by Otto Penzler
“This fellow has used the snow, and the night, and the derelict, out there, as props for his little act. He knows that we’re all in an almost hysterical state of nervous excitement—and he’s making the most of it. He’s gambling that we won’t react as normal human beings would react under normal circumstances—and he’s winning. . . . Six of us are dead. . . .
“Here’s my plan: The monster is a man, whom men can handle. Maybe some of the rest of us will be killed, getting him. But all of us will if we don’t. I don’t understand the things I saw outside—the people I saw go into the sea, only to reappear in that icebox I’ve told you about. Some of it may have been illusion, caused by the fear of the unknown which has mastered the rest of you. We’ll find out about that later. Now, we have just one thing to do: find this Neptune monster and destroy him! Who’s with me?”
A dozen of them came sheepishly forward, and I realized I had gone a long way toward cutting the horror trimmings off the Lola Garrick party. I saw approval of me in the eyes of Bette Carver, and felt I was on the right track.
“Are there any weapons among you?” I next asked. “I’ve got a pistol. We may need more. The man outside may have accomplices.”
The question produced four or five weapons of different makes, and we were ready.
I gave last instructions to the women, before we went out into the night.
“Miss Carver, here, has seen the monster close at hand. He’s just a man. She will be in charge here until we come back. If he slips past us, and comes in to take further toll, this is what you must do. Throw your arms around one another and hold fast, understand? If anyone of you tries to heed the call of Neptune, the others will hang onto her for dear life. Being only a man, after all, he can’t drag you all out and duck you into the sea.”
Then, at the head of the men, whose courage seemed to be coming back, we sallied forth from the door.
OUT IN THE driving snow their teeth began to chatter at once. I gave crisp orders.
“The secret lies out on the ice, I think,” I said. “Now, at intervals of fifteen paces, we’ll march out as far as we dare go. Don’t bunch up, or your weight will send some of you through the ice. Listen for orders. When, and if, we flush our quarry, shoot first and ask questions afterwards.”
It was a queer outfit that went out onto the ice. I scarcely knew, myself, why we did it, following a hunch more than anything else.
Fifty yards from shore, though, the conviction that I was right became stronger. The wind had piled drifts of varying heights, here and there on the ice. A man, a dozen men, could have hidden behind some of them. What better vantage place for the madman than those drifts, in which he could play hide-and-seek with his victims? He’d already ducked behind one or two, and I had seen him, and thought he had gone into the sea. The white arms which I had thought to be arms of salty spume had been swirling snow instead, kicked up by his body and that of his victim.
Then, when I had gone back, convinced that he had vanished into the sea, he had dipped his unconscious victims into some blowhole and allowed them to freeze. . . .
We marched out. My eyes searched the drifts of snow. In spite of my warning the men, from very fear, began to draw together, and I had to snap at them sharply, to make them keep their proper intervals.
Weapons were held at ready; we advanced slowly. Icy wind bit at our necks, hands, and faces. To stand still for two minutes was to feel the lethargy of death by freezing, creep into limbs and veins. We had to make this fast, or go back to get warmed up before going on.
Closer and closer to the edge.
The ice was cracking warningly now, and the men were scared. So was I, and glad Bette could not know it. And then, when I was about to issue the command for the return, we flushed our quarry. He stood out plainly against the snow. Neptune himself.
I fired every round in my pistol, aiming straight for his back. His arms shot high in the air. His scream, like that of a wheeling bird of prey, keened across the wastes of snow and water.
Other pistols spoke, almost with mine, and Neptune crashed down on the ice, which crackled under his weight.
“Quickly,” I yelled, “take off your belts and fasten them together. I’m going after him.”
They worked fast, all right, and in a matter of seconds, holding onto a chain of leather belts, I ventured out on the treacherous ice toward our “monster.” Cold water came up around my ankles as the ice gave, but I knew, if the belts did not break, that the others would drag me back to the clubhouse before I froze. I got my fingers in the neck of our quarry.
They began pulling me and gradually, dragging the monster, they got me to the beach.
There, on firm ground, with the “monster” dead in our hands, we gathered him up, and his dripping blood froze as it hit the snow at our feet.
“Into the clubhouse,” I said, chattering with the cold. “We’ve got to lay the ghost right now, once and for all.”
They shuddered as they gathered up Neptune for his last ride.
We went in at the door, dropped him on the floor. There was no mistaking him, for he was the same person who had taken Hedda Murtin away, and had caused the deaths of the others.
I spoke to the women.
“You can stop holding onto one another now. This ends the horror, I think. Maybe it would be just as well if you all went into another room. You too, Bette.”
We went trooping into a room—not the room of the cloaks and the racks. I stooped and began pulling off Neptune’s disguise. The others, breathing hard, stood around to watch and listen. Bette bent over the corpse of the unknown.
I saw his face. It looked familiar. I ripped off his tunic. There were six bullet holes through his chest, from the rear.
But the studious face was unmarred.
I looked at Bette questioningly. She nodded her head. She, too, knew the face of the man at her feet. His name was Bigelow Hutton, who had advanced a theory, some months ago, that human beings could be preserved, in a condition of suspended animation, for a period of years, decades—even centuries.
THE WORLD OF science had laughed at him. Hutton had answered by claiming that he had kept monkeys, dogs, cats, chickens, alive in that manner for weeks.
Scientists had called the man—in polite, scientific language, of course—a liar.
Bette and I had the story, then. Lola Garrick had been unfortunate indeed, in selecting this location for her party—for Bigelow Hutton lived within four or five miles of this particular strip of beach.
I could almost read his dead mind:
“I’ll prove to the world that it can be done. I can’t get volunteers to submit to my tests—so I’ll take them where I find them. The setting is perfect!”
He must have connived with Lola Garrick, must have persuaded her to help him try the thing out here. Lola herself had fallen his victim by accident, or because Bette Carver hadn’t been as hypnotized by fear as the others.
Bette and I, between us, explained it to the guests. I ended with this:
“Fortunately we snapped out of it in time. Six are dead. We’ve slain Hutton before he could do anything with the rest of us. Unquestionably he was mad. . . .”
And so it was left at that. Physicians were called in, as soon as possible, to examine the six who were dead. They were indubitably dead, and nothing could be done about it, they said.
But they kept looking at me. . . .
Bette . . . well, I caught her looking at me, many times. I knew that down the years, whenever I looked at myself in the mirror, whenever I lived over this horror in dreams, I would ask myself:
“Could he have returned the dead to life, if you hadn’t slain him?”
Doctors said no . . . but I saw by their faces that they were not sure. And that’s what will eat my heart out until the grave closes over me. Was I, indirectly, responsible for the death of those six, by killing Hutton before he could attempt to resurrect them?
I don’t know. I’ll never know. I just know this, and
it, too, eats at my heart: Bette Carver loves me from the depths of her soul. I am sure, too, that until the unanswerable question is answered, she will never cease to suffer—and to doubt.
The wind across that desolate beach, even in mid-summer, keeps ringing in my ears, filled with my own doubts, fears, and questions . . . as it will sing and whine over my grave, ruffling the dust in summer, swirling the snow in winter . . . to the end of time.
Dec. 29, 1935
AFFIDAVIT
I hereby certify that, with Ed Bodin as witness, I visited that section of the Jersey Coast immediately adjacent to the area of the Black Tom explosion, and that while half freezing in a blizzard, conceived and prepared the story, setting forth the details of the plot to my witness, while both of us huddled under a shattered wooden hulk which had drifted ashore before the intense cold had frozen the ocean itself to a distance of several hundred yards from the beach.
(Signed) ARTHUR J. BURKS.
Subscribed and sworn to before me this 24th day of January, 1936.
EDWARD F. DONOVAN
Notary Public.
AS WAS TRUE for many of the most popular pulp fiction writers of the Golden Age of these garish and lurid publications, Theodore Roscoe (1906–1992) produced work in a variety of genres: hard-boiled for Detective Fiction Weekly and Flynn’s Detective Fiction, as well as the cult classic novel I’ll Grind Their Bones (1936); Foreign Legion for Argosy and Adventure; boxing for Fight Stories; aviation for Air Stories; and horror for Weird Tales, among many other genres and magazines, but he is probably best-known for his adventure stories set in such exotic locales as Timbuktu, Tangier, Morocco, and Saigon, which were a mainstay of the contributions to Argosy. Born in Rochester, New York, he was the son of former missionaries in India, which undoubtedly provided him with his lifelong curiosity and enthusiasm for travel.
One of his trips took him to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to look into the frequently heard rumors of zombies, voodoo ceremonies, and other weird activities. He found ample evidence that these strange tales were true: goats hanging from trees, beheaded chickens, and shops that sold ouanga (a small bag containing the items needed to cast spells, both good and bad—parrot feathers, goat hairs, pebbles, spice, frog legs, perhaps a chicken head). The tales of the dead brought back to life to work as slaves in the sugar fields were rampant on the island and served as the inspiration for stories and two Argosy serials, A Grave Must Be Deep and Z Is for Zombie.
Z Is for Zombie was originally published in the February 13–March 6, 1937 issues of Argosy; it was published in book form by Starmont House (Mercer Island, Washington: 1989).
CHAPTER I
THE TAFFY-HAIRED MAN
THE TAFFY-HAIRED MAN said, “Get out of here! ’Raus mit!” His voice was slow, husky, a male imitation of Garbo’s.
Ranier stood up to return the stare. There seemed to be four taffy-haired men, four faces spread fan-wise like a handful of playing cards. The doorway behind them was a blur; and the four faces scowled, then swam together, came into focus as a single astonishment to see if anyone else could be hearing this. But the café was otherwise unpopulated; Hyacinth Lucien, Haitian proprietor of the place, had gone out back to milk a goat. Ranier had been keeping his own council; drinking, here, in solitude. He turned to give the man who had interrupted him from the doorway a challenging, “Says you!” but the pale German never gave him a chance.
It was over before Ranier could refocus his glare. A cruel blow glancing off the side of his jaw. A hand snatching him by the lapel, yanking him off balance, propelling him in a body-twist through the door. Shoved, he went stumbling across a dark verandah, caromed off a post, floundered backwards into night, and turned his lame foot on loose gravel.
THE SPRAWL MUST have knocked him out. He wondered afterwards if his head had struck a knuckle of coral, for he came to wandering lamely in wet fog around the side of the ramshackle building. He felt as if he’d been walking in his sleep. What with liquor and that blow and this wool-thick mist in night, it was hard to chart his bearings. . . . This was the Blue Kitty Café. A goat’s bleat came from somewhere in the rear, and a Negroid voice scolding in thick-lipped syllables. That would be Hyacinth.
“Dead!” she cried. “Dead for fourteen years!”
Lamplight, pumpkin-yellow, flowed from an open window near by; Ranier saw his sea cap was lying in mud under the sill. When he stooped to retrieve it he saw the German sitting at table within, back to the window. The man was scribbling on an envelope. Ranier puzzled a moment at the shoebrush head, then remembered!
“Slugged me, by heaven! Now he’s drinking my drinks! My drinks!”
In his haste to reach the front door and return to the fray, he fell again, It didn’t sober him any. Fury always blinded him, and he had to lie flat for a couple of minutes, waiting for his head to clear. Scraping mud from his knees, he ground his teeth together, outraged. The gall of that Dutchman! The damned gall! Hitting you before you could ask the reason why! Wanted the whole café to himself, did he? Only one remedy for that sort of swine. A crack on the jaw!
Ranier recrossed the verandah and stood, fists clenched, in the doorway, glaring savagely at the usurper. Flies swooped through the torpid lamplight of the room; there was no sound but that. The taffy-haired man seemed unaware of Ranier’s return. Slumped at table in midroom, shoulders sluggish against the back of his chair, stomach half-under the table, left hand in pocket, right hand on table fixed around a glass, his chin on chest and his eyes three quarters closed, the pale man stared down his nose in reverie and did not so much as give Ranier a glance.
Ranier scowled darkly.
Fellow must think he could toss people around, take a comfortable posture and forget about it. Well, Ranier would refresh his memory. He snorted; stepped forward.
Still the figure at table refused to move. The bottle at his elbow was half-emptied during the few minutes Ranier had been outside; an inch of oily white liquid was in the clutched glass. Huh! A punch in the nose would rouse him lively enough. Ranier hiccoughed a warning of hostilities to begin again; he limped into the room another step, fixing his man with a fighting glare.
Was something wrong with the bird? Walked in here to start trouble, then passed out? The man’s features were dull with that expression of blond Teutonic pokerishness; they had hardened into a stupid blank. White as chalk. Like the face of a statue with real hair and glass eyes.
Ranier stalled near the threshold to consider this phenomenon, angrily balked—you couldn’t hit a man who refused to look at you!—then was conscious of familiarity in that face. He knew he’d seen that extraordinary pallor before. This Dutchman was one of the cruise passengers from the ship. All right, that would make another reason for pasting him in the jaw.
Ranier’s lips thinned back. He’d wanted for a long time to take a sock at one of these bulldozing tourists. One of these small-timers who had three drinks and thought themselves Napoleon. Nobody could give Ranier a bum’s rush and get away with it. Ready or not, the Dutchman had it coming. The man must be drunk—
Drunk.
Thought stayed Ranier’s intended onslaught; held him at sudden standstill. Something in his spirit sank like a stone while a slow flush crawled up his throat and cheekbones. When the flush reached his forehead resentment against the taffy-haired man had turned to resentment against himself. He, himself, was drunk. Going to make a spectacle of himself, stage a loutish row because some lout had tapped him on the chin. Violating the only rule he had left not to violate—to hold his liquor like a gentleman.
A sickening weariness came over him, a headache, and a pucker of quince in his mouth. He spat dryly, walked across the room, and limped into an alcove off the bar, looking across his shoulder at the German in disgust. Something was abnormal about that Kraut. Queer.
In the alcove by himself, his drinks restored by the black Hyacinth who had reappeared with goat’s milk and diplomacy only after the crisis was dispersed, Ranier found himself watching the taff
y-haired man without wanting to, nor quite knowing why he watched.
FROM THE ALCOVE where he sat, he could watch the whole room in the back-bar mirror without himself being seen. He shifted his chair to watch the man better. It wasn’t the man’s slumped attitude of reverie, or the bleak whiteness of his face. The fellow had, so much as Ranier could now remember him, never been particularly animated on shipboard; Ranier had decided that the man’s healthless pallor was functional. But the eyes looked bad. Glassy. Why should he walk in here and throw out the first person he saw? Ranier choked on a swallow of aguardiente.
Probably that Dutch pugnacity had come from liquor. Ranier fingered soreness under his cap, wondering how long he’d been unconscious and how many drinks his assailant had had to fold up during the interim. The room was stifling, and the German had put down a lot of that aguardiente, by the looks. Half a bottle. Enough to make anybody glassy-eyed if you weren’t used to the stuff.
Ranier, who’d been putting down a lot of that aguardiente himself, poured himself another drink. Now his anger had faded; he felt only curiosity at his antagonist’s conduct. The shabby adobe-walled room was airless in the hot yellow light of oil lamps; it smelled like everything else in Haiti, first cousin to a chicken coop. No breeze from the beach. A lazy sluffing of surf outside; inside a somnolent mosquito drone. Ranier turned his interest from the face in the mirror to the tide going down in his liquor glass.