Chapter 6
But I did not want to go home. I was full of unspent energy, and knew that sleep was out of the question. I was at loose ends at three in the morning. I considered going for a long walk to induce tiredness, and set off eastward along College, intending to take a cross street northward to the Miskatonic River. But no street appealed to me, until I found myself on French Hill.
I did not admit to myself that I was going to Alma Halsey’s place until I was within sight of the turreted house in which her lodgings were located. In those times it would have been out of the question for a man to call on a young woman of good family unannounced and at a very late hour. Indeed, this is still a breach of courtesy, if not of morals. But somehow I had convinced myself that on this particular night, in my state of strange elation, I would be welcome.
I let myself in quietly and tiptoed up the several flights of stairs, wincing whenever one creaked. Finally, I stood before Alma’s door. Only then did it occur to me that what I was doing was unwise. Alma would almost certainly be asleep and would fail to hear my knock. I would have to knock loudly and repeatedly to awaken her, also rousing other occupants of the house and ensuring for myself a justly unwelcoming reception. But so strong was my conviction that I was on a path intended, that I continued to hesitate, standing before the door with its brass knocker, caught in limbo and yet strangely content to be there.
Suddenly, I heard a sound from within – footsteps, surely? Then a light glowed faintly under the door. She was awake! It seemed to me only logical that my presence had made itself known to her, and that now it was inevitable that I take the next step. So, very gently, I knocked.
Several seconds passed, and I was wondering whether to knock again, when the door opened a crack. Recognizing me, Alma opened it the rest of the way. “Charles!” she whispered. “What are you doing here? Are you all right?”
She wore a dark blue robe. I could see the white lace of a nightdress underneath. Her feet were bare and her hair was tousled. She looked a little anxious, but not, I thought, annoyed.
“I was in the neighbourhood, so I thought I’d drop by,” I said, starting to laugh at the banal absurdity of this statement.
“Well, you’d better come inside,” she said. “What do you mean, ‘in the neighbourhood?’ Have you been wandering the streets again with that ghoul Herbert West?”
“We haven’t been wandering the streets. But I was at West’s place, yes. After we left his father’s party we… got to debating life and death, and lost track of the time.”
“‘Life and death.’ Well, that’s certainly a meaty topic. I was just getting up to make myself some chamomile tea, since I couldn’t sleep. Would you like some?”
“Alma, I think there’s a reason you couldn’t sleep tonight. I think part of you knew I would come. So forget about sleeping. Forget about tea. Let’s enjoy each other’s company.” I felt an irresistible impulse to pace around the room, and gave in to it. “Tomorrow is Sunday. We have no obligations.” I turned back toward her and took her hands in mine. “It’s a pity there’s no music, so we could dance.” I slid my arm around her and whirled her around in a kind of waltz.
“Charles, what’s gotten into you? You’re acting very strangely. Have you been drinking?”
“Only the night air, and starlight, and intimations of immortality,” I replied. It was as though I had absorbed West’s peculiar energized atmosphere, borrowing it when we parted at his door, like a coat he did not need for the rest of the night. Maybe it was because of the pistol, which I had forgotten to give back to him when we parted. Whatever the reason for this state, I was enjoying it. It was like drinking wine without, as yet, any sorry consequences.
I didn’t want to let her go. Through her garments I could feel her ribs as she pressed herself backward in an effort to put some distance between us. “Charles, let me go!” she said. “This isn’t like you. Why are you so – ?”
“So happy. Because I am. And no, it isn’t like me. Tonight, for the first time in years I’m happy, Alma.”
As I spoke, I realized that the logical implication of my words was that I was happy because of her. But that was not true, rather the opposite. I had sought her out, I had come to Alma Halsey in the dead hours of the night, not seeking happiness, but bearing it with me – a strange happiness born of blood and death and unnatural life.
“I’m glad, Charles.” She had relaxed a little, now, had stopped pulling away from me. “But this is so sudden.”
“I know it is, Alma, but it’s right. All night, all through that long dinner with Hiram West and his… associates (and what a bunch they are, let me tell you), all the time I was talking with Herbert about… well, about all sorts of things, like what it must feel like to die, and whether someone brought back from death could remember it – all the time in the back of my mind I was thinking about you. I saw you, you know – you were wearing a velvet dress, sort of golden brown velvet, and you were talking to someone, but I couldn’t hear what you were saying…”
“Saw me? What do you mean?”
“It was a kind of vision – All right, I did drink quite a lot of wine at dinner, but that was a long time ago. I guess I must have fallen asleep for a few seconds, and had this wonderful dream of you.”
She was laughing, her eyes a warm blue in the dim light. “Oh Charles, you’re such a romantic! I do enjoy your company. Even now, even like this.”
“Especially like this.” I put both my arms around her, pulled her to me and kissed her. This was the first time I had really kissed her. Before this, the most I had done was discreetly brush my lips on her cheek. She made as if to pull away again, then yielded. A long moment later we moved apart a little. I tried to read the expression on her face. Bewilderment, even fear, but also curiosity and dawning passion. I loosened the robe she wore and thrust my hands under it, so there was only the thin fabric of her nightdress between us. I drew her to me again, whispering, “Alma! Let’s go into your bedroom.”
As I led her into the darkened room, as she let me take the robe from her shoulders, as I removed my own clothing, I felt something totally alien well up inside me and rush to my head like some marvellous drug. I wondered if this was how it would feel if Herbert West’s magic fluid was pumped into my veins – as though my blood had been transformed into pure light. I did not know whether Alma resisted any further. I knew only that this was the end of the trajectory. All of myself, all of these days and months and nights of secret doings had culminated here and now. If I was a river, I had reached the sea. I spent myself in her, in the ocean that was Alma.
I awoke to bright morning light welling into an unfamiliar room through unfamiliar curtains. I was alone in the room. Alma was not there.
I sat up, feeling uncertain as to what to do. Perhaps I should leave. Just then, she came into the room. She was wearing a skirt and jacket, and looked thoroughly businesslike.
“Good morning, Charles,” she said. “I’m afraid I must rush off. I’m in the choir at Christ Church, and must be at the ten o’clock service. I forgot to tell you last night. But don’t you rush. In fact, I would be grateful if you were to wait a little while before leaving. Discretion, you know.” She kissed me lightly and was gone.
I got up slowly, getting into the wrinkled clothes I had worn the previous night. I did some sketchy washing and tried to put my rumpled hair in order with my fingers. Looking in the mirror, I felt peculiar. The unnatural excitement of the night had passed, but not completely. I knew that I should have felt ashamed at what I had done, pressing myself upon a young woman who, though not altogether unwilling, was not unreservedly happy about what I demanded of her. I knew this, and yet, looking at my reflected image, I, the I that was present in my skin, did not feel ashamed. Lingering among the memories of the night was that feeling of completion, of rightness.
A few minutes later, I let myself cautiously out of the apartment. I met no one on the stairs, and only one person in the foyer, a man also on his
way out, who did not so much as glance at me. I walked homeward, unhurried, thinking about Alma. I could not guess, from the little I had seen of her this morning, how she felt about what had passed between us. She had seemed cool and cheerful, her usual self, in fact. I did not think she could have assumed such a guise of normalcy to hide feelings of distress or anger. That was not her way. And she had kissed me…
Did I love Alma Halsey then? I did not. I felt for her a great tenderness, a deep affection born of friendship. For some time I had known that it was slowly ripening into something that might eventually become love, but it had not been that which had compelled me in the night. It had been something outside myself, or rather, something which had never been a part of me before, but now was.
Later that day, after several more hours of sleep, I made my way to West’s rooms. He greeted me looking quite well, and as elegant as always. The only signs of the attack by O’Brien were some bruises on his neck.
“I’m glad to see you so well, Herbert,” I said. “You seemed pretty shaken up last night.”
“I was, then, but I’m all right now. But you, Charles, you look quite splendid.” He smiled. “It seems that the adventures of the night agreed with you.”
I felt myself blushing, and turned aside to hide it. There was no way West could know of my visit to Alma after I had left him. “Well, I slept most of the day.”
“Whatever the reason, I’m glad you find these experiments no hardship. Because last night would have ended very differently had you not been there.”
“I want to talk about that, actually. I killed him, didn’t I? I killed a man. Oh, and I should return this.” I handed him the pistol.
He took it and laid it casually aside. “Well, yes, technically you killed him. But as far as the rest of the world is concerned, he was already dead. Just ask Mike and Jerry what they brought to Arkham last night – ‘a stiff,’ is what they’ll say. I guarantee it.”
“But he wasn’t dead when he just about choked you! He wasn’t dead when he yelled at us for bringing him back! He wasn’t dead. So I killed him. You can’t get away from that.”
“What are you saying, exactly, Charles?” His voice was quieter than usual, but with an edge.
“I don’t like what these experiments are doing to me. Now I’m a murderer, as well as a grave robber. Whether anyone else knew about O’Brien coming back to life or not, he was alive and I made him dead. That makes me a murderer.”
I had been facing one of the windows as I spoke. Somehow, I could not say these things to his face. I was surprised that I said them at all. West grasped my shoulder and turned me around. Looking directly into my eyes, he said,
“And if you hadn’t made him dead, as you put it, I would have been dead. Would you have preferred that?”
“No, of course not. I thought about that on the way to fetch Mike and Jerry last night. I reached the same conclusions. I guess it wasn’t murder, really. But where are we going with this? So far we have revivified two corpses. We lost Hocks and had to turn O’Brien into a corpse again. So what’s the point?”
West sighed. “Sit down, Charles. I thought we needed to review the situation today, but now it seems we must go back to fundamentals.
“When I first told you about my research, back in May, I said, if you recall, that it was a lifetime’s work. Now, how many experiments have we done together?”
“Two,” I replied. I felt like a student called on the carpet by his professor for inexcusable ignorance.
“Exactly. Two. Now, the nature of this work is such that each time a little, a very little, knowledge is gained. Surely you must have noticed the data I record each time, the blood samples I take, the measurements. It’s only by building up a mass of such data that I will achieve anything. Do you understand this?”
“Yes. Well, no, I guess I don’t. I didn’t think it would be like that at all. I thought that after one or two successes, Dean Halsey would let you go ahead in the open, with the support of the Medical School.”
“Don’t be naïve. Academics don’t give their belief so readily, and their support even less so. Especially when they don’t want to believe in the first place. They’ll find a host of reasons not to believe, even in the face of what most would consider proof.”
“So what will it take to make them believe? Why would two dozen cases convince them any more than two?”
“Because after two dozen, or two hundred, I’ll have enough data to publish. It won’t be Halsey and his hangers-on who will judge then, but scientists everywhere.”
“Two hundred!” I was aghast.
“Well, maybe not that many.” That wave of the hand again. “Look, Charles, I think I know what’s bothering you. Perhaps I overestimated your tolerance for going against the rules, even for a good cause. It’s the business of acquiring the bodies that’s the problem, isn’t it? We had to dig up the first one. For the next one we had to go through that business of the prizefight. Although you rather enjoyed that, didn’t you?”
For a second, I saw again, vividly, Robinson’s fist connecting with O’Brien’s face, and the spray of blood. I heard again that thump-crunch of flesh ground between bones. I said nothing, and West continued.
“You’ve been entirely reliable in the lab. And last night – you couldn’t have done better. When Gibbs came around I was in a total funk. You snapped me out of it. You got Mike and Jerry pretty smartly. And that was after you dealt with O’Brien. So I can’t proceed without you, Charles.”
He leaned forward. Never had I seen him look more sincere. His grey eyes held mine with absolute steadiness.
“It’s getting the bodies that’s shaken your resolve, I’m sure of that,” he said again. “Well, that’ll be different from now on. This business with O’Brien was a whim, I admit, and an ill-considered one at that. I simply couldn’t resist the prospect of working with a really fresh subject. But now that I’m an intern, I have access to the morgue. I’ll know immediately when a subject becomes available. It’ll be a simple matter of carrying out the procedure – two or three hours at most. No more grave digging, no more prizefights. And we simply return our material to the morgue when we’re finished. It’ll be perfectly safe.”
“So you anticipate that most of them will be dead again within a few hours of revivification? But Hocks was – ”
“Forget about Hocks, for God’s sake! He was a… he wasn’t a good specimen, I’ve told you that before. Yes, I’m fairly sure most of these morgue subjects will be short-lived, which is just as well. Do you imagine that I want to start a home for revivified corpses, Charles? I expect most of them will be half-wits at best. By the time they come into my hands they’ll have lost too many brain cells to be fully-functioning human beings. O’Brien was something of an exception, because we got him so soon after he was killed, but I suspect that all the battering he had sustained in his career had damaged his brain. Apart from freshness, he wasn’t a really good subject.” He touched the bruises on his neck.
“What I saw, especially in the case of O’Brien,” I said, “were men undergoing a dreadful experience – a kind of reverse birth into a broken body. I can see that they may not be fully-functioning, as you put it. But in that case, what’s the point?”
“Each attempt adds to the sum total of knowledge. Remember that! Eventually mankind will understand more about death because of my work. And yours, too. Charles, what about your part? Last night you actually got O’Brien to talk about what he experienced after death.”
“You don’t believe in that anyway,” I said, persisting in my role of devil’s advocate. “You think it’s just brain cells dissolving, or something. And anyway, you could interview them yourself.”
“So prove me wrong!” said West. He got up and began pacing, a sure sign that he was getting wound up all over again. “Yes, when it comes to all that stuff about the death-memories of the soul, I’m every bit as skeptical as Halsey is about my ideas. But there’s nothing to stop you from gatherin
g data to set against my skepticism. It’s your project, though. And that will mean that two different kinds of research are being done using these subjects, which is practical and efficient, wouldn’t you say?”
He stopped in front of me and gave me another steely look. “Because I intend to go forward, with or without you, Charles. By the Necronomicon, I do. Are you with me, or not?”
If I said no, if I left, having dissociated myself from his work, I would never see him again, would never experience the special electricity that seemed to surround him. Until now, a kind of under-thought had been pushing me forward – now that Alma and I were to be lovers, perhaps, what room would there be in my life for West and his doings, which so often verged on the illegal? But the brief vision I had then, as he stood before me with the question hanging in the air between us, of my world without him in it, was so flat, so bleak, that even Alma seemed like a pale wraith. No, since the night of the concert, and maybe even before that, some fundamental part of me had been linked to Herbert West.
“I’m with you,” I said.
West’s anticipation that the process of obtaining experimental subjects would become easier proved true. Due to a fortunate conjunction of personalities, the chief surgeon of St. Mary’s Hospital, Dr. Welburn Bright, took a liking to him. West’s dexterity in the operating theater and his cool, detached manner appealed to Bright, who was of the scientific, patient-as-object school of thought. Through this connection, West was assigned a small, under-equipped room in the basement of the hospital, which he furnished as a rudimentary laboratory. The reasons he gave for needing this facility were rather vague – something about a special research project in pathology – but they satisfied Dr. Bright. Dean Halsey attempted to dissuade his colleague from showing favour to West. Dr. Bright, however, felt his position of authority at St. Mary’s very keenly, and made it clear to Dr. Halsey that he would not be permitted to exert his authority beyond the boundaries of the Medical School.
“The old tyrant has finally met someone he can’t push around,” said West, chuckling, as he recounted this episode to me.
Alma had a rather different opinion, as might be expected. “Herbert West has managed to convince that old autocrat Bright that he deserves special favours. Are you sure he doesn’t have some sort of hypnotic technique? But then, how would you know? You’re as enchanted by him as Bright is.”
During this time, there were few things about me that Alma did not know, but the extent and nature of my involvement with West’s researches was one secret that I resolutely concealed from her.
With the unexpected bonus of his own laboratory, located right in the hospital, and on the same floor as the morgue, West and I soon worked out an efficient routine for securing research material and conducting our experiments. West kept a close watch on new arrivals at the morgue, obtaining information on the age and condition of a corpse, and the causes of its death. He had to be particularly vigilant, since the Medical School had first choice of all unclaimed bodies for its dissecting rooms.
West had observed the routines of the hospital’s night watchmen. They were creatures of habit, one of which was card games in the boiler room. Between the hours of eleven and three in the morning we could usually expect to work unmolested.
Only a few minutes were needed for us to get everything ready. Then, the rapid but silent dash along damp, brick-lined corridors, the quick deployment of a key, a search by penlight along the ranks of numbered drawers to find the abode of our subject. Its silent occupant would be transferred to a gurney and quickly wheeled to our laboratory.
The revivification procedure itself became so familiar, that it assumed an aspect of ritual. Laying out the corpse on the table, garbing ourselves in white, the preliminary ablutions and West’s spectacle-polishing, all put me in mind (blasphemously, I thought at the time) of the Mass. As a child, I had sat through many a lengthy service where the bustlings of the priest and his attendants with vestments, chalices, ciboria, cruets and the other material implements were the only things that held my interest.
After the preparations would come the central matter, the engaging of the apparatus with the corpse, and the mechanical replacement of blood with the violet-coloured liquid. Invariably, the tension would grow at this point, the twelfth time as much as the first. West was the high priest, his attention fixed on the meters and tubes, the taps and the pump, and I, his eager acolyte, obeying his orders, following his lead.
Then the vigil. Even now I can see the dank little room, a little too dimly lit for a laboratory, the cold corpse on its cold slab, West making notes, pacing about, checking for vital signs in the subject. And I – sitting on one of the rickety chairs, I would read, or more often, think – about the purpose of what we were doing, about what might be going on inside the body and brain as West’s drug did its work. I thought about rats, and whether there were any in this cellar. I thought about my parents, about Michael O’Connor and John Hocks, about decay and rebirth (rather than revivification), about the places of life and death. Was this such a place? And I thought about Alma, and the things we did in her white-curtained bedroom. I thought about these things as the minutes ticked by and water dripped somewhere in the distance, and the other corpses in the nearby morgue, lucky enough to have escaped our ministrations, went about their business of dissolution.
Not all of our subjects returned to life, but most did. Those who might think that West’s successes were dubious because the subjects were not really dead in the first place would be wrong. If that were the case, the physicians of Arkham had much to answer for, in that so many of their patients went to the morgue with a spark of life flickering unattended within them. Of the twelve attempts we made between the boxer Kid O’Brien and the unfortunate Robert Leavitt of St. Louis, fully nine returned, however briefly, to a semblance of life.
My reverie would be broken – by an excited word from West, by a sigh from the form on the table, or, disturbingly, by a deep, agonized groan. I think it was the groans emitted by some of our victims that led to my instinctive but suppressed conviction that West and I were causing suffering. Whatever the value of the scientific data he was amassing, I could not help but wonder if it was justified.
For West, the moment of revivification was the goal and crown of the enterprise, whatever he may have said about data-gathering. I was engaged in another line of research during this time, a private one. While Herbert West studied death and revivification, I studied Herbert West. I watched him as the water dripped and what might have been rats scurried in the bowels of the old building. I watched as the cool scientist was transformed into something else when the first signs of returning life appeared in the clay under his hands.
Invariably, he called me over to bear witness. Even when it became evident to me that my assistance was no longer strictly necessary, even when it must have been plain to him that my enthusiasm had waned, still he wanted me at his side to see and hear and feel the evidence of returning life, life that was there at his command.
Of our four complete failures, three expired within minutes of the first signs of returning life, and nothing West did to them after this had any effect. One appeared to be stable, but when it opened its eyes, it gave us a look of such horror that I felt an answering surge of horror within myself. Then it fell back, as dead as it had been before our ministrations. On these occasions, I noted, West’s face quickly lost its look of exaltation, became still and cold as he went about the business of noting the particulars and dismantling the equipment.
The five revivified beings with whom I managed to converse were poor things, plainly so impaired in their cognitive functions that my records of these sessions consisted of little more than my initial question, “What do you remember?” followed by broken and meaningless phrases, inarticulate mumblings or involuntary gargling and gagging sounds produced by the vocal apparatus as West’s solution excited the broken physical mechanisms of their bodies.
A few uttered words that seemed to
be in keeping with observations made in other cases of persons recovering from near death – references to a tunnel of light, perfect peace and reunion with loved ones. “I saw Mandy!” said one man, shortly before his final collapse. I remember hoping that she was still waiting for him after his second death.
None of the five lived very long after my questioning of them. Their return to life was tenuous at best, and after they had uttered their few words, or merely babbled incoherently for a while, the vital force waned rapidly. Not one of them displayed any sustained vitality, unlike Kid O’Brien, or especially our first subject, John Hocks.
“These morgue subjects certainly are disappointing, aren’t they? Don’t you get discouraged sometimes?” West had just finished writing up his notes on our latest failure, and I could no longer hide my doubts about our project.
“Disappointing? Say rather, unspectacular. I have learned something from almost every one of them. I suspect they may be weak because most of them died after illness, rather than quickly and violently like our first two.”
West enjoyed reviewing his data and formulating theories based on them. He could go on for hours, quite unaware that he had left me in the dust long before. To forestall another monologue, I decided to ask another question, one so staggeringly elementary I wondered that I had never dared to ask it before.
“What’s in it, Herbert? In your revivifying fluid, I mean. What are the ingredients?”
He looked at me for a moment, seeming a little disconcerted. Then he gave me one of his beautiful smiles. “What if I were to say… palladium infused with krypton halides, bathed in essence of iridium and bound with imperishable gold?”
“Is that really what’s in it?” I was fairly certain he was making fun of me, but was in no mood to play along.
“No, of course not, but it might as well be, for all you would understand if I were to tell you. No, no, don’t get upset – you just don’t have the necessary background in chemistry. I can tell you that it contains organic molecules only one remove from being alive. When properly formulated for a specific organism, they bind with the existing structure and produce an excitant effect on the vital mechanism.”
“Organic molecules.” I said.
“Exactly. And don’t ask me to draw you a picture, because you wouldn’t understand it.”
Unlike West, I did not have a scientist’s training, or the willingness to repeat an experiment endlessly for the sake of small increments of data. It was his determination, optimism and sheer strength of will that I found compelling, even when I doubted the ultimate value of his work. I suspect it would have been the same if his goal had been to grow a blue rose, or turn base metal into gold.
If his field had been horticulture or alchemy, however, I would have found it easier to maintain my enthusiasm. West, with his peculiar, unemotional personality and his experience with handling the dead, was unaffected by the depressing nature of our subject matter. I, despite developing some facility in the handling of the corpses and apparatus, was never able to harden myself to the struggles of our victims. More than once I attempted to explain this to West, but he brushed aside my reservations as projections of my romantic temperament.
“You’ve tried to interview them, haven’t you?” he asked. “And most of them were no more than brainless lumps of flesh, correct? So how can you imagine they are suffering? What you see and hear are nerves responding to random electrical impulses from the brain, that’s all.”
At length, I was forced to conclude that West had a mechanical circulating device instead of a heart, or, more accurately, that he was devoid of those emotions which are normally considered resident in the heart. Not once did he betray any sympathy for the sufferings of our experimental subjects, nor even express regret that they were a necessary if undesirable by-product of his research.
I had never had a close friend before. As a child I had been thought delicate, especially after the injury to my leg, and had therefore been carefully shielded from companions and activities which might cause further damage. Being of a nature that was happy with solitude and self-sufficient, I did not realize that I was missing anything. At school I had found my niche among the bookish, studious boys, but had not formed lasting friendships with any of them. Later on, my family’s troubles had dissociated me from those among whom I should have, in the normal course of events, found friends.
Spending as much time with West as I did, it was inevitable that I learned more about him. Unlike me, he was a great believer in physical fitness, which he cultivated by masochistic practices such as fasting, cold baths and long cross-country runs.
Although he avoided smoking and most forms of overindulgence, he appreciated good wine with meals, and several times a year, not to put too fine a point on it, he liked to get drunk. He said this was a way to clear his mind and begin afresh. “Otherwise, my brain gets clogged up with details. A good debauch is like a great storm that blows out the extraneous stuff. Afterward there’s room for new ideas. It’s a kind of death and revivification, only the fluid is different,” he laughed.
He quite deliberately planned for these brain-clearing sessions, as he called them, selecting a time when he had a night and a day without obligations. He would lay in a supply of the best Scotch whiskey and invite a selection of congenial companions to his rooms, with a terse message such as Brain clearing tonight. Join me if you like. West.
He was always interesting, even when he was irritating. Whatever the topic, he had an opinion, usually an informed one. He could argue a point endlessly, but without rancour. He could be sarcastic, but his manners were always perfect, even when he was lying.
It soon became clear to me that he took pleasure in deception for its own sake, sometimes telling long, elaborate lies, simply to test the credulousness of his listeners. There was a kind of innocent joy in his manner as he indulged in these untruths and in the verbal parrying that followed. Once he told me that he had been home all day, when he knew quite well that I had seen him crossing the campus quadrangle several hours before. When I confronted him with this fact, he said,
“Ah, but that wasn’t me you saw.”
“Of course it was you! Who else could it have been?”
“My twin brother, of course.”
“But you don’t have a twin brother! He died – you told me so yourself.”
“Did I? Well, you can’t believe everything you hear, obviously.”
In November, a mutilated corpse was found in a wood near Dunwich village. The dead man, evidently a tramp, had been killed by repeated blows with a sharp, heavy object. The body had also been, in the delicate phraseology of the Arkham Advertiser, ‘tampered with,’ as if the injuries that had caused death did not constitute tampering. Local rumour was more explicit: the corpse had been disembowelled and the heart removed. The crime was, of course, attributed to the elusive Wild Man.
“Now we really have to tell the authorities what we know about Hocks,” I said to West.
“Why?” His eyes were as cold as the time I’d met him in Howard’s Alley, and as friendly.
“Because now he’s murdered someone,” I said. “And we know why too.”
“All I know is that someone killed a tramp,” said West. “I don’t know that John Hocks was the killer; in fact, it’s extremely unlikely that he was. Telling the police – who are, generally speaking, a herd of ignorant louts – about my scientific work would only get me arrested, or locked up in Sefton Asylum. You too, perhaps, which certainly would not help find whoever murdered this tramp.”
He was very convincing, and I was quite ready to be convinced.
Even now there are things that can instantly take me back to those Arkham years before the Great War. Certain musical passages, certain phrases (I can still hear West saying “Let’s get on with it, then,” as he always did as we began one of our revivifications), and scents such as the autumnal odour of ripe decay, the smell of wood smoke, or the perfumes of sandalwood and narcissus, bring back to a
n almost intolerable degree the intensity of that time.
For in addition to Herbert West, there was Alma. Between the two of them, I existed in a charged, electrical atmosphere. In retrospect, I understand that the situation was possibly unhealthy; certainly it was not sustainable. But oh, how wonderful that time was for me! It was as though I had discovered the secret at the heart of the world and had it all to myself.
The first time I saw Alma Halsey again after my visit to her in the early hours of the day Kid O’Brien died his second death, was at work the following Monday. I had arrived early on purpose, because I felt anxious about meeting her again, now that the nature of our relationship had been radically altered. I took care to be ensconced in my alcove, apparently hard at work, at the time when she normally arrived. It was not until the mid-morning break that I saw her.
As luck would have it, the two of us were alone in the staff room. Alma came in as I was pouring myself a cup of tea. My hand jerked involuntarily, and I spilled some of the hot liquid. The resulting minor confusion dissipated the awkwardness of our initial greetings.
“Charles, how are you?” she asked, a faint blush appearing on her cheeks.
“I am quite well, Alma,” I said. “I trust you sang well at Christ Church yesterday morning.”
Her blush deepened slightly. “I think I did, despite not sleeping much the previous night,” she said, looking me straight in the eyes. At this point we both began to laugh, and I felt a great relief wash over me. I had feared that she would have become angry at the events of that night, or worse, hurt or shamed. But that did not seem to be the case.
“Are you free this evening?” she asked me.
“Perfectly.” She was still looking at me intently, but I could not read her expression.
“Come over then.” Two of our colleagues entered the room then, and we said no more.
Alma opened her door to me that evening wearing a dress of golden-brown velvet, a colour that accentuated the blondness of her hair. Around her neck was a pendant of amber mounted in silver. I caught a faint scent of sandalwood. For a moment I stood silent. I had never thought Alma could look so exotic, for one thing. For another, I suddenly remembered the vision of her I had had during the boxing match.
“Alma,” I said, “you look like a dream – my dream!” She grasped both my hands in hers and drew me toward her, saying,
“Come in, Charles! Are you going to stand on my doorstep all night and stare? But I’m glad you like this dress.”
“Alma, I can’t explain what came over me the other night. I think it was in a way the result of what West and I were doing earlier that night – talking and, well, drinking, and so on. I left his place feeling – exalted is the only word I can think of. And I had been thinking about you all evening, so it seemed logical to come here. To share my happiness with you…”
“It was a surprise. Not that the possibility hadn’t occurred to me, but I hadn’t thought of you as being… well, so insistent.”
She stood in front of me, her blue eyes glowing. She’ll tell me she never wants to see me again, I thought. I’ll have to quit my job and leave Arkham… My heart beat heavily and I found it difficult to breathe.
Alma took my hands in hers. “Only now do I see clearly,” she said. “I know what I want. You. I want you to be my lover, Charles.”
I felt my face split open in a foolish smile. I did not know what to say, but I pressed her hands.
“This is going to be an adventure,” she said, laughing. “I haven’t had much practice at it, and neither have you, I think. A certain amount of discretion will be needed, but not as much as you would imagine. I’m already known as ‘one of those new women.’ And this is Arkham, after all.” She began to pace around the room, reminding me suddenly of West.
“Is Arkham the Greenwich Village of New England?” I asked, intercepting her and putting my arms around her.
“Worse,” said Alma. “The Village might have its anarchists and freethinkers, but here in Arkham we had witches, hundreds of years ago. The first practitioners of free love in America, if you believe some of the stories.”
“But they paid for it.” I shivered, in spite of my self.
“One always pays for one’s choices,” she replied, suddenly serious. “I’m ready to pay, Charles. Are you?”
In public, I was recognized as ‘that young librarian friend of Alma’s.’ We appeared together at public functions. That winter we went ice-skating on Summer’s Pond. I joined her literary group. Finally grateful for those long-ago dancing lessons I had shared with my cousin Alice, I accompanied Alma to tea dances at one of Arkham’s better hotels.
But our public togetherness, although enjoyable, was merely a façade for our private relationship, which was played out in Alma’s little apartment. We met there because my rooms were unwelcoming and my landlady vigilant and censorious. Hers, on the other hand, was indifferent, or perhaps merely discreet. Being a friend of the Halsey family, she had a special status and shared some of Alma’s free-thinking ideas.
There was something about the inherent deceptiveness of this relationship – innocent on the surface, darkly passionate beneath – that was intensely erotic. Maintaining this duality became an end in itself.
Did I love Alma then? I thought I did, but I was young, and it is easy to mistake passion for love when one is young. Certainly, when it came to the test I failed her. But that was much later.