CHAPTER 28

“House Calls”

From the Diary of Megan Halsey August 22 1928

It was just after dawn when I reached the house on Derby Street. I had made the journey through the night in order to avoid being seen. I was, after all, a wanted woman, and had been hiding from the police, as well as the man living in my own home of Griffith House, for days. I avoided the front door, and instead surreptitiously entered the grounds of the property and made my way to the back. Through the curtained windows I could see a flickering light that accompanied the calming sounds of someone working in the kitchen. I had vague and cloudy memories of my mother working in that same room, and as I crept up onto the porch and peered through the window I half expected to see her standing there. Instead, I saw the figure of a doughty old woman making pancakes on the stovetop. I recognized her instantly as Mrs. Kreitner, whom, along with her husband, I paid to maintain Crowninshield Manor and this house.

I must have lost my footing, for as I was watching her I slumped against the door, causing a loud bang and startling the old woman. She cried out, ran to the door, and flung it open. I’m not sure what she expected to see, but it certainly wasn’t me. There was an audible gasp, followed by a short silence that was finally broken by recognition.

“Miss Megan, they told us you were dead!”

I nodded as I walked into the house, technically my house, and sat down at the kitchen table. “To quote Twain, ‘Rumors of my death have been highly exaggerated.’”

“Rumors,” whispered the old woman. “T’weren’t rumors that brought the lawyers to our door.”

Just then, a second figure, that of Mr. Kreitner, came through into the kitchen. “Sheila, who exactly are you talking to at this godforsaken hour?” When he saw me I thought for sure he was going to drop the worn china cup that he was carrying. “It ca-ca-ca-can’t be,” he stuttered.

“Good morning, Mr. Kreitner,” I said to him. “I assure you, your eyes are not deceiving you, and I am not a spirit, nor a phantasm. I am your employer, Megan Halsey-Griffith, and I assure you that despite the police reports and the actions of my lawyers, I am quite alive.”

Old Mrs. Kreitner reached out and touched my hand with her own. “She’s real, Alex, though chilled to the bone.” She stood up. “I’ll make some tea—Alex, you fetch the doctor.”

“No doctors!” I barked, and then for a moment I paused. “No, perhaps a doctor is just what I need.” I wrote down a name and address and sent the man on his way, imploring him to be discreet and tell no one of my existence. After he left I turned to his wife. “I’m counting on the both of you. My presence here must be kept secret. What’s more is I’ll need your support. In my current state I have just a few clothes, and no access to monies of any sort.”

“Your mother left behind some of her things when she moved over to Griffith House, I never did have the heart to throw them away. They might be twenty years out of style, but I think they’ll fit you, Miss. You do favor her, after all.” She paused for a moment. “As for money, Miss, I think we can get you a tidy sum. That is, if you don’t mind a bit of fraud, Miss.”

“Fraud, Mrs. Kreitner?”

“Well, only against yourself. Mr. Kreitner was planning to do some work on the roof this summer, and has already put in a request for monies in which to buy materials. We could give you those funds, and delay the work until you resolve whatever problem it is that got you murdered, and you work out a way to get yourself back amongst the living.”

“Can I say, Mrs. Kreitner, that you are taking all this rather in stride, me being not dead and all.”

“You call me Sheila, and truth be told my family is Irish and I have five nephews amongst the Republicans. Being temporarily dead is a regular thing amongst that part of the family.”

“Thank you, Sheila, now where are those clothes?”

An hour later, I was dressed in one of my mother’s old outfits. It wasn’t a perfect fit, but nothing a belt or pin couldn’t fix. I was waiting in the parlor when Alex Kreitner brought back the man I had sent him for. It had been some time since I had seen him, and it seemed to me he had aged somewhat, but he was still the fine and dapper-looking man I had known since I was a small child. He stood there in the light of the morning sun, holding his medical bag, looking at me without the least bit of surprise on his face.

“Good morning, Miss Halsey-Griffith.” He smiled as he spoke.

I put my book down and rose to greet him. “Thank you for coming, Doctor Hartwell. I hope you don’t mind, but I must ask you to be discreet and tell no one that I am here, or that I am even alive.”

“Of course,” he retorted. “But are you?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Miss Halsey-Griffith, it has been my experience that sometimes the most fundamental things, the things we assume that cannot possibly be wrong, are the ones we should question the most. Do you know why this is?”

“Because this is Arkham.”

He nodded. “Because this is Arkham. So I ask you again: are you here, and are you alive?”

I crossed the room and offered him my hand. “Why don’t we let you make the final determination of those facts, Doctor Hartwell?”

The good doctor, in violation of all decorum and standards of decency, spent the next hour poking and prodding various parts of my body, drawing blood, taking hair samples, looking in my eyes, nose, and throat, and by any reasonable account doing a thorough job of examining me. He even had me carry out a few makeshift tests of physical strength and endurance. It was perhaps the most interesting and yet most unromantic time I had ever spent with a man. There was rather a lot of hemming and hawing, and a few harrumphs as well. Whatever he had learned about me, it didn’t seem to please him.

“Well, the good news, Miss Halsey-Griffith, is that you are not dead.”

A snippet of poetry came to mind, “That which is not dead . . .”

“But I would caution you as well. A cursory examination shows that all your vital signs are within normal ranges; a physician of average skill would not notice certain discrepancies.”

“Which are?”

“Your senses are peculiarly acute. I think you can see, or at least detect, portions of the spectrum that most people cannot—mostly infrared, but I suspect ultraviolet as well. Your hearing may extend into higher and lower ranges than normal. You’re resistant to pain and temperature extremes. Your ability to heal wounds is accelerated; the place where I drew blood hasn’t just closed up, it has healed. The strength in your arms, hands, and legs is tremendous, not just for a woman. I need to get your blood under a microscope, but it wouldn’t surprise me if certain characteristics were present that were reminiscent of some of my other patients who live not far from here.”

“That makes me remarkable, Doctor, not unlike Danner and a few other unique individuals that the press like to report about—not dead.”

He placed a few pieces of equipment back into his bag. “No, I wouldn’t say you were dead.”

I was growing a bit frustrated with the man. “What would you say, then?”

His tone suddenly became officious. “From all outward appearances you are a young woman with a beating heart, breathing lungs, and all the other organs that science says make you human. But I suspect that the biochemical processes that allow those organs to function are very different from those being carried out in the majority of the human population.” He guided me back into a chair and held my hand. “What I’m trying to say is that I’m not sure you are human.”

“Is that even possible?”

“The functional component of human blood is hemoglobin, which we believe to be an iron-based compound, but in other species it is hemocyanin, a copper-based compound—two different compounds that carry out the same function. You probably still use hemoglobin, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there were additional compounds present in your blood that improved efficiencies.”

“And you’ve seen this before?”

“There is a village, the residents of which could be said to have comparable physiologies. I wish I could tell you more, they really are quite fascinating.”

“These are the only examples of this you’ve seen?”

His eyes grew thin and he seemed to be considering something. “There is a procedure I know of, a reagent which is administered to the freshly deceased; it has been known to alter biochemistry in a similar fashion, along with some other, less sociable, side effects.”

“Is that what happened to my father?” I finally decided to let Hartwell in on why I asked him here. “After all, you were his assistant when he died.”

Hartwell was clearly taken aback, but didn’t even take a pause. “Your father was a great man, it was an honor to work with him. What happened later wasn’t his fault. I blame someone else entirely.”

“Herbert West.” I didn’t let him speak. “When he resurrected my father and created what has come to be known as the Arkham Terror, he killed your parents and forever sullied the family name of Halsey. He has unleashed a blight, a terrifying monstrous plague that left unchecked might threaten all of humanity.”

Hartwell blanched—I had clearly hit a nerve. “What do you mean?”

“I’ve seen the results of West’s experiments first hand. I’ve also seen exactly how maniacal and irresponsible the man himself is. He’s a child who refuses to share his toys. Which wouldn’t be so bad if he would learn to clean up after himself.”

“While I find your analogy somewhat droll, I can’t disagree with it.”

“Then we are agreed, you and I will work together and find a solution to the problem of reanimation.”

“What exactly are you proposing?”

“If there is a chemical reagent that can reanimate the dead, perhaps there is a similar reagent that can be used to—well, for the lack of a better word—deanimate them. I was hoping, Doctor, that given your experience and hate for West, you might be up to the task.”

Doctor Hartwell stood up, straightened his suit, and adjusted his tie. “Miss Halsey, I must admit that I admire what you’ve conceived here is—well in a word—diabolical. However, while I won’t oppose your little endeavor, I can’t be part of it, either. I’ve spent a lifetime pursuing some sense of vengeance against what West did to me and mine. All it has done is taken me down the same path.” He turned and took a step toward the door. “A word of advice, my dear: be careful how far you take this little vendetta. If you aren’t careful, your quest for vengeance will become stronger and more terrible than you can imagine, perhaps even more terrible than the monstrous plague you seek to snuff out.”

I suppose I must have grown irate with the good doctor, for I suddenly stood up and spoke to my guest in a voice that bordered on the uncivil. “Thank you for your opinion, Doctor, but I’ve seen what West has created lurking out there in the dark, and it has to be dealt with. If you aren’t man enough to face them, to do what has to be done to save the world, then to hell with you.”

Hartwell opened his mouth to speak, but then apparently thought better of it. He left frustrated, slamming the door and summoning the Kreitners, who were understandably alarmed.

“Are you all right, M-M-Miss?”

I stood staring out the window as Doctor Hartwell walked down the pathway to the street. “I’m fine, Sheila, just fine.” I turned to look at the two of them standing there. They weren’t exactly the finest of laboratory assistants, but they were all I had; they would have to do. “Is my father’s private laboratory still in the basement?”

Mr. Kreitner nodded. “It’s a little dusty and some of the rubber seals are probably rotted out, but it’s all down there.”

“Excellent.” I put my hands behind my back and stalked across the room. “We have some work to do, a great deal of work.”

It has been months, almost six months to the day, since I came back to Arkham and then came back from the dead. I’ve been in hiding most of that time, secreted in the home of my father and attended to by the Kreitners. They’ve been as helpful as they can, but they aren’t trained in science or medicine and I’ve had to do most of the work myself. I haven’t been out of this house, out of the laboratory, for more than a few days that entire time.

In June I found myself standing outside Hartwell’s house on Crane Street. I stood there in the dark, staring at that house where the thing that was my father had killed two people. Hartwell knew more than he was saying; he could help me, I knew that much. Why he had chosen . . . refused . . . to help me, I didn’t know, and didn’t understand. I wanted answers, I deserved answers, but I stood there in the light of the streetlamp and never got closer than the sidewalk.

My father’s lab proved adequate to my needs, as did his medical books and notes, which furthered my education into areas of human physiology and medicine that my previous studies, those with Herbert West, had not taken me. With nothing else to do, I threw myself into my studies, taking crash courses in anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, and pharmacology. By July I had read more than a hundred books and monographs, and felt that my education had equaled or surpassed that of any first-year intern. I had all the knowledge, all the education. The only thing I lacked was experience in actually treating patients.

And any sort of actual degree.

But I hadn’t set myself on this path to get a degree or to treat patients. That had been my father’s dream, or so his notes and diaries revealed. Apparently my family has a long history of being physicians, particularly on my grandmother’s side. The family had served Bavarian royalty for generations; one illustrious Waldman had once even taught at the University of Ingolstadt. It seems that I came from a long line of noble physicians. Tending to the ill was in my blood, but I wasn’t pursuing a noble career in medicine. I was pursuing something else, something that relied on centuries of advances in science, but it wasn’t going to be a new medicine or treatment.

I used my own blood. I learned that from Hartwell’s hints. I distilled it down, purified the components, and injected it into dead rats that Mr. Kreitner brought me. The initial results were disappointing. My reanimation reagent was more than adequate—the rats came back wrong, violent, and aggressive. More aggressive than any other creature I had ever seen in my life. They mimicked the behaviors I had seen in humans who had been subjected to some version of the reagent, including being cannibalistic, resistant to injury, and remaining mobile even through dismemberment. Major damage to the brain, an ice pick through the skull, was the only sure method of dispatch.

The deanimation reagent wasn’t as effective.

In proper doses injected directly into the brain it worked fine. Unfortunately, it took time and almost precise delivery to be effective. Other methods of delivery—I tried darts, sprays, and vaporizers—simply weren’t effective. Unless I got the reagent directly into the brain, my concoction just didn’t work; putting it in the body, into the blood, just wasn’t enough. By the beginning of August I realized that I had to somehow modify the reagent—something was keeping it from reaching the brain.

The problem was that I didn’t know how.

My father’s books were decades out of date, and I couldn’t exactly wander into the medical library at Miskatonic and start doing research. I wouldn’t even know where to start to look.

But I knew someone who did.

It took me a time to work up the courage, but one night in the middle of August I found myself on Crane Street looking at Hartwell’s house, and I couldn’t stay on the sidewalk anymore. With some hesitation I walked up to his door. I stood there for a few minutes, more scared than nervous, but I finally reached out and knocked on the door.

It took only a moment for the man to come to the entryway, but when he finally did swing that door open, the look that was on that face was not the one I was expecting. It wasn’t one of surprise or fear, but rather of resignation. He looked at me and at the case I was carrying, nodded slightly, and ushered me inside.

“I’ve been expecting you,” he said as I crossed the threshold.

I let my desperation become apparent. “My deanimation agent works, as long as I inject it into the brain, but it does nothing if I deliver it elsewhere.”

We sat down in his parlor. “Lewandowsky’s hematoencephalic barrier. Have you read about the dye experiments of Ehrlich and his student, Goldmann?” I shook my head no. “Ehrlich was injecting dye into the bloodstream in an attempt to make fine structures of organs visible. It worked, but failed to stain the brain and central nervous system. His student, Goldmann, injected dyes into the brain, but this failed to spread into the surrounding blood vessels and tissues. This suggests that there is some kind of barrier between the two that keeps some materials, likely including your reagent, from moving from the blood into the brain,” Hartwell explained. “If you want your reagent to work you need to find a way to penetrate that barrier.”

“Of course I want my reagent to work, why wouldn’t I?”

Hartwell stood up, took his glasses off, produced a small handkerchief, and then began to slowly clean the lenses. “We can find a way to penetrate the barrier, to make your deanimation reagent work. I’m thinking about shotgun shells with some of the shot replaced with ampules of your concoction. Headshots that penetrate the skull and allow the reagent to seep into the brain should be sufficient, if rather inefficient.”

I stood up in offense. “My reagent is nearly perfect, it’s more than 90 percent effective, and I’ve gotten the response time down to mere seconds. How much more efficient do you want it to be?”

The man had an introspective look as he stared at me. “My father, and his father before him, were butchers. When I was a boy, maybe ten, they took me out to a farm down by Witches’ Hollow. We spent the morning hunting for deer so that we could have venison for the shop, and I watched my father shoot a buck, and then I helped him clean and dress the carcass. In the process we took care to remove all the pellets and pieces of broken bone, making sure none of the meat was contaminated.”

“Later, after lunch at the farmhouse, we bought a hog from the farmer and my father had it slaughtered. This was the first time I had actually seen this. The farmer took the hog and tied its back feet together, and then strung it up over the branch of a tree. It was screaming, calling, kicking, and bucking, but to no avail. After about ten minutes the pig relaxed, and the farmer walked slowly up behind the whimpering animal and drew a knife across its throat, cutting deep into the flesh. The animal immediately began screaming and kicking, again as its blood drained out like water from a spigot. Almost as an afterthought, one of the farmer’s sons brought a basin and set it beneath the animal to collect the blood. It took more than five minutes for the animal to stop squirming, but it seemed longer. Afterward, the farmer and my father gutted and cleaned the animal. We took the carcass, and the farmer kept the organs, head, and feet. It was an additional form of payment, for the work the farmer had done in slaughtering and butchering the animal.”

“On the way home I had a question for my father, but it took me almost half the drive to work up the courage. I wanted to know why the hog had been killed with a knife, why it had to suffer, why couldn’t it have been shot instead, like we had the buck. He told me something I should have already known. The buck was shot, but it took us longer to clean the meat, and we lost some of it. The hog took longer to die, but the end result was a more complete use of all the parts. Each method was efficient in its own way, but the end results were different.”

I stood there, trying to understand his point. “You want me to use a knife to kill the reanimated?”

He laughed a little as he shook his head. “No, Miss Halsey-Griffith. I want you to think about what your end goal is. Despite not being formally trained as a scientist, you’ve accomplished a great deal. You’ve come up with a very elegant and scientific solution, but is that what we—you—need here?”

“I don’t follow.”

“Let me put it another way. Before you perfected your deanimation reagent, how did you put down experimental failures?”

“I used an icepick through the skull.”

“So, before we sit down and try to create a weapon that penetrates the skull and delivers your reagent, can we maybe consider that there might be another way, a more brutal and less scientific method?”

“Gunshots directly to the head?”

Doctor Hartwell put his glasses back on. “It has been my experience that the simpler the solution, the better.”

“I would need a gun with a significant capacity.”

“Well, my dear Miss Halsey-Griffith, there are two things that I have to say about that. The first is that I believe Colonel Thompson and his Auto-Ordinance Company have made great improvements in their weaponry since the war.” He smiled and showed me to the front door.

“What was the second thing?”

He opened the door and ushered me out. “Guns and their usefulness in pursuit of your goal are beyond my expertise. Meaning I am of little use to you. Good night, Miss Halsey-Griffith.” The door didn’t slam in my face, but it might as well have.