by Curran, Tim
The shocking, the unnatural, the
unbelievable horror from the shadows.
H.P. Lovecraft
There are things the human eye should look upon and others which should remain forever hidden. Grim legacies and dark, unnamable things which can destroy minds and wither souls black with their utter malignancy. And some of these things, yes, they dare to walk like men, though they are scarce fit to crawl through the noisome slime of creation’s dankest cellar.
I know of which I speak.
For in the second week of August, 1925, I met one of them. And never, ever have I been the same. In all the intervening years since, there has been no true peace for me. An unknown shape seen skulking by moonlight or a tree branch scraping at a midnight window to this day fills me with a manic, irrational sense of horror.
But in 1925, I knew nothing of these things.
I walked tall with a piercing gleam in my eyes, an innate curiosity filling me like a cup. In those days I was a reporter for the Bolton Chronicle. I had made something of a name for myself investigating the inhuman working conditions at Bolton’s textile mills, the political corruption and graft amongst the city’s selectmen. The moneyed powers that be despised me for if there was a dusty skeleton hiding in a closet, then I was the man to shake it out. And because of this, my by-line was carried not only in Arkham and Boston, but as far away as New York and Chicago. Some called me a progressive reformer and others simply called me a radical, a social terrorist.
No matter.
If you are as old as me and few are, I dare say you may recall the trouble at Christchurch Cemetery in Arkham during those dark days. For several months, graves had been opened and horribly rifled, the contents of which were found badly mutilated and strewn about the grounds come morning. At first, this was thought the work of deviants or depraved medical students, but as the facts surfaced, these explanations were abandoned. For the charnel remains found by daylight had all been viciously dismembered and half-eaten. Dogs were blamed originally, given the method of exhumation the graves appeared to have been opened not by shovel and pick, but by a furious and savage digging as of paws but even that was thrown out when the county coroner and pathologists from Miskatonic University Medical School claimed that the marks of dentition on the bones were consistent or near-consistent with those of the human mouth.
All of that, of course, was never released to the public. What with the disturbed graves and plundered tombs, there was already wild speculation concerning body-snatching witches and subterranean corpse-eaters. And this, of course, in the wake of Herbert West, a surgeon of morbid repute who had become something of a local bogeyman among the children and had been labeled as the “Arkham Ghoul” for his involvement in grave-robbing and weird experiments conducted on cadavers in his cellar.
So, as you can imagine, the police were very close to the vest about it, not wishing to fan the flames of hysteria that were already blazing out of control. I hadn’t seen such fear and heard such awful stories since the typhoid outbreak of 1905 when I was a boy.
Well, on August 10th of that forbidding year, I was allowed by the police to accompany them on a raid at Christchurch Cemetery. A Poe or Lovecraft could not have imagined a more perfectly macabre place than Christchurch by wan moonlight. There were twenty of us there in that bleak and misting tombyard, the police carried pistols and electric torches. I could barely carry myself through those sepulchral fields of lichen-encrusted marble. To all sides ancient headstones thrust from noxious vegetation, leaning crosses and high stone crypts were garlanded in dead ivy. We passed down twisting lanes blown by the previous autumn’s leaves and hopped over broken slabs webbed with creeping fungi.
Detective-sergeant Hayes of the Bolton force said to me, “Here…see that? He’s already picked up the scent of that devil!”
He was speaking of the hound we had brought with us. He was called Derby and he was large and sleek-muscled, his nose pressed forever to the yellow grasses and tangled weeds, sniffing out the trail of the thing that robbed graves. Derby led us on a wild chase through legions of tombstones and sullen monuments, some of which had been there two centuries or more. Now and again, he would pause, casting for scent, and we would stand there, shivering and stiff with tension. The wind was blowing and those great denuded oaks overhead creaked, dappled moonlight filtering through their gnarled boughs. Dead leaves scratched at vault doors and a fetid mist seeped from the moldering ground. One could almost imagine the ghost of Herbert West still plying its grisly trade.
After about twenty minutes in which it seemed Derby had led us in circles, he directed us to the wrought-iron, rusting door of a gray and weathered family mausoleum. And here he paused, howling and chasing his own tail, snapping at his handler and anyone that got near him. Something about that place was driving the animal mad…he was slavering and yipping, growling and whining.
Finally, he had to be led off, his mournful howling vanishing in the distance.
Animals, it has been said, are sensitive to things man cannot feel. But I think we were all feeling it at that moment—a gnawing and inexplicable sense of terror. For as we formed up our lines, the iron door to that leaf-blown tomb swung wide and something stepped into view.
What? you ask.
Even now, I barely have the nerve to tell you. It was almost a man and it was almost something else. An amorphous, twisted shadow that stank of black earth and fungi-draped caskets. It did not walk like a man nor like an animal exactly, but almost like some weird and lumbering insect. The police put their lights on it and it screamed with a squeaking, scratching voice like dozens of roofing nails dragged across a blackboard.
Nothing human, nothing sane, could make a sound like that.
It was a corpse. I say to you now it was an animate corpse. As it shambled down the crumbling steps of that centuried tomb, I think I cried out. It walked almost pigeon-toed, with its rawboned knees knocking together. Its upper torso was twisted sideways as if its back was contorted. It was hunched and broken, the entire left side of its body withered and blackened, burnt nearly to the skeleton beneath as if it had been in some terrible fire. Its flesh was gray and worm-holed, flapping on the bones beneath in that cemetery wind, the left side of its face cremated down to the skull. But the right side…here the flesh was swollen and putrefying, bulging with gases, a single deranged yellow staring out at us from beneath locks of greasy black hair.
One of the men passed clean out and an older detective suffered a heart attack at the sight of that thing. Three or four younger men ran off screaming. I did not blame them; I would have run myself if I had not been frozen with fear.
A nocturnal burrower, it did not like the light.
I believe it had been a man once, but now it was little better than an animal…a clawing, hissing ghoul with gouts of drool hanging from its seamed and puckered mouth. The smell that came off of it made me nauseous…a black, evil stink of spoiled meat. With the lights in its grimacing, rotting face, I saw white things squirming in its hair, the entire scalp undulating from the larva at work in there.
It came on with a strident mewling sound, reaching out to us with those grotesque and fleshless hands.
“For the life of Christ, shoot!” Hayes shouted to the men. “Put that damn thing down!”
The men needed no coaxing. Pistols were barking in trembling fists and the graveyard echoed with gunfire, the smell of cordite and burned powder displacing that other and worse odor.
Riddled with bullets, the thing fell over at our feet, twitching and bleeding a vile dark sap that was not blood as we understood it. It writhed there on the ground, completely insane and malevolent. There was no humanity left in it. I believe it would have disemboweled us with its bare hands had it reached us, that it would have yanked our entrails out in steaming coils and fed upon them with those narrow, crooked teeth. Finally, that single yellow eye glazed over and the thing went still.
For a moment, then two.
A final, shudd
ering convulsion and it vomited out its stomach contents like a dying fish. A miasmic pool of steaming filth spilled from its mouth and in the lights of the torches, we all saw what was in it: human remains. Globs and half-digested things, but five or six decayed human fingers as well.
The tiny fingers of a recently-interred child.
There is no need recounting the terror and revulsion we felt. Nor is there any reason to tell you how we burned that carcass to ash in a pit in the woods. You know now what I saw, the grisly horror that stalked Christchurch Cemetery, that thing from a grave.
*
I never spoke to another living soul about the events at Christchurch, save those in my confidence that were there that terrible night. And then only in the most guarded of whispers. None of it ever made it into my column in even the most truncated version. I was privy to the most ghastly of secrets and for once, I agreed with the town fathers that no mention of that atrocity should ever be made.
And I kept my word. Until now.
But I would be lying if I said to you that none of it excited my curiosity. For it had. The thing was dead, perhaps for the second time, and there would be no third resurrection. But that was hardly enough for me. Perhaps I should have turned away from that madness, wisely shut it away in the darkest corner of my mind, but my curiosity would not allow it. That thing was a walking cadaver and I had to know how and why.
With that in mind, it was only a matter of time before I started giving some serious thought to Herbert West, M.D, one of the most notorious and shadowy figures of old, witch-haunted Arkham. A town with more spooks in its past than Woolworth had nickels.
If you’re not entirely familiar with West, let me briefly recount the local legends that even five years after his disappearance and presumed death were still circulating through the streets. West, a particularly cold and ruthless individual, was a graduate of Miskatonic’s Medical School, where he came out in the top five percent of his class. By all accounts he was brilliant and dedicated, though somewhat ostracized in the collegiate community for his radical and aberrant views concerning the nature of death and his theories that it could be overcome artificially. West claimed that life was essentially mechanistic, and via the application of certain chemicals and arcane scientific methods, that this organic machinery could be re-activated.
In other words, West’s private research was concerned, so they said, with the reanimation of dead bodies.
Although he did indeed become a celebrated surgeon in Boston and one of no-little skill, it was in the shadows that he carried on his research which required a number of fresh corpses. He and a colleague robbed graves, bribed mortuary attendants, and, yes, even supposedly resorted to murder to gain the raw materials they so desperately needed. West even went so far as to join the Canadian Medical Corps during the Great War so that he could be assured a steady supply of corpses.
Those are the basic facts concerning Dr. Herbert West.
The tales and wild rumors take off from there. Did West actually succeed in reanimating dead tissue? In restoring life to cadavers? Depends on who you ask and what stories you listen to. It was said that he did. That he raised a number of corpses in and around Arkham and Bolton from the dead. That he achieved the same results in Flanders during the war with not only complete remains, but parts thereof. And it was one of these monstrosities that led a legion of the reanimated dead into West’s laboratory in Boston in 1921, carrying off the doctor in pieces.
An interesting footnote is this: in 1905, Dr. Allan Halsey, the dean of Miskatonic’s Medical School, perished during the outbreak of typhoid that swept the city. It was said that West and his unknown colleague stole the body and reanimated it via West’s serum. But what they reanimated was a hideous monstrosity that was no longer human, a cannibalistic monster that went on a violent murder spree through the city. The beastwhether Halsey or notwas captured and confined to the criminally insane ward at Sefton Asylum. Some sixteen years later, Halsey escaped with the aid, it was said, of the very ghouls that would later carry off West himself. You can easily dismiss this as lurid folk myth, but there’s no getting around one fact: the gray-faced, demented thing at Sefton bore an uncanny resemblance to Halsey and his body was never located.
I, as much as anyone, wanted to dismiss all of it. But in Bolton and Arkham, belief was absolute. Even Hayes and some of the other detectives whose trust I had gained told me frankly that there was more fact than fantasy in the tales of Herbert West.
And now I will admit to you my personal interest in Dr. West. You see, in 1920, in Christchurch Cemetery, the body of my sister disappeared from the family mausoleum. She had died during childbirth along with her infant son. It was a tragedy for my family and the apparent snatching of her corpse turned a tragedy into an atrocity.
You see, knowing what I knew of West, it was always my greatest fear that he had taken her body. That perhaps he had brought her back from beyond the veil of death, working a change upon her cold clay. And that perhaps in the dead of night, she might come knocking at my door.
*
For many years, the identity of Herbert West’s colleague has been a closely-kept secret of the authorities. But let me say to you now that this mysterious other was a man named Thomas Hamilton. West and he were students at Miskatonic and Hamilton participated actively with West from the very beginning to the very ending. And it was Hamilton whom the police questioned fiercely following the disappearance of West.
In the end, Dr. Hamilton was released from custody.
But, as charges of grave robbing and desecration of the dead had been levied at him, his medical license was revoked.
Making use of my police contacts and swearing an oath to never reveal pertinents of the case itself, I was allowed to visit him in his room at Sefton Asylum.
You see, Hamilton suffered a nervous collapse in the months after the bizarre vanishing of Herbert West. And if even half of what was said about West is true, it’s a wonder the man was even coherent.
But he was.
I was left alone with him in his room at Sefton and immediately I felt sorry for him. He was well-spoken, well-groomed, intelligent and kind. He didn’t seem to belong there at all. His committal had been voluntary, I was told, and he had been there some four years at that time. The only thing that gave his condition away was the slight tremble to his hands, that fixed and glassy look in his eyes.
After introducing myself, I got right to it. “You’re probably tired of this question, Dr. Hamilton, but I’m afraid I have to ask it: Did any of that really happen?”
Hamilton studied his hands, clutched them together as a tremor passed through them. “Did Herbert West reanimate the dead? Yes, he did. Any many times.”
Well, that was straight-forward enough. “What…what his ultimate goal? Was it just to see if he could or”
“At first, yes. And why not? West wanted to beat death, to prove that life was merely a machine like any other, a base process that could be halted or commenced chemically. And he succeeded, didn’t he? He succeeded too well, I’m afraid.” Hamilton wetted his lips, turning his face from me so perhaps I wouldn’t see the tick in the corner of his eye. “Certainly it was an experiment at first, a line of research West had been pursuing for years. But later? Then he became obsessed with raising a cadaver with its faculties intact. But, for the most part, he was not successful. The corpses were never fresh enough and when they were, well, many of them collapsed from shock or fright when they…woke up.”
The idea of it was appalling, but I did not doubt what the man said. After what I had seen at Christchurch Cemetery, I believed absolutely. “What sort of man was West?”
“Brilliant,” Hamilton said. “Never doubt that. Perhaps he applied himself in the wrong direction, but he was brilliant. A thinking machine. By his second year of medical school, he was constantly frustrating his professors with his vastly superior knowledge of anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, pathology…yes, Herbert West was brillian
t. I fully believe that if he had followed a less morbid path of investigation, he would have gone down as one of the greats in science.”
Hamilton’s haunted eyes sparkled as spoke at length of West. There was no disguising the admiration, the respect, the awe Hamilton had for the man and his techniques which were so entirely revolutionary that Hamilton fully believed that, one day, West would have toppled the entire medical establishment, left those “charlatans” (his word) groping in the dark like medieval healers with their leeches and cauterizing irons.
But as much as he worshipped at West’s shrine, he was also terrified of the man, I thought. Particularly after he discovered that West was not above murder to acquire bodies of undeniable freshness. “So fresh, they were still warm,” as Hamilton put it. But as ghoulish and criminal as that business was, West descended into even more lurid practices in Flanders during the Great War. He believed that groups of cells and detached body parts in particular were capable of independent physiological existence from the body…at least for a time. That, perhaps, even consciousness and reason, could survive without the brain or that separated anatomies might have some ethereal connection invisible to the eye.
Wild, fantastic stuff.
But West, once again, triumphed. At least this is what Hamilton claimed. West was able to keep a vat filled with reptilian embryonic cell matter alive indefinitely. Not only was it living and nourished, but it continued to grow at an incredible, almost diabolical rate. West also managed to reanimate severed human limbs as well as a headless trunk and even a head. But of these matters, Hamilton refused to speak in any depth, except to say that West was given a barn to be used as his laboratory, that bodies were shipped to him from the front…some whole, others shattered, and still others completely dismembered, brought to him in buckets.
“It was hideous, obscene, that workshop of West’s,” Hamilton told me, his face pinched and bloodless, eyes staring and wet. “You can’t imagine it, you can’t possibly imagine that awful place. Like a dissection room…only the specimens were all horridly alive. Eyes swimming in brine, watching you. Organs pumping and muscles flexing. Legs kicking and hands grasping in jars of amniotic fluid. And, yes, lording over it all, that headless thing in the corner rubbing its hands together and stumbling stiffly about…its decapitated head watching you from its tank, screaming at you, saying the most vile and sinister things. And West, dear God, West laughing about it all, amused by that slaughterhouse of resurrected anatomy.”