Herbert West, Reanimator by H.P. Lovecraft. Red by Mike Bennett. Part 3. Six shots by Moonlight.

It is uncommon to fire all six shots of a revolver with great suddenness when one would probably be sufficient.

But many things in the life of Herbert West were uncommon.

It is for instance not often that a young physician leaving college is obliged to conceal

the principles which guide his selection of a home and office.

Yet that was the case with Herbert West.

When he and I obtained our degrees at the Medical School of Miskatonic University and sought to relieve our poverty by setting up this general practitioners, we took great care not to say that we chose our house because it was fairly

well isolated and as near as possible to the Potter's field. Redicence such as this is seldom without a cause, nor indeed was ours,

for our requirements were those resulting from a life work distinctly unpopular. Outwardly we were

doctors only but beneath the surface were aims of far greater and more terrible moment, for the essence of Herbert West's existence

was a quest amid black and forbidden realms of the unknown,

in which he hoped to uncover the secret of life

and restore to perpetual animation

the graveyard's cold clay.

Such a quest demands strange materials, among them fresh human bodies and in order to keep supplied with these indispensable

things one must live quietly and not far from a place of informal interment.

West and I had met in college and I had been the only one to sympathize with his hideous experiments.

Gradually I had come to be his inseparable assistant, and

now that we were out of college, we had to keep together.

It was not easy to find a good opening for two doctors in company, but finally the influence of the university secured a practice in Bolton, a factory town near Arkham, the seat of the college. The Bolton-Wersted Mills are the largest in the

Miskatonic Valley, and their polyglot employees are never popular as patients with the

local physicians. We chose our house with the greatest

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