Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can speak
only with extreme terror. This terror is not due altogether to the sinister
manner of his recent disappearance, but was engendered by the whole nature of
his life-work, and first gained its acute form more than seventeen years ago,
when we were in the third year of our course at the Miskatonic University
Medical School in Arkham. While he was with me, the wonder and diabolism of his
experiments fascinated me utterly, and I was his closest companion. Now that he
is gone and the spell is broken, the actual fear is greater. Memories and
possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.
The first horrible incident of our acquaintance was the greatest shock I
ever experienced, and it is only with reluctance that I repeat it. As I have
said, it happened when we were in the medical school where West had already made
himself notorious through his wild theories on the nature of death and the
possibility of overcoming it artificially. His views, which were widely
ridiculed by the faculty and by his fellow-students, hinged on the essentially
mechanistic nature of life; and concerned means for operating the organic
machinery of mankind by calculated chemical action after the failure of natural
processes. In his experiments with various animating solutions, he had killed
and treated immense numbers of rabbits, guinea-pigs, cats, dogs, and monkeys,
till he had become the prime nuisance of the college. Several times he had
actually obtained signs of life in animals supposedly dead; in many cases
violent signs but he soon saw that the perfection of his process, if indeed
possible, would necessarily involve a lifetime of research. It likewise became
clear that, since the same solution never worked alike on different organic
species, he would require human subjects for further and more specialised
progress. It was here that he first came into conflict with the college
authorities, and was debarred from future experiments by no less a dignitary
than the dean of the medical school himself—the learned and benevolent Dr. Allan
Halsey, whose work in behalf of the stricken is recalled by every old resident
of Arkham.
I had always been exceptionally tolerant of West’s pursuits, and we
frequently discussed his theories, whose ramifications and corollaries were
almost infinite. Holding with Haeckel that all life is a chemical and physical
process, and that the so-called "soul" is a myth, my friend believed that
artificial reanimation of the dead can depend only on the condition of the
tissues; and that unless actual decomposition has set in, a corpse fully
equipped with organs may with suitable measures be set going again in the
peculiar fashion known as life. That the psychic or intellectual life might be
impaired by the slight deterioration of sensitive brain-cells which even a short
period of death would be apt to cause, West fully realised. It had at first been
his hope to find a reagent which would restore vitality before the actual advent
of death, and only repeated failures on animals had shewn him that the natural
and artificial life-motions were incompatible. He then sought extreme freshness
in his specimens, injecting his solutions into the blood immediately after the
extinction of life. It was this circumstance which made the professors so
carelessly sceptical, for they felt that true death had not occurred in any
case. They did not stop to view the matter closely and reasoningly.
It was not long after the faculty had interdicted his work that West
confided to me his resolution to get fresh human bodies in some manner, and
continue in secret the experiments he could no longer perform openly. To hear
him discussing ways and means was rather ghastly, for at the college we had
never procured anatomical specimens ourselves. Whenever the morgue proved
inadequate, two local negroes attended to this matter, and they were seldom
questioned. West was then a small, slender, spectacled youth with delicate
features, yellow hair, pale blue eyes, and a soft voice, and it was uncanny to
hear him dwelling on the relative merits of Christchurch Cemetery and the
potter’s field. We finally decided on the potter’s field, because practically
every body in Christchurch was embalmed; a thing of course ruinous to West’s
researches.
I was by this time his active and enthralled assistant, and helped him
make all his decisions, not only concerning the source of bodies but concerning
a suitable place for our loathsome work. It was I who thought of the deserted
Chapman farmhouse beyond Meadow Hill, where we fitted up on the ground floor an
operating room and a laboratory, each with dark curtains to conceal our midnight
doings. The place was far from any road, and in sight of no other house, yet
precautions were none the less necessary; since rumours of strange lights,
started by chance nocturnal roamers, would soon bring disaster on our
enterprise. It was agreed to call the whole thing a chemical laboratory if
discovery should occur. Gradually we equipped our sinister haunt of science with
materials either purchased in Boston or quietly borrowed from the
college—materials carefully made unrecognisable save to expert eyes—and provided
spades and picks for the many burials we should have to make in the cellar. At
the college we used an incinerator, but the apparatus was too costly for our
unauthorised laboratory. Bodies were always a nuisance—even the small guinea-pig
bodies from the slight clandestine experiments in West’s room at the
boarding-house.
We followed the local death-notices like ghouls, for our specimens
demanded particular qualities. What we wanted were corpses interred soon after
death and without artificial preservation; preferably free from malforming
disease, and certainly with all organs present. Accident victims were our best
hope. Not for many weeks did we hear of anything suitable; though we talked with
morgue and hospital authorities, ostensibly in the college’s interest, as often
as we could without exciting suspicion. We found that the college had first
choice in every case, so that it might be necessary to remain in Arkham during
the summer, when only the limited summer-school classes were held. In the end,
though, luck favoured us; for one day we heard of an almost ideal case in the
potter’s field; a brawny young workman drowned only the morning before in
Summer’s Pond, and buried at the town’s expense without delay or embalming. That
afternoon we found the new grave, and determined to begin work soon after
midnight.
It was a repulsive task that we undertook in the black small hours, even
though we lacked at that time the special horror of graveyards which later
experiences brought to us. We carried spades and oil dark lanterns, for although
electric torches were then manufactured, they were not as satisfactory as the
tungsten contrivances of today. The process of unearthing was slow and sordid—it
might have been gruesomely poetical if we had been artists instead of
scientists—and we were glad when our spades struck wood. When the pine box was
fully uncovered, West scrambled down and removed the lid, dragging out and
propping up the contents. I reached down and hauled the contents out of the
grave, and then both toiled hard to restore the spot to its former appearance.
The affair made us rather nervous, especially the stiff form and vacant face of
our first trophy, but we managed to remove all traces of our visit. When we had
patted down the last shovelful of earth, we put the specimen in a canvas sack
and set out for the old Chapman place beyond Meadow Hill.
On an improvised dissecting-table in the old farmhouse, by the light of a
powerful acetylene lamp, the specimen was not very spectral looking. It had been
a sturdy and apparently unimaginative youth of wholesome plebeian
type—large-framed, grey-eyed, and brown-haired—a sound animal without
psychological subtleties, and probably having vital processes of the simplest
and healthiest sort. Now, with the eyes closed, it looked more asleep than dead;
though the expert test of my friend soon left no doubt on that score. We had at
last what West had always longed for—a real dead man of the ideal kind, ready
for the solution as prepared according to the most careful calculations and
theories for human use. The tension on our part became very great. We knew that
there was scarcely a chance for anything like complete success, and could not
avoid hideous fears at possible grotesque results of partial animation.
Especially were we apprehensive concerning the mind and impulses of the
creature, since in the space following death some of the more delicate cerebral
cells might well have suffered deterioration. I, myself, still held some curious
notions about the traditional "soul" of man, and felt an awe at the secrets that
might be told by one returning from the dead. I wondered what sights this placid
youth might have seen in inaccessible spheres, and what he could relate if fully
restored to life. But my wonder was not overwhelming, since for the most part I
shared the materialism of my friend. He was calmer than I as he forced a large
quantity of his fluid into a vein of the body’s arm, immediately binding the
incision securely.
The waiting was gruesome, but West never faltered. Every now and then he
applied his stethoscope to the specimen, and bore the negative results
philosophically. After about three-quarters of an hour without the least sign of
life he disappointedly pronounced the solution inadequate, but determined to
make the most of his opportunity and try one change in the formula before
disposing of his ghastly prize. We had that afternoon dug a grave in the cellar,
and would have to fill it by dawn—for although we had fixed a lock on the house,
we wished to shun even the remotest risk of a ghoulish discovery. Besides, the
body would not be even approximately fresh the next night. So taking the
solitary acetylene lamp into the adjacent laboratory, we left our silent guest
on the slab in the dark, and bent every energy to the mixing of a new solution;
the weighing and measuring supervised by West with an almost fanatical care.
The awful event was very sudden, and wholly unexpected. I was pouring
something from one test-tube to another, and West was busy over the alcohol
blast-lamp which had to answer for a Bunsen burner in this gasless edifice, when
from the pitch-black room we had left there burst the most appalling and
daemoniac succession of cries that either of us had ever heard. Not more
unutterable could have been the chaos of hellish sound if the pit itself had
opened to release the agony of the damned, for in one inconceivable cacophony
was centered all the supernal terror and unnatural despair of animate nature.
Human it could not have been—it is not in man to make such sounds—and without a
thought of our late employment or its possible discovery, both West and I leaped
to the nearest window like stricken animals; overturning tubes, lamp, and
retorts, and vaulting madly into the starred abyss of the rural night. I think
we screamed ourselves as we stumbled frantically toward the town, though as we
reached the outskirts we put on a semblance of restraint—just enough to seem
like belated revellers staggering home from a debauch.
We did not separate, but managed to get to West’s room, where we whispered
with the gas up until dawn. By then we had calmed ourselves a little with
rational theories and plans for investigation, so that we could sleep through
the day—classes being disregarded. But that evening two items in the paper,
wholly unrelated, made it again impossible for us to sleep. The old deserted
Chapman house had inexplicably burned to an amorphous heap of ashes; that we
could understand because of the upset lamp. Also, an attempt had been made to
disturb a new grave in the potter’s field, as if by futile and spadeless clawing
at the earth. That we could not understand, for we had patted down the mould
very carefully.
And for seventeen years after that West would look frequently over his
shoulder, and complain of fancied footsteps behind him. Now he has disappeared.
I shall never forget that hideous summer sixteen years ago, when like a noxious
afrite from the halls of Eblis typhoid stalked leeringly through Arkham. It is
by that satanic scourge that most recall the year, for truly terror brooded with
bat-wings over the piles of coffins in the tombs of Christchurch Cemetery; yet
for me there is a greater horror in that time—a horror known to me alone now
that Herbert West has disappeared.
West and I were doing post-graduate work in summer classes at the medical
school of Miskatonic University, and my friend had attained a wide notoriety
because of his experiments leading toward the revivification of the dead. After
the scientific slaughter of uncounted small animals the freakish work had
ostensibly stopped by order of our sceptical dean, Dr. Allan Halsey; though West
had continued to perform certain secret tests in his dingy boarding-house room,
and had on one terrible and unforgettable occasion taken a human body from its
grave in the potter’s field to a deserted farmhouse beyond Meadow Hill.
I was with him on that odious occasion, and saw him inject into the still
veins the elixir which he thought would to some extent restore life’s chemical
and physical processes. It had ended horribly—in a delirium of fear which we
gradually came to attribute to our own overwrought nerves—and West had never
afterward been able to shake off a maddening sensation of being haunted and
hunted. The body had not been quite fresh enough; it is obvious that to restore
normal mental attributes a body must be very fresh indeed; and the burning of
the old house had prevented us from burying the thing. It would have been better
if we could have known it was underground.
After that experience West had dropped his researches for some time; but
as the zeal of the born scientist slowly returned, he again became importunate
with the college faculty, pleading for the use of the dissecting-room and of
fresh human specimens for the work he regarded as so overwhelmingly important.
His pleas, however, were wholly in vain; for the decision of Dr. Halsey was
inflexible, and the other professors all endorsed the verdict of their leader.
In the radical theory of reanimation they saw nothing but the immature vagaries
of a youthful enthusiast whose slight form, yellow hair, spectacled blue eyes,
and soft voice gave no hint of the supernormal—almost diabolical—power of the
cold brain within. I can see him now as he was then—and I shiver. He grew
sterner of face, but never elderly. And now Sefton Asylum has had the mishap and
West has vanished.
West clashed disagreeably with Dr. Halsey near the end of our last
undergraduate term in a wordy dispute that did less credit to him than to the
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 marvellous scientific acquirements, had scant patience
with good Dr. Halsey and his erudite colleagues; and nursed an increasing
resentment, coupled with a desire to prove his theories to these obtuse worthies
in some striking and dramatic fashion. Like most youths, he indulged in
elaborate daydreams of revenge, triumph, and final magnanimous forgiveness.
And then had come the scourge, grinning and lethal, from the nightmare
caverns of Tartarus. West and I had graduated about the time of its beginning,
but had remained for additional work at the summer school, so that we were in
Arkham when it broke with full daemoniac fury upon the town. Though not as yet
licenced physicians, we now had our degrees, and were pressed frantically into
public service as the numbers of the stricken grew. The situation was almost
past management, and deaths ensued too frequently for the local undertakers
fully to handle. Burials without embalming were made in rapid succession, and
even the Christchurch Cemetery receiving tomb was crammed with coffins of the
unembalmed dead. This circumstance was not without effect on West, who thought
often of the irony of the situation—so many fresh specimens, yet none for his
persecuted researches! We were frightfully overworked, and the terrific mental
and nervous strain made my friend brood morbidly.
But West’s gentle enemies were no less harassed with prostrating duties.
College had all but closed, and every doctor of the medical faculty was helping
to fight the typhoid plague. Dr. Halsey in particular had distinguished himself
in sacrificing service, applying his extreme skill with whole-hearted energy to
cases which many others shunned because of danger or apparent hopelessness.
Before a month was over the fearless dean had become a popular hero, though he
seemed unconscious of his fame as he struggled to keep from collapsing with
physical fatigue and nervous exhaustion. West could not withhold admiration for
the fortitude of his foe, but because of this was even more determined to prove
to him the truth of his amazing doctrines. Taking advantage of the
disorganisation of both college work and municipal health regulations, he
managed to get a recently deceased body smuggled into the university
dissecting-room one night, and in my presence injected a new modification of his
solution. The thing actually opened its eyes, but only stared at the ceiling
with a look of soul-petrifying horror before collapsing into an inertness from
which nothing could rouse it. West said it was not fresh enough—the hot summer
air does not favour corpses. That time we were almost caught before we
incinerated the thing, and West doubted the advisability of repeating his daring
misuse of the college laboratory.
The peak of the epidemic was reached in August. West and I were almost
dead, and Dr. Halsey did die on the 14th. The students all attended the hasty
funeral on the 15th, and bought an impressive wreath, though the latter was
quite overshadowed by the tributes sent by wealthy Arkham citizens and by the
municipality itself. It was almost a public affair, for the dean had surely been
a public benefactor. After the entombment we were all somewhat depressed, and
spent the afternoon at the bar of the Commercial House; where West, though
shaken by the death of his chief opponent, chilled the rest of us with
references to his notorious theories. Most of the students went home, or to
various duties, as the evening advanced; but West persuaded me to aid him in
"making a night of it." West’s landlady saw us arrive at his room about two in
the morning, with a third man between us; and told her husband that we had all
evidently dined and wined rather well.
Apparently this acidulous matron was right; for about 3 a.m. the whole
house was aroused by cries coming from West’s room, where when they broke down
the door, they found the two of us unconscious on the blood-stained carpet,
beaten, scratched, and mauled, and with the broken remnants of West’s bottles
and instruments around us. Only an open window told what had become of our
assailant, and many wondered how he himself had fared after the terrific leap
from the second story to the lawn which he must have made. There were some
strange garments in the room, but West upon regaining consciousness said they
did not belong to the stranger, but were specimens collected for bacteriological
analysis in the course of investigations on the transmission of germ diseases.
He ordered them burnt as soon as possible in the capacious fireplace. To the
police we both declared ignorance of our late companion’s identity. He was, West
nervously said, a congenial stranger whom we had met at some downtown bar of
uncertain location. We had all been rather jovial, and West and I did not wish
to have our pugnacious companion hunted down.
That same night saw the beginning of the second Arkham horror—the horror
that to me eclipsed the plague itself. Christchurch Cemetery was the scene of a
terrible killing; a watchman having been clawed to death in a manner not only
too hideous for description, but raising a doubt as to the human agency of the
deed. The victim had been seen alive considerably after midnight—the dawn
revealed the unutterable thing. The manager of a circus at the neighbouring town
of Bolton was questioned, but he swore that no beast had at any time escaped
from its cage. Those who found the body noted a trail of blood leading to the
receiving tomb, where a small pool of red lay on the concrete just outside the
gate. A fainter trail led away toward the woods, but it soon gave out.
The next night devils danced on the roofs of Arkham, and unnatural madness
howled in the wind. Through the fevered town had crept a curse which some said
was greater than the plague, and which some whispered was the embodied
daemon-soul of the plague itself. Eight houses were entered by a nameless thing
which strewed red death in its wake—in all, seventeen maimed and shapeless
remnants of bodies were left behind by the voiceless, sadistic monster that
crept abroad. A few persons had half seen it in the dark, and said it was white
and like a malformed ape or anthropomorphic fiend. It had not left behind quite
all that it had attacked, for sometimes it had been hungry. The number it had
killed was fourteen; three of the bodies had been in stricken homes and had not
been alive.
On the third night frantic bands of searchers, led by the police, captured
it in a house on Crane Street near the Miskatonic campus. They had organised the
quest with care, keeping in touch by means of volunteer telephone stations, and
when someone in the college district had reported hearing a scratching at a
shuttered window, the net was quickly spread. On account of the general alarm
and precautions, there were only two more victims, and the capture was effected
without major casualties. The thing was finally stopped by a bullet, though not
a fatal one, and was rushed to the local hospital amidst universal excitement
and loathing.
For it had been a man. This much was clear despite the nauseous eyes, the
voiceless simianism, and the daemoniac savagery. They dressed its wound and
carted it to the asylum at Sefton, where it beat its head against the walls of a
padded cell for sixteen years—until the recent mishap, when it escaped under
circumstances that few like to mention. What had most disgusted the searchers of
Arkham was the thing they noticed when the monster’s face was cleaned—the
mocking, unbelievable resemblance to a learned and self-sacrificing martyr who
had been entombed but three days before—the late Dr. Allan Halsey, public
benefactor and dean of the medical school of Miskatonic University.
To the vanished Herbert West and to me the disgust and horror were
supreme. I shudder tonight as I think of it; shudder even more than I did that
morning when West muttered through his bandages, "Damn it, it wasn’t quite fresh
enough!"