Zombies

by Otto Penzler

  “You feel jealousy, Mr. Kent?”

  Tony could not see the expression on the man’s face; he was a black-robed bulk against the lantern light. But there was a terrible gentleness in his voice.

  “You filthy—” Tony choked. Words would no longer come to him; his rage was beyond words.

  “Mr. Kent,” the big man said softly, and Tony sensed that a slow, utterly evil smile was stealing across his face, “in a little while—such a little while—you’ll no longer care what I do with her. You’ll be beyond caring.”

  He swung about to face Tony.

  “But—before I—dispose of you,” he continued, with startling unexpectedness, “I’m going to tell you the—truth about myself. Why? Perhaps because I want to explain myself, to justify myself to myself. I don’t know. Perhaps, in this moment, I have a sudden clear premonition of God’s inevitable vengeance—for I am damned, Kent; I know full well that I am damned.

  “I have been a preacher for twenty years, Kent. Not the soft-spoken, politically minded type that ultimately lands the rich city churches; sin was too real to me for that; I fought the Devil tooth and claw.

  “Perhaps that was the trouble. My ecclesiastical superiors were never certain of me. They thought of me as a sort of volcano that might explode at any time; I was unpredictable. And they suspected, too, I think, the devil in me—the physical lustiness and the desire for material things I fought so hard to stifle. They gave me only the poorest, backcountry churches, they starved me; I was hungry for a mate and I could not even afford a wife. I think they hoped that I would fall into sin, so that they might thus be circumspectly rid of me.

  “My last church was a pine shack twenty miles deep in a swamp. My parishioners were almost all Negroes—Negroes and a few whites so poverty-stricken that not one had ever seen a railway train or worn factory-made shoes. And inbreeding, in that disease-ridden country, was the rule, not the exception; you have no idea. . . .

  “I worked, there in that earthly hell, like a madman. There was something there, something tangible, for me to fight—and I have always been a literal man. It was a shaman—what you would call a medicine-man or witch doctor. He was, of course, a coloured man.

  “It may sound incredible, but I competed against that man for almost a year. We were exactly like rival salesmen. I sold faith, and enforced my sales with threats of hell-fire and damnation; he manufactured charms and love-potions, prophesied the future and healed the sick.

  “Of course I went after him hammer and tongs. I blasted him in church; I ridiculed him; I told those poor ignorant people that his salves and his potions and his prophecies were no good. Eight months after I arrived there I began to feel that I was winning. . . .

  “After about a year had passed he came to see me. We knew each other, of course; I will describe him—a very gentle old man, very tall, very thin and grey. He told me that he wanted me to go away. I think that he knew my weakness, the bitterness in me, better than I knew it myself.

  “He raised no religious arguments; in fact, I don’t think there were ever any really fundamental differences between us. You know that Holy Writ speaks of witches and warlocks and demons, and my chief objection to this man lay in my private conviction that he was a faker, a mumbo-jumbo expert pulling the wool over the eyes of fools. And, even though I am a fundamentalist, still, this is the twentieth century. The upshot of it was that I laughed at him and listened.

  “He merely told me that if I would go away he would teach me his power. What power? I said. I should have known that he was trying to trap me—to strike a bargain. He looked at me. ‘Among other things, to raise the dead, that they may do your bidding,’ he said, very slowly and seriously, ‘although I have never myself done this obeah, because there has never been the need.’

  “I laughed at him very loudly then, and for a long time.

  “ ‘Well,’ I told him, after I got my breath back, ‘I am a pretty poor preacher—if the calibre of my parish offers any criterion whatever. Perhaps I am not destined for the life of a minister, after all. Certainly my superiors don’t think so. Therefore, if you will teach me these things of which you speak, and if they work, I will never preach another word as long as I live. But, if they do not work, you will come to church on Sunday, and proclaim yourself a faker before the entire congregation.’

  “I felt very sure of myself, then, and I expected him to attempt to avoid the showdown. But he only answered me, quietly and gravely, ‘I am the seventh son of a seventh son. I will teach you the obeah my father taught me, and if it works you will go away.’

  “So—and I will tell you that I kept my tongue in my cheek all the while—I learned the rituals he taught me, learned them word for word, and wrote them down, phonetically, on paper to his dictation.

  “But—he had not lied!”

  The black-clad giant paused, and Tony saw that he was trembling. Presently the trembling passed, and, in a quiet, colourless monotone, the apostate minister added, “I knew, then, that I was eternally damned.”

  Tony shook his head. “No. Give up this—madness. No man has ever had the power to—condemn his own soul!”

  The colossus shook its head; Tony could see a sneer hardening on its lips.

  “I’ll—pay! Because I have, now, what I have always wanted—power! Power over other men—and women! Shall I tell you what I am presently going to do with you? I’m going to make you so that you will forget everything; you will walk and talk only when I tell you to; you will do only what I say. You have money; I will make you take your car, and drive Miss Eileen and me to New York. There you will go to the bank, or wherever it is you keep your money, and draw everything out for me. Then, once again, you will get in your car and drive, but this time you will be alone, and while you are driving I will stick a pin into a little doll. ‘Heart failure,’ the doctors will say.”

  For a moment Tony did not speak. Then with a strange steadiness, he asked: “But—Eileen?”

  The big man chuckled. “You ask that question of a man who has denied himself women through all his life? Eileen will belong to me.”

  Abruptly, ignoring the bound, suddenly raging man on the floor beside the wine-bin, he turned away. But now, when again he squatted close to Eileen, he did not remain motionless. From somewhere about his clothing he produced a needle and thread, and bits of cloth, and he was sewing. And as he sewed he muttered strange words to himself, in a tongue Tony had never heard before, muttered those words in a cadenceless monotone, as though he himself did not understand them, but was repeating them by rote, as perhaps, they had been taught to him by some aged coloured wizard. . . .

  Tony’s bound wrists rubbed back and forth, back and forth across the nail. Suddenly the strands binding his hands loosed.

  Slowly, inch by inch, Tony hunched along the wine-bin, drawing up his feet. Warily he watched the big, crouching man; at any moment the Reverend Barnes might notice. . . .

  But seemingly, the colossus was too preoccupied.

  In furtive, small strokes, Tony’s ankles sawed across the nail.

  Suddenly the apostate minister stood up. He was looking at his handiwork, a grotesque little thing of odds and ends, crudely sewn yet unmistakably, with its limp, flopping appendages, a doll. And then he grunted approvingly, came toward Tony with the doll in his left hand.

  “I’ll have to take a few strands of your hair,” he said grimly. His right hand reached downward toward Tony’s scalp.

  And then Tony’s hands lashed from behind his back, clutched the pillar-like legs, strained. Abruptly the colossus sprawled his length on the uneven rock, his hands outsplayed. The little doll slid unheeded across the cold stone.

  Jack-knifing his bound feet beneath him, Tony hurled himself across the floor. And with that tremendous effort the frayed ropes about his ankles ripped away.

  Instantly he was atop the big man, his fingers sunk deep into the pasty white throat, his legs locked about giant hips.

  But his antagonist’s strengt
h seemed superhuman. Only a half hour before those spatulate hands, as surely as though they had been about black throats, had simultaneously strangled three men. Rope-like torso muscles tautened; powerful hands tore at Tony’s forearms.

  The powerful hands lifted, tightened about Tony’s throat. And as those huge talons flexed, a roaring began in Tony’s ears, red spots danced madly before his eyes, the dim cellar swirled and heaved.

  The colossus, hands still locked about Tony’s throat, surged slowly to his feet. Contemptuously he looked into Tony’s bloodshot, staring eyes, hurled him reeling across the rock-gouged vault.

  And in that instant something hard and sharp split the base of his skull like an intolerable lightning. Bright sparks spun crazily before his eyes—flickered out in utter blackness. He felt himself falling, falling into eternity. . . .

  Old Robert Perry, his eyes blazing with inhuman hate, stood above the Reverend Barnes’s sprawling corpse, watching the red blood dim the lustre of the axe-blade he had sunk inches deep into the giant’s skull!

  “That hellish paralysis!” he was babbling, inanely. “That hellish paralysis—gone just in time!”

  Old Robert Perry wheeled. In the feeble yellow light beneath the lantern he saw Eileen, awake now, huddled on the floor, pointing—her eyes pools of horror. And, following with his gaze her outstretched hand, he saw them, coming from the dark bins, the dead things the fallen minister had torn from their graves to toil in the cotton! They came pouring from those great bins with dreadful haste, their faces no longer stony and still, but writhing and tortured. And from the mouths of those that yet possessed mouths poured wild wailings.

  Old Robert Perry was trembling—trembling.

  “God!” he mumbled. “Their master’s dead, and now they seek their graves!”

  Dimly, as one who dreams in fever, he saw them passing him, no longer with stumbling, hopeless footsteps, but hurriedly, eagerly, crowding one another aside in their haste to escape into the night and return to their graves. And the flesh on his back crawled, and loosed, and crawled again. . . .

  The zombies, dead things no longer beneath the fallen giant’s unholy spell, twisted, broken, rotted by the diseases that had killed them, seeking the graves from which they had been torn!

  “God!”

  And then they were gone, gone in the night, and the sound of their wailing was a diminishing, scattering thinness in the distance. . . .

  Old Robert Perry stared dazedly about, at Eileen, huddled on the floor, sobbing with little, half-mad cries that wrung his heart—at Tony, staggering drunkenly to his feet, stumbling blindly toward his beloved.

  “Eileen!”

  The name reached out from Tony’s heart like the caress of strong arms. Reeling, he followed that cry across the floor to her, dropped to the rock beside her, gathered her in his arms.

  DAWN WAS NEAR when at last old Robert Perry and young Anthony Kent trudged wearily through the purple night toward the plantation house.

  The belated moon, preceding the sun by only a few hours, glimmered in the east, a golden, enchanted shield; the woods were still.

  The two men did not speak. Their thoughts were full of the horror that had been, of the great pit they had dug in the night and filled with the bodies of the giant renegade and his followers.

  Yet, as they drew closer and closer to the rambling old house that nestled, moonbathed and serene, in the valley beneath them, words came at last.

  “Anthony Kent,” the old planter said earnestly, “I have lived on this land through near four generations. I have heard the Negroes talk—of things like this. But I would never have believed—unless the truth had been thrust in my face.”

  Tony Kent shifted his spade to his left shoulder before he replied.

  “Perhaps it’s better,” he said slowly, “that men are inclined to scepticism. Perhaps, as time goes on, these evil, black arts will die out. It may all be part of some divine plan.”

  Their footsteps made little crunching sounds in the road.

  “Thank God that the fiend and his niggers were strangers hereabouts!” the old man said fervently. “They won’t be missed. Nobody, of course, would ever believe—what really happened.”

  “No,” Tony said. “But it’s all over, now. Those dead things have gone—back to their graves.”

  They were close to the house. On the long walk, before the low screened porch, a small white-clad figure waited. And then it was running swiftly, eagerly toward them.

  “Eileen!”

  The name was a pulsing song. And then she was locked in Tony’s arms, and he was kissing her upturned, tremulous lips.

  A PROFESSOR OF English at Kent State University, Dr. Mary A. Turzillo has written critical articles and scholarly works, mainly on science fiction subjects and themes. Under the pseudonym Mary T. Brizzi, she wrote Starmont Reader’s Guide to Philip José Farmer (1981) and Starmont Reader’s Guide to Anne McCaffrey (1985). She has also written under the bylines Mary Turzillo and M. A. Turzillo.

  An award-winning poet, she has been published in numerous journals nationally, as well as producing two collections of verse, Your Cat & Other Space Aliens (2007) and Dragon Soup (2008), a collaboration with artist and poet Marge Simon.

  A longtime member of the Science Fiction Writers of America, she was given the Nebula Award by that organization for Best Novelette for Mars Is No Place for Children, originally published in Science Fiction Age (2000); her story “Pride” was nominated for a Nebula for Best Short Story of 2007; it was first published in Fast Forward I. Her only novel to date, An Old-Fashioned Martian Girl, was serialized in Analog magazine (July–November, 2004).

  Professor Turzillo is married to the science fiction and horror writer Geoffrey A. Landis; they live in Ohio.

  “April Flowers, November Harvest” was originally published in the May 1993 issue of Midnight Zoo.

  THE SHALLOW GRAVE lay quiet for over a year; then violets sprouted from the black dirt on Maggie’s eyes, and bloodroot from the clods in her hands.

  Six months later, she arose.

  The world was enervatingly warm even in the early November snow of Ohio, but she had to find something warmer still. Not the live thing that had been in her abdomen; that was dead. Something hot and furious, like a rat scrabbling at the edge of the woods.

  THE SNOW WASN’T laying yet, but flakes drifted down and melted on Dwayne’s young, strong hands, on the chain saw, and on the bark of the slabs he was cutting. He loved the harsh scream of the saw; it insulated him in a cloud of noise, like cotton batting, inside which he could savor the cold sharp smell of wood mulch and the piney sawdust. His arms ached with the weight of the chain saw, and he saw he had cut nearly all of the wood. He turned off the saw, and the silence welled up like water.

  The neighbors were complaining, Sheila claimed. Said the house looked like a shanty. The unfinished back porch, and all that stacked wood, the tools, gas cans, odd lengths of lumber on the gravel path and among the thick leaves behind the house. But Sheila’s brother worked at the yard and got the slabs for the cost of hauling them away. The slabs would help them through the winter without worrying about the growing burden of bills. And the new baby, their first child, would need a warm house. Caterpillars had broad black stripes in their rusty wool, forecasting a bad winter.

  She fretted at Dwayne, Sheila did. The baby was damn near due, and he got jumpy from the way she was always wanting things and complaining. The last days of the pregnancy made her that way, he figured, that and being laid off from Excelsior Lamp Plant.

  Sheila stood framed in the back door, holding the screen door open. Her huge stomach wasn’t cute anymore; it made her monstrous. She thrust one hip out in impatience.

  “Didn’t know you were calling,” he said in his low, slow voice.

  “Telephone. They hung up, though.” She focused her close-set eyes on him. Her face was still gaunt, though puffy around her eyes.

  “Maybe they’ll call back.”

  “D
on’t know.” She shifted her weight off the doorframe and stepped awkwardly back into the house. “You ready for something to eat?”

  “Reckon. Got to put the saw away, though. Bound to be too dark to cut any more after supper.” He reached out to pat her abdomen, a familiar gesture. But she stepped heavily out of his way and went back to the kitchen.

  Supper was hamburgers, served in the frying pan on a hot pad, with canned peas and carrots. Dwayne placed a hamburger on a slice of white bread, smeared it with mustard, and covered it with another slice. Virtuously, he ate the vegetables before the sandwich. They tasted good, watery and bland. The mustard cut through the rich grease of the hamburger. He chewed deliberately, swallowed with relish.

  Sheila ate steadily, mostly hamburger. She spooned grease over a slice of bread, salted and ate it with knife and fork. Neither spoke.

  The phone rang, and Sheila heaved herself out of the chair, throwing her bulk in front of Dwayne to get to it first.

  “They hung up,” she accused.

  “Let it go. They’ll call back.”

  Sheila dropped back into the chair. “It was that friend of yours.”

  “What friend?”

  “That woman friend of yours. Called herself Maggie.”

  Dwayne took another slice of bread. “I have reason to believe Maggie is no longer around this town.”

  “That call before. It was a woman. Sounded like Maggie. It did.”

  Dwayne laid his fork down. “That what’s eating you?”

  Sheila nodded once, staring into her plate, mouth drawn in a bitter bow.

  He took another hamburger steak to make up a sandwich. “I believe Maggie is living in Denver.”

  Sheila darted a sharp look at him. “Denver? Where did you get that?”

  “A feeling. She went away. Her sister said she had a man friend, old guy in Denver.”

  “You been to talk to her sister?”

  “No. This was a while back. Before you and me got married.”

  Sheila chewed, swallowed, laid her silverware on the Formica tabletop. “That whore,” she muttered.