Southern Horror

by Ron Shiflet

  “I’ve had enough, Charles.” She struggled against her bonds. Eyes bulging, she squealed, “Let me go!”

  Tara screamed, as Charles drove the knife home. As Tara cried and gasped, her life spurting away in a fountain, Charles dipped the bloody knife in the cup, which he put on the floor. Myrtice lapped the contents.

  That evening, Charles stared out the kitchen window into the blackness of the night. No dog was evident, but an old hag of a woman sat at the table, eating.

  “You’ll be okay, Charles,” his mother’s voice told him. Her voice sounded like it had long ago. “It will take a little time, but you’ll be all right.”

  “I know, Mamma. I know.” He glanced at Myrtice.

  “Thank you, Charles. I know she was special to you, but it was the only way to change me back.” She took a forearm from a big pot on the stove and began to eat again. “Are you sure you don’t want a hand, or maybe a thick, juicy leg? You know, she really is such a sweet girl.”

  A tear rolled down Charles’ cheek as he shook his head and stared into the night. “I know, Mamma. I’ll miss her.”

  SIX ZOMBIES DOING THAT MICK JAGGER STRUT

  MICHAEL EHART

  I hate graveyards, though not for the reasons you might guess. I’ve done a lot of my best work in cemeteries, which should temper my loathing for them, but it doesn’t. Best work in my business almost always means messiest work.

  This job was pretty messy and it was just starting. My khaki Dockers were soaked to the knees, my tan Bally half-boots covered in mud up to the zipper pulls. I was wearing my new J.H. Cutler overcoat. The light brown mud spatters formed an almost fractal design against its darker brown pattern. The only thing I was wearing that wasn’t muddy was my turtleneck and it was sweated through. Ahead of me in the gathering gloom, Gregory plodded through the gaps in the headstones. This was Memphis’s oldest cemetery, dating back even before the more famous and still active Elmwood, or the Zion, which was founded by freed slaves after the Civil War.

  “It should be just ahead, over in the uncleared section,” Gregory announced. “I’m hopin’ there’s a path.” He stopped and hunched over the print-out of the grounds he had made from the historical society’s web site, protecting it from the rain.

  “Actually, I’m hoping that there isn’t a path. This is a lousy place to mix it up with a bunch of deaders.” I wiped my eyes and ran my hand like a squeegee over the top of my shaven head.

  We were in the August P. Belmont Memorial Cemetery, one of the South’s oldest and most mysterious burial places. Like every cemetery of the old South it was segregated for most of its existence. But in 1878 the yellow fever epidemic killed over five thousand Memphis residents in just a few weeks and for a few frantic days there was little thought given to anything more than getting the rapidly bloating and disease-ridden corpses out of the hot August air and into the ground.

  To many whites in the post-Civil War south the burial of freed slaves and their descendants in a once white-only graveyard somehow tainted it. And many of those freed slaves and their families were not any happier to have their loved ones terminally ensconced next to their former owners. So business in the late part of the century and the whole of the century after fell off considerably. It was finally closed to new burials in 1958 and gradually, as survivors themselves passed on, it grew steadily more shabby and overgrown. A recent movement to revitalize and restore some of Memphis’s historical sites had nearly passed it by but at the last minute a group of students from Tulane displaced by Hurricane Katrina, funded by Gregory, had gotten together and at least managed to hack down and clear the worst of the undergrowth and uncover this neglected reminder of the past.

  What they had also uncovered was what brought me here to stumble around in the mud caused by the heavy and late November rains, something so unusual and terrifying that the cemetery keeper, Gregory Tennyhill, had called me with an offer of plane fare, my usual fee and a bonus if I would get down there pronto. He was an old client of my dad’s. Gregory was a grave keeper as a sort of hobby, as part of his graveyard preservation project. Like me, he was a trustfund baby and like me he had followed the family love of the macabre. He baby-sat the resting places of long dead folks. I put them back to rest when they forgot that they were supposed to stay that way.

  You may have seen me on that show, Unresolved Mysteries—the out-of-work exorcist story they run every Halloween. Or maybe you’ve shopped me on eBay, where I’m the Annette guy. All things Funicello. I have a neat business card printed up, with little ears over the top of the “o” in my first name: “Joe Denfar, Funicellist.”

  I have my other cards too, not so cutesy. “Joe Denfar, Exorcist with Attitude.” Fourth generation exorcist and likely the last. Right now I was wishing that the family business had only gone three. And it nearly had. Jobs were quite infrequent, almost nonexistent anymore.

  I was in Memphis, in the mud, because Gregory had seen something he never thought he would see again. The walking dead. And since a hundred-eighty year-old cemetery had an enormous supply of potential walkers, he hit the panic button and called me.

  Three nights before he was awakened by that bane of cemetery keepers—teenagers, bringing with them loud music, a litter of empty beer-cans and tipped over tombstones. Usually when he shows up with his Maglight they move on. These teenagers didn’t, most likely because they couldn’t. Everywhere he shone the light he saw only the rapidly regrowing kudzu and uneven rows of crooked and broken tombstones. He could see the teenagers just fine, dressed in prom chiffon and letter jackets, crew cuts and bouffant hair-dos, wherever the light wasn’t.

  A rocket scientist might have had trouble figuring that one out but not old Gregory. He knew ghosts when he saw them. And for the most part his attitude was like many other grave keepers; he was perfectly willing to let the dead keep their own company as long as they didn’t disturb the neighbors. If they were going to make a habit of hanging out there night after night he might have to ask them to keep the Pat Boone turned down on their portable radios but other than that he anticipated little trouble.

  The real surprise was on his way back to the caretaker’s cottage, a whitewashed pile of river-rock slabs only a little larger than an average double-wide trailer. He was almost there, thinking no doubt of the bottle of George Dickel and the latest Tom Clancy paperback that awaited him on his nightstand when he was startled by a sound in an overgrown clump of kudzu off to his right. At first he thought it was just a possum rustling around as it did its possum business. On reflex, he flipped his little Maglight around to spotlight the source of the noise. What he expected to see was the reflection of his flashlight in two beady little eyes. What he saw sent him scrambling for the safety of his cottage. There, with doors and windows barred, salt spread across the doorways and every available light on, including the open refrigerator, strings of Christmas lights pulled from the closet and plugged in, and even his Maglight on the table pointed at the kitchen door, he fumbled through his memory and came up with a long-forgotten phone number which fortunately hadn’t changed in the last forty years, and dialed me.

  Had the call come from anyone else I would have considered it a crank or a crackpot. But when Gregory Tennyhill, author of Haunts of the Antebellum, the definitive reference on the supernatural, or at least the part of it that concerns me, called to tell me that he had seen bony hands pushing aside the earth over an ancient grave I could only promise to be on the first flight to Memphis in the morning. Because you see, the bony hands were digging their way out of the grave. From the inside.

  It hadn’t been that easy, of course. There were simply no flights to be had on such short notice, not that time of year. The delay had given me the opportunity to do a little research and phone around to establish some local contacts.

  Say the word zombie and most folks rightly think of Haiti. Some more enlightened few might remember another concentration of occurrences of the shambling undead and chime in with Louisiana and stories a
bout Marie Laveau. But the truth is that there is a history of zombies throughout the Old South wherever the ancient beliefs came over from Africa on slave ships and were passed along through the generations. Memphis was no exception. Two hundred years ago along the banks of the Wolf River there had thrived among the slave shanties a community of root workers and nightwalkers. This history wasn’t lost on Those Who Know Things; when Hurricane Katrina made it impossible to hold the Voodoo Music Experience in New Orleans, Memphis was chosen as the Halloween festival’s first co-hosting city.

  What all might be surprised to know is that zombies are just like any other apparition; just a symptom of some asshole who refuses to let go. You see, haunts are pretty messed up. Part of the whole being dead thing. They usually have a hard time with identity. There is a real tendency for them to seize on some explanation for their unexpected state that has more to do with the things they were interested in while they were alive than what is the reality of their situation. In the Eighties for example, I took a lot of calls for alien abductees. The aliens looked either like ET or like the ones from “Close Encounters” but they were all just ghosts who were looking for something to explain to themselves why things had changed.

  That’s why I carry a stake. Some of the less imaginative want to be vampires and the only way to convince them to go ahead and stay dead is to stake them. Same for my pistol. The bullets are all silver-plated because you never know when some whacked out deader is going to imagine himself as Lon Chaney. To be honest, the squirt-gun which hangs in a matching shoulder holster across from my automatic is the most useful tool, along with the cross, because nearly every kind of haunt is afraid of holy water. The Velcro quick releases on my belt hold a crossbow, wooden bolts, stake and hammer, cross, garlic extract and a Leatherman’s tool.

  The hardest kind, though, are the possessors. Ever since that movie about the little girl and her pea soup problem the more imaginative and powerful spooks have wanted to control someone else. And it really isn’t so weird, because a ghost is really just a product of their own will, someone who is just not going to be controlled by the failure of their body. And most people with that kind of will power are perfectly used to imposing it on others.

  And the biggest pain in the butt possessors are the zombie masters. Not only do they possess some poor root worker or cunning woman who is usually just trying to make a few bucks conning tourists and other gullibles, they go and impose their will on other, more properly inactive deaders and get them all riled up and moving around. As you can imagine, this causes all sorts of resentment among the unwilling risen, resentment that is most often taken out on the living. You’d think that the zombies would be mad at the jerk that woke ‘em up but it never seems to work that way. But then again, you can never expect clear thinking from the dead. It just isn’t their nature.

  So here we were, tromping trough the mud looking for the final resting place of one of the granddaughters of the infamous Voodoo Queen Marie, Charlotte Laveau-Glapion, who had settled here in the 1890s. Zombies are like communists; they organize in cells around a zombie master. Because the deader that possesses the zombie master usually has the same level of imagination as any other spook, which is to say none, they almost always headquarter in or near the burial place of some bygone Voodoo practitioner.

  “I really don’t know all that much about the local history of zombies,” Gregory said over his shoulder as we pushed through the high weeds and kudzu. “My area of expertise is wealthy pre-War of Northern Aggression Southern belle suicides. They make up a substantial proportion of Deep South haunts, you know. Most of ‘em were ignored by their husbands, who were often entirely occupied with hunting, cards, cotton trading and black mistresses. An alarming number of spoiled antebellum sweet things made a final stab at getting their husband’s attention by killing themselves in dramatic and romantic ways.” He paused to check out the map then pointed left to a gap in the willows.

  “When they discovered that the old adage ‘out of sight, out of mind’ was not only accurate,” he continued, “but actually freed the object of their desire to spend even more time in the arms of their mistresses, they became so enraged that they came back to haunt the now neglected big houses. The sad part was that even then the happy widower failed to notice her presence, generally putting down the drafts of frigid air, odd reeks and strange noises to the normal symtoms of a slowing decaying mansion.”

  We walked between the trees into another world. It was dark, the waning sunlight dampened by the overcast sky and the trees that arched overhead. The air was heavy with damp and the odors of decaying vegetable matter and animal droppings, cut with a musky odor that seemed vaguely familiar.

  “Okay, Joe. There’s somethin’ you don’t see every day.” He pointed to a tree just off the path through the grove. Hanging from a noose tied to lower branch was the carcass of a goat.

  “Not unless you’re a big fan of Val Lewton movies, you don’t,” I agreed. Without thinking, my hands flashed under my coat in a cross-body draw that left both of my hands filled, silver-loaded automatic in my left, squirt-gun in my right. I clicked off the safety on the auto and sloshed the squirt-gun to verify it was still full of holy water.

  “I’m guessing that we are on the right track here,” I said. I nodded up the path. “See that bit of white up ahead? I’ll bet that’s the mausoleum we’re looking for.”

  Gregory coughed uncomfortably. I glanced over. He was wearing a sheepish expression. He opened his mouth, started to say something, closed it.

  I nodded. “Why don’t you head back to the cottage,” I said. “This kind of stuff is my department. I’ve got my cell phone. If I need anything I’ll call you there.”

  He nodded back gratefully. He disappeared with an alacrity that belied his years.

  I moved cautiously toward the white marble edifice ahead. The only sound was the dripping of rainwater on the carpet of fallen leaves and the sound of my own breathing. Past the dangling goat the path took a slight crook and I found myself with a clear view of the building. It was late neo-classical, typical of a tomb of its period, but larger than what I would have expected. Twin Doric columns flanked its door, which gaped open. Like a cliché set from a Fifties horror film the faux portico was lit by torches set in sconces on each side.

  I stepped onto the leaf-scattered age-stained marble of the entryway. It was dark through the door but unless I was imagining it, there seemed to be movement inside. There was a faint jangling that accompanied the movement.

  “Torches,” I snorted. “You know, those little battery-powered stickem-up lights are only a buck or two and they last longer.”

  “Fear me.” The voice was a hoarse whisper, drawn out. It came from inside the tomb, of course.

  I took a step back onto the dirt path. “Oh, I fear you, all right. I fear you like crazy.” There were rustling sounds in the undergrowth surrounding the building.

  “You should not have meddled!” The voice was low enough that I couldn’t tell if it came from a man or a woman.

  “Yeah, I should have.” I spun to the left and popped three silver into the walking corpse as it lunged toward me, a broken tree-branch club clutched in its cold, dead fingers. Silver doesn’t stop zombies, of course, but it did make it pause long enough for me to bring my squirt-gun around and give it a face-full of holy water. It collapsed into a ragged pile of cloth and bones.

  I ducked and whirled around. The blade of a shovel whipped over my head, pattering me with flecks of mud. One good thing about zombies, they stink. Hard for them to sneak up on anybody. Down he went, dripping holy water.

  One bad thing about zombies is they don’t really think for themselves. With a little practice a good zombie master can coordinate a group of slow-moving shamblers into a pretty impressive ballet. This one was no exception. While I was dispatching my first two assailants, a third came up from behind and clocked me with a chunk of broken granite tombstone.

  My face slapped into the wet leave
s. The last thing I saw before I spun into darkness was the zombie who had smacked me, bringing down the bloody chunk of stone to crush my squirt-gun where it lay by my outstretched hand.

  My day hadn’t started out that bad. My hotel was decent, though the Gustav Klimt prints in the room seemed a little much. My first stop of the morning was at an herbalist’s shop hidden between antique shops on South Main. The door chimed to my entrance and as it closed behind me my senses were filled by a medley of exotic and mysterious aromas.

  “Hi!” chirped the young woman behind the counter. She was slender and dark, her head topped by the sort of hairdo we called a natural in the seventies, crowned by a multi-colored Erykah Badu style knit headpiece. “You must be Joe.”

  “Yah. Simone Glapion?”

  “Yes.” She smiled, displaying twin rows of perfect, regular, white teeth. “From your voice on the phone, I expected you to be younger.”

  “I used to be.”

  She held out a hand, multi-colored bangles jangling on her arm. Her grip was firm as we shook. “Come with me,” she said, turning toward the back room. “We can talk in the office. Henri!”

  A boy in his late teens came through the beaded curtain to the back room. He was wearing a number 37 Seahawks jersey over baggy bigpocket jeans. He walked to the front and took station behind the counter, giving Simone a strange look as he went past.

  We pushed through the curtain into a stock room, shelves lined with glass jars with hand-printed labels. The sleeve of her dashiki brushed against my arm as she reached across me to push open the door to a small office. She sat behind the small desk, motioned to me to sit in the folding chair next to it. The walls were lined with travel posters and vintage calendars.

  “Never mind Henri. He’s my cousin up from Baton Rouge. When his momma died last spring, he came up to live with me.” She leveled her gaze at me. It was like being pithed, only a lot more pleasant. “You want to be asking me about zombies, you said.”