Reanimators (22 page)

We were also assisted by one of our patients named August Dewart. This young Briton, whose bald head, flat nose and beard reminded us of a goat, had a significant amount of medical training, and despite the loss of a leg, was extremely helpful as a medical and surgical assistant. Roaming around the ward on a pair of crutches, he made sure that everyone was talked to at least once a day.

As for our gracious hostess, we saw her often. Daily she would come down to the ward, climb the ladder to the curtained alcove and accompany her son’s playing with her prodigious vocal talents. While such performances were beautiful to listen to, there was such an undercurrent of sadness and despair to the Lady de Chagny’s voice and her son’s viol, that others and I were often moved to tears when they performed. During this entire period it was rare for us to catch even a glimpse of the virtuoso, and when we did see him, he always wore a matching set of a full crimson mask and gloves such that no flesh was ever seen.

The impending holiday was apparently weighing heavily on the officers in charge of the front lines, for the number of new patients we received shrank to a mere trickle, and West and I found ourselves able to spend time in the laboratory and surgery that West had cobbled together. All three of our special patients had long since succumbed to their wounds, and all three had then been subjected to the reanimation reagent, though this was but the first stage in a new direction of research. Inspired by the Frankenstein journals and from several pieces of correspondence, we had taken it upon ourselves to pursue the possibility of using the reanimated as sources for the transplant of organs from one body to another. Our primary inspiration for this was letters from the New Zealand surgeon Harold Gillies, who had left the battlefields and was fumbling his way toward actually being able to carry out skin grafts and facial reconstruction in the British Isles. Similarly, we received some notes from Doctors Alexis Carrel and Charles Guthrie, who had pioneered vascular transplants, and were kindred spirits, and their current work was just as inspiring. Carrel’s transplant work had won the Nobel Prize in 1912, and when he stopped in Arkham to lecture on the nature of cellular senescence, West and I were compelled to meet with him and demonstrate our reagent. Taking a small sample with him, Carrell began a most controversial experiment, in which he has for the decade since publicly sustained a culture of embryonic chicken cells using only a nutrient solution of his own devising. Similarly, Guthrie had also wandered down areas generally shunned by medical science. There was strong suspicion that the Nobel was awarded to Carrel over Guthrie not because he was the superior researcher, but rather because of Guthrie’s rather unorthodox and successful experiments with transplanting canine heads. Photographs of his two-headed animals, while fascinating to the medical community, were considered blasphemous monstrosities by conservative and unenlightened old men who held the reins of power and money.

Yet it was from the genius of these men that we began to formulate our own plan to resolve the problem of organ transplant. Using our reagent to inhibit rejection, we experimented in the transfer of skin tissue from one patient to another, before moving on to the actual exchange of limbs and then finally organs. In the end we had no choice but to follow in Guthrie’s footsteps and remove one of our patient’s heads and then graft it to another body. Our experiments taught us much and soon we were discussing the possibility of transplanting limbs and organs from one of our reanimates to a living subject, and we both agreed that young Dewart would be our first patient.

We made shadowy arrangements to carry out the surgery as soon as possible, but even as we girded ourselves for the extended surgery, we were accosted in the hall by Carnby, who sent word that the Lady de Chagny wanted to see us immediately in the great hall. With young Dewart already prepared, we left him on the table unconscious but secured to the table, instruments waiting.

In the house above we were ushered into a magnificently apportioned study in which both the Lady de Chagny and her masked son awaited us. In her hand was our journal, the record of our experiments over the last several weeks. West started to protest, but I placed a hand on his shoulder and told him to wait.

Once we were seated, Carnby began to speak. “As you may be aware, my lady, when she was much younger, was the victim of a most obsessive admirer. It was only through the heroic efforts of her fiancé, then the Vicomte de Chagny, that she was able to escape his unwanted attentions. Sadly, while she and Raoul escaped with their lives, the Vicomte’s brother was not as lucky. Raoul became the Comte, he and Christine were married, and soon after they welcomed a new life into the world.” As Carnby continued, the Lady lowered her eyes. “It was plain at his birth that the child was not Raoul’s, but rather that of Christine’s unwelcome admirer. Devastated by this betrayal, her husband banished the Lady and her child from the de Chagny household, and forced her to reside here. This is where she and her son have lived for the last thirty-four years; it has become their home, the only one the young master has ever known. The Lady cannot imagine how her son will fare when he is forced from this place.”

“For what cause would the young man be forced from this house?” begged West.

The Lady de Chagny rose and turned her back to us. “My husband is given to moods, Dr. West. I have over the last thirty years been able to assuage him, but I am not long for this world. My doctors tell me that I have a cancer growing inside me, that I have little time left. And while I go to my reward without regrets, I cannot allow my son to suffer the rage that will be inflicted upon him by the Comte once I am gone.” She turned toward us, eyes pleading. “He must be prepared for life outside these walls. We have been watching you for these last few weeks, and we have read your notes on your experiments. We think it may be possible that such procedures could be directed toward other kinds of conditions, congenital conditions. If my son is to survive in the world, he must be acceptable to it, his deformities must be made less pronounced. He must appear more human.”

West rose, and I could see that he was prepared to reject her request. I knew his mind, and he had no reason to pursue such noble obligations as they in no way served his secret ambition. So rather than let West speak, I quickly spoke for both of us. “Lady de Chagny, you have been most hospitable, and we have abused your trust. If it is within our power to help your son, then we shall do so.”

I waited briefly for someone else to speak, but then the Lady de Chagny motioned and her enrobed son rose up and stepped toward us. “Zann, would you show these doctors why we need their services.”

If the music that the man produced was hauntingly beautiful, then the musician himself was hauntingly tragic. The man that stood before me as his robe, mask and gloves fell away would terrify the common man on the street. Skeletally thin, with no sign of body fat and little muscle, the virtuoso’s skin was yellow, translucent, almost parchment-like. He had no nose, only two large gapped slits that sat above a slashed, lipless mouth. His eyes were red on a yellow background, and deeply sunken. On top of his head there were only a few wisps of jet-black hair. Had I found this man in one of the trenches that I had so recently left, I would have thought him long dead from starvation and dehydration. That he resembled nothing so much as a walking skeleton does not do justice to the tragedy of the poor creature’s condition.

I overheard West ask Carnby, “His name is Zann?”

Carnby shook his head. “No, no. Zann is a pet name; it means ‘ornament’, for the way he used to cling to his mother’s leg as a child. His mother named him Erik, after his father.”

I turned my attention back to my patient. “Erik.” I forced myself to adopt the mildest of manners with this patient. “Erik, my name is Dr. Cain, Daniel Cain; I would, with your permission, like to examine you.”

The man-monster hesitated and then spoke. His voice was deep, full of inner darkness and mystery. “Dr. Cain,” each syllable was pronounced with intensity, “you will forgive me if I seem reticent. Since my birth I have been hidden from the world, a world that would fear and despise me, and a world that, given the opportunity, would kill me as it killed my father. I think therefore a moment of caution before exposing myself to anyone is prudent.”

I took a step forward. “Erik, I find that position to be entirely logical, even admirable. But if you let me, I may be able to find a way to change that and make it so that you never have to live in fear again.”

I spent the next three hours examining the poor creature. I poked and prodded, looked in his ears and his throat, took samples of his skin and his blood. I checked his reflexes, his heart rate, and blood pressure and flashed a light in his eyes and checked pupil response. What I found surprised me. Despite all of his physical deformities, Erik’s nervous system and constitution were remarkable. His strength and speed were preternatural. His senses, particularly his hearing, were highly acute. Furthermore, Erik’s ability to not only repeat but also perfectly mimic any sound using either his voice or his ever-present viol was simply uncanny. His instrument was like a part of him and he never set it down, and only paused in playing it when absolutely necessary. This made examining him both difficult but strangely enjoyable as well. The only person who seemed immune to Erik’s monstrous charms was my colleague Herbert West.

It was then that the nagging thought that was scratching at the back of my skull burst out. I looked at my watch and cursed as I dashed out of the room. West and Carnby were on my heels, but sadly we were all too late. Poor Dewart, who had apparently awoken hours ago, had done what any man would have done. Unfortunately, in his attempts to free himself from the table restraints, the entire apparatus had upended and tumbled down on to the poor man. Apparently unable to obtain any leverage with only one leg, he had slowly been smothered.

As West and I attended to Dewart, Carnby ran off to inform the de Chagnys. In his absence we righted the table and repositioned Dewart, checking to make sure the straps were intact and tight. Then without an afterthought I lifted up the man’s head and West plunged a syringe full of our green bioluminescent reagent into the base of his skull. Laying his head back down, I took up my pocket watch and my notebook and observed the progression of our patient as our reagent began to work. As always, the first reaction was an uncontrolled spasm of the entire musculature sending the body bucking wildly against the restraints. This was followed by a sudden period of calm in which the eyes and indeed all of the senses suddenly began to work again, sending the patient into frantic hysteria as previously silent inputs suddenly overwhelmed the brain with massive amounts of information. As he laid there, eyes dashing about, Carnby, Lady de Chagny and Erik walked into the room. The timing was unfortunate, for it was at this moment that Dewart entered into the next phase of the reanimation process, and it had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Erik had forgotten to don his mask. Dewart’s lungs began to work once more, and this, coupled with the sudden flood of sensory information to his brain, created an automatic response that we had seen time and time again. From Dewart’s lips issued the most horrid of sounds, a cry of anguish so terrible, so soul-wrenching, that both Erik and his mother began to weep.

As Dewart collapsed into a heap of raving muscle, Erik turned to Carnby and spoke. “I thought you said he was dead?”

Carnby was either too stunned or too confused to answer. Either way, West looked at the trio with that curious half-cocked head that indicated he couldn’t tell whether someone was joking or just being stupid. “He was dead!” shouted West as he straightened his coat and shirt. “I brought him back!”

Once we were settled, West and I began discussing options on how to deal with Erik’s condition. Initially, we thought about transplanting Erik’s head, but this direction was rejected, primarily because it did nothing to resolve the issue of Erik’s face, but also because it relied heavily on the constitution of the donor body, and the suppression of various rejection processes. If we were unable to resolve the rejection problem, it would be unlikely that we could reverse the procedure. Therefore we focused instead on transplanting significant amounts of skin and vascular tissue, primarily from reanimated donors. However, since the procedure we envisioned would require significant surgery, we quickly but crudely began to assess prospective blood donors. We assessed all of the patients, Carnby and even Lady de Chagny. Several of the patients were compatible, as was Erik’s mother. Once she learned she was compatible, it was made clear to us that she was going to be his primary blood donor.

Our agreed-upon plan was simple; after determining compatibility, we would systematically remove Erik’s face and hands, and replace them with samples harvested from the reanimated. The rest of his body could be hidden by clothing. Unfortunately, the first part of the surgery would be the most experimental and the most painful. In order to confirm the compatibility of the reanimated donors, Erik would be subjected to three simultaneous transplants, one from each of the donors. These we would do on his lower back, and in rather large sections. It was our hope that all would be compatible, but the reality we faced was that the odds of rejection, even with the reagent acting as a suppressant, were extremely high.

We began the first stage of surgery early one morning in one of the many bedrooms in the chateau, by intoxicating Erik with liberal amounts of brandy until he passed out. Carnby helped us strap him down to a table, while the Lady de Chagny was set up in an adjacent bed. West commented on how poorly the Lady appeared, and she simply nodded and whispered that the strain of the last several weeks had made her extremely tired. West and I both knew that tiredness could not explain away the weight loss and unhealthy pallor she had adopted in the last few days, and I suspected that the disease that was ravaging her body was progressing rapidly.