Zombies

by Otto Penzler

  “I never even got off a shot,” the deputy said. “God, but you’re fast. What a draw.”

  “Look, you stay here if you like. I’m going after him. But I tell you now, the circle of power has played out.”

  The deputy glanced back at it. The pages had burned out and there was nothing now but a black ring on the floor.

  “What in hell caused them to catch fire in the first place?”

  “Evil,” Jebidiah said. “When he got close, the pages broke into flames. Gave us the protection of God. Unfortunately, as with most of God’s blessings, it doesn’t last long.”

  “I stay here, you’d have to put down more pages.”

  “I’ll be taking the bible with me. I might need it.”

  “Then I guess I’ll be sticking.”

  THEY CLIMBED OUT the window and moved up the hill. They could smell the odor of fire and rotted flesh in the air. The night was as cool and silent as the graves on the hill.

  Moments later they moved amongst the stones and wooden crosses, until they came to a long wide hole in the earth. Jebidiah could see that there was a burrow at one end of the grave that dipped down deeper into the ground.

  Jebidiah paused there. “He’s made this old grave his den. Dug it out and dug deeper.”

  “How do you know?” the deputy asked.

  “Experience . . . And it smells of smoke and burned skin. He crawled down there to hide. I think we surprised him a little.”

  Jebidiah looked up at the sky. There was the faintest streak of pink on the horizon. “He’s running out of daylight, and soon he’ll be out of moon. For a while.”

  “He damn sure surprised me. Why don’t we let him hide? You could come back when the moon isn’t full, or even half full. Back in the daylight, get him then.”

  “I’m here now. And it’s my job.”

  “That’s one hell of a job you got, mister.”

  “I’m going to climb down for a better look.”

  “Help yourself.”

  Jebidiah struck a match and dropped himself into the grave, moved the match around at the mouth of the burrow, got down on his knees and stuck the match and his head into the opening.

  “Very large,” he said, pulling his head out. “I can smell him. I’m going to have to go in.”

  “What about me?”

  “You keep guard at the lip of the grave,” Jebidiah said, standing. “He may have another hole somewhere, he could come out behind you for all I know. He could come out of that hole even as we speak.”

  “That’s wonderful.”

  Jebidiah dropped the now dead match on the ground. “I will tell you this. I can’t guarantee success. I lose, he’ll come for you, you can bet on that, and you better shoot those silvers as straight as William Tell’s arrows.”

  “I’m not really that good a shot.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jebidiah said, and struck another match along the length of his pants seam, then with his free hand, drew one of his revolvers. He got down on his hands and knees again, stuck the match in the hole and looked around. When the match was near done, he blew it out.

  “Ain’t you gonna need some light?” the deputy said. “A match ain’t nothin’.”

  “I’ll have it.” Jebidiah removed the remains of the bible from his pocket, tore it in half along the spine, pushed one half in his coat, pushed the other half before him, into the darkness of the burrow. The moment it entered the hole, it flamed.

  “Ain’t your pocket gonna catch inside that hole?” the deputy asked.

  “As long as I hold it or it’s on my person, it won’t harm me. But the minute I let go of it, and the aura of evil touches it, it’ll blaze. I got to hurry, boy.”

  With that, Jebidiah wiggled inside the burrow.

  IN THE BURROW, Jebidiah used the tip of his pistol to push the bible pages forward. They glowed brightly, but Jebidiah knew the light would be brief. It would burn longer than writing paper, but still, it would not last long.

  After a goodly distance, Jebidiah discovered the burrow dropped off. He found himself inside a fairly large cavern. He could hear the sound of bats, and smell bat guano, which in fact, greased his path as he slid along on his elbows until he could stand inside the higher cavern and look about. The last flames of the bible burned themselves out with a puff of blue light and a sound like an old man breathing his last.

  Jebidiah listened in the dark for a long moment. He could hear the bats squeaking, moving about. The fact that they had given up the night sky let Jebidiah know daylight was not far off.

  Jebidiah’s ears caught a sound, rocks shifting against the cave floor. Something was moving in the darkness, and he didn’t think it was the bats. It scuttled, and Jebidiah felt certain it was close to the floor, and by the sound of it, moving his way at a creeping pace. The hair on the back of Jebidiah’s neck bristled like porcupine quills. He felt his flesh bump up and crawl. The air became stiffer with the stench of burnt and rotting flesh. Jebidiah’s knees trembled. He reached cautiously inside his coat pocket, produced a match, struck it on his pants leg, held it up.

  At that very moment, the thing stood up and was brightly lit in the glow of the match, the bees circling its skin-stripped skull. It snarled and darted forward. Jebidiah felt its rotten claws on his shirt front as he fired the revolver. The blaze from the bullet gave a brief, bright flare and was gone. At the same time, the match was knocked out of his hand and Jebidiah was knocked backwards, onto his back, the thing’s claws at his throat. The monster’s bees stung him. The stings felt like red-hot pokers entering his flesh. He stuck the revolver into the creature’s body and fired. Once. Twice. Three times. A fourth.

  Then the hammer clicked empty. He realized he had already fired two other shots. Six dead silver soldiers were in his cylinders, and the thing still had hold of him.

  He tried to draw his other gun, but before he could, the thing released him, and Jebidiah could hear it crawling away in the dark. The bats fluttered and screeched.

  Confused, Jebidiah drew the pistol, managed to get to his feet. He waited, listening, his fresh revolver pointing into the darkness.

  Jebidiah found another match, struck it.

  The thing lay with its back draped over a rise of rock. Jebidiah eased toward it. The silver loads had torn into the hive. It oozed a dark, odiferous trail of death and decaying honey. Bees began to drop to the cavern floor. The hive in Gimet’s chest sizzled and pulsed like a large, black knot. Gimet opened his mouth, snarled, but otherwise didn’t move.

  Couldn’t move.

  Jebidiah, guided by the last wisps of his match, raised the pistol, stuck it against the black knot, and pulled the trigger. The knot exploded. Gimet let out with a shriek so sharp and loud it startled the bats to flight, drove them out of the cave, through the burrow, out into the remains of the night.

  Gimet’s claw-like hands dug hard at the stones around him, then he was still and Jebidiah’s match went out.

  JEBIDIAH FOUND THE remains of the bible in his pocket, and as he removed it, tossed it on the ground, it burst into flames. Using the two pistol barrels like large tweezers, he lifted the burning pages and dropped them into Gimet’s open chest. The body caught on fire immediately, crackled and popped dryly, and was soon nothing more than a blaze. It lit the cavern up bright as day.

  Jebidiah watched the corpse being consumed by the biblical fire for a moment, then headed toward the burrow, bent down, squirmed through it, came up in the grave.

  He looked for the deputy and didn’t see him. He climbed out of the grave and looked around. Jebidiah smiled. If the deputy had lasted until the bats charged out, that was most likely the last straw, and he had bolted.

  Jebidiah looked back at the open grave. Smoke wisped out of the hole and out of the grave and climbed up to the sky. The moon was fading and the pink on the horizon was widening.

  Gimet was truly dead now. The road was safe. His job was done.

  At least for one brief moment.

  Je
bidiah walked down the hill, found his horse tied in the brush near the road where he had left it. The deputy’s horse was gone, of course, the deputy most likely having already finished out Deadman’s Road at a high gallop, on his way to Nacogdoches, perhaps to have a long drink of whisky and turn in his badge.

  ROBERT E. HOWARD (1906–1936) wrote in numerous genres, including horror, detective, Western, boxing, and historical fiction, but his most famous creation, Conan, has become an iconic figure in the world of adventure fiction and film. Born in Texas, Howard had numerous odd jobs, all of which he hated, knowing he was born to be a writer. He produced reams of stories and poems while still a teenager and made his first sale to one of the greatest of all pulp magazines, Weird Tales, which published “Spear and Fang” in its July 1925 issue. He is also known today for his fantastic adventure series about the vengeful Solomon Kane, an Elizabethan Puritan swashbuckler in Africa; the barbarian King Kull, who thrived in ancient Atlantis; Bran Mak Morn, the king of the Caledonian Picts, an ancient Scottish tribe that fought the Romans; and, most memorably, Conan, the barbarian who lived in Cimmeria during the Hyborian Age, about twelve thousand years ago. Even as a young man, Conan was a large, heavily muscled wandering warrior who loved food, drink, women, and battle. His powerful sword was as invincible as he was, and he was always ready to fight. Barbarism, he proclaimed, was the natural state of being. He fought against hordes of enemies, monsters, and sorcery with a fearlessness that suggested an almost suicidal disregard for his own life. This may reflect the author’s own view of the world. A lifelong depressive, Howard was inordinately close to his mother. When her tuberculosis reached its final stage, a nurse told him that she would never again be conscious; he put a gun in his mouth and killed himself at the age of thirty, by which time he had written an astounding number of books (more than fifty) and short stories (more than two hundred), mostly unpublished during his lifetime. Although Howard died young, Conan lives in the pages of the stories he wrote and the two films about Conan, notably Conan the Barbarian (1982), which made a star of bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger, the future governor of California, who also starred in the sequel, Conan the Destroyer (1984).

  “Pigeons from Hell” was first published in the November 1951 issue of Weird Tales.

  I.

  THE WHISTLER IN THE DARK

  GRISWELL AWOKE SUDDENLY, every nerve tingling with a premonition of imminent peril. He stared about wildly, unable at first to remember where he was, or what he was doing there. Moonlight filtered in through the dusty windows, and the great empty room with its lofty ceiling and gaping black fireplace was spectral and unfamiliar. Then as he emerged from the clinging cobwebs of his recent sleep, he remembered where he was and how he came to be there. He twisted his head and stared at his companion, sleeping on the floor near him. John Branner was but a vaguely bulking shape in the darkness that the moon scarcely grayed.

  Griswell tried to remember what had awakened him. There was no sound in the house, no sound outside except the mournful hoot of an owl, far away in the piny woods. Now he had captured the elusive memory. It was a dream, a nightmare so filled with dim terror that it had frightened him awake. Recollection flooded back, vividly etching the abominable vision.

  Or was it a dream? Certainly it must have been, but it had blended so curiously with recent actual events that it was difficult to know where reality left off and fantasy began.

  Dreaming, he had seemed to relive his past few waking hours, in accurate detail. The dream had begun, abruptly, as he and John Branner came in sight of the house where they now lay. They had come rattling and bouncing over the stumpy, uneven old road that led through the pinelands, he and John Branner, wandering far afield from their New England home, in search of vacation pleasure. They had sighted the old house with its balustraded galleries rising amidst a wilderness of weeds and bushes, just as the sun was setting behind it. It dominated their fancy, rearing black and stark and gaunt against the low lurid rampart of sunset, barred by the black pines.

  They were tired, sick of bumping and pounding all day over woodland roads. The old deserted house stimulated their imagination with its suggestion of antebellum splendor and ultimate decay. They left the automobile beside the rutty road, and as they went up the winding walk of crumbling bricks, almost lost in the tangle of rank growth, pigeons rose from the balustrades in a fluttering, feathery crowd and swept away with a low thunder of beating wings.

  The oaken door sagged on broken hinges. Dust lay thick on the floor of the wide, dim hallway, on the broad steps of the stair that mounted up from the hall. They turned into a door opposite the landing, and entered a large room, empty, dusty, with cobwebs shining thickly in the corners. Dust lay thick over the ashes in the great fireplace.

  They discussed gathering wood and building a fire, but decided against it. As the sun sank, darkness came quickly, the thick, black, absolute darkness of the pinelands. They knew that rattlesnakes and copperheads haunted Southern forests, and they did not care to go groping for firewood in the dark. They ate frugally from tins, then rolled in their blankets fully clad before the empty fireplace, and went instantly to sleep.

  This, in part, was what Griswell had dreamed. He saw again the gaunt house looming stark against the crimson sunset; saw the flight of the pigeons as he and Branner came up the shattered walk. He saw the dim room in which they presently lay, and he saw the two forms that were himself and his companion, lying wrapped in their blankets on the dusty floor. Then from that point his dream altered subtly, passed out of the realm of the commonplace and became tinged with fear. He was looking into a vague, shadowy chamber, lit by the gray light of the moon which streamed in from some obscure source. For there was no window in that room. But in the gray light he saw three silent shapes that hung suspended in a row, and their stillness and their outlines woke chill horror in his soul. There was no sound, no word, but he sensed a Presence of fear and lunacy crouching in a dark corner. . . . Abruptly he was back in the dusty, high-ceilinged room, before the great fireplace.

  He was lying in his blankets, staring tensely through the dim door and across the shadowy hall, to where a beam of moonlight fell across the balustraded stair, some seven steps up from the landing. And there was something on the stair, a bent, misshapen, shadowy thing that never moved fully into the beam of light. But a dim yellow blur that might have been a face was turned toward him, as if something crouched on the stair, regarding him and his companion. Fright crept chilly through his veins, and it was then that he awoke—if indeed he had been asleep.

  He blinked his eyes. The beam of moonlight fell across the stair just as he had dreamed it did; but no figure lurked there. Yet his flesh still crawled from the fear the dream or vision had roused in him; his legs felt as if they had been plunged in ice-water. He made an involuntary movement to awaken his companion, when a sudden sound paralyzed him.

  It was the sound of whistling on the floor above. Eery and sweet it rose, not carrying any tune, but piping shrill and melodious. Such a sound in a supposedly deserted house was alarming enough; but it was more than the fear of a physical invader that held Griswell frozen. He could not himself have defined the horror that gripped him. But Branner’s blankets rustled, and Griswell saw he was sitting upright. His figure bulked dimly in the soft darkness, the head turned toward the stair as if the man were listening intently. More sweetly and more subtly evil rose that weird whistling.

  “John!” whispered Griswell from dry lips. He had meant to shout—to tell Branner that there was somebody upstairs, somebody who could mean them no good; that they must leave the house at once. But his voice died dryly in his throat.

  Branner had risen. His boots clumped on the floor as he moved toward the door. He stalked leisurely into the hall and made for the lower landing, merging with the shadows that clustered black about the stair.

  Griswell lay incapable of movement, his mind a whirl of bewilderment. Who was that whistling upstairs? Why was Branner going up those st
airs? Griswell saw him pass the spot where the moonlight rested, saw his head tilted back as if he were looking at something Griswell could not see, above and beyond the stair. But his face was like that of a sleepwalker. He moved across the bar of moonlight and vanished from Griswell’s view, even as the latter tried to shout to him to come back. A ghastly whisper was the only result of his effort.

  The whistling sank to a lower note, died out. Griswell heard the stairs creaking under Branner’s measured tread. Now he had reached the hallway above, for Griswell heard the clump of his feet moving along it. Suddenly the footfalls halted, and the whole night seemed to hold its breath. Then an awful scream split the stillness, and Griswell started up, echoing the cry.

  The strange paralysis that had held him was broken. He took a step toward the door, then checked himself. The footfalls were resumed. Branner was coming back. He was not running. The tread was even more deliberate and measured than before. Now the stairs began to creak again. A groping hand, moving along the balustrade, came into the bar of moonlight; then another, and a ghastly thrill went through Griswell as he saw that the other hand gripped a hatchet—a hatchet which dripped blackly. Was that Branner who was coming down that stair?

  Yes! The figure had moved into the bar of moonlight now, and Griswell recognized it. Then he saw Branner’s face, and a shriek burst from Griswell’s lips. Branner’s face was bloodless, corpse-like; gouts of blood dripped darkly down it; his eyes were glassy and set, and blood oozed from the great gash which cleft the crown of his head!

  GRISWELL NEVER REMEMBERED exactly how he got out of that accursed house. Afterward he retained a mad, confused impression of smashing his way through a dusty cobwebbed window, of stumbling blindly across the weed-choked lawn, gibbering his frantic horror. He saw the black wall of the pines, and the moon floating in a blood-red mist in which there was neither sanity nor reason.