Reanimatrix

by Pete Rawlik

  No matter how many files I read, I kept coming back to Doctor West and his colleagues. West had used the war as a source of subjects for his experiments in perfecting his own method of reanimating the dead. Like West, Cain and Clapham-Lee were graduates of Miskatonic University. There was another man, a doctor named Hartwell who had done something to soldiers as well, but the details were vague. Looking at their photographs, these men didn’t look mad, or even dangerous. Yet they were just that, not only to others, but to themselves. Major Doctor Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee had by all accounts died when his plane was shot down, but West had claimed the body from the morgue, a body which had by all accounts never been returned to Toronto for proper burial.

  This information was classified. The British knew West, Cain, and Clapham-Lee had served in their forces, but the other allies didn’t, and neither did the Central Powers. They knew that the dead had been brought back, but they didn’t know by whom or how. Strange and I intended to keep it that way and if possible put the genie back in the bottle. The other factor we had to contend with was the civilian angle. West and his followers had not confined their work to wartime. They had experimented at home, amongst unsuspecting townsfolk, and they had not been as discreet as they thought. Despite the risks, military intelligence had decided to keep the activities of these men a secret from local authorities and even other federal agencies. It was, as Meldrum Strange suggested, the only way to keep the knowledge from spreading across the world and disrupting the natural order of things.

  The next day came early, when one of the security men woke me before dawn; there was a man outside the gate who was asking to see me. I suggested that I meet him at one of the smaller rooms off the hall, but the officer shook his head. The stranger refused to come any further down the road. If I were to see him I would have to go to the gate. As reluctant as I was to leave the comfort of my bed, I dressed and allowed the officer to drive me out to the edge of the property, where the dark forest swallowed the road.

  The man waiting for me there had all the trappings of an Indian mystic, the sash and his turban, the great, bushy black beard that covered his face all suggested this, but his skin and his eyes betrayed his Western origins, as did his voice: his French was tinged with an accent that suggested he was from Brittany. “I am Sar Dubnotal, the Great Psychogogue. I come bearing a warning.”

  I lit a cigarette and invited him to come with me to the village, but he refused. “This place is a necropolis, a city of the dead. I am too sensitive to journey any closer.”

  “You are mistaken,” I told him. “The construction has just begun, there are no dead yet interred here.”

  Sar Dubnotal shook his head. “You are mistaken, sir; the dead have held sway here for centuries. The construction of the ossuary is merely a formality. You sleep in a grave for thousands.”

  I was frustrated with his mystic mumblings and vague inferences. “Your warning, sir, what is it?”

  His tone betrayed that he was equally annoyed with me. “I know what you and the others do here; the voices of the dead have told me. They say you are a good man, that you might do the right thing, and let the dead rest. There are others who do not share your sentiment. They would seek the power for themselves.”

  “Kramm and Sangre?”

  “I cannot say. The dead do not say the names of the living; it is unseemly. I beg you do what you must, prevent the spread of this madness. If you do not, our world and the next will suffer.”

  “Why didn’t you find me in Paris, tell me this there? It would have saved you the trip.”

  “Indeed,” said Sar Dubnotal, “but then it would not have been nearly as dramatic, and you would not have taken me seriously.” With that he bowed, turned, and began to walk away.

  I called after him, “Where is your car and driver?”

  As he marched, he looked back. “I need no car, Mr. Peaslee. I walked here from Paris. I shall walk back.”

  “That’s more than two hundred miles!”

  “One can always use more time to think, Mr. Peaslee. To reflect on what one has said, and what one has heard. You should try it some time.”

  I took a drag from my cigarette and watched as he disappeared beyond the first curve in the road.

  Strange was waiting for me when I returned. “Anything I should know?”

  “According to a very odd mystic the dead think I am a good man. They are counting on me to do the right thing, and let them stay dead.”

  Strange harrumphed, but whether it was at me being a good man or the dead having an opinion I didn’t know. “Anything else?”

  I nodded. “I think Ylourgne has secrets that we haven’t been told. I think there is a reason the French have decided to build the memorial here. I also suspect that Kramm and Sangre might not be our only concerns.”

  “Of whom do you have suspicions, and why?”

  “When Steadman spoke of Clapham-Lee he used the present tense. The man was supposedly killed, twice at that, but I suspect that he is still alive, or at least no longer dead. I think he might even be here in Ylourgne.”

  Meldrum stewed for a moment and then gave me instructions. “I’ll be in committee all day; we’re supposed to be drafting an accord making the use of the reanimated as soldiers a war crime. Most of the delegates should be there. Do what you can to learn more about our opponents, both those we know about and those we don’t.” With that, my massive employer left me, assured that I would carry out his orders to the best of my ability. It seemed that the dead were not the only ones who had faith in me.

  It has been my experience that if you want to go through someone’s things, it is best to make sure that your target is occupied. In this case I made sure that Kramm’s security was busy going through my room, leaving me free to go through Kramm’s apartments. I spent twenty minutes opening drawers and skimming files. In the end I learned that Kramm knew less than Strange and I. He had files on the Frankensteins which were slightly more robust than ours, but his files on West and Cain were weak, and as for the others, those files were little more than single pages. Kramm may have been the enemy, he may have had an agenda, but from what I could gather he wasn’t the player that the strange mystic had warned me about. The only thing of any interest that Kramm possessed was a photostatic copy of an ancient book written in German. While my reading of that language is satisfactory, this volume had been printed using a black letter type I was unfamiliar with, and thus could not immediately ascertain the book’s contents. I took the book, assured that neither Kramm nor his security would report it missing out of embarrassment.

  Once I was secure in the quarters I was sharing with Strange, and had assessed the covert search that Kramm’s man had done, I settled in to review the book I had taken from Kramm. Now able to peruse it leisurely, I found it to be entitled Von Unaussprechlichen Kulten and attributed to Friedrich Wilhelm Von Junzt. After only a few pages I discerned that its contents consisted of accounts of the rites, practices, and beliefs of secretive cults and unsavory orders scattered throughout the world. Von Junzt had apparently traveled the globe collecting what knowledge he could on these heretical religions, and in some cases even participating in certain ceremonies amongst those believers which still remained extant. It was a compendium of horrors detailing the most fiendish of sorceries and necromancies. So terrible were the things written and hinted at that I dare not mention them here, save for the one section of that grimoire which was most pertinent to my own tale, for there was in that hideous book an entire section on Ylourgne.

  Indeed, there were two entries for the ruined castle, which apparently had been built by a line of marauding barons who had been exterminated by the Comte des Bois d’Averoigne. The first chapter related the tale of Gaspard du Nord, a would-be wizard who did battle with a monstrous creation of his former master, the Necromancer Nathaire. In the spring of 1281 Nathaire and his ten disciples, fearing a Church-led purge against sorcery, fled Vyones for the ruins of Ylourgne. Not long after, there cam
e to the cemetery of Vyones and all the other boneyards of Averoigne a plague in which the newly buried dead, chiefly those stalwart men who had died in misadventure, would simply not stay buried. Not even the pious Cistercian monks were immune to the fiendish call. The source of this necromancy was of course Nathaire and his followers, who used the reanimated bodies to construct a titanic golem of flesh and bone with Nathaire’s face and his voice that strode across the countryside attacking peasants and nobles alike. Only through du Nord’s limited knowledge of necromancy was the creature stopped and laid to rest in a shallow grave by the River Isoile, not far from Vyones.

  The second section dealt with a legend that grew up in the area almost two centuries later. In 1476 shepherds reported that an area along the Isoile had been disturbed and great holes had been rent in the earth. Investigators sent out by the Comte confirmed that the riverbank had been disturbed, and that something large, perhaps many things, had been removed. A trail of damp clay led from the riverbank through the woods to the road. The road itself was disturbed, for whatever had traveled down its path had not been carried by horses or cart. Whatever had been moved down the road had been dragged to the ruins of Ylourgne, where even the Comte’s men dared not follow.

  There then grew up around the ruins tales of lights and noises emanating from the crumbling stones, and in the months that followed rumors of witchcraft, more specifically of a coven that drew their power from the evil that had been done at Ylourgne. Some say it was Nathaire and his disciples who had returned as a cohort of liches who haunted Ylourgne. Others suggested that this was the work of L’Universalle Aragne, the deposed Louis XI, who was still resorting to necromancy in his war against the Duke of Burgundy. Whatever the truth, by the time Von Junzt visited the area he found little evidence of occult activity. There were lights and sounds but the sources could not be discerned and Von Junzt left after a week, disappointed and as perplexed as he had been when he arrived. Though he was insistent that someone had inscribed in the ruins a quote in medieval French from Nathaire, perhaps as an epitaph:

  THEY THAT COME HERE AS MANY

  SHALL GO FORTH AS ONE

  It was the same saying that decorated the great hall, but in this context it was no longer a message of peace, but rather of the dark and twisted necromancy that had allowed Nathaire to transform hundreds of the dead into a single titanic golem of flesh, the Colossus of Ylourgne. The thought that the memorial cemetery was being built in such a place, and that the conference, a conference focused on the science of reanimation, was being held in such a place seemed too much of a coincidence for me. I stood and made for the door, fully intent on taking my suspicions to Strange, but I barely made it through the entrance. Someone was waiting for me on the other side, someone who had something large and heavy. I was knocked unconscious by a man I never even saw.

  When I finally regained my senses I was handcuffed to a chair. The room was dark except for a single bare bulb swaying back and forth from a dangling cord. It was such a cliché that even in my semiconscious state I was forced to chuckle. As I did there was movement in the dark, several forms shuffling about beyond the range of my sight.

  “Is that you, Kramm?” I managed to mumble. “Or is it Sangre? Perhaps both of you? Not that it matters. Show yourselves, or do you prefer to skulk in the dark like rats?”

  A match was struck and a flame sputtered to life, illuminating a man whose face I knew, a face with a beard accented by a fancy cravat, the British envoy, Steadman. He took a drag from his cigarette and smoke filled the air. It seemed to billow up around his head like a fog. “We are sorry, Lt. Peaslee. We hadn’t meant to be so heavy-handed, but you had obviously put some things together and put our timetable in jeopardy. We needed to remove you from the playing field before you got yourself hurt, before you could spook the enemy and put them on guard, before we could flush them out into the open.”

  “Them being Kramm and Sangre?”

  A second figure stepped out from the darkness; it was, as I suspected, Dr. Kramm. “The Austrians aren’t capable of such deviousness; with the loss of the war they have been placed in a most difficult position. They no longer have any desire to possess the reanimation technology, nor do they wish to see any other nation possess it. It is a terrible power, Lt. Peaslee, one that the Austrians fear could reshape the globe, and wrest it from European control. It is a childish fear, but one that cannot be ignored. But where are my manners, I must echo my ally’s apology for your poor treatment.”

  I stared at these two men and despite the questions running through my head I voiced only one. “Can someone please take these handcuffs off me?”

  As Kramm undid my chains, Steadman opened the curtain and let in the fiery light that roared outside. The conference village was on fire, and a long line of cars was slowly making its way out of the gates, carrying the delegates to safety.

  “Am I to understand that you blew up the conference?”

  It was Steadman who supplied the answer to my question, and many others that I was thinking. “We warned everybody anonymously first. I realize that it may be somewhat anticlimactic, even rushed, but I saw no reason to drag things out. Whatever the greater plan was for this place, whomever was behind it, this brings it to an end. It has accomplished at least one task.”

  “Which was?”

  Kramm smiled. “The players have been revealed. They have made themselves known. This in itself has changed the game. The field has been leveled.”

  The heat was getting to me. “What of the memorial, the conference, the accords?”

  Kramm’s smile turned into a chuckle. “The French can build their memorial cemetery someplace else. This place will be left as a ruin. As for the conference and the so-called Ylourgne Accord, the lesser nations have already signed it. Though for various technical reasons France, Great Britain, and the United States have refused to endorse it.”

  “Strange won’t stand for this.”

  “Meldrum Strange has been bought and paid for with what he holds most dear: information.” Steadman spewed as if the idea was bitter in his mouth. “He is not the idealist you thought, Peaslee, he is a realist. The conference is finished; despite the fact that the Ylourgne Accord has been signed, it is for all intents, pardon the word, dead, or at the best, useless.”

  My head was swimming.

  “Reanimation is the future, Peaslee,” exclaimed Richard Steadman. He took off his coat. “There will be no restrictions, and the nations of Earth will be free to pursue whatever studies in reanimation they desire.” He took off his cravat. “General Duval, Strange, Sangre, and the others like them can do what they want. And they will, and one day the undead shall outnumber the living and they shall rule the world.” Then Steadman took off the last of his disguise.

  I ran, fleeing the awful thing that Steadman had revealed. I fled toward the cars fleeing the conference. Meldrum Strange found me and took me back to Paris. I was discharged a week later. My discharge was honorable, but my nerves were destroyed; it took years of therapy before I could sleep easily. Though I will admit even now I carry certain scars from those events.

  After all these years, what Richard Steadman did still haunts me. It was a little thing really, almost nothing compared to the other things I had seen, but perhaps it was all that needed to happen to push me over the edge. Perhaps it was the fact that Strange had struck a black, unholy bargain with the man, or that Kramm stood there laughing. Regardless, when I close my eyes, I can still see that face, Steadman’s face as he took off the false beard and revealed his true face, a face that I had seen amongst Strange’s files, the face of Major Dr. Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, the decapitated man who Herbert West resurrected in Flanders. He was there standing before me, his disembodied head in his hands, and he was laughing; he and Doctor Kramm were laughing.

  And I knew that I had witnessed a new and terrible terror, and I was too weak to do anything to stop it.

  CHAPTER 4

  “The Awakening”


  From the Journal of Robert Peaslee January 8 1921

  I still recall how the snow was falling that morning; it seemed so peaceful, so calming as it floated out of the sky. In the background the mountains had turned gray and at times it was hard to tell where the Catskills ceased and the sky began. Tempest Mountain, the peak wrapped in clouds, was like a shaft leading up into unknown heavens. It was December 23, 1920, and I was stateside for the first time in years. My commanding officer, General Sternwood, had asked me and another agent, Hadrian Vargr, to spend our last few days of service with him at a Christmas retreat. It was supposed to be an honor, a reward for our service during the negotiations of the Versailles Treaty. At least that is what we were told. The truth was something entirely different.

  Sternwood and I had taken the train up from New York to Kingston and then transferred to the Ulster and Delaware line to reach Leffert’s Corners. From there, a picturesque horse and sleigh had taken us up the mountain along snow-covered trails to the resort. Kellerman’s was a picture-perfect winter getaway that brought back fond memories of my own childhood holidays. It was an opportune time for me to reunite with my sister. It had been years since I had seen Hannah, but unlike the estranged relationship between me and my father and my brother, we two had maintained a pleasant correspondence for many years. Indeed, when I learned that her graduation from The Hall School in Kingsport was imminent, I heartily regretted my oath never to set foot back in my native state. Likewise, when I learned that she had been offered, and accepted, a position as an instructor at that same venerable institution, I was doubly proud and regretful. So when General Sternwood had asked Vargr to come from Boston, escorting Senator Lowe to the resort, it was a minor request to ask him to do so for my sister as well. Vargr readily agreed, and Sternwood saw no fault in our plan. Even when the party grew by one more, a charge of my sister, my colleagues simply smiled and expanded our reservations accordingly.