by Otto Penzler
I felt like the last man alive.
COURTNEY WAS STILL wired and sweaty from the fight. The pheromones came off her in great waves as I followed her down the hall to her apartment. She stank of lust. I found myself thinking of how she got just before orgasm, so desperate, so desirable. It was different after she came, she would fall into a state of calm assurance; the same sort of calm assurance she showed in her business life, the aplomb she sought so wildly during the act itself.
And when that desperation left her, so would I. Because even I could recognize that it was her desperation that drew me to her, that made me do the things she needed me to do. In all the years I’d known her, we’d never once had breakfast together.
I wished there was some way I could deal her out of the equation. I wished that her desperation were a liquid that I could drink down to the dregs. I wished I could drop her in a wine press and squeeze her dry.
At her apartment, Courtney unlocked her door and in one complicated movement twisted through and stood facing me from the inside. “Well,” she said. “All in all, a productive evening. Good night, Donald.”
“Good night? Aren’t you going to invite me inside?”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?” She was beginning to piss me off. A blind man could’ve told she was in heat from across the street. A chimpanzee could’ve talked his way into her pants. “What kind of idiot game are you playing now?”
“You know what no means, Donald. You’re not stupid.”
“No I’m not, and neither are you. We both know the score. Now let me in, goddamnit.”
“Enjoy your present,” she said, and closed the door.
I FOUND COURTNEY’S present back in my suite. I was still seething from her treatment of me and stalked into the room, letting the door slam behind me. So that I was standing in near-total darkness. The only light was what little seeped through the draped windows at the far end of the room. I was just reaching for the light switch when there was a motion in the darkness.
’Jackers! I thought, and all in a panic lurched for the light switch, hoping to achieve I don’t know what. Credit-jackers always work in trios, one to torture the security codes out of you, one to phone the numbers out of your accounts and into a fiscal trapdoor, a third to stand guard. Was turning the lights on supposed to make them scurry for darkness, like roaches? Nevertheless, I almost tripped over my own feet in my haste to reach the switch. But of course it was nothing like what I’d feared.
It was a woman.
She stood by the window in a white silk dress that could neither compete with nor distract from her ethereal beauty, her porcelain skin. When the lights came on, she turned toward me, eyes widening, lips parting slightly. Her breasts swayed ever so slightly as she gracefully raised a bare arm to offer me a lily. “Hello, Donald,” she said huskily. “I’m yours for the night.” She was absolutely beautiful.
And dead, of course.
NOT TWENTY MINUTES later I was hammering on Courtney’s door. She came to the door in a Pierre Cardin dressing gown and from the way she was still cinching the sash and the disarray of her hair I gathered she hadn’t been expecting me.
“I’m not alone,” she said.
“I didn’t come here for the dubious pleasures of your fair white body.” I pushed my way into the room. But couldn’t help remembering that beautiful body of hers, not so exquisite as the dead whore’s, and now the thoughts were inextricably mingled in my head, death and Courtney, sex and corpses, a Gordian knot I might never be able to untangle.
“You didn’t like my surprise?” She was smiling openly now, amused.
“No, I fucking did not!”
I took a step toward her. I was shaking. I couldn’t stop fisting and unfisting my hands.
She fell back a step. But that confident, oddly expectant look didn’t leave her face. “Bruno,” she said lightly. “Would you come in here?”
A motion at the periphery of vision. Bruno stepped out of the shadows of her bedroom. He was a muscular brute, pumped, ripped, and as black as the fighter I’d seEngo down earlier that night. He stood behind Courtney, totally naked, with slim hips and wide shoulders and the finest skin I’d ever seen.
And dead.
I saw it all in a flash.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Courtney!” I said, disgusted. “I can’t believe you. That you’d actually . . . That thing’s just an obedient body. There’s nothing there—no passion, no connection, just . . . physical presence.”
Courtney made a kind of chewing motion through her smile, weighing the implications of what she was about to say. Nastiness won.
“We have equity now,” she said.
I lost it then. I stepped forward, raising a hand, and I swear to God I intended to bounce the bitch’s head off the back wall. But she didn’t flinch—she didn’t even look afraid. She merely moved aside, saying, “In the body, Bruno. He has to look good in a business suit.”
A dead fist smashed into my ribs so hard I thought for an instant my heart had stopped. Then Bruno punched me in my stomach. I doubled over, gasping. Two, three, four more blows. I was on the ground now, rolling over, helpless and weeping with rage.
“That’s enough, baby. Now put out the trash.”
Bruno dumped me in the hallway.
I glared up at Courtney through my tears. She was not at all beautiful now. Not in the least. You’re getting older, I wanted to tell her. But instead I heard my voice, angry and astonished, saying, “You . . . you goddamn, fucking necrophile!”
“Cultivate a taste for it,” Courtney said. Oh, she was purring! I doubted she’d ever find life quite this good again. “Half a million Brunos are about to come on the market. You’re going to find it a lot more difficult to pick up living women in not so very long.”
I SENT AWAY the dead whore. Then I took a long shower that didn’t really make me feel any better. Naked, I walked into my unlit suite and opened the curtains. For a long time I stared out over the glory and darkness that was Manhattan.
I was afraid, more afraid than I’d ever been in my life.
The slums below me stretched to infinity. They were a vast necropolis, a never-ending city of the dead. I thought of the millions out there who were never going to hold down a job again. I thought of how they must hate me—me and my kind—and how helpless they were before us. And yet. There were so many of them and so few of us. If they were to all rise up at once, they’d be like a tsunami, irresistible. And if there was so much as a spark of life left in them, then that was exactly what they would do.
That was one possibility. There was one other, and that was that nothing would happen. Nothing at all.
God help me, but I didn’t know which one scared me more.
MANLY WADE WELLMAN (1903–1986) was born in Kamundongo, Portuguese West Africa (now Angola), the son of a physician at a British medical outpost. His family moved to Washington, D.C., when he was a child, and he eventually graduated with a B.A. in English from what is now Wichita State University, then received a bachelor of laws degree from Columbia. He worked as a reporter for two Wichita newspapers, the Beacon and the Eagle, then moved to New York in 1939 to become the assistant director of the FPA’s Folklore Project.
He began writing, mainly in the horror field, in the 1920s, and by the 1930s was selling stories to the leading pulps in the genre: Weird Tales, Wonder Stories, and Astounding Stories. He had three series running simultaneously in Weird Tales: Silver John, also known as John the Balladeer, the backwoods minstrel with a silverstringed guitar; John Thunstone, the New York playboy and adventurer who was also a psychic detective; and Judge Keith Hilary Persuivant, an elderly occult detective, which he wrote under the pseudonym Gans T. Fields.
Wellman also wrote for the comic books, producing the first Captain Marvel issue for Fawcett Publishers. When DC Comics sued Fawcett for plagiarizing their Superman character, Wellman testified against Fawcett, and DC won the case after three years of litigation.
&
nbsp; “The Song of the Slaves” was originally published in the March 1940 issue of Weird Tales.
GENDER PAUSED AT the top of the bald rise, mopped his streaming red forehead beneath the wide hat-brim, and gazed backward at his forty-nine captives. Naked and black, they shuffled upward from the narrow, ancient slave trail through the jungle. Forty-nine men, seized by Gender’s own hand and collared to a single long chain, destined for his own plantation across the sea . . . Gender grinned in his lean, drooping mustache, a mirthless grin of greedy triumph.
For years he had dreamed and planned for this adventure, as other men dream and plan for European tours, holy pilgrimages, or returns to beloved birthplaces. He had told himself that it was intensely practical and profitable. Slaves passed through so many hands—the raider, the caravaner, the seashore factor, the slaver captain, the dealer in New Orleans or Havana or at home in Charleston. Each greedy hand clutched a rich profit, and all profits must come eventually from the price paid by the planter. But he, Gender, had come to Africa himself, in his own ship; with a dozen staunch ruffians from Benguela he had penetrated the Bihé-Bailundu country, had sacked a village and taken these forty-nine upstanding natives between dark and dawn. A single neck-shackle on his long chain remained empty, and he might fill even that before he came to his ship. By the Lord, he was making money this way, fairly coining it—and money was worth the making, to a Charleston planter in 1853.
So he reasoned, and so he actually believed, but the real joy to him was hidden in the darkest nook of his heart. He had conceived the raider-plan because of a nature that fed on savagery and mastery. A man less fierce and cruel might have been satisfied with hunting lions or elephants, but Gender must hunt men. As a matter of fact, the money made or saved by the journey would be little, if it was anything. The satisfaction would be tremendous. He would broaden his thick chest each day as he gazed out over his lands and saw there his slaves hoeing seashore cotton or pruning indigo; his forty-nine slaves, caught and shipped and trained by his own big, hard hands, more indicative of assured conquest than all the horned or fanged heads that ever passed through the shops of all the taxidermists.
Something hummed in his ears, like a rhythmic swarm of bees. Men were murmuring a song under their breath. It was the long string of pinch-faced slaves. Gender stared at them, and mouthed one of the curses he always kept at tongue’s end.
“Silva!” he called.
The lanky Portuguese who strode free at the head of the file turned aside and stood before Gender. “Patrao?” he inquired respectfully, smiling teeth gleaming in his walnut face.
“What are those men singing?” demanded Gender. “I didn’t think they had anything to sing about.”
“A slave song, patrao.” Silva’s tapering hand, with the silver bracelet at its wrist, made a graceful gesture of dismissal. “It is nothing. One of the things that natives make up and sing as they go.”
Gender struck his boot with his coiled whip of hippopotamus hide. The afternoon sun, sliding down toward the shaggy jungle-tops, kindled harsh pale lights in his narrow blue eyes. “How does the song go?” he persisted.
The two fell into step beside the caravan as, urged by a dozen redcapped drivers, it shambled along the trail. “It is only a slave song, patrao,” said Silva once again. “It means something like this: ‘Though you carry me away in chains, I am free when I die. Back will I come to bewitch and kill you.’ ”
Gender’s heavy body seemed to swell, and his eyes grew narrower and paler. “So they sing that, hmm?” He swore again. “Listen to that!”
The unhappy procession had taken up a brief, staccato refrain:
“Hailowa—Genda! Haipana—Genda!”
“Genda, that’s my name,” snarled the planter. “They’re singing about me, aren’t they?”
Silva made another fluid gesture, but Gender flourished his whip under the nose of the Portuguese. “Don’t you try to shrug me off. I’m not a child, to be talked around like this. What are they singing about me?”
“Nothing of consequence, patrao,” Silva made haste to reassure him. “It might be to say: ‘I will bewitch Gender, I will kill Gender.’ ”
“They threaten me, do they?” Gender’s broad face took on a deeper flush. He ran at the line of chained black men. With all the strength of his arm he slashed and swung with the whip. The song broke up into wretched howls of pain.
“I’ll give you a music lesson!” he raged, and flogged his way up and down the procession until he swayed and dripped sweat with the exertion.
But as he turned away, it struck up again:
“Hailowa—Genda! Haipana—Genda!”
Whirling back, he resumed the rain of blows. Silva, rushing up to second him, also whipped the slaves and execrated them in their own tongue. But when both were tired, the flayed captives began to sing once more, softly but stubbornly, the same chant.
“Let them whine,” panted Gender at last. “A song never killed anybody.”
Silva grinned nervously. “Of course not, patrao. That is only an idiotic native belief.”
“You mean, they think that a song will kill?”
“That, and more. They say that if they sing together, think together of one hate, all their thoughts and hates will become a solid strength—will strike and punish for them.”
“Nonsense!” exploded Gender.
But when they made camp that night, Gender slept only in troubled snatches, and his dreams were of a song that grew deeper, heavier, until it became visible as a dark, dense cloud that overwhelmed him.
The ship that Gender had engaged for the expedition lay in a swampy estuary, far from any coastal town, and the dawn by which he loaded his goods aboard was strangely fiery and forbidding. Dunlapp, the old slaver-captain that commanded for him, met him in the cabin.
“All ready, sir?” he asked Gender. “We can sail with the tide. Plenty of room in the hold for that handful you brought. I’ll tell the men to strike off those irons.”
“On the contrary,” said Gender, “tell the men to put manacles on the hands of each slave.”
Dunlapp gazed in astonishment at his employer. “But that’s bad for blacks, Mr. Gender. They get sick in chains, won’t eat their food. Sometimes they die.”
“I pay you well, Captain,” Gender rumbled, “but not to advise me. Listen to those heathen.”
Dunlapp listened. A moan of music wafted in to them.
“They’ve sung that cursed song about me all the way to the coast,” Gender told him. “They know I hate it—I’ve whipped them day after day—but they keep it up. No chains come off until they hush their noise.”
Dunlapp bowed acquiescence and walked out to give orders. Later, as they put out to sea, he rejoined Gender on the after deck.
“They do seem stubborn about their singing,” he observed.
“I’ve heard it said,” Gender replied, “that they sing together because they think many voices and hearts give power to hate, or to other feelings.” He scowled. “Pagan fantasy!”
Dunlapp stared overside, at white gulls just above the wavetips. “There may be a tithe of truth in that belief, Mr. Gender; sometimes there is in the faith of wild people. Hark ye, I’ve seen a good fifteen hundred Mohammedans praying at once, in the Barbary countries. When they bowed down, the touch of all those heads to the ground banged like the fall of a heavy rock. And when they straightened, the motion of their garments made a swish like the gust of a gale. I couldn’t help but think that their prayer had force.”
“More heathen foolishness,” snapped Gender, and his lips drew tight.
“Well, in Christian lands we have examples, sir,” Dunlapp pursued. “For instance, a mob will grow angry and burn or hang someone. Would a single man do that? Would any single man of the mob do it? No, but together their hate and resolution becomes—”
“Not the same thing at all,” ruled Gender harshly. “Suppose we change the subject.”
On the following afternoon, a white sail crept above
the horizon behind them. At the masthead gleamed a little blotch of color. Captain Dunlapp squinted through a telescope, and barked a sailorly oath.
“A British ship-of-war,” he announced, “and coming after us.”
“Well?” said Gender.
“Don’t you understand, sir? England is sworn to stamp out the slave trade. If they catch us with this cargo, it’ll be the end of us.” A little later, he groaned apprehensively. “They’re overtaking us. There’s their signal, for us to lay to and wait for them. Shall we do it, sir?”
Gender shook his head violently. “Not we! Show them our heels, Captain.”
“They’ll catch us. They are sailing three feet to our two.”
“Not before dark,” said Gender. “When dark comes, we’ll contrive to lessen our embarrassment.”
And so the slaver fled, with the Britisher in pursuit. Within an hour, the sun was at the horizon, and Gender smiled grimly in his mustache.
“It’ll be dark within minutes,” he said to Dunlapp. “As soon as you feel they can’t make out our actions by glass, get those slaves on deck.”
In the dusk the forty-nine naked prisoners stood in a line along the bulwark. For all their chained necks and wrists, they neither stood nor gazed in a servile manner. One of them began to sing and the others joined, in the song of the slave trail:
“Hailowa—Genda! Haipana—Genda!”
“Sing on,” Gender snapped briefly, and moved to the end of the line that was near the bow. Here dangled the one empty collar, and he seized it in his hand. Bending over the bulwark, he clamped it shut upon something—the ring of a heavy spare anchor, that swung there upon a swivel-hook. Again he turned, and eyed the line of dark singers.