The 11th Golden Age of Weird Fiction

by E. Hoffmann Price

  “Good God in heaven!” he groaned.

  “That’s why I warned you,” whispered Madeline. “I saw Plato before and after.”

  “If I’d only left—”

  “I’m still glad you didn’t, Walt. It was such a ghastly, lonely life. Becoming a living corpse is better than never having lived.”

  A wave of nausea racked Connell. He and Madeline would presently be the companions of that horrible hulk.

  “Hitch your chair over, bit by bit,” Madeline continued. “Maybe I can get you loose.”

  Connell’s cramped efforts moved the chair a scant fraction of an inch. At the rasp of wood, the heads of the zombies shifted. They had their orders. Not a chance.

  “Plato,” said Connell. “Loosen my hands, Plato, don’t you remember me?”

  Over and over, he repeated the name. The blank, sightless face seemed to change for an instant.

  “Maybe he’s not been this way long enough to forget everything,” whispered Madeline. “Try again—”

  The oft repeated name got unexpected results, but not from the zombie. Plato’s wife, Amelia, came slinking from the hallway. Her black plump face became slate grey as she stared into the ruddy glow.

  “Where’s mah Plato? Mistah Walt, was yo’all talkin’ to him?”

  Then she saw the hulk that had been Connell’s nigger.

  “Plato! Don’t yo’ heah me talkin’ to yo’?”

  Not a sign of life. That blasted brain could not absorb a new impression.

  “Plato, honey, cain’t yo’ heah me?”

  Finally, grey and trembling, the negress turned to Connell.

  “Mistah Walt, Ah cain’t do nuthin’. Mah Plato’s am daid.”

  Connell realized that Amelia’s persuasion had made less impression than his own authoritative voice.

  “Untie us, Amelia,” he said.

  She had scarcely reached the chair when Plato’s ponderous hand lashed out, flinging her into a corner.

  “Mistah Walt,” said the negress as she struggled to her feet, “Ah’s gwine to de village to git help. Dat debbil don’t know Ah’m here, and Ah’ll get some white folks.”

  She stepped into the hall. Connell renewed his struggles. Once or twice Madeline contrived to jerk her chair a fraction of an inch toward him, but a zombie leaped forward, bodily picked her up, and set her in a corner. They did nothing to thwart Connell’s struggles against his bonds. The orders had not covered that.

  Finally Connell contrived to spread the knotted strands of clothesline.

  “Hang on, darling,” he panted. “I’ll be clear in a second.”

  “But what good will it do?” moaned Madeline. “They’ll block you before—”

  “Maybe I can toss you out the window, chair and all.”

  He knew that he had no chance against his grisly captors, but anything was better than waiting for that deadly brew to receive the missing ingredients that would make them living corpses. Connell heard footsteps and relaxed his desperate efforts. His blood froze, and a stifled oath choked him.

  It was Amelia. She had a small parcel wrapped in paper. Damn her black hide, why hadn’t she run to the village?

  “Plato, honey,” she pleaded, “Ah’s done brought yo’ somethin’ good.”

  “For God’s sake, go to the village,” shouted Connell.

  “That would be wasted effort,” said a sardonic voice. Ducoin crossed the threshold, accompanied by Aunt Célie and several zombies. His sinister presence, and the living dead seemed to freeze Amelia with horror. She had lost her chance to make a break.

  “I guess we’ll have a number three zombie,” murmured Ducoin.

  The living dead now blocked the doorway. Aunt Célie lifted the lid of the kettle, and added a pinch of powder from a small packet. She stirred the villainous potion, and drew off a cupful and held it to Connell’s lips.

  “You might as well drink it,” said Ducoin. “If you don’t—” His gaze shifted to Madeline’s trembling bare body and he resumed, “These zombies will do anything I tell them. How would you like to see one of them—”

  His words trailed to a whisper, but Connell knew what would happen to Madeline, before his eyes.

  And then the last remnant of cord that bound his wrist yielded. His freed hand flashed out, striking the steaming beverage from Ducoin’s hand. As the Creole recoiled, Connell’s other hand jerked loose, gripping him by the throat. The sudden move caught Ducoin off guard. Since the master was present, the zombies did not interfere; and Ducoin, throttled by Connell’s savage grasp, could not articulate an order.

  Sock! Connell’s fist hammered home, driving Ducoin crashing into a corner, dazed and numb. Connell struggled with the bonds at his ankles, but only for a moment. Aunt Célie seized his elbows from the rear.

  Once Ducoin recovered his voice—!

  Amelia was free. But instead of running, she approached Plato.

  “Jes’ yo’ taste one, honey,” she crooned, placing a salted cashew nut in the bluish, sagging mouth of her dead husband.

  There was a mumbling and a drooling, a sudden flash of perception as the salty tidbit mingled with the saliva; then an inarticulate, bestial howl. Ducoin and Aunt Célie flung themselves forward.

  “Stop her!” yelled Ducoin. “She’s giving them salt!”

  Too late. Burly, powerful Plato had become a raging maniac. Amelia thrust a dozen cashew nuts into the mouth of the other zombie. Another incredible transformation. Another slavering, howling black brute. A pistol cracked, but only once.

  Ducoin’s weapon clattered into a corner. Plato and his companion closed in.

  The room became a red hell of slaughter. The insensate black hulks were pounding and trampling and flinging Ducoin and Aunt Célie about like bean bags.

  They hungrily licked splashed blood from their black hands, and renewed the assault. Other zombies came from the fields, tasted a salted nut, and joined the butchery. And presently there was only a shapeless, gory pulp that they were trampling and beating into the floor.…

  The zombies desisted for lack of fragments left to dismember. Then they clambered to their feet, utterly ignoring Amelia and the two prisoners. They shattered the window, cleared the sill, and dashed across the field. Against the moonglow Connell saw them burrowing into the ground like dogs.

  Amelia, sobbing and laughing, was releasing him and Madeline.

  “Mistah Walt,” the negress explained, “when Ah saw mah Plato Ah remembered somethin’ my ole grandmammy done tol’ me years ago, about dem zombies cuttin’ up dat way when dey ate salt. Den Ah ’membered de cashew nuts Ah done give yo’. Now, praise de Lawd, Plato am plumb daid, and all de other niggah is gwine to their graves lak Christians. Dey always does dat, when they gets salt. But fust they musses up de man what made dem zombies.”

  “But how did he do it?” wondered Connell as he helped Madeline into the car.

  “I don’t know anything about it, except that according to the law in Haiti, it’s a capital offense to administer any drug that produces a coma. And I think that’s the real reason Uncle Pierre decided to finish me—he found me reading an old book of Haitian statutes, not long ago, and was afraid of my suspicions.”

  “Mistah Walt,” interrupted a voice from the rumble seat, “yo’ll gwine to need a maid fo’ de new missus, ain’t yo?”

  “Absolutely,” assured Connell, “but you’d better take a vacation for a couple of weeks before you come to work.…”

  TOMB DWELLER

  Originally published in Spicy Mystery Stories, December 1935.

  “When I am dead, open my grave and see

  The smoke that curls about thy feet.

  In my dead heart the fire still burns for thee:

  Yea, the smoke rises from my winding sheet.”

  Diwan of Hafiz.

  Gil Maynard’
s destination was Villa Zaynab, on the fringe of the Moslem quarter of Cairo, a limbo of arcaded alleys through which robed figures silently flitted like old ghosts on their way to meet the newly dead.

  That thought took the edge from Maynard’s eagerness to meet Lili Allzanneau. Her perturbing cablegram had been the culmination of several hysterical letters that mentioned Graf Istavan, her dead lover, in the present tense. And she had inherited Villa Zaynab from Maynard’s former rival.

  The negro doorkeeper regarded him with eyes like ivory saucers on an onyx table. Without a word he ushered Maynard through a courtyard and into an arabesque reception room. He pressed a button. Presently a Coptic girl answered the summons.

  Her delicate olive-tinted face was as sweet as her full-lipped, crimson smile; she was slender, and her hands and bare feet were tiny, but there was something about her almond-shaped eyes that sent a strange thrill racing down Maynard’s spine. Fascinating, and uncanny eyes, smiling between dense fringes of closely spaced lashes. She looked like something that had stepped from the wall painting of a Pharaoh’s tomb.

  She beckoned, then silently led the way down a hallway, at the end of which she indicated a door. Her archaic smile was as disturbing as that exotic loveliness which neither time nor conquest could blot out of Egypt. Then without a word she turned and vanished down a cross passage.

  Lili was expecting Maynard; but the maid might at least have announced him.

  He tapped at the door. It was barely ajar. His knuckles set up small, hollow echoings. No answer.

  From within came a familiar breath of Lili’s Parisian perfume. It was mingled with the lingering mustiness of Graf Istavan’s long unoccupied house, and with a perceptible reek of ’Ajami tobacco, the kind the Hungarian had smoked in his outlandish salon in Paris before he died.

  But this was Egypt—Kamit, “The Black Land,” where nothing ever entirely died. No wonder Lili had the jitters.

  He tapped again, this time on the panel. The door swung open. A light was burning. The stucco walls were pierced by arched niches, and decorated in arabesque, but the furnishings were European.

  Lili sat on the edge of a broad divan. She wore a flowing black silk habara, the outer cloak of a Cairene woman. Beneath it was a coral chiffon nightgown fresh from rue de la Paix. She was slipping her tiny feet into lame mules. They were costly but badly scuffed and bespattered.

  Maynard noted that startling detail as his glance caressed the long, ivory curves of her legs, and the lotus bud breasts that rebelled against the coral chiffon. But the desire that flamed in his blood was quenched by the sightless stare of her blue-black eyes. Her scarlet lips were half parted, and her face was a frozen mask of bewilderment.

  She was utterly unaware of his presence; she was looking beyond him, and into the blackness of that dark land. He shuddered. Whatever she saw could not be pleasant.

  Moving like a lovely automaton, she rose and gathered together the folds of her silken habara. Maynard, his perceptions unnaturally sharpened, noted that her fingernails were trimmed to the quick. Odd—when Lili’s fantastically long nails had been the wonder of Paris!

  Two silent servants, and now this copper-haired creature whose very eyes seemed dead! It already seemed to Maynard that he had spent a lifetime in a tomb.

  “Lili!” His voice rang hollowly in his ears.

  She continued moving as though some sculptured figure had stepped from a pedestal. She scarcely breathed. He could barely detect the rise and fall of her shapely breast. Another stride. Maynard caught her in his arms. At least she was alive.

  “Lili!” he repeated, his voice rasping with desperation. His fingers sank into her soft flesh. She started as though a live wire had touched her. She cried out and recoiled as in the face of peril. He felt the pounding of her heart, and the sudden tension that stiffened her body.

  Her eyes were now alive, incredulously regarding him.

  “Gil—Gil! When did you get here—how—”

  “Just arrived. But where the blazes were you going?”

  Maynard seated himself and drew her to his knee. She clung to him now like a newly found hope.

  “I was on my way again,” she whispered, shuddering and drawing closer, “to open a tomb.”

  “Tomb!” echoed Maynard.

  “Yes. Walking by night in some awful, endless fog…”

  He plucked the sleeve of her black haraba. A discarded negligee was flung across the foot of the divan. And again he eyed the scuffed and bedraggled mules. She must have been wearing them out of the house.

  “I don’t know why I ever came to Egypt. I didn’t want the villa that Graf Istavan left me. But something urged me against my will. And I cabled you when he began talking to me. In vague, blurred dreams. Blurred, but terribly real. He’s calling me to some underground place. Every night I go out to hunt him. I’ve ruined my nails. Clawing—”

  “But where, for God’s sake, where?”

  “I can’t ever remember.”

  Maynard’s glance shifted towards the door of the room. She shook her head.

  “No good, Gil,” she said with a wan smile. “For a while I had Nefretari—that’s my maid—lock me in, but I came and went just the same. So I left the door unlocked. So I could believe what you were thinking—that I must have passed through the door. I didn’t dare believe anything else.”

  Maynard’s common sense rebelled. Graf Istavan was dead. And though Lili’s eyes were dark and haunted, she was a succession of rounded curves that smiled graciously through the caressing veil of chiffon, and Maynard had long and vainly desired her.

  But he did not like the name of Lili’s maid. Nefretari—unpleasantly ancient. She ought to have a decent Arabic name, despite those smoldering, almond shaped eyes that looked too much like those of a sculptured queen…

  But Lili’s copper-bronze ringlets were pillowed on his shoulder, and her warmth and fragrance drove the chill from his blood. He found her lips, and wondered if his heart could long endure its savage pounding as she returned the caress.

  “Oh, Gil! I’m so glad you’re here,” she murmured as he drew her silken length closer to him, and ventured to caress the palpitating roundnesses that gave life and richness to the clinging wisps of coral about her. Her breath was now coming in quick gasps, and she was clinging to him as though he were the last semblance of reality. His caressing hand followed the curve of her hips, and his blood flamed at the feminine sweetness of the line that tapered toward her knees.

  She no longer sought to check his exploring caresses, no longer sought to draw back into place the hem of her gown.

  Get her out of Cairo at once. That was logic; but Maynard had gone too far to retreat Tomorrow, maybe… He gathered her in his arms, and as he emerged from the chair, her arms laced more tightly about him, and her lips seconded the invitation that glowed from her misty, half closed eyes…

  He snapped off the light. Lili was an amorous, ivory fascination in the gloom that was relieved only by moon-glow peeping through a barred window.

  He knelt beside the divan, dazzled for an instant by the closeness of what had so long been unattainable. Her lips were a consuming, possessive fire…

  But as her arms closed about him, he knew that they were no longer alone. Lili cried out, retracting her arms.

  A man was speaking. There was no mistaking Graf Istavan’s voice and accent as he chanted,

  “When I am dead, open my grave and see

  The smoke that curls about thy feet.

  In my dead heart the fire still burns for Thee:

  Yea, the smoke rises from my winding sheet.”

  Maynard bounded to the switch. The room blazed into light. It was empty. And silent, except for Maynard’s hoarse breathing. Then, at last, Lili’s first shuddering exhalation. Her lips were a grotesquely scarlet splash against her pallor.

  Maynard sensed t
he futility of protest when Lili at last found her voice: “I’ll ring for Nefretari, and she can show you your room. Oh, good God, Gil, it’s just as though Istavan would be here, watching us. Don’t you understand?”

  Maynard nodded. Then, as an afterthought: “But why are you staying here alone with that damn thing?”

  “Nothing will hurt me, Gil. I’m used to it, now.” Her eyes narrowed, and she whispered as she drew him to her, “Lock me in my room, and you keep the key this time. And maybe—”

  Nefretari was tapping at the door. Palming the key, he followed the Coptic girl down the hall. The sensuous, fascinating sway of her slender hips enflamed him. Her olive-tinted curves somehow defied the severe shapelessness of her native garb. She was no longer uncanny; and her silence was now a piquant fascination…

  She bowed, and glided into the hall.

  Maynard remained awake, pondering on that uncanny voice from nowhere. Then he began wondering how Nefretari’s voice would sound…

  Yet he must have dozed. The far off cry of the muezzin from the minaret of the Hassanayn Mosque startled him. Old Cairo never slept. Nor did anything ever entirely die in Kamit, that Black Land.

  Something was stirring at the threshhold.

  Someone—or something—had softly slipped into the room. Something scarcely to be distinguished from the darkness. It was moving toward him. Bending over him. He sensed the warmth and sweetness of the presence. A woman. Perhaps Lili was seeking him. But that perfume never came from Paris. And then Maynard’s heart pounded like a riveting hammer. It must be Nefretari.

  He caught her wrist, and she did not draw away. Her flesh was warm and soft, and a compelling desire to hear her voice blotted out everything but her mysterious presence.

  “Leave at once!” Her whispered French had a heart stirring lilt. “You cannot help her. She imagines things.”

  A touch of sanity in Villa Zaynab. She was now sitting beside him. As his eyes became accustomed to the gloom, he could barely distinguish the delicate outline of her haughty, high-bridged nose, and the glow of her eyes.

  “Then she doesn’t really walk by night?”