Gianfranco Mancini’s Reviews > Reanimators > Status Update

The next day rumors spread like wildfire, and the older residents of Arkham invoked comparisons to certain events that had occurred in June of 1882 following the collection of a meteorite that had fallen on the Gardner farm.

I intended to initiate use of the revised formula almost immediately, but my attention was drawn away by a single event, one that would in its complexity lead to a cascading horror which would result in what is now commonly referred to as the Dunwich Horror, and although such events would serve to absolve me of a certain guilt, they would, in the end, precipitate my own personal disgrace.

Dr. Herbert West and I came to fight in the Great War in service to the Canadian forces not as soldiers but as medical personnel, and I must
admit we did not volunteer wholly out of a willingness to serve our Hippocratic Oaths. No, our motives also included a desire, an unwholesome
need, to have unfettered access to a supply of both the freshly dead and the dying.

That day my world changed. Somehow, despite my desire to cease my studies in reanimation, the past had returned and ensnared me in its horror. I had tried to leave such things behind, tried and failed.
I had set out to wreak vengeance on the monsters that had killed my parents, and in the process I had become a monster myself.

I could not bring 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.

"Is this what you wanted, Doctor?" he whispered from behind me as the living finally succumbed to the cleansing flames. "Those men couldn't live
with what you had done to them, they thought death was better. Would you trade humanity for immortality?"
I fell to the ground, for I knew that the answer could only be no.

"What kind of God?" called out Gogol, "What kind of God, what kind of creator would make our hands, such beautiful hands, and then mock them with those possessed by Wilbur Whateley?"
To this day I do not know. If Wilbur Whateley was my creation, then what kind of creator, what kind of God am I?

I cannot fully describe the extreme devastation that I bore witness to on the hill, but I will say that never before or since have seen such a thing.
I have not been out to see for myself what they are calling the Dunwich Horror, but I can't imagine that it is in any manner worse than what I saw that day.

The firelight revealed what we had not seen earlier in the day: alabaster skin, chalk hair and eyes with cherry-colored pupils, she was a textbook case of albinism. That was all that was needed to reveal the identities of the pair before us, Noah Whateley and his simple daughter Lavinia, the two individuals we had been warned to steer clear of.

I am sure that few people in the world could identify the man behind and to the left of Morgan, but I could. The image is blurry, slightly out of focus, but I am positive that one of the men walking with Morgan was none other than the inhuman thing that masqueraded as Professor Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee.