Here comes a departure from the movie, now officially going back to Lovecraft's original tale, although you will see a few references from the movie (think of it as role reverse in a way). Which means Herbert West is back to his original blond-haired, blue-eyed appearance, and the original story set in contemporary settings. And the unnamed narrator now is my OC Barbara Kane (named after Barbara Crampton), who is his college friend and his wife in later years. The more I thought about these ideas, the more irresistible they became, including a more chilling but otherwise happier end for them both. :) The beginning of that end with West getting torn to pieces by his own experiments is only the beginning, but the best is to come, and the heroine Barbara herself is along for the ride.

Disclaimer: The original tale doesn't belong to me, as the movies don't, but Barbara Kane-West does. :D

Chapter One

Of the Past

I fingered the twisting diamond cross around my neck as I stood on the front steps of the house I once shared with the man whom my profession was shared with and who I once allowed myself to be shackled to - out of love and out of fear, but overall out of scientific curiosity. This cross my mother gave to me as a little girl, telling me to always have faith and never give up on it, never give up on anything in life. As regretful as it is, I do not feel like I have faith anymore, that I abandoned it a long time ago when I first met Herbert West.

Herbert West, who was my friend in college and my husband later in life.

I looked down and stared at my left hand which held my jacket together - there was the unique golden ring he gave me the day we were married, set with three little rose-cut diamonds twinkling faintly - and shivered when his name came to mind. Once I would think of his name as admiration and love, at least early in the beginning when he introduced me to the black and forbidden realms of the unknown...all of which should never have been crossed. Herbert West was no man I'd ever known in my life; he fascinated me utterly even when he clashed with the dean of the medical college we attended together, had no friends and not even a girlfriend. I was the only one who ever spoke to him and discussed his theories on the re-animation of dead tissue, and how could I have predicted where my life went when I stayed with him?

Dr. Herbert West, the love of my life who was also my science partner and colleague, has been gone for a year now, but the memory of the manner of his disappearance is worse than ever. If anyone ever heard what happened, they would not have believed me and locked me away for the rest of my life in the Sefton Psychiatric Hospital.

The crisp summer wind brushed loose strands of my long hair coming undone from my clipped bun, chilling the skin of my face, but my body was kept warm by the gold-accented black suit dress I have chosen for today. Running away from the past hasn't helped me move on. Seventeen years of living with a madman is never easy to forget. The real estate agent would be inside waiting for me, and I can't wait out here any longer. I have come here not to stand and stare at this elegant place of river stone, latticed wood and triangular rooftops; I came to settle business and reclaim this place for myself.

My polished black heels made a soft clacking up the steps as I made way for the front door, ringing the bell and waiting for awhile before it was answered. "Dr. Barbara West," the agent stated coolly as she looked me over. "Long time no see. I was beginning to think you weren't coming."

I scoffed. "Really, Mrs. Jensen, I would never not come on an important time like this. My husband, rest him, and I used to own this, or has your old age finally gotten to you?" Talking back to someone who wasn't worthy of respect was something I came to inherit from Herbert.

She snorted back as she looked me over. "I may be old, Doctor, but that doesn't mean I don't pay notice to time anymore." She stepped by to let me in. The sooner I entered the foyer, I looked around this place of hideous and wonderful memories at the same time.

The polished banisters and beams...the tiled marble floors and arched doorways...Persian carpeting over some floors...it was all so magical but so painful. This was where we lived, together, before that final hellish night which took him from me. I'd feared him because of his methods which had changed so drastically over the years, but I still loved him. I made mistakes as I came to hate the things he did when we were supposed to be making a good cause. I mourn him more than I did then; I regret not saving him sometimes. The door closed behind me, but I paid Mrs. Jensen no mind as I reached again for the cross over my heart and remembered back when I first met Herbert West, Re-Animator.

~o~

17 years ago

It was at the beginning of our third year at the Miskatonic University Medical School in Arkham, Massachusetts that I finally found the courage to speak to Herbert West, whom I had classes with but never spoke to directly. I'd known him since the first year but never had it in me to talk to him because I saw him so...intimidating. Calculating and intimidating. He never socialized with anyone that I knew of, but he was bold in speaking up for himself and against anything the professors taught, resulting in getting into trouble with the benevolent Dean Alan Halsey - benevolent, but unaccepting of the young man's theories which were wild and original; I never really took another young mind's ideas seriously because I thought the older superiors knew better, but at the same time I knew better myself. I never spoke up out of fear of ostracization like West was.

West was a small, slender, spectacled young man in a white collared shirt, black tie and slacks, completely different from the other "gentlemen" of the campus; I could have sworn some students snickered behind his back, and he either noticed and pretended not to, or he was oblivious altogether. His hair was blond, almost more yellow than platinum, parted down the middle and flat on either side of his head, his face soft-featured but stern, and his eyes matched mine in color, piercing but so cold and petrifying. The moment I stood before him in the hallway before our next class, those eyes took me in off the bat, taking in my long brown hair in a ponytail, my denim jacket and jeans embroidered with ornate silver crosses, and finally the diamond cross from my mother, the jacket buttoned down to show it. But I think he sneered when he saw it.

"West, is it?" I managed, suddenly nervous and wondering why I was doing this.

He nodded. "Herbert West. And you must be Kane," he returned, finally allowing the ghost of a smile on his face.

"Barbara Kane," I answered, extending my hand out to him, keeping my other on my books. He shook it, but it was light and not eager. "I wanted to say that...that was amazing how you talked Dr. Halsey down." Why would I ever say that? Dean Alan Halsey was respected and loved by so many, his treatments of the ailing going all the way back two generations before I was born. And he wasn't so eager to let go of customs and old ideas. But the world was always changing, so there were always new scientific methods brought to light. Halsey was one of the last living Puritans of this planet.

West was still smiling, tightly. "Well, that wasn't something I came to expect from someone who has never...approached me before," he said as we started walking. "I'd have thought you would call me immature and vague as Halsey would, call me intolerant."

Honestly? Not exactly, but nobody seemed to know him well enough to dig deeper into the facts. "I don't know if I agree with him," I confessed, sitting down on the nearest bench with him. "I mean, he's a good man, but..."

West snorted, cutting me off. "Good man, indeed. But would a good man really fail to see reason, stop and view the matter a little more deeper?" He shook his head, reaching up to take off his glasses and clean them purely out of habit; I assumed it was because I don't think I detected a smudge. Putting them back, he went on, "Barbara, I have no doubt about him, but those old-fashioned cretins fail to see it. They refuse to see that all life is a physical and chemical process, fail to see that the so-called soul is a mere myth." I gasped when he spoke of blasphemy against the tradition of the soul of man; he frowned at my reaction. "What, you believe such frivolous nonsense?" he mocked.

"It's not that," I said quickly. "Just that...I never met anyone who wouldn't follow the dean and the other professors' shadows, cease all independent thought."

He nodded, but he didn't look like he was believing me when I was telling the truth. "I see."

Mom used to teach me that there were two sides to every person, so I had a feeling that he hid more than he was letting on right now. He was giving me the chills with that hard look he was giving me; he didn't seem to trust me, and somehow I wanted him to. I wanted to learn more about his...radical theories about the possible - impossible, in the eyes of the elders - conquering of death which landed him on the dean's bad side, see if he was as crazy as they said he was.

I loved the idea of the protagonist returning to the place where it is obvious happened at the end of the original tale, for closure reasons, but as I said, that story is far from finished if a new narrator of my own making. ;)

Read and review throughout the story. Appreciate it. :)