In the course of the next several months I became increasingly involved in Prof. Glauben’s research efforts. I don’t think I became as obsessed as he with the goal of the experiments, but rather I developed an affection for the process. I viewed each individual experiment as an end unto itself, and reveled in the results for their own sake.

I must admit that I also was flattered by Prof. Glauben’s increasing reliance on my assistance, and I developed a not insignificant reputation within the university as a valuable research assistant. There occurred a commensurate decline in my baccalaureate studies (which putatively focused on politics), and by the end of my third year I formally reframed my course of study to physiology. The other faculty seemed skeptical of my association with Prof. Glauben, but they couldn’t fault my work.

Academics, however, held only minor interest to me. It was the research experiments that captured my imagination. I was engrossed in the laboratory most evenings, often working until midnight. Our labors steadily progressed, and by the winter of 18– we felt confident that our work was ready for the supreme test: Thus far we had kept alive sample tissues and small animals, but we were now ready to apply our method to a human being. Unfortunately, the experiment was a miserable failure, for, upon drinking the potion, our volunteer (an old retired bookkeeper) coughed, blinked rapidly, and fell face-first upon our credenza, dead, completely destroying two-thirds of our tea service.

Yet we would not be discouraged. It is true, of course, that Prof. Glauben was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison for the unintentional manslaughter of the bookkeeper, but he insisted that I continue the experiments during his absence. For this purpose I set up a small laboratory in my apartments and secured for myself Prof. Glauben’s books and papers. Indeed, I had everything I needed except one vital component: a supply of cadavers.

For human bodies had become the primary vehicle of our experiments, indicating through their rate of decomposition the viability of the electrical life force that we managed to elicit. Thus cadavers served, in effect, as our litmus paper. Due to his esteemed position, Prof. Glauben had been able to secure an adequate supply of this litmus paper from the city morgue. But I, lacking suitable credentials, enjoyed no such access. In order to continue the experiments during the professor’s incarceration, therefore, I was forced to resort to grave robbing.

No doubt you find the idea of grave robbing to be revolting and immoral. Admittedly it’s not a topic for discussion among polite society. But I was able to justify my unpleasant work to myself, and perhaps I can alleviate some of your disgust as well. I reasoned thus: First, graverobbing is not actually robbery, for no one is being robbed. The former inhabitant of the body–the soul–has shed its earthly shell and has ascended to a place where a body is superfluous at best and downright burdensome at worst. The only ones being deprived of the body are the worms of the grave, and few of us have any particular concern for their diets.

Not only were the bodies I was disinterring unclaimed, but they were serving no good purpose. I, however, was putting them to productive use; surely positive utility is preferable to mindless waste.

Whether or not you now accept my justification, I was, at the time, convinced, and I proceeded with my work. Had I only foreseen where those accursed labors would lead!

PART 4 WILL APPEAR ON MONDAY

Prof Glauben’s personal laboratory was a cluttered and grotesque affair. A score of human skulls lined two shelves on the far wall, all seemingly staring at me with fixed grins when I entered the room. There were live brown rats in a cage, desiccated dead rats under a bell jar, and a dozen eyeballs floating in a formaldehyde bath. On the wall hung charts detailing human musculature and blood vessels. A fully articulated skeleton was suspended by a wire next to Prof. Glauben’s desk, on which various ledgers, journals, and reference books lay open at various angles. Somewhat incongruently a black and white cat that I later learned was named Helios slept on a pillow that lay in an open cabinet drawer.

Prof. Glauben was peering into a microscope when I entered, and I waited silently for him to finish.Though his back was to me, he somehow sensed my presence for he held up a hand in greeting and said “Velcome, my boy!” while still fixating on his microscope. After a few moments he scratched some words into a journal with a fountain pen and then finally stood and turned to me.

“I am eager to have your assistance, Venwick. There is much of great importance that ve shall accomplish together.” He held my two shoulders at arms length and looked me over, as though inspecting a sweater for moth holes. He smiled and released his grip. “Naturally, you will want to know on what ve shall be working. Please to sit down and relax, and I shall give you a toenail.”

“Do you mean thumbnail?” I asked hesitantly as I lowered myself into an armchair.

“Quite possibly. Your English idioms are so confounding.” Prof. Glauben resumed the seat behind his desk. “Venwick, I have spent zhe past several years isolating ein electrical impulse zhat appears to be present in all living beinks. I believe it is somehow connected with the animation–that it is a life impulse. Zhis life impulse fades as we age and disappears zhe moment we die.”

I nodded slowly, trying to convey that I followed him but not necessarily that I conceded his claims.

“Now, I suspect I am on the verge of discovering a way to preserve and sustain zhis life impulse chemically, which would mean…”

“Fame and riches?” I asked.

“I was going to say immortality, but it amounts to the same thing.”

I searched his face for a sign of humor, but he seemed to be in earnest.

“Zhis is what ve shall work on together. “

At that very moment a thunder crack from the worsening storm rattled the windows and frightened the cat. Prof. Glauben seemed not to notice, but I felt a deep sense of foreboding.

PART 3 WILL APPEAR ON FRIDAY

It’s finally time to begin our Halloween story. So pour yourself a Dark N Stormy, turn down the lights, and enjoy:

A thirteen-part Halloween tale

PART I

It is with no little apprehension that I now set about the task of relating the exploits of my long-past youth. To that vast majority of persons who are ignorant of my motivations and aspirations, my previous employments will in all likelihood be judged harshly. But I will relate my experiences just the same, for those readers who know my soul will read them with understanding and sympathy, while the opinions of strangers interest me not.

In the year 18– I left my ancestral home and took up studies at a distant and somewhat obscure university. What promise prevailed in those joyous years! I was by no means a wealthy man, but the freedom I enjoyed living on my own offered greater opportunities than any amount of money had I remained under my father’s thumb. It wasn’t merely the obvious indulgences like ales and females, but the simple pleasures of keeping my own hours and speaking my own mind afforded a theretofore unknown delectation. There were of course the tiresome constraints of university classes, but these I minimized by the careful selection of irrelevant courses in politics and government taught by undemanding professors.

For two years I had successfully avoided serious study, when my friend Hargrove convinced me to take a course from an eccentric professor of physiology. “Old Prof. Glauben is an odd bird, Fenwick, but he’s entertaining. He doesn’t lecture so much as he rhapsodizes. He doesn’t expect much of us students in the way of effort, unless you consider observing his dissections and galvanic demonstrations to be work. Join me in this course, Fenwick; it will provide great sport!”

So it was that I began my first study in the medical sciences. Dr. Ludwig Glauben was as queer as Hargrove had promised, and more so. His lectures explaining cells, microbes, and the like were conventional enough, but he would occasionally veer from the subject at hand and animatedly rail against the university, the political leadership, and even the Church. These diatribes could last for half of his disquisition, and often he would lapse into his native German, with which only a small minority of the class had any meaningful faculty.

It was whispered that Prof. Glauben harbored a fixation on the subject of cellular damage, with an eye toward correcting it and conquering death itself. As the elderly professor became more aged, this fixation grew into an obsession. More than once he remarked to the assembled class that all of us were, to varying degrees, proceeding through the process of dying.  And each time he made this observation he would pause and then archly add, “und that process vill reach its inevitable conclusion…unless someone does someseeng about it.”

I didn’t pay much regard to Prof. Glauben’s fixation on cheating death until one bleak afternoon in November. All the students were conducting galvanic experiments on pig foetuses, and Prof. Glauben walked among us, observing our efforts. He paused at my experimentation table, studying the apparatus I had assembled and the technique I employed. “Mr. Venwick, your apparatus is imaginative und your hand is steady. Ich bin beeindruckt. Please to come by mein office this afternoon; I have ein proposition for you.” Naturally I was flattered. And immediately after I’d cleaned my experimentation table and put away the equipment, I hastened to Prof. Glauben’s office on the third floor of an ancient Gothic building on the edge of the campus. I found him at his desk writing in a large folio book by the dim light of an oil lamp. He raised his head the moment I appeared at his open door. “Ah, Venwick! You come as I asked. I am in need of ein neuer Assistent, and I am convinced that you would serve zhat role most admirably.” He made no direct invitation or question of any kind, but he looked at me with an expectant visage that left little opportunity for discountenance. I told him I would be honored to serve in such a capacity, and he brightened. “Gut! Ve shall begin amMontag.”

PART 2 WILL APPEAR ON WEDNESDAY