Zombies

by Otto Penzler

  “There’s no such thing,” Weber said.

  “No?” Coicou gave him a shrewd, calculating look. “I suppose your scientists wouldn’t say so. They don’t believe in vodou.”

  “Come on, of course they don’t. Neither do I.”

  “Perhaps you’d like a firsthand experience? I’m sure I could convert you.” Suddenly Coicou had a golden amulet in his hand. He swung it like a pendulum, back and forth, in steady hypnotic rhythm.

  Weber stared, fascinated. It took a great deal of effort to tear his gaze away. “No! Hey, knock it off.”

  “I think you may believe more than you think you do,” Coicou said, sardonically. “But a man should be free to choose his fate, yes?”

  “Just like Ti Malice?”

  Coicou ignored him. “And I’ll give you a choice, Mr. Weber. You caused me much trouble just now, and I’ve half a mind to make a zombie out of you and be done with it.”

  “Please, God, don’t. . . .”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in it?”

  “What’s there to believe in?” Weber cried. Despite his terror, sweat ran down his face. “A bunch of transplanted African mumbo jumbo accompanied by drums and aerobics in the night? That man, Ti Malice, he’s suffering from a nerve poison, that’s all. I read about that zombie stuff in the newspaper. He needs a doctor. A real doctor, not some witch doctor.”

  Coicou wasn’t smiling any longer. “My beliefs are my concern,” he said. “Don’t be so quick to criticize what you don’t understand. Besides, Ti Malice brought it upon himself.”

  “How? What did he do, anyway, that was so terrible?”

  “He mocked my family. Despite my warnings, he wouldn’t stop. And he was a public nuisance, always drunk, picking fights. Finally, he angered the loas—the gods.”

  “What did he do to you?”

  “It’s none of your concern. Besides, if I were you, I would be worried about my own fate just now.”

  Despite the night’s humidity and the liquor’s warmth, Weber felt icy cold begin to creep up from his toes along his feet and legs, toward his heart.

  “As I said,” Coicou continued. “I really should turn you into a zombie, too. To punish you for your meddling. But I think there’s an alternative. One that will please me even more.” And he grinned broadly, displaying a mouthful of perfect white teeth. “We’ll be partners.”

  “In what?”

  “We’ll split the profits fifty/fifty,” Coicou said. “And a resourceful blanc like you should do very well with this.”

  Weber pulled back deeper into the cushions. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Ti Malice’s paintings. You wanted to buy them, Mr. Weber. That’s why you came down here. You may have them. All you want. Take a planeload home with you to Los Angeles and build a new vogue for him.”

  “I don’t want his work anymore.”

  “But you’ll take it, nonetheless.”

  “And if I don’t.”

  Coicou said nothing, merely swung the pendulum until it glittered in the lamplight.

  THE WEBER GALLERY was aglow and golden, each towering floral centerpiece in place, every wineglass polished, every bottle iced and waiting for the opening of “Caribbean Spice.”

  At six sharp, Weber unlocked the doors for his guests. They glittered with jewelry and fine silks dyed in jewel tones. Like a group of chattering tropical parrots they filled the room, eager to see, to buy, to be seen buying.

  As though in a dream, Weber wandered among his customers, listening to them ooh and aah.

  “Fabulous.”

  “I love the color.”

  “God, they’re so free with their work. Their lives are so natural, much more in touch with the basics than ours.”

  “David! Buddy, this is great.” It was Fred Lovell, the well-heeled producer. “I had no idea this work by Tu Malice—”

  “Ti Malice,” Weber said.

  “Right, Ti. Anyway, I didn’t know his stuff would be so exciting. You sure know how to pick ’em.”

  Weber smiled wanly. “Thanks, Fred.”

  “I can’t resist it. I shouldn’t do it, but I’ve gotta have some. Especially that one with the red angels in it.”

  “A marvelous choice,” Weber said, a bit too heartily. “I’ll just put a red dot on it. And Fred, I’ve got an even better painting to show you, one I hung with you in mind.”

  Docile with two glasses of champagne in him, Lovell followed him across the room. “Really? Wow.” He gawked at the white, green, and gold canvas, which showed a voodoo ritual taking place. “It’s terrific. I’ll take this one, too.” He patted Weber on the jaw. “Babe, you always know what I like.”

  Weber smiled his party smile and made a note on his inventory sheet.

  “What’s that necklace you’re wearing, Dave?”

  Weber touched the small rawhide bag on its leather cord. He fingered the bag lightly, twice. “This? Just something I picked up in Haiti.”

  Lovell sniffed loudly. “Boy, I’ll bet it keeps the mosquitoes away.”

  “Among other things.”

  Before the night was over, red dots had sprouted next to almost every painting in the gallery. Weber gazed at them, bleary-eyed from writing sales receipts. The show was a huge success.

  Guests crowded around him, patting him on the back and shaking his hand.

  “Terrific party, Dave!”

  “You’ve really got an eye for art.”

  “Dave, it’s another winning show. You always know where to find the best talent, don’t you?”

  “What’s your secret? Magic?”

  Weber knew he was surrounded, everybody yammering congratulations at him. But instead of the crowd he heard only one sound, the slow scratch of brush against canvas. Instead of the gallery walls, Weber saw a man’s dark emaciated hand locked in a death grip around a paintbrush, constantly moving. The brush against the canvas, the blind eyes, the slack, drooling mouth.

  “Yeah,” Weber said. “Black magic.”

  MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH (1965– ), who also writes as Michael Marshall, was born in Knutsford, Cheshire. When he was a child his family moved to the United States, South Africa, and Australia before settling in England when he was ten; he attended King’s College, Cambridge. His professional career began as a comedy writer and performer under the name Michael Rutger for the BBC Radio 4 series And Now in Colour, which ran for three seasons.

  He has been nominated for and won numerous awards, notably a 1991 British Fantasy Award for his first published short story, “The Man Who Drew Cats”; he won the award for best newcomer the same year. The same organization honored him for Best Short Story for “The Dark Land” in 1992, Best Novel (Only Forward) in 1995, and Best Short Story in 1996 for “More Tomorrow.” He has also been nominated for four World Fantasy Awards: for short story (“To Receive is Better”), 1995; novella (More Tomorrow), 1996; novella (Hell Hath Enlarged Herself), 1997; and best collection (More Tomorrow and Other Stories), 2003.

  As Michael Marshall, he wrote the brilliant Straw Men series, switching from science fiction and horror to the crime novel with a literary style more elevated than most contributions to the serial-killer genre, achieving even greater success than he had previously enjoyed. His crime novels are The Straw Men (2002), The Upright Man (released in the United Kingdom as The Lonely Dead (2004), Blood of Angels (2005), The Intruders (2007), and Bad Things (2009).

  “Later,” which was nominated for the best short story of the year by the British Fantasy Society, was originally published in the anthology The Mammoth Book of Zombies, edited by Stephen Jones (London: Robinson Publishing, 1993).

  I REMEMBER STANDING in the bedroom before we went out, fiddling with my tie and fretting mildly about the time. As yet, we had plenty, but that was nothing to be complacent about. The minutes had a way of disappearing when Rachel was getting ready, early starts culminating in a breathless search for a taxi. It was a party we were going to, so it didn’t really matter
what time we left, but I tend to be a little dull about time. I used to, anyway.

  When I had the tie as close to a tidy knot as I was going to be able to get it, I turned away from the mirror, and opened my mouth to call out to Rachel. But then I caught sight of what was on the bed, and closed it again. For a moment I just stood and looked, and then walked over towards the bed.

  It wasn’t anything very spectacular, just a dress made of sheeny white material. A few years ago, when we started going out together, Rachel used to make a lot of her clothes. She didn’t do it because she had to, but because she enjoyed it. She used to trail me endlessly round dressmaking shops, browsing patterns and asking my opinion on a million different fabrics, while I half-heartedly protested and moaned.

  On impulse I leant down and felt the material, and found I could remember touching it for the first time in the shop on Mill Road, could remember surfacing up through contented boredom to say that yes, I liked this one. On that recommendation she’d bought it, and made this dress, and as a reward for traipsing around after her she’d bought me dinner too. We were poorer then, so the meal was cheap, but there was lots and it was good.

  The strange thing was, I didn’t even really mind the dress shops. You know how sometimes, when you’re just walking around, living your life, you’ll see someone on the street and fall hopelessly in love with them? How something in the way they look, the way they are, makes you stop dead in your tracks and stare? How for that instant you’re convinced that if you could just meet them, you’d be able to love them for ever?

  Wild schemes and unlikely meetings pass through your head, and yet as they stand on the other side of the street or the room, talking to someone else, they haven’t the faintest idea of what’s going through your mind. Something has clicked, but only inside your head. You know you’ll never speak to them, that they’ll never know what you’re feeling, and that they’ll never want to. But something about them forces you to keep looking, until you wish they’d leave so you could be free.

  The first time I saw Rachel was like that, and now she was in my bath. I didn’t call out to hurry her along. I decided it didn’t really matter.

  A few minutes later a protracted squawking noise announced the letting out of the bath water, and Rachel wafted into the bedroom swaddled in thick towels and glowing high spirits. Suddenly I lost all interest in going to the party, punctually or otherwise. She marched up to me, set her head at a silly angle to kiss me on the lips and jerked my tie vigorously in about three different directions. When I looked in the mirror I saw that somehow, as always, she’d turned it into a perfect knot.

  Half an hour later we left the flat, still in plenty of time. If anything, I’d held her up.

  “Later,” she said, smiling in the way that showed she meant it. “Later, and for a long time, my man.”

  I remember turning from locking the door to see her standing on the pavement outside the house, looking perfect in her white dress, looking happy and looking at me. As I walked smiling down the steps towards her she skipped backwards into the road, laughing for no reason, laughing because she was with me.

  “Come on,” she said, holding out her hand like a dancer, and a yellow van came round the corner and smashed into her. She spun backwards as if tugged on a rope, rebounded off a parked car and toppled into the road. As I stood cold on the bottom step she half sat up and looked at me, an expression of wordless surprise on her face, and then she fell back again.

  When I reached her blood was already pulsing up into the white of her dress and welling out of her mouth. It ran out over her makeup and I saw she’d been right: she hadn’t quite blended the colours above her eyes. I’d told her it didn’t matter, that she still looked beautiful. She had.

  She tried to move her head again and there was a sticky sound as it almost left the tarmac and then slumped back. Her hair fell back from around her face, but not as it usually did. There was a faint flicker in her eyelids, and then she died.

  I knelt there in the road beside her, holding her hand as the blood dried a little. It was as if everything had come to a halt, and hadn’t started up again. I heard every word the small crowd muttered, but I didn’t know what they were muttering about. All I could think was that there wasn’t going to be a later, not to kiss her some more, not for anything. Later was gone.

  When I got back from the hospital I phoned her mother. I did it as soon as I got back, though I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to tell anyone, didn’t want to make it official. It was a bad phone call, very, very bad. Then I sat in the flat, looking at the drawers she’d left open, at the towels on the floor, at the party invitation on the dressing table, feeling my stomach crawl. I was back at the flat, as if we’d come back home from the party. I should have been making coffee while Rachel had yet another bath, coffee we’d drink on the sofa in front of the fire. But the fire was off and the bath was empty. So what was I supposed to do?

  I sat for an hour, feeling as if somehow I’d slipped too far forward in time and left Rachel behind, as if I could turn and see her desperately running to try to catch me up. When it felt as if my throat was going to burst I called my parents and they came and took me home. My mother gently made me change my clothes, but she didn’t wash them. Not until I was asleep, anyway. When I came down and saw them clean I hated her, but I knew she was right and the hate went away. There wouldn’t have been much point in just keeping them in a drawer.

  The funeral was short. I guess they all are, really, but there’s no point in them being any longer. Nothing more would be said. I was a little better by then, and not crying so much, though I did before we went to the church because I couldn’t get my tie to sit right.

  Rachel was buried near her grandparents, which she would have liked. Her parents gave me her dress afterwards, because I’d asked for it. It had been thoroughly cleaned and large patches had lost their sheen and died, looking as much unlike Rachel’s dress as the cloth had on the roll. I’d almost have preferred the bloodstains still to have been there: at least that way I could have believed that the cloth still sparkled beneath them. But they were right in their way, as my mother was. Some people seem to have pragmatic, accepting souls, an ability to deal with death. I don’t, I’m afraid. I don’t understand it at all.

  Afterwards I stood at the graveside for a while, but not for long because I knew that my parents were waiting at the car. As I stood by the mound of earth that lay on top of her I tried to concentrate, to send some final thought to her, some final love, but the world kept pressing in on me through the sound of cars on the road and some bird that was cawing in a tree. I couldn’t shut it out. I couldn’t believe that I was noticing how cold it was, that somewhere lives were being led and televisions being watched, that the inside of my parents’ car would smell the same as it always had. I wanted to feel something, wanted to sense her presence, but I couldn’t. All I could feel was the world round me, the same old world. But it wasn’t a world that had been there a week ago, and I couldn’t understand how it could look so much the same.

  It was the same because nothing had changed, and I turned and walked to the car. The wake was worse than the funeral, much worse, and I stood with a sandwich feeling something very cold building up inside. Rachel’s oldest friend Lisa held court with her old school friends, swiftly running the range of emotions from stoic resilience to trembling incoherence.

  “I’ve just realized,” she sobbed to me, “Rachel’s not going to be at my wedding.”

  “Yes, well she’s not going to be at mine either,” I said numbly, and immediately hated myself for it. I went and stood by the window, out of harm’s way. I couldn’t react properly. I knew why everyone was standing here, that in some ways it was like a wedding. Instead of gathering together to bear witness to a bond, they were here to prove she was dead. In the weeks to come they’d know they’d stood together in a room, and would be able to accept she was gone. I couldn’t.

  I said goodbye to Rachel’s parents bef
ore I left. We looked at each other oddly, and shook hands, as if we were just strangers again. Then I went back to the flat and changed into some old clothes. My “Someday” clothes, Rachel used to call them, as in “someday you must throw them away.” Then I made a cup of tea and stared out of the window for a while. I knew damn well what I was going to do, and it was a relief to give in to it.

  That night I went back to the cemetery and I dug her up. What can I say? It was hard work, and it took a lot longer than I expected, but in another way it was surprisingly easy. I mean yes, it was creepy, and yes, I felt like a lunatic, but after the shovel had gone in once the second time seemed less strange. It was like waking up in the mornings after the accident. The first time I clutched at myself and couldn’t understand, but after that I knew what to expect. There were no cracks of thunder, there was no web of lightning and I actually felt very calm. There was just me and, beneath the earth, my friend. I just wanted to find her.

  When I did I laid her down by the side of the grave and then filled it back up again, being careful to make it look undisturbed. Then I carried her to the car in my arms and brought her home.

  The flat seemed very quiet as I sat her on the sofa, and the cushion rustled and creaked as it took her weight again. When she was settled I knelt and looked up at her face. It looked much the same as it always had, though the colour of the skin was different, didn’t have the glow she always had. That’s where life is, you know, not in the heart but in the little things, like the way hair falls around a face. Her nose looked the same and her forehead was smooth. It was the same face, exactly the same.

  I knew the dress she was wearing was hiding a lot of things I would rather not see, but I took it off anyway. It was her going away dress, bought by her family specially for the occasion, and it didn’t mean anything to me or to her. I knew what the damage would be and what it meant. As it turned out the patchers and menders had done a good job, not glossing because it wouldn’t be seen. It wasn’t so bad.