Читать книгу Real Zombies, the Living Dead, and Creatures of the Apocalypse - Brad Steiger - Страница 28

Recently, one of my colleagues, Paul Dale Roberts, told me of his interview with a man who claimed to have been turned into zombie: “Pete claims that when he was vacationing in Haiti, he had a fling with a Haitian girl, whose father is a Voodoo shaman of the island. When the Haitian girl saw him with another, he was a marked man.

“One night in a disco, he was stabbed in the arm with a hypodermic needle. He passed out and awakened in a coffin. He was buried alive. He was paralyzed, but aware of his surroundings. Later, he was dug up from his grave and used as a slave, picking sugar cane for six months. He somehow managed to get out of his comatose state of mind and escaped the island back to California. He claims to this very day that he has skin lesions on his arms, legs, and torso, because of his zombie transformation in Haiti.”

When William Michael Mott, author of Pulp Winds, learned that I was doing a book on real zombies, he wrote a poem, “The Awakening of a Zombie,” which aptly describes the classic and traditional fate of one chosen to be a zombie victim of a Voodoo sorcerer:

Awake in the dark, closed in tight,

Where am I? In what hole unfound?

The memories of a funeral rite

Still haunt my ears with mournful sound.

And now I hear the digger come

Shovel pounding like a drum

Casket breaking, pale moonlight

And falling clods blot out my sight.

I must be dead! Can’t move a finger

As I’m pulled from the recent grave

And I think I’d rather linger,

Than become a zombie slave.

The potion forced between my lips

Brings tingling life back to my flesh

And I’m led away from tombs and crypts,

My gaping grave still moist and fresh.

No urge for brains or bloody fodder,

Just meager gruel, not born of slaughter

And I barely recall Romero’s films—

As I fight just to move my limbs.

This death-life is a sullen dream

In which I mind each barked command

And passing days of labor seem

An hourglass and grains of sand.

Poison of toad, and blowfish too

Went into that Voodoo brew

That I know is mixed into my gruel—

And I must eat, for reasons cruel.

I simply cannot disobey

And slowly, memories fade away

Of another time, or place, or land

When I wasn’t dead—I’d been a man. At night when torches gutter low Into a shackled cell I go And then I struggle to awaken From an existence most forsaken. The gruel’s consumed by scuttling things Before I bring myself to eat So I eat the thieves that fill my bowl— I’ve found a source of food, of meat. A few more nights, the rats and roaches Will fill my belly and free my mind And someday soon, when dawn approaches I’ll burst these chains, to vengeance find! A zombie terror from the grave Will take the lives of those who preyed, Turned a man into a slave, Who watched his own humanity fade. The price will then be paid in full For when the foreman comes around I’ll take my chains and break his skull— Then find the one who brought me down. But I won’t kill him, not then, oh no, I’ll take his tongue, then bind him tight And deep into that hole, he’ll go, Beneath the dirt, and endless night.