slowly tried to perfect a solution which, injected into the
veins of the newly deceased, would restore life; a labour demanding an
abundance of fresh corpses and therefore involving the most unnatural actions.
Still more shocking were the products of some of the experiments—grisly masses
of flesh that had been dead, but that West waked to a blind, brainless,
nauseous animation. These were the usual results, for in order to reawaken the
mind it was necessary to have specimens so absolutely fresh that no decay could
possibly affect the delicate brain-cells.

This need for very fresh corpses had been West's moral undoing. They were hard
to get, and one awful day he had secured his specimen while it was still alive
and vigorous. A struggle, a needle, and a powerful alkaloid had transformed it
to a very fresh corpse, and the experiment had succeeded for a brief and
memorable moment; but West had emerged with a soul calloused and seared, and a
hardened eye which sometimes glanced with a kind of hideous and calculating
appraisal at men of especially sensitive brain and especially vigorous
physique. Toward the last I became acutely afraid of West, for he began to look
at me that way. People did not seem to notice his glances, but they noticed my
fear; and after his disappearance used that as a basis for some absurd
suspicions.

West, in reality, was more afraid than I; for his abominable pursuits entailed
a life of furtiveness and dread of every shadow. Partly it was the police he
feared; but sometimes his nervousness was deeper and more nebulous, touching on
certain indescribable things into which he had injected a morbid life, and from
which he had not seen that life depart. He usually finished his experiments
with a revolver, but a few times he had not been quick enough. There was that
first specimen on whose rifled grave marks of clawing were later seen. There
was also that Arkham professor's body which had done cannibal things before it
had been captured and thrust unidentified into a madhouse cell at Sefton, where
it beat the walls for sixteen years. Most of the other possibly surviving
results were things less easy to speak of—for in later years West's scientific
zeal had degenerated to an unhealthy and fantastic mania, and he had spent his
chief skill in vitalizing not entire human bodies but isolated parts of bodies,
or parts joined to organic matter other than human. It had become fiendishly
disgusting by the time he disappeared; many of the experiments could not even
be hinted at in print. The Great War, through which both of us served as
surgeons, had intensified this side of West.

In saying that West's fear of his specimens was nebulous, I have in mind
particularly its complex nature. Part of it came merely from knowing of the
existence of such nameless monsters, while another part arose from apprehension
of the bodily harm they might under certain circumstances do him. Their
disappearance added horror to the situation—of them all, West knew the
whereabouts of only one, the pitiful asylum thing. Then there was a more subtle
fear—a very fantastic sensation resulting from a curious experiment in the
Canadian army in 1915. West, in the midst of a severe battle, had reanimated
Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, D.S.O., a fellow-physician who knew about
his experiments and could have duplicated them. The head had been removed, so
that the possibilities of quasi-intelligent life in the trunk might be
investigated. Just as the building was wiped out by a German shell, there had
been a success. The trunk had moved intelligently; and, unbelievable to relate,
we were both sickeningly sure that articulate sounds had come from the detached
head as it lay in a shadowy corner of the laboratory. The shell had been
merciful, in a way—but West could never feel as certain as he wished, that we
two were the only survivors. He used to make shuddering conjectures about the
possible actions of a headless physician with the power of reanimating the dead.

West's last quarters were in a venerable house of much elegance, overlooking
one of the oldest burying-grounds in Boston. He had chosen the place for purely
symbolic and fantastically aesthetic reasons, since most of the interments were
of the colonial period and therefore of little use to a scientist seeking very
fresh bodies. The laboratory was in a sub-cellar secretly constructed by
imported workmen, and contained a huge incinerator for the quiet and complete
disposal of such bodies, or fragments and synthetic mockeries of bodies, as
might remain from the morbid experiments and unhallowed amusements of the
owner. During the excavation of this cellar the workmen had struck some
exceedingly ancient masonry; undoubtedly connected with the old burying-ground,
yet far too deep to correspond with any known sepulcher therein. After a number
of calculations West decided that it represented some secret chamber beneath
the tomb of the Averills, where the last interment had been made in 1768. I was
with him when he studied the nitrous, dripping walls laid bare by the spades
and mattocks of the men, and was prepared for the gruesome thrill which would
attend the uncovering of centuried grave-secrets; but for the first time West's
new timidity conquered his natural curiosity, and he betrayed his degenerating
fiber by ordering the masonry left intact and plastered over. Thus it remained
till that final hellish night; part of the walls of the secret laboratory. I
speak of West's decadence, but must add that it was a purely mental and
intangible thing. Outwardly he was the same to the last—calm, cold, slight, and
yellow-haired, with spectacled blue eyes and a general aspect of youth which
years and fears seemed never to change. He seemed calm even when he thought of
that clawed grave and looked over his shoulder; even when he thought of the
carnivorous thing that gnawed and pawed at Sefton bars.

The end of Herbert West began one evening in our joint study when he was
dividing his curious glance between the newspaper and me. A strange headline
item had struck at him from the crumpled pages, and a nameless titan claw had
seemed to reach down through sixteen years. Something fearsome and incredible
had happened at Sefton Asylum fifty miles away, stunning the neighborhood and
baffling the police. In the small hours of the morning a body of silent men had
entered the grounds, and their leader had aroused the attendants. He was a
menacing military figure who talked without moving his lips and whose voice
seemed almost ventriloquially connected with an immense black case he carried.
His expressionless face was handsome to the point of radiant beauty, but had
shocked the superintendent when the hall light fell on it—for it was a wax face
with eyes of painted glass. Some nameless accident had befallen this man. A
larger man guided his steps; a repellent hulk whose bluish face seemed half
eaten away by some unknown malady. The speaker had asked for the custody of the
cannibal monster committed from Arkham sixteen years before; and upon being
refused, gave a signal which precipitated a shocking riot. The fiends had
beaten, trampled, and bitten every attendant who did not flee; killing four and
finally succeeding in the liberation of the monster. Those victims who could
recall the event without hysteria swore that the creatures had acted less like
men than like unthinkable automata guided by the wax-faced leader. By the time
help could be summoned, every trace of the men and of their mad charge had
vanished.

From the hour of reading this item until midnight, West sat almost paralyzed.
At midnight the doorbell rang, startling him fearfully. All the servants were
asleep in the attic, so I answered the bell. As I have told the police, there
was no wagon in the street, but only a group of strange-looking figures bearing
a large square box which they deposited in the hallway after one of them had
grunted in a highly unnatural voice, "Express—prepaid." They filed out of the
house with a jerky tread, and as I watched them go I had an odd idea that they
were turning toward the ancient cemetery on which the back of the house
abutted. When I slammed the door after them West came downstairs and looked at
the box. It was about two feet square, and bore West's correct name and present
address. It also bore the inscription, "From Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, St.
Eloi, Flanders." Six years before, in Flanders, a shelled hospital had fallen
upon the headless reanimated trunk of Dr. Clapham-Lee, and upon the detached
head which—perhaps—had uttered articulate sounds.

West was not even excited now. His condition was more ghastly. Quickly he
said, "It's the finish—but let's incinerate—this." We carried the thing down to
the laboratory—listening. I do not remember many particulars—you can imagine my
state of mind—but it is a vicious lie to say it was Herbert West's body which I
put into the incinerator. We both inserted the whole unopened wooden box,
closed the door, and started the electricity. Nor did any sound come from the
box, after all.

It was West who first noticed the falling plaster on that part of the wall
where the ancient tomb masonry had been covered up. I was going to run, but he
stopped me. Then I saw a small black aperture, felt a ghoulish wind of ice, and
smelled the charnel bowels of a putrescent earth. There was no sound, but just
then the electric lights went out and I saw outlined against some
phosphorescence of the nether world a horde of silent toiling things which only
insanity—or worse—could create. Their outlines were human, semi-human,
fractionally human, and not human at all—the horde was grotesquely
heterogeneous. They were removing the stones quietly, one by one, from the
centuried wall. And then, as the breach became large enough, they came out into
the laboratory in single file; led by a talking thing with a beautiful head
made of wax. A sort of mad-eyed monstrosity behind the leader seized on Herbert
West. West did not resist or utter a sound. Then they all sprang at him and
tore him to pieces before my eyes, bearing the fragments away into that
subterranean vault of fabulous abominations. West's head was carried off by the
wax-headed leader, who wore a Canadian officer's uniform. As it disappeared I
saw that the blue eyes behind the spectacles were hideously blazing with their
first touch of frantic, visible emotion.

Servants found me unconscious in the morning. West was gone. The incinerator
contained only unidentifiable ashes. Detectives have questioned me, but what
can I say? The Sefton tragedy they will not connect with West; not that, nor
the men with the box, whose existence they deny. I told them of the vault, and
they pointed to the unbroken plaster wall and laughed. So I told them no more.
They imply that I am either a madman or a murderer— probably I am mad. But I
might not be mad if those accursed tomb-legions had not been so silent.

THE END