by Otto Penzler
When she was sitting up again in her white dress I walked over and turned the light down, and I cried a little then, because she looked so much the same. She could have fallen asleep, warmed by the fire and dozy with wine, as if we’d just come back from the party.
I went and had a bath then. We both used to when we came back in from an evening, to feel clean and fresh for when we slipped between the sheets. It wouldn’t be like that this evening, of course, but I had dirt all over me, and I wanted to feel normal. For one night at least I just wanted things to be as they had.
I sat in the bath for a while, knowing she was in the living room, and slowly washed myself clean. I really wasn’t thinking much. It felt nice to know that I wouldn’t be alone when I walked back in there. That was better than nothing, was part of what had made her alive. I dropped my Someday clothes in the bin and put on the ones from the evening of the accident. They didn’t mean as much as her dress, but at least they were from before.
When I returned to the living room her head had lolled slightly, but it would have done if she’d been asleep. I made us both a cup of coffee. The only time she ever took sugar was in this cup, so I put one in. Then I sat down next to her on the sofa and I was glad that the cushions had her dent in them, that as always they drew me slightly towards her, didn’t leave me perched there by myself.
The first time I saw Rachel was at a party. I saw her across the room and simply stared at her, but we didn’t speak. We didn’t meet properly for a month or two, and first kissed a few weeks after that. As I sat there on the sofa next to her body I reached out tentatively and took her hand, as I had done on that night. It was cooler than it should have been, but not too bad because of the fire, and I held it, feeling the lines on her palm, lines I knew better than my own.
I let myself feel calm and I held her hand in the half light, not looking at her, as also on that first night, when I’d been too happy to push my luck. She’s letting you hold her hand, I’d thought, don’t expect to be able to look at her too. Holding her hand is more than enough: don’t look, you’ll break the spell. My face creased then, not knowing whether to smile or cry, but it felt alright. It really did.
I sat there for a long time, watching the flames, still not thinking, just holding her hand and letting the minutes run. The longer I sat the more normal it felt, and finally I turned slowly to look at her. She looked tired and asleep, so deeply asleep, but still there with me and still mine.
When her eyelid first moved I thought it was a trick of the light, a flicker cast by the fire. But then it stirred again, and for the smallest of moments I thought I was going to die. The other eyelid moved and the feeling just disappeared, and that made the difference, I think. She had a long way to come, and if I’d felt frightened, or rejected her, I think that would have finished it then. I didn’t question it. A few minutes later both her eyes were open, and it wasn’t long before she was able to slowly turn her head.
I still go to work, and put in the occasional appearance at social events, but my tie never looks quite as it did. She can’t move her fingers precisely enough to help me with that anymore. She can’t come with me, and nobody can come here, but that doesn’t matter. We always spent a lot of time by ourselves. We wanted to.
I have to do a lot of things for her, but I can live with that. Lots of people have accidents, bad ones: if Rachel had survived she could have been disabled or brain-damaged so that her movements were as they are now, so slow and clumsy. I wish she could talk, but there’s no air in her lungs, so I’m learning to read her lips. Her mouth moves slowly, but I know she’s trying to speak, and I want to hear what she’s saying.
But she gets round the flat, and she holds my hand, and she smiles as best she can. If she’d just been injured I would have loved her still. It’s not so very different.
THE LIFE OF Vivian (Bernard) Meik (1894–1955) is as filled with adventure and mystery as his fiction. Born either in Calcutta or, as he claimed, on a British ship, he pursued careers in engineering and journalism as well as writing suspense and horror fiction. During World War II, he passed himself off as a member of the British intelligence staff and obtained documents, undoubtedly with journalistic enthusiasm rather than traitorous intent, but served two years in prison for violating the Official Secrets Act. As a noted war correspondent, he was wounded in both World Wars. He lived in Germany after the war but moved to America permanently in 1947. His extensive travels in Africa, India, and the Far East provided weird stories, as well as flavor, for his fiction. Among his published work is the short-story collection Devils’ Drums (1933), which contains mostly horror tales but also some that feature mystery and crime; the episodic novel (five connected novellas) Veils of Fear (1934), which is a sequel of sorts to Devils’ Drums, with several of the characters returning; and The Curse of the Red Shiva (1936), a “Yellow Peril” tale of Oriental villains and a curse that strikes every five generations.
In addition to producing fiction, Meik wrote a once-important book, The People of the Leaves (1931), a factual report on a very primitive and obscure tribe located in Orissa, India, with whom he lived for several months.
“White Zombie” was first published in Devils’ Drums (London: Philip Allan, 1933).
GEOFFREY AYLETT, acting commissioner of the district of Nswadzi, was frightened. During his twenty years of Africa never before had he experienced the sensation of being so definitely baffled. He felt as if something was pressing against him, something that he could neither see nor locate, but, nevertheless, something that seemed to envelop him, and, in some inexplicable way, threaten to stifle him. Lately he had begun to wake suddenly at nights, struggling for breath and almost overcome by a feeling of nausea. After the nausea had disappeared there still remained a strange suggestion of some nameless horrible odour, an odour that was strongly reminiscent of the aftermath of the earlier battles of the Mesopotamia campaign. Those had been days of foul disease, when cholera and dysentery, sunstroke, typhoid and gangrene had raged unchecked; where hundreds had lain where they had fallen; when, pressed by enemies and forgotten by friends, the survivors were forced to let even the elementary decencies of death go by the board. . . . He remembered the flies and the corruption, and the temperature of a hundred and twenty degrees. . . .
And now, eighteen years later, that same smell of fetid corruption seemed to hover about him like some evil presence when he woke at nights.
Aylett was, first and foremost, a rational man, accustomed to face facts. His knowledge of the mystery of Africa, of its depths and jungles, of its eerie atmosphere, was as complete as that of any white man—he smiled whimsically as he emphasised to himself how little that was—and he looked for some concrete reason that would explain the bridging of the years by this horrible harmonic. Failing a satisfactory solution he would be forced to conclude that it was about time he went home on long leave.
Carefully, as befitted a man of his experience of the ways of the dark gods, he searched his innermost soul, but failed to find the answer he sought.
There was only one connection in the district between him and the Mesopotamia of 1915—a certain John Sinclair, late of the Indian Army—but that connection was already a broken link long before the first occurrence of these nauseating nightmares.
Sinclair had been a brother officer in the old days, and, mainly on Aylett’s advice, had taken up a few thousand acres of virgin country in the comparatively unknown Nswadzi district immediately after the War. But he had died more than a year previously—and, what was more to the point, had died a natural death. Aylett himself had been present at the passing of his friend.
Being both a mystic as the result of his knowledge of Africa, and a logician as a result of his Western upbringing, Aylett methodically considered the platitudinous truth that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy, and went over the entire period of his association with Sinclair in every detail.
At the end of it all he was forced to
admit failure, and, indeed, judged either logically or mystically, there was no adequate reason for linking Sinclair with his present troubles. Sinclair had died peacefully. He even remembered the utter content of the last sigh . . . as if some great burden had been lifted.
It was true that before this, Sinclair—and Aylett himself for that matter—during the first two years of the War, had been through a hell that only those who had experienced it could appreciate. It was also true that Sinclair had saved Aylett’s life at a great risk to his own, on a certain memorable occasion, when Aylett, left for dead, had been lying badly wounded in the sun. Aylett had, naturally, never forgotten that, but being a typical Englishman, had done very little more than shake his friend’s hand, and mumble something to the effect that he hoped that one day there would be an opportunity to repay. Sinclair had waved the matter aside, with a laugh, as one of no account—merely a job in the day’s work. There the incident had ended, and each went about his own lawful occasions.
As a settler Sinclair had been a complete success. In due course he had married a very capable woman, who, it appeared to Aylett, whenever he had broken journey at the homestead, was eminently suited to the hard existence of a planter’s wife.
At first Sinclair had seemed very happy, but as the years went by Aylett had not been quite so sure. He had had occasion more than once to notice the subtle change for the worse in his old friend. Staleness, he diagnosed, and recommended a holiday in England. Lonely plantations, far from one’s own kind, are apt to get on the nerves. Nothing came of his suggestion, however, and the Sinclairs stayed on. They had grown to love the place too well, they said, though he thought that Sinclair’s enthusiasm did not ring true. Anyway, it had not been his business.
That was all that he could recall in his contemplation, and he repeated again how it had all finished over a year ago. But old memories cling. He found himself living over again that ghastly day after Ctesiphon when Sinclair had literally brought him back to life.
He began to wonder—idly, fantastically. The afternoon dimmed to sundown, sundown gave way to the magic of the night. Still Aylett made no move to leave the camp-chair under the awning of his tent and go to bed. After a while the last of his “boys” came up to ask him whether he might retire. Aylett answered him absently, his eyes on the glowing logs of the camp-fire.
As the hours wore on he could hear the sound of the night drums more distinctly. From all the points of the compass the sounds came and went, drum answering drum . . . the telegraph of the trackless miles that the world calls Africa. Lazily he wondered what they were saying, and how exactly they transmitted their news. Strange, he thought, that no white man has ever mastered the secret of the drums.
Subconsciously he followed their throbbing monotony. He gradually became aware that the beat had changed. No more were simple news or opinions being transmitted. That much he could understand. There was something else being sent out, something of importance. He suddenly realized that whatever this something was, it was apparently regarded as being of vital urgency, and that, for at least an hour, the same short rhythm had been repeated. North, south, east and west, the echoes throbbed and throbbed again.
The drums began to madden him, but there was no way to stop them. He decided to go to bed, but he had been listening too long, and the rhythm followed him. Eventually he dropped off into a listless disturbed sleep, during which the implacable staccato throbbing kept hammering away its unreadable message into his subconsciousness.
It seemed only a moment later that he awoke. A malarious mist had rolled up from the swamps below and had pervaded his camp. He found himself gasping for breath. He tried to sit up, but the mist seemed to be pressing him down where he lay. No sound issued from his lips when he endeavoured to call his “boys.” He felt himself being steadily submerged—down, down, down and still down. Just before he lost consciousness he realized that he was being suffocated, not by the heavy mist, but by a foul miasma reeking with all the horror of corruption. . . .
Aylett looked about him in a bewildered fashion when he opened his eyes again. A kindly bearded face was bending over him, and he heard a voice that seemed to be coming from a great distance encouraging him to drink something. His head was throbbing violently, and his breath came in deep gasps. But the cool water cleared in some measure the foul odour that seemed to cling to his brain.
“Ah, mon ami, c’est bon. We thought you were dead when the ‘boys’ brought you in.” The bearded face broke into a grin: “But now you will be well, hein? You are—what you say?—a tough, hein?”
Aylett laughed in spite of himself. Why, of course, this was the mission station of the White Fathers, and his old friend, Padre Vaneken, placid and reliable, was looking after him. He closed his eyes happily. Now there was nothing more to fear, everything would soon be well. Then, as suddenly as it had come, that terrible clinging odour of death and decay left him. . . .
“But, padre man,” he discussed his horrible experience later, “what could have happened? We are both men of some experience of Africa—”
The missionary shrugged his shoulders. “Mon ami, as you imply, this is Africa . . . and I have no evidence that the curse on Ham, the son of Noah, has ever been lifted. The dark forests, they are the stronghold of such whose unconscious spirits have rebelled and have not yet come out to serve as was first ordained. Who knows? . . . We—I—do not look too deeply there. When I first came out, in my early idealism I sought but the convert, now I—I am content to do mostly the cures for fevers and wounds, and hope that le bon Dieu will understand. It is the same everywhere where the curse of Noah carries. Civilisation counts not. Regard Haiti—I spent twelve years there—Sierra Leone, the Congo, and here. What can I say about your attack by the mist? Nothings, hein? You—you thank God you live, for here, mon ami—here is the cradle of Africa, the oldest stronghold of the sons of Ham. . . .”
Aylett regarded the missionary intently. “Padre,” he spoke deliberately, “what exactly are you trying to make me understand?”
The two men, old in the ways of the black jungle, faced each other steadily. “Mon ami,” the priest said quietly, “you are my old friend. On the forms of religion we think differently, you and I, but this is not conventional Europe, thank God, and, side by side, we have done our best according to our lights. God himself cannot do more. So I will tell you. I have seen the mist before . . . twice. Once in Haiti and once in this district.”
“Here?”
The padre nodded. “I was in camp at the catechumen’s school by Mrs. Sinclair’s estate—”
“Go on.” Aylett’s voice was low.
“As you know, Mrs. Sinclair has run the plantation since her husband’s death. She refused to go home. At first you, I—all the countryside—thought she was mad to stay there alone, but—” the missionary shrugged his shoulders—“que voulez-vous? A woman is a law unto herself. Anyway, she has made it a greater success than ever, and we are silenced, hein?”
“But the mist?”
“I was coming to that. It caught me by the throat that night. I was living at the house, as we all do who pass that way—Central Africa is not a cathedral close—but beyond not knowing anything of what happened for several hours nothing happened to me.” He touched the emblem of his faith on the rosary that was part of his dress. “Mrs. Sinclair said that I had been overcome by the heat, but to me that explanation would not do. . . .”
“But that doesn’t explain anything.”
“Perhaps not—but Mrs. Sinclair said that she had not noticed anything peculiar . . . !”
“How was that?”
The priest shrugged his shoulders. “I am not Mrs. Sinclair,” he said abruptly, and Aylett knew that not another word about her would the missionary say.
“Tell me about Haiti, padre,” he asked.
The priest replied quietly. “We understood it there to mean that it was artificially produced by voodoo black magic—a very real thing, mon ami, which my church readily admit
s, as you probably know—and there they call it ‘the breath of the dead.’ Why? . . .” He shrugged his shoulders again.
Aylett turned away and looked out steadily into the distance. For a long time he fixed his gaze on the line of distant hills, thinking deeply. He recalled a picture where just such hills appeared in the background—a photograph taken by a man who had been almost beyond the borderline to give the truth to the world. But he had failed. The picture showed a group of figures. That was all until one studied them, and even then no one would believe that this was a photograph of dead men—who were not allowed to die.
For hours the two men sat silently, each busy with his own thoughts. Night mantled the tiny mission station, and from afar the sound of drums came through on the soft breeze. Aylett turned suddenly to the missionary. “Padre man,” he said quietly, “it’s only twenty miles from here to the Sinclairs’ estate. . . .”
The padre nodded. “I understand, mon ami,” he replied. Then after a moment, “Would you think it an impertinence if I asked you to keep this in your pocket—till you come back?” He produced a small silver crucifix.
Aylett held out his hand. “Thank you,” he said simply.
The sun had set when Aylett’s machila1 was set down on Mrs. Sinclair’s verandah. She came forward to welcome him. “I wondered if I should ever see you again.” She looked at him quietly. “You haven’t been here since—for over a year now.” Then she changed her tone. She laughed. “As a district officer,” she said, “you’ve neglected your duties shamefully!”
Aylett smilingly pleaded guilty, excusing himself on the ground that everything had gone so well in this section, that he had hesitated to intrude on perfection.
“Has it fallen from perfection now?” she countered.
“Not at all,” he replied, “this visit is merely routine.”
