The Binding (21 page)

“Man, so long as she’s laid out here, I don’t care if she reeks like the Cryptkeeper.”

Nat pulled the locker. It came sliding out with a screech.

John looked at Nat. The locker was empty, the metal clean and shining in the overhead fluorescents. Nat felt little darts of adrenaline shoot through his bloodstream.

“She did say 12B, right?” he said.

John called, “Hello . . . ? You believe that shit?” Nat could hear a thin note of worry in his voice.

He felt the same thing in his chest, needles of doubt growing colder and colder.

Things began to move in a swirl. Nat didn’t wait for Elizabeth Dyer, but walked down to the center of the lockers, his shoes clicking fast on the linoleum. John went past him and pounded his fist on Elizabeth Dyer’s door. Nat saw him moving, his jaw tight, as he looked for 8A. Out of the corner of his eye, Nat saw the door crack open an inch or two.

“Hey, you said 12B for Post,” John said, exasperated, to someone on the other side.

The morgue attendant pulled her door open. From the corner of his eye, Nat saw the pale white sheet of her face.

“That’s right,” she said, her voice high. She was staring at the empty locker.

Nat found 8A. He grimaced as he pulled on the stainless steel handle. The drawer refused to budge.

“Well, she’s fucking missing,” John said.

Nat swore at the locker handle and pulled again. Nothing.

John came up behind him and wrapped his thick, muscular hand over Nat’s sinewy fingers and they both pulled. The metal handle didn’t move.

“What the fuck is going on in here?!” John barked at the attendant.

She was moving past them now. She began pulling other lockers, then pushing them back.
Shooo. Clank. Shooo. Clank.
They were empty. No Margaret.

Nat and John looked at each other, and Nat braced his foot against the locker’s base. “Now,” he said, his voice tight. They hauled back, and suddenly the locker came away with a rasping sound. Nat and John both let go and jumped back, John staggering all the way to the nearest examination table, which he
bumped hard with his hip, rattling it in its floor screws. The locker slid all the way out on its own momentum and jumped when it hit the end of its runner.

“Fuck me,” said John.

The locker was empty.

John’s eyes seemed to fill with a cold fear.

Nat was trying to control his breathing. His thoughts flipped back to the talk with Dr. Jennifer Greene back at the hospital. What had she called Cotard patients?

Walkers.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

N
at Thayer sat at his desk and stared at his computer screen. It was Friday afternoon, the day after his visit to the morgue, and what he was about to do seemed not only insane to him, but somehow . . . a betrayal. Not only because of what he was considering, but
where
he was considering doing it. In his office at a pristine psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts, a temple to the scientific spirit. And he was about to desecrate it.

Is this really what it’s come to?
he thought.
I’m surrounded by some of the best scientific minds in the Northeast, and I’m about to do an Internet search for zombies.

Yes, he decided, this was what it had come to. The missing bodies at the morgue were the final straw. Something was happening that was beyond his experience.

He smiled, but the laughter didn’t come. Suddenly uncertain, he stood up and paced over to the window that overlooked the hospital atrium and the Shan to the west. His eyes moved past the traffic turning into the hospital in the direction of Endicott Street and Becca’s house. He hadn’t been able to get her off his mind. With any other patient . . .

As he debated his next move, Nat tapped absently on the glass.
Becca, are you there?
he thought idly.
Are you . . . all right?

Nat wasn’t really afraid of being made a laughingstock. His geeky high school years had cured him of most social anxieties. He’d been purified in the scorching fires of Northam High.

But this?

Get on with it
, he thought. He sat in his office chair, his fingers reaching for the keyboard. He tapped in
zombie expert
and hit
Search
.

He spent the next hour and a half reading. He skimmed two pages of the original results and found them full of cranks, Amazon.com listings for
World War Z
, and reviews of films on the undead.
I may be the only person in America
, he thought to himself,
looking for usable information on actual zombies. Goddamn fanboys.

Finally, he modified the search to
zombie academic
and began slowly reading through the links. He found a paper by a Professor Helen Zimmerman of anthropology at North Carolina State: “Culturally Undead: The Roots of Zombie Belief in Bantu Animist Communities.” He clicked on it and read in silence for five minutes before sighing and hitting the back button. The piece was gibberish to him, and had induced flashbacks to the lit classes of his undergraduate days.

The link below was a first-person account by Helen Zimmerman on investigating zombies. “Ah, now that’s more like it,” Nat said aloud.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

R
amona Best took the green can of Comet cleaner and shook out some powder onto the old white T-shirt she was using as a rag. It had been one of the shirts she’d left behind when she’d gone to Wartham, a track jersey from her freshman year at Roosevelt High. Her boobs had grown enough since then that wearing the T-shirt now risked turning the catcalls of the boys on the corners into outright propositions. You couldn’t be so sexy that they jumped down from the mailboxes or the stoops and started following you, talking
Hey, can I walk you home?
or
You bustin’ that top
out
!
The shirt now took her over that fine line, so she’d sacrificed it to the task at hand.

The chrome in the kitchen was all that was left to be done. She worked with the lights out, following the gleam of late afternoon sunlight around the chrome where it met the green stone backsplash. She didn’t need the lights; she had the path of the chrome memorized. This is where she’d done her homework when her mother was out working as a nurse’s assistant at Jamaica Hospital, the 7 p.m.–to–7 a.m. shift, before she passed away five years ago. Her mom had never saved enough money to renovate the kitchen, so it was still circa 1974, all linoleum and fake granite and as much chrome as a big-finned Cadillac Eldorado.

Ramona took the Comet, cut it with a little water from the tap, and leaned over behind the faucet and started scrubbing there. She could feel the granules of the cleaner grating underneath the cotton, and the smell nearly made her dizzy. It was a
smell she remembered from childhood; every Wednesday, it had been her job to get the kitchen “army clean” by the time her mom got home from work. Now Ramona dug the cloth into the base of the fountain and found release through the ache in her biceps. She didn’t want to think about Mama right now.

Ramona leaned into it, making little circles as she slowly half stepped along the counter. When she was done, she went back with a clean end of the T-shirt and wiped off the milky residue that lay on the chrome. Then she put the Comet and the T-shirt under the counter, next to the garbage bags and the cat litter for her aunt Zuela’s cat, Jasper. She wiped her brow and felt the need to sleep rise behind her eyes like a dark wave. But instead of heading upstairs to her bedroom, she went to the fridge. The light spilled out onto the dark floor, and she took out the Diet Coke Lime that she’d bought on the way down from Massachusetts, knowing her aunt wouldn’t buy the stuff.
Sugar won’t hurt you, Mona
, Zuela would say. Imagining her aunt’s disdain, Ramona huffed.
Yes, it will.
Wartham hadn’t made her anorexic by any means—she still ate what she wanted—but being up there with all those skinny white girls did tend to focus the mind on calories and all related matters.

She went to the dining room table and sat. She took a sip of the soda and laid her head on the crinkly red-and-white-checked tablecloth. This, too, was the same as her childhood—or a replacement that smelled and felt the same. The refrigerator was a big, old GE, and when its motor kicked in, it flooded the room with a low hum that Ramona loved. It was like hearing her mama’s heartbeat. Here is where she’d spent half her childhood. The curtains had always been open then as her mother cooked one of her West Indian specialties, and she could watch the neighbors hang their laundry on their backyard lines. Or, at night, listen to the Brambles, the Jamaican family next door, laugh and play their lover’s rock records, old Desmond Dekker and Peter Tosh
tunes. The window had been her jukebox and her air conditioner, too.

But as the afternoon light turned dusky, the window and the curtains were closed tight.

Right now, she didn’t want to see out. And she didn’t want outside coming in.

CHAPTER THIRTY

N
at had landed on a site called sacpasse.net, which seemed at a glance to be dedicated to essays on Haitian culture. A lot of first-person reports on Haitian food, the Creole language, compas music. The piece he’d clicked on was by Professor Helen Zimmerman, and it looked to be a travelogue about her search for the true origins of voodoo practices, particularly relating to the idea of the undead. The first thing Nat noticed was that she refused to use the word
zombie
throughout the piece and instead substituted the term
nzombe
.
Is that African?
Nat wondered.
Swahili, maybe? Are we talking about the same thing?
He shook his head and started reading.

I spent five years tracking the
nzombe
phenomenon all through West Africa.

I even drew maps: purple for deepest belief, orange for moderate, and so on. And I found the heart of the
nzombe
tradition was in a thin strip of territory that didn’t, of course, correspond to any of the modern states that had been superimposed on the area during colonialism, but that ran generally north to south from Senegal to Liberia. This was where the belief had been born, where it was oldest and most rooted in the lives of the people. The Nzombe Belt, some people called it.

I have no idea how this belief began. Perhaps it was a response to the epidemics that swept through the bush villages back in prehistory. Perhaps some of those illnesses reduced the sufferers to a waking death—comatose, in other words—and the first sorcerers were those village men who were able, by hook or by crook, to bring them back to life, or to appear to. Clearly it had a great deal to do with the spirit life of the people, who saw life and death in many living things, and in some things that did not live. Spirit in those parts of Africa isn’t a black-and-white affair, if you’ll pardon the pun. It’s a permeable frontier. People go through and come back. Their spirits haunt the places they died, or haunt the people who caused their deaths. The soul exists in a continuum that the real, physical world only connects to here and there. Death is not really death, not as we understand it.

This was hardly groundbreaking news. But what I found was that the ability to bring the dead back to life, to create
nzombes,
was different from the other parts of the people’s belief systems. The sorcerer was the key to the whole tradition. And here’s where I made two discoveries, both confirmed by several oral traditions from discrete parts of the belt.

The first is that sorcerers, good sorcerers, are born, not made. They’re
incredibly
rare. The idea that any village medicine man can create a
nzombe
would be laughable to any true believer. It’s a talent, and in order to perform the highest work of the tradition—raising the dead—you need to be a genius. I came to think of it this way. I brought three things into the bush with me: antimalaria tablets, a beat-up Sony tape recorder to document my interviews, and Mozart cassettes to play on it during the nights when I wasn’t transcribing. And I began to think of the great West African sorcerers as rarities on the order of Mozart. They were the flower of thousands of years of genetics and belief. They were able to harness the spirits in ways others were unable to.

You can wait many generations for a sorcerer who can create a
nzombe.
And there are many limitations on what he can do. He has to be close to his victim—physically close. You can’t control a
nzombe
from five hundred miles away. And that control is extremely difficult. The women I interviewed—and later the men, when I had been there too long to ignore them anymore—were adamant about this. They insisted that the human spirit isn’t so easily mastered. There are times when the
nzombe
becomes aware of his own strangeness in the world, when he breaks free from the thought stream of his master. When he wanders, searching for an answer to what has become of him or her.