“Sure, Professor.”
“No problem.”
“Certainly.”
“Absolutely. Good night, Dr. Perry,” I said.
“All right, I’ll take the landau and one of the horses, and my man can stay behind till you’re done, then drive the wagon back.”
“We can handle it, sir, no need for your man to hang about. Winterbourne can drive the wagon back.”
“Thanks, Van Dyson. Thank you all. It’s been a magnificent catch: An even dozen new specimens.”
“G’night, sir.”
Winterbourne had hooded the lantern again, and in the semi-dark, Jerry and I loaded the pox victims onto the dumb waiter.
“You go upstairs; shout down when the bodies are level with the floor, and I’ll tie off the ropes down here and I’ll send O’Rourke up.” His hands were clumsy with the thick gloves; he fumbled under his apron, then handed me a five-dollar gold piece. “But don’t let him hang around. Give him this. I’ll come up and we’ll move the bodies into the lab ourselves. All right?”
We shook hands briefly, then he pulled out the silver flask for the last time. “To Van Dyson and Sykes,” he said. “To our success.”
The anatomy lab was on situated on the second floor to take advantage of the sun that poured in through its skylight. Adjacent and behind a heavy, metal-clad door, was a kind of cold storage unit (also completely lined with metal) stacked with huge blocks of ice procured from the river, where we’d trundled most of the bodies we collected. But Winterbourne and O’Rourke had laid out three or four on vacant tables in the dissection room.
“Even a top-notch school like Yale has a dearth of specimens,” I said when we wrestled the male smallpox victim onto the last dissecting table.
“Well, these two won’t be occupying valuable space for long,” Jerry said. “Get some phenol, alcohol, whatever you can find.” He’d pulled down all the dark green shades and lit the room like Christmas—candles and lamps, even a crackling fire.
I went to the glassed cabinets. My hand was on the knob and I turned and said, “Let’s just spray them down and cover them up, I’m whipped.”
“Not on your life.” He was rifling a drawer in the dissection table he normally used and pulled out a syringe and a vial. “Seven-percent solution, cocaine. Nobody will be here before noon, they’ll all be in the lecture hall.”
I swallowed uneasily.
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure. How do you think I have the best grades in my class?”
Nightmares come to life. They really do. No one’s going to believe this—believe anything in these pages, but I’m going to leave them in my room after I flee. For all I know, they’ll be thrown away, but at least I’ll have written down what happened. Was it something in the disease itself that initiated the transition? I keep thinking about what Van Dyson said about the segregated pox cemeteries when I’d been about to punch him in Dr. Perry’s landau: All the headstones face east. And these victims were from the eastern wall of the crypt. It wasn’t folie a deux, it wasn’t the cocaine. It wasn’t.
We’d sprayed the bodies; perhaps unwittingly we tracked or transferred scabs, carried them on our trouser or shirt cuffs from one corpse to the next. I was chattering away a mile a minute, my mind seemed filled with an exultance that bordered on ecstasy: there was nothing Van Dyson or I couldn’t do. He smiled. “Really clears the brain, doesn’t it? Let’s inject one more hypo each, then get started.”
We undressed the body. He lowered the lamp over the male. “Excellent. He’s thawing. That will make things easier for us.” He handed me the scalpel. “You may have the honor of the first cut, Dr. Sykes.”
“I’ll start with the classic Y, so we can look at how the organs might have been affected.”
He nodded. “I’ve got a stack of slides ready next to the microscope.” He stood opposite me, leaned in.
I pushed down, concentrating on making a straight line, keeping the depth even, and drew the knife upwards toward the sternum.
The man suddenly gave out a groan and his body convulsed.
I stepped back, scalpel in hand.
The corpse lurched upright and before I could react, its hands were around Van Dyson’s throat and its mouth . . . dear God, its mouth . . . was buried in the flesh of Van Dyson’s cheek. Van Dyson screamed. The thing broke his neck as easily as you’d snap a wishbone. His head hung at peculiar cant, his tongue rolled out between his slack lips and his eyes dulled. The corpse gnawed mouth, nose, the tender skin beneath the chin, grunting. Blood poured down its throat and chest.
I shrieked.
It raised its eyes to look at me and what I saw in them was malice beyond any evil I could ever have imagined. Then it grinned.
Behind me, the female was stirring.
Half-flensed bodies began to tremble on their tables beneath the sheets.
I lunged at the male creature with my scalpel upraised and plunged it into his ear.
The blade snapped off and he fell in a heap onto the wooden boards.
Be quick now, Sykes, aim true, I told myself. There are knives by the drawer-full here.
I stabbed eyes, ears, heads. I dismembered as many of the bodies as I could, boiled the parts in a huge black kettle I hung inside the fireplace. I could scarcely keep myself from vomiting a hundred times. It wasn’t doctoring, it was butchery.
Then I heard a rattle from behind the metal-clad door. As their bodies thawed—just enough—the time of the others we’d collected had come.
It was already near daylight.
I looked around helplessly at the carnage of the dissection room, then toward the knocking from behind the heavy metal door.
I’d never get all of them rendered quickly enough.
Besides, I mourned inwardly, it was Van Dyson who knew how to articulate them, how to give a corpse a purpose even when its flesh was gone. They’d be harmless when the meat of their brains was gone, I thought; and fire would have to see to the rest.
I raked the logs from the fire, turned over the kerosene lamps.
I heard the wild scream of the rising flames mingling with the guttural cries of the resurrected ones from behind the metal-clad door, and I fled.
Auden Strothers crept stealthily into the darkened anatomy lab. Not a soul in sight—just whatever’s left of their wrecked bodies.
There was no time to worry about what might have happened to Sheri Trent, he reminded himself. Their cadaver—C 390160—lay under its blue sheet, its punctured eye hanging slightly askew on its cheekbone. Impossible to think they ever nicknamed the foul thing Molly. The autopsy students were always roving from table to table, watching a group prepare a slice of pancreas for histology, observing one of the professors work on a delicate area like the tongue and larynx . . . and people got their hands in—even if the cadaver technically belonged to another team.
He carefully unzipped the body bag embracing Team 22’s cadaver—the one that Sheri Trent had spattered with her own blood after she’d been bitten. Trent must’ve gotten her shit together when she saw the thing twitch—it too, had a deflated eye.
But, there were all those daily casual exchanges from table to table . . . and he counted two more blue sheets tagging corpses in the room . . . and the common graves where, Strothers had no doubt, the “disease” spread quietly underground and from place to place to place.
He snorted three lines of meth and joked inwardly that dismembering the bodies he was sure were infected, was essentially hackwork.
In his mind’s eye he saw the dead woman sit up and lunge, yellowed teeth bared. He saw the bloody pocket of the wound in Sheri’s arm. He cut and flensed, retching over his shoulder. Strothers picked up a surgical power saw, intent on wresting the femur from the pelvis. “For Christ’s sake,” he said aloud. He was trained to work carefully, what he was about to do was a waste. Besides, he hated the whine of the saw. If he proceeded cautiously—with precision—the bones could be articulated, he reminded
himself, and used in schools and labs and hospitals.
There was a kitchen off the lounge where he could boil up the remains. Hell, if it came to it, he could cart them home in plastic garbage bags and fire up his own stove.
It was going very well, he was whistling when the lab door suddenly burst open.
He started; sure for a brief second that a mindless, shambling corpse that had once been Sheri Trent had come to gnaw his flesh.
“Security!” A female officer with blond hair advanced on him.
More cops piled into the room.
Strothers followed their gaze from the flensed bodies to the baggie spilling white powder cheerily across an empty chrome table.
“You’re under arrest!”
“You don’t understand—they’re infected!” he shouted.
He felt his arms jerked backwards, cold metal handcuffs bit into his wrists.
Outside, through the windows, Strothers could see the flashing red lights of town and state police cars.
He watched the crimson glow play over the pale skin and ruined muscles of the cadavers, giving them an unearthly vibrancy—a warmth, he was certain, that would soon return them to life.
I Waltzed with a Zombie
Ron Goulart
It was the only movie ever made starring a dead man. This was back in the late spring of 1942 and Hix, the short, feisty, and unconquerably second-rate writer of low budget B-movies, was one of the few people who knew about it. He’d hoped to turn the knowledge to his advantage. But that didn’t quite work out.
His involvement commenced on an overcast May afternoon. He was pacing, as best he could, his diminutive office in the Writers Building on the Pentagram Pictures lot in Gower Gulch.
Carrying his long-corded telephone in one hand and the receiver in the other, he was inquiring of his newest agent, “In what context did Arthur Freed use the word ‘tripe,’ Bernie?”
“He applied it to your movie treatment, the one I was foolish enough to let you cajole me into schlepping over to MGM,” replied Bernie Kupperman from the Kupperman-Sussman Talent Agency offices over in the vicinity of Sunset Boulevard. “The full sentence was, ‘How dare you inflict such a load of tripe on me, Bernie?’ ”
“That’s not so bad. He could have called it crap instead of tripe.” Hix, his frizzy hair flickering, halted just short of an unstrung mandolin that lay in his path.
“Actually, Hix, he did, but I never use that kind of language over the phone.”
Sighing, the short screenwriter set his telephone down on his wobbly desk atop a scatter of glossy photos of starlets, drafts of scripts, three old issues of Whiz Comics, and a paper plate that once had held a nutburger. “Alas, that’s the curse of being ahead of my time with my ideas.”
“Two weeks ahead isn’t that far,” suggested his agent. “Oh, and Freed, hardly using any profanity at all, did mention that he’d heard that Val Lewton is planning to do a picture with the same title over at RKO.”
“What I hear is that Lewton and his heavy-handed director Tourneur are probably both about to get the bum’s rush out of the studio before they have time to make another clinker like Cat People.” Hix gazed at a spot on the far wall where a window would’ve been if his office actually had a window. “More importantly, Bernie, Lewton’s flicker is entitled I Walked with a Zombie, while my proposed blockbuster enjoys the far superior title of I Waltzed with a Zombie.”
“Even so, Hix, we—”
“Furthermore, pal, Lewton’s movie is going to be just another trite lowbrow effort aimed chiefly at the Saturday matinee crowd, mostly pubescent boys who flock into movie palaces to eat popcorn, whistle at Rita Hayworth, and pass gas,” he pointed out. “My effort is a big budget musical, the very first horror musical comedy ever conceived by man.”
“So far nobody—”
“Face it, buddy, the concept of a Technicolor musical in the horror genre is, well, both brilliant and unique.” When Hix’s head bobbed enthusiastically, his frazzled hair fluttered. “Were I given to hyperbole, I’d dub it super-colossal.”
After a few silent seconds, his agent told him, “Estling over at Star Spangled Studios wants you for another Mr. Woo quickie.”
Hix sank down into his slightly unstable swivel chair, sighing again. “As a potential Oscar winner,” he complained, “I ought to be working for somebody who’s not as big a moron as Estling.”
“He’s offering five hundred bucks more than you got for Mr. Woo at the Wax Museum.”
“Okay, tell him I’ll write it,” said Hix. “But keep pitching I Waltzed with a Zombie.”
“Only if it doesn’t look like it’s going to result in my suffering bodily harm.”
Hix hung up and slid the phone toward the edge of his desk. “Twenty-nine smash B-movies since I came here six years ago and they still treat me like a hack.”
The telephone rang.
“Mr. Hix’s private office,” he answered in, he was quite certain, a very convincing imitation of a very polite British servant.
“Listen, Hix, I’ve got to talk to you.”
“That can be arranged, Marlys,” he assured her. “Still unhappy about how things are going for you at Paramount? You’ve only been under contract for a little over three months after all.”
“I still haven’t been cast in one darn movie, Hix,” Marlys Regal told him. “But this is something else, something maybe worse. Can you meet me in the Carioca Room at the Hotel San Andreas on Wilshire at five?”
“I can, sure. But what exactly—”
“Listen, besides writing a whole stewpot of movies that are always on the lower half of double bills, I know you’ve done some amateur detective work now and then.”
“I wouldn’t apply the word amateur to my work in the ’tec field, kid. In fact—”
“You also know a lot about spooky stuff, occult matters?”
“We’ve been keeping company for well over a month. In that time you must’ve deduced that I’m an expert in the field.”
“Particularly zombies?”
“Well, sure. My as-yet unsold epic musical is about . . . Whoa now. Are you hinting that you know something about real life zombies?”
“I am, yes, and I’m afraid I could be in trouble.”
“So, tell me exactly what—”
“Nope, it’s too darn risky to say any more from where I am right now. Meet me at the Carioca Room. Bye, darling.” She ended the call.
Cradling the receiver, he stood up and lifted his umber-colored sport coat off the eagle-topped coat rack to the left of his desk. As he shrugged his way into it, frazzled hair vibrating, he made his way to the door. “If I crack a zombie case,” he said, grabbing the dented doorknob, “I can get some terrific publicity for I Waltzed with a Zombie.”
The green and scarlet parrot behind the long teakwood bar was alive. He swung on his gilded perch in his gilded cage, now and then squawking out what were probably Brazilian curses. The other parrots, the ones perched high in the fake banana palms that decorated the dim-lit Carioca Room, were stuffed.
Arriving about ten minutes after five, Hix stopped near the bar and scanned the surrounding South American gloom.
“Still busily turning out crap, Hix?” asked an overweight writer who was occupying a nearby stool.
“I’ve recently been promoted to writing tripe, Arnie.” Eyes narrowed, he looked again at the surrounding tables. There was no sign of Marlys.
After swallowing the rest of his Manhattan and plucking the cherry from the bottom of the glass, Arnie said, “Buy you a drink, old buddy?”
“I’m meeting somebody.”
“Anybody I know?” he inquired, biting the cherry.
“I’m hoping for Carmen Miranda,” Hix answered. “My doctor advised me to get more fruit in my diet. I figure if I eat her hat, I’ll—”
“Marafona,” cried the parrot, agitating his golden cage. “Marafona.”
Marlys Regal, smiling very faintly, had just entered the cocktail l
ounge. She spotted Hix, gave him a minimalist wave before crossing to an empty table next to an almost believable palm tree. Before sitting down, she looked back toward the doorway. She was a very pretty young woman in her early twenties, slender and, at the moment, a redhead.
Arnie nodded. “Cute, but a little too skinny for my tastes,” he observed. “And obviously too good for you.”
“She’s lowered her standards because of wartime shortages.” Hix, his crinkly hair fluttering, went trotting over to the actress. En route he passed out greetings to some of the other customers. “Hi, Chester, you were great in the new Boston Blackie flicker.”
“That crap,” said the actor.
“Tripe,” corrected Hix. “Howdy, Eleanor, loved you in Ship Ahoy.”
“Do I know you?”
As he seated himself opposite Marlys, the young actress asked, “Did you notice anybody watching me as I came in, Hix?”
“Sure, each and every guy, with the exception of Grady Sutton. As I’ve oft told you, kiddo, you’re very presentable.”
“No, seriously. I’m pretty sure I’m being watched.”
He reached across, put his hand over hers. “Okay, so what’s going on wrong?”
“Well, I know something and I figured maybe Paramount wouldn’t want it known. All I really was after was a chance at a good part, you know.”
“Are we talking blackmail?”
“I call it goosing my darn career. Thing is, I’m not sure how they took my proposition and, past couple days, Hix, I have this really spooky feeling they’ve got a watch on me.”
“The time has come, Marlys, for a few more details.”
She inhaled slowly, exhaled slowly. “Now this all started before I met you at the Rathbones’ party in April, Hix, so don’t get jealous or hit the ceiling. You see—”
“What’ll you folks have?” asked the buxom blond waitress who materialized out of the shadows.
The red-haired actress said quietly, “I’d like bourbon and water.”
“Plain ginger ale,” said Hix.
Nodding, the waitress departed.
Resting both elbows on the tropical-patterned tablecloth, Hix suggested, “Get back to your story.”
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