this godforsaken hellhole? It’s absurd. It’s high comedy.” Then he must have seen the look on my face and sighed. “But…never let it be said that I stood in the way of romance. Of course, I’ll stand with you.”
Some days I had hope for the man, but very rarely.
As I said, I had little contact with him, then he again sought me out, dragging me away in the night to view his new workshop. In the past two months, I discovered, he had been very, very busy indeed. How shall I tell of what I saw there? The bones scattered over the floor…the buckets of seething anatomical waste…the spreading foul-smelling stains…the still sheeted forms atop slabs…the articulated skeletons hanging from wires…the dissected monstrosities…the revolting stench of the charnel. The walls were covered in anatomy prints, shelves crowded with skulls and books and arcane tubular glassware, bottles and jars of unknown chemicals and powders, grim preserved things in casks and tanks of oily fluid.
Amongst profuse biochemical apparatus which seemed a combination of modern scientific equipment and the wares of Medieval alchemy, I saw that his research was following perverse lines that were nearly unspeakable. What I viewed was a warehouse of the dead: large glass vessels filled with body parts-heads, arms, legs, hands, various organs…and dare I say that none of them in their baths of preservative and vital solutions were as dead as they should have been? That I saw a perverse and diabolical movement amongst that collection of morbid anatomy?
West was convinced that there was an ethereal, intangible connection amongst various parts of a body, that even severed from nervous tissue the attendant parts of a dissected form would answer the call of its brain. I knew it was true. For I had seen such evidence in the barn with the headless trunk of Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham- Lee, who had been decapitated in an aeroplane crash then successively reanimated by West…head and body.
So, yes, I saw the most unspeakable and hideous things in the farmhouse. Whilst his research into the vagaries of perfect reanimation continued, he had involved himself in certain side projects, the nature of which turned my blood to ice. There, atop at table, in a metal wire cage surrounded by beakers and flasks, a maze of glass tubing and what appeared to be archaic alembics and retorts and spirit chambers, I saw a grotesque fleshy thing that was not one rat, but six or seven that had been shaved of fur then expertly sutured together into a common whole-a flaccid, pulsating mass of tissue with various clawed appendages scratching for escape and several heads with yawning jaws, bleary red eyes staring out at me with a voracious hunger.
“It’s horrible,” I said. “Why, Herbert? Why in God’s name would you do that?”
He laughed as he sank several eyeballs in a jar of brine. “Why? Because I can, old boy, because…I… can.”
We moved amongst tables set out with dissection instruments, surgical knives, exotic curcubits and glass pelicans, beakers and flasks and distillation units. Nearby was the head of a monkey resting in a jar of serum. Pale and hairless and shriveled, it floated in bubbling pale green plasma. Merely a specimen, I thought…and then out of some ghoulish curiosity I touched the jar and it was hot against my fingertips. A few oblong bubbles emerged from the puckered lips of the ape…and it opened its eyes. One eye, yes, for the other was stitched closed. But that eye, rheumy and pink and filled with a malevolent vitality, looked upon me and the lips parted, revealing yellow teeth that began to grind against one another.
“Toothsome little thing, isn’t it?” West said.
There is madness in war, but the story West told me was beyond that. There was an officer, a Captain Davies, with the West Surrey Regiment, who routinely tiptoed over the top of the sandbagged parapet, whistling “Tipperary” with his pet monkey tucked safely under his arm. No one doubted that he was a lunatic for he often charged into battle stark naked. One evening, a German shell exploded as he walked the parapet, the shrapnel neatly decapitated his monkey and reducing him into an unrecognizable mess of red meat. Somehow, of course, West had gotten his hands on the monkey’s head.
And what he did with it you can well imagine.
I would be remiss at this point if I did not write of the massive bubbling vat that was secreted in the very center of the workshop. I likened it to some massive aluminum womb that was connected via an intricate spider- webbing of glass tubing and rubber hoses to various immense glass tanks and vessels that hung from the ceiling in swaying harnesses, all filled or half-filled with red and green and yellow solutions that bubbled almost continuously. Other snaking tubes led to upended vacuum jugs and what I was certain were athenors, sublimation vessels, and decomposition chambers straight out of the Middle Ages, all connected together and feeding into the vat with an intricate system of glass piping like organs connected by artery and vein. I saw what I thought was a primitive digester furnace alongside vacuum pumps and gas combinators.
A womb. No more, no less.
The centerpiece of that congested laboratory.
West had yet again cultivated a seething mass of reptilian embryonic tissue. It was steaming and fluid and pulsing. A terrible hissing came from it as it “cooked” in its own vile secretions. There was a steel lid keeping it in absolute darkness. West kept it at 100% humidity and at a stifling temperature of 102?. Mimicking some offensive tropical spawning ground, the vat was but a revolting noxious womb of wriggling fetal life. As I stood there, trembling, he dropped the corpses of six rats in there, a jar of carrion and something else he would not let me see.
“Soon enough,” he said, ducking under the tubing and piping and ductwork. “Soon enough.”
I did not inquire further though my scientific curiosity was nearly insuppressible with a desire to know. West showed me something that snarled in the corner, a thrashing nearly impossible thing that bayed like a hound in its reinforced cage. I dare not describe that fanged doglike horror, its jaws dripping foul-smelling saliva.
I was glad when we stepped away around tanks and heaped stacks of books.
What West wanted me to see was lying on a slab in the center of the room. He pulled the sheet back and I saw the body of youngish woman. She was pale, certainly, but in no way decomposed. She had the “freshness” that West always sought in his subjects and which we both knew from our experiments was the key to successful reanimation.
I found her disturbing.
Just another corpse one might say and I should have been quite used to such things by that point…but the sight of her unnerved me. She was like Death personified: emaciated to a frightening degree, her ribs protruding and her pelvic wings seeming to nearly thrust from the flesh, legs and arms like broomsticks. Her grinning skull was horribly pronounced, lips shriveled back from dirty teeth and discolored gums. She was a skeleton stretched with tight yellow-white flesh that was shiny and ill-fitting. I was reminded, and unpleasantly so, of the female from Grunewald’s The Dead Lovers.
“A prostitute,” West said, holding up one sutured wrist. “The poor thing tired of life. But, you and I, we’ll give her the chance that her maker never would.”
The idea that this wraith could stand and walk was unthinkable. The very notion made cold chills run up my spine like spiders, a feverish sweat break out on my face.
As I lifted her head up, West made a tiny incision at the base of her skull with a scalpel, then taking up his hypodermic of reagent, carefully slid the needle into the medulla oblongata at the sight of the inferior peduncle which was just below the cerebellum. There was no guesswork with West; when you had dissected as many bodies as he had and put them back together again, there was no such thing as chance. Once the needle was seated properly, he injected 8 cc’s into the selected site.
Then I lowered the woman back to the slab and the waiting began. Perspiring, trying to ignore certain nameless oddities squealing and slithering in that anatomical sideshow, I timed it with my stopwatch. West claimed that this latest reagent-which now contained a certain abominable glandular secretion from the reptilian tissue that hissed in the vat-would give us, he believed, a near-perfect reanimation. I was skeptical, of course, remembering quite well the absolute horrors we had resurrected in the past. The very idea of them made something inside me clench tight.
There was nothing to do but wait. Sometimes reanimation was achieved within minutes, sometimes not for hours.
I wrote my observations in West’s voluminous leather-bound notebook while he examined the body: “10:27 PM,” he said. “Six minutes, twenty-three seconds since injection. No discernable reaction as yet. No evidence of rigor. Limbs are supple, flexible. Pallor mortis unchanged. Algor mortis has flatlined…temperature rising steadily now.” He checked the stopwatch. “At seven minutes, forty seconds, body temperature shows a noticeable spike. Sixty-one degrees…now sixty-two.”
