Dr. Herbert West--Reanimator

[Priestess of Neptune]

Okay, before you read this, I need to explain the assignment (yes, this was for school). We were to find an object of an age older than 30 years, then write a story including the object in three different time periods: the original time, an intermediate date, and a current date. The stories weren't required to be about the same subject, but mine were anyway. We were to list them in reverse chronological order, which looking at this arrangement, I like better, so I suggest reading them starting with the third one. Just a suggestion, though.

This whole thing in a single post might have been a little intimidating to read, so I split it into the three parts, each of which should be fine, even independent of the other parts. So feel free to read however many you please.

If you are inclined towards comments, please include the date of the one you are talking about, since the order might be confusing.

Please give me criticism, meaning tell me where I can improve-- be harsh. I don't mind ego-stroking, though wink  

[Priestess of Neptune]

1905

He recalls nothing of his past, save the day he was created- a gusty November morning, the day after a large rain had drowned a dam worker. Of the vanished Herbert West, his reanimator, he knows little more than that it was Dr. West who injected him into life a second time on a table in the deserted farmhouse adjacent to the potter’s fields. Bestial cries resound through the woods as he contemplates the horror of his unnatural existence. Creatures of the forest bolt in terror before him as he thrashes through deer-paths, not bound for any particular destination save a respite from where he currently is.

A full week passed in which the incessant howling was heard from reaches of the forest not traveled by any men of dignity, and little by those of ill repute. In the lamp-lit barrooms, whispered over pints were rumors of a voodoo cult, whose practice it was to vivisect animals and men for sacrifice to their heathen deity. The laboratory aide shivered over West’s discrete coldness in ignoring the obviously still-alive experiment, as he continued to prepare new strains of his reanimation solution.

The dark regions of the forest held only a solitary creature, only and last of its kind, which after a week of self-pity yowled itself into a quiet, senseless loathing of everything else alive, and lethargy of not moving from the root of a banyan tree but for water. While he soliloquized, the need for water transformed into a need for something much more gruesome, a need which propagated as another week passed and the lunar cycle waxed to gibbous.

The night of the moon’s death, hunger was uncontrollable, unmitigated by mammals too slow to escape the serving-platter hands tipped with iron talons. With a baleful eye he looked at the town, basking in the thought of the appeasing bloodshed and wanton feasting upon macabre remnants of bodies. Muscles convulsed against the skin of his biped legs, and as inexorably as the Mark IV tank crosses the trenches of the Great War, the hulking, black furred form crosses the potter’s field to the town, ignoring momentarily the cradle of its misery in a blood-rage not yet meanly fulfilled. Revelers in the alleys of town chorused out-of-tune, the launderers and weavers and married women slept easily in cots free from flighty dreams of malevolence spurred by the superstitious noises, clandestine meetings in the night were executed as planned, ale flowed freely from the taps into the mugs and mouths of workmen. The town exudes normalcy and peace. Gradually the singing of revelers subsides, leaving the town in a deep sleep. A solitary policeman wanders the edge of the industrial district, glancing often and with relish at his pocket-watch. Passing bars pulsing with welcome warmth, he notices a dark stain leading into an unnoticed nook between two gay bars. The creature looks up from its breakfasting, globules of spittle, gore, and things which are horrendous to even a battlefield surgeon stream from his fanged mouth and collect in the dark puddle emanating from the jumble of unthinkably mangled corpses he crouches before. The lack of revelry accosts the policeman, accompanied by the notion of flight and help. His whistle makes a loud enough din to cause bar-goers to look outside long enough to see the former policeman become nothing at all, before raising the alarm to neighboring bars and the rest of the nearby town.

The ensuing melee and gunshots leave in their wake fire, carnage, and half-delirious accounts of a half-man, half bear-pig, or a half bear, half man-pig. Remains of the monster are attributed lost to the fire, neglecting one pulped forearm.

As sincere as the aide’s denial of being the destructor of the missing Dr. Wake were the post-fire testimonials of the rustic hunters far outside of town of a bear-like form which stalks the forests trackless and silent, extending help to the maimed or trapped creatures of the forest with its single arm. A parallel can not help but be drawn between these accounts of fifteen years ago and the aide’s own of the delivery men, who deposited a man-sized box at Dr. West’s door on the day he disappeared, one of whom was a hairy man of tremendous size, with one empty sleeve.  

[Priestess of Neptune]

1918

With the end of the Great War and readily available fresh specimens, Dr. West’s manner became impatient. He had been accustomed to the daily delivery of the bodies of young men, killed in the mien of France’s fields, sometimes still warm. As a panacea to his long days in the laboratory drew steadily nearer in the form of a single perfect elixir, the quality and life span of the reanimated increased, with fewer occurrences of monstrosity. Felicitous fate ceased to smile two years after the war, when Dr. West is discovered as missing, and his lifetime laboratory aide rants of queer happenings in the furnace room, insisting that Dr. West was murdered by no mortal hand.

***

Dr. West’s recalcitrant blue eyes are dull and on a different wavelength than the world as he injects the first post-war corpse with the life-giving serum, mumbling coherently about the time elapsed since death, and less comprehensibly about the similarity between the current formula and a previous mixture used with success upon rabbits. His hands are steady as the needle enters the pale skin just above the right elbow; the few milliliters of solution are efficiently and effortless injected, marked with a practiced expertise suitable for a patient living or dead. From above the prone figure on the operating table, he quietly dictates notes on the proceedings to the aide at the writing desk against the wall behind him, the electric table lamp competing with the electric operating lamp for lighting the room.

“No activity for the first seven minutes- typical. Appendages twitching; primitive comprehension in eyes thirty seconds after. Low growl at ten minutes forty seconds. Movement is fading, fourteen minutes even,” Dr West drones on as the reflexive twitching resembled more closely the movements of a dying spider than a man attempting to move himself. “Movement ending, seventeen minutes fifty seconds. Not fresh enough. Why can’t they fly another plane into the ground in front of our operating building? A jolly pity the war’s over.” A faraway look replaces the bored stare of before. “Nineteen minutes, we’re done.” With this he deftly removes a six-chamber revolver from his apron, and leaves a centimeter-wide hole between the patient’s ribs before returning the warm gun to its ordained pocket, located directly below his now limp right hand. The outmoded pocket-watch on the stand next to the operating continues ticking as the aide finishes the stat sheet, and the gun in Dr. West’s pocket cools.

“Finish up here, and wake me if a new subject is available. I’m retiring to my bedroom for a nap- those blasted propellers kept me awake for the entirety of the miserable flight.” The doctor removes his spectacles to reveal darkly shadowed eyes, and wipes his face with a grimy handkerchief. “Is it eight morning or night?” he disinterestedly asks the room, walking with heavy tread towards the stone staircase. The aide replies that it is day, eliciting the standard response: “I hope someone steps under a lorry.” With the mechanical answer, he exits the basement, leaving the aide to dispose of the body.

Studiously the cadaver is inserted into the furnace, with little fumbling or finagling of the dead weight. The recently purchased furnace, a beauty of iron and brick, heats to an hellish thousand degrees—not as sinfully hot as the furnace at the university, but those days are substantially behind the two doctors, along with the indignantly traditional professors with qualms over what kinds of science are off-limits. As the evidence of the morning’s efforts are lost to fire but for a sheaf of paper in a locked file, the aide truthfully stares at the masquerade of flames as innocents, thinking ahead to the day that he too might be fed to the heated hungry horror of harmonious hissings of gas and greed--the freshest body, met by a certain revolver no less thirsty than the bottomless coffin before him.  

[Priestess of Neptune]

2009

Construction crews clear debris from what used to be a magnificent stone mansion, tales of which had reached the hardhats on the site. Bright yellow termites scramble about in the pit of masonry and earth, disgorging chunks of history from the ground for 6.50 USD an hour. The noon sun of October unfailingly warms tempers and restlessness, which the subtle breeze does little to alleviate, saturated as it is with smog and the smell of the nearby low-rent district. Knells ring out from churches unknown; meaningful work shudders to a trickle as the Joes and Johns seek shaded spots, situated serenely—safe from sun’s spotlight. Some of the more wrinkled and arthritic strong-men display metal lunch pails from a time long-past, yet somehow befitting a past not long enough to those of the locale. Two younger crew members sit on an exposed basement corner, heedless of the example set by the obviously sun-spotted elders.

“I heard this place was haunted by a ghost who stole the bodies of the dead, then used them to ransom money from rich families,” states worker number one.

“That’s a wheelbarrow full of bollocks,” retorts worker number two. “What would a ghost do with money? Bribe the devil? That’s hardly likely. I heard that a doctor’s assistant who lived here went bonkers and killed his mentor, then buried him in the very basement we’re excavating, causing the ghost of the doctor to haunt this manor with strange figures and sounds at night.”


“We would have found any remains if a body had really been buried here.”

“No, I think you are wrong on that account. See that stone in the opposite corner, down there, with the large piece of wood sticking out of the ground next to it? I bet that’s a support beam for a second basement. We haven’t found the foundation yet, you know.” Worker number one leers at his friend, daring a denial of what he’d said.

Work resumes gradually; the overseer is laconic in the heat and turns a blind eye to workers covertly exerting below-par effort. Oiled machinery combusts passively along, and tedium pervades the sweat excreted from glands of dehydrated men. The known foundation level is cleared of the flotsam and jetsam of a worksite, but as dirt is removed in an effort to make evident the foundation, nothing is discovered except more dirt. Puzzled, a conglomerate of the older workers authorizes a backhoe to test the depth of dirt in lieu of the foreman, who is absent. The cavernous shovel tool grips the dirt, and sinks… and continues to sink, until the shovel is full and the newly excavated hole is examined. No foundation is visible for three feet below where it should be. A second hole identical to the first is dug against a wall, in hopes that the foundation might be evident there, but with as much success as before. A disgruntled worker kicks the wall above the second hole, an impetus for the dirt compressed against the stone wall to fall into the newly delved pit, revealing a white, flaking mortar between the dark stones, entirely different than the dun mortar between the green stones one lay above.

Extraction of the dirt and newly discovered wall-stones results in the discovery of a room adjacent to the manor and its sub-basement. A shivering worker of about twenty, with sweat-dampened brown hair and eyes glancing continually back to his friends behind advances into the dark depths, armed with a pocket torch. The stench of long-dead air pervades the tomb of forgotten memories, accented by a waft of decay and fungal growth. In the center of the unadorned stone crypt lies a cairn, arranged neatly. Later it would be found empty, the skeleton with antique spectacles and pocket-watch found beside the cairn with a bullet in the chest, fired by a similarly ancient revolver found upon the remnants of an apron suited for medical work the presumed would-be occupant.  

[Collote]

I am so sorry that this took me so long... I've been outrageously busy.

I don't have any edits... your writing is much more sophisticated than my writing.

This piece is wonderful. =D  

[Priestess of Neptune]

It's fine if you've been busy, or even if you haven't been busy.

I "beg to differ". I think it's because one can't read one's own writing and like it as much as one ought to.

If you think this is wonderful, check out the original I 'stole' the idea from. =)

EDIT: If anyone has anything to help improve this, please be blunt and let me know. I strive for perfection!  

[dragongirl187]

I think that nearly every sentence is too wordy. Normally I wouldn't have said anything, but if you're really striving for perfection I might as well put in my two cents. xd  

[Priestess of Neptune]

I appreciate every barb. Yes, I do tend to get a little wordy. I don't know if I want to go through the whole thing and shorten my sentences, but I guess not everyone is a Dickens fan, so I'll try and stick to compound or complex sentences vs. compound-complex for future work.