First of the Immortals - 1. An Awakening

[shinon]

Fandom: Herbert West - Reanimator (H.P. Lovecraft)
Characters: Narrator, West
Word count: ~3000
Warnings: Eventually there will be violence and death
Notes: I was like "how can I make an AU that ends even more horribly than Sine Qua Non" and here we are. This story is also meant eventually to fill the "Mind Games" square for Gen Prompt Bingo. You might ask, if you'd looked at my card, "why 'mind games' when you also have the prompts 'horror' and 'resurrection' available," and then I'd tell you oh trust me I have other things in mind for those squares

A cold hand peeled back my eyelids. A cold voice said, "Anyone at home?"

My eyes were dry and unfocused, and it was some time before the blobby shapes on my retina congealed into any recognizable image. The power of speech took even longer to return. I felt as though my mouth had been stuffed with cotton. "West?" I said at last.

"Ah. Excellent." For it was Herbert West leaning over me. "You will no doubt be pleased to hear that your respiration and heart rate are completely normal. Blood pressure remains a little low, but as you've successfully regained consciousness I see no cause for concern as yet. How does it feel?"

All sensation remained muffled as yet. By racking my brains I was eventually able to come up with an answer: "Cold."

West's fingers were still pinning my eyes open. He blinked so seldom in the normal course of life that perhaps he could not conceive that this would inconvenience me. It was beginning to hurt. "Unsurprising. You'll warm up soon enough. Meanwhile, do you want a blanket? Coffee? Are you experiencing any paresthesias? Are you hungry?"

"One thing at a time," I said.

West frowned slightly, and his enthusiasm lost some of its sharp edge. "I suppose," he said, as though this were a great concession. He finally took his hand away from my eyes, and when my immediate reaction was to squeeze them shut he reacted with sincere alarm. "Don't you dare go to sleep."

"Why not?" I opened them again, now they felt slightly less gritty. "Has something happened to me?"

One corner of West's mouth twitched and then drew outward, exposing a glint of enamel - but no more; he put a stop to the expression before it had time to become a smile. "In a word, yes."

"And in more than one word?"

"We'll get to that in time," he said. "Aside from 'cold,' how are you?"

I took stock of my situation. "Something feels... unfamiliar. I can't remember..."

"Chest pain? Light-headedness? Unusual perceptions?"

"No, yes, and I don't know." I swallowed and considered my current position. "Am I to gather I lost consciousness in the laboratory?"

"Precisely that. Perhaps you're working too hard. You needn't try to keep up with me, you know, particularly if it so overtaxes your nerves."

"Are you concerned," I said, not yet having regained the presence of mind to stop myself, "or are you insulting me?"

"Why, are those my only options?"

I did not answer, instead beginning an ultimately futile struggle to sit up. My body seemed weak and uncoordinated, or else held down by something of weight.

"No, no," said West, "that won't do," and threw a heavy blanket over me.

"Not like you to play nursemaid, West."

"I have only the one assistant. You are most incredibly useful to me." That odd spasm twisted his lips again, and again he suppressed it. "A man may protect his own interests without being accused of untoward sentiment."

"Of course he may," I said in mock placatory tones. I reached up to arrange the blanket into a more suitable configuration. But my hand was stopped mere inches above the cot on which I lay. I lowered it again and, on a second attempt to raise it, encountered the same resistance and a muted clanking. I pulled up with greater force; my reward was a cry of alarm from West and the feeling of metal biting into my wrist. When a similar trial showed comparable restraint of my other arm, I began to panic. I could not move my feet at all.

Finally West's sensible monotone interposed itself over my fearful shouting: "You had to be restrained to ensure you wouldn't hurt yourself - surely you understand that? Whatever popular novels may say to the contrary, a syncopal episode is no laughing matter. You have no history of such fits. How was I to anticipate whether it would devolve into convulsions?"

His face was not as calm as his words, but surely the circumstance at hand accounted for that. I was valuable to him, and he had cause to believe I had been in danger. Lapses in rationality were of course forgivable. "Did it?"

"No," he said, "I'm pleased to report you were quite peaceful."

"Then surely" - I rattled the chains fastening me to my place - "you can remove these."

"That, I fear, would be a trifle premature. You're still disoriented, confused, and..." West raised his eyebrows. "Uncharacteristically aggressive."

"I am not -"

"You shouted at me. Hardly appropriate laboratory protocol. No, the restraints stay on until I'm certain you're stable. Terribly sorry." He was not sorry at all.

I sighed and sat back. "What was the nature of my collapse, then?" I asked him. "Is there reason to think it will happen again?"

"Hard to say. You should rest, regardless."

I frowned at him. "I know that, thank you. But to the best of my knowledge, I was in good health, as I have been all my life. If something has changed -"

"Don't concern yourself unduly. I'm taking care of it."

"West," I said, beginning to feel irritated, "perhaps you treat your patients this way - though I hope to God you don't - but as a friend and a fellow doctor I feel entitled to a little more information."

"Your collapse was idiopathic -"

"So at the very least tell me what causes you can rule out." He said nothing. I drew breath and began marshaling stronger terms to use against him, but then made myself damp down my ire lest he have cause to believe me, of all things, uncharacteristically aggressive. Besides which, speaking any more forcefully might have done damage to my dry throat. For all his apparent concern on my wakening, he still had not gotten me anything to eat or drink. "Did you administer any treatment, or have I come out of it on my own?"

His mouth twitched. He struggled, and then failed, to bring the offending muscles under control once more. He clamped a hand over his face, to conceal if he could not repress the offending expression. "Pardon me," he said, the sound somewhat muffled by his fingers, "I am simply overcome with relief to find you well." And a sound escaped him then that I found so incongruous that it took me a moment to identify. Herbert West was laughing like a child.

I wanted to believe it was no more than he said. I was no longer so naive.

"West," I said.

He took a moment to collect himself. "What a pity," he murmured as he lowered his hand. His expression was a trifle less crazed by now, though if he believed he was in full control, he was mistaken. "I had always imagined that when this day came I would be more dignified. I suppose I failed to account for the involuntary physical reaction to… to…"

As my returning consciousness grew stronger and more coherent, I was certain. I could think of only one thing that would provoke such intense emotion in him, and that was not my well-being. "The reagent."

"The reagent and a strong sedative, yes."

"I didn't collapse," I said. I felt a numbness in my extremities; my thought was stunned; the words came out thick and slow and distorted as if my face had been paralyzed. "I died, didn't I?"

"Strictly speaking, you did both. One rather led to the other, you know," said West, with another odd little laugh. "Difficult for a corpse to remain standing unaided."

"How…?"

"How did you die? That, I've yet to discover. I wasn't lying; it was quite sudden and, you were correct to note, you had always been a hale and hearty specimen until two days ago -"

"Two days?"

"The sedative, remember. No need to take unnecessary chances." It was then I saw the revolver resting on the endtable at his elbow. I did not have to struggle against my restraints to know it would be well outside the maximum radius that I could reach from here.

My heart - a heart that had recently been bloodless and still - began hammering. When I closed my eyes I could see the pulse of the tiny vessels in my eyelids. The sounds of my circulation, my lungs, all the processes of a body that should have been in the grave, threatened to drown out reason.

But they did not drown out West. "If we cannot determine what went wrong in time, and the same fault prompts another collapse, well. As you yourself can attest, there is little reason to be concerned. I shall simply bring you back and try again. It would be best if you avoided any heavy exertion for the time being, of course. But never fear, I will be monitoring you very closely for any signs of failure."

My eyes fell on the gun again. West seemed galled by my silence, perhaps expecting a teary outpouring of gratitude, and finally followed my gaze. When he realized what I was looking at instead of him, he sighed enormously and pushed the end table out of my line of sight. "What the devil is wrong with you," he said, "that you can't be happy for me for five minutes?"

---

He lingered, of course, for much longer than five minutes. By taking stock of the amount of light coming through the windows high above me, I surmised that he stayed by my side throughout the afternoon and well into the night. I was not given the questionable luxury of contemplating my current position and ultimate fate in all this time, as West kept up a monotonous chatter for the duration. This consisted in the main of the most egregious self-congratulation, though he stopped at regular intervals to ask me the same set of questions concerning my health and jot my answers down in a little book. Before long I was answering these monosyllabically and by rote.

"Ah, but now," he said, several hours after dark, "is there anything you would like to ask me?"

"Do you ever sleep?"

"In the face of such exciting developments, I'm sure I couldn't, and I'm surprised you can even think of it." But his expression had all at once grown calm, and he leaned in close to me, staring into my face not as if there were another human being behind it but as if it were an interesting mineral sample or - perhaps more aptly to West's interests - a dead bird. "Growing testy now, are we?"

"I will confess a certain impatience."

He sat back and made a note. "That took you long enough."

I had been awake - alive, perhaps I should say - for at least ten hours now and had neither eaten nor drunk a thing. It is to these factors I attribute my failure to catch his meaning sooner. After some moments, incredulous, I said, "You're not saying you set out to provoke me on purpose?"

West made more notes, then flicked a bored look up at me. "Given that past trials have yielded mostly violent cannibal maniacs, I would like as many assurances as possible that the same won't become of you. Surely you would, as well." He contemplated me a full minute longer, his eyes slightly narrowed, and then said, "You can have bread, if you want it. No meat for the time being." He got up. "It happens that I'm made of meat."

"Will you unchain me?"

"Not yet."

This being the case, when he returned with bread and water, he seated himself next to my head and fed these to me by hand. The process took a deal longer than I would have liked. "You're not concerned I may bite your fingers off?" I muttered. He immediately withdrew from my reach. "Sarcasm, West."

"Hardly reassuring - any imbecile can be sarcastic. You'd do less damage to my faith in your recovery if you had bitten me."

I sighed. "Please give me the rest of the water." He stared at me warily. "If my word means anything, I will promise not to attack you."

"Of course you would."

But he gave me the water, and ultimately unchained me a few hours later when I claimed a need to use the bedpan and he - who had spent a greater proportion of his lifetime elbows-deep in corpses than most - was aghast at the idea of assisting me with the maneuver.

---

"What will you do next?"

We were eating breakfast, and I suspected this in itself was another experiment. West continued to insist I should have only bread - or rather, had said I was welcome to try meat but he would feel obliged to chain me up again after, and was alarmingly vague on the planned duration of such restraint. This morning he had at least been so generous as to let me put jam on it. He had then proceeded to pan-fry a steak and was now eating it in front of me. No doubt I was meant to notice, in case I got ideas, that he held a knife and had placed his gun on the table by his other elbow. I knew, however, that he had never used a knife as a weapon and was a poor shot with his left hand.

"How do you mean?" he said, before very deliberately carving off a piece of the steak and placing it in his mouth.

"The reagent works. You have accomplished all you meant to, and you're only -" I paused, uncertain after all of how old he was. I had assumed he was about my age, but as he always looked the same from year to year I had little evidence to support this. "Presumably a number of years remain to you."

West chuckled. "To put it mildly. The reagent works, as you say. I see no reason my years should ever come to an end at all."

The thought gave me pause: Herbert West, eternal.

But why should that be such a terrifying prospect? Surely, with death subdued, he would have no reason to continue generating such horrors for all time as he had in the past decade. That research was completed now, or nearly so. There would be no cause to fear him after his end had been achieved. "Perhaps, then, you could put an end to other illnesses or infirmities. With the danger gone, you could move on to eliminating the pain and the inconvenience -"

"No," he said, with a brusque wave of his hand, "no, that's not interesting. An unworthy use for my intellect. Assume, as we do, that I shall soon defeat mankind's greatest adversary - you suggest that afterward I should reduce myself to something so mundane?"

His scorn surprised me. "So mundane as the practice of medicine? The very thing we went to school for?"

"As far as I am concerned, medicine has been solved. I shall gladly leave issues of ordinary maintenance to whatever tinkerer wishes to take them up. I cannot concern myself with that."

"The reduction of human suffering is and has been -"

"Boring."

"- one of my major incitements to take up these experiments with you, West. I should like to know what you think is so damned much more important."

Several seconds elapsed. West's expression crystallized into the purest image of indifference. "I've yet to decide. I shall have to think about it. In the meantime" - he produced that accursed notebook from the night before - "you just swore at me. Are you conscious of any increasing disequilibrium, or is it occurring on a level you cannot perceive?"

I understood the trajectory of this question at once, and struggled to suppress my dismay. I did not wish to be chained up again. I said, "I am not going mad, I promise you." I ate my toast.

He watched me some time longer, then pocketed the notebook again and favored me with the merest ghost of a smile. "Such is my hope as well." He leaned over and patted my hand, in a motion as awkward as if he had learned it by rote memorization of Figures 1 through 3 of a monograph on friendly reassurance and the text of that monograph had been in untranslated Hungarian. "But we shall have to wait and collect more data, hm?"

He sat back and returned his attentions to the steak. It smelled delicious.

---

It was not until nightfall, over a day since my sudden awakening, that West consented to let me out of his sight. He had emptied out a locked and windowless storage room attached to the laboratory, and into this he had dragged a mattress.

"How long have you had this ready?" I asked him. He only raised his eyebrows, shoved a bucket into my hands, and locked me in.

Then I was alone.

For so long I had wondered what lay on the other side of death. Now it seemed I had been to that country and returned, and never known the difference. I lay down in the dark and pressed two fingers to my jugular vein. There was a pulse there. I counted the beats - my heart ran on as if it had never stopped.

But he assured me it had, and none of his behavior over the past day and a half made sense in any other context. I had to accept, then, that I had died, and that it had gone unnoticed by any but West. I myself had not marked it. We were, if West was telling the truth, wholly ignorant of its cause. I could remember nothing of my own demise. In a way I felt I had been cheated of something essential.

Yet despite my disquiet, I drifted eventually to sleep. In my dreams, West stood over me, watching in silence, his lips twitching, his face threatening to break into a grin of mad delight. I tried to question him, but could not speak; one of his hands held a syringe, and the other was clamped around my throat.

Morning came, and West unlocked the door. He asked how I had slept. For the first time I can recall, I lied to him.