Zombies

by Otto Penzler

“A mere stone’s throw, sir. A last, few steps, you might say.”

  They progressed the length of the passage, then turned a corner. The officer trod on an upturned dustbin lid and promptly swore. “Damned careless of someone. You might have broken your neck, sir.”

  “This is the way I came,” Mr. Goldsmith stated and the policeman’s grip tightened.

  “Is it now, sir? Sort of retracing your footsteps.”

  Hope was sliding down a steep ramp as Mr. Goldsmith started to struggle. “You . . .” But the grip on his arm was a band of steel. He clawed at the blue tunic and twisted a silver button. The bubbling words came from a long way off.

  “Oi . . . um . . . dud . . .”

  The moon peeped coyly from behind a cloud and watched a burly, but dead policeman drag a struggling little man towards eternity.

  NO CHARACTER APPEARED in the pages of the prestigious pulp magazine Weird Tales with greater regularity than Jules de Grandin, the occult detective created by Seabury (Grandin) Quinn (1889–1969). The first de Grandin story, “The Horror on the Links,” appeared in the October 1925 issue, and he battled vampires, zombies, werewolves, mummies, ghosts, and other supernatural foes in ninety-three stories over the next thirty years.

  Quinn was born in Washington, D.C., graduated from the law school of the National University and practiced until serving in World War I, was a lawyer for the government during World War II, and returned to the legal profession later in life. In between, he was a prolific pulp writer and edited several trade publications of the funeral business. Under the pseudonym Jerome Burke, he wrote fictionalized human-interest stories that had been told to him as reminiscences of funeral directors. He was instrumental in founding the Washington Science Fiction Association. His first published story, “The Stone Image,” appeared in the May 1, 1919, issue of The Thrill Book. The first of his 154 stories for Weird Tales was “The Phantom Farmhouse” in the October 1923 issue. He wrote about five hundred stories in all.

  Jules de Grandin, a noted French surgeon and intelligence agent who moves to America, settles in the town of Harrisonville, New Jersey, with his friend Dr. Trowbridge, who chronicles the cases of apparently supernatural and occult crimes, most of which turn out to be rationally explained, merely the result of human ingenuity and, frequently, depravity.

  “The Corpse-Maker” was originally published in the July 1929 issue of Weird Tales; it was first collected in book form in The Phantom Fighter (Sauk City, WI: Mycroft & Moran, 1966).

  THE AMBULANCE-GONG INSISTENCE of my night bell brought me up standing from a stuporlike sleep, and as I switched the vestibule light on and unbarred the door, “Are you the doctor?” asked a breathless voice. A disheveled youth half fell through the doorway and clawed my sleeve desperately. “Quick—quick, Doctor! It’s my uncle, Colonel Evans. He’s dying. I think he tried to kill himself—”

  “All right,” I agreed, turning to sprint upstairs. “What sort of wound has he?—or was it poison?”

  “It’s his throat, sir. He tried to cut it. Please, hurry, Doctor!”

  I took the last four steps at a bound, snatched some clothes from the bedside chair and charged down again, pulling on my garments like a fireman answering a night alarm. “Now, which way—” I began, but:

  “Tiens,” a querulous voice broke in as Jules de Grandin came downstairs, seeming to miss half treads in his haste. “Let him tell us where to go as we go there, my old one! It is that we should make the haste. A cut throat does not wait patiently.”

  “This is Dr. de Grandin,” I told the young man. “He will be of great assistance—”

  “Mais oui,” the little Frenchman agreed, “and the Trump of Judgment will serve excellently as an alarm clock if we delay our going long enough. Make haste, my friend!”

  “Down two blocks and over one,” our caller directed as we got under way, “376 Albion Road. My uncle went to bed about ten o’clock, according to the servants, and none of them heard him moving about since. I got home just a few minutes ago, and found him lying in the bathroom when I went to wash my teeth. He lay beside the tub with a razor in his hand, and blood was all over the place. It was awful!”

  “Undoubtlessly,” de Grandin murmured from his place on the rear seat. “What did you do then, young Monsieur?”

  “Snatched a roll of gauze from the medicine cabinet and staunched the wound as well as I could, then called Dockery the gardener to hold it in place while I raced round to see you. I remembered seeing your sign sometime before.”

  We drew up to the Evans house as he concluded his recital, and rushed through the door and up the stairs together. “In there,” our companion directed, pointing to a door from which there gushed a stream of light into the darkened hall.

  A man in bathrobe and slippers knelt above a recumbent form stretched full-length on the white tiles of the bathroom. One glance at the supine figure and both de Grandin and I turned away, I with a deprecating shake of my head, the Frenchman with a fatalistic shrug.

  “He has no need of us, that poor one,” he informed the young man. “Ten minutes ago, perhaps yes; now”—another shrug—“the undertaker and the clergyman, perhaps the police—”

  “The police? Surely, Doctor, this is suicide—”

  “Do you say so?” de Grandin interrupted sharply. “Trowbridge, my friend, consider this, if you please.” Deftly he raised the dead man’s thin white beard and pointed to the deeply incised slash across the throat. “Does that mean nothing?”

  “Why—er—”

  “Perfectly. Wipe your pince-nez before you look a second time, and tell me that you see the cut runs diagonally from right to left.”

  “Why, so it does, but—”

  “But Monsieur the deceased was right-handed—look how the razor lies beneath his right hand. Now, if you will raise your hand to your own throat and draw the index finger across it as if it were a knife, you will note the course is slightly out of horizontal—somewhat diagonal—slanting downward from left to right. It is not so?”

  I nodded as I completed the gesture.

  “Très bien. When one is bent on suicide he screws his courage to the sticking point, then, if he has chosen a cut throat as means of exit, he usually stands before a mirror, cuts deeply and quickly with his knife, and makes a downward-slanting slash. But as he sees the blood and feels the pain his resolution weakens, and the gash becomes more and more shallow. At the end it trails away to little more than a skin-scratch. It is not so in this case; at its end the wound is deeper than at the beginning.

  “Again, this poor one would almost certainly have stood before the mirror to do away with himself. Had he done so he would have fallen crosswise of the room, perhaps; more likely not. One with a severed throat does not die quickly. He thrashes about like a fowl recently decapitated, and writes the story of his struggle plainly on his surroundings. What have we here? Do you—does anyone—think it likely that a man would slit his gullet, then lie down peacefully to bleed his life away, as this one appears to have done? Non, non; it is not en caractère!

  “Consider further”—he pointed with dramatic suddenness to the dead man’s bald head—“if we desire further proof, observe him!”

  Plainly marked there was a welt of bruised flesh on the hairless scalp, the mark of some blunt instrument.

  “He might have struck his head as he fell,” I hazarded, and he grinned in derision.

  “Ah bah, I tell you he was stunned unconscious by some miscreant, then dragged or carried to this room and slaughtered like a poleaxed beef. Without the telltale mark of the butcher’s bludgeon there is ground for suspicion in the quietude of his position, in the neat manner the razor lies beneath his hand instead of being firmly grasped or flung away, but with this bruise before us there is but one answer. He has been done to death; he has been butchered; he was murdered.”

  “WILL YE BE seein’ Sergeant Costello?” Nora McGinnis appeared like a phantom at the drawing room door as de Grandin and I were having coffee ne
xt evening after dinner. “He says—”

  “Invite him to come in and say it for himself, ma petite,” Jules de Grandin answered with a smile of welcome at the big red-headed man who loomed behind the trim figure of my household factotum. “Is it about the Evans killing you would talk with us?” he added as the detective accepted a cigar and demi-tasse.

  “There’s two of ’em, now, sir,” Costello answered gloomily. “Mulligan, who pounds a beat in th’ Eighth Ward, just ’phoned in there’s a murder dressed up like a suicide at th’ Rangers’ Club in Frémont Street.”

  “Pardieu, another?” asked de Grandin. “How do you know the latest one is not true suicide?”

  “Well, sir, heres’ th’ pitch. When th’ feller from th’ club comes runnin’ out to say that Mr. Wolkof’s shot himself, Mulligan goes in and takes a look around. He finds him layin’ on his back with a little hole in his forehead an’ th’ back blown out o’ his head, an’, bein’ th’ wise lad, he adds up two an’ two and makes it come out four. He’d used a Colt .45, this Wolkof feller, an’ it was layin’ halfway in his hand, restin’ on his half-closed fingers, ye might say. That didn’t look too kosher. A feller who’s been shot through the forehead is more likely to freeze tight to th’ gun than otherwise. Certain’y he don’t just hold it easy-like. Besides, it was an old-fashioned black-powder gun, sir, what they call a low-velocity weapon, and if it had been fired close against the dead man’s forehead it should ’a’ left a good-sized smudge o’ powder-stain. There wasn’t any.”

  “One commends the excellent Mulligan for his reasoning,” de Grandin commented. “He found this Monsieur Wolkof lying on his back with a hole drilled through his head, no powder-brand upon his brow where the projectile entered, and the presumably suicidal weapon lying loosely in his hand. One thing more: it may not be conclusive, but it would be helpful to know if there were any powder-stains upon the dead man’s pistol-hand.”

  “As far’s I know there weren’t, sir,” answered Costello. “Mulligan said he took partic’lar notice of his hands, too. But ye’re yet to hear th’ cream o’ th’ joke. Th’ pistol was in Mr. Wolkof’s open right hand, an’ all th’ club attendants swear he was left-handed—writin’, feedin’ himself an’ shavin’ with his left hand exclusively. Now, I ask ye, Dr. de Grandin, would a man all steamed up to blow his brains out be takin’ th’ trouble to break a lifetime habit of left-handedness when he’s so much more important things to think about? It seems to me that—”

  “Ye’re wanted on th’ ’phone, Sergeant,” announced Nora from the doorway. “Will ye be takin’ it in here, or usin’ th’ hall instrument?”

  “Hullo? Costello speakin’,” he challenged. “If it’s about th’ Wolkof case, I’m goin’ right over—glory be to God! No! Och, th’ murderin’ blackguard!

  “Gentlemen,” he faced us, fury in his ruddy face and blazing blue eyes, “it’s another one. A little girl, this time. They’ve kilt a tiny, wee baby while we sat here like three damn’ fools and talked! They’ve took her body to th’ morgue—”

  “Then, nom d’un chameau, why are we remaining here?” de Grandin interrupted. “Come, mes amis, it is to hasten. Let us go all quickly!”

  • • •

  WITH MY HORN tooting almost continuously, and Costello waving aside crossing policemen, we rushed to the city mortuary. Parnell, the coroner’s physician, fussed over a tray of instruments, Coroner Martin bustled about in a perfect fever of eagerness to begin his official duties; two plainclothes men conferred in muted whispers in the outer office.

  Death in the raw is never pretty, as doctors, soldiers and embalmers know only too well. When it is accompanied by violence it wears a still less lovely aspect, and when the victim is a child the sight is almost heart-breaking. Bruised and battered almost beyond human semblance, her baby-fine hair matted with mixed blood and cerebral matter, little Hazel Clark lay before us, the queer, unnatural angle of her right wrist denoting a Colles’ fracture; a subclavicular dislocation of the left shoulder was apparent by the projection of the bone beneath the clavicle, and the vault of her small skull had been literally beaten in. She was completely “broken” as ever a medieval malefactor was when bound upon the wheel of torture for the ministrations of the executioner.

  For a moment de Grandin bent above the battered little corpse, viewing it intently with the skilled, knowing eye of a pathologist, then, so lightly that they scarcely displaced a hair of her head, his fingers moved quickly over her, pausing now and again to prod gently, then sweeping onward in their investigative course. “Tiens, he was a gorilla for strength, that one,” he announced, “and a veritable gorilla for savagery, as well. What is there to tell me of the case, mes amis?” he called to the plainclothes men.

  Such meager data as they had they gave him quickly. She was three and a half years old, the idol of her lately widowed father, and had neither brothers nor sisters. That afternoon her father had given her a quarter as reward for having gone a whole week without meriting a scolding, and shortly after dinner she had set out for the corner drug store to purchase an ice cream cone with part of her righteously acquired wealth. Attendants at the pharmacy remembered she had left the place immediately and set out for home; a neighbor had seen her proceeding up the street, the cone grasped tightly in her hand as she sampled it with ecstatic little licks. Two minutes later, from a spot where the privet hedge of a vacant house shadowed the pavement, residents of the block had heard a scream, but squealing children were no novelty in the neighborhood, and the cry was not repeated. It was not till her father came looking for her that they recalled it.

  From the drug store Mr. Clark traced Hazel’s homeward course, and was passing the deserted house when he noticed a stain on the sidewalk. A lighted match showed the discoloration was a spot of blood some four inches across, and with panic premonition tearing at his heart he pushed through the hedge to the unmowed lawn of the vacant residence. Match after match he struck while he called “Hazel! Hazel!” but there was no response, and he saw nothing till he was about to return to the street. Then, in a weed-choked rose bed, almost hidden by the foliage, he saw the gleam of her pink pinafore. His cries aroused the neighborhood, and the police were notified.

  House-to-house inquiry by detectives finally elicited the information that a “short, stoop-shouldered man” had been seen walking hurriedly away a moment after the child’s scream was heard. Further description of the suspect was unavailable.

  “Pardieu,” de Grandin stroked his small mustache thoughtfully as the plainclothes men concluded, “it seems we have to search the haystack for an almost microscopic needle, n’est-ce pas? There are considerable numbers of small men with stooping shoulders. The task will be a hard one.”

  “Hard, hell!” one of the detectives rejoined in disgust. “We got no more chance o’ findin’ that bird than a pig has o’ wearin’ vest-pockets.”

  “Do you say so?” the Frenchman demanded, fixing an uncompromising cat-stare on the speaker. “Alors, my friend, prepare to meet a fully tailored porker before you are greatly older. Have you forgotten in the excitement that I am in the case?”

  “Sergeant, sir,” a uniformed patrolman hurried into the mortuary, “they found th’ weapon used on th’ Clark girl. It’s a winder-sash weight. They’re testin’ it for fingerprints at headquarters now.”

  “Humph,” Costello commented. “Anything on it?”

  “Yes, sir. Th’ killer must ’a’ handled it after he dragged her body into th’ bushes, for there’s marks o’ bloody fingers on it plain as day.”

  “O.K., I’ll be right up,” Costello replied. “Take over, Jacobs,” he ordered one of the plain-clothes men. “I’ll call ye if they find out anything, Dr. de Grandin. So long!”

  The Sergeant delayed his report, and next morning after dinner the Frenchman suggested, “Would it not be well to interview the girl’s father? I should appreciate it if you will accompany and introduce me.”

  “He’s in the drawing room,” th
e maid told us as we knocked gently on the Clark door. “He’s been there ever since they brought her home, sir. Just sitting beside her and—” she broke off as her throat filled with sobs. “If you could take his mind off of his trouble it would be a Godsend. If he’d only cry, or sumpin—”

  “Grief is a hot, consuming fire, Madame,” the little Frenchman whispered, “and only tears can quell it. The dry-eyed mourner is the one most likely to collapse.”

  Coroner Martin had done his work as a mortician with consummate artistry. Under his deft hands all signs of the brutality that struck the child down had been effaced. Clothed in a short light-pink dress she lay peacefully in her casket, one soft pink cheek against the tufted silken pillow sewn with artificial forget-me-nots, a little bisque doll, dressed in a frock the exact duplicate of her own, resting in the crook of her left elbow. Beside the casket, a smile sadder than any grimace of woe on his thin, ascetic features, sat Mortimer Clark.

  As we tiptoed into the darkened room we heard him murmur, “Time for shut-eye town, daughter. Daddy’ll tell you a story.” For a moment he looked expectantly into the still childish face on the pillow before him, as if waiting for an answer. The little gilt clock on the mantel ticked with a sort of whispering haste; far down the block a neighbor’s dog howled dismally; a light breeze bustled through the opened windows, fluttering the white-scrim curtains and setting the orange flames of the tall candles at the casket’s head and foot to flickering.

  It was weird, this stricken man’s vigil beside his dead, it was ghastly to hear him addressing her as if she could hear and reply. As the story of the old woman and her pig progressed I felt a kind of terrified tension about my heart. “. . . the cat began to kill the rat, the rat began to gnaw the rope, the rope began to hang the butcher—”

  “Grand Dieu,” de Grandin whispered as he plucked me by the elbow, “let us not look at it, Friend Trowbridge. It is a profanation for our eyes to see, our ears to hear what goes on here. Sang de Saint Pierre, I, Jules de Grandin, swear that I shall find the one who caused this thing to be, and when I find him, though he take refuge beneath the very throne of God, I’ll drag him forth and cast him screaming into hell. God do so to me, and more also, if I do not!” Tears were coursing down his cheeks, and he let them flow unabashed.