Herbert West, the animator by H.P. Lovecraft.

Red by Mike Bennett. Part 4. The Scream of the Dead.

The Scream of a Dead man gave to me that acute and added horror of Dr Herbert West

which harass the latter years of our companionship. It is natural that such a thing as a dead man's

scream should give horror, for it is obviously not a pleasing or ordinary occurrence. But I was used to similar experiences, hence suffered on this occasion

only because of a particular circumstance, and as I have implied, it was not of the dead man himself that I became afraid.

Herbert West, whose associate and assistant I was, possessed scientific interests far beyond the usual routine of a village physician.

That was why, when establishing his practice in Bolton, he had chosen an isolated house

near the Potter's field. Briefly and brutally stated,

West's sole absorbing interest was a secret study of the phenomena of life and its cessation, leading toward the reanimation of the dead

through injections of an excitant solution.

For this ghastly experimenting it was necessary to have a constant supply of very fresh

human bodies.

Very fresh because the least decay

the brain structure and human because we found that the

solution had to be compounded differently for different types of

organisms.

Scores of rabbits and guinea pigs had been killed and treated,

but their trail was a blind one.

West had never fully succeeded

because he had never been able to secure a corpse sufficiently

fresh. What he wanted was bodies from which vitality had only just departed.

...