VI. The Tomb-Legions
When Dr. Herbert West disappeared a year ago, the Boston
police questioned me closely. They suspected that I was holding something
back, and perhaps suspected graver things; but I could not tell them the
truth because they would not have believed it. They knew, indeed, that
West had been connected with activities beyond the credence of ordinary
men; for his hideous experiments in the reanimation of dead bodies had
long been too extensive to admit of perfect secrecy; but the final soul-shattering
catastrophe held elements of daemoniac phantasy which make even me doubt
the reality of what I saw.
I was West's closest friend and only confidential assistant.
We had met years before, in medical school, and from the first I had shared
his terrible researches. He had slowly tried to perfect a solution which,
injected into the veins of the newly deceased, would restore life; a labour
demanding an abundance of fresh corpses and therefore involving the most
unnatural actions. Still more shocking were the products of some of the
experiments -- grisly masses of flesh that had been dead, but that West
waked to a blind, brainless, nauseous ammation. These were the usual results,
for in order to reawaken the mind it was necessary to have specimens so
absolutely fresh that no decay could possibly affect the delicate brain-cells.
This need for very fresh corpses had been West's moral
undoing. They were hard to get, and one awful day he had secured his specimen
while it was still alive and vigorous. A struggle, a needle, and a powerful
alkaloid had transformed it to a very fresh corpse, and the experiment
had succeeded for a brief and memorable moment; but West had emerged with
a soul calloused and seared, and a hardened eye which sometimes glanced
with a kind of hideous and calculating appraisal at men of especially sensitive
brain and especially vigorous physique. Toward the last I became acutely
afraid of West, for he began to look at me that way. People did not seem
to notice his glances, but they noticed my fear; and after his disappearance
used that as a basis for some absurd suspicions.
West, in reality, was more afraid than I; for his abominable
pursuits entailed a life of furtiveness and dread of every shadow. Partly
it was the police he feared; but sometimes his nervousness was deeper and
more nebulous, touching on certain indescribable things into which he had
injected a morbid life, and from which he had not seen that life depart.
He usually finished his experiments with a revolver, but a few times he
had not been quick enough. There was that first specimen on whose rifled
grave marks of clawing were later seen. There was also that Arkham professor's
body which had done cannibal things before it had been captured and thrust
unidentified into a madhouse cell at Sefton, where it beat the walls for
sixteen years. Most of the other possibly surviving results were things
less easy to speak of -- for in later years West's scientific zeal had
degenerated to an unhealthy and fantastic mania, and he had spent his chief
skill in vitalising not entire human bodies but isolated parts of bodies,
or parts joined to organic matter other than human. It had become fiendishly
disgusting by the time he disappeared; many of the experiments could not
even be hinted at in print. The Great War, through which both of us served
as surgeons, had intensified this side of West.
In saying that West's fear of his specimens was nebulous,
I have in mind particularly its complex nature. Part of it came merely
from knowing of the existence of such nameless monsters, while another
part arose from apprehension of the bodily harm they might under certain
circumstances do him. Their disappearance added horror to the situation
-- of them all, West knew the whereabouts of only one, the pitiful asylum
thing. Then there was a more subtle fear -- a very fantastic sensation
resulting from a curious experiment in the Canadian army in 1915. West,
in the midst of a severe battle, had reanimated Major Sir Eric Moreland
Clapham-Lee, D.S.O., a fellow-physician who knew about his experiments
and could have duplicated them. The head had been removed, so that the
possibilities of quasi-intelligent life in the trunk might be investigated.
Just as the building was wiped out by a German shell, there had been a
success. The trunk had moved intelligently; and, unbelievable to relate,
we were both sickeningly sure that articulate sounds had come from the
detached head as it lay in a shadowy corner of the laboratory. The shell
had been merciful, in a way -- but West could never feel as certain as
he wished, that we two were the only survivors. He used to make shuddering
conjectures about the possible actions of a headless physician with the
power of reanimating the dead.
West's last quarters were in a venerable house of much
elegance, overlooking one of the oldest burying-grounds in Boston. He had
chosen the place for purely symbolic and fantastically aesthetic reasons,
since most of the interments were of the colonial period and therefore
of little use to a scientist seeking very fresh bodies. The laboratory
was in a sub-cellar secretly constructed by imported workmen, and contained
a huge incinerator for the quiet and complete disposal of such bodies,
or fragments and synthetic mockeries of bodies, as might remain from the
morbid experiments and unhallowed amusements of the owner. During the excavation
of this cellar the workmen had struck some exceedingly ancient masonry;
undoubtedly connected with the old burying-ground, yet far too deep to
correspond with any known sepulchre therein. After a number of calculations
West decided that it represented some secret chamber beneath the tomb of
the Averills, where the last interment had been made in 1768. I was with
him when he studied the nitrous, dripping walls laid bare by the spades
and mattocks of the men, and was prepared for the gruesome thrill which
would attend the uncovering of centuried grave-secrets; but for the first
time West's new timidity conquered his natural curiosity, and he betrayed
his degenerating fibre by ordering the masonry left intact and plastered
over. Thus it remained till that final hellish night; part of the walls
of the secret laboratory. I speak of West's decadence, but must add that
it was a purely mental and intangible thing. Outwardly he was the same
to the last -- calm, cold, slight, and yellow-haired, with spectacled blue
eyes and a general aspect of youth which years and fears seemed never to
change. He seemed calm even when he thought of that clawed grave and looked
over his shoulder; even when he thought of the carnivorous thing that gnawed
and pawed at Sefton bars.
The end of Herbert West began one evening in our joint
study when he was dividing his curious glance between the newspaper and
me. A strange headline item had struck at him from the crumpled pages,
and a nameless titan claw had seemed to reach down through sixteen years.
Something fearsome and incredible had happened at Sefton Asylum fifty miles
away, stunning the neighbourhood and baffling the police. In the small
hours of the morning a body of silent men had entered the grounds, and
their leader had aroused the attendants. He was a menacing military figure
who talked without moving his lips and whose voice seemed almost ventriloquially
connected with an immense black case he carried. His expressionless face
was handsome to the point of radiant beauty, but had shocked the superintendent
when the hall light fell on it -- for it was a wax face with eyes of painted
glass. Some nameless accident had befallen this man. A larger man guided
his steps; a repellent hulk whose bluish face seemed half eaten away by
some unknown malady. The speaker had asked for the custody of the cannibal
monster committed from Arkham sixteen years before; and upon being refused,
gave a signal which precipitated a shocking riot. The fiends had beaten,
trampled, and bitten every attendant who did not flee; killing four and
finally succeeding in the liberation of the monster. Those victims who
could recall the event without hysteria swore that the creatures had acted
less like men than like unthinkable automata guided by the wax-faced leader.
By the time help could be summoned, every trace of the men and of their
mad charge had vanished.
From the hour of reading this item until midmght, West
sat almost paralysed. At midnight the doorbell rang, startling him fearfully.
All the servants were asleep in the attic, so I answered the bell. As I
have told the police, there was no wagon in the street, but only a group
of strange-looking figures bearing a large square box which they deposited
in the hallway after one of them had grunted in a highly unnatural voice,
"Express -- prepaid." They filed out of the house with a jerky tread, and
as I watched them go I had an odd idea that they were turning toward the
ancient cemetery on which the back of the house abutted. When I slammed
the door after them West came downstairs and looked at the box. It was
about two feet square, and bore West's correct name and present address.
It also bore the inscription, "From Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, St. Eloi,
Flanders." Six years before, in Flanders, a shelled hospital had fallen
upon the headless reanimated trunk of Dr. Clapham-Lee, and upon the detached
head which -- perhaps -- had uttered articulate sounds.
West was not even excited now. His condition was more
ghastly. Quickly he said, "It's the finish -- but let's incinerate -- this."
We carried the thing down to the laboratory -- listening. I do not remember
many particulars -- you can imagine my state of mind -- but it is a vicious
lie to say it was Herbert West's body which I put into the incinerator.
We both inserted the whole unopened wooden box, closed the door, and started
the electricity. Nor did any sound come from the box, after all.
It was West who first noticed the falling plaster on that
part of the wall where the ancient tomb masonry had been covered up. I
was going to run, but he stopped me. Then I saw a small black aperture,
felt a ghoulish wind of ice, and smelled the charnel bowels of a putrescent
earth. There was no sound, but just then the electric lights went out and
I saw outlined against some phosphorescence of the nether world a horde
of silent toiling things which only insanity -- or worse -- could create.
Their outlines were human, semi-human, fractionally human, and not human
at all -- the horde was grotesquely heterogeneous. They were removing the
stones quietly, one by one, from the centuried wall. And then, as the breach
became large enough, they came out into the laboratory in single file;
led by a talking thing with a beautiful head made of wax. A sort of mad-eyed
monstrosity behind the leader seized on Herbert West. West did not resist
or utter a sound. Then they all sprang at him and tore him to pieces before
my eyes, bearing the fragments away into that subterranean vault of fabulous
abominations. West's head was carried off by the wax-headed leader, who
wore a Canadian officer's uniform. As it disappeared I saw that the blue
eyes behind the spectacles were hideously blazing with their first touch
of frantic, visible emotion.
Servants found me unconscious in the morning. West was
gone. The incinerator contained only unidentifiable ashes. Detectives have
questioned me, but what can I say? The Sefton tragedy they will not connect
with West; not that, nor the men with the box, whose existence they deny.
I told them of the vault, and they pointed to the unbroken plaster wall
and laughed. So I told them no more. They imply that I am either a madman
or a murderer -- probably I am mad. But I might not be mad if those accursed
tomb-legions had not been so silent.
FINIS
