Zombies

by Otto Penzler

  “Whuh—when I get to the village?”

  “Marcelline will drive the car. Coolidge, you go, too. While Brown’s phoning, you get out those police. And bring ’em back on the jump.” He whipped back his cuff to inspect a strap watch. “It’s nine-thirty. Don’t forget, all three of you are in this under suspicion. Try any funny stuff and it’ll be just too bad. If you aren’t back by ten, I’ll swear out warrants for your arrest.”

  Angelo Carpetsi whimpered, “I’ll go with them, Mr. Kavanaugh.”

  “Like hell,” the Italian was corrected harshly. “You’ll stick here with the rest of us till the cops come. Okay, you three. Go!”

  They went. Pug-nosed Mr. Coolidge with his nerves, plump Mr. Brown and bugeyed Monsieur Marcelline. There was something in the sound of their fast departing heels that left no doubt about their being grateful to leave. Distantly the doors of the Winton were heard to bang; followed by the hammering of an engine, the squeal of a car bending a driveway on precarious wheels, zooming off down a mountain road in night.

  John Ranier was thinking: “Now I’ve only got to watch the blond mess, the Professor, the Dago and Kavanaugh. Find Eberhardt and do something about this girl—”

  Kavanaugh cut into his thoughts with:

  “So now, ladies and gentlemen—” slurring the “gentlemen” as his eyes went coldly at Ranier—“the Haitian police will be here soon, and meanwhile we can wait right here where it’s cozy and we can keep an eye on each other. And maybe the girl can tell us what’s become of the doctor who runs this establishment, and explain this crazy nonsense about Mr. Haarman!”

  If the Irishman’s tone chewed a brittle suggestion of threat through his teeth, the girl at Ranier’s side did not notice it.

  “There were five of them who died,” she whispered. “Five who died besides Adolph Perl. It was here they were stricken by the mauve death from Brazil, and here on this coast they were buried. And that man on the operating table was buried in the cemetery three miles down the road—”

  CEMETERY THREE MILES down the road? Sweat beads bunched on John Ranier’s forehead as he recalled the little cluster of candle-lit gravemounds constellating the fog-cloaked mountainside. He couldn’t help a side-glance at the body on the operating table; a glance that moved hastily to Kavanaugh’s scowling face, to the faces hovering in the doorway—Professor Schlitz’s fear-cartooned features ridiculous in a sun helmet; the blond woman a portrait of misery scribbled in rouge and powder; Angelo Carpetsi’s terrified black eyes. An hour ago they’d been bored American tourists seeing the Caribbean littoral through the bottom of a grog-bottle; now they were peopling a nightmare in which a member of their party had been slain by an invisible knife, only to be identified by a nurse in this jungle-locked retreat as a man who had died four years after the World War.

  He looked sharply at the girl. Whispering through her fingers, her voice had been barely louder than the fog-muffled thumpings that were as counted heart beats from the white-washed night. She must have sensed the thought behind his scrutiny, for she dropped her hands from her marble-white face, let them fall inertly to her sides.

  She whispered, “Nein, I am not mad. How it can be, I do not know, but it is the same man. I would have known him anywhere—anywhere—”

  “But it can’t be the same man,” Ranier assured her. “People don’t die twice, Miss—Miss—”

  “My name is Laïs Engles. I came to the Americas from Griefswald, Germany—on a schooner with that man. It was the last year of the War, and I was six years old. My mother was dead and my father had been killed in the Battle of Jutland—it was my uncle, Captain Friederich, who took me on his schooner because the orphan asylums of Germany were crowded—there was no place for me to go. Adolph Perl—he—was mate of that schooner!”

  Brushing past Ranier to confront the girl, Kavanaugh snarled: “If you’ve got to spin us a yarn, Miss What’s-your-name, you might keep it straight while you’re spinning it. While back you called Dr. Eberhardt your uncle; now it’s some Kraut skipper during the War!”

  “Captain Friederich was my real uncle. Dr. Eberhardt, who raised me here in his hospital after Captain Friederich died—him I call Unkle Doktor.” Fingers clenched, she turned to send a dilated stare at the body on the operating table.

  “That was in 1918, but I remember as if it were yesterday. My uncle’s schooner was the Kronprinz Albrecht, very fast and with hidden engines. A blockade runner, like the famous Emden, it was to sail through the British fleet, cross the Atlantic, travel up the Amazon on a secret mission for the Kaiser’s government. Do you understand? It was camouflaged as a tramp ship flying the flag of Holland; no one to suspect it was the German Navy. Another reason for taking me—a child on board would put the vessel above suspicion. And the crew were handpicked volunteers.” Her eyes shone strangely and she pushed a hand across her forehead. “Do you think I could forget this man—this man who was mate of that schooner?”

  Kavanaugh’s lip curled. “This happened when you were six years old?”

  “So you think I would not remember? The long Atlantic voyage? The day we sailed into the Amazon at Para, where the mate—Adolph Perl—went ashore and got in a fight with an Indian who slashed that scar in his hand? Nein,” her eyes, fixed on that frowsty operating table, grew. “I remember well. My uncle, Captain Friederich, confined him for three weeks in irons because of that fight. Brazil had declared war on Germany, and it was dangerous for us to attract attention. That is how I could never mistake that scar—”

  Ranier looked at the body that was stark under the hurricane lamps. Flies were walking on the coat that covered the taffy-haired man’s face, and his hanging arm looked stiffer than it had a few moments ago. Already the dead hand had discolored a little. He jerked his eyes from the Z-cut scar to surprise a venomous expression on the face of Mr. Kavanaugh. Scorn fought with unbelief across the Irishman’s hard-chiseled features; his eyes were twinkling at the girl under fanning lids; and, as was usual in domineering types, the man’s doubt crystallized into anger.

  He lashed at the girl, “Even if Haarman was the man you think was the mate of that schooner—which he wasn’t!—just what would a German ship be doing, exploring up the Amazon in war time?”

  She whispered, “Germany was desperate. All the world was leagued against her. The Kaiser wanted a secret pact with Chile, one of the few countries that was neutral. In the mountains of Chile were nitrates for explosives. Our mission was to reach Chile somewhere in the headwaters of the Amazon, to bribe the Chilean diplomats to declare war on our side against Brazil and Peru. From Para we sailed up the Amazon, across the interior of South America, deep in the vast river wilderness through a thousand miles of jungle, such a voyage as no schooner had made before. But we did not reach Chile. In those miles and miles of floating wilderness we became lost. How could I mistake anyone who was in that little handful of German sailors?”

  Kavanaugh said harshly, “The mythical expedition gets lost in the Amazon and turns up in Haiti. Two times two makes six!”

  But the girl’s voice went on, low, appalled: “We were four years lost on the Amazon. Unexplored tributaries. Yellow channels everywhere. I think it was on the Rio Madeira tributary my uncle lost the way, deep in the heart of South America. Our schooner went aground and we camped in the jungle for months, waiting for floods to float her. Brazil was enemy country and we dared send no message for help. Our wireless went to pieces, too. From Berlin we had no word of news, and the sailors of the Kronprinz Albrecht almost forgot Germany or such a place as Europe. The primitive Indians of the Rio Madeira had never heard of the War; only Captain Friederich and Colonel Otto, the Prussian envoy in charge of the mission, refused to turn back. They had promised the Imperial High Command to reach Chile, a mission that might save their Fatherland. They were German officers of the old school. Adolph Perl—the mate—was a German of the old school. Nein, we pushed on until the schooner was rotting to pieces, the crew starving, only a few of us remained.
Our gear was rusted, clocks stopped for lack of oil, time was lost track of. There was an old woman who had come with us from Germany to look after me—Old Gramma Sou. She used to tell me stories of Germany, and Adolph Perl, the mate, would stand listening. ‘Herr Gott!’ he used to say. ‘If only I could see the girls on the Unter den Linden again.’ How many, many times have I thought of it!”

  LISTENING TO THE girl’s haunted voice as it spoke just then, John Ranier could almost forget this was a hospital in Haiti and she was talking of a cruise passenger who’d been murdered, stabbed that night in a waterfront café a few miles away. He could almost forget this strange bright room with its sinister fog-curtained window, its company of frightened tourists, its undertone echo of Negroid drums. He was seeing a river in far-off South America, a vast brown flood slipping through endless green, a tattered schooner manned by desperate men, a little German girl with yellow pigtails and round blue eyes. What incredible distances the vibrations of the War had traveled. She’d been six, and he sixteen—a boy in the muds of France, crawling through barbed wire with a smashed foot—a child with pigtails in the lost jungles of Brazil—

  “After four years hunting for a way to Chile, my uncle had to turn back for supplies, for engine oil. We found our way to a place called Porto Velho. There were a few English and Americans there; a little camp in the jungle, building a railroad to Bolivia, they said. How they stared at us—all that was left of us. We thought them soldiers, but they were not soldiers. They said the War was over long ago. Can you imagine the feelings of Captain Friederich and his men? It was 1922—all those terrible miles of journey, those months in the jungle for nothing. I will never forget how Adolph Perl raved and cursed. How, when the schooner returned to Para, my uncle wept on learning Germany lay beaten, the Kaiser’s government was no more; and in answer to his cable to Berlin came an order from an admiral he had never heard of. It was thought our ship had gone down long ago. So the Kronprinz Albrecht was ordered back to Germany at once, still under secret orders, and we started up the Caribbean. But a terrible storm drove us close to Haiti, drove us into this Gulf of Go naives; our ship ran up on the beach of the village below. Fourteen years ago, that was. That night I first saw Dr. Eberhardt. That night—” her voice shook—“that night came the mauve death.”

  “The mauve death?” Ranier questioned hollowly. “What was that?”

  “So Dr. Eberhardt called it,” she murmured huskily. “A rare tropical disease with symptoms like beri-beri. Terribly contagious, it is, and kills within two hours of infection. The—the skin turns violet. Our—our schooner had brought it from the jungles of Brazil.”

  She pulled her linen robe tighter as if the room were suddenly cold; and John Ranier, watching her closely, felt a slow malignant dread begin to creep up his spine. Had sight of that wizardish laboratory upstairs, and the added shock of this emergency case, deranged the girl’s mind? Carried her back to some terrible childhood experience which a stunned mind was translating into the present? Shock did queer things to people. Inspired hallucinations. But the girl looked sane—terrified, not deranged—

  “Verstehen-zie?” she panted. “That awful germ, that mauve death must have been carried by our schooner, for Dr. Eberhardt said it had never before been in Haiti, and the night of the storm with our schooner on the beach, the disease broke out among us. I was then ten years old, and never could I forget that night. I could not! The darkness. The strange island. Bonfires on the beach. The Haitians crowding to see the ship. We came ashore in a lifeboat—all that was left of our pitiful expedition—with what luggage we could save. Dr. Eberhardt was among the Negroes; ran up to see if he could help. When he discovered we were Germans, he spoke to us delighted—but, nein! He stared suddenly at Colonel Otto and cried, ‘Lieber Gott! you must get out of this crowd at once; you must all come at once to my hospital!’ ”

  Ranier said thickly, “But Miss Engles—” and she lifted a hand in protest, whispering, “Please! I must tell you! I must tell you what happened that night to us—to that man! Dr. Eberhardt—he brought us here to this hospital, and Colonel Otto was dead before we got here. My uncle, Captain Friederich, was next to die—an hour later. Then Old Gramma Sou, my nurse, whom I had grown to love as my mother. Nothing could save them. Dr. Eberhardt could not save them. ‘It is the mauve death,’ he told me that night. ‘It is the mauve death that strikes like the lightning and spreads like the wind. You must be a brave little girl, my child. Some of your friends will never leave Haiti alive.’ ”

  She stopped to draw a shuddery breath, and Kavanaugh’s voice quarreled: “So this Eberhardt was in Haiti at that time, was he?”

  “He has spent his life here in Haiti,” her lips gripped back a sob. “Dr. Eberhardt is a great man, a scientist. He came here before the War, and when the fighting broke across Europe he refused to go back to Germany. His life is devoted to medicine, to his experiments, to his work among the Negroes. That night he was terrified for fear the mauve death would spread, and he fought to stop the contagion, knowing plague and panic would destroy all his work. It was terrible! Terrible! The American Marines were in Haiti at the time, and there was a marine sergeant at the hospital. Dr. Eberhardt sent him down to the beach with orders to burn the schooner. Ja, the American soldier burned our schooner that night, and gave his life to do it. The plague took him, too. He returned to the hospital—died!”

  FISTS CLENCHED, EYES wide, she moved so suddenly at Kavanaugh that the Irish -man, startled, sidestepped into Ranier. Off-balanced by his lame foot, Ranier swung against Professor Schlitz, and the thin insectologist shrieked as if tagged by a ghost. The white, morguish room dizzied in John Ranier’s vision as he heard the girl’s low-pitched words flung at Kavanaugh:

  “Do you think I could forget one detail of that horrible night? Mistake anyone who was there? Nein, I remember every detail. How Colonel Otto, when he died, asked to be buried in his Potsdam uniform. Old Gramma Sou dying in the taffeta dress she had saved from the schooner—the dress she had brought from Berlin to wear at the embassy in Chile. Captain Friederich dying with ‘God save the Fatherland!’ on his lips. That marine sergeant—his name was O’Grady. A huge man over six feet tall, he was, and he fell to his face out there on the verandah, his cheeks all lavender, and he had a red moustache. Dying. Dying and singing a wild American song!

  “How could I forget that brave man or any one of those brave Germans who gave their lives for the Fatherland four years too late, killed by the plague they had brought from Brazil. My uncle, Captain Friederich, blamed himself because the mission to Chile had failed; ja, he thought that was why Germany had lost the war. He cursed the death that was striking him down in Haiti, the death that would prevent him from carrying out his government’s last order. He called Dr. Eberhardt that night. ‘You must carry on for us!’ he told the doctor. ‘If the mate, Adolph Perl, dies also, you must carry on!’ He told Dr. Eberhardt the story of the secret mission. He gave Dr. Eberhardt a suitcase of papers, something of great value to Germany that should have been delivered to the diplomats in Chile. Now Captain Friederich had been ordered to return that suitcase to Berlin. Dying he begged the doctor to look after me, but first he made him promise to take charge of the suitcase; Dr. Eberhardt must swear as a German to return that valuable case to the German government. And Adolph Perl was weeping. Weeping that night. ‘I will not die,’ he cried. ‘I will carry on for the Fatherland!’ It was right out there in the hall. I was listening at a door, and I overheard.”

  Her fingers, pointing at the door, brought cries of fear from the tourists dummified in the frame. “Out there in the hall,” she repeated. “Fourteen years ago. Colonel Otto, Captain Friederich, Old Gramma Sou—dead! And that American Marine on the verandah—fourth to die. And an Anglican missionary from a little village down the coast was fifth. An Anglican missionary who had stopped in to pray for the dying, and in two hours he, with them, was dead. Ja, it was a fatal disease, that mauve death. Dr. Eberhardt locked all the doors, le
t nobody enter after that. If word got loose there was a plague in the hospital, the Haitians would have rioted and murdered all the whites. Those of us from the schooner—all that had survived—we waited to be next. There were only three of us left. A sailor named Hans Blücher—myself—the mate, Adolph Perl. We waited for death to take us. In this very room we waited.”

  Turning slowly, fearfully, the girl pointed at the fog-blurred window across the room. “Dr. Eberhardt and the house-boy, Polypheme, they were in the stable back there behind the hospital. We could hear them sawing and hammering. Building coffins. I wept in fear, because I was little and it was late at night and I did not understand. I only knew the bodies were in a row out there in the front hall, waiting. And Hans Blücher, the sailor, wept too. And Adolph Perl, the mate, walked up and down cursing. I can see it now, as I saw it then.

  “Hans Blücher said he was feeling sick, and he crept out into the corridor. We sat in this room together, Adolph Perl and I. We waited. Hans did not come back. In a minute Adolph Perl said, ‘I am going after that man!’ and went out into the corridor. I waited alone. The pounding of the coffins went on and on, like those drums you hear beating on the mountain tonight. After a while Adolph Perl returned. ‘Hans Blücher has fled the hospital,’ he told me. ‘The scoundrel has run away.’ Then Adolph Perl began to stagger and cough. He put his hand to his throat—his scarred hand. ‘Heilegegott!’ he screamed. ‘I have caught it from going out there. Now I, too, am going to die!’ He climbed up on that operating table—that very table where you see him now—and lay there gasping—”

  THERE WAS A sensation of frost forming on John Ranier’s temples; it was too late at night for this sort of thing. Something in the girl’s voice convinced him she was speaking truth, and her breathless words, whispering out of memory, described a scene more real than present actuality. The dread in her eyes, fixed now on Haarman’s stiffening body, was no pretense. There was sanity in the white struggle of her lips to go on, as if the words were being dragged from her throat at great effort of will.