Herbert West knew what he was doing. He knew exactly. He felt he knew so much about what he was doing he had the ability to write a book, however he felt the book would be rather boring, but he could. He knew what he was doing, wrapping up her body delicately in cheap sheets he got from the Salvation Army. He knew what he was doing as he piled her into the trunk of his car, a hertz he came by in convenience, as he killed the previous owner when running into him with another car. He knew what he was doing as he placed her between two other men also in sheets. He was gentle with her, as he believed the body if nothing else, remembered its adventures even after the mind has left, particularly if he were to reanimate the said body. His gentle handling though appeared to be out of sympathy was not so.
For Herbert West questioned what was sympathy and doubted if he had it. Because he knew exactly what he was doing. West was probably more self-aware than any other person on the planet, as he did realize there was much self examining he had to do, to understand himself, because in the beginning he did want to understand all this. He did want to know what made him do these things. He did want to know why he was defacing graves like he had seen Dr. Frankenstein do on the television during those Halloweens back home. In this examining he came to conclusions and constantly referred back to them and questioned them, and questioned himself again. He knew why he did everything, every twitch, and every stutter, and every leaning on one leg, as he questioned it the moment he did it.
He felt this was a necessary precaution as to prevent madness, as even he realized the things he was doing was quite maddening, even though he knew exactly what he was doing. Over the years he felt his actions based on his circumstances were not due to his own madness, but the madness of the world. But perhaps there was some of his own in there, he knows for sure there was in the beginning of all this.
Herbert West did not feel pride as he drove off with the five total bodies, even though he should have, as that was a large number for only one of them in a night. Herbert West would not allow himself to be more prideful than his studies have allowed. He was prideful for bringing the dead to life, but there was no more in simple tasks. He would not be anymore proud unless he perfected all this either.
He went home then.
He knocked on the basement door for Daniel, who opened and came to help him carry the next load in. West was not sure if Daniel would have been there this time, as Daniel does not fair well with the work. But due to previous adventures Daniel seems to have a lack of confidence in himself to move on, thus Daniel thinks he is trapped by the success of this work. Daniel wants this to succeed, so that not all he has done or seen or killed be in vain, due to this conclusion one can imagine how resentful of West he is, as West continues to fail. Daniel comes and he goes. He leaves their home, does whatever he does which most likely consists of attempting to call his parents, mourning for the two deaths his lover's heart had to endure, and drinking. Oh and maintaining a relationship with that other woman he went with after that whole Meg's heart thing never worked out. Daniel when not here will stay with that female for long periods of time, but he always comes back for some reason. Daniel is maddened, and West often fears Daniel and his rather weak state of mind. West has adapted to taking care of Daniel's mind as he does not let Daniel see the experimenting which often fails, and keeps the living body parts out of his sight. Daniel essentially doesn't know what happens, he only knows if he needs to go and get more bodies or not.
Herbert West does not exactly care too much for Daniel. If he was to one day stay with that female and not return that'd be fine, as West is confident the two would not say a word about all this. But perhaps it is guilt that makes West keep Daniel, West did drag Daniel into this anyway.
Herbert West doesn't really care though, as stated before. He doesn't need friends. He has never needed them.
Daniel carries the two men in while West carries the girl and they place them on surgical tables. Daniel without a word drifts off into the corner, sure that he can't take this for much longer. On cue Daniel leaves for the upstairs where he thinks about going to sleep early again or going back to his female.
"Stop drinking that." Herbert tells him, referring to the bottle of beer in Daniel's hand. "It's going to kill you."
"Do you ever think about that, West?" Daniel looks back.
"Think about what?"
"Death."
"Of course I do."
"What do you think about it?"
"That it is curable."
Daniel nodded, he knew that already.
"Hey, listen." Daniel said. "If I were to like die on you, don't you dare come near my corpse."
West stared at him.
"What if I perfect my…" West began.
"Don't come near me!" Daniel said. "I'm not taking any freaking chance."
West continued to stare with no evident feeling about all this.
"What about you?" Daniel asked. "What do I do if you die?"
"I'm not going to die."
Daniel rolled his eyes, and left.
Herbert West knows exactly what he's doing as he begins to cut these people up. He knows exactly what he's doing as their cold blood covers him, being freshly dead they still have blood. He knows he doesn't like the cold blood, but he's gotten used to the smell. He knows why he starts with the woman first, and why he begins cutting her scalp off at her ears.
Herbert West knew what he wanted, and he wanted to conquer death. It was not for the fame of it. He didn't believe he'd share his discovery with the world when he found it, something he has neglected to tell Daniel. He understands that it's not practical. He understands people must die. He understands that the idea of immortality could cause a war between brothers, as some will have it, and some will not. He knows he could overpopulate the world if no one died. Daniel believes this is all to save people, he believes this gift will be given to the world from him and West, not so. Herbert West is selfish and he will give immortality only to himself and possibly Daniel, who probably won't want it anymore.
Death came for West early in his life. As he was a living being encased in a dead being. His mother died before birth, and West was not birthed into the world but pulled out of a dead box. His father would not forgive him for killing his mother. His father would from the day he was born, tell him, his mother was dead because of him. Herbert can imagine that his father never wanted him in the first place, and his conception was driven at the whims of his mother. Anyway, two-year-old Herbert West came to believe he killed his mother, and she was dead, and that meant she was never coming back.
His father raised him as a Catholic, which involved memorizing the Lord's words, and confessing all sins daily. West would confess to whoever was on the other side of that wall that he killed his mother, and often wondered why God would allow such a terrible thing as he live. He couldn't imagine how he did it either. He didn't know how a fetus such as he could have killed her, but he thought he must have known back then but forgot.
Even as a young child he didn't get along with others so well. His social skills were impaired by a constant fear that someone was going to hurt him like his father did. Without his father realizing he took a lonesome puppy as his own, and felt that if he saved this dog, if he fed it, and took care of it until the day it died, it would in some way redeem him for killing his mother. Now he did not name this puppy as he was not good at naming things, and he kept it in a make shift dog house in the woods beyond his backyard so his father would never know about him.
Herbert West was just getting to know this dog when it got run over by a car. And he had to stare at it's flattened skull, as the blood squirted onto his face.
It was in that moment Herbert West decided he was not going to die. He was not going to be a flatted piece of meat on the street. Not only that, but he would give others life. He would give back what he took from his mother and this dog, he would be the giver of life like the Lord he was being told to worship. That moment he decided he wasn't going to believe in God anymore, for no God would allow such a terrible thing as he to exist, and no God would kill a dog just like that for being nothing but a dog. Herbert even went so far as to say a God that existed would not allow people to die.
West worked hard after all this to discover a way this was all possible. He went to school and was very good at it, much to the dismay of his father, who continued abuse far into his teens. He stole formaldehyde from his biology teacher, and anatomy books. He started to take interest in medical things, but kept it balanced with science.
And one day when he was eighteen and leaving for school, West had a prototype. The endures of all his work had constructed a small piece of early serum. This serum, unlike its future incarnations, was not perfect at all. The body need immediate insertion and could not keep a body alive for too long, but simply a burst of life back in that old dead brain. But it was good enough for what West wanted to do.
Even then he knew exactly what he was doing. He had been planning it for a good part of his life, and he knew exactly what he was going to do. Armed with a shovel, he knew. He struck his father on the side of the head as he was watching some television show. And again on the head to make sure he wasn't about to get up.
"You listen to me now!" West told his father.
He took out a syringe full of his prototype, and showed it to his nearly unconscious piece of meat that was his father.
"You're going to be the first to witness your son's achievement, and gift to this world! Hear that father? I'm giving you this privilege, this gift, for you will be the first one to see this!" He told him. "Come and see what your son has done!"
And he knew what he was doing when he killed him. He knew what he wanted. He wanted to watch this man die, to finish what he started at his birth, to rid himself of both of these people in his life. Herbert West stood in glory over the corpse he had created before he shoved the syringe into the corpses flesh, and the thing began to scream with life.
"See it father!? Do you see what I've done!?" Herbert West asked.
The corpse just screamed in a fit of painful birth.
And he knew what he wanted, and what he wanted was simple. For his father to go away again. Herbert West put his foot on his father's throat, and killed him again. And that's all he wanted. He wanted the man to die, be brought back to life, and die again, and he wanted to do it all.
In this fit of madness, that's all he wanted.
And that is how he found himself there, in the basement surrounded by moving dead things, not a single thing of life but himself. His reasoning for this self induced exile was that he both lacked the skills and was not going to let himself achieve the skills. For he did not want to be tempted by social conduct both males and females, he did not want it to distract him from his work. For if he solely lived to figure all this out, he would, and he would achieve immortality, in which there would be time to get these social skills and use them.
But for now Herbert West, with little things indulging his human senses, lived solely to live forever. He had achieved reanimation of the body, and not yet the mind, though he was able to create a new mind with the reanimation of a new body. Inanimate parts of a body could be given what one could call in stretch a mind. The serum gave the part enough energy to stay alive for at least a year, as he discovered with his pet liver, "Flutter." Staying alive in this definition was being animated, and having control of movement. West was not yet sure how he had given a liver a mind that it used to move and recognize him. He suspected the serum not only gave energy to the part for an extended time, but had in some way constructed a brain within the entire tissue, since upon dissection he had not found a brain in the liver.
Herbert West did not indulge himself often, but he considered breathing an indulgence. But beyond that, he kept to a very strict diet he had conceived was the best, and healthiest. He did everything he could to ensure he was healthy, to ensure his life would be long enough for him to complete his work. He exercised constantly, not for muscle or any silly thing such as appearance, but to rid himself of the bad within his body. He needed the body clean, working at its best. And though he found it rather disgusting he knew intercourse was also healthy for the body, for it too cleansed the body. He knew human contact was probably healthy for him emotionally, but emotions were part of the mind, and the mind was immortal, much unlike the body. He used the idea of human contact, and human love as a prize at the end of this. Not only would there be immortality but there would be people there. People at the end of all this, human contact and touch. A mother a father, some friends. And if he cared for them deeply he would give them life. He lived for that life that at the moment he was denying himself.
Herbert West was going to do everything possible to live as long as he could to perfect this. Even now he sometimes thought he could feel his body dying. Like he could feel the skin replacing itself, feel the cells dying inside him, feel his heart weaken with each passing beat until it finally would just die. He knew he was five years older than his self five years earlier, the body was weaker now, five years older, five years less of his life. He felt older each year too, he could feel the end of life coming for him, even though then it was at a fairly good distance away. But he knew, he could feel it, he could feel the hours stack up into days, and days to years.
We are born to die, he felt. The moment we are born we begin to die. Day by day one dies. Day by day the body is killing itself.
He will not let himself die. He will live forever. He will have a body that no longer ages, and no longer tires and dies. The body will finally suit the mind. After all he's done, the maddening things, the things he's given life to and taken from. After all this, he will not die. He denies death. He will not be just a piece of meat on the road, rotting away into nothing. He will not rot into the earth to feed its trees and animals, he will not become nothing. Not after all this, all this work, all the abominations he's created.
He looked up into the dark where he could hear his pet organs rattling about in their cages. Where he could hear the dead man he's kept alive for months now, strapped to the wall. He theorized the dead could be re-educated, but this has so far not folded, as the dead man has yet to verbalize a coherent word. Not even "dada." After all this, he won't die.
He'll find the way to overcome death, and he will keep it to himself. The idea of fame for all this has lost it's sweet taste, of course he's not going to allow someone to take credit for it, if this were to ever get out, but he's determined not to let that happen. He'll be the man that never dies, and he'll watch the world come and go, live and die, and when everything is dead, he'll still be there. Alive. Perhaps with a few syringes stuck in his head, but one must make sacrifices he assumes.
And then he gave this woman's body life, and he attempted to bring back her mind, for he did not believe in a soul and did not try and bring whatever that may be back. He wanted her mind, he wanted her higher brain function.
"I have given you life." He told the waking body. "You started as simply human clay, day by day rotting away, but you rise as a divine creature of my will and science." He said to the body, as he said to all bodies.
The body screams into living, and he holds it down with his bloody hands, and like a doctor reaching into his mother's carcass, he brings out the life in the body. The body struggles for a moment before it completely goes limp, and it stares up with white eyes, pupils up in the back of the head. The body wimps in its new laugh, giving out small cries. A promise being made, death is being conquered, you are at his gates, you can defeat him, you can live forever.
And Herbert West knew exactly what he was doing. Why he was doing it. Where he was before all this, and where he was going. What he was, and what he was going to become.