On the stage beyond the float wreckage, Yuko Yukiyama was dripping slimy fluid from her jellyfish hat and producing clouds of bubbles as she angrily shook her mallets at the pirate boy lying amidst the wreckage of her skull xylophone.
August quickly accounted for his zombies. Claudette was by his side, and he immediately located the half-faced lady, Sad Celeste, and Little Prince Itty-Bitty.
But of Jacques LeSalt there was no sign.
The upended box of Carnival throws rested above August’s head, pinned against the foredeck rail. But no pirate. Bracing his shoe sole against the crumpled reef, August grabbed the rail and hauled himself above the surrounding bedlam.
Yards away, moving rapidly toward the river, he spied the pirate’s twisted shoulders and lurching gait. The zombie looked around with a puzzled air, apparently disoriented and confused.
His upper arm was in the grip of a fist, which appeared to be dragging him along. The fist was attached to a person wearing a hat, a hat so flowery that it resembled an azalea bush.
And clutched in the flowery hat–wearing person’s other fist, held safely above the surrounding turmoil, was a skeleton sculpture set with a large amber marble.
“The Zombie Stone!” cried August. “Headed that way!”
He grabbed Claudette, who grabbed the small prince, who grabbed Sad Celeste, who grabbed the half-faced lady, and they launched themselves into the swelling masses.
August was elbowed and kicked; his feet trodden upon. He was forced to break through linked arms, untangle himself from droopy sleeves, and navigate around large buttocks.
The boy’s heart was thundering with a sense of desperation. He could sense the Zombie Stone merely yards ahead of him. August had never wanted anything this badly, so despite his negligible size and weight, the boy forced himself and his comrades through the heaving press of bodies with the inhuman strength of a zombie.
“Can you see them?” he called over his shoulder.
Sad Celeste, tallest of the present party, stood on tiptoe and August plowed in the direction of her sort of pointed finger.
And thus, the pursuers proceeded through the pandemonium that was Croissant City Carnival. August was growing winded, his battery draining. His ribs felt pummeled; it seemed likely to him that by tomorrow he would find bruises on them.
Suddenly his toes hit a low brick wall, and August was face to face with a high iron railing. His zombies, coming in fast behind, crushed him against it. But by clutching at the vertical iron bars, August dragged himself rightward and was released into the wide expanse of an open gateway.
Before him spread a cemetery.
But this cemetery was not the sleepy collection of higgledy-piggledy caskets that constituted the DuPont-Malveau family graveyard on the banks of Black River. This cemetery was a vast, hunkering complex of closely packed stone sarcophagi and mausoleums bisected by a mind-boggling web of avenues and alleyways that were filling with tendrils of the evening mist that, as we’ve seen, tended to form on the river.
It has previously been noted in this history that by necessity the deceased of this water-logged region were interred above the ground. Where more people live, so more people die, and the resulting arrangements, of tomb beside tomb beside tomb, begin to resemble small cities. So, fittingly, arched above August’s head was a metal sign reading “City of the Dead, Number Two.”
Whisper, whisper.
But August paid no heed to the now familiar sound; he didn’t have time for that.
For deep in the cemetery, an azalea bush was bobbing above the low-lying mist, heading for the river.
“This way!” August half shoved the zombies ahead of him, half dragged them behind him in pursuit of the diminishing pink blur.
The streets traversing the City of the Dead were extremely narrow, only a few feet wide. On either side loomed dark structures in a state of grave decay. Plaster flaked to reveal stained gray bricks beneath. Engraved epitaphs had been weathered to unreadable shadows. Roofs and steps were smothered by moss and lichen. Any unoccupied crevice or gap was choked with weeds and untrimmed palm trees.
The pavers underfoot were broken and uneven. August was stumbling and tripping almost as much as his clumsy companions. And the place was a maze, each claustrophobic lane letting into another, one identical to the next.
The layer of mist was thickening to obscure the surroundings. August stopped, the zombies bumping into him from behind. They were adrift in a pale gray nothingness. The boy’s panting swirled the milky vapor before his face.
“We’re lost!” He fell back against a mausoleum, attempting to catch his breath.
With all view blocked, August was forced to listen. He heard the distant, muffled hubbub of Carnival revelers. He heard zombie drool drizzling onto the path, the soft whop, whop, whop of a passing owl. The cold dampness of the crypt seeped into his bones. The stone seemed to press itself against his spine. Or was the gyration of the planet pressing his spine against the stone? Could he feel a dull, distant throb, perhaps the very heartbeat of the earth?
He had felt this way before, August realized. Once near Claudette’s tomb, shortly before her appearance…in the proximity of the Zombie Stone. And again, in the prop room of the Theatre Français, shortly before the reappearance of Orfeo’s zombies…in the proximity of the Zombie Stone.
The boy looked around with a mounting sense of horrified revelation. He was literally surrounded by hundreds—maybe thousands—of corpses, all at this very moment…in proximity of the Zombie Stone.
Whisper, whisper.
August was promptly revisited by the dizziness he had experienced while gazing into the Oraculum. Again the whispers gathered, but this time unchecked. Louder and louder they grew, mounting to a steady rush of sound inside his head.
He glanced at Claudette, chest heaving. “You hear it?” She nodded. The other zombies were looking around inquiringly. They heard it too.
The whispers were taking the form of something close to words. They were a thousand voices competing to be heard. But there was more. August could feel a presence, just beyond the horizon of his consciousness. It was a large, swelling presence of many.
It was the Dead.
The boy’s heart thundered. He felt fearful and faint.
“Something’s happening.” He clutched Claudette’s shoulder for support. “Something bad. We need to get out of here—right now!”
He looked up, the only point of reference being the stony tomb tops piercing the low-lying river fog. He examined the surrounding vaults but could find no means of scaling them to attain a vantage point.
“Claudette,” he whispered urgently, “do your eye thingy!” The zombie cocked her head questioningly. “Take it out,” explained August, banging the back of his head and cupping his palm before his face.
The zombie’s eyebrows rose in understanding. Using her detached arm, she smacked the base of her own skull, and plop! Out shot her right eye. August was ready and, with a grimace, caught it neatly and then handed it back to Claudette.
“Now, hold it up, high.” The boy gestured accordingly.
With the extension of her dismembered limb, Claudette’s eye cleared the fog and even the press of tombs.
“Can you see the azalea bush?”
She could (while the state of being undead is generally a rather gruesome affair, it does have its advantages).
And so, with the aid of Claudette’s makeshift periscope, August and the zombies navigated the City of the Dead Number Two, leaving the whispering, restless tombs behind them and emerging at a second gateway on the opposite side of the cemetery.
The crowds were absent here. Just a handful of smudge-like pedestrians drifted past the formless building before them; a warehouse, August guessed, by its size and elevated windows.
And through the fog, rounding the str
ucture’s corner of painted brick, August caught a glimpse of pink. The flower-hatted lady and Jacques LeSalt had gained distance but were still in sight. “Come on!” cried August, finally reaching a space open enough to run.
The boy let his legs go, leaving his shambling undead friends behind, hoping they’d catch up.
He dashed past the colonnaded warehouse frontage and through the surrounding parking lot. He sprinted across train tracks—the same tracks, he figured, that must hug the river, passing through Pelican Wharf and beyond. Then he was racing through a narrow park, over soft lawn, gravelly paths, dodging moss-draped oak trees and couples sauntering hand in hand.
On the far side of a bandstand perched at the edge of the river, he spotted the azalea bush. Beyond, he could see blurry spots of light suspended above the muddy water—the pier—and at its far end, the illuminated hulking form of the Delta Duchess. The deep throb of its mighty idling engine drifted across the water.
August reached the riverbank to find a pair of high-heeled shoes abandoned on the path, and just a few feet below him, the footwear’s owner and Jacques LeSalt scrambling down the rocky embankment.
They were headed for a small, aluminum fishing boat with an outboard motor and a hard-top enclosure. The woman, apparently quite strong, hurled the pirate into the boat, where he sprawled across the deck, looking around with confusion and fear.
It was then that August saw it; his model skeleton. It was the best he had ever made, painstakingly crafted from coat-hanger wire and papier-mâché sanded to an ivory smoothness. It depicted a boy dangling from the string of a balloon, but the balloon was an apricot-sized Cadaverite, a vividly beautiful, translucent amber sphere with a swirl of jet-black at its center, reminiscent of an alligator’s eye.
The sculpture was cradled in the left arm of the floral-hatted woman, who was, with her free hand, yanking at a rope secured around one of the boulders from which the embankment was formed.
“Stop!” yelled August. “That zombie does not belong to you.”
The woman’s head jerked up sharply.
Under the azalea branch lay a soft, babyish face, with thick black spectacles and bulbous, pug-like eyes.
“Does it belong to you?” asked a familiar, oily voice.
August peered more closely, and his eyes widened.
“Professor Leech?”
August, who had started down the embankment, was so surprised that he slipped backward into a seated position.
“It was you? Who purchased the zombie stone?”
“With this disguise,” responded Leech, his fingers still tugging to release the mooring, “I had rather hoped to conceal that fact. I have been invited on occasion to conduct ball readings at Saint-Cyr’s Wax Museum; I suspected that your so-called Gallery Macaroni was in fact the gift store there.”
“Then why,” August wondered, “send us to Pelican Wharf? Unless…unless you wanted us to run into the Armadillo Gang. Were you trying to…to get rid of us?”
Leech’s bitter leer revealed the accuracy of August’s guess.
“Well, get rid of you at least,” admitted Leech. “There is nothing the Armadillos could have done to this one”—he nodded at Jacques LeSalt—“to render him any deader.”
August heard a messy scrambling of footsteps on the embankment behind him, and sensed the clammy presence of Claudette at his shoulder. The zombies had caught up.
“But, Professor Leech, what”—August’s voice rose with distress—“do you want with him?”
“What would anyone,” scoffed Leech, “want with a two-hundred-year-old pirate?” He leaned forward and with the back of his hand to his mouth he whispered, as if revealing a thrilling secret, “It’s the treasure, dummy!”
“But”—August gestured at the pathetic creature attempting to rise on the surging boat—“he’s just a zombie; look at him.” The pirate at that moment obligingly became entangled in a pile of crawfish traps. “He couldn’t tell you where his belt buckle is, never mind find his way through Lost Souls’ Swamp to some ancient buried treasure.”
“Which is why”—Leech brandished the sculpture—“I required this little trinket. With Orfeo’s Zombie Stone, I can revive what little sense of self remains within this bony bag of un-death, and command it to lead me to his long since hidden booty.”
“No! He’s frightened,” cried August, standing and leaping down the stones, closer to the water. “He won’t do as you say,” August insisted. “Jacques, get off the boat!”
The zombie clumsily attempted to kick free from the crawfish traps, moaning piteously.
Smiling eerily, Leech abandoned the mooring knots, straightened, and thrust his arm and the skeleton boy into the air. The spindly sculpture showed signs of its recent rough journey; its right foot was missing, and its left arm had broken off at the elbow. “Po-Na-Fantom,” Leech cried aloud in a theatrical voice. “Ancient talisman. Bridge of Ghosts. Go-between. I call upon thee.”
A tiny flickering light appeared at the center of the boy’s balloon, as if a firefly were trapped inside.
August was simultaneously revisited by a surge of dizziness and whisperings and the sense of an immense presence nearby and yet far away.
The light within the Cadaverite brightened and expanded, until the whole interior glimmered and sparkled with a flickering spiderweb of luminance.
It was beautiful.
But August’s heart lurched with horror, for Jacques LeSalt’s eyes had rolled back into his head, and the visible whites glowed with an eerie, milky light.
“Just like the poster,” whispered August.
“Spirit who calls itself Jacques LeSalt,” cried Leech, “bring me your weapon!”
Gracelessly but without hesitation, the pirate extracted himself from the traps, jerkily crossed the deck, and unsheathed his cutlass. The professor, without turning, reached back to grab the hilt, then swiftly spun the blade toward August.
Its rusty but formidable point quivered mere inches from the boy’s neck.
August glanced to his left.
“Her?” laughed Leech. “She can’t help you now, boy. Take a look!”
August gingerly (because of the cutlass) turned his head and was shocked yet not entirely surprised to discover that Claudette—that indeed all the zombies—had been reduced to the same trance-like state as Jacques, their awkwardness less awkward, their posture more passive, their eyes burning with that empty light.
“No one,” sneered Leech, “can help you now.”
With a sudden, violent slash to his right, Leech severed the rope mooring the boat. Carried by the current, the vessel immediately moved away from shore and the man leaped aboard.
Behind him, the Delta Duchess’s great red paddle wheel had begun to turn, and the riverboat was pulling away from the pier.
As the gap between them widened, Leech regarded August and spread his hands, one still grasping the sculpture, the other the cutlass.
“You see, boy,” he yelled above the din of the riverboat’s splashing wheel. “He with the Go-Between controls the dead! There is nothing you can do to stop me.”
August reached into his pocket.
He pulled out the boatswain’s whistle.
He lifted it to his lips and blew as hard as he could.
Leech’s smile dissolved into a condescending sneer.
Snorting with disdain, he threw down the sword, laid down the sculpture, braced one foot against the washboard, and tugged the outboard engine’s starter cord.
A brief snarl petered into a sputtering cough and died.
He tried again with the same result.
A frown creased the professor’s brow.
August blew into his whistle again.
And again.
The fog smothered and flattened the high-pitched skirl to some extent; it was not
as far-reaching as it might be on a clear night. But it pierced the air sufficiently to send a flicker of alarm across Leech’s face.
The professor’s efforts to start the boat’s engine grew more urgent. But with each violent yank, the motor wheezed, gurgled, and ground, but ultimately stalled.
August blew again. And again.
Leech, now several yards from shore, glanced repeatedly toward the park above the embankment. August guessed that the man was concerned less about the arrival of a small girl on a houseboat than the arrival of a larger and more inconvenient law enforcement officer.
The boy followed the professor’s gaze, realizing that for himself, such a development might not be a bad thing. But behind him August discovered only Claudette and the other zombies. They were, at least, emerging from their trance.
Their stances slowly drooped once more. Their awkward manner returned. The glow in their eyes faded, and their pupils swiveled back to loosely fix themselves on August, awaiting instruction.
“Glad to see you back,” August assured Claudette, as the hum of another outboard motor became audible.
A hut-like shape was advancing through the swirling mists from the direction of the pier.
“Madame Marvell,” yelled August. “Here!”
In moments, the houseboat had passed Leech, and its pontoon was bumping the embankment. August was the last of the group to scramble on board, and, as his first foot hit the deck, there was a throaty, watery roar; Leech’s engine fired, and the fishing boat lurched forward.
“Follow that boat!” cried August.
Leech’s boat headed downriver, a crest of water spouting from its stern. Beyond it loomed the vast mass of the Delta Duchess. Lights high on the riverboat’s decks winked weakly in the twilight fog.
The Zombie Stone Page 14