Chapter Text
It’s difficult to remember now what qualities in him made me first seek out the friendship of Herbert West. The horrifying events surrounding our latter collaborations cast a retroactive pall over the seventeen years preceding, until I can hardly recall what else bound me to him, before it was secrecy and fear. Though academically I know it to be true, it seems unfathomable now that we were friends - that the departed Dr. West ever had any friends at all. I find myself wondering if he was not always what he became.
No more do I know whence came the mania that was to consume his life, and mine, and a number of others I cannot guess. I must have asked him, in the beginning. I no longer know what he said.
But despite the fog of horror that hangs over the history of our partnership, some things from the early days I recall very clearly, even if I can hardly credit them now. I remember stealing the workman’s corpse.
West had been quietly agitated ever since learning of the man’s death, and by the time we stood over that fresh grave he was nearly vibrating with it. He was a scientist to the marrow, and I had previously thought him as unsentimental as they came, but there was a slight hesitation before he signaled me to help him break the ground.
“You do realize what this will mean,” he said. Though soft as ever, his voice cut the blackness of the potter’s field like a knife. “If we achieve any measurable degree of reanimation, the firing of a single nerve…” He trailed off. He still said “we” in those days, I remember, though the formula was all his own.
“Surely it won’t stop there.”
Our dark lanterns did no favors to the geometry of West’s face; in their strange light his answering smile looked nearly sinister.
How young we were. How little we both knew. I had the sense we were standing on a precipice. I thought that West - who for all his pragmatism was not yet numb to human concerns; not as much so as he would be in later years - felt it too.
We said no more. Solemnly, like a high priest in the temple of some faceless God of Progress, he handed me a shovel.
But neither tension nor solemnity could last long in the face of our task. The workman had been buried in haste, but he had been buried well, and we were only medical students. West, particularly, was not a large man, and the strength of his mental faculties and his convictions was not matched by strength of the more mundane and physical kind. We were forced to take a respite when our work was only half done, and stood a while leaning on our shovels under a sickly yellow moon.
“So begins our illustrious career,” West said sardonically. “The men who will usher in a new era for all mankind, wheezing like a pair of elderly asthmatics, with grave dirt ground into our spectacles.”
This description applied to him far more than it did me. I had no need of eyeglasses until quite recently; my eyesight was still impeccable at that time, though some of the things I later saw in West’s various laboratories would give me cause to regret that. I began to wonder if the plural was only an affectation on his part, as if he considered my presence and concurrence with everything he proposed to do a foregone conclusion.
I would never have voiced the question, but he answered it anyway: “Good thing you’re here. You’re the only man in the whole damned school with any sense,” he said. “Excepting myself, naturally.” He made an attempt to clean his glasses, which failed. It seems comical to me now that there was a time we were so unaccustomed to our sordid business. Freshly turned grave dirt is among the least objectionable substances we were ultimately to handle.
I returned his vote of confidence with one of my own: “This will all pay off. That we've had to resort to this” - I gestured to the field of graves around us - “is only a minor stumbling block on the path to greater understanding.”
West straightened, giving me a considering look, then nodded once and climbed back into the grave with renewed vigor.
I think we joked as we carted our grisly prize back to our secret facility. I can’t recall what about.