Unsympathetic Magic

by Laura Resnick

  “I just had to ask.” Jeff set down his fork. “I think I’m done eating.”

  “You could also shoot the body,” Puma said. “Or inject it with poison.”

  “Or strangle it,” said Max.

  “It’s a whole buffet of choices,” said Jeff.

  “You shouldn’t let that salmon go to waste,” I said. “It looks good.” After the things I had experienced lately, I didn’t see any point getting squeamish over methods of killing a body that was already dead.

  Jeff said to me, “Be my guest.”

  “Thanks.” I took a bite of the fish. It was tasty, so I lifted the filet onto my plate. “I have a question, Max. I was alone in the dark with Darius last night. If he’s a zombie, then why didn’t he try to eat my brains or something? Isn’t that what zombies do?”

  Biko gave me a wan look, and paused in his eating.

  “Oh, not at all!” said Puma. “People just get that idea from the movies.”

  “Sure, blame the entertainment industry,” Jeff muttered. “It’s all some actor’s fault that Esther’s wondering why no one has ripped open her skull and consumed her brains.”

  Biko sighed and pushed his plate away.

  “Zombies aren’t villains,” Puma said emphatically. “They’re victims.”

  “But they can be dangerous,” Max interjected.

  “Yes, that’s true,” Puma agreed. “More mashed potatoes, Dr. Zadok?”

  “Oh, yes, thank you. Just a small amount, please.”

  “Zombies don’t eat brains,” Puma said. “They don’t eat at all. They’re not human anymore.”

  “Ah. I get it.” I nodded. “Which is why they also don’t bleed, sweat, cry, and so on. But even if Darius wasn’t, er, hungry last night, why didn’t he attack me? Was it just because he was disoriented and weak after being attacked?”

  “He would only have attacked you if commanded to do so. Which clearly was not the case,” Max said. “Zombies aren’t evil, they’re just the living dead. They can, of course, be used for evil purposes by their master, but they are inherently neither good nor bad. They are just tools and have no will of their own.”

  “And that’s why someone raises the dead,” Puma said to Jeff. “To have a docile, obedient slave.”

  “A person no one will search for,” Max added, “because they’re not missing. They are no longer part of this life.”

  Puma explained to me, “A zombie is not a demon or monster, it’s a dead body whose soul the bokor steals and whose body the bokor reanimates with black magic.”

  “After exhuming it from the grave?” I said, finishing Jeff’s salmon.

  “Robbing the grave is more like it,” said Biko.

  “Ah, and that suggests a possible answer to Jeffrey’s question of why Mr. Phelps was chosen as a victim,” Max said, looking pleased with the realization. “Darius’ death was recent, and a bokor needs a fresh corpse when he raises a zombie from the grave.”

  “Oh, absolutely,” Puma said. “A zombie should be raised within a few days of burial. After all, decomposition would make it so . . . messy. Body parts dropping off, teeth falling out, skin rotting away. And the stench of decay would be hard to conceal.”

  I suddenly felt very full.

  “I suppose you could wait longer if the body was embalmed,” Puma added doubtfully. “But a bokor’s rituals are bound to be based on rural Haitian practices, where most buried bodies rot and start being consumed by parasites quickly.”

  “I think I’m done eating,” I said faintly, feeling a tad queasy.

  “Are you sure?” Jeff said to me. “Because we can always go out and sacrifice a goat for you, if you’re still feeling a bit peckish. The night is young.”

  I laid down my fork and pushed my plate away as a strong memory assailed me.

  “Are you all right?” Puma asked me. “You suddenly look a little . . . green.”

  “Darius smelled funny,” I blurted.

  Jeff made a sound. “That’s a little too much information, Esther. I don’t really want sensory detail on the experience.”

  “He was dead at the time,” Biko said charitably. “He didn’t have a body odor problem in life.”

  “Hmm. Yes, even with a relatively prompt post-burial exhumation, thus allowing very little time for decomposition before the bokor’s magic would halt—or substantially decelerate—nature’s progress . . .” Max nodded with a thoughtful expression. “Yes, I think a certain amount of odor should be expected, even so. The zombie is no longer a living being, after all, and dead tissue does smell . . . different.”

  Biko said, “So if they smell funny, don’t breathe, don’t sweat or bleed, and so on, they should be easy to identify, right?”

  “Oh, yes,” Max said. “Under normal circumstances, I would think so. Keep in mind that Esther’s brief encounter with the zombie last night occurred in very frightening and confusing conditions. If, by contrast, the creature simply walked into this room right now . . .”

  We all looked toward the door, as if afraid of seeing the late Darius Phelps suddenly enter it.

  “It would be much more obvious that Darius is no longer a normal man,” Max said. “As is often the case with reanimation of the dead—”

  “Often?” Jeff repeated. “How often do you meet dead people, Max?”

  “Not now, Jeff,” I said.

  Max continued, “His skin would probably be sunken and dull, his eyes glassy and unblinking, his expression blank. His movements would be clumsy and unnatural, his speech slow and slurred.”

  “Since zombies have no thoughts or will, they don’t speak unless spoken to, and they don’t move or do anything unless ordered to,” Puma added. “And if you try to talk with a zombie, it will seem confused and disoriented, because it has no memory and no normal cognitive functions.”

  “Most of that describes the, uh, individual that I met last night,” I said. “I thought his disorientation was because, you know, he had just lost a hand.”

  “Okay, time out. I believe that you saw something really weird last night, but it’s time to get off this zombie train to nowhere,” Jeff said to me. “How about this theory instead? You did see Darius on the street last night, but he wasn’t a zombie. He was reanimated by technology, not by voodoo.”

  “What sort of technology animates a three- week-old corpse?” I said with a frown.

  “Let’s say someone dug up his body and installed robot parts inside him.”

  “But how did he answer my questions when I spoke to him?”

  “Computer programming.”

  “And how did he manage to struggle against the baka?”

  “Remote control.”

  “And what about the baka?” I said. “What were they? Robots with bad breath, drool, and dirty claws?”

  He thought it over. “They were mutant dogs.”

  “Good God, Jeff,” I said. “Were all your brains in your hair when they shaved it off?”

  He looked self-conscious and ran a hand over his bald head. “You don’t think this look works, do you?”

  I said to Max and Puma, “Okay, now there’s something else I don’t get. If zombies are just tools, serving the will of the bokor, then what was Darius doing wandering the streets by himself?”

  “That is a puzzle,” Max agreed.

  “It’s also kind of surprising that he could tell you his name,” Puma said with a frown. “Zombies are supposed to be empty inside, with no . . . Oh, wait! I’ve got it!” In her excitement, she leaped out of her chair, startling us all. She looked at Max, “When is a zombie most dangerous?”

  “When its bokor commands it to commit violence or mayhem,” Max said promptly.

  “No, I mean, when is it most unpredictable?”

  Max looked puzzled for a moment, then his expression cleared and he rose to his feet, too. “When it is awakened!”

  “Yes!”

  “Whoa! How do you awaken a zombie?” I asked. “You’ve just said they’re the living dead
, with no will or soul.”

  “There are various ways to awaken one, in theory,” said Max. “If the zombie tastes salt or meat, for example.”

  “But I thought they don’t eat or feel hunger?” I said.

  “If it makes them unpredictable,” said Biko, “I’d say that’s a good reason not to feed a zombie, hungry or not.”

  “Another way a zombie may awaken is if it hears someone it knew in life calling it by name. But again, that’s a theory,” said Max. “I have never actually seen a zombie or studied with a bokor.”

  “The essence of it is,” Puma said, “that the zombie has an experience that reminds it of being alive. And so it awakens.”

  “In much the way that a specific taste or smell can evoke a powerful memory within a living person, so that the person feels transported back to the place or event in question,” Max said. “Alternately, something may go wrong with the bokor’s spell, and so the zombie begins to slip free of the sorcerer’s control. All magic is notoriously unpredictable, after all, and dark magic especially so, because it is governed by such mercurial influences.”

  I said, “So you think Darius, er, woke up?”

  “Quite possibly,” said Max.

  “I don’t like to hear myself asking this,” Jeff said, “but what’s so dangerous and unpredictable about an awakened zombie?”

  “Well, instead of an empty vessel just serving the bokor’s will,” Puma said, “now you have a soulless creature trying to exercise its own will, without morality, self-control, or memory. And there’s no telling what it’ll do or what might happen.”

  “So now that he’s awake, Darius won’t just go back to his apartment and open a bottle of wine?” Jeff asked.

  “No. He may be drawn to places or people that were familiar to him in life,” Max said. “But, as Puma has indicated, he is devoid of reason or awareness. Whatever he does, he will not behave as if he were still alive.”

  “Oh, my God,” I said slowly. “Max, I think I know why the baka attacked Darius!” I recalled the way the two little creatures had made a swift beeline across the street that night to the spot where they assaulted Darius. They were hunting him. “If he awakened and, er, wandered away from home—”

  “Or fled captivity,” said Puma.

  “Then maybe the baka were sent after him,” I said.

  “Ah!” said Max. “To retrieve him for the bokor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Or maybe the bokor wanted to get rid of the evidence before anyone saw his runaway zombie and started asking questions?” Biko suggested. “Maybe the baka were sent to dismember Mr. Phelps and scatter the parts!”

  “Okay, what do you say we put away these leftovers?” Jeff said loudly.

  I took a deep breath. “So what we’re saying is—”

  “What do you mean ‘we’?” said Jeff as he and Puma rose to start packing up the food and throw away our paper plates and plastic utensils. “I’m voting for the robot theory.”

  “It’s a stupid theory, man,” said Biko.

  “Okay, then I’m voting for the detective’s theory,” Jeff shot back, folding aluminum foil over what was left of the chicken.

  Puma frowned. “What’s the detective’s theory again?”

  “I don’t know,” Jeff said. “But it’s got to be better than this.”

  “Let’s get our theory straight,” I said. “Darius dies of a freak medical problem, and there happens to be a bokor in the neighborhood who decides to raise him from the dead, wanting a slave who’ll be completely obedient to his or her will. Is that what we’re saying?”

  “Actually, I think we should consider the possibility that the death was not accidental,” Max said.

  We all looked at him in surprise.

  Then Jeff said, “It was a ruptured intestine, Max. If there had been anything suspicious about it, the doctors would have told the cops. And the cops would have started sniffing around Darius’ life—including his workplace. But nothing like that has happened.”

  Max said, “A bokor powerful enough to raise a zombie from the dead and conjure baka could, I’m sorry to say, commit murder and make it appear to be natural causes.”

  This statement had a sobering effect on us all.

  “Mr. Phelps might have been killed?” Biko said. “Deliberately?”

  “Perhaps,” Max said.

  “To make him a zombie?” When Max nodded, I said, “That’s awful! Why would someone do that?”

  “I suspect,” Max said, “it may be that someone has been raising a small army of zombies and needed at least one more—and quickly, too.”

  “Excuse me?” said Jeff.

  “The disturbance in the directional flow of mystical energy that has been building steadily in this locale is consistent with Darius’ reanimation,” Max said, “but not explained by it. Not entirely, that is.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Because it is too powerful to be the result of one isolated incident. Something more is happening than just the mystical enslavement of Darius Phelps.” With a frown of concentration on his face, as if focusing on the disrupted spiritual flow of this dimension from his folding chair right there in Puma’s Vodou Emporium, he said, “I believe there are more zombies out there. And I believe the bokor has raised them to assist with some devastating plan that is unfolding even as we speak.”

  12

  “I don’t think it’s the best possible idea for us to bring Max in there with us,” Jeff said to me in a low voice.

  “He wants to see Nolan,” I said.

  “But—”

  “He’s coming with us,” I said firmly. “You, on the other hand, are entirely expendable if you keep irritating me.”

  Jeff gave a disgruntled sigh but dropped the subject.

  We were entering the hospital where Nolan was a patient, a few blocks away from Puma’s shop. I didn’t want to make a bad impression on the D30 production office by missing my visit altogether. It was early evening now, well past my afternoon slot on the visitation schedule; but I figured better late than never. I also thought that the sooner I introduced Jeff to Nolan, the sooner I could shed him; his skepticism was getting a trifle shrill. Meanwhile, Max wanted to interview Nolan and assure himself that the heart attack was exactly what it seemed to be, rather than a devious voodoo assault that mimicked natural causes.

  Apparently crack whores weren’t that unusual a sight at the hospital, since the nurses on staff scarcely even blinked at my appearance. Or perhaps they just had very low expectations of the sort of person likely to visit Nolan. In any case, my name was on the security list that the D30 production office had given the hospital for its star’s private room, and my two companions and I were told where to go.

  Puma, who had already been anxious about angry spirits and voracious baka when we’d first met, was now totally freaked out by the prospect of an army of zombies being raised in Harlem as part of some major dark mojo that Max believed was in the works. So she was going to consult Mambo Celeste about holding a community ritual to appease the gods and seek their protection. It should be done soon, Puma thought—very soon. Meanwhile, she would also try to learn if the ruptured intestine that killed Darius might have been magically inflicted on him.

  With zombies and baka on the loose in this neighborhood, Biko didn’t want his sister walking home alone from the store, even though it was still light out. So he would help her close up the shop, take her home, and then meet us at the hospital. Max wanted to see the places where Biko had encountered baka during his recent nocturnal adventures, as well as the spot where I had met Darius’ zombie. And since I wasn’t keen on making that tour after dark, I wanted to get this visit to Nolan over with in a hurry and get back outside while there was still some evening light left.

  The door to Nolan’s hospital room was guarded by his personal assistant, a plump, anxious, bespectacled woman whose appearance suggested that, like me, she hadn’t been home since the actor had fallen ill last night.r />
  She checked off my name on her list. “You’re late.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Very late.”

  “We were unavoidably detained,” Max said. “Please accept my humble apologies. The fault is mine, I fear.”

  “And you are?”

  “Dr. Maximillian Zadok,” he said, taking off his straw hat. “A specialist from Oxford University.”

  “A specialist? Oxford? All right, you can go in, too.”

  “And I’m Jeffrey Clark.” Oozing charm, my old boyfriend said to Nolan’s twitchy assistant, “You’ve had quite a day, I’ll bet. Maybe you want to go get yourself a cup of coffee or something while we visit with Mike?”

  She was too accustomed to actors to be flustered by his flirting with her. “I can’t. He likes me to be within shouting distance at all times.” She looked down at her notebook. “Jeffrey Clark? Your name’s not on my list.”

  Jeff nudged me. I said, “He’s with me.”

  “Hmm. Well, there’ve been two no-shows already, and Mike’s cranky about how few visitors he’s had so far. The star of Criminal Motive was hospitalized for exhaustion last year,” she said, naming an Emmy Award-winning drama in the Crime and Punishment franchise. “Mike found out how many visitors he had while he was in the hospital, and now he’s keeping score. We’ve only been here one day, and we’re already way behind.” She said to Jeff, “So I guess you can go in. It’ll help the tally.”

  He beamed at her. “Thanks.”

  It was a good thing that I hadn’t really expected a brush with death to change Nolan’s personality, since it took only a few seconds at his bedside to establish that this was indeed not the case.

  He told me I looked like shit, then glanced at Jeff and Max and asked me, “Who the fuck are they?”

  I introduced them to him. Jeff, a dedicated self-promoter, immediately tried to engage him in conversation. Nolan interrupted him, without apology, to shout for his assistant, demanding that she come straighten his pillows for him.

  Jeff again tried to strike up a conversation. Nolan again interrupted him, asking me, “Are those for me?”

  “Huh? Oh!” I realized he was nodding to the two books tucked under my arm. “No. This is some, uh, research I’m doing.”