by Jeff Rovin
“Yes, I came to be alone. Take your microscope and get out.”
Hill grinned. “Surely you don’t think I came for that?”
“Then what do you want?”
The surgeon rubbed his hands together. “First, to satisfy my curiosity. Were you sent here, Mr. West?”
“What?”
“Did someone give you a mission to plague me?”
West waved an index finger at the surgeon. “You’re being paranoid, Dr. Hill. Plaguing you was entirely my own idea.”
“In that case, to what end?”
“To protest what you are—a thief.”
Hill seemed saddened. “Then it is you, Mr. West. It’s not Willett or the Josephs or blind devotion to Gruber. This foolish hate . . . is yours.”
“Just as my research is mine, which is a boast you cannot make.”
The sadness became tinged with anger. He had to fight to keep it down. “You’re being petty, Mr. West. I’d hoped that if you were carrying someone else’s banner I could reason with you to lay it down, convince you to do your research under my auspices.”
“And have you steal from me as you stole from Professor Gruber? I was not born yesterday, Doctor.”
“Nor were you born wise, it seems. I can offer you my resources and complete privacy. You can accomplish twice as much as you are now.”
“I’m afraid you miss the point.”
“And I’m afraid”—Hill’s rage got the best of him—“that you miss my point, Mr. West. One way or the other I will have your discovery . . . whatever it is that gives the dead the appearance of life.”
West’s shoulders came back. Despite the accusations and insults, it was this which finally offended him.
“It is not the appearance of life, it is life. This is not magic!”
“Can you prove that?”
“If you need proof of my reagent’s power, put it on your next hamburger instead of catsup. The results will astonish you.”
Hill’s anger abated, the scientist once more in control. “Mere movement is not life. Halsey would not take food, and he battered himself without pain trying to reach Megan.”
“Which proves my point. He was responding to his daughter. The formula interprets and then recreates, exactly, each cell. What comes back to life is the subject as it was at the moment of death. Miss Halsey was on her father’s mind when he died, so she is on his mind now. Just as, if he were hungry before dying, Halsey would now take nourishment. Or if he’d been carnally aroused, his foremost priority would have been sexual in nature. I grant you, these are imperfect creatures, but they are not mere automatons. They are alive!” He added dryly, “As you say, I am a scientist.”
The insult did not go unnoticed. Hill’s mouth grew rigid. “I’ll have you locked up for a madman . . . or a murderer. You will do what I tell you to do!”
“I think not.”
Hill circled around West, his eyes burning, holding those of the young scientist. “To the contrary. Did you know, Mr. West, that before going to Switzerland I spent time in many other countries? And in India I met a man who taught me how to focus the mind to achieve any goal, physical or mental. That was what sent me on my quest for the will and the soul in the cerebral cortex.” West’s eyelids began to droop. “You see, Mr. West, by speeding up respiration and slowing all other movement, I can actually nourish that area in specific to boost my intellectual capacities briefly . . . to solve a problem . . . to operate with greater dexterity at a crucial moment . . . to force you to do what I bid.” Wavering where he stood, West took his notebook from the desk and handed it to Hill. Hill smiled. “You see, Mr. West? You may control the dead, but I can control the living. Soon I shall control both.”
The surgeon broke his stare, and West put his hand to his brow. Hill laid the book beneath the lamp and began to read. As he did so, his mouth widened.
“I see. Good God, I see. It is life!”
He turned the pages more rapidly, his finger leading his eyes down the center of each. “Genius, Mr. West! Your extension of that old fool Gruber’s work is really quite . . . brilliant!” He snapped the book shut and picked up a small vial of reagent. After studying it for a moment, he gestured toward the microscope. “Let us see my new serum at work, shall we?”
At once furious and impressed with what Hill had done, West thought feverishly while he did what he was told. He remembered the cat carcass, burying it in the yard that morning. He smiled to himself as he slipped a fresh slide into the microscope and used tweezers to take a new specimen of tissue from a soap dish marked “Arcane,” a disguised form of “Rufus Cain,” used to keep from upsetting his roommate.
“Dead cat tissue,” he announced, urging Hill to the binocular eyepiece as he picked up an eyedropper. “The reagent,” West said, applying the formula and backing slowly away.
Hill’s face exploded with delight. “Magnificent!”
West continued to step away, feeling behind him.
“This is miraculous!”
The youth felt the shovel’s stiff handle and wrapped his fingers around it.
“Yes, Mr. West. Yes! I will be famous!”
West brought the shovel around hard, flush against the side of Hill’s head. There was a loud snap, and Hill fell writhing to the floor.
“Yes,” West agreed, “you will be famous. But not for stealing my reagent!” He straddled Hill’s chest and stared into his pinched face. Lifting the shovel, he brought the blade down on his neck. Hill’s eyes went wide as blood poured freely from both sides of the wound and from his mouth. Mechanically, West raised the spade and brought it down again. This time he reached to the backbone; the third time he severed it completely. The head lolled to the side, stopping when the nose wedged against the floor; blood from the neck continued to wash over it like a fountain.
“There’s one problem laid to rest,” West remarked as he watched Hill’s hands and feet twitch for several seconds after decapitation. When they were still, he stood staring at the head for a long moment. Suddenly, he dashed over and, grabbing a handful of the surgeon’s blood-streaked hair, picked up the head. He plunked it into a dissecting pan, and the head rolled over; he righted it, but once again the head dropped to its side. Finally, West grabbed a memo spike from the desk and, setting it in the center of the tray, impaled the head upright.
“Stay, damn you,” he muttered as he sought the reagent. Filling the hypodermic, he jotted the amount in his notebook. “Parts . . . whole parts. I’ve done the brain, but never whole body parts.”
Injecting the head at the base of the skull, he hurried to the body. Squatting in the thick stream of blood still pumping from the neck, he emptied the remainder of the dose into the heart.
Sitting back on the stool, West tapped the pencil impatiently on Hill’s head while he waited. He checked his watch. Ten seconds, eleven, twelve—
The eyelids fluttered. Scribbling down the time, West looked back at the body. Nothing had happened. He looked back at the head, the glassy eyes now fully open.
“Wessssst!”
The voice was a sibilant, airy whisper, the cheeks filling and blowing puffs of air past the lips. West was astonished. Hill’s urge to speak transcended even the loss of his lungs and voicebox. He’d only been dead a half-minute; time did make all the difference in the world.
“Yes, Doctor, it’s Herbert West. What are you thinking?”
“Wessssst . . .”
“Yes?!”
“Wesssst . . . yoooou . . . basssstaaardd.”
The youth frowned. “Never mind that now! I take back what I said, you are a scientist! Now help me. What are your sensations, what are you feeling?”
Hill’s nostrils oozed blood into his trembling lips.
“Come . . . cloooooser.”
West readily obliged, and Hill’s glazed eyes rolled slowly to the left.
“Yes . . . what is it? Speak!”
Hill continued to stare as a pair of powerful hands clutched West’s head
and drove his forehead hard into the table; with a small moan, the young man fell unconscious.
Something like a laugh slipped from between Hill’s pale lips as the body edged from behind West and gently removed its own head from the spike.
“Feeeels . . . bettttter . . .” Hill cooed, looking up at his own torso. There was a large clot atop the neck and glistening streams of blood down the front and arms of his overcoat. He felt all of the sensations the body experienced, yet he still felt oddly superior to it; proof, he thought, that the soul was indeed located entirely in the brain.
The body carefully cuddled him under its arm, from which vantage point Hill surveyed the room. He instructed his ambulatory half to collect the notebook and vials of reagent in the refrigerator, all of which were crammed hastily into the coat’s deep pockets.
“Go . . .” Hill said, looking toward the door, and the reanimated body obeyed, walking stiffly from the house and staying to the shadows just beyond the streetlamps.
Hill was delighted to find that he could direct the body’s every movement simply by thought, from changes in direction to using a sleeve to blot away the water splashed in its eye by a passing motorist. Though they shared no physical sensations, they shared that bond; and when they turned the corner and the wind knifed off the nearby Concord River, the body went so far as to hold the head close to keep it warm. Hill was touched by the gesture and could not help but wonder: if he decapitated other bodies and destroyed the heads, could he build an army of devoted slaves?
He would try it very soon. First, however, there was other business to which he must attend.
When he was a child, West once balanced volumes A through F of the World Book on his forehead. He did it to counteract the stiff neck he suffered from hours bent the other way, peering into his microscope. He awoke now feeling worse than he had then, with enormous pressure on his brow and a deadness in his ears, as if they were stuffed with cotton.
However, nothing compared with the sick horror he felt when he looked up and saw the empty dissecting pan. His glasses slipped off his nose, and he quickly rammed them back on. There was no doubt about it, the head was gone. He spun: so was Hill’s body. He looked to the left: so was the formula. He spun to the right: the refrigerator door was open, and the formula was gone from there as well. He rose on weak knees and staggered back, knocking over the stool.
“My work!”
There were footfalls upstairs, and West staggered over, falling against the banister.
“Hill? Hill, is that you, you son of a bitch?”
He started up, stopping when Cain appeared in the doorway.
“Daniel!” he wheezed. “My work! He took my work!”
“Who did?”
West backed down the steps, bumped into the refrigerator. He threw his hand toward it. “Hill. He took my serum, too, except for what I have upstairs. He took my serum . . . my notes. Everything!”
Cain hurried down. “Herbert, you’re insane! What really happened?”
West clutched at Cain’s jacket. “He’s alive!”
“Hill? No kidding, and he’s been very busy tonight.”
“No, you don’t understand. I had to kill him.”
Cain grew rigid. “When?”
West looked at his watch. “About an hour ago. But he’s not dead anymore.”
Cain understood then, and shook his roommate violently. “Damn you, Herbert. This isn’t a goddamned science project—it’s murder! This has got to stop!”
“Daniel, you still don’t understand. He tried to blackmail me!”
“That doesn’t mean you had to—”
“And he wanted you to disappear!” he lied. “This is a conspiracy, Daniel. He’s trying to do with us what he did with Gruber.”
Cain released his companion and took a step back, almost losing his balance in the pool of blood. He looked at it, then at West. “You brought him back to life—and he left? With all his faculties?”
“He did. The miserable bastard is perfect. Well, almost perfect. He suffered a rather . . . disfiguring wound. His mind”—West jabbed at his own—“that, Daniel, is just as devious as it ever was. The serum works!”
Cain nodded with understanding. “A conspiracy,” he repeated. “Of course. That’s why he did it.”
“Did what?”
“Operated on Dean Halsey. He lobotomized him so he could control him in case he ever tried to talk or tell somebody what happened.”
West slammed the refrigerator door shut. “So he could protect his discovery. Very clever.”
Cain splashed through the blood to the steps. “Yes. I’ve got to tell Meg.”
“What does Meg have to do with this?”
Cain paused. He pitied West just then, less for what he’d done to Halsey and Hill than for the transparent resentment—or was it jealousy?—that he felt toward Meg. But he needed West’s help and explained, “Hill’s got this weird file on her, full of napkins and hair and photographs. I think he’s projected some sort of psychotic need onto her.”
West arched his brows comically as he tried to imagine Hill proposing to her, down on one knee, his head between his feet.
“I wouldn’t worry about Dr. Hill losing his head over her,” he said, laughing. “It’s too late!”
The laugh grew until Cain began to doubt West’s sanity. The night had taken its toll overtly and also in insidious ways; perhaps the fragile fence West had always straddled had been undermined, pitching him headlong into madness. He would see to him later. Right now, Megan was his concern. With the dean out of the way, he only hoped Hill’s compulsion was not among the qualities restored by West’s formula.
The lumbering body opened the door to Hill’s office and walked in, crashing into the bookcase, bouncing off, overturning a standing lamp, and pinballing into the filing cabinet before finally reaching the desk. There it felt around for a dissecting pan, one Hill had left there after the Halsey surgery. Finding it, the groping hands pushed away the small section of brain tissue and rested Hill’s head on the paraffin.
Its eyes shut, mouth sagging, the head sighed. The wax was softer than the cold tin in West’s lab, and it felt so good against the raw flesh of the neck. But he was tired, much too tired to open his eyes; he urged the body to hurry with the serum.
Fumbling in its pockets, the hands withdrew a vial and the hypodermic, clumsily stabbing its finger while trying to find the stopper. Finally filling the needle, it injected the head with a fresh dose. Hill rationalized that whatever hadn’t been absorbed by the brain had dripped out the neck; he made sure the needle went higher this time, almost vertically along the medulla oblongata and up the wall of the brain-case.
The serum worked almost at once. Hill felt the tingle of renewed vigor in his surviving senses, and his mind quickly regained its edge. But there was still a haze behind his eyes, and he suspected the reason for that. Ordering the body to inject itself again, he sent it off to a refrigerator beside the cubicle.
The body clipped the edge of the desk and caused the head to slide to its side. “Caaaareful . . . oooaf!” Hill scowled as, disoriented, he was unable to prevent the body from stumbling into the armchair. Righting itself, it groped for the refrigerator, spilling a shelf of croquet trophies beside it. Pulling open the door, it returned with a plastic pouch of blood. Unscrewing the cap, the body squirted it into the tin.
“Yeeessss . . .” Hill moaned as his hungry tissue soaked up the blood. When the pouch was empty, the body obediently followed Hill’s silent commands to pick it up—though by the hair, not the neck. The ragged edge was sore from having rubbed repeatedly against the overcoat sleeve on the way over. The body turned the head around slowly until its eyes came to rest on the cubicle. Smiling, Hill ordered that he be carried over.
“Allllaaan!” he suspired when his face was near the glass. “Allaan!”
Halsey stood, his dumb expression showing signs of comprehension. Still straitjacketed, he shuffled over, falling to his knees by the m
irror. He pressed his face to the glass, saw Hill’s face beyond. He grunted in recognition.
Hill opened his mouth to speak, but blood oozed from the corners, obscuring his speech; he’d taken too much, wouldn’t be so greedy next time. Using his tongue to push out the rest, he said, “Allaan! I waant you . . . to come ouuut . . . noooow.”
Obediently, Halsey staggered to the door, where the body met him and released the latch.
Hill instructed the hands to raise him so he was eye to eye with his servant. Then, his eyes wide and bloodshot from the infusion, he patiently and meticulously explained what he wanted Halsey to do.
CHAPTER
11
Cain drove the side of his fist against the six-panel door.
“Megan! Meg, are you there?”
He heard the sound of her slippers on the floor. “Dan?”
“Yeah. Are you okay?”
She flicked the deadbolt and opened the door. “Sure. Why?”
He stepped in and hugged her. “Nothing, Meg. I was just so afraid!”
“Dan, what is it? You’re shaking.”
“I don’t know, I was just . . . worried about you.”
She wriggled free, once again demanding to know why.
Cain shut the door and said evasively, “I just feel horribly about everything. I guess I’m getting paranoid.” He looked into her eyes. “It’s just . . . it’d be so hard to lose you.”
Megan pulled her robe tighter and wrapped her arms around her waist. “I think you should know, Dan, I tried to hate you. I wanted so very much to hate you.”
“I’m glad you failed.”
