A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, April 1950 — page 109: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE LITTLE DOLL DIED ee Only that zombie business was a worse angle, and the statue of a fisherman’s widow around Morne Noir didn’t relax anybody’s nerves. After a week of it, plus the suspense of waiting for Charlemagne, I was ready to be retired to the hospital for mentally disabled Marines. “We've got to get-her out of here,” I told McCoy. “T’ll risk an escort and you ean take Mrs. Peabody to Port au Prince.” McCoy gloomed over his bandaged hand, “Sure an’ I’d like to get her out oi here, Captain, an’ myself, too. But she won't go.” “Won't go?” Wasn't he right! If Jenny Lou wouldn’t budge from her ideas, neither would she budge from Morne Noir. Her determina- tion to remain was founded on the granite of her certainty. Go to Port au Prince, when her husband might return to Morne Noir? Nothing doing. That was the day I got firm about it. I pointed out to Jenny Lou that this zom- bie nonsense was a superstitution brought over by the Negro slaves who came to Haiti from Africa. No amount of black magic could rouse a corpse from the grave. The thing was a lot of terror- ism by which unscrupulous Haitian witch doctors frightened the peasant out of pen- nies, and Charlemagne was using it as Schreklekeit to stir up the natives. Dead men, | declared, could not come back to life. “Yes,” Jenny Lou agreed, “dead men do not come back to life. But the Haitian witch doctors revive them to a half-life, a soulless animation. They are dead, yet they are not dead. The un-dead dead. The Norwegian doctor at Jacmel said it was a possibility.” I wished I] had that Norwegian doctor on hand to wring his neck. Some drunken old exile, I suppose, who’d discussed the subject of body-resurrection with Pea- body. Well, there was no use telling Jenny Louise I didn’t believe in bedy-resurrec- tion or Peabody-resurrection. She had it fixed in her mind that her husband had fallen into that mountain lake, that the water would be cold enough to keep him in a suitable state of preservation, that these Haitian wizards might find him and give him the zombie business. As long as there was a possibility, she was going to stay. McCoy worked on her. He tried argu- ment, cajolery, persuasion. That Irishman tried all the blarney out of Erin, but he couldn’t convince pale Jenny her husband wasn't going to show up as a walking dead-head. “T’ve heard the drums, Terry,” she'd say. “I’ve heard the negroes talking. 109 Why do they bury their dead at a cross- roads and keep a relative close by three days with a rifle? Why do they drive stakes into their graves? There are mys- teries in Haiti unknown to the white men, Terry. No, until I’ve seen him have a Christian burial I can’t go and leave Wil- fred.” Until she’d seen him have a Christian burial! “There’s only one thing te do about it,” McCoy declared to me. “Lord knows I hate the job, but we won't move th’ widow till it’s done. I’ve got to go up there in the mountains an’ bring back her hus- band’s body.” All right. What with worry and deser- tions and the Caco situation like smolder- ing dynamite, all this spooky zombie talk © was driving me bughouse. I rigged up an expedition to go up there to that lake with pike poles and grappling hooks and fish out Wilfred Peabody. The last minute I decided to leave my old sergeant in charge . of Morne Noir and lead the fishing party myself, so as to see the job was done right. I had a couple of reasons for consenting to such a risky jaunt. I was as anxious to have Wilfred Peabody buried as his widow was. Jenny Lou’s tall had gotten around Morne Noir, you can bet, and those telephone-eared Haitians were twice as excited as they’d previously been. If the Great White Doctor’s wife believed in zombies, who were they to question the un-dead dead? It added a lot of weight to Charlemagne’s threat. WE off we trekked to that mountain lake—a squad of Marines, McCoy and I—on as sour an angling expedition as I ever hope to make. We found the place easily enough, and we chopped a path down to the valley-bottom and put out in a couple of Haitian canoes. GComichboo SEO)