Re-Animator (2 page)

And Gruber had always called him Herbert or Mr. West. He didn’t have to be told or corrected, he’d sensed not to call him by a nickname from the start. He was a man of rare perceptions, and he deserved nothing less than sainthood. Unlike with most saints, however, West wanted him canonized while he was alive.

His impassive expression changing, West grinned as the fluid reached the 25-cc scale marking. The serum would work, they would publish and become famous, and—when their time came—not a soul from the foster home or the school or from Toronto and the Maple Leafs would get any of it.

Not a drop for them,
West thought with some delight. He’d use it on another gibbon before he’d give it to the people who had made his life so unpleasant, so needlessly unfruitful.

Gruber looked back, his flesh taut over his bony face. “Are we ready, Mr. West?”

The young man slid the test tube into its rack and brought the hypodermic close to his thick glasses. The measurement was precise, the needle cannula was clear.

“Yes, sir. We’re ready.”

“Excellent.”

The large eyes of the elderly biochemist were solemn beneath the burst of white hair that hung over his forehead and back along his ears. The tall, lanky man weakly brushed the tangle from his brow and gazed at his lap. After a moment, he said in his thick German accent, “ ‘They scream when they’re born, and they scream when they die!’ ”

West looked at him curiously. “Sir?”

“Strindberg,” explained the professor. “From
A Dream Play.”
He looked back at the small mound of powders. “What do
you
think, Mr. West? Will we add a new dimension to the playwright’s line? Will I scream when I am
re
born?”

The slender young man frowned and slid one hand into the pocket of his lab jacket. “That depends, sir. If you’re wrong about the extra 10 cc’s and there’s a buildup in the neuromuscular junctions—”

The professor interrupted with a slow wave of his hand. “I did not mean for you to take me
literally,
Mr. West. I was speaking about my soul. How will God respond to what we are about to do?”

The rebuke stung, but West didn’t let it show. He never claimed to be a scholar, he was a scientist. And from that sixth-grade science project, when he had kept a mouse alive for over a day using a quarter-pint of his own blood, he had resolved to be nothing more or less than the greatest biochemist since Pasteur.

“God should be delighted,” West replied. “After all, he hasn’t seen anything like this for nearly two thousand years.”

The professor snickered. “You know, Mr. West, you give me hope . . . you truly do. Whatever happens to me, you
will
make this project succeed. People who are unconstrained by propriety have always made the most effective scientists.”

This comment, too, West allowed to pass. Gruber always became a humanist when they were about to reach for a new plateau in their work. He had come to recognize it as the old man’s way of hedging against failure, of reminding himself and others that he was not a superman. West filled with fresh anticipation as he wondered if these ephemeral, nonbiological traits would survive the experiment.

The young scientist also felt a sudden bubbling in his stomach. He looked at the wizened man and then at the syringe.

“Professor,” West said, “there’s—something I wanted to say to you.”

“Yes, Mr. West?”

“You
do
know how I feel, don’t you?”

“About the experiment?”

“No, sir. About you.”

Gruber seemed pleased. He rubbed his knees. “I have my suspicions, Mr. West, but it would do my soul good to hear them—and yours good to say them, I think.”

West was clearly uncomfortable. “You’ve been like a father to me,” he said. “Whatever happens, I want you to know that I appreciate all you’ve done.”

“Appreciate.” Gruber played with his chin. “A rather mild word from some, but a serious confession when it comes from Herbert West.” He smiled. “I shouldn’t tease you, should I? In three years I don’t think I’ve ever told you that I love you like a son, and have taken a pride in your achievements that I never thought I would experience.”

Gruber was not surprised to see how uncomfortable the praise made West feel. He was not a young man who knew how to give or take anything that was nonintellectual, could not be weighed on a scale or measured using hashmarks on a beaker. But one day, perhaps, the moment they’d shared here would mean something. Maybe one day. In that respect, he wasn’t much different from Hill, whom he had caused to resign four years before for his shocking lack of ethics. Gruber only hoped that if something went wrong and he did not recover, his young associate would have the good sense, if not the charity, at least to stay within the law.

With a reassuring smile, the old man closed his thin lips over the spoon. He took the mixture down in a single gulp, and, almost at once, the compound went to work. The cocaine overdose shut down his heart, and with a small gasp he slumped over the bench; he was oblivious to the cyanide as it went to work on his bloodstream or the Acidulin as it generated enough gastric juices to eat through his stomach lining.

Gruber dropped from the bench to the floor, landing on his face with a loud slap. West hurried over and flipped him onto his back, pulling a stethoscope from his lab coat.

“August 24, ten-thirty
P.M.,
” he said evenly as he placed the instrument to Gruber’s chest, deftly pulling the binaurals around his head with one hand while holding the syringe, needle up, in the other. “Professor Gruber’s heart has stopped, and I expect the ingestion has also affected his circulatory system and stomach as we anticipated.” Tossing the stethoscope aside, he switched the hypodermic to his right hand and put it to Gruber’s hairless chest. “About to inject 25 cc’s of serum, which we’ve calculated will counteract the poisons and restore the professor’s dead tissue.”

Jabbing the needle into Gruber’s flesh, West pushed the plunger until he’d emptied the barrel, then sat back on his heels to await the results. The wait was not a long one.

Down the corridor, Dr. Margot Koslik was singing softly as she studied a tumor section under a microscope.

“Den atem des lebens hauchte er in sein angesicht—”

When she heard the scream, the portly radiologist snapped off the rest of Haydn’s
Creation
and stood with her ear cocked toward the corridor. The scream came again, louder than before.

“Professor Gruber?”

Of course it was Gruber, she told herself. He and his assistant were the only other people in the building, and Margot couldn’t imagine young West screaming.

“Nothing affects him,” she complained. Not a pretty girl’s smile or the triumphs of a hardworking colleague. Between the short-cropped black hair and expressionless mouth, his cold blue eyes were perennially slit and staring, focused on something only he could see.

Yes, the scream had to have come from Gruber. But if he were ill or had hurt himself, why hadn’t West come out to call for help? She hesitated to go over, not wanting to get into a debate with West over why she was interfering, why she wasn’t minding her own business. Falling into his mouth was an experience not even Dr. Willett enjoyed. If only the little bastard hadn’t had Gruber’s protection.

“Fuck him,” she decided.

The short woman rose from her stool and waddled past a shelf full of jarred organs. She poked her head into the dark hallway. Three rooms down on the opposite side, she saw hazy shadows moving violently across the bright, frosted glass of the door. She took a few steps toward it.

“Herr Professor?”

A third scream echoed from the room, followed by a low gurgling and the hollow thud of stomping feet; beneath these she heard West mumbling in his clipped, mechanical voice.

“Professor, are you all right?”

Another scream was followed by the shattering of glass, and, with a small oath, Margot spun and hurried toward the phone.

The police car swung into the parking lot just as Dr. Willett was climbing from his Audi. He stood rigid, impatiently tapping his toe as the two officers jogged over. This was all he needed, a scientific misadventure at the Institute. It would be the worst disaster to befall the local medical community since Mary Shelley had opted to make Victor Frankenstein Swiss. The three men entered the ivy-covered building together.

“Did she actually enter the room?” asked one officer as they walked briskly down the corridor.

“I’m aware of nothing more than I told you over the phone,” Willett lied in clipped, unpleasant tones. Willett had known what Gruber was up to, and that was what worried him. He’d let the professor use the facility because widespread honors and lavish grants would be accorded the Institute were he to succeed, and Gruber had
promised,
sworn absolutely to stick to animals.

Of course, that was before West had joined the project.

Things had moved along faster since Gruber had rescued West from the Neanderthal minds and Hunnish souls at NYU. Using Gruber’s research, West had made that all-important breakthrough of stimulating the chromatin in the dead rat and reactivating mitosis. Since then, he’d managed to bring entire animals back for limited stays, though each of them died soon thereafter because West was unable to pinpoint quickly enough what was failing and why.

Willett shut his eyes and exhaled weakly; he could taste his lobster dinner in his throat. He’d been the youngest man ever appointed to this position at the university and did not intend to be the first man in the school’s long history to have to resign the job. As he heard the faint snarls echoing down the tiled corridor, he prayed fervently that Gruber had merely had a heart attack or spilled acid on himself.

As they rounded the corner, their footsteps drew Margot around. She’d been pacing anxiously before room 121, and now she held her hands toward it in a gesture of hopelessness.

“Has anything else happened?” Willett demanded, nervously tugging at the knot of his tie as he stopped beside the radiologist.

“Nothing, Herr Doctor. Only these horrible noises and . . . now and then a scream.”

Emboldened by the presence of the police officers, Margot narrowed her eyes and slid around Willett. After seven
P.M.
this was her responsibility, her domain. She rapped several times on the door.

“Professor Gruber!”

There was more muttering—West—and then another loud shriek.

“Herr Professor!”

Perspiration forming on his brow, Willett stepped forward and put his mouth close to the door.

“Hans! Herr West!”

The dull thumping of shoes against the tiles punctuated the low, guttural sounds coming from within.

“Let us in!” Willett shouted. “Open the door at once!”

There was another scream, followed by something unintelligible from West. Licking his lips, Willett nodded at the police officers and stepped back as one used his nightstick to break the pane directly above the knob, the other reaching in and opening the door. The officers drew their guns and rushed in, followed by Willett and Margot; what they saw caused them all to stop dead in the doorway.

Professor Gruber was writhing horribly on the floor, his features contorted and white. His gnarled fingers clawed at the floor; his legs and heels jumped up and down as though they were being pumped with electricity. Kneeling beside him, looking back at the newcomers, West had an empty syringe in his hand and a grim expression on his face. Like a child who’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar, he let the hypodermic fall as his expression shaded to shock.

“I—we need to be left alone,” he said flatly. Then, reaching for the stethoscope and slipping it around his neck, he turned back toward the professor.

His eyes ablaze, Willett finally raised a trembling finger and pointed toward the youth. “Get him out of here.”

Scowling from the tart fumes which filled the laboratory, the two officers hustled over and, grabbing West under his arms, yanked him to his feet. He squirmed away from them and bent back down over the professor.

“You idiots, you don’t understand! I have to record his vital signs!”

The blue-suited men pulled him roughly from the scientist’s side, dragging him back toward the door amidst his shrill protests. Ignoring West, Margot strode toward the contorting old man.

“Professor, can we help you? What is wrong?”

“Only
I
can help him!” West shouted. “Let me
go,
fools!”

Thinking the professor might be having an epileptic seizure, Margot plucked a pencil from her vest pocket. Leaning forward to place it between his teeth, she screamed when the lanky scientist shot suddenly to his feet. Streams of yellowish spittle began pouring from the sides of his mouth, and his eyes bulged unnaturally. His high-pitched scream spoke of agonies the others couldn’t begin to comprehend.

Wresting himself from the constables, West pushed past the radiologist and grabbed the professor.

“Sir, what is it?
Where
is it?”

West went to press the diaphragm of the stethoscope to his chest but stepped back when he felt something hot spray against his belly. He looked down and saw the professor’s hands clasped to his midsection. Greenish liquid was shooting from between his fingers—his gastric juices eating right through his body. Obviously, the formula had overcompensated for the cyanide but undercompensated for the Acidulin; he should have given the injection lower in the chest to balance the absorption.

The officers came forward again but froze when the professor’s brow and eyes began to throb and crawl. He began to claw at his temple, raking long bloody lines in the soft flesh. His lids began to tear as the eyeballs bugged even further, blood seeping out from around them. Suddenly, the right eye exploded, showering blood on Margot and West. The woman screamed and backed into the arms of the startled Willett; West simply stared in fascination.

The brain took in too much blood and is hemorrhaging,
he concluded. Gruber was wrong after all. The extra .5 cc’s had been soaked up entirely by the brain, which drew not only the blood but the formula
in
that blood back to it. That would also explain the presence of the formula in his saliva.