Name: Herbert West – Reanimator by H.P. Lovecraft | Audiobook（Herbert West – Reanimator by H.P. Lovecraft | Audiobook）
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Herbert West - Reanimator by H.P.  Lovecraft. Read by Josh Greenwood.

Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college  and in after life, I can speak only with extreme  

terror. This terror is not due altogether to  the sinister manner of his recent disappearance,  

but was engendered by the whole nature of  his life-work, and first gained its acute  

form more than seventeen years ago, when  we were in the third year of our course  

at the Miskatonic University Medical School  in Arkham. While he was with me, the wonder  

and diabolism of his experiments fascinated  me utterly, and I was his closest companion.  

Now that he is gone and the spell is  broken, the actual fear is greater.  

Memories and possibilities are  ever more hideous than realities. 

The first horrible incident of our acquaintance  was the greatest shock I ever experienced,  

and it is only with reluctance that I repeat it.  As I have said, it happened when we were in the  

medical school, where West had already made  himself notorious through his wild theories  

on the nature of death and the possibility  of overcoming it artificially. His views,  

which were widely ridiculed by the faculty and  his fellow-students, hinged on the essentially  

mechanistic nature of life; and concerned means  for operating the organic machinery of mankind  

by calculated chemical action after the failure  of natural processes. In his experiments with  

various animating solutions he had killed  and treated immense numbers of rabbits,  

guinea-pigs, cats, dogs, and monkeys, till he  had become the prime nuisance of the college.  

Several times he had actually obtained signs  of life in animals supposedly dead; in many  

cases violent signs; but he soon saw that the  perfection of this process, if indeed possible,  

would necessarily involve a lifetime of  research. It likewise became clear that,  

since the same solution never worked alike on  different organic species, he would require  

human subjects for further and more specialised  progress. It was here that he first came into  

conflict with the college authorities, and was  debarred from future experiments by no less a  

dignitary than the dean of the medical school  himself—the learned and benevolent Dr. Allan  

Halsey, whose work in behalf of the stricken  is recalled by every old resident of Arkham. 

I had always been exceptionally tolerant of  West's pursuits, and we frequently discussed  

his theories, whose ramifications and corollaries  were almost infinite. Holding with Haeckel that  

all life is a chemical and physical process,  and that the so-called “soul” is a myth,  

my friend believed that artificial reanimation of  the dead can depend only on the condition of the  

tissues; and that unless actual decomposition has  set in, a corpse fully equipped with organs may  

with suitable measures be set going again in the  peculiar fashion known as life. That the psychic  

or intellectual life might be impaired by the  slight deterioration of sensitive brain-cells  

which even a short period of death would be apt to  cause, West fully realised. It had at first been  

his hope to find a reagent which would restore  vitality before the actual advent of death,  

and only repeated failures on animals had  shewn him that the natural and artificial  

life-motions were incompatible. He then  sought extreme freshness in his specimens,  

injecting his solutions into the blood  immediately after the extinction of life.  

It was this circumstance which made the professors  so carelessly sceptical, for they felt that true  

death had not occurred in any case. They did not  stop to view the matter closely and reasoningly. 

It was not long after the faculty had interdicted  his work that West confided to me his resolution  

to get fresh human bodies in some manner, and  continue in secret the experiments he could no  

longer perform openly. To hear him discussing  ways and means was rather ghastly, for at the  

college we had never procured anatomical specimens  ourselves. Whenever the morgue proved inadequate,  

two local negroes attended to this matter,  and they were seldom questioned. West was  

then a small, slender, spectacled youth with  delicate features, yellow hair, pale blue eyes,  

and a soft voice, and it was uncanny to hear him  dwelling on the relative merits of Christchurch  

Cemetery and the potter's field. We finally  decided on the potter's field, because practically  

every body in Christchurch was embalmed; a  thing of course ruinous to West's researches. 

I was by this time his active and enthralled  assistant, and helped him make all his decisions,  

not only concerning the source of bodies  but concerning a suitable place for our  

loathsome work. It was I who thought of the  deserted Chapman farmhouse beyond Meadow Hill,  

where we fitted up on the ground floor  an operating room and a laboratory,  

each with dark curtains to conceal our midnight  doings. The place was far from any road,  

and in sight of no other house, yet precautions  were none the less necessary; since rumours of  

strange lights, started by chance nocturnal  roamers, would soon bring disaster on our  

enterprise. It was agreed to call the whole thing  a chemical laboratory if discovery should occur.  

Gradually we equipped our sinister haunt of  science with materials either purchased in Boston  

or quietly borrowed from the college—materials  carefully made unrecognisable save to expert  

eyes—and provided spades and picks for the many  burials we should have to make in the cellar.  

At the college we used an incinerator,  but the apparatus was too costly for our  

unauthorised laboratory. Bodies were always  a nuisance—even the small guinea-pig bodies  

from the slight clandestine experiments  in West's room at the boarding-house. 

We followed the local death-notices like ghouls,  for our specimens demanded particular qualities.  

What we wanted were corpses interred soon after  death and without artificial preservation;  

preferably free from malforming disease,  and certainly with all organs present.  

Accident victims were our best hope. Not for  many weeks did we hear of anything suitable;  

though we talked with morgue and hospital  authorities, ostensibly in the college's interest,  

as often as we could without exciting suspicion.  We found that the college had first choice in  

every case, so that it might be necessary to  remain in Arkham during the summer, when only  

the limited summer-school classes were held. In  the end, though, luck favoured us; for one day  

we heard of an almost ideal case in the potter's  field; a brawny young workman drowned only the  

morning before in Sumner's Pond, and buried at  the town's expense without delay or embalming.  

That afternoon we found the new grave, and  determined to begin work soon after midnight. 

It was a repulsive task that we undertook in the  black small hours, even though we lacked at that  

time the special horror of graveyards which later  experiences brought to us. We carried spades and  

oil dark lanterns, for although electric  torches were then manufactured, they were  

not as satisfactory as the tungsten contrivances  of today. The process of unearthing was slow and  

sordid—it might have been gruesomely poetical if  we had been artists instead of scientists—and we  

were glad when our spades struck wood. When the  pine box was fully uncovered West scrambled down  

and removed the lid, dragging out and propping  up the contents. I reached down and hauled the  

contents out of the grave, and then both toiled  hard to restore the spot to its former appearance.  

The affair made us rather nervous, especially the  stiff form and vacant face of our first trophy,  

but we managed to remove all traces of our visit.  When we had patted down the last shovelful of  

earth we put the specimen in a canvas sack and set  out for the old Chapman place beyond Meadow Hill. 

On an improvised dissecting-table in the  old farmhouse, by the light of a powerful  

acetylene lamp, the specimen was not very  spectral looking. It had been a sturdy and  

apparently unimaginative youth of wholesome  plebeian type—large-framed, grey-eyed, and  

brown-haired—a sound animal without psychological  subtleties, and probably having vital processes of  

the simplest and healthiest sort. Now, with the  eyes closed, it looked more asleep than dead;  

though the expert test of my friend soon left  no doubt on that score. We had at last what West  

had always longed for—a real dead man of the ideal  kind, ready for the solution as prepared according  

to the most careful calculations and theories  for human use. The tension on our part became  

very great. We knew that there was scarcely  a chance for anything like complete success,  

and could not avoid hideous fears at possible  grotesque results of partial animation.  

Especially were we apprehensive concerning  the mind and impulses of the creature,  

since in the space following death some of  the more delicate cerebral cells might well  

have suffered deterioration. I, myself, still held  some curious notions about the traditional “soul”  

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Herbert West – Reanimator by H.P. Lovecraft | Audiobook（Herbert West – Reanimator by H.P. Lovecraft | Audiobook）

artificial

experiment

fear

awful