She entered the room. There was nothing there. The dusty windows caught the sun’s early light and filtered it, casting dust-shadows against the floor and one wall.
The door was closing behind her, and Penny turned to see herself in the mirror hung on the back of the door. Through the haze of old dust covering the glass, she looked nebulous, almost not there.
Also not there, Peter. There was no chair, no husband. The room contained old, old dust, and stale air, heavy with the aromas of age and seclusion.
“I’m here,” she said. “I’m here!” Louder. Dust floated down from the ceiling and flitted in pale sunbeams, like tiny flies startled at her presence.
A broken wooden blind hung down across one window, and one end tapped gently against the panelled wall. There were no broken panes, no breeze. Penny closed her eyes and felt a slight dizziness not connected to her hangover. The tower moved, or the world. Now that she was here it did not matter which.
Penny began to understand. She had not come here to die. Neither had she come to try and make amends to her absent husband, or to prove to herself that she was not as he had always portrayed her. She had come because this was another place where she belonged. This empty, barren room was her home, not the house down below. And there was no way she could leave here again, because everywhere else felt so terrible, threatening, and a million miles away from where she needed to be.
She pressed her face to a glass pane. At least with dust on the windows, she was shielded from some of the distance.
Soon, she would lock the door, prise a window open a crack, and drop the keys outside. Belinda and her family were not visiting for ten days, so there was plenty of time. Because hers was the face at the window. And she was a trick of the light.
GREGORY NICOLL
But None Shall Sing for Me
GREGORY NICOLL’S HORT FICTION has appeared in dozens of anthologies since the 1980s, including Ripper!, Confederacy of the Dead, Still Dead: Book of the Dead 2, Cthulhu’s Heirs, 100 Vicious Little Vampire Stories, Freak Show, It Came from the Drive-In, Gahan Wilson’s The Ultimate Haunted House and Mondo Zombie.
However, after witnessing a profoundly disturbing act of real-life violence in 1999, the author avoided the horror genre for nearly a decade. Many of his best tales were reprinted in the 2004 collection Underground Atlanta, and more recently he penned a dark mystery for a book of New Hampshire-based thrillers entitled Live Free or Die Die Die, as well as a steam-punk novelette for the anthology Clockwork Fables.
About the story reprinted in this volume, Nicoll says, “It was being asked to create a tale for Zombiesque, a book of zombie stories told exclusively from the zombies’ point of view, which finally lured me back into writing horror.
“I’d previously done some savagely gory zombie stories for John Skipp’s anthologies, but that’s the last thing I want to do this time. Instead I thought, hey, what about an eerie, mystical voodoo zombie story that takes place on a south sea island? After all, George Romero had nothing on Val Lewton.
“Of course, what nearly did me in was not realising how difficult it would be to write a zombie’s-point-of-view story set in a real place that was so exotic and unfamiliar to me. I had to keep stopping over and over to research history, culture, folklore, religion, and geography. I even stopped and read the entire memoirs of an African slaver.
“This dragged the process on for several months and almost caused me to miss the deadline but, as a result, the finished short story is woven with a novel’s worth of details.”
WARM CARIBBEAN SEAWATER splashed gently over his bare brown ankles, clawing at the soft crystalline sand under his feet as it glided back into the foamy surf, beckoning him toward the ocean depths, urging him to join its turbulent blue-green mysteries.
He stood firm, unmoving, resolutely upright and solidly ashore, ignoring the siren calls of the waves. Many decades before, his long-ago mothers and long-ago fathers had crossed that great ocean in the belly of the slave ship Brillante, each of them rationed just one pint of unsalted water per day, their dry and piteous cries answered only by the sting of the slaver’s cat o’ nine tails.
His people still spoke of the cruelty of Captain Homans who, on one infamous voyage, rather than allow his illegal human cargo to be captured by the policing British frigates, had dragged every dark-skinned man, woman, and child from the hold of his ship and cast them into those waters, with the iron shackles still fastened tightly about their legs. It was whispered that the echoes of their voices could still be heard, crying out from those depths, their horror at this fate mixed with joy that their suffering was finally at its end.
Tonight, for a moment, he thought he could hear them.
Though his eyes were huge and white, bulging on his face like two eggs taken from the nest of a goose, his unblinking grey pupils revealed little to him beyond indistinct variations of light and shadows. Instead, whenever and wherever he walked, his steps were guided by the more potent signals of sound and smell. Unable to distinguish morning from twilight, he determined the hour of the day by feeling the ocean’s tides. Now, as the white waves crashed against the high, jagged black horns of rock on St Sebastian’s coastline, he knew that evening had finally come.
In the distance, from across the sugar cane fields, came the forlorn call of a huge horn made from the great curled shell of a conch, a voice from the sea displaced far inland. It was the signal for which he had been waiting, the summons for the faithful to gather at the hounfour, where tonight they would conduct a ceremony with a blood sacrifice.
He had a duty to perform there. A potentially deadly duty. Yet he had no fear of death.
He had been dead himself for years.
He was called Carrefour, named for the moonlit crossroads where he stood guard.
Nearly seven feet high, he was a human statue with skin darker and drier than the husks of over-ripening cane that grew around him on every side. The strong, warm tropical winds blew and shook those rain-starved stalks violently, but Carrefour did not move. Nor was there the slightest flutter among the close, tight curls of woolly hair which clung to his scalp. His great muscular brown chest was bare. Carrefour’s only clothing was his loose pair of blackened sackcloth trousers, so old and so stiff that even the wind could not bestir them.
As if frustrated by its inability to ruffle Carrefour, the night breeze swirled toward a large ceramic jar which hung some distance away, suspended by hemp ropes from a crude scaffold made of driftwood. The jar had been carefully pierced with irregular holes in several places, like a whistle, so that the air would howl when passing through. Its tone was low and mournful.
From the place of worship, just a short distance away through the cane fields, came the steadily pounding rhythm of the tamboulas and the frantic rattling of instruments made from bones and gourds. The dancers had begun to move and chant, singing and crying out, raising small offerings as they asked the serpent-spirit Dumballah Wedo to bring rain to these thirsty fields.
Carrefour smelled blood.
The rich, fragrant red liquid dripped thickly and steadily from the carcasses of a white she-goat and a black he-goat as they dangled from the branches of a nearby tree. The animals’ life essence had been drained to satisfy the thirst of the loa whose presence was expected at tonight’s ceremony. Their bodies now swayed in the wind, grisly fruit that no living man would pick.
The musk of the dead animals was strong, almost overpowering, yet Carrefour’s widened nostrils picked up another scent behind it in the wind tonight. It was faint at first, a vague hint of something less natural to these fields than the carcasses and the cane. It was a faraway aroma of silks and soaps. The strange scent hovered ghostlike in the distance, but slowly drew nearer.
Woman, he thought. The healer.
The scents reminded him of an encounter he had observed earlier, during the daytime, in the village where he concealed himself from the burning afternoon sun. There were two strangers in the market, a man and a woman
, both white and both smelling of alcohol. The man stank of the rum distilled from this island’s own cane. He spoke loudly, his words distorted by the strong drink. The woman smelled sweetly of a very different alcohol, the kind Carrefour knew was used in the medicine rooms of the island’s Great White Mother.
He had seen the rum-soaked man before, out in the cane fields. Carrefour recognised him as the brother of the planter who owned these fields. Those two men lived together near the coast, in the old Fort Holland, a sombre stone mansion whose central courtyard was infamously decorated with a massive wooden figurehead salvaged from the wreckage of the slave ship Estrella.
The woman who had accompanied him, however, was completely unknown to Carrefour.
These two white strangers had sat together in the café across the market. Their faces were a mere blur to Carrefour’s unblinking eyes, but from their different scents and their differing words, he detected a tension between them. The rum-soaked man was in great need of healing. The medicine-woman was a healer. Yet Carrefour sensed that the rum-soaked man’s need was simply too great. He was broken. He was already lost. The medicine-woman’s words were soft and caring, but they came too late.
The man had done something evil and selfish, something so foul to the eyes of God that its infamy had inspired their village’s calypso troubadour to compose a ballad about it. Carrefour had heard the song, but had never seen its subject until that moment. As he had tried to remember the words of the ballad, the troubadour had appeared there in the street, as if lured by Carrefour’s thoughts, and had begun to sing the song from the next corner. That round little fellow with his sad guitar had strummed the song quite mournfully, singing of the sorrow and shame brought to the rum-soaked man’s family.
The drunken man’s crime was familiar to Carrefour. Once, long ago, he too had lusted after his own brother’s wife . . .
A strange light gleamed through the cane stalks.
It is she who walks toward me, Carrefour observed, the healer-woman.
The small spot of light moved along the ground, blazing from a silver cylinder clasped in the healing-woman’s hand, its beam guiding her across the uneven terrain. As her gentle footsteps tentatively approached the wind-swept crossroads where he stood guard, Carrefour’s senses were at full alert. He saw her now through his murky eyes, the same female stranger from the village, drawing cautiously closer in the moonlight. The faint perfume of the medicine-alcohol still lingered about her. She wore a white gown, over which she had pulled tightly a dark wool shawl. She moved in the direction of the ceremony, following the sound of the drums.
Carrefour knew she could not go there.
I must not let her pass.
Accompanying the medicine-woman was another white female. This one moved more slowly, but with a strangely regular rhythm. Though Carrefour could not discern the features of her face, he noticed the strong line of her eyebrows, arching gracefully like the countenance of a white owl. There was something curiously regal in how she bore herself, as if she were the exalted lady of a great estate. No sooner had the thought formed in his mind than Carrefour knew she was the one, the wife of the plantation owner, and the object of the damning passions of that planter’s brother.
This woman was dressed only in ivory-hued silks, as if she had just risen from her bed. She smelled strongly of oils and powders, along with something else . . .
And then he knew.
She is one like me.
The second woman was, like himself, a zombie.
There was no stink of the grave about her. Unlike Carrefour, this one had never lain immobile with her heart stopped by the strange paralysis of the island magic, nor had she felt the first shovel full of earth tossed onto her chest, followed by another and another, until it seemed the weight of the whole island was atop her.
Neither had she known, some nights later, the sudden horrid jolt of awakening to an unholy and maddening afterlife, bringing with it the strength to claw oneself up from beneath the thick carpet of dark, wormy earth, through thick yellow roots and heavy veils of rough, tooth-like rocks and, finally, to walk once again in the moonlight.
This one’s fate had clearly been much different. Doubtless her passage had taken place in a big house, on a soft bed, with palm fans and silken curtains. But she was just as dead. And, sadly, just as alive.
Is it I alone who see this?
Carrefour stepped forward. The healer’s light beam illuminated his face, causing her to stop short. She gasped and covered her mouth in horror at the sight of him, stifling a scream; but her silent white companion remained expressionless and unmoved.
Since the night of his resurrection, Carrefour had been assigned many tasks by the houngan priest and even by the Great White Mother, but all these chores had involved only the use of his massive size and matching strength. None had required thought and reasoning. Tonight’s task was simple, to guard the crossroads and let only the faithful pass by. These two were not of the faith, and by the command with which he had been charged, he should drive them away. Yet there was a purpose driving them here, a purpose which was not his to deny.
The planter’s wife wore a small patch pinned to her gown, indicating she had been approved to attend the hounfour tonight, but the healer did not.
Carrefour hesitated only briefly before stepping aside.
The healer will see, at the hounfour, and tonight she will learn of our ways . . .
They moved past him, the healer giving one nervous glance back, her expression a strange mix of fear and gratitude, before pressing on toward the sound of the ritual drums.
Carrefour stood for a moment, alone in the crossroads, listening to the wind howl through the holes in the dangling ceramic jar.
Then, slowly, he turned and followed them.
Flickering torchlight reflected off the long, gleaming steel blade as the sabreur danced to the hammering of drums within the sacred circle. The air was hot and musky despite the wind, for the hounfour was hidden down in the low ground, its edges ringed by tall benu trees whose branches were heavy with fruit. The faithful watched the sabreur’s sacred dance, enraptured, from the periphery of the circle. The whiteness of their fine linen suits and cotton gowns contrasted starkly against their dark faces, black skin sparkling with perspiration.
The two white women emerged from the darkness and stood at the edge of the circle. The healer nervously beheld the scene, but her companion was expressionless and unmoved. Carrefour stopped a short distance behind them, concealing himself back in the shadows.
Many of the worshippers clutched offerings of live hens and wicker baskets of eggs which they brought as offerings to the serpent-spirit Dumballah Wedo. Others had already placed their gifts around the central post, beside the tall black top hat and the cigarettes that had been laid out for the exclusive use of Papa Ghede, brother to the Patron Spirit of the Farmers, should he care to make his appearance tonight. Nearby stood a tall clear glass bottle filled with first-distillation rum, into which a dozen large red-orange Cuban peppers had been inserted, crushed, and mixed. One sip from this vessel would sear a mortal man’s throat and force his eyes to close shut in choking agony.
It was Ghede’s favourite drink.
The sabreur slung his huge sword left and right, and then stopped and held it proudly aloft as the faithful cried out joyfully. The drummers increased the speed of their rhythmic pounding on the tamboulas, and a row of dancers strutted into the circle. They were half a dozen young women of the island, chosen for their beauty and the magnificence of their swelling bosoms, which they bared proudly as they danced. Smiling, they leapt in unison left and right, necklaces of bead and bone swinging to and fro between their naked breasts while, down below, their white skirts twirled to the rise and fall of the drummers’ beat.
From a group of faithful seated near the two strangers, a small dark-skinned boy suddenly leapt into the circle. His arms flailed as if he were a marionette shaken on its strings, and it was immediately evident to
Carrefour that the little one’s mind was not his own. Less than ten years in age, this child was now the helpless puppet of a loa, come to join the festivities.
The boy lurched to a stop at the central post. Quickly donning Papa Ghede’s black silk hat, which would have slipped down and covered his head completely if not for his wide ears blocking its descent, the child poked several cigarettes between his lips and lit them all almost simultaneously with the flame from a dripping crimson wax candle. Puffing pungent white smoke, he hoisted the rum bottle and flicked the cork from its aperture before darting into the line of dancers.
The drummers quickened the pace of their rhythm yet again, excited to have such a prominent loa here in their midst, even if the human body he had chosen to inhabit was hardly much larger than a monkey. The worshippers applauded and swayed eagerly with the music, confident that if Papa Ghede had joined their ceremony, the spirits of Zaka and Dumballah must be nearby as well. This would bode well for their harvest.
Hopping about and then undulating as if engaged in intense copulation, the small boy passed down along the row of dancers. He briskly pinched each one on her buttocks as her skirt rose with the beat. After leaving his mark in this manner upon the whole company, he stopped at the far end of the circle and, taking the cigarettes from his mouth, threw his head back and opened his jaw wide.
How the oversized top hat remained atop his head through this was impossible to determine, but even more astonishing was what followed. The possessed child tilted the bottle of fiery pepper-infused rum and poured nearly a quarter of it straight into his mouth, gulping it down eagerly and without pause. Even from the far side of the circle, the stinging aroma of that fiery spiced rum burned at Carrefour’s nostrils.
Carrefour noticed the healer-woman react to this event, reflexively turning to the planter’s wife in alarm. Seeing that her silent companion was still unmoved, the healer moved forward as if to intercede between the boy and the bottle. Carrefour extended one arm and held her back, restraining her from entering the circle.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 23 (Mammoth Books) Page 20
