Morbid Anatomy

by Curran, Tim

  That’s all he would say and, frankly, I was glad. But what he told me next was equally as perverse and horrifying.

  “West came out of the war disturbed. His experiments became increasingly gruesome, his morals, his sense of ethics were completely gone.” Hamilton was re-living it, sweating and shaking and rambling on in a dry, cracking voice. “At the hospital, a suicide had been brought in, I remember. She wasn’t even cold yet, just a girl of perhaps seventeen or eighteen that had laid her wrists open with a razor. West injected her and she woke…her eyes rolled open, a look of utter terror in them. Her face contorted into a scream and she leaped off the table, making slashing motions across her wrist. She had been deranged at the moment of death and that’s all that was left…utter, debilitating insanity. She lived maybe ten minutes, screeching and drooling and tearing at her own flesh. And if that was a horror, what came next was a nightmare. West reanimated an accident victim…a young boy that was grotesquely mutilated…just to see if he indeed could. I will never forget that shrieking, contorting mass of human wreckage, attempting to walk with its bones thrust out and its head cleaved open, gray matter spilling down its agonized face.”

  Hamilton had to breathe for a while after that.

  Finally, he said, “You see? That’s what had become of that brilliant man. He was reanimating dead things just to prove that he indeed could.”

  I tried to get Hamilton to tell me about my sister. To see if he could remember snatching any women from Christchurch around the time of her tomb being robbed, but he would not answer anymore questions. He was trembling and sobbing, speaking to people that were not there, watching the shadows in the corners very carefully.

  As maybe they watched him.

  *

  I would like to say that this grisly little narrative is at an end, but I am not finished. I hoped, I think we all hoped, that Herbert West’s dark legacy was over, but there was one last harrowing chapter to be played out. God help us, but there was.

  It was Detective Hayes that brought it to my attention.

  Though he did not need to. Bolton had been set by a series of strange, inexplicable disappearances in the past year or so. And being that it was essentially a mill town populated by the lowest rungs of the working class, a class which generally did not trust the police, I had no doubt that these abductions had been going on far longer that that. Something which Hayes admitted to be true.

  But of late, this fiend that was snatching people off the street, had been growing more bold. And in its wake, it had been leaving cannibalized human remains. Sometimes entire bodies chewed and mutilated to an extreme degree and sometimes just scraps from its meals. And the most unnerving thing was that very often these remains were found on rooftops. There had even been a few witnesses and they all agreed on one thing: the killer was small and agile and it displayed almost apelike characteristics…escaping right up walls or into trees. A single footprint had been pressed into garden soil at the home of an abducted child and that foot was small and deformed, not that of a monkey, but more like that of some misshapen dwarf.

  Derby was called in once again and that determined hound led us on a merry chase through the city, finally leading us into the dirty and decaying streets of Easttown. If you know Easttown only by its high-rises, townhouses, and thriving artistic community, then you would not have recognized the absolute slum it was in the 1920’s. The streets were unlit, mostly just dirt with rotting timbers shorn beneath, though there were a few colonial and brick thoroughfares. The entire area was filthy and claustrophobic, a collection of shuttered federal houses, abandoned farm buildings, leaning warehouses, and blocks of 18th century rowhouses. Everything there was ancient and crumbling, a crazy-quilt of mossy gambrel roofs and narrow alleys and crowded avenues. There was no electricity or gas, water had to be fetched from public wells. Outbreaks of typhoid and influenza were fairly common.

  But what do I remember best about the area?

  The smell: a dank, pestiferous odor that seemed to saturate every dwelling and by-way as if that section of Bolton was putrefying. All of it was bulldozed down long ago and for this we can be thankful.

  Anyway, this is where Derby led us, amongst the squalor and tenements, the Georgian monstrosities broken up into flats. He brought us to a gate encircling an overgrown yard. Above us stood a weathered high house with shattered lattice windows. Even in that neighborhood, it was a place of evil-repute.

  I stood there on the grimy street with ten policemen, feeling the place and smelling it and not liking it one bit. Hayes ordered two men to break the door open and they did so with little trouble. Even where we were standing, you could smell the hot, seething miasma of putrefaction oozing out.

  Hayes and his men led the way in and after our experiences at Christchurch, we expected the very worst and were not in the least bit disappointed. The house had obviously been abandoned for decades, if not much longer. There was no furniture. The wallpaper hung in strips, the wainscoting was chewed to sawdust by mice. The walls were bowed, the floors uneven. Everything creaked and groaned as we entered.

  The first thing I really noticed was the atmosphere of the place…festering and rotten, a dank pall in the air that made the flesh crawl at my spine. It felt like what I would imagine a plague ship would feel like, utterly noxious and suffocating. You could almost sense the horror that place had known, the madness and despair and spiritual corruption. It oozed from the walls and bled from the air in mephitic vapors.

  “You can feel it, can’t you?” one of the uniformed policemen said. “In your belly, your throat…enough to make you gag.”

  He was right. It not only made you want to wretch, it made you feel like a noose was slowly being tightened around your throat.

  “Christ, that stink,” was all Detective Hayes would say.

  And, yes, it was bad. The atmosphere was something you sensed with your brain, your spine, your belly, but the smell of that moldered house was simply repellent. A seething effluvium of dust and damp, rot and mildew. But it was more than that, because you could smell death there, old death and new death. Organic putrefaction and a more recent odor, one that was violent and raw: the stink of fresh blood, gristle, and well-marbled meat.

  “Well,” Hayes said, his voice cracking, “let’s do what we came to do.”

  We searched the upper stories and found nothing but dirt and rotting plaster, a trunk filled with ancient clothes. Yet, we knew something was there. We could hear it moving in the shadows and scratching in the walls, always keeping just out of sight. Downstairs, towards the rear of the house, we began to find human remains. Bones and scraps of meat, a few yellowed skulls splattered with brown stains. Like a path, they led us to the cellar door which was missing.

  I personally could feel something building in the air, something that made me go white inside. The others were feeling it, too, and we soon realized why.

  From that warped square of darkness leading into the cellar, there were a set of huge glistening eyes watching us. They shone like wet chrome.

  “Jesus,” somebody said. “Do you see them? Do you see those eyes—”

  There was a rush of motion, a spoiled stink, and then something jumped out at us. Something with claws and teeth and a shaggy hide, something howling and hissing. Men cried out and others just gasped. It was like fighting a leopard in the darkness. Every time the men tried to get their guns on it, it darted away, scratching faces and biting hands as it went. It jumped and hopped, writhed and slashed. Our torches were spinning about and men were crying out and just about the time it seemed it would gore all of us, a burly sergeant named Trowbridge screamed and all the lights went on him instantly.

  The thing was on him.

  It was hanging off him like an ape, tearing at his throat, slashing him to ribbons with those claws. But he was a brave men and he held it, refusing to let it slip away. The thing was angry, growling and squealing.

  I saw it with the others, but I wasn’t exactly sure what it was
. It looked, if anything, like some immense albino spider. But it was no spider…it had a head and four limbs and that was about all I saw until Trowbridge managed to toss it to the floor and pistols instantly began discharging. The thing took about ten or fifteen rounds. It jumped and screeched, spraying loops of vile-smelling blood, but finally, wounded, it lay there breathing with a wet, bubbling sound.

  And that’s when we got our first real good look at it.

  Human?

  Even now, I cannot be sure. Its body was squat and thick, oddly bulbous and covered in a tight mesh of white flesh that was smooth and shiny like poured rubber. You could see the jutting architecture of bones beneath as it gasped in its death throes. Though its torso wasn’t really any larger than, say, a five-year old boy’s, its limbs were completely out of proportion—the arms equally as long as the legs. And its face…quasi-human, at best. Its head was large and ill-shaped, the jaws vulpine and exaggerated and set with fine, sharp teeth. But it was the eyes I noticed most, for they were huge and unblinking, set with a grayish membrane like a slick of jelly.

  “Kill it,” one of the men said. “Jesus, it’s disgusting.”

  But we didn’t kill it.

  We didn’t need to, for it was dying just fine on its own. As it lay there, tangled in those elongated limbs like white whips, glaring up at us with saturnine eyes filled with a flat malevolence, it made a rasping, barking sort of sound, great gouts of blackish blood gushing from its mouth like drool. It was bleeding from a dozen holes, its viscous life pooling around it. Its hands made half-hearted attempts to scare us off, the fingers like jointed knitting needles, each a good ten or twelve inches in length.

  It was revolting, yet oddly fascinating and maybe even a bit pathetic. What intrigued me about it was the bleached whiteness of its flesh, completely lacking pigment like something from a cave, something born to darkness. It had a shaggy mane of hair and it, too, was colorless.

  Finally, those attenuated, bony fingers began to click madly, scraping at the floor. The thing jerked and shuddered and went still.

  It was dead.

  Next we went down into the cellar. Five of the men with us had been horribly bitten and clawed and Trowbridge was dead. The rest of us went down into that blackness. But the stairs were missing, so we had fetch a fireman’s ladder to descend.

  And to this day, I wish we had not.

  For down there, in that stygian murk and rancid stink, we found a perfectly circular pit cut into the earth. The sides were made of brick and we supposed it to be an abandoned well. When we put our lights down its mouth, something perhaps twenty feet below shrieked up at us.

  We all saw what it was.

  But perhaps I saw more clearly than the others.

  There was a thing down there all right, something hissing and chattering its teeth. Something pallid-faced like a woman in a sloshing, fungous pit of bones and decomposed scraps and rags. Its flesh hung loose and billowing like canvas and seemed to be about the same texture. Its scalp was nearly hairless, just a few strands of greasy gray hair falling over the cadaverous, pocked face.

  It had no eyes, just lewd sockets filled with worms.

  It had but one fleshless arm and most of the skin had been chewed from its breasts and belly and that’s how I knew it had been feeding on itself. It tried to pull itself up at us and we saw that its legs had been worried to bony nubs, victims, like its missing arm, of its ghoulish hunger. Auto-cannibalism, I suppose would be the correct term.

  It raged and splashed and spit tangles of slime up at us and I knew if one of us had fallen down there, she would have stripped us to the bone in minutes.

  Yes, a blasphemy and a horror.

  Yet, I knew it was a woman.

  And this is what made me stagger from that necrotic, steaming, charnel pit. I barely got away from it before that awful cellar pitched this way and that and I passed clean out.

  I don’t remember Hayes and his men taking me out of there. But I remember what I saw and I remember what it did to me. Hayes said they dumped kerosene into the pit and roasted that nightmare alive. The other spidery thing joined it for the cremation. He said the house was being torn down and that pit would be filled with cement.

  All and good.

  But what haunts me to this day was that spidery, dwarfish thing and the woman in the pit. Even so many decades later, it fills me with a shivering terror, an almost lunatic horror. Those things, yes, they were the final legacy of Herbert West and his profane experiments. I had no doubt of it then and I have no doubt of it now.

  I recognized the woman, of course.

  She was my sister who had died in childbirth. Even though Hamilton would not admit to it, West indeed stole her corpse from its coffin and reanimated her cold graveyard husk. And that unspeakable, starving monstrosity in the pit was what was left of her.

  And the spidery thing?

  Dear God, that was her child…born post-mortem. My nephew…or niece.

  -The End-

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