“Then your experiments, such as they are, are doomed to failure.”
“There are some minor obstacles, I’ll admit,” Petteau mused. “There’s got to be a reliable method for restarting the heart and correcting post-mortem brain damage. I know it can be done chemically – but all the elements must occur simultaneously to make the reanimation work.”
“Do you speak of reanimation or resurrection?”
“You are splitting hairs, my friend.” The doctor smiled and put a hand on the other’s shoulder. “I need to know the former before I know the latter. The latter is a matter of metaphysics. I’m a doctor, not a theosophist.”
“And that is your failing, Joseph. You view bodies as things. Doing that paves a path of evil. You forget about the human soul. There’s an immortal spark in humanity… a divinity…you refuse to accept. Had you remembered that all those years ago, you’d still be practicing medicine and not embalming the dead.”
This always had been a sore subject between the two. Petteau worked on the edge of the natural world and things forbidden in God’s domain. Had he been born a hundred years earlier, he’d have been among the first to be hanged for grave robbing and witchcraft, all done in the name of science. Instead, he had been teased with forbidden concepts from the tomes of the university library, and his mind pondered over the application of such knowledge.
“And you, Victor, would do the exact same thing if the conditions were right,” the mortician said not unkindly. “You’d experiment with giant corpses and electricity to bring dead flesh to life. All you can show for your trouble is a crypt full of electrically toasted bodies.”
“Life is more than the interaction of chemicals, Joseph.”
“Is it?” Petteau laughed. “I’ve rarely seen the exception to that. The hormones to create love and stimulate anger are actually quite easy to reproduce. Chemicals make us who we are. You and I are a delicately balanced chemical mix. And with that, I propose we add some alcohol to them. Let’s get a drink.”
The two walked and argued through the dark streets of Arkham, each certain that the other was fundamentally wrong in his philosophy and scientific beliefs. They discussed some of their unorthodox theories in hushed tones. In arguing their points, they parried and thrust their points against each other in their walk to the tavern. They continued to argue even as they entered the quiet, dimly lit tavern.
And despite the natural susurrations within the barroom, their conversation did not fall upon deaf ears.
In most drinking establishments, a dark hooded figure might seem unusual, however in this town situated in the shadows of Miskatonic University, it was not uncommon for a traveling cleric or holy man to seek rest and shelter at an inn. He sat still in a dark corner of the room and quietly smoked a pipe filled with pungent tobacco. The stranger hid in the darkness and to most eyes he was quite invisible. Whether he was surrounded by a natural cold gloom or his own eldritch magicks was anyone’s guess.
Tonight, Petteau was filled with feverish excitement. He’d spent so much of his university days experimenting with cadavers and exploring the operation of the human nervous system. It was fascinating work. He remembered a guest speaker from as far away as Norway spoke of the stimulus and response of the working human brain. It was amazing how adding just minimal pressure to the cerebral cortex’s soft tissues a surgeon could get unconscious patients to tap their fingers or raise their hands. These responses worked beyond voluntary nerve impulses. Once stimulated with a probe, the muscles would obey.
Petteau knew the brain was still mostly an uncharted map of possibilities.
“It’s that damn decay rate,” Petteau said anxiously. “I cannot experiment on any putrid cadavers. I need a fresh corpse.”
Victor lowered his voice, “What do you suggest then? You said any…” He looked over both shoulders and hushed his voice even lower. “… recently deceased body would be missed amongst friends and family.”
The dark figure softly blew a stream of blue smoke from his mouth. An evil smile grew under his hood. Silently he rose from his chair and reached into his bag. He withdrew a large book and approached the two men with the subtleness of a shadow.
“You wish to bring back the dead?” the stranger said softly. His Cajun voice sounded like the sliding of a stone sarcophagus against a marble slab.
“What business is this of yours?” Petteau said nervously. He cursed himself inwardly. Careless talk in public. A man in the privacy of his own home or secluded office could speak freely about any topic under the sun. However, when a man goes to a tavern and begins to use words like 'decay rate' and 'fresh bodies' in public, he invites trouble.
“I apologize for eavesdropping,” the stranger said softly. “You appear to be a man at an impasse.”
“I don’t think you can help me,” Petteau said dismissively. “I am a man of science discussing a hypothetical problem regarding human anatomy.”
“I may have something that may aid you in your ‘hypothetical problem.’ I offer a solution that starts where science ends.”
The tall figure, for he stood easily a head taller than either of the two, placed the thick book down with almost reverent grace upon their table. His hand emerged from the robe and his index finger pointed to a piece of parchment serving as a bookmark.
“Read,” the dark figure said simply.
Petteau noticed the stranger’s hand. It was thin and tanned with claw-like nails growing from each of his digits. He wore a ring on his middle finger. It appeared to have been made entirely out of a green black stone, flecked with gold highlights. The top of the ring curved in a sphere with the head of some kind of weird cephalopod adorned with an intricate set of wings, forming the band.
“That is not dead which can eternal lie, yet with stranger aeons, even Death may die,” the stranger said with some bit of solemnity. Then he turned, walked out of the tavern, and quickly vanished into the early autumnal blackness with only the ghost of his gossamer pipe smoke still hanging in the air to mark that he was ever there at all.
*
The doctor bade farewell to his friend and went directly from the tavern to his private study, his hands clutched tightly around the book.
The book was unique yet familiar. It was thick with a deeply tanned cover bound with carved ivory-like clasps and fastened with another leather-ish band to ensure that none of the pages could escape. There were no inscriptions of any kind on the surface. The cover itself felt odd. He stroked his finger along its surface and noted the feel of the thing. Then he closed his eyes and did the same to the hairless portion of his forearm. They felt almost identical.
The book was bound in the leather of dried, oiled, and tanned human flesh.
When he opened the book and flipped through the pages, he saw each of the pages had the look, feel, and color of preserved human skin. Indeed, upon closer examination through a magnifying glass, the skin cells upon the page were plain to see. He could only assume that the brownish red “ink” was nothing less than blood.
It was not written in English. Petteau recognized the text as Latin. As a doctor, who was required to read many of his medical books in a slightly less dead tongue, he read the cover page with little difficulty.
The book entitled The Necronomicon, based off the Arabic translation written by an Arab named Abdul Alhazred. It was mainly about ancient magical practices as well as a mythic history of “the Old Ones”. Peppered throughout the book were mentions of long sleeping celestial giants, ancient priests, their rituals, and incantations. Familiar references from his university days.
The doctor browsed other portions of the book before he’d found the hooded stranger’s bookmark. The chapter entitled, Ex Mortis, broke down a complex ritual with the chemical compounds required to bring life to dead tissues. Many of the chemicals, written in older, more archaic names were in sync with his own experimental blood formula. The other compounds were quite exotic. Some called for the blue tinted innards of common insects and the
distillation of plants related to the belladonna family.
What the doctor found objectionable were the associated rituals stressed within the chapters. Spirituality for him was the opiate of lesser minds let alone the arcane and occult practices within The Necronomicon. He was a man of science. If however, there were something to be gleaned from the perpetual phonetic resonance of the incantation, as a scientist, he’d need to understand this phenomenon more intimately.
After all, he had nothing to lose by following the book’s directions.
For the next month, Petteau read the book thoroughly. With the ease that comes from repetition, the book’s old Latin opened up to him. He read each of the texts voraciously, consuming all of the rituals’ specific nuances. There was something about The Necronomicon that could draw the reader into its complex language and hold his soul captive until he stopped through exhaustion or a herculean act of will.
Each new seed of forbidden fruit found fertile ground within Petteau’s hungry mind and took root where no thought should ever find rest. He now saw the ethereal link between the natural laws of science and the quantum laws of metaphysics. With each day that passed and with every chapter of the dark book his brain digested, Petteau found the line between science and magic quickly blurring.
As far as Petteau’s experiment went, the book was certainly clear on the subject of reanimation. It was not only possible, but with the right chemicals, rituals, and tools, it would only be a matter of breaking a few well-published laws that could get any good man hanged.
Petteau knew what he had to do and he knew that the easiest way to get a fresh corpse was to make one. The only real requirement he had to follow was that the body had to be an unknown. The last thing he needed was having to explain to the authorities why someone’s dead relative was now walking the streets in near perfect health.
After all, the mortician is usually the last person to handle a body.
At last, he would create life or, more importantly, reanimate dead tissues. Still, he was concerned with his biggest obstacle – decaying brain matter. Suppose he was able to reanimate the dead. What then? He’d have a being with all the signs of life except a working cognizant brain. He would not make a moving piece of meat that had no intelligence. He wanted a thinking rational being – not a mockery of life.
Reanimation would have to occur in two phases. He needed a fresh body and, even more importantly, a fresh brain. Only a fresh undamaged brain would work for reanimation. After all, that’s what his formula would take care of. He would not only replace a human brain, but his formula would stimulate and regenerate, through a pseudo stem cell process, the reattachment of dendrite receptors in the central nervous system and simultaneously counter the natural foreign rejection process that happened in any organ donor transplant.
If successful, he would hold the keys to immortality.
Posing as a visiting surgeon, he infiltrated the familiar buildings of Miskatonic University’s medical school and stole a fresh healthy brain by hiding until the building closed for the evening. Finding a properly preserved brain in a correctly balanced cerebral spinal solution was easier than he’d expected. Students studying brain surgery required a recently deceased cortex with the proper texture – which was akin to soft butter at room temperature.
As far as the body was concerned, he was waiting for the right subject. He knew he could not work with an adult. Should anything go wrong with the process, he wanted a body that he could easily subdue. An adult woman would raise too many questions and an adult man, even an average sized one, might gain almost superhuman strength if he went mad during the process – especially if he had freshly reanimated adrenal glands.
It would have to be a child or a teenager. Someone he could easily overpower and dominate.
As fate would have it, the doctor did not have to kill anyone. Two days after he’d stolen the brain, the local authorities found a sixteen-year-old boy near one of the main roads of Arkham. The child was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead on arrival. The cause of death was unknown.
As a matter of course, the local constabulary took the child to his funeral home for cremation. Petteau could hardly contain his delight upon getting the perfect specimen at this convenient time. Fate was on his side. He hid the body and presented the authorities a unique blend of burned organic remains mixed with baking flour.
The reanimation needed to happen the following night. The ritual was not difficult, but it was specific. The alignment of celestial bodies fell into place the next evening, on Halloween night. In the meantime, he spent most of his time gathering all of the ritual’s unholy ingredients.
Petteau was anxious about performing the ritual. He’d spent time practicing the chants. It was not easy as he was unsure of the words’ origins. Initially, he assumed they were Sumerian but many of the syntaxes were unfamiliar to him. So, he fell back on guesswork and did his best to extrapolate the sounds from the obscure pronunciation guide found near the beginning of the book.
The boy’s body itself was not irreversibly damaged. The complexity lay in transplanting the brain into the boy’s skull. Remembering most brains are roughly the same size, he was relieved to see that after he’d removed the shaved top of the boy’s cranium, the brain fit perfectly.
“Now you’ll have a mind to mind your manners,” the doctor said aloud to the boy’s corpse and laughed to himself. All that answered back were the chirping crickets that made their winter home within his lab. He’d have to call an exterminator.
A lab was no place for bugs.
Petteau inspected his handiwork. The brain transplant seemed successful. He’d replaced the boy’s brain and added his unique solution along with the necessary cerebral spinal fluid to the brain cavity. As he was finishing his surgical procedure, he remembered he’d left the top of the boy’s skull soaking in the preservative – the chemical needed to accelerate healing.
The doctor turned and brought the shaved skull cap back to the body. He placed it delicately back onto the boy’s head and used some liquid sutures to organically cement the top to the bottom. It would be somewhat fragile over the next week but the skull was now air tight and he could begin the ritual once the last harvest moon rose and the constellation of stars was in its proper place.
The moon rose in the midnight sky and the doctor lowered the boy’s naked body into the eldritch bath of chemicals. Then raising his arms, he slowly began speaking the unholy incantation, “Hye’did leydee de haktorz lie formée!”
As he repeated and quickened the chant, he noted the twinkling star that began to gleam upon the boy’s glistening skin in its eerie luminescence. He continued the ritual and saw color returning to the boy’s face. His skin went from corpse grey to a healthy pink within minutes. When the doctor’s rhythm had reached its peak, the boy’s eyes opened wildly as he sat up and drew a sharp loud gasp inward.
Petteau ceased his chant only to have his silence broken by the boy’s blood-curdling scream. Clutching at his own bald head, the boy leapt out of the bath and ran for the nearest door. The doctor hesitated and, in his shock, slipped backward onto the floor.
Still shrieking, the boy bolted out the front door and into the October night, leaving nothing but a long wail of screams that only a tortured frightened soul fueled by nothing but pain and madness could generate echoing in the darkness.
By the time Petteau had gotten to the door the boy was gone for good.
*
The autumn night was cold and the boy’s wet naked body shivered as it ran across the leaf-strewn strewn road. His bare feet ran from the rough road to a wet soft meadow. A wind blew harshly against his soaking skin, bringing gooseflesh to the freshly reanimated nervous system.
And still the boy kept screaming.
The adult brain which had grown used to perceiving the world at a much higher stature was still adjusting to being in a body several inches smaller in height. He had been an older man who’d been suffering from arthritic pain most of
his life. Now he was running with much smaller legs that kept moving through a freshly fueled cardiovascular system.
Newly created nerve synapses had signaled to the transplanted brain that the body had screamed its new throat raw and further screaming was now impossible. When the body could no longer make sound, the mind screamed for it. The boy’s head pounded unmercifully against the tender area of his still knitting skull. After running nearly a mile without rest, the boy slowed down. He was now exhausted.
Instinctively, the brain knew it had to find shelter. It knew it had to rest and get to some kind of shelter. His new eyes saw a light of a campfire up ahead. If he ran just a little longer, perhaps he could get there.
With all of the energy the freshly reanimated unfed corpse could muster, the boy ran to the fire. Once he’d arrived, he fell to the ground unconscious across from a hooded man. The man took a pull from his pipe and blew the smoke out with a dreadful chuckle.
The stranger knew exactly when Petteau would perform the ritual – a moonlit evening between September twenty-third and October thirty-first when the stars aligned in accordance to The Necronomicon. The doctor was at the mercy of the stars, leaving only this night. There was no better place to do the ritual than in the privacy of his laboratory. The hooded man knew the high probability of madness brought on from the ritual. An escape was likely.
All the stranger had to do was sit, wait, and follow whatever came out. As it stood, the boy ran to him.
The fact the doctor had chosen a child only made him a better candidate. The blood of an innocent was perfect for the upcoming ceremony. Plus, he would be easy to catch and carry.
The stranger picked up the unconscious boy. The child’s breathing was steady and he seemed to be recovering. The man drew a small rag and drenched it liberally with some chloroform. He covered the boy’s mouth with it. The child inhaled the fumes and continued to sleep. Then, he wrapped the boy up in a blanket, bound with some smooth rope, gagged him with a bandanna, and placed him gently into the back of his covered cart. The hooded stranger drove quickly through the darkened streets of Arkham, towards to the sea beyond.
Miskatonic Nightmares Page 11