Indeed, I have not died.
His hands slid into the warm cavity of the cadaver and wrapped themselves around the stomach. Caressing it softly, he removed it and observed the way the lights of the morgue glanced off of the glistening organ. Yes, he thought, Atrenis would live again – or, rather have some semblance of life – for his own purposes of course. With this experiment, he would finally be victorious.
-1-
"But wait, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me take you back to where it all began." Nathan Adler, from David Bowie's Outside album
The tomb legions had not destroyed him. To his intense pleasure, that had all been a dream. His experiments were quite real, but he had not been rent to pieces. That damned officer, or whatever he had been, had been controlling his experiments. His works, for which he had sacrificed his education at the university. So, as soon as Herbert had awoken, he threw all of his creatures into the furnace, including that damnable officer, taking no chances in ensuring their demise. He watched as they shrieked, and remained there until the only semblance of their existence were the light, lazy drifts of ash rising towards the ceiling. As a further precaution, he had gathered what remained of the ashes in the furnace and scattered them from his third story window.
Leaning back into his chair in the Layman's Apartments, Herbert West thought of what was to be his newest endeavor, one that would through all of his efforts be his greatest success. The creature, Atrenis, was believed by her cult to be the offspring of one of the Old Ones, and nearly as ancient. In his general perusal of the university's library, in the sections containing the oldest tomes, West had discovered books of mythos. In a particular book dating to the 1200's, he had first learned of Atrenis. Both the date of the book and the knowledge within had made him especially careful where he read it, and even more so when he surreptitiously removed it from the campus library.
From the tome, West learned that her cult was quite different from that of Dagon, one of the better known of the Old Ones, in the instance that her cult was more preoccupied with the idea of the land. To her followers, the earth and even the universe were supposedly projections of her mind, a dream of hers to put it simply. While most of the cults had a description of the thing that they worshiped, all that West could find was the mention of her gender. Apparently, her formed changed depending on the viewer, but the form was always female. Yes, he thought once more, this was going to be quite interesting.