The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft

by H. P. Lovecraft

  The end of Herbert West began one evening in our joint study when he was dividing his curious glance between the newspaper and me. A strange headline item had struck at him from the crumpled pages, and a nameless titan claw had seemed to reach down through sixteen years. Something fearsome and incredible had happened at Sefton Asylum fifty miles away, stunning the neighbourhood and baffling the police. In the small hours of the morning a body of silent men had entered the grounds, and their leader had aroused the attendants. He was a menacing military figure who talked without moving his lips and whose voice seemed almost ventriloquially connected with an immense black case he carried. His expressionless face was handsome to the point of radiant beauty, but had shocked the superintendent when the hall light fell on it—for it was a wax face with eyes of painted glass. Some nameless accident had befallen this man. A larger man guided his steps; a repellent hulk whose bluish face seemed half eaten away by some unknown malady.61 The speaker had asked for the custody of the cannibal monster committed from Arkham sixteen years before; and upon being refused, gave a signal which precipitated a shocking riot. The fiends had beaten, trampled, and bitten every attendant who did not flee; killing four and finally succeeding in the liberation of the monster. Those victims who could recall the event without hysteria swore that the creatures had acted less like men than like unthinkable automata guided by the wax-faced leader. By the time help could be summoned, every trace of the men and of their mad charge had vanished.

  From the hour of reading this item until midnight, West sat almost paralysed. At midnight the doorbell rang, startling him fearfully. All the servants were asleep in the attic, so I answered the bell. As I have told the police, there was no wagon in the street; but only a group of strange-looking figures bearing a large square box which they deposited in the hallway after one of them had grunted in a highly unnatural voice, “Express—prepaid.” They filed out of the house with a jerky tread, and as I watched them go I had an odd idea that they were turning toward the ancient cemetery on which the back of the house abutted. When I slammed the door after them West came downstairs and looked at the box. It was about two feet square, and bore West’s correct name and present address. It also bore the inscription, “From Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, St. Eloi, Flanders.” Six years before,62 in Flanders, a shelled hospital had fallen upon the headless reanimated trunk of Dr. Clapham-Lee, and upon the detached head which—perhaps—had uttered articulate sounds.

  West was not even excited now. His condition was more ghastly. Quickly he said, “It’s the finish—but let’s incinerate—this.” We carried the thing down to the laboratory—listening. I do not remember many particulars—you can imagine my state of mind—but it is a vicious lie to say it was Herbert West’s body which I put into the incinerator. We both inserted the whole unopened wooden box, closed the door, and started the electricity. Nor did any sound come from the box, after all.

  It was West who first noticed the falling plaster on that part of the wall where the ancient tomb masonry had been covered up. I was going to run, but he stopped me. Then I saw a small black aperture, felt a ghoulish wind of ice, and smelled the charnel bowels of a putrescent earth. There was no sound, but just then the electric lights went out and I saw outlined against some phosphorescence of the nether world a horde of silent toiling things which only insanity—or worse—could create. Their outlines were human, semi-human, fractionally human, and not human at all—the horde was grotesquely heterogeneous. They were removing the stones quietly, one by one, from the centuried wall. And then, as the breach became large enough, they came out into the laboratory in single file; led by a stalking thing with a beautiful head made of wax. A sort of mad-eyed monstrosity behind the leader seized on Herbert West. West did not resist or utter a sound. Then they all sprang at him and tore him to pieces before my eyes, bearing the fragments away into that subterranean vault of fabulous abominations. West’s head was carried off by the wax-headed leader, who wore a Canadian officer’s uniform. As it disappeared I saw that the blue eyes behind the spectacles were hideously blazing with their first touch of frantic, visible emotion.

  Servants found me unconscious in the morning. West was gone. The incinerator contained only unidentifiable ashes. Detectives have questioned me, but what can I say? The Sefton tragedy they will not connect with West; not that, nor the men with the box, whose existence they deny. I told them of the vault, and they pointed to the unbroken plaster wall and laughed. So I told them no more. They imply that I am a madman or a murderer—probably I am mad. But I might not be mad if those accursed tomb-legions had not been so silent.

  1. This is not from Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula; rather, it is a slight variation on the following dialogue from the 1931 Tod Browning film, whose script is credited to Garrett Ford:

  DRACULA: To die . . . to be really dead . . . that must be glorious.

  MINA: Why, Count Dracula!

  DRACULA: There are far worse things . . . awaiting man . . . than death.

  The quotation is omitted from many published versions of this story.

  2. The six parts of the story were written in 1921–22. The first part was published in February 1922, in Home Brew 1, no. 1, 19–25, and reprinted after Lovecraft’s death in Weird Tales 36, no. 4 (March 1942), 84–88. Because Lovecraft knew that the story would be serialized, in each part he deftly recapitulates key elements that first appeared earlier.

  3. Later references confirm that this is probably October or November 1903 (in the third school year, “many weeks” after the start of the experiments, which may have started at the beginning of the fall term, but evidently before the cold of winter had set in, because it is later revealed that a drowning took place in a pond that had not yet frozen over). In the fourth West tale, below, set in July 1910, the narrator states that he and West were medical students “seven years ago.” This confirms the 1903 date.

  4. This is the first mention of the famed university. Its library holdings figure significantly in “The Dunwich Horror.” Fritz Leiber Jr., in “A Literary Copernicus,” traces the known history of this institution from 1882, when the meteor described in “The Colour Out of Space” fell, to the Australian expedition of 1935 detailed in “The Shadow Out of Time.” “Certainly the Miskatonic faculty,” remarked Leiber, “constitutes a kind of Lovecraftian utopia of highly intelligent, aesthetically sensitive, yet tradition-minded scholars” (303). A partial roster of the faculty is presented in Appendix 2.

  5. In short, West seeks to reanimate the dead. The idea of scientific resurrection is not original to West, of course; his most famous predecessor is Dr. Victor Frankenstein, whose experiments are reported in Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. Prior to Frankenstein’s work, from 1801 to 1804, natural philosopher and physicist Giovanni Aldini (1762–1834) reportedly made many attempts, using galvanic forces, to achieve human reanimation. Like Herbert West, German naturalist Johann Konrad Dippel (1673–1734) experimented with chemical means to extend the life span of humans. Dippel reported discovering the “elixir of life,” but there is no evidence of its effects; though rumors spread that he engaged in what was called “soul-transference” with cadavers, this has not been verified. Curiously, Dippel was born in Castle Frankenstein, in central-southern Germany.

  6. Note that Charles Dexter Ward (see The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, here, below) lived in “the old Halsey mansion” in Providence.

  7. Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel (1834–1919) was an eminent German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor, and artist. A popular lecturer and supporter of Darwin’s theories, he coined the terms “ontogeny” (the growth of an organism) and “phylogeny” (the interrelatedness of species) and famously dogmatized that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” Most important for purposes of this story, Haeckel theorized about Urschleim, primordial slime from which life evolved. He rejected the idea that there was some special vital force, arguing that biology was merely a branch of ph
ysics and that living matter was subject to the same laws as inorganic or dead substances.

  8. One hundred years ago, little was known of brain death; today, the subject still remains shrouded in mystery. Studies in 2002 provided evidence that brain cells could be kept alive for weeks after the death of the body. However, there is no evidence that intellectual activity continues. Scientists have recorded a “wave of death” passing through the brain, a burst of brain cell activity, about one minute after clinical death, and many speculate that this signals the loss of membrane potential and irreversible brain death, a “point of no return.” Others, however, remain unconvinced, pointing to experiments in which electrical activity returned to reoxygenated brain cells after fifteen minutes of oxygen deprivation.

  9. West follows in the tradition of medical researchers in the early nineteenth century who had difficulty finding the cadavers they required. The scarcity was the combined result of the expansion of medical training, the decrease of capital punishment, and the lack of refrigeration. As a result, “body-snatchers” or “resurrectionists” stole corpses from graveyards. In the notorious case of the Edinburgh serial killers William Burke and William Hare (1827–28) and the copycat London Burkers (1831), the sellers provided fresh corpses by murdering their wares. The plan was mooted by the passage of the Anatomical Act of 1832 in England, widening the pool of corpses available to supply the market.

  10. Compare this with the activities of two medical students and an African-American cemetery worker, Jess, who exhume the body of a man named Henry Armstrong in Ambrose Bierce’s “One Summer Night” (1906). Upon discovering that Armstrong is not dead, the three flee; but Jess returns and clubs Armstrong with a spade, and thus the students procure the fresh corpse they needed.

  11. No Meadow Hill is found in Marblehead or Salem. The location is also mentioned in “The Unnamable,” “The Colour Out of Space,” and “The Dreams in the Witch House,” below.

  12. A dark lantern was a modification of an ordinary gas or kerosene hand lantern that could be darkened while lit, by a sliding shield that covered the light without extinguishing the flame.

  13. The electric torch, or flashlight, was first patented in 1899. The torch ran on zinc-carbon batteries and carbon-filament bulbs that required frequent rest periods to recharge. The light was best used in brief intervals, or “flashes.”

  14. Known as carbide lamps, these burned acetylene gas and provided a bright light for lighthouses, also serving as headlamps for cars and bicycles.

  15. Near-death experiences (previous to West, these were limited to persons who died and were resuscitated by medical means or spontaneously revived) came to public attention with the book Life After Life, by Raymond Moody Jr., published in 1975. Numerous scientific studies of near-death experiences have produced little consensus among subjects or researchers, and much controversy over the definition of “death.”

  16. These were used to produce a high heat. The flame of a small portion of the alcohol was made to heat the reservoir containing the remainder, thereby vaporizing it. The escaping vapor issued with considerable force and burned with a smokeless flame.

  A simple alcohol blast lamp.

  17. Vessels or chambers in which substances are distilled or decomposed by heat.

  18. Coincidentally, another Chapman house burned in 1920. Lovecraft recorded that “the large Chapman house . . . two lawns to the north of #598 Angell” (where Lovecraft lived prior to 1924) was destroyed in “a titanic pillar of roaring, living flame” (Lovecraft to R. Kleiner, February 10, 1920, Selected Letters, I, 108).

  19. Are we to understand that the reanimated corpse sought to return to its grave? Why?

  20. First published in Home Brew 1, no. 2 (March 1922), and reprinted in Weird Tales 36, no. 5 (July 1942), 86–90.

  21. Likely August 1905. Part VI, “The Tomb-Legions,” is definitely set in 1921 (see note 62, below), and the events described here are referred to there as “sixteen years ago.”

  22. In Arabic and Persian lore, Eblis (Iblis) is the equivalent of Satan. When Adam was created, God ordered all the angels to reverence him, but Eblis refused, and God turned Eblis into a devil, the father of all evil devils.

  23. Epidemic typhoid is caused by the spread of the Rickettsia prowazekii bacterium, usually through lice, and, prior to the discovery of vaccines, had a high fatality rate. While a major typhoid epidemic occurred in 1885 in Plymouth, Pennsylvania, and in 1903 in Ithaca, New York, the Arkham epidemic is not otherwise recorded, and no other took place subsequently in the United States until 1915, when typhoid broke out in New York, and the next year, when a typhoid epidemic was reported in Illinois. However, in 1918, Rhode Island, and Providence in particular, was devastated by influenza, with almost 33,000 deaths from influenza reported in Rhode Island in a two-month period. In May 1921, when the narrator was recording these tales, Providence Magazine reported a talk by the health commissioner of New York in which he warned about the influx of contagion from immigrants bringing typhus, cholera, and bubonic plague from Europe, where diseases raged in the years after World War I.

  Worcester Lunatic Asylum, later known as Worcester State Hospital, shown in 2008.

  24. A fictitious asylum in a fictitious town, described later (in Part VI, “The Tomb-Legions”) as fifty miles from West’s home in Boston. It is possibly based on Worcester State Insane Hospital, about forty miles from Boston, in Worcester, Massachusetts, near Grafton, Massachusetts, which may have suggested the name. Its significance is explained later in the story.

  25. The belief, propounded by Ptolemy, second-century geologer and astronomer, that the sun, planets, and stars revolve around the earth.

  26. The doctrines of the Reformed church, first espoused by French theologian John Calvin (1509–1564), and in particular, predestination.

  27. Darwinism, a term coined upon the publication, in 1859, of naturalist Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, is the biological theory that humans were evolved from an unknown species lower on the ladder of development; its most well-known precept is the “survival of the fittest.” The anti-Darwinists rejected evolution and embraced Creationism, the notion that God created man in the image of God, without earlier experiments.

  28. As wide-ranging and indefinite as the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) may be seen to be—including, as it does, such statements as “God is dead”—there can be no precise definition of a school of anti-Nietzscheanism, unless it perhaps refers to an embrace of traditional philosophies.

  29. Sabbatarianism required strict observance of the Sabbath, producing the “blue laws” in many states that forbade the operation of businesses on Sundays. Sumputary laws regulated consumption of certain goods, such as alcoholic beverages, and conduct, such as dog fighting or horse racing.

  30. In Greek mythology Tartarus was a region beneath Hades, into which originally only those who were a threat to the gods were cast. Other mythologies made it synonymous with Hades.

  31. Bolton is a small town in Worcester County, Massachusetts, bordered by the towns of Harvard to the north, Stow to the east, Hudson and Berlin to the south, Clinton to the southwest, and Lancaster to the northwest. S. T. Joshi, in The Annotated H. P. Lovecraft, suggests that the mention of Bolton is confirmation that Arkham is in central Massachusetts, not on the eastern coast. Bolton, forty-three miles from Boston and fifty-six miles from Providence, lies on the Still River. The Still is not the Miskatonic; the former empties south into Long Island Sound, while the latter ends in Kingsport. As will be seen below, the village of Bolton also lacks the industry it is described as having. This must be rejected as a spurious clue regarding the location of Arkham.

  32. This presumably refers to the structure where cadavers and coffins are delivered to the cemetery.

  33. The only Crane Street in Massachusetts is in Danvers, far from any possible location of Arkham. Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee (“The Shadow Out of Time,” here, below) lives at 27 Crane Street.

 
; 34. In modern English, “nauseating eyes.”

  35. Published April 1922 in Home Brew 1, no. 3, 21–26, and reprinted in Weird Tales 36, no. 7 (September 1942), 75–78.

  36. Curiously, there was a Worsted Mills in Bolton, England, the namesake of Bolton, Massachusetts, but the latter was a small agricultural hamlet. More likely, this is the Wood Worsted Mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts, twenty miles from Salem (the possible site of Arkham), completed in 1906 and reported to be, at 1,490 feet long, the largest mill in the world “under one roof.”

  37. There is a Pond Street in Lawrence, Massachusetts, near a densely wooded area and close by the aptly named World End Pond.

  38. In fact, public boxing matches were illegal throughout Massachusetts from 1895 until October 30, 1920. There is no way to date the “March night” in question beyond placing it sometime after 1906, when the mill was completed and West and the narrator established their practice (in “The Plague-Daemon,” they are “post-graduate” students in the autumn of 1905), and earlier than 1920.

  39. Awkward and stupid; the noun is “lubber.”

  40. Lovecraft suggests a Jewish heritage that stands in contrast to the boxer’s Irish moniker. He created another Jewish-Irish hybrid in Bridget Goldstein, mentioned in his story “Sweet Ermengarde” (not published until 1943), and Gavin Callaghan, in H. P. Lovecraft’s Dark Arcadia, calls this “emblematic . . . of Lovecraft’s collectivized view of America’s various ethnicities . . . into a single, loathsome mass” (7).