Part Two – From the Dark
Sherlock grabbed an uncomfortable chair that was mainly used as a surface to pile unfiled paperwork, and dragged it around to the same side of the desk that Molly was seated on. Once he was satisfied with their seating arrangements, facing each other with their knees nearly touching, he reached for her ice-cold hand and nodded.
"I'm ready."
Molly gripped his hand tighter, as if needing to ground herself in the tactical sensation of his touch.
"I met him ten years ago. Doctor West. Well, he was simply Herbert back then. Neither one of us was a doctor yet."
இڿڰۣ-ڰۣ—
The tumour in her father's abdomen was still small when it had been discovered. Unfortunately, it was nestled against his colon and there was no guarantee that surgery would manage to get all of it. At the time, Molly didn't really understand all of the technical jargon the surgeons were throwing out, but she caught enough to know that if the cancer had spread her father wouldn't get better.
There was a clinic in the states, however; one with a surgeon who promised amazing results in cases like her father's. The decision to temporarily uproot the family to Massachusetts had been made within weeks.
Her father's condition had been the push Molly had needed to enrol at Miskatonic University in Arkham. They had one of the best medical programs in the state, and the added bonus of being less than an hour away from the small home her parents had rented.
It was during one of her anatomy classes that she met Herbert West, reluctant teaching assistant and all around anti-social arse. It was clear to Molly from the first that he'd only agreed to take the unpaid job to gain after-hour access to the donated bodies in the cadaver lab for his own research. Perversely, she had found herself listening with interest to his muttered asides during the lab practicals.
Herbert theorized that the body was a complex machine made of organic material. A machine that could, in theory, be 'restarted' after it failed. In a word, Herbert believed that he could 'cure' death.
To a woman who was watching her father undergo debilitating cancer treatments, the idea of circumventing the finality of death was incredibly enticing.
By the end of the semester, Herbert had allowed her to observe his experiments and even offer her input.
During the summer break, the two of them set up a makeshift lab in an abandoned barn. They ordered equipment off the internet, and whatever they couldn't find online they pilfered from the university.
Molly had been shocked the first time she arrived at the barn and the body on the exam table was not a deceased dog or monkey, but an actual corpse. The first she'd seen outside of her classes at Miskatonic.
"Where did that come from?"
"There was a fresh burial at the cemetery up the road. Buried at the city's expense, no friends or family in attendance. I watched the entire thing from the road. No one will miss him, Molly. We're ready to move on to a human subject, why not take the opportunity when it practically throws itself in our laps?"
That night, with the barn lit by candles and kerosene lanterns as the small gas generator was needed to power the medical equipment, Molly assisted as Herbert injected his serum into the corpse. He had instructed her to crawl atop the body and administer chest compressions in an effort to circulate the fluid and improve the chances for a successful reanimation.
Five minutes passed. Ten. At a quarter of an hour, her arms had begun to ache and tremble; but she persisted as Herbert darted about the room, adjusting knobs and dials, looking at the laptop screen with increasing frustration, grumbling and cursing with each passing minute.
Eighteen minutes after the initial injection, Herbert officially called the experiment a failure and finally allowed Molly to rest. She sank to the floor in relief, her thighs and wrists like jelly.
Herbert began to angrily rip electrodes from the corpse, then crossed the room to dump them onto a metal tray. "Why? Why didn't it work? I used the same formulation as the sixth monkey, and it came to long enough to open its eyes and screech. You heard it."
"Everyone heard it," Molly huffed, still a little out of breath. "That's why we're out in the middle of nowhere instead of the labs at Miskatonic."
He ignored her and continued to think out loud. "Perhaps we needed to use more of the serum? Was the subject not fresh enough?"
They both froze as a strange wheezing noise teased through the air.
"Herbert?" Molly whispered as she pushed herself off the ground with the splintered wood wall at her back. "Did you hear that?"
He nodded. "It's coming from the subject." He hurried to the exam table. "Bring a lantern. Quickly!"
Molly did as she was ordered, apprehension and excitement warring within her. She held the lantern high as Herbert leaned down over the corpse.
"It's breathing. It's breathing, Molly!"
Suddenly, the body jerked. The wheezing turned into an unholy shriek as the former corpse began to flail and shudder. It smacked Herbert with enough force to toss the man into the nearby, causing it to overturn and dump their laptop and several delicate pieces of equipment onto the floor with a clatter. The lantern was knocked from Molly's hand and shattered against the wall, the kerosene ignited almost immediately.
"Herbert!" Panic took over and Molly rushed to his side on pure instinct. She dragged him away from the growing flames, and together they stumbled out of the barn.
"Do you think we can get to the-" Herbert's words were drowned out by the sound and heat of the gas powered generator exploding.
They stumbled away through the nearby overgrown fields when they heard the far away bleat of approaching sirens.
News of the fire took up a quarter of the front page of the Arkham paper the next morning, but buried back on page three was a blurb about a desecrated grave in the local cemetery. The fresh dirt had been dug up and the coffin ripped apart, no sign of the body. Both the dirt and shattered coffin were covered in claw marks as if from a beast . . . or strong human hands.