by Peter Rawlik
Chapter 2.
A REBIRTH IN ICE
My quest for vengeance festered like an infection, tolerable at first—the wound need only be scratched to bring relief—but as time wore on, it was inevitable that more drastic responses were required to bring comfort. It is not often that a doctor must conceal the motivations which guide his decisions on how to manage his life and career, yet that was the position I found myself in. My medical degree obtained and the plague burned out, I found myself courted by the most prestigious of hospitals throughout the country, including Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. I was even offered a partnership in a practice located in the distant and exotic locale of Key West. To the chagrin of my colleagues and mentors I eschewed all of these offers, and instead set up a small general practice in the family home, renovating what was once a butcher shop into receiving and examination rooms and even a small surgery. As I was something of an accomplished carpenter, most of the renovations were made by my own hand, and thus in a matter of weeks I was easily able to conceal the presence of both the basement and sub-basement, the existence of which was my primary reason for staying in my horror-haunted family home.
For all public appearances, I was a simple town doctor, but in the secret chambers beneath my offices, I plotted against the man who had murdered my parents. It was true that the Arkham Terror, the plague-demon that had brought death to Arkham, was locked away in Sefton Asylum, but towards this malformed creature I felt no malice, for my vitriol was directed at the man who had created that poor beast. Though none but I had made the connection, I knew without doubt that it had been Herbert West and his companion Daniel Cain that had stolen the body of Dr. Halsey from the receiving vault of Christchurch Cemetery, and it was these two that had so shockingly murdered the night watchman who had must have disturbed them in their foul exploits. West and Cain had formed queer ideas about the nature of life, and of death, and their theories had allowed them to develop some biochemical process by which they could reanimate the recently dead. The reanimated and demented Halsey was obviously the horrid result of one of their gruesome experiments. That the two madmen had been attacked by the creature was justly deserved, for their creation had gone forth and terrorized the city, over two nights slaughtering and partially devouring sixteen innocent victims, including my own parents in the very house I called home. In the basement of my family home I plotted vengeance, maintaining a sort of covert surveillance of West and his sycophantic companion, all the while constructing a laboratory in which I could understand the process that West had invented.
The first task I undertook was to isolate and then reproduce the process by which reanimation was achieved. I initiated my investigation by first examining samples I had ready access to, namely the blood and tissue samples I had gathered from the walls and floor of my kitchen, the remnants of my shooting of the reanimated Halsey. I had collected and stored these samples, not with any forethought, but rather in accord with the cold methodical processes used by trained medical researchers. The skills I had learned at Miskatonic University had developed into reflexes that automatically recognized the value of such samples regardless of the horror with which they were associated. Thus I had an adequate supply of samples to at least begin my studies of the strange compounds that coursed through the blood and tissues of Dr. Halsey.
Being cautious and rationing my supply, I was able to discover that the samples all contained high concentrations of a compound that I was able to identify quite easily. Derived from a byproduct of the Leblanc process for the manufacture of alkali salts, the chemical whose name and formula I shall, for obvious reasons, not reveal, was relatively easy to synthesize. Chemical experimentation showed remarkable properties, similar to some qualities of both dimethyl sulfoxide and hemocyanin, the principal component found in the blood of mollusks and arthropods. Readily bonding, transferring and becoming saturated with oxygen, the compound revealed itself to be chemiluminescent, producing a strong blue-green glow visible even in daylight.
It was not until early December of 1905 that I began to experiment on animals. Initially I had thought to breed and use rabbits, but while their procreation rates were sufficient, their size and dietary needs quickly eliminated them as test subjects. After much consideration I settled on the ubiquitous laboratory rat which I could breed quickly, feed kitchen waste, and if need be handle with a single hand. In the sub-basement I built separate cages for both experimental animals and breeding stock. My breeders consisted of ten females and three males, which I routinely culled and replaced with their own progeny. In this manner I made sure that my animals were as homogenous as possible.
As I expected, my first few experiments were qualified disasters. The discovery of what dosage was required to elicit a response was a matter of trial and error. Too little reagent and there would be no reaction, or the reaction would be limited to the tissues immediately surrounding the injection site. Too much reagent and the subject would suffer uncontrollable seizures as all the nerves in the body seemed to react simultaneously. These reanimated rats were inherently violent and voracious, and refused to eat anything but live prey, and the cannibalism of live rats was carried out without pause. Strangely, these monsters would not ever attack one of their own reanimated kin, even when all other sources of sustenance were denied.
Yet through all this hardship, through tedious nights of failure and limited success, not to mention numerous rat bites, I slowly discovered the secrets of the reagent and soon had developed a procedure by which the bodies of recently dead rats could be effectively reanimated. Moreover, I was able to incorporate certain steps that prevented the animals from turning violent. However, as these were simply animals, I had no manner in which to discern whether or not any higher functions were retained. Thus I was forced to begin studies on the social behavior of both normal and reanimated rats. In this I discovered a marked variation, for out of every twenty rats that I successfully reanimated only one seemed capable of being reabsorbed by the general population. The others would cluster together with their own kind, and eventually develop a sort of malaise. Their food and water intake would decrease and eventually cease, and they would simply expire from a combination of starvation and dehydration.
It was on the basis of their behavior that I began to classify the various states of the rats in my basement. Those that had returned as violent uncontrollable monsters I called revenants, while those that returned but slowly lost the will to live earned the title morbids. Those rats that reanimated and successfully reintegrated into the warren, I called the risen. From all three classes I learned much. While morbids would die from starvation within weeks, revenants could linger for months before their systems would collapse. Similarly, morbids suffered from death like any normal rat, while revenants would only cease functioning if a significant portion of the brain or upper spinal column were destroyed; this however was not without complication, for on occasion the body of the monstrous little beasts would continue to function even after the head was severed from the body. Such revelations propelled my studies forward and as my knowledge grew so did my desire for revenge.
While my skills at using the reagent grew, an ability to reproduce West’s reagent and his results was not the only course of action in my vengeful plot. At least once a week I would take the morning train for the short trip from Arkham to the nearby mill town of Bolton where West and Cain had established their practice. I would spend the day in the potter’s field that was so conveniently located next to their residence and offices. From a concealed position I would observe the comings and goings of both my quarry and their patients. When it came to securing their home and laboratory, Cain and West were careless, and often failed to lock their front door. This presented an opportunity I could not resist, and one November evening I hit upon the most brilliant of strategies. I waited for West and Cain to make their usual error and then cautiously entered through the unlocked door. I made my way to the kitchen and carefully searched through the drawers until I found a ring
of spare keys. It took only moments to locate one that fit the back door, and even less time to slip it off the ring and into my pocket. Then with great care I made my way into their secret basement laboratory, where careful not to disturb anything, I proceeded to carry out several tasks. First, I took minute samples of any new versions of the reagent that West had developed; this was relatively easy as he would methodically label each minor modification with a letter, while major advancements warranted a new Roman numeral. After securing sufficient samples, I would then systematically contaminate the remainder, assuring that any results obtained from its usage would be wholly irreproducible. Finally, I would scour the contents of West’s experimental journal, learning what I could from his successes and failures.
With the key in hand, I gained the ability to enter the home of my dreaded enemy, and to learn the most marvelous of things about him. In this way I discovered West’s weakness, for despite his genius, he had made a fatal miscalculation when he decided to forego experiments on animals to work exclusively on men. For where I could easily carry out thirty or forty experiments a week, West could only use those bodies which readily availed themselves. Thus, while West had more experience with how humans responded to the reagent, I had achieved greater success with my rats; West had only succeeded in using his reagent to create the human equivalent of my revenants, yet he had never produced a human risen, nor even the equivalent of a morbid. At this revelation my mind snapped, all pretense of caution was cast aside as my head whipped back and my cackling laughter filled the air. As I made my way through the woods towards Bolton I continued to chuckle and my laughter only grew louder as I walked down the long road toward Arkham.
In February of 1906 I came to the realization that I had learned all I could from the rats. I resigned myself to the fact that if I were to continue my march towards vengeance, my experiments needed to progress from animals to men. It was a realization that shook me to the core, for it bore with it the implication that I must become involved in an event that would serendipitously bring a recently deceased body into my possession, or manufacture some such event. Thankfully, I was spared the need to engineer any macabre accidents, for I soon found myself surrounded by the dead and the dying.
February was bitterly cold, with sleet falling from the sky in sheets for three days straight, leaving the sidewalks and roads nearly impassable, covered in thick glittering sheets of ice. Arkham came to a near standstill, with even the postal service foregoing their daily rounds. The only people foolhardy enough to brave the frigid air and the frozen landscape were those with no worries or fears. Thus the winter streets of Arkham became filled with children: children on skates, children with sleds, children building snow men and snow forts. In retrospect the accident was inevitable, for while children filled the streets, the public servants, policemen and the like had shunned the temperatures and stayed close to their warming fires. So when the municipal trucks and their loads of salt left the garage, there was no one there to tell the children. When municipal truck number seven reached the top of the hill, there was no one there to clear the children. When municipal truck number seven, driven by Virgil Potter, began to roll down the hill, there was no one to warn the children. And when municipal truck number seven began to slip on the ice, and Virgil Potter turned the wheel, municipal truck seven lurched sideways first to the left, and then to right, no one on the street below was there to hear it and alert the children. Potter swore as the front left tire clipped the sidewalk, but no one heard that either. It was only when municipal truck number seven turned on its side, tossing Virgil Potter into the street, and dumping its load of salt onto the road in a crashing wave of glittering rock, only then did anyone, meaning the children, react.
Virgil Potter rode the wave of salt down the street screaming in fear and pain. The salt swallowed up the road in front of it like a wave on the beach. Before it children scattered like seagulls, jumping to the sidewalk or into yards and even up trees or light poles. It was young Sally Moore who they say stumbled on her scarf and then tripped, taking down with her three others, including one of my neighbors, the eldest Peaslee boy. They were swallowed by the salt, devoured, chewed and smothered by it.
I was on the street in seconds, for I and everyone else on the block had heard the truck overturn. Moreover, there was the screaming, that high-pitched mournful sound that was coming from Virgil Potter as he clutched his severed leg in his arms. I yelled for one of the unscathed children to run to St. Mary’s for an ambulance and I saw three boys take flight like the devil himself was after them. Reaching Potter, I ripped the scarf from around his neck and tied the wool garment tight around his leg to stay the flow of blood. His screaming was unbearable and as he turned towards me to beg for help I cold-cocked him across the chin, sending him instantly into unconsciousness. It was as I began to drag Potter that I saw little Sally’s boot sticking up out of the salt. I grabbed that tiny foot with two hands and in a supreme effort pulled the tiny girl out of her pebbly tomb. Crystals caked her face and packed her nose. Clearing her mouth, I immediately determined that the young child was not breathing. Cradling the girl’s head I carefully carried her from the street and into my offices. Laying her on an exam table, I began application of the Silvester Method, alternatively lifting her arms above her head and then compressing them against the chest. Sadly, several minutes of this activity produced no results, and I collapsed in a combination of exhaustion, frustration and despair.
As I sat there listening to the siren of the approaching ambulance, I was suddenly conscious of the opportunity that had presented itself. Rising with a jolt, I dashed down to the basement and quickly prepared a syringe of reagent, basing the dosage on an estimate of the girl’s weight. Climbing the stairs, I carried the syringe before me as if it were the fabled philosopher’s stone itself. Pulling back the girl’s hair and sweater, I adeptly inserted the needle into the base of the skull and penetrated the deeper tissue. In a second action I depressed the plunger and injected the glowing green fluid into her brain.
I fell back into a chair and rolled backwards into the wall. Through the window I could see the events transpiring outside. The first ambulance crew was loading Virgil Potter and his severed leg into the back of their vehicle, while a second crew was busy excavating poor Sally Moore’s lost companions from the salt that was still slowly spreading down the street. Tears welled up in my eyes as I watched the rescuers drag body after small body out of the debris. Even from a distance I could see that only a handful of the other children had survived the accident, and once more I collapsed back into my chair.
It was then that I noticed that changes had taken place in the formerly cold dead body of Sally Moore. As I watched, her eyelids snapped open and her eyes darted back and forth. I watched her pupils dilate, and then her back arched and her mouth opened, and from it issued forth a soul-shattering scream that rivaled that of Virgil Potter. She convulsed wildly, thrashing her arms and legs about and knocking me to the floor, shattering cabinets and raining glass down upon both of us. As she sat up her mouth opened wide, wider than I thought possible, and then the air was filled with acidic fluid and partially digested food as she vomited forth the contents of her stomach. The stench of bile and other bodily fluids permeated the room and I retreated backwards across the floor.
She spun herself sideways, finding the edge of the table which she grasped firmly with both hands. Her eyes continued their frantic motions, but I somehow felt that they were no longer uncontrolled, but rather purposeful, for the look that had taken over her face was not one of madness but rather of fear and confusion. Before I could act, young Sally Moore bolted from the room and out the front door, leaving me stunned in silence. It was nearly twenty minutes before I rose up from the floor and methodically began cleaning up the shattered glass and other evidence of Sally Moore’s violent reanimation. In the middle of sweeping up, the events of the last hour suddenly caught up with me and I let loose a resounding exclamation of joyful accomplis
hment.
Over the course of the next week I kept tabs on the girl, making sure I caught sight of her at least once each day. Her mother and father doted on the child as well as her two siblings, an older brother and a younger sister, and all seemed unaware of any change in their Sally. The only family member that seemed disturbed by the risen child was the family cat, which hissed incessantly at the girl. Besides this one problem I quickly came to believe that my first attempt at human reanimation had been a resounding success.
Eight days later my joy turned to dread as a representative of the city’s police department disturbed my evening repast. Earlier that evening, the officer related, a child had gone missing; now normally the police would not involve themselves so early, but given that temperatures were expected to drop well below freezing the local constable was convinced that immediate action was required. I had not been out of the house all day, and consequently had seen no children, which I readily told the officer. He thanked me for my time and bade me a good evening. I retired shortly after that, but my sleep was restless, for endless worrying possibilities nagged at my mind. I woke with the dawn and dressed quickly, determined to check on young Sally’s welfare.
I had not even left my own yard before all doubts were removed. The missing child sat on the sidewalk in front of my house. She must have arrived sometime after the police officer had left. She was frozen there; crystals had formed in her hair and a small icicle hung from her nose. She was obviously frozen to the ground and there was no doubt in my mind that she was dead. I had made a critical error; I had let an experiment begin and end in uncontrolled conditions, and as a consequence had leapt to a tragically incorrect conclusion. It was true that I had successfully reanimated Sally Moore, but I had no reference data with which to understand her life prior to her death; thus when I saw her with her family, I assumed that she had successfully reintegrated, that she was the human equivalent of a risen. Now I knew better, for the frozen child who sat before me was indeed Sally Moore who had returned from the dead not as a risen but as a morbid. Like all morbids, Sally had succumbed to an organic malaise, and in the end she did the only thing that made any sense to her melancholy mind. Unable to function with her family she returned to the last place that seemed to matter to her, the place where she had died. The place she now sat frozen, staring accusingly at my home and laboratory, the place where I had robbed her of that death, and dragged her back into a perverse imitation of that life.