Part Four - Six Shots by Midnight
"Christ, Molly. Why didn't you tell me?" He ran a hand through his hair, ruffling his curls into the sort of disarray she would have normally found adorable.
"What was I supposed to say?" she scoffed, followed by a quick inhale that was almost a sob. "Oh, by the way, I had a friend in uni who discovered the secret to reanimating dead flesh. Unfortunately, the process had a rather inconvenient side effect of turning the test subjects into flesh-eating ghouls. How, exactly, should I have tried to work that into a casual conversation, Sherlock?" Molly's was voice growing shriller with each new word; which she seemed to realize because she clamped her lips together to hold in whatever nervous noise was trying to break free.
"I see your point." He slumped, his head coming to rest on the back of the chair so he could stare up at the tiled ceiling. "That's all of it, though. Right?" Sherlock lifted his head at her silence. "Right, Molly?"
Her skin had, somehow, gone even paler than before. He began to worry that she was going to be sick all over her desk.
She winced. "No."
Acting purely on instinct, he slid from the chair and knelt at her feet. He grabbed both of her hands, which were far too cold to the touch for his liking. In his most calming voice he said, "Take a deep breath for me. Now let it go. And another one. In. And out. There we go, that's my girl."
"Your what?" Molly blinked, her fearful expression momentarily morphed into bewilderment.
"My . . . We'll talk about that later." Now that she had regained some of her colour, Sherlock sat back on his heels. "All right. Tell me the rest."
இڿڰۣ-ڰۣ—
The experiments stopped after the Halsey incident. Or, more likely, Herbert had simply stopped asking for Molly's assistance. Not that she would have given it.
Not then, at any rate.
Molly's father's condition continued to worsen. Eventually the American doctor told them there was nothing more he could do. Her father wanted to spend his last few months in his familiar family home, so the Hoopers returned to Lincolnshire. Molly was relieved to leave Miskatonic University (and Herbert West) behind.
After her father died, she redoubled her efforts to finish her schooling. Her father had told her that his greatest wish had been for her to become Doctor Hooper, and while he wouldn't be around to see it, she made sure his wish was fulfilled. There were some who called her heartless and cold—her mother included—because she took no more than a week off when he died, just long enough to help make arrangements for and to attend his funeral, but she had a mission. No one understood that this was her way to grieve. Her penance for not being able to save him.
Her first job after becoming a doctor was at a small medical practice in Louth. It took months, but she eventually came out of her shell and her old personality broke free. She made friends with the other clinic staff and Milly at the diner.
One dreary day the next spring, she pushed through the front door of the clinic, her usual friendly greeting for the young receptionist dying on her lips at the sight of Herbert West leaning against the counter.
"And there she is," Herbert laughed. "I was just about to leave a note for you."
"How-how did you-Why?" she stuttered.
He quickly interrupted her with a sharp glance at the receptionist who was watching them, obviously hoping for a juicy bit of gossip about the newest doctor. "Surprise you? I thought it would be more fun if I didn't call ahead."
Which would have been a nice trick, considering he shouldn't have had her number. Or her address. She'd cut off all ties to him and nearly everyone else from the States when she'd left.
"Well, I am definitely surprised." And it wasn't particularly pleasant.
"I've a meeting this afternoon, but how about dinner tonight? We've got a lot to catch up on." Herbert offered a smile that didn't quite reach his eyes.
Over a too-large portion of Shephard's Pie that evening, Herbert told her that he'd kept an eye on her academic progress since she'd left. He'd even managed to read her thesis. When he had heard that one of the partners in her practice was getting ready to retire just as he was looking to make a change and leave Arkham, Herbert decided it was clearly a matter of fate.
"I'm sorry? Are you saying you're replacing Doctor Masters?"
"Not replacing, per se." He set aside his own plate of barely touched food. "I'll be taking over his caseload over the next month or two, on a probationary basis, to see if I'll be a good fit in your quaint little community."
She got the impression he was mocking either her village or her boss. Or both.
"So, why did you leave Massachusetts?" People didn't just drop everything and move to Louth on a whim.
"I told you, Molly, I was ready for a change."
She had resolved to hop on-line as soon as she got back to her tiny cottage and look for any strange news out of Arkham over the last few months, and was relieved to see nothing of note had been reported.
Months later, Herbert had settled into the practice with little trouble. He was extremely competent as a doctor, but had little to no bedside manner. There were the occasional mutterings about his abrasive nature over the reception desk.
He'd purchased a small house for a song, simply because it shared a fence with the cemetery and therefore was rumoured to be haunted. He'd hired workmen to complete much needed repairs around the long empty home and to enlarge the small cellar into a workspace.
It took a while, but Molly eventually found herself warming toward her old friend once more, and falling into old habits. At first it was just reminiscing about their former research (while carefully avoiding any mention of Doctor Halsey's death and subsequent reawakening). Then it became shared meals and looking over a few notes to try to figure out where they had gone wrong, purely a hypothetical exercise of course. And then the odd evening down in the cellar, messing about with reagents and new formulas.
Before she knew it, Molly was pulled back in. Rather than risk another Halsey incident, they concentrated their work on a much smaller scale, the overly abundant rat population. Not even the entire rat. Miraculously, Herbert's latest serum was capable of reanimating dismembered limbs, organs, even the severed head of a particularly large rodent specimen.
"Think of it, Molly. We could revolutionize transplant procedures. No more wasting time waiting for a suitable organ donor to get caught in a traffic accident. Part out a donor corpse, inject the serum, then put it all in cold storage until needed."
His enthusiasm was infectious, but she couldn't help but wince at his phrasing. "Part out? You'll need to work on your wording if you hope to ever convince the medical community to accept your work."
Herbert rolled his eyes. "On the whole, most of them are feeble minded sheep anyway. Sticking to what they were taught without a thought toward innovation or advancements."
"Be that as it may, you'll need funding if you want to take this large scale." It would do him no good to alienate the people who cut the checks.
"Trust me, my dear, there will always be someone searching for the secret to immortality and willing to pay for it." He sighed as he stared at their latest experiment. "There are so many variables that need to be calculated. Trials with rats won't be enough for us to go public. If only we had a human specimen to work with."
Molly shook her head with a grimace. "I am not going to help you dig up another body. I know these people, Herbert. I work with them, they wave to me when I walk down the main street, I talk to them at the diner."
He sighed and agreed, a tad too quickly for her comfort.
Suddenly the doorbell echoed through the ground floor of the house and through the open door to the cellar. They looked at each other, then up as if they thought they would be able to see through the floorboards.
"Who's that?" Molly asked.
"Probably one of the yokels, asking if I could come 'out to the farm and help Bessie birth a calf', as if I were a common veterinarian. You answer it, tell them I'm busy doing . . . anything." He waved her off. Molly stuck her tongue out at his back, before trudging up the stairs.
It wasn't a rancher worried about his cattle. It was one of the men who worked at city hall. He looked nervous, and the stench of alcohol and cigarette smoke assaulted her nose as soon as she pushed the screen door open.
"Hey, Frank."
He seemed surprised to see her. "Uh, hello, Miss Molly. Is, uh, Dr West here?"
Molly wondered yet again why everyone insisted on calling her by her first name when Herbert was still known as Dr West. "He's a bit busy at the moment. Is there something I can help you with?"
He opened and closed his mouth a few times, then sharply nodded his head as if he'd come to a decision of some sort. "You gotta come help, there's been a-an accident."
She immediately straightened from where she'd been leaning against the door frame. "What happened?"
"At the pub, there was . . . He fell in the basement. Banged his head up pretty bad. There's a lot of blood, ma'am. I don't know if he'll make it."
It was a widely known but unspoken secret that certain men from the village liked to gather in the basement of the pub and pummel themselves silly on a semi-regular basis. She didn't believe the injured man had fallen on his own, not for a minute.
Molly hurried to the cellar door and called down to Herbert, "I need to head out, someone's hurt. I don't have my bag with me, where's yours?"
Herbert stomped up the stairs, visibly irritated at the interruption and the loss of his assistant. "In the hall closet. What do you mean, someone's hurt?"
She quietly filled him in as she pulled Herbert's medical bag from the shelf in the closet, including her suspicions that the injury was boxing related. "Frank thinks he might not live."
"Interesting. I suppose we'll be the judge of that, won't we?" Herbert took the bag from Molly's hands and gestured for her to precede him out the front door. "Tell me, Frank. Who is it who . . . fell?"
Frank led the way toward the cars parked in the short gravel drive. "You wouldn't know him, just a bloke who's been hanging around the village, looking for work the last few weeks. You've probably never even seen him. Geoff bought him a few drinks, to be friendly. You know."
So drunk and clumsy was going to be the story the boys at the pub were going to tell, Molly thought as she settled into the front seat next to Herbert. They followed Frank's car into the village, although Herbert drove around to the alley behind the pub and parked there.
Frank had been right. By the time they arrived, the drifter had stopped breathing; which was probably for the best as she could see brain matter through the fractured skull. "This wasn't just a fall," she whispered to Herbert as they examined the massive body of a man who was clearly used to hard manual labour.
He grunted in reply, then stood up and wiped his hands against his shirt, leaving a smear of blood against the white material. "Frank, a word, if you please."
She watched the two men move to a corner of the room. The handful of other village men stood to the side, whispering to themselves. Probably making sure they had their stories straight, she thought.
Minutes later, Herbert returned to her side and Frank crossed the room to speak with his friends. Some of them gave her and Herbert a look, then the entire lot of them hurried up the stairs.
"What's going on?"
"They're going to their respective homes to pretend that none of this happened, and I have agreed that we will deal with our friend here out of the goodness of our hearts and to protect the reputations of several of those fine gentlemen." Herbert looked around and found a tarp, which he quickly laid down next to the body. "Help me roll him on to this."
"I'm sorry, we're what?" Molly questioned, even as she did as he'd asked and tried to help push the heavy body onto the tarp.
"We're taking him back to the house. If you remember, I was just lamenting the lack of human specimens to test our new serum on. Ask and you shall receive."
It took considerable effort to haul the dead weight up the stairs into the kitchen and out the back door of the pub. Molly spent the entire drive back to Herbert's house praying that they weren't pulled over for a traffic stop, and that no one would ask to look in the trunk.
By the time they dragged the corpse into the house (literally dragged, because Molly was surprisingly strong for her size but the drifter had outweighed her by more than seven stone), they were both tired. Rather than risk injuring themselves trying to get their burden down to the cellar, Herbert brought the absolutely necessary equipment up to the kitchen front hall where they had dumped the tarp wrapped drifter.
"Shouldn't we tie him up or something?" Molly worried her lower lip as she stared at the large body splayed out on the floor. She still remembered Halsey and the damage he'd done before he'd been caught and contained.
"The rats were docile enough, I don't think that's necess-" Herbert slowly stopped talking as Molly narrowed her eyes and glared. "I've got some rope in the shed."
Unfortunately, the serum didn't work. They waited nearly thirty minutes, used six vials of the glowing liquid, chest compressions, everything they could think of . . . and nothing.
In all honesty, Molly was relieved that the experiment had been a failure. The work they'd been doing in the cellar could someday save lives. How many people died waiting on a transplant list every year?
But that, the corpse currently bound in rope and anchored to the radiator in Herbert's sitting room . . . That had the potential to become dangerous in the blink of an eye.
They'd worked hard to modify the serum's formula. None of the rodent body parts they'd managed to reanimate had shown any signs of aggression, not even the severed head. She'd let their small successes and Herbert's enthusiasm override her cautious nature. Thank God no one had been forced to pay the price for their hubris this time.
Herbert sat back on his heels and grimaced. "What is it? What variables are we overlooking?"
"Herbert."
He tapped his fingers against the drifter's still chest and continued to think out loud. "How long would you say he was dead? Those buffoons had to stand around until one of them had the bright idea to summon a doctor. Five minutes lost there, if I'm being generous."
"Herbert."
"Another thirty for Frank to get in his car and drive here, he wouldn't have sped because he didn't want the constable to have any reason to pull him over. Twenty-five for us to get to the pub. Then another-"
"Herbert!" Molly nearly shouted. "Stop."
"But don't you see? It's the decomposition. He's been dead three, possibly four hours before we began." He hopped up and gesticulated wildly. "The rats were all fresh, still warm when we dismembered them. No chance for decomp to set in before we injected the serum."
Molly used an end table to slowly pull herself up. Her muscles ached from hauling so much dead weight around. "We can't keep doing this."
He frowned, looking at her as if he didn't even recognize her, and then his expression cleared and he nodded. "You're right. We've been coming at this from the wrong direction."
That hadn't been what she'd meant at all, but she was tired and they still had to figure out what to do with the dead man. "Do I even want to know what you're talking about?"
"We have to stop the deterioration of the brain matter. I'm almost positive that is what has been causing the regression to primitive instincts."
"And violent," Molly felt the need to remind him.
He waved her off. "The important thing is that the serum works."
"We don't really know that," Molly quickly interjected.
Herbert ignored her. "Clearly, the next step is to find a way to slow down, or even stop, decomposition."
That seemed like a bit of a leap, but if it meant no more cannibalistic half-zombies then Molly was all for it. "In the meantime, what do we do with him?" She nodded toward the body.
After a moment's thought, Herbert gestured toward the tarp they'd abandoned when they first tied the drifter's corpse up. "I'll wrap him up, you get the shovel out of the shed."
இڿڰۣ-ڰۣ—
"Considering what you told me earlier, that could have gone much worse," Sherlock offered.
"Oh, no. We're not done." Molly rubbed at her forehead. "Not even close."
"Damn." Sherlock stood up from the floor and took her hand. "Let's move to the sofa than. I'm tired of kneeling."
Once they were settled on the small loveseat, he put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close enough that she could tuck her head under his chin. He thought it might be easier for her to talk if she didn't have to look him in the eye.
"Herbert dug a shallow grave behind one of the mausoleums. Half the village still treated the cemetery as if it were haunted so there wasn't much chance that anyone would be wandering around the place and stumble across it." She took a deep breath and reached for his free hand, tucking her fingers between his. "For two days everything was fine. And then the Meynard boy went missing."
"Fuck," Sherlock whispered under his breath. He felt her tense, and held her hand even tighter to show her that he wasn't going to run off. "Did . . . Did they find him?"
"Yeah." Molly's voice broke. She had to take a minute to compose herself. "In the meantime, his mother couldn't handle the stress and worry. Sherry had always been high strung and delicate. Bad heart. She collapsed in a fit of hysteria, and Herbert happened to be the doctor on call that day. He went out to their house, thinking that he'd be able to sedate her a bit, calm her down. Maybe convince Ralph to drive her into the city so she could be admitted to hospital. She had a heart attack while arguing with them both that she wasn't leaving until they found her little boy. Herbert couldn't save her."
She tilted her head up. He could feel the brush of her eyelashes against his jaw as she closed her eyes and took a deep breath. "Ralph tried to beat the crap out of him, said Herbert didn't try hard enough. Pretty sure the only thing that saved Herbert was the constable coming by to check in with a progress report on the search."
She sniffled, and Sherlock knew that whatever was coming was going to be bad. Very bad.
"Gossip being what it is in a small community, I headed out to Herbert's that evening. I wanted to make sure he was okay. He answered the door with a revolver in his hand. I have no idea how he managed to get his hands on one, or how long he'd had it. He said he had thought I was Ralph, come to finish the job. I'd barely been there twenty minutes when someone started pounding on the kitchen door, hard enough to make it shake."
Even though he knew the answer already, he still asked, "Ralph?"
Molly made a noise that was a cross between a choke and a sob. "I wish. Herbert ripped open the door, revolver pointed at his visitor. It was the drifter, hunched over low enough that his knuckles almost scraped against the broken concrete step outside the door. I remember thinking he looked like a gorilla. And then I realized that was because he was covered in dirt and grave moss and-and viscera. He had, hanging out of his mouth he had-"
Sherlock rubbed his cheek against the top of her head. "Shh, it's okay. You don't have to say it."
He felt her nod. "Thank you. Herbert emptied his revolver into it. All six bullets. One right in the forehead."
"How did he explain any of it? Surely the others had to have said something. The men in the pub?"
"When Frank asked, Herbert told him there were cases of people being clinically dead and then waking up on the autopsy table. The drifter must not have been truly dead when he buried him. And when he woke up and dug himself out, the extensive brain damage from the 'fall' must have made him go berserk. Frank backed off once Herbert mentioned the incident in the pub."
Molly sighed and sniffled again. "Ralph laid his wife and son to rest on the same day. There wasn't really a need for the second casket, but they buried one anyway."