VI. The Tomb-Legions

When Dr. Herbert West disappeared a year ago, the Boston police questioned
me closely. They suspected that I was holding something back, and perhaps
suspected graver things; but I could not tell them the truth because they would
not have believed it. They knew, indeed, that West had been connected with
activities beyond the credence of ordinary men; for his hideous experiments in
the reanimation of dead bodies had long been too extensive to admit of perfect
secrecy; but the final soul-shattering catastrophe held elements of daemoniac
phantasy which make even me doubt the reality of what I saw.
I was West’s closest friend and only confidential assistant. We had met
years before, in medical school, and from the first I had shared his terrible
researches. He had slowly tried to perfect a solution which, injected into the
veins of the newly deceased, would restore life; a labour demanding an abundance
of fresh corpses and therefore involving the most unnatural actions. Still more
shocking were the products of some of the experiments -- grisly masses of flesh
that had been dead, but that West waked to a blind, brainless, nauseous
ammation. These were the usual results, for in order to reawaken the mind it was
necessary to have specimens so absolutely fresh that no decay could possibly
affect the delicate brain-cells.
This need for very fresh corpses had been West’s moral undoing. They were
hard to get, and one awful day he had secured his specimen while it was still
alive and vigorous. A struggle, a needle, and a powerful alkaloid had
transformed it to a very fresh corpse, and the experiment had succeeded for a
brief and memorable moment; but West had emerged with a soul calloused and
seared, and a hardened eye which sometimes glanced with a kind of hideous and
calculating appraisal at men of especially sensitive brain and especially
vigorous physique. Toward the last I became acutely afraid of West, for he began
to look at me that way. People did not seem to notice his glances, but they
noticed my fear; and after his disappearance used that as a basis for some
absurd suspicions.
West, in reality, was more afraid than I; for his abominable pursuits
entailed a life of furtiveness and dread of every shadow. Partly it was the
police he feared; but sometimes his nervousness was deeper and more nebulous,
touching on certain indescribable things into which he had injected a morbid
life, and from which he had not seen that life depart. He usually finished his
experiments with a revolver, but a few times he had not been quick enough. There
was that first specimen on whose rifled grave marks of clawing were later seen.
There was also that Arkham professor’s body which had done cannibal things
before it had been captured and thrust unidentified into a madhouse cell at
Sefton, where it beat the walls for sixteen years. Most of the other possibly
surviving results were things less easy to speak of -- for in later years West’s
scientific zeal had degenerated to an unhealthy and fantastic mania, and he had
spent his chief skill in vitalising not entire human bodies but isolated parts
of bodies, or parts joined to organic matter other -than human. It had become
fiendishly disgusting by the time he disappeared; many of the experiments could
not even be hinted at in print. The Great War, through which both of us served
as surgeons, had intensified this side of West.
In saying that West’s fear of his specimens was nebulous, I have in mind
particularly its complex nature. Part of it came merely from knowing of the
existence of such nameless monsters, while another part arose from apprehension
of the bodily harm they might under certain circumstances do him. Their
disappearance added horror to the situation -- of them all, West knew the
whereabouts of only one, the pitiful asylum thing. Then there was a- more subtle
fear -- a very fantastic sensation resulting from a curious experiment in the
Canadian army in 1915. West, in the midst of a severe battle, had reanimated
Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, D.S.O., a fellow-physician who knew about
his experiments and could have duplicated them. The head had been removed, so
that the possibilities of quasi-intelligent life in the trunk might be
investigated. Just as the building was wiped out by a German shell, there had
been a success. The trunk had moved intelligently; and, unbelievable to relate,
we were both sickeningly sure that articulate sounds had come from the detached
head as it lay in a shadowy corner of the laboratory. The shell had been
merciful, in a way -- but West could never feel as certain as he wished, that we
two were the only survivors. He used to make shuddering conjectures about the
possible actions of a headless physician with the power of reanimating the dead.
West’s last quarters were in a venerable house of much elegance, overlooking
one of the oldest burying-grounds in Boston. He had chosen the place for purely
symbolic and fantastically aesthetic reasons, since most of the interments were
of the colonial period and therefore of little use to a scientist seeking very
fresh bodies. The laboratory was in a sub-cellar secretly constructed by
imported workmen, and contained a huge incinerator for the quiet and complete
disposal of such bodies, or fragments and synthetic mockeries of bodies, as
might remain from the morbid experiments and unhallowed amusements of the owner.
During the excavation of this cellar the workmen had struck some exceedingly
ancient masonry; undoubtedly connected with the old burying-ground, yet far too
deep to correspond with any known sepulchre therein. After a number of
calculations West decided that it represented some secret chamber beneath the
tomb of the Averills, where the last interment had been made in 1768. I was with
him when he studied the nitrous, dripping walls laid bare by the spades and
mattocks of the men, and was prepared for the gruesome thrill which would attend
the uncovering of centuried grave-secrets; but for the first time West’s new
timidity conquered his natural curiosity, and he betrayed his degenerating fibre
by ordering the masonry left intact and plastered over. Thus it remained till
that final hellish night; part of the walls of the secret laboratory. I speak of
West’s decadence, but must add that it was a purely mental and intangible thing.
Outwardly he was the same to the last -- calm, cold, slight, and yellow-haired,
with spectacled blue eyes and a general aspect of youth which years and fears
seemed never to change. He seemed calm even when he thought of that clawed grave
and looked over his shoulder; even when he thought of the carnivorous thing that
gnawed and pawed at Sefton bars.
The end of Herbert West began one evening in our joint study when he was
dividing his curious glance between the newspaper and me. A strange headline
item had struck at him from the crumpled pages, and a nameless titan claw had
seemed to reach down through sixteen years. Something fearsome and incredible
had happened at Sefton Asylum fifty miles away, stunning the neighbourhood and
baffling the police. In the small hours of the morning a body of silent men had
entered the grounds, and their leader had aroused the attendants. He was a
menacing military figure who talked without moving his lips and whose voice
seemed almost ventriloquially connected with an immense black case he carried.
His expressionless face was handsome to the point of radiant beauty, but had
shocked the superintendent when the hall light fell on it -- for it was a wax
face with eyes of painted glass. Some nameless accident had befallen this man. A
larger man guided his steps; a repellent hulk whose bluish face seemed half
eaten away by some unknown malady. The speaker had asked for the custody of the
cannibal monster committed from Arkham sixteen years before; and upon being
refused, gave a signal which precipitated a shocking riot. The fiends had
beaten, trampled, and bitten every attendant who did not flee; killing four and
finally succeeding in the liberation of the monster. Those victims who could
recall the event without hysteria swore that the creatures had acted less like
men than like unthinkable automata guided by the wax-faced leader. By the time
help could be summoned, every trace of the men and of their mad charge had
vanished.
From the hour of reading this item until midmght, West sat almost paralysed.
At midnight the doorbell rang, startling him fearfully. All the servants were
asleep in the attic, so I answered the bell. As I have told the police, there
was no wagon in the street, but only a group of strange-looking figures bearing
a large square box which they deposited in the hallway after one of them had
grunted in a highly unnatural voice, "Express -- prepaid." They filed out of the
house with a jerky tread, and as I watched them go I had an odd idea that they
were turning toward the ancient cemetery on which the back of the house abutted.
When I slammed the door after them West came downstairs and looked at the box.
It was about two feet square, and bore West’s correct name and present address.
It also bore the inscription, "From Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, St. Eloi,
Flanders." Six years before, in Flanders, a shelled hospital had fallen upon the
headless reanimated trunk of Dr. Clapham-Lee, and upon the detached head which
-- perhaps -- had uttered articulate sounds.
West was not even excited now. His condition was more ghastly. Quickly he
said, "It’s the finish -- but let’s incinerate -- this." We carried the thing
down to the laboratory -- listening. I do not remember many particulars -- you
can imagine my state of mind -- but it is a vicious lie to say it was Herbert
West’s body which I put into the incinerator. We both inserted the whole
unopened wooden box, closed the door, and started the electricity. Nor did any
sound come from the box, after all.
It was West who first noticed the falling plaster on that part of the wall
where the ancient tomb masonry had been covered up. I was going to run, but he
stopped me. Then I saw a small black aperture, felt a ghoulish wind of ice, and
smelled the charnel bowels of a putrescent earth. There was no sound, but just
then the electric lights went out and I saw outlined against some
phosphorescence of the nether world a horde of silent toiling things which only
insanity -- or worse -- could create. Their outlines were human, semi-human,
fractionally human, and not human at all -- the horde was grotesquely
heterogeneous. They were removing the stones quietly, one by one, from the
centuried wall. And then, as the breach became large enough, they came out into
the laboratory in single file; led by a talking thing with a beautiful head made
of wax. A sort of mad-eyed monstrosity behind the leader seized on Herbert West.
West did not resist or utter a sound. Then they all sprang at him and tore him
to pieces before my eyes, bearing the fragments away into that subterranean
vault of fabulous abominations. West’s head was carried off by the wax-headed
leader, who wore a Canadian officer’s uniform. As it disappeared I saw that the
blue eyes behind the spectacles were hideously blazing with their first touch of
frantic, visible emotion.
Servants found me unconscious in the morning. West was gone. The incinerator
contained only unidentifiable ashes. Detectives have questioned me, but what can
I say? The Sef ton tragedy they will not connect with West; not that, nor the
men with the box, whose existence they deny. I told them of the vault, and they
pointed to the unbroken plaster wall and laughed. So I told them no more. They
imply that I am either a madman or a murderer -- probably I am mad. But I might
not be mad if those accursed tomb-legions had not been so silent.