Alright, these are my little ficlets that I've been working on in my absence from . Unfortunately, my college load is absolutely killing me, and everything I attempt to work on is either robbed of creativity, or is abandoned because I can't get anything together long enough to work on it. I'm taking 18 credit hours as a freshman, what the crap was I thinking? Seriously...
Anyways, these are meant to keep you entertained while I attempt to go back and work on the next chapter for Gibing Up Spring: Taking the Fall... Although I realize some of you aren't really Re-Animator fans, nor are you interested in these little half canon stories, this is still my only offer. I have nothing to give you, and in Seymour Krelbourn's famous words, You're not happy unless I open a vien... XD No, I know no one is really like that here. Actually, I believe a few of them are crossovers with Gotham and a few other odds and ends. If you can spot them, points to you. They're in no chronological order either. Enjoy!
I do not own Re-Animator, Herbert West, Daniel Cain, Peru, Miskatonic Medical University, Gotham City, or anything else in these small stories. Most everything belongs to HP Lovecraft, aka the Literary Horror God, Stuart Gordon, Jeffrey Combs, David Gale, Bruce Abbot, DC Comics, and a few other odds and ends. I claim nothing and I'm not profiting from any of this. Only taking the reviews cause I'm an attention whore...
#12 - Insanity
He's not really insane you know.
Not really, not ever.
Some of us are here, but not him. He's always been here, lurking in the background while the rest of us rush around like ants all over the place, serving something…I'm not sure what we serve, but it is something. He knows, I know he knows, why else would he be here? Well, what other reason besides the little being insane part, which he's not. I'm not sure he even knows anymore. Although there is often times when he comes out of his solitude to talk about someone named Gruber or Hans. I think they're the same person sometimes, but I'm not sure if he knows that anymore.
That man.
Herbert West.
He's not crazy, but maybe I am.
Who really knows for sure but him anyways?
He's the doctor after all.
#37 – Roses
Roses, the sickening smell of roses fills the funeral parlor as he stands in the middle of the room.
All around him roses, hundreds of them in all colors, shapes, and sizes: filling the room with their nauseating scent as they attempted to cover up the lingering smell of something terrible beneath. He'd know that smell anywhere. He probably always would too. Something foul: and he knew what it was…
Death.
The roses were meant to cover up the smell of death.
But who's death?
Was it his own death? No, it wasn't his death. Even now he could feel the blood smashing through his veins as he attempted to take deep enough breaths to keep him on the brink of panic but out of the clutches of unconsciousness. His heart was thundering furiously in his chest, hitting the inside of his rib cage repeatedly as it begged him to run, to flee from whatever was happening to him. It was screaming to be released from its mortal prison. He didn't want to listen. He didn't know if he really could listen.
Suddenly a long, black coffin appeared in the center of the room beneath the mound of roses, rising up like a great title wave from the depths of the ocean. It shoved aside thousands of roses in its wake, moving as if shoved by some greater force, invisible to the naked eye. Not that he had his glasses anyways, they'd disappeared somewhere in his haste to get out. It moved until it stood at waist height, his waist height. The lid was open too…a gaping hole in a black pit.
It called to him to take a peek inside.
He started for the coffin with an agonizing slow pace. He knew it was a coffin, just by the appearance and the room that looked like a morgue crossed with a funeral parlor. (He'd been in enough of both of those to know what they each looked like, what each characteristic meant.) He didn't know who was in the coffin though, it wasn't him. He didn't think it was him anyways. Carefully he stepped forwards, leaning on the side of the coffin as he gazed down into the depths of the satin lined final resting place. A man laid there, a young man with brown hair and a pale face. He recognized him…
Daniel Cain lay dead in the coffin beneath him.
Herbert West screamed.
The roses covered the smell of death.
#1 – Introduction
Herbert didn't like Megan Halsey right off the bat.
She was brash, rude, inconsiderate, clingy, and above all intolerable. He hated her, not an uncommon thing for him because he really hated most people. Herbert West, by nature, wasn't a very social person. He preferred solitude to human companionship, a corpse more enjoyable to him than useless chatter often passed around in the lie that was called friendship. Death was by far more fascinating. He'd never really understood the whole process anyways. It was all very useless.
So, by natural habit, he'd already made an assumption on the two individuals in his new home based on the first ten minutes of interaction with him. Ever since he'd gotten ready to knock on the door, and it was flung open from in front of him to reveal the two people who'd trampled onto his life, he'd had a distinct dislike for Megan Halsey.
And an extreme liking for Daniel Cain.
It wasn't logical, nor was it based off of anything more than first glances, but Herbert immediately liked Dan. It must have been something about the way he reacted to his presence in the doorway. Perhaps it was the fact that he had enough consciousness to be embarrassed about his basic nudity as he chased the damn Halsey girl around the house in nothing but a thin sheet, undergarments disregarded for the sake of play. Herbert couldn't be sure, but he also couldn't shake the fact that he liked him immediately. He was…charismatic.
And attractive
And friendly
And strong
Everything he himself wasn't, Daniel Cain was.
He as perfect.
Maybe that's why he liked him. But what did he know anyways? He wasn't built for social interaction or the understanding of such behavior like the rest of humanity was. He was built for re-animation and the like, to work with dead corpses and tissue placed under medical instruments and tools instead of being placed under social situations. Bone saws were his lawnmowers, scalpels his knives, and organs his canvas. Everything else he'd leave to Dan…
#4 – Dark
The serum glowed brightly in the dark as Herbert West stood over one of countless corpses he'd brought home from the morgue in Gotham City this time. It was a young woman, late twenties to early thirties, brought in after a fatal gunshot wound to the abdomen and upper chest. She'd only been dead a few hours now, the coroner having brought her in around seven o'clock or about an hour before he had clocked out. It was the perfect specimen too, fresh, no name, no family, no record…
She was perfect.
So he'd brought her home with him, a new batch of reagent fresh out of the beakers and test tubes and just waiting to be tested out. Ever since the incident at Miskatonic and Peru he'd been trying to perfect the solution, not only to re-animate corpses, but to return rational thought as well as personality and coherent brain function. Dr. Hill had been an anomaly, one he wanted to figure out and replicate. The next subject had been the Bride, and then a random corpse here and there before they'd gone into convulsions and died once more. It wasn't traceable and unpredictable.
Ever since he'd had to leave Daniel though, things just hadn't been the same. No longer could Herbert replicate his serum as he once had…no longer had he even cared that nothing had happened as planned. He didn't have the extra set of hands in the lab, which was always welcomed when it was Dan, and he didn't have the brilliant brain to bounce ideas off of like he used too. He missed him really. It wasn't natural, it wasn't normal, and it wasn't welcomed.
No all he had was the dark and the glowing green reagent to keep him company, not even the rats would come near him anymore. Somehow the animals always knew though, from Dan's cat Rufus to the rats in the various asylum and building walls he'd stayed in, they always seem to know. They had a missing link that the human race seemed to lack now. No one bothered to blink twice at the small, creepy little mortician who scuttled about behind the scenes in the dark of the morgue. No one bothered to give him a second look as long as he wasn't causing any trouble…well, any trouble that they knew of anyways. If only they knew of the break-threw he was making in his lab as they piddled around with their meaningless day jobs.
Then they'd know the brilliance behind his supposed madness.
But no, for now he had to remain hidden safely in the dark and away from prying eyes who wouldn't understand his important work. It was the only thing that really meant anything to him anymore. The only thing he had left since Dan had been taken away from him, since he'd been blackmailed by Dr. Hill, since he'd lost the bride, since his exile. He'd been shunned before they'd attempted to cart him off to some other sanitarium like an animal!
In the dark he was safe.
In the dark he was home.
#9 – Drive
Dr. Carl Hill was dead.
Or, at least now he was anyways. The whole decapitating shovel technique had certainly done the job if the original blow to the back of the head hadn't done it, which it hadn't and he knew that for a fact. Now there was a bloodied floor about his feet and two separate parts of Dr. Hill lying on his floor as he removed the shovel from the separation point in between his neck and shoulders.
It was really fair in all regards. The man was a thief and a blackmailer, trying to take a ride on everyone else's hard work while he did nothing on his own. He was the lowest of the low in Herbert's eyes now, a common thief or cockroach like the ones under the bricks in Dan's basement stair case. They slowly weaseled their way into a healthy and functioning house only to eat at it from the inside out, destroying it and taking all of the good qualities for himself. He was a parasite.
Herbert wouldn't allow it.
He wouldn't take his work!
He couldn't have them: he couldn't have his life's work! No, not if he had anything to say about it! He would never allow that plagiarist anything more that what he truly deserved. A nice, deep, cement, hole in the ground six feet under the flooring in Dan's basement. That's where he was going to go. Oh and every time he or Dan would walk across the floor, Herbert would know that the foul beast was getting what he actually reaped. It was such sweet pleasure.
Nothing spurred Herbert West on like a good challenge.
#17- Blood
It had become a regular occurrence for someone to start checking up on Dr. West's progress before they last checked out and left the mostly silent and rather creepy doctor to close up shop before heading home for the evening. It had been a few months now since the man had wormed his way into the Greenfield City Morgue, using his mysterious medical expertise and doctorate to prove himself worthy to work along-side the head mortician. The man himself was rapidly aging, closer to being a patron of the morgue than to actually working in it anymore. Herbert West seemed to know this.
He was better than almost all of the other employees there: such was his way with the dead. His manners, his precision, his technique, everything was beyond extraordinary. Everyone else was quite content to let him have his way about things now though, to just let him work how he saw fit. Even Dr. Weston, Greenfield's longest medical practitioner and coroner, had no complaints to the way that Dr. West moved about his job. They didn't see anything wrong with him.
Herbert West secretly knew what idiots they were.
Every night one of the two doctors on duty with him would check up on him, only to poke their heads in, wave a bit, and take off again. They left him alone after that, free to do what he would while no one was there to watch him. He couldn't have asked for something more spectacular. That's when he was really able to get down to the bare, nitty-gritty. That's when the blood would really start to pump through his veins, the life to come back to him again.
He always saw the blood.
It wasn't necessarily his own blood, although nine times out of ten it was his, but it none the less stimulated his natural curiosity to cure the disease known only as death. It was like he saw only red, the color that drove human existence, as his own personal drug. That and the reagent of course, but that was mostly his little secret now. No one else knew of its existence, let alone his dependency on it. Only Dan had ever known anyways. That's the way it should stay too…
Oh the blood.
#23 – Cat
It was all because of that damnable, infernal beast that he was in this situation with the Dean, Dr. Hill, and Daniel Cain now. Ever since he'd shown Dan his experiments, driven to some half-formed bit of compassion which caused him to bring the stupid cat back from the dead in the first place, he'd almost regretted his decision to let anyone else in on his work. Although it wasn't a complete failure in other areas like his friendship with Dan for instance, or in the relationship that spawned from his involvement with him.
Maybe the cat wasn't so bad after all.
Rufus, the cat's name was Rufus, or had been Rufus before his…death. Herbert wasn't sure that Dan still didn't believe that he hadn't killed Rufus; that he really did find him dead in the garbage. But, no matter how hard he tried to convince him otherwise, Dan never seemed to want to believe him. He didn't kill Dan's pet, he knew that he was fond of him and being fond of Dan would never have allowed for him to harm him. Kick him sometimes, and hiss at him in a manner resembling a beast, but never kill him. If anything he'd tried to re-animate him because he didn't want Dan to be sad and lonely. He'd done it because he cared for him, not because of some reversed sense of guilt for "killing" the beast.
He hadn't killed it after all.
He'd only found it dead in the garbage, its head stuck in a jar, just as he'd said it had been. It wasn't a lie, Herbert was a lot of things but a liar wasn't one of them. A creepy, mad, deranged, slightly off his rocker, scientist, yes, a liar, no. He was above that, not much, but he was still above it. He always had been.
All thanks to a damn cat.
#57 – Sacrifice
"You know Dan, in ancient Alchemic practices the art of creation always came at a price. In order to build one thing, you'd have to give up another." Whispered Herbert, his lips ghosting over pale flesh as he continued to work. "That's what I'm doing now."
"You're giving up your own life for theirs? For your work Herbert?" gasped Dan, outrage clearly written on his face. "Why?"
"Because that's what someone with a gift does Dan. They give themselves in the name of science, of their work." he squinted through his glasses as he continued his work. "You think me a bad person, don't you? You think I can't be selfless, a potentially good move."
"No Herbert, you're wrong." Started Dan. "You don't know that and--"
"Save your breath Dan. You and I both know that what I say is true. You think I can't sacrifice anything, that I can't care for anything, but you're wrong." He stopped mixing his chemicals and gazed up at Dan sadly, eyes clouded in grief. "You're wrong, Dan, you're wrong. I can love."
"Herbert, I know that…" Herbert cut him off.
"No, you're wrong! I can love!" He buried his face in his hands, sobbing in only the way that a lonely, miserable scientist can. The sounds of a broken heart. "I can sacrifice everything for something I love! I'd give it all up!"
Dan grasped Herbert's heaving shoulders loosely, unsure of how to go about comforting him. After all, he'd never shown this side of him before. Herbert was normally such a strong person, never moving in the face of needless emotion, never wavering. He was the constant rock of certainty in Dan's emotional, movable, breakable life. He was everything he himself couldn't be, strong, detached, focused, concrete, and oddly inhuman. Dan had never given the thought that Herbert could be like this…this human.
Herbert finally cracked and rounded on him, clinging to Dan's shirt front like there was no tomorrow. He sobbed hard into the stunned man's hands and cried as if he'd never been able to do so ever before. It scared Dan to no end. He clung to Herbert as much as Herbert clung to him, the other man's grasp tightening as time drew on. All the while Herbert sobbed and Daniel Can tried to calm him down. Their roles had been reversed; their lives had been turned upside down forever.
"I can love Dan, I can love…I can love."
"Shhh, Herbert, it's alright. I know you can."
#71 – Obsession
"God damn it Herbert!" shrieked Dan, rounding on the smaller man as he slid down the wall into a crumpling mass of hysterical laughter. It was his own way of dealing with things, this insane cackling. "It's your own damn obsession isn't it?"
Herbert continued to laugh, even as Dan rounded on him again.
"It's sick Herbert, this fascination of yours is sick!" He turned around and slammed Herbert up against the wall roughly, the sound of breaking glass and medical equipment shattering ringing throughout the basement lab. "This has got to stop!"
Herbert continued to laugh. His voice was high pitched, loud, startling in contrast to his normal controlled tone. It fueled Dan to continue on in his rampage, shoving Herbert through glass beakers and lab notes until he came to rest, back down, against one of the two operating tables they had set up in the basement now. It was more than a lab though, it was a morgue.
Dr. West never stopped laughing.
"We're going to Hell for this Herbert, don't you understand?" Dan slammed his head against the cold metal once, twice, three times in an attempt to knock some sense into him. The sounds of bone meeting metal ringing in both their ears. "You're damned because of this sick obsession, and I let you do it…"
Dan cried into Herbert's shirt as they lay against the table together, Dan holding Herbert down as he attempted to reason through his own mental crisis. The man was still laughing, although now in a sick and twisted manner belonging to someone in the midst of meltdown instead of someone enjoying hilarity.
"I let you do it."
#43 – Dying
Herbert had been dead.
He regretted not being able to tell Dan that little fact sometimes, especially when their spirits were down after one too many failures. He always wanted to tell someone besides the lifeless bodies he brought home about his little secret, to tell someone that he was just as inhuman as they said he was. He even almost felt bad about lying about his escape from Hill's super-pumped corpse. (It had an iron tight grip on him, strangling the life from him slowly as he could. Mix that with the noxious gas coming from within the lab and you would have gotten a pile of corpses similar to what they had.) Anyone still present should have been dead. Would have been dead…
He had bee.
Technically
For over seven and a half minutes.
He'd conquered brain death. Really, truly conquered it. He'd lived through it, no worse for wear in his opinion. But he couldn't tell Dan that, nor could he tell him the real reason he'd been able to self revive himself. He couldn't tell his lab partner, no, his friend why he was able to make it out alive when his girlfriend had died. He couldn't tell Daniel Cain that he was the reason behind it.
And he could never know.
No matter how much he wanted to tell him…
#74 – Are You Challenging Me?
Herbert was beyond brilliant. He'd developed a reagent that brought the dead back to life, he'd conquered brain death over twelve minutes, he'd found a true friend…something only a true genius could do in life. He had it all. Herbert West had an amazing knack for getting things he wanted. It was perfect.
However, Herbert was still human. And, like all humans, Herbert had made quite a few mistakes. Some of them were more severe than others, but they were mistakes none the less. One of the mistakes was putting up with Megan Halsey: another was always forgetting to lock his doors…like the ones into the morgue, his room, and his basement lab.
He couldn't count on one hand how many times his experiments had been ruined or compromised because of that foolish and overly stupid mistake. He couldn't count on both hands how many times he wished that he'd had enough sense to go someplace more remote for his testing. The police and medics in Switzerland were the first, Megan Halsey the second when discovering the body of the cat in his little fridge. Daniel Cain came after that when he discovered him reviving his beloved pet, and then Dean Halsey when he walked in on their after-hours morgue test. But the worst, the very worst of them was currently standing in the basement with him.
Dr. Carl Hill
The man was currently trying to blackmail Herbert and rob him of his discovery, using Dean Halsey and Dan as leverage. He'd not only threatened to take away his results, his product, his work, but he also threatened to make Dan disappear permanently and to send him off to the mental hospital. If that wasn't bad enough, Dr. Hill was also using his illegal testing. (Their results hadn't been legally obtained in most cases after all.) He was going to take everything he'd ever worked for away from him.
"Well Mr. West, what will it be?" Dr. Hill questioned, an evil smile plastered across his face. "Either way, Daniel Cain will have to disappear…permanently and Halsey will have to be dealt with. Now, let's see my new serum at work!"
"Of course Doctor…" ground out Herbert, teeth clenched as he led the man over to the microscope where the animal tissue was. "Dead cat tissue."
"Yes." Agreed Dr. Hill, his eye pressed to the view lens carefully.
"The reagent…"
Herbert quickly squirted a small amount of the green glowing liquid onto the slide of tissue, knowing full well how it reacted under the microscope. He'd been looking closely at it not ten minutes before without the nosey interruptions of Dr. Hill. He hated the man.
"I'll be famous!" the man practically shouted as Herbert saw his chance and backed up silently, stepping until he backed into a sharp-ended shovel. He knew he liked Dan's basement for a reason. "They'll retire the Nobel Prize for Medicine in my name!"
The sound of the shovel hitting the back of the man's head was beautiful. The sound of the shovel decapitating him even more so, the gurgling noise like a symphony to him as Hill begged for his life. It was truly the closest thing to the bliss of an orgasm as Herbert West had ever gotten, and probably ever would get. He didn't have a libido, but this, this was truly amazing. He relished in a challenge.
"Plagiarist."
The gurgling noises set the mood.
#18 Rainbow
Peru was quite a long ways off from organized civilization.
It was more than just backwoods too: the two men each noticed as they stepped off the dismal, rickety little airplane that had landed on a narrow dirt path far out in the middle of nowhere. If they were to scream, which was almost insured when they'd left Miskatonic for Peru, no one would ever hear them. Not that anyone could help anyways, this being a civil war and all. That's why they were here…
To help.
Or, to help and to study, to be more exact. Herbert West hadn't picked this damnable place for nothing, after all, and Daniel Cain would certainly follow him to the ends of the earth now. He was the only thing he had left anymore, since the death of his girlfriend/fiancée Megan Halsey. He'd been keeping up with the research and him for almost two months now since the Miskatonic Massacre: quite the feat if Dr. West could be so bold as to say.
Not that he minded, no, certainly not. He rather enjoyed Dan's company and constant reminder of humanity. It was what kept him in check, what kept him from crossing that final line that would completely erase the fine line between insanity and brilliance, humanity and carelessness. He was Herbert's rock unto the solid world, and forever would hold him in place.
As long as he stayed…
The rainbow over head did nothing to comfort Herbert's thoughts that day.
Some of this material also comes out of deleted/extended scenes from all three Re-Animator movies.