Then I lowered the woman back to the slab and the waiting began. Perspiring, trying to ignore certain nameless oddities squealing and slithering in that anatomical sideshow, I timed it with my stopwatch. West claimed that this latest reagent—which now contained a certain abominable glandular secretion from the reptilian tissue that hissed in the vat—would give us, he believed, a near-perfect reanimation. I was skeptical, of course, remembering quite well the absolute horrors we had resurrected in the past. The very idea of them made something inside me clench tight.
There was nothing to do but wait. Sometimes reanimation was achieved within minutes, sometimes not for hours.
I wrote my observations in West’s voluminous leather-bound notebook while he examined the body: “10:27 PM,” he said. “Six minutes, twenty-three seconds since injection. No discernable reaction as yet. No evidence of rigor. Limbs are supple, flexible. Pallor mortis unchanged. Algor mortis has flatlined… temperature rising steadily now.” He checked the stopwatch. “At seven minutes, forty seconds, body temperature shows a noticeable spike. Sixty-one degrees… now sixty-two.”
West continued his examination while I wrote feverishly by lamplight, the shadows sliding around me. Above the infernal noise of the creatures in that room, I could hear the wind whipping outside, hear the creaking of a tree, the scrape of branches at the roof.
“Temperature up two degrees,” West said.
It was happening and I could feel it as I had so many other times. How to explain it? It was as if something in the atmosphere of the room had subtly shifted, as if the very ether around us was being charged with some unseen malefic energy. I swear to you that I could feel it crawling over my arms and up the back of my neck like a rising static charge. The shadows thrown by the lamps seemed thicker… oily, serpentine shapes that cavorted about us. Those abominations in their cages seemed to sense it and they began what can only be deemed a whining/shrilling/baying/screeching chorus of bestial wrath and fury that was part fear and part near-human hysteria. The profane head of that primeval-looking ape began to move in its jar of serum, suckering flabby lips to the glass like a snail. And in those bubbling vessels of vital fluid, the various limbs began a mad, hellish dance, thumping and bumping, hands wiggling their fingers and swimming around like waterlogged spiders. And in that vat of pestilential tissue, that seething firmament of fungous, godless creation, there was movement and hissing, weird slopping sounds. The metal lid began to rattle as if what was inside desperately needed to get out.
And then—
Through that bacchanalian cacophony of fleshy monstrosities, I heard a tapping. A single finger on the woman’s left hand trembled. It was tapping against the slab as if impatient. Then her body jerked stiffly, her back arching, bones straining beneath that thin veneer of skin, and a low mournful moaning came from deep in her throat. “Aaaaaaa,” she said. “Gaaaaahhhh.” It was a dry and scratching sound like claws on concrete, like the rustling of ancient wrappings in a violated tomb.
“Nine minutes, thirty-two seconds,” West said above the din. “Reanimation achieved…”
I was terrified to come into contact with her, for my fingers to brush against that shining, near-phosphorescently pallid flesh. And I say to you now, she sensed my unease, filled herself with my anxiety and tremor. For the eyes peeled open in that skullish face and they were glossy pink orbs, translucent like egg yolks, set with tiny pinprick pupils. She looked right at me, titling her head slightly and offering me a charnel grin of yellow, narrow teeth and blackened gums. It was a mirthless, sardonic grin of sheer malevolence that made me take a step back.
“You must not get up,” West told her as if she were any patient that had just undergone a difficult procedure.
Licking my lips, fear-sweat running down my spine, I said, “Tell us… where have you been?”
She began to shudder, limbs contorting, fingers gripping the edge of the slab out of sheer unbridled terror. Her mouth opened into a wide oval and she screamed, screamed with a tortured voice that echoed up from the bleak cellars of helclass="underline" “YAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!” It rose the hackles on both West and I. She looked around frantically like a caged animal. “I saw it… I… saw… IT…” she finally managed.
“What?” I said, my heart pumping in my throat. “What did you see…”
“…IT… IIIIIIIT!” she cried out. “IT! IT! IT! The jagged face… it was coming for me, it filled time… it filled space… EYAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!”
I had no idea what she was speaking of, but my mind cavorted with the most dreadful imagery. She had seen something. Something that terrified her and no doubt had shattered her mind. I could not know what. We all wonder what lies beyond the grim edges of death. We all hope it to be our savior, our deceased loved ones, the ultimate good… but what if it is something else? Some forbidding evil anti-human essence of malign corruption?
A mad terror took hold of me as she climbed from the slab, hugging herself with those stick-thin arms. I trembled so badly I thought I might swoon. And it was because she said my name. Looking at me with those eyes like suppurating pink ova, she said my name clearly, but with the mocking flat tone of a parrot. Her grinning mouth like that of a hooked fish… dead, blank.
Stumbling along with a pronounced stiff-legged gait, a foamy red-tinged saliva running down her chin, she descended on West who suddenly looked frightened. As she moved, snaking ribbons of saliva swung back and forth at her chin, her face a distorted, seamed fright mask made of white gossamer flesh like spider’s silk. Her eyes were sunken, pustular pits of wrath. She reached out to him with white-skinned, blue-veined hands that were like reaching, gnarled twigs.
Though an icy fear gripped me, squeezing my heart with cold fingers, I knew I must do something as she moved at my friend with her jerking, mechanical walk. I came up behind her and took her by the bare, bony shoulders and her flesh felt like thawing meat beneath my fingers.
A black slime running from her mouth, she turned and fixed with me with those eyes that had seen Death. I trembled in the cold lamplight of her gaze.
I used the only weapon I had: “Where have you been?” I asked her.
She backed away, clutching hands to the side of her head, greasy strands of hair hanging over her face which was frozen in a silent, wasting scream. “IT,” she said with that grinding, subhuman tone. “IT… IT… COMES…”
With that, she whirled away from me, running from the room, knocking a table of glassware to the floor, her entire body jumping with wild spasms and contractions as if every neuron in her brain were misfiring. We heard the door open above the shrieking animals and heard the night, heard the woman crying out as she found the darkness of oblivion and it found her.
And it was at that moment, as she fled, that we both felt something in that room, a presence, a force, a darkness beyond death, moving around us with the whisper of casket satin, the flutter of shrouds. I think it was IT: the Angel of Death. It was there, so palpable that it flooded the room with an unspeakable despair and darkness… then it was gone as if it never were.