The Ultimate Undead

by Anne Rice

  “Just like Ti Malice?”

  Coicou ignored him. “And I’ll give you a choice, Mr. Weber. You caused me much trouble just now, and I’ve half a mind to make a zombie out of you and be done with it.”

  “Please, God, don’t….”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in it?”

  “What’s there to believe in?” Weber cried. Despite his terror, sweat ran down his face. “A bunch of transplanted African mumbo jumbo accompanied by drums and aerobics in the night? That man, Ti Malice, he’s suffering from a nerve poison, that’s all. I read about that zombie stuff in the newspaper. He needs a doctor. A real doctor, not some witch doctor.”

  Coicou wasn’t smiling any longer. “My beliefs are my concern,” he said. “Don’t be so quick to criticize what you don’t understand. Besides, Ti Malice brought it upon himself.”

  “How? What did he do, anyway, that was so terrible?”

  “He mocked my family. Despite my warnings, he wouldn’t stop. And he was a public nuisance, always drunk, picking fights. Finally, he angered the loas—the gods.”

  “What did he do to you?”

  “It’s none of your concern. Besides, if I were you, I would be worried about my own fate just now.”

  Despite the night’s humidity and the liquor’s warmth, Weber felt icy cold begin to creep up from his toes along his feet and legs, toward his heart.

  “As I said,” Coicou continued. “I really should turn you into a zombie, too. To punish you for your meddling. But I think there’s an alternative. One that will please me even more.” And he grinned broadly, displaying a mouthful of perfect white teeth. “We’ll be partners.”

  “In what?”

  “We’ll split the profits fifty/fifty,” Coicou said. “And a resourceful blanc like you should do very well with this.”

  Weber pulled back deeper into the cushions. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Ti Malice’s paintings. You wanted to buy them, Mr. Weber. That’s why you came down here. You may have them. All you want. Take a planeload home with you to Los Angeles and build a new vogue for him.”

  “I don’t want his work anymore.”

  “But you’ll take it, nonetheless.”

  “And if I don’t.”

  Coicou said nothing, merely swung the pendulum until it glittered in the lamplight.

  The Weber Gallery was aglow and golden, each towering floral centerpiece in place, every wineglass polished, every bottle iced and waiting for the opening of “Caribbean Spice.”

  At six sharp, Weber unlocked the doors for his guests. They glittered with jewelry and fine silks dyed in jewel tones. Like a group of chattering tropical parrots they filled the room, eager to see, to buy, to be seen buying.

  As though in a dream, Weber wandered among his customers, listening to them ooh and aah.

  “Fabulous.”

  “I love the color.”

  “God, they’re so free with their work. Their lives are so natural, much more in touch with the basics than ours.”

  “David! Buddy, this is great.” It was Fred Lovell, the well-heeled producer. “I had no idea this work by Tu Malice—”

  “Ti Malice,” Weber said.

  “Right, Ti. Anyway, I didn’t know his stuff would be so exciting. You sure know how to pick ’em.”

  Weber smiled wanly. “Thanks, Fred.”

  “I can’t resist it. I shouldn’t do it, but I’ve gotta have some. Especially that one with the red angels in it.”

  “A marvelous choice,” Weber said, a bit too heartily. “I’ll just put a red dot on it. And Fred, I’ve got an even better painting to show you, one I hung with you in mind.”

  Docile with two glasses of champagne in him, Lovell followed him across the room. “Really? Wow.” He gawked at the white, green, and gold canvas, which showed a voodoo ritual taking place. “It’s terrific. I’ll take this one, too.” He patted Weber on the jaw. “Babe, you always know what I like.”

  Weber smiled his party smile and made a note on his inventory sheet.

  “What’s that necklace you’re wearing, Dave?”

  Weber touched the small rawhide bag on its leather cord. He fingered the bag lightly, twice. “This? Just something I picked up in Haiti.”

  Lovell sniffed loudly. “Boy, I’ll bet it keeps the mosquitoes away.”

  “Among other things.”

  Before the night was over, red dots had sprouted next to almost every painting in the gallery. Weber gazed at them, bleary-eyed from writing sales receipts. The show was a huge success.

  Guests crowded around him, patting him on the back and shaking his hand.

  “Terrific party, Dave!”

  “You’ve really got an eye for art.”

  “Dave, it’s another winning show. You always know where to find the best talent, don’t you?”

  “What’s your secret? Magic?”

  Weber knew he was surrounded, everybody yammering congratulations at him. But instead of the crowd he heard only one sound, the slow scratch of brush against canvas. Instead of the gallery walls, Weber saw a man’s dark emaciated hand locked in a death grip around a paintbrush, constantly moving. The brush against the canvas, the blind eyes, the slack, drooling mouth.

  “Yeah,” Weber said. “Black magic.”

  SURPRISE

  RICK HAUTALA

  YOUR wife Ann found you sometime after midnight, out behind the toolshed. You were sitting with your legs pulled up tightly against your chest. There was an empty whiskey bottle beside you, but you hadn’t drunk it all. You must have knocked it over with your knee or something.

  Make no mistake; you had been drinking earlier that evening.

  Plenty.

  It was all part of your Double-A program to help you deal with what was happening in your life.

  Double-A … avoidance and alcohol.

  A good solution, if you’ll excuse the horrible pun.

  But you’d been dealing with a lot of shit that—well, you used to joke with your wife that it would have broken a lesser man, and honest to Christ—sometimes you wonder how you hung in there for so long.

  In the span of six months—no, actually, it was less than six months—you lost your job, your mother died, and the bank, which had been making some not so nice noises before, began foreclosure on your house.

  You had plenty of life insurance, back from when the money in real estate was good, and quite honestly, you had considered suicide a few times … usually at night, when you’d lay there in bed, staring up at the ceiling and wondering where the money was gonna come from for all those bills.

  Shit, yes—it would have broken a lesser man, but you religiously practiced your Double-A method, and by Christ, it worked!

  Up to a point.

  You were getting calls from the bank just about every day, asking when you were going to pay up the last six months’ mortgage—with late charges—and what you intended to do about your current financial situation. You told that asshole in collections, Karen what’s-her-face, that you were doing every goddamn thing you could think of, but she should try supporting a family of four on next to nothing.

  You had cashed in everything—your retirement account, what was left of your inheritance, and the few valuable antiques you and your wife had acquired over the years. Day after day, you went through the classifieds until your hands were black with smudged ink, but—well, shit, you don’t care what they say about the economy in the rest of the country, up here in Maine there aren’t a whole lot of jobs that pay what you need.

  And quite a bit of what little money you did have went into your Double-A program.

  Why the fuck not?

  In your private moments—and you tried like hell not to grind Ann on this—you often wondered why she didn’t get the fuck out there and find a job herself. She’d remind you of how she hadn’t had a job in better than five years, and the job she used to have at the electronics factory had become computerized, so she would have had to g
o back to school before she’d be able to jump back into the work force.

  What did you expect, anyway, that she’d go out and get a job bagging groceries at the local Shop ’n Save?

  Between the two of you, you might have been able to make enough to scrape by a little while longer, but you needed considerably more than a minimum wage paycheck to meet your bills. Besides, who was going to stay home with the kids?

  Or were you supposed to put one whole grocery-bagging paycheck toward day care?

  But tonight—Christ, you finally reached your limit. You couldn’t help it.

  What started out as a casual conversation with your wife about your finances set you off, but good. Was it too much of one A and not enough of the other? Or maybe there was a third A you needed—a little more ass! What with all the stress you’d been under, you were staying awake so late at night that you never felt like having sex anymore.

  But maybe that’s exactly what you needed.

  Beats the shit out of you!

  Anyway, you lost it real bad and started yelling at your wife, berating her for all of your problems. Then, when Sally, your six-year-old, wandered into the living room, you started screaming at her to get her butt upstairs to bed.

  Damn, you were so mad, you threw the book you were reading against the wall, and it knocked the photograph of your wife’s parents’ wedding day off the mantel. It hit the floor, smashing the frame and glass to pieces.

  That’s when Ann lost control.

  You had told her that you hadn’t wanted even to talk, so it wasn’t your fault, but now you’d done something to set her off. Rather than keep the shouting match going, you stormed out into the kitchen, grabbed the nearly full bottle of whiskey from the counter, and walked on out the door, making sure to slam it shut hard behind you.

  Fuming and sputtering with curses, you went out across the backyard to the toolshed where you sat down, leaned back against the building, and just stared off at the dark line of trees bordering your property.

  Goddamn, you were pissed!

  Rage filled you as you spun off the bottle cap and took several long slugs of whiskey. Your heart was punching like a piston against your ribs, and you hoped the booze would help calm you down.

  After a while, your breathing slowed, and you felt at least a little bit at peace. Bats or some kind of night birds were darting back and forth across the powdery gray of the star-filled sky. All around you, the night seemed to throb with a weird purplish glow. You focused hard on the solid black line of trees until your vision began to blur. In the tangled lines of branches and leaves, you imagined you saw silhouettes of faces and the cold fire of eyes, staring back at you.

  You knew you were losing your mind, but you didn’t care.

  You were pissed!

  Fed up!

  So what if you lost your fucking mind. You’d lost everything else, so who gave a shit?

  Once or twice you checked your watch, but after a while you lost track of time. You were still fuming with rage. At some point you became aware of a deep, hard throbbing in your neck. At first, you were only mildly worried, but then, as the pain grew steadily stronger and sharper, you started to panic. A cold, deep ache shot down your left arm and up underneath your chin like you’d been cold-cocked a good one.

  It didn’t take long to figure out what was happening.

  You were having a heart attack.

  No fucking wonder!

  Your breathing came hard and fast, and the icy pain spread like an evil touch throughout your chest and shoulders. You wanted to stand up but were suddenly afraid.

  Shit, you didn’t want to die, but you didn’t even have the strength to call out to Ann for help.

  You were fucked and you knew it, but suddenly, like a bubble bursting, you no longer cared.

  You realized that this was probably what you had been looking for all along—an escape from all your problems; and this way, you didn’t have to commit suicide, so your family would be able to collect the life insurance money.

  So why not just go with it?

  Ride it to the end.

  You didn’t even blink your eyes as you cocked your head back and stared up at the night sky. It was pulsating with dull energy, and seemed at times to shift into two gigantic, dark hands that reached out to grab you. They wrapped around you, and then began to squeeze tighter and tighter.

  Go with it—you kept telling yourself—Just go with it!

  You thought of a few things you would miss—especially watching the kids grow up—but you knew that the heart attack was too strong and had gone on for far too long. Numbing pain gripped you tighter, like cold, pressing waves.

  Go with it! … Just go with it!

  And then from somewhere deep inside your head, you heard—honest to God, you heard what sounded like a thick piece of wood, snapping in half. Sound, pain, and light exploded inside you. You vaguely sensed your legs kicking out in front of you as you stiffened and desperately clutched at your chest. Then, in one final, hard convulsion, you pulled your legs back up to your chest and sat there like a fetus, willing the night to take you all the way down.

  Only it didn’t happen that way.

  You were frozen, lost in an impenetrable darkness, but you were still horribly alert and aware of the world around you. The intense pain was still there, too, as strong as ever; but you were somehow distanced from it, as though it was just the memory of pain. All around you, you could hear the soft sighing of the breeze in the trees, the rasping flutter of unseen wings, the gentle hissing of the lawn, and something else that sounded like someone crying … or laughing.

  You were convinced that you were dead, and you just sat there, waiting for the darkness to pull you all the way down.

  But that didn’t happen.

  Just at the edge of awareness, you heard something else—the soft thud of approaching footsteps.

  Someone was coming!

  Was it your wife … or someone else?

  You struggled to open your eyes.

  Or maybe your eyes were already open, and you had blown out something inside your brain and had gone blind.

  It didn’t matter.

  It wasn’t simply that you were frozen and couldn’t move; you couldn’t even feel your body. You were nothing more than a tiny spark of awareness, suspended in an endless, black void; but soon, that void was filled with a shouting voice. Through the confusion, you finally recognized your wife’s voice, frantically shouting to someone that she had found you and to call the rescue unit.

  You wanted desperately to move, to say something to her, to indicate that it was all right—that you were content to be dead and drifting far, far away. Everything was all right, and maybe everything would be all right for her, now, too. You struggled to open your eyes or your mouth to give her a sign, but you simply couldn’t.

  Her footsteps thundered like drums in your ears as she came up close to you. Her presence was a pulsating, burning heat that touched your mind as much as your body, and you were instantly aware that she was what you needed—she was warm, human flesh.

  A misery and longing as deep and painful as anything you’d ever experienced before filled you, and the darkness embracing you throbbed with a groundswell rush of deep, blood red. You knew—absolutely—that you were dead, but you also realized that you’d been like this for a long time … for a very long time.

  And you knew what you had to do next to dull that overpowering surge of loneliness welling up inside you.

  You couldn’t believe how loud your wife screamed when you opened your eyes!

  THIS ONE’LL KILL YOU

  BRIAN HODGE AND WILLIAM RELLING JR.

  IF Jack Meehoff had been a better comedian, he never would have ended up at the Croghan Brothers Mortuary.

  Meehoff’s problem was that he just wasn’t funny. Rather, that was half of his problem. He wasn’t funny, but he remained convinced that he was. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

  He was booed at the Com
edy Store in Hollywood by a predominately gay audience for telling an AIDS joke that he happened to have stolen from another comic: “Did you hear about the millions Liberace’s ex-lover was asking for, just ’cause they’d had sex after Liberace got sick? Hell, for a million bucks, I’d fuck Liberace right now. You meet me at the cemetery with a shovel and a check, and we’ll talk deal….”

  He was hissed at the Ice House in Pasadena by a largely female gathering for a joke from the point of view of a man who’d had a sex change operation: “It didn’t hurt when they sliced off my nuts. What hurt was when they cut out half my brain.”

  He was chased off the stage at Igby’s in West L.A. by a group of Saudi businessmen and their dates for a joke about their sexual proclivities: “What do you call an Italian virgin? A girl who can outrun her brothers. What do you call a Greek virgin? A boy who can outrun his brothers. What do you call an Arab virgin? A fast camel.”

  Soon, no comedy club in Los Angeles would allow Meehoff near its doors. His photograph was circulated among the owners, like that of a card sharp haunting casinos in Las Vegas. As another comedian said, they wouldn’t touch him with a ten-meter cattle prod.

  But Meehoff remained confident of his talent, even though he possessed neither wit nor sensitivity, timing nor decent material. What he did have was a legally changed name, which he thought was screamingly funny, and a big mouth, which was large enough to accommodate a pair of Buster Browns at once, Howard Stern should be so lucky. But those dubious attributes weren’t enough to get him work as a stand-up, so he answered an ad in the Hollywood Reporter. And ended up with a job as a janitor, working the night shift at the Croghan Brothers Mortuary on the corner of Melrose and Vermont.

  He arrived promptly at eleven o’clock his first night, a Sunday, letting himself in through a rear door with a key provided by the younger of the Croghan brothers. Meehoff stood just inside the door, letting his eyes wander about the mortuary’s back corridors.