by Otto Penzler
The women started a slow rigadoon, sliding their bare feet sidewise, stopping to stamp out a grotesque rhythm, then pirouetting languidly and taking up the sliding, sidling step again. Their arms were stretched straight out, as if they had been crucified against the air, and as they danced they shook and twitched their shoulders with a motion reminiscent of the shimmy of the early 1920s. Each wore a shift of silken netlike fabric that covered her from shoulder to instep, sleeveless and unbelted, and as they danced the garments clung in rippling, half-revealing, half-concealing folds about them.
They moved with a peculiar lack of verve, like marionettes actuated by unseen strings, sleep-walkers, or persons in hypnosis; only the drummer seemed to take an interest in his task. His hands shook as he plied his drumsticks, his shoulders jerked and twitched and writhed hysterically, and though his eyes were closed and his face masklike, it seemed instinct with avid longing, with prurient expectancy.
“Les aisselles—their axillae, Friend Trowbridge, observe them with care, if you please!” de Grandin breathed in my ear.
Sudden recognition came to me. With the raising of their hands in the performance of the dance the women exposed their armpits, and under each left arm I saw the mark of a deep wound, bloodless despite its depth, and closed with the familiar “baseball stitch.”
No surgeon leaves a wound like that, it was the mark of the embalmer’s bistoury made in cutting through the superficial tissue to raise the axillary artery for his injection.
“Good God!” I choked. The languidness of their movements . . . their pallor . . . their closed eyes . . . their fixed, unsmiling faces . . . now the unmistakable stigmata of embalmment! These were no living women, they were—
De Grandin’s fingers clutched my elbow fiercely. “Observe, my friend,” he ordered softly. “Now we shall see if my plan carried or miscarried.”
Shuffling into the room, as unconcerned as if he served coffee after a formal meal, came a Chinese bearing a tray on which were four small soup bowls and a plate of dry bread. He set the tray on the floor before the fat man and turned away, paying no attention to the dancing figures and the drummer squatting in the corner.
An indolent motion of the master’s hand and the slaves fell on their provender like famished beasts at feeding time, drinking greedily from the coarse china bowls, wolfing the unbuttered bread almost unchewed.
Such a look of dawning realization as spread over the four countenances as they drained the broth I have seen sometimes when half-conscious patients were revived with powerful restoratives. The man was first to show it, surging from his crouching position and turning his closed eyes this way and that, like a caged thing seeking escape from its prison. But before he could do more than wheel drunkenly in his tracks realization seemed to strike the women, too. There was a swirl of fluttering draperies, the soft thud of soft feet on the tiled floor of the room, and all rushed pellmell to the door.
The sharp clutch of de Grandin’s hand roused me. “Quick, Friend Trowbridge,” he commanded. “To the cemetery; to the cemetery with all haste! Nom d’un sale chameau, we have yet to see the end of this!”
“Which cemetery?” I asked as we stumbled toward my parked car.
“N’importe,” he returned. “At Shadow Lawn or Mount Olivet we shall see that which will make us call ourselves three shameless liars!”
Mount Olivet was nearest of the three municipalities of the dead adjacent to Harrisonville, and toward it we made top speed. The driveway gates had closed at sunset, but the small gates each side the main entrance were still unlatched, and we raced through them and to the humble tomb we had seen violated that morning.
“Say, Dr. de Grandin,” panted Costello as he strove to keep pace with the agile little Frenchman, “just what’s th’ big idea? I know ye’ve some good reason, but—”
“Take cover!” interrupted the other. “Behold, my friends, he comes!”
Shuffling drunkenly, stumbling over mounded tops of sodded graves, a slouching figure came careening toward us, veered off as it neared the Carson grave and dropped to its knees beside it. A moment later it was scrabbling at the clay and gravel which had been disturbed by the grave-diggers that morning, seeking desperately to burrow its way into the sepulcher.
“Me God!” Costello breathed as he rose unsteadily. I could see the tiny globules of fears-weat standing on his forehead, but his inbred sense of duty overmastered his fright. “Gyp Carson, I arrest you—” he laid a hand on the burrowing creature’s shoulder, and it was as if he touched a soap bubble. There was a frightened mouselike squeak, then a despairing groan, and the figure under his hand collapsed in a crumpled heap. When de Grandin and I reached them the pale, drawn face of a corpse grinned at us sardonically in the beam of Costello’s flashlight.
“Dr.—de—Grandin, Dr.—Trowbridge—for th’ love o’ God give me a drink o’ sumpin!” begged the big Irishman, clutching the diminutive Frenchman’s shoulder as a frightened child might clutch its mother’s skirts.
“Courage, my old one,” de Grandin patted the detective’s hand, “we have work before us tonight, remember. Tomorrow they will bury this poor one. The law has had its will of him; now let his body rest in peace. Tonight—sacré nom, the dead must tend the dead; it is with the living we have business. En avant; to Wallagin’s, Friend Trowbridge!”
“Your solution of the case was sane,” he told Costello as we set out for the house we’d left a little while before, “but there are times when very sanity proves the falseness of a conclusion. That someone had unearthed the body of Gyp Carson to copy his fingerprints seemed most reasonable, but today I obtained information which led me up another road. A most unpleasant road, parbleu! I have already told you something of the history of the Wallagin person; how he was dismissed from the Rangers’ Club, and how he vowed a horrid vengeance on those voting his expulsion. That was of interest. I sought still further. I found that he resided long in Haiti, and that there he mingled with the Culte de Morts. We laugh at such things here, but in Haiti, that dark stepdaughter of mysterious Africa’s dark mysteries, they are no laughing matter. No. In Port-au-Prince and in the backlands of the jungle they will tell you of the zombie—who is neither ghost nor yet a living person resurrected, but only the spiritless corpse ravished from its grave, endowed with pseudo-life by black magic and made to serve the whim of the magician who has animated it. Sometimes wicked persons steal a corpse to make it commit crime while they stay far from the scene, thus furnishing themselves unbreakable alibis. More often they rob graves to secure slaves who labor ceaselessly for them at no wages at all. Yes, it is so; with my own eyes I have seen it.
“But there are certain limits which no sorcery can transcend. The poor dead zombie must be fed, for if he is not he cannot serve his so execrable master. But he must be fed only certain things. If he taste salt or meat, though but the tiniest soupçon of either be concealed in a great quantity of food, he at once realizes he is dead, and goes back to his grave, nor can the strongest magic of his owner stay him from returning for one little second. Furthermore, when he goes back he is dead forever after. He cannot be raised from the grave a second time, for Death which has been cheated for so long asserts itself, and the putrefaction which was stayed during the zombie’s period of servitude takes place all quickly, so the zombie dead six months, if it returns to its grave and so much as touches its hand to the earth, becomes at once like any other six-months-dead corpse—a mass of putrescence pleasant neither to the eye nor nose, but preferable to the dead-alive thing it was a moment before.
“Consider then: the steward of the Rangers’ Club related dreadful tales this Monsieur Wallagin had told all boastfully—how he had learned to be a zombie-maker, a corpse-master, in Haiti; how the mysteries of Papa Nebo, Gouédé Mazacca and Gouédé Oussou, those dread oracles of the dead, were opened books to him.
“ ‘Ah-ha, Monsieur Wallagin,’ I say, ‘I damn suspect you have been up to business of the monkey here in this so pleasant State of
New Jersey. You have, it seems, brought here the mysteries of Haiti, and with them you wreak vengeance on those you hate, n’est-ce pas?’
“Thereafter I go to his house, meet the little, discharged Chinese man, and talk with him. For why was he discharged with violence? Because, by blue, he had put salt in the soup of the guests whom Monsieur Wallagin entertains.
“ ‘Four guests he has, you say?’ I remark. ‘I had not heard he had so many.’
“ ‘Nom d’un nom, yes,’ the excellent Chinois tells me. ‘There are one man and three so lovely women in that house, and all seem walking in their sleep. At night he has the women dance while the man makes music with the drum. Sometimes he sends the man out, but what to do I do not know. At night, also, he feeds them bread and soup with neither salt nor meat, food not fit for a mangy dog to lap.’
“ ‘Oh, excellent old man of China, oh, paragon of all Celestials,’ I reply, ‘behold, I give you money. Now, come with me and we shall hire another cook for your late master, and we shall bribe him well to smuggle meat into the soup he makes for those strange guests. Salt the monster might detect when he tastes the soup before it are served, but a little, tiny bit of beef-meat, non. Nevertheless, it will serve excellently for my purposes.’
“Voila, my friends, there is the explanation of tonight’s so dreadful scenes.”
“But what are we to do?” I asked. “You can’t arrest this Wallagin. No court on earth would try him on such charges as you make.”
“Do you believe it, Friend Costello?” de Grandin asked the detective.
“Sure, I do, sir. Ain’t I seen it with me own two eyes?”
“And what should be this one’s punishment?”
“Och, Dr. de Grandin, are you kiddin’? What would we do if we saw a poison snake on th’ sidewalk, an’ us with a jolly bit o’ blackthorn in our hands?”
“Précisément, I think we understand each other perfectly, mon vieux.” He thrust his slender, womanishly small hand out and lost it in the depths of the detective’s great fist.
“Would you be good enough to wait us here, Friend Trowbridge?” he asked as we came to a halt before the house. “There is a trifle of unfinished business to attend to and—the night is fine, the view exquisite. I think that you would greatly enjoy it for a little while, my old and rare.”
IT MIGHT HAVE been a quarter-hour later when they rejoined me. “What—” I began, but the perfectly expressionless expression on de Grandin’s face arrested my question.
“Hélas, my friend, it was unfortunate,” he told me. “The good Costello was about to arrest him, and he turned to flee. Straight up the long, steep stairs he fled, and at the topmost one, parbleu, he missed his footing and came tumbling down! I greatly fear—indeed, I know—his neck was broken in the fall. It is not so, mon sergent?” he turned to Costello for confirmation. “Did he not fall downstairs?”
“That he did, sir. Twice. Th’ first time didn’t quite finish him.”
ALTHOUGH HE DESCRIBED himself as American and referred to America as home, F.(rancis) Marion Crawford (1854–1909) was born in Bagni di Lucca, Italy, and was mainly educated at Cambridge University (England), the University of Heidelberg (Germany), and the University of Rome (Italy). He spent two years in India, studying Sanskrit. In 1881, he moved to Italy, where he lived permanently, though he spent many winters in New York.
His books were very successful from the beginning, though a rather sumptuous lifestyle and enormous generosity forced him to work at a ferocious pace, producing about five thousand words a day and two or more novels a year almost until the day he died. He was primarily a romanticist and was often accused of writing too quickly and too prolifically to allow the full expression of his talent. His villains were absolutely black, his heroes were unrealistically virtuous, and his women characters of unsurpassed perfection, which, a cousin of his noted, was the way he saw people in the real world.
His vivid, picturesque novels, for all the impressive sales and popularity during his lifetime, have not stood the test of time and few modern readers are likely to know, much less be tempted to dip into, what are regarded as his finest works: Saracinesca (1887), Sant’ Ilario (1888), or Don Orsino (1891). The same is not true of “The Upper Berth,” his most famous and frequently anthologized tale, which H. P. Lovecraft described as “one of the most tremendous horror stories in all literature” in his critical history, Supernatural Horror in Literature.
“The Upper Berth” was first collected in a very rare book, The Broken Shaft (New York: Putnam, 1886), and then, because of its reputation as a small masterpiece, it was published in the collection The Upper Berth (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1894).
SOMEBODY ASKED FOR the cigars. We had talked long, and the conversation was beginning to languish; the tobacco smoke had got into the heavy curtains, the wine had got into those brains which were liable to become heavy, and it was already perfectly evident that, unless somebody did something to rouse our oppressed spirits, the meeting would soon come to its natural conclusion, and we, the guests, would speedily go home to bed, and most certainly to sleep. No one had said anything very remarkable; it may be that no one had anything very remarkable to say. Jones had given us every particular of his last hunting adventure in Yorkshire. Mr. Tompkins, of Boston, had explained at elaborate length those working principles, by the due and careful maintenance of which the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé Railroad not only extended its territory, increased its departmental influence, and transported live stock without starving them to death before the day of actual delivery, but, also, had for years succeeded in deceiving those passengers who bought its tickets into the fallacious belief that the corporation aforesaid was really able to transport human life without destroying it. Signor Tombola had endeavoured to persuade us, by arguments which we took no trouble to oppose, that the unity of his country in no way resembled the average modern torpedo, carefully planned, constructed with all the skill of the greatest European arsenals, but, when constructed, destined to be directed by feeble hands into a region where it must undoubtedly explode, unseen, unfeared, and unheard, into the illimitable wastes of political chaos.
It is unnecessary to go into further details. The conversation had assumed proportions which would have bored Prometheus on his rock, which would have driven Tantalus to distraction, and which would have impelled Ixion to seek relaxation in the simple but instructive dialogues of Herr Ollendorff, rather than submit to the greater evil of listening to our talk. We had sat at table for hours; we were bored, we were tired, and nobody showed signs of moving.
Somebody called for cigars. We all instinctively looked towards the speaker. Brisbane was a man of five-and-thirty years of age, and remarkable for those gifts which chiefly attract the attention of men. He was a strong man. The external proportions of his figure presented nothing extraordinary to the common eye, though his size was above the average. He was a little over six feet in height, and moderately broad in the shoulder; he did not appear to be stout, but, on the other hand, he was certainly not thin; his small head was supported by a strong and sinewy neck; his broad muscular hands appeared to possess a peculiar skill in breaking walnuts without the assistance of the ordinary cracker, and, seeing him in profile, one could not help remarking the extraordinary breadth of his sleeves, and the unusual thickness of his chest. He was one of those men who are commonly spoken of among men as deceptive; that is to say, that though he looked exceedingly strong he was in reality very much stronger than he looked. Of his features I need say little. His head is small, his hair is thin, his eyes are blue, his nose is large, he has a small moustache, and a square jaw. Everybody knows Brisbane, and when he asked for a cigar everybody looked at him.
“It is a very singular thing,” said Brisbane.
Everybody stopped talking. Brisbane’s voice was not loud, but possessed a peculiar quality of penetrating general conversation, and cutting it like a knife. Everybody listened. Brisbane, perceiving that he had attracted their general atten
tion, lit his cigar with great equanimity.
“It is very singular,” he continued, “that thing about ghosts. People are always asking whether anybody has seen a ghost. I have.”
“Bosh! What, you? You don’t mean to say so, Brisbane? Well, for a man of his intelligence!”
A chorus of exclamations greeted Brisbane’s remarkable statement. Everybody called for cigars, and Stubbs the butler suddenly appeared from the depths of nowhere with a fresh bottle of dry champagne. The situation was saved; Brisbane was going to tell a story.
I am an old sailor, said Brisbane, and as I have to cross the Atlantic pretty often, I have my favourites. Most men have their favourites. I have seen a man wait in a Broadway bar for three-quarters of an hour for a particular car which he liked. I believe the bar-keeper made at least one-third of his living by that man’s preference. I have a habit of waiting for certain ships when I am obliged to cross that duck-pond. It may be a prejudice, but I was never cheated out of a good passage but once in my life. I remember it very well; it was a warm morning in June, and the Custom House officials, who were hanging about waiting for a steamer already on her way up from the Quarantine, presented a peculiarly hazy and thoughtful appearance. I had not much luggage—I never have. I mingled with the crowd of passengers, porters, and officious individuals in blue coats and brass buttons, who seemed to spring up like mushrooms from the deck of a moored steamer to obtrude their unnecessary services upon the independent passenger. I have often noticed with a certain interest the spontaneous evolution of these fellows. They are not there when you arrive; five minutes after the pilot has called “Go ahead!” they, or at least their blue coats and brass buttons, have disappeared from deck and gangway as completely as though they had been consigned to that locker which tradition unanimously ascribes to Davy Jones. But, at the moment of starting, they are there, clean-shaved, blue-coated, and ravenous for fees. I hastened on board. The Kamtschatka was one of my favourite ships. I say was, because she emphatically no longer is. I cannot conceive of any inducement which could entice me to make another voyage in her. Yes, I know what you are going to say. She is uncommonly clean in the run aft, she has enough bluffing off in the bows to keep her dry, and the lower berths are most of them double. She has a lot of advantages, but I won’t cross in her again. Excuse the digression. I got on board. I hailed a steward, whose red nose and redder whiskers were equally familiar to me.
