Disclaimer: Reanimator isn't mine, nor is "skin" by Oingo Boingo, nor is the Aquitaine; but that's beside the point.
In a small town in Ohio, a dead man got up and went out into the street. Nobody screamed or ran, nobody got a gun or anything sharp handy, no one said a word. The dead man got into a car and started it, pedestrians didn't run off in the opposite direction, no police cars came to take down the walking menace. He drove to a small medical clinic and got out, no one crossed the street to avoid him, a few even smiled. He walking inside to a reception desk, where a secretary, instead of screaming bloody murder, said
"No calls for you, Dr. Cain."
Daniel Cain's face went into a rictus very like a smile and moved his head up and down like a marionette. He turned smoothly and strode off to his office, his feet like a toy soldier's. He managed the door open and then closed as he entered the room, sat down with a faint thud, and then stared at the wall for an hour or so. This was a frequent pastime.
Dan could remember not always being dead, in that golden long ago when he had been alive, very alive for short stretches. Before the days were like boxes piling up one after the other, before all the feeling had gone from his chest. He had laughed and occasionally cried, and at the end of some days had felt good. But then he had died, and now all days were the same.
Even though he couldn't feel, he remembered who had done this to him. That human being that had killed him in such a baffling manner. The person to whom Dan had given everything he had and who had left him with nothing. The one who Dan had tried to save but lost himself in the process.
Herbert West.
A knock on the door. "Hey, Dan? You got those x-rays for the Whaites file?" a sandy blonde head with a shag cut stuck itself in and smiled at Dan. Dan grimaced in return.
"Sorry, no Katie, check with Derby."
The shag cut giggled. "Then can I steal you for lunch? Christopher brought some chicken breast panini from Bello's and we're going to have a calorie-fest in the breakroom."
"Naw, thanks. I already had lunch earlier."
"Geez, Dr. C! No wonder you stay in shape, you don't consume fat with the rest of us mortals."
In fact no one at the medical clinic had seen Daniel Cain eat, but they had put it down to his solitary nature.
"Well, I'll see you after a bit, alley Kat."
That giggle again. "You're such a charmer, Dr. C!"
The door closed and Daniel was alone with himself again, free to reminisce. It seemed like forever since he had thought about West, but in reality it had only been a few days. It was hard to keep track of time when you no longer slept.
The point just after he died, Dan had still been able to feel, and more specifically, feel anger. He had felt that and just a bit of resentment toward the former medical student who all through his inquest had sat silently staring straight ahead with the same arrogant look he perpetually wore. Dan had wanted to wipe that look off his face, wanted to punish him like a naughty child, until he learned that humanity was not just a bag of meat for his operating table. He wanted to give Herbert a time-out, somewhere where he wouldn't have access to anything medical, somewhere where he could think about just what he had done. Prison had seemed the place, but both his testimony and the evidence couldn't prove his sanity, so West had been sent away to an asylum. Cain could have told any of them that it wasn't that Herbert was sick, he just didn't care. But no one listened. Not even Herbert, who didn't even look at Dan throughout his testimony.
It had now been a few year since Herbert had been locked away, but to Dan it had been an entire lifetime. He supposed he should hate Herbert for what he had done to him, but he can't find it in himself to hate anymore. It took energy he didn't have.
That day was relatively slow, only a motorcycle crash victim and a man with a fingertip severed in a gardening incident. Dan mostly sutured, his stitches even and fine as if from a machine. He no longer lost patients, what potential fatalities there were in such a small town, and many of the other doctors marveled at his uncanny ability. Dan modestly put it down to skill, which was true. But it was also due to experience, and this he mentioned to no one. Staying with Herbert so long had sharpened as well as hardened him, he no longer feared the death of his patient. It was better than the alternative.
Existing without fear of death would probably be a freeing experience to most people, but then again most people were still alive. Dan had once massaged a patient's heart back to life unhurriedly, knowing he could do him no more harm than already had been done. He was mechanical but efficient, and he no longer had his warm bedside manner. Instead he was professionally courteous and polite to all his patients, made scarce small talk, and worked so quickly no one ever had time to question why he never blinked.
Now scrubbed clean and back in his office, Daniel Cain took a break from staring at the wall to stare at the ceiling. A refreshing change. He was over the main wave of reminiscence now, and could pick out individual memories classified by type. This memory of West with a severed foot showed how he felt no remorse, this memory of taking West out to eat for the first time showed his total lack of empathy or social skills, here-
Now Dan winced, because he had grazed a painful memory. They were all a little sore, some more than others, but this was the only one that outright hurt. He had reached out to Herbert, just once really reached and wasn't going though the motions…
Herbert sewing on a corpse's leg. "Herbert?" he turned, his prevalent eyepieces reflecting the light of the single naked bulb in the basement, making his eyes disappear.
A sigh. "Yes, Dan?" he could almost hear his thoughts: time to humor the bleeding heart again.
"I was wondering…"
"Unhealthy habit."
He ignored the sarcasm and went on. "About you."
"Dan, we really don't have time to talk right now."
"But when will we have time? You're always down here, I don't think I've ever seen you sleep."
West turns to face him directly and puts on a patronizing smile.
"Real science never sleeps."
"That's just it. I don't think what we're doing is real science."
"Now really, Dan, you should leave the thinking up to m-"
"If it's real science, then why are we hiding out in a basement and using equipment almost a century old?"
"Please don't interrupt me Daniel, I was just about to say that following instructions is much more you line of work than complex problem solving. And I have told you already that we have to be down here in case of accidental discovery. If the reagent were to be revealed now, we would be seen as monsters. But after we perfect it, we'll be the greatest names since Fleming or Pasteur."
"But even they were subject to the analyses of their peers!"
Herbert stiffened. "Peers? I have no peers present in the scientific community! No man among them is fit to judge the mighty art I have wrought! Their rituals are empty oaths they neither understand nor live by."
"Herbert! Even opinion from a negative source is better than nothing. What we do here seems more like groping in the dark for knowledge."
A sardonic grin. "And you'd be the best judge of that, wouldn't you, Daniel?"
"West, I-I didn't mean…"
"What? Didn't mean what? You impugn my very life's work and expect me to take it as 'constructive criticism'? You who were not there for the birth, nay, the inception of this vision of the future, are going to critique me? I think I'd prefer to hear a five-year-old's opinion about how babies are made before that."
Pleading now. "West, you're being oversensitive. The scientific community, especially the younger faction have been known to provide invaluable feedback-"
Herbert's face hardens, and his eyes behind his glasses probably narrow. "I'm being oversensitive? And I had thought personal attacks were beneath you. The scientific community has also been known for outright theft, Dan. Once this worked and we went to get a second opinion, who could guarantee that some hot young up-and-comer wouldn't seize glory the moment it sailed through his line of vision?"
He remembered being too tired to point out that West had begun the personal attacks, or that Hebert really was being oversensitive. He remembered being almost constantly tired with Herbert. For Dan, a person who tried hard to give everyone exactly what they wanted, life with Herbert, who was never satisfied with anything he did, was soul-draining.
"Herbert, I-I just meant…I care about you, Herbert. I don't want anything bad to happen to you, or the…the reagent."
Herbert West did something he did not do very often. He blinked. "What, Dan?"
"It's just… we have no insurance here, not literally, although we don't have that either, and, well, when you-"
"Dan." Herbert spoke slowly, as if to explaining to a small child. "You're rambling. I told you before, emotions merely complicate an actually very simple process. You're not the one on 'the slab', so to speak. This is someone else's body, someone that you never knew, this is someone else's body, am I getting through to you?"
A sigh, coming from his own lips. "I get it, West. So long as it's not you personally, nothing else matters."
Herbert was cautious. "Yes, Dan. That's right. And it's not as if we're just tearing down, we're tearing down and building up as well. It's the same as anything else in life, something lost and something gained."
The memory tilts up and down as Dan nods his defeat. Always agree with Herbert. Never question him, don't get attached to anything or anyone. There was much to adjust to when he worked with Herbert. The constant knowledge that he is only there for glorified grunt work, there are long periods of isolation, and something shared that feels strange. Like they were co-conspirators in some great master scheme that would never come to fruition.
Parts of Dan were still Dan, and he looked at Herbert sometimes and wanted to ask questions he knew he never could. If you peeled away his armor was there anybody there? Days spent in Herbert's self-inflicted tomb had made him almost numb but not blind to Herbert's vigilant defensiveness. He still had a feeling, something cold that would not go away, that Herbert saw him just as much of a piece of meat as the corpses.
"All right, Herbert, all right." He lacked the energy to defy him further. "Let's get on with it..."
In the here and now, Dan's memory skipped a little in its groove, dipping a little bit into his testimony at the inquest, how he had finally extricated himself from Herbert just a little too late.
Dan sighed and got a pen from the mug of sand on his desk. While fiddling with it, he began something he had done countless times before. He listed what he shouldn't have done with Herbert.
He should not have agreed with Herbert.
He should not have let Herbert into his life.
He should not have let Herbert control his life.
He should not have let Herbert ruin his life.
He should not have let Herbert control his soul.
He should not have let Herbert take his soul.
He should not have let Herbert take his life.
He should not have left Herbert.
Dan knew, now, that that act itself was what had been his death-knell. He had finally given up on someone. A person had been reaching out, trying hard to cling to life and Daniel had drawn his hand back. What difference did it make that that person had been Herbert West?
West could never fully recover, Dan knew, because as brilliant of a scientist as he was, West had the emotional IQ of a child. Dan should have seen it from his overreactions, his extreme possessiveness, his utter dependency on someone he regularly declared to be his intellectual inferior. And Dan, probably the only lasting parental figure in his life, had left him. That was a wound that would probably never heal.
He had come to realize that the real motivation for Herbert to even get up in the morning had been him, he was Herbert's peer, who he tested new ideas on and watched for his reaction. He was the only one who could stop Herbert, although he hadn't known how for a long time. And in the reverse, he needed Herbert. The thing that had kept him from being a complacent dummy his entire life he had banished.
As far back as preschool, the teachers had praised the quiet and docile little child, who gave away toys to anyone who asked. He was always polite and cautiously friendly, but shy. This had become something of a problem in High School, as the other students, girls especially, had seen his complacence and eager to please demeanor as weakness. He had been alone for a very long time before Meg. Perhaps that was why he missed her so much. She had been the first to really engage him in conversation, even if it was only for a dismissible opinion. He supposed Meg had been attracted to him because she was used to getting her way, and Dan was happy to give it. He wondered if Herbert hadn't been attracted to that as well.
Yes, perhaps in the deep recesses in his mind, Herbert felt love for him, and just perhaps Meg had only been interested in a Yes man. He couldn't ask now, they were both gone. It was just as well, West would probably deny it vehemently and Meg would go on a crying jag and ask him how he could say such a thing. So many probablys.
Dan did miss Herbert, now and again, because with Herbert he had always felt something. True, West asked for compliance, but he didn't demand it, and he had asked for Dan's opinion, more often than not easily dismissed. But whether it was disgust, hopelessness, mortification or morbid satisfaction, anything with Herbert was preferable to oblivion.
Dan spun now, around and around in his chair, while a fly landed on his eyeball and would not go until flicked away. He had thought about his mistake, now he could think about how to rectify it.
Surely the time in the hospital, where the solitude that Herbert loved so would not be allowed, will have broken him, or at least blurred his outlines a little. He would no longer be so sure of himself as he had always been and he would need something to define him. Dan would be that something. He would put Herbert back together, bend him back into shape, but a little more to Dan's liking. This time, Dan would demand something and get it.
Something was coming, he couldn't tell how far off, something big, and on the day it happened he would be reunited with Herbert West, Reanimator and never leave him again. Because Dan knew that as much as the world needed protection from Herbert, Herbert needed protection from the world. He would emerge from his intellectual cocoon, soft and malleable, which Dan would mold in to something less transitory. He would make Herbert strong again, and better.
But that was so far away that Dan couldn't tell when it would happen. So for now, all he could do was sit. Sit and wait. What does time matter when you're dead?
Author's Note: Meant as a companion piece to Prognosis, but works fine as a standalone piece. Imago can mean two things: 1. the last stage of an insect's metamorphosis, where they emerge from the pupa, or 2. a clay mask made from the face of a recently deceased person. I just can't restrain myself from making literary allusions, also, I quoted extensively from the Oingo Boingo song "skin" which I was listening to while writing this. I think it describes the situation between the two pretty well. Two guesses to where Herbert's "I have no peers" speech comes from. That's right. One final note, does anyone else think it's funny how Daniel is an anagram of Denial? Just a thought.