Chapter Text
In all honesty, Dan wasn’t entirely sure why he came back to Arkham Cemetery. He certainly wasn’t trying to save Herbert for some ungodly reason. That would be idiotic. Maybe he wanted to see for himself that Herbert was truly dead, that the nightmare was over, and that he could finally move on with his life.
Francesca begged Dan not to go back, said that West was better off buried underground where he could do no more harm. Dan knew she wasn’t wrong, yet here he was, digging through rubble.
Herbert was alive of course, if unconscious and in critical condition. Dan could see a nasty looking gash on his temple, a stream of blood running down onto his neck. A particularly large piece of fallen debris had crushed his right hand, and his left knee was at an odd angle. It was difficult to assess how many more injuries had been sustained, but Dan would be surprised if his ribs went unscathed. In short, the only explanation for his survival was that Herbert West was simply too stubborn to die.
Dan should have left West right then and there. Or at the hospital once his condition stabilized. Or after driving him home once he had been released. What Dan should not have done was become Herbert’s caretaker for the following months.
Well… Dan never was known to follow his better judgement.
---
If there was any silver lining to be found, it was that Herbert was physically incapable of reanimating any corpses or body parts during this time, although not for lack of trying. Within the first week of their return, Dan woke in the middle of the night to the sound of Herbert falling down the steps in an attempt to access his laboratory. Dan kept the basement door locked after that, much to Herbert’s chagrin.
The downside was that without his experiments to occupy himself, Herbert was absolutely insufferable. He tried to make up for his inability to work by foisting it onto Dan. Any time Herbert came up with a new theory to test or wanted to add something to his research, he would make Dan write it down. It wasn’t too bad at first, but the more restless Herbert got, the more Dan was required to write. To top it off, Herbert was very particular, often complaining that Dan’s format was all wrong and that he’d have to write everything all over again. Usually Dan would outright refuse at that point, but this tended to result in a fight:
“Seeing as you will not allow me to continue my experiments, the least you can do is provide me something I can work with once my activities are no longer confined to this damned house!” Herbert huffed.
“Would you prefer to be in prison?”
“This is prison!”
“Well if there’s no difference, I might as well turn you in and do us all a favor.”
Herbert called Dan's bluff. “If you were going to do that, you would have done so when the police came looking for Lieutenant Chapham.”
“I still could, you know.”
“And incriminate yourself in the process? Hardly.”
This would typically be enough to make Dan shut up and start writing. Though if he was feeling particularly irritable he would add some colorful notes of his own such as:
- What would happen if I attached eyeballs to a cadaver’s buttocks? I must know. For science.
- I will stop at nothing in order to conquer death, because the alternative would be to get a life.
- Most scientists would look at the serum’s disastrous results and go back to the drawing board. But I, Herbert West, am an egomaniacal idiot so I’m just going to keep doing the same thing over and over again and act surprised when things go to shit like they always do.
Dan might have made a mistake writing that last one, because that night he found a dead rat in his bed.
Herbert’s moodiness aside, those months were the most normal Dan had experienced in a long time. There were no violent zombies, the police had stopped coming around with questions, and he could work at the hospital in peace. Dan even found Herbert’s quirks oddly charming instead of disturbing now that the man was effectively harmless.
Of course Dan knew it wouldn’t last forever. By now Herbert had begun physical therapy and was able to take his own notes. It would only be a matter of time until this bizarre domesticity came to an end. Dan supposed he could always hack Herbert’s limbs off if he wanted to avoid that outcome altogether. Herbert would never again be able to hold a syringe or attach random body parts together if he no longer had hands. The idea had some merit.
Unfortunately, when Dan crept into his room to attempt this, Herbert was still awake:
“Dan? Why do you have an axe?” He seemed genuinely curious as he asked the question.
“Thought I saw a… spider,” Dan stupidly replied.
Herbert stared at him, perplexed.
“You should go to bed, Dan.”
“Ok… Good night.”
“Good night.”
Dan had been too embarrassed to try again after that.
---
His next best idea was to do what he ought to have done in the first place: Leave and never come back. This time, he would actually commit to it. True, he’d have to find a new place to live, but he was popular enough among his coworkers to find someone who’d be willing to let him crash on their couch for a few days. The real hard part would be telling Herbert.
“We need to talk,” Dan declared one morning.
“Yes, we do,” Herbert said.
“First of all, your recovery is going pretty well.”
“Indeed. Thanks to you, we should be able to resume our work soon. We have a lot of lost time to make up for and I have-”
“No!” Dan cleared his throat before calmly continuing, “Herbert, I can’t.”
“What are you talking about? Of course you can!”
“I mean I won’t.”
Realization dawned on Herbert’s face. “You want to leave again? Why?”
“The fact that you have to ask that question is exactly why.”
“But Dan-”
“You’re not going to talk me out of it this time. You have no more pieces of Meg to bargain with.”
“I could try to find some,” Herbert smirked.
“That is not the point!”
“I know that.” He grimaced as if his next words caused physical pain, “You were right, Dan.”
Dan eyed him suspiciously. Herbert wasn’t supposed to actually agree with him.
“About what, specifically?”
“We’ve hit a wall in our work. Although the freshness of a subject’s body certainly contributes to how well they retain their mental faculties, we have yet to find complete success in restoring the brain’s higher functions. There’s little point in continuing our experiments this way…”
This was sounding far too reasonable. Herbert had to be planning something demented or else something was terribly wrong with him.
“…We’ll have to find a way to regenerate the subject’s dead brain cells in order to restore rational thought. That would also mean we wouldn’t need to limit ourselves to fresh bodies-”
Oh, thank god. Dan was worried for a moment there.
“-Now there are plenty of multicellular organisms capable of regenerating entire body parts, including their brains. I have a theory that-”
“That’s great, Herbert. I hope you figure it out, I really do.” As he said it, Dan realized that he actually meant every word, “But you’ll have to continue without me. I’m done.”
“Daniel, you are the only other person who understands this work.” The look on Herbert’s face almost made Dan feel guilty. Almost.
“I’m sorry, but my mind’s made up and there is nothing you can say or do to convince me otherwise.”
The door buzzed before Herbert could respond. Thankful for the excuse to get away from this conversation, Dan left to answer it. There, he found himself in front of a tall man he didn’t recognize and… Meg?
Bubba Brownlee took the presumption of innocence very seriously. It was why he’d had doubts about the Pretorius case to begin with. Too many elements didn’t add up: How could Crawford Tillinghast have chopped his mentor’s head off without leaving a trace of blood? He wouldn’t have had time to clean it up and even if he had, why leave the body in plain view? Besides, the method of Pretorius’s decapitation wasn’t consistent with that of an axe to the head, or any other method Bubba could think of.
When he met Dr. Tillinghast, Bubba saw a young man who had been traumatized. Sure, the kid was probably delusional, but that did not necessarily make him a murderer. Bubba was no psychiatrist, that was Katherine’s department, but the existence of Pretorius’s sex dungeon was enough to make him suspect that Crawford’s claims of an otherworldly “It” were his own way of coping with an entirely different kind of monster.
As it turned out, the truth was much worse. Crawford wasn’t crazy and he hadn’t killed his boss. The creatures were real; “It” was real.
Bubba wasn’t wrong though: Dr. Edward Pretorius was a sick son of a bitch.
A sick son of a bitch who was not dead, but rather had turned into an oozing fleshy… thing that now existed in another dimension and wanted to eat their brains. That would have been more than enough of a problem without the Resonator messing with their heads. That machine affected all three of them irreparably.
It gave Bubba the worst headache of his life and no pill was able to dull it. Even twenty-four hours later, he still felt that pulsing pressure behind his eyes. He worried it might never go away, but Bubba wasn’t complaining though; he got off easy compared to Katherine and poor Crawford.
(God, Bubba would never forget the sight of Crawford’s pineal gland bursting through the center of his forehead.)
Despite everything, the kid had been able to come back to himself in the end and distracted the Pretorius monster from consuming Katherine. Even after getting his head twisted off and devoured by the creature, Crawford was still able to fight it from the inside. He saved both Katherine and Bubba’s lives that night.
Katherine was a wreck after that. Bubba had to drag her away from the Pretorius house kicking and screaming.
“He’s not dead!”
“It ate him, Doc.”
“We thought Pretorius was dead before, that means-”
“It means that he’s not coming back. The Resonator blew up, remember?”
There wasn’t any time to mourn beyond that. They were both in trouble. Bubba had been on suspension when he helped Katherine escape the mental hospital earlier that evening. He would certainly be fired if not arrested now. The fact that Katherine had been alternating between sobs and maniacal laughter in front of a group of concerned neighbors would do nothing to convince anyone that she wasn’t crazy.
As they sat silently in Bubba’s van, staring out at the horizon in front of them and wondering what to do next, his thoughts turned back to Crawford Tillinghast. No one would ever know that he died a hero. Would anyone care?
“Did he have any family? Should we contact them?” Bubba knew that was a stupid question as soon as the words left his mouth. Notifying next of kin was decidedly the least of their current problems. Still, it brought Katherine out of her stupor somewhat.
“I think- yes, any relatives would be in his file,” she leafed through the stack of papers in her briefcase, muttering to herself.
“No spouse or children… Parents deceased… One living relative: A twin brother named Herbert West.”
“West?” That name sounded familiar. Where had Bubba heard it?
“According to this, he’s a doctor at Miskatonic Hospital.”
That was it! He remembered hearing about a series of incidents at the hospital over a year ago: The Miskatonic Massacre. One of the survivors was a young med student named Herbert West. The name continued to pop up as a primary suspect in odd cases every now and then, but no one could ever solidly pin anything on him. “Herbert West did it” was practically an inside joke among the homicide department at Arkham Police.
The guy was either an evil mastermind or an incredibly unlucky bastard who always happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Bubba had never worked any of those particular cases, but if West was anything like his brother, he was leaning towards the latter.
“We should tell him,” he decided.
Katherine continued staring at the file in her hands for a few more seconds before nodding. “Yes. Yes, we should…”
It was a destination at least, so off they went.
“... My mind's made up and there is nothing you can say or do to convince me otherwise.”
Herbert didn’t think that could be true. After all, Daniel had said similar things in the past and Herbert always knew how to encourage him to keep going. True, the Bride project wound up falling apart (quite literally), but she would have remained stable had she not pulled her heart out of her chest. That was hardly Herbert’s fault.
Sometimes Herbert just didn’t understand Daniel at all. Dan had a real passion for the work, but keeping his focus was becoming an increasingly difficult endeavor. Herbert had hoped the Bride would solve this problem; he’d taken care to ensure that every part of her would appeal to Dan’s taste, but apparently that wasn’t good enough.
That begged the following questions: Would anything be good enough for Daniel? If so, what would that be? Or if not, what was Herbert going to do? Dan knew far too much to simply be allowed to leave. Herbert trusted him more than most, sure, but that did not mean he trusted him implicitly. Like most people, Dan was fallible. He could be tricked, bribed, or even forced to reveal Herbert’s secrets to malicious parties.
The most straightforward thing would be for Herbert to kill and reanimate him. After all, once Herbert finished his re-worked version of the reagent, he would need a subject to test it on. It would be easier to assess any deviation in personality from someone he was already quite familiar with. Unfortunately Dan wouldn’t be able to fill the role of assistant and test subject simultaneously, and Herbert needed an assistant.
The trouble was simply, should Dan leave, he would be incredibly difficult to replace. Herbert required someone intelligent, discrete, and willing to take risks; preferably someone with decent upper body strength. People like that were already difficult to find, even more so ones he could trust.
What about Crawford?
No. Absolutely not. First of all, he was too much of a coward. Second, his specialization was in physics and Herbert needed a medical professional. Finally, they hadn’t spoken in at least four years.
It wasn’t that Herbert disliked his brother; in fact he’d always thought Crawford was the most tolerable member of the family. Crawford, on the other hand, had kept his distance ever since they were thirteen: after the chemical fire immolated their home along with Mr. and Mrs. West.
In the following years at their foster home, Crawford did everything in his power to differentiate himself from Herbert. When Herbert managed to get a hold of testosterone at the age of fourteen, Crawford initially refused because he didn’t want them to transition at the same time. (Though he eventually relented after seeing Herbert’s successful results.)
Even then, he replaced his glasses with contact lenses and wore his hair longer. When they went through the arduous process of changing their names, Crawford went so far as to adopt their mother’s maiden name: Tillinghast. Not that it would have convinced anyone they weren’t related.
Even when Herbert transferred to Miskatonic University after his stint in Switzerland, they never interacted. Though that had less to do with Crawford and more with the fact that Herbert was deep in his own work and had no reason to meet with him. The thought of contacting him now was laughable.
So what was Herbert going to do?
He’d have to hold that thought for now, because he heard someone mention his name. Curious, Herbert grabbed his cane and hobbled to the front door.
No, this wasn’t Meg. Although the woman in front of Dan had similar blue eyes and blonde hair, she was older. Dan briefly wondered if maybe this was what Meg would have looked like in her thirties. That is, if he hadn’t failed her.
“Sir?” the man next to her had apparently asked a question.
Dan mentally slapped himself out of his stupor before responding, “Sorry, what did you say?”
“I’m Sergeant Buford Brownlee, this is Doctor Katherine McMichaels,” he repeated. “Is this the current residence of Dr. Herbert West?”
“Sergeant?” Dan felt sick. Why was there a cop at his front door? Why was he still seeing Meg’s face everywhere? Wasn’t he supposed to be moving past all of this?
“He isn’t in any trouble, we just need to talk to him,” the woman, Dr. McMichaels, added.
“Really?” Dan didn’t believe that for an instant.
“Not unless there’s something we should know about.” It sounded like Sergeant Brownlee was joking, which meant there really wasn’t trouble.
“Oh, good!” Dan breathed a sigh of relief before immediately tensing up again when Brownlee raised an eyebrow at him.
“Is Dr. West here?” McMichaels asked, more forcefully this time. “It’s urgent.”
A hand gripping Dan’s shoulder from behind caused him to turn around. It was Herbert.
“Don’t let them in without identification, Dan!” He glared at the two strangers.
Dr. McMichaels stared back at him, eyes wide with a glint of something Dan had only ever seen in Herbert during his experiments. Dan realized then that she was a terrifying being the universe had designed specifically to torture him: A horrid amalgamation of Meg’s looks and Herbert’s madness.
“You must be Herbert West.”
“Doctor Herbert West.”
“Of course,” she held out her hand, “Dr. Katherine McMichaels.”
Herbert’s head tilted slightly in recognition, but he made no move to take her hand. “I’m familiar with your research on mental disorders. That doesn’t explain why you are here.”
“Your brother was one of my patients.”
If a clown had walked up to Dan and pulled his pants down before slapping him in the face, that would have been surprising. Doctor McMichaels’s statement was not surprising. It wasn’t even shocking. Dan actually had no idea what it was, because in that moment nothing existed. Sense was a thing of the past. Out of everything he had experienced in the past year and a half, this was what finally broke Daniel Cain.
Herbert. Brother. Herbert has a brother.
The sentence made no sense. It implied that someone somewhere at one point in time gave birth to Herbert West. Dan had never once considered the notion of Herbert having a family. He’d always assumed that Herbert had emerged fully formed from a pod, or something to that effect.
McMichaels continued as if she hadn’t shattered Dan’s perception of reality, “May we come in, Dr. West?”
“No,” Herbert’s attention shifted to the sergeant, “You’re police? I see no badge nor warrant.”
“I’m off-duty. Consider this a social call.”
Dan saw Brownlee’s demeanor shift to one of discomfort. Herbert must have clocked it as well, because he started laughing.
“A controversial psychiatrist and an ‘off-duty’ police sergeant want to talk to me about Crawford? Well whatever it is, you can say it out here.”
McMichaels and Brownlee shared a look that Dan found foreboding. Now that he had somewhat regained the ability to think, he realized that the two had seemed distressed from the moment he opened the door. Not only that, they were covered in burns and abrasions. Something was wrong. Very wrong.
The sergeant cleared his throat, “Alright, might as well just say it… Your brother is dead.”
Oh.
Herbert had a brother.