Zomby Dick or, The Undead Whale

by Melville, Herman

  It is some systematized exhibition of the zomby in his broad genera that I would now fain put before you. Yet is it no easy task. The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed. Listen to what the best and latest authorities have laid down, few though they be.

  “No branch of Zoology is so much involved as that which is entitled Zombology,” says Commander General Romero, former leader in combatting the latest manifestation of the zomby plague in this country, in California, who, upon receiving a grievous zomby-induced wound, for his remaining days turned his genius to zomby consultation until that inevitable time when, the disease progressing to its ultimate conclusion, his assistant was instructed to crush his skull with one swift blow. “It is not my intention,” he is known to have said before that fatal day, “were it in my power, to enter into the inquiry as to the true method of dividing the zomby into groups and families. Utter confusion exists among the historians of this heinous creature.”

  Thus also speak many other preeminent zomby scholars such as Brooks, bold Grahame Smith, and the trio of Mogk, McGuire, and Ma who have shed the lights of zoology, anatomy, and history on the subject. Nevertheless, though of real knowledge there be little, yet of books there are a plenty; and so in some small degree, with zombology, or the science of zombies. Many are the men and women, small and great, old and new, landsmen and seamen, warriors and priests, harlots and homemakers who have at large or in little, written of the zomby. Run over a few:—The Authors of the Bible (for who is Lazarus but a zomby sanctified?); Aristotle; Pliny; Dr. Schlozman; Sir Verstynen; Voytek; Ray; Linnaeus; Rondeletius; Willoughby; Sir William Hinzman; Lowther, Tiller & Conkle; Austin; J.R. Angelalla; Wallace; Murphy; Talluto; T.W. Long; Barnhart; Bourne; Kirkman & Moore; Tufo; Hocking; Luethke; Magnum; and the legendary Reverend Zed. But to what ultimate generalizing purpose all these have written, the above cited extracts will show.

  Of the names in this list of zomby authors, only those following Bourne ever saw a zomby in the flesh, as it were; and but seven of the scholars thus far mentioned were a real professional soldier in the latest war. I mean, of course, the septet of Romero, Kirkman, Moore, Brooks, Mogk, Ma, and McGuire. Doughty blades all.

  There are only three books, to my knowledge, which at all pretend to put the zomby before you, and at the same time, in the remotest degree succeed in the attempt. Those books are Romero’s illustrated history of the Undead, the astute investigations of McGuire, and the prolific work of Brooks and Mogk. In addition to his books, Romero’s visual body of work must be particularly lauded, for his many experiments and autopsy-floor inventions are indispensable to all authors thus far listed, myself included, all of whom stand on his venerable old shoulders.

  The original matter touching the zomby, so far as it goes, is of excellent quality, though mostly confined to scientific description, or storytelling of the truest sort, or well-informed speculation and only occasionally wild flights of fancy. As yet, however, the zomby, scientific, prosaic, or poetic, lives not complete in any literature. Far above all other undead creatures, its is a largely unwritten lifelessness.

  The various species of zombies need some sort of popular comprehensive classification, if only an easy outline for the present, hereafter to be filled in all its departments by subsequent laborers. As no better man advances to take this matter in hand, I hereupon offer my own poor endeavors. I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty. I shall not pretend to a minute anatomical description of the various species, or—in this place at least—to much of any description. My object here is simply to proffer the draft of a systematization of zombology. I am the architect, not the builder.

  But it is a ponderous task; no ordinary letter-sorter in the Post-Office is equal to it. To grope down into the bottom of the void after them; to have one’s hands among the unspeakable foundations, ribs, and very scrotum of the world; this is a fearful thing. What am I that I should essay to hook the rotting nose of this horror! I have swam through libraries and forced my way through forests to fight the undead; I have had to do with zombies with these visible hands; I am in earnest; and I will try. There are some preliminaries to settle.

  From all I gleaned from extant literature in my researches, tomes both ancient and modern, and no small amount of first-hand accounts, I submitted these findings to my friends, Simeon Macey and Charley Coffin, of Nantucket, both acquaintances whose opinions, knowledge, and wisdom are much revered among the Militia. Sim and Charley united in the opinion that the reasonings set forth in some theories were altogether insufficient. Charley profanely hinted they were some of them utter humbug. Those so deemed by Charley and agreed upon by myself and Sim I have discarded, but there is yet some clarity to be won from this muddle.

  First: The uncertain, unsettled condition of this science of Zombology is in the very vestibule attested by the fact that, in some quarters it still remains a moot point whether a zomby be but living or dead. Let us settle this issue for good and all.

  In his System of Nature, A.D. 1776, Linnaeus declares, “I hereby separate the zomby from the ranks of the living.” The grounds upon which Linnaeus would fain have banished the zomby from the phylogenetic taxonomy of the living, he states thus: “On account of their cold unthumping heart, their unbellowed lungs, their unblinking eyelids, their hollow, death-sharpened ears,—for what greater silence is there to hear from than the ultimate silence of death—their snuffling nose, penem non oritur, pectus dat non lac,” and finally, “comedunt carnem vivere.” To hear so definitively from such an august figure as that great classifier Linnaeus, the matter is settled; there is not life in the common zomby. But there are some creatures lumped with the zomby that are not zombies properly, and of these, each will be refuted in turn.

  It is chiefly with his name that I now have to do. The name zomby likely came from its first human iteration in prehistory on the dark continent, where the Kikongo call it zumbi and the Kimbundu dub it nzambi. Philologically considered, it is likely his name arose from those African languages aforementioned, but even here in the new world, those who speak the Spanish tongue have legends passed from the Aztecs and Olmecs of those one-and-the same creatures called sombra.

  Of my own knowledge, earned through harrowing experience in libraries, I know that down to this very year, 1852, in that tiny dark isle of Haiti, there are still found those called zombie, or in that language zonbi (similar to the nzumbe of the Mbundu tongue): men and women whose souls were caught by some shifty shaman and held in shackled servitude, but as far as my researches can tell, these are not proper zombies, or at any rate, not such as I have come to know them, for these Hatian creatures neither slaver nor eat flesh and indeed are warm to the touch and are possessed of a beating heart. These insular zombies we can ignore and bid them cleave to that mystic Haitian isle where they will trouble us not.

  Next: How shall we define the zomby? By his obvious externals, so as conspicuously to label him for all time to come? Indeed. To be short, then, the Zomby Ultima—his final form, and the most virulent—is a creature, a former human being who, upon expiring, has in him the tiniest spore, which sprouts in that damp inner darkness to send slithering invisible fingers of mycelium that then causes him to rise again after a dire fever—to Quicken. The former human is then a zomby; become a pale thing, soon foul-smelling as the most deliquescent fungus; a fiend from out the very bowels of hell’s imagination; had hell a hell of its own, there would you find the zomby, bent on devouring all the living motile creatures it may encounter. As stated previously, the zomby prefers brains above all things, but such sweetmeats, for all but the most determined and patient zomby, are out of reach behind that wondrous bony lockbox, the skull.

  There is no small debate as to whether any residual of human consciousness yet lurks in the zomby’s corpus. It is from no small amount of my own experience with
these matters that I put forth here that there may indeed be some influence upon the zomby by the person from which it was spawned. The behaviors of particular zombies, I assert, are influenced by the predilections of the human it once was. Granted, naught remains within the zomby corpus but a festering tangle of twitchy switches, but in some way are these yet connected to a source of power, as a miller’s water wheel that spins but is not connected to the grindstone. As you will learn anon, the zomby in its own particularity does act in distinct ways, and this I do believe to be that residual alluded to above.

  So, there you have him, your zomby of the ultimate stage, found only in human form, for no animal yet known to have been bitten by a zomby lives for long, and what is more, when that animal dies it remains dead; there is no Quickening, no reanimation. However protracted, that definition of zomby is the result of expanded meditation. Others with less thought involved have mistakenly misidentified other creatures and called him zomby, regarding which, these refutations; to wit:

  The Mummy: A mummy may have once been dead like a zomby, and is now motile in a similar manner to the zomby, but the mummy is not a zomby, because it is preserved, and does not devour living flesh, nor does the mummy rot and stink like the zomby, possessing instead a not unpleasant, dry, dusty odor. A curious similitude however, can be seen in the upraised arms and slow shuffling gait, but the difference lies chiefly in the fact that the mummy wants only to throttle you, or to curse you, while the zomby will scratch, claw, bite and rip your intestines from you as you watch.

  The Vampyre: A vampyre is not a zomby, for though he also is reanimated, and does devour—in his own fashion—yet he is not an unreasoning, slavering creature but instead sports a sly savagery and fiendish wit. True, like the zomby, the vampyre, if he bites and devours not, makes more of his kind, but this is a superficial similarity, the mechanism for which is altogether different. Finally, as any fool can state, no zomby known has ever flown, nor ever is likely to do so, lest it be a short fatal flight from a high rooftop where you did lure it to its doom from some safely adjacent building.

  The “Adam” of Frankenstein’s labors: Finally, the beast created by Victor von Frankenstein is also set apart from the ranks of the zomby, for although it, too, has been re-animated, it is not a biological Quickening, but is instead a product of science. Also, Frankenstein’s Adam is neither mindless nor savagely bent on devouring all the living, but is a creature whose intelligence and refinement are not matched by its outer shell; a malady shared by perhaps all humanity. Such creatures are to be pitied, not feared.

  Therefore, to all who may hold certain confusions, no matter how convicted, the preceding abominations are most decidedly and by definition not included in the domain zomby. With a dismissive wave, we banish them from this treatise and move on to its proper subject.

  First: According to magnitude of danger—a tricky subject as shall be seen—and the relative rarity which exists as an inverse relationship to the former, which is to say that the less common the zomby, the more dangerous it is. Thus, according to characteristics evinced by each type, I divide the zombies into three primary Books (subdivisible into Chapters), and these shall comprehend them all; in addition I have appended a fourth book which lists briefly some of the heroic sub-species of homo sapiens sapiens who do battle against the zomby.

  Book I (Duodecimo): Zomby Ultima

  Book II (Octavo): Zomby Penultima

  Book III (Folio): Zomby Ante Omnes

  Book IV (Appendix): Homo Sapiens Venatores

  As the type of the Duodecimo, I will present the Zomby Ultima, known by most as the Common Zomby, or simply Zomby, which comes in the most profligate array and, being the zomby type of which most are now aware—at least in the contiguous United States and the northernmost environs of Mexico—it is the one with which most concern themselves and which is the most immediately dangerous; of the Octavo, I will present the Zomby Penultima, of which, despite the name’s implication, there may be many types, each with varied intellectual, moral, and spiritual predilections; of the Folio, I present the only member of that thin but vital chapter, the Zomby Ante Omnes, primary mover for the whole of the quickened dead’s species, greatest in size; its intellectual or moral spirit unknowable. I beg of ye: Look beyond the common zomby; for the devil you do battle with in front of you may blind you to the larger Lucifer looming close behind.

  These zombies are hereby ranked according to size from smallest to largest, and within each category from least to most perilous. The broad distinctions herein also are presented from least to most perilous. All this you shall understand forthwith. So Ishmael: tend to your quill with the same care as you sharpen your axe, and to it.

  Book I (Duodecimo): Zomby Ultima

  Conventions being what they are, that is to say, both regionally and circumstantially originating, it will be no surprise to the astute reader that, indeed, more than one moniker may be applied to the profligate number of zombies herein presented. I but relate the nomenclature as used by Militia on the field of battle. As many know, there is no small amount of black humor in the trenches, and I make no apology for anything indecorous included here.

  It should be noted that, in addition to these classifications, there also exist among the Militia, other naming conventions, mentioned earlier in the brief encounter Queequeg and I had in New Bedford with what I then called a soloist, which is to say a single zomby. As these classifications provide little information beyond numbers, I will exclude them from this chapter, but any imaginative reader can easily envision trios, quartets, and so forth, up to the full orchestra, a site few see and hear and yet live to tell of the performance.

  Also, before proceeding further, some clarity is necessary as to race. Some pretend to see a difference between the New Zealand and Australian zomby, or the English and the French zomby, or the African and the Asian zomby, or—most especially of late—the Mexican and the Union zomby. But they precisely agree in all their grand features; nor has there yet been presented a single determinate fact upon which to ground a radical racial distinction, for the zomby are as one race bent on one thing only. It is by endless subdivisions based upon the most inconclusive differences that some departments of natural history become so repellingly intricate.

  In various sorts of zombies, they form such irregular combinations; or, in the case of any one of them detached, such an irregular isolation; as utterly to defy all general methodization formed upon such a basis. On this rock every one of the zomby-naturalists has split. The tack I take is to present the zomby in some Euclidian-like purity of form, as it were, and allow the reader, from his or her own experience, to note the possible combinatorial details. Among the main category of zomby ultima above can be found any number of phylum, including the following:

  Chapter I. Headless Zomby; Ichabod Zomby

  Simply put, this is a severed yet still-slavering head. His great lips present a cable-like aspect, if they have not been deformed into slashed folds of flesh from its insensate feeding. Its grand distinguishing feature, the teeth, are often most conspicuous for he will gnash and slaver and you can hear its teeth clacking together till they break; the Ichabod has been known to drag itself slowly by the teeth alone toward a victim; this type of zomby is no winner of races.

  On flat new-mown grass, or on a trampled battlefield, the Ichabod can be plainly seen projecting from the surface, is relatively easily despatched, and therefore poses little danger. However, beware!, for this zomby is a sneaky sort; bushy terrain, or tall grass, and in water—both floating and submerged—this zomby poses a dire threat, for dangers concealed are those that most often take us down. Creating such a zomby—which is to say, beheading one—is known among Militia as “Craning,” this being, of course, the gerund derived from Ichabod’s surname.

  The only benefit regarding the Ichabod is the ease with which the head may later be staved in. It is best to prop the head face-do
wn against a hard surface, preferably in some corner, thereby steadying the thing. Billy Langdon did once swing at such an unsecured head and instead of crushing the skull, his mace made of it a kicking ball and that ball smacked right into Billy’s own bare calf where the ball took a bite, and then we had to let Billy drink himself to death with the last of our pilfered moonshine before crushing his skull.

  Stand aside, I say! and ever ware the teeth and any other fluids; let such never touch thy own wet parts; such advice is of value in many a dire situation, not limited to zomby encounters.

  Chapter II. Zomby Philosopher; Thoreau, etc.

  Very shy; always going solitary; unexpectedly surfacing in the remotest and most sullen woods; his straight posture when uninjured and his solitary nature make this zomby rise like a tall misanthropic spear upon a barren plain; gifted with such wondrous power of solitude, as possessed by natural philosophers, this zomby prefers to wander wild places alone. Take heed however, for despite its solitary nature and its predilection for squirrels and other easily caught rodents, it is yet a zomby and if given a fair chance, will rip from thee thine innards and greedily choke down thy red essence.