Zombies

by Otto Penzler

  THE WET SMELLS of the jungle came to him strongly as he sat considering what he should do next. Kam Jalan had the keys to the Land Rover. Burnett could oblige the villagers, and they would then let him leave. The other alternative was to force Kam Jalan at gunpoint to take him back to Kuala Lumpur.

  “I’m not going to kill you, you know,” he said, into the blackness around him. There was no answer.

  Burnett made a decision. He jumped out and ran to the main hut and, as he had expected, found the villagers crowded within.

  “Kam Jalan,” he called into them, “drive me to Kuala Lumpur now, or I will open fire on these people. You shall be the first.”

  The Indo-Malay stepped from the huddled group and bowed sharply. He switched on an electric torch and led the way back to the Land Rover. Burnett was nervous, expecting at any moment to receive a parang in the back.

  “Just a minute,” he said. “My things.”

  “Sir?”

  “My gun case . . . and holdall.”

  Kam Jalan shouted something, and a few minutes later two or three figures skulked past them in the dark. Burnett pressed the barrels to the back of Kam Jalan’s neck.

  “Remember, if they try anything . . . ”

  “They will not do so,” said Kam Jalan sullenly.

  “They had better not, or you’ll lose your head.”

  Half an hour later Burnett was bouncing on the Land Rover seat as Kam Jalan drove them recklessly along the potholed track back to Kuala Lumpur. The rain was falling in great swathes of wind and water, but Burnett was determined to reach K.L. by midnight. He was elated at his success. He had never considered himself to be strong-willed or adventurous, and tonight he had proved some thing to himself.

  “The suspension . . . ” said Kam Jalan.

  “Keep going.”

  The windscreen wipers laboured to keep the windshield clear of the flood.

  They reached the hotel at twelve-twenty. The monsoon had ceased and Burnett jumped out of the vehicle, still carrying the gun. Nervously, he searched the back of the vehicle, but after several minutes found nothing. His holdall and gun case were there, and several pieces of equipment, including a box of tools, but certainly no child, supernatural or otherwise. He felt cheated. Had he imagined being followed from the edge of the village to the huts? And then again to the vehicle? What about the movement of the Land Rover on its springs? Perhaps the child had climbed out again, while he had been fetching Kam Jalan.

  Well, it wasn’t here now.

  “Bring my things,” he ordered Kam Jalan.

  Disappointed, he climbed the steps and made his way to his room. There he stripped and went into the shower. He took his bottle of whisky in with him.

  Once he was clean he felt refreshed. Wrapping a towel around him he returned to the bedroom. Kam Jalan had placed the gun case and the holdall on the bed.

  “Damn the man,” said Burnett irritably. He had expected him to wait.

  The bed suddenly creaked.

  Burnett looked down. What? There was something most . . . the holdall was creating a depression in the bed far too deep for the weight of a bag of personal effects.

  It moved, very slightly. Afraid, yet at the same time fascinated, Burnett crossed to the bed and stared down at the case.

  The top had been left unfastened. Slowly the opening began to part, and Burnett cried out as the holdall fell, over on to its side.

  The logi was not like a small, pink-skinned baby after all. It was the colour of fungi that squat in deep caves, and it tumbled from the holdall as ungainly as a leaden toad, to roll clumsily on to the linen bedspread.

  The bed sagged to form a pit in which the grotesque logi sat and regarded Burnett with a lugubrious expression. Its head tilted to one side as Burnett cried out again, loudly. It was not the repulsive, wrinkled skin of the creature which motivated the shout, nor the lidless eyes with mucus crusting their rims, but the familiar, the caricatured resemblance to Burnett’s own features. There was the sound of a bullfrog again, only this time, his senses sharpened by his fear, Burnett recognized the word the Malays had taught it. He reached out for his shotgun, leaning against the wall, as the logi crawled rapidly towards the edge of the bed. The creature dropped suddenly on to his bare foot, crushing it. It dug its hard little fingers lovingly into the pulpy flesh.

  “Bapa,” it croaked happily. “Father, Father . . . ”

  Burnett’s head was awash with pain. He steadied himself against the wall and grasped the gun. They stared at each other for a full minute, then Burnett allowed the gun to slip between his fingers. It clattered on to the floor. The logi pulled the weapon to itself and cradled the present in its arms.

  EJLER JAKOBSSON (1911–1986) was born in Finland, moved to the United States in 1926, and received his B.A. from Columbia University in 1935. He met his future wife in the same year, and she also received a B.A. from Barnard College in 1935. As a husband-and-wife team, they began writing for the pulp magazines immediately after graduation.

  In addition to horror stories, they created a series detective for one of the most prestigious pulps, Dime Detective, in 1939. Nate Perry, known in the underworld as “the Bleeder” because he was a hemophiliac, found himself in numerous impossible situations but always managed to evade the single scratch that would mean his death. In the novella The City Condemned to Hell, they also created Dr. Skull, who battled the eponymous villain of The Octopus, a pulp magazine that lasted a single issue (February/March 1939). Dr. Skull then took on another villain whose diabolical schemes also lasted for a single issue in The Scorpion (April/May 1939), as recounted in “Satan’s Incubator.” The two Dr. Skull stories, written under the pseudonym Randall Craig, had been credited to Norvell Page until Bob Weinberg, one of the country’s leading pulp experts, uncovered the author’s true identity.

  Ejler Jacobson also worked as an editor of such science fiction magazines as Astonishing Stories, Super Science Stories, Galaxy, and If, succeeding Frederik Pohl as editor of the latter two.

  “Corpses on Parade” was first published in the April 1938 issue of Dime Detective.

  PUTRESCENT MASSES OF DECAYED FLESH, THEY WALKED THE STREETS OF NEW YORK—THE VICTIMS OF THE ROTTING DEATH. WAS BONNY, MY BELOVED, DESTINED TO BE OF THEIR NUMBER? COULD I, ALONE, OUTWIT THE MONSTERS THAT HAD TERRORIZED THE WORLD’S LARGEST CITY? I WOULD DIE TRYING. . . .

  CHAPTER ONE

  DUES PAYABLE TO DEATH

  THEY BURIED ANDY Carter on one of those bleak February mornings when the sun forgets to shine. He had a big turn-out; and I wasn’t surprised to see every society editor in town at St. Anne’s, dressed in mourning, with note-books and pencils constantly in hand, jotting down the notables present.

  I guessed at the paragraph they’d give me: “Barry Amsterdam, New York’s play-boy and thrill-seeker Number One, was grieving at the loss of his erstwhile playmate, the fabulously wealthy heir to the Carter utility millions, whose untimely death—” and so forth.

  I only hoped they’d leave it at that. Because I knew, and so did others, that Andy Carter hadn’t died of pneumonia. He had died of whatever it was that had made him a ghost-faced stranger the last time I’d seen him alive.

  Or could you call that—life? That cringing shadow of a man who’d whimper as he pulled his hand from my clasp, refused to answer the natural questions a best friend would ask?

  We didn’t speak of it to each other, we who were the monied fraction of New York, but it was there, behind every bland mask of a face at the fashionable funeral. Andy Carter had died of stark, grisly terror!

  “YOU LOOK LIKE the prelude to several long drinks Barry, my boy,” said a slow voice at my elbow. It was Duke Livingstone, city editor of the Chronicle, and in times past, friend enough to squash some of my snappier high-jinks before they reached the headlines. Tall and baldish, with eyes like an owl’s, and a mouth that was sometimes like a kid’s and sometimes like a professor’s. He was humorous; he had to be. A grimmer man might have gone cr
azy, knowing the things he knew about people and their shortcomings.

  “I feel like the tail end of a bad life,” I told him. “And what brings you here? Poor old Andy wasn’t that important.”

  Duke put a long finger against his thin nose and wagged it. “Poor old Andy,” he said, “died without explaining a few things that might be interesting to the press. For instance, what happened to the Carter money? Andy didn’t live long enough to spend four million—”

  “Duke, skip it,” I urged. “Skip it as an editor, anyway. Don’t hurt the Carters any more than you can help it.”

  Duke’s owlish eyes followed my gaze to a brave erect little figure, black-veiled, at the front of St. Anne’s. “And that’s another thing,” he drawled. “I have a hunch Bonny Carter knows more about her brother’s death than any of us. Don’t worry. I won’t interrupt her grief—yet. You’re a little sunk on her, aren’t you?”

  Sure. I was sunk on her. Until Andy’s—well, we called it illness—we’d been talking Armonk every night of the week. Duke knew it, so I didn’t bother telling him. And I guess he knew I didn’t want him around, just then, because he vanished, like the good fellow he was.

  There was something about Bonny Carter, even in the stark shock of sudden loss, that made a man think of the way spring felt when he was a kid. She was—well, perfect. Violet eyes, tawny hair, flawless skin; that was only a part of it. You could feel something underneath that, a kind of beautiful purity that made you want to help her and protect her.

  I don’t know what she saw in me, except that I loved her; but I knew, from the way she reached out her hands to me the minute she saw me, that if anyone could comfort her in this tragedy, it was I. I swore silently to myself that I’d live up to her trust in me. God, how little we know our own follies! In spite of myself, through my very efforts to save her, I was to add to her sorrows!

  “Barry,” she whispered, “has he gone? That newspaperman, I mean?”

  I held her fingertips, reverently. “Yes, he’s gone,” I said. “I asked him to. Duke’s not a bad sort.”

  “No, he isn’t. But I’m wary of reporters.” She was a little breathless, and it was not the breathlessness that comes from tears. Her glance darted about unhappily, and then she beckoned me into a side aisle.

  “I have to talk to you before we go to the cemetery,” she said. “Barry, I don’t know what I’ll be like afterward. I’ve been so worried! We don’t have a cent, Mother and I, and we don’t know what’s happened to it. Andy’s club was awfully decent about paying for the funeral. But the living should pay for their own dead.”

  I tried to tell her that it would be all right, that the sweetest thing she could do for me would be to let me take care of her and her mother forever. But she retreated from me in a kind of appalled daze—and then I saw a look in those violet eyes that made me wish I’d died before I saw it.

  It was the same look that had been on Andy’s face the last time I saw him alive . . . a look that made you think terror, like a huge cancer, was amok in a living being, feeding on it and slowly causing its death.

  She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at the pall-bearers, six black figures, moving with Andy’s coffin down the aisle. Was it the candlelight, or the tragic occasion that made them seem what they were, that sad sextet? Or was it—my mind recoiled toward sanity from the thought—that same expression of panic gone hopeless that turned those faces, so familiar to cameramen around the town’s hot-spots, into death’s-heads of despair?

  I DIDN’T SEE Bonny at the cemetery, nor after the burial, for the very good reason that the burial ended in a near-riot. I remembered thinking, then, that life had turned into a crazy caricature of death. I didn’t know, you see, that I was as yet only in the hinterland of a horror that would blacken my world, later. . . .

  It was just after the first spadeful had been flung against the coffin. Grant Anders, the leading pall-bearer, stood very straight and gaunt at the edge of the grave, his loose black coat flapping in the February wind like the wing-humming of the Grim Reaper. Grant’s family had come over on the Mayflower; he was an old classmate of mine. I thought that he was not looking too well.

  Suddenly high, mirthless laughter pierced the reverent silence. It was Grant’s voice. There was a sharp cracking sound. Grant faltered, and then plunged into the open grave, his dead fingers still linked around a smoking revolver.

  I suppose I must have taken charge in the panic that followed, because when Sergeant Connor put a heavy hand on my shoulder, it seemed I had pushed eight men away from the body, and was engaged in slapping a middle-aged matron out of hysteria.

  “I’m a friend of the Carters,” I explained. “I know all these people. I tried to keep them from running wild.”

  “Ye’ve been doin’ a bit of runnin’ wild yerself, m’boy,” said the sergeant, not unsympathetically. “However, I’m glad ye let no one touch the body.” He beckoned to a comrade in brass-and-blue, and they hoisted poor Grant out of the pit. “Suicide,” they observed pithily.

  Grant had been a great one for thrills when I knew him, and he was willing to pay for them whenever they offered. Consequently, he’d usually carried at least a century on him, generally more.

  Yet, when we examined his pockets in that vain half-blind search for motive that follows every tremendously wrong human act, we found—a nickel, two pennies, a clean handkerchief, and one slip of paper in the otherwise empty wallet. It was a notice, from the Quadrangle Club that dues, amounting to ninety dollars quarterly, were payable on the first of February.

  I thought dully, and it was a thought that clicked on an empty cartridge, that members of the Quadrangle Club seemed to be showing a singular mortality. First Andy—now Grant Anders. I was occupied with a resentment against Kitty Anders. Grant had married her on a dare, and it worked out as such marriages usually do. Grant had been good sport enough to stick it, but I was sure Kitty, with her erratic expensive tastes, had brought my former classmate to this pitiable end.

  What a difference there is in women! I thanked God for the sweet sanity of my Bonny—little realizing that when I saw her next, she would seem far from sane.

  I gave the sergeant my name, address and twenty dollars for being helpful. The funeral guests were gone; and what was left of Andy and Grant was in hands fit to deal with remains. Suddenly, after all the excitement, I began to feel a little sick—and more than anything in the world, I wanted to see Bonny.

  NEITHER SHE NOR her mother were at the town apartment when I got back to Manhattan. I floundered into an easy chair, and gritted my teeth over a Scotch and soda. At ten-minute intervals, I phoned the Carters. By five in the afternoon, they were still out. I had just about decided to go over there and wait for them, when Suki, my man-servant, announced a visitor.

  It was the city editor of the Chronicle. He helped himself to a Corona, and asked for a drink, and then his mouth that was humorous as a kid’s came out with a bombshell.

  He said, “Kitty Anders has just jumped out of the window.” And then he sighed, and blew the kind of contented smoke rings you see in bedroom slipper ads.

  When it penetrated, I shouted, “You’re crazy! Or else everyone else is!”

  “I always knew about everyone else,” Duke answered. “You learn about them in my racket. Now, lad, I’ve done you a turn or two in our time. You knew the Anders better than I did. Would you say Kitty was the sort of woman who’d kill herself out of grief at the loss of a husband?”

  I laughed, not happily. “Hardly. She’s dead then?”

  Duke nodded. “Most messily dead. It’s a shame. She was a pretty woman. Say, didn’t I tell you earlier you needed a drink? Keeps a man’s stomach down. Swallow one, and I’ll take you over for a look at the corpse. There’s some kind of cop who says you know the answer.”

  I damned Sergeant Connor in my private thoughts, and went to the Anders’ apartment on East Seventy-third in a press car. I’d avoided that apartment since Grant’s marriage—it wa
s gaudy, and there seemed to be a price tag on everything, screaming expense. I dreaded, too, the habitual reek of over-applied Oriental perfumes that had been a perfect expression of Kitty.

  I needn’t have. No hint of bottled flowers was in that air. Instead, a sultry foulness, faint but undeniable, hit us the moment we entered. Duke’s long nose wrinkled in distaste. I wasn’t imagining it.

  In the bedroom, surrounded by gewgaws she would never enjoy again, lay Kitty Anders, and for salon she had the coroner, the press and the law. And now I placed that odor of corruption; it proceeded from the dead woman’s decently shrouded body.

  I said, “She’s been dead for days!” and the coroner looked at me curiously and shook his head. . . .

  “Take yerself a look,” said Sergeant Connor, pulling the sheet from Kitty’s face. I looked—and something in me froze. I’m not a coward; I’ve been in some tough spots in my time and laughed afterward, but this was different. In the first place, with the removal of the sheet, the stench became almost overpowering—as though Kitty had been pregnant with death before she died!

  And on the dead face was that unnameable expression of hopeless despair that I had seen on too many faces that day. That was it—she had carried death within her like an unborn evil—I turned away, half-sick with a fear I dared not name to myself.

  “Ye wouldn’t know what makes the poor girl smell so horrible, would ye?” asked the sergeant.

  I said, “The living don’t smell like that, nor fresh corpses. . . .”

  The coroner straightened, and looked at me. He was haggard and perplexed. “Of course not. But we have sworn testimony that Mrs. Anders was alive this morning, that she shouted a warning to passers-by before she jumped . . .” he shrugged, and went into the next room. Duke followed him, hoping, I suppose, to get a more complete report. The sergeant was busy with Kitty’s effects.