Zombies

by Otto Penzler

  BORN IN WATERVILLE, Washington, Arthur J. Burks (1898–1974) had two primary careers: the military, and as a prolific pulp writer. After he served in World War I, he was promoted to aide to General Smedley D. Butler in 1924; he resigned in 1928 to become a full-time writer, but rejoined the marines when World War II broke out, supervising the basic training of nearly one-third of all marines engaged in the war, and retiring as a lieutenant colonel. Although he had started writing at the age of twenty while a lieutenant, it was in the 1930s that he earned the title “the Speed Merchant of the Pulps,” producing between one and two million words a year for more than a decade. Unlike other hyperprolific authors, like Walter B. Gibson and Lester Dent, who wrote novels about the Shadow and Doc Savage, respectively, Burks rarely wrote novels and had few series characters, keeping to original short stories in virtually every genre, notably horror, mystery, aviation, science fiction, adventure, fantasy, and romance (under the pseudonym Esther Critchfield). He wrote about what it was like to write at such a furious pace for Writer’s Digest, noting that he once had eleven stories in a single magazine under eleven different names. He had the reputation among other pulp writers (and editors) of being able to select any inanimate object in a room and write a thrilling story about it. Many of his stories were less plot-driven than those of his contemporaries, using instead a sense of mood to create terror.

  “Dance of the Damned” was first published in the August/September 1936 issue of Horror Stories.

  WILL SIX PEOPLE, WHO COULD HAVE RETURNED FROM THE DARK LIMBO OF DEATH, REMAIN THERE THROUGHOUT ALL ETERNITY BECAUSE OF ME? THE WIND WILL WHINE THAT QUESTION OVER MY GRAVE—RUFFLING THE DUST IN SUMMER, WHIRLING THE SNOW IN WINTER . . . TO THE END OF TIME. . . .

  I KNEW IT was all wrong from the beginning; but it was a story the editor wanted. Bette Carver was there to get the women’s angle of the macabre show. Bette was another reason I knew it was all wrong. It wouldn’t do her sensitive nature any good, to spend half the night in such a dismal atmosphere. Imagine it! A deserted beach club, where during hot summer months young people made merry, turned over, in the icy grip of winter, to a desolate roistering, a wild celebration of scores of deaths.

  It was like this: Two years ago the Cyclonic had gone down off the Jersey Coast, with all on board. It had been returning from Bermuda with a holiday crowd, men and women able to afford the luxury of summer tan in mid-winter.

  Nobody ever knew what happened, really. There was just a brief SOS after a blaze in the eastern sky and then, the queer message. Scarcely even a trace of the Cyclonic remained—except a piece of hatch-cover that came floating ashore, with bloodstains on it, stains of fire, and here and there a trace of a woman’s hair.

  It was pretty terrible, and neither Bette nor I relished the job of visiting that bit of flotsam to gather “atmosphere.”

  Bette shuddered.

  “Heavens, Alex!” she said. “The mere sight of it gives me the creeps! If that piece of timber could speak! Think of the terrible way those poor people died—I can almost hear their screams. . . .”

  “They were pretty good sports, Bette—” I said—“that Cyclonic crowd. Remember the last radio message the public got from her?”

  Bette nodded. “It was so strange and hysterical,” she said. “It must have been sent by a radio operator out of his head with terror. It said: ‘Make merry for us, for we die!’ ”

  She gasped and turned on me.

  “That’s why Lola Garrick is giving this ghastly show tonight,” she said. “Her mother went down on the Cyclonic! Her mother loved her pleasures. It’s Lola’s gesture of defiance. . . . Alex—the names of her guests—Let’s get back and look them over.”

  I WAS GLAD enough to get away from that piece of the Cyclonic which bore mute testimony to a ghastly sea tragedy. The place was horrible. The huge piece of timber, filled with rusty nails and bolts, was half buried in the snow and sand. Grim ice stretched out from the beach for hundreds of yards to sullen grey water. I kept thinking of the drowned, coming up under the ice, bumping coldly and soggily along. . . .

  I put my arm around Bette’s shoulders. She was trembling like a leaf, and I knew it was not with the cold. She was frightened. The dismal atmosphere had done it. Snow was driving down, blowing almost parallel with the ground. It scurried along the boardwalk like clouds mashed flat against the wood. The night was eerie, freezing cold.

  Bette’s head came just to my armpit, so I had to bend to help her along. I had fallen in love with Bette, in spite of the fact that a newspaper office is no place for love to bloom in—it’s too close to the grim facts of life, with all the sentimental trimmings cut away.

  We went back to the clubhouse, and had scarcely put our heavy wraps away when I noticed how the windows rattled. There were roaring fires at either end of the big room, in pot-bellied stoves put in for this dance. I stared at the windows, on which driving snow was etching queer white shapes. Bette followed my glance, and shivered again.

  “Ghostly!” she said. “And ghastly! The snow figures on the panes make me think of the drowned. White ghosts looking in! What do they think of this merriment?”

  A band was playing. It was cold in here, even with the fires going; but the band was perspiring, and now and again its members stared at the windows, which rattled in their casements.

  Lola Garrick was running the show. Her cheeks were flushed a rosy red. She was calling for a funereal waltz, with the lights turned down. I didn’t like it. Bette kept on trembling. Her lips shook when she looked at me, as though she were about to cry.

  Said Lola Garrick: “My mother went down on the Cyclonic, off this coast. Some relative of each of you went down with her. It was a pleasure cruise. Their pleasure was interrupted by death in the cold seas. What more fitting than that we go on where our relatives left off? They’d all have approved. They loved life and gaiety, they rebelled at the suggestion of death. So, make merry for them, for they died!”

  She had paraphrased the words of the grim quotation, the last radio message from the Cyclonic.

  “We might as well dance, dear,” I said.

  The band swung into its tune, a slow, measured waltz that made me think of a military funeral, with the escort marching in solemn tread.

  Bette’s whole body was shaking as I held her.

  “Look!” she said. “There’s Harrison Graves; his wife was on that boat—with some other man—according to gossip. And Pierce Paget. His sister was on the Cyclonic. Cora Patterson, too, with a husband who she didn’t know was on the Cyclonic until the passenger list was published. Every person here lost someone on that boat, just as Lola said. It’s horrible, this celebration!”

  I agreed with her. I shivered with the thought. I was acutely conscious of the fact that outside on the beach, which because of the ice extending a quarter mile from shore, the only relic of the Cyclonic was all but buried in the snow and sand and ice. I remembered how the wind had whistled through its cracks. I could hear the sound now. It seemed to come right into the brightly lighted dancing space with us, bringing an eerie refrain: “Make merry for us, for we die!”

  ONLY, THE WINDY refrain, which I heard in my heart, was not a command, but a ghastly warning. All imagination—but I couldn’t help it to save myself.

  “The derelict,” whispered Bette, against my chest, “I can hear it whispering, crying out against all this!”

  Strange that she had the same idea, as though our frightened hearts were somehow in tune. That fact should have warmed my soul, because it proved a sort of lover’s telepathy between us—but it didn’t. It made my growing fear of weird consequences a black stone resting in my breast. I held Bette more tightly against me.

  “Whatever happens,” I said, “we’re together. Nothing will happen to you while my arms are around you.”

  She shivered. “I’m afraid, just the same. I wish I hadn’t come.”

  “Let’s beat it,” I answered.

  “And let the editor down? Imagine how this
will look, pictures and all, in the Sunday supplement. Look at these people, dressed as pirates, sailors. . . .”

  We were interrupted by a sound that caused the musicians to stop in the middle of a bar and their horrified eyes to turn on the windows. All the dancers stopped, lifted their heads to listen. There was a strange, roaring sound, over our heads. I looked up to see the roof of the clubhouse shaking. Then I looked at the windows once more.

  Lola Garrick began to laugh, a bit shakily.

  “It’s nothing,” she cried. “What are you all keyed up about? It’s been snowing for two days and nights, and the snow is heavy on the roof. The heat in here has warmed the roof, that’s all, and the snow is sliding off. You all saw a sheet of it drop past the window. . . .”

  “Like a winding-sheet,” said a pasty faced man who was dancing with Lola’s sister. “A shroud in the wind!”

  “That’s the spirit!” shouted Lola. “Make light of it! There’s lots of fun to be had in this world, even yet. I wouldn’t be surprised if our people on the Cyclonic, wherever they are now, were having a dance of their own. . . .”

  That got under my skin. I was thinking of just such a dance—of the drowned trying to make shore, under the ice, bumping their heads against the underside of the ice, staring up at it with frosty eyes. That was the sort of dance they were having!

  But the band didn’t go on, and the dancers stood where they were. The sounds on the roof hadn’t stopped yet. They were just different. I stared at the shaking ceiling above me. Very plainly, I could hear footsteps up there, heavy shoes crunching the snow—and after the footfalls, which went angling across the roof, the snow slid down, over the edge, past the windows.

  Someone was up there, then, making the snow slide off!

  That wouldn’t have seemed strange under any other circumstance, but as matters stood, at least in my mind, the presence of something on the roof took on horrible significance. I thought of a frosted Neptune, coming out of the icy deep to preside over these ghastly festivities.

  “Lola,” I called, “who’s up there? Who’s missing from your party? Has the owner of this club sent someone to keep the roof clear?”

  She laughed, a bit shakily.

  “I had an express understanding with the owner,” she said, “that he was to come nowhere near the place. As a matter of fact he turned everything over to me, and is getting drunk in New York tonight.”

  “Then, your guests . . .”

  She must have memorized the roster, for she called off the names right away, and not one was missing. I could check her, for my paper had received the list in advance. Whoever was out there on the roof was a stranger, an unwanted guest.

  We all listened. . . . The footsteps had stopped almost directly above the point where Bette and I stood. The wind whistled over the roof. It carried fine snow with it, which scurried under the eaves, over the comb of the roof, all about the clubhouse, like the scampering of little feet shod with ice.

  In that instant the whole show took on a horrible significance.

  These people were not the relatives of the victims of the Cyclonic! How had I ever got that idea? They were the victims themselves. . . .

  Bette turned to me.

  “They are the Cyclonic victims,” she said—and I hadn’t spoken aloud, either.

  The dancers looked like corpses. The band was ghastly under the yellow shaded lights.

  AND THEN THE footsteps began again; we heard them move to the edge of the slanting roof. Then, a thudding sound on the walk outside, and we knew that the unknown had dropped off. The steps approached the door. It seemed to me that the wind outside became wilder, fiercer, as the visitor approached the door.

  Then, the door, strong and heavy though it was, shook as though hammered by a high wind. The band was still silent. The dancers still stood in their places, looking at one another.

  The door burst open. I whirled. For a minute or two I did not miss Bette. I was held spellbound by the apparition in the doorway.

  Neptune, with frosted, blazing eyes, with icicles in his beard, his feet shrouded in snow. His breath steamed forth. Little eddies of wind-driven snow came in with him, to form white, still whirlpools on the door at his feet. He laughed, and his laughter was the sound of the wind.

  He lifted his right hand, pointing—at one Hedda Murtin. I felt that he was a ghastly judge, passing sentence.

  “You are first,” said the apparition, his voice a guttural rasp, “to make merry with those who die!”

  Nobody made a move to stop Hedda as she walked slowly, white-faced, right hand clutching her throat, to face the apparition. Standing for a second before him, she screamed, then turned and fled past him, vanished into the night. The apparition laughed and whirled around, going out after her, slamming the door. The door shook in its casements for a long time.

  I whirled to Lola Garrick for an explanation, but she had disappeared.

  Peter Fraym, Hedda’s escort, yelled wildly, and dashed out of the door after them. He was gone fifteen minutes or so. Then he came back, stuck his head in at the door—and his eyes were wide and wild. He beckoned to me. I went with him, wondering at his strange terror-haunted manner.

  He took me to the derelict where Hedda Murtin sprawled there, supine, under the boxlike thing which, I had been told, was a hatch-cover from the Cyclonic.

  It looked to me as though she had been in the water, all over, with her clothes on. But it didn’t matter now. She was frozen stiff, and her clothes were a coating of ice about her dead body.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “I HAD A FRIEND . . .”

  Peter Fraym knelt beside Hedda, tried to take her in his arms. Horror flowed over my whole body in cold waves. I stared out toward the sullen sea beyond the ice sheets, and saw traceries of fine snow rolling into, over, and past two pairs of footprints—two pairs, one of a man, one of a woman, leading out to the edge of the ice. Only one pair, the woman’s, came back! There seemed to be no sense to it. But as I looked I thought I saw, out there at the edge, a black shadow come up on the ice, out of the sea, like a seal coming up to look. But I must have been wrong, for when I looked again it wasn’t there.

  Peter Fraym was trying to get Hedda to speak to him, and his voice was utterly heartbroken. He clutched her with frantic arms, and her clothing crackled because it was frozen. Her icy face was against his.

  Finally it began to penetrate to his shocked brain, I suppose; the fact that Hedda, by some strange freak of the night, the storm and the party, was dead.

  “You can’t come back to me, Hedda,” he said wildly. “Then I’ll come to you!”

  He jumped to his feet, still looking down at her. He ran his cold hands swiftly through all his pockets. Hunting a suicide weapon, I thought, and I was ready to grab him if he brought forth anything that would serve. But he didn’t.

  He whirled, finally, looked out to sea—for the first time connecting it with the condition of Hedda’s garments. Then, I was sure, he saw what was left of the footprints, the trio of sets, leading out to the sea and back.

  He looked at me and laughed: “It’ll be a good story for your paper, Alex!” he chattered.

  Then Fraym was away like a shot. I watched him start, and things were moving in my brain, like maggots. Hell was here, hell of some kind, and Bette was back there in the clubhouse in the midst of it. Lola Garrick was back there, too, maybe knowing more about it all than any of us had guessed. I wondered what, really, was behind the whole party.

  Then I saw my duty and followed it. I couldn’t allow Fraym, though I scarcely knew him, to go off like that. I started after him, knowing I could outrun him easily, even with the start he had.

  “Fraym! Fraym!” I shouted. The wind caught the name right off my lips and hurled it into the night and the storm.

  Fraym laughed without looking back, and drew away from me. I saw the sullen water at the edge of the ice spout up, as though it were shaping arms to receive the man who had lost his sweetheart. I suppose he got
the same idea, and that the arms might be those of Hedda, for he flung out his own arms, as though he couldn’t wait to embrace her, and shouted hoarsely into the wind:

  “I’m coming, Hedda! Coming, coming!”

  He speeded away. I almost broke my neck trying to catch him, but it was no use. The ice was getting mushy, and I knew that if I paused it would go out under me, letting me into deep water. I had to go back soon or I wouldn’t go back at all. Only movement kept me atop the ice, as it kept Fraym.

  Then he seemed to drop into a hole, and water splashed up through the hole in whitish spume, as though to throw tentacles around him. He laughed as he vanished through into the ice, and the spume arms disappeared.

  I didn’t make the mistake of stopping, turning, going back. To have done so would have sent me after Fraym. No, I didn’t do that. I kept on running, but cutting a circle to the left, so as not to lose speed, so as to spread my weight over the ice.

  And then, shortly, it was firm under me, and I had a grim job to do, one I didn’t like, one that would send the pseudo-merrymakers into hysterics, I was sure. I had to take Hedda back to the clubhouse.

  I didn’t see anything around the half-buried derelict as I approached it, but I felt that something—something unearthly and abysmally evil—was there. I hated to go back. I had never dreaded anything as much in my life.

  I picked out the white mound, in the dark under the rough planks, and kept my eyes on it, until I reached the spot where I must stoop to gather the dead woman in my arms.

  I got a shock when I stood over the spot. Hedda wasn’t there. It didn’t look to me as though she had ever been there. There was no depression where her body had been—nothing!

  AND NOW THE snow, drifting with the wind, had obliterated all footprints save those I had made on my return from the edge of the ice. From the clubhouse came the strains of eerie music; the band was playing again.