Zombies

by Otto Penzler

  Doctor Agnew paused, pretended to wipe the steam from the Oxford glasses he affected, although Meredith knew that he had seen him when he first came in the door.

  “Oh. Oh it’s you, Meredith,” he said finally.

  “Yes,” Meredith admitted. “It’s me.”

  Agnew cleared his throat impatiently, frowned, and reached for his wallet.

  “Well? How much this time?”

  “This isn’t a touch,” his former superior assured him. “You’ve read the morning papers?”

  “I have.”

  “Well, Murphy was my friend.”

  THE OTHER MAN looked puzzled, then his thin lips twisted. “What am I supposed to do, cry?”

  “No,” Meredith said quietly. “I just wish that you’d make it possible, Bill, for me to look at the hospital records.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Judge Taggart died here at Mercy, didn’t he?” Meredith asked him. “And Grenfal the lawyer? And Marc Long? And Pete Harris?”

  Agnew puzzled his brow in thought.

  “Some of those names are familiar,” he admitted. “Perhaps they did. What about it? Mercy is one of the largest hospitals in the city. A lot of people die here. A lot of people die in every hospital. Just what is it that you want?”

  “To have you make it possible for me to look at the records.” Meredith smiled wryly. “I believe I’ve been dropped from the staff.”

  “Yes,” Agnew nodded, “you have. And you can’t blame the board, Jim. Frankly, the way you’ve let yourself go to pieces—”

  “I know, I know,” the older man interrupted wearily. “But if you’ll just okay me to the girl at the desk and see that I have access to the death records for half an hour, that’s all I ask.”

  For a moment the other man seemed about to refuse, then he shrugged.

  “All right. But it sounds as insane to me as some of the other things that you’ve done.” He stepped across the corridor to the desk. “This is Doctor Meredith,” he introduced him. “He formerly was on the staff here and I’ll appreciate it as a personal favor if you give him access to any of the hospital records he may care to see.”

  The girl behind the counter beamed. Her smile alone was proof of the former assistant’s standing.

  “Yes, Doctor Agnew. Just as you say, sir.”

  Agnew smiled in his superior fashion, turned to Meredith.

  “Certain a few dollars wouldn’t help you?”

  The night before Meredith would have taken them and been grateful. Now he shook his head, flushed slightly.

  “No. Thank you.” He paused, eyed the other man intently. “But you might tell me this, Bill. What did you ever do with that saline anesthetic that we were working on?”

  Agnew looked puzzled.

  “I don’t recall it, Jim. Why?”

  “No reason,” Meredith told him. “Just wondered.” He turned his back abruptly, faced the desk. “And now if I may, miss, I’d like to look at those records. The case records and death certificates of certain names I’ll give you. Men and women who have died here.”

  For a moment the ferret-faced surgeon glared at the threadbare back of the man who had once been his superior, then he turned on his heel and stamped across the corridor into the door that was marked—For Doctors Only.

  • • •

  WHEN SHE FOUND out that he had been the Doctor Meredith, the record clerk couldn’t do enough for the shabby man, who for the best part of an hour had sat poring over the case records of men and women long since supposed to be dead.

  “You saved my mother’s life,” she told him. “You trepanned for a blood clot.”

  Jim Meredith smiled wearily.

  “That was a long time ago, before I lost my skill.” He folded up the papers on which he had been writing and put them in his pocket. “But thank you. You’ve been kind.”

  He slipped into his top-coat as a fresh-faced young intern banged into the office.

  “Four-sixteen just died,” he told the clerk.

  “Mrs. Boderman?” she asked.

  “That’s right.” The intern grinned. “And boy. Would I like to inherit those millions.”

  Meredith frowned, puzzled.

  “You don’t by any chance mean Max Boderman’s widow?”

  “That’s the one,” the intern told him. “She came in an emergency last night. It seems she smashed that big imported car of hers right smack into a culvert out on the Maplewood road.”

  Meredith closed his eyes. In his day he had been considered an over-conscientious surgeon who refused to cut until every detail of the diagnosis checked with all known facts. And in the case on which he was working, Max Boderman’s widow had worried him. Her death had clarified a lot. He was ready now to face Tim Murphy’s editor. If he wasn’t locked up as insane, he believed he could point out the devil. Proving it would be up to the police.

  He bowed, thanked the record clerk again, and left the office. Through the thin partition he could hear the intern ask—

  “And who was that bum?”

  “Why that,” the record clerk told him, “was Doctor Meredith. The Doctor Meredith.”

  The intern’s muffled “Gee!” was solace to his soul. Perhaps Tim Murphy had been right. Perhaps he could come back. Perhaps he hadn’t been responsible for those ten deaths. Perhaps—

  The bite of the icy wind that rushed up Michigan Avenue to greet him as the door of the hospital closed behind him cut short his thoughts. It sank its icy fingers through his threadbare clothes and tore at his tortured nerves. What he needed, he decided, was a drink.

  He counted the change in his pocket. He had exactly fifteen cents and he had picked that off the table on which Tim Murphy had died. He braced his body against the wind and walked out to the curb. The traffic light was against him. He stood huddled against a lamp post waiting for it to change.

  “Taxi, mister?”

  A cab drew up beside him and he shook his head.

  “Better get in and ride, mister,” the driver insisted.

  “No thank you,” Meredith refused. “I—”

  He looked up to find himself staring into the muzzle of a gun held by the slim yellow fingers of a smiling Oriental who sat on the rear seat of the cab.

  “I think perhaps you had better ride,” the Oriental smiled. “Satan would like to see you.”

  Meredith licked his lips. The smiling Oriental was a killer. It showed in the glittering pin points of his iris, in the cruel, thin lips.

  “But I don’t know Satan,” he protested.

  The Oriental’s yellow fingers whitened on the trigger of his gun.

  “That is an oversight we mean to remedy. Step into the cab. You will please to meet Satan.”

  Meredith did as he was told. There was nothing else he could do.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  DEAD MEN DON’T TALK

  The room was as impressive as the man. Semidark, it was lighted by four red flares, one in each corner. Each flare gave off an insidious, yet somehow pleasant, smell of sulphur. The walls were draped in thick black folds of heavy silk. The only furniture was the chair and desk at which Satan sat and a chair for the consultant. A fifth red beam of light shone through the glass-topped desk and etched Satan’s ivory face in bas-relief against the gloom behind him.

  “So,” Satan smiled, “you are Doctor Meredith.”

  “I am,” Meredith admitted.

  Satan waved the waiting Oriental from the office.

  “You may leave us, Yoshama. I hardly think that Doctor Meredith will attempt any violence.”

  The Oriental backed to the door, bowed from the room.

  Meredith sat studying the face of the man before him. It was vaguely familiar. It once had been a strong face but both the eyes and the ivory pallor of the skin gave evidence to trained eyes that the man was addicted to drugs.

  “You wanted to see me?” Meredith asked finally.

  Satan smiled.

  “Yes. It has been brought to my a
ttention that you have developed an overwhelming curiosity concerning certain of my subjects who belong to the League of the Grateful Dead.”

  “Can’t we drop the fol-de-rol?” Meredith asked. “You’re not impressing me at all. I know you’re a fake. And I believe I know the man who is behind you.”

  Satan merely smiled his languid smile.

  “No one is behind the devil. I have chosen this means and form of returning to earth for certain reasons of my own.” He paused. “But we digress. I want those notes and names that your friend Mr. Murphy so unfortunately wrote down last night at Maplewood Cemetery while I was resurrecting a certain Mr. Max Boderman from the dead.”

  Meredith took the notes from his pocket and laid them on the desk.

  “Also what data you collected at Mercy Hospital this morning,” Satan insisted.

  Meredith added his own notes to the small pile of papers on the desk.

  “I can remember the names,” he smiled. “And when I leave here I’m going to the Morning Reformer first, and then to the police.”

  “The police?” Satan smiled. “I see you are still laboring under a grave misapprehension, Doctor Meredith. You still believe I am a fake, a charlatan.”

  “I know you are.”

  Satan shook his head.

  “I am sorry, for your sake, but I am real. And when you leave this office, you won’t talk. The police will merely be more mystified when a fifth mummified corpse is found.” He chuckled. “You have no idea of the disciplinary effect of those four corpses on the members of my League of the Grateful Dead.”

  “They aren’t dead. It’s a racket,” Meredith said grimly.

  Satan smiled.

  “There have been complaints?”

  “No,” Meredith admitted. “Dead men can’t talk. You kill them before they can—kill them as you killed Tim Murphy, killed that woman in that Clark Street bar.”

  “That’s right,” Satan agreed. “As I am going to kill you in just a moment.” He paused, opened a humidor on his desk, selected a cigarette and lighted it. As an after-thought, he waved his long thin fingers to the box.

  Meredith took one.

  “Thank you.”

  Satan extended the still burning lighter in his hand, an amused smile on his face. Meredith leaned forward, the cigarette between his lips. But before he could light it, the door to the office opened.

  “Is the police again,” the Oriental hissed. “They will not believe you are not here.”

  A frown of annoyance crossed Satan’s face. He gathered the scattered papers on his desk into a mound.

  “Burn these in one of the flares,” he ordered. “I had hoped we could postpone this, but it seems we can’t.” Ignoring Meredith completely, he sat stroking his small black goatee. Then he smiled at the heavy, impatient rapping on the door. “So the police want to question Satan. All right. But I am afraid they will be surprised.”

  THE CORRIDORS OF the South State Street Central Bureau swarmed with camera men and leg men. A palpable fake though he was, they were covering the biggest story Chicago had ever known. Satan had been arrested.

  Inside the commissioner’s office, Commissioner Craig sighed wearily.

  “Why will you persist that you are Satan? You’re a faker and you know it.”

  The man who claimed that he was Satan smiled.

  “Yes?”

  The commissioner spat out his cigar.

  “All right. We’ll wait until your fingerprints come back from Washington. Until then we’ll hold you on an open charge.”

  Satan shrugged.

  “And now you.” The commissioner turned to Meredith. “What were you doing there inside this charlatan’s office.”

  “I was forced there at the point of a gun,” Meredith told him truthfully.

  “By whom?”

  Meredith pointed to the sober-faced Oriental. “By that man there. I believe Yoshama is his name.”

  “Is that right?” the commissioner asked the Oriental.

  “No, sir,” Yoshama lied. He pointed to Meredith. “He come in answer to advertisement. He say he lose good friend named Murphy, would much like to meet his spirit.”

  The commissioner covered his face with his hands for a moment, then exploded.

  “Now look here, damn it,” he stormed. “I’m getting tired of all this run-a-round.” He leveled a finger at Satan. “Just what kind of a racket are you running?”

  “No racket,” Satan told him. “If you would ever care to consult me professionally, I’ll be pleased to talk to you. But under the circumstances I am afraid I must refuse. As you yourself suggested, why don’t we wait until my fingerprints come back from Washington?”

  The commissioner looked around the grim, stern faces in his office. Most of the more influential civic leaders had gathered there at his request.

  “Is the editor of the Morning Reformer here?”

  A wiry little white-haired man stepped forward.

  “Here I am, sir.”

  “Murphy, the fourth mummified corpse that we found, worked for you. Is that right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you say that he phoned you last night that he saw the dame in that Clark Street bar turned into a mummy?”

  “He did.”

  “And that he was on his way out to Maplewood Cemetery to watch Satan here resurrect the body of Max Boderman?”

  “That’s what he said. I figured he was high.”

  The commissioner nodded.

  “I still do. But we can tell better on that score when the squad I’ve sent out to Maplewood call in their report. If Boderman’s body is still in his tomb, then Murphy was drunk.”

  “But he wasn’t drunk,” Meredith protested. “I talked to him when he came back.” He pointed a finger at Satan. “And as I’ve already told you, Tim said that he not only saw Satan there resurrect Max Boderman but he had talked to at least a dozen men and women whom you have listed on your files as dead.”

  The commissioner smiled skeptically.

  “I believe you were once quite a well-known surgeon, Doctor. Can you explain a dead man coming back to life?”

  “In this instance, yes, I think I can,” Meredith admitted. He scribbled a phone number and a name on a piece of paper. “But before I begin my explanation I’d like to have you call that number and ask that man to be here.”

  The commissioner pursed his lips.

  “WHY NOT?” HE decided finally. “The more the merrier. The whole town is going to have hysterics unless we crack this case.” He handed the paper to an assistant. “Send out a squad car and bring this fellow in.”

  The assistant left the office.

  “Might I ask the name of the man for whom you’re sending?” the white-haired editor of the Morning Reformer asked.

  “Doctor Agnew of Mercy Hospital,” the commissioner told him. He stared hard at Meredith. “But just where does Doctor Agnew come in?”

  Meredith smiled grimly.

  “If I’m right, he’s the devil.”

  The man who claimed to be Satan laughed thinly.

  “How amusing. I seem to have a competitor.”

  “You, shut up,” the commissioner ordered. He turned back to Meredith. “And you say you know how those guys and that dame were turned into mummies, Doctor Meredith?”

  “I think I do.”

  The commissioner wiped the perspiration from his forehead.

  “Thank God for that. Another of them mummified corpses popping up, and I’ll have hysterics myself.” He looked at the man who claimed to be Satan. “I was beginning to believe you were the devil.”

  “I am,” the other told him smiling.

  A lieutenant fought his way into the office through a mob of howling reporters. His eyes were puzzled. His face was pale. He looked at the man who claimed to be Satan and then looked away.

  “Washington has just reported on those fingerprints, sir,” he saluted.

  “Yes—?” the commissioner looked up.

/>   The lieutenant stared hard at the man who claimed to be Satan, huge drops of perspiration beading his forehead. He forced his eyes back to his chief.

  “And Washington wants to know what the joke is, sir. They say that according to the fingerprints we sent them, he’s ten men—and that all ten of those men are dead!”

  The silence grew inside the office until the beating of their hearts pounded in the eardrums of the straining men like strange and somehow obscene tom-toms.

  White-faced, the lieutenant laid a sheaf of telephoto pictures on the desk.

  “According to the whorls of his left thumb, he is Mace Manders the magician who was electrocuted at Stateville two years ago for the murder of his wife. According to the whorls of his right thumb, he’s Johnny Green, the bandit, who was shot last year by a squad from the Woodlawn station. According to the whorls of his left forefinger—”

  The man who claimed that he was Satan laughed an unpleasant, tinkling little laugh.

  “Perhaps now you will believe me.” He picked up his hat from the commissioner’s desk and shaped it on his head. “Satan is not one, but many people.” He stretched out his hand and a belch of smoke and crimson flame flared in the doorway. “If you want me for any further questioning, gentlemen, I’d suggest that you go to hell!”

  He had the door already open when the commissioner came to his senses.

  “Stop him! Shoot him! Stop that man!” he bellowed.

  The lieutenant leveled his gun.

  “Stop!” he ordered.

  Satan smiled, turned his back deliberately and walked out of the door into the hall.

  “Stop!” the lieutenant ordered—then fired.

  Six steel-jacketed bullets picked curiously at the cloth of Satan’s well-tailored and departing back. But that was all they did do—that, and scatter the reporters who scrambled cursing for safety. Satan didn’t even turn his head, just kept on walking down the hall.

  “So sorry,” Yoshama beamed. He closed the door behind them.

  For a moment there was only silence in the room and the pungent smell of gun smoke. The commissioner broke it with an oath. His superstitious, Irish face was florid.

  “By God!” he swore. “By God! He was the devil!”

  CHAPTER FIVE