Reanimators (19 page)

I could not bring myself to tell Wilson that it was highly unlikely that I was susceptible to infection. Indeed, since Peaslee had injected me with his version of the reanimation reagent, I had not experienced a single day’s illness or even the remote symptoms of a cold or any other kind of infection. Even in the trenches of France, while those about me succumbed to various maladies, I had remained disease-free. Given such a state, it dawned on me that I might be the perfect physician for ministering to those infected by the outbreak, as long as I did not act as a carrier. With this in mind, and with some fervor, I descended into my secret laboratory and began to work.

It took me a good hour to ready the lab, and another hour after that to create a nutritive broth and then inoculate it with macerated tissue extracted from the beef kidneys left by Miss Soames. I left the concoction to incubate and went back up the stairs to prepare lunch. Wilson left word that Mary was feeling somewhat better, and I was comforted by the idea that she might already be past the worst of it. Afterwards I went back down to the lab and continued to clean up the clutter that had accumulated from years of neglect. It felt good to be back at work again and I took some sense of satisfaction as the lab took shape and returned to a usable state. After the evening meal, I retreated back down into the basement, this time taking down soiled material from the Wilsons. I ran a swab over the sheets and plates and then inoculated a tube of the cell culture I had prepared earlier. I then repeated the process, this time running the swab over my own skin. I returned the vials to the incubator and retired to a chair in the parlor.

The next morning Wilson informed me that Mary’s condition had worsened, her fever was spiking and she was having trouble breathing. In addition to food and tea I sent up a small bag of eucalyptus leaves that should have helped to alleviate some of her congestion. In the lab I used a microscope to check on the two vials of cells I had inoculated the day before. The cells exposed to the swab from Mary’s sheets were all damaged, exploded from the inside, a telltale sign of viral infection. The cells that had been exposed to the swab from my own skin remained intact, indicating that I was infection-free.

That afternoon, between administering to the needs of Wilson and his wife, I called Dexter and made discreet inquiries concerning the progression of the plague. Dexter obliged me by listing off names and addresses both in my own neighborhood and throughout Arkham. Afterwards I went into the office and packed a large valise with what medical supplies I could spare. That night, after I was sure that my partner was soundly asleep, I left the house with my bag and crept through the streets of Arkham. I made my way to six of the houses on Dexter’s list, where I followed my Hippocratic oath and in my own way did what I could for those poor unfortunates.

It took me hours, and it was nearly dawn before I found my way home. I snuck in the back door, careful not to make a sound. The house was still dark and I was sure I had some time before the Wilsons woke up. My night on the town had left me somewhat rank and I desperately needed to bathe and change. There were facilities and clothes in Muñoz’s old quarters, and I went down for a quick shower.

As I emerged from the bathroom only half-dressed, he was waiting for me. Francis Wilson was standing there waiting for me. He swung at me, his fist caught me in the chin, and I fell to the floor. “Get up, Stuart!” I sat there dumbfounded. “I said get up, you bastard.” There was a sorrow in his voice and his eyes. “I need you to get up and get down to your lab and do whatever it is you do down there.”

I was still stunned but managed to stutter out a single word. “What?”

He looked at me with tears in his eyes. “Mary is upstairs dying. I can’t break her fever. I’ve tried everything that I know, Stuart, and nothing has worked. She’s going to die. Unless you go downstairs to your secret laboratory and whip up a batch of your reagent to save her.”

My mind reeled, but the look on Wilson’s face gave me no time to think about what had just happened. I stumbled to my feet and placed a hand on Wilson’s shoulder. “Bring her down.” He smiled through the tears and dashed out. I grabbed a shirt and threw the switch on Muñoz’s cooling apparatus to high before running down to the lab.

It was a half hour before Wilson joined me. He came down meek and quiet, and asked what he could do to help. I asked how Mary was and he told me that her fever was still high, though the cool air was helping.

I nodded and handed a beaker of chemicals to Wilson to continue mixing. “How long have you known?”

He refused to look at me. “About the lab? Almost as soon as we started to work together, I knew that there was something you were working on, something you wanted to keep hidden. But I didn’t care. You were a good man. I could see that. Whatever you were doing down here, you seemed to honestly care about your patients. So I ignored it and let you keep your little secret, whatever it was.” He paused and chuckled, just a little. “It was Mary who found the entrance, by accident of course, while you were in France. She was always a little too curious. She didn’t even bother to tell me until she had finished reading your notebooks. At first I thought she was mad, and then after I read them myself, I thought that you were. But there were too many coincidences, too many referenced events that could be documented. Then of course there was the farmhouse. You, my friend, are meticulous, but West and Cain were terribly sloppy. The proof that you weren’t insane, the evidence for reanimation, I found it in their basement.”

I nodded. “So why the charade after I came back?”

“Well, Mary and I discussed it at length. For some time we hoped that you wouldn’t return from the war, it would have made things simpler. Then after we tried to make our own batch of reagent we realized we needed you. Your notes aren’t quite good enough to follow. Every subject we tested ended up becoming…well, what was the term you used, “revenant”? We needed you to come back and show us how to make the mix properly. Except…”

“You hadn’t counted on me not being interested anymore.”

“Yes, that was bothersome. But the influenza outbreak presented an opportunity that we could leverage. Mary would fake being sick and I would beg you to save her, and in the process you would show me how to make the reagent properly.”

Now it was my turn to laugh. “Except Mary really did get sick and she really is dying.” Wilson nodded. “What was the plan? What were you two going to do with it? I mean besides the obvious?”

Wilson stared at me incredulously. “You mean besides living forever? We could be rich, Stuart. People would pay a fortune for your reagent. There would be enough, more than enough, for all of us.”

I nodded angrily and continued to work. “Well, now you’ve seen how it’s done, I am sure that you’ll be able to reproduce it.”

I showed him the beaker of glowing green fluid. He smiled and whispered an earnest “Thank you.”

I grabbed him by the shoulder. “I’ve never administered it to someone who was truly sick before. My experiments have always been on the healthy, injured, or already dead. There’s no telling how she’ll react.” I could tell he wasn’t listening. “Bring her down here and we’ll start her on a regimen.”

When he returned carrying his wife in his arms, I could tell things had gone from bad to worse. Her breathing was shallow and labored, her pulse was weak, and her skin showed signs of dehydration. Her response to stimuli was varied and poor. Wilson was correct, Mary was succumbing to the disease and had little time left. We laid her on the table and I prepared a series of five syringes with the reagent.

We administered the first syringe, a small dosage into her femoral artery, and watched for some sort of reaction. Her symptoms improved slightly, her pulse increased as did her breathing, but she remained unconscious, and her temperature actually increased by almost half a degree. After an hour those improvements faded and I suggested that we administer the second dosage. Wilson concurred, and this time I inserted the needle into one of the veins in her arm.

As before, Mary’s symptoms improved, but once again her fever rose as well. Concerned, I ordered Wilson to soak towels in cold water and drape her with them in the hopes of bringing her temperature down. The towels worked to an extent, but after some time Mary’s breathing became labored and her pulse unsteady. Wilson was pacing back and forth frantically, and I was becoming frustrated as well. I was just about to suggest a third dosage when Mary suddenly gasped and then ceased moving. I rushed to check her pulse, and found nothing. Her heart had stopped. Despite my efforts to inoculate her against death, Mary Wilson had succumbed to the virus that had ravaged her.

“I’m sorry.” I said solemnly, whether it was to Wilson or Mary I wasn’t sure. “Truly sorry.”

For the second time that day Wilson hit me and knocked me to the floor. I watched as he grabbed at the remaining three syringes and finally fumbled the fifth dose into his hand. I screamed at him to stop but he ignored me, and in his grief he madly lifted up his wife’s head and plunged the needle into the soft spot between her skull and neck. After the injection he dropped the syringe, letting it shatter against the floor. He cradled her body and I could hear him whispering like a child, “Please…please…please,” over and over again.

Rising from the floor, I staggered forward. “Wilson, we need to strap her down.”

He just sat there, oblivious to what I had said. “We need to strap her down. Sometimes when they come back, they aren’t entirely right.” I took a few steps forward.

Wilson stared up at me blankly and managed to sob out the words “What did you say?” Just as he finished, Mary returned from the dead.

She returned screaming and rose up from the table, throwing Wilson across the room in the process. He hit the wall with a sickening thud and slid to the floor, leaving a thin trail of blood behind. Mary’s awakening seizure flipped her off the table and onto the floor. She clawed her way up like an enraged animal, her jaw clenched, spittle flying as she panted. She scanned the room, her head jerking from side to side. There was no humanity in her eyes as they locked onto mine, no recognition. She opened her mouth wider and roared.

I grabbed a beaker and threw it at her in a futile gesture of defiance. Strangely enough it worked, perhaps too well, for after a moment of being startled, the thing that was once Mary turned and ran up the stairs. I could hear her tearing through the house, breaking glass and knocking over furniture. There was a sudden loud crash and I knew that Mary was now free to roam the streets of Arkham.

I staggered over to where Wilson lay motionless against the wall. He wasn’t breathing, and it was clear from the way his head was lolling that his neck was broken. I picked him up and carried him over to the table. It took me less than a minute to strap him down. The fourth syringe was still intact, and I lifted up Wilson’s head and once more plunged a syringe into the base of a man’s skull.

I left him there in my secret laboratory and went off in search of his reanimated wife. The sun had set, but even in the evening darkness her trail was easy to follow. This was the second time I had stalked such a creature through the streets of Arkham and I had no intention of letting this thing, which I had created, repeat the atrocities that had occurred so many years ago.

I tracked her through the streets of Arkham, down alleyways and across rooftops. I caught up to her as she crossed the Miskatonic; she was running like an ape and grunting. Carefully I took out my revolver, took aim, and fired. She shrieked like a cat and tumbled to the edge of the bridge. I took a deep breath and fired again, aiming for her head. The bullet exploded her jaw, scattering flesh and bone across the bridge. A mist of blood filled the air and drifted across the lamplight, giving the night a crimson cast. Mary gurgled out one last roar before she leapt off the bridge and into the river. I fired wildly, and I think that I hit her; I just didn’t know if it was enough. The black river flowed eastward into the night, and whatever Mary Wilson had become, it was swallowed up and lost in the dark waters.

By the time I got home Wilson had returned, and I did what I could to repair his neck, but he would never stand straight again, and would ever after walk with a limp. We waited a day to call the police, and stuck to as much of the truth as possible. Mary Wilson, suffering from fever-induced dementia, escaped from our care and ran screaming into the night. I gave chase but lost her when she jumped into the Miskatonic. The officer who interviewed us seemed to accept everything we told him and even commented that he had seen worse things in the last month, far worse things.

In August a rogue tropical storm moved up the coast and battered Massachussetts for a day. When it finally moved off, it took the doldrums that sat over Arkham with it, and apparently the plague as well. By September, the city had returned to normal, and the only mention of the Spanish Flu was in the papers of far-off cities. Wilson returned to Kingsport, but he was never the same, and I fielded calls from concerned patients throughout September and October. In early November I finally suggested that he and I part ways: instead, Wilson signed documents turning the practice over. White readily agreed to assume Wilson’s place. The last I heard, Wilson had moved south to a small town in New Jersey and was working as a company doctor for a paper company.

I wish that had been the end of it, but in early December Ambrose Dexter walked into my office bearing dark news. New cases of the plague had appeared in the last few weeks, first in London, then France and then in Northern Africa. The source of the new, and even more deadly, outbreak was unclear, and no pattern in its behavior could be discerned. Officials in the Congo, warned by agents to the north of the spreading disease, had in late November instituted a policy of inspecting cargo ships before allowing them to move upriver. It was a prudent act, and aboard one such vessel they found the most horrifying of things. It was a woman, albeit one who had suffered considerably and been deformed by some undocumented trauma. A local doctor, inspired by the case of Mary Mallon—Typhoid Mary—gave her the name Spanish Mary, for it soon became evident that she was a carrier of the new virulent strain of Spanish influenza. Where she had come from and how long she had been onboard the ship, the captain and crew could not or would not tell. In an act both prudent and horrific, the terrified Colonial Governor confined Spanish Mary and the crew to their vessel, towed it several miles offshore and burned it to the waterline, allowing the fire and sharks to deal with the bodies and survivors.