“Your turn, m’sieu the artist — ”
Narcisse’s teeth were scissors, shearing the word “artist” out of tin. I picked up my shovel and dug. The grave sank to my ribs. Shoulder-deep. Five feet down through solid clay, each scoop weighing half a ton. My back stooped, now, with no volition on my part. I was a robot, rusty, but working. Six feet. I remember a sudden stoppage of vibration in the air; remember looking up out of the trench into Tousellines’ face and hearing him tell me it was midnight and the twenty-four hours of funeral drumming had come to an end. Seven feet. I was thinking that, the grave being exactly ten, we should come to something presently.
Then the spade jarred in my hand, bump; the shovels round me were scraping earth from a rosewood lid; I climbed out of it. I didn’t approve of standing on coffin lids; at least not on that one with that stake-hole splintered through its heart. Nor did I hanker to stand on the lip of that violated grave and watch the lid pried off with shovels.
There was no time for raising the casket, and Narcisse ordered it opened on the grave-bottom. The levering shovels jimmied and creaked; nails tore loose with a crying sound.
“Nom de Dieu! Sluggards!” Narcisse bawled down. “Remove that curst cover and lift him up here!”
Creeeek! The sound of the lid ripping off was the sound of everybody’s ripping nerves. It was too much for the Christian field hands down below. The lid came up, and they came up with it. Narcisse swung forward with his bull’s-eye lamp and sped a white ray into the grave. Torch-flares and goose-livered faces crowded forward; leaned around me and looked down. Somebody gurgled like a throat drinking iodine; another said, “Aaaah!” like a connoisseur with an opened jewel box in his hand; and Tousellines, beside me, squeezed my elbow numb with a gray-knuckled fist.
But the corpse-quiet body in the coffin said nothing, absurdly little in that rosewood long box, like a doll wrapped up for delivery with its prim-toed boots sticking from the end of the wrappings, pointed up at us. A doll wrapped up! I didn’t remember that black cloth cape which shrouded the body from head to foot like the windings of a mummy. Where the fold of the cape was cracked open over the face, like the peep-hole of a Moslem woman’s veil, one wax-lidded, shuttered, sleeping eye showed through. I could see where the hands were clasped in repose under the shroud. Of course it was Uncle Eli in that grave-cloth. But I didn’t remember any such mantle!
Then my eyeballs chilled in my head; my stare was freezing on that black-wound body. It wasn’t what looked like a dark stain over the breast. I was goggling in panic at a shoe — the prim-pointed toe of one upturned boot —
My mouth flew open to yell. A whiplash cracked in the night behind me. I spun, screaming nothing. Tousellines pitched against me, clawing at a hanging arm. A voice screeched, “Cacos!” The dark downhill began to explode.
I didn’t have a chance to reach the pistol in my coat. You can’t dig graves wearing the coat of your only and best suit, no matter what the reduced condition of the garment. I’d shucked the jacket and hung it on the angel. Before I could broad-jump the grave, bullets were coming like a blizzard from all points of the compass, woodpecking the tree, ricocheting off the angel’s face.
Singing like an artillery shell, a hurled machete blew over my head, and I dodged for the tree. Shadows were running on the slope below. Darkness sparked and crackled like a corn-pan on fire. The whack of police rifles as the Garde d’Haiti opened up. The slam, bang, thud and whang of all manner of gunnery downhill. The croon of flying lead, the whine of thrown knives, a starting chorus of caterwauls, shrieks, grunts, howls, mingled with the screams of the fleeing Christian gravediggers and the shrill shouts of Lieutenant Narcisse, and sent a rumpus of echoes running down the valley.
Already a khaki gendarme was down, mysteriously unable to rise, kicking as if he were trying to pedal a bicycle. Cornelius was rolling in the mud, struck somehow in the throes of a fit.
Stovepipe hat jammed over his eyebrows, Maître Tousellines crouched behind the mound of fresh sods, nursing a broken arm. Narcisse was sprawled flat on the clods, firing loudly at the dark. Little showers of dirt kept squirting up around his bandaged dome. The three remaining gendarmes lay belly to mud in a line beyond the tree; I couldn’t see them, but I could see the fire of their guns, jumping one-two-three in the gloom like motorcycle exhausts. The gravediggers had departed in the direction of the Caribbean, and I never saw them again.
Thrown to the ground, the torches blazed like election night bonfires on the hilltop; the enemy was protected by night; and we were surrounded like an island. I wanted my pistol badly, finding myself armed with nothing more than a long-handled shovel. Under cover of the earthworks, I inched along with my eye on the angel where my coat was being torn to ragtag. It was tough traveling on that shot-swept hillcrest. I cursed myself bitterly for having abandoned Pete to the mercies of the château down below. By lifting my head and daring extinction, I could see the roofs in the valley. The valley was quiet, shadowy, moonlit. No lights showed in the house. I consoled myself with the thought that our preoccupation with the cemetery had decoyed the enemy assault to the hilltop. Small consolation when I remembered the cadaver in the graveyard at my back.
I dared a dash for my coat; ran headlong into a knot of Negroes who soared out of shadow and were at me like panthers. Negroes everywhere. I didn’t get the pistol. I was thrown back against the monument. Face averted from the opening in the ground, I had to fight like a barbarian to save my life. Time stood at zero while I slapped black topknots with the shovel. It was like hitting gongs. The shovel rang. Blue bodies twirled and danced around me. I saw heads and hit them. Things hit me. I don’t know why bullets didn’t. There were explosions on all sides. A stone caught me hard in the eye. My nose bled. Smoke, flame-balls, knife-shine, tooth-shine, black arms boiled around me where I stood under my guardian angel and stirred the tempest with a shovel.
I stirred that little battle into a witch’s cauldron. Through that roaring surf of bodies and noise I caught crazy-quilt glimpses of Caribbean, jungle, valley, the moonlit roofs of the château; and every time I thought of Pete I howled like static and hit another head. Narcisse went pirouetting by me like a tackled football end. Tousellines sat on the ground with the top sheared from his hat and his arm in his lap. I guess the gendarmes were somewhere. It wouldn’t do to think of the man in the grave under the tree and those prim-pointed boot-toes. Fighting was better. Don’t slug till you see the whites of their eyes.
Of course this heroic bit of biography wasn’t as bold as it sounds and lasted half as long as the telling. The shovel rang damn! damn! damn! on half a dozen heads like black coconuts; and there must have been a hundred of those Cacos. Fifty for Narcisse. Fifty for the angel and me. I stood there with my nose-bleed and shinered eye, walloping out with the scoop, and I couldn’t miss.
Somehow Narcisse had climbed the pedestal of the monument and was hanging there like a Bolshevik on Union Square, waving a bloody fist and hollering over the heads of the mob, “Gran moon li mort! Cacos — ici — Voilà! Moon li mort!”
Tousellines shrieked at me, “Let them come, m’sieu! He tells them the old man is dead — demands them to look in the grave and see — ”
Whatever the officer was trying to tell them, his howls only served to inflame the riot, drawing a volley that sent him leaping from his rostrum. “Non! Non!” was the roaring response. “Papa Proudfoot gran’ zombie — ” Narcisse was thrown crabwise through a smoke-billow. Lights banged all over the hilltop. If those Haitian natives were marksmen I’d have been shot to sponge, but they made up in ferocity what they lacked in science. “Papa Proudfoot! Papa Proudfoot!” — “Zombie! Zombie!” Nothing Narcisse could say would drown that battle cry.
Loudest of all it screeched from a triangular mouth that swam at me through the din. A big black man, naked to the belt, with a rifle club-fashion in his hands. Sinews egged out on him like lumps of wet coal; his face was all out of shape; his mouth — I remembered that mouth. Ha
relip Louis! Harelip Louis, the gendarme corporal, who’d been left in the house to guard Pete!
He plunged at me, swinging the rifle at my head, yelling. I shouted his name, and he struck at me again. The gun-butt sliced past my face. I hit at him with the shovel. Larruping downward, his rifle-stock whacked my hands, and the shovel went flying out of my fingers.
I screamed his name and jumped him, grabbing his arms, throwing him flat under a trampling stampede of ankles and feet. I banged his head against the angel’s pedestal. I screamed, “Where’s Pete! Where’s Pete! Where’s Ma’mselle?” and let up on him for an answer.
He squalled, “Ma’mselle no more! Zombie come to house, call Louis, tell Louis go ’long Cacos! Louis see zombie. Papa Proudfoot gran’ zombie — ”
I drove a knee in his stomach and banged his head. “Where’s the girl?”
He kicked his heels, fighting like a cat. He screeched. “Ma’mselle in château. Ma’mselle finish. Zombie tell Louis go away from door. Zombie go to door, finish Ma’mselle — ”
His eyes were white mirrors of terror, glaring shiny into mine. He got a thumb on my cheek, slid it over the bone and pressed on my eye. We rolled through a churn of legs. Something hit me a crack on the neck; driving me sidewise. Louis wrenched away from my hands, planted a foot in my spine and shoved me smothering into the mound of soft clods. I got my fingers closed on something that felt like iron; rolled; groaned to my feet, the iron crowbar that had been the stake in the grave gripped in my hands. I saw the harelipped face; screamed, “What happened to the girl? Pete! Pete!” and tried to swing the iron stake.
Louis dodged. I tried to lance him with the stake. That solid iron post seemed light as a feather and it must have weighed plenty. It threw me off balance, spun me in a futile twirl and spanked the granite angel a whack in the pants. Stone splinters spurted through the air. The blow tore the bar from my fingers. I staggered backward and had to windmill my arms to keep from flopping into the grave.
Louis towered over me. I perceived that there was a knife in that upraised fist where the rifle had been. I saw that the blade was aimed to stab me between the eyes. It didn’t come. I seemed to be waiting. The knife seemed to be waiting. The blade wouldn’t drop. The black man had jammed the joint of his elbow. The effort to bring down the knife wrung streams of ink from his forehead, started his eyes from their sockets.
Then I saw that those goo-gooed eyes weren’t looking at me, but over my shoulder at something behind my back! The cry that blew from his rabbit lips would have waked the dead. And did!
“Stop!” The voice spoke out of the grave.
In a quiet so total and sudden that the night seemed to have smashed, I spun and looked down.
The body in the coffin moved! The hands beneath the black cape stirred. The eye in the shroud was wide open, glassy, staring. The cloaked mouth moved in its cowl-like wrappings, and a voice came through the cloth in a muffled, toneless neigh —
“Cacos, I come — The King of All Zombies waits to lead you. Let the dead master rise from his tomb — ”
The voice died out in a horselike, whinnying sigh. The black-wrapped head lifted slowly from its pillow. The body in the coffin swayed to a sitting posture. There was a hideous minute while I stared at the dark stain over the breast. A corresponding smear where the cape had been torn out in the back. I could see where the stake, going through, had left a dent in the bottom of the coffin. Once more I was glaring at a streak of color across the toe of the left shoe.
I knew my colors, and I knew that streak. Winsor Newton, dandelion yellow!
The black-wrapped body stood upright in its grave!
XII.
Buried!
“Vive le mort! King of all Zombies—”
“Vive le mort! King of all Zombies—”
“Exurgent mortui!”
“Exurgent mortui!”
The minute won’t be clocked when I can efface the memory of that mummyish body rising from its grave after twenty-four hours’ interment in a coffin anchored by an iron stake and tons of angel. Nor will I speedily forget the look of that empty casket with the dent in its floor on the grave bottom, while its rightful inhabitant stood above ground on the sods that had covered him, his arms spread wide under the cloak, the one live eye gleaming in the black-muffled face like an oily fish-scale, the clammy voice doing things to that Caco mob.
“Mortoo tombeau, à moi!”
“Corpse in the tomb, to me — ”
Words neighed through the black mantle — that flabbergasted creole-Latin Voodoo gibberish — the woolly heads of the Negroes lifting and falling, dark cabbages on a sea of sound. The hidden mouth spoke and the mob bayed a recitative chant. The fallen torches splintered to shed a salmon light through the nodding topknots. The moon’s rays slanted through the bones of the silk cotton tree and scarred the black-hooded figure on the mound with stripes of witch shine. Picture that silhouetted figure atop the clods, that moon-striped shadowy face with its solitary eye. Listen to that voice from the tomb, and visualize a one-time portrait painter, Cycloped himself on the fringe of that scene.
The grave yawned between me and that hoodoo on the mound. From what source I drew the locomotive power, I don’t know; but I made a rearward fumble to find my coat and sneak the revolver from its tattered pocket. My hand was weaker than a leaf of stale lettuce. The gun trembled in my aim.
I bawled into singsong uproar, “You’ve been in the house; what have you done with the girl?” The effort tore a cartilage in my throat, breaking shrill-lunged above the Caco chant.
God knows what sort of answer I expected; certainly not the one that came. At my unexpected outburst the black mob, which had forgotten me, stopped their holyrollering. The thing on the clod pile wheeled in this silence and fixed me in the vision of that fish-scale eye. What a stare that was! The venom radiating from that opalescent eyeball would have poisoned a rattlesnake.
“Fool!” came the muffled malediction, “would you speak thus rudely to a zombie?”
“Zombie be damned,” I managed to blurt. “Pete — what have you done with her?”
Lidless, mica-bright, the eye dealt me a cataleptic stare that held me as if in suspended animation; the voice lowered to a sermon tone deep down as the bass notes of a dungeoned pipe organ.
“I have taken care of the girl. At last the ungrateful little wench has been rewarded for her thanklessness. I shot her through both her little eyes at eleven o’clock tonight — ”
“God!”
I swung the pistol, working the trigger. There were horrible seconds while the black revolver chattered like a typewriter. Monstrous across the grave from me, the thing in the black cloak screamed, but wasn’t shot. Not till then did I realize that the Widow Gladys’s gun was as empty as the rifle I’d taken from Toadstool. Emptier! There were no nick-of-time gunshots coming from handy vines to save me this trip.
Sweat streamed into my eyes as I heard that cloth-drugged mouth screaming, “Blackguard! would you try to murder the dead?”; and the Negro mob came in two hollering rivers around the ends of the grave and crashed fighting on top of me. Harelipped Louis hit me with the force of a coal truck; I was thrown like a calf; ropes sailed around my throat, thongs pinned my wrists behind my back; I was stampeded and trussed before I could excavate my face from the mud.
I was picked up, thrown from hand to hand, shuttled, whirled as so much stacked wheat through a binder, and my next impression was total paralysis imprisoned in a monstrous ball of twine, bound neck to ankles like a stick wrapped with kite-string.
Cloaks sweeping the earth like a bishop’s robe, the black figure came down off its rostrum and rustled at me, raging like a witch. Now it might have been an old woman in mourning gowns shrilling senile imprecations at a vandal in her cemetery lot.
“How would you like,” was the hag-shrill screech, “to try my coffin for your very own?”
I could only stare up at the eye.
The cape hem-swished the mud as
its wearer made a pirouette.
“Cacos, ici! To the grave with him!”
“To the grave with him!”
Smoky hands shot out to grab me. I was lifted like a sack of meat, propelled through the air, held horizontally over the grave, dropped. Wham! If I had not been spun in a cocoon of rope, that ten-foot drop into a coffin would have broken my spine in four places and killed me outright. A moment was coming when I was going to wish it had.
As it was, my head walloped the pillow; the jolt whacked my breath out of me; then I could see my oxfords pointing their toes at the foot of the rosewood box, earthen walls sheered up on either side, and far above my face the sky was a rectangle of yeasty clouds streaking an ebony dome of night.
Weird in perspective on the grave-rim high above my toes, the black figure in its shroud was crucified against the moon, arms widespread like opened wings, chin on wounded bosom, that one ulcered eyeball of hate glittering down at me.
A decidedly melancholy cold invaded the grave.
A Negro with the face of a sleeping Egyptian looked down at me. He was holding a shovel in his hands.
The crucified silhouette dropped its arms. “Bury him!”
That was my requiem. I suppose I was hollering and kicking, for little cascades of pebbles came slithering down the grave walls and rattled on my rosewood frame. Then a black shadow hovered like an airplane wing over the foot of the grave. The lid was thrown down with a stunning crash, and I shouted in the dark.
The corpse was burying me alive!
Whang! Never in all the world will I hear again a sound as unwholesome, as appalling as that first coffin nail going into the lid above my face. I’d waited in mortal suspense for its arrival, and when it came I was gripped in a vice of terror that blotted all thought from my mind. Whang-bang-whang-bang! It can be a sensation — listening to the driving of your own coffin nails! It did not take long for those spikes to travel around the lid-rim, either. I know one carpentry job that was finished in record speed. Feet that had scuffled on the lid stopped scuffling. A little cone of gray light leaked down through the coffin cover — through that hole where a stake had been driven! — and the carpenter who had covered the hole with his foot was going away.
Murder On the Way! Page 18
