III. 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 sympathise with his hideous experiments. Gradually I had come to
be his inseparable assistant, and now that we were out of college we had
to keep together. It was not easy to find a good opening for two doctors
in company, but finally the influence of the university secured us a practice
in Bolton -- a factory town near Arkham, the seat of the college. The Bolton
Worsted Mills are the largest in the Miskatonic Valley, and their polyglot
employees are never popular as patients with the local physicians. We chose
our house with the greatest care, seizing at last on a rather run-down
cottage near the end of Pond Street; five numbers from the closest neighbour,
and separated from the local potter's field by only a stretch of meadow
land, bisected by a narrow neck of the rather dense forest which lies to
the north. The distance was greater than we wished, but we could get no
nearer house without going on the other side of the field, wholly out of
the factory district. We were not much displeased, however, since there
were no people between us and our sinister source of supplies. The walk
was a trifle long, but we could haul our silent specimens undisturbed.
Our practice was surprisingly large from the very first
-- large enough to please most young doctors, and large enough to prove
a bore and a burden to students whose real interest lay elsewhere. The
mill-hands were of somewhat turbulent inclinations; and besides their many
natural needs, their frequent clashes and stabbing affrays gave us plenty
to do. But what actually absorbed our minds was the secret laboratory we
had fitted up in the cellar -- the laboratory with the long table under
the electric lights, where in the small hours of the morning we often injected
West's various solutions into the veins of the things we dragged from the
potter's field. West was experimenting madly to find something which would
start man's vital motions anew after they had been stopped by the thing
we call death, but had encountered the most ghastly obstacles. The solution
had to be differently compounded for different types -- what would serve
for guinea-pigs would not serve for human beings, and different human specimens
required large modifications.
The bodies had to be exceedingly fresh, or the slight
decomposition of brain tissue would render perfect reanimation impossible.
Indeed, the greatest problem was to get them fresh enough -- West had had
horrible experiences during his secret college researches with corpses
of doubtful vintage. The results of partial or imperfect animation were
much more hideous than were the total failures, and we both held fearsome
recollections of such things. Ever since our first daemoniac session in
the deserted farmhouse on Meadow Hill in Arkham, we had felt a brooding
menace; and West, though a calm, blond, blue-eyed scientific automaton
in most respects, often confessed to a shuddering sensation of stealthy
pursuit. He half felt that he was followed -- a psychological delusion
of shaken nerves, enhanced by the undeniably disturbing fact that at least
one of our reanimated specimens was still alive -- a frightful carnivorous
thing in a padded cell at Sefton. Then there was another -- our first --
whose exact fate we had never learned.
We had fair luck with specimens in Bolton -- much better
than in Arkham. We had not been settled a week before we got an accident
victim on the very night of burial, and made it open its eyes with an amazingly
rational expression before the solution failed. It had lost an arm -- if
it had been a perfect body we might have succeeded better. Between then
and the next January we secured three more; one total failure, one case
of marked muscular motion, and one rather shivery thing -- it rose of itself
and uttered a sound. Then came a period when luck was poor; interments
fell off, and those that did occur were of specimens either too diseased
or too maimed for use. We kept track of all the deaths and their circumstances
with systematic care.
One March night, however, we unexpectedly obtained a specimen
which did not come from the potter's field. In Bolton the prevailing spirit
of Puritanism had outlawed the sport of boxing -- with the usual result.
Surreptitious and ill-conducted bouts among the mill-workers were common,
and occasionally professional talent of low grade was imported. This late
winter night there had been such a match; evidently with disastrous results,
since two timorous Poles had come to us with incoherently whispered entreaties
to attend to a very secret and desperate case. We followed them to an abandoned
barn, where the remnants of a crowd of frightened foreigners were watching
a silent black form on the floor.
The match had been between Kid O'Brien -- a lubberly and
now quaking youth with a most un-Hibernian hooked nose -- and Buck Robinson,
"The Harlem Smoke." The negro had been knocked out, and a moment's examination
shewed us that he would permanently remain so. He was a loathsome, gorilla-like
thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs,
and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom
poundings under an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in
life -- but the world holds many ugly things. Fear was upon the whole pitiful
crowd, for they did not know what the law would exact of them if the affair
were not hushed up; and they were grateful when West, in spite of my involuntary
shudders, offered to get rid of the thing quietly -- for a purpose I knew
too well.
There was bright moonlight over the snowless landscape,
but we dressed the thing and carried it home between us through the deserted
streets and meadows, as we had carried a similar thing one horrible night
in Arkham. We approached the house from the field in the rear, took the
specimen in the back door and down the cellar stairs, and prepared it for
the usual experiment. Our fear of the police was absurdly great, though
we had timed our trip to avoid the solitary patrolman of that section.
The result was wearily anticlimactic. Ghastly as our prize
appeared, it was wholly unresponsive to every solution we injected in its
black arm; solutions prepared from experience with white specimens only.
So as the hour grew dangerously near to dawn, we did as we had done with
the others -- dragged the thing across the meadows to the neck of the woods
near the potter's field, and buried it there in the best sort of grave
the frozen ground would furnish. The grave was not very deep, but fully
as good as that of the previous specimen -- the thing which had risen of
itself and uttered a sound. In the light of our dark lanterns we carefully
covered it with leaves and dead vines, fairly certain that the police would
never find it in a forest so dim and dense.
The next day I was increasingly apprehensive about the
police, for a patient brought rumours of a suspected fight and death. West
had still another source of worry, for he had been called in the afternoon
to a case which ended very threateningly. An Italian woman had become hysterical
over her missing child -- a lad of five who had strayed off early in the
morning and failed to appear for dinner -- and had developed symptoms highly
alarming in view of an always weak heart. It was a very foolish hysteria,
for the boy had often run away before; but Italian peasants are exceedingly
superstitious, and this woman seemed as much harassed by omens as by facts.
About seven o'clock in the evening she had died, and her frantic husband
had made a frightful scene in his efforts to kill West, whom he wildly
blamed for not saving her life. Friends had held him when he drew a stiletto,
but West departed amidst his inhuman shrieks, curses and oaths of vengeance.
In his latest affliction the fellow seemed to have forgotten his child,
who was still missing as the night advanced. There was some talk of searching
the woods, but most of the family's friends were busy with the dead woman
and the screaming man. Altogether, the nervous strain upon West must have
been tremendous. Thoughts of the police and of the mad Italian both weighed
heavily.
We retired about eleven, but I did not sleep well. Bolton
had a surprisingly good police force for so small a town, and I could not
help fearing the mess which would ensue if the affair of the night before
were ever tracked down. It might mean the end of all our local work --
and perhaps prison for both West and me. I did not like those rumours of
a fight which were floating about. After the clock had struck three
the moon shone in my eyes, but I turned over without rising to pull down
the shade. Then came the steady rattling at the back door.
I lay still and somewhat dazed, but before long heard
West's rap on my door. He was clad in dressing-gown and slippers, and had
in his hands a revolver and an electric flashlight. From the revolver I
knew that he was thinking more of the crazed Italian than of the police.
"We'd better both go," he whispered. "It wouldn't do not
to answer it anyway, and it may be a patient -- it would be like one of
those fools to try the back door."
So we both went down the stairs on tiptoe, with a fear
partly justified and partly that which comes only from the soul of the
weird small hours. The rattling continued, growing somewhat louder. When
we reached the door I cautiously unbolted it and threw it open, and as
the moon streamed revealingly down on the form silhouetted there, West
did a peculiar thing. Despite the obvious danger of attracting notice and
bringing down on our heads the dreaded police investigation -- a thing
which after all was mercifully averted by the relative isolation of our
cottage -- my friend suddenly, excitedly, and unnecessarily emptied all
six chambers of his revolver into the nocturnal visitor.
For that visitor was neither Italian nor policeman. Looming
hideously against the spectral moon was a gigantic misshapen thing not
to be imagined save in nightmares -- a glassy-eyed, ink-black apparition
nearly on all fours, covered with bits of mould, leaves, and vines, foul
with caked blood, and having between its glistening teeth a snow-white,
terrible, cylindrical object terminating in a tiny hand.
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