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First of the Immortals - 2. An Epiphany
Characters: Narrator, West
Word count: ~3000
Warnings: Violence.
Notes: I totally forgot to post this. Hi. It's the end of February and I am backdating this mightily. I gotta get back on the horror horse. The horrorse? Point is, yeah, more to come.
The next three days continued in like fashion. West kept me confined in his home and subjected me to constant questions and tests - of sensory function, of reflexes, and perhaps more than anything else, tests of my patience. And at night he insisted, for his own peace of mind, that I must be shut up in the dark storeroom with its crypt-like silence. It was this part of the experience I found most unbearable. My dreams grew more lurid with each passing night, and as each day furnished no new material for my unconscious mind to mull over, their subject was always and only Herbert West, my friend and my jailer. He lurked in every corner, watching me and smiling to himself, and I knew, as one knows in dreams, that he was plotting against me some unfathomable ill.
But daylight came and showed the real Herbert West absent any evident malice toward my person - only rather irritating and, even four days after the fact, insufferably smug.
Thus, on the fifth day after my resurrection and desperately desirous for a change of scenery, I made him an appeal. “West, would you say my recovery has been proceeding apace?”
He looked up briefly from the newspaper, from which he had discarded unread every section but the obituaries. “I’ve no complaints.”
“Then I wish to propose a next step in the rehabilitation process.”
“Do you want an egg?” he said, and pushed his plate toward me. I had noted that in the days since my death he had been much more consistent about eating breakfast than at any prior time in our acquaintance. Even if it was for the purely practical purpose of making my life hell, I could not help looking on the change favorably.
And in truth the offer of something to supplement days of dry toast almost distracted me from my purpose, but I resolved to stand firm in the face of anything short of a half-pound of bacon. “I’d like to go outside this afternoon. A brief walk only, but I feel I’m up to the challenge of an uncontrolled environment.”
The newspaper crackled and almost tore between West’s hands. “You’re certain of that?”
“Even you get out sometimes, albeit mainly to steal new subjects. Is it so unfathomable that I’ve been feeling a bit cramped?”
“We still don’t know why you died in the first place. Too much exertion could -”
“Is it your intention I should return to assisting you in the laboratory someday? Or did you revive me just to be ornamental?”
My tone was perhaps harsher than advisable, given West’s customary reaction to any display of temper. But after a moment he sighed and put the newspaper down, and I saw that the gamble had been successful. “I shall have to go with you and supervise.”
“I assumed.”
“And bring a supply of the reagent, should anything happen to you. Although -” And for a moment I saw an unusual expression cross his features, one of intense distaste and dismay.
“Although?” I prompted him.
“Never mind. Eat the damned egg; it was overcooked in any case.”
West showed a subtly mounting anxiety over the course of the morning, and filled a large valise with all manner of medical paraphernalia for which, in the brief walk I proposed, I could conceive absolutely no use. He shot me looks of tight-lipped disapproval when he thought I was not looking.
“I don’t suppose you can be dissuaded,” he said around noon.
“I’m not going to escape.”
“Of course you’re not; where else would you go? That is not and was never the source of my…” I thought of supplying a word for him, but everything that came to mind he would have taken as a profound insult. I nearly did it anyway. “Misgivings,” he said at last.
“Have faith in your reagent, if nothing else.”
“Faith,” he said loftily, “is for imbeciles.” But he did not elaborate on what his misgivings might be, and I maintained that I would not abandon my plan unless he did, and so at three o’clock I had my first breath of fresh air since the day I died. Herbert West, scowling and nervous, was never more than half a step behind.
He had never supplied me any calendar date for my death or revival, despite my occasional queries. But when I emerged into the light, I knew. It was late August or early September - what I had always considered Arkham’s most genial season, with the worst of the heat beginning to bleed off and the days still long and sweet. West preferred October, one of the few windows of time wherein it was neither too hot to preserve a corpse nor too cold to break ground, and wherein the nights came early enough to conceal such distasteful deeds as our work required - but my concerns were perhaps less pragmatic than his. This had been a mild summer even at its peak, and so the grass was a deeper green than July often leaves it and the trees all arrayed in lush foliage. Birds sang above, but lazily, the territorial wars of spring behind them and the scarcity of winter some time off yet. Even the potter’s field - visible from here as from any place West and I would ever have chosen to live - even it was fresh and beautiful to my eyes.
“I should like to walk down to the stream,” I announced, knowing West would disapprove of any movement made without such a declaration of intent.
Even thus forewarned, he made sounds of indignation and announced, “I’m against it, professionally speaking.”
I pantomimed writing his objection down in a little book like the one he carried, and to the stream we went. A very minor tributary to the Miskatonic, it ran quite low at this time of year, but still possessed enough animation in its play over the rocky bed to put forth a refreshing chatter. My spirits lifted to see and to hear it, and for quite some time I halted in my perambulations simply to stand and watch it in its wooded course.
“Has something happened?” said West, off to my left. His tone was some hybrid of attempted sarcasm and real concern. “Shall I note ‘strange fascination with running water’ as a side effect, as in some Old World superstitions? You do realize this stream has been here all along, I’m sure. You could’ve gazed rapturously on it at any time.”
“But I never did.”
“Precisely. Why start now?” I did not look at him, but heard him shifting uneasily on the grass at my side. “Let’s go back in.”
“No, not yet.” I breathed deep of the warm air. It smelled of dirt, mostly, and of the previous year’s leaf mold - but even that was marvelous after my confinement. “What’s got you so nervous?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all. I think it rather beneath your dignity to go about impersonating a bloodhound, but if that is your sincere wish…” Evidently unable to come up with a suitably dire end to the sentence, he trailed off into sour silence.
I paid him little heed. It was true I had not often looked on this land in sunlight. I had been too consumed with our research, or else I had been sleeping fitfully through the day in preparation for the clandestine endeavors of the night to come. My death was not the first time West and I had spent days without venturing outside. I had never paid any heed to the simple beauty surrounding us. Then I had died.
If West had not injected me with the reagent, I would never have seen any of this again. I would never again have heard the avian babble I’d always taken for granted, nor trampled grass under my feet, nor felt the breeze on the back of my neck. All of this, if not for West, should have been lost to me forever. It was a fine day and clear, and one that I had very nearly never lived to see.
“West,” I said - and how had I not marveled, any of the countless times I had done it before, that I had the power of speech and the facilities to hear it? That I had reason, and will, and life? How had I gone about my days with so little care for the rarity and fragility of my existence? My voice came out hushed and strangely choked, and that, too, astounded me. That, too, was a marvel. “You have my gratitude.”
“What,” he said snidely, “only now?”
“I’m sorry.” I shook my head. “I couldn’t understand then exactly how much you had done.”
When I turned to him, his eyes went wide and he took a step back, horror at the sight of me written over every inch of his aspect. “Stop that at once.”
“West -”
“I mean it. I - I shall - I’ll just stand over there and avert my eyes. Yes. That’s what I’ll do. So - for God’s sake, man, pull yourself together.” He pointed to a spot about five feet distant and quickly made good on his word by retreating there, folding his arms, and staring decidedly at a tree.
I found myself smiling wryly even as I struggled to blink the offending moisture from my eyes. “‘For God’s sake?’ I think you mean for yours.”
“A figure of speech, as you know. I’ve as little regard for any god or gods as -”
“I owe you a further apology.”
Though I could see him only in profile at this point, I noted that West raised his eyebrows and nearly looked toward me again before stopping himself. “Go on.”
“Any doubts I have ever had about your work - its principles, its ethics, the less conventional aspects of its conduct - I must admit now that they were wrong.” I looked up at the blue expanse overhead. “Death is … such a vast and incomprehensible thing. Any means to the end of conquering it must be justified.” I felt the sun on my face, and it was miraculous.
“Of course I’m very pleased you’ve come around,” said West, his voice taut with obvious discomfort, “but if you could extend your gratitude to curtailing this disgustingly sentimental spectacle, I would be much obliged.”
“Sentimental? You’ve given me the world back, and you think this is -”
“Yes. It is. And quite enough excitement for one day; we are going back inside. Now. Come along.”
I followed him back to the house without further objection. This incredible stiffness in his demeanor, which suddenly inspired in me some mixture of amusement and pity, did not ease until we were safely enclosed by four walls and he was assured I would not start weeping at the unassuming majesty of a volumetric flask.
I saw West’s face, distorted. There was a shimmer in the air between us that rendered his features indistinct and slightly out of proportion, and in this light the quality of his expression shifted from one grotesque parody of humanity to another. Behind his head stretched out a blue swath of afternoon sky, decorated here and there by scraps of cloud, and it was some time before I understood why this troubled me. It gave the impression that West was looking down at me, or I up at him. In reality I stood a good five inches taller than him and had, in our undergraduate days, occasionally put laboratory glasswares on shelves he could not reach simply to be a nuisance. I had lacked then my current reservations against angering him - or perhaps what was truly lacking was an understanding of what he was.
Perhaps I was lying down. That would account for the apparent reversal of our heights. This was not, after all, so very different from what I had seen when I had first awakened from death. I felt fully as cold now as I had then, and the odd sensation of weightlessness was familiar to me as well. But on that occasion my eyes had adjusted after a time; now the image of West refused to coalesce into anything firm but remained an abstraction in shifting colors.
In some time staring at him I received the impression that his mouth was moving, though I could not hear a word. I thought I should ask him to speak louder, but it was some time before the muscles of my face heeded my instruction. And when my mouth opened, I wished they had taken longer still. For as soon as I did, water poured into my mouth - water so cold it made my teeth ache, water moving so strongly and rapidly it had entered my lungs before I knew a thing, and I could not close my mouth again. I began to thrash about and attempted to raise my head clear of the torrent, but my progress was arrested by a pressure on my shoulders. Above me, Herbert West slowly shook his head.
Water continued to flood my nose and mouth. I would not last long this way. I made another desperate attempt to rise, and this time succeeded. My head broke the plane of water between me and West, and as I coughed and struggled for air I heard him say, in disinterested tones, “That’s quite enough of that.”
In my panicked flailing and spluttering I nonetheless apprehended a terrible fact: it was his hands on my shoulders. As he leaned forward to bear me down beneath the surface again, he said, “You’d better not remember this, even if the reagent works.” I struggled, but he was stronger than he had any right to be, and lying as I was on the bottom of a stream I did not have the leverage to resist him long. “Come now,” he said in the last moments before my strength failed, “you mustn’t take this so personally. You’ll be back soon enough.”
The water closed over me again. My vision began to blur and gray, and as water replaced air in my lungs a strange languor came over me. I went still, and let the images I had seen in the few seconds I had been above the surface fill my mind. How odd, I recall thinking, that he should choose to drown me in the same place we’d gone walking that afternoon.
I woke in the darkness of the storeroom, shivering uncontrollably despite the relative warmth of my prison. A dream; it had all been a dream; I assured myself of this repeatedly, both in my mind and aloud.
And yet - if not for fear I would remember some sinister incident on the banks of the stream, why had West been so set against my going out?
Of course, many things seem conceivable in the midnight hours which morning light exposes as ridiculous, and my conviction that West had murdered and reanimated me in secret was one such. West was a cold-blooded creature, certainly, bordering on the reptilian, but I had only known him to kill for one of two reasons. The first was self-defense, which was clearly not in play; the second was the prospect of some scientific gain. I could fathom no profit to him in killing me.
“You look unwell,” he said when he unlocked the door.
“Perhaps I’m anemic,” I said dryly.
“Yesterday’s exertion may have overwhelmed your system,” he said. “We don’t yet know much about the effects of this final formulation.”
“I doubt that. If anything, earlier subjects only became the stronger for having -”
“But the final formulation,” West insisted, “is different. Come along.” He all but dragged me to the kitchen, where he forced upon me a plate of eggs slightly less scorched than on the day previous, pulled out his notebook, and subjected me to the longest and most intensive questioning yet. It was under this examination that I finally admitted to a slight difficulty with sleeping, though naturally I held back the particulars.
“I wonder,” said West. “That creature in Sefton Asylum…” He trailed off, staring thoughtfully into the middle distance with a look of displeasure.
“Halsey?”
West’s eyes came back into focus, and I was sorry to be on the receiving end. “I was certain I told you never to speak that name. Its owner is dead, and the story ends there. Do you want us discovered? Especially in your current state - the moralistic outcry from such undeveloped intellects -”
I held up a placatory hand. “What about the creature in the Asylum? I profess complete ignorance of all things concerning its origins or disposition, or any uncanny resemblance to persons thought deceased.”
West scowled and did not immediately resume the thread of his prior discourse. But at last he said, “I’ve been unable to inquire about it much without arousing suspicion - but all evidence is that it never sleeps at all. That effect may be attenuated with the current formulation, but perhaps some impurity still remains.”
What I said next was partly in jest, but the greater part was this: as soon as the words occurred to me, I knew I needed to know how West would react to them. And so I said, with all the gallows nonchalance I could muster, “Perhaps you can make some refinements and wait until the next time I die.”
There was a long silence. West did not grow pale or evince any other sign of surprise, remorse, or fear. After a time, however, his bearing took on a character of moral offense. “I don’t find that amusing,” he said at last.
I could not have imagined a more inconclusive result had I tried. But it had been only a dream, after all. There was little enough sense trying to falsify in the real world what had only sprung from my own mind; and clearly the image of my only friend on Earth staring down as he methodically drowned me in the stream was purest phantasy.