Zombies

by Otto Penzler

  “Adolph Perl lay where you see him now, and Dr. Eberhardt ran in from the corridor, very angry. ‘Who left the front door open?’ And Adolph Perl lifted his hand, the hand with the scar. ‘Blücher ran away!’ he swore. ‘I saw him running for the jungle. He was afraid he would get the contagion. Now I have caught the mauve death from going out there in the hall.’ He was weeping, coughing, and he described the symptoms the others had suffered. He begged Dr. Eberhardt to take him out in the hall. ‘Lay me between Captain Friederich and Colonel Otto. I want to die between my officers!’

  “Dr. Eberhardt carried Adolph Perl into the hall and put him on the floor between the dead officers. Adolph Perl lay writhing. Then he lay still. Dr. Eberhardt looked down at him and groaned, ‘He is dead. We must bury them quickly and secretly.’ The doctor had been giving me injections, and he gave me another and told me, ‘You are not going to die. You must help me now and not cry out or the Haitians will hear you. We must turn out all the lights so the Negroes will not see us.’ The coffins were there in the hall. The lights were turned out. Moonlight came through. Dr. Eberhardt put all the bodies in the big yellow rough-boxes in a row. He said the bodies must be buried at once and he told me to take a last look at my friends; then he ran outside to help Polypheme hitch up the wagon. I was afraid to wait there in the hall alone, and I ran upstairs to the laboratory and hid. When the wagon came, I crept downstairs again. I had to help nail on the wooden lids. It was terrible, nailing on those lids. Dr. Eberhardt had covered all the faces with handkerchiefs in the dark, and—I am telling you this because—because—”

  Hand to forehead, she stared at the operating table. “Because there was a streak of moonlight,” she whispered, “and it fell across Adolph Perl’s hand as we nailed up the coffin, and the last thing I saw was that brown, Z-shaped scar. Then I watched Polypheme and the doctor load the wagon. There were six coffins. ‘We must hurry,’ Dr. Eberhardt said. ‘We must distribute them at different cemeteries along the coast so the natives will not see a lot of new graves together and suspect anything.’ I remember how he climbed up on the wagon and wrote the names on the coffins with a pencil. How he held me on his lap. How we started off in the moonlight, Polypheme whipping the horses—”

  Once more the girl was shivering. Lips colorless; face marble; eyes shining, narcotic. She cried, “Adolph Perl was buried that night. In the cemetery down the road—near the village. I saw it. I saw Dr. Eberhardt dig the grave. White with exhaustion, he was, but he dug every one of those graves, choosing sandy soil to make it easy for the shovel, digging, digging, while Polypheme held the lantern. Ja, then Polypheme would fill them, and the wagon would go on. We put Old Gramma Sou in the graveyard east of here, and the American Marine sergeant in the soldiers’ cemetery beyond. The missionary in his own churchyard; then Colonel Otto at Bois Legone; and my uncle, Captain Frederich, last, at a place high on the morne overlooking the coast. But Adolph Perl was buried in the graveyard three miles below here, ja—I saw him buried—you can see the marker. He died of the mauve death that night, and I saw him buried—and this man you have brought here tonight,” she finished with a sob, “is that same Adolph Perl!”

  “Ohmygod!”

  Miss Daisy May was on the floor again.

  CHAPTER VIII

  THE WEBBED FOOT

  And the girl, herself, might have fallen if John Ranier hadn’t caught her in time. She swayed, and he steadied her, wondering about his own knees and doubting his sanity. He was imagining this. He’d had one drink too many down there at Hyacinth Lucien’s, and aguardiente had gone to his brain. But the girl’s slim body quivering against him was real enough, as the past, the dark scenes her husky-throated words had conjured to his vision were gone, and he was conscious of the present, tonight, Haiti outside, jungle and mountain close around, a villa smothered under breathless fog. White walls of a make-shift hospital room, and moths flitting under lamps. Kavanaugh’s shoulder beside him, that fainted female on the floor, Carpetsi’s pistachio-tinged face sweating, and Professor Schlitz’s pince-nez, silly with fear.

  It was a charade, a spell cast by the muffled tumpy-bum-bum that pulsed from the fogbank beyond the window screen and came into the room like a dead march for the body on the shabby operating table. The fogbank was a ghost looking in, and there were ghosts in the room that couldn’t be seen. Ranier could feel their fingers in his hair. He knew he ought to do something about it, but he could only stand there, muddied, disreputable, sea cap aslant, supporting a slim girl in white linen with gold lights in her hair and blue terror in her eyes; could only stand there glaring from the girl to the dead man in mid-room, the cruise passenger named Haarman who’d been stabbed to death tonight—a man this girl had seen buried fourteen years ago!

  It was the insectologist who broke that cataleptic charade. Eyes popping the glasses from his nose. Voice climbing a ladder in his throat to a windy peak of falsetto.

  “You hear what she says? You hear what this girl says?” waving his hands. “That man Haarman—she knew him during the war—she saw him die in Haiti in 1922! But he got on our boat from New York—! Was sharing my stateroom on this cruise! He told me he’d never been to sea before. Said he was German—yes!—but born in America—in the artichoke business in New York City. Artichokes!” the professor screeched. “He told me that! And he said he was taking this cruise for his health! His health! My God! How pale he always was! So horribly pale! His health!”

  “And always walkin’ around by himself!” Carpetsi said, staring frantically at the table and rabidly biting at a hangnail on his finger. “He’d never come into the bar, or—”

  “And he’d always walk the deck in carpet slippers,” the professor shrilled, as if the fact held some evil significance. “Carpet slippers! You’d be standing at the rail and he’d go by and you’d hardly hear him. As if—as if—”

  “Who stabbed him in that café? No knife or nothin’! Marcelline said there was a face, didn’t he? Didn’t Marcelline say—”

  “Those zombie things! The guides in Cape Haitian mentioned them, too. Dead men brought to life, and—”

  A whimper broke from the Italian boy, jumping him around in the doorway. “Holy Jees, I’m gettin’ out of here!” And then Kavanaugh’s voice was crashing with the authority of gunfire, hammering, “Stand still, you fool! All of you, shut up! Nobody’s going to leave.” Striding across the floor, he jerked Carpetsi back from the corridor, shoved the thin man aside, blocked the exit. “Nobody’s getting out of here, see? At least, not until those three fools come back with the police!”

  FEET PLANTED APART, body bowed a little at the middle, the Irishman let his eyes circle the room with an uncompromising glare that came to rest on John Ranier and the girl at his side. Kavanaugh aimed his finger at Laïs Engles. “Get this!” he told her in a grating tone. “There’s a murder been pulled off tonight, and no crackbrained ghost story is going to run me out of here before I’m cleared. I don’t know you, see? and I don’t know your reason for dishing out this yarn. Much obliged for an interesting tale to take up the time. Thanks. But I don’t believe any of it.”

  “It’s true,” she whispered.

  “Sure.” Kavanaugh grinned. “This guy from New York was a German naval officer up the Amazon. He told us he never went to sea before and his name’s Haarman, but he was a mate on a blockade runner, named Perl.”

  “I know him.”

  “He died of a stab-wound after we brought him here tonight, but he’s the same man who died in this hospital fourteen years ago!”

  “I saw him buried.”

  Kavanaugh sneered, “Oh, sure. Some of these black island witch doctors raised him from the dead and he goes up to New York and runs an artichoke business, and then he takes this Caribbean cruise back to Haiti for his health. But all this time he’s a living dead man, eh? He’s one of these zombies—”

  “I don’t know.” She put her face in her hands. “I don’t know—”

  “I suppose this Dr. E
berhardt who runs this hospital would remember all about this German expedition who died of th’ plague from Brazil? I suppose Dr. Eberhardt would recognize this guy?”

  “Dr. Eberhardt only saw him that one night, but I am sure—”

  “And where is Dr. Eberhardt?” Kavanaugh demanded. “Why isn’t he here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I know,” the tall Irishman rasped. “Maybe there’s such a thing as corpses coming back to life and going into the vegetable trade after fourteen years in the grave, but not in my bailiwick! I know Mr. Haarman got on this cruise ship in New York City ten days ago. I know he had a few drinks with me on deck and told me about his business in New York. I know he asked me if he could join a motor ride from here to Port-au-Prince, and chipped in his share for the automobile. I know he was alive back there in that damned dirty café where we were going to start out, and I know somebody stabbed him. I don’t know why he was stabbed or who did it or how, but I know it’s murder and he died in this hospital of yours for the first time in his life, see? If you think you can throw a scare in me with all this zombie rubbish, you’re wrong.”

  He turned a thin smile at John Ranier. “And what does our ship’s doctor think?”

  John Ranier thought: “The man’s talking sense, but he doesn’t see this girl believes her own words.”

  He said slowly: “I’m sure Miss Engles has had a shock. Whatever happened tonight upstairs in Dr. Eberhardt’s laboratory frightened her, and her imagination is overwrought.” He touched the girl’s arm. “There are such things as close resemblances. Many people look alike. After all, you haven’t seen the man, Adolph Perl, in fourteen years, and you were a child when you last saw him. As for the scar on Mr. Haarman’s hand, why that may be coincidence, too.”

  “The thing isn’t worth bothering about,” was Kavanaugh’s harsh comment. “Telling us Mr. Haarman is a German naval officer she saw buried in 1922. She hasn’t the slightest bit of proof—”

  The girl’s head came up, her wide dark eyes met the man’s scoffing stare. “I have proof.”

  “Just because you saw that scar—”

  “There is more than the scar.”

  Kavanaugh said in a low fury, “Listen, Mr. Haarman was never in Haiti before and you never saw him before and he isn’t anybody named Adolph Perl and you know it!”

  “Very well,” her tone was weak with strain. “If the man is not Adolph Perl there is proof. In South America the sailors on my uncle’s ship went barefooted. The left foot of Adolph Perl fascinated me as a child. The crew nicknamed him the Duck. The toes of Adolph Perl were joined by a membrane. Perl had a webbed foot—”

  Every eye in the room was drawn by that same icy magnetism. That body on the operating table. The dead man’s shoes. High-laced brown shoes, thick-soled, awkward in the outspread, loose-ankle posture of death. John Ranier heard Kavanaugh’s half-throttled oath. Professor Schlitz made a gargling sound. Even the Daisy woman roused to her feet at this climax to cling on Carpetsi’s sleeve and stare with eyes like doughnuts, whimpering.

  The girl’s white lips murmured, “If the left foot is webbed—”

  John Ranier walked to the table, unlaced and juggled off the shoe, pulled off the sock; expecting, naturally, to find the left foot of Mr. Haarman was not webbed.

  It was webbed.

  CHAPTER IX

  BE HE ALIVE OR BE HE DEAD

  They ran. They fled that anamorphosis, went into the corridor as if that grotesque bare foot had kicked them wholesale through the door. John Ranier went with them because he could see no reason to remain behind with a Mr. Haarman whose naked pedal extremity showed an eczematous heel, a pallid callus-scabbed sole, a fallen arch, five dead toes pointed at the ceiling and that batwing-like membrane between the toes. Mr. Haarman, dead with a webbed foot, did not invite companionship. The case, Ranier felt, was beyond a ship doctor’s chirurgery. It might even have baffled a chiropodist.

  Half way down the corridor he discovered Mr. Haarman’s left shoe was in his hand, and the bang! it gave when he dropped it brought Kavanaugh around as if he’d fired a gun. The girl cried, “Oh!” running with her fingers across her mouth; and at the corridor’s turn he could not help looking back, half expecting to see Mr. Haarman in the doorway, coming after his shoe.

  Always to Ranier there’d been something of the eerie about a hospital at night, something beyond the calculations of materia medica. There could be a “witching hour” in medicine when the most hard-boiled and scientific practitioner sat back with folded hands to wait. For what? For something not in the book. Something outside the realm of test-tube, nostrum and pledget. Something that stirred through the hushed hallways or entered a dim-lit ward, barely moving the window curtains, to choose a patient for the “turn.” The Unseen impulse that stemmed the tide of a hopeless hemorrhage to rescue the moribund for another day. The Caprice that stole into an adjoining room to beckon bony-fingered at a simple tonsillectomy case, and whisper, “You—”

  It was there. In Dr. Eberhardt’s hospital, cloaked in mountain isolation and fog. But it was more than the mystery of death or healing behind quiet doors; more than the nocturnal silence of whitewashed walls, the shadows restless under dimmed vigil lamps, the drugged air heavy with sick-room exhalations, germicides. There was, in this shadowy corridor, something invisible and malign.

  The front hall was no improvement. The stairway at the side cast a bone-like pattern of bannister-shadows on the opposite wall. The pneumonia pallor of the night-lamp did not reach the upper balcony. Infected by the panic, the gray tabby sped from somewhere and streaked across the hall like a frightened thought. Miss Daisy May jumped the cat with a wail. Mr. Angelo Carpetsi helter-skeltered along the bone-shadowed wall, hooked his suspenders on an unsuspected knob and yanked open a closet door. An umbrella, a sun helmet and a black frock coat that might have been Dr. Eberhardt but wasn’t, tumbled out of the wall-cupboard to tangle with Professor Schlitz’s feet. Professor Schlitz said nothing, but proceeded to go through the front door at a pace undignified for a Ph.D. from Upsala. Seen from behind, he appeared to evaporate in the dark mists of the verandah, a process that was too much for him, for after a half second’s contemplation of the fog outside, the professor wheeled and sprang back into the hall, panting like a spaniel. Where to go when a man with a webbed foot, fourteen years dead, was after you?

  Kavanaugh barked, “Upstairs! Quick!” steering the blond woman around the newel post and dragging her up the steps.

  Ranier found himself supporting the slim girl’s elbow, and heard himself telling her, “There’s nothing to be afraid of !” But he didn’t mean it. There was a white blanch to her lips that could not have been there without reason, and she moved in a resistless way, impelled by his hand, as if too frightened to follow her own responses.

  THEN THEY WERE in the laboratory because the lighted room—despite that unappetizing odor of cookery!—was better than any of a number of dark doors off the upper hall. They stood. Angelo Carpetsi with his back to the door as if holding it against an assault of haunts. Kavanaugh fanning the Daisy woman whose haystack head was buried in his shoulder, threatening to swoon at any moment. Professor Schlitz handkerchiefing his temples. Laïs Engles trembling. John Ranier fighting a conflict with the muscles in his stomach. You could not have heard a pin drop, but there was only the gurgly bubbling of water boiling in the glass bowl on the white table.

  John Ranier walked to the table and turned off the Bunsen flame under the bowl. Two evil objects settled to the bottom of the bowl, and he saw the bullfrog on the near-by spike was dead, and the only sound then was not born of the room, but a faint undertone echo that might have traveled miles through the fog-hushed outer night to enter by the vapour-curtained window and throb in the stifled air. Had the tempo of those mountain drums quickened, or was that the rapid pounding of his own blood?

  A shocking thought occurred to him. He said to Laïs Engles, “Those aren’t—Dr. Eberhardt’s hands?
”

  She shook her head violently.

  But whose-ever they were (he couldn’t look at the bowl) they’d want some explaining. So would that pilloried frog. What cannibalistic machination had been in progress up here, and what bizarre violence had disrupted it? That disordered desk; those spilled bottles of Prussic acid, cyanide, strychnine, ammonia; that scattered lab table. He wondered stupidly at the big glass tank swimming with frogs, at the skeleton looking on. The green whirligig in the tank might have been the visual expression of his own thoughts. What sort of experimenter was this old Dr. Eberhardt who had disappeared in this Chamber of Horrors? And how might this have to do with a Leo Haarman, taffy-haired Teutonic artichoke dealer, dead downstairs with membranes between his toes?

  He took a turn about the crazy room, limping noticeably as he always did when excited, his thoughts stumbling in his head. Three problems, now. Who stabbed Haarman? How could Haarman be the mate of that Amazon expedition recounted by the girl—a German sailor who died in 1922? And where was Dr. Eberhardt? He paused at the window to pull fresh air into his lungs. Fog and darkness outside. Darkness and fog in his mind. He swung from the window to put a question to the girl, and saw Mr. Kavanaugh push the blond woman from his shoulder to confront the room with sudden decisiveness.

  Kavanaugh’s mouth was going angrily. “Now then, now then, what the devil are we running for?” as if someone’s insubordination had caused a stampede. The Irishman’s eyes were contemptuous. They circled the room with scorn. Narrowed at a bottle upright on one of the vandalized shelves.

  He snapped, “Scotch!” Walked to the shelf, uncapped the bottle, and drank off an inch of Sandy Macdonald without coughing. He handed the bottle to the blond woman, and snapped, “Drink!” The blond woman tilted her picture hat and drank off an inch. Angelo Carpetsi snatched the bottle, drank, sputtered; passed it to Professor Schlitz who declined with a shudder. Kavanaugh took the bottle and returned it to the shelf. His hard flat cheeks had congested a little. He cocked his thumb and aimed his imperative finger at the door.