by David Case
I thought. He watched me closely.
“After the body has died?” I said.
“Yes.”
“Impossible.”
He still was watching me, like a predator waiting to strike; some remarkable beast of prey which feasted upon the human imagination.
“Are you trying to tell me you believe this?”
“I know this.”
“Let me get it straight. The body is actually dead. The heart no longer beats, the lungs no longer breathe, the blood no longer flows. All the symptoms of morbidity are present, the life processes are terminated. And yet the brain continues to live?”
“That is precisely what I mean.”
“How long?”
He frowned and did not reply.
“Your instance of fingernails and hair—those cells live on for a certain duration, yes, but eventually they too die. It has been said that the head of a man, severed on the guillotine, lives for a few seconds as well. I might even concede that point. But are you speaking of a space of seconds, of minutes? Of hours?”
“I mean—indefinitely.”
I stared at him.
“Forever, Ashley.”
I continued to stare, wondering if this strange man possessed a sense of humor or if he were insane. But he seemed absolutely serious and convincingly sane. He also seemed concerned at my obvious disbelief. I still was uncertain whether I understood him. He had a habit of speaking in a circuitous manner, of obscuring his meanings, and perhaps I’d failed to grasp his point.
I said, “What do you mean by the brain?”
Mallory looked surprised.
“Why, the brain, no more and no less.”
“Every function of the brain?”
“Yes.”
“Awareness? Intelligence?”
“Yes, yes. The mind itself.”
He tapped his head impatiently.
“But that is monstrous,” I exclaimed. The full import of his statement struck me for the first time. It was impossible, of course, but even the theoretical concept was hideous. “You have a gruesome imagination, Mallory. A living, sentient brain, aware of its condition, encased within a decaying body? Knowing what was happening as its flesh rotted away and the maggots worked in its body? My God—”
“If the body decayed, yes. But if the flesh is preserved? What then, Ashley? Not preserved as the mummies we know, desiccated and withered, but capable of obeying the commands of the mind—able to move, to act, to live though dead—freed of the mortal shell. Is that monstrous, Ashley?”
“Yes,” I shuddered, with chills ascending my backbone.
“No, no. Not monstrous. That is immortality.”
He no longer appeared quite so sane. Or are such judgments in the eyes of the beholder, like beauty? Did the fevered glint in his gaze reflect from his unbalanced mind, or strike from within my perceptions?
“I can’t believe you are serious,” I said.
He scowled.
“Would Snow have come here, had I nothing to show him? No tangible results?”
“Snow? I thought he came to examine Sam?”
“Yes, yes. So he did. While he was here. But that was secondary, that was not the reason he came.”
Neither of us spoke for some time. Mallory reached out to bend the lamp lower, and the shadows soared up the wall, becoming dimmer. He extinguished his cigarette. I noticed, with a singular clarity, that his fingernails were well cared for and that he wore a heavy gold ring on his third finger. The room was very quiet.
“Shall I continue?” he inquired at length.
I didn’t want him to. I felt a revulsion toward both the man and his mad suppositions, but there was curiosity too, a morbid compulsion to listen to him; just as a passerby is attracted to the mangled remains of a sanguinary accident, so I was drawn to him, some gruesome gravity at work on my mind.
“Yes, continue,” I said finally.
“Oh, there are difficulties, many difficulties, but I am on the threshold of success. Ashley, you doubt me now. Know this, then: for three weeks I kept a dog alive after the heart had stopped beating.”
I shook my head. He ignored me.
“For ten days the dog was capable of motion. It walked, it wagged its tail, it scratched automatically at nonexistent fleas. There were no fleas. The dog’s body was dead. After it could no longer walk it was still able to move its tongue, to open its eyes, to quiver with canine dreams. And even after all external signs of animation had ceased, it continued to register brain waves on my instruments. Ashley, it could have lived forever, had I known the process of preserving the flesh. That is what we must find in the ancient symbols.” He was excited now, speaking frenetically and spraying saliva onto the desk. “With the dog, the blood began to congeal, the tissue to putrify. The brain continued to command the flesh, but soon the flesh had rotted and could not obey those commands. Do you understand? The brain can activate dead cells, but it cannot restore or replenish them. There is no digestive process, no way to assimilate fresh protein. As long as the original cells existed, they could function, but in that function they destroyed themselves. It is too soft, too weak, the living tissue. It must be preserved.”
He suddenly snatched up the papyrus roll and shook it before me.
“Find me the secret of the flesh, Ashley!” he cried. “I have the secret of the mind! Between us we have the key to eternity!”
I stood up, alarmed by his abrupt movement.
Mallory bit his lip and put the papyrus down again. He seemed ashamed of his outburst, a man who did not wish to lose control of his behavior. His lips were wet with spittle. I did not like this, being closeted with a madman. And madness, it must be. Madness, it had to be. I did not wish to consider the alternative.
“Do you want to live forever, Mallory?” I asked, recalling that one should speak calmly to a lunatic.
He smiled.
“Of course,” he said. “But even if I die—think of it—to die myself, and leave the legacy of immortality to mankind! To be the father of eternity! To be greater than Prometheus, bearing a gift far more magnificent than fire! If I die, Ashley, it will be as Osiris died—as a god!”
“You would use this process on man?”
“Why, what else? What other creature deserves it? Do you think it’s not been done before? Perhaps the longevity of the Old Testament, certainly in Egypt, certainly in Haiti. I have invented nothing new but simply rediscovered the knowledge of the ancients. I have traced the course of this knowledge, seeing it fade in its journey, picking up a piece here, a piece there. I followed it up the Nile, pursued it through the African deserts and rain forests, traced the gulf where, in the galleys of foul slave ships, it crossed the Atlantic. I persevered, Ashley. At times I fell into despondency, feeling I should never gather up the thread, but I never doubted it existed. At times I was weak—like my mortal flesh, weak, weak. I flew into drunken rages and sank into sullen gloom. But always, in the end, like a lamp glowing in the distance, I was drawn once again on my quest. Perhaps it was predestined. Who knows? I know only what I have found, and what remains to be found.” Mallory gestured, using both hands like a scale, weighing one against the other.
He spoke again.
“In Haiti,” he said, “there are zombies.”
I waited for a few seconds before commenting, “So I have heard, Mallory.”
“You still doubt me, eh? Still, I can’t blame you in your ignorance.”
“Have you seen zombies?”
“No, I’ve not seen one. Not living. But I was able to gather the legends and to understand the realities. Zombies are not immortal, although they survive after death. They exist as the undead for seven years, so the legends go, and I have no cause to doubt that duration. Seven years, give or take a few months—better than I was able to do with the dog, Ashley. Far better
.” He shook his head morosely and then continued, “But only by duration. The zombies obey their masters and, in the end, are rewarded by peace. Just as the dog obeyed me. It looked at me with devotion in its dead eyes, even as they glazed. It licked my hand with its decaying tongue. Perhaps the dog knew what I had tried to give it. And, in the end, I rewarded it with peace. I destroyed its living brain. I am not a cruel man, Ashley. Once my experiment had failed.” He sighed, and then his deep-set eyes once again glinted. “But you see, it need not fail in the future. Modern science gives us advantages that the Haitian witch doctors do not have. They have lost a great deal of the knowledge that was transported from Africa; carried in the minds of slaves, just as those slaves were carried in the stinking holds of ships. The art of preserving the flesh was partially lost. Or perhaps the necessary herbs and spices—chemicals, to us—were not available in the New World. Yet they retained enough skill to keep the brain alive for seven years, to anneal the flesh so that it did not corrupt; so that it endured until all the cells were exhausted by feeding upon themselves. But finally the tissue weakened and aged and could no longer function, although the brain lived on—although the mind survived within the brain.”
“If that were true,” I muttered, “these creatures went to their graves with awareness—they knew the fact; knew that they must lie immobile in their tombs through the ages.” Mallory nodded quickly, excitedly, as if he thought I were beginning to believe him. But belief was not necessary. Even as an abstraction, the concept was sickening.
“But their masters were not always unkind,” Mallory contended. “Even as I gave my faithful dog oblivion, so did they treat their servants—if the servant had been dutiful.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
Mallory leaned closer.
“I have seen, Ashley. With my own hands I have dug up the graves of the undead.”
Such was the intensity of his expression, such the compulsion of his convictions, that I could not doubt him. I believed him deceived, mistaken, perhaps utterly insane, but did not for a moment doubt that he believed his own words. My revulsion now had ebbed. I was fascinated. I nodded for him to proceed.
“Three graves I found, Ashley, tracing them through squalid villages and sordid towns, asking questions of suspicious squint-eyed men and wretched plague-ridden women, of black sorcerers and wild hermits. They denied, they deceived, they fled, but I never doubted; I pleaded, I bribed, I threatened, and, in the end, I found what I sought. Three graves, Ashley, in the mountain fastness where few white men have ever ventured. They were unmarked, grown over, secreted. I rooted them out like a voracious swine greedily snuffling after truffles. The first two graves were the same. The corpse had decayed, brittle bones lay in peaceful death, the skulls were picked clean and empty. But, Ashley—in both those graves I found that a wooden stake had been driven through the eye sockets. The stakes remained, upright in the skulls, and the skulls were void of contents.”
A faint smile flitted fleetingly over his cavernous countenance. “Do you understand what this meant, Ashley? Those men had been fortunate. They had merciful masters to destroy the brain before consigning their servants to the grave. I saw it instantly. These men had served well and were deserving of peace. By destroying the continuity of the brain itself, the mind was released, the brain could die. The stake had deprived it of the ability to function, to survive; no longer must it preserve its own matter from decay. By these negative discoveries, I strengthened my own convictions. It was logical. It was fundamental. It could be traced back even to the legend of the vampire, the wooden stake through his heart to bring him peace, although the myth had mutated; it was not the heart that must be spitted upon the stake, but the brain. I was overjoyed. I saw that the lost knowledge was even more widespread than I’d hoped, directly linked to the vampires of the Balkans, the jaguar men of South America, the crocodile men of the tropical rain forests of equatorial Africa; that it was more ancient than the pyramids; that some primeval ancestor of man, mixing herbs and roots with evolutionary curiosity, might well have created the immortal gods before mortal man existed. Ashley, I knew then I was on the right track, I knew I was destined to find this lost knowledge. Ashley, I have—”
He paused.
I was captivated beyond skepticism.
“And the third grave, Mallory?” I asked.
“The third grave,” he repeated.
He looked directly into my eyes.
“In the third grave I found proof.
“High in the central mountains, deep in brooding mahogany forests where stunted thorn trees claw at barren cliffs and the wind beats at the land with a pulsing rhythm compelling as the voodoo drums, I found the third grave. A mound of earth, no more, unmarked, unhallowed. I stood over it for a long while, certain at last that I’d found my proof. The trees were grotesquely malformed by the wind and twisted away on all sides as though I stood in the vortex of a storm—as though the trees themselves, living creatures, were cringing back from that unholy grave. I stood in awe, in dread, horrified at what I hoped to find. And then, at last, I opened the earth. I had a spade, the grave was shallow, within minutes I uncovered bone. There was no coffin, the corpse had been placed naked in the ground. I cast the spade aside and cleared the dirt away with my bare hands, gently, carefully, without disrupting the skeleton. The task done, I stood back and surveyed from a distance, delaying for final delicious and terrible moments my ultimate examination. The bones lay at a contorted posture, as if frozen forever at an instant of writhing agony. Only a few dried shards of flesh remained on the rib cage, the thigh. The burial garment had rotted to foul shreds. I regarded the skull. It was tilted at the neck. The empty eye sockets were black, the teeth thrust upward in a fleshless grimace.
“I knelt beside the skeleton.
“I straddled it, on hands and knees.
“I lowered my face over the skull, as if to breathe life into drowned lungs.
“I looked into the empty eye sockets.
“And there, Ashley, there within the naked bone, the living brain remained—”
I recoiled from his words as from a blow, then leaned back toward him as though drawn by perverse fascination. I mumbled something, God knows what, and he nodded.
“Yes, the brain lived,” he said.
“My God.”
“The worms do not devour living tissue, Ashley—they had spurned the brain while gorging on the body. I crouched over the skeleton feeling—what did I feel? I’d found the proof I needed, but the horror—I am not immune to horror. I felt a bond of brotherhood with that abomination; we were stamped from the same mold, pressed from the same template, shared the same human sentience. I spoke to the creature, my warm breath fell over it. It was not aware of me, of course. Its senses had withered with its flesh, it could not see or hear or feel. But Ashley, there is no doubt—it could think!”
I tried to speak. My vocal cords rebelled.
“And what did it think, Ashley, through the long decaying years? What does the mind think when it is divorced from all bodily sensations? Does it lose awareness, or gain? Does it sink into darkness, forgetting, becoming clouded without external stimuli? Or does it perhaps expand, grow, become a thing of higher evolution once it has been freed from the carnal dungeon? I did not know then, I do not know now. I was faced with terrible alternatives. I strained in silence, thinking to hear the creature’s brain waves within my own mind; thinking, devoid of physical bondage, it might have developed senses beyond human limitations. But I felt no transmission. I had to decide. I am not unmerciful, the fear of destroying something finer than mortal man wrenched my mind asunder. Yet I could not know, there could be no certainty. I wished for an encephalograph to read the patterns of those impulses; perhaps to devise a code by which I could understand them, could communicate with its mind. But there in the high forest I had no equipment, I had only my erring human judgment.”
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He shook his head sadly, regretfully.
“I could not remove the body. There already had been some difficulty over the opening of graves; I was hounded by blind authority. No, there were but two choices, and both were immediate. Night was coming on with tropical suddenness, the wind fashioned a threnody in the mahogany trees. At last, in agony, I made my decision.
“I cut a sharp stake from a satinwood limb.
“I had no mallet, I chose a heavy rock. The scene is engraved upon my memory. I remember it all in every detail. There was green moss on the rock, living moss; a small mammal scurried through the undergrowth; the shadows were long and jagged but for two; these, cast by storm-ravaged trees, intersected at the grave, adumbrating a cruciform symbol. I am no Christian, Ashley, and yet this shadowed cross struck a primitive chord in my senses. Perhaps it was this that caused my decision, who knows? I knelt once more beside the skeleton. I took the stake in my left hand and placed the sharpened point into the eye socket. With my right hand I raised the stone. My hand trembled. A bit of moss fell from the rock and fluttered onto the skull.
“I spoke to the skull.
“ ‘Forgive me, if I am wrong,’ I said.
“And I drove the stake into the brain—”
“It was gruesome. The brain is more resilient than one imagines, and the stake recoiled. I struck again and then again. Slowly the wood was driven down into the viscous mass, each blow dull, muted. In a frenzy I slammed the rock down time and again. One blow missed, crushing the front of the skull. Brain matter extruded from the eye sockets. It sickened me. I closed my eyes and struck once more, and it was finished.
“I had given him peace?
“Or had I committed murder?”
He stared at me, expecting an answer, convinced—through his own conviction—that I believed his tale. And I? Did I believe him, then? Had we been in the Red Lion, my own cottage, on neutral ground, I’d have thought it the babbling of a madman. But there, surrounded by his relics in that stone-walled chamber—it was a setting conducive to belief. Doubt was enfeebled by circumstance. The rational surface of my mind proclaimed it impossible, but from beneath that calm surface erupted bubbles of emotion, dragons from the depths of the id. And as they rose, the rational surface rippled.