Reanimators

by Peter Rawlik

  Once we were settled, West and I began discussing options on how to deal with Erik’s condition. Initially, we thought about transplanting Erik’s head, but this direction was rejected, primarily because it did nothing to resolve the issue of Erik’s face, but also because it relied heavily on the constitution of the donor body, and the suppression of various rejection processes. If we were unable to resolve the rejection problem, it would be unlikely that we could reverse the procedure. Therefore we focused instead on transplanting significant amounts of skin and vascular tissue, primarily from reanimated donors. However, since the procedure we envisioned would require significant surgery, we quickly but crudely began to assess prospective blood donors. We assessed all of the patients, Carnby and even Lady de Chagny. Several of the patients were compatible, as was Erik’s mother. Once she learned she was compatible, it was made clear to us that she was going to be his primary blood donor.

  Our agreed-upon plan was simple; after determining compatibility, we would systematically remove Erik’s face and hands, and replace them with samples harvested from the reanimated. The rest of his body could be hidden by clothing. Unfortunately, the first part of the surgery would be the most experimental and the most painful. In order to confirm the compatibility of the reanimated donors, Erik would be subjected to three simultaneous transplants, one from each of the donors. These we would do on his lower back, and in rather large sections. It was our hope that all would be compatible, but the reality we faced was that the odds of rejection, even with the reagent acting as a suppressant, were extremely high.

  We began the first stage of surgery early one morning in one of the many bedrooms in the chateau, by intoxicating Erik with liberal amounts of brandy until he passed out. Carnby helped us strap him down to a table, while the Lady de Chagny was set up in an adjacent bed. West commented on how poorly the Lady appeared, and she simply nodded and whispered that the strain of the last several weeks had made her extremely tired. West and I both knew that tiredness could not explain away the weight loss and unhealthy pallor she had adopted in the last few days, and I suspected that the disease that was ravaging her body was progressing rapidly.

  Carefully, I removed four strips of skin from Erik’s belly, while West went off to obtain replacement strips from our donors. Each donor was color-coded Blue, Red, Green, or White, so that there would be no mistake as to the origin of any successfully transplanted tissue. Carnby acted as a go-between, bringing each strip up from West’s laboratory to me as it became available. I worked as fast as I could, suturing in tissue first from Blue, then Green, then Red, and finally White. As I tied off my last piece of silk I noticed that West had not yet returned from the catacombs to join me in evaluating the response of Erik’s body to the transplanted tissue.

  Leaving Carnby with explicit instructions, I dashed down into the catacombs and flew into West’s lab. There I found West violently pinned to the wall by the patient designated Green but whom I immediately recognized as Dewart. The soldier’s hand was wrapped around West’s throat, dragging him up against the cavern rock. Grabbing a wooden chair, I smashed it against Dewart’s remaining leg, sending the man to the floor and West sliding back to the ground.

  Brandishing the leg of the now-shattered chair like a club, I helped West up while keeping an eye on his attacker who floundered, unable to right himself with only one leg. Having some experience with such uncontrollable patients, West and I proceeded to strap Dewart down to his bed, and then gag him as well. We checked on the remaining donors, who all appeared secure, and then returned to the surgery to monitor Erik’s progress.

  After a few moments it was clear that Erik’s body was rejecting three of the samples. The flesh around the transplants had swelled up, become red and warm to the touch. Agglutination of the blood between the recipient and the donated tissue was apparent even with the reanimation agent acting to suppress rejection. Fearing a serious reaction, West crudely ripped through my sutures and threw the offending tissue into a waste bin. He cursed as he studied the last transplant area, which showed no signs of rejection. We had found a compatible donor; unfortunately our only compatible donor was August Dewart.

  West ordered Carnby to follow him, and the young scholar soon returned pale and frightened. I had a sneaking suspicion of what he had seen, but the medical procedure we were endeavoring to undertake allowed no time to coddle the meek. I took the two strips of tissue that West had carved out of Dewart and quickly sewed them into the vacancies created by the earlier rejection. As I finished, West appeared with a third strip and that was quickly installed as well.

  We waited an hour. The tension was high. Carnby knew something unseemly had just happened, but either didn’t or couldn’t understand exactly what that was. I could see he wanted to tell the Lady de Chagny something, but he remained silent. For our part, West and I periodically checked the transplant sites. While the original donation seemed to be well received, we both feared that the reanimated tissue would complicate the procedure. Fortunately for both of us, the treated tissue showed no signs of initiating an adverse reaction. Without hesitating, I began to work on removing the skin from Erik’s head while West left to obtain the replacement tissue.

  I began my incision on Erik’s chest just below the neck, and then made cuts that traveled over each shoulder heading toward his back. Then, carefully and with Carnby’s help, we lifted Erik and I connected both cuts at a spot just between his shoulders. I then sliced from the back up his neck and over the rear of the skull. With care I gripped both flaps and peeled the skin away from his body, much in the way that you would peel an orange, on occasion using my scalpel to slice through areas of difficult connecting tissue. Once I was over the shoulders and the crown of the skull, I had Carnby hold the body up as I pulled the now hoodlike mass of skin up and off of our patient. The resulting skinless apparition was monstrous to behold. Thankfully, Lady de Chagny had mercifully passed into unconsciousness before the bloody raw shape of her son’s head was ripped out of his skin.

  Moments later, West arrived with the replacement flesh, including the cartilaginous tissue we needed to construct a nose. I nodded, thankful that for once he had put medical care above experimentation. West had performed nearly the same cuts as I had, so once the nose tissue had been pinned in place it was only a matter of wrenching the new skin over the skull, centering the face into place and then trimming and suturing it at strategic places to take up slack. The whole procedure took less than an hour, after which we took a moment to admire our work. Erik’s new face was not particularly handsome, but it was a vast improvement over his own. He was still bald, but at least now he had a nose, although this last feature was rather large and flat. Combined with the mustache and beard that had belonged to Dewart, Erik looked like nothing so much as an operatic Mephistopheles.

  Making sure that Erik was fully unconscious so that we could begin the next stage of the procedure, we were suddenly interrupted by a great and violent wailing, the source of which was obviously deep in the catacombs. West and I, accompanied by Carnby, dashed down the stairs to find Dewart free from his bonds and flailing about the room. Skinless from the chest up, the creature was like some ghoulish revenant come back to seek revenge on his tormentors. Furniture was thrown about the room, glass shattered, instruments flew, and as we three moved in to subdue the monster I saw it grab a slightly phosphorescent syringe, and the vial of glowing fluid that lay beside it. West and I could do nothing to stop what happened next. The syringe flew across the room like a dagger, only to lodge in Carnby’s right shoulder. The vial was thrown as well, shattering against the wall and spraying reagent across the other reanimates. Enraged and empowered either by the events or by overexposure to the reagent, the three patchwork soldiers ripped through their bonds and began to lurch violently toward us.

  Knowing full well that a disaster had been set in motion, I grabbed Carnby and ordered us all back up the stairs. West furtively grabbed his medical bag and followed us. We could h
ear the creatures thrashing about the room as we stumbled frantically away. Hearing the screams, the few nurses that were on duty came rushing into the hall. I ordered them up the stairs as well, but they paused in confusion. It was then that the door to West’s private lab burst open and the creatures began to stalk down the hall and into the ward. They were horrid visions of phosphorescent death, killing the other patients without pause or remorse. Worse were the traces of reagent that they carried with them, which seeped into the wounds of their victims, spreading the plague of arisen dead throughout the catacombs.

  Overwhelmed, and with the nurses in tow, we reached the top of the stairs and slammed the door shut, bolted it, and then lodged a large masonry statue between it and the floor. The nurses fled out the front gate into the night. Carnby fled toward our surgery, while West and I immediately began to think about how to deal with an apparent rampant reanimation problem growing underneath our feet. Our ruminations were shattered when Carnby cried out that the Lady de Chagny was not breathing.

  I sprang to her side and checked her vitals. She was cold, so very cold, with no heartbeat or pulse to be found. I cursed my eyes. The Lady de Chagny had not passed out at the sight of her son’s surgery; she had succumbed to her cancer. I shook my head, indicating that she had been dead too long, and that there was nothing conventional that could be done to save her.

  West and I exchanged knowing glances, which Carnby caught. Never before had I seen such a look of resigned terror on a man’s face. Helman Carnby knew what we planned on doing and knew that there was nothing he could do to stop us. Resigned, he slunk out of the room and left us to our own devices. What we did next needed to be done; it is what the Lady de Chagny had asked us to do, and it is what she would have wanted us to do. Erik’s surgery went well, and in the end the skin transplants on his face and hands healed quickly and his recovery was rapid. He suffered a bout of melancholy over the loss of his mother, but he had been prepared for that event and overcame that tragedy as well.

  As for the things beneath the house, we only ever opened the door once and then only briefly to add one last victim of our reanimation reagent to those who roamed below. Only Carnby, West and I knew the truth of what had happened that night, and we all agreed to keep the truth from Erik, believing that the less he knew the better. We foolishly hoped that the catacombs would have contained their horrid secret, but it was not to be. As we tended to Erik in our snowbound fortress, the moaning that had leaked out from the great door slowly ceased. We all suspected the worst, but all of us refused to open the door and venture below. Our suspicions were confirmed when word reached us from the nearby village. War-crazed soldiers had pillaged the local towns, attacking and killing residents without mercy. Inevitably, one of these madmen was captured and hanged for his crimes. When the body with its broken neck refused to cease moving, there was talk of necromancy and the superstitious peasantry quickly consigned the undying thing to a raging bonfire.

  The winter held horrors for those in the trenches as well. Reports of diseased soldiers carrying out ghoulish acts on both sides of the lines were rampant and added fuel to the vile rumors of the German Kadaververwertungsanstalt or corpse-rendering works. Likewise frequent were the reports that echoed those of the Angels of Mons, of a spectral lady in white with red gloves, who would roam the field of war singing the most beautiful of operatic arias. Many of the French officers, older men who had spent some part of their youth in Paris, swore they recognized not only the melodies and lyrics, but even the haunting voice. Troops seduced by her siren song and longing to embrace her ghostly beauty walked out into the no man’s land between the trenches, and were never seen again.

  In March the thaw was such that the four of us packed up what things we could and made our way to Paris by horse and cart. Carnby took what portions of the library he dared, and I know that West absconded with The Pretorius Commentary on the Journals of Victor Frankenstein. Erik took his viol, a tintype of his mother, as well as several volumes of music and librettos, but left the vast majority of his life behind. Once in Paris we met with the managers of the Paris Opera, and with the aid of letters from his mother he obtained a position in the orchestra under an assumed name. West and I returned to the front and served and experimented until the powers called an end to hostilities. Carnby took passage to the United States and returned to California to study with his brother. I heard that many years later, something untoward had occurred between the two and both were lost when their Oakland house caught fire.

  Over the years, I corresponded with Erik. He was perhaps one of our greatest scientific achievements, and I longed to follow his progress. He quickly became something of a minor celebrity, renowned for his music, his baritone voice and wicked appearance, all of which allowed him to be cast in various productions concerning supernatural forces throughout 1918 and 1919. His last letter to me was dated from 1920, after his return from a tour of European capitals in which he performed as the Devil who travels to Tblisi in Georgia and challenges a young farm hand to a musical duel. Sadly, the tour had seemed to take a toll on the young man. He had lost his voice, and the skin on his hands and face seemed to have aged dramatically in just a few weeks. He wondered if, after all these years, he could be undergoing a rejection of the transplanted tissue. I wrote back suggesting a course of treatment and the possibility of my coming to examine him personally. I never heard from him again, and my inquiries at the opera house were ignored as well. Still, I treasure the review Erik had sent me from his London performance.

  While some would suggest that the production currently on stage at the London Opera House caters to the less refined tastes of the populace, this critic finds the performance of Erich Zann to be a significant contribution to modern operatic endeavors. Zann’s performance as the Devil is complemented not only by his physical appearance but also by his nearly divine singing. Moreover, his voice is complemented, perhaps even surpassed, by his technique in playing the viol. So magnificent is his bowing style that it is my humble opinion that those most magnificently delicate hands must have been a gift from God himself, or perhaps stolen from some fallen angel of music.

  Chapter 20.

  THE RETURN OF CAIN AND WEST

  By late 1922 I had buried myself in my practice and my long-term experiment of inoculating a portion of my patients with the prophylactic version of the reagent. Any concerns I had about Daniel Cain who had begun a small and seedy practice across town had faded, and I was free to worry about the more mundane things in my life. My partnership with young Dr. Randolph White, who had replaced the traitorous Dr. Wilson, was stable and genial, and I visited his office in Kingsport a little more than weekly. I had full confidence that Dr. White had become and would remain a fine and upstanding community physician.

  In the closing days of the year, young White called to inform me that one of our patients, the writer Randolph Carter, had suffered some kind of seizure during the Christmas holiday and was being moved from the meager facilities in Kingsport to St. Mary’s in Arkham. As his physician, I was of course concerned for his well-being, but more importantly Carter was one of my many experimental subjects and as such he should have been resistant to physical trauma and disease. I could not help but wonder what had triggered his sudden illness.

  At the hospital Carter seemed physically healthy. He responded to stimuli and his vital signs were adequate, though slightly suppressed. His mental state, however, was of greater concern, for he seemed not only distracted but nervous as well. He seemed overwhelmingly relieved that he had been transferred to Arkham and out of Kingsport. At the mere mention of that seaside town which he had apparently spent a few days in, his respiration and heart rate would suddenly increase, his skin would become clammy, and his limbs would become uncontrollably frenetic. I soon concluded that whatever had happened to the man was not physical in nature, but rather psychic. Something in Kingsport had affected Carter in a most horrendous fashion.

  Knowing that Carter was a writer of
weird and fantastic fiction, I suggested to the staff that a pen and notebook be placed by his bed. Given access to such tools, he might just find a way to exorcise whatever demons he had allowed to possess him. Oddly, my suggestion was met with some resistance. Several of the staff recalled Carter’s tale “The Attic Window” that had appeared more than a year earlier in a magazine called Whispers, and the furor that it had generated amongst certain vocal critics who had called for its censorship. Thankfully these silly milksops were overruled by more senior hospital staff and Carter was allowed the tools of his trade.

  This course of therapy seemed to accomplish its goal, for within a day the man had filled the notebook with the observations and occurrences that he had made and witnessed while in Kingsport and seemed much improved by the process. By the end of the week I declared him healthy enough to leave the hospital and oversaw his transfer to the ancestral Carter manse that sprawled southwest of Arkham. I made several visits to Carter while he recuperated and soon concluded that the rambling old house, with its overgrown gardens and dark wooded acres with the accompanying isolation, while familiar, may not have been conducive to his full recovery. Carter had always shunned the wealth he had been born into, preferring to live a more bohemian lifestyle that was more appropriate to his image as a writer. I suggested that it would behoove him to move to an area more in keeping with his needs. Somewhere he could be with more people that might understand the ennui that seemed to be gripping his soul. He agreed, and by the end of February he had packed a small bag and set off for the bustling city that was New York. The change of locale seemed to do him good, for although he complained about the lack of work and money, his writing seemed to flourish and I read with much gusto the draft stories and poems he routinely sent me.