Herbert West, Reanimator by H.P. Lovecraft.

Red by Mike Bennett.

Part six, the Tomb legions.

When Dr Herbert West disappeared. When Dr Herbert West disappeared a year ago, the Boston police questioned me closely,

they suspected that I was holding something back and perhaps suspected graver things.

But I could not tell them the truth because they would not have believed it.

They knew, indeed, that West had been connected with activities beyond the credence of ordinary

men, for his hideous experiments in the reanimation of dead bodies had long been too extensive to admit of perfect secrecy.

But the final soul-shattering catastrophe held elements of demoniac fantasy which make even me doubt the reality of what I saw.

I was West's closest friend and only confidential assistant. We had met years before in medical school and from the first I had shared his terrible researches.

He had slowly tried to perfect a solution which, injected into the veins of the newly deceased,

would restore a life, a labor demanding an abundance of fresh corpses and therefore involving the most unnatural actions.

Still more shocking were the products of some of the experiments.

Grizzly masses of flesh that had been dead, but that West waked to a blind, brainless, nauseous animation.

These were the usual results, for in order to reawaken the mind it was necessary to have specimens

so absolutely fresh that no decay could possibly affect the delicate brain cells. This need for very fresh

corpses had been West's moral undoing. They were hard to get, and one awful day he had secured his specimen while it was still alive and vigorous.

A struggle, a needle, and a powerful alkaloid had transformed it into a very fresh corpse, and the experiment had succeeded

for a brief and memorable moment, but West had emerged with a soul calloused and seared, and a hardened eye which sometimes glanced

with a kind of hideous and calculating appraisal at men of especially sensitive brain and especially vigorous physique.

Toward the last I became acutely afraid of West, for he began to look at me that way. People did not seem to notice his

glances, but they noticed my fear, and after his disappearance, used that as a basis for some absurd suspicions.

...