Zombies

by Otto Penzler

  The liquid in his brain was nearly at a boil. “Me?” He lurched away from his father’s cloying embrace. “You want me to mind that the rest of my life?”

  “There is little to care for,” Maxwell said soothingly. “She requires no food, only . . .”

  “What? What does she require?”

  “Care. A wash now and again . . .”

  George laughed desperately, and knew he was approaching hysterics. “A wash! Good Christ, and perhaps a permanent, and some nail clipping . . . !”

  “Care!” bellowed McCormack. “What you would do for anyone like this!”

  “There is no one like this! She is . . . she is dead.” The word had stuck in his throat. “I’m not going to have any part of this, nor of Cairnwell. You chose this, not me! I won’t rot here like the rest of you did. Keep Cairnwell—give it away, burn it, bury it, for Christ’s sake—that’s what suits the dead!”

  “No! She is not dead! She is alive, and she needs us! She needs . . .” McCormack paused, as if something had stolen his words. A pained look grasped his features, and before George or Maxwell could leap to his side, he toppled like a tree, and his head struck the stone floor with a leaden thud.

  Maxwell swept around the bed, pushed George aside, and knelt by McCormack. “The lantern!” he said, and George moved the flickering light so that he and Maxwell could see that his father’s face wore the gray softness of death.

  MUCH LATER, in the study, Maxwell poured George another glass of sherry. “I shouldn’t have let him go down there,” the older man said, almost to himself. He turned back to the cold fireplace. “After the last operation . . . it left his heart so weak . . .”

  “It was better,” George said quietly. “Better that way than for the cancer to finish him.”

  “I suppose.”

  They sat, sipping sherry and saying nothing. George rose and walked to the window. The sun, setting over the ridge of the western fields, slashed a thin blade of orange-red through the beveled panes. He looked at a flock of blackbirds pecking in the damp earth for grain.

  “I shouldn’t have upset him,” said George.

  “He hadn’t been down there for quite a while,” Maxwell said. “I shouldn’t have let him go.”

  “You couldn’t have stopped him,” George said, still gazing out of the window.

  “I suppose not. He felt it . . .”

  “His duty,” said George.

  “Yes.” Maxwell turned from the dead fire toward George’s tall figure, outlined in the sun’s flame. “Will you go then? Leave Cairnwell?”

  George kept watching the birds.

  “It’s not . . . there’s really very little to it,” said Maxwell, with the slightest trace of urgency. “You don’t have to see her at all, you know, not ever, if you wish it. Just so long as you stay here.”

  In the field, the blackbirds rose in formation, turned in the wind like leaves, and settled once more. George looked at Maxwell. “May I have the key?”

  THE DOOR OPENED more easily this time, and George walked into the room, holding the lantern at his side without fear. He knew there were no ghosts. There was no need for ghosts.

  His earlier exposure to the smell made it much more palatable, and he thought about fumigants and disinfectants. He pulled the straight-backed chair over to the bedside and looked at the woman’s face.

  Strange he hadn’t noticed before. The resemblance to his father was so strong, particularly about the eyes. They were so sad, so sad and tired, open all these years, staring into darkness.

  “Sleep,” he whispered. “Sleep for a bit.” He hesitated only a moment, then pressed with his index finger upon the cool parchment of the eyelids, first one, then the other, drawing them down like tattered shades over twilight windows.

  “There,” he said gently, “that’s better now, isn’t it? Sleep a bit.” He started to hum a tune he had not thought of for years, an old cradle song his mother had crooned to him on the nights when the terrors of Cairnwell made sleep come hard. When the last notes died away, caught by the smooth fissures of the chamber walls, he rose, laid a hand of benediction on the wizened forehead, and started upstairs where his brandy waited.

  The twenty-third laird of Cairnwell had come home.

  ONE OF THE most common adjectives that sits next to the name of a pulp writer is “prolific,” and few have earned the sobriquet more richly than Arthur Leo Zagat (1895–1949). Born in New York City, he went to Europe to serve in the signal corps in World War I, staying on in Paris to study after his discharge. He returned to New York and received a law degree from Fordham University in 1929 but began writing for the pulps instead of going into legal practice. His first story sold and he quickly established himself as a force in various literary genres, but most successfully as a master of weird menace. His specialty was the long story, approximately twenty thousand words, which magazines described on their covers as “feature-length novels.” Zagat was one of the first of “the electric typewriter boys” whose “novels” often appeared on three or four magazine covers a month, with a few short stories thrown in, written under his own name or pseudonyms (he wrote as Grandon Alzee, among others). He became a popular regular contributor to The Spider magazine with his series about Doc Turner, and enjoyed success with his Red Finger spy series in the pages of Operator #5. For the new magazine Bizarre Detective Mysteries, he appeared in the debut issue with the warm hearted Dr. John Bain, who bears a striking resemblance to his Doc Turner character, always ready to help those in need. All contributed to making him one of the highest-paid pulp writers of all time until his sudden death of a heart attack at the age of fifty-three.

  “Crawling Madness” was first published in the March 1935 issue of Terror Tales.

  THE MEN WHO WERE TO HAVE HELPED ANN TRAVERS AND HER INJURED, HELPLESS HUSBAND HAD DRIVEN MADLY AWAY, FEAR’S CLUTCHING FINGERS AT THEIR THROATS. NOW ANN WAS ALONE IN THE DESERT—ALONE WITH HIM OF THE GAUNT, SATANIC FEATURES, AND WITH THE CRAWLING HORRORS THAT SLITHERED UP FROM THE GREY MOONLIGHT TO FEED ON HUMAN FLESH! . . .

  ANN TRAVERS AWOKE with a start. She lifted her head from the rough tweed of Bob’s overcoat shoulder and looked dazedly around. The roadster’s motor still thrummed the monotonous song that seldom had been out of her ears in the long week since they had left New York. Her husband’s blunt-fingered, capable hands still gripped the steering wheel. The desert still spread—bare, utterly lifeless—from horizon to horizon; and running interminably under the hood there were still the two faint ruts in the sand which the thin-lipped filling-station attendant in Axton had pointed out as the road to Deadhope. Yet Ann was uneasy, oppressed, aware of a creeping chill in her bones that matched the anomalous chill of the desert night.

  “Awake, hon?” Bob broke the silence. “We’re almost there. Not much over a mile more.”

  Ann’s lips smiled, but her weary eyes were humorless. “I don’t believe it. This trip is never going to end. We’re going on and on . . .”

  “Wrong again. A mere five thousand feet from here, the gang I sent ahead to get things ready is waiting to greet their boss—Mrs. Travers.”

  How Bob loved to mouth that title. She hadn’t gotten used to it yet—one doesn’t identify a new name with oneself in a week. . . .

  All at once now, Ann realized what change had occurred to weigh her down with vague fear since she had drifted off to sleep. The stars that had been close and friendly, their myriads a vast, coruscating splendor in the velvety black bowl of the heavens, now were pale, infinitely distant in a sky suffused with heatless, silvery radiance, forerunner of a not-yet-risen moon. The spectral luminance silted down to paint the undulating, gaunt plain with weird mystery, and long flat shadows of mesquite bush and cactus barred the vibrant glow with a network strangely ominous.

  Bob leaned forward, flicked a switch on the dashboard. The headlights boring the night dimmed. “Save battery,” he muttered, in explanation. Then, grinning, “Show my employer how economical her mine-superintendent can
be.”

  Ann twisted to him. “Bob! I don’t want to hear that sort of talk any longer. The silver mine Uncle Horvay left is as much yours as mine. More, because it’s just so much dirt except for your wonderful process. There hasn’t been anything taken out of it for years.”

  The man threw an arm up in mock defense against her vehemence. “All right. All right. I’ll be good. Give me a kiss.”

  Even while Bob’s lips clung warmly to hers, Ann’s eyes strayed past him. Ahead, the horizon was close, much too close, as if the road ended abruptly in a vast uncanny nothingness. It was just the crest of a rise, she told herself fiercely; but she could not rid herself of the eerie sensation that they were plunging on to a jumping-off place, a Land’s End over which the car would hurtle to fall eternally into some abysmal chasm.

  Under the steady thrum of the roadster and the sough of its tires there was a hissing sound, like the breathing of some unseen monster. It was the whispering of countless grains of sand sifted along the desert by the wind, but it added to the spine-prickling certainty of impending disaster in Ann’s mind. This strange, grim land resented their intrusion, their intention to reopen the old wounds in its bosom that long ago had healed. Once before it had lured men with false promise into its deadly gullet, had spewed them out broken in pocket and health, grey with the patina of defeat. Now it was warning them to turn back—before it was too late.

  Ann started at a new sound that filled her ears. It was a roaring from ahead from the secret region beyond the ridgecrest. It was the thunder of an approaching engine, a ponderous engine plunging through moon-hazed night at breakneck speed.

  The tremendous apparition on that too-close skyline was startling despite the trumpeted warning of its approach. The huge truck lurched over the ridge, careened down the road, hurtled straight at them. Bob’s horn blared raucous warning. Ann glimpsed his pallid, lined face, his blanched hands fighting the wheel. The truck blasted down upon them like a juggernaut, an avalanche of destruction. Ann screamed. . . .

  THE GIGANTIC FRONT of the bellowing projectile loomed right above her. In that age-long, frozen instant of imminent demolition Ann saw the utterly white countenance of its high-perched driver his eyes that bulged with a terror blinding him to the presence of the other car, of anything but some stark inner vision from which he fled; his twitching, bitten lips. She screamed again, more in horror at that which she read in the contorted visage than from her own peril.

  Her shrill keening penetrated the brain of the truck driver. His big-thewed arms jerked, the careening vehicle swerved, scraped past the edge of the roadster’s fender. The swaying body of the dirt-truck, altitudinous above her, was crowded with husky, brute-jawed men. They were rigid in the grip of the same terror that invested their chauffeur. Their livid faces were color-drained masks straining through the dust-cloud that swirled after them. Their eyes were deep-pitted coals ablaze with black flame. The truck skidded. . . .

  The picture of soul-shattering, fearful flight flashing on Ann’s vision exploded in a grinding crash, a thunderous detonation of metal on metal, of bursting tires and smashing glass. She hurtled, asprawl, through a whirling world, thudded down on stinging, breath-expelling grit.

  She looked up through dazed eyes. The truck was already yards away, its breathless haste not slackened at all, the red eye of its tail-light penduluming in short arcs as panic speed magnified the slight inequalities of the desert road. The sideward, yellow spray of the tiny lamp spattered, not on a license plate, but on an incredible figure hanging by clenched, bony fingers from a bracing truss under the truck’s tailboard and hidden by it from the terror-stiffened men above.

  Ann saw the man clearly. The grisly fingers by which the rag-garmented, dust-greyed apparition was suspended from the catapulting vehicle seemed to probe her brain with horror. Skeleton-thin, he streamed out behind the hurtling lorry like a bedraggled pennant; whatever of clothing had covered his pipe-stem, bounding legs was torn away and they were greyed to the hue of putrescent bone. His feet, flesh-stripped as they dragged through the dirt of the turnpike, trailed two lines of scarlet blood.

  Then the truck was gone. Only a low-lying band of drifting dust-cloud and two scars on the desert’s silvered surface showed that it had even been. Two scars between which thirsty sand drank red moisture, till no trace remained to testify that the grisly figure she had seen, or thought she had seen, was real.

  The truck was gone! The meaning of that impacted on Ann’s bewildered mind. As on the trackless sea, so in the desert waste the unwritten law of Man’s obligation to his fellow in distress is stringent, inflexible. To have ignored it as the occupants of the lorry had, in rushing heedless from the wreck they had caused, stamped them as utterly vile—or inflamed by such devastating panic as had stripped humanity from them. . . .

  The sound of a groan cut into Ann’s consciousness. She rolled toward it.

  THE ROADSTER WAS on its side, smashed to a jumble of twisted metal, burst rubber. Ann realized that only by the miracle of a lowered top had she been thrown free. Threshing arms, a body twisting up from chaos, falling back into it, showed her that Bob had not been so fortunate.

  A sob tightened her throat. She pawed sand, pushed herself to her knees, heaved erect. The ground rolled like a tidal swell, staggered her, reeled her to a grip on the crumpled car-side. Bob groaned again, and she saw his twisted torso, the pale, tortured oval of his face.

  “Ann!” His voice was a husked, hoarse whisper, pain-edged. “Ann! You’re—you’re all right?”

  “Yes,” the monosyllable squeezed from between her icy lips. “But you—you’re hurt, darling. You’re terribly hurt.”

  “A—little.” Bob gasped and collapsed to the sickening sound of grating bone. “I—can’t—get free.”

  His eyes sought Ann’s face. Agony flared in them, was obscured by drooping, bloodless lids. Suddenly he was so motionless, so filmed over by the spectral moonlight with the very hue of death, that Ann’s heart stood still and her skin was an icy sheath constricting her trembling body. But his cheek was warm to her darting palm; his nostrils quivered with pain, and a muscle twitched across the taut cords of his stretched-back neck.

  Ann’s teeth gritted. Her lips tightened to a grim, thin line. Her husband’s right leg was strangely askew. Its ankle, making a nauseatingly awkward angle with its calf, already was swollen to twice normal size and the foot was caught between gear-lever and emergency brake. No wonder he had groaned in anguish, no wonder he had fainted!

  The next few minutes greyed to a blur of feverish activity, of muscle-tearing effort. How Ann accomplished it she never knew, but somehow she extricated Bob, somehow she lifted his hundred-eighty pounds free of the wreck. At last he was stretched out on the sand. Ann loosened his shoe, got it off. Then, staggering back to the car to pull seat-cushions out, she improvised a bed for him. She tugged and pushed at his inert frame till he was as comfortable as she could make him. She paused then, stared down at his big-boned face, appallingly white against the black leather.

  Bob’s eyelids flickered open, revealing hot torment. “My boy,” Ann sobbed. “My poor boy.”

  There was something besides pain in those queerly glittering eyes—an appeal, an urgent demand. “What is it, dear?” the girl gasped. “What do you want?”

  The croak that came from him was unintelligible. But his arm lifted, motioned waveringly to the breast pocket of his coat.

  Ann realized what worried him. She slipped a hand between the warm roughness of the fabric and his pounding heart. Paper crackled at the tips of her searching fingers. She pulled it out, the envelope containing the essential formulae for the process that would make profitable the working of low-grade ore from the abandoned mine at Deadhope. She pulled it out and held it up for Bob to see.

  His mouth twisted, and his eyes signaled imperatively. Ann slid the envelope into her bosom, felt it crackle against her breast. After he had proved the worth of his process, Bob had told her he could sell it for v
ast sums. Until then he must keep it secret. There were interests. . . .

  But her husband was once more unconscious. Her own limbs were water weak. She sank down beside him, squatted there, holding his hand in hers. Exhaustion welled up in her like a dark sea.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE CRAWLERS

  The moon was risen now over the ridge whence had catapulted the juggernaut of terror and destruction. It hung low in the sky, a great orange globe. It was so close, yet so infinitely far. It watched Ann’s distress with an impersonal stolidity and she was small, terribly small, in the unpeopled immensity of the desert, in the hush weirdly emphasized by the whispering of the restless sand. What else did the moon watch, there on the hill, there where the ghost town of Deadhope had spawned horror which had sent hard-faced, stolid men careening through the night in a paroxysm of terror?

  Ann tried to wrench her mind away from fear, tried to tell herself that she ought to see what she could do for Bob’s broken ankle; that she ought to bathe his face, pimply with the cold sweat of pain even in his coma. In a minute she would—in a minute, but just now she must rest. She was so tired, so tired, and her body was one gigantic ache. And she was terribly afraid. Not only because of the breath of death’s wings that had brushed so close. Not only because of Bob’s hurt, his helplessness. But because of that which she had read in the faces of the men on that truck—because of that which had trailed behind the vehicle as it rushed away!

  Recalling these, a pall of dread closed down, somehow visible in the sheeted moonlight lying spectrally on the limitless, lifeless waste around her. Lifeless? Was it some trick of the half-light, of her tired eyes, or was that shadow, that one way off there on the horizon, moving? . . .

  It was moving. It was something gruesomely alive, undiscernible, flat against the sand, something that slithered slowly, that slithered over that ridge to the east, that vanished over the earthfold beyond which was—what?