Zombies E-Book

Otto Penzler

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Serie: The Best American Mystery Stories
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 2428

Beschreibung

Handpicked by legendary editor Otto Penzler, this is the biggest and bloodiest collection of stories. Featuring a cast of world-class writers, including H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, Clive Barker, Richard Matheson, Edgar Allan Poe, Joe R. Lansdale, Vivian Meik, Lisa Tuttle, W.B. Seabrook, Karen Haber, Guy De Maupassant, Richard Laymon, Thomas Burke, Anthony Boucher, John Knox, Theodore Sturgeon and Seabury Quinn, this might just be the world's biggest and bloodiest zombie anthology yet. Horrifying ghouls, decaying corpses, body snatchers, grave robbers and flesh-eating monsters. In this gruesome anthology of the living dead, all these and more will try to catch your eye and devour your brain. From the macabre pens of the world's most spine-tingling horror and fantasy writers, the grisliest, goriest, ghastliest stories from the last two centuries have been plucked from the shadows by legendary editor Otto Penzler, to form the most monstrous volume in zombie history.

Leseprobe

OTTO PENZLER is the proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City. For seventeen years he was the publisher of The Armchair Detective, the Edgar Award-winning quarterly journal devoted to the study of mystery and suspense fiction. Penzler is also the founder of The Mysterious Press, Otto Penzler Books and The Armchair Detective Library. He currently has imprints with Grove/Atlantic Inc. in the United States and with Corvus in Great Britain, publishing such authors as Thomas H. Cook, Andrew Klavan, Thomas Perry and Joyce Carol Oates. He also wrote a weekly column, ‘The Crime Scene’ for the New York Sun, for five years. In 1977, Penzler won an Edgar Award for the Encyclopaedia of Mystery and Detection. In 1994 he was awarded the prestigious Ellery Queen Award for his exceptional contributions to the publishing field by the Mystery Writers of America. He was also honored with its highest non-writing award, the Raven, in 2003.

ALSO EDITED BY OTTO PENZLER

THE BIG BOOK OF PULPS

THE VAMPIRE ARCHIVES

AGENTS OF TREACHERY

BLOODSUCKERS

FANGS

COFFINS

THE BIG BOOK OF BLACK MASK STORIES

THE BIG BOOK OF ADVENTURE STORIES

First published in the United States of America in 2011 by Vintage.

This edition first published in Great Britain in 2012 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Introductions and compilation copyright © Otto Penzler, 2011

Owing to limitations on space, the permissions to reprint previously published material on pages 807–810 constitute an extension of this copyright page.

The moral right of Otto Penzler to to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The stories included in this compendium are works of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed herein are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-0-85789-027-6 eBook ISBN: 978-0-85789-028-3

Printed in Great Britain.

Corvus An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd Ormond House 26-27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ

www.corvus-books.co.uk

For Steve Stilwell

Who, like me, will live forever

Otto Penzler: INTRODUCTION

W. B. Seabrook: DEAD MEN WORKING IN THE CANE FIELDS

David A. Riley: AFTER NIGHTFALL

Hugh B. Cave: MISSION TO MARGAL

Chet Williamson: THE CAIRNWELL HORROR

Arthur Leo Zagat: CRAWLING MADNESS

Lisa Tuttle: TREADING THE MAZE

Karen Haber: RED ANGELS

Michael Marshall Smith: LATER

Vivian Meik: WHITE ZOMBIE

Guy de Maupassant: WAS IT A DREAM?

Steve Rasnic Tem: BODIES AND HEADS

Dale Bailey: DEATH AND SUFFRAGE

Henry Kuttner: THE GRAVEYARD RATS

Edgar Allan Poe: THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF M. VALDEMAR

Yvonne Navarro: FEEDING THE DEAD INSIDE

Charles Birkin: BALLET NÈGRE

Geoffrey A. Landis: DEAD RIGHT

Graham Masterton: THE TAKING OF MR. BILL

Jack D’Arcy: THE GRAVE GIVES UP

H. P. Lovecraft: HERBERT WEST—REANIMATOR

H. P. Lovecraft: PICKMAN’S MODEL

Robert Bloch: MATERNAL INSTINCT

Kevin J. Anderson: BRINGING THE FAMILY

Richard Laymon: MESS HALL

Sheridan Le Fanu: SCHALKEN THE PAINTER

Thorp McClusky: WHILE ZOMBIES WALKED

Mary A. Turzillo: APRIL FLOWERS, NOVEMBER HARVEST

Mort Castle: THE OLD MAN AND THE DEAD

Henry S. Whitehead: JUMBEE

Peter Tremayne: MARBH BHEO

Thomas Burke: THE HOLLOW MAN

Anthony Boucher: THEY BITE

Gahan Wilson: COME ONE, COME ALL

Ramsey Campbell: IT HELPS IF YOU SING

R. Chetwynd-Hayes: THE GHOULS

Seabury Quinn: THE CORPSE-MASTER

F. Marion Crawford: THE UPPER BERTH

Ralston Shields: VENGEANCE OF THE LIVING DEAD

Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg: THE SONG THE ZOMBIE SANG

John H. Knox: MEN WITHOUT BLOOD

Uel Key: THE BROKEN FANG

Theodore Sturgeon: IT

Day Keene: LEAGUE OF THE GRATEFUL DEAD

Garry Kilworth: LOVE CHILD

Edith and Ejler Jacobson: CORPSES ON PARADE

Richard and Christian Matheson: WHERE THERE’S A WILL

Michael Swanwick: THE DEAD

Manly Wade Wellman: THE SONG OF THE SLAVES

H. P. Lovecraft: THE OUTSIDER

Robert McCammon: EAT ME

Joe R. Lansdale: DEADMAN’S ROAD

Robert E. Howard: PIGEONS FROM HELL

Scott Edelman: LIVE PEOPLE DON’T UNDERSTAND

August Derleth and Mark Schorer: THE HOUSE IN THE MAGNOLIAS

Stephen King: HOME DELIVERY

Arthur J. Burks: DANCE OF THE DAMNED

Theodore Roscoe: Z IS FOR ZOMBIE

ZOMBIES AIN’T WHAT they used to be. Not so long ago, they were safely ensconced on Haiti so the rest of the world could merely scoff at the bizarre myth of the living dead on one relatively small Caribbean island. Well, they have proliferated at an alarming rate, invading the rest of the world, and it seems unlikely that they have any intention of going away anytime soon.

W. B. Seabrook, in his 1929 book, The MagicIsland, recounted “true” tales of voodoo magic on Haiti bringing the recently dead back to life as slow-moving, virtually brain-dead creatures who would work tirelessly in the fields without pay and without complaint. These stories introduced the zombie to much of the world, though most national folklores have similar tales and legends. A decade after Seabrook’s groundbreaking volume, Zora Neale Hurston researched Haitian folklore and told similar stories of eyewitness accounts of zombies, as have subsequent anthropologists, sociologists, and others not prone to imaginative fancies.

If zombie literature began with the reportage of Seabrook, it had powerful ancestral works on which to draw. Stories of the living dead, or ghouls, or reanimated people, have existed since the Arabian Nights tales and borrowed from other horror story motifs, from the lurching reanimated monster of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the undead vampires of John Polidori’s The Vampyre and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Several of the most distinguished short-story writers of the nineteenth century turned to figures who had been dead but then, uh-oh, were alive. Edgar Allan Poe was almost relentless in his use of the dead coming back to life, most famously in “The Fall of the House of Usher” but most vividly in his contribution to this volume, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” Guy de Maupassant’s poignant “Was It a Dream?” lingers in the memory as an example of how a corpse leaving a grave can destroy the living without a single act or thought of violence. Ambrose Bierce’s famous “The Death of Halpin Frayser” may be interpreted as a ghost story, a vampire story, or a zombie story, and is equally terrifying as any of them; it is not included in this volume because I selected it for inclusion in The Vampire Archives.

Now a staple of horror ction, zombies, as we know them today, have a very short history. Tales of resurrected corpses and ghouls were popular in the weird menace pulps of the 1930s, but these old-fashioned zombies had no taste for human flesh. For that, we can thank George Romero, whose 1968 lm Night of the Living Dead introduced this element to these undead critters. Writers, being writers, took to this notion as a more extreme depiction of reanimation and have apparently made every effort to outdo one another in the degree of violence and gore they could bring to the literature.

While this incursion into the realm of splat-terpunk may be welcomed by many readers, I have attempted to maintain some balance in this collection and have omitted some pretty good stories that, in my view, slipped into an almost pornographic sensibility of the need to drench every page with buckets of blood and descriptions of mindless cruelty, torture, and violence. Of course, zombies are mindless, so perhaps this behavior is predictable, but so are many of the stories, and I have opted to include a wider range of fiction. While the characters in early stories are not called zombies, they are the living dead (or, occasionally, apparently so), and they qualify for inclusion.

Inevitably, some of the most popular writers and their best stories will have been collected in other anthologies, so will seem familiar. For a definitive collection like this one, I wanted them to be included, so if you’ve already read the stories by H. P. Lovecraft, Poe, and Stephen King, skip them if you must, though they became popular because they are really good and bear rereading. On the other hand, you will find in these pages some stories that you’ve never read by authors of whom you’ve never heard, and you are in for a treat.

To cover the broad spectrum and significant history of zombie literature required a good bit of research, and I am indebted to the welcome and needed assistance of numerous experts in the genre, most notably John Pelan, Robert Weinberg, John Knott, Chris Roden, Joel Frieman, Michele Slung, and Gardner Dozois.

W(ILLIAM) B(UEHLER) SEABROOK (1884–1945) was the type of adventurer, explorer, occultist, and author more frequently encountered among the British eccentrics of the Victorian era although he was an American born in Westminster, Maryland. He began his career as a journalist for the Augusta Chronicle in Georgia, became part owner of an advertising agency, and joined the French army when World War I broke out, receiving the Croix de Guerre. After recovering from being gassed in the trenches, he became a reporter for The New York Times before setting out on a series of travels that provided subject matter for his immensely successful books.

His first book, Diary of a Section VIII (1917), told of his war experiences. This was followed by Adventures in Arabia (1927), about his time with various desert tribes, and then The Magic Island (1929), which explored the voodoo practices and black magic of Haiti; he claimed to be the first white man to witness the rituals, songs, and sacrifices of the islanders. This adventure was succeeded by a trip to the Ivory Coast and what was then Timbuktu, where he again witnessed native sorcery and magic, as well as cannibalism, in which he willingly participated, describing the various cuts of human flesh and comparing them to veal. These travels inspired Jungle Ways (1934) and The White Monk of Timbuctoo (1934). Drawn to witchcraft, Satanism, and other occult practices, and for a time befriending Aleister Crowley, he wrote frequently on the subject, notably in Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today (1940).

Seabrook spent a year and a half in a rehabilitation clinic to treat his alcoholism, writing Asylum (1935) about the experience. He committed suicide with a drug overdose a decade later.

“Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields” purports to be entirely true, without “fiction or embroidery,” as he said of his many books. It was originally published in The Magic Island (New York, Harcourt Brace, 1929).

PRETTY MULATTO JULIE had taken baby Marianne to bed. Constant Polynice and I sat late before the doorway of his caille, talking of fire-hags, demons, werewolves, and vampires, while a full moon, rising slowly, flooded his sloping cotton-fields and the dark rolling hills beyond.

Polynice was a Haitian farmer, but he was no common jungle peasant. He lived on the island of La Gonave, where I shall return to him in later stories. He seldom went over to the Haitian mainland, but he knew what was going on in Port-au-Prince, and spoke sometimes of installing a radio. A countryman, half peasant born and bred, he was familiar with every superstition of the mountains and the plain, yet too intelligent to believe them literally true—or at least so I gathered from his talk.

He was interested in helping me toward an understanding of the tangled Haitian folk-lore. It was only by chance that we came presently to a subject which—though I refused for a long time to admit it—lies in a baffling category on the ragged edge of things which are beyond either superstition or reason. He had been telling me of fire-hags who left their skins at home and set the cane fields blazing; of the vampire, a woman sometimes living, sometimes dead, who sucked the blood of children and who could be distinguished because her hair always turned an ugly red; of the werewolf—chauché, in Creole—a man or woman who took the form of some animal, usually a dog, and went killing lambs, young goats, sometimes babies.

All this, I gathered, he considered to be pure superstition, as he told me with tolerant scorn how his friend and neighbour Osmann had one night seen a grey dog slinking with bloody jaws from his sheep-pen, and who, after having shot and exorcised and buried it, was so convinced he had killed a certain girl named Liane who was generally reputed to be a chauché that when he met her two days later on the path to Grande Source he believed she was a ghost come back for vengeance, and fled howling.

As Polynice talked on, I reflected that these tales ran closely parallel not only with those of the negroes in Georgia and the Carolinas, but with the medieval folk-lore of white Europe. Werewolves, vampires, and demons were certainly no novelty. But I recalled one creature I had been hearing about in Haiti, which sounded exclusively local—the zombie.

It seemed (or so I had been assured by negroes more credulous than Polynice) that while the zombie came from the grave, it was neither a ghost nor yet a person who had been raised like Lazarus from the dead. The zombie, they say, is a soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life—it is a dead body which is made to walk and act and move as if it were alive. People who have the power to do this go to a fresh grave, dig up the body before it has had time to rot, galvanize it into movement, and then make of it a servant or slave, occasionally for the commission of some crime, more often simply as a drudge around the habitation or the farm, setting it dull heavy tasks, and beating it like a dumb beast if it slackens.

As this was revolving in my mind, I said to Polynice: “It seems to me that these werewolves and vampires are first cousins to those we have at home, but I have never, except in Haiti, heard of anything like zombies. Let us talk of them for a little while. I wonder if you can tell me something of this zombie superstition. I should like to get at some idea of how it originated.”

My rational friend Polynice was deeply astonished. He leaned over and put his hand in protest on my knee.

“Superstition? But I assure you that this of which you now speak is not a matter of superstition. Alas, these things—and other evil practices connected with the dead—exist. They exist to an extent that you whites do not dream of, though there is evidence everywhere under your eyes.

“Why do you suppose that even the poorest peasants, when they can, bury their dead beneath solid tombs of masonry? Why do they bury them so often in their own yards, close to the doorway? Why, so often, do you see a tomb or grave set close beside a busy road or footpath where people are always passing? It is to assure the poor unhappy dead such protection as we can.

“I will take you in the morning to see the grave of my brother, who was killed in the way you know. It is over there on the little ridge which you can see clearly now in the moonlight, open space all round it, close beside the trail which everybody passes going to and from Grande Source. For four nights we watched there, in the peristyle, Osmann and I, with shotguns—for at that time both my dead brother and I had bitter enemies—until we were sure the body had begun to rot.

“No, my friend, no, no. There are only too many true cases. At this very moment, in the moonlight, there are zombies working on this island, less than two hours’ ride from my own habitation. We know about them, but we do not dare to interfere so long as our own dead are left unmolested. If you will ride with me tomorrow night, yes, I will show you dead men working in the cane fields. Close even to the cities there are sometimes zombies. Perhaps you have already heard of those that were at Hasco . . .”

“What about Hasco?” I interrupted him, for in the whole of Haiti, Hasco is perhaps the last name anybody would think of connecting with either sorcery or superstition. The word is American-commercial-synthetic, like Nabisco, Delco, Socony. It stands for the Haitian-American Sugar Company—an immense factory plant, dominated by a huge chimney, with clanging machinery, steam whistles, freight cars. It is like a chunk of Hoboken. It lies in the eastern suburbs of Port-au-Prince, and beyond it stretch the cane fields of the Cul-de-Sac. Hasco makes rum when the sugar market is off, pays low wages, a shilling or so a day, and gives steady work. It is modern big business, and it sounds it, looks it, smells it.

Such, then, was the incongruous background for the weird tale Constant Polynice now told me.

The spring of 1918 was a big cane season, and the factory, which had its own plantations, offered a bonus on the wages of new workers. Soon heads of families and villages from the mountain and the plain came trailing their ragtag little armies, men, women, children, trooping to the registration bureau and thence into the fields.

One morning an old black headman, Ti Joseph of Colombier, appeared leading a band of ragged creatures who shuffled along behind him, staring dumbly, like people walking in a daze. As Joseph lined them up for registration, they still stared, vacant-eyed like cattle, and made no reply when asked to give their names.

Joseph said they were ignorant people from the slopes of Morne-au-Diable, a roadless mountain district near the Dominican border, and that they did not understand the Creole of the plains. They were frightened, he said, by the din and smoke of the great factory, but under his direction they would work hard in the fields. The farther they were sent away from the factory, from the noise and bustle of the railway yards, the better it would be.

Better, indeed, for these were not living men and women but poor unhappy zombies whom Joseph and his wife Croyance had dragged from their peaceful graves to slave for him in the sun—and if by chance a brother or father of the dead should see and recognize them, Joseph knew that it would mean trouble for him.

So they were assigned to distant fields beyond the crossroads, and camped there, keeping to themselves like any proper family or village group; but in the evening when other little companies, encamped apart as they were, gathered each around its one big common pot of savoury millet or plantains, generously seasoned with dried fish and garlic, Croyance would tend two pots upon the fire, for, as everyone knows, the zombies must never be permitted to taste salt or meat. So the food prepared for them was tasteless and unseasoned.

As the zombies toiled day after day dumbly in the sun, Joseph sometimes beat them to make them move faster, but Croyance began to pity the poor dead creatures who should be at rest—and pitied them in the evenings when she dished out their flat, tasteless bouillie.

Each Saturday afternoon Joseph went to collect the wages for them all, and what division he made was no concern of Hasco, so long as the work went forward. Sometimes Joseph alone, and sometimes Croyance alone, went to Croix de Bouquet for the Saturday night bamboche or the Sunday cockfight, but always one of them remained with the zombies to prepare their food and see that they did not stray away.

Through February this continued, until Fête Dieu approached, with a Saturday-Sunday-Monday holiday for all the workers. Joseph, with his pockets full of money, went to Port-au-Prince and left Croyance behind, cautioning her as usual; and she agreed to remain and tend the zombies, for he promised her that at the Mardi Gras she should visit the city.

But when Sunday morning dawned it was lonely in the fields, and her kind old woman’s heart was filled with pity for the zombies, and she thought, “Perhaps it will cheer them a little to see the gay crowds and the processions at Croix de Bouquet, and since all the Morne-au-Diable people will have gone back to the mountain to celebrate Fête Dieu at home, no one will recognize them, and no harm can come of it.” And it is true that Croyance also wished to see the gay procession.

So she tied a new bright-coloured handkerchief round her head, aroused the zombies from the sleep that was scarcely different from their waking, gave them their morning bowl of cold, unsalted plantains boiled in water, which they ate dumbly uncomplaining, and set out with them for the town, single file, as the country people always walk. Croyance, in her bright kerchief, leading the nine dead men and women behind her, passed the railroad crossing, where she murmured a prayer to Legba, passed the great white-painted wooden Christ, who hung life-sized in the glaring sun, where she stopped to kneel and cross herself—but the poor zombies prayed neither to Papa Legba nor to Brother Jesus, for they were dead bodies walking, without souls or minds.

They followed her to the market square before the church, where hundreds of little thatched, open shelters, used on weekdays for buying and selling, were empty of trade, but crowded here and there by gossiping groups in the grateful shade.

To the shade of one of these market booths, which was still unoccupied, she led the zombies, and they sat like people asleep with their eyes open, staring, but seeing nothing, as the bells in the church began to ring, and the procession came from the priest’s house—red-purple robes, golden crucifix held aloft, tinkling bells and swinging incense-pots, followed by little black boys in white lace robes, little black girls in starched white dresses, with shoes and stockings, from the parish school, with coloured ribbons in their kinky hair, a nun beneath a big umbrella leading them.

Croyance knelt with the throng as the procession passed, and wished she might follow it across the square to the church steps, but the zombies just sat and stared, seeing nothing.

When noontime came, women with baskets passed to and fro in the crowd, or sat selling little sweet cakes, figs (which were not figs but sweet bananas), oranges, dried herring, biscuit, casava bread, and clairin poured from a bottle at a penny a glass.

As Croyance sat with her savoury dried herring and biscuit baked with salt and soda, and provision of clairin in the tin cup by her side, she pitied the zombies who had worked so faithfully for Joseph in the cane fields, and who now had nothing, while all the other groups around were feasting, and as she pitied them, a woman passed crying:

“Tablettes! Tablettes pistaches! T’ois pour dixcobs!”

Tablettes are a sort of candy made of brown cane sugar (rapadou); sometimes with pistaches, which in Haiti are peanuts, or with coriander seed. And Croyance thought, “These tablettes are not salted or seasoned, they are sweet, and can do no harm to the zombies just this once.” So she untied the corner of her kerchief, took out a coin, a gourdon, the quarter of a gourde, and bought some of the tablettes, which she broke in halves and divided among the zombies, who began sucking and mumbling them in their mouths. But the baker of the tablettes had salted the pistache nuts before stirring them into the rapadou, and as the zombies tasted the salt, they knew they were dead and made a dreadful outcry and rose and turned their faces toward the mountain.

No one dared to stop them, for they were corpses walking in the sunlight, and they themselves and everyone else knew that they were corpses. And they disappeared toward the mountain.

When later they drew near their own village on the slopes of Morne-au-Diable, these men and women walking single file in the twilight, with no soul leading them or daring to follow, the people of their village, who were also holding bamboche in the market-place, saw them drawing closer, recognized among them fathers, brothers, wives, and daughters whom they had buried months before. Most of them knew at once the truth, that these were zombies who had been dragged dead from their graves, but others hoped that a blessed miracle had taken place on this Fête Dieu, and rushed forward to take them in their arms and welcome them.

But the zombies shuffled through the marketplace, recognizing neither father nor wife nor mother, and as they turned leftward up the path leading to the graveyard, a woman whose daughter was in the procession of the dead threw herself screaming before the girl’s shuffling feet and begged her to stay; but the grave-cold feet of the daughter and the feet of the other dead shuffled over her and onward; and as they approached the graveyard, they began to shuffle faster and rushed among the graves, and each before his own empty grave began clawing at the stones and earth to enter it again; and as their cold hands touched the earth of their own graves, they fell and lay there, rotting carrion.

That night the fathers, sons, and brothers of the zombies, after restoring the bodies to their graves, sent a messenger on muleback down the mountain, who returned next day with the name of Ti Joseph and with a stolen shirt of Ti Joseph’s which had been worn next to his skin and was steeped in the grease-sweat of his body.

They collected silver in the village, and went with the name of Ti Joseph and the shirt of Ti Joseph to a bocor beyond Trou Caiman, who made a deadly needle ouanga, a black bag ouanga, pierced all through with pins and needles, filled with dry goat dung, circled with cock’s feathers dipped in blood. And in case the needle ouanga be slow in working or be rendered weak by Joseph’s counter-magic, they sent men down to the plain, who lay in wait patiently for Joseph, and one night hacked off his head with a machete . . .

WHEN POLYNICE HAD finished this recital, I said to him, after a moment of silence, “You are not a peasant like those of the Cul-de-Sac; you are a reasonable man, or at least it seems to me you are. Now, how much of that story, honestly, do you believe?”

He replied earnestly: “I did not see these special things, but there were many witnesses, and why should I not believe them when I myself have also seen zombies? When you also have seen them, with their faces and their eyes in which there is no life, you will not only believe in these zombies who should be resting in their graves, you will pity them from the bottom of your heart.”

Before finally taking leave of La Gonave, I did see these “walking dead men,” and I did, in a sense, believe in them and pitied them, indeed, from the bottom of my heart. It was not the next night, though Polynice, true to his promise, rode with me across the Plaine Mapou to the deserted, silent cane fields where he had hoped to show me zombies labouring. It was not on any night. It was in broad daylight one afternoon, when we passed that way again, on the lower trail to Picmy. Polynice reined in his horse and pointed to a rough, stony, terraced slope—on which four labourers, three men and a woman, were chopping the earth with machetes, among straggling cotton stalks, a hundred yards distant from the trail.

“Wait while I go up there,” he said, excited because a chance had come to fulfil his promise. “I think it is Lamercie with the zombies. If I wave to you, leave your horse and come.” Starting up the slope, he shouted to the woman, “It is I, Polynice,” and when he waved later, I followed.

As I clambered up, Polynice was talking to the woman. She had stopped work—a big-boned, hard-faced black girl, who regarded us with surly unfriendliness. My first impression of the three supposed zombies, who continued dumbly to work, was that there was something about them which was unnatural and strange. They were plodding like brutes, like automatons. Without stooping down, I could not fully see their faces, which were bent expressionless over their work. Polynice touched one of them on the shoulder and motioned him to get up. Obediently, like an animal, he slowly stood erect—and what I saw then, coupled with what I had heard previously, or despite it, came as a rather sickening shock. The eyes were the worst. It was not my imagination. They were in truth like the eyes of a dead man, not blind, but staring, unfocused, unseeing. The whole face, for that matter, was bad enough. It was vacant, as if there was nothing behind it. It seemed not only expressionless, but incapable of expression. I had seen so much previously in Haiti that was outside ordinary normal experience that for the flash of a second I had a sickening, almost panicky lapse in which I thought, or rather felt, “Great God, maybe this stuff is really true, and if it is true, it is rather awful, for it upsets everything.” By “everything” I meant the natural fixed laws and processes on which all modern human thought and actions are based. Then suddenly I remembered—and my mind seized the memory as a man sinking in water clutches a solid plank—the face of a dog I had once seen in the histological laboratory at Columbia. Its entire front brain had been removed in an experimental operation weeks before; it moved about, it was alive, but its eyes were like the eyes I now saw staring.

I recovered from my mental panic. I reached out and grasped one of the dangling hands. It was calloused, solid, human. Holding it, I said, “Bonjour, compère.” The zombie stared without responding. The black wench, Lamercie, who was their keeper, now more sullen than ever, pushed me away—“Z’affai’ nèg paz z’affai’blanc” (Negroes’ affairs are not for whites). But I had seen enough. “Keeper” was the key to it. “Keeper” was the word that had leapt naturally into my mind as she protested, and just as naturally the zombies were nothing but poor ordinary demented human beings, idiots, forced to toil in the fields.

It was a good rational explanation, but it is far from being the end of this story. It satisfied me then, and I said as much to Polynice as we went down the slope. At first he did not contradict me, even said doubtfully, “Perhaps”; but as we reached the horses, before mounting, he stopped and said, “Look here, I respect your distrust of what you call superstition and your desire to find out the truth, but if what you were saying now were the whole truth, how could it be that over and over again people who have stood by and seen their own relatives buried, have, sometimes soon, sometimes months or years afterwards, found those relatives working as zombies, and have sometimes killed the man who held them in servitude?”

“Polynice,” I said, “that’s just the part of it that I can’t believe. The zombies in such cases may have resembled the dead persons, or even been ‘doubles’—you know what doubles are, how two people resemble each other to a startling degree. But it is a fixed rule of reasoning in my country that we will never accept the possibility of a thing being ‘supernatural’ so long as any natural explanation, even far-fetched, seems adequate.”

“Well,” said he, “if you spent many years in Haiti, you would find it very hard to fit this reasoning into some of the things you encountered here.”

As I have said, there is more to this story—and I think it is best to tell it very simply.

In all Haiti there is no clearer scientifically trained mind, no sounder pragmatic rationalist, than Dr. Antoine Villiers. When I sat with him in his study, surrounded by hundreds of scientific books in French, German, and English, and told him of what I had seen and of my conversations with Polynice, he said:

“My dear sir, I do not believe in miracles nor in supernatural events, and I do not want to shock your Anglo-Saxon intelligence, but this Polynice of yours, with all his superstition, may have been closer to the partial truth than you were. Understand me clearly. I do not believe that anyone has ever been raised literally from the dead—neither Lazarus, nor the daughter of Jairus, nor Jesus Christ himself—yet I am not sure, paradoxical as it may sound, that there is not something frightful, something in the nature of criminal sorcery if you like, in some cases at least, in this matter of zombies. I am by no means sure that some of them who now toil in the fields were not dragged from the actual graves in which they lay in their coffins, buried by their mourning families!”

“It is then something like suspended animation?” I asked.

“I will show you,” he replied, “a thing which may supply the key to what you are seeking,” and standing on a chair, he pulled down a paperbound book from a top shelf. It was nothing mysterious or esoteric. It was the current official Code Pénal (Criminal Code) of the Republic of Haiti. He thumbed through it and pointed to a paragraph which read:

Article 249. Also shall be qualified as attemptedmurder the employment which may be madeagainst any person of substances which, withoutcausing actual death, produce a lethargic comamore or less prolonged. If, after the administeringof such substances, the person has been buried,the act shall be considered murder no matterwhat result follows.

The strangest and most chimeric story of this type ever related to me in Haiti by Haitians who claimed direct knowledge of its essential truth is the tale of Matthieu Toussel’s mad bride, the tale of how her madness came upon her. I shall try to reconstruct it here as it was told to me—as it was dramatized, elaborated, perhaps, in the oft re-telling.

An elderly and respected Haitian gentleman whose wife was French had a young niece, by name Camille, a fair-skinned octoroon girl whom they introduced and sponsored in Port-au-Prince society, where she became popular, and for whom they hoped to arrange a brilliant marriage.

Her own family, however, was poor; her uncle, it was understood, could scarcely be expected to dower her—he was prosperous, but not wealthy, and had a family of his own—and the French dot system prevails in Haiti, so that while the young beaux of the élite crowded to fill her dance-cards, it became gradually evident that none of them had serious intentions.

When she was nearing the age of twenty, Matthieu Toussel, a rich coffee-grower from Morne Hôpital, became a suitor, and presently asked her hand in marriage. He was dark and more than twice her age, but rich, suave, and well-educated. The principal house of the Toussel habitation, on the mountainside almost overlooking Port-au-Prince, was not thatched, mud-walled, but a fine wooden bungalow, slate-roofed, with wide verandahs, set in a garden among gay poinsettias, palms, and Bougainvillaea vines. He had built a road there, kept his own big motorcar, and was often seen in the fashionable cafés and clubs.

There was an old rumour that he was affiliated in some way with Voodoo or sorcery, but such rumours are current concerning almost every Haitian who has acquired power in the mountains, and in the case of men like Toussel are seldom taken seriously. He asked no dot, he promised to be generous, both to her and her straitened family, and the family persuaded her into the marriage.

The black planter took his pale girl-bride back with him to the mountain, and for almost a year, it appears, she was not unhappy, or at least gave no signs of it. They still came down to Port-au-Prince, appeared occasionally at the club soirées. Toussel permitted her to visit her family whenever she liked, lent her father money, and arranged to send her young brother to a school in France.

But gradually her family, and her friends as well, began to suspect that all was not going so happily up yonder as it seemed. They began to notice that she was nervous in her husband’s presence, that she seemed to have acquired a vague, growing dread of him. They wondered if Toussel were ill-treating or neglecting her. The mother sought to gain her daughter’s confidence, and the girl gradually opened her heart. No, her husband had never ill-treated her, never a harsh word; he was always kindly and considerate, but there were nights when he seemed strangely preoccupied, and on such nights he would saddle his horse and ride away into the hills, sometimes not returning until after dawn, when he seemed even stranger and more lost in his own thoughts than on the night before. And there was something in the way he sometimes sat staring at her which made her feel that she was in some way connected with those secret thoughts. She was afraid of his thoughts and afraid of him. She knew intuitively, as women know, that no other woman was involved in these nocturnal excursions. She was not jealous. She was in the grip of an unreasoning fear. One morning, when she thought he had been away all night in the hills, chancing to look out of a window, so she told her mother, she had seen him emerging from the door of a low frame building in their own big garden, set at some distance from the others and which he had told her was his office where he kept his accounts, his business papers, and the door always locked . . . “So, therefore,” said the mother relieved and reassured, “what does all this amount to? Business troubles, those secret thoughts of his, probably . . . some coffee combination he is planning and which is perhaps going wrong, so that he sits up all night at his desk figuring and devising, or rides off to sit up half the night consulting with others. Men are like that. It explains itself. The rest of it is nothing but your nervous imagining.”

And this was the last rational talk the mother and daughter ever had. What subsequently occurred up there on the fatal night of their first wedding anniversary they pieced together from the half-lucid intervals of a terrorised, cowering, hysterical creature, who finally went stark, raving mad. But what she had gone through was indelibly stamped on her brain; there were early periods when she seemed quite sane, and the sequential tragedy was gradually evolved.

On the evening of their anniversary Toussel had ridden away, telling her not to sit up for him, and she had assumed that in his preoccupation he had forgotten the date, which hurt her and made her silent. She went away to bed early, and finally fell asleep.

Near midnight she was awakened by her husband, who stood at the bedside, holding a lamp. He must have been some time returned, for he was fully dressed now in formal evening clothes.

“Put on your wedding dress and make yourself beautiful,” he said; “we are going to a party.” She was sleepy and dazed, but innocently pleased, imagining that a belated recollection of the date had caused him to plan a surprise for her. She supposed he was taking her to a late supper-dance down at the club by the seaside, where people often appeared long after midnight. “Take your time,” he said, “and make yourself as beautiful as you can—there is no hurry.”

An hour later when she joined him on the verandah, she said, “But where is the car?”

“No,” he replied, “the party is to take place here.” She noticed that there were lights in the outbuilding, the “office” across the garden. He gave her no time to question or protest. He seized her arm, led her through the dark garden, and opened the door. The office, if it had ever been one, was transformed into a dining room, softly lighted with tall candles. There was a big old-fashioned buffet with a mirror and cut-glass bowls, plates of cold meats and salads, bottles of wine and decanters of rum.

In the centre of the room was an elegantly set table with damask cloth, flowers, glittering silver. Four men, also in evening clothes, but badly fitting, were already seated at this table. There were two vacant chairs at its head and foot. The seated men did not rise when the girl in her bride-clothes entered on her husband’s arm. They sat slumped down in their chairs and did not even turn their heads to greet her. There were wine-glasses partly filled before them, and she thought they were already drunk.

As she sat down mechanically in the chair to which Toussel led her, seating himself facing her, with the four guests ranged between them, two on either side, he said, in an unnatural, strained way, the stress increasing as he spoke: “I beg you . . . to forgive my guests their . . . seeming rudeness. It has been a long time . . . since . . . they have . . . tasted wine . . . sat like this at table . . . with . . . so fair a hostess . . . But, ah, presently . . . they will drink with you, yes . . . lift . . . their arms, as I lift mine . . . clink glasses with you . . . more . . . they will arise and . . . dance with you . . . more . . . they will . . .”

Near her, the black fingers of one silent guest were clutched rigidly around the fragile stem of a wine-glass, tilted, spilling. The horror pent up in her overflowed. She seized a candle, thrust it close to the slumped, bowed face, and saw the man was dead. She was sitting at a banquet table with four propped-up corpses!

Breathless for an instant, then screaming, she leaped to her feet and ran. Toussel reached the door too late to seize her. He was heavy and more than twice her age. She ran still screaming across the dark garden, flashing white among the trees, out through the gate. Youth and utter terror lent wings to her feet, and she escaped . . .

A procession of early market-women, with their laden baskets and donkeys, winding down the mountainside at dawn, found her lying unconscious far below, at the point where the jungle trail emerged into the road. Her flimsy dress was ripped and torn, her little white satin bride-slippers were scuffed and stained, one of the high heels ripped off where she had caught it in a vine and fallen.

They bathed her face to revive her, bundled her on a pack-donkey, walking beside her, holding her. She was only half-conscious, incoherent, and they began disputing among themselves as peasants do. Some thought she was a French lady who had been thrown or fallen from a motor car; others thought she was a Dominicaine, which has been synonymous in Creole from earliest colonial days with “fancy prostitute.” None recognised her as Madame Toussel; perhaps none of them had ever seen her. They were discussing and disputing whether to leave her at a hospital of Catholic sisters on the outskirts of the city, which they were approaching, or whether it would be safer—for them—to take her directly to police headquarters and tell their story. Their loud disputing seemed to rouse her; she seemed partially to recover her senses and understand what they were saying. She told them her name, her maiden family name, and begged them to take her to her father’s house.

There, put to bed and with doctors summoned, the family were able to gather from the girl’s hysterical utterances a partial comprehension of what had happened. They sent up that same day to confront Toussel if they could—to search his habitation. But Toussel was gone, and all the servants were gone except one old man, who said that Toussel was in Santo Domingo. They broke into the so-called office, and found there the table still set for six people, wine spilled on the table-cloth, a bottle overturned, chairs knocked over, the platters of food still untouched on the sideboard, but beyond that they found nothing.

Toussel never returned to Haiti. It is said that he is living now in Cuba. Criminal pursuit was useless. What reasonable hope could they have had of convicting him on the unsupported evidence of a wife of unsound mind?

And there, as it was related to me, the story trailed off to a shrugging of the shoulders, to mysterious inconclusion.

What had this Toussel been planning—what sinister, perhaps criminal necromancy in which his bride was to be the victim or the instrument? What would have happened if she had not escaped?

I asked these questions, but got no convincing explanation or even theory in reply. There are tales of rather ghastly abominations, unprintable, practised by certain sorcerers who claim to raise the dead, but so far as I know they are only tales. And as for what actually did happen that night, credibility depends on the evidence of a demented girl.

So what is left?

What is left may be stated in a single sentence:

Matthieu Toussel arranged a wedding anniversary supper for his bride at which six plates were laid, and when she looked into the faces of his four other guests, she went mad.

IN ADDITION TO writing fantasy, horror, and science fiction, David A. Riley (1951– ) works for a law firm as a legal cashier and runs a charming bookshop in Lancashire, England, the eponymous Riley’s Books, which specializes in the genres in which he writes, but also carries first editions and out-of-print books in numerous other fields, as well as folio art and photographic books.

He is currently the editor of Prism, the magazine of the British Fantasy Society. In 1995, he coedited, with his wife, Linden, the fantasy and science fiction magazine Beyond. His first novel, Goblin Mire, was published as an original electronic book by Renaissance. Riley has also written under the pseudonym Allan Redfern (a story titled “Gwargens”). His first short-story collection, TheLurkers in the Abyss (2010), includes the title story and such other frequently anthologized tales as “The Farmhouse,” “The Urn,” “The Satyr’s Head,” “Out of Corruption,” and “After Nightfall,” of which Hugh Lamb, in The PenguinEncyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural, wrote, “. . . the nearest literature has yet come to creating George Romero’s cinematic effects in words.”

“After Nightfall” was first published in Weird Window (1970), then in TheYear’s Best Horror Stories, edited by Richard Davis (London: Sphere, 1971).

I

ELIOT WILDERMAN NEVER struck anyone as a person possessing that necessary instability of character which makes men in a sudden fit of despair commit suicide. Even Mrs. Jowitt, his landlady, never had even the vaguest suspicions that he would ever do anything like this. Why should she? Indeed, Wilderman was certainly not poor, he was in good health, was amiable and well liked in the old-fashioned village of Heron. And in such an isolated hamlet as this it took a singularly easygoing and pleasant type of person to be able to get on with its definitely backward, and in many cases decadent, population.

Civilisation had barely made an impression here for the past two hundred years. Elsewhere such houses as were common here and lived in by those not fully sunken into depraved bestiality were thought of as the slums, ancient edifices supporting overhangs, gables, high peaked roofs, bizarrely raised pavements three feet above the streets and tottering chimneys that towered like warped fingers into the eternally bleak sky.

Despite the repellant aspect of the village Wilderman had been enthusiastic enough when he arrived early in September. Taking a previously reserved room on the third floor of the solitary inn he soon settled down and became a familiar sight wandering about the wind-ravaged hills which emerged from the woods in barren immensities of bracken and hardy grass, or visiting various people, asking them in his tactful and unobtrusive manner about their local folklore. In no way was he disappointed and the volume he was writing on anthropology soon had an abundance of facts and information. And yet in some strangely elusive way he felt the shadow of dissatisfaction. It was not severe enough to worry him or even impede his creative abilities and cheerfulness, but all the same it was there. Like some “imp of the perverse” it nagged at him, hinting that something was wrong.

After having been here a month his steadily growing hoard of data had almost achieved saturation point and little more was really needed. Having done far better than he had expected prior to his arrival he decided that he could now afford to relax more, investigating the harsh but strangely attractive countryside and the curious dwellings about it, something he had only been able to do on a few brief occasions before.

As he had heard from many of his antiquarian friends Heron itself was a veritable store of seventeenth and early eighteenth century buildings, with only a few from later periods. Except for the ramshackle huts. Even these, though, were perversely fascinating. None exhibited any features suggesting comfort; sanitation and ventilation were blatantly disregarded and hampered to an unbelievable extent. Roughly constructed from wood veneered with mould, with murky insides infested with the humid and sickening stench of sweat, they were merely dwellings to sleep and shelter in, nothing more.

In fact the only feature which he noticed in common with the other buildings was that each had heavy wooden doors reinforced from outside with rusted strips of iron, barred by bolts or fastened with old Yale locks from within. Apart from the plainly obvious fact that there was nothing inside them to steal Wilderman was puzzled at such troublesome if not expensive precautions against intruders.

Finally when an opportunity presented itself Wilderman asked Abel Wilton, one of the degenerates inhabiting these huts, a thick set man with a matted beard and cunningly suspicious eyes, why such precautions were taken. But, despite his fairly close acquaintance with this man, for whom he had previously bought liquor and shared tobacco with for information about local legends, all the response he got was a flustered reply that they were to keep out the wild animals that “run ’n’ ’ide in th’ ’ills where none but those pohzessed go, where they wait for us, comin’ down ’ere at night, a ’untin’ ”; or so Wilton claimed. But his suddenly narrowed eyes and obvious dislike of the subject belied him, though Wilderman tactfully decided to accept this explanation for the moment. After all it would do him no good, he reasoned, to go around accusing people of being liars. It could only result in his drawing onto himself the animosity of Wilton’s kinfolk who, ignorant though they were, were extremely susceptible to insult.

However, after having noticed this point about the clustered huts on the outskirts of Heron, Wilderman realised that all the other houses that he had entered also had unusually sturdy locks. Not only on their doors; most had padlocks or bolts across the shutters on their windows, too, though they were already protected by bars. But, when he questioned someone about this, he again received a muttered reply about wild beasts, as well as the danger of thieves, and again he did not believe it. He could have been convinced of the possibility of thieves, even in the worthless huts, but how could he accept the wild animals, when he had never seen a sign of them during his now frequent rambles across the hills? Certainly none that were of any danger at all to man. And so, realising then that any further approaches on this subject would probably only bring similar results he did not pursue it any further, though he fully intended to keep it in mind. Perhaps, he thought, this was what had been troubling him all along.

It was at this time in late October, when he was beginning to pay closer attention to his surroundings, that he first realised that no one ever left their houses after dusk. Even he himself had never gone out after nightfall since he had first arrived. He had not been particularly conscious of this before since it had kept light until late, but as the nights became longer, creeping remorselessly into the dwindling days, this universal peculiarity in Heron became apparent to him, adding yet another mystery to be solved.

The first time he had this brought to his attention was one evening when he tried to leave the inn and failed, both the front and back doors being locked. Irritably he strode up to Mrs. Jowitt, an elderly woman, grey of face and hair with needle-like fingers and brown teeth that seemed to blend in with the gloom of the sitting-room where she sat knitting a shawl. Without preamble he asked why the inn had been locked at so early an hour.

For a moment she seemed to have been stunned into silence by his outburst and immediately stopped her work to turn towards him. In that brief instant her face had paled into a waxen mask, her eyes, like Wilton’s, narrowing menacingly—or were they, Wilderman conjectured in surprise, hooded to hide the barely concealed fear he felt he could glimpse between the quivering lids?

“We always lock up at night, Mr. Wilderman,” she drawled at length. “Always ’ave an’ always will do. It’s one of our ways. P’raps it’s foolish—you might think so—but that’s our custom. Any’ow, there’s no reason to go out when it’s dark, is there? There’s nowt ’ere i’ the way of entertainment. Besides, can’t be too careful. More goes on than you’d suspect, or want to. Not only is there animals that’d kill us in our sleep, but some o’ them in the ’uts—I’m not sayin’ who, mind you—wouldn’t think twice o’ breakin’ in an’ takin’ all I’ve got if I didn’t lock ’em out.”

Her reply left little with which Wilderman could legitimately argue, without seeming to do so solely for the sake of argument: and he was loath to antagonise her. Always he was aware that he was here only on the townspeople’s toleration; they could very easily snub him or even do him physical damage and get away with it. Justice, a dubious word here, was at best rudimentary, depending for a large part on family connections and as good as open bribery; or at its worst and most frequent on personal revenge, reminding Wilderman distastefully of the outdated duelling system of latter day Europe, though with less notice here taken of honour.

Convinced that fear of wild animals was not the reason for Mrs. Jowitt’s locking of the doors after dusk Wilderman became determined to delve further into this aggravating mystery.

The next morning, rising deliberately at dawn, he hurried noiselessly down the staircase to find his landlady busy unlocking the front door. So engrossed was she in the seemingly arduous task that she did not notice his presence.

Finally succeeding in turning the last of the keys she cautiously prised the door open and peered uneasily outside. Evidently seeing nothing to alarm her she threw the door open and knelt down to pick up an enamel dish from the worn doorstep outside. Filled with curiosity Wilderman tried to see what was on it but could only glimpse a faint red smear that might have been a reflection of the sun now rising liquescently above the hills.

Before Mrs. Jowitt could turn and see him he retraced his steps to the second floor, walking back down again loudly and calling a greeting to her. After a few brief but necessary comments about the weather he left, stepping out into the cold but refreshing early morning air to see the narrow streets still half obscured by mists through which beams of sunlight shone against the newly unshuttered windows like drops of molten gold.

As he slowly made his way down the winding street he could not help but notice the plates and dishes left on many of the doorsteps. Some others had been shattered and left on the stagnant gutter that ran down the centre of the street to a mud-clogged grate at the end.

It was immediately obvious to Wilderman that these dishes had contained meat, raw meat, as shown by the watery stains of blood still on them. But why should the villagers leave food out like this, he asked himself, every one of them, including those in the fetid huts, though they themselves had little enough to eat at the best of times? Such behaviour as was evident here seemed ludicrous to him. Why, indeed, should they have left food out like this, presumably for animals, when they dared not go out after nightfall for fear of those very creatures which the meat would only attract? It didn’t make sense! That people in Heron were not exceptionally kind and generous to animals he knew; quite the opposite, in fact. Already he had seen what remained of one dog—a wolf hound with Alsatian blood in its savage veins—that made a nuisance of itself one Saturday on Market Street. Its mangled carcass, gory and flayed to the bone, had almost defied description after some ten or so heavy boots backed by resentful legs had crushed it writhing into the cobbles. Then why, if they had no other feelings but contempt for their own animals, should they be so unnaturally benevolent to dangerous and anonymous beasts?

Obviously, though, no one would tell him why they did this. Already he had tried questioning them about their heavily locked doors with only the barest of results. There was, he knew, only one way in which he would have the slightest chance of finding out anything more, and that was to see for himself what came for the food.

Preparing himself for the nocturnal vigil he returned to his room and spent the rest of the day re-reading several of his notes and continuing his treatise from where he had left off the previous day.

Nightfall soon came, and with it an all-penetrating fog that tainted even the inside of his room with an obscuring mist. Sitting on a high backed chair by the window he cursed it, but was adamant that the fulfilment of his malign curiosity would not be foiled by a mist.