My situation thus revealed, I took little time in extricating myself from the ropes that bound me. It was very, very dark, but because of my previous visit there with Father Gill, I believed it would not be difficult to find my way out.
As I prepared to feel my way along the rocky walls, my hand lit on the carving of Papa Legba to which I had been bound, and there I found my Luger, tied to his hand. (The bullets had not been removed, and I pocketed the firearm quickly.) After perhaps a quarter of an hour’s work, I successfully navigated my way through the forest of rock to a point where I could see the open mouth of the cave. The moonlight shone off the calm waters of the inlet beyond, and I used their glare to navigate the rest of the way.
I emerged cautiously into the humid Haitian night, my weapon drawn and at the ready. Yet the scene was quite placid, and no aggressors attacked me. Though wary of another attack, I navigated my way up the cliffs and out of the cove, and returned to our residence without further incident. I did not sleep for the rest of the night, astounded and perplexed by the events that had befallen me.
Early the next morning, I lit out straightaway for the offices of Father Gill and his fellow priests. However, Gill was not at home, and his Papist colleagues could not account for his absence.
Now with a full understanding that further violence upon our person may be impending, Inspector Gehrin and I have armed ourselves against future attacks. We have opened the crate of MP 40 submachine guns and Model 24 (“stick”) hand grenades that you so thoughtfully sent with us. Given the roominess of my cassock, it should prove easy for me to carry one of each with me at all times in a concealed fashion—in addition, of course, to my trusty Luger.
I have also taken the precaution of relocating our headquarters. I believe the house arranged for us by the university is known to those in the Voodoo community. (In a previous missive, I mentioned the totems that have appeared upon our doorstep.) Thus, I have secured a house of similar size—if of more modest appointment—in a more secluded area east of the city. This new house is, to the best of my knowledge, far removed from the site of any Voodoo-related encounters. It is insulated on one side by a nearly impenetrable forest, and its front door looks out on a large empty field where nothing ever happens.
Our work here will continue, but, my dear Obergruppenführer, it is clear that our approach must change. With the apparent abduction or murder of my most helpful contact (Father Gill), I believe it is now time to curtail my “diplomatic” approach to our operations in favor of a more direct line of inquiry.
Whilst we have already learned a great many things about the process of zombie creation—and the zombie itself—the task still remains for us to collect samples, attempt the vivisection of a “living” zombie subject, recreate a successful corpse-to-zombie transformation, and send the required ingredients back to Berlin for replication by the Reich.
In my opinion, we have learned all that we can from observing the practitioners of this religion from afar. We must now aggressively collect samples—using force whenever necessary—and compel those who hold Voodoo secrets to divulge them to us, whether or not they are inclined to do so. Have my assurances, Obergruppenführer, that we will show these godless heathens what happens when dedicated men of the Reich put their minds to something.
How do the Americans put it? “No more Mr. Nice Guy.”
Respectfully,
Gunter Knecht
Postscript: News has reached us that the Reich is now pushing into France and Belgium. Huzzah! We shall, despite our strained conditions, endeavor to celebrate this accomplishment tonight with what passes for beer in this miserable country.
Communication 21
May 30, 1940
From: Oswaldt Gehrin
To: Reinhard Heydrich
My Obergruppenführer,
As Inspector Knecht will have informed you, our research has taken a decidedly direct turn. After his unfortunate abduction—and, I understand, humiliation at the hands of a sodometically inclined statue—the inspector has directed that our activities moving forward shall consist only of two activities: 1) the collection of samples and 2) the interrogation of subjects regarding Voodoo techniques used to create zombies.
Under the newly enthusiastic direction of Inspector Knecht, we resumed a nocturnal surveillance of Bell’s Hill. Per Knecht’s new directive, we sought either a Voodoo practitioner (for interrogation) or a zombie (for vivisection). It did not take long for a suitable specimen to emerge.
After only a few days, I chanced to encounter a female Voodoo priest leading a single shambling zombie along the forest paths near the hill. It was the hour after midnight, and they were the only moving beings in sight. (I say “I chanced to encounter them” instead of “we” because Inspector Knecht had suddenly contracted a tropical fever and was convalescing in our new abode. Determined that a flu bug should not impair our work, I undertook that evening’s surveillance alone.)
That this strange young woman was steeped in the Voodoo arts, there could be little doubt. She wore the heavy rope necklaces with dangling idols that I have come to realize are associated with the arts of the Bocor. On her brow was a headdress embroidered with colorful patterns of eldritch origin. In one hand she held a rope loosely tied around the neck of the zombie. In the other, she gripped a rattan cane with a cluster of cock feathers attached to one end. (It may be worth noting that our only previous sighting of a female Voodoo priest involved a giant ovoid woman who was mostly abhorrent to the eye. Whilst I thought this might be indicative of the typical physical manifestation of all female priests, the woman I now beheld was a striking example to the contrary. Her bosom was ample, but complemented by a modest waist and shapely hips. Her legs were long, and her long strides down the jungle path were a beautiful thing to behold. Though African of origin (and thus, as our Führer reminds us, inherently inferior to an Aryan woman), her beautiful features had a stunning effect on me, exhibiting a pleasing symmetry and appearance. I must confess that I felt a great engorgement of pleasure upon beholding this woman’s visage and figure, having fraternized, you will recall, almost exclusively with men since the beginning of my time in this country.)
With my courage thus tumescent, I emerged from my hiding place and addressed the young woman and her zombie.
At first, she smiled pleasantly, and it seemed as though she would happily engage me in polite conversation. Then she espied the submachine gun swaying on its cord over my shoulder, and her face coiled into a horrible mask of anger. She emitted an audible hiss like that of a snake. (This caused my infatuation to dim somewhat, though not completely.)
Remembering my mission, I lifted the offending weapon and fired half of the clip into the brain of her zombie (a crusty old fellow who appeared to have been in the earth for many years). Its brittle head all but exploded, ripped apart by the gun’s powerful blasts. The torso fell to the ground in front of us, still and unmoving. For all her serpentine bluster, the Voodoo priestess was quite disarmed, and she put her hand to her mouth.
I shoved my gun’s hot barrel into the space between her breasts.
“You will now be coming with me, young lady,” I said to her. “We have much to discuss. If you are forthcoming and honest, then you have nothing to fear.”
She regarded me icily but did not protest. I moved behind her and nudged her forward with my gun. Taking back roads and discreet jungle paths to avoid being seen by any third party, I conducted her back toward the abode I share with Inspector Knecht. (Though I knew my compatriot was feeling under the weather, I hoped that he would feel well enough to help me interrogate this remarkable specimen.)
My guest remained silent as we trekked through the jungle. For a moment, I became concerned that she might be dumb. (An interrogation with a subject who could not communicate would obviously reveal nothing useful.) To test her tongue, I attempted a conversation.
“I mean you no harm,” I said to her. “I am . . . a visiting scientist and student of Voodoo, only seek
ing to learn more about your great and historic culture.”
Here, of course, I was forced to suppress a laugh.
“Am I correct,” I continued, “in assuming that you are a practitioner of the Voodoo arts? A Bocor?”
At this juncture, the woman responded with a strange word I had never heard before (though it seemed she might be referring to a tropical fruit.)
“Come again?” I said.
“Mambo,” she repeated. “When it is a man, it is a Bocor. When it is a woman, it is a Mambo.”
“Ah, I see,” I responded, thankful to see that she was capable of coherent speech.
“It’s strange that the most basic distinctions of our religion are unknown to a ‘visiting scientist,’” she declared icily. “Perhaps you are not a very good one.”
“I—,” I began.
“Am German,” she finished my sentence in her own way. “I can hear it in your accent. Are you perhaps one of the visiting butterfly researchers who have been so clumsily bumbling about the area? We do wish you would all go away.”
I did not reply.
“By your silence, I see that you are indeed one of them,” she continued. “I also see by your conduct this evening that you are more than simply a student of tropical insects.”
“It is enough for you to know that I am a faithful servant of my country!” I exclaimed, becoming annoyed by the precocious tone of my captive.
“As were the French before you,” she said. “And the British. And all the others . . . back to the Spanish in the time of my great-great-great-grandmother. All of them were only faithful servants of their countries. All of them, eventually, decided to try to take things with the tip of a gun or a sword. Does it not concern you, my German friend, that all others have abandoned their projects here? Only a few outposts remain, and they are mostly staffed by harmless religious zealots whom we have learned to humor. What makes you think you are any different?”
I disliked the presumptive nature of the Mambo’s question and the tone in which she delivered it. I remained silent for the rest of our journey.
Eventually, as the hands on my watch moved close to two in the morning, our circuitous route wound back to my headquarters. As far as I could tell, we had made the trip unobserved. No zombie footfalls pursued our own, and no ominous drums beat in the distance. Even so, to make our approach less conspicuous, I took us along the forest that abutted the house on one side—as opposed to across the wide field on the other—until we arrived at the back door.
We entered the dark, quiet house without event.
“Hallo!” I called to Inspector Knecht. “It is Gehrin! I have returned with a female Bocor—who is called a Mambo—so that we may interrogate her, per your instructions.”
My calls were answered with only a low moan. The fever that had overtaken my colleague had been as sudden as it was severe. All afternoon he had been very sick. When he finally did emerge from the upstairs bedroom, I saw that Knecht was covered with sweat and could only support himself by leaning against the guardrail of the staircase.
As my sickly colleague slowly made his way down to the house’s first floor, I busied myself tying the Mambo’s body to a chair. She did not resist. As I secured her, she regarded my colleague with what can only be called an evil eye.
Knecht descended the old wooden staircase slowly and seemed to run out of energy upon reaching the final step. Instead of approaching us, he sat down on the staircase and rested his chin in his hands.
When the Mambo was tied quite tightly, Knecht motioned that I should approach him. I did so. He leaned in close and spoke to me in whispers.
“Gehrin, I am still very weak from this horrible fever,” he rasped.
“I can see that,” I said. “I am sorry to have roused you. I assure you that I am fully capable of conducting an effective interrogation on my own. Please, return to your bed if you are not well.”
Knecht waved this idea away: “No, I insist on being present. I’m sure that you are capable . . . but even so, I wish to be here. ”
“Very well,” I said, turning my attention once more toward our comely captive.
No sooner did I swivel around to face her than the Mambo began to laugh. (It was not a pleasant laugh—no light expression of joy or delight—but the low, evil chuckle of a person contemplating revenge.)
She was not looking at Inspector Knecht or myself but, rather, out the window into the open field at the front of the house. Concerned that she had seen something, I rushed to the pane and peered outside. There was nothing beyond, however—only the empty sky, the short grass, and the low-hanging moon.
Frustrated, I slammed the window shut and closed the shutters. Then I stalked back to the laughing Mambo and turned my attentions to her directly.
“This is no time for levity, young lady,” I said to her. “Let me be direct: My colleague and I are in the business of extracting information. We have been carefully trained in this art and are capable of making uncooperative subjects feel pain beyond their wildest imaginings. That said, if you are cooperative and forthcoming—which I hope you will be—there shall be no need for physical persuasion at all.”
The young woman nodded seriously, yet a smile was still upon her lips. Although she clenched her teeth, an amused titter still escaped every few seconds.
“I see that you are not convinced,” I said to her. “Have no fear. You soon will be.”
I then took a chair from the kitchen and moved it in front of the Mambo. I sat facing her and took out my notebook and pen. I looked over at Knecht, who nodded in approval from his position at the foot of the stairs.
“We wish for you to tell us the means by which a lifeless corpse is transmuted into a zombie,” I said to her. “As a female Bocor—a Mambo, that is—you are in possession of this information. You see, there is much that we already know about you.”
Here she stopped her tittering and raised an inquisitive eyebrow.
“I see that I have your attention,” I told her. “Yes, we are aware of much of the ceremony. The goat that must be sacrificed . . . the drumming . . . the designs drawn upon the floor and over the corpse in cornmeal.”
As I finished this litany, the Mambo cast her eyes around the room as if waiting for the punch line of a joke. When it became clear that I had finished speaking, she once again broke loose with peals of dark laughter that seemed to spew forth from an evil subterranean cave within her.
“Yes!” she cackled. “It is clear to me—someone has made you aware of something, indeed. Haha!”
I did not have to look over to Knecht to know that he wished me to correct the situation. I stood and gave the jocular witch several hard blows across the face with the back of my hand. The Mambo presently fell silent. Though I had bloodied her nose and lips, she still managed to smile. I sat back down across from her.
“I can assure you that that was nothing, young lady,” I said sternly. “If you will not become immediately cooperative, we shall begin the interrogation in earnest. My colleague seated on the stairs is not as kind as I. His predilections usually call for me to begin by removing a subject’s fingernails and teeth, and then to move on to more serious methods. It would be a pity if you forced me to disfigure a face as comely as yours, but you must understand that I would not hesitate to do it.”
For a moment, the young lady only stared at me—still smiling, always smiling.
“Yes,” she said with a confidence that seemed out of place. “I think that teaching you to raise the dead—here and now—is exactly what needs to happen.”
“Good,” I said cautiously. (Probably my tone reflected my surprise. I had not expected her capitulation to come so freely. Given the woman’s fiery spirit, I was betting that the extrication of at least a few fingernails would come before any useful progress.)
“But you must untie my hands,” the Mambo said. “There are certain . . . motions involved . . . that I cannot describe with only words.”
“Very well,” I told her
, “but have no confusion. Any attempt on your part to escape will be met with brutal—or fatal—consequences. My colleague may be under the weather, but he can still shoot a gun. And the surrounding hills are rife with Bocors and Mambos. It would be a very small matter for us to kill you and obtain another.”
The Mambo smiled icily as I loosened the ropes that bound her upper body, and she worked her arms free.
“Now,” I said, taking up my pen and notebook, “how does one create a zombie?”
“There are many totems and trappings in our ceremonies,” said the Mambo. “But these are merely decorations. Formality. The real power of the Bocor and the Mambo is in one thing alone.”
“Yes?” I said, my fountain pen dripping on the page in anticipation. “And what is it?”
“A chant,” said the Mambo. “The power is found in an ancient chant that has been passed down to a select few since the oldest days. It is older than Muhammad or Jesus or Moses. It is older than the first men who sailed in barks from sea to sea. It is as old as the Old Ones themselves, who are older than men.”
“And how does it go, this chant?” I asked, hoping that my years in the conservatory would allow me to accurately record any musical subtleties to the incantation.
“I shall sing it . . . but then you must sing it with me,” the Mambo said. “Two voices are required. It is one chant upon another chant. Therein may be found the power. Listen to what I sing now, until you know it well enough that you can reproduce it perfectly.”
She then began an almost indescribably guttural and blunt-tongued cant. The words she spoke—if, indeed, words are what they were—seemed almost entirely devoid of verbs. There were animalistic clickings, spittle-filled stops, and trills of the tongue that were closer to the language of insects than men. As her mouth emitted these remarkable noises, the Mambo lifted her hands over her head and snapped her fingers to punctuate certain words (again, if words they even were). Her eyes rolled back in their sockets, and she seemed to enter a trancelike state.
The Ultimate Book of Zombie Warfare and Survival Page 18