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the thing that had once been Robinson, but I know what happened to that little boy, for as I ran I turned back, and my last fleeting glimpse was of that giant of a man beating the bloody child with his own ersatz club; a club that was thin and pale and terminated in five delicate fingers.

Chapter 4.

    THE SHADOW FALLS

    After my disastrous experience in Bolton, I found myself in the most desperate of states. My mind was shattered and my spirit broken. My quest for revenge had not only faltered but had led me to take risks and commit acts that had ended in the murder of an innocent child, a murder I held myself responsible for. In my rash attempts to revenge myself on Herbert West for the accidental death of my parents, I had followed in his footsteps and descended to the same depths of depravity. The irony was not lost on me. In the week immediately after the horrid day in which I reanimated the amateur pugilist James Robinson, and he tore a small child to pieces before my eyes, I shut myself away, canceling all my appointments and seeing no one.
    My only solace in those days was the evidence of my previous successes in the field of reanimation, the dozens of rats that occupied the cages hidden in my sub-basement laboratory. I had long ago slaughtered any revenants, and likewise the morbids had all since expired from their terminal malaise, leaving only untreated specimens and those rats that I called the risen, individuals that had been exposed to the reagent and showed no negative side effects. Attending to this community of normal and risen rats was the only thing that gave me any modicum of peace, and I devoted hours to the care and feeding of my charges.
    April came, and though I had once more begun seeing patients, my melancholy showed no signs of waning. Such was my state that even my neighbors had noticed and apparently decided to take action, for early one evening there came to my door Wingate Peaslee, the young son of my neighbor. My presence, he informed me, was required, and his mother had told him not to return home without me in tow. Assuming the worst, I grabbed my medical bag and quickly followed the child home. Mrs. Alice Keezar Peaslee, a lovely woman with flowing locks and a shapely figure, greeted me as I came through the kitchen door, and immediately handed me a large knife and fork. On the kitchen table was a large roasted chicken, and she kindly asked me to carve the bird. For the moment I was dumbstruck, but I quickly conceded to her request. Within a few minutes I had filled the serving plate and with the help of the three Peaslee children the table was set just as their father came through the door.
    Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee was a professor at Miskatonic University, primarily teaching economics and some business courses, of which I had been fortunate to benefit from. A decade or so my senior, his family and mine had been friendly since they first occupied the neighboring house in 1897. A serious but amiable man, Nathaniel Peaslee was a pillar of the community and was well loved by those who knew him.
    Dinner was a casual affair, with idle chatter about the children’s lessons as well as local and current events. It was only after the children had been dismissed, and Mrs. Peaslee had served coffee and then retired to the kitchen, that I learned the real reason that I had been summoned to the Peaslee home. Peaslee had learned that his personal physician, Dr. Arthur Hillstrom, was planning on retiring, and had yet to establish a successor to his practice, which consisted primarily of several dozen faculty members and their families. Similarly, Peaslee had also learned that many of his colleagues were significantly unhappy with the fees being asked by my old classmate Chester Armwright. All in all, suggested Peaslee, there were more than forty faculty members and their families that Peaslee believed he could deliver to an enterprising young doctor. That doctor, Peaslee believed, was myself.
    Slightly