Zombies Read online

  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 Magic Island, 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 wer
e 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.