Divine Fantasy

by Melanie Jackson

  “But not anymore?”

  “No. I no longer need the praise of outsiders to make me feel whole. In fact, I find the scrutiny of strangers to be dangerous and annoying. Still, I think it may be time for my story to be told. At least part of it.”

  Ah-ha! I had been right. He was not after me solely for my long legs. That was a bit of a letdown.

  “Why not do it yourself?” I asked. “An autobiography would get a lot of attention.”

  “Too much attention, at least in the wrong quarters.” He shook his head. “I am sincere about wanting to avoid celebrity. I need someone intelligent, low-key, and competent. And someone who would be willing to shade the truth in my favor this time.”

  Well, I was definitely low-key. One could stretch a point and claim I was competent. But intelligent, or willing to shade? This I was less sure of.

  “You used to avoid a lot of other things, too,” I pointed out. And maybe I was digging. “Women among them. Why look to a female biographer for help?”

  His response was heated. “That’s an out-and-out lie, perpetrated by my wife and the critics. I didn’t avoid women. I just avoided marriage after my first and greatest mistake. It’s not the same thing at all. I assure you that I like women very much. Always have.” The wrong look could have made this exchange a bit too pointed, but his dark eyes never dipped from my face.

  “I never talk business over dinner,” I said at last. It suddenly occurred to me that I would very much like writing this biography, but I also knew it might be the whisky and candlelight doing the thinking.

  “Very wise,” he answered, relaxing. “Now, do try the tuna. My chef is a master at his craft.”

  I nodded and forked up a small morsel of the delicate fish. He was absolutely correct; his chef was a master. I had never tasted better.

  Prepared to enjoy both the meal and the company, I leaned back in my chair and encouraged Ambrose to talk about his supposed work on the Panama Canal. He was very attractive and I knew that he also fancied me, but I also knew that absolutely nothing would happen that night. Unlike most men, in terms of morality Ambrose had more fiber than a granola bar and understood the art of delayed gratification. I could put off deciding whether I wanted to have a vacation fling with a madman.

  Ghoul, n. A demon addicted to the reprehensible habit of devouring the dead.

  Rational, adj. Devoid of all delusions save those of observation, experience and reflection.

  —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

  Chapter Three

  The next morning I decided to try snorkeling in the sea. I had only ever used a snorkel in a swimming pool, but I was feeling brave. I wasn’t sure I would like it, since I have always found the oceans I’ve known to be rather big and scary. But life is full of surprises and I figured that statistically I should like one of them. A call to room service, the only place the telephone could reach, brought a young man—his name was Emori—with a mask, snorkel tube and flippers, and a lovely basket of scones and jam, and a small pot of coffee.

  I ate all of it. That was foolish, since I was planning to go into the water alone, but the beach was so tranquil and the azure sky so calm that it seemed impossible to even imagine that anything bad could happen out there. Besides, I was famished, more hungry than I could ever remember being.

  I did have a small bit of help with my meal. The island had a mascot, a small calico cat whose beaded collar said ASHANTI. There were no mice on the island, so she wasn’t required to earn her kibble by the sweat of her brow. Or paws—or whatever cats sweat from when they engage in honest toil. She wasn’t all that interested in my scones or jam, but she obligingly shared the small pitcher of cream intended for my coffee.

  The ocean was indeed big and scary as I waded into it a half an hour later, flippers flopping gracelessly as I splashed myself with surf and sand, but it was beautiful too. Even now I can say that and mean it, though I am not sure I’ll ever go in again. I waded out perhaps ten feet into the blood-warm water and then let the gentle waves take me out to where the hotel brochure said the reef would be.

  To say that the reef is a rainbow of color is to do it an injustice. No rainbow has ever been made with such intense hues and shades. The colors in that clear water were so bright they almost caused the eye pain. There were corals in gold and violet. There were vivid red sea fans where equally red crabs went about some urgent crustacean business that involved a lot of antennae waving.

  Keeping near the safety of the surface and the shore, I could still see a carpet of what I later learned were zoanthids, a kind of wormy coral whose flowery white tentacles looked like a field of African daisies caught in a stiffish breeze. I saw a giant clam that was too large to be anything but frightening, but there were also tiny gobies, scalefins and a variety of pastel anemone fish. I thought for a while that I was being followed by an octopus but it turned out that he was after a royal blue ribbon-eel. The octopus was fast, but the eel even faster.

  There were also gray reef sharks, but they were small, no more than eighteen inches long, and they seemed indifferent to me, so I decided not to waste energy being panicked by them when they swam by beneath me.

  That was a mistake. Without realizing it, I allowed myself to be lured farther from shore than I intended. I was frog-kicking along, engrossed in the view, when all of a sudden, the reef just disappeared and I was over barren white sand that sloped away from the island at a precipitous angle and disappeared into utter darkness.

  I pulled back abruptly, fanning my hands as I treaded water and resisted the small waves that wanted to bump me farther from the shore. I don’t know why deep water is so very frightening, when anything over three inches can drown us just as effectively, but for some reason it just is. However, though I was unnerved at the sudden drop-off, I didn’t turn back immediately. There was something wonderful and awe-inspiringly awful about staring into the gray-blue twilight; something mesmerizing. So, I just hung there, aware that the waves were rougher beyond the reef and the water colder, but unwilling to turn back and admit that I was more frightened than fascinated by the vast nothingness.

  My bravery lasted maybe thirty seconds and then a great many small silver specks began rushing toward me. In an instant they were on me and then over me, a horde of baby green turtles like the ones in Sylph’s Hole. Right on their green heels—or flippers—came an uncomfortably large number of gray reef sharks. These were bigger, maybe three to four feet long. They seemed to be chasing the turtles along the surface instead of clinging to the sandy bottom.

  I was suddenly cold on the inside. It wasn’t fear and it wasn’t shock or anything else internal, of that I am sure. Not at first. But something from the outside had reached inside me and put a chill on my heart. The expression, I believe, is feeling that someone has walked on your grave. I was in the presence of some kind of evil, and it was only then that true fear awoke in me.

  I did an about-face and began swimming hard for the shore, clawing at the waves as I tried to pull myself to safety. But I stopped when all the thrashing sharks had overtaken me and I could feel myself to be alone again. Not sure why, I turned around and stuffed my face back in the water and looked back into the blue void.

  And that was when I saw it: the impossibility, the sanity-stripper.

  Know this about me. I don’t—didn’t—hang around in weird neighborhoods. I never saw a ghost or Loch Ness monster, and never expected to be kidnapped by a UFO. Nevertheless, I have an adequate imagination and an open mind, and I like to think that I can stroll the spooky side of the street with the best of them. But this abomination was beyond anything I had ever imagined, or had the capacity to envision or even hallucinate. I can describe it now, but at the time my eyes didn’t understand what they were seeing. That might be why I was more shocked than terrified in those first instants.

  It looked like a man. A naked, drowned man that was a few shark bites shy of an entire skin. The wounds didn’t bleed, they just flapped like flexing g
ray gills as the currents pulled them open and shut at irregular intervals. Everything was magnified underwater and I could see that he wore a leather belt with an Oakland Raiders buckle on it, and a pair of dark pyramidal charms about eight inches in length that could only be weights. He had the remains of dark canvas deck shoes on his feet. His skin was wrinkled and prunelike and hung down around his belly and ankles like it was trying to slide off his bones.

  This would have been bad enough, but the thing’s eyes were open and he was walking—walking—up the slope that led to the reef and then the island. The eyes—eye, really, the one that didn’t have an eel in it—paused on me, who was floating up there on the surface, and it opened its mouth. The lower jaw fell all the way to its chest and I could see things moving inside.

  I turned and fled, swimming for shore like I was being chased by a walking corpse with an eel in its eye. I fled right into the cloud of thrashing sharks and never paused, though I could feel their hard bodies all around me as they whipped back and forth in the water. It’s a wonder I wasn’t bitten repeatedly. But all of us were united in our desire to escape the horror, none wasting time on petty squabbles.

  I finally reached a place where I could touch bottom. I ran forward in slow motion and finally stumbled up onto the sand, stripping off my mask and flippers with shaking hands, and began staggering for my cottage with some notion of calling room service and demanding help. I was, if not blinded by terror, certainly limited to severe tunnel vision and unable to catch my breath as I staggered toward the phone and what felt like my only hope of salvation. My head swiveled back toward the water frothing with fish that were as panicked as I, and I was not watching where I was going, so it is fortunate that the first thing I ran into was Ambrose.

  “Whoa there! What’s wrong?” he demanded when my head whipped to the front and he got a look at my face.

  “M-m-monster,” I stuttered, gasping for air that didn’t seem to be reaching my body.

  “Was it a shark?” he asked, hands still on my dripping shoulders. They were very hot hands, and I was grateful because fear had frozen me to the marrow of my shaking bones. “A crocodile?”

  “No. Monster,” I said again, and then my brain chose a very interesting word. “Zombie.”

  Most men would have questioned this statement, but not Bierce. It may have helped my cause that the thing chose that moment to stagger out onto the beach. In the sun it looked even more bloated and horrible than it had in the water, especially when the eel wiggled out of the eye-socket and dropped back into the surf.

  Expecting that Ambrose would now grab my hand and we’d both run for it, I was shocked when he released me, took a leap forward, bounding into the air at an impossible height and speed and somehow managed to travel the impossible distance necessary to get behind the shambling horror and land without stumbling in the turbulent surf.

  Then he did something so terrible that, even months later, my hands are shaking as I type this. Without one second of hesitation, he wrapped an arm around the bloated thing’s throat and one around the top of its head. I was certain that he was going to break the creature’s neck—and maybe that was his plan, but the corpse had simply rotted too much to have anything in the way of connective tissues left. In any event, he didn’t just break the thing’s neck; he tore the entire head off, leaving a bit of ragged vertebrae sticking out of the top of the torso.

  There was no blood as the head came off, just a small gush of sludgy brown gore that dribbled down the trunk of the body

  I have no words to describe what this event sounded like—deboning a raw chicken, maybe. I could take a stab at describing the smell, but you don’t need these things creeping around in your memory and haunting your dreams.

  The head went sailing and landed about ten feet away in a stand of some kind of stiff aquatic grass with feathery white tassels. The head had red hair and a small tattoo under its left eye. I might have noticed more, but Ambrose wasn’t done mutilating the still-thrashing body, and though I didn’t want to see anything else bloody or horrible or impossible, my eyes refused to look away as he shoved the headless body to the ground and punched a fist through the ribs and into the thing’s heart. After that, it quit moving.

  I realized that I had been rescued. It had been done violently and with maximum gore, but I was no longer afraid of being chased by a bloated corpse. My brain took a stab at trying to decide if I needed to be afraid of Ambrose, but was too frozen with shock to make any decision except to evacuate my stomach of my breakfast.

  Ambrose got to his feet and looked back to see what I was doing. Which was nothing once I was done retching. I was staying as still as a corpse. Stiller, actually. The headless body continued giving an occasional twitch and wheeze through its headless windpipe, whereas I was as quiet as even the strictest librarian could wish.

  I made an unsuccessful effort to speak. After two ineffective tries I managed to gasp: “What is it?”

  “A zombie, like you said. Good guess. Few people outside of Haiti—apart from horror movie fanatics—could have pegged it.”

  Apparently satisfied that I wasn’t hurt or on the brink of hysteria, Ambrose bent down and, with a casual strength that wasn’t human—nothing about him seemed human in that moment—he picked up the body by the belt around its waist and then walked over to the head, which he picked up by the hair. He began hiking east along the beach. I swear by anything you like that the intact eyeball was still looking around as the head swung back and forth at the end of Ambrose’s long, pendulous arms.

  “Let’s go,” he called back over his shoulder.

  Not sure what else to do, I followed. My footsteps were clumsy and I was weaving like a drunk. My world was still dark around the edges and I wasn’t far from fainting. Hands down, this was the most insanely dangerous situation I had ever been in, but still I staggered along behind him instead of heading for my cottage and my heart medication.

  “Where are we going?” I asked as my heart and breathing calmed a fraction and I could see again. My voice was barely more than a whisper, but he heard me.

  “The barbecue pit where we roast pigs. It should have kindling in it.”

  My stomach rolled over at this, and the periphery of my vision began to go dark for a second time. “Why?” My voice was faint.

  “The body has to be burned. It’s…possibly contagious. A monster roast seems wise.” I had known he was going to say something like that, but it didn’t stop my dismay and horror—and sheer bewilderment—at his answer.

  “He…he has a disease?” I reviewed every disease I had ever heard of but drew a blank on symptoms that included being able to walk under water. And hadn’t he agreed that this thing was a zombie?

  I tried to keep up with Ambrose, but my feet were heavy and awkward. I was glad when Ambrose stopped at a ring of stacked stones and dropped the body onto the sand. Again using strength that wasn’t normal, he hauled a heavy grate away from what proved to be a pit that was about five feet in diameter and three feet deep. It was full of dry sea grass and driftwood. The wind changed directions abruptly and flung a new smell into my face. The barbecue pit held the scent of charcoal, dried tinder and a pinch of chimney dust where too many resinous pinecones have burned. It was a melancholy winter scent, poignant and nostalgic, that had no place in the present circumstances or location. I noted that I seemed to be having a number of olfactory hallucinations. Perhaps my brain wasn’t getting enough oxygen.

  “Well, he’s dead and walking around. So he’s probably diseased and may be contagious. And we need to burn him before anyone else sees or touches him. And before he manages to heal his wounds and start walking around again.”

  “Heal decapitation?” I asked.

  “You have a point. This one is probably not getting up again. It just takes a while for the body to get the message.”

  “Does this happen often?” I asked stupidly, sinking into sand that was blessedly burning hot on my too-cold skin.

  �
�No. Not around here. Last one I saw was in Mexico more than half a century ago. I thought they were all killed by the army at the end of the war.”

  I focused my eyes on my bare feet and not upon whatever Ambrose was doing in the fire pit. I tried to control my shivering. I told myself that my chest didn’t really hurt, that I was just cold from being in the water and there was nothing wrong with my heart.

  “Mexico?” I didn’t actually know what I was saying. I was just hoping that if I kept asking questions he would eventually say something I would understand and all this would be explained.

  “Yes. Pancho Villa was using them in his army—much to the dismay of his human soldiers. I tried to explain why this was bad, but in those days tact was a second—actually third—language, and I was far from fluent. Villa didn’t agree me.”

  Pancho Villa. Ambrose had mentioned him before, but this time I believed he had really met him.

  “You’re really Ambrose Bierce, aren’t you?” I was surprised when this came out of my mouth.

  “Yes, I really am.” He tossed the zombie’s body and then head into the pit. Then he peeled off his spattered shirt and added it. I didn’t see him strike a match but there was a flash of light that looked a bit like lightning, and suddenly there was smoke rising from the ring of stone. I was glad to be upwind. “And I’m very sorry about this, Audrey.”

  “Why? You didn’t know he was there.” I paused. “Did you?”

  He met my gaze. “No. And I find his presence to be disconcerting. Mysterious. I might even say ominous.”

  “Ominous. Yes. I’m trying hard to think of an explanation for…it…but so far nothing has suggested itself.” I admitted, “Maybe I’m just not up on my tropical diseases. We don’t have many zombies in Bavaria.”

  “They don’t like the cold much. They have no internal system to produce body heat, and freeze fairly quickly if they’re outside.”

  “Oh. Well, that explains everything.”