IV. 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 galvanised into morbid,
unnatural, and brainless motion by various modifications of the vital solution.
One thing had uttered a nerve-shattering scream; another
had risen violently, beaten us both to unconsciousness, and run amuck in
a shocking way before it could be placed behind asylum bars; still another,
a loathsome African monstrosity, had clawed out of its shallow grave and
done a deed -- West had had to shoot that object. We could not get bodies
fresh enough to shew any trace of reason when reanimated, so had perforce
created nameless horrors. It was disturbing to think that one, perhaps
two, of our monsters still lived -- that thought haunted us shadowingly,
till finally West disappeared under frightful circumstances. But at the
time of the scream in the cellar laboratory of the isolated Bolton cottage,
our fears were subordinate to our anxiety for extremely fresh specimens.
West was more avid than I, so that it almost seemed to me that he looked
half-covetously at any very healthy living physique.
It was in July, 1910, that the bad luck regarding specimens
began to turn. I had been on a long visit to my parents in Illinois, and
upon my return found West in a state of singular elation. He had, he told
me excitedly, in all likelihood solved the problem of freshness through
an approach from an entirely new angle -- that of artificial preservation.
I had known that he was working on a new and highly unusual embalming compound,
and was not surprised that it had turned out well; but until he explained
the details I was rather puzzled as to how such a compound could help in
our work, since the objectionable staleness of the specimens was largely
due to delay occurring before we secured them. This, I now saw, West had
clearly recognised; creating his embalming compound for future rather than
immediate use, and trusting to fate to supply again some very recent and
unburied corpse, as it had years before when we obtained the negro killed
in the Bolton prize-fight. At last fate had been kind, so that on this
occasion there lay in the secret cellar laboratory a corpse whose decay
could not by any possibility have begun. What would happen on reanimation,
and whether we could hope for a revival of mind and reason, West did not
venture to predict. The experiment would be a landmark in our studies,
and he had saved the new body for my return, so that both might share the
spectacle in accustomed fashion.
West told me how he had obtained the specimen. It had
been a vigorous man; a well-dressed stranger just off the train on his
way to transact some business with the Bolton Worsted Mills. The walk through
the town had been long, and by the time the traveller paused at our cottage
to ask the way to the factories, his heart had become greatly overtaxed.
He had refused a stimulant, and had suddenly dropped dead only a moment
later. The body, as might be expected, seemed to West a heaven-sent gift.
In his brief conversation the stranger had made it clear that he was unknown
in Bolton, and a search of his pockets subsequently revealed him to be
one Robert Leavitt of St. Louis, apparently without a family to make instant
inquiries about his disappearance. If this man could not be restored to
life, no one would know of our experiment. We buried our materials in a
dense strip of woods between the house and the potter's field. If, on the
other hand, he could be restored, our fame would be brilliantly and perpetually
established. So without delay West had injected into the body's wrist the
compound which would hold it fresh for use after my arrival. The matter
of the presumably weak heart, which to my mind imperilled the success of
our experiment, did not appear to trouble West extensively. He hoped at
last to obtain what he had never obtained before -- a rekindled spark of
reason and perhaps a normal, living creature.
So on the night of July 18, 1910, Herbert West and I stood
in the cellar laboratory and gazed at a white, silent figure beneath the
dazzling arc-light. The embalming compound had worked uncannily well, for
as I stared fascinatedly at the sturdy frame which had lain two weeks without
stiffening, I was moved to seek West's assurance that the thing was really
dead. This assurance he gave readily enough; reminding me that the reanimating
solution was never used without careful tests as to life, since it could
have no effect if any of the original vitality were present. As West proceeded
to take preliminary steps, I was impressed by the vast intricacy of the
new experiment; an intricacy so vast that he could trust no hand less delicate
than his own. Forbidding me to touch the body, he first injected a drug
in the wrist just beside the place his needle had punctured when injecting
the embalming compound. This, he said, was to neutralise the compound and
release the system to a normal relaxation so that the reanimating solution
might freely work when injected. Slightly later, when a change and a gentle
tremor seemed to affect the dead limbs; West stuffed a pillow-like object
violently over the twitching face, not withdrawing it until the corpse
appeared quiet and ready for our attempt at reanimation. The pale enthusiast
now applied some last perfunctory tests for absolute lifelessness, withdrew
satisfied, and finally injected into the left arm an accurately measured
amount of the vital elixir, prepared during the afternoon with a greater
care than we had used since college days, when our feats were new and groping.
I cannot express the wild, breathless suspense with which we waited for
results on this first really fresh specimen -- the first we could reasonably
expect to open its lips in rational speech, perhaps to tell of what it
had seen beyond the unfathomable abyss.
West was a materialist, believing in no soul and attributing
all the working of consciousness to bodily phenomena; consequently he looked
for no revelation of hideous secrets from gulfs and caverns beyond death's
barrier. I did not wholly disagree with him theoretically, yet held vague
instinctive remnants of the primitive faith of my forefathers; so that
I could not help eyeing the corpse with a certain amount of awe and terrible
expectation. Besides -- I could not extract from my memory that hideous,
inhuman shriek we heard on the night we tried our first experiment in the
deserted farmhouse at Arkham.
Very little time had elapsed before I saw the attempt
was not to be a total failure. A touch of colour came to cheeks hitherto
chalk-white, and spread out under the curiously ample stubble of sandy
beard. West, who had his hand on the pulse of the left wrist, suddenly
nodded significantly; and almost simultaneously a mist appeared on the
mirror inclined above the body's mouth. There followed a few spasmodic
muscular motions, and then an audible breathing and visible motion of the
chest. I looked at the closed eyelids, and thought I detected a quivering.
Then the lids opened, shewing eyes which were grey, calm, and alive, but
still unintelligent and not even curious.
In a moment of fantastic whim I whispered questions to
the reddening ears; questions of other worlds of which the memory might
still be present. Subsequent terror drove them from my mind, but I think
the last one, which I repeated, was: "Where have you been?" I do not yet
know whether I was answered or not, for no sound came from the well-shaped
mouth; but I do know that at that moment I firmly thought the thin lips
moved silently, forming syllables which I would have vocalised as "only
now" if that phrase had possessed any sense or relevancy. At that moment,
as I say, I was elated with the conviction that the one great goal had
been attained; and that for the first time a reanimated corpse had uttered
distinct words impelled by actual reason. In the next moment there was
no doubt about the triumph; no doubt that the solution had truly accomplished,
at least temporarily, its full mission of restoring rational and articulate
life to the dead. But in that triumph there came to me the greatest of
all horrors -- not horror of the thing that spoke, but of the deed that
I had witnessed and of the man with whom my professional fortunes were
joined.
For that very fresh body, at last writhing into full and
terrifying consciousness with eyes dilated at the memory of its last scene
on earth, threw out its frantic hands in a life and death struggle with
the air, and suddenly collapsing into a second and final dissolution from
which there could be no return, screamed out the cry that will ring eternally
in my aching brain:
"Help! Keep off, you cursed little tow-head fiend -- keep
that damned needle away from me!"
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