Zombies

by Otto Penzler

  They swayed closer and Marvello noticed the girl’s sharp, tiny teeth were constantly snapping, chewing on the air she walked through. He gave her an especially intimate grin.

  “I’ll wager Hugo has a lollipop or some other sweet edible possibly more to your taste, little missy,” he confided. “Something chewy, something wet, something juicy, something nice! The gentle giant has never been able to resist the tender implorements of hungry little children, dear.”

  The child’s eyes lost some of their glaze as she neared, tugging at her mother now. Marvello could hear her teeth clacking dryly. He reflected that it was a remarkably nasty little sound and gently prodded the tent flap up invitingly as he touched a hidden button which caused a deep, kindly voice to boom out from inside the tent amidst the excited chirpings of happy children.

  “It sounds like everyone’s having a fine old time,” Marvello observed, leaning over his rostrum and smiling gently down. “A fine old time. Why don’t you go join them, darlings?”

  He paused, furtively turned a dial, and then appeared to listen in happy surprise as the children’s voices coming from inside the tent were suddenly amplified in a burst of avid glee and enthusiastic crunchings and slobberings and gulpings became increasingly audible.

  “Harken,” hissed Marvello excitedly, holding his hand cupped dramatically behind an ear. “Harken at that, will you? It’s my guess dear old Hugo has just now given his little chums inside some particularly tasty morsels—he has a whole tub full of them, you know—something ripe and gooey, something positively dripping, just the way I know you sweet things like ’em, eh? Eh?”

  He leaned lower over his rostrum and leered openly at the two of them.

  “Take a friendly tip from me, from your dear old uncle Professor Marvello,” he whispered, “and hurry on in before it’s all et up!”

  The girl’s feverish pulling increased into a desperate frenzy of haulings and jerkings, and the two of them were halfway into the tent when the mother balked stubbornly, her filmy eyes bulging up at Professor Marvello with slowly increasing interest, staring up at the smooth pink skin of his neat little double chin in particular.

  “No, Mother, no,” said the professor with a dry, friendly chuckle, firmly pointing at the entrance with his bamboo cane. “No, non, nyet, nein . . . the food’s in there, sweetness. Inside the tent with dear old Hugo.”

  The mother’s cracked lips writhed back, the lower one splitting slightly with the effort, and this brought her teeth entirely into view for the first time. They had been longer than the ordinary run of teeth in life to the point of deformity, but now, because of the shrinkage of her gums, they were of an appalling size and curvature. When she fully opened her mouth wide in Marvello’s direction, it looked like a mantrap fitted out with yellowed boar’s tusks. Quietly, without fuss, he placed the tip of his cane on the side of her shoulder, on the meatiest part so it would get a good purchase, then he shoved it with an efficient and expert brutality, timing his nudge with the haulings of her still-tugging daughter, and sent the two of them tumbling clumsily into the tent’s opening.

  “Get inside there, inside with you, you grinning, rotting cunt,” Marvello drawled softly, nudging the flap so that it rolled down smartly and pushing another button which caused the sounds of Hugo and the happy children to cease forthwith.

  There was a faint sparking noise from within the tent and a wisp of acrid burning wafted outwards. Marvello frowned slightly at this and consulted a series of dials set into the rear of the rostrum just to make sure all the readings were correct. It would never do to have a mechanical failure during a performance. It would never do at all.

  He paused to give his face another wipe with his polka-dot hanky and to reponder the advisability of a sip from the flask. It was dry work; neither man nor beast could deny that it was dry work. He had allowed himself to pull the flask a third of the way out of his pocket when he froze at the sound of a persistent and complicated growling coming from the darkness to his left. He let the flask slip back into its hiding place and peered carefully in the direction of the growling, his hand screening his eyes from the spotlights overhead.

  At first he saw nothing, but then he became aware of activity in the darkness outside the midway, an ominous black milling highlit with small metallic gleams. It stirred closer, then suddenly boiled out into the lighted area to reveal itself as a group of fifteen to twenty very large ones moving together as a unit.

  They were a shaggy, snarling army of the night. Huge, all of them, built like bears and almost as hairy, and they all favored black leather outfits with bones and flames painted on them and lots of stainless steel rivets pounded in along the hems. Some wore visored caps, others Nazi helmets, the rest went bareheaded to show off bizarre shavings and haircuts, and a few had lost their scalps entirely. One of these last had a crude swastika hacked crudely into the top of his skull.

  They were a group of bikers who had somehow, almost touchingly, managed to stay together after death. The gaudily terrifying tattoos on their skin may have faded or dimmed with mildew when they had not sloughed off altogether, and some of their bulging muscles and beer bellies might be lying exposed and rotting in swaying hammocks of flesh gone to leather, but their sense of being a group had survived into their new condition beyond a doubt. They all still glared balefully out at the world from a common center.

  “Come this way, my dear gentlemen, do, for your pleasure’s sake, come this way,” Marvello intoned into the mike, upping the bass dial slightly to give his voice a little more authority. “I perceive without difficulty that you have wandered long and far—both in life and in your present status, from the looks of you—and it is my considered professional opinion that you all are tired, very tired, very, very tired, yes, every one of you without exception, yes, and that you could all do with a little relaxation. Relaxation.”

  First they gaped vaguely around at the show in general, staring at the bright lights and flapping pictures and glittering words, but one by one their eyes began shifting in the same direction during Marvello’s spiel until they had all zeroed in on the professor himself, the only living human in sight. Their stomachs began to rumble audibly and then they started to whine and bark, first one by one and then in a pack, like wandering wolves instinctively organizing at the sight of a lost and lonely child.

  “Relaxation . . .” Marvello murmured the word thoughtfully once more, seeming to be blissfully unaware that any harm might befall him from his visitors. “And you have come to the right place for it, gentlemen, you couldn’t have come to a better, because we have here on the premises of Marvello’s Miraculous Midway one of the all-time expert practitioners of producing that enviable condition.”

  He turned and pointed with his bamboo cane at a large canvas rectangle bearing the painting of a thin, brown man wearing a turban and a loin cloth, staring intensely with his large, dark eyes, and holding his hands poised weirdly out before him with all his fingertips pointed directly at the viewer.

  “Allow me to direct your attention to this depiction of one of my most valued and trusted associates, the Swami Pootcha Ahsleep,” intoned Marvello, beaming down at his guests in a friendly fashion, a man anxious to share a boon. “Pootcha Ahsleep.”

  The bikers steadily continued their sinister, shuffling approach and Marvello noticed that their odors preceded them and was interested to smell that the peculiar stench of tanned leather gone mouldy had at last managed to completely dominate their other mingled stenches of decay.

  “The Swami and myself,” he continued, “both studied the occult arts at the very same Tibetan monastery during our childhood, but I am not ashamed to freely admit that Ahsleep, my old-time pal and fellow scholar, far exceeded me in a number of the difficult arts there imparted, particularly outshining me in the little-understood and seldom-mastered skills of hypnotism!”

  As he uttered this last word with great emphasis, his hand moved smoothly under his rostrum and the Swami’s eyes painted on
the poster suddenly began to lighten and darken in a slow, even pulsing as the sound of a snake charmer’s horn began to wail eerily from the tent’s interior. For the first time the bikers paused in their meaningful progress toward the professor and shifted their large, jackbooted feet with the beginnings of indecision as they stared up with steadily-increasing interest at the poster’s throbbing eyes.

  “I see you have noticed the irresistible fascination which the Swami’s eyes inevitably hold for any intelligent observer,” pointed out Marvello, lowering the bass even further and emphasizing the singsong quality which he had allowed to creep into his voice, allowing it to move in and out of the melody of the Hindu flute. “It is very hard to take one’s eyes from their deep, hypnotic gaze, very hard. I’m willing to hazard you gentlemen even now are finding it increasingly difficult to look away even as I speak to you, that you are starting to discover that it is, in fact, impossible. Impossible. That you cannot look away. You cannot look away.”

  One particularly huge biker at the rear had rather worried Marvello from the start, since for most of his hulking approach his head had been held at an odd, low angle and the professor had been unable to determine if the man actually had any eyes left with which to see the Swami’s flashing gaze, but now, at the professor’s last words, the biker’s head had lifted with a painful-looking, sudden twist of his inflated, purple neck, and Marvello was greatly relieved to observe that it seemed he did have one eye left, after all. Not much of it, true, but enough for the purpose.

  Gently, making as little fuss about it as possible, Marvello teased the tent flap open. The snake charmer music subtly increased in volume, grew more complicated, and the professor timed his commands to match its cadence.

  “Walk into the tent, gentlemen,” he intoned softly, intimately, close to the microphone. “Walk into the tent for peace at last, lovely, soothing peace. It’s waiting in the tent, my wandering friends, my little lost sheep. All you need to do is stumble in any which way you can and take it for your own. Walk into the tent for peace. For peace.”

  With their various shuffles, staggers and lurches in almost perfect rhythm, they began moving toward the opening with their gaze fixed dutifully on the throbbing eyes of Pootcha Ahsleep. They had almost gotten there when the large biker Marvello had noticed in particular, the cyclops with the faulty eye, hesitated and then halted entirely. He twisted his head this way and that in a mounting panic, and then he began to howl monotonously, to push and flail at his companions desperately in a sort of clumsy fit.

  “Damn,” murmured Marvello under his breath, for he saw that the fellow’s piss yellow, distended staring eye had chosen this unfortunate moment to explode altogether and that its slimy juices were even now slithering smoothly down from his freshly-emptied socket, down along the rough stubble of his cheek.

  Now that he was totally blind he could no longer see Pootcha Ahsleep’s hypnotic gaze, and since his retention span was almost nonexistent if not entirely so, he had forgotten that gaze completely and was no longer under the Swami’s spell. As his pointless, panicky struggles and flailings increased, he began to seriously impede the steady, tentward drift of his companions.

  “All of you must go into the tent, dear fellows,” Marvello commanded, rising to the challenge. “Every one of you, with no exceptions, that’s what the Swami wants. Recall that you are an organization of sorts, and press together proudly as you did when you thundered down the highway on your mighty machines, your fine black hogs. Keep the herd entire, keep the pack complete. That’s the way, boys, that’s the way.”

  The others had now crowded firmly around their blind companion, heaving a surrounding wall of hairy flesh up against him until they had actually lifted him, so that the black toes of his boots scuffed the ground uselessly and he was as helpless as a small child hauled through a mall by its mother.

  “Good lads,” drawled Marvello, watching the bikers shuffle into the tent, carrying the struggling rebel along in the center of the group with the pressure of their rotting shoulders and bellies. “Good lads.”

  He lifted his cane, holding it at the ready, and when the last of the bikers had finally stumbled into the tent, he darted its tip at the flap with the speed and accuracy of a striking cobra, closing the opening instantly.

  “That had a distinct and genuine potential of becoming downright unpleasant,” he mused into the darkness, turning off the Hindu music abruptly.

  Without bothering to enter into any further debate with himself, he plucked the flask from his hip pocket, unscrewed its cap with dispatch, and gratefully swallowed a good full inch of its contents. Perhaps he should altogether abandon this little hobby he’d developed of buck and winging the first stages of the scooping. Those damn bikers could have done him in. He replaced the cap on the flask and slid the flask back into his pocket, then took up the microphone.

  “I believe,” he said, smiling benignly around at the empty midway, “I believe the time has come for the Grand Finale.”

  What had happened up to now was, as Marvello would have freely admitted, a mere frivolity, a bit of harmless self-indulgence, a catering to his sense of whimsy. Now the evening was wearing on and he had his quota to meet and it was time for sterner stuff, it was time to really crank the Midway up full blast, it was time to let her rip.

  He bent to his rostrum with a faint sigh of resignation and began a major readjustment of the control board built into its rear, and as he pushed its buttons and turned its knobs and slid its levers along their slots, a vast alteration began taking place along the abbreviated midway.

  First the lights dimmed almost to darkness, so that the towering silhouettes of the signs and tent peaks seemed a sort of Stonehenge; then, after a significant pause, the lights began to glow again, but changed from their former bright, bodacious white to sinister variations on the color red, ranging from burning crimsons to ominous scarlets, which were all of them so splashed and spattered with bright gouts of orange and rust that the whole place seemed to be suddenly soaked in gore.

  Following that, the crudely painted, innocent carny posters of freaks and fire-eaters and rounded women in spangled tights rolled out of sight while their places were smoothly taken by huge blank screens which rolled smoothly into view in order to receive the projections of three-dimensional, violently colored, moving pictures showing freshly ripped-out bowels quivering in random loops, still-beating hearts exposed in chests newly torn open, and many such other anatomical wonders.

  At the same time the entire area was suddenly infused with the overpowering odor of fresh-spilled blood and the air was rent with a ghastly din of screams and shrieks mixed with the sounds of flesh being hacked and sawed amid the gurglings and splashes of spouting arteries and spilling guts.

  “Very well, very well,” murmured Professor Marvello softly, giving the ghastly effect his labors had created a steady, professional appraisal, carefully and critically observing all its grisly nuances.

  “Not bad, not bad at all,” he finally opined. “Perhaps a few more sobbing women, a little upping of the stench of newly-opened innards.”

  He bent to turn a dial, then brightened and smiled as awful feminine gaspings and groanings joined the cacophony sounding about him and a new, tangy reek invaded his nostrils.

  “Just the needed touch,” he said to himself, adjusting his boater and bow tie contentedly.

  He took up his microphone and spoke into it loudly and clearly so that his voice rang out resoundingly through the sea of darkness all around.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. This is it, this is it. What you’ve been shambling around trying to find out there in those used-up fields and little bitty no-account towns, what you’ve been yearning for, hungering for, and likely starting to doubt to believe could possibly exist.”

  He pulled a lever and a thick, vomitous, charnel stench blew enthusiastically out of the four outlets of a tall pipe overhead, gouting forth its ripe, rich odors into each cardinal direction simul
taneously.

  “It’s here, it’s here, in Marvello’s Miraculous Midway, my good friends, right here on this very spot where you hear the sound of my voice inviting you one and all. Inviting you all. Forget those friends and loved ones you’ve sucked dry so long ago, dear hearts, leave off trying to content yourselves with the wandering, shriveled cows and dogs and cats you run across less and less these days, and come on in, come on in!”

  Marvello heard a faint, choking meep and turned to see a tiny shape crawling into the gory light of the Midway. It was the corpse of a baby dressed in a long lacy dress that trailed along behind it as it hauled itself determinedly through the Kansas dust with what was left of its tiny, rotting fingers.

  “Not much, but you’re a start,” said Marvello, observing the little creature with interest as it struggled toward the entrance. “If I’d have known the likes of you was out there, I’d have lured you in during the preamble with Wally Mysto and his Edible Animal Puppets. Land’s sake, I do declare this little nipper must have drowned in its baptismal font. Yes, I’d have sworn the likes of you would have shown up for one of the earlier shows, sweetness, yes I would, but there’s no accounting for taste.”

  He made no move to close the flap as the baby cleared the entrance and entered the tent. He’d only done it with his earlier visitors because he liked the effect, the truth be told. A vague electrical sputtering, a curl of smoke, and perhaps the faintest hint of a tiny, cut-off wail were ignored completely by Marvello because a surrounding murmur of activity had taken his full attention. He straightened and stared into the surrounding darkness.

  There were so many of them, but then there were always so many of them. The first few rows now emerging into the ruddy light were distinct, you could read their separate forms, see their individual bodies, observe that one was little more than bones and shreds of leather, another was so ballooned with gas it could not bend its limbs but only totter, and that a third had the steel sutures the surgeons had clipped onto its arteries still dangling from its opened chest, but once you got past the first few rows of them, they all started to merge into one heaving thing moving at you. Steadily. Hungrily. Endlessly.