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Truth be told, Dan doesn’t remember how he got home from the hospital, after everything. He must have driven, because it’s too far to walk in the cold and his car is in the driveway, but it’s a miracle he didn’t crash on the way, because he doesn’t remember anything. One minute he’s standing over Meg’s small, limp body, and the next he’s sitting on the couch, and his eyes won’t focus. Not on the wall, not the floor, not even his own hands shaking on his lap.
He knows what shock looks like. He’s seen it enough times, and in the last few months he’s been in shock more times than he ever thought he would, and he knows what he’s supposed to do, but he can’t bring himself to do it. Part of the shock, probably. Instead he shuffles to the kitchen, dry swallows one too many sleeping pills, barely makes it upstairs. He lies flat in bed, right on top of the covers, and counts by sevens until sleep takes him.
The next day is Saturday. He starts drinking at eleven in the morning and doesn’t stop, not even when he’s hunched over the toilet in the small tiled bathroom, forehead pounding and stomach screaming at him as he vomits, wishing Meg were here to run her hands through his hair and the back of his neck like she always did whenever he got sick.
Meg. Her soft smile and her sweaters, the apple smell of her shampoo. She used to hum when they studied together in her perfect smooth voice, and she always laughed at his puns even when they were horrible. She was going to be the best psychiatric nurse in the country, and Dan was going to marry her.
When he finally pushes himself to stand, he washes his mouth out with water from the sink, splashes cold water onto his face. There’s a half-full beer bottle on the counter that he brought in with him. He’s always been a lightweight. He takes another swig, and steps out of the bathroom.
At some point, the phone rings. Dan’s lying on the floor in the living room, in the small space between the couch and the coffee table, staring at the crack in the ceiling, and it takes almost until the end of the ring for him to work himself to standing and stumble to the telephone. “Hello?”
“Dan? It’s Lisa.”
His classmate in Dr. Wilmer’s class, who he sits next to and gets lunch with every once in a while, and who gave him all her notes the week last year he had the flu. “Hey.”
“Are you…“ Her voice hesitates. “I heard about what happened. I mean, I read about it on the news—although I don’t think anyone really knows what actually happened. Anyway, I’m sorry about Megan. Really sorry.”
He’s sorry too. Sorry he ever talked to her in the first place, because maybe if he hadn’t she would have been safe. Sorry it took him so long to saw that thing off her throat. Sorry he tried to revive her with Herbert’s ridiculous chemical potion, and cursed her to a second death even more painful than the first.
He can’t even think about Herbert right now, or something in him will snap.
“Dan?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Thanks. Do you—“ Guiltily, he glances at the clock on the wall. 2pm, but that’s no help. “Do you know what day it is?”
A pause over the phone, like Lisa’s trying to decide what to think about that. “Monday. I covered for you this morning, but I guess everyone’s already heard. Listen, do you want me to bring you some soup or something?”
He should probably eat, he realizes. Can’t actually remember if he has eaten since before. He hasn’t felt hungry, hasn’t felt much of anything. “That would be great, actually. Thanks.”
After he gets off the phone he showers, and brushes his teeth, because he doesn’t want Lisa to see how bad he was, and he doesn’t look in the mirror. He doesn’t want to see the hollow gaze that will stare back at him like—well, a corpse.
When Lisa arrives she ushers him into the kitchen and puts the soup in a real bowl for him, leans against the counter and watches him drink a glass of water. He thanks her and demonstrably takes a few bites, and she smiles wanly. She does not comment on the empty beer bottles scattered on every surface, or on the pile of dirty dishes in the sink that might at this point be growing something in it. She must sense that he just wants to be alone, because all she says is, “Take care of yourself, Dan. I mean it.”
He nods, and lets her leave.
The next day he goes back to class, because there’s nothing else to do. When they put him back on shifts at the hospital it doesn’t escape him that they’ve removed him from the emergency ward and put him on menial tasks only, but he can’t bring himself to care. It’s better than them trying to put him on some kind of leave, where he’d just sit at home and mope some more. He gives his coworkers a smile he hopes isn’t too forced, and tries to ignore the looks of sympathy following him around. At least when he sits down to lunch no one tries to get him to talk. They just let him listen to the hospital news, Karen’s date on Saturday, the new nurse in Pediatrics.
He feels normal for a few hours, and when he goes home he puts on the TV behind assigned reading, and tries not to think about anything else. The next day he picks things up from the grocery store and makes himself cook even though he’s never been good. Anything to bring some kind of routine to a life that has become nothing short of a horror sequence.
He finds himself pushing open the door to Herbert’s room, and he’s not sure if he wants to think about the reason. He tells himself someone has to deal with his things, and Herbert didn’t have any friends. Actually, Dan was his closest friend, and that’s not the word Dan would use to describe their relationship. Manipulator and idiot who fell for it, maybe. Actual mad scientist and the goon who follows him around because no matter how hard he tries, the work fascinates him. It’s unlike anything that’s ever been seen before. A breakthrough like no other.
Anyway, something has to be done with the things in his room. Dan stands awkwardly in the doorway, trying to figure out if there’s a way to deal with it without actually entering the space, until eventually he sighs and forces himself to step inside.
Herbert never spent much time in here, and Dan doesn’t remember him having a lot to move in. Just a few boxes, maybe. There’s nothing on his walls except a brain anatomy poster, and his bed is impeccably made, but there’s a scattering of legal pads and books on his desk, and his closet door is halfway open. A quick peek inside shows several of the exact same white button down, and the blue one Dan only saw him wear a few times. He reaches toward the desk, feeling, horribly, like someone will walk in at any moment and ask him what the hell he’s doing.
The top drawer is a mess of number two pencils, spare cash, and a battered passport. Part of him wants to flip it open and look at the photo, but he doesn’t. The second drawer is a few books of anatomy and more notebooks, mostly filled with his scientist’s scrawl, except for a notable few that feature a looping cursive belonging to someone else. Dan scans through pages wrinkled by reading over and over, but a lot of the notes are in German, and Dan only took Spanish through undergrad.
He flips through one more page, and something flutters to the ground—a note that looks like it’s been torn from some other page, in the same cursive but in English this time. Dan stoops into a crouch, holding it between dry fingertips.
Mr. West,
You know I have always been willing to sacrifice myself for this work. I fear that day may be near. I know you will continue our research with the enthusiasm and brilliance I have come to know in you. I do not know what I would do without you. Luck and care,
Dr. Hans Gruber
In the end, Dan doesn’t move anything in Herbert’s room, not even to straighten out the brain poster that’s hanging crookedly. Maybe another day, or another week. For now he goes back to his room and turns on the radio so loud it might damage his eardrums, and lies down on his bed until he falls asleep, a minute or an hour later.
It’s a week before he can bring himself to venture into the basement, into the lab. At first even thinking about it makes him sick but it has to be done, so he puts on old shoes and jeans and climbs down, finding a light switch at the bottom of the stairs that floods the room in warm light. Of course Herbert would never use it, just the blueish lamp pointed at the table because nothing else in the world mattered but the work.
The sight is a terrible one, and Dan almost goes right back upstairs and locks the door to never think about it again. Blood everywhere that must belong to Dr. Hill, and a shovel with the blade caked in something nasty. He dimly recalls seeing all this before, Herbert agonizing over his lost notebook, and confessing that he’d injected Dr. Hill, and Dan had been so focused on that he’d barely registered the mess around him. Test tubes smashed, stool kicked over, fridge door hanging open. With the cloth over the table Dan gathers everything up and dumps it all, retrieves a mop from the closet upstairs and cleans up as much of the blood as he can. He knows there’s re-agent in Herbert’s fridge upstairs but he can’t touch that. It’s all Herbert has left.
Had.
He slumps onto the stool, now upright, and puts his head in his hands.
Faintly from upstairs, there’s a muffled rattling at the front door. Dan freezes and jerks his head up. The rustling continues, and it sounds like someone’s trying to get in. Wildly, he hopes it’s plain old burglary instead of something worse, like some Frankenstein horror coming back for revenge, or something like that. Carefully, he slides off the stool and tiptoes back upstairs, grabbing the baseball bat on the way, the end still stained with the blood of some failed experiment creature of Herbert’s.
He hovers near the front door, waits for the person on the other end to either give up or to come crashing in.
Neither happens.
The knob turns, and a pale hand pushes open the door.
Herbert West steps inside.
He’s rumpled, the collar of his shirt stained with blood, one glasses lens cracked, a cut halfway healed across his cheek. But it’s him, in the same goddamn suit and smelling like antiseptic, and looking absolutely exhausted.
“Hello, Daniel.”
Dan’s jaw drops, the bat falling out of his hands with a crash to the floor. “You—” his mouth says, “You were dead.”
Herbert looks at him, and smiles that same infuriating little smile as when he’d stood outside Dan’s door and held up the note, while Dan scrambled to cover himself with a sheet. “Only for about ten seconds.”
That gets Dan going. He steps forward, grips Herbert by the lapels and shakes him, because anger is better than whatever the hell other emotions are threatening to bubble up and escape. “What the hell. Is wrong with you? It’s been weeks and no one’s seen anything and everyone thought you were dead and I saw you die and now you just show up here?”
Herbert grips his wrists until they both come to a standstill, but doesn’t let go after that, pressing his lips together with a worried wrinkle above his nose. “I’m sorry,” he says slowly. It’s the first apology Dan’s ever heard from him, and it will probably be the last. “I had to make sure there wouldn’t be charges against us. And…”
He hesitates. Dan releases his grip on Herbert’s jacket. “And?”
“I was unsure if you wanted to talk to me,” says Herbert.
For a moment, Dan doesn’t know what to say to that. He’s been so busy trying to cope with the fact that Herbert was dead that he doesn’t even know how he feels about him. The man that ruined his life in a matter of weeks, who thinks that life is a series of the right chess moves, although Herbert would probably sneer at the metaphor, tell Dan it was nothing but math and chemistry. Does he want to talk to him?
Herbert’s looking at him with wide eyes, waiting for an answer. For some reason, all Dan wants to do is gather him up into his arms and feel how warm he is and how steady his hands are, and never let him go.
Instead he grips Herbert’s hand, and pulls him into the house. “You look terrible,” he says. “Do you want to borrow one of my sweaters?”