Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

GREGORY NICOLL’S HORT FICTION has appeared in dozens of anthologies since the 1980s, including Ripper! Confederacy of the Dead, Still Dead: Book of the Dead 2, Cthulhu’s Heirs, 100 Vicious Little Vampire Stories, Freak Show, It Came from the Drive-In, Gahan Wilson’s The Ultimate Haunted House and Mondo Zombie .

However, after witnessing a profoundly disturbing act of real-life violence in 1999, the author avoided the horror genre for nearly a decade. Many of his best tales were reprinted in the 2004 collection Underground Atlanta , and more recently he penned a dark mystery for a book of New Hampshire-based thrillers entitled Live Free or Die Die Die , as well as a steam-punk novelette for the anthology Clockwork Fables .

About the story reprinted in this volume, Nicoll says, “It was being asked to create a tale for Zombiesque , a book of zombie stories told exclusively from the zombies’ point of view, which finally lured me back into writing horror.

“I’d previously done some savagely gory zombie stories for John Skipp’s anthologies, but that’s the last thing I want to do this time. Instead I thought, hey, what about an eerie, mystical voodoo zombie story that takes place on a south sea island? After all, George Romero had nothing on Val Lewton.

“Of course, what nearly did me in was not realising how difficult it would be to write a zombie’s-point-of-view story set in a real place that was so exotic and unfamiliar to me. I had to keep stopping over and over to research history, culture, folklore, religion, and geography. I even stopped and read the entire memoirs of an African slaver.

“This dragged the process on for several months and almost caused me to miss the deadline but, as a result, the finished short story is woven with a novel’s worth of details.”

WARM CARIBBEAN SEAWATER splashed gently over his bare brown ankles, clawing at the soft crystalline sand under his feet as it glided back into the foamy surf, beckoning him toward the ocean depths, urging him to join its turbulent blue-green mysteries.

He stood firm, unmoving, resolutely upright and solidly ashore, ignoring the siren calls of the waves. Many decades before, his long-ago mothers and long-ago fathers had crossed that great ocean in the belly of the slave ship Brillante , each of them rationed just one pint of unsalted water per day, their dry and piteous cries answered only by the sting of the slaver’s cat o’ nine tails.

His people still spoke of the cruelty of Captain Homans who, on one infamous voyage, rather than allow his illegal human cargo to be captured by the policing British frigates, had dragged every dark-skinned man, woman, and child from the hold of his ship and cast them into those waters, with the iron shackles still fastened tightly about their legs. It was whispered that the echoes of their voices could still be heard, crying out from those depths, their horror at this fate mixed with joy that their suffering was finally at its end.

Tonight, for a moment, he thought he could hear them.

Though his eyes were huge and white, bulging on his face like two eggs taken from the nest of a goose, his unblinking grey pupils revealed little to him beyond indistinct variations of light and shadows. Instead, whenever and wherever he walked, his steps were guided by the more potent signals of sound and smell. Unable to distinguish morning from twilight, he determined the hour of the day by feeling the ocean’s tides. Now, as the white waves crashed against the high, jagged black horns of rock on St Sebastian’s coastline, he knew that evening had finally come.

In the distance, from across the sugar cane fields, came the forlorn call of a huge horn made from the great curled shell of a conch, a voice from the sea displaced far inland. It was the signal for which he had been waiting, the summons for the faithful to gather at the hounfour , where tonight they would conduct a ceremony with a blood sacrifice.

He had a duty to perform there. A potentially deadly duty. Yet he had no fear of death.

He had been dead himself for years.

He was called Carrefour, named for the moonlit crossroads where he stood guard.

Nearly seven feet high, he was a human statue with skin darker and drier than the husks of over-ripening cane that grew around him on every side. The strong, warm tropical winds blew and shook those rain-starved stalks violently, but Carrefour did not move. Nor was there the slightest flutter among the close, tight curls of woolly hair which clung to his scalp. His great muscular brown chest was bare. Carrefour’s only clothing was his loose pair of blackened sackcloth trousers, so old and so stiff that even the wind could not bestir them.

As if frustrated by its inability to ruffle Carrefour, the night breeze swirled toward a large ceramic jar which hung some distance away, suspended by hemp ropes from a crude scaffold made of driftwood. The jar had been carefully pierced with irregular holes in several places, like a whistle, so that the air would howl when passing through. Its tone was low and mournful.

From the place of worship, just a short distance away through the cane fields, came the steadily pounding rhythm of the tamboulas and the frantic rattling of instruments made from bones and gourds. The dancers had begun to move and chant, singing and crying out, raising small offerings as they asked the serpent-spirit Dumballah Wedo to bring rain to these thirsty fields.

Carrefour smelled blood.

The rich, fragrant red liquid dripped thickly and steadily from the carcasses of a white she-goat and a black he-goat as they dangled from the branches of a nearby tree. The animals’ life essence had been drained to satisfy the thirst of the loa whose presence was expected at tonight’s ceremony. Their bodies now swayed in the wind, grisly fruit that no living man would pick.

The musk of the dead animals was strong, almost overpowering, yet Carrefour’s widened nostrils picked up another scent behind it in the wind tonight. It was faint at first, a vague hint of something less natural to these fields than the carcasses and the cane. It was a faraway aroma of silks and soaps. The strange scent hovered ghostlike in the distance, but slowly drew nearer.

Woman , he thought. The healer .

The scents reminded him of an encounter he had observed earlier, during the daytime, in the village where he concealed himself from the burning afternoon sun. There were two strangers in the market, a man and a woman, both white and both smelling of alcohol. The man stank of the rum distilled from this island’s own cane. He spoke loudly, his words distorted by the strong drink. The woman smelled sweetly of a very different alcohol, the kind Carrefour knew was used in the medicine rooms of the island’s Great White Mother.

He had seen the rum-soaked man before, out in the cane fields. Carrefour recognised him as the brother of the planter who owned these fields. Those two men lived together near the coast, in the old Fort Holland, a sombre stone mansion whose central courtyard was infamously decorated with a massive wooden figurehead salvaged from the wreckage of the slave ship Estrella .

The woman who had accompanied him, however, was completely unknown to Carrefour.

These two white strangers had sat together in the café across the market. Their faces were a mere blur to Carrefour’s unblinking eyes, but from their different scents and their differing words, he detected a tension between them. The rum-soaked man was in great need of healing. The medicine-woman was a healer. Yet Carrefour sensed that the rum-soaked man’s need was simply too great. He was broken. He was already lost. The medicine-woman’s words were soft and caring, but they came too late.