shinon | First of the Immortals

Fandom: Herbert West - Reanimator (H.P. Lovecraft)
Characters: Narrator, West
Word count: ~5000
Warnings: Violence
Notes: FUCK DID I SERIOUSLY FORGET TO POST THIS FOR SEVERAL WEEKS uhhhh I really need to get better about maintaining this DW

I did not realize to what extent West had put his work on hold for me until, about a week since my awakening, he resumed it. He was hesitant as well to let me help him; he would mutter vague and ominous things about “vapors” or “inherent instability” and after an hour’s work insist I go stand apart some distance and read a book. He had a number of books now that I could not remember seeing before my death, on a variety of subjects that I knew did not interest him in any way. A majority had come from the library, but some were clearly stolen and some, in a circumstance I found confusing, appeared to be both.

“You didn’t go to all this trouble for me, did you?” I asked him. He frowned and didn’t answer. “It would’ve been more practical to invest that effort in a proper fume hood -”

“Don’t speak to me about practicality,” he snapped, “and don’t stand so close. Do you want to die?”

I took a step back, but began to wonder: had that been a well-intentioned warning, or a threat?

I did not read the books, but only watched him and tried to divine his true purpose. That he was manufacturing an enormous volume of the reagent was clear to me, but he made no accompanying effort to obtain new test subjects. Given his apparent apprehensions about the reagent’s reliability - evidenced in his treatment of me - I did not believe he was simply creating it to stockpile for the future. He had abandoned as well his side experiments with disembodied tissues in order to focus only on this. He must have some definite goal, but its nature remained opaque.

I remembered the awful images that dogged my sleep and suppressed a shudder, but I did not dare speak to him of those dreams. He would assure me they were only phantasms, or he would tell me they were not, or else he would shoot me. Each outcome I could imagine held its own horrors, and I could not will myself to face any of them.

I picked up a book: an adventure novel about Antarctica, as wholly outside the realm of West’s interests as anything I could find. He would not ask me about it, or would not attend to my answers. I sat down and held it open before me, and over the tops of the pages I watched Herbert West in his natural habitat.

Before long I was struck with a realization: he was much more efficient without me. I had thought that I followed his instructions exactly, and that he and I worked together like hand in glove. But he was capable of doing all of this alone without a word spoken, his movements finely calibrated to every task, from slicing out human and animal glands to isolating the needed extracts to maintaining all the apparatus. I wondered if I had been holding him back from greater progress. Perhaps - given the form his progress so often took - it was better that I had.

But perhaps West had realized the same thing, and this was why he wanted me dead.

I shook my head at the thought. If he wanted me dead, he could do better than to revive me each time he got what he wanted. Even if he was the better chemist of us two, I had other uses, including but not limited to rudimentary social skills and the ability to lift more than thirty pounds.

I became aware of how long I had been staring at him and, lest he become suspicious, lowered my eyes to the adventure story. I even, for a time, attempted to read it, but the harsh and icy frontier it depicted could not hold my interest more than the forbidden lands West and I had devoted our lives to charting: the black country of death itself.

I would not question him now, and dared not act against him. I needed more information.

West’s mood was unusually variable in the days that followed. I remembered this same volatility from our student days; this oscillation between smug triumph and snappish ill temper had closely followed the success or failure of his earliest trials in animals. And yet he was conducting no experiments now that I knew of, only refining the process needed to generate large volumes of reagent.

“We’ll need to make an excursion,” he said one evening. “I’m nearly out of pituitary glands. They don’t keep in this weather, not nearly as well as I would like.”

“Have you anyone in mind?” I asked him. Immediately I cringed at the infelicity of my choice of language. I had meant to ask whether he knew of a recent burial, but could now easily imagine him going on the hunt for persons in good health who would not be missed. I did not doubt the thought would furnish me with any number of unsavory dreams now it had once occurred to me.

But to my immense relief, he only slapped a shovel into my hand. “A family of five, all found dead of a fever. More than we can carry, obviously, so I’ll have to extract the brains in situ and hope for the best. Carry this, too.” He handed me a bucket of ice.

My recollection becomes confused at this point. West handed me the bucket of ice and we went outside, but after that time I cannot testify to the sequence of events. As far as I am able to reconstruct a chronology, my next memory is of the taste of soil and a dull pain blooming at the base of my skull.

I scrabbled in the dirt, I remember, finding little purchase; bits of soil and a fine gravel were driven up under my fingernails, but I lacked the strength or the leverage to get upright. It occurred to me after a moment, when the disorientation faded, that I might wish after all to stay down.

“That’s right,” said a distorted voice. A foot disturbed the dirt just to the right of my head. I strained to focus my eyes upon it: a small, sensible shoe attached to a thin trouser leg. “I don’t enjoy this any more than you do, I promise that.” The sound was impossibly warped, sliding up and down the octave with no regard for human inflection, and I seemed to hear the echo of the words before I heard the words themselves. I had suffered head trauma, clearly, which could be expected to play a certain level of mischief with my senses - but did that necessarily rule out the presence of demons in this world? Could it not be both that I had suffered a blow and that what stood over me now was a chthonic beast in human skin?

I rolled onto my back. No, I realized: what stood over me then was Herbert West with a bloody shovel. The gravel I had struggled in was chips of ice - the bucket lay upended not far from where I had fallen.

“You, at least, are spared remembering this,” said West.

“I remember the stream,” I said.

His eyes widened. There was fire in them, and fear; he had a thousand shadows; his skin was leaking a pale light. He said, “Is that so?”

I do not know what happened next. My teeth were sunk into the soil of the potter’s field, his foot was on my shoulder, and I heard the metallic whistle of air passing over a flat surface as it swung toward me from the rear. I woke in the storage room. Morning in the laboratory was business as usual.

What I found most disturbing about my dreams, before long, was my inability to distinguish them from reality. I did not know at any time whether I slept or woke. Nor did I know how much time had passed - I knew the season was turning, but I did not know how quickly, whether I had lost a few hours or days or weeks. West permitted me no contact with the outside world even now, and was not in possession of a calendar. I was afraid to ask him questions, lest he begin to suspect what I suspected. I tried for a time to monitor the phases of the moon, but I was generally in rooms without windows, and at any rate soon began to distress myself with speculation: I might well know how far into a month we were, but what was to tell me which month? Which year? West did not age, and if I spent much of this time dead, neither would I. I could not look for changes in myself to guide an estimate. Even my hair and fingernails had stopped growing; the reagent restored some life processes, clearly, but not all. It could have been any amount of time since my death, and after tormenting myself with the thought for every waking hour I eventually lost the desire to know.

The more pressing issue became this. I struggled to find something in the world that I could confirm, securing a foothold against the tidal pull of my dreams. What could I rely upon to remain unchanging? Might there be something on the premises of our home and my prison that West could not tamper with? Perhaps I could check this something each time I woke, and know if it was changed that what I saw could not be real.

But the business of trying to predict what West would do - or what he would not do - was a dangerous and uncertain one, especially now. For some days (what I believed to be days; what could have been decades) after I made this resolve, I had found no foundation to which I might affix my sanity and could only wait quietly and observe his habits, while by night I saw things that cast a shadow of sinister implication over the most mundane of his doings. Until I could find some external way to confirm my reality, I could not know what was true and what had sprung from my own mind or the reagent’s subtle actions upon the same; and even then I should never know the truth of what had occurred before I found it.

There were no mirrors in the house, I noted, and could not recall whether this had always been the case. Was it possible West had removed them so I could never examine my own body for proof of what he had wrought upon me?

From the instant this thought occurred to me, I had no more rest. I did not wish to believe he had harmed me, but I could not prove otherwise, and it seemed chillingly within the bounds of his character. Several times in the laboratory he reproved me for my evident distraction, little knowing I was trying to gain a glimpse of my reflection in the curved surface of the receiving flask, searching for signs of the violence he might or might not have done me. There should, if I were not mad, be the purpling imprint of a belt buckle pressed into my throat; there should be bruising, petechiae. In these distorted glimpses I saw nothing to confirm my fears, but likewise not enough to show them false.

The deaths I endured in that time are too varied and numerous to recount. I was stabbed, suffocated, poisoned, and choked; I was frozen to death, starved, dehydrated, stabbed again. Anything that did not destroy my internal workings beyond repair was fair game, and between West’s medical degree and his accursed reagent there was a great deal that he could repair. From each death I would awaken in the darkness and solitude of my room, soaked in perspiration, my nose and mouth filled with a vile and clinging residue that seemed to me to bear the taste of undiluted fear.

I would awake, and I would inspect myself and my surroundings for any evidence that what I had seen was true, but I could not turn on a light for fear of alerting West. In those dark hours of the morning I could not bear the thought of his presence.

There was never a mark on me, as far as I could determine - but as I have said, there were no mirrors. In my dreams, if dreams they were, he killed me in ways I would not see. I supposed too that he must inject the reagent into a vein not visible to my own scrutiny, though of course I was unable to account for that time. Still I searched each day for puncture wounds, for any bruising or soreness around likely injection sites. I continued to find nothing.

“How are you sleeping?” said West, and I did not know which West was speaking. Was he a doctor inquiring after his patient, a researcher wondering when his assistant might return to duty, or a murderer slyly probing a past and future victim for any knowledge of his crimes?

“Beg pardon?” I said, not wishing him to know the difficulty I faced. My answer must depend on his intentions in asking, but these I could not yet guess.

“You reported you were sleeping poorly. You’ve been among the living for a month; is that still the case?”

If he were my friend, or if he were truly motivated by creating the perfect remedy for death, I should answer honestly. He would, in his own fashion, try to help me. If he were my friend - but I did not want to take the risk that he was not. “No,” I told him. “I sleep about as soundly as before.”

“Dreams?”

“Nothing abnormal.”

He stared thoughtfully up into my face for some time, and I began to wonder if he would call me a liar. But he only smiled, and for the first time I could remember the expression was empty of malice or of madness. “Then we’ve done it.”

West was a paranoiac and had been so for years. The essence of science was a repeatable procedure, but the essence of not being torn apart by the undead was avoiding as far as possible any kind of regular habit. To manufacture the reagent he must have a fixed base of operations; to prevent past subjects from destroying him he must not get too comfortable there. His entire existence depended by now on a carefully calibrated balance between these opposing principles.

And yet - as I watched him for any murderous intent, as gradually he became more confident of my recovery and began to allow me some paltry freedoms - in time a pattern emerged. I cannot fairly say that he became careless, as his hours became rather more irregular than less and his comings and goings throughout the laboratory and other rooms of the house were maddeningly arbitrary, to the point of seeming without purpose. No - he was perhaps too careful. All other things were variable, but after a long period of observation I had found the one constant: there was one cabinet I had never seen him open. Having grasped this much, I soon became aware that he would never even look at it, at least not in my presence. It seemed to me that one as wary and as constitutionally restless as he was should have from time to time let his eyes fall in its direction by pure chance. This was no apathy, but a pointed omission. Whatever was within, he did not wish me to think of it.

I was certain that while I lived it had contained something mundane and unworthy of such subterfuge, but due to that very mundanity I should never be able to recall what. I began also to avoid the sight of that cabinet and its unassuming wooden door, while my mind churned over what ghastly possibility might now lie in such a small space. If it were something so precious and secret to West, surely he would have placed it in a container that could be locked - but if there were nothing evil in it, he would not behave as he did. The more care I took not to look upon or to reference it, the more my preoccupation with its contents grew, until the conviction took hold of me that if I could only open it all my questions should be answered. I should know immediately why and how, and how many times, I had died, and what West meant to accomplish with all of this. All I needed was to be free from his scrutiny long enough to see to it.

“Won’t anyone wonder what has become of our practice?” I asked him one evening at the meal that passed for breakfast, as he had never gone to bed until noon and expected me to keep the same much-disturbed sleep schedule. “I assume you had it put out that we were closing down for a time due to my illness, but hadn’t you better make some show of returning to business?”

He snorted. “You suppose we’re still going to require business after my research is done? We’ll never want for anything again.”

“Perhaps, but as I recall, the reagent confers no immunity to angry mobs.”

“It might,” he said, but then we both fell silent. I was gripped by the memory of what had become of Dean Halsey and certain reports in the papers of what it had taken to subdue him at last. West, I suspect, was thinking of the same. “Still,” he said, too briskly, “if you introduced the topic in hopes I might take up some other hobby than nagging you” - his smile was faint and supercilious - “you are in luck. Or, rather, you shall at least have a brief respite from my presence. I have been planning some further refinements to our laboratory process that will require glasswares of a very particular character. Nothing for it but to have them bespoke. Consequently, I shall be meeting with a craftsman in town tomorrow afternoon.”

“And leaving me the run of the house?” I said, incredulous.

“You must have read that blasted novel seventeen times by now.” I winced, realizing that perhaps at some point I ought to have changed out the book I was using to cover my ruminations. “And if anyone is watching the house, I expect this to confuse them terribly. Let your shadow be seen at the windows after I’m gone, but under no provocation must you answer the door.”

“You aren’t concerned I’ll rummage through your things?” I should not have said it. If the idea had not occurred to him, I should not have been the one to introduce it.

“We have few enough secrets now, haven’t we? I can’t imagine you would find it very enlightening.” He gestured idly with his fork. “Do bear in mind, if the temptation strikes, that I saved you when I could have left you to perish.”

This was my opportunity, then. When he left, all his secrets would be mine.

I was heartily disappointed to learn, the following afternoon, that “all his secrets” comprised an untidy pile of financial documents. I began to wonder if this had all been a trap. Had he meant to trick me into reading these? Should I be made to suffer for displaying any knowledge of their contents? Had he perhaps so arranged the cabinet so that he would immediately see the proof of my tampering? Maybe it was a test, and one I had failed; maybe he would use this evidence to further restrict my freedoms, or maybe he would kill me properly this time.

I could not know. But sure in any case that some threshold had been passed, I must at least try to arm myself with any knowledge I could. I must hope that my trespass was not for nothing.

After careful and prolonged examination of the evidence, I learned two things. The first was that Herbert West’s fiscal condition was a shambles; it seemed he’d had little to no income since August, at a time I suspected would coincide with my initial collapse. I could not help smiling bitterly at this revelation. When I had spoken of a return to medical practice I had meant it, just as he surmised, as a means of getting him away from me for a time, but it seemed I had chosen precisely the right concerns to fake. And today he was only racking up more expenditures. Either he had complete confidence that the reagent would make us wealthy, or he was an idiot.

The second revelation was in the nature of one of these invoices. Apparently, sometime in September, he had contracted to have a small building on the premises supplied with electricity. The house had already been powered before my death, besides which it was not small, and I had not been aware of any outbuildings.

This must be where West conducted his real experiments. The laboratory in the house had been given over entirely to synthesis for some time now, and I had given up on wondering why, my other concerns having become far too pressing. But however much we produced, he was not storing it here. And if this other building was only a warehouse for reagent, he would not need the risk or the expense of providing it with electricity.

I continued my search through the documents in hopes of finding something that would point to the building’s location; if it was of recent construction I should find evidence of that here. I thought it rather sloppy of West to leave so many crucially important documents in the same place - though in another person, and in another circumstance, this same behavior would have been sensible or even fastidious. Thus when I could find no bill or schematic for the building that should not exist, I took it to mean it had existed long before I had died - since at least the previous year, or perhaps even longer.

“Few enough secrets,” I muttered, “indeed.”

The best I could determine, from that original invoice, was an approximate distance in yards from the house proper to this secondary structure. But West returned before I could make my survey. I only scribed the number on my memory and resolved to find it the next time he went out. I assured him all had been well in his absence; he told me his errand had met with success; little more was said.

Some time later - I do not know how long - West subjected me to another round of questioning, and jotted down my answers in his book. It had been a while since the last time he had done this, though again, I cannot estimate the time more precisely than that. At the conclusion of the interview he shut the book and said, “I account myself almost entirely satisfied. You will be free of these bothersome questions soon. However.” He uncrossed his legs and stood. “There is still need for a few tests, of a rather different nature.” He began rummaging through the items atop the table beside me, and when he turned back to me with a syringe it was all I could do not to flinch away. But I saw then that it was empty. “Your arm, please; I’ll need a blood sample.”

I hesitated briefly before rolling up my sleeve. His bearing and voice were perfectly calm and professional, but knowing what his profession entailed, I could draw only so much reassurance from the fact. And he, soon thereafter, could draw only so much blood; he encountered a certain difficulty in finding a vein, as they seemed to have receded further under my skin.

“What is this?” he said mockingly. “A fear response? How childish of you. Make a fist, if you would.”

I did so, but he had been more correct than he knew, and now more than my existing concerns about Herbert West I had also to worry that my own body would betray me to him - that he would divine somehow all that I dreaded and all that I meant to do. But after a moment he leaned back, having gotten what he wanted. He regarded the syringe of my blood and gave the barrel a thoughtful flick. “That should do,” he said, and swabbed something over the puncture site inside my elbow and set the sample aside.

This done, he commenced a number of minor physical tests of coordination or reflex, pausing every few minutes to measure my vital signs, and seeming more and more pleased with each result. I thought my responses wholly unremarkable, though for some reason I could not bring to mind the normal reference ranges we had established for each parameter, and somehow I kept forgetting my own performance soon after each test was done. Regardless I felt his excitement was excessive. “Haven’t we already shown that the reagent has done its work?” I said. “That I am normal?”

He didn’t answer, only gestured as if he were about to throw something into my face, and made approving noises and noted something in his book when I recoiled and closed my eyes.

“West,” I protested, “this is all getting rather silly -”

“Silly? Do you imagine I get some amusement from this?” His tone was an attempt at lofty offended dignity, but his mouth twitched, and I could see teeth. “What is five multiplied by the square root of sixty-four?”

“Forty, but -”

“That’s very interesting.”

“Basic arithmetic is interesting?”

“No.”

“Then is it my capacity for calculations? Do you…” My mouth felt unaccountably dry, and it took longer than I wanted to summon up the words. “Are you implying that I’m stupid?”

“Not in the slightest,” he said, and once again measured my pulse and blood pressure and respiratory rate, and once again found the results oddly delightful.

“West,” I said, “I’m tired. Can we please stop this? Are you not satisfied yet?”

“We’re nearly done, I promise you,” he said; his voice held a note of ill-suppressed glee. He asked me a few more mathematics questions, which, tired as I was, I found increasingly difficult to answer. My eyelids were sinking and my limbs felt heavy, and still he kept testing me.

I felt that I should like to snap at him, save that the idea of getting angry was exhausting. It was all I could manage to plaintively mutter, “West, that’s enough. I want to go to bed.” Some removed part of me wondered at the phrase. When, since my death, had I ever wanted to go to bed? A bed no longer represented a place of peaceful repose. And strictly speaking, I had none in any case, only a mattress in a storeroom…

My thoughts wandered even further afield before West spoke again. “What did you say?”

“I said - I’m tired.” But when I listened to my own voice the words were slurred and indistinct. As if…

It was a struggle to connect one thought to the next, but…

I had not been tired at all before I had sat down for this test. This intense fatigue had come on me quite suddenly, in a manner unprecedented in my lifetime. It had begun shortly after West drew the blood sample.

I laboriously turned my weak and protesting neck so that I might look to the left. There was a long needle in my arm, in the same place West had drawn the blood from, the same place he had swabbed with - some manner of numbing agent, so that I would suspect nothing -

And the needle was attached to a thin tube, and the tube to a tank in which I must suppose he had created a vacuum, and though I had at some point lost the ability to distinguish color, I thought the dark liquid in that tank must be a striking hue.

“West.” I had not the strength for an accusation; I was amazed there was even enough vigor left to me to feel horror at my circumstances.

He sighed. “Well, don’t get excited. If your heart rate accelerates, you’ll only die all the faster. And that would play havoc with my data - I was hoping to generate an accurate trend line.”

“West,” I said, and was able to muster some strength and urgency behind my voice this time.

He sounded bored. “I fully intend to put it back afterward.”

“How much?”

“How much am I taking, or how much will I return to you? Second question first: I only need that initial sample, which as you saw was quite small. You shall have all the rest back. As to your first question” - he looked at the tank filling with my blood, then at me, then adjusted his spectacles and calmly told me - “all of it.”

“You… bastard.” With all my failing strength, I struggled to raise my right hand, to reach across my chest and tear the needle from the opposite arm. But I knew I would not succeed, and I knew this even before West leaned over and pinned me down at the shoulder, an expression approximating pity on his face.

“There’s no call to fight it. People speak of death as the eternal sleep, but for the likes of us it’s no more than a catnap.” I was beginning to slip into unconsciousness, but in the last moments before I succumbed, West leaned in even closer, his face mere inches from mine. “Unless you annoy me. I have saved you in the past, but I can just as easily withhold the favor. If any part of you remembers this next time around, do yourself the favor of going quietly.”

“Next time?” I said. He sat back, chuckling to himself. My eyes closed, and I could not will them open again.

My eyes opened. It was morning, and West was speaking to me. “I’ll be gone for three hours. Don’t do anything stupid.” He started to walk away, then returned to the doorway and said, “Don’t do anything intelligent, either. Do as little as you can help.”

I did not even try to rise for the first half-hour, afraid my muscles would still show the same weak and sluggish responses of a slow death by exsanguination. But as I lay there and collected my thoughts again, I knew: I would have to find the secret laboratory today. I could not wait until the next time he was gone.

I got up. My body functioned as it should. I stopped on my way out of the house and extracted an odd assortment of keys from the pockets of West’s spare coat. And at the appointed distance, I found a wooden trapdoor, likely a former root cellar, beneath a skeletal tree that had already surrendered the last of its leaves to the oncoming winter. I hauled it open.

At the bottom of the stair stood a door.

First of the Immortals - 3. The Rubicon