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| Weird Tales 1943.09 |
"Herbert West: Reanimator" was published in six installments,
with each one designed to stand on its own, independent of the other stories.
What in Brown Jenkin's Name..?
Herbert West investigates the technique of bringing the dead back to life through post-mortem chemical injections. His ruthless methods result in ironically-dangerous results.
1. From The Dark:
Opening Statement:
Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can speak only with extreme terror.Synopsis:
The narrator and his student friend (at Miskatonic Univ.) Herbert West rob a body from a grave and try to revive it through chemical injections. At first nothing happens, but then the body begins moaning horribly. The two men flee the lab, and later there are reports of someone trying to dig himself back underground (unsuccessfully) at the cemetery where the body was dug up.From Dr. Armitage's Notes:
- 1st appearance of Miskatonic University.
The Horrible Conclusion:
And for seventeen years after that West would look frequently over his shoulder, and complain of fancied footsteps behind him. Now he has disappeared.
2. The Plague-Daemon:
Opening Statement:
I shall never forget that hideous summer sixteen years ago when, like a noxious afrite from the halls of Eblis, typhoid stalked leeringly through Arkham.Synopsis:
A year later the area is subject to a deadly typhoid plague. Professor Halsey dismisses West's resurrection experiments. Nonetheless, West secretly continues his chemical experiments with limited success. When Halsey dies, the narrator and West bring “a figure” into their lab. The next morning the lab is destroyed and the mysterious figure has escaped out the window. A watchman is clawed to death at the cemetery. The next night 17 more bodies have been found in a similar condition (some chewed upon). The creature is captured, and it looks like Prof. Halsey in some ways. It is kept at Sefton Asylum for the next 16 years.The Horrible Conclusion:
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!”
3. Six Shots By Moonlight:
Opening Statement:
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.Synopsis:
West continues his experiments in the town of Bolton. He tries to resurrect an African boxing victim but the procedure seemingly fails again, and the corpse is buried. Soon, a child goes missing. In the dead of night the door rattles. West shoots and kills the returned, resurrected boxer. The reanimated cadaver is found holding a child’s arm in its mouth.The Horrible Conclusion:
Looming hideously against the spectral moon was a gigantic misshapen thing not to be imagined save in nightmares—a glassy-eyed, ink-black apparition nearly on all fours, covered with bits of mould, leaves, and vines, foul with caked blood, and having between its glistening teeth a snow-white, terrible, cylindrical object terminating in a tiny hand.
4. The Scream of the Dead:
Opening Statement:
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.Synopsis:
Six or seven years later, West gets a new specimen, and claims to have preserved it through a new embalming compound. When he “de-embalms” it with a second injection, the victim begins to quiver - West uses a pillow over its head to “quiet” the specimen. The man is successfully revived, but suddenly cries out in remembrance of his last living memory, yelling at West to not inject him with a needle. He then dies a second time.The Horrible Conclusion:
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 in a life and death struggle with the air; and suddenly collapsing into a second and final dissolution 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 tow-head fiend—keep that damned needle away from me!”
5. The Horror From the Shadows:
Opening Statement:
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.Synopsis:
Five years later, West and his assistant serve as surgeons overseas during the war. West experiments with reanimated body parts in order to determine if the separated parts of a body are “intangibly” linked somehow, and if the isolated body parts can move without messages from the brain. For this research he uses reptile tissue to help his efforts. When Major Clapham-Lee, one of his new-found, fellow reanimation associates loses his head in an plane crash accident, West uses the reptile tissue to preserve the head. West sews up the body and proceeds to successfully reanimate it. Suddenly the distant, decapitated head screams for his copilot to “jump out of the plane”. The entire lab is then destroyed in artillery fire (although West and his assistant survive). The fate of Clapham-Lee’s head and headless body is unknown.The Horrible Conclusion:
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.
6. The Tomb Legions:
Opening Statement:
When Dr. Herbert West disappeared a year ago, the Boston police questioned me closely...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.Synopsis:
In Boston, West discovers a tomb under his house but declines to explore it further, and has it boarded up. At Sefton Asylum, a headless man leading a group of soldiers (Clapham-Lee and his reanimated soldiers) arrives and captures the reanimated Prof. Halsey. West hears about this and becomes worried. Clapham-Lee’s zombies deliver a box to West’s house. West incinerates the unopened box (a decoy, probably). Suddenly the boarded-up tomb adjacent to the lab opens from inside. Clapham-Lee’s zombie squad emerges and tears West apart.The Horrible Conclusion:
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.
Read all six chapters of "Herbert West: Reanimator" here.
Follow'd by "Hypnos".
