“Get back in there, Amelia,” Connell abruptly ordered. “I’ll fix the top.”
But the woman shook her head.
“No, sir, Mr. Walt. I’m goin’ to find him myself. I knows you’re too busy, and I’m much obliged for the ride.” Her glance shifted, and she saw the familiar model T. “That’s Plato’s Ford. I’ll get him. Don’t you wait here no longer, Mr. Walt.”
Amelia’s contradictory blend of stubbornness and humility got under Connell’s skin. He couldn’t sell his niggers down the river that way; neither could he leave Madeline another night in that fiend-haunted plantation house. But his indecision was costly.
Dark forms slipping from the shadows closed in on them. Ducoin’s black laborers! Their eyes were not blind, but staring, unfocused and unseeing. Their faces were utterly devoid of expression. Walking dead men, moving with the slow, horrible motion of animated corpses.
“Get back, you devils!” snarled Connell, thrusting aside a clutching hand and driving home with his fist; but it was like hammering the trunk of a tree. Not a gasp, not a grunt, not a change of expression. Madeline screamed as other hands clutched her.
Though Connell’s fists crunched against bony faces, and chunked wrist deep into leathery stomachs, he made no more impression than on tackling dummies. Kicking, slugging, and gouging as the tangle of voiceless black men overwhelmed him, Connell’s brain became a vortex of horror. He knew now why the Cajuns called them walking corpses.
They could not be alive. There was no resentment or wrath at his frantic, savage blows. Somewhere he heard a terrified wailing and a scurrying. Amelia was taking cover. The walking corpses seemed unaware of her presence.
Madeline’s outcries were throttled. As Connell vainly battled, he caught glimpses of her silk clad legs flailing in the moonlight, heard the ripping of cloth as her ensemble was torn to ribbons by her captors. Then he was smothered by the irresistible rush. A sickening, musty, charnel stench stifled him. Iron muscles, leathery bodies, exhaling the odor of incipient decay, yet more powerful than any living thing, crushed him to the border of unconsciousness. They seized him and Madeline as though they were logs, and hauled them up the veranda stairs and into Madeline’s room.
Connell heard Pierre Ducoin’s familiar voice.
“Too bad,” he ironically commented as the blacks dropped their burdens, and pinned Connell to the floor with their bony knees. “Aunt Célie told me something was going on.”
Then he turned to the corpse men, and spoke in a purring, primitive language, more rudimentary than any Haitian patois: the old savage dialect of Guinea.
They bound Connell’s hands and feet to a chair, and flung Madeline carelessly across her bed. Though half conscious, she was stirring and moaning, and instinctively trying to draw her tattered ensemble down about her hips. And then Aunt Célie appeared, black, sombre and malignant. The sinister black woman knelt beside the hearth and struck light. In a moment she had a fire kindled and was heaping it with charcoal.
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