by Mann, W. E.
It was only a small, wooden doll. But Angélique said that its eyes seemed to shine brightly. The priest explained to Angélique that she and her sister shared one soul. So when one of them died, half of their soul would join the afterlife. The priest said that he had stopped that from happening by performing a Voodoo ritual so that the part of their soul belonging to Angélique’s sister would live on inside the doll.
For years and years, Angélique wore the doll on a string around her neck and would never take it off. Not even to go to sleep. But eventually she married a Catholic man who didn’t trust the old ways. And, to please him, she took Holy Communion and promised never to wear the Voodoo doll again. She put it in a tin box and hid it in a hole in the ground.”
I looked around, remembering where I was. I realised that it wasn’t a far cry from being in a tin box in a hole in the ground. I started to feel a need for daylight and air.
***
One day Angélique went to fetch water from the lake. She had to walk for an hour to get there with four empty buckets. It was an unusually hot day, even for West Africa. The sun was pounding down on her as she trekked through the dust. She was thirsty and there was a mirage always hanging in the air in front of her.
As she approached the lake, she saw that there was a girl standing there with her back to Angélique, just staring out towards the water. It was strange because there was nobody for miles around and the nearest village was the one which Angélique had come from. At first, she thought it was just a trick of the heat or her thirst getting to her, but she felt that she knew this girl. In fact, it was more than that. She didn’t just recognise the girl, she actually felt like it was her standing there where the girl stood and she suddenly felt a terrible empty sadness deep within her like all of her insides had been taken out. She wanted to cry, but she couldn’t.
She approached the lake slowly. She didn’t want to because she was afraid. But she couldn’t help it, as if she was being drawn towards the girl like two droplets of rain, side by side, running down a window. The nearer she got to the girl, the more the sadness inside her threatened to overwhelm her.
When she was a few feet away from the girl, the girl turned to face her. Angélique felt a heavy jolt, like a heart-attack. She looked at the girl and felt like she was looking at herself twenty years earlier. But something about the girl wasn’t right. Her eyes were dead and she had no smile.
“Who are you?” asked Angélique. Her voice sounded like a distant whisper as if it was coming from someone else.
The girl answered slowly and carefully as if it was difficult for her to remember how to use words. Her voice came out dry and flat and seemed to echo and hang in the air like a whisper in a dream:
“I am Maude. I am dead.”
And she lifted her arms from her sides, with the palms of her hands facing the sky, to show that her wrists, with gaping wounds, had been slashed wide open. Angélique was horrified. But she could not move.
“You are my sister!” Angélique rasped with tears streaming down her face. “What happened to you?”
The girl stared at her as if she was trying to remember. And then she said, “Bokor made me a ghost. Bokor will make you a ghost. And your daughters. And their daughters. Unless you run. You must run!”
***
Freddie gulped loudly.
Samson added, “Angélique told me that Maude didn’t use the French word for ghost, Fantôme. She used the old African word, Jamby.”
He looked at us, waiting for a reaction.
“Come on, guys!” he said when he realized that we did not know what he meant. “You’ve heard this word in English before haven’t you?”
I shook my head.
“Zombie!”
thirteen
I just had to get out of there.
All of a sudden, when Samson said the word “zombie”, the delight of being in an underground hideaway, far away from Vanderpump, Barrington, Saracen, the Gestapo, the Führer and everything else that haunted my dreams, drained from me. Suddenly I was buried alive and I panicked.
By the time I knew where I was, I was standing breathless, knees quivering, by the Watchtower, near the boundary of the 1st XI cricket field, where they had just begun their match against Pinewood College.
Sunlight and the soothing crack of bat on ball would, under normal circumstances, have calmed me and organised my thoughts. But circumstances were far from normal.
Today was hot and muggy and the air seemed to sit stiffly and heavily upon the ground. The droning of bees and wasps and the fidgeting of crickets floated on the more hesitant growlings of a distant lawn-mower and seemed to press themselves into my ears just as the mingling scents of heady pollen and freshly-cut grass permeated my sinuses.
So could that really be it? Zombies! Surely that is just ridiculous; a thing of children’s stories. Really, could Barrington be attempting to zombify all of the sick boys? And what about Doctor Boateng? He would probably know more about it than anyone. But why would they do it?
Boateng and Barrington must be acting under orders, I thought as I sat and tried to distract myself with the cricket. They could not do this alone. And if Boateng had been sent all the way from the Frankfurt Ethnology Laboratories, the orders must have come from high up. Who knows? Maybe all the way from the top. So, what could we do about it? Nobody, not Wilbraham or Ludendorff even, could defy those kinds of orders.
I shook my head and forced a chuckle as the Talltrees opening bowler was loping towards the crease. Zombies, honestly! That’s just ridiculous!
Barrington had said that Miss Prenderghast and Head Matron were under the spell. That could only mean one thing. I didn’t know much about zombies, only silly stories in comic-books and sometimes films, when we were allowed to watch them. But it occurred to me that aside from brain-eating and obvious signs of decomposition, Prenderghast and Head Matron did seem to behave in a very zombie-ish way.
“Turnpike! There he is. You alright?” It was Reggie. Freddie was with him, but was wearing a dark expression. Samson was hiding just behind him amongst the bushes so as not to be seen with us. I looked down at my hand and saw that it was still shaking.
“Look here, Tom,” said Freddie solemnly, “I think we ought tell them.”
I paused, wondering what, if anything, I could tell anyone.
“Tell us what?” laughed Reggie, looking from me to Freddie. His smile faltered. “What’s going on?”
“Hey, Tom,” added Samson solemnly, “I swear I...we won’t tell a soul.” Reggie nodded in silent agreement.
“Tom,” said Freddie. “Tell them. It’s not as if we’ve got any bright ideas.”
I started from the beginning and Freddie chipped in whenever I neglected some detail or possible interpretation. I began by telling them about how Freddie and I had been followed into the Dungeon by Barrington and that it still disturbed me that while we were down there, he had shone his torch straight at me, but hadn’t said anything. I explained that Barrington hadn’t been following us at all, but had obviously been down in the Dungeon for some other purpose. I told them about the horrendous groaning which I had thought we’d heard in the dark.
I looked around to make sure that nobody else was within earshot. “So, Freddie and I found this secret room behind the Library, you see...”
“Crikey!” exclaimed Reggie. “I’ve heard about the Hidden Library. You’ve got to show us how to get into it. What’s back there?”
“Reg, shut up!” said Samson. “Let the man finish! He can show us some other time.”
“Sorry, Turnpike,” said Reggie. “Go on.”
“Well we found this book in there. It was laid out on a lectern like someone was planning to come back to it. This book was written in a strange language, which we realised later must be a language which is spoken in the Gold Coast.” I paused to look at Samson. “Do you think you would be able to read it?”
“Well, obviously my main language is English,” he said. “But I
still know a bit of the E’we language because of the songs my mum used to sing. If that’s what it is, I might be able to read it, I suppose.”
“Well it’s worth a try. We should try to get back in there and see if we can find out more from the book. But anyway,” I said, resuming the story, “what happened was that Freddie and I hid because the Colonel and Doctor Boateng came in.” I explained how the two of them were having a quarrel about Voodoo and that Barrington had said that the strange book had been given to him by a Witchdoctor in Africa.
I was beginning to feel slightly less shaky now. The more I told them, the more real and the more bizarre what I was telling them seemed. But it still felt good to be involving other people, people I was sure I could trust, like I was offloading part of the problem onto them. “Now look, you must swear on your mothers’ graves that you won’t tell anyone what I’m about to say.” I wasn’t really sure why, but mothers’ graves were always the touchstone for solemn promises at Talltrees, even if your mother was still alive.
“I swear,” said Reggie.
“I swear,” repeated Samson.
Each having sworn the oath, I told them the story that Pontevecchio had told Freddie and me about what happened to Barrington in Africa, the kidnap of his wife whose photo we had seen, and his own decline into madness and witchcraft.
“So you see,” I said, “what we saw was really just part of a long argument which Barrington and Boateng have been having for years. Barrington showed Boateng the book. We couldn’t hear much, but he said something about a Bokor and something about preparing a poison to bring all the boys under a spell. He even said that Head Matron and Miss Prenderghast were already under the spell and something...”
“Wait a sec,” said Reggie. “What’s the Bokor?”
“Well we didn’t know until Samson just told us when we were down in the Burrow,” said Freddie, looking at Samson who seemed, amazingly, to have turned rather pale.
Samson gulped and said, “A Bokor is an evil priest, a Necromancer. He can cast spells and... and...”
“Tell him, Samson,” I said.
“...he can raise people from the dead...”
“What? Come off it!” exclaimed Reggie. “Raise people from the dead?”
“Yes,” replied Samson. “You know... it was what I was just telling you about... zombies!”
Reggie looked at each of us with his mouth hanging open like a goldfish at feeding time. Then he burst out laughing. “Oh sure, fellas. Very good. Very good indeed. You really ‘ad me going there. Did you plan this one when you were in the War Committee Room?” He looked at each of us again and registered that none of us was sharing his mirth or poking him in the ribs whilst shouting “gullible!” His laughter was abruptly stifled and he said, “But surely you’re kidding... aren’t you?”
“Not this time I’m afraid, Reggie,” I said grimly.
And then he gasped and said, “So, the boys who’ve fallen ill...you don’t think...”
Freddie and I nodded. “Well that’s exactly the point,” said Freddie. “It’s a bit suspicious, isn’t it, that all these boys have been taken to Sick Bay, not one of them has come back and some have been there for over two weeks? And, what’s more, nobody’s allowed to see them, not even the Masters.”
“So,” said Reggie, “the only person who ever sees them is... Head Matron...”
“Exactly!” I added. “And, like the Colonel said, Head Matron and Miss Prenderghast are already under the spell...”
“God!” said Reggie. “That really makes sense. Both of them are really zombie-like. I can’t believe I never noticed that before. I wonder if that means that now they have to do whatever Colonel Barrington tells them to do.”
“Which,” I said, “could include helping him to turn everyone else into zombies.”
“So do you think Doctor Boateng was trying to stop Barrington?” asked Reggie.
“I don’t know,” I said, thinking it through. “At first, it sort of sounded like he was, but, thinking about it, he can’t have been. I mean, if he’s been given a travel permit to come all the way here from Frankfurt, it must be for something more important than just giving a talk to some schoolboys, don’t you think? He’s come from the Ethnology Laboratories. Isn’t this the sort of thing they do?”
“But if he’s an honorary Aryan,” said Freddie, “he can probably get any travel passes he wants.”
“Well, maybe,” I said. “But think about it: You don’t get to be an honorary Aryan for doing nothing. No. He must be important to the Party for some reason or other. And he is an expert on Voodoo. I’ve got this nasty feeling that the orders come all the way from the top...”
“What?” said Reggie incredulously. “You mean all the way from... the Berghof? Unbelievable!”
“Who knows?” I said. “But it is a bit odd that Doctor Boateng has been sent all the way here now. It must be an experiment...”
“God,” whispered Freddie in horror. “They’re planning to create a race of Nazi-Zombies!”
There was a silence when this thought sunk in.
I shook my head. “If it does come from the top, we can’t tell anyone, not even Mr. Wilbraham. So we’ve got to deal with this by ourselves.”
“Hang on a second, boys.” It was Samson from the bushes. “It may come from the top, but it must also be top secret. So that means if it got out, it would be a huge embarrassment for the Party, wouldn’t it? I mean, we’d need evidence. We need real, solid evidence for everyone to see. And we have to make sure everybody could see it without knowing it was us that found it.”
“He’s right,” said Reggie, obviously starting to believe us by now. He looked distracted, thinking it all through. “And we don’t know who else is involved or when all these boys are going to come back as zombies or, most importantly of all, what we can do to stop all this and save them, right?”
“Exactly. So,” I said, “any ideas?”
As it happened, Reggie did have an idea.
fourteen
Later that afternoon, Reggie, Freddie and I were waiting, huddled, in the disused Green Bogs on the First Floor opposite the Junior Bathroom. We remained completely silent, with Reggie holding up a hand like a conductor.
The Green Bogs were disgusting. In fact, I was trying to focus my attention upon my scuffed brown sandals because everything else in the room made me retch. The air was cold and bore a squalid stench. The urinal which spanned the wall was thick with what looked like mucus. The radiator, which had presumably once been white, was actually growing fungus. Literally toadstools. And not, I imagined, the edible kind. This room had obviously been neglected for a long, long time. The only signs of maintenance were that the forty watt bulb that hung listlessly from the ceiling still shed its reluctant light upon the vomitous filth below.
But it was a good hiding place close to the Surgery and the Sick Bay, a place so disgusting that nobody would ever think to look in here. And we needed a hiding place because just as Freddie and I had been about to walk into the Surgery as Phase One of Reggie’s strategy to get into the Sick Bay, we saw the silhouette of Colonel Barrington through the frosted glass panel on the Surgery door. He was in there with Head Matron. His voice was raised in anger. “For God’s sake, woman!” he shouted. “Can you remember nothing?”
Perhaps, I thought to myself grimly, she had forgotten the necessary dosage of poison for the latest boy to succumb to the zombie-‘flu epidemic.
After a few minutes longer in the Green Bogs, and just as I was beginning to wonder if it’s possible to die of disgust, the Colonel stomped briskly past the door behind which we waited. When we could no longer hear his footsteps, Reggie lowered his hand. Then he indicated to me and Freddie with two fingers – less like a bishop and more like a commanding officer – by pointing at each of us and then towards the Surgery, that we should “deploy”.
Phase One: Diversion.
Freddie put an arm over my shoulders and lent heavily on me. I helped him to limp
down the Upper Corridor, past the stairs up to the Sick Bay to our right, and through the Surgery door.
Head Matron seemed not to notice our entry and continued with whatever it was that she was doing, tinkering with bottles of who-knows-what in the far corner by the window.
I watched her for evidence of zombiness. She was a very strange woman who seldom spoke – certainly never when not prompted. She was tall and thin with slender fingers and elegantly groomed fingernails. In spite of the fact that her equally carefully groomed hair was bright white and that her skin looked paper-thin and brittle, like the wings of a dead moth, the rumour was that she was actually fairly young. In fact, the rumour was that she had nearly died in a house fire years ago and that the terrible burns she suffered had made her look much, much older than she really was.
Nobody had ever asked her about it, but I found it hard to believe. In fact, until recently, I had been convinced that she was just old. But now I had an alternative explanation for her condition: Barrington had zombified her. She was walking dead.
Following Reggie’s strategy, Phase Two, Freddie began to play up to his supposed injury by wincing and groaning.
I coughed lightly to gain Head Matron’s attention. “Ma’am?”
Still she didn’t notice us and continued carefully to decant a gloopy green liquid from a bottle into a beaker with a funnel.
“Ma’am?” I repeated more loudly.
She turned slowly towards us with a syringe menacingly raised, casting an arched shadow against the wall. Freddie looked at me in immediate fright.
“What is it?” she said flatly, placing the syringe in another beaker.
I suddenly felt silly and that our ruse was far too obvious. But all we needed to do was stall for long enough to allow Reggie time to hop up the stairs to Sick Bay, have a look around (a “dekko” as he insisted upon calling it) and get back without being caught.
“It’s Strange’s ankle, Ma’am,” I said. “Think it’s broken.”