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shinonCharacters: Narrator, West
Word count: ~10000 oh god
Warnings: Gore
Notes: IT'S OVER. HAPPY HALLOWEEN.
My memoirs of Herbert West are almost complete now. I doubt they have been widely read, and I know they must be universally disbelieved. Though I should like to be vindicated, it was not to this end that I resumed writing them, or paid to have them printed. Whatever the general public may believe of me now is irrelevant. I have revisited all this for a purpose, and my purpose is now nearly achieved - though my hand trembles yet at the means my end has taken.
But I am not mad, and Herbert West, in the end, was not the greatest monster I have known.
A rash of grave robberies in my area over the past few months had turned the eye of the local authorities toward me; though many of the police officers had not met West, or had not heard my account of him personally, they were aware that some charnel residue clung to my name. Consequently I allowed my home to be searched many times over. I had been prepared for this possibility ever since embarking on the present plan. Each time the police found nothing, but each time I could see that they left with their suspicion of me unabated. Perhaps if I intended to live long in this town after all was ended, this would be to my detriment. I did not, and I do not. I knew that in one way or another, all this would soon be at an end.
It was Thursday, four nights since my house had last been investigated. Accustomed as I was to hearing strange footsteps in my hallways with little warning, I had not come to expect them at the hour of three A.M. No more did I anticipate the odd cadence with which these steps fell. I was awake at once, my every sense alert for this different kind of intruder.
I heard a slow dragging shuffle near the base of the stairs, and then for a time nothing more - nothing save the thudding of my pulse in my ears. I began to wonder if I had miscalculated after all. I sat up and cast off my bedsheets and thought, absurdly, that perhaps I ought to get dressed to meet whatever was coming for me.
I heard a footstep on the lowest stair, the one that creaked. After several more seconds there came a quiet scraping noise and a muffled thump. This repeated twice more while I waited. I had never previously regretted that I did not keep a gun; for a long and cowardly moment I now did so.
I was conscious now in the space between footfalls of another sound, a repeated two-tone wheeze - the heavy breathing of the clearly moribund. It was unlikely any creature struggling thus with basic respiration would pose me any danger. Yet the sound intensified rather than allayed my fears.
The creature on my stairs made another two steps. The breathing sound intensified. There followed shortly a frantic scrabbling as of claws against plaster, and a few moments later a sharp and hideous wrenching sound that might have been audible from half a mile down the road.
I put my shoes on, but at this point I froze, uncertain how to proceed, or whether I wished to proceed at all. And while I sat on the edge of my bed in agonies of indecision and fear, a voice came drifting from the stairwell, as dry and precise as ever I could remember it: "Perhaps it's better you should come down here."
For some seconds I found myself unable to move and scarcely to breathe. Eventually I took up an electric torch and, with hesitant tread, went to the stair.
The lower half of the banister had been ripped free of the wall and now hung at a tormented angle over empty space, screws thrusting out of its brackets into nothing at all. On the floor, beneath a gentle snow of plaster dust, was a small hunched shape draped in what appeared to be a man's greatcoat.
"I find my coordination," said the voice of Dr. Herbert West, "leaves much to be desired." And from that pitiable heap on my landing, I saw him raise a face that looked no different from the day he had died, and no older than the day we had met.
I went down to him. I could do little else. Of the thousands of questions buzzing in my mind, I could find the voice to ask him none. I was conscious of a tremor that had seized my entire spine.
Two steps above West - or this creature that wore his face - or my hallucinations of the same - I found a shoe. Examination revealed the bones of the ankle, at the very least, still inside. "Have you lost something?" I said. West gave me a look of bored incomprehension. I indicated the disembodied foot on my stair. "If this doesn't belong to you, I am at a loss as to how it came here."
"Oh," he said. "That." Something began to move beneath his coat - something writhing and twitching where the muscles of his back should have been, had his body not been torn apart before my eyes years before - and inch by inch he lifted himself from the floor. I watched this process with a kind of fascination. His clothing hung oddly from his frame, here falling loose, there stretched over the hard contour of a bone where none should have been. He braced himself against the wall at last and began to adjust his tie; one of his hands had been attached upside-down and in the dimness I was not altogether convinced about the numerical ratio of thumbs to fingers. As a result he was not terribly successful with the tie.
Some time passed and he made no motion to reclaim his foot, so I thought it best perhaps to move on to other matters. "I never thought I would see you again."
"Then what were all those stories for? You were after someone's attention."
"I thought the tomb-legion must come for me, or perhaps its commander himself."
"And instead you only rate a defector from the same. How very anticlimactic for you." I did not respond immediately. "Of course he knows of you - I wouldn't have found out otherwise - but he's seemed little inclined to act on that knowledge. That may change now, of course. Tell me," he went on, with a sort of wry amazement, "did you truly think I should ever remain dead?"
"You say that as if you returned under your own power."
"Didn't I?" he said, almost preening. "The legion had such clear instructions to leave my head undamaged. For being brilliant enough that even my enemies cannot afford to destroy me, I take full credit." His breathing had become increasingly labored the longer he spoke, and now each word was undercut with a deathly whistle. "Though of course, it doesn't prevent them having their fun. He may have seemed a sensible type in life, but -" Clotted black blood had begun to trickle from the corner of his mouth. He attempted to wipe it away, but was taken by a fit of coughing in the process, and his hand shook. All he accomplished in the end was to smear his entire lower jaw with gore, as though he had only risen from a feast of raw meats.
He did not notice. I did not comment.
"...Seemed sensible enough," he resumed, "but he has a truly vile sense of humor. And no understanding of how to reattach a trachea."
"Clapham-Lee?" I said.
West scowled at me. "Whom else would we be speaking of? Really, James."
"My name isn't James."
For a moment he looked alarmed, but then smiled. His teeth were stained dark, no doubt with the same fouled blood. "A joke," he said. He essayed a laugh, and the sound was so horrible I wished he had not. "Couldn't you tell? Even death could never have damaged my mental powers such that I wouldn't remember my own assistant."
Perhaps not, but it was everything that had happened after his death that now concerned me. "West," I said at last, "what has he done to you?"
He looked at me as if I were very stupid indeed. "Can't you see that for yourself?" He looked around. "Let's go sit down. I meant to find you in your bedroom, to be maximally discreet, but" - he gestured at the stairs and at the foot he had left on them, but still showed no inclination to pick it back up. I pointed him toward my sitting room, and he braced himself against the wall and laboriously pivoted round to face the right direction. The now-footless leg was a good few inches longer than the other, as I now saw, and the sight and sound of bone scraping against my floor as he balanced precariously on the truncated limb was hideous. He attempted to limp along, but the lateral malleolus is not a load-bearing structure and he soon fell.
"Let me help you," I said.
"No," he snapped, and forced himself upright again and went on at an undignified hop.
I hung back and let him precede me to the sitting room; under the circumstances it seemed fairest to give him first choice of chairs. In so doing, I saw that as soon as he had left the landing, the foot he had left behind began twitching until it toppled over and fell down the stairs after him.
When I followed, I saw West had arranged himself in my best chair in a posture of elaborate nonchalance – and one that, by no coincidence, obscured some of the more outlandish contours of his reconstructed body. When he saw me come in, he began to speak without preamble: "I think he means to reattach his head to his body someday, the better to disguise his nature. But he lacks any experimental basis for such a procedure. It was for this reason he had his legion abduct me."
I did not think "abduct" was the best word for what I had seen transpire that day in the cellar. I did not say so.
"And so, these past few years, I have been his primary test subject. I suppose he thinks it poetic justice. This body," he said, with a disdainful look down at the twisted frame that supported him, "is composed entirely of criminals, which I find singularly insulting."
"You're no stranger to crime yourself, West."
"Yes, but real criminals," he said, almost petulant, "guilty of real crimes."
"Murder is a real crime."
"Don't be pedantic."
West's disembodied foot, having finally caught up to us, shuffled in at last and thumped against the side of his chair. "Oh, for God's sake," he said with consummate distaste, and from somewhere inside his coat produced an old familiar-looking revolver. He aimed it at the foot.
I nearly jumped out of my chair, desperate that he should not fire it in my house. "West, your hand!" For it was shaking so violently there was no telling where any shot would have gone, if he even had the strength to pull the trigger. I saw he'd wrapped two fingers around it instead of one, just to make certain.
"No, Leonard, I think you'll find it's a foot." My name is not Leonard. "And one I never liked, at that. The damned thing was attached at least thirty degrees off the regular."
I picked the foot up and shut it in a cabinet. "It won't trouble you. Give me the gun."
West looked at me, then at the cabinet, from which could already be heard periodic weak bumps as the extremity in question tried to escape. I locked the cabinet door and went over to West, holding out my hand; with a final sigh of resignation, he placed the revolver into it. "If you try to give that thing back when I leave, you should know I won't take it."
I sighed and sat back down opposite him. "You say Clapham-Lee is experimenting on you."
"As should be obvious." He shook his head. "I am a combination hunting trophy, test subject, and on occasion a scientific consultant. It is not amusing."
It was some seconds before I grasped the implications of this. At last I said, "A consultant? What on earth would compel you to help him?" I knew remorse over his own shabby treatment of the man's remains could not number among his motivations. I had never known West to have any motivation but one.
"How does he control any of the dead? You recall what single-minded creatures they were. What compels them to band together and act in an organized fashion? Recall the night I was taken. They moved with perfect coordination, and in silence." I remembered, and the scene still revisited me in my dreams. "They still do," said West, and in his eyes I saw a perfect reflection of my own horror. "Each time I've escaped they have brought me down."
An expression of sympathy would be wasted on him. He had no capacity for it himself. Instead I said, bluntly, "You haven't answered the question."
West gave a very faint, taut smile. "Whether through incompetence or a fiendish alteration to the formula, the esteemed Sir Eric cannot maintain reanimation above two weeks with one injection."
I frowned. "Such a short time? But you managed... how many years?"
"On our first attempt, yes, twenty-five and counting." West examined his fingernails, but did not seem to care for what he saw. After a while he added in a low voice, "Our first attempt... I still see it. He hasn't won it over into his legion. It's still watching me." The seated position seemed to have eased the strain on his respiratory system for a time, but there was blood on his lips again, and at the conclusion of this statement his lungs seized up and he began making noises like a beached catfish dying in the thick black mud. As this was my private residence, I didn't have access to much of a pharmacopoeia - but it little mattered. He waved off my offers of laudanum, whiskey, anything to stop the cough or ease the pain. And when the episode passed, he said only, "I should be flattered my enemies follow me even beyond death. That I've so upset them only proves I did something remarkable."
"What a cheery way to look at it."
"One finds what joy one can," said West, though his expression turned sour even as he said it. "As you may well imagine, I find it difficult to continue my research in this state - there is a deterioration of reflexes and coordination" - and at once he began speaking quite rapidly, with a corresponding increase in both volume and pitch - "which naturally can only be attributed to the inferiority of Clapham-Lee's formula -"
"Naturally," I said, but my interruption came too late to prevent another episode of coughing, this shorter than the last but altogether as bloody. The tremor that I had noted in his hands from the first had now spread to his entire body, its shockwaves setting off odd muscular spasms that hinted at what malformed wreckage his coat concealed. I wondered if, over and above his respiratory difficulties, the other internal organs were so mangled, assembled with such disregard for ordinary human physiology. Was Clapham-Lee's formula really the weaker, if it could sustain something that by rights should never have survived its own awakening? West's had only worked with specimens that were largely intact, notwithstanding a part that had been autotomized here or there.
"It is the temporary nature of his reagent that lets him hold the tomb legions in thrall," he said. "They must all go back to him and do as he says, lest he withhold the next injection and doom them to die. He refuses even to make a batch in advance, so no one can kill him to steal the surplus." He attempted to straighten his glasses, but missed, instead jabbing a finger into his eye. He swore, wearily, tonelessly, and lowered his twitching hand back into his lap. "I let him think he controlled me as well. I was only biding my time, but -"
"But you can't manufacture anything alone as you are."
He gave a jerky nod. "And I grow tired of the pretense." He gave me as level a look as he could manage, and despite everything else, his gaze still held the power to terrify. "You have written most convincingly in recent months of how I could have done nothing without you. Can you prove it?"
"West, I -"
"In running off to find you I have already showed my hand. When next he comes for me I doubt I'll even be given the opportunity to grovel, if I even had the stomach for it. Needless to say, I don't." He frowned, and for a moment the intensity behind his eyes dimmed. "I'm not certain I have an alimentary system at all."
I stared at him. "Then what do you have?"
"That, only Sir Eric knows. I realize what you must be thinking - that a vivisection would prove informative - but be aware that I would stop you."
"That's not what I was thinking at all."
He chuckled. It was accompanied by an ugly sucking sound from somewhere in his ribcage. "Ah, Wilberforce. You aren't half the scientist I was."
"That isn't my name, either," I snapped, "and if I decline to cut into an old friend to satisfy my curiosity, I fail to see how that reflects -"
"Of course, Ignatius. Again, I was only joking." He grinned, an awkward rictus that had been alarming enough even in life. He had tried it on a patient once; I had taken him aside and advised him that perhaps an affable bedside manner could be sacrificed in favor of absolutely anything else he might care to do.
We stared at each other for some time. The forced expression of mirth gradually slipped from his features. I asked him, "What else have you forgotten?"
"Enough," he said. "I've come to ask you to do one of two things." He held up two of the seven fingers on his right hand. "Restore my life to me as it was meant to be. Or else..." He took a deep breath and nodded toward the revolver, which I had set down on the end table between us. "Put that gun to use."
For some time I could make no response. An irate thumping sound came from the cabinet; West and I turned as one to look at it. At last I looked back at him and said, "Truly?"
"When have I ever lied to you?"
I glared at him. "Do you recall smothering a man to death right in front of me? A man you assured me had already been two weeks dead?"
West rolled his eyes. "Are you still harping on that? Good Christ. It's not as though I never had to swallow my scruples to work with you, you know. You really are the most horrifyingly narrow-minded xenophobe I have ever met."
"You dare -"
He held up his hand. "Time enough to hash this out once I am my own man again. I have two days left on my current injection, assuming a party doesn't come for me before then. What will you do?"
Two days. It took at least thirty hours to manufacture a batch of West's reagent, and this was assuming that I remembered how it was done and already had all the necessary equipment and extracts to hand. I did not think it at all likely I would be able to help him.
I looked at the gun. How often had I wanted, toward the end, to break free of his influence? How often had I seen that calculating look on his face and thought I had better run before he applied his ministrations to me?
It was unthinkable. He had come back. He could not have come back only for that. "We have just enough time," I said. "Come, I'll show you my laboratory. I salvaged some equipment of yours."
"Did you, now?" he said, his voice utterly arid. "I'm touched."
I rose and offered him my arm for support. He behaved as if I'd gravely insulted him, got up, and hobbled along as best he could.
"There are stairs involved," I told him after he had made it a few laborious paces.
He turned slowly and shot me a black look over his shoulder. In the end he snatched up a poker from the fireplace and proceeded to use this as a crutch, though it was clearly much too short and scored deep rents into the wood of my floor with every step. I could not find it in myself to be surprised how little he cared.
I put the revolver into my pocket after he had passed around the corner and out of sight. I would give it back to him when he left; until then, better not leave it unattended.
Herbert West - alive, I thought. Of all the absurd things I had never dreamed of -
He would never have asked me to kill him. He would never submit to death. On reflection, he had never said it in so many words. I resolved in my mind that this was only some strange joke of his, some pointed sarcasm I had yet to grasp. He trusted me to save him. Though I did not know if it lay within my power, I should expend every effort not to betray that trust.
I shook myself from my distraction and went to show him the way.
"Aha," said West, looking at the assembled materials in my basement. "So you were paying attention, despite your squeamishness. I must tell you, Herbert, I've never been so pleased to have underestimated someone."
There followed a long silence, long enough that I think even the chronically insensitive West detected my growing unease. "West," I said at last, "that's your name."
He looked at me blankly. "Is it?"
"Of course it is. You're Dr. Herbert West. Don't you know that?"
"Ah. Yes. That must be why it sounded familiar." He smiled, but it did not reach his eyes. Abruptly he looked away, shoving his malformed hands into the pockets of his coat. "You keep it too cold in here. Barbaric."
I went to see to the stove, but glanced back at him in passing and immediately wished I had not looked. I have no choice now but to remember that I saw him that way, small and hunched over and shivering, wearing the ill-fitting assortment of cast-off garments with which he could best approximate respectability - and, in that moment, the expression of a man lost at sea.
"I don't suppose you have any fetal gavial tissue to hand," he said when he saw me looking at him. He had completely reconfigured his face in an instant, back to something I did not find so disturbing to look upon. "Vastly preferable to what we had before, but of course, I don't expect you to have his influence."
"What exactly is a gavial?"
"It's from India," West said boredly. "He had them imported somehow. You'd probably hate India."
I felt an odd flare of resentment. "My, I didn't know you were keeping such cosmopolitan company these days. It must be painful, reducing yourself to -"
"I would rather be here. Paucity of supplies and all. An alligator would suffice." I didn't answer. He frowned and took his hands out of his pockets, holding them about two feet apart. "A medium-sized snake."
I ventured, "A turtle?"
He raised his eyebrows and sniffed disdainfully. "I take back what I said about your paying attention. A turtle, indeed."
"Dare I ask what would be so wrong with that? Turtles are known for their longevity, after all."
West stared at me a moment longer, then shook his head. "Deplorable. You spend a few years dead and come back to find your associate's brains have already gone to mush. Well, you'd best show me around. No doubt there will be other things wanting; you'd better hope you can buy them all tomorrow."
Having assembled a list of the components we were still lacking, and finally impressed upon my guest that it was coming on five in the morning, I escorted him back upstairs. I have the luxury of a spare bedroom, and I left West there that I might return to my own bed. Ultimately, however, I was unable to put it to use. After a half-hour or so of restless tossing I arose again, and dawn found me poring over old notes I had never managed to discard, and making new ones for our altered circumstance.
All was silent where I had left West. I was grateful for this, and went down into the town alone to do my shopping. In addition to the necessary components (some bought, some wheedled out of the pharmacist, some - I confess - stolen outright under the cover of a small but highly distracting explosion) I procured a cane for West. I did not want any further damage to my floors, and as he would be leaving with only one foot he would require such a thing for the rest of his life anyway. I expected no gratitude.
I returned that afternoon and received no answer to my knock on the door of the spare room. I waited some seconds and repeated it. When the third such trial produced no results, I announced that I was coming in and opened the door.
West was precisely where I had left him, sitting on the edge of the bed, facing toward me. His expression had not changed one whit. He did not react as I approached him. As I drew nearer I saw the daylight did even fewer favors to his appearance than one might expect. "I have all the supplies now," I said. He gave no impression of hearing me. I moved my finger back and forth an inch before his face, and his pupils did not track it, though his eyes were open.
I closed the door on him and returned to the laboratory. I didn't know what else there was to do.
He joined me again at dusk, badly disoriented, and professed no knowledge of my intrusion, or of anything else transpiring during the day. In fact he used considerably stronger language than that, which I do not reproduce here because his confusion made him vicious and his invective hit a number of nerves I do not care to recall.
His temper improved as we began our project. I think the familiar work was a reassurance to him. The reactions I had left percolating throughout the day were coming along nicely, and he gave me a curt nod of approval for my forethought. Even now the gesture gave me a certain childish elation, which I found disquieting. I knew what Herbert West was. I knew what he had done. Did it not speak ill of me, still wanting his favorable opinion?
But in some ways he reminded me now of who he had been before – before the war, before Brazil, before Halsey. We were collaborators again. It was not long before I rediscovered my old facility for ignoring all manner of unpleasantness simply so that I could preserve that feeling.
And preserve it I did, for several hours. I found I moved almost automatically, as if my body recalled precisely what to do even before my conscious mind could recall the next step. After all these years, I might have thought I would need some instruction, or that West and I would get in each other's way on occasion. Neither ever happened, and there was very little need even for speech to coordinate our movements.
Which was why, when West finally did say something substantive, he had my immediate attention. "Give it to me," he said. "Hand it over this instant."
I looked up from the bubbling retort that was my charge. West was staring at me, wide-eyed, his glasses askew and sliding down his nose. Still he spoke in his customary monotone: "You're doing it wrong."
"I'm following our procedures exactly."
"You are doing it wrong."
"Then tell me how you want it done. All due respect, West, but I'm not much inclined to trust this to your motor skills above mine."
"You want me to die," he said, quite calmly. "Don't you? You want me to go back there."
"That's complete nonsense."
As I watched, a horrible spasm passed over his face. "Do you think yourself a match for me, Iscariot?" His voice had become a bestial snarl. Blood once again flecked his lips. "Do you think you have the right to withhold this from me? What I labored for? What I've already given my life for?" He made a violent grab, whether for the retort or my throat I did not know. I threw myself backward out of his reach all the same, and caught a laboratory bench in the small of my back.
For some seconds neither of us moved. West stood frozen with his hands outstretched and his head lowered, breathing heavily.
Then he straightened, with a faint, rueful smile. "That was uncalled for," he said. "I suppose the stress must be affecting my nerves." He waved his hand at me. It still trembled. "Go on; you're doing well."
Still I looked at him with some mistrust and it was the best part of an hour before either of us spoke again. I remembered well the mindless frenzy that had seized most, if not all, of our earlier subjects. If West himself succumbed to the same - but he was dreadfully weak. I knew I should be able to defend myself in any contest between us. I did not want to.
West eventually gave up on doing any of the manufacturing himself and settled back to direct me. His scrutiny was not pleasant even when it did not have the air of the would-be anthropophage. For all he professed to trust me, I sensed he was watching me for any mistakes, and imputing to them all kinds of sinister intent. If my hand slipped, or if the temperature of a flask got slightly outside his specified parameters, if crystals began to form in the solution, I would hear an angry hiss of breath from somewhere behind me. I learned not to look back at him when this happened, and not to ask questions if I could help it. I should simply try to correct the error myself as quickly as possible.
"So jumpy," West remarked as I scrambled to wash a glass stirring rod I feared had offended him. "That was rather my part than yours, once."
"I'm sure you know there is a great deal at stake," I said. I felt I must do my best not to provoke him, but it was unfair he had no such hesitations over me.
"There always has been." I did risk looking at him now. His eyes were unfocused, staring far off. "We were to be the first of the immortals, you and I. Eventually no human should ever have to die unless they chose to, but we - we would have come first."
He had never spoken to me of anything like that; I had not known a thing of his goals beyond the reversal of death. That had seemed quite a lofty enough ambition. "Have plans changed?"
West looked at his ruined hands, their supernumerary digits, the odd protrusions of bone at his wrists, his twisted and mismatched legs. He was silent for some time. I wondered what else he knew of the ruin that had been visited upon him. What further damage had Clapham-Lee wrought, beyond what I could see?
Then he raised his head. "Of course not. We proceed as always."
"West," I began, but could not then find the vocabulary for the question I wished to ask him.
"What is it?"
I knew I was making a misstep the moment the words left my mouth, but I could not recall them. I asked him, "Was it so bad?" Whereupon I bit my lip and pretended an immediate fascination with the nearest distillation apparatus. I watched a droplet coalesce and fall into the receiving flask. Then another.
I heard West take a deep breath. I was conscious of the gun in my pocket - I had transferred it there when I had dressed for the day, using the same rationale as before, that it should not be left lying around. But I had now to contend with the notion that was not really the reason I carried it, and never had been.
Several more seconds elapsed.
West said, "Time is of the essence. I will... consider entertaining your questions when our work is done. No sooner." I could hear him moving away, limping off to the far end of the bench. "Perhaps in the interim you can devise a less stupid line of inquiry."
As the evening wore on, West lapsed more and more frequently into the unresponsive fugue state in which I had found him that morning. He would go still and completely silent for ten minutes or longer, and though he remained upright and breathing I was never able to establish to my satisfaction that he had a pulse. I did my best to put him out of mind and simply continue the synthesis.
My best was hardly adequate. I would often catch myself staring at him, not knowing whether I was fascinated or appalled, whether I should pity or fear him. He was my friend. He was a monster. He had been both for a very long time.
I had been thinking of breaking for supper when he came out of this latest episode. Consciousness returned to him with more violence than incidents past; he spasmed wildly and almost upset a lamp. "No," he said.
"West? What is it?" I already feared the answer.
"No," he said again, "no, no, you imbecile, how could you let this happen? You unmitigated fool, you - you horse's ass -" He broke off into a horrible moan, and then pressed his fist to his mouth in an only half-successful attempt to stifle it.
I followed his gaze.
"You see that?" he said, in an uneven parody of his ordinary voice. "It's precipitated. There isn't supposed to be any precipitate. You ignoramus. Did you just leave all the extracts sitting around in the damp all year? Did you never bother to make fresh? What the hell is wrong with -"
"You died, West. I thought our experiments were at an end. What reason would I have to maintain -"
"I hate you," said West. His eyes were bright, and a manic smile stood in opposition to his words. He threw his head back and laughed. "God, I hate you. Do you know what you've condemned me to? Can you even imagine?"
I looked at the solution more closely. The crystallization hadn't gone very far. "I can filter it out. We can salvage this. Just be careful not to touch anything -"
"'We can salvage this,'" he echoed mockingly, between peals of harsh and breathless laughter. "Oh, of course. Of course we can. Now that there's almost nothing left worth the saving. How convenient for you that it took this long -"
"What are you saying? I got to work as soon as I knew you were back."
His twisted shoulders heaved with bitter mirth. "That's a very pretty excuse, Brutus. Very pretty indeed. No court would convict you."
I dared not answer, knowing he would be immune to reason. Nor would he have heard me at any rate, as he took this opportunity to fall about coughing again, leaning his whole weight on the cane. When the fit passed, he removed his glasses and buffed them clumsily on the front of his shirt. I could see clean tracks through the blood and grime on his face. I realized he had not been laughing.
When he saw me watching him, he replaced his glasses and snapped, "Well? You said you could fix it. Go get a funnel."
I went and got a funnel, and waited to come back until West had collected himself. We did not acknowledge this incident.
"Clapham-Lee must be destroyed," he said, meditatively, as if the thought had come to him from pure ether.
"Agreed," I said, because it hadn't.
West had gone quiet again, save for his increasingly labored breathing. It was nearing midnight. Had I been in a better state of mind I might have tried to determine if there were any hourly or daily cycles to his activity – if it corresponded in any way to the circadian rhythms seen in life. But, remembering his earlier outbursts, I did not want to observe him too closely. His eyes were still open, and though he responded to no stimuli I had a sense something yet watched me from behind them.
There was little left for me to do now but wait and hope. I had no doubt the earlier accident would reduce the yield, and having no idea of the mass of West's current body there was no easy prediction of how much reagent was needed. This was all assuming, too, that we were able to generate a viable product at all – or rather, that I was. West had been of no help. I had never done this entirely alone before. He would never have trusted me with it while he lived, even when we were friends. He was fussy and particular even before he became paranoid. And once he died, I had seen no point.
Wait and hope, I thought.
But should I hope, after all? Was the return of Herbert West an end I, or anyone on Earth, should desire? What good could ever come of that? If he returned to life, resumed his tests, perfected his reagent – what then? Where would we go from there, we two immortals?
"What was it all for?" I asked him under my breath. I expected no answer, and received none.
"Put that gun to use," he had said. He had offered me that as one of my options. I deliberately took my hand out of my pocket when I felt it brush against the grip of that weapon. I could do it. But did I have the strength to condemn him, even so?
Only in self-defense, I resolved, and then repeated it aloud to reinforce my convictions, trusting that West remained catatonic.
Some seconds elapsed in relative silence, and I resumed staring at our equipment, wondering what I was meant to feel about any of this. But then I heard a peculiar thickening in the sound of West's respiration. His breath was louder, harsher, coming more rapidly, and to my ear it seemed apparent there was fluid in his lungs. Small wonder, I thought – but shuddered to ponder precisely what fluid it might be. Nothing so conventional as phlegm, I was certain.
I looked over to him to assess whether there was anything I could do, and saw he had apparently returned to himself. His head was bowed, and one hand gripped the bench in front of him.
"West," I began, "do you need -"
His cane clattered to the floor. He braced the other hand on the bench. He remained there for some time, shaking, his every breath a sound like a failing vacuum pump. I turned to retrieve a sedative I had covertly acquired alongside the reaction components. I did not know how it would affect West in this state, but if it at least slowed whatever metabolism he might be said to possess -
But a horrific scraping made me turn back to him before I could reach it. He had shoved off from the bench and stood now, however unsteadily, on his own. His head was still lowered, his chin nearly touching his chest, so that I could not see his face.
"You ought to sit down," I said.
He stepped toward me on his good foot, then dragged the bones of his other leg across the floor after.
"West, let me at least -"
Again he stepped forward, again scraped the exposed bone against the stone floor of the laboratory. His breathing was growing faster yet, and at once all the more stertorous. He took a third step, drew a breath, and stopped.
He must be preparing for some action, I realized – and the back of my head cracked against a hard surface, halting further thought. When the pain dulled enough to allow for other sensation, I felt something hard pressed into my chest, and something cold brushing my throat. When my vision cleared, it was West I saw, his eyes wild and mad, nostrils flared, mouth contorted into a bloody grimace.
It was his knee shoved up into my ribcage, his hands fumbling about my windpipe. He spoke in a voice I would never have known for his if it had not issued from his mouth, inches from my face: "Goddamn you, Cain, why did you let me die?" I tried to gather my wits to maneuver myself from under him. He could not seem to muster the coordination to choke me, at least; those hands would not generate enough pressure. I began to raise an arm to shove him off me. But he had given up on strangulation, and instead slammed my head to the floor with great force. "Why?" He raised my head and slammed it down again. "Why?"
I was badly dazed, and believed he would soon kill me in any event. I could think of no more salient response than "My name isn't..."
West shook me by the shoulders, but then let me fall without inflicting further injury. He raised his head, though he remained with the majority of his mass – greater than it should have been – centered over me. "They came from the walls," he said some moments later, staring fixedly into the distance. "I was prepared for so many deaths. I had ways to prevent them all. But the walls – that's not what walls are for."
My skull did not seem to be broken, though it hurt tremendously. I thought of issuing West some sarcastic query – asking him whether and how I was to have stopped a legion of the undead tearing him apart and carrying him away – but I could not find the words anywhere in my rattled brains.
"I can't die," said West. "I refuse." He was taken by a fit of coughing, but when it passed he renewed the pressure of his knee into my sternum. "I categorically... refuse." He looked down at me, considering. Even if he couldn't manage to strangle me with his own hands, he could simply bring his full weight to bear on my throat and kill me that way. I knew this, and I knew he would figure it out if he hadn't yet.
Our eyes met. It was thus that I could see the precise moment the madness left him.
He straightened his glasses and carefully moved himself off of me. He was trembling worse than ever. "Clapham-Lee's reagent is inferior, as we've discussed." It was his ordinary conversational voice again, though hoarse. "And we're about to see to what extent the damage is reversible. Won't that be an interesting experiment?" He started to get up, thought better of the attempt, and simply sat on the floor beside me. "It would have been ideal to test in healthy volunteers" - the faint smirk which accompanied this reminded me of his rather liberal definition of "volunteer" - "but I suppose I'll have to suffice, under the circumstances."
I slowly sat up. He watched for a moment, then looked away from me.
"Are you all right?" he said. I did not answer, as I could hardly believe my ears in the first place. "In my right mind, I would never..." He shook his head and took a few more uneven breaths. "That would be far too traumatic a death. If I were to kill you, I promise it would be..." He looked down. "Not that way."
"Thank you," I said – meaning it for sarcasm, but realizing as the words left my lips that in some part they were genuine. I may never understand the extent of what Herbert West has done to me.
After some time, I got up. The world spun alarmingly around me as I did, but I braced myself against the wall and was able, eventually, to see in a straight line again. West did not get up, and I realized a little belatedly that this was because he had left the cane several paces behind him. I went to get it for him, though my head protested the change in altitude as I bent down to retrieve it from the floor.
While I stood thus with my back to him, West said, "Incidentally, should the change prove irreversible – or should anything else go wrong, for that matter – I shall want my brain destroyed beyond any possibility of revival. A shot or two to the head should do it. As long as the gray matter is sufficiently scrambled."
I stood frozen for some long moments. "I thought you categorically refused to die."
"Yes," West said in a low voice, "and look where that's landed me." There was a pause, and then he went on in so uncharacteristically cheerful a tone that it would never deceive me for a minute, "But this is purely hypothetical. Nothing will go wrong. Do recall, you learned from the best."
I returned the cane to him. He refused my offer of further assistance and struggled to his feet – rather, foot – alone. He coughed quite a bit, until his hand came away sticky with something the color of tar, and then spent some time rearranging his clothing. I didn't have the heart to tell him he was only distributing the black substance over his lapels.
"I trust you to do what needs doing," he said at last. "As I should have all along."
I could not speak. Eventually he offered me his hand and I shook it, which, in light of its unusual configuration, was a novel and disturbing experience.
"Also hypothetically," he said under his breath, "I might suggest you burn everything. Now – to business."
This display of gross sentiment done, we began looking about us for anything there might remain to do. And, almost as one, we both perceived a sound and turned toward its source.
It was a slow, rhythmic drip followed by a whisper as of escaping steam. There were droplets of liquid falling gently from the edge of the table nearest the spot where West had attacked me. With mounting dread I let my eyes follow the rivulet of fluid back up to where it began.
In a proper laboratory all the benches would have been fixed to the floor. This had begun as a proper laboratory, but as I accumulated more chemicals and more glassware I had brought down a number of additional tables and simply resolved to exercise great caution. When West had tackled me, my head had struck the leg of one such table before I hit the floor. The impact had jarred loose a small length of hose on top of the table.
The liquid dripping to the floor and rapidly oxidizing to uselessness was the last precursor to West's reagent. As each droplet evaporated, it took that much of our hope with it.
For some time I could not move. I felt an incredible cold take hold of my chest and throat.
West did not seem to suffer the same. "Well," he said evenly, "reattach that hose and we'll wait and see."
I did so. The gun felt heavy in my pocket.
After that last outburst, West sat down and did not get up again. Remaining upright seemed to tax his system too much, and perhaps he feared as much as I did what else might happen if he were up and about. He was quiet, though he did make idle suggestions from time to time, which reassured me he was still lucid enough. But in time even his supply of advice on the proper preparation of a formula to raise the dead ran dry. There was nothing left for me to adjust, and nothing to fuss with, and so I sat down as well - though a few arms' lengths away from him. He did not fault me for this precaution.
"I would try to pass the time with nostalgic anecdotes," he said, "asking you if you remembered this thing or that - but from everything you've written recently it's clear that you do. Your memory is in far better shape than mine."
"Did you read all of it?"
"I find your representation of me uncharitable. However, I can't attest to its accuracy either way."
"'Uncharitable?'" I echoed. "How?"
"It isn't as if I killed all those people for no reason."
"And what reason was it, West? 'Better them than me?'"
He gave me a look of bruised dignity and said, "I rest my case."His eyes went distant. "We could accomplish so much, if we were not bound by death and the fear of same. Especially brilliant minds like mine – and yours."
"Maybe so. But all those severed limbs you animated just to prove you could? The vats of spare sense organs? What did those have to do with such a noble goal?"
He frowned at me. "Proofs of concept. I can't recall, were you always such a goddamned Puritan? Without those experiments, I wouldn't have been able to return -"
"Without those experiments, Clapham-Lee would never have had any reason to kill you."
West's lips compressed to a thin line. "I see," he said. For a time I feared that in his evident anger he might lapse into madness again and renew his attacks on me, but then he shook his head. "I tried to obtain some replacement parts for myself before I got here, but they weren't fresh enough."
"The grave robberies."
He gave me an odd, wry smile. "In times of stress, one falls back on what comes naturally. Ah," he said, after a pause, "there's your nostalgic anecdote. Can you remember a time when exhumation wasn't second nature?"
I could remember.
He had said we would usher in a new era for mankind – but if the ghastly end of that expedition had been the start of anything, it was an era of terror and pain, of unthinkable perversions of nature, of nights haunted by strange footsteps and stranger shadows, cannibal creatures and headless madmen. Did I truly believe this time could end any differently?
West got up and limped carefully over to the table he had jostled earlier, where the precursor was slowly collecting in a vial, where over the course of the next day it would reach its final form. There was only a little of it – so very little. He said nothing; no more did I. He stood there a long moment in contemplation.
And at last he turned back - I had not meant for him to turn back - to the muzzle of his revolver, inches from his face. Momentarily his eyes widened, and I began to stammer some kind of apology, but then he smiled.
"Good," he said, his voice distant and hollow, "then we're on the same page."
The gun wavered in my hands. "West?"
"Let me show you something." With some difficulty he shrugged out of his coat and let it fall to the floor. He began applying much greater effort to his shirt.
I averted my eyes. "For God's sake -"
"You need to see this." He scowled and continued fumbling with his collar. "I can't... buttons," he said, the final word bursting from his mouth like the vilest of imprecations. "I could yesterday - granted, it took a few hours - but it degrades so quickly -"
Beneath the waxen pallor of the grave, he was growing flushed with frustration and, I think, shame. I looked away again. Finally I heard a tearing of fabric, and West, wheezing, said, "That will have to do."
I set the gun down - I cannot tell you why I was still holding it - and looked at West. His shirt hung open off ruined and bony shoulders, and I could see the sutures scoring much of his neck and torso, connecting tissues from any number of mismatched sources. His chest was concave. I could see his pulse clearly in five or six places.
"Weaknesses in the vascular system? Or..." I watched in horrified fascination, counting off seconds, and realized the pulses I saw were drastically out of sync. "Multiple hearts?"
"My going theory is 'both,'" said West. "I asked him once. He said, 'What difference does it make? In life you didn't even have the one.'" He shook his head. "Physiologically impossible, of course. He doesn't know what the hell he's talking about."
But Clapham-Lee clearly knew something we didn't - there was absolutely no possibility West could have survived this way in life or on his own reagent. Even if we could make enough of it for a man of his mass, even if the earlier mishaps had not ruined the whole batch - the longer I looked, the more signs I saw that this mangled body could not be saved, except by returning to the madman who had created it.
"So that's that," West said brusquely, and tried to straighten his tie where it fell over his bared chest. He was no more successful at this than in past attempts. "You see it, don't you? The gun is loaded; you know what to do."
"West, wait -"
"You do know what to do, don't you? You were the one who taught me to use the damned thing; do I have to return the favor? Very well, take up the Hippocratic Oath there and stand back a pace or two. You seemed eager enough to do it a moment ago."
But that had been before I'd had to look him in the eye. West was my friend, and my association with him had precluded my ever making any others.
"Come on," he said, "I can't do this myself." His voice dropped half an octave. "I have tried."
"If you'd come to me sooner, maybe we could have -"
"I might have, but I thought you dead. I'm pleased to find otherwise, even if it is too late. Now," he snapped, "hurry up and shoot me."
There was a sudden manic light to his features, and I wondered: was this impatience born of anger or of fear? "You say... you've 'tried.'"
"Ah. And yet here I stand. So you ask yourself, 'was there a failure of strength, or of will?' Was I physically unable to do it, or did I lack the nerve? Is that your question?" He took a shuffling step toward me and stared up into my face, his eyes blazing. "Listen to me closely. No one on this Earth hates death more than I do. I find it completely unacceptable and regard it as my personal enemy." He picked up the gun in one shaking hand. "But it's clear now that I have no alternatives." He slapped the grip down into my hand with force. "Shall we do this in a civilized fashion," he said scornfully, "or would it ease your conscience to wait until the next time I lose control and go for your throat?"
I don't remember what I said, if I said anything at all. My next memory is of a few seconds later. Herbert West's revolver - the Hippocratic Oath - hung limply from my fingers. Herbert West stood doubled over before me, coughing blood and things much worse onto the floor of my basement laboratory.
At long last, he straightened. "I told you," he said, "that if I took your life I would be reasonably merciful. Our positions are reversed, but do kindly bear that in mind." The look in his eyes was not what it had been the first time I had seen him killed. It was worse. There was terror there, but it mingled now with a sick foreknowledge. "I want this done with."
"What happens?" I asked him. I could hardly stop myself. "When it is done, what becomes of you? Where do you go?"
"If you are my friend," he said between clenched teeth, "you will not make me stand here and contemplate it." He cast a pointed look toward the Oath.
I took a breath, and I took my aim.
"One final matter," he said, "before... we part. No, keep the gun up, I'll be brief."
But he did not elaborate for some seconds. "What is it?" I said.
"I fear I may owe you an apology."
I snorted. "For making a shambles of my entire life? For populating my dreams with horrors no man should ever see? For defiling every -"
He held up a hand. "Beg pardon, you think your life is a shambles?"
I could hardly believe he would speak so flippantly at a time like this. I could hardly believe it when I heard myself respond. "West, speaking as a doctor, I don't think your present condition constitutes a life. Granted that it is exceptionally shambolic, whatever it is."
He considered this for a moment, and then shrugged his misshapen shoulders. "Fair enough. But no, I wasn't speaking of that."
"Then what?"
He took a breath, steadying himself. At last he said, "Your name. Try though I might, I can't seem to remember what it is." He closed his eyes. "I think... before I go... an introduction is in order."
I don't know which was the last thing he heard: my name, or the bark of gunfire.
At length I went upstairs and washed my hands, and returned the poker to its place by the fire. It was only then I saw that a cabinet had fallen over, and a detached human foot was struggling weakly across the carpet. West was dead, I thought, and it had the unmitigated audacity -
I emptied the gun into it. As I write this, it has finally stopped moving.
I address myself therefore to the headless corpse of Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, one last time.
What Herbert West did to you, he could not have done without me; what you did to Herbert West, I have undone. I have seen too much now to fear anything you might bring against me. I will be waiting.
