I've been pulling my hair out again. I know it's a disgusting habit, but I can't help it.
I've heard of people who go too far, who pull until they have a bald spot and have to wear scarves, or a wig until it grows back. Not me. I'm careful.
I only pull the right kinds of hairs, the ones that have to be pulled out by the slimy, sticky little root. Only the hairs that feel different, that rasp between the pads of my thumb and forefinger. The ones that don't belong. I can spend hours searching for just the right kind of hair. I have plenty of time.
They don't like me to do it. They tell me to try and think of what makes me want to, and deliberately do something else. Or think of something else. And break the habit that way. But it's not so easy. No matter what I think about, it's the same. My hand goes to my hair again, and I can lose hours, staring into space, searching for hair that must be pulled out, no matter what they say.
So they gave me a pen. Well, a felt marker really, that's all we're allowed. And they gave me a pad and they said write it down. Maybe they thought it would keep my hands busy. Joke's on them. I can balance my pad on my knee, write with my right hand, and pull my hair with my left hand.
I shouldn't be smug. I like it here. They're nice to me here. There's the ocean, and it's warm. I can sit outside in the sun if I want, and watch the waves. And there are no basements. That was the deal, I told my mother so. I'd only go willingly if the place had no basements. And she found this place by the water, which means there can't be basements, or else they'd flood in a storm. So I said okay, and here I am. The water is nice.
Except at night. Sometimes I wake up and there are the waves and the dark and the sound is like whispering through the walls and I have to get up and look out my window to make sure the room didn't become a basement. I have to look at the moon and the air and the sea and the sand. No one could tunnel under the sand, you know. It's too loose. It would bury them. So it's okay.
Except he was so clever. He could find a way to do it.
That's why I don't sleep on the nights where there is whispering.
Sometimes it sounds like his voice in the dark.
I remember seeing him for the first time, on my first day of medical school. My parents had paid my way, bemused that the little pet they'd had for twenty-two years could insist on something so definite, so mature as medical school. Not to a city school, like Harvard or Boston University, where I could be close to them as well as the fine glass-enclosed hospitals there, but to tiny Miskatonic U in shabby little Arkham. The school was better known for its literary and historical studies than its medical school, but I (city girl though I was) was terrified of the haughty Harvard students, who no doubt aspired to be the top surgeon of some big name hospital or other. I was more modest - I only wanted a small, general practice where I would be part of the community, like the kindly doctor in Back Bay I'd grown up with, who knew all her patients by name and was often invited to Sunday dinners.
I'd felt exhilarated that day, feeling that I had my last blank page of school before me upon which to write whatever I wished, leaving the snarl of college disappointments behind me. Here, I was determined not to make a mess of things for once. (And you can see where that got me, ha ha.)
He was alone, striding across a green patch of lawn, and gaining quickly on the nervous gaggle of fellow first years I had latched myself onto. He was tall and cadaverously thin, with ashy blond hair that managed to look both lank and unruly at the same time. He had severe little wire-frame glasses, and a sharp nose. His eyes, I noticed when he came close, where a light blue - more milky than watery. Some people have eyes that are "piercing," but his were not. The blue instead looked oddly flat, like the surface of a tile. When he looked at me, I could practically feel the cold tiles press lightly against my skin.
"Is this the building for biochem? With Doctor Halsey?" he'd asked.
My hand shot up to my hair, twisted a lock, pulled. "Yeah. Lecture room three."
"Thanks." He'd turned, leaned against the near wall, lit a cigarette. The girl I'd been talking to gave me an astonished look. I shrugged. She mouthed "not bad!" at me. I pretended not to see, and shouldered my bag, heading to class - biochem with Doctor Halsey.
The scraggly group of first years dispersed as we entered the lecture hall. I walked in ahead and took a seat near the side, wondering if one of the group would sit next to me. No one did. The group reformed in the middle row, too far for me to hear their conversation. I pulled out a book, turned to the reading assignment, pretended not to care.
Really, it was the smell that hit me first. Fresh-smoked cigarette, and underneath a sharp citrusy cologne, barely there but heightened by the cigarette. The type of scent that sneaks up behind you and sinks tiny hooks into your sinuses. One of the doctors here wore something like that a few weeks ago, and I threw up on his shoes.
(ha ha)
He'd sat down next to me, despite the full row of empty seats that he could have taken.
"Hello," he said.
"Hello," I said
And we waited for the lecture.
I have to admit that I've forgotten what I learned in medical school, and college as well. I'd majored in biochemistry, graduated summa cum laude from a small but respectable Boston school. But after that night - the night in the basement - it all went away. Gone, as if that part of my brain had been torn out and replaced with scar tissue to fill the swiss cheese holes.
Post traumatic stress disorder, say some of the doctors.
I don't mind it, forgetting. I remember too much as it is.
I remember that it didn't take too long for him to get into an argument with Doctor Halsey. A few days of lecture, a few barbed questions and snapped replies, and suddenly the rest of the class didn't exist. It was just him and Doctor Halsey sparring over the nature of life and death.
"There is nothing, absolutely nothing about human consciousness that is unique," he'd snapped. "All it is is more detail. A more intricate structure. Tessellated. But the same structure."
Doctor Halsey scoffed. "Are you a scientist or a rhetorician? Until some very significant developments in biochemistry are made, there is no way to study the concept of consciousness, or rational thought, or soul."
"The only scientific word for 'soul,'" he spat back, "or God, or love, or fear, or life, or death is 'chemical.'"
"The only scientific word for what you are spouting is 'bullshit,'" fumed Doctor Halsey, indulging in his own, blunter rhetoric.
"I agree with him," said a new voice - mine. I had rarely spoken up in class before, and my outburst, made without even raising my hand, shocked me - but I continued. "The chemicals responsible for love, bonding, addiction, anger, fear - they've all been discovered. What's not to say there isn't a chemical at the bottom of logical thought? Or even just… life?" I trailed off. The argument had sounded forceful and potent coming from him. From me, it sounded hazy, flimsy.
Doctor Halsey seemed to think so too. He found my argument not worth countering, and segued back to the original lecture.
But he'd been struck dumb. He'd stared at me with those flat blue eyes as a smile, warm and genuine, like the sun tearing through clouds, grew wider on his face.
It was that moment when I cast my lot entirely with Herbert West.
I called him "West," partly because the stodgy name of "Herbert" didn't fit the fierce intellectual I'd found sitting next to me in every class we'd had together. The other part was that to a Boston-born girl, the idea of "West" connotated something distant, unattainable. This certainly applied to Herbert West. Though we were considered friends, he was always entirely impersonal towards me during our first year of school. We talked for hours about the development of the scientific method, the value of Aristotelian thought to the practice of medicine, or the intricacies of viral mutation, but even after a year I still had no idea of where he was from or who his parents were - if, indeed, they were still alive. I'd wondered about that, as he spent every vacation at school doing lab work or self-study, but I never dared ask.
The little information I got out of West was more than any of my classmates got. He never spoke a word to anyone - besides his professors or me - unless he had to, and even then he was formal and clipped. I admit that I enjoyed this, and made a habit of waving a hand above my head and calling out "West!" if I saw him walk by while I was talking to another student. He would invariably stop and talk to me - even if he had no time for a full conversation, he at least said a few words about where he was going, or what he thought of the last reading, or would I like to have dinner and go over our notes from this or that class. To whomever I had been speaking before he'd appeared, he said not a word, and I never tried to involve them in the conversation. When West had gone, I'd give the impatient student a little shrug that seemed to indicate my lack of control over the situation, but really meant "I can't help it if he only wants to talk to me."
It was obvious to everyone except West that I was in love with him, of course. The girl who I'd been talking to that first day of classes tried to give me advice on how to "make my move," as she put it, but doing so was as unthinkable to me as asking about his family. It would have been an affront, I thought. So I kept on as I had done, all the while thinking that if just once I could put my face close to his - not touching, just close- it would be worth it. More than worth it.
That isn't to say that I agreed with West against Doctor Halsey that day in class because I was in love with him and wanted him to like me back. No, I genuinely agreed with his theory. As a child of Unitarians, I had grown up without strong beliefs, and overthrew any weak ones without remorse. There was no scientific evidence for "God" or "soul" or any of it, and as such, any of those things did not matter to me in the slightest. Even the "love" I felt for West, I chalked up as chemically induced, and I assumed that if some process had been developed that could suck those particular chemicals out of my system, I wouldn't give him a second thought. But there was no such process, and as it was, I enjoyed being in love - frustrating as it was due to the reticence and impersonality of my object.
It was in our second year that things really began.
We were in a dissection class, the lot of us huddled over a still, stiff body, observing the musculature of the thigh and hip, as the the professor manipulated the scalpel. I was taking notes when my attention was arrested by a hand gripping my upper arm. The smell of cigarettes and faded citrus loomed as West whispered to me, "come here. I want to show you something."
I didn't answer, but slowly shuffle toward him, making it look as though I were shifting to give the students behind me a closer look.
We backed away from the cluster of students until we were at the head of the cadaver. West flipped the sheet with a flick, revealing half of the dead man's face.
"Look," West whispered, and drew something out of his pocket that flashed in the overhead fluorescent lights. A syringe - a big one. I looked up, but West gave a small shake of his head. "Watch him," he said. "Watch his eyes." I watched.
West paused for just a moment, then plunged the needle into the cadaver's jugular and forced the plunger down. The speed with which West jabbed the syringe in and removed it was startling. If I hadn't been watching, I would have missed it.
I watched. For a few seconds, everything was still. Then I heard West draw in a sharp breath, and the corpse's eyes flew open.
I was too shocked to move, though West's hand on my arm tightened to prevent my jumping anyway. The dead man's eyes focused, looked wildly around, and then fixed on my face. His lips parted. West's hand squeezed tighter around my arm, but I could barely feel it.
Then, as suddenly as his eyes had opened, they lost focused, stopped moving, lay still. He was, once more, a corpse.
West flipped the sheet back up as the professor with the scalpel (and God, I don't remember her name) looked up and said acidly, "if the two of you are finished with… whatever it is you're doing…."
Some of the other students snickered. The girl I knew gave me a surreptitious thumbs-up behind her notepad. West and I shuffled back toward the group, and I tried to pay attention to the rest of the lecture. The professor droned on, the students scribbled. None of them had noticed a thing.
I began to shake as I stood there. West shifted behind me, and held both my arms above the elbow in his hands, as if he were trying to hold me still, to tamp my shaking down. And while he did this, I knew he was watching me, as analytically as he had watched the corpse. I could feel the cool flat tiles of his eyes pressed lightly against the back of my neck.
After the lecture ended, I waited outside the laboratory building for the other students to disperse, and for West to light a cigarette. He stare at me as he did so, waiting for the obvious question. I knew he wouldn't say a word until he asked it.
"What the hell did you just do?" I hissed as soon as the lawn was deserted.
His expression - such as it was - did not change. "I haven't done it," he said. "Yet."
"It can't be done," I insisted with a shiver that had nothing to do with the late autumn air. He sucked on his cigarette and didn't respond.
"I mean," I continued, "think about brain death. The brain doesn't receive blood or oxygen for even a short period of time, and part of it just shuts down. There's no way to bring that back, even when the person is technically alive! And with someone dead, there's embalming or decay, brain tissue, nerves that won't function when they've rotted! And you can't reverse that once it's started! You just can't!"
West looked at me thoughtfully. "Yes," he said finally. "I'd thought of that. It means that to be successful, I need to have an unpreserved body, just deceased. Fresh."
"It means it can't be done!" I said, but he had stopped listening.
"Total, instant death, I mean. Someone whose body functions and brain stopped simultaneously. So caught at the same moment of decay with no prior brain death. What can do that?"
"An electric shock," I said without thinking. "Or maybe - some kind of poison? Dimethyl mercury?"
He shook his head. "Brain damage, even with a shock. And dimethyl mercury breaks down the bain prior to death."
"Then it can't be done," I said.
"Then what did you just see?" He waited, but I couldn't answer.
He finished his cigarette, crushed it out. "Come on," he said. "I'll show you what I've been doing."
His tiny dormitory room was a cluttered mess of makeshift bunsen burners, tubes, piping, chemicals, and cages of rabbits and guinea pigs in various stages of life, death and decay. The smell was ghastly, and I began to realize why he'd taken to napping on the floor of my modest off-campus apartment provided by my parents' largesse. The bed here was covered in textbooks, pads, pencils and other detritus. The naps must have been the only sleep he'd had on any given day.
"You can't keep this up," I remarked. Though most days I couldn't be bothered to rinse my coffee cup, this epic panorama of filth aroused a protective instinct in me, mostly comprised of disgust. "It's a fire hazard, West. You've probably got gas leaking out of the tubing here, and I can't even think of how your clothes must smell by now, and-"
"And I need to start on human cadavers," West finished.
"I guess so," I said, giving in, "if you can find any."
"I don't suppose you-"
"Absolutely not! My lease doesn't allow pets. Or cadavers. And anyway, you need my floor to sleep on."
West shrugged. "Unless you know an out-of-the-way place, big enough to set up equipment, and to accommodate bodies…
"Actually," I said, an idea dawning, "I think I do."
Arkham was a mill town during the industrial revolution, and remained so during the first art of the twentieth century. The economic upheavals and outsourcing of labor that occurred in later years had decimated the once-respectable town. The university and the better-off part of town lay on one bank of the Miskaton, filled with stone edifaces and puritanical feats of architecture dating from the seventeenth century. On the other bank lay the abandoned mills and factories, the shabby duplex houses with crumbling siding and sagging shingles, abandoned or occupied by the desultory castaways of progress. I was further beyond these that I steered my car at one a.m., turning onto a disused blacktop road that crumbled to gravel after a few miles. Here stood the farmhouses and barns, abandoned during the meal years, but of solid New England construction.
We settled on a smallish, out-of-the-way barn that was easily broken into, and then easily secured with our own padlock after we had done so. A sterile surgical room it wasn't, but it had the advantage of being thick-walled and relatively well insulated against the encroaching Massachusetts winter. West immediately declared it perfect, and we set to work clearing debris, and over the next few weeks, setting up equipment pilfered from the University. We cleared West's room just as clandestinely, the equipment going to the barn, and the animals to shelters, the carcasses snuck into a nearby landfill in the wee hours.
I began to keep West's sleeping habits, which were brutal. Only his bullying and my desire to be close to him in every way (including grades) kept me to my studies. the combination was effective. When winter exams concluded, I was fourth in our class. He was first.
The exhaustion took its toll. I spent most of the winter holiday asleep, causing my mother great concern. She asked me repeatedly whether I should think about taking a semester off to rest, and bristled at my increasingly indignant reply that doctors don't get semesters off. It was a relief to return to school and to West, who had refused my invitation to spend the holiday in Boston with me. Three weeks with no classes had given him the time to finish setting up the makeshift lab with a small propane tank powering a space heater and the bunsen burners. A few tins of sterno provided any additional needed heat. And a large pit had been dug in the dirt floor.
"What's that?" I asked.
West shrugged. "Insurance," he said. "If it doesn't work."
We set to work mixing chemical solutions to West's specifications, and soon all the experiment required was a cadaver. West took to monitoring the Arkham Advertiser website for local death notices. He also approached the single funeral director on the other side of the river, ostensibly looking for an opportunity to view embalmings to further his anatomy studies. While at the funeral home, West told me, he began to drop hints about the deplorable lack of human cadavers at the medical school, which stunted the students' anatomical education.
The funeral director wasn't moved by the students' plight, but was interested when West told him that the University would pay for any bodies donated to their program. The bodies, West said, had to be as fresh as possible.
Months passed, but in the early spring, during the throes of studying for our Step One USMLE, we got our break.
A migrant worker looking for a job had a heart attack, and dropped dead in a seedy Arkham bar. The cursory investigation performed by the authorities showed that he had no family to contact (though we suspected that his illegal status did not prompt them to look very hard), and he was turned over to the funeral director that West had cultivated. A phone call, an assurance that the University would handle the embalming process, and a check (supplied by my parents through a request for a new laptop) ensured that the body was ours in less than twenty-four hours of the man's passing.
Driving with a body in the trunk of my car was a nerve-wracking experience, but carrying the thing from the off-road clearing in which we'd parked to the barn was worse. The man had not been large, but he was bulkier than either of us, so that even using the large sling West had borrowed from the funeral director, we had to take frequent breaks as we wove our way through the trees.
Once inside the barn, we heaved the corpse onto a plank propped between two beams, and held our breath until we saw that the makeshift table could hold the weight. When West unzipped the body bag, I blanched a bit at the smell. True decay had not set in, but twenty-four hours without preservation and a ride in a car trunk had not done him much good.
"I don't know, West," I said. "It might be too far gone. And with cardiac there's sure to be some brain damage."
"It's here. We're here. We might as well try."
In reply, I handed him the syringe.
West injected the solution into the man's neck, and we waited. Nothing happened. We continued to wait. West pressed his (gloved) fingers into the man's neck, his wrist, his chest. Nothing. West produced a stethoscope, pressed it to the body. I could tell from his expression that there was nothing to hear.
West gave an irritated snort. "Damn. I could try to tweak the formula…." He looked at his watch. "It'll take me two hours, tops. If that doesn't work…" He glanced at the pit in the corner.
I sighed. I had wrenched my shoulder while carrying the corpse inside, and wasn't looking forward to shoveling piles of dirt into a hole for the rest of the night.
West tossed me the stethoscope. "Watch him," he said. "If anything changes-"
I nodded, and West turned to the plank holding the various chemicals and tools.
I kept my solitary vigil over the corpse, applying the stethoscope from time to time hearing nothing. An hour passed. I shifted on my feet - nothing to sit on, of course - and glanced back at West, who was absorbed in his work. I applied the stethoscope again - and there it was. Faint, almost inaudible, but there.
"West!" I cried. "Look, it's-"
But I was interrupted by the thing's drawing a shuddering breath. Then it started to scream.
The sound was inhuman, high, loud and piercing. I jumped back from the plank. The thing took another breath, reared back, then smacked me to the ground. I heard a smash, then a hollow thunk as West first threw the beaker he'd been working with, then the next nearest thing - the can of sterno he'd been using to heat the solution. The beaker missed, and smashed against the opposite wall. The sterno hit, thunked against the thing's head, rebounded and rolled behind the propane tank.
Oh God, I thought, the propane tank.
For a second, I thought the can might have gone out after having been thrown - but then saw the debris behind the tank begin to smoulder. The thing, temporarily stunned, shrieked again, and got unsteadily to its feet. It took one step toward me, and then I was yanked to my feet and pushed toward the door.
"Run!" West shouted in my ear, and I ran. West pushed the plank he'd been working on over, spilling chemicals and the bunsen burner which, I noted to my increasing horror, tore the makeshift piping out from the tank, allowing gas to escape into the air. The thing stumbled over the plank, thudded to the ground. I reached the door, was through it, ran out, West close at my heels.
We made it about twenty feet when West shouted "wait!" and turned back. I gave an inarticulate scream as he reached the barn again, thinking he'd run back inside, but he didn't. Instead, he slammed the door shut, fixed the padlock, and sprinted back to where I stood. He grabbed my wrist - re-wrenching my already injured shoulder - and set off on a dead run towards the car. We just reached it when we heard the bang of the propane tank exploding.
Turning onto the dirt road, I swerved away from the most direct route, driving over the river and around Arkham proper so as to approach the city from another direction. As I pulled into my apartment parking lot, I muttered a prayer to nothing in particular that no one would be awake to see us arrive at that hour. No one was. We slipped silently into the apartment, and I double bolted the door.
West sank into my sofa while I procured a bottle of aspirin from my medicine cabinet. After a moment's hesitation, I also took down a large bottle of ginger brandy, a Christmas gift from my Boston Brahmin grandmother, who had told me in a clipped voice that no doctor had ever cured a cold, but ginger brandy had seen her through every one she'd had. I was not much of a drinker, and I'd never seen West drink so much as a glass of wine at a school function, but he accepted the glass I poured for him and tossed it back before I even had the chance to ask him if he wanted ice. He followed this with a fistful of aspirin, and another shot of brandy.
"This," he said as I poured him a third glass, "is disgusting."
"Don't knock the only known cure for the common cold," I said, sitting down with my own glass and shaking some aspirin into my mouth.
West stuck a cigarette in his mouth and started fumbling, unsuccessfully, with his lighter. "Please don't," I begged. "Between the fumes from the propane and the brandy, you'll explode us all over again."
West ignored me, and managed to light his cigarette. He didn't explode. My breathing started to sound like gasps, and I realized I was hyperventilating. I put one of my ice cubes in my mouth and forced myself to breathe around it, the cold air biting into my lungs. West finished his cigarette and lit a fresh one from the butt of the first.
"Why don't you take that off?" I asked, grabbing at his left hand, which still had a plastic glove on. West winced as I touched his hand, and after staring for a moment, I saw why. He'd grasped the can of sterno from its top, shoving his palm directly into its blue flame. A second degree burn had bubbled up in a perfect circle just below his fingers, and the plastic of his glove had melted onto his skin. West stared at his hand curiously, as though it belonged to someone else.
West refused to move from the couch to the bathroom, so I settled on filling a mixing bowl with cold water, soaking his hand in it, and prising the plastic up as gently as I could. It took me two glasses of the horrible brandy to stop my hands from shaking long enough to pick away the last scraps of plastic with a pair of sterilized tweezers without stabbing the large watery blisters on his palm. West alternately stared at what I was doing with his hand and at the ceiling, chain smoking and not saying a word.
I finished wrapping gauze around the burn, and sat crosslegged, waiting for West to move or speak. He didn't, save for the mechanical hand to mouth motion involved in smoking his cigarette. It was frightful to see him like that, and I wondered whether it was his success or his failure that had done it.
"West," I said. He didn't look at me. I took his chin in one hand, and turned his face toward mine. "West, I said. "wake up."
"I'm awake," he said, and he kissed me.
Things progressed rapidly from there, and we spent the rest of the night, and all the next day in bed, but not sleeping, save for fitful dozes that seemed only to last for a few minutes and ended with one or the other of us waking with a gasp, terrified.
When the sun began to set, and no police officers had come to knock down my door yet, West ventured out cautiously for a newspaper and more cigarettes.
"You could quit smoking and check on the internet," I ventured.
"It's more suspenseful this way," West replied, "and I'm looking forward to cancer."
He returned, undressed, lit a cigarette, and snapped open the newspaper with mock solemnity. He searched the headlines as I buried my face into the coverlet. He turned pages, then stopped. His mouth twisted into a smile that was more sneer than anything else.
"What?" I asked. West snickered. "God damn it, West," I said, throwing my pillow at him. "Are we going to jail or getting expelled or what?"
"Makeshift Meth Lab Destroyed in Blaze," he read.
I looked at West in astonishment. Then we both broke into hysterical laughter.
West read the story out between laughing fits. Barn destroyed, traces of methamphetamine discovered ("meth?" I asked, horrified. "Just more insurance," said West with a shrug), narrowing in on suspects involved in local White Supremacist gang.
West tossed the newspaper aside and lay next to me, both of us still laughing, his face close to mine. Bliss.
Except.
We were drifting off again, finally safe, knowing that privileged medical students from the prestigious local university would never be investigated for a drug manufacturing fire. But one thought suddenly struck me.
"West?"
"Hmm?"
"There wasn't a body, was there?"
"Mm?
"You knocked down the table, the thing fell over. You ran back and padlocked the door. But the newspaper story - it didn't mention a body - right?"
We didn't sleep that night either. And the next day, West applied for a handgun permit.