Zombies

by Otto Penzler

  Once more, Tom Stuart lifted his eyes to meet the even gaze of the scientist. Into the huge bearded man’s expression had suddenly come something almost boyish—that rare and irresistible quality of frankness and regret mingled with sheer childlike trust, which makes no extenuation of deeds committed, but appeals entirely to the understanding and kindness and forgiveness of the injured party.

  He concluded: “And there it is; the whole truth as straight as I can give it to you. I—I hope it isn’t too much of a shock, old man. Believe me, I’d sooner have cut off my left hand than tell you this; but there wasn’t any choice. . . .”

  For a long time, Beswick sat there without saying anything, or making any sign. And when, finally, he broke his silence, the tones of his voice were entirely casual.

  “Youth and youth,” he murmured. “Both young, you and my wife; and I have gray hair. Who can annul the laws of Nature? But I’d better get Wanda, perhaps, Stuart, before I say any more.” He rose to his feet. “You don’t object, now that you’ve made everything plain?”

  “Call her by all means.” As Stuart rose likewise from his armchair, his honest countenance cleared; he was openly relieved to see that the other had taken his bombshell so calmly. “Then we can discuss the situation from every angle, and decide what is to be done. It was only—only while I was breaking the news to you, old chap, that I somehow felt—it would be easier, without her. . . .”

  AS HE LEFT the room, Dr. Beswick actually smiled. It was a rather horrible smile that hovered on his incongruously red lips; a smile full of craft and cruelty and malice; but Stuart, caught up in his own thoughts, did not notice. The huge man felt his heart pounding in his chest; in one moment more, he would see her—the dearest thing in the world to him, the treasure of his dreams, Wanda. . . . And at the same time, he cautioned himself that he must consider Beswick’s feelings; after all, in the man’s own house—even if everything did seem to be straightened out now. . . . Somehow, he must restrain himself from taking her in his arms; he must be content with holding her cool hand in his own, and letting his love speak only from his eyes. Later—somehow, in some way—things would be worked out so that they could be together without restraint; but for the present, he must hold himself in check.

  And then, presently, Wanda Beswick entered the library; she stood there, tall and slender and heart-breakingly lovely. She was one of those waxen-white women with skin textured like flower-petals unfolded in some distant tropical rainforest. A coil of gleaming black hair rested on the nape of her slender neck; this, and her perfectly-formed scarlet lips contrasted strikingly with her pallid complexion. She was gowned in a sheath of dull silver brocade, designed to enhance the grace of her lithe body, at once fully rounded and delicately slender.

  For Tom Stuart, when Wanda came into his field of vision, every resolve, every admonition he had given himself, was swept away in a flood of emotion. For four long months, this woman’s loveliness had been burning in his thoughts; and now that he was face to face with her, he was like one suddenly intoxicated by a potent and irresistible drug. Dr. Beswick, whose feelings Stuart had intended to respect, had come into the room with his wife; but the tall, bearded man was suddenly oblivious of his presence; there was room for only one thought in his brain. . . .

  He strode past Beswick to Wanda’s side; he gathered her in his arms, and held her close to him. For a long time, he stood thus motionless, breathing the perfume of her wonderful hair. But then he slowly held her away from him at arm’s length, as if to feast his eyes on her loveliness. “My darling,” he whispered. “How I have dreamed of you! It seems so long! Tell me, did you get my letters? I had several chances to write, you know; I sent you long letters.”

  She did not answer his question; but Stuart at first supposed that she was so overcome with emotion that she was unable to speak. It was only after a moment that he realized that something was wrong. The look in her eyes was the thing which first made a little chill of nameless fear quiver along his spine. Somehow, her eyes were different; there was no physical change, they were dark and liquid as always, fringed with long delicate lashes: but they no longer reflected anything—they no longer spoke to him. . . .

  Wanda’s eyes were empty: that was it; they were vacant as the eyes of an idiot, from whose living body the soul has fled—or a small baby, in whom the soul has not yet been awakened.

  Very quietly and gently, Stuart repeated his question. “Wanda; my letters . . . did any of them reach you?”

  She did not reply; only her lips slackened a little; from one corner of her exquisite mouth trickled a glistening rivulet of saliva. It was hardly noticeable; and yet there was something infinitely horrible about the sight: a perfectly gowned and lovely woman, in the very flower of maturity, drooling—actually slobbering like a small, helpless infant. . . .

  SUDDENLY, A SPASM of frantic energy coursed through Stuart’s giant frame. He shook Wanda violently, as if to stir up in her awareness something that escaped him; at the same time, he fairly roared, “Wanda! Answer me, I tell you! Speak, Wanda—for God’s sake, speak to me!”

  Now, at last, enough impression seemed to be made on Wanda’s brain to elicit a response from her; but her reaction was almost more shocking than a continuation of her apathy would have been.

  Whimpering, she pulled away from Stuart. “No,” she whined, in the voice of a resentful little girl. “Don’t shake Wanda! Nasty man with black beard leave Wanda alone. Wanda won’t play. . . .”

  Slowly, Stuart’s arms sank down, and hung limply at his sides. His brief outburst had subsided utterly; now he was a man stunned, utterly nonplussed; the only emotion in his eyes was pain, mingled with complete bewilderment.

  “Wanda,” he muttered. “What’s wrong? What’s happened to you?”

  Slowly, he turned his massive head in the direction of Beswick, who stood by, peering with a dreadful bird-like intentness through his heavy glasses. Stuart’s bewildered eyes focused as if with an effort on the older man; when he spoke, it was still almost plaintively, in the voice of a man confronted with something beyond his understanding.

  “Is something wrong with her, Beswick?” he asked. “Something’s happened—while I was gone?”

  Beswick slowly nodded. “Quite correct, Stuart. Something has happened. And there’s something very decidedly wrong with her—at least from your point of view.” He spoke deliberately, as if each word were a morsel of food, to be savored by his tongue and his moist red lips, tasted and relished with all the voluptuous enjoyment of the gourmet.

  But then, suddenly, his manner changed. “You fool,” he rasped, his speech acrid now as if tinctured by an inexhaustible well of bitterness in his soul. “What did you take me for, during the past year, when you were making love to my wife? Did you suppose I was a blindman, or an utter imbecile? Did you imagine I wasn’t aware of what was going on between you and Wanda? It wasn’t difficult, you know, once I’d noticed you mooning at each other with love-sick eyes, to arrange things so you’d suppose you were alone together—while I watched from a place of concealment.

  “And just now, when you decided at last to flaunt your deception in my face, you did so in the expectation that I would meekly bow to the inevitable, and step out of the picture—a quiet little divorce—you and Wanda would set up housekeeping together—and you’d even invite me to dinner once in a while, just to prove that we were all civilized, and no hard feelings. . . . I know all your arguments, Stuart, all the arguments you and Wanda accepted as self-evident, along with the rest of your sophisticated, enlightened generation. She married me when she was a mere girl, too young to know her own mind, dazzled by my wealth and position; but then True Love comes along, and of course she can’t be expected to go on living with a man old enough to be her father. . . . Oh, I know the whole rationalization as well as you do yourself. But the point is, it doesn’t impress me!

  “Why should I be cast aside like an old and worn-out garment that has outlived its usefulness? I can assu
re you I’m not so old that I fail to appreciate Wanda’s loveliness. And I refuse to be cheated out of a thing that belongs to me, for all the notions you and your kind take so readily for granted—self-sacrifice, and unselfishness, and doing the decent thing, and all the rest of it.

  “No, no, my friend; you don’t get rid of me so easily. I made up my mind to that, the very same night I confirmed my suspicions about you and Wanda; and it didn’t take me long to decide on a plan of action.”

  “YOU MIGHT BE interested to learn that the idea of the Pardee-Fleischer Tibetan expedition originated with me. It took a little time to convince our directors that such a thing should be undertaken; but once I had done that, it was very simple to obtain the leadership of the venture for you. Tibet is a long way from the United States; and I wanted to feel that you were safely disposed of for a certain length of time.

  “That gave me an opportunity, you see, to deal with the case of my lovely but slightly tarnished partner in marriage. The—treatments I had decided upon as appropriate in her case necessitated a definite period of weeks; and I did not want to be disturbed by any embarrassing inquiries, such as you would have made, concerning her whereabouts.”

  While Beswick was speaking, Tom Stuart’s expression reflected a strange gamut of emotion; pained bewilderment gave place to sheer horror, until he stared at the older man as if he were confronted by a loathsome and venomous reptile, an adder, a cobra, instead of a human being.

  “You?” he said thickly, speaking as if his throat were half-paralyzed. “You—did this—to Wanda . . . ?”

  Deliberately Beswick went through his horrible mannerism of moistening his lips with his tongue; even the bitterness he had for a time been unable to conceal was replaced now by a dreadful complacency at the thought of his own cleverness. “It was a most interesting experiment,” he purred. “To transform an alert and intelligent adult woman into a mental defective, somewhat between a high-grade idiot and a very retarded imbecile. Certain drugs, mescal and cocaine derivatives, administered secretly in her food, made it easier; but the real work was done by radiations of extremely short frequency, which I focused upon her while she slept. The rays leave no external trace; Wanda’s friends are greatly shocked to learn that she is suffering from a mental derangement; but no one is suspicious of foul play—these psychotic states are so little understood, you know; it might be hereditary as well as not.

  “I was under the impression that my treatments had actually destroyed Wanda’s intelligence, once and for all; but it may be, Stuart, that your interesting discoveries, which you brought back from the High Lama in Tibet, indicate another hypothesis.” Beswick’s tone, at this point, sharpened itself with an odious edge of sarcasm. “Perhaps Wanda’s soul, to use your romantic term, was not destroyed at all by my radiations, but merely driven out of her body, leaving her with only the reflexive powers of speech and action that reside in the lower centers of the brain. That possibility worries me very little, however; I’m not interested in her soul; it can float about in the spaces of the universe till doomsday, for all I care.

  “No, my friend, the condition and location of Wanda’s soul does not interest me, to be utterly frank with you. As she is now, Wanda needs very little care; she’s like a small child, quite happy so long as she is given something to play with, something she can do with her hands, like cutting out paper dolls or digging in a sand pile. And her beauty, as you notice, remains quite unimpaired. An ideal arrangement, my dear Stuart—I flatter myself that I was very clever to think of it.”

  While he had listened to these taunts, Stuart’s face had gone first dull red, and then it had paled to a startling blank whiteness. His shoulders raised themselves slightly; he clenched fists like two powerful hammers, at the same time thrusting his massive bearded head forward. He took a step toward Beswick. “You unspeakable swine! Do you think you can get away with this—and live? By God, I’ll . . . I’ll tear you apart with my bare hands. . . .”

  The menacing advance of the huge bearded man was in truth something to quail at; a wild animal, enraged to the point of madness, a gorilla or a tiger, would scarcely have been more ominous.

  The gaunt, stooped, gray-haired scientist, however, remained perfectly calm. He casually removed his strong eye-glasses, as if to rest his eyes for a moment. . . .

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE MURDER MACHINE

  Instantly, a small tufted missile sped across the room from the closed draperies of the window opposite the fireplace. It was true to its mark: its sharp needle-point pricked the flesh of Tom Stuart’s neck, just between his collar and the line of his hair. Kandru had carried out his instructions with precision. . . .

  Stuart was not even aware of the slight prick made by the tiny dart in his neck, so intent was he upon the fulfillment of his towering anger. The first intimation that came to him was a curious feeling of stiffness. He wanted to lunge forward, to seize Beswick with his hooked fingers, to throttle the life from him. But, somehow, his limbs would not obey his will; he felt an involuntary tension of the muscles over his whole body.

  And then, as the drug Dr. Beswick had smeared on the dart took full effect, Stuart was no longer even able to stand erect. He remained fully conscious; but he pitched helplessly forward, like a stone effigy off balance. He began to make an outcry; but his very organs of speech were paralyzed; nothing came from his lips but a horrible dry croaking, inarticulate and meaningless.

  And then, for all the world like some dark and evil spider that has remained in concealment until a strategic moment, the Negro servant, Kandru, scuttled forth from the red velvet curtains across the room. He joined Dr. Beswick, who was already kneeling beside the helpless form of Stuart with a coil of rope which he had taken from his desk. Together, master and servant bound the drugged man, with knots and loops that were cruelly tight; even Stuart’s immense strength, when he regained consciousness, would avail him nothing against these bonds. While they made him captive, he continued to watch with open eyes—eyes that were like uncovered pits through which could be seen a hell of horror, baffled rage and sickening apprehension.

  As all this took place, Wanda continued to stand there; but she had lost all interest in the man whom once she had loved. She was playing a childish game with her fingers, twining and intertwining them with a certain clumsy solemnity. However, when Kandru and Beswick began to move the helpless giant from the room, Wanda followed behind them.

  Down a long corridor went that strange procession; then they shoved and pulled Stuart into a large, white-tiled room, equipped with the gleaming apparatus of a scientific laboratory. With great effort, they heaved him on a white-enamelled stand supported on rubber wheels—a piece of furniture similar to an operating table such as might be found in a hospital. The table was equipped with metal clamps; Dr. Beswick proceeded to fasten these about Stuart’s massive body, so that he was held immovably in place.

  While Kandru watched with the inscrutable visage of a man scarcely removed from a jungle savage, and Wanda with her habitual imbecile fixity of feature, Dr. Beswick proceeded with his design. He wheeled the enamelled stand across the room, and adjusted it in place beneath a curious mechanism—a tall iron frame shaped like an inverted U. From the cross-bar at the top of the uprights, dangled a long, glittering and very heavy blade of steel, its needle-point directly above the heart of the huge man who lay helpless on the operating table. This grim sword was attached to a trigger device, evidently intended to let it fall at a jerk upon a cord which depended from a ceiling pulley, a few feet to one side. In effect, Dr. Beswick’s mechanism was a slight variant of the classic instrument of execution as used in France since the days of the Terror—a guillotine, which differed from the original only in that its victim would be skewered through the heart, instead of decapitated. . . .

  IT BECAME EVIDENT, now, that the doctor’s precaution in shackling and binding his victim had been far from groundless. Though he could still not speak, the effect of the paralyzing drug wa
s beginning to wear away from Stuart’s body. His tremendous muscles swelled and strained, and his great body heaved with fierce effort.

  However, it was of no avail; he could scarcely stir.

  Deliberately, his red lips curved in a cruel smile, Dr. Beswick toyed with the trigger-cord of his abominable machine.

  “Can you hear me, old chap?” he murmured to Stuart. “I think you can—my drug contained nothing to impair the hearing. I’d like you to understand the full beauty of the vengeance I’m about to take upon you, before it is consummated.

  “I, at least, have the virtue of frankness, you observe. I don’t pretend to be any better than I am. I know that the emotion of revenge is not a very laudable one; but it so happens that I feel vindictive, and I intend to indulge myself. Frankly, I hate you, Stuart. I envy you for your youth, and your strength, and your virile good looks. And I loathe and detest you because my wife preferred you to myself. For a whole lifetime, I have conducted myself as a reputable and constructive member of society. I have contributed to scientific progress; I have earned the respect, and even the admiration, of the whole world. But now, at last, I intend to enjoy myself. I shall satisfy every murderous impulse that civilization tends to suppress in us. I shall be cruel and merciless, not only with considerable enthusiasm—but with all the finesse of a subtle mind.

  “Let me remove even the slight satisfaction you may feel, in supposing that I will be detected and be punished for that which is about to happen to you. Obviously, neither Kandru nor Wanda will give me away. And even in the event that someone knew you were coming to my house this evening, Stuart, even in the unlikely event that suspicion should be awakened against me—it will be impossible for anything whatever to be proved against me. I have the means, in this laboratory, of chemically destroying every trace of your body and clothing; and you may be sure that I shall perform the process completely and carefully.