The Horror Megapack_ 25 Classic and Modern Horror Stories ( PDFDrive )

Walt.”
Amelia’s contradictory blend of stubbornness and humility got under Connell’s
skin. He couldn’t sell his niggers down the river that way; neither could he leave
Madeline another night in that fiend-haunted plantation house. But his indecision
was costly.
Dark forms slipping from the shadows closed in on them. Ducoin’s black
laborers! Their eyes were not blind, but staring, unfocused and unseeing. Their
faces were utterly devoid of expression. Walking dead men, moving with the
slow, horrible motion of animated corpses.
“Get back, you devils!” snarled Connell, thrusting aside a clutching hand and
driving home with his fist; but it was like hammering the trunk of a tree. Not a
gasp, not a grunt, not a change of expression. Madeline screamed as other hands
clutched her.
Though Connell’s fists crunched against bony faces, and chunked wrist deep
into leathery stomachs, he made no more impression than on tackling dummies.
Kicking, slugging, and gouging as the tangle of voiceless black men
overwhelmed him, Connell’s brain became a vortex of horror. He knew now
why the Cajuns called them walking corpses.
They could not be alive. There was no resentment or wrath at his frantic, savage
blows. Somewhere he heard a terrified wailing and a scurrying. Amelia was
taking cover. The walking corpses seemed unaware of her presence.
Madeline’s outcries were throttled. As Connell vainly battled, he caught glimpses
of her silk clad legs flailing in the moonlight, heard the ripping of cloth as
her ensemble was torn to ribbons by her captors. Then he was smothered by the
irresistible rush. A sickening, musty, charnel stench stifled him. Iron muscles,
leathery bodies, exhaling the odor of incipient decay, yet more powerful than
any living thing, crushed him to the border of unconsciousness. They seized him
and Madeline as though they were logs, and hauled them up the veranda stairs
and into Madeline’s room.
Connell heard Pierre Ducoin’s familiar voice.
“Too bad,” he ironically commented as the blacks dropped their burdens, and
pinned Connell to the floor with their bony knees. “Aunt Célie told me something
was going on.”
Then he turned to the corpse men, and spoke in a purring, primitive language,
more rudimentary than any Haitian patois: the old savage dialect of Guinea.
They bound Connell’s hands and feet to a chair, and flung Madeline carelessly
across her bed. Though half conscious, she was stirring and moaning, and