V. The Horror From the Shadows
Many men have related hideous things, not mentioned in
print, which happened on the battlefields of the Great War. Some of these
things have made me faint, others have convulsed me with devastating nausea,
while still others have made me tremble and look behind me in the dark;
yet despite the worst of them I believe I can myself relate the most hideous
thing of all -- the shocking, the unnatural, the unbelievable horror from
the shadows.
In 1915 I was a physician with the rank of First Lieutenant
in a Canadian regiment in Flanders, one of many Americans to precede the
government itself into the gigantic struggle. I had not entered the army
on my own initiative, but rather as a natural result of the enlistment
of the man whose indispensable assistant I was -- the celebrated Boston
surgical specialist, Dr. Herbert West. Dr. West had been avid for
a chance to serve as surgeon in a great war, and when the chance had come,
he carried me with him almost against my will. There were reasons why I
could have been glad to let the war separate us; reasons why I found the
practice of medicine and the companionship of West more and more irritating;
but when he had gone to Ottawa and through a colleague's influence secured
a medical commission as Major, I could not resist the imperious persuasion
of one determined that I should accompany him in my usual capacity.
When I say that Dr. West was avid to serve in battle,
I do not mean to imply that he was either naturally warlike or anxious
for the safety of civilisation. Always an ice-cold intellectual machine;
slight, blond, blue-eyed, and spectacled; I think he secretly sneered at
my occasional martial enthusiasms and censures of supine neutrality. There
was, however, something he wanted in embattled Flanders; and in order to
secure it had had to assume a military exterior. What he wanted was not
a thing which many persons want, but something connected with the peculiar
branch of medical science which he had chosen quite clandestinely to follow,
and in which he had achieved amazing and occasionally hideous results.
It was, in fact, nothing more or less than an abundant supply of freshly
killed men in every stage of dismemberment.
Herbert West needed fresh bodies because his life-work
was the reanimation of the dead. This work was not known to the fashionable
clientele who had so swiftly built up his fame after his arrival in Boston;
but was only too well known to me, who had been his closest friend and
sole assistant since the old days in Miskatonic University Medical School
at Arkham. It was in those college days that he had begun his terrible
experiments, first on small animals and then on human bodies shockingly
obtained. There was a solution which he injected into the veins of dead
things, and if they were fresh enough they responded in strange ways. He
had had much trouble in discovering the proper formula, for each type of
organism was found to need a stimulus especially adapted to it. Terror
stalked him when he reflected on his partial failures; nameless things
resulting from imperfect solutions or from bodies insufficiently fresh.
A certain number of these failures had remained alive -- one was in an
asylum while others had vanished -- and as he thought of conceivable yet
virtually impossible eventualities he often shivered beneath his usual
stolidity.
West had soon learned that absolute freshness was the
prime requisite for useful specimens, and had accordingly resorted to frightful
and unnatural expedients in body-snatching. In college, and during our
early practice together in the factory town of Bolton, my attitude toward
him had been largely one of fascinated admiration; but as his boldness
in methods grew, I began to develop a gnawing fear. I did not like the
way he looked at healthy living bodies; and then there came a nightmarish
session in the cellar laboratory when I learned that a certain specimen
had been a living body when he secured it. That was the first time he had
ever been able to revive the quality of rational thought in a corpse; and
his success, obtained at such a loathsome cost, had completely hardened
him.
Of his methods in the intervening five years I dare not
speak. I was held to him by sheer force of fear, and witnessed sights that
no human tongue could repeat. Gradually I came to find Herbert West himself
more horrible than anything he did -- that was when it dawned on me that
his once normal scientific zeal for prolonging life had subtly degenerated
into a mere morbid and ghoulish curiosity and secret sense of charnel picturesqueness.
His interest became a hellish and perverse addiction to the repellently
and fiendishly abnormal; he gloated calmly over artificial monstrosities
which would make most healthy men drop dead from fright and disgust; he
became, behind his pallid intellectuality, a fastidious Baudelaire of physical
experiment -- a languid Elagabalus of the tombs.
Dangers he met unflinchingly; crimes he committed unmoved.
I think the climax came when he had proved his point that rational life
can be restored, and had sought new worlds to conquer by experimenting
on the reanimation of detached parts of bodies. He had wild and original
ideas on the independent vital properties of organic cells and nerve-tissue
separated from natural physiological systems; and achieved some hideous
preliminary results in the form of never-dying, artificially nourished
tissue obtained from the nearly hatched eggs of an indescribable tropical
reptile. Two biological points he was exceedingly anxious to settle --
first, whether any amount of consciousness and rational action be possible
without the brain, proceeding from the spinal cord and various nerve-centres;
and second, whether any kind of ethereal, intangible relation distinct
from the material cells may exist to link the surgically separated parts
of what has previously been a single living organism. All this research
work required a prodigious supply of freshly slaughtered human flesh --
and that was why Herbert West had entered the Great War.
The phantasmal, unmentionable thing occurred one midnight
late in March, 1915, in a field hospital behind the lines of St. Eloi.
I wonder even now if it could have been other than a daemoniac dream of
delirium. West had a private laboratory in an east room of the barn-like
temporary edifice, assigned him on his plea that he was devising new and
radical methods for the treatment of hitherto hopeless cases of maiming.
There he worked like a butcher in the midst of his gory wares -- I could
never get used to the levity with which he handled and classified certain
things. At times he actually did perform marvels of surgery for the soldiers;
but his chief delights were of a less public and philanthropic kind, requiring
many explanations of sounds which seemed peculiar even amidst that babel
of the damned. Among these sounds were frequent revolver-shots -- surely
not uncommon on a battlefield, but distinctly uncommon in an hospital.
Dr. West's reanimated specimens were not meant for long existence or a
large audience. Besides human tissue, West employed much of the reptile
embryo tissue which he had cultivated with such singular results. It was
better than human material for maintaining life in organless fragments,
and that was now my friend's chief activity. In a dark corner of the laboratory,
over a queer incubating burner, he kept a large covered vat full of this
reptilian cell-matter; which multiplied and grew puffily and hideously.
On the night of which I speak we had a splendid new specimen
-- a man at once physically powerful and of such high mentality that a
sensitive nervous system was assured. It was rather ironic, for he was
the officer who had helped West to his commission, and who was now to have
been our associate. Moreover, he had in the past secretly studied the theory
of reanimation to some extent under West. Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee,
D.S.O., was the greatest surgeon in our division, and had been hastily
assigned to the St. Eloi sector when news of the heavy fighting reached
headquarters. He had come in an aeroplane piloted by the intrepid Lieut.
Ronald Hill, only to be shot down when directly over his destination. The
fall had been spectacular and awful; Hill was unrecognisable afterward,
but the wreck yielded up the great surgeon in a nearly decapitated but
otherwise intact condition. West had greedily seized the lifeless thing
which had once been his friend and fellow-scholar; and I shuddered when
he finished severing the head, placed it in his hellish vat of pulpy reptile-tissue
to preserve it for future experiments, and proceeded to treat the decapitated
body on the operating table. He injected new blood, joined certain veins,
arteries, and nerves at the headless neck, and closed the ghastly aperture
with engrafted skin from an unidentified specimen which had borne an officer's
uniform. I knew what he wanted -- to see if this highly organised body
could exhibit, without its head, any of the signs of mental life which
had distinguished Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee. Once a student of reanimation,
this silent trunk was now gruesomely called upon to exemplify it.
I can still see Herbert West under the sinister electric
light as he injected his reanimating solution into the arm of the headless
body. The scene I cannot describe -- I should faint if I tried it, for
there is madness in a room full of classified charnel things, with blood
and lesser human debris almost ankle-deep on the slimy floor, and with
hideous reptilian abnormalities sprouting, bubbling, and baking over a
winking bluish-green spectre of dim flame in a far corner of black shadows.
The specimen, as West repeatedly observed, had a splendid
nervous system. Much was expected of it; and as a few twitching motions
began to appear, I could see the feverish interest on West's face. He was
ready, I think, to see proof of his increasingly strong opinion that consciousness,
reason, and personality can exist independently of the brain -- that man
has no central connective spirit, but is merely a machine of nervous matter,
each section more or less complete in itself. In one triumphant demonstration
West was about to relegate the mystery of life to the category of myth.
The body now twitched more vigorously, and beneath our avid eyes commenced
to heave in a frightful way. The arms stirred disquietingly, the legs drew
up, and various muscles contracted in a repulsive kind of writhing. Then
the headless thing threw out its arms in a gesture which was unmistakably
one of desperation -- an intelligent desperation apparently sufficient
to prove every theory of Herbert West. Certainly, the nerves were recalling
the man's last act in life; the struggle to get free of the falling aeroplane.
What followed, I shall never positively know. It may have
been wholly an hallucination from the shock caused at that instant by the
sudden and complete destruction of the building in a cataclysm of German
shell-fire -- who can gainsay it, since West and I were the only proved
survivors? West liked to think that before his recent disappearance, but
there were times when he could not; for it was queer that we both had the
same hallucination. The hideous occurrence itself was very simple, notable
only for what it implied.
The body on the table had risen with a blind and terrible
groping, and we had heard a sound. I should not call that sound a voice,
for it was too awful. And yet its timbre was not the most awful thing about
it. Neither was its message -- it had merely screamed, "Jump, Ronald, for
God's sake, jump!" The awful thing was its source.
For it had come from the large covered vat in that ghoulish
corner of crawling black shadows.
Go to Next Chapter.....
