Zombies

by Otto Penzler

  What did it all mean? Blood . . . graves opened . . . Dwight could only guess, and his brain whirled with the chaotic vision of monsters reanimated, monsters with some frightful hell-brew in their veins, monsters more hideous and appalling than beasts, soulless, pitiless, conscienceless! He saw them in a multiplying horde boil up from the dank dens and alleys, swarm through the fetid gutters, gibbering insanely, shrieking like the damned, driven perhaps by a loathsome thirst for what their bodies lacked, howling for blood, blood, blood. . . .

  The vision swirled and vanished; reality thundered back as a sound from the laboratory sent an electric current rippling through Dwight’s veins. A crash, a muttered oath, and then the scream—a shrill ululation of fear and agony which rose until the walls seemed to shiver before its impact—then died in a convulsed, blubbering sob snapped sharply off!

  CHAPTER TWO

  WHERE CORPSES WALKED

  Dwight hurled his body toward the door. He tried the knob, beat on it with his fists. It was locked—an automatic spring lock on the inside, he supposed. Damn the man’s absentmindedness!

  “Professor! Professor!”

  There was no reply. More than fear, Dwight realized now, had been in that wail. He threw his weight against the door, battered it until the bones of his shoulders ached. But it would not yield.

  He crouched, applied his eye to the keyhole. His knee-joints went watery at what he saw. Horror like a slimy thing crawled into his throat and choked him.

  In the small area of visibility which the keyhole afforded, two figures could be seen. One was the headless body of Professor Collins, sprawled hideously in a welter of blood upon the floor! The other was the grisly Thing lifting its lean, cadaverous body over the sill of the window. In one harpy-like claw, it carried a flagon of some dark liquid, in the other a sheaf of papers.

  For an instant the Thing turned its head. Dwight would never forget that brief glimpse of its face. For it was the face of a revenant, a ghoul, a thing without blood!

  The stunned paralysis which held Dwight lasted for only a moment. He sprang to a side door, gun in hand, and dived out into the black and vaporous night. Groping his way through the sodden murk, he reached the open laboratory window. But the specter had vanished, swallowed up by the humid, incorporeal fog which seemed its proper element. Except for the ghastly, decapitated body, the laboratory was empty.

  Then, in the alley behind the place, an automobile motor roared its hoarse vibrations through the smoking mist. Dwight stumbled toward the front of the house, saw that his taxi was still there.

  “Get started!” he yelled. “Follow the car that leaves the alley!”

  The driver nodded. As the car shot forth, he swung swiftly in pursuit.

  But it was hopeless. The fog, that clammy monster who fights for crime, spread the shadow of his tenuous wings about the ghostly fugitives. Somewhere, soon, they made a quick turn and were lost in the greyness.

  Dwight saw then that it was useless to attempt to pick them up again. He had seen the car but dimly. He settled back and gave the driver his downtown address. No use in going back to the place. Professor Collins was beyond all help now, and the papers had been stolen. He would phone a report of the murder to the police and then follow the faint and bloody trail alone.

  He got out at his office and hurried in. And the first thing he did was to take a stiff drink of whiskey, a very stiff one. . . .

  THIRTY MINUTES LATER, Stanley Dwight, unrecognizable in his shabby topcoat and flop-brimmed hat, and with his face considerably the worse for a little deftly applied make-up, shuffled his sagging shoes along a fog-muggy street of pawnshops, penny arcades and cheap clothing stores. Ahead of him, in the middle of the block, a spot of light stood out under the grey nimbus of the fog. Colored globes, which winked like evil eyes, formed an arc over the foyer of an old theater and lit up the cracking sign: Paley’s Wax Museum, past which the fog in pink and green wraiths was drifting.

  A thinning crowd of grey, nondescript figures stood hunched and half interested before the painted box where a gold-toothed spieler with a scenic necktie was talking hoarsely and gesturing with a cane toward the sample exhibits.

  “There he is, ladies and gentlemen,” said the spieler, pointing toward the waxen image of a burly young giant who stood on a pine plank gallows surrounded by a wide assortment of lethal weapons. “There he is—a man who loved his feller man! Yes sir, why he loved his feller man so much that he ate him!”

  Even the unresponsive crowd stirred a little at this ghastly pronouncement. A murmur like a challenge rose from the seedy ranks.

  “You don’t believe it? It’s a matter of police records. And the man boasted of it himself. He ate his pal when the two of ’em was starvin’, hemmed up by the law in a Florida swamp. Bysshe Guttman was his name—the only authenticated modern American cannibal! He saved a million bucks from his crimes, hid it away. But the law finally got him. He was drowned a month ago while trying to escape from Alcatraz Island. His body was never recovered from the swift current. So the fishes ate the great lover of humanity!”

  He cleared his throat, spat discreetly within his box and turned to another figure. This was of a small man, incredibly hairy, with a thick black beard muffling his features, and smoked glasses over his eyes. He wore an Inverness cape and there was something monstrous and evil about the soft, almost dainty hands which were outstretched as if for inspection.

  “See them hands, ladies and gentlemen?” the spieler barked. “The hands of a sorcerer! Dr. Magwood was this soft-speakin’ little feller’s name—a skilled surgeon, a madman, a pleasure-killer. In the dark of night he done his bloody deeds for pleasure, curtin’ his victims in pieces an’ arrangin’ them in neat piles. Foxy as a devil, he claimed he could do magic, even raise the dead. He was supposed to have been killed by a mob, but it ain’t certain. Now, ladies and gentlemen, inside you will see . . .”

  Dwight heard no more. He shuffled to the curtained entrance, asked to see the manager and was directed to a narrow flight of steps that led him up to a cubbyhole office. The man behind the battered desk lifted a thin, crafty face to regard his visitor.

  “You’re the manager?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want to collect that ten dollars you offer to anyone who’ll spend the night in your Gallery of Ghosts.”

  The manager studied him shrewdly, rolled a smoking cigar between thin fingers. “We’ve had a little trouble with that stunt,” he said. “Several men got so scared they ran out in the middle of the night.”

  “I don’t care. I need the ten bucks. I’m broke, out of a job. It’s good publicity. . . .”

  “Sure, it’s good publicity.” A pause. “Got a family?”

  “No. What difference does that make?”

  “We got to know these things. How’s your health—nerves good?”

  “Nothing wrong with me. Just not eatin’ enough.”

  “Well, I suppose—if you want to try . . .”

  “Thanks,” Dwight said. “When do I start?”

  “It’s about closin’ time now,” the manager said. “I’ll have ’em put a cot in there for you.”

  Fifteen minutes later Stanley Dwight sat alone on a narrow balcony which overlooked a huge and dimly lighted room. Around and below him, like a vast congregation of the unhallowed dead which the very grave had rejected, the pallid effigies of evil were grouped. Dwight was watching the door which had just closed. The man who had brought him here might still be spying, so for a time he sat perfectly still on his cot.

  Three colored ceiling lights threw out a faint and greenish luminescence of a brightness about the equivalent of moonlight. Under this weird unearthly glow, the silent and ghostly place took on the look and atmosphere of a morgue—but a morgue in which no veil or covering softened the icy contours of death’s horror, a morgue in which the unhallowed dead had risen with stiff, corroded limbs to mock in a motionless pantomime whatever black and bestial deed had won them this posthumous inf
amy.

  Reaching into his pocket, Dwight took out a folded piece of paper which he had been carrying about for several days. It was one of those anonymous tips, some worthless, some valuable, which drift to the office of every detective. It had come to him unsigned through the mail. It read:

  Have a look in on Paleys Waxworks. The police are too dumb. Men go in there and dont come out. Somebody dressed like them runs out yellin to fool people. Tramps and drifters are all theyll take, so nobody wont know the difference. A strate tip.

  Dwight pondered the queer message.

  Until tonight he had given it little thought. Now, with only a blank void like the fog confronting him, it seemed a clue worth following. It was little enough, but it was something. The flop-house keeper’s mention of the resemblance between the monsters and the wax-effigies had brought the note back into his mind. Then too, this place was located in the very heart of the district which the execrable creatures seemed to have chosen for their hunting ground.

  Added to this were the words of Professor Collins which, together with his ghastly end, had engendered that appalling hypothesis in Dwight’s mind—and now he seemed to see a possible connection between the scattered pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. He meant to wait now, see if anything happened. If not, he would make a thorough search of the place. He wanted particularly to examine some of the effigies, to see if, as rumor had it, there were real corpses among them.

  Dwight put the note away, stood up and looked about him. “The Six without Blood!” Here at least were men without blood. Their frozen attitudes, their gruesome postures, their staring lifeless eyes seemed to mock his thoughts, jeer at him horribly. The figure nearest to him, that of a sallow young man who had murdered his father-in-law by thrusting his head into a gas stove, was seated beside the replica of his fiendishness, staring at it with an expression almost of pride.

  Feeling that by now he should be safe from the manager’s eyes, Dwight stepped to the figure. He stripped the baggy clothes from the stiff frame, wrapped his own topcoat about it and threw it on its side upon the cot. He laid his hat over the thing’s eyes. At a little distance it might have been his own body, peacefully asleep.

  He then took up his position in the chair by the stove. He adjusted his limbs in the very attitude of the effigy, and sat very still with his revolver on the edge of the chair beside him.

  Silence and forced inaction are the immemorial allies of fear. Dwight, who prided himself on the steadiness of his own nerves, thought of how an ordinary man might feel in this place alone. He thought of it with a certain amusement but also with a certain vague flutter of uneasiness. The imagination is a powerful and terrible instrument. For instance, with very little encouragement from excited nerves, Dwight could imagine that he had seen a figure—the figure of a murderess in a group below—move slightly as if tired of the posture. Well, that was patently absurd. He expected something to happen, but no such fantastic business as that. He laughed it aside and waited.

  The place was deathly still. A jittery man might positively lose his mind staring too long at the horrible, frozen immobility of these grisly figures. With the thin green light over it, it was like some ghastly tableau frozen in ice. It was like something a man might see if he came upon some village where a sudden catastrophe had left the whole population frozen in its tracks, standing hideously in their familiar attitudes with a frightful, timeless patience, as if for ages unnumbered they had stood thus, and for other ages would so stand. He imagined how such a man might wander for days among staring dead faces, until his mind cracked and he shrieked for them to move or speak.

  A totally unexpected throb of cold shot through Dwight’s veins. At first he thought that it was the idea itself which had excited it—then he realized that in reality it had been an impression that the wax figure slightly behind him had moved. But he did not turn. If anyone were watching now it would be fatal to betray the fact that he had substituted the wax figure for his own upon the bed. As for that wax likeness of a dead murderer, well . . .

  His thoughts scattered like leaves before a puff of cold wind. He did not move or start, but now his eyes narrowed in earnest. It was the slight figure of the hirsute Dr. Magwood which had been brought inside at closing time and which now stood here on the balcony just under the dangling noose of the portable gallows. It had seemed to him that this figure had bent slightly as if to peer at the thing that lay upon his cot.

  Now, without making a movement, Dwight studied the figure’s face. Something like a gleam of life showed in the eyes behind the smoked spectacles. He hadn’t noticed it before. The figure was perfectly still now. Why did it give such a curious impression of life and intelligence? It was looking at the cot, looking with a sort of rapt gloating, like an obscene fat spider leering at a captured fly.

  Dwight stiffened, stiffened into a cold rigidity that rivaled the frightful statues themselves. For from somewhere in the room below, the rusty mechanism of a clock began to purr and chime. The sound was somehow ghastly in that tomblike chamber.

  Then, on the stroke of twelve, the short figure of the evil Dr. Magwood bent forward with a movement slow and mechanical! While Dwight watched with a strange breathlessness and a slow, clammy crawling of his skin, the bearded ogre reached up, caught the noose of the gallows rope and began to draw it slowly down!

  Dwight fought to keep his muscles steady. An hallucination had been his first thought. Now, as a flash of reason told him that the thing was really taking place, the horror of that creeping, ghostly pantomime held him with a dreadful fascination. For the feet of the bearded doctor made no sound, yet they were moving nearer and nearer to the cot. And the fiend’s grisly lips, which showed like bloodless slabs of flesh between the beard, were parted in a smile of insane gloating!

  Dwight held himself ready to spring up, gun in hand. He now understood what sort of hellishness had been going on in here! And at the thought of the unsuspecting men who had awakened at midnight to find this creeping demon with his noose bending above them, his blood ran cold. For the squat figure in the cape was now bending above the cot, was reaching out his pudgy, obscene hands with a sort of hideous gentleness to place the noose over his victim’s head.

  Now! Now was the moment! And while the hair bristled on his scalp, Dwight slid one hand across his lap to seize the revolver at his side.

  Then abruptly cold horror like strangling fingers of ice closed on his throat. For where the pistol had been, the fingers of his groping hand encountered something as repulsive as the touch of rotting flesh. At the same moment he lunged away. Lunged but could not move—for fingers like the jaws of a vise were on his shoulders, dragging him back!

  He struggled to his feet, still unable to turn and face the nameless horror which had fastened itself upon his back, for the strength of the thing which held him was like that of a boa constrictor. A cold and hairy arm had encircled his throat in a deadly strangle-hold which held the air in his bursting lungs and seemed to be forcing his eyes from their sockets with the torturous pressure.

  Still he fought with his waning strength, for the horrid little monster of a doctor was moving toward him now, a low chuckle quivering in his throat.

  A choked cry of fear and defiance rattled from Dwight’s lungs and he made a desperate lunge at the fiend. Something stung his arm, something like the jab of a hypodermic. His senses began to swim. Giddily he reeled, felt himself released to stagger forward blindly.

  Blackness passed for a moment over Stanley Dwight’s mind, blackness which he felt, in that awful moment of awakening consciousness, had been something sweet and merciful. For now his hands were bound to his sides, the noose was about his neck, and he was being dragged up, up from the floor. He saw the green lights spinning; he saw the bearded face of the doctor, floating hazily like the head of a demon. Then the dark flowed back, gratefully swallowing mind and senses.

  CHAPTER THREE

  HOSTAGE OF THE DEAD

  Dwight opened his eyes. For a long tim
e, it seemed, he had lain there in a semi-conscious stupor. Now his nerves jerked thoroughly alive. Instinct warned him of the nearness of some living presence.

  He blinked into the eerie twilight of the tunnel-like passage in which he lay, realized that he was lying upon a clammy floor of stone, his hands and arms still bound. He flung his body over. Pain shot through him at the first movement of his wrenched and swollen neck. But in the shock which now smote his cringing nerves, the pain was forgotten.

  A silent figure was bending above him. It was a woman. Pink tights ruffled at the waist—the outmoded chorus-girl costume of the murderess he had seen move in the waxworks! Next his eye fell on the point of light that gleamed dully on the blade of the knife she held, striking the weird attitude of some sacrificial priestess.

  Then he saw the face, and a queer sob of mingled incredulity and despair forced itself between his gritted teeth. For it was the face of the girl with the dark eyes and hair whom he had seen in the flop-house! The black eyes bored into his now with a strange fanatical gleam that gave to her face a mingled beauty and horror. The knife seemed on the point of descending. . . . Dwight’s jaw set; he steeled himself for the blow.

  And then the frozen look on the girl’s face changed. Human feeling betrayed itself, a sort of startled anxiety, “Oh!” she sobbed. Then in a suppressed whisper, “I almost killed you—I thought you were one them!”

  “The first break I’ve had,” Dwight grunted. “Cut these ropes quick! Who are you!”

  “My name doesn’t matter,” she said. With quick fingers she slit the ropes and released him. “I came here to kill. You’re going to help me.”

  Dwight got to his feet. “I’m going to get out!” he said.