Drum, the Doll, and the Zombie Page 4

  The intruder moved faster than the professor would have thought possible. The left hand let go of Johnny—who released a long shuddering wail—and intercepted the tire iron. The weapon fell with a heavy smack! Yet the eerie stranger gave no indication of having felt the slightest pain. The fingers closed on the tire iron, the man gave a twisting wrench, and the professor felt the tire iron fly from his hand. The creature swung his arm in a vicious backhand swipe that surely would have knocked the professor unconscious—except that he slipped in the icy grass and fell under the blow.

  The momentum of the swing moved the intruder halfway around. The professor had an inspiration. He barrel-rolled forward, coming up beside the creature, and he used the flashlight as a club. He struck as hard as he could at the back of the zombie's right knee—knowing that even the strongest person can be toppled if the knee is forced forward.

  The man tumbled, thrusting his hands out. They slid across the frosty grass, and the dead man went sprawling. Johnny sprang up and tugged at the professor's arm. "Let's get outa here!" he bawled.

  Professor Childermass needed no urging. He scrambled up, and together he and Johnny ran back toward Dr. Coote's house. "Go!" ordered Professor Childermass when they reached the hedge. He shoved Johnny roughly through the gap he had forced earlier. A noise came from behind him, and the professor fearfully turned the flashlight back that way. Amazingly, the flashlight bulb was still burning, and he saw the creature lurching toward him. The professor scraped through the hedges. "Get to the garage!" he yelled at Johnny. "We'll take my car!" Lights began to come on in the houses behind Dr. Coote's place as all the commotion woke people up.

  Before they were halfway across the backyard, the professor heard the thrashing of the zombie coming through the hedge. He ran with all his strength, easily catching up to Johnny. They piled into the Pontiac, and the professor pulled the keys from his trouser pocket. He started the car, and the tires screamed as the car leaped back.

  "Look out, Professor!" screamed Johnny. The car hit something with a sickening thump, and then the tires bounced over something—thud! thud! The professor turned on the headlights and could hardly believe what he saw. The car had knocked down the zombie, and both the rear and the front wheels had rolled over the body. But the creature rose and turned, his horrible dead face staring bleakly at them in the headlight glow. He lurched toward them.

  Johnny screamed. The professor heard distant yells: "What's goin' on?" "For cry in' out loud, we're try in' ta sleep here!" And then another sound, high and musical and sinister: the sound of a flute or pipe. And a deep regular pounding, like bare hands beating a drum in a wild rhythm. The zombie's head turned. He staggered away and disappeared into the night.

  For a few moments the professor sat behind the wheel, the Pontiac's engine humming. He took long, shuddering breaths. Then he turned to Johnny. "I believe someone called the—the thing off," he panted.

  Johnny's teeth were chattering. He stammered, "Th-that thing w-was a zombie, Professor!"

  "Calm down," said the professor. "Whatever it was, it's gone now. Well, shall we return to Duston Heights right now, John Michael? Or shall we go back inside and see how that ghastly creature got in?"

  Johnny was trembling. "He was there the whole time, Professor," he gasped. "He must have been hidin' in the cellar all along. Maybe behind the furnace, or under the stacks of old newspapers an' junk. It didn't break in—it was breakin' out when you came."

  "Was it?" said the professor. "Well, that settles it." He put the Pontiac in gear and rolled it into the garage. "I'll be dipped in bread crumbs and French fried if I'll let anyone, living or dead, make a fool of me. And somebody owes me a tire iron too!"

  The two of them got out and carefully locked the garage door, and together they went down into the cellar. Sure enough, the professor could clearly see that the zombie had yanked the cover off the coal-chute opening from inside. A couple of the nails had been left in the frame, and in climbing out the creature had bent them. Grumbling under his breath, the professor fetched a hammer and long nails and fastened the coal-chute door back into place. Then he hunted around until he found an old broom. He sawed the broom head off, and with a couple of pieces of board he nailed the handle into place as a brace against the cover.

  They looked behind the furnace and found a faint impression in the dust where the zombie must have waited. "Somebody sent our friend in," muttered the professor, "and then left him here like a time bomb. I'll bet you my Pontiac to a dried-up jelly doughnut that I know what he was after too. It was that cursed drum!"

  "Wh-what do we do now, Professor?" stammered Johnny. He was terrified. He remembered all too well the zombie's clammy grip and empty gaze. He knew he would see them again in his nightmares.

  The professor took a deep breath. "Well," he said, "it's only three or four hours before dawn. Let's make a tour of the house and make sure we don't find any other nasty little surprises."

  They found nothing else out of the ordinary, and they looked everywhere that a person—or a zombie—could possibly lurk. They had breakfast at sunup, packed their bags, and loaded the Pontiac. At eight o'clock Professor Childermass made a telephone call, talked for a few minutes, then came back to the kitchen table looking smug. "I believe I have taken care of a rather bad problem," he said. "I telephoned young Todd Lamort and got him to agree to the offer I made. He says he will stay here in Charley's house for the time being. He will keep an eye on things, and whoever broke in will think twice with a young, strong man in residence."

  "Did—did you tell him about—" Johnny could not finish.

  "Certainly not," said the professor. "However, I did warn him that burglars have been a problem. He says he will be on his toes, and I believe we can trust him. I certainly wish we had more young men like him."

  An hour or so later Todd Lamort showed up. The professor took him on a tour of the house and turned his key over to the young man. After giving Lamort his address and phone number, the professor said, "I shall telephone every other day or so to check on things. But as long as you stay alert, there shouldn't be any problems."

  Then Johnny and the professor drove back to Duston Heights. Gramma and Grampa Dixon noticed how subdued Johnny was, but he explained that Dr. Coote's illness had upset him.

  Days passed, and the professor kept pretty much to himself. Johnny told Fergie that he definitely would not dress up as a zombie. In the end he went to the Halloween party as a tramp, just as Grampa had suggested. Fergie showed up as a zombie, but in his green greasepaint and torn old clothes, he was certainly not as scary as the real thing had been. And at least his father had refused to lend him any rubber fishing worms.

  Johnny told Fergie about his adventure, because Fergie was the only person he could talk to about such things. Fergie listened as the two of them sat at a table in Peter's Sweet Shop, sipping chocolate malteds. Fergie whistled in an impressed way at Johnny's description. "Wowee, Dixon," he said. "I dunno why you didn't go outa your ever-lovin' mind! Course, it was probably just some guy tryin' ta scare ya—"

  "It was not!" whispered Johnny fiercely. "Fergie, I saw his horrible gray face and felt his cold, clammy hands. This guy was dead!"

  "Okay, okay," replied Fergie with an irritating smirk. "Keep your hair on, big John. Just for the sake of argument, let's say it really was a zombie. So what's the professor gonna do about this, huh?"

  Johnny shook his head. "He hasn't told me. And when I ask him, he just tells me to mind my own beeswax. But I know he's been up to Portsmouth again, an' he's been talkin' to some other college professor on the phone a lot."

  "I betcha he's learnin' how to handle zombies," mused Fergie. "I wonder how ya kill them. A stake through the heart? Nah, that's vampires—John baby, ya listenin'?"

  Johnny's jaw had dropped open, and he stared through the window in frozen terror. At last he croaked, "It's her! See? There she is—it's her. She's here in Duston Heights!"

  Fergie craned his neck around and star
ed out through the front window of the Sweet Shop. He saw a shapeless, dumpy old woman standing at the curb, carrying a shopping bag. She wore a black coat and a black scarf, and long, gray hair straggled down across her shoulders. Then she crossed the street and turned a corner. "So who is it, Dixon?" asked Fergie. "Looked like th' devil's granma to me—"

  Johnny jumped up out of his seat. "We gotta tell the professor," he said. "C'mon!"

  The two ran all the way to Fillmore Street, but they found the professor's house empty, and his car was nowhere in sight. "Oh, no," Johnny said. "Well, as soon as he comes back, we have to tell him. Want to come in for a while?"

  "Sure," said Fergie. "How 'bout some poker, John baby? Last time I looked, ya owed me two an' a half million bucks."

  "Okay," said Johnny, but without much enthusiasm.

  "Hiya, Fergie," said Gramma as they walked in. "Say, Johnny, look what I got." She held up a white cardboard box with a clear cellophane top. The box held a hairbrush and a hand mirror, both of them in silver-colored frames with white porcelain ovals on the backs. A red-and-green pattern of vines and roses decorated the ovals.

  "It's great," Johnny said.

  "An' best of all, it's free," replied Gramma, smiling broadly. "Darndest thing y' ever heard of. This ol' lady comes t' th' door sellin' brushes and such, an' she says she'll trade this for my old hairbrush. Beats me how anybody expects t' make a livin' if she does everybody that way!"

  Johnny felt cold. "Gramma, what did this old lady look like?" he asked.

  His grandmother laughed. "Well, she was sure no bathin' beauty! She looked kinda like a big toad, t' tell ya the truth. She had long stringy gray hair an' she wore this awful ol' black scarf, an' she talked funny. I could hardly unnerstan' her—say, Johnny, you all right?"

  Johnny had almost fainted. The terrible old woman knew where he lived. Would the zombie turn up next? Or did she have something much worse in store for the Dixon family?

  CHAPTER SIX

  As the first week of November passed, nothing much changed. Professor Childermass took the news about the weird woman with some impatience. He had not seen the toadlike figure in the hospital, and he grumbled that Johnny was making a mountain out of a molehill. "Probably she's just what she says," he muttered. "A deranged Fuller Brush lady or something. But I'll be on the lookout for her, if it will make you feel any better." In the following days neither the professor nor Johnny saw anything more of the mysterious woman. Worse, the professor became even more secretive than he had been, and with one exception he told Johnny almost nothing.

  The one thing that he did talk about was the zombie. On a chilly Saturday morning the professor invited Johnny over for a game of chess. As usual, they played in the professor's cluttered second-floor study, but the old man's mind was not really on the game, and he lost his queen after only about half an hour of play. Then he pushed back from his desk, cleared his throat, and said, "I've been debating whether or not to show you something, John. I have decided that not only can you take it, but you will have to see it. I did not get as close a look at—ahem!—our midnight visitor as you did."

  He opened a desk drawer and took out a folded newspaper. He pointed to a small, grainy photograph. "Recognize this fellow?"

  Johnny shivered. The face in the photograph was lean and long, with gaunt cheeks, a high forehead, and deep-set eyes. "Yeah, I recognize him," said Johnny. "He's the zombie."

  "I thought so." With a grim smile, the professor tossed the paper over to Johnny.

  Johnny read the story. It was an obituary for a Mr. Jacques Dupont. He had been a retired merchant living in Portsmouth, and he had died—Johnny blinked—a week before the chilling encounter in Dr. Coote's house. "What does it mean, Professor?" asked Johnny.

  "It means the worst kind of voodoo," growled Professor Childermass. "Sinful sorcery, nefarious necromancy, and malevolent magic!" But that was all he would say. When Johnny asked if he had heard any news about Dr. Coote, the professor sighed. "Yes, and it is all bad," he said. "Charley was jabbering nonsense, but at least he was awake. Yesterday he fell unconscious and lapsed into a coma. The doctors are feeding him through a tube."

  Johnny's heart sank. He began to fear that the old man did not have a fighting chance. The rest of his visit with the professor was quiet and bleak.

  Fergie was no help at all when Johnny talked to him about the dead Mr. Dupont. He refused to believe that the dead could really and truly walk, and even when Johnny insisted that the professor had seen the zombie too, Fergie just smirked. The two of them did go to the public library to see if they could learn anything about the dark secrets of voodoo, but they found only a couple of books on the subject. One of them, Tell My Horse, was by a woman named Zora Neale Hurston, who had spent time in Jamaica, Haiti, New Orleans, and other places where sorcerers did voodoo magic. The only other book the boys could find was Hayti, or the Black Republic, by Sir Spenser St. John. Both volumes discussed zombies, but they were not really much help. Fergie read in one of them that salty food would break the spell that animated the dead bodies. A zombie that tasted salt would remember that it was dead and would burrow down into the ground until it came to rest in its own tomb. Fergie thought that was a hilarious notion, and he whispered to Johnny that he should have offered old Mr. Dupont a bag of Lay's potato chips. Just saying that gave Fergie such a bad case of snickering that the librarian came by, frowning, and asked the boys to leave. Johnny checked out both books, but they added very little to his understanding of exactly what he and the professor had encountered.

  Days passed, and then the fourth week in November arrived. Both Fergie and Johnny would get a Thanksgiving holiday from Wednesday until the following Monday. On Tuesday morning Johnny came downstairs for breakfast to find Gramma sitting in a kitchen chair, panting. "What's wrong, Gramma?" asked Johnny, anxiously. He thought of the terrible time when Gramma had had a brain tumor, and he worried that maybe she had another one.

  She gave him a tight, pained smile. "Dunno. Just got kinda short o' breath. I'll be all right in a minute, but do you suppose you could make your own breakfast?"

  "Do you want me to get Grampa?" Johnny asked.

  Gramma made a face. "I guess so," she muttered. "Course, he'll haul me off to the doctor right away. Not a thing in the world wrong with me—just gettin' old, I expect."

  By the time Johnny got Grampa into the kitchen, Gramma was better. She was right about the doctor's visit, though. Grampa phoned Doc Schermerhorn and told him he would drive Gramma over that morning for a checkup. Meanwhile, Johnny got out a box of cornflakes and made himself two pieces of toast.

  He worried about his grandmother all during school, but when he got home, she seemed more or less her old self. "Slept kinda bad last night," she said. "Anyway, the doc couldn't find anything wrong with me that he didn't already know about."

  That night Duston Heights got a little powdering of snow, and the next day Fergie came over early. The snow was too thin for sledding and too dry for snowballs, but the two friends enjoyed walking around town and seeing how the white layer had changed everything from drab gray to sparkling white. Johnny and Fergie stopped at Peter's Sweet Shop for a quick lunch of egg-salad sandwiches, hot cocoa, and fudge brownies with hot chocolate sauce. Then they decided to go see if Round Pond was frozen. They knew any ice would not yet be thick enough for skating, but even a skim of ice would promise winter fun to come. Fergie was a natural athlete who skated as expertly as he did any sport, and he had taught Johnny to skate well enough to enjoy himself. Even Professor Childermass liked to get out on the ice on cold winter afternoons, and for an old man he could really whiz along.

  Johnny and Fergie reached the pond to find it lightly iced. They stood on the bank and tossed stones for a while. Any heavy rock crashed right through the thin layer of ice, sending waves of gray water spouting out of the hole it made, but some of the smaller pebbles went skidding across the frozen surface. The day was warming up, and already the thin dusting of snow
had melted everywhere except in the shady spots. "Is there any news about Dr. Coote?" asked Fergie as he tired of tossing the rocks. He was not wearing gloves, and he stuck his red hands deep into his coat pockets.

  With a sigh Johnny said, "I don't know. Professor Childermass says he's holdin' his own, but he's in a coma. That's always bad."

  "Yeah," agreed Fergie. He sighed. "Well, I hate to think of old Doc Coote croakin', but if he's gonna go, I wish it would be quick."

  "Fergie!" said Johnny, scandalized.

  Fergie shrugged. "I just mean I don't want to think of him sufferin'. Say, what's the matter between you an' the prof, anyhow? You've said almost nothin' about him lately."

  Johnny shook his head. "He's playin' everything close to his vest," he said. He explained how Professor Childermass had been making himself scarce.

  Fergie turned to him with a big grin on his face. "Dixon, don'tcha see what that means?"

  "It means that the professor thinks there's something dangerous goin' on," replied Johnny promptly.

  "Yeah!" said Fergie. "An' that means somethin' exciting. Now, how can we cut ourselves a slice of this pie?"

  Johnny just stared at his friend. "Are you crazy?" he demanded. "Fergie, didn't you listen to me when I told you about that dead guy? Somethin' bad is goin' on, an' the professor is trying to protect us!"

  "Who wants to be protected, John baby?" asked Fergie teasingly. That was just like him. Johnny had to get his nerve up before he did anything risky, but Fergie always plowed straight ahead. One day, Johnny thought sourly, Fergie's enthusiasm was going to land him in trouble so deep that he would not be able to climb back out again.

  They turned to go, and Johnny felt his breath catch. Standing not ten feet away from them was the old woman he had seen twice before. She wore the same clothes—a long black coat and a tattered black scarf. Her ugly, wide face was dark and weathered. Her eyes were black slits, staring out from beneath shaggy gray eyebrows. Her wrinkled mouth grinned at him, the wide lips pulled tight against her yellow teeth. "Hello, boys," she said in a nasty, low voice. Her accent made her sound like Mr. Plessy, the French-Canadian owner of Plessy's Plumbing and Hardware in Duston Heights. She took a step toward them and purred, "The old fox is cunning, no? But maybe these two fine little pups will be able to persuade him. You, the blond one! I have something special to show you."