Zombies

by Otto Penzler

  “I’m drunk,” he decided, lowering the tide. This Caribbean mouthwash did things to a fellow. Made a man stare the way that pale bird at the table was staring. Made another man’s nerves think something was wrong. Ranier gulped half a glass, still watching the back-bar mirror. Trouble was, instead of deadening his sensibilities, alcohol always sharpened them. His mind could shut off, but the nerve-ends under his skin couldn’t. They felt things. Way they were feeling queer atmosphere, right now.

  John Ranier muttered, “To hell with it,” and drained his glass.

  He meant the taffy-haired man who had thrown him out of the door, then gone into a trance. He meant the Blue Kitty Café, the island of Haiti, tropical cruises, the ship out in the bay waiting to sail, the fact he was ship’s doctor sitting here in this waterside hole, imagining something uncanny was the matter with that fool across the room.

  He pushed the smudged white sea cap back on his rumpled dark head; ran slim brown fingers over his jaw, and regarded the surgeon’s stripe on the unlaundered cuff of his uniform.

  “To hell with it all.”

  HE MEANT THE M.D. certificate in his cramped ship’s quarters; the five years he’d spent between New York harbor and Caribbean ports with this down-at-the-helm steamship line, dispensing seasick pills to nauseated ladies, adhesive tape to the crew, tomato juice to soused tourists who wanted to see the world through the bottom of a gin glass.

  And what’s Dr. Ranier doing now? Dispensing seasick pills and tomato juice! Don’t tell me! Not the Dr. Ranier who was going to be the greatest surgeon of his day! Not the young, brisk, clever Dr. Ranier who ran that big glass and chromium office on Park Avenue, and did all those positively-miraculous-my-dear operations on pinguid millionaires? Not Dr. John Ranier who was wounded with the Rainbow Division when he was sixteen, “came back and made good,” social position, stock market, elegant practice, engaged to Helen Goddard of Goddard Steel and Coal—not the Dr. Ranier.

  John Ranier put down a dry glass. “To hell with everything.”

  He meant the Dr. Ranier. The stripling who’d gone out to fight the war to end war, and came back decorated with a limp. Who’d fought through medical school to save the world from cancer and ended up doing wonderful operations on wonderful millionaires. Who’d been listed in the best stocks and at the oldest clubs and doffed his shiny tophat to shiny Helen Goddard who’d accepted his shiny ring. “Oh, John, I love you so.” At least until the Depression. “But you couldn’t expect me to go to that five-room house in Newark, John.”—“I’ll have to do seven million tonsillectomys and ten million trepannings before we can afford anything better.”—“Honestly, John! Be the wife of a small town doctor?”

  “And nuts to you, too,” said John Ranier to John Ranier, grinning expressionlessly at the bottom of his glass. Four more of these aguardientes and his head would be pleasantly like the fog. He’d forget the Dr. Ranier who’d lost everything in a market crash and learned the price of everything and the value of nothing. Four more aguardientes and he’d even forget he’d been marked down low enough to consider brawling in a bar room with a taffy-haired Dutchman who—

  Ranier drowsed.

  Later, when it was important, he could not remember just what it was that jolted his attention back to the taffy-haired man. When it was important, he could not remember at just what moment the tourist party from the ship entered the café to join the Dutchman at his table and start ordering drinks. He was certain everything was all right with the taffy-haired man when those people from the cruise walked in; he could have sworn he heard the man grunt “Ja” and “Jawohl” in the opening conversation.

  But later he couldn’t remember. He’d paid little notice to the incoming crowd, except to mark them as tourists from the ship and hope they’d clear out soon with their ugly-natured friend.

  Then, all at once, he was watching that white face in the mirror, again. He was aware that the man had not spoken for the past quarter hour. The taffy-haired man had not altered his posture or expression—chin on chest, glass in fist—his table companions were engaged in commonplace discussion among themselves—but some instinct, some galvanic tension in the atmosphere told Ranier there had been a change.

  Were the others aware of it, too? Did those people now sitting at that table know something was queer? Cords tightened in Ranier’s necknape. Something was the matter with that taffy-haired man!

  He sat so still.

  He looked so white.

  He seemed dead—but wasn’t.

  CHAPTER II

  A BLADE IN THE BACK

  There were eight at the table, counting the man in question, and John Ranier was destined to remember them—the café as the stage, his encounter with the taffy-haired man as prologue. The table was almost centered in the room, endwise to the bar and broadside to the door. It was long and rectangular, imitation Mission oak, outcast of some white planter’s dining room; its company of chairs as chance-assorted as the tourists sitting in them.

  The taffy-haired man slumped at the far end of the table, looking down its length toward the bar, which stretched across Ranier’s end of the room. His back was toward the open window that admitted clammy tatters of fog, as if white curtains tacked to the outside kept blowing in over the sill.

  At the Dutchman’s left was the tourist named Mr. Brown. There was always a Mr. Brown on these $100 cruises. This Mr. Brown wore plus fours, golf jacket and camera case on a loaf-of-bread figure; the face of a damp but genial pie; eyes like blue huckleberries behind horn-rimmed spectacles; chuckly mouth. His name was Al, and at a moment’s introduction he would call you “Fella.” Composograph figure of all the fraternal orders in Ohio. As Ranier observed him first he was kissing a cigar almost as plump as himself and chuckling smoke at the slat-thin Roman-nosed individual at his side.

  The man with the Caesar nose was a Professor Philemon Schlitz, narrow and nervous with a face four inches wide and pince-nez glasses which flaunted a prissy black ribbon. He wore a Ph.D. on his name and a sun helmet somebody’d told him to buy in Cape Haitian, the effect being that of an old maid school teacher playing Frank Buck. Not only an entomologist, he was a walking glossary of limericks; liable to veer from a discussion on dragon flies to come up giggling with, “Did you hear the one, ‘There was a young lady from Sweden—’ ” or “ ‘There was an old man from Siam—’ ” Everybody on the cruise liked him.

  Nobody liked the man next to him—Angelo Carpetsi, swarthy New York Italian youth who’d been seasick on the way down and remained sour ever since. Coat on arm, he displayed a pink silk shirt, high-waisted trousers, trick suspenders. His eyes were feline, sleek, and he wore a Dance Palace haircut with sideburns. Ranier had found him taciturn and disagreeable, but had been amused at his cabin-mate who now bulked large beside him—Mr. Coolidge.

  The name didn’t fit a Brooklyn truck driver sweating in gaudy tourist attire. Mr. Joseph Coolidge, beetle-browed, grinning, cropped and cauliflowered, resembled a Tanganyika gorilla on a holiday. First night at sea he’d gone trampling and swinging his arms after every woman on the boat, and failing there, he’d resorted to bellowing rum-battles in all the Haitian ports of call. Both Coolidge and Carpetsi were more the Havana-cruise calibre, and Ranier had wondered what brought them on this Haiti excursion anyway.

  ON THE OTHER side of the board, at the right of the taffy-haired man and across from Mr. Brown, was the woman called Daisy. Ranier had often wondered what became of those Baby Peggy prodigies when they grew too old for Hollywood; this blonde was the answer. Eyes big as black-eyed susans, the petals wide, as if they observed the world in a transport of childish wonder from under the floppy brim of a picture hat. Peroxide hair. Much powder, more paint, flabby cheeks, hard mouth, and that Kiddy Koop stare. Ten to one she’d roll those bulgy eyes (did they come from exophthalmic goiter?) and mew, “Itsy bitsy” and “Ooo, it’s cute.” The type that ought to be in a pasture, Ranier thought. Five years old from the neck up; from the neck down, all bosom and behind
.

  She was traveling with the man who sat beside her and across from the oily Carpetsi—an Irishman named Kavanaugh. A man who looked to be successful in his line and in taking care of himself. Jaw lean, nose sharp, eyes that could pick winners at Belmont. Women went for the dash of gray at the temples, the belted waterproof coat and snapped hat brim, the quality of hard confidence. There was intolerance in the way he addressed a remark, cocking his thumb and pointing his finger at a listener, as if to say, “This means you!” But why did these smart operators who knew their way around always travel with some blond pin-cushion who blubbered babytalk? A dozen times he’d ordered the woman to shut up—aiming his pistol-barrel finger in exasperation—to let them hear what the Haitian gentleman, who was with them, had to say.

  Monsieur Marcelline, this was; and unlike his countryman behind the bar, Marcelline was as smartly tailored as any of his white superiors at table, and nearly as condescending. His tone was suave, his manner urbane. He’d boarded the cruise ship, Ranier recalled, at Cape Haitian with a second class ticket for passage around the island to Jacmel. Second class because his complexion was only a little darker than Spanish, maple-walnut with a few lavender pimples, known in the Haitian spectrum as griffone.

  Languidly fanning himself with a new Panama, Marcelline was speaking good English with a Haitian-French accent, advising the white tourists in their plans.

  “Everything I believe is ready, monsieur,” to Kavanaugh. “There is a new coastal highway from here to our capital, and once we are on it we may travel at high speed. Mais oui.”

  “A night drive ought to be interesting.” Kavanaugh spoke in a flat-keyed voice with just a fine shade of boredom. “If we’re delayed too long I suppose we can stop at some inn along the way. I’d like to make it by midnight; at all events we’ve got to be in Port-au-Prince by tomorrow morning. That’s flat. You’re sure there won’t be any hitch.”

  “The starting time is at your discretion, monsieur.”

  “And I hope, monsoor has some idea of where he’s going,” the Daisy woman gave her Irish escort a look, surprising Ranier with a voice that sounded like a lumberjack talking through a doll. “I don’t like this night air.”

  John Ranier deduced the party had decided to abandon the cruise boat and motor along the coast to Port-au-Prince where they could spend time buying souvenirs made in New Jersey in the quaint marts of the Haitian capital, and pick up the ship when it came along. Mr. Kavanaugh was engineering the shore excursion, and Monsieur Marcelline had been recruited to do the arranging, hire the car, go as guide.

  It was the taffy-haired man who was curious. His quarter-open eyes trained down the table in that glassy stare. Like camera lenses under motionless lids. As if the eyeballs were taking a long-exposure photograph. But his table companions didn’t seem to notice anything. Only John Ranier, watching the face in the mirror, felt his neck-hairs stiffening.

  YET NOTHING HAD happened at that table since the tourist party came in. Ten minutes ago Marcelline had left the café on an errand, returning shortly to announce the car was outside waiting, and if they delayed a little longer the fog might lift. There was some concern about driving over mountain roads in fog.

  Dense vapor which had rolled along the peninsular coast at early evening had thickened, burying the Gulf of Gonaives in blowing cotton. Coastline, headlands, bay and immediate foreshore were obscured in night-white blanketing, formless and opaque. A big German liner heading down the gulf for Port-au-Prince had vanished with the horizon, leaving in its wake a far, faint echo, like the moo of a lost cow groping its way through invisibility. Out in the bay the cruise steamer riding at anchor was a cluster of yellow gangway lights, pinpricks afloat in mist; and down beach the town was smothered. Mud streets, shanties, clay walls and palm-tops snared in drifting cobwebs. Outlines dissolved. Thinning, streaming, straggling, churning, the fog eddied around Hyacinth Lucien’s Blue Kitty Café, curling up to the door, blowing in white curtains through the window at the taffy-haired man’s back.

  And something was wrong with that man!

  Glaring at that face reflected in the bar mirror, Ranier gripped the edge of his alcove table, made as if to rise, shook his head, sat back with a frown. Anything was wrong, the man’s tourist companions would know it, wouldn’t they? Ranier tried to shrug off a feeling of undercurrents in the room. Hyacinth Lucien, behind the bar, swatting cockroaches with a chimpanzee hand. Bugs humming around the lamps. Somewhere out in the fog-hung town a gramophone was playing a Caribbean rumba, a tropical minor-key chant, the smoky snake-hipped rhythm quickened by the sifty time-beat of the ouira and the monotone toky-tok-tok of mahogany sticks.

  For the last ten minutes not a flicker had crossed the taffy-haired man’s face.

  His table companions seemed to have forgotten him, their faces turned to the Haitian, Marcelline. Watching, listening, Ranier had a distinct impression that unseen wires had tightened in the room; a nervous emendation from that table, as if clocks inside those people had been wound up faster. Plump Mr. Brown was smoking vigorously. The boy, Carpetsi, kept turning his head to look out of the door at the fog. The blonde was fiddling with a powder puff as if it were a hot cake. Everybody was talking faster, louder. He stiffened in his chair, catching the words “dead man.”

  “Is it true the natives believe a dead man can be brought back to life?” Professor Philemon Schlitz was asking in a high-pitched voice. “I mean to say, this fantastic nonsense the guides were telling us in Cape Haitian about witch doctors who dig up bodies and reanimate them with magic so they walk about and—what do you call the things—?”

  Marcelline throated an alto laugh. “Monsieur speaks of our Voovoo? Alors, there are mysteries, or, perhaps one should say, superstitions. Haiti, you comprehend, is not quite the United States. Especially in the mountains and coastal districts like this where the natives are, I am unhappy to say, somewhat primitive. Par example, the matter of bullfrogs. Few Haitians are not afraid of the frog, monsieur. Toads are agents of the Devil. Bullfrogs? Demons, monsieur. I give you my word, if you dropped a live bullfrog through the skylight of the government buildings—pouf!—every soldier in the place, including Monsieur the President, would jump out the windows.”

  A TIME WAS coming, although he didn’t know it then, when John Ranier was to remember that speech. A time was coming when he was to remember every detail of that scene. The professor’s piping query; Marcelline’s alto laugh and answer. The professor adjusted his pince-nez nervously, leaning up the table towards his informant.

  “But what about these dead people flitting about and all that? Those creatures you read about in books—eh?—gombies?”

  “Z, monsieur,” the Haitian corrected suavely. “Z as in zombie. Corpses resurrected, brought to life for magical purposes. One hears the rites are performed by that band of outlawed sorcerers known as the Culte des morts. The Society of the Dead, you would say. There are stories, then. Rumors of dead men who leave their graves to walk the jungles on silent feet—”

  “Dave,” the woman named Daisy snapped at Kavanaugh, “do we have to sit and listen to this? Frogs and live dead people—!”

  “Madam will perhaps also hear the drums on the mountain,” Marcelline went on blandly, “the Rada drums calling the people to some midnight dance, some bamboche to ward off evil. You see,” he apologized with his shoulders, “we are Africans, we Haitians, after all. In the fog the drums will be beating, for the village people fear the white mists. It is said that on nights like this the dead walk best, and it might interest you to know there will be few Haitians lurking around the local cemeteries on such a—”

  “Dave,” the woman named Daisy said decisively, “I’ll be so nervous tonight I could scream.”

  Kavanaugh’s hard flat voice said critically, “You wanted to come, didn’t you? You wanted to come on this shore party? And it won’t hurt you, anyhow, if these shines believe all this hocus-pocus. So what?”

  “Well, I could take less of it, my
self,” the guttural belonged to Angelo Carpetsi. “This place is givin’ me goose pimples.”

  “You got goose pimples?” from Coolidge. “I got hen’s eggs. Whaddya say, Kavanaugh, let’s get under way. I’m a mass of nerves.”

  “We got to wait for the fog,” suggested the plump Mr. Brown.

  “The fog won’t hurt,” Kavanaugh said, “and I wish to God you people would quit stewing. It’s quarter of eight, now. Okay with Marcelline, and everything’s set, we can start at eight.”

  “Everything,” Marcelline said in his darky alto, “is ready.”

  John Ranier set down his glass with a little bang, tugged his cap down over one eye, slammed back his chair, limped out of the alcove and pointed a finger at the taffy-haired man.

  “That man is dying!”

  In the hot, close room he might have touched off a bombshell. He had a glimpse of everything happening at once; chairs going back, people leaping up. Mr. Brown’s shellrim spectacles big as moons behind the smoke of his cigar. The professor standing in astonishment, his left hand somehow in a beer glass. Carpetsi in a half crouch backing slowly from the table; Mr. Coolidge standing on spread legs, elbows bent, hands open like a wrestler’s; the woman with her powder puff mashed to her lips. Kavanaugh twisted to face him, jaw pointed, hands jammed deep in the pockets of his trench coat. Marcelline bent and half turned, as if from a blow.

  Out in the night the gramophone’s haunting monody, and behind the bar a crash as Hyacinth Lucien lost control of a pan of bottles. Only the taffy-haired man at table’s head hadn’t moved.

  Kavanaugh’s flat voice started, “What the devil’s—” when the googoo-eyed woman dropped the powder puff and screamed, her words running together in one long soprano screech.

  “Ohmygoditsblood!”

  John Ranier saw she was staring at a sticky dark liquor that had crept from under the taffy-haired man’s chair to touch the toes of her big-bowed shoes. Everyone piled around the table to see. Everyone but the Dutchman who slumped in reverie with quarter-open eyes, hand fixed to a wine glass, shoulders glued to the back of his chair. Glued, Ranier saw, by a thin inch-small slit where a knife had gone through the cane chair-back into flesh. Blood wiggled in a syrup-like stream down the chair-back; dripped in Chinese torture-drops to the floor. But the knife was not there.