Zombies

by Otto Penzler

  “Nein.” She moved backwards from his out-reached hand.

  Ranier protested harshly, “But you can’t stay here. Nothing we can do for Angelo,” he grated a short humorless laugh, “since people don’t seem to stay buried in this country. And I’m not going to hang around here twiddling my thumbs waiting for Kavanaugh to come back. He may not come back. That village mob may come instead. I’m going up there to Bois Legone and taking you with me. I’ll leave you at the Gendarmerie or the nearest white planter for protection.”

  “There is no Gendarmerie,” the girl said, “at Bois Legone. Even if there was—I cannot go.”

  “You’ve got to. I want a look at the cemetery where that Prussian colonel was buried.”

  “Go, then. I will remain here.”

  “You can’t,” he snapped hotly. “I tell you, I’ve got to see that Bois Legone graveyard and see it quick. You think you could stay all by yourself in this howling madhouse?”

  “Polypheme will be with me. We will have the rifle. It is not a madhouse.” She drew herself up, and in the algid hall-light her face was marble carved in determination. “It is a hospital. Dr. Eberhardt is—is out; and there are the patients.”

  “Patients!” Ranier’s eyebrows came together, eyes glaring.

  “In the excitement—I forgot. Too long already I have left them unattended. There is smallpox here, a Negress dying, a child very sick.”

  Smallpox! A moribund Negress! A dying pickaninny! As if there wasn’t enough hell in this murderous mumbo jumbo! He flipped an impatient hand.

  “All right, I’ll look at them. Right now. Then we’ll leave Polypheme to tend them, and you’ll go with me. Where are the beds?”

  She said wearily, “Nein. Go. At two-thirty I must give an intravenous injection. Ja. I have done it before,” she answered the unbelief on his face. “Other cases. When Dr. Eberhardt was overworked. So I will be on duty here.”

  “After all you’ve been through? Good God!”

  “I am a nurse.”

  HE WANTED TO shake her. Make her listen to reason. Anger at heroics that seemed unreasonable saw-edged his speech. “Listen to me. I’ve got to go to that next cemetery because it’s our only chance to catch up with the killer who’s behind tonight’s job. We’ve got to stop that murderer or it may mean our lives. This isn’t any Voodoo racket. It’s deeper. Something to do with that German war-time expedition to Brazil that you were with, that’s plain. Those people who died fourteen years ago—Perl, the old lady, the rest of them—had something this ghoul is after. Whoever the devil is, he’d decapitate his own mother to get it. God knows where the next strike will hit.”

  Apprehension switched his eyes to the front door where a moist draught had opened the door a little. Tendrils of mist were clammy fingers curling around the inside knob, the gauzy and secret fingers of a wraith trying to force an entrance. Drum-beats walked in measured tread through the opening, padded softly down the hall in a monkish processional, unseen, and whispered off into dark recesses at the villa’s back. The tremor beat under his hair.

  He went on furiously, “Believe me, our lives aren’t worth a nickel while this killer’s on the rampage. And you’re involved with that expedition. If it’s Eberhardt—maybe mad, trying some crazy experiment—we’ve got to stop him. Brown and that fellow Marcelline—they never got to the police!—where are they? Kavanaugh, Coolidge, the blonde—I wouldn’t trust any of them with the lights out—and this loco bug-expert on the loose! Add that outfit to a gang of body-snatchers—”

  He stopped pacing, arrested by an idea. Turned at the girl in an excitement that lowered his voice to a slurred monotone. “Judas! I’m dumb. Why didn’t I think of it before. Listen, Laïs!”

  “Ja, I am listening.”

  “You know where those body-snatchers are, right now? Well, they weren’t far ahead of us when we got to Morne Cuyamel. They were on their way to the colonel’s cemetery at Bois Legone. Right now they’re leaving Bois Legone, and I’d stake my life on it they’re headed for Captain Friederich’s grave. Sure! Wasn’t that captain of your German expedition last to be buried? Well, they’ve gone right down the line so far. Get it? We can cut them off by going to that last grave before they get there. Where was that captain buried?”

  She said tonelessly, “My uncle, Captain Friederich, was buried on the mountaintop above Bois Legone. A tiny cemetery there, overlooking the coast, on the main road to Port-au-Prince. You will know the entrance by stone urns which stand beside the road. My uncle’s body lies in a mausoleum.”

  “A mausoleum!”

  “It belonged to Dr. Eberhardt who bought it from a French planter. That night of 1922—the Herr Doktor gave it to me for my uncle’s—”

  Ranier blazed, “That’s where we’ll go! We’ll head off the rats, by God! Give ’em a dose of that Winchester! Come on—!”

  “Take the gun. I will stay. I am not afraid.”

  “Risk your life for a batch of niggers when—?”

  “I cannot leave my patients.”

  Ranier’s veined eyes squinted. “All right. I can’t take the time to argue. You know this is a dangerous spot. I told you the only chance to stop this pogrom was to head off these jackals at your uncle’s tomb,” he warned roughly, “and that’s where I’m going. It doesn’t seem the moment to pull any of this Christian-duty stuff. You’d better save your own life and stick with me. It’s madness to stay here!”

  Direct, unwavering, the girl’s eyes met his. “You are a doctor, mein herr. You know I must.”

  HE WAS A fool. He didn’t need any little bird to tell him that. He knew it when he steered from the hospital driveway and headed the Model T for Bois Legone when any sane man would have skipped for the nearest timber patch and waited in hiding for the protection of daylight.

  He was doubly certain of it when he stopped the flivver five hundred feet down the road, backed off the macadam shoulder into a screen of plantain, switched off the ignition and climbed to earth in the floating darkness. Save for that steady tremor in the night, silence. Smell of soggy loam, mould, closed flowers, vegetal decay. All of Haiti, at night, smelled like rotted floral pieces after a funeral. Around him the darkness foamed and coagulated and clung, the mist blacker than a steam of liquid stove-polish. He might have been a million leagues from Dr. Eberhardt’s hospital. And he should have been, if he weren’t nine kinds of a fool.

  He groped his way along the road-edge. He wasn’t seeking a nice, secure hiding place, either. He was limping back to that hospital, going to scout around the villa for a secret look at that German girl, a little sortie to check her actions once she thought him out of sight. That, at least, was his excuse to himself for returning. Trouble was, he knew it was an excuse.

  John Ranier had probed too many subconscious motives from secretive neurotics to be able to hide his own inner motivations. Debunking himself had been one of his favorite amusements for the past five years, but in this emergency it was disconcerting to discover himself an idiot. John Ranier, his nerve-ends tuned to a million pricky needle-points of perception, knew he wasn’t going back to spy on this girl at all, but to make sure she’d locked all the windows. He wasn’t going back there to watch that girl, but to watch over that girl from some place of vantage for espionage on the villa, fearing for her safety.

  At the last moment, before leaving her there, he’d gone the rounds to bolt-and-shutter all the windows, and found to his dismay there were neither shutters nor bolts on the emergency room. He’d lugged Angelo’s mortal remains to a storeroom and out of her sight, and weakened to the point of visiting the sick beds and giving the Negress with elephantiasis a hypo, stalling, worrying. Worrying about those windows that couldn’t be locked.

  Then he’d kidded himself. Told himself he was staging a clever act, tricking the girl into believing he wanted her with him, kidding himself into thinking he actually wished to be rid of her.

  Matter of fact, it was lucky for him she’d determined to stay behind. Damn
ed lucky. Yet the minute he’d shut the door on her there in that stale hall a sick muscle had closed over his heart, and the sweat-beads of anxiety were still on his face.

  Ranier perceived with sardonic grimness the War hadn’t taught him what happened to gallants who went out of their way to stick their noses in danger zones. Even that charming experience with a coal baron’s daughter had taught him nothing. And here was John Ranier playing Boy Scout over a woman he’d known less than seven hours, going to stand guard all night over a girl who might, herself, have a finger in this grisly Haitian pie, when he ought to be saving his own skin. He ought to have a rose in his teeth. What in God’s name was that girl to him?

  He hesitated to hunt for the road-edge, warily shading the picayune ray of his flashlight as it sought the wet macadam. Scuffing his heels to keep them on the paving, he went on. He grinned to himself. “Sucker!” Suppose that girl did have a part in this wholesale body-snatching racket? And for that matter, suppose she didn’t? Either way he was a fool. If she was part of the racket, he’d make a swell target for that Winchester he’d gallantly left with her. If she wasn’t, what difference would it make? Tomorrow the police would come to the rescue, friends would take her away, and John Ranier would be a bum ship’s doctor swinging over the horizon on his way to Nowhere. If she were attacked tonight what in God’s name could he do about it. Rush cheering to the rescue with a jammed and rusty army automatic?

  Even Don Quixote hadn’t been such a fool. The romantic Spig had owned sense enough to pick windmills for adversaries. A clogged gun, in this hoodooed night, would be of less avail than Quixote’s wooden lance, and he’d be jousting with adversaries something more than windmills, if past indications meant anything.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  THE SKULL

  Ranier paused in the turbid darkness, peering, listening. Groped forwards like a blind man, feeling out the invisible road with uneasy shoes. Deserting that car amounted to cutting off his means of retreat, but if unknown eyes had been watching the hospital, ears listening at the walls, they’d think him on his way to Bois Legone. At least he had that much advantage. If he didn’t know where his enemies were, they didn’t know where he was.

  Sweating, he halted again to listen. Limped a few paces forward. Stopped. Moved on. Those drums didn’t seem any nearer, but every second the girl was alone in that fog-cloaked manse her life was in jeopardy. Provided, of course, she was on the level. He quickened his blind-man’s walk. Wait a second—

  Ranier stopped with sucked breath. In the pitchy murk five inches before his eyes a black shape was waiting. He could almost see its face. His hair stood up. He heard a movement, a faint and sinewy creak, no louder than the sound of a stretched ligament in a flexed forearm.

  He struck, left handed, before his galvanized right hand could thumb the switch of his pocket torch. Struck, and grabbed a hairy beard. The thing hit back, a hard little blow tapping him on the point of the chin. Hanging on, he swallowed a yell, and the flashlight came on, spearing its electric ray through the black.

  “Hell!”

  It wasn’t Polypheme, although the caricature resemblance was remarkable. Ranier was hanging for dear life to the chin whiskers of a black billygoat. There was nothing funny about it.

  The goat was dead, stiff-legged, front hoofs brittlely out-thrust, hind legs swinging at the height of a man’s knees, clear of the ground. Ranier was clutching the animal’s chin-tuft, and the animal was hanged by the neck from the fruited lower limb of a sapodilla tree that reached out over the road’s edge.

  Ranier let go hurriedly and backed away, keeping his light on the hanged goat. In the mist the dead animal revolved slowly and the rope creaked. Flesh contracted along Ranier’s spine. He knew the meaning of this bugaboo; had seen such symbols in Haiti, before. A Voodoo warning! The goat had not been dead long. Earlier tonight it hadn’t been there. That meant Negroes were in the neighborhood. Some skulking black papaloi had crept up in the night and marked the vicinity of Dr. Eberhardt’s hospital with a high-sign.

  He flicked off the torch with an oath; started down the roadside on a run, left hand outstretched, feeling his way along the sidewall of jungle foliage. A dozen strides beyond the sapodilla, he became aware of opalescence in the fog in front of him. Reflections lighting the mist. He halted, half turned as the mist brightened. A car was coming up behind him. Coming from the direction of Bois Legone and at race-track speed.

  Blades of light swept around a black bend in the night, went by him and dissolved in moving vapour clouds ahead. The road’s smoking surface became visible. The sound of the engine broke through muffled silence with an abrupt roar. Before he could leap for cover the headlights were on him, picking him out of darkness with a pour of blinding light, yellow eyes racing at him out of the night. The car was on top of him with the suddenness of an express train rushing out of a blizzard. At him sixty miles an hour.

  A tenth of a second he stood dazed in the onrushing light. Instinct jumped him away from the car’s path. He saw the body of the car take form in the smother, the glistening plane of the windshield, the smudged shadow that was the driver’s face behind the glass. At the same time the driver must have seen him. He heard the squeal of brakes, the uproar of a quickly throttled engine, the screech of tires skating on macadam.

  He thought, “Kavanaugh!” as the car slewed, tilted, came at him sideways, made an oblique swerve to catch him full in the headlamps’ glare. The car was still moving toward him, slowing down on the skid, ten feet from him, and he’d lifted a defensive elbow as if to ward it off, when the shooting started. Spat-spat! Spat-spat-spat!

  He heard the shots in something like astonishment. Surprised at the ruthlessness of it; appalled at himself being the target. Flashes of blue-white flame spitting at him from the car. Glimpse of a wrist, a shadow-hand, an automatic reaching out of the driver’s window. Spat! Spat! Quick daggers of fire poked at him. An invisible zzzzzip! tearing the lobe of his right ear. Instant pain.

  Ranier fell. Plunged to the road with his head between his elbows, rolling across the macadam to escape those deadly headlights. Spat! Spat-spat-spat! Flame whiplashed from the car window, the reports deadened by the revving of the engine as gears went into neutral, bullets striking the road around Ranier’s writhing body, glancing off the macadam, skittering off into the underbrush. He turned over twice and lay still in roadside weeds, auto lights blazing on his closed eyelids. All over now. The next bullet—

  BUT THE CAR was turning. Backing and turning. Clash of meshing gears. Smell of oil-smoke from the exhaust. That gunman was leaving him for dead, wheeling in a reverse turn for a get-away. Light passed across John Ranier’s squeezed eyelids; then darkness swept over him; sound of the car driving off. Ranier rolled over and sprang to his feet. Fading up the highway toward Bois Legone in the direction from which it had come was a misty, diminishing, red eyeball—the tail light of the fleeing sedan.

  Oaths boiled to his lips as he watched the dwindling tail light scooting off into night. He began to swear blasphemously, viciously, hurling silent and scorching names after his departing assailant. Rage swelled in his throat, choking him. His temples burned. Fury mounted as he thought of himself standing unarmed and helpless in front of that murderously unexpected gun-blast; as he remembered the greedy sound of those bullets smacking the road around him, trying to hit him when he was down. Stand here and let that dirty hireling of the devil drive away?

  John Ranier was running. Blindly. Crazily. Dashing for the flivver he’d parked up the road, and lighting his way with the pocket torch, aware of folly and uncaring. Cranking, flinging himself behind the agued wheel, slamming out of the undergrowth to the backfire explosions of a moon rocket, Ranier drove the Model T in white hot pursuit of the escaping gunman. He had forgotten his intended vigil over Dr. Eberhardt’s ward. Forgotten the girl, the hospital, the storm gathering under the fog, the game of Going to Jerusalem. Rage melted the problem down to a simple basic. There was no involved myste
ry about the driver of that fleeing sedan. A human hand had triggered those gunshots. The question was only one of identity, and there was the answer racing off into night, wagging his tail light behind him. Get him!

  ALONE, STEERING THE half-blind rattletrap through blowing cotton, apprehensive of mountain curves and chasms unmarked by guard rails, he would have been slowed to fifteen miles an hour after the first road-bend. Following a car made it easier. The car in the lead had good headlamps, and was making time. Ranier set his jaw, pulled down the gas lever, sloped his shoulders over the wheel and never took his eye from that red point of light marking the route before him.

  The red point of light was a star climbing obliquely. A steep grade. It disappeared at the summit; reappeared as a meteor flying downhill. It dipped and vanished. A culvert. Described an arc and went out. A curve. Reappeared on the straightaway, dimming as it lengthened the lead. Cursing, Ranier drove the battered flivver to the limit of its endurance, following the convolutions of that red spark in nothingness ahead.

  Somewhere they passed the cemetery where the U.S. Marine occupied the plot of Grossmutter Sou. A handful of candles there and gone in the murk. Farther on, the deserted marine barracks, the place where a missionary’s celluloid collar turned up instead of a topkick’s tunic. Moments later Ranier marked the Morne Cuyamel churchyard, fragmentary in fog, the Prussian colonel still lounging by the mission’s headstone at the scene of a Haitian gendarme’s assassination.

  Landmarks in the night. Like the unreal surprises in those old-fashioned scenic railways where the gondola rolled suddenly out of blackness into a briefly glimpsed horror-chamber labeled “Orpheus in Hades” or “Blue Beard Boiling His Wife,” and women passengers screamed.