So Luke lit the dead kid on fire and the others hooted and clapped as the dead kid went up like a torch, staggering and dancing around the clearing, trailing black, oily smoke. Then he fell down and seemed to shrivel up into a pile of blackened, smoldering sticks.
Luke forced me over to where the dead kid had fallen and made me touch what was left with my swollen hand.
And the dead kid moved. He made that bleating sound. He whimpered.
“You see? You can’t kill him because he’s already dead.”
They were all laughing, but I just puked again, and finally Luke hauled me to my feet by both shoulders, turned me around, and shoved me away staggering into the woods.
“Come back when you stop throwing up,” he said.
IV
Somehow I found my way home, and when I did, Mom just stared at me in horror and said, “My God, what’s that awful smell?” But Stepdad Steve shook me and demanded to know where I had been and what I’d been doing? Did I know the police were looking for me? Did I care? (No, and no.) He took me into the bathroom, washed and bandaged my hand, then held me so I couldn’t turn away and said, “Have you been taking drugs?”
That was so stupid I started to laugh, and he smacked me across the face, something he rarely did, but this time, I think, he was determined to beat the truth out of me, and Mommy, dearest Mommy didn’t raise a finger to stop him as he laid on with his hand, then his belt, and I was shrieking my head off.
All they got out of me was the admission that I had been with Luke Bradley and his friends.
“I don’t want you to associate with those boys any further. They’re unwholesome.”
He didn’t know a tenth of it, and I started to laugh again, like I was drunk or something, and he was about to hit me again when Mom finally made him stop.
She told me to change my clothes and take a bath and then go to my room. I wasn’t allowed out except for meals and to go to the bathroom.
That was fine with me. I didn’t want to come out. I wanted to bury myself in there, to be quiet and dead, like the dead kid in his box.
But when I fell asleep, I was screaming in a dream, and I woke up screaming, in the dark, because it was night again.
Mom looked in briefly, but didn’t say anything. The expression on her face was more of disgust than concern, as if she really wanted to say, Serves him damn right but, Oh God, another crazy kid we’ll have to send to the so, so expensive psychiatrist and I’d rather spend the money on a new mink coat or a car or something.
It was my kid brother Albert who snuck over to my bed and whispered, “It’s the dead kid, isn’t it?”
“Huh?”
“The dead kid. He talks to me in my dreams. He’s told me all about himself. He’s lost. His father’s a magician, who is still trying to find him. There was a war between magicians, or something, and that’s how he got lost.”
“Huh? Is this something you read in a comic book?”
“No! It’s the dead kid. You know what we have to do, David. We have to go save him.”
I have to give my brother credit for bringing about my moral redemption as surely as if he’d handed me my sanity back on a silver platter and said, Go on, don’t be a pussy. Take it.
Because he was right. We had to save the dead kid.
Maybe the dead kid talked to Albert in his dreams, but he didn’t tell me anything. Why should he?
Still, I’d gotten the message.
So, that night, very late, Albert and I got dressed and slipped out the window of our room, dropping onto the lawn. He wasn’t afraid, not a little bit. He led me, by the ritual route, under the arching bushes, through the tunnels of vines to all our secret places, as if we had to be there first to gain some special strength for the task at hand.
Under the bushes, in the darkness, we paused to scratch secret signs in the dirt.
Then we scurried across the golf course, across the highway, into Cabbage Creek Woods.
We came to the fort by the light of a full moon now flickering through swaying branches. It was a windy night. The woods were alive with sounds of wood creaking and snapping, of animals calling back and forth, and night-birds cawing. Somewhere, very close at hand, an owl cried out.
Albert got down on all fours in the doorway of the fort, poked his head in, and said, “Hey, dead kid! Are you in there?”
He backed out, and waited. There was a rustling sound, but the dead kid didn’t come out. So we both crawled in and saw why. There wasn’t much left of him. He was just a bundle of black sticks, his head like a charred pumpkin balanced precariously on top. All he could do was sit up weakly and peer over the side of the box.
So we had to lift him out of the pit, box and all.
“Come on,” Albert said to him. “We want to show you some stuff.”
We carried the dead kid between us. We took him back across the golf course, under the bushes, to our special places. We showed him the secret signs. Then we took him into town. We showed him the storefronts, Wayne Toy Town where I bought models, where there were always neat displays of miniature battlefields or of monsters in the windows. We showed him where the pet store was and the ice cream store, and where you got comic books.
Albert sat down on the merry-go-round in the playground, holding the dead kid’s box securely beside him. I pushed them around slowly. Metal creaked.
We stood in front of our school for a while, and Albert and the dead kid were holding hands, but it seemed natural and right.
Then we went away in the bright moonlight, through the empty streets. No one said anything, because whatever the dead kid could say or hear wasn’t in words anyway. I couldn’t hear it. I think Albert could.
In the end the dead kid scrambled out of his box. Somehow he had regained enough strength to walk. Somehow, he was beginning to heal. In the end, he wanted to show us something.
He led us back across the golf course but away from Cabbage Creek Woods. We crossed the football field at Radnor High School, then went across the street, up in back of Wyeth Labs and across the high bridge over the P&W tracks. I was afraid the dead kid would slip on the metal stairs and fall, but he went more steadily than we did. (Albert and I were both a little afraid of heights.)
He led us across another field, into woods again, then through an opening where a stream flowed beneath the Pennsylvania Railroad embankment. We waded ankle-deep in the chilly water and came, at last, to the old Grant Estate, a huge ruin of a Victorian house which every kid knew was haunted, which our parents told us to stay away from because it was dangerous. (There were so many stories about kids murdered by tramps or falling through floors.) But now it wasn’t a ruin at all, no broken windows, no holes in the roof. Every window blazed with light.
From a high window in a tower, a man in black gazed down at us.
The dead kid looked up at him, then began to run.
I hurried after him. Now it was Albert (who had better sense) who hung back. I caught hold of the dead kid’s arm, as if to stop him, and I felt possessive for a moment, as if I owned him the way Luke Bradley had owned him.
“Hey dead kid,” I said. “Where are you going?”
He turned to me, and by some trick of the moonlight he seemed to have a face, pale, round, with dark eyes; and he said to me in that bleating, croaking voice of his, actually forming words for once, “My name is Jonathan.”
That was the only thing he ever said to me. He never talked to me in dreams.
He went to the front of the house. The door opened. The light within seemed to swallow him. He turned back, briefly, and looked at us. I don’t think he was just a bundle of sticks anymore.
Then he was gone and all the lights blinked out, and it was dawn. My brother and I stood before a ruined mansion in the morning twilight. Birds were singing raucously.
“We’d better get home,” Albert said, “or we’ll get in trouble.”
“Yeah,” I said.
V
That autumn, I began junior hig
h school. Because I hadn’t been very successful as a bad boy, and my grades were still a lot higher, I wasn’t in any of Luke Bradley’s classes. But he caught up with me in the locker room after school, several weeks into the term. All he said was, “I know what you did,” and beat me so badly that he broke several of my ribs and one arm, and smashed in the whole side of my face, and cracked the socket around my right eye. He stuffed me into a locker and left me there to die, and I spent the whole night in the darkness, in great pain, amid horrible smells, calling out for the dead kid to come and save me as I’d saved him. I made bleating, clicking sounds.
But he didn’t come. The janitor found me in the morning. The smell was merely that I’d crapped in my pants.
I spent several weeks in the hospital, and afterwards Stepdad Steve and Mom decided to move out of the state. They put both me and Albert in a prep school.
It was only after I got out of college that I went back to Radnor Township in Pennsylvania, where I’d grown up. Everything was changed. There was a Sears headquarters where the golf course used to be. Our old house had vanished beneath an apartment parking lot. Most of Cabbage Creek Woods had been cut down to make room for an Altman’s department store, and the Grant Estate was gone too, to make room for an office complex.
I didn’t go into the remaining woods to see if the fort was still there.
I imagine it is. I imagine other kids own it now.
Later someone told me that Luke Bradley (who turned out to have really been three years older than me) had been expelled from high school, committed several robberies in the company of his three goons, and then all of them were killed in a shootout with the police.
What Luke Bradley inadvertently showed me was that I could have been with the gang all the way to their violent and pointless end, if Albert and the dead kid, whose name was Jonathan, hadn’t saved me.
MALTHUSIAN’S ZOMBIE
by Jeffrey Ford
Jeffrey Ford is the author of several novels, including The Physiognomy, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, and The Shadow Year. He is a four-time winner of the World Fantasy Award, and has also won the Nebula and Edgar awards. He is a prolific author of short fiction, whose work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, SCI FICTION, and in numerous anthologies. Two collections of his short work have been published: The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant and Other Stories and The Empire of Ice Cream, with a third—The Drowned Life—on the way.
The idea for this story came from Ford’s reading of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. “The book posits that the voice of god in ancient cultures was in fact one side of the brain communicating with the other across the corpus callosum, through the Wernicke’s Area,” Ford says.
Add to this the fact that at the time, as now, Ford was teaching Poe. He says the setup of the story is sort of like what Poe would do: “take some speculative aspect of science, a theory that has not been corroborated, an idea not many know the extent of, and extrapolate a bizarre, fanciful tale from it.”
1
I’m not sure what nationality Malthusian was, but he spoke with a strange accent; a stuttering lilt of mumblement it took weeks to fully comprehend as English. He had more wrinkles than a witch and a shock of hair whiter and fuller than a Samoyed’s ruff. I can still see him standing at the curb in front of my house, slightly bent, clutching a cane whose ivory woman’s head wore a blindfold. His suit was a size and a half too large, as were his eyes, peering from behind lenses cast at a thickness that must have made his world enormous. The two details that halted my raking and caused me to give him more than a neighborly wave were his string tie and a mischievous grin I had only ever seen before on my six-year-old daughter when she was drawing one of her monsters.
“Malthusian,” he said from the curb.
I greeted him and spoke my name.
He mumbled something and I leaned closer to him and begged his pardon. At this, he turned and pointed back at the house down on the corner. I knew it had recently changed hands, and I surmised he had just moved in.
“Welcome to the neighborhood,” I said.
He put his hand out and I shook it. His grip was very strong, and he was in no hurry to let go. Just as I realized he was aware of my discomfort, his grin turned into a wide smile and he released me. Then he slowly began to walk away.
“Nice to meet you,” I said to his back.
He turned, waved, and let loose an utterance that had the cadence of poetry. There was something about leaves and fruit and it all came together in a rhyme. Only when he had disappeared into the woods at the end of the block did I realize he had been quoting Pope. “‘Words are like leaves, where they most abound, beneath, little fruit or sense is found.’” As a professor of literature, this amused me, and I decided to try to find out more about Malthusian.
I was on sabbatical that year, supposedly writing a book concerning the structure of Poe’s stories, which I saw as lacking the energetic ascent of the Fichtian curve and being comprised solely of denouement. Like houses of Usher, the reader comes to them, as in a nightmare, with no prior knowledge, at the very moment they begin to crumble. What I was really doing was dogging it in high fashion. I’d kiss my wife goodbye as she left for work, take my daughter to school, and then return home to watch reruns of those shows my brother and I had devoted much of our childhood to. Malthusian’s daily constitutional was an opportunity to kill some time, and so, when I would see him passing in front of the house, I’d come out and engage him in conversation.
Our relationship grew slowly at first, until I began to learn the cues for his odd rendering of the language. By Thanksgiving I could have a normal conversation with him, and we began to have lengthy discussions about literature. Oddly enough, his interests were far more contemporary than mine. He expressed a devotion to Pynchon, and the West African writer Amos Tutuola. I realized I had spent too long teaching the canon of Early American works and began to delve into some of the novels he mentioned. One day I asked him what he had done before his retirement. He smiled and said something that sounded like mind-fucker.
I was sure I had misunderstood him. I laughed and said, “What was that?”
“Mind-fucker,” he said. “Psychologist.”
“Interesting description of the profession,” I said.
He shrugged and his grin dissipated. When he spoke again, he changed the subject to politics.
Through the winter, no matter the weather, Malthusian walked. I remember watching him struggle along through a snowstorm one afternoon, dressed in a black overcoat and black Tyrolean hat, bent more from some invisible weight than a failure of his frame. It struck me then that I had never seen him on his return journey. The trails through the woods went on for miles, and I was unaware of one that might bring him around to his house from the other end of the block.
I introduced him to Susan, my wife, and to my daughter, Lyda. There, at the curb, he kissed both their hands, or tried to. When Lyda pulled her hand back at his approach, he laughed so I thought he would explode. Susan found him charming, but asked me later, “What the hell was he saying?”
The next day, he brought a bouquet of violets for her; and for Lyda, because she had shown him her drawing pad, he left with me a drawing he had done rolled up and tied with a green ribbon. After dinner, she opened it and smiled. “A monster,” she said. It was a beautifully rendered charcoal portrait of an otherwise normal middle-aged man, wearing an unnerving look of total blankness. The eyes were heavy lidded and so realistically glassy, the attitude of the body so slack, that the figure exuded a palpable sense of emptiness. At the bottom of the page in a fine calligraphic style were written the words Malthusian’s Zombie.
“I told him I liked monsters,” said Lyda.
“Why is that a monster?” asked Susan, who I could tell was a little put off by the eerie nature of the drawing. “It looks more like a college professor on sabbatical.”
“He thinks nothing,” said Lyda, and with her pinky finger pointed to the zombie’s head. She had me tack it to the back of her door, so that it faced the wall unless she wanted to look at it. For the next few weeks, she drew zombies of her own. Some wore little hats, some bow ties, but all of them, no matter how huge and vacant the eyes, wore mischievous grins.
In early spring, Malthusian invited me to come to his house one evening to play a game of chess. The evening air was still quite cool, but the scent of the breeze carried the promise of things green. His house, which sat on the corner lot, was enormous, by far the largest in the neighborhood. It had three acres of woods appended to it and at the very back touched upon a lake that belonged to the adjacent town.
Malthusian was obviously not much for yard work or home repair; the very measure of a man in this part of the world. A tree had cracked and fallen through the winter and it still lay partially obstructing the driveway. The three-story structure and its four tall columns in front needed paint; certain porch planks had succumbed to dry rot and its many windows were streaked and smudged. The fact that he took no initiative to rectify these problems made him yet more likable to me.
He met me at the door and ushered me into his home. I had visions of the place being like a dim, candle-lit museum of artifacts as odd as their owner, and had hoped to decipher Malthusian’s true character from them as if they were clues in a mystery novel. There was nothing of the sort. The place was well lit and tastefully, though modestly, decorated.
“I hope you like merlot,” he said as he led me down an oak paneled hallway toward the kitchen.
“Yes,” I said.
“It’s good for the heart,” he said and laughed.
The walls I passed were lined with photographs of Malthusian with different people. He moved quickly and I did not linger out of politeness, but I thought I saw one of him as a child, and more than one of him posing with various military personnel. If I wasn’t mistaken, I could have sworn I had caught the face of an ex-president in one of them.
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