Reanimators

by Peter Rawlik

  He ordered me to keep the truck running, and strangely, despite my fears, I was inclined to obey without question. I watched in the mirror as five figures clambered out of the back of the truck and slowly staggered toward the entryway. A sixth man, a large repellent brute with a bluish tinge to his face, came forward and helped guide Clapham-Lee from the truck and along the flagstone path. It dawned on me then that Clapham-Lee, for all his bravado, might, as the result of some wartime accident, suffer from some measure of vision loss, or even complete blindness.

  The body of silent men pounded demandingly on the door, and did so at regular intervals until finally they gained the attention of the attendants who, just as I had been trained to respond to calls in the middle of the night, did what they had been trained to do and opened the door to receive a new patient. After all, who in their right mind would attempt to break into an asylum for the criminally insane? There was a skirmish at the door, but whatever resistance was offered was quickly withdrawn and the company of seven men entered Sefton Asylum in silence.

  I cannot personally speak of what happened inside those walls. I would learn later that a man with a military demeanor carrying an immense black bag had demanded that the cannibalistic thing that had terrorized Arkham sixteen years earlier be turned over to his custody. The men in charge flatly refused such a ridiculous demand. Apparently expecting such a response, the commanding figure raised his hand and precipitated a riotous attack that killed four and left the others beaten, bitten and fleeing for their lives. By the time help could be summoned, the intruders and the monster they had sought to liberate were gone.

  For my part, I can only speak to what I personally saw. Seven men left the truck I was driving, and twenty minutes later, eight figures including Clapham-Lee returned. At the Major’s direction we left the asylum at a brisk rate which continued as we moved further south. After nearly an hour on several rough roads, we carefully merged onto a paved by-way somewhere near Lynn. We drove until we came to a small farmhouse that had obviously been abandoned. As we rumbled down the track of frozen earth, the barn opened and Clapham-Lee directed me to drive inside. As the doors slid shut I caught the first hint of the sun rising up over a hill to the east. Inside the barn, my passengers once more disembarked, and Clapham-Lee suggested that I stay in the truck and get some sleep. The concept seemed repugnant to me and I balked at the suggestion. The Major was insistent, though, and in the strange sourceless voice he ordered me to stay seated and sleep. I seemed bound to do what this man told me, and I settled back and soon drifted off.

  When I once more returned to consciousness night had fallen. Indeed, according to my watch I had slept for more than twenty hours. In the passenger seat was an apple, a bottle of milk and explicit instructions on how I should attend to certain bodily functions. I followed these instructions to the letter and then returned to consume the apple and the milk, standing outside of the truck as I had been instructed.

  At a little before the eleventh hour Clapham-Lee appeared and ordered me back into the truck. I complied and soon after the hulking brute appeared and guided the Major to the passenger door where he fumbled with the handle before climbing inside. I immediately noticed that the Major’s black bag was not present, but instead in his hand he clasped a piece of paper bearing my name, which he shoved clumsily in my direction. As I opened it, I noticed that Clapham-Lee’s men were loading a large box, about two feet square and four feet long, into the truck. After they had finished, they climbed up through the door and closed it behind them. Clapham-Lee gestured crudely at the open barn door and without further urging I started the truck and drove back to the main road.

  The piece of paper with my name also bore directions that led us into Boston, and then into one of the more venerable neighborhoods that bordered what appeared to be one of the older and more historical burying grounds that permeated the city. As directed by the note, I carefully pulled up in front of the given address and kept the motor running. My human cargo unloaded themselves and the curious wooden crate, and then as before the great blue-cast brute came forward to help Clapham-Lee. As the Major stumbled from the truck, he fumbled in his pocket and once more produced a note bearing my name. I snatched it from his waving hand and tore it open, desperate to read its contents and have this nightmare of servitude finished with.

  The message was simple and clear. I was, as I had hoped, finished. My only remaining task was to return to Arkham and secrete the truck back into the warehouse. As the passenger door to the cab slammed shut I turned to watch in the mirror, to make sure that the two men were clear before I began moving. Clapham-Lee was clearly having more trouble than previously, and was leaning heavily on his servant for support. The icy conditions of the road and walkway may have had some influence on the situation, and with what happened next.

  Leaving the street, the brute cautiously helped the Major onto the sidewalk before taking a single broad step himself. That step proved too great, and coupled with the ice, the brute slid forward, bowling into Clapham-Lee’s legs and knocking the straight-laced Major to the ground. In the light of the streetlamp I watched as the Major landed firmly on his back, knocking his hat off and letting it bounce and then roll back into the street. It was not until the hat arced and wobbled that the horror of the scene was fully realized, for the hat as it came to a stop suddenly broke in two. It took me a moment to understand what I had seen, and to recognize what it meant. Mere seconds later I was speeding down the street, barreling through Boston and onto the road that led north back to Arkham, urged on by fear nearly untempered by any sense of control.

  I followed directions explicitly and returned the truck to its warehouse, securing the door behind me before walking the few blocks back to my home. Never before had I been so grateful to be back in my own home and my own bed, and although my sleep was haunted by what I saw in the streetlight that fateful evening, I swore to myself that it had merely been a trick of the light. Even the next day when the papers reported that Dr. Herbert West had disappeared from his Boston address that was but a single number away from that given to me by Clapham-Lee, I maintained my denial of what my eyes had seen.

  It was a year later, in the spring of 1922, that I finally succumbed to the truth. A member of the District Attorney’s office in Arkham called me and asked me to act as a consultant on a case. Out of some sense of civic duty I agreed before I even knew what the case was. Had I known I was to aid in the evaluation of the mental health of Dr. Daniel Cain, I would have refused outright. Not only out of a need for my own self-preservation, but also out of my own feelings for the man. I had never made my enmity for West and Cain public, and this it seems was the problem.

  Following West’s disappearance, the Boston authorities had kept Cain in various states of incarceration for more than a year. At one point, just a few months earlier, he had been incarcerated in a mental hospital, and while there he had undergone several doses of drugs which had resulted in a long and rambling narrative spanning the highlights of West and Cain’s medical experiments, including several confessions that served to incriminate the two doctors. Cain’s lawyer had the document suppressed, as releasing it would violate medical privilege. The Boston authorities had no evidence of a crime, and had no desire to expend the funds to prove one had occurred. Cain was simply insane, and had been transferred to Arkham for treatment.

  As I had once been familiar with Cain, we both attended Miskatonic, the District Attorney assumed that I would be more than capable of evaluating his current mental state, as compared to that of years ago. I attempted to dissuade them from using me for such a task, but was assured that based on my handling of the Peaslee case I was more than qualified for the task.

  Cain’s confession, a virtual autobiography of the horrors he and West had committed over the years, revealed too much of the past. It detailed their early experiments, their failure with Dr. Halsey and again with John Robinson and scores of other unnamed victims. But as I read on, a slow creeping horror
reached out to drag me back to that night in Boston. For it was clear from Cain’s writing that Major Clapham-Lee had died in the war. He had been decapitated and then both parts had been reanimated by West’s perverse sensibilities. That the head and body of the Major had been destroyed in a volley of German artillery was never proven, and would seem now to be in doubt. For even though he had seen little in the attack that had shattered the basement wall and carried West away, he had seen enough: The body of a man dressed as a Canadian major, a body with no head, the same thing I had glimpsed in the lamplight on the street when my master had stumbled and fallen, allowing the false wax head to bounce away and into the street where the tires of the truck crushed it like a paper carton.

  It took me weeks, but I managed to convince the authorities that Cain had made the whole story up, that it was a drug-induced hallucination, and that the man should be released. I could see no other way to resolve the situation. He came to see me afterwards, just once. I asked him what had really become of the wooden crate that had been delivered that terrible night, the one he claimed to have burned in the furnace. He shrugged, opened his mouth to speak, but never said a word.

  I thought that would be the last of it, but a few weeks later the postman brought a thick envelope bearing Cain’s name and a return address on the other side of Arkham. He has started his own practice amongst the poor and uneducated Italian and Polish immigrants who either don’t know or don’t care about the scandals of his past. The contents of the envelope, pages upon pages of handwritten notes, were a manuscript of sorts, a missing chapter from his confession in which Cain and West seem to actually do some good with their experiments. I suppose somehow or another Cain felt he owed me something. I just wished he would find it in his heart to leave me alone.

  Chapter 19.

  THE MASQUERADE IN EXILE

  Note

  The following document was recovered by Federal agents from the home of Dr. Stuart Hartwell while he was in custody for events that resulted in the apparent deaths of several of his patients. It was in an envelope bearing the return address of Dr. Daniel Cain and the handwriting matches that on file for Dr. Cain. It is included here as the contents have some bearing on the validity of Hartwell’s confession.

  —Hadrian Vargr, Special Agent in Charge

  Much has been written of the Great War, and indeed I have set forth my own accounts of my exploits in the trenches with my constant companion and fellow Dr. Herbert West. But I have until now refrained from writing of one of our adventures out of respect for those who were involved. Yet, this day the paper brings notice of disaster in the Antarctic and with it the sure death of the polar explorer the Comte de Chagny. The report states that he died heirless, just short of his seventieth birthday, and that his title will transfer to his nephew Emille Belloq. No mention is made of his wife and son who vanished so many years ago at the height of the war. Strange how the papers have such short memories, but I suppose that the war did its best to wipe clean the memories of newsmen either through death or simple overload of information. Still, as I appear to be the last living participant in those strange events, I see no reason why I should not convey the tale, and let the truth be known.

  Dr. Herbert West and I came to fight in the Great War in service to the Canadian forces not as soldiers but as medical personnel, and I must admit we did not volunteer wholly out of a willingness to serve our Hippocratic Oaths. No, our motives also included a desire, an unwholesome need, to have unfettered access to a supply of both the freshly dead and the dying. With such specimens and in such quantities we could further our experiments into the science of reanimation and perhaps, given our skills as researchers and some luck, we might have found the key to resolving the problem of death itself. If only we had realized the truth of how deluded we were. That war is no place for men of science, that war devours not just truth and innocence but rational thought as well. We came to the war hoping to find the cure to one of man’s greatest flaws. Instead the war corrupted us and we inevitably sunk into depravity, finding dark joy in carrying out the most twisted and amoral procedures on the mortally wounded committed to our supposed medical care. None were safe from our predations, for we experimented on allies and enemies alike, of all ranks from the lowliest private to the most highly decorated officers. Even those who knew of our secret tests were not immune from our machinations. West and I hardly hesitated from experimenting on our commanding officer and colleague Major Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee when his plane crashed during a battle in Flanders in March of 1915.

  This is not to say that West and I did no good upon the field of battle. I particularly remember the Battle of the Somme, which raged from July through November of 1916 near Belloy-en Santerre. This prolonged engagement brought me wounded from around the world, including a trio of Legionnaires. Though I could do nothing to save the poet Alan Seeger from his mortal wounds, I was able to do better by his comrades Randolph Carter and Etienne-Laurent de Marigny. After several weeks of care and with the capture of the Ancre River, conditions in the war-torn countryside and of my patients were sufficient to ship the two and others to Bayonne for recuperation. Both West and I had grown weary of the frontline, and when the opportunity came to rotate to a field hospital several miles back we eagerly volunteered.

  The Chateau d’Erlette was a small manor whose master had volunteered it as a staging area for injured troops to be taken to for stabilization before being moved to more competent facilities further away. Our liaison was a young American with a pale appearance and wild hair named Helman Carnby, who explained as he drove us to the house that his mistress was the wife of a well-respected member of the aristocracy who was serving overseas in some undisclosed capacity. The war had not been kind to the landscape. The roads had been turned into paired ruts of mud and filth bordered by running mounds of debris. The refuse of years of human conflict littered the barren frozen fields of fire. Denuded trees stood like reapers, skeletal sentinels watching over the few emaciated cattle that still roamed the once-lush farmlands. There was no other animal life to speak of, save for the two horses pulling the cart. The war, hunger and disease had taken their toll. What animals had survived the battles and the need to feed its soldiers had fled to less unhealthy places. Over all of this dismal landscape hung the vilest of stenches, an unhealthy blending of rot, gun smoke and the strange metallic scent of bitter deadly cold; a miasma that would have sickened weaker men, but one West and I had grown used to.

  The chateau was built on a squalid grey hill overlooking fields of crop stubble and clods of frozen earth. The building itself was originally of medieval French architecture, all gothic arches and flying buttresses, but it had long since become a chimera of features including heaped renaissance ornaments and baroque symmetrical facades that had long ago cracked and fallen into disrepair. In the barren hellish countryside of war-torn France, the Chateau d’Erlette was just another horror to inflict on the already shell-shocked populace and the men who had come to make war on their land.

  The interior of the house was as bleak as the exterior, lit by meager oil lamps that did little but turn the deep shadows a murky grey. Only the massive fireplace with a roaring fire provided any real light and heat. Without invitation both West and I gravitated toward the comforting blaze while Carnby went to fetch his mistress. It didn’t take long before West was browsing through the various accoutrements of the room.

  “Daniel, these books, this library, there are things here that not even Miskatonic has.” I wandered over to where West was perusing the shelves that lined the walls. It was a fascinating collection of volumes highlighted by the most wonderfully dark titles, some of which puzzled me.

  “West, I thought I had read all of the works of the Marquis de Sade, but these: Los Reliques, La Cure de Prato, and this Tancrede, I’ve never heard of these.”

  West nodded and pulled down a strange, green, leather-bound volume.

  “This is an original copy of Cultes de Goules, written in 1665 by t
he Comte d’Erlette. Most of these were burned during the revolution. I’ve been trying to see the University copy for years.” Just then my colleague audibly gasped, and I watched as he carefully replaced the precious Cultes de Goules and lifted out another folio, this one heavily beaten and stained. “I thought this was a myth: The Pretorius Commentary on the Journals of Victor Frankenstein.” He clutched the book with two hands, unable to look away from the cover, like a bird caught in the gaze of a snake.

  “If you prefer, Dr. West, you can study that volume while you are here.” The voice was angelic, full of music and poetry, but controlled. There was a trace of an accent, something Scandinavian, but the diction was perfect. We two turned to face the source and did encounter such a vision that both of us were stunned into silence. Our hostess was an older woman of substance and grace. Her iron-grey hair and firm figure were accented by an air of self-assurance and pride. When she moved, she glided across the floor, and not a hair on her head fell out of place. Had it not been for my medically trained eye, I would have thought her in her mid-forties, but certain lines around the eyes and spots on her hands suggested that she might be into her fifth decade of life.

  West stepped forward to greet the charming woman. “Lady d’Erlette, I presume. You honor us with your hospitality.”

  I went to make my own greeting, but was quickly silenced by our hostess. “I am sorry, Dr. West, but the House of d’Erlette is all but extinct, at least in France, put down by the crown and the people one too many times to survive. Though I hear there may be surviving members in the Americas. These lands are now held in trust by the family of my husband, the Comte de Chagny; you may address me as Lady de Chagny.”