by Otto Penzler
“Let ’em come! Let ’em come!” Carpetsi’s expression was close to rabies. His fingers scratched the air before Kavanaugh’s face. “You can’t put this over on me, you big mick! By God, I see the trick you’re pullin’! I’m gonna spill your beans, Kavanaugh—”
Kavanaugh told him in a deadly voice, “You’re going to shut up! You’re going to shut up, Angelo, and go over and sit in the car. You’ll shut up, or I’ll shut you up!”
“Yaaah!” The Italian’s face was the shade of liverwurst. “You’d knock me off now, if you dared, but you don’t dare! Too many witnesses you’d have to dust off. I won’t shut up! I’ll spill your beans! If you think that stunt of sendin’ off Brown and Coolidge—”
There was an interruption, then, that suspended the Italian’s screeching in mid-air.
John Ranier, standing back with the girl, too dazed by Carpetsi’s outburst at Kavanaugh to move, heard a shout from somewhere beyond the car. A full-lunged bellow that came from the darkness on the road, its source invisible in the mist.
“Hey, there! Who wants Coolidge?”
It spun Kavanaugh in a crouch. Sent Carpetsi reeling on his heels as if struck by a fist, combing wild fingers through his Dance Palace hair. Thrusting the girl sideways, Ranier glared in bewilderment toward the car under the cemetery arch where the blond woman had trilled a coloratura shriek and the professor was blatting, “Did you bring the police?”
Then boots came pounding under the fog-drizzled arch, crackled over the cockle shells of a grave mound, and Coolidge formed in the lighted area before the headlamp. It was not the same Coolidge who had gone for the police two hours ago in this nightmare. The man’s appearance was that of a rhino flushed by big game hunters from a swamp. The tourist attire that had been incongruous on his Mack truck frame was plastered, shapeless with mud. His shoes were swollen with clay, pants mired to the knees, sleeves brown to the elbows.
Blinking in the misty light-bath, he faced the group at the grave-side and scowled from one to the next, stupidly. Gold gleams ricocheted from his teeth as his mouth pulled lungfuls of breath and his chest puffed like a blacksmith’s bellows.
“I was leggin’ it back to the hospital,” he panted at Kavanaugh. “Seen you go by in th’ flivver. Damn near run me down in th’ fog, and you was by before I could yell. Got here fast as I could.” Plucking off the cap he had hung on one doorknob ear, he mopped his face and forehead with the cap, rotary motion, panting, rolling his eyes. “There’s been an accident, see? I’m a mass of nerves! Justa mass of nerves!”
KAVANAUGH SAID, “I’LL say there’s been an accident!” pacing up to the big man in a way that made Ranier think of a terrier accosting a Great Dane. He shoved his pocketed gun into Coolidge’s muddy midriff, and Coolidge looked down at the Irishman’s nudging pocket, and scowled, and began to walk backwards. Kavanaugh followed him, walking forwards.
Coolidge blurted, “What the hell—!” as Kavanaugh walked him out of the headlamp’s path, drove him stumbling away from the car, pushed him at a tangent toward the foot of the graveyard. In the fogged darkness, still walking, the two men were gray, half-melted shapes.
Clinging to John Ranier’s arm, Laïs Engles peered into the vapour-screen where the men had dissolved to a merged shadow, and whispered, “What is happening? What is happening?”
Ranier said, “Wait and see.”
He heard the Irishman’s voice bang, “Tell your story, big boy, and tell it quick!” the bang lowering to a menacing rapidfire undertone, muffled words punctuated with oaths, too inaudible for listeners to catch. Coolidge replied in gushing whispers, evidently pleading. Their voices bleared to a smothered mumbling from which Ranier’s ears caught fragments. Kavanaugh haggling, accusing. Coolidge groaning, panting, denying. Coolidge shouted, “Holy Jumping Judas!” and Ranier could see the white oval of his face as he stretched his neck to look past his inquisitor at the opened grave. Twice Kavanaugh caught the big man’s lapel, seemed to be shaking him; several times the Irishman looked back, glinty-eyed. Ranier heard his own name spoken, Professor Schlitz’s, the girl’s.
It seemed to him the whispered inquisition was lasting a long time, but he stood at the foot of the grave with the girl, nerves tight, waiting because there was nothing else to do. Everything was ravelling off into mists, facts dissolving, swimming through his fingers before he could clench them on anything certain. Bad dreams were like this—figures formed; faded; changed features; cut illogical capers that in the dream seemed logical. Like one of those nightmares where you walked in jeopardy through a forest of unseen perils, only it wasn’t a forest and you were falling through limitless space. But he wasn’t falling through space. He was standing in a Haitian graveyard with a frightened girl. A frightened Italian was rooted near-by, making throat-sounds like whimpering. A frightened Negro, a frightened blonde and a frightened college professor were parked in a frightened Model T under the cemetery arch. Two frightened men were arguing in violent whispers off in the fog; and the only one present who wasn’t frightened was the little old lady jaunty against the tombstone—uncaring because she was dead.
What had become of the Winton? Of Brown and the Haitian, Marcelline? But those would be easy answers compared to: What became of Haarman? Was he dead when he was killed? Was he Adolph Perl buried fourteen years ago, and if he wasn’t why had Perl vanished from his grave? Simple answers compared to: How did this old lady travel three miles on those mossy shoes? Who brought her here and why? How the hell can I get this frightened girl out of this? Has that mob started from the village? Where’s Eberhardt?
EBERHARDT! QUEER! THE name kept prowling through his subconsciousness with the insistence of those drum-beats tunneling the fog. He wondered if he’d spoken it aloud. No; that was Kavanaugh’s voice. They were coming back into the light; the Irishman moving with swift, purposeful strides; the muddied Coolidge wiping his battered face on his cap.
“We’re getting out of here,” Kavanaugh came shouting, “right now! Everybody into the car!”
Angelo Carpetsi raised a whimper. “I ain’t going.”
“Don’t be a fool,” was Kavanaugh’s tongue-lashing command. “Stay behind here in this bone-yard and the black mob that’s coming from the village will tear you to mince. We’re moving out! Quick!”
He strode at Ranier, pointing toward the road, talking with the up-pitched momentum of a radio announcer. “Smash up! The Winton! That damned coon Marcelline crashed the sedan in a swamp a mile this side of the village. Marcelline and Brown went on. Beat it on foot the rest of the way to get the police. Coolidge says the car’s smashed to junk, and there’s hell to pay down there. Gunshots in the village and drums going like express trains. There’s a riot, all right. Marcelline told him to run back and warn the hospital. Coolidge says he passed this graveyard on the way up, but he didn’t see anything because it was all he could do to keep his feet on the macadam.”
“If I’d known what was here, I’d have never come back,” the big man promised. “I’d have never come back after you passed me up the road in the flivver. I’m justa mass of nerves!”
Kavanaugh panted, “We’ll be more than a mass of nerves if we don’t get out of here!” And suddenly his hand was on Ranier’s shoulder, his hard voice cracked, shaken, his manner conciliatory. “This is getting me, Ranier—sorry my nerves blew up a while ago. That goes for the girl, too. Lost my head the way the Italian kid lost his at me. Can’t blame the boy, with things popping like they are. Now on, we got to stick together. Stand by me, will you?”
They were running for the car. Ranier, hand clasped over Laïs Engles’ hand, nodded blankly at the Irishman beside him, and tried to remember something he had wanted to do. Kavanaugh reminded him.
“And you’re right, Doc. We’ll go to the graveyard where the girl says that old lady was buried. Try to find some clue—!”
Looking back from the Model T’s running board, Ranier saw the old lady had assumed a more comfortable pose against Adolph Perl’s
headstone. Her glasses had dropped to her lap, bonnet tipped over her eyes, chin fallen to her breast. Wrapped in a cocoon of fog, she might have resumed her interrupted immortal doze. A cadence of low-boomed drums drifted through the cemetery vapours, and the old lady’s chin sank further, as if lulled.
But she was not quite asleep. As the car charged off with pounding cylinders, Ranier saw her head nod perkily, twice—good-bye.
CHAPTER XIII
THE SECOND GRAVE
On the road the fog had thickened. Surging across the highway’s surface as if the macadam were afire. Bushing up from the roadside. Rolling in white woolly bales before the headlight; boiling blackly astern. Where the road dodged between high embankments, the stagnated mist was the consistency of evaporating milk. Landscape, sky and night were blotted out. Jungles had dissolved to steam; solids turned into white, watery gas and set adrift. That a car from Detroit could stay on this nebulous Milky Way in Haiti was not the least of tonight’s miracles.
But the car climbed and plowed through the vapour-blizzard with a disregard for safety that had its passengers howling. If it once slowed to forty it was not the driver’s fault. The little black man at the wheel yanked the gas lever down to the last notch on its quadrant. Whatever those native drums had told him, he didn’t like it. No need to wipe the steamed windshield. Under the brim of his giant sombrero, Polypheme’s eyes were occult headlights that discovered a road the half-blind car couldn’t see.
And once more Ranier was assailed by a sense of dream-like unreality. This race to escape an undertone muttering of drums. This desperate dash from cemetery to cemetery to inquire why an old lady, fourteen years underground, had tonight deserted her tomb. Skidding, rocking, slewing on unseen curves, threatening to fly into fragments at every turn, the car boiled on through invisibility, and only the girl’s fingers locked with Ranier’s seemed real. He could not see the running board supporting him. He could only guess Mr. Coolidge was clinging on the opposite side, from occasional shouted references to nerves. Polypheme was a shadow with a pair of eyes, and the jam in the back seat a formless blur of shapes and outcries—groans from the professor, caterwauls from the blonde, howls by Carpetsi and oaths from Kavanaugh.
He could not see or hear the girl. Clutching the windshield post with his right hand, he locked his left hand with the girl’s in reassuring pressure. She was there. In the front seat, and trembling, her invisible fingers icy cold. But he wasn’t dreaming their frightened grip, and they were something human to hang on to when the car screeched on an unseen curve. It was strange as hell. Why hold the girl’s hand? He hadn’t held a woman’s hand like that in all of five years. His grip wasn’t fatherly, either. Why in the name of God should he try to reassure this girl? Who was she, after all? What was he doing in this nightmare, working up a protective instinct over a girl he’d never heard of three hours before, when he ought to concentrate on saving his own skin?
Ranier withdrew his fingers and fastened them on the door-frame. Was he going insane? A ship’s passenger had been murdered; stabbed before his eyes! Body-snatchers were loose in the night, and a black mob was coming, and for all he knew—
Well, it was no time for romancing. For all he knew, the girl’s lovely hand might have a part in this dirty business. Certainly when Kavanaugh had questioned her she’d held something back. Something concerning Dr. Eberhardt—that hospital?
As if summoned by his thought, the hospital loomed ghostly at the left of the road, and as the car raced past the entrance, Ranier had a glimpse of that lighted laboratory window shining Hallowe’en yellow through the black upper branches of the sablier tree. In the fog the place looked dismal as an owl-hoot. The car did not slow down, and the outsprawled villa was a misshapen shadow surrounded by the ghosts of trees, there and gone in the mist.
John Ranier looked back, wondering if Haarman’s body were roaming that spectral place. Hell with that! Native Voodoo might dig up the dead, but it couldn’t animate them, even on a night like this. Someone had stolen the Haarman cadaver for good reasons that weren’t so good. To do away with the evidence? Hide the fact of homicide? You couldn’t bring a murder charge when you couldn’t produce the corpse.
Or had the taffy-haired tourist’s body been appropriated for some darker purpose than concealment, some necrologic experiment conceived in this Haitian limberlost?
REMEMBERED WORDS PHRASED themselves through Ranier’s mind. “He was experimenting—something so important he works on—a theory he could revive dead cells with adrenaline—tonight he was to finish, to make the vital discovery—” The girl’s words, spoken when they’d found the wrecked hospital lab, the doctor absent. Dr. Eberhardt, again! Could this mysterious and as yet unseen physician be back of tonight’s witcheries? Some half loony scientist, demented by years of isolation in this Caribbean backwater, bent on resurrectionism?
There was Eberhardt’s name on that envelope from the murdered tourist’s pocket. There was the girl’s assertion the stabbed tourist was someone Eberhardt had buried fourteen years ago. There was that little old lady, another of that long-ago funeral party, transplanted to a robbed grave. There was the possibility that Eberhardt, missing in the night, had returned to the hospital, pilfered Haarman’s body from the emergency room, slammed that downstairs door. What sort of doctor would walk off and leave dissected hands boiling over a Bunsen flame?
Ranier’s imagination began to picture a dark figure chasing down the night with shovel and wheel barrow, hunting likely cemetery-subjects for experiments. The sort of creature who, in cone-shaped astrologer’s hat and alchemist’s robes, would conjure at midnight in a laboratory, a dabbler in mummy-dust and usnea (moss scraped from the head of a criminal who had been hanging for weeks on a gallows).
Whew! Ranier shook off a shiver. No moment to go woolgathering with that sort of material; better quit thinking until the next shock came along. Ten to one, he’d fall off this running board flying through nothingness, come to earth with a bang, and wake up back in the Blue Kitty Café, banging his chin on Hyacinth Lucien’s floor.
But the ride went on. Climbing. Banking. Tunneling through jungles of vapour. Dipping through smothered undercuts. Taking unseen curves on two wheels. Uphill and down-dale through the dissolving, white-blanketed night; across an aerial trestle that had no more foundation than a rainbow, its girders merely shadows suspended in mist; between black rustling walls of timber that slashed invisible overhangs of foliage at Ranier’s face; past the half-formed shapes of boulders, the half-seen trunks of great trees. Once the gray ghost of a donkey went by in the cloudy backwash like some waterlogged carcass seen from a ship’s rail at night; and once there was a horse’s skull on a post, like a rural mailbox at the roadside, a frowsty death’s-head signalling Haitian Voodoo. In the momentary light of the headlamp, the eye holes steamed, and, as the car slewed past, the horse-teeth bit at the seat of Ranier’s pants.
The ride went on; and the next shock came after the girl cried out of darkness, “Polypheme! Ici!” and the car skidded to a standstill with screeching brake-bands. Wiping mist from his vision, Ranier made out a rift in the jungle’s wall, a little bay in the creaming forest, an open glade beyond the edge of the road. The fog was thinner in this clearing, as if held back on three sides by the close-packed trees, and the car light spread across the vale a moony illumination. Grassy and sequestered, it might have been a picnic spot, save the knolls were mounds and the mossy rocks were tombstones and there were tilted wooden crosses and a scattering of late-burning candles.
No, it was not quite the place for jelly sandwiches. There was a path led in from the roadside, a sandy lane that picked its way among the mounds, and about twenty feet in from the road the path was blocked by a sand pile. There was an excavation. There was an uncovered coffin grounded alongside the excavation. There was a round-shouldered tombstone at the head of the excavation. From the roadside John Ranier could read the epitaph.
HIER RUHET IN GOTT
GROSS
MUTTER SOU
GEST. 3 JANUAR 1922
ICH HATTE EINST
EIN SCHONES VATERLAND
But the figure sprawled beside the unlidded coffin was not resting in God. Neither was it Grandmother Sou.
Before he was half way up the path, Ranier knew who it was.
CHAPTER XIV
THE DEAD MARINE
Shatterpated, John Ranier stared down at the thing while the fibres of his skin twitched with repulsion and a cold passed through him and made his lamed foot ache. It was lying beside the empty coffin, an elbow negligently hooked over the coffin’s cowling, its long legs outstretched in the weeds, one foot in the grave.
The mummified face under the faded campaign hat was distinguished from Tutankhamen’s only by the wispy remains of a red moustache. One surmised it had not always been gaunt, for the uniform fitted loosely and the leather-faced leggings had sprung from the dwindled calves. The tunic was no more than a mustard colored gauze, a delicate garment spun by a khaki spider, and the bronze sharpshooter’s medal was sewed to the breast pocket by cobwebs, and the webbed bullet belt, unhooked from its rusty buckle, had lost its cartridges.
John Ranier had seen that O.D. uniform before, that globe-and-anchor insignia above the hatband. He had seen it before, and in similar disrepair. Once he had stepped on it in the leaf-mould of Belleau Wood, and there’d been another in the wire at Cantigny. They seeded the earth from the home of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, these soldiers of the sea, but Ranier would have wagered this leatherneck was the first to rise from a grave after fourteen years, mascotted by a bullfrog. The frog was tied to the bullet belt by a length of grocery string, and it did not want to play mascot for a tough marine, a three striper of the breed that wouldn’t stay down—
