He looked at her, eyes wide, confused, and she wondered how it would be, her own flesh cool and numb, and the fingers of a more vital creature firing the nerves, sending charges into the midnight places of the brain. She pictured mental lightnings striking down in a landscape of eroded thoughts, sparking new life, new memories; but it would be nothing so dramatic. Things dawned slowly upon them. Every sensation, it seemed, held for them a clue to their essential wrongness, their lack of true relation to the world, and they struggled to arrange the murky shapes and unfamiliar smells and ringing voices into structures which would support them.
Breath whistled in his throat, but he didn’t speak; he leaned back and closed his eyes.
His name - his ‘zombie’ name - was Donnell Harrison, though the body had once hosted the dreams and memories of Steven Mears, a carnival worker dead of alcohol poisoning at the age of twenty-nine. He did not remember Mears’ life, however; he remembered having been a poet and living with his wife Jean in a mountain cabin. ‘The air was clarity,’ he had said. ‘The rain fell like peace.’ Almost singing the phrases, he had told her how his wife had died, crushed beneath a roofbeam during a storm. His hand had clawed at the armrest of the sofa as he strained to express the emotion swelling in him, and Jocundra had imagined that his skin contained not flesh and blood, but was tightly stretched over a cool darkness lit by a tendril of green fog, the magical analogue of a tungsten filament at the center of a light bulb. She had listened to the tapes so often since the initial interview that she had memorized his final outburst.
‘Old men, old liars drowsy with supper and the hearth, their minds grazing on some slope downward of illusion into death, they’ll tell you that the wild north king visits the high country disguised as a wind, blowing up spectacles of lightning-flash and hosannas of cloud. But this storm was animal, a wave of black animal breath bigger than the beginning. All its elements infected the land, making it writhe like the skin of a flea-infested dog, setting St Elmo’s fire to glimmer in the pinetops, decaying the stones into thunder, rotting the principles of ordinary day until the light caught fire and roared…’
Then, at the realization of loss, understanding, the magnitude of the tragedy he had invented for himself, he had broken off his life story and sunk into a depression. Jocundra had not been able to rouse him. ‘Slow-burners always go through a fugue,’ Edman had told her. ‘It’s as if they realize they’re in for the long haul and better get their act together, slow their pace, reduce their intensity. Don’t worry. Sooner or later he’ll come around.’ But Jocundra was not sure she believed Edman; all his advice to her reeked of bedside manner, benign assurances.
The potholes became so wide she had to ease down into them and use the four-wheel drive to climb out. The live oaks thinned and swamp country began. Stretches of black, earth-steeped water were ranked by gaunt cypresses, their moss-bearded top branches resembling the rotted crosstrees of a pirate fleet mouldering in the shallows. Gnats blurred the air above a scaly log; a scum of rust-colored bubbles clung to the shoreline reeds. It was dead-still, desolate, but it was home ground to Jocundra, and its stillness awakened in her a compatible stillness, acting upon her tension like a cold compress applied to a fevered brow. She pointed out the landmark sights to Donnelclass="underline" a wrinkle in the water signaling the presence of a snake, dark nests in the cypress tops, a hawk circling over a thicketed island. Prodded by her touch, he lifted his head and stared, using - she knew -some vague shape or color of what he saw to flesh out his life story, adding hawks or a pattern of cloud to the sky above his mountain cabin.
The swamp gave out into palmetto glades and acacia, stands of bamboo, insects whirling in shafts of sunlight, and they came to an ironwork gate set into a masonry wall. A tar paper shack stood beside it. The security guard logged their arrival on his clipboard. ‘Y’all have a nice day,’ he said, winking at Jocundra as if he knew nice days were not in the cards.
The grounds were gloomy and gently rolling. A flagstone path bordered with ferns and azalea meandered among enchanted-looking oaks, which fountained up at regular intervals. They overspread the lawn, casting a dark green shade upon the stone benches beneath them; thin beams of sun penetrated to the grass as a scatter of gold coins. And at the center of the gloom, glowing softly like the source of the enchantment, was a two-story house of rose-colored brick with white trim and fluted columns across the front. A faceted glass dome bulged from the midpoint of its gabled roof. Two orderlies hustled down the steps as Jocundra pulled up and helped Donnell into his wheelchair.
‘If you’ll take Mr Harrison to the suite,’ she said, ‘I’ll see he gets checked in.’ And paying no attention to Donnell’s alarmed reaction, she walked out along the drive.
From the bench nearest the gate, the brightness of the brick and trim made the house appear to be rippling against the gloom, as if while she had been walking it had reverted to its true form - a black castle, a gingerbread house - and in turning back she had caught it unawares. It was an unlikely place for scientific work, though its gothic atmosphere bolstered the image Edman had fostered; he had suggested that Shadows would be an Experience, spoken about it in terms suited to the promotion of a human potential group rather than demystifying it as he usually did any hint of the occult. She had talked to other therapists who had been at Shadows, but most had seemed traumatized, unwilling to discuss it. Even the microbiologists had been hazy at her briefing, saying they knew little about the new strain of bacteria with which Donnell had been injected. ‘He’ll be longer lived,’ Ezawa had said. ‘Better motor control, sharper senses. Watch his visual development especially, and keep in mind he won’t be easy to fool. He’s no short-termer.’
No doubt about that, she thought, as she began strolling back to the house. Before lapsing into his depression, Donnell had displayed a subtle good humor, a joyful appreciation of life apparently grounded in a realistic assessment of its pleasures and pains, this far different from the short-termers: cloudy, grotesque creatures who clutched and stared until you feared you would burn up under the kindling glare of their eyes. They had many of the qualities of the zombies in her father’s lurid bedtime stories: dazed, ragged men and women stumbling through plantation fields at midnight, penned in windowless cabins fifty or more to a room, stinking, shuffling, afraid to touch each other, sustained on water and unsalted bread. ‘They ever get a taste of salt,’ her father had said, ‘they’ll head straight for the buryin’ ground and try to claw their way back into Hell.’ Sometimes the straw boss would send them after runaway slaves, and the slave would scramble through the swamp, eyes rolling and heart near to bursting, hearing the splash of the zombie’s tootsteps behind him or seeing its shadow rear up from the weird fogs wreathing the cypress, reaching for him with rotting fingers and arms rigid as gibbets. Let the slave escape, however, and the zombie would wander on, single-mind-edly searching until years later - because a zombie lives as long as the binding magic holds; even if its flesh disintegrates the particles still incorporate the spirit -maybe a hundred years later, the image of its quarry grown so amorphous that it would react to any vaguely human form, the zombie spots a lighted window in a house on the bayou and is drawn by the scent of blood… Her father had banged the bottom of the bed, jumped up in mock terror, and she had lain awake for hours, shivering, seeing the tortured faces of zombies in the grain of the ceiling boards.
But there was no such witchery involved with Donnell, she thought; or if there was, then it was witchery of an intensely human sort.