Short Story: “The Animation of Matter”
“The animation of matter: if we are not of such stuff as vivified matter, then why would it not be that the shades are likewise atoms moving at different speeds.”
“I, Dr. Adelaide D. Luckstrim, or Ada for short, a medical doctor just arrived in Ontario, California had been researching the matter even Penetration at last. as I began my new position at Chaffey College during the Spanish influenza. Being relatively distanced from the epicenter of the pandemic, the bodies stacked up even still, and my research of reviving the dead became more and more urgent.”
“It was my mission to not only understand the quintessence of the soul, to look deep within the sparkling space between space, magnified cells, and the space in between, but to find a way to regenerate cells upon the onset of Death.”
On many a crisp morning, Ada could be seen writing in a journal by the window with a steaming cup of tea. If one were to take a deeper look, to somehow penetrate beneath her skin and see her thoughts, one would see her singular obsession with the potentiality of animating those who had passed on to the unknown country. We might consider her an aspiring lady Pygmalion in the cold hard year of 1917. Certainly, the Pygmalion myth was on her mind as she wondered “Whatever did they call the statue?” It was a reminder that her experiments were about saving life rather than her own aggrandizement. The most fascinating thing about the myth was the cold marble brought to life after all.
Ada was a Catholic, and the church frowned upon playing God, but this was a new age, and so many of the young were dying. She went to church every Sunday and said her confessions, but on the other days of the week, during her enforced sabbatical for the college, which had closed down as the numbers of the ill and dying grew, aside from helping the ill, she studied all of the modern medical works along with the old.
Being so far from civilization amidst orange groves and open sky, in the shadow of a mountain on a quiet plain, it was difficult to get the books she needed, but the college library helped. It remained open on an appointment basis, and the librarians were always helpful in ordering books from other colleges even if they took months to arrive. Because of their cooperation, Ada was able to dive into rare medical and alchemical works. These texts were important because they trod on ground considered taboo by the establishment. Ada read in awe about graveyard dirt being refined and purified, yielding a strange gold like substance. She immersed herself in theoretical texts about the metamorphosis of elemental form. The stars and their angelic correspondences took on new meaning as she envisioned medical miracles that could breathe fresh life into otherwise inert flesh.
Ada was able to do her experiments in the basement of her large Dutch Revival home. She acquired equipment at loan from the college across the street. Her experiments took on a haunting quality as the bodies began piling up on the street. Sometimes, truth be told, in the darkness of night, Ada would go to the street and procure a body for her experiments. Her frame was frail, so this was no easy feat. She would enlist her butler to aid her at these times. He frowned on her activity but had been close to the family since she was a child. He was loyal in his trust that the experiments were not just a manifestation of some mental illness but rather a means to fighting the germ infecting the masses. Once tucked inside the basement, Ada would send jolts of electricity into the acquired corpse while cooking away at various substances, hoping to create the perfect philter of vitality.
The illness spreading was no plague, but the modern medical literature failed to provide any clues about what could stop it. Inoculations were the rage, funded by big East coast money, but she had faith in some quicker solution, a solution that would have utility even beyond the current outbreak. Her experiments took time, and like the doctors depicted in literature, there was continued futility overhanging her work. However, her ambition led her to continue reading. That is how she stumbled upon Paracelsus’ writings on the homunculus.
A homunculus is an artificially created life, said to have strange powers. The alchemists, the early chemists and doctors as she saw them, believed that human beings could create life as they carried the fire of god within, that ever-reaching pneuma. It was all about proportions of vivifying substances, heat, incubation, and filtration. One would shape a man from earth or from earth mixed with other substances and breathe life into it while invoking God, all the while observing the steps listed in the magical recipe. Ada found the concept one with promise.
The homunculus that freed Prague from the crush of Anti-Semites has been widely accepted as true throughout Europe. Ada mused that if a creature could be given life outside a womb, then life could be sparked in the dead as well. She could then use the reanimated corpses as a means to grow organs to replace the ones that burst in the victims of the unusual influenza visiting America. The homunculus was no easy feat though, and Paracelsus, as others, had strange ways of coding their texts. The only thing to do was to continue her experiments.
In her private and spacious laboratory, she began acquiring ever more rare equipment, following the instructions of Paracelsus. She set up an alembic, a furnace, thermometers, and tubes that would transfer the vivifying substances of sperm and blood into her corpses. Luckily, she had human sperm and blood delivered to her rush from a colleague working at USC’s medical college.
There was a problem, however, that she hadn’t anticipated. Her equipment was metal and was running a lot of energy. While she had used electricity in an attempt to revive the recently deceased, having power available in this way was a luxury, one afforded to her by her position of importance at the college. The house was not fit to transmit so much energy, however, and eventually, things spun out of control.
One sweltering October day, a true Indian summer, there was a thunder and lightning storm. A wild fork of lightening zapped though the house and its twin electric bolt zapped the farm two blocks east over at the olive grove
As the sky wrent above the farm, the spirits entered, unaware that they had at some other time passed beyond the realm of the living into the realm of the dead, yet here they traversed that boundary again, just as ignorant as the first time.
Ada would have been unaware about such phenomena had not the curtain been open by means of her once silent but now frighted black cat. The cat nearly leapt out of its skin at the burst of light emanating from the heavenly bolt, resulting in it knocking the curtain back to reveal the spectacle to the east.
Even though this burst of light lasted but a fraction of a second, Ada’s, and the cat’s, vision was obscured by the blinding imprint of the sky splitting.
Do the shades battle in the realm of the dead, or once deceased, do they drop their enmity like a heat that burns, turning water to vapor? The question was worth considering, for it was upon this land that blood was once shed hot upon the ochre dust, boiling upon the immovable stones, nourishing the withered grass. Human battling human is one of the oldest truths, and it was one that hung in the air as she blinked back her vision of what must have once passed to watch the spirits of the dead presently march though the split seam of sky. It was not so much a march of corpses as it was of men and ladies in travel dresses, antiquated fashion, or dirty rags. Though Ada watched in earnest, one might ponder if she was actually embroiled in a fainting dream. Fevered and hysterical, perhaps Ada dreamt that the shades were marching through the hard heat of a Southern California autumn in search of water. It was so hot that certainly the heat could pierce to the heart even of the dead. Her vision had been blinded, painted white, though momentarily, but still she had training to resist the slow and perhaps inevitable fainting spell that such a troubling sight would normally cause in a lady. Her state of consciousness is arguable, but in her mind, she watched them raptly without detection while questioning her stability of thought and cursing the progressive alchemy of her modern engagement with physik, now seeing the frightening implications of challenging death before her very eyes. Such rigid, raging curses she threw at all of science, at the periodic table, of cells that withered and bloomed, of transformed common compounds that turned the orderly mind into a carousel of ghosts.
She thought she was watching the shades, but what is closer to the truth is that she was being watched and not just from a distance. Though she could see some of them, there were other entities within her vicinity that were as of yet still invisible to her. Somehow the lightning bolt that connected her home with the farm had activated something brewing in her laboratory, a mysterious substance that mixed with extremely high voltage had the power to blur the boundaries between life and death. The sperm and blood in the alembic which had been previously warmed to just above room temperature had received some of the heat from the errant lightning bolt. Just as Paracelsus promised in his hinting and mysterious way, a small clear man began growing in her laboratory.
When she woke up after the storm, several hours had passed. She was not sure if she had dreamt or if the events she witnessed had truly came to pass. After gathering herself off the floor, she went down to her laboratory, noting only that the glass alembic which had once housed that brewing potion of bodily fluids had shattered, along with her dream of making many small artificial men and extracting their organs or, if legend was true, have them do magic to perform miraculous healings of the ill. What she failed to consider was the amount of time she had been unconscious. During those hours, the small clear man that had sprung up in her alembic grew at a rapid pace, shattering the confines of his glass cell and spilling the elixir of life on to the laboratory floor.
Ada went back into the house, just a few steps behind. She was unaware not only of the alchemical man she had haphazardly birthed but also of the ghosts that gained entry from the tear in the heavens during the electrical storm. They were drawn to the spilt fluid of the homunculus’s shattered womb, and the ones that could sip of it decided to stay around as they were creatures of never-ending thirst, being neither fully dead nor fully alive.
This unlikely yet all too real alchemical mishap led to these hungry ghosts gusting and blowing around the rooms of her home. As Ada soon discovered, there were mischievous spirits in her domicile, slamming doors with the power of riotous, unrestrained winds. Those winds, they sighed and they moaned, swished and dove, they danced in the fans as our poor lady doctor hid below, peering out from the covers of her bed or from behind the doors of her heavy armoire.
*
“Why, Ada, this tea is to die for. Where ever did you acquire it?” Henrietta, the college president’s gorgeous blonde wife, crooned at Ada’s table.
Ada was bored with the idle chatter of Sunday teas, but since her sabbatical, her company had been the dead for the most part as her butler was busy running the household. Thus, inviting some ladies over for tea was a choice that she made in order to stay better connected with the world of the living.
“I took the train to Pasadena. There was this delightful little shop that had a variety of full leaf.”
“Did they have apricot tea?” Irene, her sweet and homely neighbor chimed in.
“Yes. I suppose they did now that you mention it.”
By 5:00 P.M., her guests had left, the only evidence of the living were the crumbs comingling on the tea table. Ada contemplated how the women engaged with her as if everything was normal, as if there weren’t dead bodies in the gutters, as if Ada herself wasn’t a sight for sore eyes. Even more perplexing to Ada was the contrast between the image of her life and what her life actually was. The hauntings had been going on for weeks after all.
The ghosts mainly came to her when she was alone in the twilight hours after work. Her body would be weary from long hours standing and tending to the ill or experimenting. She was sure they wanted to drown her on air since they found expression in such great quantities of it and held no reserve at her delirious panic.
Other times, the ghosts wouldn’t bother with gusts of wind. Instead, they would follow her around her home and whisper secrets in her ear about the dead. They could only emanate, however, within strange angles — if not as wind than that of shifting shadow, if not in shadow then in reflections uncast: images found traveling in mirrors but with no physical form. Still yet they found ways in even if she threw fabric upon the glass. They could come in with sounds. They could vibrate off the walls.
Ada invited a friend of hers, a professor of metaphysics from USC. He took the train one cloudy day and arrived at her home to discuss her problem.
“The phenomenon of ghosts is an ephemeral thing. They always thirst for the substance that drives all things, for living, flowing blood.” Professor Schmidt insisted.
“That’s rather far-fetched don’t you think?” Ada countered glumly.
The professor sat impassively. He had a response for any counter-argument. “It’s noted in all of the lore of the ancient world. Now, Ada, tell me about the spirits that have been troubling you.”
“On a typical day, the sun rises to make shadows, and then the shadows begin to creep in the corners of my vision. Small bursts of softly flowing wind touch my skin. The curtains flutter and then items that aren’t secured are knocked over. The shadows then begin to take more distinct shape.”
“You said this all started happening after an electrical storm. Did you hit your head at all?” Schmidt interrupted.
“No, I was conscious the entire time.” Ada lied. “It wasn’t the electricity that worried me so much as some of the work I had been doing in my laboratory. I was studying reanimating the dead in order to help alleviate the human cost of the pandemic. Some of the fluids I was working on had leaked out during the storm.”
Schmidt rubbed his chin, looking at her intensely. “Continue your story.”
“First, I noticed a shadow in feminine form. The woman follows me throughout the house, vanishing if I turn around to look at her directly. A few weeks later, the shadows began to dance at the corners of her vision. I started feeling sick. Then I noticed that the shadows seemed to grow greater in power, and they began taking on forms, some human like and some monstrous. Then, and this is the reason I thought it was time to reach out to you for help, one of the entities move across the whitewashed wall with what appeared to be a knife, sharp and sinister.”
“Ada, you should come visit my wife and me in Malibu. It’s just lovely. Perhaps all of the isolation due to the pandemic is getting to you. You may just need some fresh air. Some of the laboratory chemicals may be making you ill.”
This was not the reaction Ada expected. Dr. Schmidt was an expert in the field of metaphysics. She had spent some time discussing alchemical experimentation with him in the recent past and knew he believed that some things in life couldn’t be explained with science, so for him to think she had simply hit her head or been poisoned was dissatisfying indeed.
Ada was expressionless. “Perhaps I shall” was all Ada said in reply.
*
Weeks ago, when she woke up after the electrical storm that unleashed the shades, she had convinced herself it was all a dream. After examining the damage from the lightning bolt, she quickly called the college for help disposing of the research cadaver she had been working on in the laboratory and then some of the masons in town for repairs.
She didn’t believe in feminine hysteria, but she did acknowledge the persistence and power of the soul even beyond death. She chose to believe in the shadows parading around her home, mocking her with imagery and disembodied sounds.
One morning, she woke up, recognizing the signs of dehydration. Her mouth lacked moisture and tasted like dust, her limbs ached, and her head hurt. She heard a low deep humming emanating from the laboratory. She pulled herself up from bed, put on a dressing gown, and made her way down the stairs to the basement. The hum became omnipresent, yet she could not detect its origins.
Once back inside the house, she saw a tall yet transparent man making his way slowly toward her.
“Stop!” she shouted. The being continued to creep toward her. She closed her eyes and told herself that she was imagining it. She realized she must be hallucinating despite her belief in the miraculous and unexplained. It was all too much. The shadows in general had been gaining strength, but this time she felt a sense of panic and urgency. Rationally, it must be a hallucination. All the entrances were locked, a habit unusual in such a remote community but one she observed religiously since the electrical storm. Nevertheless, as she swished into another room, frightened by the odd humanoid, she realized she was a lady alone in a wild corner of not much more than farmland and history. Despite her contracted ministrations to the college community, which allowed her human contact that was not otherwise plentifully available during the lockdowns, she was still alone.
The entity now was almost material even while its almost transparent quality shimmered oddly against the finely papered walls. He drew closer. The being emanated physical density that she could feel. He came closer still and was nearly on top of her. Though he was not actually pressing down on her flesh, she felt a sensation and yelled “Stop!” loudly at the still air, and lo, his form materialized still yet closer before her, like the breath of a lover upon the neck.
He was of pale complexion, hair of sepia. She was stunned that what had seemed merely the suggestion of a form began taking on feature. A voice issued from the being, which she stared at in a now mute and helpless terror. “Water” he croaked, and that was the last she remembered before opening her eyes.
*
She was able to work consistently for the course of days without further phantasmagoria. Being a modern woman of science, she was ready to dismiss her prior certainty about the ghosts in favor of rational obliviousness despite her once adamant belief that both guided her research and her world view.
The days marched on, and the shadows began to circulate through the house again. Autumn was deepening toward winter, and breezes faintly stirred the dead dry leaves. If not the wind from outside, then the winds within the house began to circulate and blow.
“What could it be?” she would think to herself, fully embracing denial as a coping strategy. She dismissed the slamming shutters and doors and turned a blind eye to the sinister shapes lurking in the shadows.
Day followed day like this until she could no longer ignore what was lurking in her home. She was filing papers in the study when the air turned to ice, and suddenly, he was there: the strange clear man of shadows. She could feel him distinctly behind her as his presence was not just visual but one that had a marked effect on the atmosphere. As she looked in front of her, the long shadow of a knife loomed over head.
She whirled around in panic only to find an empty room in the cold shadow of the mountain on that desolate plain.
She was now sure she was being hunted. Her denial crumbled apart. A feeling of menace painted the walls, yet she could not turn to anyone. Her confessions hadn’t been taken seriously in the past, and the college had rules. “What would the higher ups say about my failed experiments? What would they remark when looking at my sources, my materials? Would my failures cause them to disdain the hiring of women?” she wondered. She realized that she would be deemed hysterical. No rational mind would pay credence to her feeling. The sounds would be explained away as house sounds. The shadows that loomed, simply shadows. The feelings of despair and danger, perhaps the result of isolation, of not having a husband and family, or the stress of the job.
She did not believe that these phantoms were flights of fancy. She dreaded to sleep, but sleep took its natural course. Despite her nocturnal fear, it wasn’t at night when the clear tall man returned. Dreary sunlight crept in between the blinds. The feeble light painted her bed in stripes. In her dream, she was pinned down unable to move, unable to scream. The weight covered her body exactly but with considerable heaviness. She struggled, gasped for air, and senselessly reached for the light of day. When she opened her eyes, he was on top of her. “Water” he croaked. She felt unquenchable thirst. She made to scream, to lurch up, but she was still paralyzed, her muscles cramping in the manner of the dehydrated. She could see him, this strange ghoul from beyond the grave, but not fight him. She felt there were others too: shadows and shades, peering at the spectacle.
She wanted so badly to speak. She was sure this thing, stronger than all the other shades, was no regular phantom. He felt real in a material way, and his physicality, though visually disorienting, seemed organic rather than ghostly.
She stared at him pleadingly.
He lifted an arm and hand, displaying a heavy, wicked knife. He leaned closer. His breath smelled of the grave. His eyes were unfocused. She noticed he had a strange dent on the side of his head. It looked like a depression caused by something like a shovel. She still continued to try to break the sinister, paralyzing spell. The shadows moved closer, a breeze began blowing in the room, she could hear the rustling of paper. Then suddenly there was a sound unlike the ghostly ones she had been detecting around the house, a pounding, a loud pounding upon wood, she blinked, and he was gone, the weight was gone, the shadows inhabiting the room had lifted.
She pulled herself up sobbing. Her gaze went to her now bruised wrists. She rushed up and grabbed the crucifix above her vanity. She ran to the door of her bedroom and cast it open, expecting to see the sinister man of her nightmares. No one was there.
She began sleeping with the crucifix. Her reading and experiments, her patients, they still remained, but she was worn and afraid. She was distracted.
She kept seeing glimpses, almost of a form, like a woman in a lavish, old dress. It was always in the outer reaches of her vision or a blurry impression as from the mirror.
One night she was walking down the hallway, and she saw here. A widow, a young woman in a black Victorian gown, but she seemed to not be solid. There was something transparent about her, something that bent the light. “Water” the woman whispered. Ada noticed the woman’s lips were pale and dry, her eyes hollow, and the smell of the grave seemed to creep into the room.
Ada replied, “Water!? Yes, I will give you water.” One would have expected a scream perhaps, but Ada did not feel the same sense of menace radiating from this one. She was hopeful that this woman might help her figure out how to dispel the violent ghost from her home. Perhaps this woman phantom knew a secret, some obscure knowledge from the realm of the dead, that could help her turn things around.
Ada rushed past the woman to the kitchen to pour the water. She turned around. The woman was still there but flickering. She extended the glass of water, curious what this ephemeral thing would do. “Water” the shade croaked, looking longingly at the glass.
“Yes, come take it.”
“Water” The woman wailed, slowly and heart breakingly.
Ada decided in a flash of desperate inspiration that the woman might actually take the glass if she placed it at her feet.
The shade looked at it.
“What are you doing here? Are you a ghost? Can you help me? A man, like you, a ghost is trying to hurt me” Ada addressed the shadowy feminine ghost. She paused, looking imploringly at the flickering phantom before her.
Ada felt an incredible sense of thirst. Her skin started itching. She kept licking her lips.
The corpse like woman shifted awkwardly to pick of the glass and stared at her.
Ada continued, “Tell me about yourself. Why are you here?”
The shade stared. “Water” she whispered.
Ada’s skin was crawling. She felt thirstier by the second.
“Who is that man? Why does he want to hurt me?” The shade looked at her and dematerialized. The glass crashed on the floor, shattering. A shard cut Ada’s leg, and blood flowed down her leg, mixing with the water on the floor.
*
Time kept passing.
Ada hadn’t been attacked again, but she kept thinking about the rift in the sky. It had been located just above the old farm house next door. Rumor had it that a man had been killed there. Not once did her mind turn to the man she was trying to create in her laboratory. Instead, she was preoccupied with neighborhood tales indicating that before the town was built, the farm house marked the end of a long desert trail coming from the east. The pioneers who made it had crossed Death Valley. She was certain the lady ghost, who she nicknamed the widow, was one of those pioneers based on the style of her dress and her ailment. As for the man who was once murdered so close by, she pondered if he could be the strange sepia haired being who was invading her tranquility.
Ada decided to make a call to the neighboring farm house. The inhabitants could tell her the story of what happened there. Finally, she thought to herself, “The man might not be the murder victim; he could be one of those other ghosts, or maybe he really was some sort of homunculus. His spirit might have drunk the strange fluid formulating in the basement. Maybe he found vivification thereby.” If he wasn’t a regular ghost but a form of reanimated matter made possible by her experiments, then he might be the key to getting widespread recognition for her ground breaking formula and procedure. She wanted to see him again even though he inspired a superlative sense of terror in her breast, one that made her heart quake and vacillate in alarming proportions.
She was thinking these thoughts one morning while lying in bed. She was in and out of a troubled sleep. She knew it was day break and time to get to work. As she began mustering herself out of the heaviness of sleep, the air in the room became leaden and cold. Her muscles began cramping.
The shadows began condensing, but she couldn’t see the darkness gaining weight in the room. Her eye lids were stuck shut. She tried desperately to open them as she twisted and turned on the bed, tangled in her calico bedsheets. The skin of her eyelids felt as if it might tear apart at any moment.
She felt a pressing upon her. A body was there, heavy and uninvited.
“Water.” The body hissed in her ear. The hiss was cold and malignant. She tried to speak. Nothing came out but unhappy groans.
“Water.”
The voice was decidedly masculine, and she recognized it as none other than the voice of the sepia haired entity.
Still she struggled as he pressed ever more, ever more, ever more, and her breath receded ever more in reaction to his weight. His breath was ice, the cold of the grave. Her eyes opened, but her body was paralyzed.
She looked up. With the reduced air flow, she could not even whimper, nor ask the questions fluttering in the back of her mind.
Somehow above him, she could see a shadow, growing larger and more menacing. At the same time, the man’s oddly transparent skin darkened as she struggled for air, and terror welled up in her breast as a shadowy arm extended holding a gruesome blade that took on monstrous proportions, the way shadows extend under the high sun.
*
When finally someone noted Ada’s disappearance, there was no accompanying odor but rather just a corpse. It was the midst of winter, yet there was a record-breaking heat wave amidst a terrible drought. The authorities grimly entered her house and found her naked in bed with an antiquated blade sunk deep in her breast. Oddly, she was in a dehydrated state quite at odds with the natural decomposition of a corpse. She looked like an Egyptian mummy, like sun dried leather, her skin so dry that when they tried to lift the body for disposal her remains crumbled into a white, salt like powder. The only thing that did not disintegrate at the final hour was her heart and the blade that extended from it.
In her journal, her thoughts and reflections about the ghosts and the electrical storm seemed frenzied and incoherent. What is clear is that the water of life indeed animated matter but in such a way that can not be controlled. The homunculus was a murderer after all. Perhaps he had been reanimated when he would rather rest, the lightening rending apart time and space, sending the soul of the murdered man into the alembic where the aqua vita brewed. The other ghosts had been thirsty too, lost souls drawn by magnetism to an unlikely seat of vitality, but as this tale illustrates, they were of no help at all.
Her tale then is one of penetration at last, penetration into the realm of the dead and the exercise of creation, a penetration that left her dry.
