VII. THE VISITORS
It is not often that a close friend, connected through shared and secretive pursuits that create a bond of simple necessity, will inject a colleague with a self-concocted serum. The total effects of the mixture on my mind I am unaware of; in fact, with the additives of the serum unknown to anyone but the administrator, I find it more believable - ludicrously believable - that for the duration of the exchange I had lost my sanity. The full scope of the ingredients and their morbid effects were known only to a certain Herbert West, whose knowledge in these areas was unparalleled in its sheer extensive atrocity. And now, I believe, the secrets I do not dare call arcane will die with him, for Herbert West has disappeared.
The effects I observed on my brain, which addle it even now with the barest memories of the encounter, I pray would not have come to pass had I not the mind to pry into West's affairs. We had become intimate colleagues during our educational pursuits, and our graduation from the Miskatonic University had left us sharing quarters in Bolton, as West's ambitions were not of the kind applicable by the timid and rote physicians in Arkham. Seeking freedom, West and his bosom assistant (as I was, at the time, steadfast and enraptured with a shared interest) had taken up board in a quiet house off Pond Street. For reasons I dare not repeat for fear of my wavering mind - be assured it is not lacking in atrocity - West and I consented again to a change of accommodation after learning that the potter's yard had been burned. To West, this was the blow that forced him to seek housing elsewhere in Bolton, for our sole shared interest could only be sated through a ready supply of recently-deceased flesh; West desired no more than the reanimation of the dead.
A practical and logical man, of blond hair, blue eyes, and slight stature, West was not immediately suspicious to proprietors; we succeeded eventually in securing a small house with two beds and small dining quarters on the opposite side of the city in Clydesdale, a decision I attributed to our anxiety to leave the remains of the potter's yard behind. In walking distance to the nearest city block, a seedy district where crime ran rampant, West was certain that fate would again deliver a husk fresh enough for use in his crazed ventures. West believed that - given the nature of living flesh and all its chemical processes - neither spirit nor soul existed, and it was only in the body's machinations that super-natural patterns came to be. The closest West came to the superstitious was the fervour that struck him as he explained that the shack we had taken residence in would surely bring him more remains, for the previous family had died underneath this roof.
As I unpacked my possessions in the dilapidated building we had purchased with our meagre scholarship funds - it was needless to say that West's requests for cadavers had made us unpopular - West retreated to the basement to construct a lab in which our endeavours could be concealed. It was then that the curiosity struck. Beside West's antique shotgun, in the accumulation of ironed shirts, gleaming medical implements of various length and form, and stacks of records, was a folder bronzed with age. Its title bore the words, "Board of Pure and Applied Medicine: Arkham District" and below it, after a string of numbers, a red-stencilled "restricted". Drawn to it by curiosity, as West had long renounced the Board as far too old-fashioned for his experiments, I began to thumb the pages. In the hours after, as I ruminated on the findings by moonlight - dry details of the board's refusals to West's demands for cadavers - I could not help but feel a sense of dread. The final page in the folder was not a letter of refusal. It was the deed to the very abode I sat in, the Gerstein estate. A picture had been attached to the bottom corner, presumably by West, of a woman.
I recognized Annabelle Gerstein's fine features from the windows of the Miskatonic University, through which I often caught West looking. Though Gerstein was a woman and a Jew, her beauteous smiles and sun-kissed features - such welcome breaks from the University's cold bright light - drew the attentions of many Miskatonic students. West, though he hid it, was rather preoccupied with her; a detail that chilled me even in the hot Autumn air as West slept soundly across from me. Did she draw his affections even in death? Fearing the answer, I stuffed the folder away where I had found it, returned to the depths of his possessions and piles. It was a quiet night for a supposed crime-addled town, and the bog across from us brimmed with sweet cricket sounds, and yet I could not sleep. The morbid, half-alive creations West created from cadavers not-yet-fresh-enough often haunted our psyches, and West oft complained of an unease that can only be attributed to being watched, and yet that was not it either. The thing that snatched my rest from my bloodshot eyes was that Gerstein had died two weeks after West began their courtship.
In the weeks that passed we secured no corpses, though our perusal of Clydesdale gossip to the locals must have been regarded with suspicion, for we also treated fewer patients than we had in our previous arrangement. Our pantry soon emptied itself of food, and due to the nature of our experiments, our implements would have to be replaced and new dressings purchased, for West's constant tinkering with his life-giving reagent bled us dry. After two months, I was forced to take jobs outside my scope of expertise. I was lucky to have found a job caring for a wealthy, retired couple. Mister Collingstead was a European immigrant of thick accent, self-assured demeanor, and a curious scaly lizard that he claimed to have stolen from a tribe of Ethiopia. Once, upon West's behest, I smuggled the eggs of such a creature into the basement of the Gerstein estate, whereupon West injected each egg with a range of multicolor syringes.
Though he never disclosed details, West also took the offers of employers, their credibility unknown. At odd hours of the night (when I had fallen into a fitful rest as the thought of the Gersteins would allow), I often awoke to swelling of crickets when West came and went, doing as he pleased, often in the accompaniment of a shadowy escort. As I lay prone in the sheets, feigning sleep, I would hear voices. All were feminine; I shudder to think of why West needed such company in the small hours, and as I listened to the brief exchanges, I began to put voices to his moonlight visitors' faces. Helen Abrams was the butcher's daughter, of short stature and high alto; Jessica Wechsler was the Clydesdale district's sole and central librarian, who spoke sotto voce even outside of the confines of her archives; and Mary Schwarz was so baritone and pallid that I was initially afeared that West had succeeded in summoning from Tartarus an estranged eidolon. It was around this time I would find West jumpy, terse, and lacking focus. His midnight menagerie became thinner with time - sleep often took me before I saw each visitor's departure, assuming they indeed departed from the basement at all - and by midday West proved so erratic in his movements I kept a wide berth so as to avoid his ire. His clear blue eyes were clouded, his pupils stretched and black, and he affixed me with a vacant stare each time I entered. It had been more than a month since he forbade me entrance to the basement, where he undoubtedly made attempts to sate his thirst for deceased flesh through means I could not then fathom. Indeed, in the later days could not hide my growing fear of West; he appeared as starved for a cadaver as a drunkard for wine. It was not long until he began to fix the living with stares normally reserved for the dead, wishing morbidly for a chance to open them atop his scuffed surgical table.
By the start of November, I became quite obsessed with any notion of reviving my partner from his stupor. Sensing an opportunity in his ego, I clung to Mister Collingstead's bloated self-assurance and siphoned from him an invitation to a Mister Herbert West, inviting us to his home on the 7 November 1910. The door was answered on that day by his niece of nineteen years, Margaret, a pink-faced youth to whom I took a liking. As we gathered around his quarters and sipped from hot china, Collingstead mentioned a detail hitherto unnoticed to us. West's blue eyes brightened as Collingstead recounted the details of Margaret's family's death - she was the sole survivor of the nigh-extinct Gerstein line. For the rest of the evening, West experienced a sudden vitality befitting of his youth, and I rejoiced in my partner's restored vigour. The unsettling gaze he reserved for fresh corpses (of which I had found myself the target as of late), that they might swiftly die and allow him access to their biological secrets, was now focused solely on the Gerstein woman.
The remainder of November was an end to the purrs of the crickets, and West found it easier in layers of thin snow to conceal his pursuits. He was, nonetheless, stringent about my access to the basement; when I returned from the Collingstead estate in the small hours, I could often hear noises of a vehement quality, and see the flicker of light across the basement stairs. Our daytime pursuits were equally engaging; it was a cool afternoon when West emerged from the road, sweating, jumpy, and alone, to give an unexpected call of my name. His eyes shone as he detailed an engagement that had occurred not minutes before; as he turned the roundabout from James St. to purchase medicines and implements, a gunshot had resounded from the bog. He had dropped the grotesque groceries to shield his ears from the noise and ran to the location I found him presently, he breathlessly explained. Ecstatic at our sudden turn of luck, I sprinted for the baggage while West promised to secure the body. I heard two more gunshots by my return in the evening, and we hurried the bloodstained baggage to the basement I had not set foot in for months. I gaped at the gelatinous mess of lizard eggs, multiplying in a sealed container, and the various other relics that West had collected: bits of hair, flesh, and nail of many colours, cluttered tables with alarming metal restraints, implements stinking with biological juices, coals still scarlet from the incinerator. West dragged a bag of equal size from beneath the table and shoved several work benches together. He lay the two caskets down with a tender grip, shaking with excitement, and ripped them open.
I nearly fainted in my shock; inside one bag was Margaret Gerstein, whose blood had not yet drained from her smooth visage. The identity of the other body was not known to me until I heard West's giddy voice - it her elder sister, Annabelle, who had died years ago when we attended the Miskatonic University. She had been buried in a potter's yard not far from the property. I averted my eyes from the elder's rotten smile. Two gaping holes in her abdomen had been stifled by a cloth and sutured shut. West carefully made eight uniform incisions in the scalps of the women, four each, and I observed with a terrified fascination as he connected them together. Eight rubber tubes led to a humming electric machine, and a ninth snaked along the floor, feeding the appliance. The biological similarity between the corpses excited him; no doubt West believed he could revive one with the juvenescence of the other. Wielding a syringe filled with a sharp green liquid, West inserted the point into Margaret's slender wrist. The smell of formaldehyde suffocated us as he inserted another, of stronger prescription, into Anabelle's. The breath caught in my throat as West backed away.
A smooth metal object brushed my side. I had failed to notice it in my disbelief. Hidden in the creases of his dirtied garments, the barrel of his antique shotgun protruded from the back of West's shirt; slung over his shoulder, I could smell, from my position, the scent of gunpowder. With a look at Margaret's body barely drained of colour, I ran headlong from the basement.
West's boots thumped behind mine with barely a difference, and I sprinted the staircase with the murderer clawing at my coat. His breathing thundered in my ears, desperate to contain the only other human who could expose his life's work, thrumming with listless energy. He yanked at my wrists solidly. I barrelled into the door and worked my fingers at the lock, hopelessly undexterous in my panic. West drew his rifle, and a scream welled in my throat before he slammed it into the back of my head.
I awoke on a battered bench, across from the pallid corpses of the Gerstein women. Blood bloomed across my temples. In the corner of my vision, West filled a third syringe with a fulgent liquid, and I beat against my restraints in fear. West undid a bolt on my wrist and with a hard-eyed focus, then drew the syringe to a height so tremendous I was afraid it would exit through the other side of my arm. He swept down to plunge the implement into my flesh. I cried out; my mind puddled into a queer warmth. The basement lights grew into bloated, spinning fractals. Static noise rushed into my ears. Why inject a living specimen with the reagent?, I sputtered inanely, sore afraid. West looked down at me with an indescribable emotion - anger? Disgust? - his mouth taut, his eyes dark, then silenced the world by pressing his lips to my mouth. He fell to such perusal of my face as he would draw it, his heartbeat pounding in his extremities with such fervor I could feel it, moving with such certainty as if that was precisely the answer to my question. I fell into a winter memory; West had brought the Gerstein woman to the Miskatonic dormitories, and with their cries they woke me, for I had boarded opposite from them. I would lay red-faced and prone, shuddering hotly in my sheets. And still the memory repeated, with Abrams and Wechsler and Schwarz, so often I feared my affection was not for the Gerstein woman at all, but for my constant partner ...
West's hands clawed at my chest to tear my shirt down the center, all his weight pressed upon me. His hands lurched downward into my trousers, and with a cry I kicked into the air. With a painful jolt, the cable feeding the monstrous life-giving machine was torn at my ankle, and West stuffed a pungent cloth to my face to quell my skittering gasps. My legs tore at the rubber, entwined within it, until the electric lights gave out with the shriek of shattered glass. From a corner of my vision not obscured by the fabric, a black amoeba emerged from the dimness. Two more of similar stature followed, a crushing gravity in their steps. They gaped at me, the hulking and ravenous shadows, and with a simple silence West turned to face the assembly. I used the distraction to break my other shackle and leapt off the table, West's cries faint in the rumbling din. As I fell to the ground outside of the bolted door, my mind placed the wretched growls.
It was Margaret Gerstein, West's pallid amour, whose soft voice rose into a terrible roar as she strained her rotted vocal chords:
"Damn your syringes, Herbert West!"