Strange Conflict (36 page)

He was by now used to the perpetual silence which she was forced to observe, but she had had her handbag with her when she had scrambled out of the wrecked plane so she was still in possession of her tablet, and it occurred to him that she had not written anything upon it the whole evening, confining herself to nods whenever she had been addressed. She had been sitting there impassively for over four hours, her round eyes fixed on their sinister host. He wondered if she was very tired, but did not like to ask her in front of the Doctor so he laid his hand gently on her arm and said:

‘You feeling all right?'

Her large eyes seemed quite blank as she turned towards him, but she nodded twice and, looking away, lit a cigarette. It was his job to keep Doctor Saturday up as long as possible, so he swiftly put Philippa out of his mind and brought the conversation back to Haiti.

‘Pretty awful fate to be caught by those Grey Pig people but even worse to be turned into a Zombie.'

‘So you know about Zombies also?' said the Doctor with a slightly amused glance.

‘Um,' Simon nodded. ‘Not much, but the Priest told me something about them. They're bodies without souls—sort of Vampires, aren't they?'

‘Hardly that. But it is another subject that is normally taboo in Haiti, as we are ashamed to let the outer world know that such awful things still go on here.'

‘What is the difference?' Simon's eyes flickered quickly over the Doctor's face. ‘That is, if you don't mind talking about it in private?'

‘The only resemblance between a Vampire and a Zombie is that both are dead and have been buried yet have left their graves after their mourning families have departed. A Vampire is said to live in its grave but leave it each night in search of human victims, and it keeps life in its body by sucking the blood from living people—like a human bat.

‘A Zombie, on the other hand, is one who is called back from the dead, and once it has left its grave it never returns to it but continues as the bond slave of the sorcerer who holds its soul captive. A Zombie possesses the same physical strength as it had before it sickened and died, and it sustains its vitality with ordinary human food which it is given in the hovel in which it lies imprisoned during the daytime. I say “prison”, but that is not really the right word, because no bolts and bars are needed to keep a Zombie captive. They cannot speak, they have no reasoning powers, and they cannot recognise even the people who were dearest to them when they were alive. For them there is no escape; and they do not seek it; they labour night after night, year in year out, in the banana plantations, or at any other task which is set them, like poor blind beasts.'

‘How—how frightful!' muttered Simon.

The Doctor nodded his white head. ‘And it is even more frightful for a family which respects that one of its members has been turned into a Zombie. Think of it. Someone you love very dearly—your wife or your sister, perhaps—and whom you have always cherished and surrounded with every comfort, suddenly, to your great sorrows, falls ill and dies. Even if you are poor you stint yourself to make the best funeral arrangements you can afford, and afterwards you try to assuage your sorrow
by thinking of that person sleeping peacefully in the grave, relieved of all earthly cares and worries. Then, a year or perhaps two years later, you hear a whisper that your loved one has been seen and recognised, covered with lice and dressed in filthy rags, bowed down with weariness, stumbling away from some plantation in a distant part of the island one morning in the grey light of dawn.

‘Your whole being cries out to go there, to rescue them, even though you know that if you could find them they would stare at you without a trace of recognition in their blank eyes. But you dare not do so. You know that if you attempted to seek them out the Witch Doctor who has enslaved them would learn of it and that before long you, too, would sicken and die and he would make a Zombie out of you.'

Fascinated against his will by this macabre subject, Simon inquired: ‘How are the victims selected? I mean, are there any special qualifications which the Witch Doctor seeks in a person whom he decides to turn into a Zombie?'

‘None; except that the man or woman concerned should not be too old for the labour required of them—usually work in the fields. And there are a number of reasons for making Zombies. For an unscrupulous man it is a good way of acquiring labour, since Zombies do not have to be paid; they have only to be fed, and any sort of garbage will do, providing it contains enough goodness to support their strength. Again, if one hates a person sufficiently, what could be a more subtle and satisfactory form of revenge than to go to a Bocor and have one's enemy turned into a Zombie? Quite frequently, too, people are made Zombies as a result of a
ba Moun
ceremony.'

‘What's that?'

‘
Ba Moun
means “Give man”, and there is a definite similarity in it to the medieval European practice of selling oneself to the Devil. A poor man who is very ambitious, but sees no hope whatever of improving his status by normal means, may decide to go to a Bocor and ask for the help of the evil gods. Under the altar in every Hounfort there are jars containing the spirits of one or more long-dead Houngans and the more powerful Bocors possess many such jars. These spirits are invoked, and when the right offerings have been made to them they begin to
groan; then the inquirer knows that the evil gods are prepared to listen to his supplication. He signs a deed in his own blood and puts it with money into one of the jars. He is then given a little box. The priest tells him that this contains some small animals and that he must look after them and tend them each night as though they were a portion of himself.'

‘There's a similarity between that part of the affair and the toads and lizards and cats and owls which Witches in Europe used to keep as their familiars,' Simon cut in, and with a nod of agreement the Doctor proceeded.

‘A bargain is struck by which the evil gods will prosper the man's affairs for a certain time but he agrees to surrender himself to them at the end of that period, and he is warned that, if he fails to do so, upon the third night after the expiration of the pact the little animals will become huge, malignant beasts which will devour him. There is, however, one way in which he can escape payment, at least for a time, and this is by giving some other member of his family to become a Zombie instead of himself. The pact is then automatically renewed for a further period, but the person given must be someone whom he holds dear and thus a definite sacrifice made by him. People have been known to give their whole families in this way—sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, parents, until they have no one left—hoping each time that they will die a natural death before the next payment is due; and often they commit suicide rather than face payment of the debt themselves.'

That's a pretty grim picture,' Simon commented, ‘but I suppose it applies only to the most ignorant and superstitious of the Negroes?'

‘Not at all.' Doctor Saturday's white teeth flashed in a grim smile. ‘That they may one day be turned into a Zombie is the dread of every man and woman in Haiti, from the blackest Negro to the lightest-skinned Mulatto. It is a fear that is ever present in the minds of even the richest, because there are other uses to which Zombies can be put beside working in the fields. Not long ago one of the loveliest young Mulatto girls in Haiti died with mysterious suddenness, and eighteen months later she was found one night wandering in the streets of Port-au-Prince. Her mind
was blank, and she was dumb, so she could not tell her story, but it was a curious coincidence that a very rich Negro, who had wished to marry her when she was alive, but whom her parents had rejected for her with scorn, had died only the day before she was found. I have good reason to believe that as he could not get her by marriage he paid a powerful Bocor to turn her into a Zombie, received her back from the grave after her resurrection and took his pleasure with her whenever he wished, keeping her hidden in his house. Then, when he died, his wife, wanting to be rid of the girl, turned her adrift.'

‘What happened to her?' asked Simon.

‘Naturally her family was most anxious to hush the matter up, so the nuns took charge of her and she was smuggled away by night, in a ship that was leaving for France, to enter a convent. But the Bocor who made her a Zombie would still have the power to bring her back to Haiti if he wished, and if he were a very powerful occultist he would also have the power to animate her brain and put into it such thoughts as he wished to express, even at a very great distance; though it would not be possible for him to enable her to speak.'

Suddenly the Doctor's manner changed. He stood up abruptly. From veiled mockery his tone hardened to one of open enmity and contempt, as he said:

‘I have amused myself by talking to you for long enough, Mr. Aron. I am now going to bed and to sleep. When you wake your friends and they renew their struggle to escape meeting me upon the astral they may gain a short respite from the interest which I'm sure they will feel if you repeat to them what I have told you about Zombies— particularly the story of the beautiful Haitian girl who was sent to France. I was the Bocor in that instance, and in order to keep a watch upon you all, through her, during your journey it suited me very well to bring her back to Haiti.'

For a moment Simon did not catch the full implication of what Doctor Saturday had said, then his heart stood still. He slowly turned his head and stared at Philippa.

The beautiful dumb girl was sitting there without a trace of expression on her face. If she had heard the Doctor's words she showed no sign of it whatever, and it suddenly came to Simon that apart from eating the food which had been set before her at supper she had not made a single self-initiated action since she had entered the Doctor's house.

Even as he struggled against the bewildering horror of the situation his swift brain was working again. If, as the Mulatto had said, she was indeed a Zombie whose brain he had power to animate and direct even at a distance, he could presumably also empty it and leave it blank at will. Every idea that Phillippa had expressed by writing on her tablet since they had first met her on Waterloo station, nearly a week before, had, therefore, been pure persiflage—just a meaningless froth of written words—not in anyway expressing the personality that she had been in her true self two years or more ago, but conventional phrases having just enough individuality to convey to her unwitting companions the sort of person whom the Doctor
wished
them to believe her to be.

They had it only from her that she had been struck dumb by a bomb which had fell on a hospital in which she was nursing, and evidently that was quite untrue; yet it was just the sort of story that their clever enemy would have caused the girl to tell, knowing it to be a certain winner in gaining their sympathy for her. That other business, too, about her having lived in Jamaica and having had an
uncle who had taken her all over the West Indies, was also a fabrication of the Doctor's, put out through her solely to enable her to remain in their company so that she could continue to act as a focus for him to keep an easy watch upon them.

Kaleidoscopic pictures of himself and the girl together during the last few days flickered wildly before Simon's mental eyes. He had held her hand and danced with her, and had it not been for his terrible anxiety about his friends on the previous night, so that his mind was capable of thinking of nothing else during those frightful hours when he did not know if they were dead or alive, he would certainly have made love to her; yet she was a dead thing—a body without a soul—something that had come back out of the grave.

As he stared at her smooth, faintly dusky cheeks and rich red lips, that seemed impossible; and yet, now that he knew, he had a great feeling of revulsion. There was something rather repellent in her apparent full-blooded healthiness, and he felt that even to touch her would now fill him with nausea. At the same time he was conscious of an overwhelming pity for her—or rather, for the person that she had been before she had been robbed of her soul.

The lovely thing at which he was staring was only a lump of ‘human' clay, animated entirely by a tiny portion of another extraordinary powerful will. Somewhere the girl's spirit must be imprisoned, suffering all the tortures of one that was neither in incarnation nor out of it, that could neither enjoy that tranquil period after the completion of a life on Earth nor go forth as a free spirit to animate another human body; but must watch in an agony of misery the uses to which the body that she could no longer control should be put, until some fatal accident or disease of the flesh rendered that body no longer tenable for the alien entity which had taken possession of it.

Another thought struck Simon. As long as he had imagined that he had the dumb girl's companionship he had not been afraid of the Doctor, although he was perfectly well aware that she could have done little to protect him—just as a man walking through a jungle at night might be comforted by the presence of his dog, although that dog could not guard him from the bite of a snake or a
panther's spring. The others were sleeping, and so deeply that he doubted if his loudest shout would wake them. Philippa was not even a friendly animal, but a puppet in human form animated by the will of his enemy, and he was utterly alone with the malignant Satanist.

All those thoughts had rushed through his brain like lightning. At the last of them he had felt a sudden impulse to spring from his chair and dash in terror from the house, but resisted it; and, by the law that all resistance to Evil brings added strength, a new thought leapt into his mind. ‘You fool! Your case is no worse now than it has been the whole evening. You had made a plan, and Philippa had no part to play in it. Therefore this frightful disclosure of the Doctor's makes no difference. He told you about Philippa only to terrify you. Don't let him succeed. Carry on as you meant to; as though he had not mentioned it, but had just announced—as you expected him to do sooner or later— that he was going to bed.'