Zombies

by Otto Penzler

  Ranier snapped, “That’s a good one, since the man was chatting about the trip with you when you pulled up chairs at his table,” but his forehead was wet in a sudden apprehension of the fox-look on the tall man’s face, the smirk as he held out the book left-handed, indicating a page under his thumb.

  “Haarman might’ve been stabbed before the rest of us got there,” Kavanaugh was repeating softly. “He might’ve sat there in his chair talkin’ to us and havin’ a drink. Sure, just as if nothin’ had happened. I’d never of thought it possible, till I seen this doctor’s book lyin’ open on the floor. Just the right paragraph, too. Haarman might have sat there dyin’—just like th’ case on this page—and not even known he’d been stabbed!”

  It was there in the pages of that medical book as it had been printed from the start of that evening in the back of Ranier’s mind. Haarman could have been stabbed before the others came to the café; could have slumped there in his chair and gone on drinking and talking, never conscious of his fatal wound. There was that Austrian empress who was said to have continued a long walk after being stabbed by a shoemaker’s awl, dropping dead without knowing of her wound—the many instances of soldiers going for hours without realizing they’d been hit.

  Kavanaugh’s voice was purring on: “That explains him talkin’ to us when we met him. But he looked bad, sittin’ there, all right. Ginned up, too. Never seen you creep up behind him. After he chucked you out, you come in behind him through the window, I suppose. Then went back out over the sill, threw away the shiveree, and walked in by the front door.”

  Ranier said huskily, “It doesn’t hold water—”

  Kavanaugh nodded agreeably, “Who’s talking about water? I’m talking about blood.”

  “That’s what I’m talking about,” Ranier appealed to the room. “Cases of people being stabbed without knowing it apply to internal hemorrhage. Haarman’s wound bled externally. That much blood, he’d certainly know it. Soaked his jacket across the shoulders. And if he was stabbed before you joined him there at that table, you’d have seen the stains when you took chairs beside him.”

  “The blood run down the back of his chair,” Kavanaugh supplied smoothly. “Since none of us went around behind his chair we didn’t see it. The coon who owns the joint didn’t see you do it because he was out in back somewhere. All right, Haarman was still ticking when our party arrived. So what? So you see a chance to pin the job on one of us, or maybe blame it on these Voodoo ghosts. That jigaboo Marcelline plays into your hand by having visions and what-not. Also you realize we’ll rush Haarman to the nearest hospital, which is Eberhardt’s here. You stall around. Still Haarman keeps ticking. Then you tell us you’re going to beat it out to the ship and fetch back the captain, but instead of that you take a short-cut, and you’re already on hand at the hospital when we arrive. Didn’t Coolidge see you tear from behind th’ building when this nurse jerked that scream?”

  “I tell you,” Ranier’s tongue felt thick, “I rode out here on the back of your car!”

  “Unless, say, you cut up the mountain, an’ got here first to forestall this Doc Eberhardt from giving Haarman a transfusion after you’d given him a blood-letting. Then let’s say Eberhardt refused to lay off. There’s a fight up here in this little museum of his. Was that how you ripped your Sunday pants? Your elbow, too? Look at th’ cuts on your hands.”

  “I fell. I fell off the spare tire of that Winton!”

  “Or,” Kavanaugh said in his sweetened voice, “did this Doc Eberhardt knock you for a loop up here just before we came. Let’s say he did. Then let’s say you knocked him for a loop. Say the beautiful lonely nurse runs in. She sees Eberhardt out cold—dead, for the sake of argument. She sees you. I don’t say it’s love at first sight, y’understand; I say you’ve known her for some time. I say,” Kavanaugh delivered the indictment in the bored tone of a District Attorney summing an obvious case for a stupid jury, “I say you and this girl are hand in glove together. At least, in part of this. Pretending you don’t know each other. Huh! But you put Eberhardt out of the way, then cooked up this Adolph Perl gag to scare us off. The girl spins a fairy story about an expedition in Brazil when she was a kid, and Haarman comin’ back to haunt her; and you play you’re haywired by the whole set-up. Well, you can tell it to the bulls, if they ever get here.”

  • • •

  KAVANAUGH FLIRTED THE gun impatiently; switched his address to the three tourists statue-struck behind him. “It’s a pip, isn’t it?” showing the book, before throwing it aside. “Poor Haarman was dyin’ when we met up with him. Never knew it, either. I wonder what the cops will say when they see those footprints of Ranier’s—the ones we saw when Marcelline turned the car around to start for the hospital—those tracks under that café window. Maybe I’m prejudiced,” he whipped his aim back at Ranier, “but it seems to me my theory is a damn sight more reasonable than all this living-dead-man stuff!”

  Consternation stalled Ranier’s tongue. It was reasonable, all right. Reasonable enough to wring a cry from Carpetsi: “Why, th’ dirty rat, you oughta let him have one from th’ gun!” Reasonable enough to bring a whinny from Professor Schlitz: “Our ship’s doctor! Great Scott! He might have murdered us all! I do believe he did stab poor Mr. Haarman!”

  “He did,” Kavanaugh sneered, “if you happen to be a Christian white man who doesn’t believe in Voodoo and all this zombie hocus pocus. If—”

  The Irishman did not conclude the remark. Thump! Sound of a door slammed somewhere in the lower part of the house took the words out of Kavanaugh’s mouth; left him tense, bead-yeyed, listening. Everybody turned to listen. No denying that below-floors report; unmistakably someone was in the house downstairs, had slammed a door.

  A channel of cold air coursed down the back of John Ranier’s neck, as if an unseen breeze had entered the room. Laïs Engles might have felt it, too, the way she shivered, staring wide-pupiled toward the hall; and Kavanaugh’s face was frosty as he flung around at the girl, white but not so Christian. “Who’s that? It’s not Coolidge and Brown—we’d heard the car. Who slammed that door downstairs just now?”

  Without replying, the girl made a swift move past the man, snatched open the laboratory door, sent a tremulous call out across the upper balcony glooms. “Wer da? Dr. Eberhardt—? Unkle Doktor—? Dr. Eberhardt, is that you—?”

  The only answer was the gray cat arriving silently on the threshold, smiling up at the girl, then trotting into the room. Ranier looked at the cat, half-expecting to learn that this was Dr. Eberhardt.

  Mouth ugly, eyes glittering, Kavanaugh caught the girl’s wrist and twisted her back from the threshold. “Who’s downstairs in this place?”

  She gasped, “Only the patients. Four. A child with an amputated leg. A man confined in contagion with smallpox. A man dying of dhangi fever. A woman bed-ridden, dying of elephantiasis. They could not leave their beds.” Her whisper lowered to hardly more than a movement of her lips. “That door—”

  Kavanaugh’s knuckles showed white from the grip on the gun. Stepping out on the balcony, he sped a quick glance down on the hall below, turned, confronted the laboratory with a grim eye.

  “Wait up here! I’ll be back in a minute, and I wouldn’t worry about shooting the first one of you I caught trying to leave!”

  He pulled the door after him; then his shoes made a hurried tattoo on the stairs. Then silence. Silence filled with the blond woman’s alarmed breathing. In which Angelo Carpetsi’s skin staled from olive to ptomaine-green while his tie sweat blue through his pink-striped collar. In which Laïs Engles stood rigid against the wall, her hands pressed to the plaster, eyes averted; and Professor Schlitz watched Ranier with the hypnotic stare of a bird confined with a cobra. Anger struggled with apprehension in Ranier’s mind. These fools didn’t have to be afraid of him; he was as lost in this jabberwok nightmare as they were. A bead of sweat guttered down the side of his nose, and he grimly considered an Anopheles mosquito that had buzzed out of the tai
nted air to sit on his hand. He pinched the head from the malarial insect, and stood in tension, waiting for sounds below. The gray cat polished itself against his shins.

  TWO MINUTES. THREE minutes. What the devil was keeping that Irishman? What was going on in this mountain villa?

  Had the ambulance party, rushing Haarman to this gloomy asylum, surprised some nefarious enterprise here in the hospital? At the thought, Ranier gave the girl at his side a glance of sudden mistrust. Maybe Kavanaugh had been right and that story of hers was a stall. Her manner was convincing enough, but he’d been fooled by one woman in his life—certainly a trained nurse couldn’t believe in ghosts coming back from the grave. Her fear was masking something—something she was holding back? Well, the Garde d’Haiti ought to be here any minute now, and this guy Kavanaugh—

  The door burst open, and Mr. Kavanaugh was back in the laboratory. Not the same Mr. Kavanaugh who had gone to explore downstairs. Somewhere during that prowl the Irishman had lost his self-possession. Mr. Kavanaugh’s cheekbones showed the loss. His lips were pieces of chalk. Eyes glassy. Finger in collar, he seemed to sway in the doorway as if a deck were rocking under him.

  “It’s Haarman,” his lips writhed in chalktalk. “It’s Haarman, and his shoe isn’t there in the corridor where Ranier dropped it. He isn’t in that room down there. The body—Haarman—he’s gone!”

  Then, before anyone had time to recoil from that shock, a motor-roar broke in the night outside. The sound grew. Tires skidding on loose gravel. A screech of brakes and wrenched springs as the car came into the driveway under the window. Kavanaugh blurted hoarsely, “The police!” and Ranier listened to boots pound across the verandah with something like Thanksgiving in his heart. Thanksgiving that changed to perspiration on his forehead. It was not the police!

  He knew it was not the Garde d’Haiti, for that efficient and colorful gendarme patrol generally sauntered in pairs, and this new arrival came alone and at high speed.

  The police would not have banged through the front door howling, “M’sieu Docteur! Ma’mselle Laïs! Malheur! Malheur! Mortoo tomboo vient! Au secours!”

  Wild feet came stumbling up the stairs, bringing that frenzy in Creole; and Laïs Engles cried in answering dialect:

  “Polypheme! Ici! Ici! ’Vitement!” She turned to those in the room. “It’s Polypheme—the house-boy—back from the village! He—”

  Then there came through the doorway the most terrified darky John Ranier had ever seen. A little old black man made of rags and licorice with eyes like saucers under the tatter-fringe brim of an enormous straw sombrero. Overwhelmed by the fifty-gallon brim, his face looked not much bigger than a raisin; one guessed he was lost under the hat and frightened by its omnipotence. He wore patchwork trousers and a sleeveless cotton jumper, the right half red, the left half blue, as if he’d sewed the garment from a moth-eaten Haitian flag; and there was a snowy goat-tuft on his chin. He resembled for all the world a black performing goat that had escaped a circus in full costume; and he performed in the laboratory doorway, rocking on hind legs, waving his forefeet at Laïs Engles, eyeballs like burnt matches rolling around in china saucers, mouth bleating, “Nnnnnyaaaaah!” Then, hat and all, he jumped the threshold; flung himself prostrate at the girl’s feet.

  She cried, “Lever ou, tout suit! Stand up, Polypheme! Speak English! Where is Dr. Eberhardt! What have you seen?”

  He could stand before her doing a sort of jig, but the English was too much for him after a gibbered, “No see’m Dr. Eberhardt—Ah been village, come quick!” His linguistic ability blowing a fuse when it came to what he had seen.

  Then Haitian and goat-bleats poured from his mouth, and even his native tongue seemed inadequate. He had to windmill his arms and roll his eyes. His goatee flickered, and the effort brought globes of ink on his forehead. He pointed at the ceiling, at the floor, at the fog-hung window; saw the laboratory tank of bullfrogs and ended with a caterwaul beyond translation.

  Ranier stared. The little old lady—dead for fourteen years—looked much alive.

  But it needed no interpreter to make John Ranier understand terror when he heard it. He saw the fear in the little Haitian’s eyes reflect in the eyes of the girl. Saw her put hand to throat as if in want of air, and gaze in white transfixion at the window.

  “What is it?” Ranier growled. “What does he say?”

  “He says,” Laïs Engles whispered, “he has just come from the village. A mob is gathering, and the Rada drums are signals. Rumor has started a zombie is loose—a dead man walking in the fog. The blacks are angry, and Hyacinth Lucien is spreading word Dr. Eberhardt is a sorcerer, a white magician who has raised this zombie from the dead. It was to warn the hospital of danger that Polypheme left the village early. On the way home he passed the graveyard. Oh, God!”

  She spread one hand against the wall for support, pressing the other to her forehead as if it hurt. “He says—he says he saw near the road an opened grave. An old lady sitting on a coffin. An old lady who is dead. She wears a black bonnet and a taffeta dress, and there is a live frog tied to her wrist. She is the old lady, he says, who came with me from Brazil. Who died in this hospital fourteen years ago. It is Old Gramma Sou—”

  CHAPTER XI

  THE LADY AT THE GRAVE

  If he survived to be ten thousand, Ranier knew, the picture of that graveyard would be indelible in his memory, although he never could quite remember how he got there. Afterwards, it had seemed like Kavanaugh’s doing. Kavanaugh had yelled like a Choctaw, “Come on!”

  There was a tumble down the stairs, led by the Irishman with the gun and followed by all who did not wish to be left behind. A battle to reach the night air. Ranier took time out to sprint to the dark rear corridor and down the corridor to the emergency room in the hopes of finding Mr. Haarman, because Kavanaugh must have been wrong and the dead man had to be there—then wasn’t. He could remember racing to join the others at the front; seeing what looked like a small sedan.

  From there to the cemetery everything blurred. He stood on the running board, for all the seats were taken—Professor Schlitz squealing with the blonde swamping his lap; Kava naugh and Carpetsi jammed together; Polypheme at the wheel with Laïs Engles—then no one had wanted to go. The small sedan hadn’t wanted to go, either. Made in Detroit, it had suffered hard usage in this tropical environment, and tonight it was worn out. The fog had given it asthma, and its right eye was blind. It bucked spleenishly on leaving the driveway, shied at the turn, shimmied its front wheels when it hit the macadam, then shot on the downhill grade in spiteful abandon. Perhaps it would not have moved at all, if Kavanaugh hadn’t muttered something virulent at the driver and flourished his automatic. All right, it would show them.

  Ranier had traveled up the mountain on a spare tire; now he was racketing down it on a door. This Model T must have come from the same museum as the Winton, and there was the same sensation of zooming off into space. Night loomed in cliffs that scraped the running boards, and the fog streamed through the cracked windshield and under the wheels so there wasn’t any visible road. The car’s single eye, its battery dim, was useful solely in showing the curves when the wheels were on them and it was too late to do much about it. But it was no good worrying about accidents. The accidents had happened. If you were a ship’s doctor accustomed to only normal miracles and suddenly confronted by vanishing knives and life after death, there wasn’t much you could do but hang on.

  Ranier hung on.

  The woman in the back seat was shrieking like a dame on a roller-coaster as Kavanaugh fired oaths at break-neck turns and Carpetsi loudly remembered saints. Fog funneled by in rushing, fumid whorls; pearl-tinted in the path of the headlight; barrage-thick beyond, as if the night had been everywhere afire and doused, and now the charred blackness was smoking. At the steering wheel Polypheme was a pair of eyeballs, disembodied, with a faint blue shine of a cheekbone, and Ranier could see Laïs Engles’ hands, tight-nerved, deathly white, gripping the dashboar
d just above a dimmed grape-sized light-bulb.

  IT WAS NO time to think about a dead man climbing down off an operating table, leaving the room to retrieve a shoe for his webbed left foot, and slamming the door in departure. Cardiac spasm did peculiar things; rigor mortis might cause a cadaver to salute a terrified morgue attendant, or quirk lifeless lips in a grin. But it never walked a dead man out of a hospital, or animated him throughout a Caribbean cruise after fourteen years in the ground.

  It was no time, either, to recall the story a French consul in Port-au-Prince had once told him about the dead men they’d found working at the Hasco plant. Ranier recalled it. Hasco stands for Haitian American Sugar Company, and you can buy Hasco Rum today in any good liquor store in the States. You wouldn’t expect the un-dead in a modern industrial plant under Yankee capital, but the rumor persisted that zombies had been seen there—John Ranier had laughed at the story.

  It had been easy to laugh at the story told that time in the suburban country club at Kenscoff, where polite waiters served Planter’s Punches under Japanese lanterns, and bored tourists capered to a Haitian orchestra butchering the “Black Bottom.”

  Zooming downhill through fog in this Model T stuffed with terrified tourists in a night alive with the threat of jungle drums, John Ranier didn’t laugh. He heard the girl cry faintly, “Hurry, Polypheme—Vite! Vite! Oh, God—I’ve got to see—” and the fog seemed to be blowing in cold blank streams under his scalp. Blowing with the words, “Unreal! Unreal!”

  No dead man could walk out of a door. If Haarman could saunter from that downstairs room after epidermal discoloration had set in, all the rules were off, and he might in truth have been buried four years after the War. It gave one’s foundations no more substance than this mist at night. Better go back to elixirs, witch-burnings, wands. Accept the “touch-power” of Valentine Greatrakes, the miraculous beds of Cagliostro, and Perkins’ tweezer-cure, Hippocrates and Galen were fools in tonight’s fog; Pasteur, Jenner and Carrel had built on myths, and this old lady the house-boy claimed to have seen, might be there.