Zombies

by Otto Penzler

  She was there!

  A HAITIAN CEMETERY is, at best, a stage-set for ghosts, with broken masonry and jerrybuilt vaults and the helter-skelter parceling of the plots. The little mounds are heaped high with cockle shells; the moss grows green, and there are lizards; there might even be a granite angel with a broken nose. The tombstones have a way of leaning, like bones poked up out of the ground.

  The Haitians know who tipped over those stones. They know who tilted that mound at an angle overnight; who blurred the letters once chiseled so deep in the marble. So their cemeteries hug the roads for comfort and burn their penny candles late. But neither candles nor the headlamp of a car were comforting in this particular mountain graveyard.

  The headlamp’s ray made a swerve across the road, streamed under the cemetery arch and diffused in a cone of misty luminescence that spread uphill in the murk, touching a gleam to wet marbles, creeping across the sleeping mounds. In the vaporous background, the vigil candles were outer moons in a void, each a sentinel to its own patch of earth, and beyond these yellow blurs, the jungle joined with the night in an impenetrable wall.

  In the mist that unraveled above them, the dark mounds were smoking. Gray wooden crosses dripped. Vine-clad headstones showed patches of white through glistening creeper, and near the entrance arch one mound was distinguished by a little glass-windowed doghouse where mourners might peep at a wreath made of the departed’s hair, a collection of the deceased’s belongings, a chromo of Saint Sulpice and a miniature of the departed looking holier than he was. The car-light streamed past this doleful reliquary and touched on something that would have cooled the thick-skinned hearts of Burke and Hare. That Scotch-Irish team of grave robbers would have run for their lives. Even the Model T jumped back.

  She was sitting on an overturned coffin, her back propped against a tombstone at the head of an opened grave, regarding the pile of shoveled red sand heaped alongside, with solemn interest. She was frail, and old-fashioned, and the fog-shawl wrapped about her shoulders blew in tatters and wisps that floated away. Her black taffeta dress was the same stuff as the fog, delicate as cobweb, and the black kid gloves in her lap wanted mending. Some bright beads glinted from a crumbled reticule at her feet; and her shoes, styled of another period, high-buttoned like those of Mrs. Katzenjammer, were mossy from too long in the damp. But her granny’s bonnet, fastened beneath her chin by an enormous bow, was almost jaunty. Her spectacles were bright. She looked spry. An old lady—the words occurred to Ranier with a taste of zinc in his mouth—well preserved.

  Very well preserved. Approaching her on legs that moved through no volition of his own, John Ranier was sure she was alive. She was sitting there composing an elegy. She had come there with flowers and sat down to rest; come there out of the long ago, and was tired from the long walk. Ought to have chosen a better seat, though. That coffin-bottom was pretty well gone. In the darkness she’d mistaken it for a bench. She’d better go. That shawl of fog was draughty for frail shoulders, and the taffeta so thin it wore into holes and tatters as one watched.

  There! She nodded at Ranier. Quaintly the bonnet nodded twice. Good evening, young man. Plain as could be. Then he saw the movement came from a fat green bullfrog tethered to her wrist by a length of string. When the frog jumped, her head moved. Tied by a hind leg, the frog made another restricted hop, and the old lady reproved her pet with a perky nod. Some flakes crumbled from the satin bow under her chin, and her glasses went awry. You wouldn’t have expected Mother Goose in Haiti—

  “Old Gramma Sou—!”

  “Don’t!” Ranier pulled the girl back, and she stood against him, hiding her face in his shoulder. Mindless, he stood in the headlamp’s gray-yellow path, arm about the girl, while shadows charged by him, struggled together at the grave-edge. Professor Schlitz, after one appalled look, tottered backwards over two mounds, fell against the little doghouse near the entrance arch, ramming an elbow through one of the windows. Automatic hanging at his side, Kavanaugh went in a prowl around the opened grave, circling it twice, cursing in a harsh guttural monotone, coming at last to a stand beside the old lady in black. In the wet rays of the car light his face was marble. His eyes were cat-green. Inadvertently he touched the coffin with his boot toe, and the wood crumbled like punk. Oaths snarled from his teeth. Typically, the Irishman’s fear appeared to translate itself into rage.

  ANGELO CARPETSI WAS on hands and knees, staring down into the raw excavation. The blond woman stumbled up to Kavanaugh, holding her skirts up to one knee, slipping and sliding in the soft loam. Too late Ranier thought of footprints. That old lady, no matter how spry, could not have shoveled her way out without assistance. Someone else had been there. That length of string on her wrist looked new. The bullfrog could not break from the leash, although his desperate leaps reduced the glove holding him to leather fragments. It was better to think that someone had been there earlier tonight, someone who had arranged this necromantic old lady in that pose. Whoever it had been, the footprints would be blotted by this rush. Tightening his arm about Laïs Engles, Ranier could feel her shivers running up and down his own skin. His teeth jiggled. He heard glass jangle as the professor rebounded from the housed grave; heard sounds something like words blurt from the Italian boy—“Empty—How’d that old woman—! Holy Mother—!” Heard Kavanaugh’s toothground oaths. Only the old lady sitting there in frayed taffeta remained composed.

  The blond woman began to scream. She clutched Kavanaugh’s sleeve, pulling him toward the car, screeching into his agate face. “Get me awaaaay!” her voice ascending as if in rage. “I’ve had enough of this! Enough of this, understand? That man murdered—! This—! I won’t have it—! You’ve got to get me out of this—! You said there wouldn’t be any danger—! Just a ride, you said, and you’d take care of ev—!”

  She slipped to her plush knees, dragging him almost down on top of her, as his free hand smote across her mouth, stopping her outcry with an infuriated smack. “Get into the car!” He yanked her to her feet; shoved. “Get back into that car, by Judas, before I—” He sucked in his breath, green-lit eyeballs following her hysterical gallop through the archway; then wiped his lips on his wrist and wheeled to face the grave.

  Carpetsi turned and rose from his knees with a corkscrew motion that brought him around to face Kavanaugh. Greasy hair slid in a raven’s wing across his left eye. His right eye, black, glitterous, moved from side to side under a sickly lid. He whispered, “What the hell, Kavanaugh?” in a voice that seemed to come from a cramped stomach. Three times at Kavanaugh, as if the Irishman should have some answer.

  Kavanaugh shook his head, panting, “I don’t know how—I don’t know how that body—”

  Staring across the gold lights in Laïs Engles’ hair, John Ranier growled, “Somebody did this! Somebody exhumed this—old lady! Yes, and propped her up against that tombstone—tied that live frog there!”

  His own reaction now was anger. He’d let his imagination make him a fool. Heat dried pallidness on his forehead in an upsurge of rage against the vandals who had roused an old lady from her last sleep.

  “Damn! Maybe I’m wrong, Kavanaugh, but I’ll bet the one who stole Haarman’s body out of the hospital tonight is the same filthy rat responsible for this!”

  “Stole Haarman’s—” Kavanaugh’s teeth came together with a click. “By Judas! Sure! Well, Ranier, how much do you know about that?”

  “I don’t know anything about it. I’m going to find out.”

  Carpetsi pushed hair from his left eye; stepped towards the Irishman. “This ain’t no time to talk, Kavanaugh. I’m gettin’—”

  “Shut up!” Flinging the command at the Italian from the side of his mouth, Kavanaugh kept his gaze focused on Ranier. “Just who do you think snatched Haarman’s body?” His voice was harsh, threatening. “If you’ve got any ideas, let’s have ’em. And about this!” He jerked his chin at the grave.

  Ranier shook his head. “All I know is, that frog looks like one of the bat
ch from the tank in Eberhardt’s laboratory.”

  Carpetsi interrupted in a raw voice, “Kavanaugh! I’m goin’!”

  “We’d all better go,” Ranier snarled. “For the police.”

  “Like hell! After what that black goat in the car told us about the riot in the village?” Kavanaugh’s mouth went up at one corner, baring teeth. “Those boogs would tear your beautiful nurse to pieces. Besides,” he twisted at Carpetsi, “Coolidge and Brown went for those gendarmes, and they’re due any minute. Pull yourself together, boy! I’ll handle this! We’re going back to the hospital, that’s where. But first we’re going to settle something.”

  SLIPPING THE AUTOMATIC into a pocket of his khaki waterproof, Kavanaugh stepped close to Ranier, stopped in front of him, glared down at Laïs Engles, his hard eyes fixed on the back of the girl’s neck. “First,” he repeated, aiming his finger at the girl, “we’re going to settle something. She claims Haarman is a guy named Adolph Perl, a man she saw buried in Haiti fourteen years ago. I don’t know the game, see? I don’t know the Hallowe’en racket! But as long as she’s stickin’ to her Haarman-Perl story, maybe she can show us that grave?”

  Ranier gripped the girl’s shoulder. “Miss Engles—”

  Slowly she wheeled in his grasp. Gems of moisture glimmered in her hair, and her face was gardenia-white in the wreathing fog. Confronting that rectangular black pit and the frail watcher at the grave-side, she shut her eyes, swayed. Ranier held her firm.

  “That Perl fellow, Miss Engles. We’d like to see his grave.”

  She whispered, “The tombstone—look at the tombstone—!” pointing.

  Carpetsi uttered a strangled yelp, turning swiftly to see; and Kavanaugh’s eyes swerved between wolfish slits, the pupils glinting yellow-green through quivering lashes. Aghast, John Ranier saw the girl’s finger indicated the tombstone employed as a back-rest by that appalling old lady. The slab at the head of the opened grave. The old lady leaning against the edge of the slab gave a nod as if in confirmation, and settled against the stone a little more comfortably, her bonnet sliding down rakishly over her forehead.

  The hazed headlamp of the car did not afford enough light for reading the weathered stone. Ranier snatched for his flashlight; sent a wan ray leaping across the excavation. The misty circle brought the slab into spectral relief, its legend clearly legible.

  HIER RUHET IN GOTT

  ADOLPH PERL

  GEST. 3 JANUAR 1922

  ICH HATTE EINST

  EIN SCHONES VATERLAND

  Professor Schlitz translated in a wizardish tremolo, “Here rests in God—Adolph Perl—Died third January, 1922—I once had a buhbeautiful Fatherland.”

  Laïs Engles cried, “I had that inscription put on for him, myself. That is Adolph Perl’s grave! The old lady—that is Old Gramma Sou, who was buried in the cemetery three miles from here!”

  Her chin touched her breast sleepily, and she slowly went to the ground through Ranier’s nerveless hands.

  CHAPTER XII

  DRUMS SPELL DISASTER

  “By Heaven! if that is Perl’s grave!”—“I told you, Kavanaugh!”—“What’s this old woman doin’ here when—?” “You can see it’s just been dug up!”—“Where’s Perl, then? He ain’t here, is he? That means Haarman was—!” “If anybody thinks they can do this to me, Dave Kavanaugh—” “How she get here? If this dame was buried in some bone-orchard three miles away—?”

  Voices. Voices banging, snarling, caterwauling in Ranier’s ears, a pyrotechnic of words, sentences exploded unfinished, hanging fire in the air. Impossible to follow that play of expressions. Impossible to think. Fog seemed to swirl through Ranier’s head as if doors had blown open in his frontal lobe, and his thoughts went scattering about his brain like the papers on the floor of that scrambled hospital laboratory. Voices were bats whisking through his brain-doors in erratic flight, and somewhere in his subconscious, drums were muttering.

  He discovered his mouth was open, inhaling mould. He closed it, and dropped to one knee beside the girl. Chafed her wrists. Heard himself wheedling, “Take it easy! Take it easy!” in an insincere way. Like asking someone to have some ice cream in a catacomb. But it was hard to effect a bedside manner at the edge of a freshlyopened grave in a foggy cemetery; particularly when the rightful owner of the plot wasn’t there, and the visitor sitting on the absentee’s coffin was an old lady from a neighboring necropolis.

  Bad enough to believe her above ground in her own graveyard without learning she was three miles from home. He’d thought Adolph Perl (if any) securely anchored in some burying ground nearer the village. What unearthly power had transported the old lady to this foreign field, dead with a live pet bullfrog? What was she doing at Perl’s grave, and where was its original inheritor?

  Kavanaugh was bawling in the direction of the car, “You get this, Daisy? Keep screamin’ like that and you’ll have everybody in Haiti down on top of us! The body that oughta be here ain’t here, that’s all. If you’ll close that trap of yours and give me a chance to think—”

  From the car Professor Schlitz’s voice went piccolo. “Perl’s grave! Perl’s? Then Haarman is Perl—Of course he w-wouldn’t be in his grave! It’s precisely as the girl told us, don’t you see? Don’t you see?” The piccolo in his throat struck high G. “He was a zombie! In my stateroom! Dead tonight and walked off again. Again! Oh, my! He’ll be roaming—!”

  The insectologist’s screech conjured visions of Mr. Haarman strolling down the night, vacant eyes staring, dead face expressionless, blood creeping from that hole in his back—perhaps carrying his shoe in a lifeless hand and walking on that exposed duck foot.

  You could see things that way in the fog. Adolph Perl’s grave empty. Haarman being Adolph Perl. As sensible as any of tonight’s wizardries, with that café stabbing in broad lamplight; that cryptogram on Haarman’s mail; Dr. Eberhardt’s disappearance from a laboratory where hands cooked; Haarman’s walk-out after death. The girl had said Haarman was Perl and Perl was missing from his grave and an old lady from another cemetery was here to pay her respects to the departed. It fitted with the girl’s war story and the legends of Monsieur Marcelline. No denying that old lady, well preserved though she was, had been buried a long time—

  Helping Laïs Engles to her feet, John Ranier shied a glance at the visitor across the excavation; would not have been surprised to see her stand up briskly, adjust bonnet and specs, bid them a hoarse good-bye, and lead her bullfrog off into shreds of mist.

  Drawing the girl aside, he asked huskily, “Feel all right now?” At the sound of his voice, Kavanaugh and the Italian stopped shouting blurred words and looked toward him.

  Laïs Engles shuddered. “Please—I will be—all right.”

  Ranier said dryly, “Don’t look again, but—are you certain that’s the—the old lady who was on the German expedition with—”

  “Oh, it is—it is—!”

  He said under his breath, “This is terrible!” Aloud: “Where’s the cemetery the old lady came from?”

  The girl whispered, “Beyond the hospital. Back up the road the way we came. About a mile the—the other side of the hospital.”

  “The other side of the hospital?” Kavanaugh shouted the word “other,” shouldering forward. “Direction away from the town? Impossible!”

  Ranier’s tone was grim. “We’re going there to look. Right now! We’re going to the cemetery where the old lady, here, was buried.”

  “We ain’t!” The snarl was surprising, coming from Angelo Carpetsi. The Italian boy’s face was surprising. Pushing oily hair from his black eyes, he made a sudden lunge between Ranier and Kavanaugh, stood glaring from one to the other, his fog-drenched features glistening, wrenched. His pink silk shirt, pasted to his breast, pumped up and down. He cat-spat at Ranier, “You keep outa this!”

  Ranier said through his teeth, “We’re going to the cemetery where that old lady was buried!”

  “We’re goin’ to find Brown an’ Coolidge!” th
e Italian boy corrected. His eyes glittered. His face puckered like Mussolini’s in the gnashing bombast of a speech. He pinched his finger-tips together and sawed the gesture up and down under Ranier’s nose, spitting, “If you know what’s good for you, quack, you’ll keep your puss outa this! I say we’re goin’ to catch up with Coolidge and Brown!”

  He wrenched around at Kavanaugh. “You’ve stalled long enough. Yeah. I know the racket. I’m on to you, see? If it wasn’t a stall, you’d be huntin’ damn quick for Brown an’ Coolidge an’ that shine they went off with, instead of—”

  Kavanaugh’s eyes were barbarous as he plunged his hand into trench-coat pocket, shoved the bulge at Carpetsi and broke in with, “You greasy little wop, you’ve lost your head! I don’t know any more about this than you do!”

  “Yah?” The Italian boy was screaming now. “You’re smart, ain’t you, Kavanaugh? Too damn smart! Well, you ain’t goin’ to get away with it. I know you’re in this with the ship’s doc. You fixed it for this quack to be in that café when we started tonight. You’re workin’ this with him. Sure, you are!”

  KAVANAUGH SQUINTED THROUGH the yellow-lit mist as if it were acrid and stung his eyes. Squinted from Carpetsi to Ranier while his sharp features registered wrathful amazement. “Can you beat that? He thinks,” he scoffed at Ranier, “I’m hand in glove with you!”

  “You betcha you are!” Carpetsi howled. “You’re workin’ together with this murderous sawbones, or you’d have knocked him off after Haarman was bumped. You dirty double-crosser, I suppose you think you’re gonna smudge me out? Yah, it’ll be me next. Me! All the while you’re pretending you don’t know a thing about this set-up in the graveyard, here—”

  Kavanaugh put his face close to the Italian’s; squalled, “It’ll be you next, all right, if you don’t close that yap! You’ll have every boog in Haiti on our necks!”