The walking corpses lined themselves against the wall, awaiting orders. It was only then that Connell fully realized what had mauled and pounded him and Madeline.
They were breathing; but their lack of expression reminded him of a dog he had once seen in a vivisection laboratory. The greater portion of the animal’s brain had been removed; it lived, but it was a living log. And those black men had only enough brain left to let their reflexes function.
“How do you like my crew of zombies?” murmured Ducoin as the woman set a kettle of water over the glowing coals.
Zombies! That one word rounded out Council’s rising horror. They were corpses stolen from unguarded graves and had been reanimated by a primal necromancy to serve as farm cattle! Zombies, toiling as no dumb beast could. Rich profits, farming a plantation with hands like those. He wondered why Aunt Célie knelt swaying and muttering before the kettle into which she tossed dried herbs, and bits of bark and roots and pebbles.
“Pretty nice, eh?” was Ducoin’s satirical comment. “I learned the trick at Haiti, and I’m going to add you to my string of zombies. Once Aunt Célie mixes you a drink you won’t be so interested in women.”
Wrath blazed in Ducoin’s eyes as his glance shifted to his disheveled niece.
“I don’t know what you two were doing,” he murmured, “but I can fairly well guess. Or else she wouldn’t have been so willing to go away with you. Just another no-good wench. She’ll be a very good zombie herself—”
“You damn’ dirty rat!” snarled Connell. “Do you mean—”
“Certainly,” answered Ducoin. “After fooling around with you, she’s no niece of mine. In this day and age I can’t give her what she deserves, but making her a zombie is different. Nobody will inquire out here on the Delta. And she’ll not be playing around with strangers any more.”
Another guttural command. The corpse men marched over to Madeline’s bed as returning consciousness stirred her. Connell, struggling against his bonds, saw them stripping her dress to tatters as they throttled her into submission. Shuddering with horror at the grisly contact, Madeline finally surrendered, and the zombies methodically lashed her to another chair. Her dress was a pitiful rag. Her clawed breasts were half exposed, and her bruised legs peeped through the remnants of her hosiery.
Ducoin chuckled at Connell’s frenzied struggles.
“That won’t do you any good. I’ll leave a guard here to watch you while Aunt Célie and I finish the brew that’ll make both of you zombies.”
At Ducoin’s command, all but one of the zombies filed out of the room. Before he and Aunt Célie followed, the Creole paused to remark. “You were looking for Plato. All right, I’m sending Plato in to help watch you. Now see how you like the white man’s burden!”
They left. But presently, as the fumes from the kettle stifled and dizzied Connell, he heard approaching footsteps clump-clump-clumping down the hall.
The black apparition which stood framed in the doorway froze his blood. Plato had returned, a loose-jointed, shambling, lifeless hulk that moved in response to the zombie master’s command.
“Good God in heaven!” he groaned.
“That’s why I warned you,” whispered Madeline. “I saw Plato before and after.”
“If I’d only left—”
“I’m still glad you didn’t, Walt. It was such a ghastly, lonely life. Becoming a living corpse is better than never having lived.”
A wave of nausea racked Connell. He and Madeline would presently be the companions of that horrible hulk.
“Hitch your chair over, bit by bit,” Madeline continued. “Maybe I can get you loose.”
Connell’s cramped efforts moved the chair a scant fraction of an inch. At the rasp of wood, the heads of the zombies shifted. They had their orders. Not a chance.
“Plato,” said Connell. “Loosen my hands, Plato, don’t you remember me?”
Over and over, he repeated the name. The blank, sightless face seemed to change for an instant.
“Maybe he’s not been this way long enough to forget everything,” whispered Madeline. “Try again—”
The oft repeated name got unexpected results, but not from the zombie. Plato’s wife, Amelia, came slinking from the hallway. Her black plump face became slate grey as she stared into the ruddy glow.
“Where’s my Plato? Mr. Walt, was you talkin’ to him?”
Then she saw the hulk that had been Connell’s servant.
“Plato! Don’t you hear me talkin’ to you?”
Not a sign of life. That blasted brain could not absorb a new impression.
“Plato, honey, can’t you hear me?”
Finally, grey and trembling, the woman turned to Connell.
“Mr. Walt, I can’t do nuthin’. Plato’s dead.”
Connell realized that Amelia’s persuasion had made less impression than his own authoritative voice.
“Untie us, Amelia,” he said.
She had scarcely reached the chair when Plato’s ponderous hand lashed out, flinging her into a corner.
“Mr. Walt,” said the woman, as she struggled to her feet, “I’m goin’ to the village to get help. That devil don’t know I’m here, and I’ll get some friends.”
She stepped into the hall. Connell renewed his struggles. Once or twice Madeline contrived to jerk her chair a fraction of an inch toward him, but a zombie leaped forward, bodily picked her up, and set her in a corner. They did nothing to thwart Connell’s struggles against his bonds. The orders had not covered that.
Finally Connell contrived to spread the knotted strands of clothesline.
“Hang on, darling,” he panted. “I’ll be clear in a second.”
“But what good will it do?” moaned Madeline. “They’ll block you before—”
“Maybe I can toss you out the window, chair and all.”
He knew that he had no chance against his grisly captors, but anything was better than waiting for that deadly brew to receive the missing ingredients that would make them living corpses. Connell heard footsteps and relaxed his desperate efforts. His blood froze, and a stifled oath choked him.
It was Amelia. She had a small parcel wrapped in paper. Damn her, why hadn’t she run to the village like she’d said she would?
“Plato, honey,” she pleaded, “I brought you somethin’ good.”
“For God’s sake, go to the village!” shouted Connell.
“That would be wasted effort,” said a sardonic voice.
Ducoin crossed the threshold, accompanied by Aunt Célie and several zombies. His sinister presence, and the living dead seemed to freeze Amelia with horror. She had lost her chance to make a break.
“I guess we’ll have a number three zombie,” murmured Ducoin.
The living dead now blocked the doorway. Aunt Célie lifted the lid of the kettle, and added a pinch of powder from a small packet. She stirred the villainous potion, and drew off a cupful and held it to Connell’s lips.
“You might as well drink it,” said Ducoin. “If you don’t—” His gaze shifted to Madeline’s trembling bare body and he resumed, “These zombies will do anything I tell them. How would you like to see one of them—”
His words trailed to a whisper, but Connell knew what would happen to Madeline, before his eyes.
And then the last remnant of cord that bound his wrist yielded. His freed hand flashed out, striking the steaming beverage from Ducoin’s hand. As the Creole recoiled, Connell’s other hand jerked loose, gripping him by the throat. The sudden move caught Ducoin off guard. Since the master was present, the zombies did not interfere; and Ducoin, throttled by Connell’s savage grasp, could not articulate an order.
Sock! Connell’s fist hammered home, driving Ducoin crashing into a corner, dazed and numb. Connell struggled with the bonds at his ankles, but only for a moment. Aunt Célie seized his elbows from the rear.
Once Ducoin recovered his voice—!
Amelia was f
ree. But instead of running, she approached Plato.
“Jes’ yo’ taste one, honey,” she crooned, placing a salted cashew nut in the bluish, sagging mouth of her dead husband.
There was a mumbling and a drooling, a sudden flash of perception as the salty tidbit mingled with the saliva; then an inarticulate, bestial howl.
Ducoin and Aunt Célie flung themselves forward.
“Stop her!” yelled Ducoin. “She’s giving them salt!”
Too late. Burly, powerful Plato had become a raging maniac. Amelia thrust cashew nuts into the mouth of the other zombie. Another incredible transformation. Another slavering, howling brute.
A pistol cracked, but only once. Ducoin’s weapon clattered into a corner. Plato and his companion closed in.
The room became a red hell of slaughter. The insensate hulks were pounding and trampling and flinging Ducoin and Aunt Célie about like bean bags.
They hungrily licked splashed blood from their hands, and renewed the assault. Other zombies came from the fields, tasted a salted nut, and joined the butchery. And presently there was only a shapeless, gory pulp that they were trampling and beating into the floor.…
The zombies desisted for lack of fragments left to dismember. Then they clambered to their feet, utterly ignoring Amelia and the two prisoners. They shattered the window, cleared the sill, and dashed across the field. Against the moonglow, Connell saw them burrowing into the ground like dogs.
Amelia, sobbing and laughing, was releasing him and Madeline.
“Mr. Walt,” the woman explained, “when I saw my Plato, I remembered somethin’ my ole grandmammy told me years ago, about them zombies cuttin’ up that way when they ate salt. Then I remembered the cashew nuts I gave you. Now, praise de Lord, Plato is plumb dead, and all the other zombies are goin’ to their graves like Christians. They always do that, when they get salt. But first they messes up the man what made them zombies.”
“But how did he do it?” wondered Connell as he helped Madeline into the car.
“I don’t know anything about it, except that according to the law in Haiti, it’s a capital offense to administer any drug that produces a coma. And I think that’s the real reason Uncle Pierre decided to finish me—he found me reading an old book of Haitian statutes, not long ago, and was afraid of my suspicions.”
“Mr. Walt,” interrupted a voice from the rumble seat, “you’re goin’ to need a maid for the new missus, ain’t you?”
“Absolutely,” assured Connell, “but you’d better take a vacation for a couple of weeks before you come to work.…”
SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO SHOUT ABOUT IT, by Darrell Schweitzer
When Caroline was born (so she was told later), she came out of the womb screaming, and the doctor allegedly remarked, “Good strong lungs. Maybe she’ll be an opera singer when she grows up.” But by the time she was old enough to run around the neighborhood and blast people’s eardrums to near deafness (or at least to the point of angrily slammed windows and doors) it was clear that she might have the volume, but there was no particular beauty in her voice.
“Christ, that kid is loud,” people said, and what very few friends she had in the early grades asked her, “Why do you make so much noise?”
That wasn’t to be the last time anyone asked her that, though her mother, by and large, gave up on the point, and when her father took her to the zoo or to the park or celebrated her birthday or otherwise paid attention to her (however infrequently) and managed to keep her quiet, he never ruined the affair by asking such questions.
But most of the time her father was “away” and her mother was preoccupied with something she said Caroline was too young to understand.
Father went away for good when Caroline was nine. One night she got up late because she had a sore throat, or a had had a bad dream, or both (details became confused as she was later forced to tell this story over and over) and for all she knew that it was really unlikely that she would get much comfort from either parent, she came downstairs, and knocked gently on the door to her father’s study (which was always locked, even when he was in it).
But she paused when she heard Father and Mother arguing in there, in tones that sounded as much fearful as angry.
Certainly no one heard her, and she stood alone in the darkened hall as the noise got worse and things crashed and there were awful, burning smells, then the impossible sound of a roaring wind, as loud as an express train. The whole house shook with it and something thumped hard, once, twice, three times against the door until it seemed about to burst off its hinges.
Then there was silence, and blood flowed like a wave under the door, eclipsing the light from within, splashing over Caroline’s slippers until her feet were soaked and the cuffs of her pajamas were glued to her ankles.
That was when Caroline started screaming. She ran out into the chilly November night, screaming, until windows came up and people shouted, “Shut up you crazy brat!”
She was still screaming when the police found her, hours later, minus her slippers and covered with mud, huddled among some trees in the park, almost hoarse now, so that the noise she made was more of a wheezing moan than a scream, and she tasted blood in her mouth.
After that she was wrapped up in warm blankets and treated kindly by lots of people who made stupid noises at her and talked in near baby-talk in a pathetic attempt to “get down to her level,” as someone (even Caroline, years later) might have put it. She was made to tell her story again and again, but still she screamed a lot, and therapists, in a hospital, gave her drugs to make her sleep, and told her when she woke up that everything had been a bad dream.
But no one believed her story. Her father was gone, yes, but there was no trace of blood, and nothing was broken in the house, and her mother, on visits, refused to explain further. She overheard the doctors and her mom and someone who might have been a lawyer talking about “desertion” once, but when everybody realized Caroline was listening, they shut the door to her room and went down the hall to the lounge.
What really must have been a dream, Caroline concluded, was the time her mother slipped into her room after visiting hours and sat down beside her bed in the dark. Mother was crying, which was amazing, and she whispered, “Honey, I want you to know that whatever happens, I still love you.”
Then Caroline turned and buried her face in her pillow and screamed as hard as she could, but no one heard her, and Mother was gone.
That was the greatest discovery in her life so far, that if she screamed into her pillow and no one heard her, she could pretend she was getting better and would be allowed to go home, and she could keep her secret from her mother, from the therapists, from everyone.
Her secret, which indeed she had kept, even through the relentless interrogations, was the real reason she made so much noise in the first place, why she screamed—into her pillow now, unheard by everyone else, which was actually much better.
It was because if she screamed loudly enough, it was like punching through a barrier into another world, and sounds came back to her, not echoes, but answers. She was conversing with something or someone very far away, and she had to shout to make herself heard. Many nights she would scream into her pillow for a while, then lie awake for hours, listening to the darkness make its reply, comforting her and soothing her, telling strange stories and promising the answers to things she didn’t understand.
If no one else listened to her, if no one else believed her, there was always this other, this answerer, who did.
Once she even asked the darkness, “What am I going to be when I grow up?” and a voice like a winter wind rattling dead leaves replied, “Anything you want. Anything at all.”
II
That must have been a dream about her mother saying she loved her, because when Caroline came back home, Mom had a new boyfriend, whose name was Jack. He pretended to be her uncle, but wasn’t. He didn’t like Caroline at all. Mom would not let “Uncle” Jack hurt her, and once she even
grabbed his wrist when he raised a coke bottle to smack her, but otherwise Mom did everything Jack told her to do, as if she were his slave. The two of them were away a lot, or when they were home they were locked in the basement (which had been converted into a laboratory of some sort; Caroline was never allowed down there), and sometimes there were the awful smells and noises.
In summer, Caroline took to sleeping on the porch, or in the hammock in the back yard. This was encouraged. She wasn’t wanted in the house.
She always brought a pillow to scream into.
She pretty much raised herself. When she was twelve, she decided she wanted to be a dancer when she grew up, and in the times when Mom and Jack were somewhere else, she would spend long hours curled up in front of the TV watching videotapes of Fred Astaire and Ginjer Rogers movies, sometimes with the sound off, just watching the two graceful black and white figures whirling across the screen, while the darkness whispered to her in the voice she had known all her life.
Meanwhile, Jack started to bring strangers into the house, a lot of them, late at night. Sometimes they didn’t seem to arrive. They were merely there. They spoke with foreign accents or even in foreign languages, or chanted, or sang behind closed doors, and the smells were worse then. Caroline could tell that her mother didn’t like this. Mom looked hollow-eyed and even afraid, exhausted all the time, but she still wouldn’t say anything to Caroline, who knew that when this sort of stuff was happening, it was time to make herself scarce.
She spent hours in the local library, doing her homework, reading books about far places, or drawing leaping, flying, costumed figures in her notebooks. She had given up on the idea of being a dancer by the time she was thirteen, because she knew she’d never get lessons and it was probably already too late to begin anyway. She’d fallen in love with comic books and sometimes pretended she was a superhero with a secret identity. Not heroine. It never occurred to her that comic-book characters really had gender, or anything under those tights.
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