Shadows

Disclamer: I don't own Herbert West, but I do own the phrase "" Shrieking vapors"...it doesn't come up much, but there it is.
Herbert West was not an evil man, no; he was merely a man of principle. Oh, he knew of the rumors that had progenated around him like some goat with a thousand young. It was for those rumors alone that he was confined here, shut in a splintery cage where the shadows laughed madly up the walls and the floor smelled of stale urine.

He lay immobile in his filth-encrusted bed, strapped down so tightly he could barely breathe. This was the result of a whispered conversation behind the locked door of his cell. He had plunged into sleep one night, only to wake up the next morning in this cuckoo cocoon that they would only loosen for bowel relief and sparse nutrition.

As such, he had some time to think. At length he thought of the world that had wronged him; but sometimes, when he was on the cusp of sleep, his thoughts would drift to the macabre carnival that followed him at every interval. Those he had come into contact with and had been burned by his brilliance. Those wraiths of jealousy, the shrieking vapors of his toxic past, driven on only by their thirst for vengeance. The ghouls would catch up to him some day and drag him out of his rotten nest, their shredded laughter tearing at his ears.

There was the man in Zürich, the enfeebled half-mad professor who made the grievous mistake of attempting to mentor Herbert. He had met an unsightly end; not once, but twice. The wry satisfaction he got from seeing the old man's visage twist in rapturous pain hardly outweighed the fact that he had used the last of his efforts to bring the man back from stagnation. Herbert had been confined briefly to another cage; though that one had been deceptively room-like.

He had left Europe quickly after that; thought not, it seemed, quickly enough. A peculiar shuffling echo had begun to haunt his footsteps and a ghastly odor followed him all the way to England. It was here that he finally found respite–for a time

He shifted on his mattress, well aware of the sores that were beginning to form on his recumbent frame. His arm was asleep again and his left nostril had begun to itch. He would gladly give the lives of any of his "caretakers" to be free once more. To be free– but still in a mortal prison.

In England he had taken up again, safe at least for the time being. He had begun experiments on the local victims of the "oldest profession", even though they were not ideal subjects there was a steady stream of them. He discarded many failures in the nearby ravine that, when discovered, led to an uproar about the new "ripper". But the true furor did not start until one of the bodies found was discovered to be a young man who had died in a motor incident not three months prior.

Herbert could not be blamed if he forgot to check the date of death sometimes, he did not think the rate of decomposition was such that a body could be identified so quickly after being through both the coroner's and his hands. But he supposed that, unfortunately, his formula had something to do with it. His true misfortune didn't start until he happened upon the boxer, though.

He stirred uneasily, a creak coming from the floorboards could have easily been an orderly outside his door, but all the years he spent abroad had him jumping at shadows.

When he had arrived at the (illegal) boxing match, the young man was already beyond any mortal help. He showed all the hallmarks of his chosen profession, from a nose that had been broken so many times it was nearly flat, to a mouth that was full of teeth like rank, maggoty cheese. The small number of Irish and Welsh immigrants departed soon after, probably all in deep enough trouble with the local constabulatory without adding "accessory to manslaughter" to the list. So Herbert was alone with the body.

The brown young man was nothing more than a mass of scar tissue, it left him looking slightly subhuman to Herbert's eyes. How he managed to cart his heavy frame home, he'd never know. He had high hopes for this specimen, the freshest so far; though sadly with massive tissue damage. After 30 minutes and no animation, he had enveloped its pathetic form with a sheet and dumped it.

Later that night, when he buried himself in his experiments to wash the taste of utter failure from his mouth, there was a knock on the door.

Herbert shifted again; another creak that sounded much closer. He couldn't stand the help checking in on him with those gummy grey eyes, he pretended to be asleep whenever it happened.

The knock, rather than follow any specific cadence, just went on ceaselessly in a broken rhythm. Herbert readied a pistol he saved for just such an occasion. It had barely been enough.

The thing that opened the door was no longer inclined to walk upright, it was in some sort of mad half-crouch, broken canines bared. Whether it was the boxer or some other shuffling corpse, Herbert didn't stop to see. He emptied his pistol, reloaded, and emptied it again.

After that, it seemed bad taste to stay in the area, particularly with all of the abducted child alerts and tales of half-seen creatures in the night. Herbert had no reason to believe that all of his failures had been found by the authorities, and his steps had begun to reverberate again. So he shipped of for the colonies, the upper states. He decided upon Massachusetts, where the renowned Henry Armitage had first begun studies on psychoplasmic phenomena in the latter half of his life. Unfortunately, this was where things had really started to go wrong.

He had decided on the Miskatonic valley instead of greater Arkham, access to proper facilities becoming second to secrecy. He enrolled in their fourth-rate college, slicing about a decade from his actual age and inventing a childhood in Ipswitch. He was deployed to the morgue for his seeming inexperience, a turn of events that filled him with satisfaction at this marvelous coincidence.

His first few experiments that day were inspiring, to say the least; one of his specimens was a young man free from the rot of disease infesting his organs. He had whimpered, rather than screaming like his other experiments did, Herbert's chemical mixture working small miracles on the delicate pink network of nerves. His eyes fluttered open, bloodshot, and he groaned louder.

Herbert was frenetically taking notes, feeling like skipping for joy, when things took a turn for the worse. He hadn't thought of the differences in body decomposition, and had used the same amount as his Soho corpses; to disastrous results. Now, the wraith was screaming, straining with Herculean effort at the leather bindings of its gurney; and to Herbert's surprise, loosening the bolts.

Thanks to quick thinking and a skull saw, the mistake was dispatched with. But Herbert knew it would be more problematic working here than in England, people were bound to notice a headless corpse far more swiftly.

So he began searching for a new dwelling. Hiding out in the basement and using the hospital showers was anything but productive.

A soft thud like a footstep. Herbert clenched his whole body. He waited what seemed like an eternity of held breath, but nothing more. He let it out as quietly as he could.

He eventually found lodging just off campus, but by that time he had much worse tribulations to deal with. A sudden outbreak of smallpox, a hitherto unmutated strain theorized to come from the Colobus monkeys MiskTech used for their lab division. Not only that, but the Dean began inquiries into Herbert's past and his practices on campus.

The Dean was a miserly little man, so set in his conservative ways Herbert clashed horns with him immediately on medical procedure. He had been haunting Herbert's steps ever since, threatening expulsion at the slightest hitch, trading verbal blows over Herbert's imagined faults. He would often be called in by some irate professor whom Herbert had corrected, ready to stifle any and all independent thought. Herbert loathed the man.

Luckily, the two were dealt with in a final blow. The Dean, a skilled healer in his own right, had taken it upon himself to supervise the administration of vaccines. The man had been vaccinated but fell to the disease anyway, his age a concluding factor. Herbert had little time to savour his triumph, however, as his assistant and flatmate fell to the disease as well. He had refused inoculation, citing scarcity and availability to the townsfolk. No matter how Herbert nursed him, he ended up in the same as the other victims; a grim, charred corpse with sanguineous eyes.

It was here that he made his biggest mistake of all.

Herbert's eyes flickered over to the cell door, and the wall to the right of it. Was it just a trick of the light, or was there something…

A shadow, vaguely man-sized.

Herbert opened his mouth and let out a long, unending scream.

Did the orderlies perch outside his door? They came in far too quickly, or was it just his skewed perception of time?

Shifting their flashlights about, their cyclopic beams came to rest on Herbert, and the muttering immediately started. He knew what was coming long before a slim young blond man came in, cradling his syringe full of venom on a grimy towel. Though he was entombed in cloth, Herbert still fought.

"I–Damn you! Let go! Help! Keep off, you cursed little tow-head fiend–keep that damned needle away from me!"

Three heavy orderlies took his head while the last drew the syringe full of golden liquid and plunged it deep into Herbert's veins. His screamed threats gradually died away, a quantity of drool hitting the pillow. He was now incapable of much voluntary movement, something he was quite used to. But he was unused to the currents of terror eddying up and down his body, and though his jaw was slack and his throat lifeless, he still tried to scream.

The orderlies, having completed their midnight brutality, shuffled quietly out, the last stopping to drop him a wink. The door creaked shut and there was silence. Herbert laboriously turned his face up to the ceiling, swallowing as hard as he could. Some patients had died from the administration of this drug; they fell asleep on their back and choked on their own saliva.

He swallowed again, more easily this time, and lay there.

He had not been planning to use Dean Halsey's corpse; and perhaps in the end it was not really wise to do so, but his pride drove him on.

It was mostly out of spite that he stole the doddering old alumnus's carcass, the temptation of proving himself right after many wordy battles with the Dean was far greater than the fear of discovery. He was laid out as primly as a man in his condition could be when Herbert crept into the makeshift crypt they had made out of the morgue.

The fact that men of science still clung to old rituals disgusted Herbert, he counted no one in the school his equal; but even he felt a twinge of guilt removing the old man's body, wrenching his clasped hands apart like two misshapen tallow candles. The stench in the morgue was unbearable, in his laboratory even more so. Halsey had not been towering in his lifetime, but laid out on the steel gurney he looked as he truly was; a pitiful old man.

Herbert readied the steel straps, prepared this time after many violent failures. He was an old man, but even children turned into raving corpses so strong they could kill a grown man. A train disaster had taught him this.

He shot the measured formula into the old man's brittle neck, frantically recording notes.

10 seconds: pulse still, no sign of reanimation.

20: minor twitches, pulse flutter, still no major sign of reanimation.

25: tremors, R.E.M, erratic pulse.

30: convulsions, sounds issuing from mouth of subject.

45: eyes open, body looking for something, weak sounds issuing from mouth of subject.

At 51 seconds exactly, the former Dean Halsey's eyes locked onto Herbert, and he gave the same spine-shattering cry that he had heard from the others. Before he could dispatch the mistake, however, things went horribly wrong.

Herbert twitched, barely able to shut his dry eyes. That was definitely a soft footstep, coming from the direction of the shadow, but he wasn't going to give it the satisfaction of looking. He'd swallow his own tongue before admitting that thing existed.

The Dean began rocking spasmodically back and forth, overturning the gurney and upsetting Herbert's surgical implements. He violently twisted about in his steel prison like a monstrous worm, but could not break free. That is, until one of his cries was answered by something at the door. Herbert dove for the fire poker he kept handy, but the rotted wood of the door splintered, and in came a creature that looked vexingly familiar.

Herbert could never be sure what the proper manner was to dispatch one of his mistakes, so he was fairly certain some survived. But he was quite unprepared for the small crowd that flooded in, angrily keening notes that would frighten a dog, making straight for the Dean's corpse and Herbert himself. Only swift thinking and the fire poker got him out alive; he shattered one of the minuscule basement windows and somehow managed to crawl out, shredding his shirt and part of the skin on his abdomen.

He managed to get away under cover of night, spinning a wild tale of crazed pox survivors to the military quarantine guard; but he had a sneaking suspicion they hadn't been there for him. Yet. He recovered after a few days, decided medical internship wasn't for him, and packed up and left.

But he hadn't realized until then that he had made a powerful enemy. He had just taken it for granted that all of the fiends lost both reason and speech capability once they came back. But there was one subject whom he had abandoned prematurely, it seemed. One who had a inexplicable ability to exert control over the others, one who–

There it was, it was definitely soft padding footfalls. It had followed him here.

During his travels, Herbert had incurred the wrath of a powerful enemy, one who lusted for his blood and wished to pick him apart like his many cadavers.

He had known the thankless beast in new England, had talked of medical matters with him and shared insights. And the ungrateful swine tried to have him turned in, tried to steal his life work for himself! Of course West hard retaliated, why shouldn't he? His entire life was devoted to this one calling, no one else had any right to it.

Sure, he had killed him, that was unavoidable. But he had immediately begun preparations for reanimation. If he could but experience the work firsthand, he would have a different opinion, would see why Herbert was doing al of this for the greater good. But most of all, Herbert's supply of fresh cadavers had been halted by order of the meddling Dean, and this was the first body that he had seen in days.

But it had been a mistake, for even those of the medical personnel were subject to their own petty jealousies. Herbert supposed he was foolish for thinking even death would stop a grudge nursed so absolutely.

He hadn't done it out of spite, hadn't done it to prove that he was justified in his actions, he simply had continued doing what he had always done. But then ten months later, his surgical equipment had been planted on the corpses of brutally murdered persons, some even unfit for experiments. Of course he had contested, saying he was nowhere near the murdered folk at the time, but they had taken one look at his basement laboratory and locked him away.

But that hadn't stopped the ghoul from seeking vengeance, oh no.

It had taken him five hellish months to track Herbert down, but Herbert wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of calling for help. Even though he was one of Herbert's only successful experiments, albeit an unusual one, Herbert had nothing but contempt for the walking remains of a stubborn man. So stubborn that even death could not deter him of his goal of seeing Herbert stifled, locked away–

The footfalls stopped, right by his bedside. Herbert looked up at the ceiling resolutely, he would not give him the satisfaction of looking. The dry-rotted breath of the thing washed over him, reminiscent of that terrible plague where the pox had taken to his pink underparts and he had begun to hemorrhage beneath the skin, where it had become a lost cause to even keep him alive. He remembered that smell, that sickly rot, and the weak rasp that had gone with it, accusing him of foul play, of infecting him with that unholy disease while he slept.

And now the rancor of his breath was unbearable, the hands gripping his arm revoltingly soft, Herbert's eyes were watering. And in that moment, the face he had seen closed in death so long ago, now grotesquely changed by illness and decay, hove into his line of vision; its face frozen in a rictus of perverse joy.

"Hello." Breathed Daniel Cain.

Author's Note: Spooky. This was done as a tribute to the original serial of Reanimator, and as such I tried to make it as episodic as I could. I stayed as faithful to it as I could, crafty people will notice a nod to the original Herbert West from the story.