Zombies

by Otto Penzler

  NIGHT, COLD WINTER night, had begun to creep up Clark Street from the tall spires of the Loop in swirls of icy pellets that battered against the frosted, lighted window of the bar like so many frozen fingertips that were anxious to be warm. From where he sat on the high, leather-cushioned bar stool, a paper spread on the bar before him, Tim Murphy raised his eyes to the window. Ghost-like figures flitted past it, eager to be home—those who had homes. The reporter poured himself another drink from the bottle at his elbow, sighed deeply.

  “Tough on a guy who hasn’t got some place to crawl into on a night like this, eh?”

  But for himself and the bartender, the bar was deserted. The bartender paused in his toweling to fleck a bit of lint from a brandy glass with his thumb.

  “It sure must be,” he agreed. He nodded at the headline of the paper on the bar. It read: FIND SECOND MUMMIFIED CORPSE.

  “But them guys,” he continued after a moment, “won’t worry about where they’re going to sleep tonight. Were you in on that, Tim?”

  “I saw both corpses,” Murphy admitted.

  “What did they look like?” the bartender wanted to know.

  The reporter shrugged.

  “Just like the mummies you see over in the Field Museum. Only”— he hesitated for a word—“well, fresher.”

  “How do you explain it, Tim?” the bartender asked.

  “I don’t,” Murphy told him. “The thing is impossible. Somebody’s screwy. Witnesses have testified that they saw both guys alive five or ten minutes before they were found. And down on the records at the City Hall, both guys are listed as dead. One died four weeks ago. And the other, that broker, died two months ago.”

  The bartender eyed the brandy glass with a critical eye.

  “Then supposin’ the witnesses are mistaken, could guys turn into mummies in that time?”

  Murphy sipped his drink, glanced up at the clock on the back bar.

  “Don’t ask me. That’s why I’m waiting for Doc. I thought perhaps he’d know.”

  The bartender opened a cigar box on the back bar and took out a small, clipped bundle of tabs.

  “Four-twenty you owe me for his tabs,” he told Murphy. “He was in here last night until I closed.”

  The reporter laid a five-dollar bill on the bar and tore the tabs into pieces.

  “Yeah. I know. He came back to the apartment last night as stiff as an owl.”

  “Why be a sucker for that rum hound, Murphy? What if he was a big shot doctor once? Why I’ll bet he wouldn’t even have talked to you when he was a big shot.”

  “So what?” Murphy bristled. “When he was a big shot he didn’t need a friend. But now that he’s down on his luck, he does. Why? You want to make something of it?”

  “Certainly not, certainly not,” the bartender soothed. “Just keep your shirt on, Murph. So you want to support him, that’s your business. But you don’t have to keep him lushed up, do you?”

  The reporter toyed with his glass.

  “Booze is about the only thing that he’s got left. It keeps him from remembering. But I’ve got faith in that guy. Doc’ll make a comeback some day. Besides, I like him.”

  In that one last statement Tim Murphy summed up his philosophy of life. If he liked a man, he’d go to hell for him. If he didn’t, the man could go to hell, and the back of his hand from Tim Murphy.

  THE DOOR TO the street banged open and shut. Both men looked up instinctively. Neither of them recognized the girl who stood in the doorway shaking the snow and sleet from a cheap, white fur jacket. Her hair was a bleached and frowsy yellow. Her profession was obvious.

  “Sorry, sister,” the bartender waved her out.

  The girl’s smile faded. She glowered at him with cat green eyes. Her lips were two crimson slashes across a dead white face that had once been pretty.

  “Who’s talking to you?” she demanded. She walked slowly down the bar to where Murphy sat and climbed up on the stool beside him. “You’re Tim Murphy, the hot-shot reporter of the Morning Reformer, aren’t you?” she accused.

  “My name is Murphy,” he admitted.

  She smiled at the bartender.

  “A double brandy, please. The gentleman is paying.”

  He looked at Murphy.

  “Give her a drink,” the reporter told him.

  The girl sipped at her drink in silence, then turned back to Murphy.

  “You’re a good guy, Murphy. Everybody says so. That’s why I’ve come to you. They told me in the restaurant next door that I’d probably find you in here.”

  “Yes?” Murphy said. His tone was noncommittal. The girl, he decided, for all her attempt at nonchalance, was on the verge of panic. Her lips were quivering and the muscles of her neck stood out like cords. “Yes—?” he asked once again.

  Fear fought with avarice in the girl’s green eyes.

  “How much will your paper pay for the biggest story that it ever printed, Murphy?”

  Murphy lit a cigarette. “Concerning what?” he asked.

  The girl tapped the headline of the paper on the bar.

  “Concerning the devil,” she told him. “I don’t know how he did it, but I know who killed those fellows.”

  “A cigarette?” Murphy offered.

  “No, thanks. I’ve some of my own,” she refused. She opened a shoddy handbag, extracted a package of cigarettes, lit one from the match he held, then fished in her bag again. She found what she was looking for and laid it on the bar. It was a small red card printed in flamboyant gold. “You seen one of these yet, Murphy?”

  Murphy picked up the card, sat looking at it.

  “Yes. I have,” he told her.

  There was small doubt the man was a charlatan, but his advertisement was tempting. Too strong for any of the daily papers, it was printed in gold on scarlet cards and passed out discreetly on the corners. It was simple and to the point. It read—

  WANTED—CORPSES: Have you a loved one who has died? Would you like to bring them back to life, know again the thrill of their caresses? You can. Would you like to assure yourself of everlasting life, know youth again and all the pleasures it once held? You can. See Satan—Suite 21A, Braddock Building.

  They had flocked, still flocked to Suite 21A by the dozens: the rich, the poor, the young, the old, the halt, the maimed. And they went away seemingly satisfi ed. But what Satan promised, or what Satan did, the general public didn’t know. For Satan wouldn’t talk to anyone but a legitimate applicant—and his consultants wouldn’t talk at all.

  THE HANDS OF the police were tied, had been tied for six months. That it was a racket, they knew. But until someone filed a complaint they were helpless.

  So were the papers. Murphy, with every other leg man in town, had tried to crack the story since the printed cards had first appeared. But they couldn’t. Satan could smell printer’s ink through the closed inner door of his expensively furnished suite of offices. All that any reporter or sob sister had ever gotten was a bland smile from Satan’s smug-faced Oriental secretary and a courteous, “So sorry. Satan no can see.” There were even a dozen descriptions of what the man himself looked like.

  Murphy laid the card down on the headline of the paper.

  “You mean the two are connected?”

  The girl nodded. Her face seemed suddenly lined and haggard. She had difficulty in breathing.

  “That’s right.” She turned to the bartender, smiled. “Give me a glass of water, will you, Jack? I guess I’m scared,” she admitted. “I feel like I’m burning up.”

  She gulped the water greedily, sucked deeply at her cigarette and spoke through a wreath of smoke as she tapped the card on the bar with a too long, crimson fingernail.

  “I went to him two months ago. He told me he could bring Bill back to life.” She paused, added bitterly. “But he never. That’s why I’m talking.”

  Murphy studied the girl’s face, puzzled. In the indirect, fluorescent lighting of the barroom she seemed much older than he first had judged
her to be.

  “You aren’t sick, are you, sister?”

  “No,” she shook her head. “Just a little scared, that’s all.” She glanced at the clock on the back bar. The hands stood at three minutes to eight. She laughed, nervously defiant. “He told me I’d die by eight o’clock. But I’m still alive, aren’t I?”

  “Who told you that you’d die?” Murphy asked.

  She tapped the card on the bar impatiently.

  “He did. The devil. He told me I’d dry up and burn in hell flames if I talked so much as a word.”

  “And just who is the devil?” Murphy probed.

  “Why, Satan,” she told him unsmiling. “Didn’t you know? He came up from hell to organize the League of the Grateful Dead.”

  The bartender grinned and went back to toweling glasses.

  “You’re out the price of a double brandy, Murphy. She’s hopped to the eyes.”

  “Go on,” the reporter told her patiently. “You said you went to him two months ago to bring Bill back to life. Who’s Bill?”

  “My baby,” she said simply. The flesh had grown strangely taut across her cheeks. “He died six months ago. And Satan told me if I gave him all my earnings for two months, he’d bring Bill back to life. That’s why I went on the street. But he never. I guess we were such small fry he wouldn’t mess with us.”

  Murphy stared at her, hard. The girl’s lips were twisted as though she was crying but there were no tears in her eyes. Her cat green eyes, themselves, had lost their hardness and their glitter and were sunk deep in her head. He had to rap sharply on the bar to recall her wandering attention.

  “You say that Satan murdered these two men?”

  She nodded, with an effort.

  “That’s right. First he brought them back to life, and then he let them die again because they threatened that they’d talk just like I’m doing.”

  “Brought them back to life?” the bartender scoffed.

  “Yes,” the girl told him slowly. “He could empty all the graves in town if he wanted to. He’s bringing Max Boderman, the rich banker, back to life tonight at Maplewood Cemetery. They say at the Club that his widow is paying half a million dollars for the resurrection.” Her voice trailed off in a whisper.

  The bartender reached for the phone.

  “Better let me call a squad, Murph. The dame is not only hopped, she’s nuts.”

  The reporter stopped him. He pointed to the girl but made no attempt to touch her.

  “Turn on those ceiling lights, Jerry,” he ordered curtly.

  The bartender switched on the brighter lights and stood staring at the girl, his eyes bulging from his head.

  THE GIRL STILL perched on the stool, one arm on the bar. But in the glare of the full light her whole figure seemed shrunken and shriveled. Her dress gaped loosely from her body. Her skin had turned a sickly brown. As they watched, it tightened across her cheekbones until it cracked like parchment. With an effort she turned her shrunken, faded eyes up to the clock and shuddered. Her voice was faint and seemed to come from far away.

  “He said I’d die by eight o’clock if I talked. Satan said—”

  Accustomed as he was to scenes of violence and sudden death, the reporter turned away briefly, gagged. The girl was dying, drying up as she sat there. Her words had stuck in her throat as the flesh of her neck contracted visibly to a taut, dried thickness no larger than a small man’s wrist. Then, as he watched, her eyes dissolved, dropped back inside her skull and disappeared. But the burning cigarette still dangled from her grinning teeth and smoke began to issue from the empty sockets where her eyes had been.

  The bartender, staring wide-eyed, began to whimper and make strange noises in his throat. Murphy leaned across the bar and shook him.

  “Snap out of it, Jerry. This is murder.”

  “But she’s dead,” the bartender whimpered. “She’s dead. She turned into a mummy right before our eyes.”

  The reporter stood up on the rail and slapped him sharply.

  “Snap out of it, Jerry!” he ordered. “You’ll go nuts if you don’t!” He discovered that he himself was shouting and fought hard for self-control.

  His stomach retching, he backed off his stool, his eyes still on the girl and fumbled for his overcoat.

  “You call the police. I’ll phone the paper from the cab stand.” He paused, fought his queasy stomach. “Then I’m going out to Maplewood Cemetery to watch Satan resurrect Max Boderman.” One searching hand swept the bottle from which he had been drinking from the bar. The glass neck chattered against his teeth, briefly. Then he corked the bottle and dropped it in his pocket. His face was white but determined. “This is more than a story. Hell’s loose in this man’s town!”

  The reporter forced himself to check the contents of the dead girl’s purse. It held nothing but a motley assortment of make-up and odds and ends that gave no clue to her identity. Then he turned up the collar of his coat and strode out of the bar.

  But the bartender didn’t even see him go. He was still staring at the grinning mummy on the stool. A big man, his plump, smooth-shaven jowls shook like jelly. Then, as the still contracting skin of what five minutes before had been a living woman caused a bony, brown, mummified arm to slide along the polished bar, its outstretched fingers pointing toward him, he screamed. He was still screaming and smashing at the “thing” with bottles from the back bar when the police from the Chicago Avenue Station arrived.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE DEVIL LAUGHS

  At twenty-four hundred north, the western limits of Chicago are 72nd Street or Harlem Avenue. That’s where the car line stops. Beyond that stretch, there are only a few cheap real estate developments, a few small suburban towns, then prairie. In between, several cemeteries blossom white and pink with their old-fashioned tombstones, stark white crosses, and squat, expensive mausoleums. Of these cemeteries, the largest and oldest is Maplewood.

  Bounded on one side by the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul tracks, on the others by two highways and the little unincorporated town of Prairie Grove, Maplewood slept—its dead wrapped warm under fragrant evergreen grave coverings and a three-foot blanket of snow.

  Two yellow eyes that groped through the blinding snow and sleet grew to be a cab that skidded to a stop before the heavy wrought iron gates that separate the living from the dead.

  “Four-sixty, Bud,” the driver pulled his flag.

  Murphy passed a five up through the glass partition, changed his mind and made it ten.

  “Wait for me,” Murphy repeated to the cabby.

  The cab driver scrubbed at a side window with his glove, peered through the snow at the gates.

  “You can’t get in there no more tonight, Bud. They lock them gates at five o’clock.”

  “Wait for me,” Murphy repeated.

  He turned up the collar of his coat, pulled his hat down over his eyes, and stepped out of the cab, slamming the door behind him. The snow came to his knees and, ten steps away, the cab had vanished behind a stinging curtain of white.

  “But it’s nice to know it’s there,” Murphy smiled wryly to himself. “If I have gone nuts he can drive me right on out to Elgin. If I haven’t—” He shrugged and shook the wrought iron gates.

  The gates clanked eerily but didn’t give. Murphy ran his gloved fingers down the center bars and found they were looped with a chain, in turn fastened by a stout steel padlock. There was, however, if he remembered correctly, a second, smaller gate that opened directly from the platform of the now obselete and seldom used Maplewood Station. There was a chance it might be open.

  The reporter braced himself against the wind and plowed through the snow along the fence. At the corner of the fence he stopped and looked back. Loud on the rushing wind, the cemetery bell had begun to toll a requiem for the dead. Yet there was no light inside the lodge house or the office. Murphy stood, irresolute, listening to the bell while the short hairs on his neckline stiffened.

  “What the hell,” he reassu
red himself, “it’s just the wind, that’s all. Every phenomenon has got to have some natural explanation.”

  Still, it seemed strange that the bell should have started to toll. He turned the corner grimly. The wind was stronger here and he had to pull himself along the fence hand over hand. The gate he had remembered was both unlocked and open. And the snow on the path that led inside had been freshly trampled by many feet.

  “So,” Murphy said.

  He crouched in the shelter of the ancient station and finished the whiskey in the bottle in his pocket. It tasted good but failed to warm him. When he had phoned the office regarding the girl on the stool, they had claimed that he was drunk. He almost wished he was.

  FAR INSIDE THE cemetery a yellow light showed through the curtain of snow, went out, then showed again. Murphy moved toward it cautiously, wading from tombstone to tombstone where the bare shrubbery and trees failed to hide his progress from any possible outposts whom Satan might have stationed. The bell still tolled.

  “Three mummified corpses and a resurrection,” he muttered to himself. “What the hell? No wonder the office thought I had an edge on.”

  The yellow light grew brighter, turned out to be a pressure lantern standing in the low, stone doorway of a mausoleum. Its intermittent periods of darkness were caused by the passage of a score or more of heavily muffled figures who tramped a narrow circle around the mausoleum.

  The reporter edged as close to the circle as he dared, stopped finally behind a huge stone cross. In the light from the lantern he studied the faces of the figures as they passed, and was surprised to find he knew as many of them as he did. Most of them were prominent business men and women whom he had interviewed at one time or another. But all had a strange unearthiness about their faces; an eager rapture he had never seen before. They seemed to be waiting for something—or for someone.