by Otto Penzler
He remembered, then, that the old paralytic had asked him if he had a gun.
From the mutter of voices Tony guessed that there were three men seated about that table; the two Negroes were talking volubly yet with a low, curious tenseness; the Reverend Barnes interrupting only infrequently with monosyllabic grunts. All three seemed to be waiting.
Beside the big man’s pallid white hand, on the naked oaken table, sprawling disjointedly amid soggy bits of bread and splotches of grease and chicken bones, lay an incongruous object, a little doll that had been wretchedly sewn together from various bits of cotton cloth. It possessed a face, crudely drawn with black grease or charcoal, and a tuft of kinky hair surmounted the shapeless little bag that represented its head. Obviously it caricatured a Negro.
From time to time, hunching over the table like a great gross idol, his shiny, worn clerical coat taut across his massive shoulders, the renegade minister would pick up the little rag doll, flop its lax arms and legs about, and put it down again.
Suddenly, then, a door, invisible to Tony, opened and closed. The conversation of the two Negroes abruptly ceased. Two black men shuffled slowly across the dining-room floor, came close to the table, opposite the colossus. Tony could see them both.
The face of one was rigid and grim, and he held his companion firmly by the arm. The second Negro was swaying drunkenly. His lips were loose and his eyes bleared. Yet there was terror in him.
The Reverend Barnes hunched lower over the table. Tony could see the big muscles in his back ribbing beneath his rusty coat, and the big brass collar-button at the back of his pillar-like neck. “You’re here at last, nigger?” he asked softly. “You’re late. What delayed you? They came from the cotton a long time ago, we have already eaten supper.”
The drunken man mouthed some reply that was unintelligible, terror-ridden.
The giant’s shoulders seemed to tighten into a ball of muscle. “You’re drunk, nigger,” he said, and his voice trembled with contemptuous loathing. “I smell corn liquor on your breath. It stifles me; how any man can so degrade himself—‘Look not upon the wine when it is red.’ ” He paused. “You fool; I told you not to drink. How can you stay down the road and watch for strangers if you’re drunk? You can’t be trusted to wave the sheet when you’re drunk. You failed today. What have you to say for yourself?”
Words tumbled from the man’s slobbering mouth. “Ahm not drunk. Ah tuk de cawn foh toofache—”
The giant shrugged. “A stranger came up the road today before we could hide them in the cotton. You’re drunk, nigger. I have forgiven you twice. But this is the third time.”
He picked up the little doll.
“This is you, nigger. This is made with your sweat and your hair—”
A scream burst from the man’s throat. He had begun to shake horribly.
“Hold him, niggers,” the giant said imperturbably. “I want to study this; I want to watch it work.”
Black hands grasped the writhing, shuddering man.
The Reverend Barnes picked up a fork. He was holding the little doll in his left hand, looking at it speculatively. And it seemed to Tony—although it may have been a trick of the light—that the lifeless doll writhed and moved of itself, in ghastly synchronisation with the trembling and shuddering of the terror-maddened human it caricatured.
Carefully, the Reverend Barnes stuck a prong of the fork through a leg of the doll. There was a slight rending of cotton.
The shuddering wretch screamed—horribly! And the colossus nodded his head as if in satisfaction.
Again the fork probed into the doll. But this time the big man jabbed all four tines through the little doll’s middle. And this time no scream, but only a gasping, rending moan came from the Negro so firmly held by the strong hands of his kind. And suddenly he was hanging limply there, like a slaughtered thing. . . .
The Reverend Barnes pulled the fork from the doll, tossed the torn doll carelessly on the floor.
“He’s dead, niggers,” he said then, callously. “He’s stone dead.”
As Tony lay sprawled on that rough pine flooring, peering down with horrified fascination into the room below, the incredible realisation grew and grew in him that he had witnessed the exercise of powers so primitive, so elemental, so barbaric that descendants of the so-called higher civilisations utterly disbelieve them.
God! Was this voodoo? Perhaps, but the Reverend Barnes was a white man; how had he become an adept? Was it something akin to voodoo but deeper, darker? Had that wretched Negro died through fright, or had there really been some horrible affinity between his living body and the lifeless doll?
What of the thing without a face, walking down the road?
The word that Eileen had written in the dust on the porch rail was hammering at Tony’s consciousness. Almost he grasped it, yet it eluded him. An unfamiliar word, reeking of evil. . . .
For a long time there was only silence from the room below—silence, and a thickening haze of bluish smoke. The Negroes, Tony guessed, were smoking, although the big man almost directly beneath his eyes was not. Abruptly, then, the Reverend Barnes rose to his feet. Tony heard him walk across the floor; there was the sound of a door opening, and then a deep, throaty chuckle.
“No need for you to do the dishes tonight, Miss Eileen. Just leave them where they are; we don’t need them any more. Come with me; I’m going to take you back to your room.”
Tony heard the man padding heavily yet softly across the floor, and Eileen’s reluctant, lighter footsteps. The dining-room door opened and closed.
Tony stumbled to his feet, then shook the door with a despair that was almost madness. Exhausted at last, he clung limply to the iron latch, panting.
Minutes passed—minutes that seemed hours.
Suddenly, from close to his ears, Tony heard muffled sounds of sobbing. Eileen, crying as though her heart was broken, was imprisoned in the next room!
“Eileen!”
Abruptly the sobbing ceased.
“Tony!” The girl’s voice came almost clearly into the room, as though she had moved close to the wall. “You didn’t—escape them, Tony?”
“They ganged me,” Tony said grimly. “I think they were going to let me go, but that big two-faced rattlesnake saw what you wrote on the porch rail, and then they jumped me.”
There was a gasp from beyond the wall and then a long silence. At last Eileen said, softly and penitently, “I’m sorry, Tony. I thought that you would read it and—understand—and come back later with help. I’m sorry that I got you into this, Tony. I tried to keep you out. But when you came here I—I loved you so, and I wanted so terribly to escape. I had a wild hope that when you got safe away, even though you didn’t understand, you would ask someone who knew and could tell you what zombies meant—”
Zombies! That was the word she had written in dust on the porch rail! And instantly, with kaleidoscopic clarity, there flashed across Tony’s brain a confusion of mental images he had acquired through the years—an illustration from a book on jungle rites—a paragraph from a voodoo thriller—scenes from one or two fantastic motion pictures he had witnessed. . . .
Zombies! Corpses kept alive by hideous sorcery to work and toil without food or water or pay—mindless, dead things that outraged Nature with every step they took! These were zombies, the books glibly said, grim products of Afro-Haitian superstition. . . .
The men who wrote those books had never suggested that zombies might be real—that the powers which controlled them might be an heritage of the blacks exactly as self-hypnotism is a highly developed faculty among the Hindus. No, the books had been patronisingly written, with more than a hint of amused superiority evident in them; their authors had incredibly failed to understand that even savages could not practise elaborate rites unless there was efficacy in them. . . .
“Zombies!” Tony muttered dazedly. And then, eagerly, “But—you love me, Eileen, I knew it; I knew you couldn’t mean those things you wrote—”
“Uncle was old, Tony, and he didn’t keep much help here—only six or seven coloured men. The place was run down, Tony; after Uncle had put me through college he didn’t have much incentive for keeping it up; he’s always told me that I could have it for a sort of country home—after he died.
“But then—this man who said he had been a minister came, and saw all these unworked acres and how isolated the place was.
“He went to Uncle, and told Uncle that he would furnish extra help if Uncle would give him half the crop.
“It was after the—help came that Uncle’s Negroes left. Some of them even moved out of their shacks—out of the county. And this man—this Reverend Barnes, had already made a little doll and told Uncle that it was supposed to represent him. He tied the little doll’s legs together with Uncle’s hair and told Uncle that with stiff legs Uncle wouldn’t be able to run away and get help. He told Uncle that any time he wanted to, he could stick a pin through the little doll and Uncle would die.
“And—Uncle can’t move his legs! It’s true, Tony, every word he said. That man, that—devil, can do anything he says.
“He read all my letters to Uncle, and all of Uncle’s letters to me, too, before he sent them down to the post office. He tried to keep me from coming here.
“And when I did come he made another doll, Tony, to represent me. It’s stuffed with my hair, Tony; they held me while he cut my hair. He’s got little dolls that represent everyone here; he keeps them in a bag inside his shirt.
“He can kill us all, Tony, whenever he pleases!”
Hysteria had begun to creep into her voice. She paused for a moment. When she went on, her voice was calmer.
“He keeps one of his coloured men as a lookout in a tree at the top of the hill. The man can see way down to the main road. When he sees anyone turn up this way he opens out a big sheet and they hide the—helpers—”
Tony chuckled grimly.
“He didn’t open out the sheet today,” he muttered. “He was drunk.” He tried to make his voice sound confident. “Eileen, sweetheart—we’ll have to get out of this. It shouldn’t be impossible, if we can only keep calm and try and think.”
There was a silence. Then Eileen’s words came back with quiet, hopeless finality.
“We can’t break out of these rooms, Tony. The house is too strongly built. And—I think that tonight he’s going to do something dreadful to us. I think that he’s afraid to stay here any longer. But before he leaves this place he’s going to—Tony, I know that man! He’s ruthless, and he’s—mad. Sometimes I think that he was really a minister. But not now, not now. He’s pure devil now!”
HOW LONG TONY and Eileen, with the terrible earnestness of despair, talked to each other through the wall that night, neither ever knew. But it must have been for hours, for they talked of many things, yet never of the horror that menaced them. And they spoke calmly, quietly, with gentle tenderness. . . .
Why should the doomed speak of that which they cannot evade?
Both knew that they were utterly in the giant madman’s hands, to do with, save for a miracle, as he pleased. Both knew that the apostate minister was merciless. . . .
There was no moon. But it must have been close to midnight when Tony heard the footsteps of several men on the stairs, the grating of the locks on Eileen’s door, the sound of a brief, futile struggle, and then Eileen’s despairing cry, “Good-bye, Tony, sweet—”
Frothing like a rabid beast, he hurled himself at the door, at the barred window, at the walls, beating at them with his naked fists until his knuckles were raw and numb and sweat poured in rivulets from his body.
Grim minutes passed. And then the footsteps returned. There was the sound of pine bars being withdrawn. Tony waited, crouching.
When they entered he leaped. But there was no strength in him—only a terrible, hopeless fury. Quickly they seized his arms, bound his hands firmly behind him with rope, dragged him, struggling impotently, down a steep flight of stairs, through the ground floor hall, and down a second flight of stairs, musty and noisome.
Here they paused for a moment while they fumbled with the latch of a door. At last the door swung open, and they dragged Tony forward into an immense, dimly lit chamber. The door swung shut; the old-fashioned iron latch clicked.
This was the cellar of the plantation house, an enormous, cavernous place, extending beneath the whole rambling structure. Once designed for the storage of everything necessary to the subsistence of the householders living on the floors above, its vast spaces were broken by immense, mouldy bins. An eight-foot cistern loomed gigantically in a dark corner; wine shelves extended along one entire wall. The whole monstrous place had been dug half from the clayey soil and half from the solid rock; the floor underfoot, rough and uneven, was seamed and stratified rock.
Two oil lanterns, hanging from beams in the cobwebby ceiling, lighted no more than the merest fraction of that great vault; the farther recesses were shrouded in blackness.
The three Negroes—Mose, Job, and the man who had brought in the drunken lookout—waited expectantly, their black hands strong on Tony’s arms. And suddenly Tony was a raging fury, tearing madly at those restraining hands. . . .
There in the centre of the old cellar, kneeling over a small, fragile form lying still and motionless on the mouldy rock, was the gigantic, blackclad Reverend Barnes!
That still, fragile form was Eileen!
At the sound of Tony’s struggles the giant looked up, stood erect. Great beads of perspiration bedewed his unnaturally pallid forehead—yet there was a pursy, significant grin on his face.
“Hard work, this, Mr. Kent,” he said genially. “Much harder work than you would think.”
“What are you doing to her!”
There was exultant triumph in the booming reply.
“I am binding her with a spell, so that she will always do what I say. This is powerful obeah, Mr. Kent. I never dreamed—” He paused, while a swift dark shadow overspread his huge face, so strong and yet so weak. But the shadow passed as swiftly as it had come, and once again his eyes blazed with evil. “Within a few moments I shall put the same spell on you, also, so that you too will always do what I say.”
Chuckling, he spoke to Tony’s guards.
“Tie his feet securely and pitch him there by the wine-bin. I’ll not want him until later.”
With both his hands and feet tightly bound, the three Negroes dumped Tony down on the jagged rock beside the wine-bin. Tony’s face was turned toward where the fallen minister squatted beneath the lanterns, a monstrous, Luciferian image.
“Sit down on the floor, niggers,” he said slowly. “Relax and rest; there’s no need to stand.” The deep, resonant voice throbbed with kindliness. “I must think.”
Obediently, the three squatted in a row on their haunches and sat looking with silent expectation at this white conjure-man who was their master.
The frock-coated figure shook its head slowly, as though its brain were cobwebby. Then, slowly, it opened the front of its filthy linen shirt, baring the grey-white of its chest—the chest of a powerful and sedentary man, who yet had always shunned the healthful sunlight—the chest of a physical animal whose warped brain had, perhaps through most of its years, abhorred the physical as immoral and unclean. A bag hung there at the figure’s chest, suspended by a cord around its neck. Two big hands dipped into that gaping pouch. . . .
Tony was struggling, struggling, rolling his body back and forth in straining jerks, trying to loosen the ropes that bound his feet and hands.
That bag of cotton dolls! One of those dolls represented Eileen.
Tony’s shoulder crashed against the beams beneath the wine-bins, leaped with pain as an exposed nail tore the flesh. But the ropes held. . . .
The big man’s forearms, be
neath the shiny black coat, were suddenly bulging—and in that instant the three Negroes who had been squatting on their haunches were rolling and writhing on the floor, their hands clawing at their throats, their bodies jerking and twisting, their faces purpling, their eyes bulging!
Slow minutes passed. And still the giant, renegade minister crouched there, motionless, his big forearms knotted, his face drawn into a sardonic grimace.
The struggles of the three were becoming feebler. Their arms and legs were beating spasmodically, as though consciousness had gone from them. And at last even that spasmodic twitching ceased and they lay still.
Yet the Reverend Barnes did not stir.
But then, after it seemed to Tony that an eternity had passed, he withdrew his hands from the bag. In his left hand he held by the throat two little cotton dolls, in his right hand, one. With a careless gesture he tossed them to the floor, rose to his feet, and stood slowly flexing and unflexing his fingers. At last he stooped over the three motionless Negroes and grunted with satisfaction.
“Fools, to think that I would ever keep you after your work was done!” He was swaying slightly. Seemingly he had forgotten Tony.
But Tony was stealthily, warily sawing his bound hands back and forth, back and forth across the bit of nail that jutted from the base of the wine-bin. Strand by strand he was breaking the half-inch hemp.
The Reverend Barnes had returned to his position beside Eileen, was once more squatting beside her. She had not moved. But she lay unbound; the colossus was very sure of his sorcery!
For long minutes he sat motionless, his shoulders drooped, his muscles flaccid. At last, with a deep sigh, he raised his head and looked at Eileen.
“Beautiful, beautiful womanhood!” he whispered softly. “All my life I’ve wanted a woman like you—”
He reached out a big, splayed and unhealthily colourless hand, touched Eileen’s body. Beneath his gentle touch she stirred and moaned.
And suddenly Tony was cursing him wildly.
“Damn you; you hound of hell in priest’s clothing!”
The Reverend Barnes’s huge hand paused in its caressing.
