 Stories and content in Weird Darkness can be disturbing for some listeners and is intended for mature audiences only. Parental discretion is strongly advised. Welcome, Weirdos. I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained. Coming up in this episode, it's Thriller Thursday and this week it's a classic tale from HP Lovecraft entitled Herbert West Reanimator. Herbert West is perhaps the best known of Lovecraft's human characters. Most people upon hearing the word reanimator will automatically think of the film from 1985 of the same name based upon the story you're about to hear, but loosely based. Very loosely based. They went more in a comedy direction with the film. Some believe Lovecraft did intend his original story to be a parody of Frankenstein, but it doesn't really feel like a parody, at least to the extent that parodies are supposed to be funny. Also, Herbert West is the antithesis of Victor Frankenstein. Whereas Barry Shelley's scientist is mad only to the extent he is prone to wild flights of passionate emotion and expressing himself in florid romantic speeches, Herbert West is hyper-rational, dispassionate, amoral and unsanimental. Where Frankenstein is wracked with debilitating guilt, West is a sociopath driven by a desire to prove his theories correct no matter what the cost. Maybe Lovecraft's point was that if anyone was going to bring dead bodies back to a kind of life, it would be a ruthless and unemotional scientist, not someone who sounds suspiciously like a lovesick poet. And I guess he's probably right. Still, if you're after the big laughs, Herbert West is not the place to find them. It's a story in six parts, but each part is essentially the same as the others. West reanimates a corpse. Reanimated corpse starts wrecking everything. West and the narrator conceal their involvement, rinse and repeat. We'll let the rest of the story unfold as you listen. The story was written as a serial, published one chapter at a time from October 1921 to June 1922 in the amateur publication Homebrew. And because it was written during this time, you'll hear language not considered politically correct today, particularly that of words used to describe people of color. But as I have done in the past, I am leaving it all intact to preserve the author's words in their original form, and so we never forget our sometimes horrible history. If you're new here, welcome to the show. While you're listening, be sure to check out WeirdDarkness.com for merchandise, to visit sponsors you hear about during the show, sign up for my newsletter, enter contests to connect with me on social media, plus you can visit the Hope in the Darkness page if you're struggling with depression or dark thoughts. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com. Now, bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with me into the Weird Darkness. Part 1. From the Dark Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in afterlife, I can speak only with extreme terror. This terror is not due altogether to the sinister manner of his recent disappearance, but was engendered by the whole nature of his life work and first gained its acute form more than 17 years ago when we were in the third year of our course at the Misktonic University Medical School in Arkham. While he was with me, the wonder and diabolism of his experiments fascinated me utterly and I was his closest companion. Now that he is gone and the spell is broken, the actual fear is greater. Memories and possibilities are even more hideous than realities. The first horrible incident of our acquaintance was the greatest shock I ever experienced and it is only with reluctance that I repeated. As I've said, it happened when we were in the medical school where West had already made himself notorious through his wild theories on the nature of death and the possibility of overcoming it artificially. His views, which were widely ridiculed by the faculty and his fellow students, hinged on the essentially mechanistic nature of life and concerned means for operating the organic machinery of mankind by calculated chemical action after the failure of natural processes. In his experiments with various animating solutions, he had killed and treated immense numbers of rabbits, giddy pigs, cats, dogs and monkeys till he had become the prime nuisance of the college. Several times he had actually obtained signs of life in animals supposedly dead, in many cases violent signs, but he soon saw that the perfection of this process, if indeed possible, would necessarily involve a lifetime of research. It likewise became clear that since the same solution never worked alike on different organic species, he would require human subjects for further and more specialized progress. It was here that he first came into conflict with the college authorities and was debarred from future experiments by no less a dignitary than the dean of the medical school himself, the learned and benevolent Dr. Alan Halsey whose work in behalf of the stricken is recalled by every old resident of Arkham. I had always been exceptionally tolerant of West's pursuits and we frequently discussed his theories whose ramifications and corollaries were almost infinite. Holding with hackle that all life is a chemical and physical process and that the so-called soul is a myth, my friend believed that artificial reanimation of the dead can depend only on the condition of the tissues and that unless actual decomposition has set in, a corpse fully equipped with organs may with suitable measures be set going again in the peculiar fashion known as life. That the psychic or intellectual life might be impaired by the slight deterioration of sensitive brain cells which even a short period of death would be apt to cause West fully realized. It had at first been his hope to find a regent which would restore vitality before the actual advent of death and only repeated failures on animals had shown him that the natural and artificial life motions were incompatible. He then saw extreme freshness in his specimens, injecting his solution into the blood immediately after the extinction of life. It was this circumstance which made the professors so carelessly skeptical for they felt that true death had not occurred in any case. They did not stop to view the matter closely and reasoningly. It was not long after the faculty had interdicted his work that West confided to me his resolution to get fresh human bodies in some manner and continue in secret the experiments he could no longer perform openly. To hear him discussing ways and means was rather ghastly for at the college we had never procured anatomical specimens ourselves. Whenever the morgue proved inadequate, two local Negroes attended to this matter and they were seldom questioned. West was then a small, slender, spectacled youth with delicate features, yellow hair, pale blue eyes and a soft voice and it was uncanny to hear him dwelling on the relative merits of Christchurch Cemetery in the Pottersfield. We finally decided on the Pottersfield because practically every body in Christchurch was embalmed, a thing of course ruinous to West's researches. I was by this time his active and enthralled assistant and helped him make all his decisions not only concerning the source of bodies but concerning a suitable place for our loathsome work. It was I who thought of the deserted Chapman farmhouse beyond Meadow Hill where we fitted up on the ground floor and operating room and laboratory each with dark curtains to conceal our midnight doings. The place was far from any road and in sight of no other house yet precautions were nonetheless necessary since rumors of strange lights started by Chance Nocturnal Rombers would soon bring disaster on our enterprise. It was agreed to call the whole thing a chemical laboratory if discovery should occur. Gradually we equipped our sinister haunt of science with materials either purchased in Boston or quietly borrowed from the college, materials carefully made unrecognizable, saved to expert eyes and provided spades and picks for the many burials we should have to make in the cellar. At the college we used an incinerator but the apparatus was too costly for our unauthorized laboratory. Bodies were always a nuisance even the small guinea pig bodies from the slight clandestine experiments in West's room at the boarding house. We followed the local death notices like ghouls for our specimens demanded particular qualities. What we wanted were corpses interred soon after death and without artificial preservation, preferably free from malforming disease and certainly with all organs present. Accident victims were our best hope. Not for many weeks did we hear of anything suitable, though we talked with morgue and hospital authorities ostensibly in the college's interest as often as we could without exciting suspicion. We found that the college had first choice in every case so that it might be necessary to remain in Arkham during the summer when only the limited summer school classes were held. In the end though, luck favored us. For one day we heard of an almost ideal case in the potter's field. A brawny young workman drowned only the morning before in Sumner's pond and buried at the town's expense without delay or embalming. That afternoon we found the new grave and determined to work soon after midnight. It was a repulsive task that we undertook in the black small hours even though we lacked at that time the special horror of graveyards which later experiences brought to us. We carried spades and oiled dark lanterns for although electric torches were then manufactured, they were not as satisfactory as the tungsten contrivances of today. The process of unearthing was slow and sordid. It might have been gruesomely poetical if we had been artists instead of scientists and we were glad when our spades struck wood. When the pine box was finally uncovered West scrambled down and removed the lid dragging out and propping up the contents. I reached down and hauled the contents out of the grave and then both toiled hard to restore the spot to its former appearance. The affair made us rather nervous especially the stiff form and vacant face of our first trophy but we managed to remove all traces of our visit. When we had padded down the last shovel full of earth we put the specimen in a canvas sack and sat out for the old Chapman place beyond Meadow Hill. On an improvised dissecting table in the old farmhouse by the light of a powerful acetylene lamp the specimen was not very spectral looking. It had been a sturdy and apparently unimaginative youth of wholesome plebeian type large framed gray eyed and brown haired a sound animal without psychological subtleties and probably having vital processes of the simplest and healthiest sort. Now with the eyes closed it looked more asleep than dead though the expert test of my friend soon left no doubt on that score. We had at last what West had always longed for a real dead man of the ideal kind ready for the solution as prepared according to the most careful calculations and theories for human use. The tension on our part became very great. We knew that there was scarcely a chance for anything like complete success and could not avoid hideous fears at possible grotesque results of partial animation especially were we apprehensive concerning the mind and impulses of the creature since in the space following death some of the more delicate cerebral cells might well have suffered deterioration. I myself still held some curious notions about the traditional soul of man and felt in awe at the secrets that might be told by one returning from the dead. I wondered what sights this placid youth might have seen in accessible spheres and what he could relate if fully restored to life. But my wonder was not overwhelming since for the most part I shared the materialism of my friend. He was calmer than I as he forced a large quantity of his fluid into a vein of the body's arm immediately binding the incision securely. The waiting was gruesome but West never faltered. Every now and then he applied his stethoscope to the specimen and bore the negative results philosophically. After about three quarters of an hour without the least sign of life he disappointedly pronounced the solution inadequate but determined to make the most of his opportunity and try one change in the formula before disposing of his ghastly prize. We had that afternoon dug a grave in the cellar and would have to fill it by dawn for although we had fixed a lock on the house we wished to shun even the remotest risk of a ghoulish discovery. Besides, the body would not be even approximately fresh the next night so taking the solitary acetylene lamp into the adjacent laboratory we left our silent guest on the slab in the dark and bent every energy to the mixing of a new solution the weighing and measuring supervised by West with an almost fanatical care. The awful event was very sudden and wholly unexpected. I was pouring something from one test tube to another and West was busy over the alcohol blast lamp which had to answer for a Bunsen burner in this gasless edifice when from the pitch black room we had left there burst the most appalling and demonic succession of cries that either of us had ever heard. Not more unutterable could have been the chaos of hellish sound if the pit itself had opened to release the agony of the damned for in one inconceivable cacophony was centered all the supernatural terror and unnatural despair of animate nature. Human it could not have been. It is not in man to make such sounds and without a thought of our late employment or its possible discovery both West and I leaped to the nearest window like stricken animals overturning tubes lamp and retorts and vaulting madly into the starred abyss of the rural night. I think we screamed ourselves as we stumbled frantically toward the town though as we reached the outskirts we put on a semblance of restraint just enough to seem like belated revelers staggering home from a debauch. We did not separate but managed to get to West's room where we whispered with the gas up until dawn. By then we had calmed ourselves a little with rational theories and plans for investigation so that we could sleep through the day classes being disregarded. But that evening two items in the paper wholly unrelated made it again impossible for us to sleep. The old deserted Chapman House had inexplicably burned to an amorphous heap of ashes that we could understand because of the upset lamp. Also an attempt had been made to disturb a new grave in the potter's field as if by futile and spadeless clawing at the earth. That we could not understand for we had padded down the mold very carefully. And for seventeen years after that West would look frequently over his shoulder and complain of fancied footsteps behind him. Now he has disappeared. Part two, The Plague Demon. I shall never forget that hideous summer sixteen years ago when like a noxious of fright from the halls of ebbless typhoid stalked leering through Arkham, it is by that satanic scourge that most recall the year for truly terror brooded with bat wings over the piles of coffins in the tombs of Christchurch Cemetery. Yet for me there is a greater horror in that time, a horror known to me alone now that Herbert West has disappeared. West and I were doing postgraduate work in summer classes at the medical school of Miskatonic University, and my friend had attained a wide notoriety because of his experiments leading toward the revocation of the dead. After the scientific slaughter of uncounted small animals, the freakish work had ostensibly stopped by order of our skeptical dean Dr. Alan Halsey, though West had continued to perform certain secret tests in his dingy boarding house room and had on one terrible and unforgettable occasion taken a human body from its grave in the potter's field to a deserted farmhouse beyond Meadow Hill. I was with him on that odious occasion and saw him inject into the still veins the elixir which he thought would to some extent restore life's chemical and physical processes. It had ended horribly in a delirium of fear which we gradually came to attribute to our own overwrought nerves and West had never afterward been able to shake off a maddening sensation of being haunted and hunted. The body had not been quite fresh enough. It is obvious that to restore normal mental attributes a body must be very fresh indeed, and a burning of the old house had prevented us from burying the thing. It would have been better if we could have known it was underground. After that experience, West had dropped his researches for some time, but as the zeal of the born scientists slowly returned, he again became important with the college faculty, pleading for the use of the dissecting room and of fresh human specimens for the work he regarded as so overwhelmingly important. His pleas, however, were wholly in vain, for the decision of Dr. Halsey was inflexible and the other professors all endorsed the verdict of their leader. In the radical theory of reanimation, they saw nothing but the immature vagaries of a youthful enthusiast whose slight form, yellow hair, spectacled blue eyes and soft voice gave no hint of the supernormal, almost diabolical power of the cold brain within. I can see him now as he was then, and I shiver. He grew sterner of face, but never elderly, and now Seth the Nesylum has had the mishap and West has vanished. West clashed disagreeably with Dr. Halsey near the end of our last undergraduate term and a wordy dispute that did less credit to him than to the kindly dean in point of courtesy. He felt that he was needlessly and irrationally retarded in a supremely great work, a work which he could of course conduct to suit himself in later years, but which he wished to begin while still possessed of the exceptional facilities of the university. That the tradition-bound elders should ignore his singular results on animals and persist in their denial of the possibility of reanimation was inexpressibly disgusting and almost incomprehensible to a youth of West's logical temperament. Only greater maturity could help him understand the chronic mental limitations of the professor-doctor type, the product of generations of pathetic puritanism, kindly, conscientious, and sometimes gentle and amiable, yet always narrow, intolerant, custom-ridden, and lacking in perspective. Age has more charity for these incomplete yet high-sold characters whose worst real vice is timidity and who are ultimately punished by general ridicule for their intellectual sins, sins like Ptolemism, Calvinism, Anti-Darwinism, Anti-Niciism, and every sort of Sabitarianism and Sumptuary Legislation. West, young despite his marvelous scientific requirements, had scant patients with good Dr. Halsey and his erudite colleagues and nursed an increasing resentment coupled with a desire to prove his theories to these obtuse worthies in some striking and dramatic fashion. Like most youths, he indulged in elaborate day dreams of revenge, triumph, and final magnanimous forgiveness. Then had come the scourge, grinning and lethal from the nightmare caverns of Tartarus. West and I had graduated about the time of its beginning but had remained for additional work at the summer school so that we were in Arkham when it broke with full demonic fury upon the town. Though not as yet licensed physicians, we now had our degrees and were pressed frantically into public service as the numbers of the stricken grew. The situation was almost past management and deaths ensued too frequently for the local undertakers fully to handle. Burials without embalming were made in rapid succession and even the Christchurch Cemetery receiving tomb was crammed with coffins of the unembalmed dead. This circumstance was not without effect on West, who thought often of the irony of the situation. So many fresh specimens, yet none for his persecuted researches. We were frightfully overworked and the terrific mental and nervous strain made my friend brood morbidly. But West's gentle enemies were no less harassed with prostrating duties. College had all but closed and every doctor of the medical faculty was helping to fight the typhoid plague. Dr. Halsey in particular had distinguished himself in sacrificing service, applying his extreme skill with wholehearted energy to cases which many others shunned because of danger or apparent hopelessness. Before a month was over, the fearless dean had become a popular hero, though he seemed unconscious of his fame as he struggled to keep from collapsing with physical fatigue and nervous exhaustion. West could not withhold admiration for the fortitude of his foe, but because of this was even more determined to prove to him the truth of his amazing doctrines. Taking advantage of the disorganization of both college work and municipal health regulations, he managed to get a recently deceased body smuggled into the university dissecting room one night and in my presence injected a new modification of his solution. The thing actually opened its eyes, but only stared at the ceiling with a look of soul-petrifying horror before collapsing into an inertness from which nothing could rouse it. West said it was not fresh enough, the hot summer air does not favor corpses. That time we were almost caught before we incinerated the thing and West doubted the advisability of repeating his daring misuse of the college laboratory. The peak of the epidemic was reached in August. West and I were almost dead and Dr. Halsey did die on the 14th. The students all attended the hasty funeral on the 15th and bought an impressive wreath, though the latter was quite overshadowed by the tributes sent by wealthy Arkham citizens and by the municipality itself. It was almost a public affair, for the dean had surely been a public benefactor. After the entombment we were all somewhat depressed and spent the afternoon at the bar at the commercial house where West, though shaken by the death of his chief opponent, chilled the rest of us with references to his notorious theories. Most of the students went home or to various duties as the evening advanced, but West persuaded me to aid him in making a night of it. West's landlady saw us arrive at his room about two in the morning with a third man between us and told her husband that we had all evidently dined and whined rather well. Apparently this assidualist matron was right. For about three a.m. the whole house was aroused by cries coming from West's room where, when they broke down the door, they found the two of us unconscious on the blood-stained carpet, beaten, scratched, and mauled and with the broken remnants of West's bottles and instruments around us. Only an open window told what had become of our assailant, and many wondered how he himself had fared after the terrific leap from the second story to the lawn which he must have made. There were some strange garments in the room, but West, upon regaining consciousness, said they did not belong to the stranger but were specimens collected for bacteriological analysis in the course of investigations on the transmission of germ diseases. He ordered them burnt as soon as possible in the capacious fireplace. To the police, we both declared ignorance of our late companion's identity. He was, West nervously said, a congenial stranger whom we had met at some downtown bar of uncertain location. We had all been rather jovial, and West and I did not wish to have our pugnacious companion hunted down. That same night saw the beginning of the second Arkham Horror, the horror that to me eclipsed the plague itself. Christ's church cemetery was the scene of a terrible killing, a watchman having been clawed to death in a manner not only too hideous for description, but raising a doubt as to the human agency of the deed. The victim had been seen alive considerably after midnight. The dawn revealed the utterable thing. The manager of a circus at the neighboring town of Bolton was questioned, but he swore that no beast had at any time escaped from its cage. Those who found the body noted a trail of blood leading to the receiving tomb, where a small pool of red lay on the concrete just outside the gate. A fainter trail led away toward the woods, but it soon gave out. The next night, devils danced on the roofs of Arkham, an unnatural madness howled in the wind. Through the fevered town had crept a curse which some said was greater than the plague, and which some whispered was the embodied demon soul of the plague itself. Eight houses were entered by a nameless thing which strewed red death in its wake. In all, seventeen maimed and shapeless remnants of bodies were left behind by the voiceless, sadistic monster that crept abroad. A few persons had half seen it in the dark and said it was white and like a malformed ape or anthropomorphic fiend. It had not left behind quite all that it had attacked, or sometimes it had been hungry. The number it had killed was fourteen, three of the bodies had been in stricken homes and had not been alive. On the third night, frantic bands of searchers led by the police captured it in a house on Crane Street near the Miskatonic campus. They had organized a quest with care, keeping in touch by means of volunteer telephone stations, and when someone in the college district had reported hearing a scratching at a shuttered window, the net was quickly spread. On account of the general alarm and precautions, there were only two more victims, and the capture was affected without major casualties. The thing was finally stopped by a bullet, though not a fatal one, and was rushed to the local hospital amidst universal excitement and loathing. For it had been a man. This much was clear despite the nauseous eyes, the voiceless simianism, and the demonic savagery. They dressed its wound and carted it to the asylum at Sefton, where it beat its head against the walls of the padded cell for sixteen years, until the recent mishap, when it escaped under circumstances that few liked to mention. What had most disgusted the searchers of Arkham was the thing they noticed when the monster's face was cleaned, the mocking, unbelievable resemblance to a learned and self-sacrificing martyr who had been entombed but three days before, the late Dr. Alan Halsey, public benefactor and dean of the Medical School of Miskatonic University, to the vanished Herbert West and to me the disgust and horror were supreme. I shudder tonight as I think of it, shudder even more than I did that morning when West muttered through his bandages. Damn it, it wasn't quite fresh enough. Six Shots by Midnight It is uncommon to fire all six shots of a revolver with great suddenness when one would probably be sufficient, but many things in the life of Herbert West were uncommon. It is, for instance, not often that a young physician leaving college is obliged to conceal the principles which guide his selection of a home and office, yet that was the case with Herbert West. When he and I obtained our degrees at the Medical School of Miskatonic University and sought to relieve our poverty by setting up as general practitioners, we took great care not to say that we chose our house because it was fairly well isolated and as near as possible to the potter's field. Redicence, such as this, is seldom without a cause, nor indeed was ours, for our requirements were those resulting from a lifework distinctly unpopular. Outwardly, we were doctors only, but beneath the surface were aims of far greater and more terrible moment, for the essence of Herbert West's existence was a quest amid black and forbidden realms of the unknown, in which he hoped to uncover the secret of life and restore to perpetual animation the graveyard's cold clay. Such a quest demands strange materials, among them fresh human bodies, and in order to keep supplied with these indispensable things, one must live quietly and not far from a place of informal interment. West and I had met in college, and I had been the only one to sympathize with his hideous experiments. Gradually, I had come to be his inseparable assistant, and now that we were out of college, we had to keep together. It was not easy to find a good opening for two doctors in company, but finally, the influence of the university secured us a practice in Bolton, a factory town near Arkham, the seat of the college. The Bolton worsted mills are the largest in the Miskatonic Valley, and their polyglot employees are never popular as patients with the local physicians. We chose our house with the greatest care, seizing at least on a rather rundown cottage near the end of Pond Street, five numbers from the closest neighbor, and separated from the local potter's field by only a stretch of meadowland, bisected by a narrow neck of the rather dense forest which lies to the north. The distance was greater than we wished, but we could get no nearer house without going on the other side of the field, wholly out of the factory district. We were not much displeased, however, since there were no people between us and our sinister source of supplies. The walk was a trifle long, but we could haul our silent specimens undisturbed. Our practice was surprisingly large from the very first, large enough to please most young doctors and large enough to prove a bore and a burden to students whose real interest lay elsewhere. The mill hands were of somewhat turbulent inclinations, and besides their many natural needs, their frequent clashes and stabbing a phrase gave us plenty to do. But what actually absorbed our minds was the secret laboratory we had fitted up in the cellar, the laboratory with the long table under the electric lights, where in the small hours of the morning we often injected West's various solutions into the veins of the things we dragged from the potter's field. West was experimenting madly to find something which would start man's vital motions anew after they had been stopped by the thing we call death, but had encountered the most ghastly obstacles. The solution had to be differently compounded for different types. What would serve for guinea pigs would not serve for human beings, and different human specimens required large modifications. The bodies had to be exceedingly fresh, or the slight decomposition of brain tissue would render perfect reanimation impossible. Indeed, the greatest problem was to get them fresh enough. West had had horrible experiences during his secret college researches with corpses of doubtful vintage. The results of partial or imperfect animation were much more hideous than were the total failures, and we both held fearsome recollections of such things. Ever since our first demonic session in the deserted farmhouse on Meadow Hill in Arkham, we had felt a brooding menace. West, though a calm, blond, blue-eyed scientific automaton in most respects, often confessed to a shuddering sensation of stealthy pursuit. He half felt that he was followed, a psychological delusion of shaken nerves enhanced by the undeniably disturbing fact that at least one of our reanimated specimens was still alive, a frightful, carnivorous thing in a padded cell at Sefton. Then there was another, our first whose exact fate we had never learned. We had fair luck with specimens in Bolton, much better than in Arkham. We had not been settled a week before we got an accident victim on a very night of burial and made it open its eyes with an amazingly rational expression before the solution failed. It had lost an arm. If it had been a perfect body, we might have succeeded better. Between then and the next January, we secured three more, one total failure, one case of marked muscular motion and one rather shivery thing. It rose of itself and uttered a sound. Then came a period when luck was poor, intermits fell off, and those that did occur were of specimens either too deceased or too maimed for use. We kept track of all the deaths and their circumstances with systematic care. One March night, however, we unexpectedly obtained a specimen which did not come from the potter's field. In Bolton, the prevailing spirit of puritanism had outlawed the sport of boxing with the usual result. Seraptitious and ill-conducted bouts among the mill workers were common, and occasionally professional talent of low grade was imported. This late winter night there had been such a match, evidently with disastrous results, since two timorous Poles had come to us with incoherently whispered entreaties to attend to a very secret and desperate case. We followed them to an abandoned barn where the remnants of a crowd of frightened foreigners were watching a silent black form on the floor. The match had been between Kid O'Brien, a loverly and now quaking youth with a most unhybronian hooked nose, and Buck Robinson, the Harlem Smoke. The Negro had been knocked out, and a moment's examination showed us that he would permanently remain so. He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling forelegs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable cargo secrets and tom-tom poundings that are an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in life, but the world holds many ugly things. Fear was upon the whole pitiful crowd, for they did not know what the law would exact of them if their affair were not hushed up, and they were grateful when West, in spite of my involuntary shutters, offered to get rid of the thing quietly, for a purpose I knew too well. There was bright moonlight over the snowless landscape, but we dressed the thing and carried it home between us through the deserted streets and meadows. As we had carried a similar thing, one horrible night in Arkham. We approached the house from the field in the rear, took the specimen in the back door and down the cellar stairs, and prepared it for the usual experiment. Our fear of the police was absurdly great, though we had timed our trip to avoid the solitary patrolman of that section. The result was, wearily, anticlimactic. Gasly as our prize appeared, it was wholly unresponsive to every solution we injected in its black arm, solutions prepared from experience with white specimens only. So as the hour grew dangerously near to dawn, we did as we had done with the others, dragged the thing across the meadows to the neck of the woods near the potter's field, and buried it there and the best sort of grave the frozen ground would furnish. The grave was not very deep, but fully as good as that of the previous specimen, the thing which had risen of itself and uttered a sound. In the light of our dark lanterns, we carefully covered it with leaves and dead vines, fairly certain that the police would never find it in a forest so dim and dense. The next day, I was increasingly apprehensive about the police, for a patient brought rumors of a suspected fight and death. West had still another source of worry, for he had been called in the afternoon to a case which ended very threateningly. An Italian woman had become hysterical over her missing child, a lad of five who had strayed off early in the morning and failed to appear for dinner, and had developed symptoms highly alarming in view of an always weak heart. It was a very foolish hysteria, for the boy had often run away before, but Italian peasants are exceedingly superstitious, and this woman seemed as much harassed by omens as by facts. About seven o'clock in the evening, she had died, and her frantic husband had made a frightful scene in his efforts to kill West, whom he wildly blamed for not saving her life. Friends had held him when he drew a stiletto, but West departed amidst his inhuman shrieks, curses and oaths of vengeance. In his latest affliction, the fellow seemed to have forgotten his child, who was still missing as the night advanced. There was some talk of searching the woods, but most of the family's friends were busy with the dead woman and the screaming man. Altogether, the nervous strain upon West must have been tremendous. Thoughts at the police and of the mad Italian both weighed heavily. We were tired about 11, but I did not sleep well. Bolton had a surprisingly good police force for so small a town, and I could not help fearing the mess which would ensue if the affair of the night before were ever tracked down. It might mean the end of all our local work, and perhaps prison for both West and me. I did not like those rumors of a fight which were floating about. After the clock had struck three, the moon shone in my eyes, but I turned over without rising to pull down the shade. Then came the steady rattling at the back door. I lay still and somewhat dazed, but before long heard West's rap on my door. He was clad in dressing gown and slippers and had in his hands a revolver and an electric flashlight. From the revolver, I knew that he was thinking more of the crazed Italian than of the police. We'd better both go, he whispered. He wouldn't do not to answer it anyway, and it may be a patient. It would be like one of those fools to try the back door. So we both went down the stairs on tiptoe with a fear partly justified and partly that which comes only from the soul of the weird small hours. The rattling continued, growing somewhat louder. When we reached the door, I cautiously unbolted it and threw it open, and as the moon streamed revealingly down on the forum silhouetted there, West did a peculiar thing. Despite the obvious danger of attracting notice and bringing down on our heads the dreaded police investigation, a thing which, after all, was mercifully averted by the relative isolation of our cottage, my friend suddenly, excitedly, and unnecessarily emptied all six chambers of his revolver into the nocturnal visitor. Where that visitor was neither Italian nor policeman. Looming hideously against the spectral moon was a gigantic, misshapen thing not to be imagined to save in nightmares. A glassy-eyed, ink-black apparition nearly on all fours covered with bits of mold, leaves and vines, foul with caked blood and having between its glistening teeth a snow-white, terrible cylindrical object terminating in a tiny hand. Part 4 The Scream of the Dead The scream of a dead man gave to me that acute and added horror of Dr. Herbert West which harassed the latter years of our companionship. It is natural that such a thing as a dead man's scream should give horror, for it is obviously not a pleasing or ordinary occurrence. But I was used to similar experiences, hence suffered on this occasion only because of a particular circumstance, and, as I have implied, it was not of the dead man himself that I became afraid. Herbert West, whose associate and assistant I was, possessed scientific interests far beyond the usual routine of a village physician. That was why, when establishing his practice in Bolton, he had chosen an isolated house near the Pottersfield. Briefly and brutally stated, West's sole absorbing interest was a secret study of the phenomena of life and its cessation, leading toward the reanimation of the dead through injections of an exciting solution. For this ghastly experimenting, it was necessary to have a constant supply of very fresh human bodies. Very fresh because even the least decay hopelessly damaged the brain structure and human because we found the solution had to be compounded differently for different types of organisms. Scores of rabbits and guinea pigs have been killed and treated, but their trail was a blind one. West had never fully succeeded because he had never been able to secure a corpse sufficiently fresh. What he wanted were bodies from which vitality had only just departed. Bodies with every cell intact and capable of receiving again the impulse toward that mode of motion called life. There was hope that this second and artificial life might be made perpetual by repetitions of the injection, but we had learned that an ordinary natural life would not respond to the action. To establish the artificial motion, natural life must be extinct, specimens must be very fresh, but genuinely dead. The awesome quest had begun when West and I were students at the Miskatonic University Medical School in Arkham, vividly conscious for the first time of the thoroughly mechanical nature of life. That was seven years before, but West looked scarcely a day older now. He was small, blond, clean-shaven, soft-voiced and spectacled, with only an occasional flash of a cold blue eye to tell of the hardening and growing fanaticism of his character under the pressure of his terrible investigations. Our experiences had often been hideous in the extreme. The results of defective reanimation when lumps of graveyard clay had been galvanized into morbid, unnatural and brainless motion by various modifications of the vital solution. One thing had uttered a nerve-shattering scream. Another had risen violently, beaten us both to unconsciousness and run him up in a shocking way before it could be placed behind asylum bars. Still another, a loathsome African monstrosity had clawed out of its shallow grave and done a deed. West had to shoot that object. We could not get bodies fresh enough to show any trace of reason when reanimated, so had Perforce created nameless horrors. It was disturbing to think that one, perhaps two of our monsters still lived. That thought haunted us shadowingly, till finally West disappeared under frightful circumstances. But at the time of the scream in the cellar laboratory of the isolated Bolton Cottage, our fears were subordinate to our anxiety for extremely fresh specimens. West was more avid than I, so that it almost seemed to me that he looked half covetously at any very healthy living physique. It was in July 1910 that the bad luck regarding specimens began to turn. I had been on a long visit to my parents in Illinois and upon my return found West in a state of singular elation. He had, he told me excitedly, in all likelihood solved the problem of freshness through an approach from an entirely new angle, that of artificial preservation. I had known that he was working on a new and highly unusual embalming compound and was not surprised that it had turned out well. But until he explained the details, I was rather puzzled as to how such a compound could help in our work, since the objectionable staleness of these specimens was largely due to delay occurring before we secured them. This I now saw. West had clearly recognized creating his embalming compound for future rather than immediate use and trusting to fate to supply again some very recent and unburied corpse as it had years before when we obtained the Negro killed in the Bolton Prize Fight. At last fate had been kind so that on this occasion there lay in the secret cellar laboratory a corpse whose decay could not by any possibility have begun. What would happen on reanimation and whether we could hope for a revival of mind and reason West did not venture to predict? The experiment would be a landmark in our studies and he had saved the new body from my return so that both might share the spectacle in accustomed fashion. West told me how he had obtained the specimen. It had been a vigorous man, a well-dressed stranger just off the train on his way to transact some business with the Bolton worsted mills. The walk through the town had been long and by the time the traveler paused at our cottage to ask the way to the factories his heart had become greatly overtaxed. He refused a stimulant and had suddenly dropped dead only a moment later. The body as might be expected seemed to West a heaven sent gift. In his brief conversation the stranger had made it clear that he was unknown in Bolton and a search of his pockets subsequently revealed him to be one Robert Levitt of St. Louis, apparently without a family to make instant inquiries about his disappearance. If this man could not be restored to life, no one would know of our experiment. We buried our materials at a dense strip of woods between the house and the potter's field. If on the other hand he could be restored, our fame would be brilliantly and perpetually established so without delay West had injected into the body's wrist the compound which would hold it fresh for our use after my arrival. The matter of the presumably weak heart, which to my mind imperiled the success of our experiment, did not appear to trouble West extensively. He hoped at last to obtain what he had never obtained before, a rekindled spark of reason and perhaps a normal living creature. So, on the night of July 18, 1910, Herbert West and I stood in the Siller laboratory and gazed at a white, silent figure beneath the dazzling arc light. The embalming compound had worked uncannily well, for as I stared fascinately at the sturdy frame which had laid two weeks without stiffening, I was moved to seek West's assurance that the thing was really dead. This assurance he gave readily enough, reminding me that the reanimating solution was never used without careful tests as to life, since it could have no effect if any of the original vitality were present. As West proceeded to take preliminary steps, I was impressed by the vast intricacy of the new experiment, an intricacy so vast that he could trust no hand less delicate than his own. Forbidding me to touch the body, he first injected a drug in the wrist just beside the place his needle had punctured when injecting the embalming compound. This, he said, was to neutralize the compound and release the system to a normal relaxation so that the reanimating solution might freely work when injected. Slightly later, when a change and a gentle tremor seemed to affect the dead limbs, West stuffed a pillow-like object violently over the twitching face, not withdrawing it until the corpse appeared quiet and ready for our attempt at reanimation. The pale enthusiast now applied some last perfunctory tests for absolute lifelessness, withdrew satisfied and finally injected into the left arm an accurately measured amount of the vital elixir, prepared during the afternoon with a greater care than we had used since college days when our feets were new and groping. I cannot express the wild, breathless suspense with which we waited for results on this first really fresh specimen, the first we could reasonably expect to open its lips in rational speech, perhaps to tell of what it had seen beyond the unfathomable abyss. West was a materialist, believing in no soul and attributing all the working of consciousness to bodily phenomena. Consequently, he looked for no revelation of hideous secrets from gulfs and caverns beyond death's barrier. I did not wholly disagree with him theoretically, yet held vague instinctive remnants of the primitive faith of my forefathers, so that I could not help eyeing the corpse with a certain amount of awe and terrible expectation. Besides, I could not extract from my memory that hideous inhuman shriek we heard on the night we tried our first experiment in the deserted farmhouse at Arkham. Very little time had elapsed before I saw the attempt was not to be a total failure. A touch of color came to the cheeks hitherto chalk white and spread out under the curiously ample stubble of sandy beard. West, who had his hand on the pulse of the left wrist, suddenly nodded significantly and almost simultaneously a mist appeared on the mirror inclined above the body's mouth. There followed a few spasmodic muscular motions and then an audible breathing and visible motion of the chest. I looked at the closed eyelids and thought I detected a quivering. Then the lids opened, showing eyes which were gray, calm and alive but still unintelligent and not even curious. In a moment of fantastic whim, I whispered questions to the retting ears, questions of other worlds of which the memory might still be present. Subsequent terror drove them from my mind but I think the last one which I repeated was Where Have You Been? I do not yet know whether I was answered or not, for no sound came from the well-shaped mouth. But I do know that at that moment I firmly thought the thin lips moved silently, forming syllables I would have vocalized as Only Now if that phrase had possessed any sense or relevancy. At that moment, as I say, I was elated with the conviction that the one great goal had been attained and that for the first time a reanimated corpse had uttered distinct words impelled by actual reason. In the next moment there was no doubt about the triumph, no doubt that the solution had truly accomplished, at least temporarily, its full mission of restoring rational and articulate life to the dead. But in that triumph, there came to me the greatest of all horrors, not horror of the thing that spoke, but of the deed that I had witnessed and of the man with whom my professional fortunes were joined. For that very fresh body at last writhing into full and terrifying consciousness with eyes dilated at the memory of its last scene on earth, threw out its frantic hands and a life-and-death struggle with the air and suddenly collapsing into a second and final disillusion from which there could be no return screamed out the cry that will ring eternally in my aching brain. Help! Keep off, you cursed little toehead fiend! Keep that damn needle away from me! Part 5 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 and a Canadian regiment in Flanders, one of many Americans to proceed 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 would 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 war-like or anxious for the safety of civilization. Always an ice-cold intellectual machine, slight, blonde, blue-eyed, and spectacled, I think he secretly sneered at my occasional martial enthousiasms and sensures of supine neutrality. There was, however, something he wanted in embattled Flanders, and in order to secure it, he 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 plan-destinely 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 Miss Katonic 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 conceivably 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 that accordingly resorted to frightful and unnatural expedience 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 annoying 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 carnal 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 and fastidious baudelaire of physical experiment, a languid elegabulous at 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 centers, 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 at St. Eloy. I wonder even now if it could have been other than a demonic 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 babble of the damned. Among these sounds were frequent revolver shots, surely not uncommon on a battlefield, but distinctly uncommon in a 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 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 DSO was the greatest surgeon in our division and had been hastily assigned to the St. Eloise sector when news of the heavy fighting reached headquarters. He had come in an aeroplane piloted by the intrepid Lieutenant Ronald Hill, only to be shot down when directly over his destination. The fall had been spectacular and awful. Hill was unrecognizable 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 halish 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 within grafted skin from an unidentified specimen which had borne an officer's uniform. I knew what he wanted to see if this highly organized 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 carnal 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 blueish-green specter 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 habit 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 airplane. What followed I shall never positively know. It may have been wholly a hallucination from the shock caused at that instant by the sudden and complete destruction of the building in a cataclysm of German shellfire. Who can gain say 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 shall not call that sound a voice, for it was too awful, and yet its timber 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. Part 6 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 demonic fantasy which make even me doubt the reality of what I saw. I was West's closest friend and only confidential assistant. We 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 labor 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 animation. 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 16 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 vitalizing 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, DSO, 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 too were the only survivors. He used to make shuttering 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 internments were of the colonial period and therefore of little use to a scientist seeking very fresh bodies. The laboratory was in a sub-seller, 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 sepulcher therein. After a number of calculations, West decided that he represented some secret chamber beneath the tomb of the Abarals, where the last internment had been made in 1768. I was with him when he studied the nitrous, dripping walls laid bare by the spades and maddox of the men, and was prepared for the gruesome thrill which would attend the uncovering of centuries' grave secrets. But for the first time West's new timidity conquered his natural curiosity, and he betrayed his degenerative fiber 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. Howardly 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 neighborhood, 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 attendance. He was a menacing, military figure who talked without moving his lips and whose voice seemed almost ventriloqually 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 whole 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 their mad charge had vanished. From the hour of reading this item until midnight, West sat almost paralyzed. 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 Moorland Clapham Lee, St. Eloy, 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 hole, 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 device, and smelled the carnal bowels of putrescent earth. There was no sound, but just the electric lights went out and I saw outlined against some phosphorescence of the netherworld 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 censured wall. And then, as the breach became large enough, they came out into the laboratory in single file, led by a stalking 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. They then 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, a 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 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. True crime, monsters or unsolved mysteries like you do. You can email me anytime with your questions or comments at darren at weirddarkness.com. Darren is D-A-R-R-E-N. Weirddarkness.com is also where you can find information on any of the sponsors you heard about during the show, find all of my social media, listen to free audiobooks I have narrated, visit the store for Weird Darkness t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, phone cases and more merchandise, sign up for monthly contests, find other podcasts that I host like Church of the Undead and more. Weirddarkness.com is also where you can find the Hope in the Darkness page if you or someone you know is struggling with depression or dark thoughts. Also on the website, if you have a true paranormal or creepy tale to tell, you can click on Tell Your Story. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com. All stories on Thriller Thursday episodes are works of fiction and you can find links to the stories for the authors in the show notes. Herbert West, re-animator, was written by HP Lovecraft. I have linked to a book in the show notes that will take you to a paperback version with six different stories of Herbert West written by Lovecraft, if you want to hear more of this kind of thing. Weirddarkness is a registered trademark, copyright Weirddarkness. And now that we are coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. Isaiah 26, verse 19, Your dead will live, their corpses will rise. You who lie in the dust awake and shout for joy, for your due is as the due of the dawn and the earth will give birth to the departed spirits. And a final thought, the irony of being a zombie is that everything is funny, but you can't smile because your lips have rotted off. Isaac Marion from the book Warm Bodies. I'm Darren Marlar, thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness. The Son of a Sorceress, armed with weapons and armor, assisted by six magically summoned knights, embarks on a quest to save a princess from a vengeful wizard. That's right, it's not just an awful movie, it's an awful historically incorrect period piece movie. You got a two-headed fire-breathing dragon, cursed shrunken people, a giant ogre that looks like a guy in a werewolf costume, a wicked and ugly witch, you'll see the cone heads from Saturday Night Live. Well, they look that way, at least. You've got dated special effects, terrible acting, and costumes that look like they were ripped right out of a Monty Python skit. The Weirdo Watch Party is always free to watch online with all of us, so grab your popcorn, candy and soda, and jump into the fun and even get involved in a live chat as we watch the movie. It's The Magic Sword, presented by the Weirdness Really Bad Movie Show, Saturday August 5th, starting at 10 p.m. Eastern, 9 p.m. Central, 8 p.m. Mountain, 7 p.m. Pacific. See a trailer for the film and invite your friends to watch along with you on the Weirdo Watch Party page at WeirdDarkness.com. It will see you on Saturday August 5th for the Weirdo Watch Party. Bonus points if you're wearing your Renaissance festival costume while watching. When Salem Roanoke took a job near his family's new home as a hired hand in the Texas Hill Country, he anticipated learning the ranchers' trade, but a series of strange events, shocking murders, and unholy revelations divert him down another path. This terrifying trajectory puts him directly into the middle of a struggle between monsters, magic, and men. Armed and backed by a militia of ranchers, Salem attempts to combat the creeping tide of evil that threatens to engulf his new home and destroy the people most important to him. Will Salem manage to save his home or have his actions condemn everyone he hopes to save? The Witch Trials, a summer of wolves and season of the witch by SR Roanoke, available in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook versions. Look for The Witch Trials by SR Roanoke on Amazon or find it on the audiobooks page at WeirdDarkness.com. That's WeirdDarkness.com slash audiobooks.