As a start, let's say Barbara does something nobody ever would have expected me - as well as myself - to do with the female lead against the man she loves...or used to love.

Chapter Ten

Horrors From the Shadows

5 years ago

The truth was, I wasn't checking into a motel, as much as I wanted to. I went straight to the house of the one man I knew was the last real friend I had in a long time. Though Eric and I didn't get anywhere beyond friendship unlike Herbert and I, at least he was someone I could talk to about anything. He was a great science partner and a fun-loving guy back in those days; now he was more refined but still had his sense of humor.

"Barbara!" He was surprised to see me at an unexpected time. Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee was the opposite of Herbert with his dark hair and spectacle-less brown eyes, charming and warm unlike Herbert. He was everything my husband was not. I sometimes wondered if I should have married Eric instead of Herbert, if my life would have been different. "What are you doing here?" I was about to answer when he stepped forward and his fingers brushed against my cheek; I think I shivered involuntarily when I felt warmer than I had ever been before, like I was back when we were teenagers. The warning bells were on again, but I was here, and I didn't want to go back to that prison tonight.

"Why were you crying?" he asked, eyes narrowing. "What did he do to you?"

I pulled back, feeling like I was stung by his touch. "He did nothing physically. We just had a fight. But I don't think I can take it anymore." I had to be very careful not to reveal anything and get us both in danger.

Eric stared at me for a moment before nodding and leading me inside. I saw a mostly white, modernized structure with colorful spun glass figures on the dark wooden shelves and tables, all in style in contrast to the old fashion I lived in. It felt surreal but a good change from my comfort zone. "Can I offer my oldest friend something?" Eric asked as he closed the door behind us. I nodded.

"Still have the booze we used to sneak from your parents' for some of those nights?" Back in high school, near the end of senior year, we used to celebrate by sneaking to his parents' to celebrate the end of midterms and finals before he went off to Harvard and I to Miskatonic. He grinned and laughed, nodding before leading me to the black leather sofa and bringing over the decanter and brandy glasses. I just needed something smooth and burning, something mellowed.

"Just like the good old days, eh?" I laughed with him, though I really didn't feel like it after today. "So, what happened? You got home from a long conference to what?" Eric asked as he sat down with me.

I tried not to drink too much in case the truth slipped out. "Herbert and I just...aren't on fire anymore. We still work together, but it's not the same like it used to be. We've known each other since college, but it's gotten worse over the years, and three years of marriage hasn't changed anything." I looked up to see his brows furrowed as he took in what I said.

"Is this because of the...miscarriages?" he asked hesitantly.

I shook my head and nodded at the same time. "It's not just them, but the fact he's so caught up in the work. One time caused me to lose the other baby the second time, remember that?" I'd told him then that the cause of losing the second child was a crazy person attacking us in the street one day. He nodded and said simply "Mm-hmm" before allowing me to continue. "I wanted a normal life, but with him, it's just so..." I swallowed. "...I love him, but I don't know if I will ever change him back to the one I fell in love with." Silently, unspoken, I knew there was no going back. Herbert was too insane to consider redemption no matter how hard I tried to make it work between us.

"I know being married and having children can change a man, but I doubt it will a man like Herbert West." He shook his head. "You married a brilliant man, a great doctor, but everything's just changed so much. I was married before you and I met up again, but we divorced after six years. Just didn't work out; she couldn't stand us not able to spend time together." I was shocked to learn he had finally told me of a wife before me. Seemed we both were having marriages that weren't working out; well, I was still in mine and he was out of his.

"That makes us both," I said tiredly. I clinked my glass with his. "To horrible lives," I said jokingly before taking a giant swig that burned my throat and made me feel a little lightheaded.

I spent the rest of the evening in his arms, just him holding onto me as we watched television together, and I felt like I wanted to go to sleep, but at the same time, his body temperature matching mine, I wanted more than just sleep. More than just infatuation was on the rise, and it was desire. Something I haven't felt in a long time. I looked up into Eric's eyes and saw them darkening when they met mine. His face was nearing mine, and I think I was doing the same, but I couldn't tell because my brain was in a haze. My body's reactions were bubbling like the ones in the basement of me and Herbert's home.

My lips were covered with his; how long did I want to kiss him when we were teenagers? He was certainly consoling and exactly who I needed now when I was nothing but a ghost of who I was then. Happiness was no good for me since becoming the wife of a mad doctor...and then it dawned on me I was making a mistake in making out with our friend and colleague, who was also a long-ago infatuation. But the heavier, lightheaded side of me told me that I needed just one night of relief and solace from the hell I had been living. "Eric," I said softly, "take me upstairs?"

I let myself be carried upstairs to his room. He laid me across a nature-themed jacquard printed bed and helped me out of my sweater. I reached up and unbuttoned his light blue shirt, exposing a lightly sculpted chest far more healthier than my husband's. Every young girl's dream. I flushed, running my hands up his chest and then grasping his shoulders. He leaned down and kissed me again, this time getting hotter when his tongue was joining with mine. I reached down and undid the button and zipper of my jeans, lifting my hips so he could slip them and my underwear off. Cool air ignited the nerves down there, making me hotter and wetter for him. "Please," I begged softly, helping him free his erection from the tight prison of his jeans.

However, the whole time we were having what I decided to call comfort sex - anyone else, actually - and it was pure bliss that brought me to life once again, sending a wave of lightness that had been taken away from me through my body, I found myself looking past Eric's broad shoulder and to a dark corner; the whole room was dark save for one of the bedside lamps lit, the shade a dark red and not offering much brightness. The corner hid everything from the eye's sight, but glancing at it gave me the unnatural feel of horror I felt had followed me to this sanctuary I had escaped to for one night. It was like Herbert, despite being the atheist he was, had followed me spiritually and haunted me as I gave my body to our friend and fellow doctor. He would not let me be happy tonight, not ever again. He wanted me committed to the work and the work only, force me to share his madness.

I could almost see his bright blue eyes piercing through the darkness and glaring at me, telling me I was betraying him and everything we did together. He was marking me with infidelity, with deceit and uncleanliness, but it wasn't like I wasn't filthy already.

~o~

2 years later

Eric had been transferred out of Massachusetts to Canada in 2012, and when he was, he enlisted the help of both me and my husband, the celebrated surgeons Dr. Herbert and Barbara West. Little did anyone know how estranged we were despite remaining married for the sake of a research between me and him, and us alone.

I'm not sure if being a medic in the war was worse than what I went through in my life, but one thing was for sure: being here with my husband was more than I could bear. We didn't share a bed anymore, didn't touch each other much anymore, barely exchanged words other than regarding work, as I believe I said before. I stayed with him because I had nowhere else to go, no matter how much I wanted to leave, but it was also because I was afraid one of his subjects would still end up killing him when I wasn't around. Nowadays he finished his violent subjects with a revolver, but there were some times he wasn't fast enough and they escaped, worsening both our fears, which kept us close together and watching over.

I had begun to think of my husband now worse than what he did, anything he did without any remorse. I had wanted to remain behind in Bolton, but Eric wanted me there, and the reason I went there was because he asked me. We hadn't been together again since that night Herbert murdered and temporarily re-animated businessman Robert Leavitt, but we still spoke. Herbert had no idea of what I'd done when I left him, and I preferred to keep it that way as much as it ate me up inside. And Herbert hadn't killed another human being after Mr. Leavitt, but that didn't change anything between us. The next night after I returned home, he'd apologized, but I didn't trust him, until he followed through on his promise he wouldn't kill another person again.

I can't believe this, but I still love Herbert despite everything, despite what he's doing now and what he will do in the last years of our marriage and time together. If my mother were here, I could hear her putting us both back on track, as forced as all of this seemed. I slept with our friend and colleague that one night, and it had been a mistake, but Eric had been there for me. He gave me what Herbert didn't give me anymore. At this point, I was more than confused at my feelings.

What Herbert has done while serving as a medic for the soldiers was worse than he'd done back in Massachusetts, and it was this that made me sicker than the killing of the businessman. He might have performed his magic on so many soldiers, but for those who weren't so lucky, he didn't do it because he was concerned for the people suffering, and he needed something beyond simply re-animating the dead: he wanted a supply of newly dead soldiers in all stages of dismemberment.

I shared the lab with him, sharing it with him as our private sleeping quarters despite our marriage on the rocks. Though despite his ever cold exterior he still put on for the world to see - and our constant arguments - he wanted me to be on the same page as him again. I wanted so badly to forgive him but found it harder than ever now. I'd wanted him to be the man I always wished he was, a man who showed compassion and sought to conquer death as his result. But his early losses and experiences with our re-animation subjects had hardened him so much. In college, I was with him because he had the dream I did, stated numerous times, but by the time we were married not long before the losses of our children we should have had as well as the living body he'd gotten in our home basement lab, I was afraid of him. But that was also the first time he'd been able to revive a cadaver to full reason.

My stomach lurched at the smell of gore around us as I watched every day how Herbert handled certain body parts when no one was looking, not even Eric. The sounds of bones sawed, flesh ripped and organs spilled...I wanted to pass out, but I would only wake up in the ankle-high, slime-gore floor and vomit there. My husband had become a butcher in comparison to the every day general practitioner everyone in Bolton knew. He'd lost his mind for real, and I knew it. But he insisted on taking the experiments to a whole new level, which was the re-animation of detached body parts. "We're supposed to work on saving whole people, not parts of them," I argued one day, to no avail.

"If we don't try another method of restoring rational thought, what else do you have in mind?" he returned hotly. "I have so many ideas - so many new ones - about how the nerves might be able to function without being attached to other parts, or perhaps to different ones. You know a reptile has regeneration properties, correct?" He reached behind him and held up the lizard itself. "Its egg fluids are the key. Just think that the body and its lone parts might be able to survive WITHOUT the need of the brain."

I'd said nothing, just glared at him. Looking down at the floor and bringing both my hands up, I saw how little blood I had in contrast to him. But I also glimpsed my wedding ring which I never had in me to take off...and the other one he gave me before our wedding. Rings were supposed to just be objects, but these were given to me by a man who promised I was his everything, before things took a turn for the worse. Marriage was supposed to be hard, Mom said once, so long ago. If she was here, I would have told her how right she was.

"Barbara." He sighed then, lowering the lizard back to the table and taking both my hands in his. "Please, my love, look at me." I looked up at him in surprise. This was the first time in a long time I heard him call me his love. My heart was too hard, but I was too off-guard to think straight. "Just...please trust me on this. I know I've been terrible to you all these years now, but we're getting close to restoring rational thought in a subject. We were so close that one time only for it to end as it shouldn't have. You've been with me in everything we've done so far, right? You believed we could do this, or has it been so long you forgot?"

I pulled my hands free, though not harshly. "I did, but that was before this." I motioned to the boney, gory chaos around us. "The man I love has resorted to the work of a butcher, which is more than I bargained for. I want us to be helping a complete human being, not this."

Herbert looked at me, expressionless for a few seconds before shaking his head. "Barbara, everything else we've done haven't gotten us very far. Science is all about pushing boundaries, remember? We'll make better progress if you could at least show me the support you used to." He lowered his head. "Saying I'm sorry won't change it, I know, but I want us to work like we used to. We can't change anything in the past, but we can change the future."

He was right that a simple sorry didn't cut it any slack, but to hear him voice almost the same as I've thought - but my fears were still present - I felt a small glimmer of hope amidst this terrible mass of blood and dead flesh. I nodded, and we went back to work.

However, the downfall occurred late in March of 2013, behind the lines which was the hospital where we worked by day. I had prayed then that it was a dream, but Herbert bringing me to the site made it impossible. Eric had been in an aero plane in the middle of battle before it was shot down, and he wasn't so lucky. I could feel my heart shattering that me and Herbert's cherished friend - and a sharer of the theory of the re-animation of the dead - was gone now, but when the plane crashed on the roof of the hospital. No one had made it there before us just yet, but Herbert recovered the body of Dr. Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee - and showed that his head had been nearly decapitated, showing white bone, gory red muscles and the likes. Handling our friend the way he did made me nearly fall down the stairs back to where we had our lab set up in the abandoned shed behind the hospital, where no one ever came inside without knocking first.

In the back corner - I really hated dark corners - Herbert kept a large vat of the reptile matter for preservation purposes, other than use in the re-agent. I liked to think that Herbert preserved body parts because he needed them as fresh as they were upon losing life. He'd brought the embalming compound with him, instead choosing to use it for the vat of reptile embryo tissue. I didn't think two separate things would coincide very well, but I didn't question Herbert because he always knew what he was doing. Over time, the stuff had grown puffy and hideous, sickly gray mingled with blue. I helped Herbert get the body of Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee onto our lab table. Then he abandoned us both and retrieved the saw, the silvery blade menacing under the light as he went to work in finishing the job of removing the head all the way and carrying it by the hair to the vat.

"Herbert, after what he went through?!" I cried, getting a glare from him that warned me to not question him any further.

"Of course I sympathize. How could I not for our old friend? But look at him: he was so physically and mentally powerful, even if his genius level doesn't match mine. And he has a splendid nervous system. He's perfect. And all I have to do now is to join the veins and arteries as they should, to keep the blood flowing without spilling a mess." I hesitantly and squeamishly helped him follow through - in my mind, doing this to our friend was wrong on so many levels - with joining the vessels until it was finished off with grafted skin. Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee's body was nothing but a headless figure on our table now, the man who was my classmate from high school and one-night paramour, and our oldest friend and colleague.

The re-agent was administered into the neck, as always, but since the head was no longer attached, it was a little lower in the spinal cord than usual. Outside, while we waited for the usual results, I could hear gunfire and shouting of the battlefield. I managed to look from Eric's headless corpse to Herbert's face, which gleamed under the light of the lamp over the table. I chewed my lip when I looked around at the gore-covered floor and then finally the greenish-yellow glow in the black corner, which held the head of the man between us. I still didn't know how reason could exist without certain parts connected, or how this would ever help anyone now.

Then the body began to twitch, the muscles contracting grotesquely, the chest heaving up and down; a hideous series of breaths sounded without the need of a mouth. I stepped away from the table the same time as Herbert when the body rose on its own, its arms struggling about blindly as though trying to figure out where to go first. Herbert's theory was proven; the body could survive without the brain, but this wasn't how I'd wanted it to be.

"Jump! For God's sake, jump!"

That was ERIC'S voice, but it didn't sound like it was wholly him. That voice...it couldn't be classified one. I don't know another way to describe it, other than the fact that it wasn't of this world as much as the hideous material which engulfed it. And its words...it remembered everything that happened to it before its end from the sky. Eric had tried to get free from the plane falling from the sky, but he would have died either way.

Just then, the whole building was wracked with a terrible impact. We were under attack now. I ran around the table to grab my husband by his lab coat sleeve and drag him away from the table; he tried to wrestle free from me. "No, we can't leave him!" he shouted, turning for our subject which now rose from the table and stumbled about, trying to find its head. "He's our success; he's the next step!"

"And we're under attack!" I shouted back, dragging him through the door and snatching up the nearest notebook of our notes we had. "Our lives depend on it. We can't continue if we're dead!"

He didn't argue with me then. So we left our lab behind, all the dead material...and our headless re-animated colleague and his head in the vat.

Dun dun DUN, here it comes. :) Barbara and Herbert might have reconciled even though it's far from over, her onetime lover a headless zombie now, so you all know what happens in the next chapter. ;D You do NOT wanna miss that.